CoR Klaxon: Rise

So tired… wish he’d hush so I can just sleep… maybe I’ll never wake up. Bet that’d make my uncle and aunt happy. Who would even sob for me? No one… No… that’s the drugs talking and the beating… So tired though…

“What if I’m broken beyond fixing…?” Jimmy mumbled at no one in particular, though it was meant for Jesse since no one else was in the room with them. The other two were probably disgusted by his appearance and left the room. He’d be disgusted as well if he saw his appearance. Fighting to listen to the doctor who was a very nice guy, the injured male soon zoned off, words coming off as a wahwahwahwah sound instead of words. Not wanting to be rude though, he decided to give a one-word answer, hoping it was the right one.

“Okay.” Jimmy said before adding, “I was throwing up blood earlier too.”

Shuddering, he made a noise akin to whining and let his eyes close as he was injected with the dose of adrenaline. What if his heart raced so fast it exploded? Would he die from that? Blinking his eyes back open, Jimmy tried to focus on his heart to see if it was racing or if anything was wrong.

“What if this doesn’t work? Does that mean I just die? If I do die… just throw me into the trash. Don’t need to bury me and my uncle and aunt surely won’t give a shit if I’m dead.” He scowled a little, fists clenching at the idea of no one wanting him.

“So far nothing is racing and I’m not dizzy.” Jimmy inhaled deeply and exhaled in an attempt to relax as much as he could.

“By the way, shit has gone insane outside and there could be more hurt coming in, so I understand if you need to go tend to them.” Getting that out, he yawned widely, reaching a hand up to rub his forehead.
 
"If it doesn't work, we fix you the old fashioned way," Jesse replied reassuringly. "We should know within a few minutes if there's any change."

He didn't reply to Jimmy's self-deprecating remarks. If the kid pulled through this, he was going to need an altogether different kind of doctor for that one.
 
As expected, bullets proved to be largely ineffective against the ghoul-creature's fresh coat of paint. Snow scowled, tossing the rifle to one side as the thing calling itself Steven landed nearby and taking a long, drawn out breath.

"You know," he murmured, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders. "I'm actually kind of glad you came along today. I've really needed something I can lay into without holding back, these last few weeks." He flexed his fingers, then balled them up tightly into fists and narrowed his eyes. "So thanks for volunteering."

He gave the creature no further warning before lunging forwards, closing the distance between them in a bare moment before driving his fist up in a brutal jab aimed to slam into the thing's armored sternum and pulverise its ribcage beneath -- delivering enough strength in that single blow to double it over and entirely lift it from its feet. His second swing came down with the intent to strike it before it had come back down from the first, smashing into the top of its head to piledrive it into the ground.

____

The situation outside had, apparently, escalated. Lark hissed under his breath as he peered out through the door to see that the hulking ghouls had apparently transformed into even more horrific monstrosities. He could hear more going on around the corner of the warehouse, but just the two he could see -- spine-whip and armor-skin -- were bad enough for him to get the picture.

"Fucking hell..." he muttered. For now, he'd let the evolved ghouls' dance partners deal with them -- he had his sights on other targets, in the form of the lesser ghouls stalking their way towards the door he was taking cover in. There wasn't a chance in hell he was letting any of them past to get to the infirmary.

Cocking the shotgun, he took a breath and stepped out into the open, levelling the barrel at the closest of the two ghouls and pulling the trigger, firing a shell directly towards the thing's head, then aiming a second shot down at one of its legs to drop it to the floor, in the event that a headshot didn't put it down.
 
Broch barely caught a glimpse of the wee lass soaring through the air as the monstrous abomination hurled her aside. His eyes followed her trajectory for only a heartbeat, but he couldn’t see where she landed. He could only hope that it wasn’t on her head. The door had worked, but he knew it wouldn’t last long. It was only a brief reprieve against the horror they faced.

His father had spoken of ghouls before, but only in passing, and Broch had encountered them a mere handful of times. But this... this was something far worse. This wasn’t just ghouls. It was an abomination—an affront to nature itself, a grotesque distortion of something already twisted. Nuadha had crossed countless lines before, but this was beyond anything Broch had imagined. And after what that fiend had done to his family…

The boy he carried on his back, the mission to get him to the warehouse—none of it seemed to matter anymore. Not with this thing in front of him. This threat had to be dealt with first.

The badger’s eyes glowed with crimson light as he growled, his gaze fixed on the grotesque snake before him. The door was thrown as the creature surged toward him almost in unison. Broch tensed, waiting for the exact moment. As both the door and snake closed in, he threw himself to the side in a desperate dodge. And then, with every ounce of strength he could muster, he raised both fists high and slammed them down with all his might, aiming for the snake’s armored head.
 
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Hatred. Disdain. Disgust.

These were terrible, powerful, and enduring words. Many argued that they were amongst the feelings Humanity most readily embodied; many argued it was those three feelings and not Love, respect, or empathy that were the hallmarks of civilization. These beliefs were firmly and honestly held by a large corpus of cynics, no few of which It, had been able to personally witness realize the disastrous error of their ways. To great personal amusement.

Love. Respect. Empathy.

These were also terrible, powerful, and enduring words. Most so called ‘true feelings’ were. It was the part that made Ayman hate humans the most, their perversion of the true shapes of things that were ever beyond the imperfect clay that made up their very substrate.

How could beings that required the consumption of life to subsist comprehend empathy? What could an impermanent flicker of consciousness come to appreciate of disdain? Why did anyone expect meat of all things to love?

From the moment the entity that had come to be known as Ayman Al Nadir had Its awareness brought to the existence of the mortal plane’s greatest mistakes, the ancient evil was disgusted by the tolerance displayed by the other entities that shared the multitude of spheres alongside towards these aberrations.

Worse, they weren’t even immutable! Vampires. Lycanthropes. Even zombies! The disgusting things weren’t content to pollute an entire sphere no, they also had to bring with them instability and mutability to consciousness. Disgusting.

The others did not blame Ayman for Its nature of course. As true beings, they understood Evil and did not originally fault Ayman his stances. They knew and expected It to go and perturb the newly established morality of mortality that was trialed amidst one of the lesser spheres.

They didn’t like it however, when It had nearly proven his point. For the crime of nearly unmaking creation’s mistake, they’d gathered together to stuff him inside this sickened sphere with them. But Ayman’s unseen contemporaries could never change what It was or what It was capable of by virtue of existence any more than his taking of a name and an identity could. All that could be done was limit the scope of Its influence to what he could achieve from within their plane…

Breadth. Intent. Power.

The secret to Ayman’s power was the fact that so many humans and things that formerly were the same were both so ignorant of the true depth of things, but at the same time so infatuated to the point of neurotic obsession with not just trying to understand true natures but also in desiring a different outcome to them.

Want. Desire. Wish.

The Evil that came to call itself Ayman Al Nadir felt the vibrations stir upon reality’s weave readily enough, and thoughts that could only bring mirth to an embodiment of the perversion of generalized morality kindled in his/Its thoughts. The vibrations gave the force the bounds it needed to take shape. Bridged the gap that let Its limbs stretch all the way to the corners of the reality that imprisoned It, and against the wishes of Its jailers, let Ayman shake and shape the very fabric of the plane of existence where matter and energy were the same.

For all that Ayman hated humanity and its derivatives with a passion beyond mortal ken, the Djinn couldn’t lie to itself in Its need for them in order to access those aspects that made It himself; without their faulty—in Ayman’s considerably more ancient and clear-of-purpose version if you asked—consciousness grasping beyond them towards ideals too large for their conceptualization, Ayman couldn’t move the corpse his power had become fully.

He just needed to finish removing the obstacles left in his path so he could change them all from their various disgusting forms into the unified and altogether more pleasant form of being ghoulish servants to Ayman’s will and Its wishes…speaking of which…

Ingenuity. Faith. Goodwill.

These were words It understood better than most, as they formed the fulcrum, lever, and world from which Ayman’s very essence demanded he leveraged himself from and through. This was the most dangerous aspect of their kind that the few examples of humanity who were aware of the reality of his kind—as opposed to the fairy tales human and fae both—failed to properly appreciate in their ruinous attempts to court their whimsical capability to alter what to humans was everything.

Normally, the being would need to make an effort to establish a connection between Its essence and any supplicants whose strong idiot desires would be tapped to power the Djinn’s miraculous capacity for transubstantiating reality, but that was the principal reason why Ayman had devised and crafted the avatars as more than mere lieutenants to address It’s worldly affairs.

Honor was another one of those big words that Ayman was contractually obliged to do whatever he wanted with, and so Bardiche’s presence and opinion substituted for his own just fine, entering his consciousness into the freely broadcast desired as if he had chanced upon a weary traveler in the traditionally cliched ways.

No one who wasn’t seeking fulfillment would broadcast such a naked call and repeat it once they were exposed to the thrumming of Its power. The wolf girl’s desire was startlingly pure and clear through the Djinn’s connection to the avatar, like a lighthouse through the stormy darkness. Ayman had but to think it so, and he became the insidious whispers within her mind.

There had been quite a lot of blood. Enough of it to fill the imagination of a dozen young children, let alone a single one. That much Ayman saw clearly through Islet’s recollections.

Things like you shouldn’t live—“And on that we can agree, Da,” Ayman opined with a yawn as It walked through time-space’s deceit to experience Islet’s fragmentary shadows of past emotions. Such absurd creatures playing at love without an understanding of hatred or vice versa. The alienness of it was understandable, but the Djinn considered the insistence with which humans clung to their definitions as both the source of their misery and the justification It needed to further demonstrate to them how the Nature of a thing mattered.

“It’s okay. I’m here,” It whispered as it ruffled across the myriads of crimson fibers upon memory’s welcoming red carpet. Yes…These so-called werewolves were quite surprisingly resilient, for all that they were particularly offensive to Ayman’s sensibilities. At least most of the other human derivatives trended towards undeath’s preserving pall, but not lycanthropes oh no.

Disgusting living engines of mutability, Ayman hated their varied capacity to just survive most of all. They existed firmly within their temporary sphere, partook of all of life’s bounties, and had the unmitigated gall to regenerate and out heal the overstaying of their welcomes, on average. No respect for a natural order for all they sought to emulate it, and as always worse still, believed they were a part of.

I wish I could be the strong one. I wish I could help him - that he'd need my help and I could do it.

The ancient Evil awakened to the guise of person hood out of pure disdain smiled.

“Oh he will need you, Islet, because whether you meant it or not, you truly did wish it” Ayman said to the young woman’s soul directly. Its voice was deceptively the same as Islet’s not because of a need for subterfuge—let the humans ponder and explain what was about to happen how they would, for all It cared—but because it would ensure that the girl would always leave a kernel of guilt attributable to herself. A crack through which he could slip in the future should he need to, and an object lesson on the natural order of reality.

“In fact, Islet, he needs you so badly that without you, he will die,” the Djinn whispered as he effected his departure from Islet’s inner world and back into his worldly prison.

A clammy and pallid look overcame Antony’s features. The young man’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water as both horror and a lack of blood oxygenation set in whilst his grip on Islet’s arm faltered. The horror was partially at the feeling of his body going into hypovolemic shock as his blood pressure plummeted in response to his blood volume steadily disappearing into the ether beyond existence.

But it was also in no small part due to the sight of seeing Islet cry ruddy tears as blood began to freely leak out of her tear ducts, nose, and ears. Islet could feel a twisting and liquid itch as her body began to overproduce more blood than it could use.

Neither could immediately speak—Antony because he was increasingly too physically weak to, and Islet out of a shock she’d yet to recover from—but both intrinsically understood that their blood types were not only compatible with each other, but that right now, no other blood but Islet’s would do to save Antony’s life as he painfully felt dehydration begin to set in. The question of what changes or long-term harm it might bring Antony to receive lycanthrope blood wasn’t similarly imparted, however.

A painlessly but profusely bleeding Islet began to scream at the top of her lungs as her decision on her next steps was slickly rendered a slippery proposition by the volume of excess blood her body was producing. Her scream resounded through the interior of the warehouse, the volume thereof overcoming the literal volume of space occupied by the warehouse’s expansive compartmentalization; Neither Jesse—and his patients—further in nor Lark below could miss hearing it.

Antony meanwhile continued to gasp mostly silently while breaking into a cold sweat as dizziness and fatigue gripped him under the physical symptoms of great acute blood loss despite the lack of any apparent wound on his person.
 
The battle outside the warehouse raged on as Islet’s wishes within were twisted. Rian and Nessa tangled out back with one of the fresh ghouls with gusto and enthusiasm, in spite of how messily or hare-brained their would-be proctors might find them if they weren’t busy themselves.

The newly turned Ghoul by the track entrance to the warehouse didn’t have enough presence of mind to pause following the compulsion to try to get inside in order to fend off Nessa’s macabre grapple attempt. Unperturbed by the lack of hygiene—on account of being dead—and under flaring orders more important than life itself, the Ghoul was tripped and faltered whilst trying to move forward.

The ghoul didn’t even react to Nessa’s screaming her plans out loud, and any pain it may have felt was lost in the torrent of torment it was already undergoing as its transformation finished. Nessa’s knives connected and released a slurry of half-coagulated blood as they sliced through undead flesh before finding purchase on bone.

Thankfully, Rian’s sense in not blasting Nessa away in friendly fire and opting to instead encourage the other prospect to make some distance before blowing the ghouls legs off prevented the reasonable trucker-turned-gangster hopeful from owing the more volatile firecracker prospect and the rest of the pack a round of drinks.

Unless you were shooting at Leo or Ragenard—and usually at their own suggestion—accidental friendly fire with some sort of decent excuse—like being in the middle of a ghoul attack—meant the next round was on you.

It was only fair, and Edduard—the once Iron Jackal enforcer whose soul was done being scoured even as his knees disintegrated under a buckshot laden shockwave—would have loved if the IJ’s would have had such a good-natured policy. He laid there for a moment as the prospects set off, hating them. He found it strange that it felt good, having considered himself quite the apathetic man in life. But he didn’t move to give chase as the flesh on his legs came to life and crawled back to rejoin him. He felt the compulsion still, understood he had marching orders, and his continuing existence hadn’t been guaranteed.

He turned his hands to the concrete beneath the rolling steel door as he laid there and began to scratch. It didn’t hurt at all as the flesh gave way, revealing bone animated by sinews dripping with Ayman’s power. Even as his lower legs still pulled themselves tight in order to knit themselves back on, Edduard began to dig.

It turned out, Ghouls were really good at digging, and the concrete chipped, tore, and parted almost immediately, and the ground beneath might as well have been water to the creature Edduard had become.

The scant seconds that the prospects’ attention was on their moving elsewhere would be all it took for them to see the shoulder narrow hole and the ghouls body gone headfirst in with only a moment left for them to see the thing disappear from the calves on down as it slipped beneath the earth outside of the locked-up track door.




That is such bullshit, he only has one head…, Fernando mentally groused to no one in particular over the ghoul’s scryblast. Everyone besides Bardiche was too busy ignoring the frenetic bursts of sensory information being vomited by the newbies to pay him any mind. But he felt quite justified in his assessment.

Thanks to his three-fold increase on available sensory apparatus, the altered ghoul had no problem or need to slow down his run in order to clearly perceive the fuckery that was being arranged against him, at least as far as visual acuity was concerned.

All three of his brains boggled together as he witnessed what he was beginning to fear wasn’t a particularly egregious pair of examples in the arena of how little self-regard the Bloodstones had for their own safety...

No way dude could even see how close he came to—whazzat?

The tri-headed Ghouls charge slowed down the barest of fractions, as he tried and failed to make out what exactly Draaven had passed to Rhetta in the split second before…

Fernando’s commitment to his motion was too complete even despite his slight slowing down, and his attempts to reposition his spine whip weren’t fast enough to impale Rhetta. He’d seen her do something with her hands and caught a glint, but it wasn’t until she was suddenly in front of him and trying to unfurl her own trap—while heedless of his own momentum—that the wire became clear.

Her moves might have caused him actual harm if he hadn’t slowed down previously, but as it was, he was able to bleed off his momentum by simply going with the motion and pressing the spine whip taut against his head where the wire held it. Without his momentum to supplement, Rhetta’s tugging merely produced a cascade of bone dust to fall upon them as her struggle made the wire grind against the rough surface of Fernando’s boney exterior.

Finally, he had the slip of a woman right within range of—

The bottom fell from his non-existent stomach, and Fernando’s eye sockets thrummed as he cast his vision about madly in search of help. There was too much interference from the newbies on the scryblast, and he couldn’t catch Bardiche’s attention.

He couldn’t close his mind to the question in time, and it was too loaded with the unaddressed emotional detritus accumulated over a half life that already had gone more than twice the length his original run as a young man of 23 had.

“Isabella,” replied the undead monster, almost automatically. His hands weren’t fully lowered, but the creature was otherwise wide open for the moment, with the exception of holding the whip-like appendage against his head where the wire tangled them together.




“It’s—” Steven’s response was literally beaten short, as Snow unfurled his one-two combo. Outwardly, Steven’s skin around his sternum appeared unharmed as Snow’s first hit connected, but the young werewolf would be able to feel the pulverization of the bone’s beneath as the force of the blow transferred through the cut resistant skin and down on through the creature’s heft.

You could bend and defer the forces all you wanted (or could, to be more accurate), even sending them on through a trip through the outer spheres where reactions wouldn’t come due until everything else did as Lord Ayman himself knew but nothing dispelled the simple truth: physics was owed.

As he was not gifted with any abilities against momentum, Steven was utterly unable to do anything further except fall in accordance with the equal but opposite reaction that was imposed upon his body by the sheer force of Snow’s hit. A force that was summarily cancelled and replaced with that of Snow’s second strike, which sent the upward lurching Ghoul to crash down to the Earth with a vigorous smash that released a puff of grass and earthen debris around Snow.

“—actually my pleasure, no biggie,” Steven finished as he adroitly twisted upon the ground and jumped back up to his feet almost immediately. His head appeared dented as he smiled menacingly, but it visibly puffed itself back out with an audible pop as Steven turned his upward momentum into a spin intended to shift that force angularly onto the roundhouse kick the ghoul subsequently uncoiled towards Snow’s midsection, aiming to send the werewolf off his own footing.




Joey didn’t bother with trying to discuss with the others or even keep abreast of what was going on in the rest of the battlefield. More than the others, the wealth of experience he’d accrued over his centuries serving Ayman was something the serpentine ghoul valued itself, over the mere fact that they got to be.

He’d already been a warrior in life, a proud and disciplined soldier of an ancient Iverian house—a house that unbeknownst to him was nothing but a thralldom of a certain group of Iverian beings—and as such the centuries under Ayman had only given him more time to hone his battle instincts.

Instincts that had already once before met Broch’s kind, and who demanded a pair of narrowed eyes be firmly kept on the monster’s own glowing ones, waiting for the telltale hint…

Joey didn’t think, simply reacted. A mixture of instincts and physiology left it bracing for the impending—and significant—ouch that the shadow of the werebadger’s fists promised, but not before the snake monster reacted to Broch’s sudden dodge by desperately flinging its tail and lower section towards the shifter’s legs.

Joey wasn’t able to dodge Broch’s strike, and his vision of the world simple ceased as the force of the blow first concussed and then briefly disabled his metabody’s brain, but before it was stunned, it was rewarded with feeling it’s tail lightly curl around the werebadger’s feet.

Blind and briefly stunned, Joey nonetheless found the mobility necessary to give his tail a solid yank, of the sort that might slow down a follow up momentarily…and make a sudden wrenching jolt that would make holding on difficult for Broch’s passenger.




Edduard found himself pulled upwards almost immediately, and as Lark managed to step outside, so then did Edduard find itself inside the dimly lit interior of a hallway, right outside a storage room. He didn’t know why hell was like this, but he could hear screams, and they angered him. Before it could move to follow them upstairs however, a great phantom pain that it thought belonged to him overcame him…

Lark had just blown off the upper two thirds of Antoine’s head outside. The ghoul briefly hopped about as the remains of its mouth were unable to produce the same disorienting scream that the ghoul was providing its buddies over their connection as it experienced its first bout with catastrophic damage…that slowly began to knit itself back together.

Its macabre dance only lasted a few fractions of a second before Lark’s second blow dropped it to the ground, where it proceeded to roll in healing agony. Myriads of questing tendrils that found each other and began to knit together roiled visibly over the creature’s wounds.

The second ghoul ran on towards Lark, as if heedless or unwilling to stop or slow down despite the gruesome response it witnessed its buddy encounter.




Avatar Bardiche closed her monstrously unhinged jaw and smiled in ecstasy as she briefly felt her beloved Ayman’s presence surge through her into the world and then back again. She resumed a leisurely walk in the direction of the back of the warehouse, continuing to give Joey and Broch’s encounter a wide berth.
 
“A few minutes doesn’t sound too bad.” He mumbled with his eyes still closed. He probably would have stayed that way and might’ve even fallen asleep if it hadn’t been for the female screaming. Snapping open his eyes and nearly flailing, Jimmy sat up and looked over at her.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Shouting at the image of blood pouring out of Islet’s body, Jimmy somehow managed to scamper off the bed and move toward the doorway, wanting to get away from the macabre scene. Was he asleep?! Please let him be asleep! Pinching his arm, he yelped and realized that no, this hell was really happening.

“Help them!” Jimmy pointed at the siblings, it not escaping his attention that even the male seemed like something was happening to him. He clamped his hands over his ears and tried to close his eyes to the scene unfolding in front of him. This was way worse than his appearance and if he had been able to think clearly, he would’ve realized that although still slower than normal, his regeneration had kicked in and his body was repairing itself.

“Fuck!” Swearing, he limped over to the siblings to try and stop the female from bleeding, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere and it wasn’t long before he was once again coated in blood but this time, it wasn’t his. He cursed softly and looked at Antony, noticing just how pale and unwell he looked. Had he been poisoned? What else could be happening!? This just wasn't right, not at all.

“Oh shit, just what is happening?!”
 
Isabella.

As a name, it didn't tell Rhetta very much. It was common in enough places that it didn't immediately point to a particular nationality, and it had been around long enough that it didn't pinpoint an era, either. It could have been anyone, anywhere - but she supposed it didn't matter to her.

It mattered to him. She'd noticed, certainly, when he'd let his guard down. That was why she stayed where she was, not pretending that she hadn't, but not capitalizing on it immediately, either. Draaven was there, backing her up - he would be ready to take the opening if needed. She didn't need to ask him, she just knew - just like she knew he'd wait long enough to let her play this one out if she wanted, and see where it went.

Rhetta didn't repeat the name. It would have been jarring, to hear it from someone else; would have reminded him that her name shouldn't be here, be spoken by someone who wasn't connected to her. The last thing that she wanted to do was break this shattered thing enough that it might be reforged.

"You want to be with her." This was not a question, but a statement, quiet and solemn, almost forgiving. Of course he did. And she, as he had told her himself - she died.

"I told you before... if you tell me how, I'll make it quick." It was an offering, perhaps even a promise. It whispered, in words unspoken: would she have wanted this for you? Would she have loved this thing you've become? Haven't you been without her long enough?

Letting go was always the hard part. Rhetta tugged at the wire, not sharply, not enough to cut, merely enough to pull down a little bit in indication for the hulking creature towering above her.

"Kneel."
 
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