Act 3, Chapter 90: Monsters, they are all monsters

Day in the story: 29th January (Thursday), around 2 hours earlier; 10 a.m—9 hours into the time trial

Elle Erikson

I always considered myself a cheater—long before I fractured the light of my soul into multiple bodies, when I was still just Alexandra, I was a person who could and would somehow find a shortcut through a straight line. And yet, Ideworld time and time again proved to be an ever-increasing challenge to that axiomatic self-portrait of mine.

Today wasn’t any different.

We were on the road for most of the day, moving behind a mass of shadow-spawned memories of Allied forces going on the offensive against the Nazis occupying war-ridden France. We’d faced some light defenses along the way, but they were of no significance to our advance. And so, meter by meter, kilometer by kilometer, we pushed forward through mud, dust, and blood alike, while the enormous Eiffel Tower remained a constant on the horizon of this strange place. Never coming any closer, never really becoming smaller either.

To fight boredom and exhaustion caused by our march, we talked to keep our sanity alive as we approached the point marked on the retrieved map as a shortcut into the city.

“Got anything good?” Liana asked, drifting closer to Laurent. He had fallen in behind Kito and Piotr, snapping photos of the landscape as we walked.

“A few,” he replied, handing her his wide-lens camera. She took it and began scrolling through the images he had captured.

“It’s all eerily like Earth,” she said. “The flower fields, the grass, the stretches of golden wheat. If not for that clock thing hanging in the sky, I wouldn’t be able to tell we were in Ideworld at all.” Ahead of us, the boys were still discussing the rather creative dismemberment of the Nazis we had encountered half an hour earlier. Kito had transformed his arms into a blend of human limbs and mantis blades and carved them apart with surgical efficiency. Milo covered his face with both hands, trying and failing to suppress his laughter.

“It is,” Bastien replied, pulling his attention back to Lia’s observation. “Though I’d say that enormous jellyfish floating overhead is a dead giveaway that we’re not home.”

He continued staring toward the horizon.

“Yes, I got to that part,” Lia answered dryly.

I stepped beside her and peeked over her shoulder. One of the photos showed the sun still low above the wheat fields, bathing everything in dusky twilight tones. The colossal creature drifting through the sky cast a shadow across the landscape, its silhouette stretching for miles beneath the rising sun.

“It’ll reach the tower long before we do,” Patricia said.

“Probably the final boss of this pierdolony splinter, right?” Piotr asked with a grin as he glanced back at us.

“Sometimes the big ones are easier to kill than the small ones,” Kito said. “Their size works against them.”

“That’s not what she said,” Milo quipped and a muffled laugh escaped Laurent. Kito frowned in confusion, then finally understood several seconds later. By then, everyone else had already moved on.

“Dick jokes aside,” Lia said, still studying the photographs, “these are beautiful. You should turn them into an exhibition someday.”

“For Bohema, perhaps,” Laurent replied. “I fear Sleepers would have their memories altered if they learned what they truly depict.”

“Only if they knew they were real,” Lia countered. “You could present them as edited photographs. Plenty of artists do work like that. Maybe some of those surreal landscapes we’ve seen aren't surreal at all they're just labeled that way.”

Laurent considered that for a moment.

“I’ll think about it.”

**********

Piotr, preparing to peek around the corner of a building in a small town off the main road, pressed his back against its brick wall and held that steel bat of his firmly in both hands, squeezing it tightly. “You sure they’re there?” he asked in a hushed voice as he jutted his head around the corner for a quick glance.

“Of course,” I replied. I had scouted the entire area about half an hour earlier thanks to paper birds and their ability to provide me with an aerial view of the terrain. We’d left the main force and taken a smaller road to reach this town. While it was mostly abandoned—or emptied of its usual inhabitants by the forces of evil wearing human faces—it still served as a hub for their operations. The town square was occupied by armed Nazi soldiers and what looked like tanks fused with flesh. Humanoid in shape, but rising at least six meters high, they were clad in armor taken straight from tanks and had tank barrels for arms. Four of them stood overlooking a lone building in the middle of the square that served as a base of operations for our opponents. “My birds are still in the air. I can see all of it.” I added.

“Yup. Can see two tankmen at the front and a few soldiers,” Piotr said when he turned back toward us. We had dispatched the soldiers patrolling the outskirts pretty easily, thanks to my scouting abilities and Lia’s bugs, which crawled up to them and injected some of Kito’s specially cooked venom into their veins. But with those tanks around, we had to come up with a different approach. “There’s a gate over there leading into the courtyard we need to reach,” he continued.

“Yes, and the Nazis are preparing to hang some dissidents and rebels in there,” I added, seeing it all from the safety of a nearby rooftop where my folded pigeon perched.

“We could try saving them,” Patricia replied. “Events like that often coalesce into soulmarks afterward.”

Heavy footsteps shook the ground, raising dust as we spoke. Those ironclad men were no joke, and their weight suggested they could pack a serious punch.

Milo wanted to go in as quickly as possible, but despite his bravado, he wasn’t indestructible. Being hit while fighting one of them by the others could very well result in us having to dig a grave for him.

“We should. We can make it training for saving real people at the same time,” Kito said. “What’s the plan?”

“I’ll send bees to get rid of the soldiers while you and Milo get close enough to deal with the tanks. Tien can make some obstacles out of the ground that we can hide behind.” Lia started formulating a plan, then remembered me and turned her attention my way. “Elle, can you help somehow?”

“I could blow them up, set them on fire, or make a lot of noise to divert their attention.”

“Right. Forgot about those cards of yours,” she said, remembering what I’d told them about my abilities and gear while we were still in the discussion and preparation phase back in Paris. Using painted cards seemed like a good addition to the whole Domain of Paper thing I was posing for.

“I say El should send a few exploding spiders crawling toward the tanks at the start, when we make our approach, and throw a few noise cards to get the soldiers’ attention while the bees get them,” Patricia added her thoughts to the plan. “I also feel something with really vile Authority inside that building. Most likely more than a soldier, but it’s hard to tell what it is. Maybe it warrants some further scouting?”

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I nodded. It felt better to be prepared by at least knowing what the danger looked like. Bastien and Lia agreed immediately, nodding as well in support of the idea.

“Fuck this. We won’t always be able to scout. Let’s just go. We’ve wasted enough time already,” Piotr said, but I had already reached for my paper birds within my aura and sent them flying closer to the gate. They soared from the rooftops where they had been perched and glided toward the building.

Moments later, rifle shots shattered the relative silence of the courtyard, and the birds were torn to pieces.

“What’s going on!?” Patricia asked, raising her voice. “Did they notice us?” She looked directly at me while I watched through the vision of the few birds I’d left circling high above.

“No. They remain focused on their tasks, but a few scouting birds I sent farther in were shot down.”

“Good.” Piotr smiled. “My plan it is, then.”

“Out of the three guys here—one of whom can literally reshape his body into an abomination, no offense, Kito—you’re the actual monster, Peter,” Patricia said.

Peter only grinned, practically vibrating with anticipation for the violence to come. He shifted from foot to foot, tightening and loosening his grip on the bat in his hands.

“Elle, please wait before making a move like that in the future until we’ve had a chance to discuss it,” Liana said, completely ignoring the ongoing banter between Patricia and Milo.

“I will,” I replied.

“Good.” She glanced around the group. “If there are no objections, I say we move.”

**********

They moved in like a unit, and I tried my best to keep up and adjust my methods to suit the needs of working in a group.

Everything so far unfolded just as Lia had proposed. The first human soldiers, shouting at us in German, were being violently stung by the bees she had sent a minute earlier. Their shots faltered and stopped against the shields provided by Kito at the front and against quickly edited fragments of building walls that rose between us and them—put in place through the skillful manipulation of Bastien’s magic.

All of this happened accompanied by the distracting noise of the cards I had thrown to either side. They played nothing but plain radio static.

But as that part of the defense began to wane, the two tankmen initially on our side of the building were joined by the two stationed on the opposite side and all four of them started sending heavy shots in our direction.

Milo, busy batting those shots away one by one, focused on redirecting them either into the air—to avoid hitting and destroying the building ahead—or into the monstrous men coming from the sides. In doing so, he managed to send one straight into the torso of the leftmost tankman, hurling the mangled steel body backward.

It left fragments of iron casing and bodily entrails behind, suggesting that at least this one would not be rejoining the fight.

At the same time, as the rifle-wielding soldiers struck by Liana’s insects began to collapse—unconscious or dead, depending on the dose of venom they had received—my paper-spider mines reached their targets unnoticed.

They crawled onto the massive legs and higher still, searching for weak points. Some squeezed between armor plates, while others attached themselves to the thinnest sections they could find. A few were shot off by soldiers firing at the armor of their comrades, but enough remained.

I flexed my Authority and made the explosives painted onto them real enough for the universe to accept them as such. Light flooded our vision in response to my will.

Body parts and iron fragments rode the shockwave a breath before the brutal roar of the explosion shook both the ground beneath us and the bones within our bodies.

Kito held the line, despite his shielding wings fluttering in the man-made wind I had created through my magic. Moments later, Milo joined him, creating an additional barrier around us to protect us from the heat and force of the blast.

Two of the tankmen were reduced to debris, blood, and pulp in an instant. One, somehow, survived. It still stood, with only the left side of its torso remaining intact and a single arm still aimed in our direction, continuing to fire. Its human head was half exposed, showing metallic bone where muscle and skin had receded. The remaining flesh twisted into a grimace of pure hatred.

Milo was on the monstrosity the instant the explosion subsided. His magical base and the shield it provided dropped, and he launched himself at the opponent, pinning it to the ground as his legs slammed into the bulk of the half-machine, half-human abomination.

The first swing of the bat, delivered in a wide upward arc, smashed into the tank barrel protruding from its arm and shattered it with a wet metallic crunch.

Red and white shadowlight followed the path of Piotr’s weapon as he rolled off the Nazi’s body onto the ground behind it, twirled the bat once through the air, and brought it down on the creature’s head with the same efficiency.

“Well done,” Lia addressed all of us while standing beside me and watching the excesses of the Polish man. With every encounter we shared, it became clearer that Piotr embodied the brutality and thirst for blood his family was supposedly famous for.

“Please help!” someone shouted from the courtyard in French—a woman’s voice.

“We should go help her,” Patricia said, pinching her nose shut. All that death had filled the air with the foul odors of emptied bladders and bowels, blood, and rusted iron. I was starting to accept those smells as something perfectly natural at this point. Maybe it was the bear senses taking control of my system or just indifference, but I was glad for it nonetheless.

“She’s there.” Kito pointed into the space enclosed by the building’s walls.

In the middle of it stood a hastily constructed gallows where four people were already hanging—their bodies limp. One woman remained standing on a small stool, her legs and arms bound, a noose around her neck. The Nazi soldiers responsible for conducting the execution were all convulsing on the ground, fluid spilling from their mouths.

“Please help!” she shouted again.

“Let’s go,” Milo said, striking his bat against the paved ground to shake off at least part of the blood smeared all over it.

“Why is she just standing there?” Liana asked, voicing my concerns as well. “Can’t she at least try to get her head out of the noose?”

“Who cares? Maybe she’s scared, or this shadowspawn just doesn’t know any better,” Milo replied as we all ran toward the woman. He was also the first to reach her.

The moment he jumped onto the wooden platform to free her, her body was violently yanked backward by some unseen force. She snapped and turned horizontal in the air and her entire body split apart. Not like flesh tearing, but like a giant mouth opening.

A seam running from the crown of her head to her pelvis peeled apart, exposing glistening layers of wet muscle and rows upon rows of teeth. The first row looked almost human—all crooked and yellowed—but behind them waited deeper rings of jagged shark-like fangs, rotating and shifting against one another.

A long serrated tongue exploded from that grotesque opening. Barbed ridges lined its length like hooked blades. It wrapped around the surprised Milo before he could react, instantly compromising his movement and lifting him off the ground. Squeezed by a sudden force he dropped the bat to the ground.

Only then did I notice that the woman’s body was nothing more than biological bait. Her back was connected to a thick cord of flesh, like an umbilical tether stretched taut into the darkness beneath the gallows. Then the thing attached to the other end skittered into view.

At first glance it resembled some monstrous scolopendra, but its body wasn't segmented chitin. Instead, it was formed from a long, writhing slab of living flesh that flexed and contracted like an enormous tongue crawling across the ground.

Human fingers served as its countless legs—hundreds of them.

They clawed at the earth in frantic synchronization, knuckles bending the wrong way, nails scraping grooves into the stone. Every finger ended in a long jagged nail yellowed with rot and stained dark at the tips. Together they carried the creature forward in a horrifying scuttle that was far too quick for something so grotesque.

Where its head should have been, a massive human hand unfolded. The skin stretched taut over bulging veins. Joints cracked and popped as the fingers spread wide. The index finger had transformed into the fleshy tether to that bait of a woman’s body currently holding Milo.

In the center of the palm sat a circular mouth—a grinding pit of chainsaw-like teeth arranged in concentric rings, spinning and clicking against one another with a metallic shriek. Strings of saliva hung between them and splattered the ground whenever the thing snapped its maw shut.

The remaining fingers, including the thumb, were swollen and riddled with dozens of human eyes. Some were bloodshot, some cataracted white, others gleamed with unnatural clarity. Every single one darted frantically in search of prey. Every single one was twisted into the same expression—pure, unrestrained hatred.

Tongue-like tentacles lashed outward with whip-like speed from inside that grotesque mouth, reaching for anything they could catch. Lia, Bastien, and unfortunately me were caught by them—they wrapped around our bodies with crushing force, slick and hot and far stronger than they had any right to be.

“Please help!” The woman's head, still attached to the monster, continued screaming. “Please help!” The creature kept repeating it over and over. The pleading voice never changed.