Metra held onto the shaft of Qiada, swinging her lower body around in an attempt to kick the nightmarish millipede. The guided hand of Zimmothy’s body caught her armoured foot. The spikes covering the shin guard ravaged the skin of the corpse, but of course the puppet master didn’t care for its short-term home’s well-being.

“Of all beings – Yes, I will tell her and all of them gathered. - you should be the most respectful to us, Metra,” Izha mockingly stated as it closed the hand around the berserker babe’s leg and tossed her towards John. She landed on all fours, continuing to slide through the grass even after having caught herself. Her hands and feet dug trenches into the cold and wet ground.

She growled like a beast, clearly about to charge in again. However, when Izha pulled Qiada from its host’s head like it was swatting an annoying fly and then hurled it at the ancient weapon, she was stopped dead in her tracks.

“What do you mean?” John asked, in regards to both statements that the Lorylim had just made.

“I still need his flesh, that is clear enough for us and you are smart, smart indeed, that is why we think you should join us, you could be more so much more,” the millipede rubbed its legs together, creating a skittering sound that was something like laughter. “Be like me.”

John grabbed his right arm; the scars were itching and hot. It was a mere echo of the maggot-crawling feeling that had taken hold of him before and yet still something he wanted to escape as quickly as possible. “WHOSE flesh?” he asked about more details. “If its Zimmothy, you are already inhabiting a corpse, leaving the barrier will be impossible.”

“No, no, not this one’s useless pile of sinews and …, the one that laughs like the animal.” So, Jackal, that was what John got out of Izha’s careless rambling. “We need that one’s flesh. – I need that one’s flesh. – That plan is convoluted. – The original plan is dead. – Yes, he stopped it. Now, let’s have fun with him. – Do you not want to die? – No. – Some of us do, most of us don’t. – Ah, the fear is delicious.”

Having a conversation with a clearly schizophrenic hivemind was like grinding his tongue against a whetstone. “What would you need his flesh for?” John continued to ask questions; it continued the stalemate, which gave everyone time to regenerate some of their reserves. Furthermore, while the Lorylim was in this talkative a mood, the Gamer might as well try to learn something useful about his hated enemies.

Everything that he could use to hurt those that hurt Undine and Salamander (even if both of them had gotten themselves into those situations) he would want to know.

Izha closed its mouth and it was replaced with the eye again. The solid iris, a black dot in the body of bone white, rested in a dry network of lines that looked like somebody had damaged a piece of crystal and carefully removed everything between the cracks. It stared. Then the lower side of the millipede burst open into a laughing mouth.

Zimmothy’s worn armour bulged and writhed all over his body. One by one and in a shower of lifeblood, tongues cut open the leather from the inside. Rows of dagger-like teeth grew outwards as forming mouths added their laughter to the cacophony.

The terrible song of the Lorylim once more rushed through John’s ears within that laughter. He clenched his arm harder. ‘Not yet,’ John thought, hoping Metra and Rave saw his warning glances. ‘Don’t attack yet, it may tell us something we want to know still.”

Grey viscous goo flooded out of the hole that Metra had punched through its skull, soon forming the bodies of two smaller millipedes, possessing enormous sickle-esque front legs.

Then all of the laughter ceased, every orifice closing and inverting, leaving Izha in command of a body with hundreds of eyes of varying sizes and just one mouth. “Do you think…” Izha sounded weirdly human for this one moment, fatherly, lightly scolding, charismatic. Despite its horrid appearance, John had to fight not to be soothed by the tone. “… that, if we could have, we wouldn’t have mass-produced these pills in ages before?”

It clicked inside John’s brain and the disgusting revelation made him swallow heavily. Jackal was the carrier of a sentient plague and he was shaving bits and pieces off himself and into his concoctions. While a horrid image, the good news was that he would eventually use himself up, for the lack of a better term. The other was that this clearly wasn’t easy, otherwise all of those failures wouldn’t have stood around the form that became progressively less Zimmothy and more of an eldritch abomination.

The best news would be if he could just prevent that alchemist from getting out and take him out while still here. There had been enough damage already; his potions had sent hundreds into suicide over the course of this war. “And why do you still need his flesh?” John asked.

“We will not tell,” Izha giggled. “You have been given all the information to hate yourself by. For the shocking realization yet to come.”

It was back to nonsensical gargling. Nonsensical gargling that John best keep in mind and try to extract some meaning from, but nothing he could use in this particular moment.

“Why would Metra pay you respect?” he asked the other line of questioning.

“Ah, so many people not of us hold the answer to that. - So many times, so many lies. - Why should we tell you what I learned at the price of my forehead’s structural integrity?”

Yeah, the questioning time was definitely over. “Sad for you that he won’t be able to get out while I command this barrier.”

“False,” Izha giggled, giggled with all of his mouths. “You still know so little. – Little about truths. – Little about how this world functions. – Little about warfare. Pop quiz!” suddenly the monster was back to sounding human, mocking this time. It made John feel like he was a little boy not getting what he wanted. “How would Bearings get out of here?”

That was a good question. If Jeff Bearings had wanted to just leave the barrier and make a run for it, he could have done so at any point prior to this attack. Therefore, there had to be some sort of device that allowed him to make a more worthwhile escape, something that took time to prepare and ate a lot of mana. ‘Point-Point teleportation,’ John realized. ‘Shit.’

Izha hadn’t just been talking for the hell of it, it was buying its fleshy toy as much time as it could to make chasing him impossible. Not all was yet lost if they could just find the teleporter and organize patrols wherever the endpoint was.

“And now we are on one page – you – me – and the rest of the us that is above me.” The two grey millipedes growing out of the host’s brain suddenly stretched outwards. Their legs all extended into enormous sickles and buried them one by one inside the drugged people surrounding the Lorylim like the manifestation of god on earth. Like pigs in a slaughterhouse, they hung from the millipedes’ elongated bodies. Then they began to melt into malleable material, which wrapped around Izha like a cocoon of human flesh.

The group around John didn’t stand idle watching this time. “This is so gross!” Rave complained charging in together with everyone else. Her hands were engulfed in dark fire, a gift from Salamander. She didn’t need to look at the buff to know what it was. Jumping up with her hands united at the wrist, she conjured a massive blast of light that covered the entire cocoon.

Bright light mixed with grey and golden flames turning the outer layer of the chrysalis into a withered piece of crumbling ash. A moment later the next creature burst out, that outer layer unfolding into halfway destroyed limbs. That initial action had at the very least spared them the headache of dealing with a flying enemy.

Nevertheless, the thing that got on its clawed legs was monstrous to behold. Izha had transformed all of the bodies into one goliath. With six arms, all of them overly long and ending in needle-like claws, and the thankfully defunct wings, it was quite top heavy and hunched forwards, needing those arms to support its own weight. Its head was a nightmarish middle ground between a human and a praying mantis, but much worse was what covered its skin.

Eyes and mouths were erratically blinking and closing to change into the other. The abhorrent growths were cackling in the gaps of the ripped skin, much too scarce to cover the entirety of the five metre colossus of white bone matter and liquified flesh. It was stretched beyond anything skin should endure and its ragged condition only got worse as the thing began to move.

‘Again, with the binary?’ John thought, trying to imprint it. The last time his brain had been overloaded with other stuff and unable to recall it, this time he would decipher whatever this was. After this whole affair was done with.

The Inconvenience swatted at Rave, who was quickly saved by Aclysia using her body as a shield. With Fortification, she managed to keep herself from getting impaled by the claws. The two of them managed to land somewhat elegantly a distance away, in large part thanks to Salamander and Sylph then engaging the monster and preventing a follow-up attack.

‘If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have burned Combination so easily,’ John thought and then began running into the fray himself. He had another tool he could burn to take care of this. He stopped at a sensible distance and waited for Rave and Aclysia to re-join the fight.

Together with Gnome, the weaponized maid forced the attention of the beast on them with the sheer brutality of their attacks. Metra, Beatrice and Rave assaulted it with quick attacks while Salamander, Sylph and Siena went in whenever they saw a small opening. It should have been a one-sided fight, but the Inconvenience was more persistent than that.

Not only did it possess a high regenerative factor, its six arms and many eyes also gave it the tools to deal with such a swarm descending on it.

In a brutal flurry of movements, it hit Beatrice with the back of its hand, causing the passive maid to fly far away. Simultaneously, it managed to scratch across Rave’s torso, parting the battlesuit where the sharp claw travelled, and also hit Sylph with its massive tail made from melded spines. The first two weren’t particularly bad: Beatrice took a lot of damage but would heal quickly while the cut across Rave’s chest only hurt a lot but wasn’t life-threatening (especially after the suit sealed back up, essentially first aiding the wound). Sylph on the other hand was absolutely devastated by that one attack.

Being the glass-canon of the entire formation, she couldn’t sustain such a hit. ‘Ow, this hurts… owww, owwww,’ she tried to palaver something cheery but out came only sounds of pain. She was lying on the floor, unable to fly again. John wanted to go and heal her, but Undine was already subject to a dark pull in the soul-dwelling state she was in. Getting her out to heal the spirit was not an option. Therefore, he told the tempest elemental to immaterialize as well. Saddened, she obeyed.

The fight continued, and with the most agile member of its enemies out of the picture, the Inconvenience could focus more of its eyes on the rest. John was still looking for that opening as everyone kept landing hits that healed shortly thereafter. He sacrificed an entire one-thousand mana to Shardbound, combined it into one and hurled it at the creature.

It hit just in the nick of time, as the Inconvenience’s maw was about to close around Salamander. The lower jaw of the creature got blown off by the attack giving Salamander the opportunity to fill its exposed windpipe with fire that would cook the beast inside out. Or so she thought.

‘What the fuck?!’ the endflame elemental thought instead as she found the thing to not have any openings that could lead to any lungs. Its maw existed purely to bite, not to swallow. This creature was, after all, not meant to communicate or sustain itself, it only existed to delay or kill.

She still engulfed the head of the creature in fire, but that neither blinded it nor was there a brain that would have been a weak spot. It was just another wound that started regenerating, slower due to the endflames being particularly effective against the corruption that birthed them, but nothing lethal.

John meanwhile realized another question in all of this. ‘Where is Nia?’ he asked himself. The blank, rather than partaking in the actual fight, was watching like he was. Clutching her dagger and spear, she was waiting for something. A part of him desperately wanted to yell at her to get her act together, but he knew that the blank was not one to act idly.

Nia was a social retard, to be frank, but she was a battle genius and always searching and usually finding the quickest way to win. If she was standing there, she must have had a trick up her sleeve. The tip of her visor pointed straight at the Lorylim abomination as she raised her weapons above her head. The jet-black weapons lost their shape, flowed together above her head into one sword. Her lips moved, the words rung painfully in John’s ears as his brain was unable to hear them but yet forced meaning from them, “[Extermination]”

A wave that could not be seen but perceived with every other sense cut through the air like a sword made from paper. With minute precision, it passed between Aclysia and Gnome and sliced into the Inconvenience.

The dark sword disappeared from Nia’s hands and, heavily translucent, she sunk to her knees. The moment her leg hit the ground, the three left arms of the creature suddenly began to slide away, separated from the main body. She looked over to John, who was positioned to the left of the creature.

He was already acting, a better opening than that wouldn’t come. The many mouths of the inconvenience hissed in annoyance and triumph. Even as John raised his left arm and unleashed the spell within Purgatory. A mana blade worth twelve-thousand mana broke forth. It was more like a limited laser beam than a sword at that point. It lasted only for one second, but that was enough time for John to slice the beast apart a second time.

The shadow and earth infused blade disappeared, and everyone else sprung into action. Kicking, slicing, burning and punching apart the three-parted monstrosity, they caused heaps of liquid flesh to rip off at invisible seams. The Inconvenience was beaten, quickly disassembling into the hastily gathered parts that had made it up.

The millipede-esque beasts scattered out of the body as it fell apart, gathering into a shifting mass in the shape of a toothed mouth. “We look forwards to your despair, John Newman,” a voice not Izha’s but a melody of millions giggled before being disintegrated by a large fireball Salamander cast at it.