Chapter 68: My Biggest Mistake

  ChrisLensman

  I backed off on pure instinct as I saw the ball of legs and chitin writhing within Carl. I couldn't help it. I wasn't bothered by insects usually, not even by very rge ones, but something about that mass of centipedes just made my entire body break out into goosebumps.

  Centipedes in general were just kind of horrible. There was little more gross than shaking out your pant leg and having a centipede fall out. Then there was an even more inherent grossness to a tangle of vermin like that, whether it was snakes or scorpions or cockroaches or rats, rge piles of vermin were just viscerally disgusting in a way very little else could manage. But a rge pile of centipedes of all things was worse still, a giant ball of vileness that was tough to stomach.

  But the knowledge that this giant ball of vileness was inside of a person was simply too much. Carl wasn't so much parasitized by crimson centipedes as much as he was a sack of skin piloted by a nest of insects. And clearly he was aware of and perfectly happy with this arrangement. Not that there was much he could do about it. The centipedes were all that was keeping him alive at this point. Given how damn many of them there were I wasn't even sure Carl had any bones or internal organs left.

  And the fact that he seemed more or less healthy meant that our options for defeating him were extremely limited. Amputation clearly didn't bother him much and stab wounds would need to inflict catastrophic damage in order to even slow him down. At the same time the centipedes apparently exploded violently if heated up enough so there was that.

  This meant we either had to pierce his brain and hope he at least needed that to live or we needed to blow up that centipede king he had in pce of a heart.

  All of this was easier said than done, however, because merely getting close to him was a challenge. And I was brutally reminded of that fact because the moment I backed off I had to scramble backward to dodge a downward hammer blow of force magic.

  But Selene had clearly come to the same conclusion I had because a moment after the hammer blow fell she sprinted past me, now wielding a mace. While she had nothing that could make those centipedes blow up, a heavy mace would be able to crack their shells and crush them.

  Once again Carl summoned up a hail of force bdes to mow her down but before he could even let them loose I threw another dispelling stiletto at him, disrupting his spell just long enough for Selene to nd a devastating blow with the force of a full sprint behind it.

  There was the unmistakable cracking sound of shattered chitin and a moment ter Carl simultaneously let out two completely distinct sounds. One was the shrieking of a young man in agony, the other was the high-pitched death shriek that some giant insects let out when you killed them. Apparently whatever Selene had struck had been vitally important for both of them.

  “Kill you...” Carl rasped and Selene hurried out of the way of a dozen shadow spears that shot out in front of him like a phanx. “I'll kill you!”

  As she rushed backwards her foot snagged on a shadow tendril and before she could yank her foot loose a hammer blow of force took her right in the chest, causing her to sail through the air with a sickening crunch of impact. Alisha immediately hurried to her and started casting her healing miracle but that left me fending Carl off on my own.

  Carl looked bad. His left side had a very big and obvious dent in it, his skin and tattered tunic hanging loose over a hollow spot. On a normal person it would have looked like a very bad case of broken ribs, though that kind of dent on a normal person would have been fatal as it would have meant their broken ribs had been driven deep enough to pierce their heart. Carl, on the other hand, just looked like a merchant's ox cart had run him over. He looked even paler if that was possible, what was left of his left arm hung limp like it was just a tube of flesh and his aura didn't extend as far from his body as it had before.

  But clearly whatever magic the centipedes inside him still generated was enough for him to be threatening because he immediately sent out another flurry of force bdes, not at me but at Selene, trying to finish her off before Alisha's healing miracle finished.

  Once again I threw a dispelling stiletto but this time I wasn't quite fast enough. Three of them still unched before the throwing knife disrupted the spell. Two of them went wide and the third veered off course, scything through Alisha's leg and severing her right foot.

  My little elf shrieked in agony and I squeezed my eyes shut to stop the tears. I knew she would be fine if I just kept fighting, knew that turning around to help her would make things worse, knew that I needed to distract Carl so he couldn't unch another attack like that.

  I rushed Carl, not even swinging a weapon but simply charging forward and ramming my shoulder into his chest. This technique was normally used to hit an opponent in the stomach but the bastard was so short that even leaning forward as far as I could without falling over I was only able to hit him in the chest.

  A moment before impact I saw his face, his expression twisted into momentary horror as he had just realized where his attack had nded.

  Before he even had a chance to right himself I swung Helios Edge through a Qi Burst, hitting him in the chest once again. There was a sizzle but no violent explosion so clearly I had missed the nest of centipedes.

  “That's what happens,” I hissed at him as I pressed the attack. “Did you think those force bdes were for fun? They're deadly weapons.”

  “Of course I knew that,” he growled back, sending a shadow nce out of his palm that I leaned away from. “But I didn't want to hit Alisha.”

  “That's right,” I said, kicking him in the chest to push him back. “You think Alisha is some prize to be won. Someone who just stays out of the fight and then becomes the victor's property.”

  “Don't pretend like you know me,” he shrieked and coated his fist in force magic before swinging it at me. I could have used the throw Yume had taught me to toss the fucker onto his back but I was too angry to go for anything fshy. I just dodged the blow and caught him with a hook to the chin, making him stumble back once more.

  “It was the same when I worked for you,” I said. “Cocksure despite being completely useless, you had Alisha trail behind us despite her being the most powerful person in our party back then. You just wanted your little walking trophy to see how strong and cool you were.”

  “Fuck you!” he screeched and summoned forth shadow magic. It coiled around him, ready to strike but this time I didn't even bother with a dispelling stiletto. I just punched him in the face.

  “That's why it stung so hard when she told you how she really felt, right?” I asked. “You realized that your little trophy wasn't happy with the person she had been given to. Instead of becoming a better person you doubled down and decided to have Ares destroy Alisha's mind so you could have your obedient little puppet.” I pulled out Helios Edge again, charged a Qi Burst and cut his right arm off as well, then jumped a step back to avoid the explosion of blue bug guts. “But guess what? Even if you do win here, even if Ares mindfucks her into your perfect trophy, you still didn't get Alisha to respect you. You will just erase her and repce her with someone who does.”

  His expression went sck and his eyes lost their luster. For a moment I thought I had finally gotten through to him.

  But then two centipedes burst from his arm stumps and his aura fred back up. “I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!” he shrieked and force bdes coated in darkness unched out from him, all homing in on my location. Evidently I hadn't just struck a nerve, I had struck the nerve too hard. He knew that I was right and there was nothing he could say about it.

  And it was the final push I needed. Even after everything I was hesitant to just kill a person. As ridiculous as his name was, learning it had still humanized him further. But with this I had realized what kind of person he was.

  I sympathized with what he'd gone through after we'd left him for dead, I truly did. I could see uncomfortable parallels between his situation and mine. It had led me to conclude that him and me hadn't been so different. But I had been wrong about that.

  He had been rotten from the very start. He'd been scum back then and every step he had taken since then had made him worse and worse. And finally, right at the end, he had been confronted with the way to better himself and he had rejected it in favor of petty anger. There was nothing worth saving about this person. Just because I sympathized with parts of his story didn't mean I had to have sympathy for him. Not when the thing he had become was nothing more than an expression of what he had always been.

  Before I could even lean sideways to dodge his wave of projectiles a barrier miracle snapped into pce in front of me, blocking all the projectiles. I chanced a look backwards and saw Alisha, once again hale and healthy, leaning into an equally healthy-looking Selene.

  Before the barrier miracle could colpse she sent out four air nces ced with Qi. Normally her air nces improved with Qi were violently powerful tornado nces but these were different. They weren't meant to be more destructive. They were instead built for longevity.

  The four air nces struck Carl in each of his limbs, two skewering the heads of the centipedes acting as his arms and two impaling his legs. Then, instead of dissipating or exploding, they hoisted him up into the air.

  “I used to regret what happened to you,” Alisha said, her voice still slightly strained. “I never regretted leaving you for even a moment but I thought leaving you in that castle was cruel.”

  Carl's eyes regained a bit of luster but before he could say anything Alisha continued:

  “But after all of this? No, Felix has the right of it. The only thing we should regret is not killing you then and there.”

  She walked over to me, limping just a little bit. She reached me and rested a bit of her weight on me as she pced a hand over the one I was clutching Helios Edge in. I sought her gaze and when our eyes met she gave me a nod.

  I stood up straight and held Alisha with my left arm as I began to funnel my Qi into Helios Edge. Alisha's right hand rested on my wrist and her Qi, too, flowed into the bde until it started humming with our combined life force.

  Finally I sent a nce of pure, blindingly white fme at Carl's chest, where I knew the knot of centipedes resided. The nce of fire struck. Pierced him. His body bulged out grotesquely for just a moment and then, with a final shriek of giant bugs, he exploded in a shower of blue gore.

  “My biggest mistake,” Alisha breathed, “made right.”

  **

  By the time we were done with Carl the others had managed to not only kill the horde of orcs and goblins but to free Artemis as well. The virgin goddess of the hunt was sitting on the wooden block she had been tortured on, a traveling cloak thrown over her vioted body, crying into Athena's shoulder. We couldn't even kill her and let her revive in her tholos because for all we knew her tholos was filled with goblins waiting to jump her in case she died.

  Alisha, Selene and I approached the scene together, Alisha's gait growing surer and surer with each step, which comforted me. Alisha had a horrible pain threshold and even minor injuries left her hurting long after they healed, which made the fact that she liked to get hurt in the bedroom all the more bizarre to me but, as Alisha expined it, bedroom pain was completely different and she actually enjoyed that it smarted for hours afterwards.

  As we reached the others Artemis said: “I should kill you for seeing me in this state, Tailor”

  “Then why don't you?” I asked, though there was no real heat behind it. The depths of Tartarus couldn't be worse than what had been visited upon Artemis.

  “Because you, all of you, came to save me,” she said. “When Ares and his little Chosen One chained me up here I thought my torment would st forever, but it didn't. You saved me. Never let it be said that I don't honor that kind of debt.”

  “Do you want to help us take these bastards down?” I asked her, my voice gentle.

  “Yes,” she said with fire in her voice.

  “Do you want us to go liberate your tholos? That way we can restore you and grab your gear.” Athena asked. I cringed inwardly, not wanting to waste that much more time, but before I could say anything Artemis shook her head.

  “No. I shall wear these scars until we have ousted these bastards. Only then will I restore this body.”

  “Do you want a bow?” I asked. The one I had in my bag of holding wasn't particurly good but I was pretty sure Artemis would be a monster if you just handed her a stick with a piece of twine tied to it.

  “There is a saying,” Artemis said as she got up. “'Learn to fight naked and you can never be disarmed'.” I was about to raise an eyebrow but she continued. “That's cute but that's not really my style.”

  She snapped her fingers and a moment ter her body began to glow. When the glow faded she was wearing a long tunic and a quiver full of arrows and in her hands was an ornate longbow.