Arcane Apocalypse ~ 46

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*****

The large man glanced at where Carmilla’s dainty finger pointed, his rugged face twisting into a scowl. “The cunt tried to shank me in me neck while I slept. That cur wanted me dead, so he sent that pathetic sack of shit to finish the job he didn’t have the guts to do.”

“Did he really?” Carmilla mused, giving the man an unkind smile that for some reason made him simper and bow his head. “Like we were here to hunt you down on his orders?”

“No!” The man shouted. “I mean YES! He did shank me too, just a bit too late as I was already mid-shift. Me neck was more than tough and thick enough to survive a single shoddy pocket knife … I still have the damned thing somewhere in the cave … “

Feeling increasingly weirded out by whatever the fuck was going on, Mia squeezed Carmilla’s arm. The simpering, naked, filthy man before her and his deranged ramblings were really raising alarm bells in her head by the dozens.

This was the sort of person she made sure not to look in the eye when she met one on the street, and pray they ignored her. The man reminded her of those unstable lunatics that looked fine one moment, only to lunge at you with a used syringe that had more STDs on it than Mia had fingers to count them on.

Her human, and probably just general survival instincts were screaming at her to stop being stupid and move her dumb butt away from the lunatic.

“I’ll handle it from now if you want to stay out of this,” Carmilla murmured, glancing at Mia over the shoulder and at the single pink chain still grasped in her hand. “I know … this probably looks very strange, but I- uhm, I wouldn’t want to kill him if he really only killed that man in self defence.”

Her eyes were understanding, those ruby gems shining with a gentle light which gave Mia a bit of a whiplash after seeing how the girl acted for the last few minutes. 

“Okay,” Mia said, gulping as she glanced at the man. He looked back, the submissive demeanour he had on with Carmilla evaporating as he snarled her way, making Mia stumble back in fright as his jaws enlarged to snap at the air.

In return, Carmilla’s claws sunk into his chest up to the knuckles and then yanked out a rib with a torturous crack of flesh and bone.

The man only grunted, showing how used to the pain he got with a regenerative Skill, or more likely, Trait that powerful. If getting a rib torn out barely made him flinch, how atrociously agonising did those Blood spells have to be to have him seizing and writhing in pain? 

I think I really don’t want to know. Mia though, taking a respectful dozen steps back after letting go of Carmilla’s calming arm. She still kept Arcane Shackles going though, an ember of spite blossoming in her heart. 

The damned mutt played stupid games, so it would win stupid prizes. Which in this case were a group of chains tightening around his body and cracking every joint he had in all four of his limbs.

He’s much weaker in his human form. Mia realised, having never been able to do more than to hold him back while he was in his bear form. Now though, she felt with a flick of her wrist she could snap his neck, break his spine or crush his arm into pulp. These Shackles might be cooler than I thought.

Still, consciously controlling them was taxing and strained her mental muscles considerably more than anything she’d done before. Probably it was her now ten points of Control that made it possible at all, along with her fully utilised Sensitivity.

She felt like the spells she cast weren’t just weapons, simple tools to be used and discarded. There was a connection there, like the spells cast with her own mana were still part of her, though that feeling was extremely faint.

“What’s your name?” Carmilla asked, her voice back to being merciless with a new hint of malice creeping into it.

“Lars,” the man said, his face twitching in pain as Mia’s chains grinded against his crushed joints. 

“Well, Lars,” Carmilla said, leaning closer to the man as she grabbed him by the jaw with a clawed hand. “I want you to tell me everything, from the very beginning. Why are you out here? Who was that Alpha who you spoke of?”

*****

Mia’s Shackles dissipated a mere five minutes later — even with her having dismissed the sadly unused Spectral Blade a while ago —, just as she’d felt the approach of mana deprivation. So after ordering her Familiar to keep watch, she sat down on a torn out trunk and Meditated.

A tiny flicker of her awareness paid attention to the rambling story Carmilla was slowly teasing out of the lunatic piece by piece.

The gist of it was that the bear shifter had a mansion up near the top of the hill. After the System came he started picking up all of the rowdy Shifters near him and — with some weird Shifter magic — formed a Pack with himself as its leader, its Alpha.

Unfortunately for him, one of the werewolves he picked up a week into the apocalypse was strong, almost as strong as Lars and twice as ambitious.

The werewolf poisoned Lars and then challenged him to a duel, which Lars had to accept due to that weird Pack magic of his even though he was half-dead from shitting his guts out due to the poison.

The werewolf won, obviously, and in a show of mercy only banished Lars from the Pack instead of killing him like it would have been proper for a new Alpha.

As for which part of that process broke Lars’ mind into the crazed state it was in at the moment, Mia didn't know. Still, she hazarded a guess that the man had not always been a lunatic, what with him being able to assemble a Pack in the first place.

That must have taken more than just strength, a leader was supposed to have some charisma too, right? A proper one anyway, not the tyrannical asshole kind that the werewolf ‘king’ and Jeff are. Perhaps Lars was like that too.

“Wha-“ a startled voice shouted, quickly followed by scrambling and then a thud.

Mia cracked an eye open, breaking out of her Meditation and feeling the incoming stream of mana slow to a crawl. I’m at about 40%. Should be enough for now.

Dumb, or perhaps Dumber (it was hard to tell the difference), was first to wake from the fudge state Lars’ shouts put the soldiers in. As for the thud, apparently the moron’s first action was smashing his face into a tree.

The rest, who’d all fallen into some strange half-asleep, half-paralysed state all woke up at his shout right next to them. Even Carmilla and Lars stopped their conversation to look over.

The Sergeant stood up, a hand on his temples as he gazed at the surroundings with a cautious grimace. His eyes landed on Mia, swept over her then stopped on Carmilla and Lars kneeling before her feet.

The man stared, incomprehension clear on his face then he scrambled for the handgun holstered at his waist a moment later.

Better be safe than sorry. Mia thought as she watched the wide bloodshot eyes of the older man. He might really just shoot her.

“Break the gun,” Mia whispered, tugging at her bond with her Familiar to make sure it knew the order was meant for it.

The cat shot off, and before the Sergeant could even fully pull the pistol out in his frenzied haste, a cat clawed at his hand and then chomped down on the gun.

Metal shrieked and bent, and the Familiar hopped away not a second later. The gun was thoroughly ruined, barrel bent and grip pierced by a fang.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” The man shouted, startling his drowsy looking soldiers into full awareness. “You-“

“Calm down Sergeant,” Carmilla said coldly, gazing at the five of them like they were less than the dirt on her boots. “I’ve just gotten what Colonel Zeigler had been searching for for the last week.”

“I am the commanding officer of this squad!” The Sergeant reddened, jaw clenching. Did whatever Lars did to him scramble his brain? “You’ll face the tribunal for striking me!”

The second part had been said with a heated glare at Mia, the man stomping up to her pompously without any fear as his troopers assembled behind him.

None of them had their rifles though, and it seemed only the Sergeant carried a sidearm well hidden enough that Mia missed it. The rest was all hidden under a bush nearby, since she’d disarmed the bunch right before going to Meditate.

Mia didn’t back down, stumble back and scamper off at top speed like she would have two weeks ago. No, she stood her ground and gazed at the approaching heavyset man two heads taller than her with only curiosity and a hint of something else in her gaze.

Her orders to the Familiar from before still stood. It would protect her if he did anything.

Well, apparently not from ‘anything’. The elemental controlling the Familiar was probably only slightly less shocked by the sucker punch that knocked the breath out of Mia than she was.

“That’s right, you arrogant bitch!” The man spat, gleeful as Mia collapsed with a whimper. “That’s what you get- ARGHHHHH!!”

Mia gritted her teeth, then pushed herself up. Halfway through the motion an arm snaked under her armpits and helped her stand.

Carmilla’s calming scent that reminded Mia of pine and roses gently caressed her nostril and calmed her nerves.

“Make it stop!” Gwen screamed at the two girls, barely having the peace of mind not to follow in her commanding officer’s footsteps and stomp up to Mia and make her. “Tell your monster to stop!”

Mia snorted out a laugh, dismissively glancing away from Gwen and looking at the Sergeant. His uniform was torn, bloody tears and rips covering more of his skin than not. He screamed, rolling on the ground as the Familiar darted around, dodging the frantic fists and grapples of Dumb and Dumber.

It wasn’t going for the kill, just like she’d ordered, but neither was it satisfied with merely doing the bare minimum and disabling Mia’s attacker.

HOW DARE HE? Mia was livid, her whole body trembling from barely suppressed rage. He hit her. He did that, didn’t he? He really did!

A flare of wrath almost made her give the killing order, but perhaps due to Carmilla’s calming presence already putting her nerves to rest pulled her back enough to reason to stop in time.

“Back,” Mia ordered, and the Familiar danced through the two oaf’s grasps one last time before racing back over to Mia and settling in atop her head. “That was very, very rude, but I suppose you are hurting a hundred times more than I ever did from your punch so I’ll let the matter rest for now.”

Carmilla’s grasp tightened on her, the hand the girl still had around Mia’s waist to help her stand dug into Mia’s flesh almost painfully. With a start, the pain was gone and Carmilla slumped with a whispered, “Sorry.”

“W-what was that about?” Mia said, her face still a grimace. 

“Nothing, sorry,” the vampiress said, barely in a whisper as she stared at her feet meekly. 

“You think you can get away with that?” Gwen asked, her anger close to boiling over by the looks of it as she pointed at her groaning Sergeant.

Mia glanced at him, winced in sympathy that came unbidden despite her loathing for the man. Her Familiar was quite vicious, taking both of his eyes and ravaging the fist he used to punch her into an unidentifiable gory mess.

While it wasn’t her who did it directly, she still felt like a colossal hypocrite the moment she thought of what names she called Lars in her mind before. Arguably, what she’d done to the Sergeant was even worse than what he’d done to his would-be murderer.

The sight made her stomach lurch, there was so much blood. Maybe she’d gone too far, that was … going to cause lasting damage. Possibly blinding the man for life. I’d have gotten decades in jail for that. That is, if this was still the earth from a month ago.

“But it isn’t,” Mia murmured under her breath, gently untangling herself from Carmilla and stepping up to Gwen. “Isn’t it? This isn’t the same Earth we knew. This isn’t the world where the same laws still apply, is it?”

“You-“ Gwen started, starting to sound annoyingly similar to her superior.

“Gweny, let’s not,” Fred made an appearance, his wiry hand grabbing Gwen by the wrist. “Okay? Let’s not sacrifice ourselves to getting mutilated, hmmm?”

The woman glowered for a moment, the tore her arm out of the man’s grasp and stomped off to the Sergeant.

Mia’s ears twitched, catching the pained moans of the man and a spike of immense guilt shot into her gut. The man had been abrasive, an asshole and had the gall to hit her. But, did he deserve that for those ‘crimes’ of his?

This might be a new world, but that doesn’t mean I need to be as much of an asshole as he is.

Mia grimaced, thinking about what she was panning to do then let it out in a huff. She fished out her one remaining basic Elixir of Healing and held it out for Fred. 

“This is … ?” The man asked, looking at the diminutive vial.

“Healing Elixir,” Mia said briskly before her calculating part could convince her to reverse course. “It’ll fix him up.”

“Oh … “ Fred gingerly took the vial, holding it between two fingers. “Right. I’ll … feed it to him then? Or do I just pour it over him?”

“Feed,” Mia said, turning away without another word and walking back over to Carmilla. The vampiress waited back where Mia had left her like an abandoned puppy, which earned the girl an amused chuckle from Mia. “What’s with you?”

“Eh?” Carmilla startled. “What? Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Mhmmm,” Mia hummed, giving a slow nod. Whatever it was, the girl clearly didn’t want to say it so Mia relented despite her curiosity. “Can you tell me what that man did to them? And what you did to him to make him … like that?”

“Primal Roar is a general ability most supernatural creatures with bestial characteristics have,” Carmilla said, latching onto the chance to change the subject. “They use it to establish dominance over the less powerful of their kind. Lars’ use of it … well, it sort of put the lot of them in a paralysing fear.”

“I didn’t feel anything like that though?” Mia mused.

“You have both Mind and Spirit over ten, don’t you?” Carmilla asked, though it was more of a statement. “He isn’t strong enough to affect you with it. As for what I did? Well, I just … established my dominance over him in a way he could understand.”

“You vampires have something similar to that Primal Roar of his?”

“Sort of,” Carmilla shrugged, glancing over at the still kneeling shifter. “It’s neither a Skill nor a Trait … but I can use the primal ferocity of my bloodline to dominate his.”

“Can I do that too?” Mia asked, curious. Her bloodline was supposedly kind of a big deal, wasn’t it?

“I don’t think so,” Carmilla said, her lips curling in amusement for a moment before being forcefully wiped off as the girl put on a nervous expression. “How do I say this? Your bloodline is … not the predatory kind needed for this sort of thing.”

“What kind is it then?” Mia asked, raising an eyebrow and Carmilla averted her gaze. Carmilla murmured something as a response, but not even Mia’s supernatural hearing could make out the words. “What was that?”

“Different,” Carmilla said a bit too quickly, and Mia was pretty sure that was not among the words she murmured. “The … opposite kind to predatory.”

“What?” Mia asked, sounding between dubious and affronted. Was this girl telling her Mia was the prey animal to her predator? “Prey?”

The thought sent a slight flush up her cheeks when she considered it that way, her heart stuttering as her overactive imagination spun out of her control.

I wouldn’t mind her hunting me. Mia mused, imagining the crimson haired beauty pushing her up against a tree with a ferocious grin on her pretty red lips.

“Sorry,” Carmilla said again, looking aghast at Mia’s reddened state. Probably thinking the halvyr was livid at the insinuation that she was anything less than dignified royalty. 

The moment, if there was one in the first place, was broken by the Sergeant coughing and cursing. He was healthy, though his eyes remained shut as he stood wobbly, helped up by Dumb and Dumber.

Perhaps a regular healing Elixir wasn’t quite enough to heal a pair of organs as finicky as the eyes. Or the process was still in progress and behind his shut eyelids, chunks of flesh were still shifting around to repair the damage.

“The Colonel will hear of this!” He said, voice belaying his barely contained rage. Mia felt momentarily stunned that he still had the guts to spout that after he got mangled. It was almost respectable, no, it was respectable.

I’d be sobbing in a corner, trying to forget the pain. Mia though, looking at the old soldier with what she hoped was an even expression. Still, she dignified his remark with a response. “As will he of the fact that you struck me first, the person you had been tasked to protect.”

“Arrogant bitch,” he cursed under his breath. “You think he’ll favour you? For what? You are obstructing a mission he gave himself, or is that bastard there not the beast we were supposed to put down?”

He pointed at Lars, who glowered at him in turn. The shifter seemed to be happy enough to sit around until stuff got handled by the two groups, but he clearly didn’t appreciate the Sergeant’s tone.

“He is also a witness, and a source of intelligence the Colonel had been desperately searching for,” Carmilla cut in, glaring at the soldiers. “Go, run and report back to your superiors. Your ‘protection’ was worthless anyway, you’d all be mangled corpses without the two of us.”

The soldiers glowered, only Fred having the decency of looking ashamed at the accusation. Still, it seemed the rest also managed to get it through their thick skulls that the two girls before them did the majority of the work today.

“So be it,” the Sergeant muttered, glaring at the two girls in turn. He turned. “They obstructed the mission, attacked us and then threatened us to leave. We can’t be held responsible for leaving them here and reporting the mission a failure. Let’s go.”

They ambled away, Gwen sending occasional glares back at them unil their forms got lost behind a wall of trees. 

“This’ll be trouble,” Mia said, glancing at Carmilla with some nervousness gracing her features. “I’d bet they’ll try to get a fireteam, or preferably a tank to take us into custody or just straight up gun us down the moment we get back to the city.”

“They can try,” Carmilla said, a cold glint dancing in her crimson eyes. Those two ruby gems seemed to glow in the twilight of the forest.

“Well, I doubt they’d be able to convince the Colonel,” Mia said, unconvinced by her own words. They were his soldiers after all, why wouldn’t he listen to their opinions over two civilian girls’? “I doubt he’d let them outright attack us anyways. And you said that man has something he needs, right? Is there something to that beyond just some basic info on that werewolf king?”

“There is,” Carmilla said, a gleeful trill entering her voice as she smirked at Mia. “Lars here told me the werewolf in question had recommended a specific tactic of getting by numerous times before he became the Alpha. Any guesses about it?”

“Nooo?” Mia said, a hint of curiosity apparent as she stared at Carmilla’s enthralling smile. 

“Chase the monsters on the hill into the city to cause a distraction,” Carmilla said, her grin widening. “And while the defenders are occupied, raid their stockpiles of food and water. Sounds familiar?”

A cold pit formed in Mia’s stomach, her eyes widening. The dozens of soldiers she’d seen get torn apart by the thorny vines of the Evergreen Marauders flashing before her eyes.

She had been wondering how the opportunistic assholes who raided the army’s food stores acted so fast, but it seemed they weren’t just quick to make use of a weakness in the army but knew of it in advance.

No, they made it happen. They, the werewolf and his lackeys, consigned dozens of men and women to their death and who knows how many more with depriving them of food.

“You think the Colonel will want to know about that?” Carmilla mused, sounding oddly thrilled about this new development.

“Yes,” Mia breathed, her voice shaking slightly. “Yes I think he would.”