NOVEL SIMPLE Ch. 3.5 Infection
5.
Fire licked at the homes as Bianca’s cleansing flame grew to slowly encompass the house and then the others around it. Red and blue flames leapt from roof to roof, increasing in size and ferocity as the small pit stop of a town emptied itself out. There were more raiders than Santi would have thought possible. Over a score of them left alive, gathering around two men who were barking orders.
Black lines ran across their skin like sticky webs of corruption, pulsing with every word and gesture. The men around them listened and obeyed with speed, fear of their commanders greater than their fear of Santi’s team. He would have to see about changing that.
“We crush them, I want one alive though. Not the cursed bastards, but one of the others.”
“Thought we said no survivors?” Cam asked.
“There won’t be survivors after I’m done talking to him,” Santi said. There was a momentary stillness, then everyone seemed to recall the two women on the roadside and all thoughts of mercy fled. The squad formed up into their normal formation and began to march with the cleansing flames behind them.
Santi watched the raiders with one eye, while with the other he kept a lookout for Daniel and Hana. The two had a bad habit of disappearing and a great habit of showing up unexpectedly. They wouldn’t stay out of this fight for the entire time but would likely hop in when the fight got down to the nitty gritty and the raiders were too busy to pay attention.
The slapping of their feet on the pavement was loud in his ears, his breaths ragged as he let that wrath that he had been carrying around for months begin to billow inside of himself. Heat suffused his chest as he spun his mana through his body and into the atmosphere, drenching the area around them with his power.
The trick was something that was easy in theory but tough in practice. It was similar to what Yessenia had done to activate her rituals but scaled up. It would taint the area around him with his power, his flavor of magic. While it wouldn’t stop enemy mana based attacks, it would help diffuse them, make them easier to block or parry and at the same time allow him to cast his own spells with less resistance.
[Crosscurrent-Orb] spun free of his hand, passed between Chloe and Cameron’s head and crossed the distance between the two groups in a flash. The tightly packed raiders, who were trying to form some type of unarmored shield wall, were thrown apart like matchsticks in a hurricane. The two Acolytes in the center of the formation didn’t budge, both of them weathering the storm with grimaces.
“Don’t let those fuckers touch you!” Santi reminded them as Cameron closed the distance, raising his physical shield while using his skill to block a lobbed pearlescent attack that splashed harmlessly off the golden barrier.
Cam struck like lightning, moving with the dreadful efficiency that let him move faster than he should. The hatchet sheared apart meat and bone and a limp hand fell to the ground, its former owner screaming in pain as he clutched at the severed stump.
Bianca and Chloe were cutting and slashing, ripping apart men with no hesitation. The two enemy Acolytes were backing up, fear in their eyes as they began to break away from their dying followers.
The poor shield wall was destroyed and now the team’s wedge formation was shedding attackers, sending wounded and dying men to land behind the front line trio so that they could be ripped apart with ease by the others. Mom’s spear was moving with brutal power, killing with every blow. Torin and Grimvr were unphased as they butchered while Tank held a faint grimace as he brought his maul down to end suffering.
Santi let them work, none of them aside from Mom were earning anything of note from this. But not everything was about experience and potential gained. Something had to be done, some monsters had to be killed lest they grow and fester in the wounds of the worlds.
Santi kept a careful watch on the two cursed Acolytes and the madness in their eyes. The bloodlust was growing until there was another palpable aura around them, a blood red and foul black aura that sank into the few survivors around them. The newly infected smiled, baring their teeth as their necks stretched taunt. They howled a fierce cry that broke over the team as they charged with reckless abandon.
“Cut them down,” Santi yelled, but he could feel the aura of bloodlust infusing him even as he said it. Each of the infected was a carrier, growing the curse as they raced to die on Santi’s team's weapons. Gore flew in long strings and bone was cleaved and flesh split, but the berserk Initiate class fighters didn’t care.
They howled and snapped their mouths, trying to bite even as they were trimmed of offensive limbs. Weapons were abandoned as they tried to use their fingers and nails like beasts. For a moment there was a shift in the balance of power as Cameron and the others were stymied, their superior stats not allowing for them to be overwhelmed, but lacking the experience to fight through the madness.
Santi stepped around them.
The morph blade extended and struck like lightning, taking heads with each flick of his wrist. Bodies fell around him like leaves as Santi charged straight toward the two Acolyte’s and the source of aura that was empowering the weaker fighters. Both men seemed to teeter on losing themselves to the curse’s power, or breaking and running. Fear and death warred in their eyes as the aura around them strengthened to the point of becoming a miasma around them.
[Gust] staggered them and pushed back against the miasma while the morph blade lengthened to a lance and Santi lunged. The tip of the lance punched through a thigh, breaking bone and emerging out the other side with a wide spray of blood. It was enough to tip the two men over and into madness.
The impaled man ran up the lance. He drug his wounded thigh further down the lance so he could reach Santi with his own homemade spear. Santi ducked his head and retracted the lance, ripping free of the thigh in a burst of destroyed muscle. Any normal, sane, person would be down for the fight, Acolyte stats or not. The femur was destroyed.
The man didn’t stop, he stepped on his broken and bleeding leg like it was completely fine as a bloody froth stained his teeth. His spear flashed out again and Santi removed the head of it with a simple block, his own weapon slicing apart the wood as if it was rotten.
A ball of flame lobbed past his head and struck the second cursed man. He went up like a torch, the flames burning away the miasma that clung to him breaking through the curse’s seeming granted immunity from pain. His screams filled the air, pain and terror and something darker and more twisted underneath each howl.
Santi kept his attention on his own foe who had closed to grappling range, ignoring his wounds in his determination to grab Santi. The man didn’t use any skills or spells, just enhanced stats as his clawed hands scratched at Santi’s unarmored biceps. He extended a blade and circled it quickly, removing both of the offending appendages, but not before bloody furrows were staining his shirt.
Santi finished the Acolyte with a hammer blow to the skull, caving in the man’s head with a finality that no driving bloodlust could cure. He turned back to look at the others and was happy to see they had managed to drag one of the raiders off to the side, pinning him to the ground with a spear through the knee.
With the two Acolyte’s dead, the fight faded in the survivors as their wounds overrode what little remained of their killing frenzy. They didn’t last long after that as blades fell like rain, cleaning away the filth of the world.
Santi walked past the dead and looked toward their captives as his heart continued to beat frenziedly in his chest. The morph blade extended into a full sized halberd with a keen headsman edge. An urge to continue on, to finish the miscreant whispered in his mind.
Infection of Bloodlust
(Lesser)
“Shit.” Santi retracted his blade and backed up quickly. He couldn’t allow the curse to gain any traction. If he fell into its primal urges it would grow stronger. Curses fed on strong, normally negative, emotions. In a world consumed by the System, bloodlust would be one of the more treacherous curses.
“Santi, it’s saying your infected?” Tank asked, his maul held out to the side.
“It’s fine. It’s weak. Just makes me want to hack away a bit, see some blood flow, you know?”
“He’s rhyming, something's wrong,” Bianca said as she stood a few feet away.
“He’s fine as long as he controls it. If he starts to feed the curse and it grows stronger, then he’ll become a threat to everyone. For now just try to keep him away from the curse’s stressors,” Torin supplied helpfully. It was nice to have someone who understood the System around to explain things he couldn’t.
“So, he shouldn’t be fighting in a monster den or hunting down criminals?” Cam asked.
“Absolutely not,” Thorin said. He wasn’t as wary as the others who were looking at him like he was a rabid animal. There was still an edge of wariness though as he kept his weapon close.
“So, we’ll have to tackle the den without him? That’s not going to be easy,” Chloe groused.
“It’ll be fine. We regroup with the others and leave Santiago here with his Mother and the scouts. I’m strong enough to cover for most of his ability and leadership. We’re a decently rounded team,” Torin supplied.
“Good idea. Torin will take command, heed his orders and trust him. He’s the Hall Master for a reason. We need to break that den before that infected crab thing spreads it to the rest of the den. Don’t need bloodlusted monsters running around,” Santi ordered the group. He was mad about losing out on the den and what would the harm be in going on one raid? His willpower was strong enough that he could resist the curse. Falling behind on the leaderboards could affect him negatively in the long run. Maybe he should go.
That train of thought stopped him in his tracks with his mouth open, ready to countermand the orders he had just given. Curses could be nefarious, wheedling their way into his every intention to lead him toward a solution that it craved.
“Oh fuck it all, go clear it up and hurry it up. I don’t want to be here all day. Me and Mom will go find our errant spies and see what this one has to say,” Santi said, pointing at the quietly crying man.
“No need to yell, we’re right here. Tank we’re going to need some assistance. All three of them are hurt, nothing severe but we got caught up with one of the smaller bands of the raiders near the edge of town,” Hana said, jogging toward them as she dropped her light illusion.
Her and Daniel really did enjoy sneaking up on people and being dramatic with their entrances. It could be annoying. He should stop them from doing that, tell them they needed to be disciplined, and if they didn’t, well he could always make them.
“Fuck, this curse is fucky. I don’t think being around the rest of these guys is helping anything. Tank, go and heal them scouts, Hana and Daniel, go find the den and see what’s going on. Reconvene with Torin and go scour the bastard. Bianca, cleanse the area please, it’s giving me good ideas.”