by Brant Danay
The Necrodelic launched himself into a spinning attack, a black tornado dervishing atop the Janus Kraken's head, claws outstretched to slash and sunder. The Janus Kraken's hands plunged through the deadly swirl of claws and recoiled in a shower of blood, only to swing back from the other side on hinged shoulders to pummel the twirling Necrodelic as he spun in mid-air, knocking him from its crown and into the lake below.
The arms of the Janus Kraken did not stop, however, but swung completely over its head and into the water after Chariah, blasting him with a double-handed blow. Chariah ricocheted slowly off the bottom of the lake, as though on a planet or moon of extremely low gravity. The giant webbed hands slapped him back down to the bottom of the lake again, then grabbed the Necrodelic between their palms and began to squeeze. Chariah bit through scales and blood as the Janus Kraken tried to burst his skeleton. The Janus Kraken applied unbearable pressure to the Necrodelic's body, causing fresh gouts of blood to spurt from his puncture wounds.
Chariah managed to slip both sets of claws through the narrow slits between the Janus Kraken's joined hands and tear a small hole in its scales. The water of the lake began to pour in as the opening grew. He squirted through the hard-won exit to the surface of the pool, then swam for the parapets as the Janus Kraken rose again. This time, when the Janus Kraken charged, Chariah met it with his ten claws joined into the Hellsword, opening a deep gash in its abdomen that bubbled and bled. The Janus Kraken spun, and the Necrodelic drove the point of his combined talons into its guts with an impaling strike. The Janus Kraken rotated again, and its other side had, once again, healed and regenerated like the head of a hydra.
Just as the Necrodelic began to wonder whether to employ a strategy which would involve him continually leaping from one side of the lake to the other in pursuit of the wounds he had wrought, or to direct his attack from atop the Janus Kraken's joined skulls on both sides at once, he saw the Oneirophage slithering along the parapets across from him, the ones he had originally traversed, where the Soul Cleaver remained sheathed. The Dreaming Predator had the handheld iron maiden in one hand and the Prismsword in the other, and began battling the Janus Kraken from the other side.
Chariah attacked the half of the Janus Kraken facing him with a flurry of claws, blasting it with overhand blows, uppercuts, backfists, tiger slashes, impaling strikes, and double-handed chops. On the opposite side of the Megafiend, the Oneirophage had begun to unleash his own offensive repertoire of cobra strikes, venomous injections, tail lashings, and blows from the Prismsword and the hand-held iron maiden. Now, the Janus Kraken couldn't spin its way to safety, for it was assaulted from both sides, and it was soon a bloodied, battered, quivering pulp. Chariah had once again climbed to the top of its skull, and was driving his claws repeatedly into its brain. The monstrosity was slowed, but not yet killed. It sank back into the water to try and shake the Necrodelic loose, but Chariah would not budge, and the conjoined leviathan was forced to raise itself above the waves once more, where the Oneirophage was waiting with yet more damage to inflict. Chariah raked both sides of the Janus Kraken's face and thrust repeatedly through its skull and eyes, but the gargantuan mutant would not die. Finally, the Oneirophage clutched the Soul Cleaver about the hilt, still in its surrogate sheath in the parapet beside him, and, while gripping the half-buried crimson and black broadsword thusly, called out to the Necrodelic, "Flesh-smoker...use the Soul Cleaver."
From his perch atop the Siamese twin krakens in the driving rain Chariah yelled, "It will turn them fourfold, and more."
"Remember the Tantradox," the Oneirophage hissed through the monsoon. "The sword shall sunder, and we shall slay."
The Necrodelic paused, a black silhouette of war mounted atop the bleeding head of the leviathan, his crimson eyes glowing amidst the gusts of wind, the torrents of rain, the explosions of thunder, and the flashes of lightning. Finally, in reply, he held out his right hand. The Oneirophage smiled and wrenched the Soul Cleaver from its pit. He lifted it and tossed it high into the air. The Necrodelic reached out and caught it by the hilt, then gestured with his head towards the Stormtower.
"Raise the crane."
The Oneirophage began slithering toward the Stormtower, where the tip of the crane's arm lay. As the Oneirophage made his way across the ramparts, Chariah yelled, "If this fails, I shall smoke your still-beating heart as you look on."
The Necrodelic continued to bloody the Janus Kraken's head as the Oneirophage operated the crane. A few moments later, a great shadow fell directly over the Necrodelic. He unsheathed his claws from the Janus Kraken's skull and leapt straight upwards, hundreds of feet into the air, landed atop the crane, and raised the Soul Cleaver over his head. For a brief instant, while lightning flickered, the silhoutte of murder incarnate hung like a black hole in the sky. Then, with a battle cry that drowned out the thunder, the Necrodelic leapt, dropping as swiftly and heavily as a neutron star. He swung the sword directly through the invisible suture that bonded the krakens, ripping through the seam of their flesh and soul and falling through the bloody chasm he had wrought, two perfectly straight slabs of exposed olive muscle and pulsing organs at either side. He fell to the bottom of the lake, severing the Janus Kraken's tentacles. The vermilion blade of the Soul Cleaver, physically, had only sliced through a part of the Janus Kraken, but its sorcery did the rest, bisecting the entire Siamese twin leviathan. Both halves of the Janus Kraken fell face-first into the amniotic lake, which was now both their womb and deathbed.
The Necrodelic rose through the bloody waters and swam to the Stormtower. The liquid seared his open wounds like Hellfire. Like a black crocodile, Chariah slipped silently from currents to shore, still holding the dripping Soul Cleaver in his right hand. The Oneirophage had gone to examine the cadavers of the krakens. Chariah knew not the dream-eater's intentions, but until he abetted the accursed rain he cared for nothing else. The Necrodelic ascended the stairs of the Stormtower and entered its upper chamber. He looked once at the complicated array of organs and bones, and the severed head mumbling numbers and soliloquies to itself. The entire clandestine control panels would take days to decode. He did not look twice, merely opened his mouth and breathed a jetstream of fire over the living device. The organs sizzled and popped, bones turned to ash, and the entire control chamber incinerated around the Necrodelic.
Through the pleasant crackle of the conflagration and the assuaging smoke of cremated flesh, Chariah listened for the spattering of rain outside. There was none. Satisfied, the Necrodelic returned to the rooftops of the Megafiend. Hydraman had commandeered the Metasaur and maneuvered it to the side of the Megafiend. He was assisting the Oneirophage in dumping the twin carcasses of the Janus Kraken into the psychedelic moat surrounding Phantasmagorika.
Chariah left them to their toil and made his way along the parapets to the Geryon Baal'Striga. He leapt onto her back and plunged his hands through the skull and brain of her second head, then dug his claws into her cerebellum and hijacked her nervous system. Through the conduit of the avian bird demoness, Chariah steered the Megafiend toward the Forest of Flesh, which had departed the lake in which it had taken sanctuary from the Necrodelic's Hellfire and once again taken root on one of Elasvai's fertile plains. Accustomed to the dragon-like ease of flight and the mind-bending speeds of his bestial spaceship, Chariah flew the less-evolved Megafiend as though it were the Omnibeast, dropping altitudes and making sharp and sudden turns in a manner that spilled the entire lake from the roof, breaking the walls and foundations of the entire structure and sending the Siamese twin slaves of the Tantradox tumbling through the cracks to their deaths below.
As the Forest of Flesh came into view, Chariah spurred the Geryon Baal'Striga to her maximum speed and set her and the entire Megafiend on a direct collision course with the bound Omnibeast. Traveling at supersonic speeds, the demon-commandeered, monstrosity-driven edifice crashed into the Forest of Flesh with an explosion of blood and flying arms, legs, and genitals. Chariah flew the Megafiend
directly into his spaceship, dislodging it from its prison of living trees and gigantic bondage devices, then leaping from the back of the Geryon Baal'Striga into the waiting Arachniotics, which formed a cradle that bore their master up and into his vessel.
A moment later, the Omnibeast spun in place and then soared out of the gaping void in the Forest of Flesh. Meanwhile, the Geryon Baal'Striga and the Megafiend continued to careen through the Forest of Flesh, toppling living trees, breaking bones, and sending extremities shooting through the skies while the Forest of Flesh cried out with millions of anguished voices. Several of the Geryon Baal'Striga's breasts were severed in the process, and when the avian fertility demoness smashed through the integument on the far side of the living forest, she left in her wake several embryoes, fetuses and hatchlings quivering and dying on the swampy ground, or impaled upon twigs and branches. The wounded Geryon Baal'Striga continued to fly the Megafiend into the distance, dangerously low to the ground but too injured to increase her altitude. Leaving behind a trail of blood, the avian demoness soared very slowly over the horizon.
Chariah briefly visited his meditation chamber and Bloodbong to heal his wounds, then entered the Omnibeast's cockpit and commandeered the vessel. He commanded the Omnibeast to fly in a large circle around the Forest of Flesh, and as it did so, the Overdragon breathed a continuous stream of fire, so that the entire mutated mass was encircled in a ring of flames taller than itself. Once the encirclement was complete, leaving the Forest of Flesh trapped inside the ring of raging conflagration, Chariah flew the Omnibeast in a succession of five straight lines within the circle of containment, while the Overdragon continued to breathe fire on the forest below. After the final path of the pattern had been flown, the Forest of Flesh was alight with a pentagram of flames, a gigantic, blazing pentagram that channeled the forces of Hell and caused the entire forest to kindle, while the flames which outlined the shape of the pentagram towered high over all the others, rising several miles into the skies, until the burning Satanic sigil could be seen from outer space and formed a blood-red constellation visible throughout the entire galaxy.
Chariah watched the Forest of Flesh burn through one of the Omnibeast's sentient scrying tubes, and saw that as the branches and trees crackled and fell to the ground they reassumed their original bodies, covering the ashen floor of the forest with a mass grave of demon corpses. Millions had been sacrificed to create the Forest of Flesh, the most massive of all the genetic and surgical abominations created by the Tantradox. They had at last been released from their tortuous purgatory, but they were being released into an eternal torment billions of times worse than that which they had suffered at the hands of the Tantradox.
The Necrodelic inhaled the smoke of the immolated demons through one of the Omnibeast's umbilical cords, fitted around his mouth and nose like a gas-mask. He lingered around the conflagration for several minutes, enjoying the pleasant surge of pyromania as he gazed with fascination upon the hypnotic flickerings of the arson which he had wrought, all the while plotting the complete and total armageddon of the garden planet Elasvai.
43
The Necrodelic ran at blinding speeds beneath the gargantuan shadow of the Megafiend. The claws of his right hand impaled the very air, while the Soul Cleaver in his left sundered in twain various elemental sylph demons in their ethereal and invisible lairs, for the ensorcelled sword was imbued with the power to cut through the interdimensional fabric, and its crimson, bisecting blade was capable of damaging both the physical and the astral planes. Overhead, Chariah could hear the clatter and clanging of adamantium meathooks and iron chains, could smell the fragrant aroma of meat both living and dead. He waited like a predator for the perfect moment to strike, then leapt into the air and grabbed onto one of the hooks. He swung for a moment, then hoisted himself up, to stand with one foot in the curve of the meathook and one hand gripping the chain from which it dangled. With his other hand, the Necrodelic plunged the Soul Cleaver into the white ceiling, burying it to the hilt in an upside-down sheath of stone, where it stuck fast and did not budge. Chariah then pulled himself up to the ceiling, his dark, black-veined biceps muscles rippling and bulging. He slid the talons of his feet into one of the grooves in the ceiling and dug them into the stone. The Necrodelic then let go of the chain and hung within the abattoir like a bat, upside-down, his arms crossed over his chest, and there, amongst the meathooks, concealed by adamantium chains and dripping chunks of flesh, he waited like a meditating vampire for his prey.
*
Morpheus Rex stood atop the Siamese twin brontosauruses with their frayed and broken reins in his right hand, riding the giant reptiles across the gardens and flowerbeds in pursuit of the Tantradox. His tattooed flesh bore several bruises from a brief and vicious battle with Drelrei and Junisia, who had crashed down into a nearby meadow of lavender grass not long after he himself had fallen from the Megafiend. The Dreaming Predator had suffered an empurpled eye and split lip from Junisia's clubbed ankylosaurus tail, as well as a lacerated chest and thigh from Drelrei's spiked stegosaurus tail. The long fingernailed hand with which he directed the immense conjoined brontosauruses was covered in crimson, but the blood was that of the Tantradox, whose open wounds he had exacerbated as they fought by wrenching, prying, prodding, and ripping them further with every opportunity. Drelrei and Junisia had responded by bludgeoning him with their brutal tails until the vengeful brontosauruses came lumbering over the horizon and proceeded to maul their former tormentors. Morpheus Rex had clambered onto their backs and, because he was descended from reptiles and his bottom half was ophidian, they formed an immediate psychic bond. The Dreaming Predator directed the dinoaurs to trample the Tantradox beneath the bone-crushing tread of their massive paws.
After finally extricating themselves from the feet of the brontosauruses, the Tantradox had fled across the fields on their three cloven hooves, at speeds faster than any stallion or gazelle or unicorn had ever reached. Morpheus Rex gave chase like a wildman, his prism-beaded hair streaming out behind him from atop his brontosaurus steeds as they ran with their slithery, waving gait, his forked tongues flickering as he yelled incoherent battle cries and guttural animal sounds.
When the Tantradox spotted the wounded Geryon Baal'Striga, irrigating the horizon with her blood and dragging their palace, their sanctuary, the Megafiend, through the air, it was as though the citadel were a cynosure, beckoning them home. They called to the avian fertility demoness, who turned her bloody vulturine head in their direction and cried out with her three beaks, then headed towards them. As she flew low to the ground, the Tantradox ran alongside and vaulted onto the short set of stairs that led to one of the entrances. The Tantradox stopped to catch its breath on the stone steps as the Geryon Baal'Striga flew the Megafiend back into the sky, above the Siamese twin brontosauruses and the angrily gesticulating Morpheus Rex below. It was then that they felt a black hand around their ankle, and the Necrodelic dragged them kicking and thrashing into the abattoir like a trap-door spider drags its prey into its pit, a macabre polarization, an upside-down perversion, of that gruesome predatory act.
Chariah, still hanging upside-down like a vampire bat, had maneuvered through the dangling slaughterhouse by holding onto the bottom of a chain and following the grooves which had been chiseled into the ceiling for hauling meat. He reached out and grabbed Junisia's ankle, then wrenched the Tantradox from the stone steps. He held them by the cloven feet, one clawed hand around each ankle, the claws of his feet firmly embedded in the ceiling above. Chariah swung the Tantradox sadistically through the air, then began to drag them inexorably upward. The Tantradox's cloven hooves slipped on the metal meathooks as they battled back and tried to gain their balance.
Chariah lifted the Tantradox and bent Drelrei's knee over the curve of a meathook. Chariah, now hanging right-side from the chain next to them, reached out with his right hand, grabbed Drelrei once more by the ankle, and violently wrenched his leg. The sound of his kneecap shattering was lik
e a wrecking ball striking a mirror. Tendons and ligaments tore and snapped, and his patella exploded into bonedust inside his very flesh. Both Drelrei and Junisia screamed simultaneously, and continued to scream while Chariah pulled himself up to crouch in the smooth curves of the meathooks. With his left hand still gripping a chain for balance, he pounded Drelrei's decimated knee with hammerlike fist. When the Necrodelic finally ceased, the moaning Tantradox dangled painfully from its broken leg over the vertiginous, nauseating landscapes below.
Chariah etched a pentagram of blood on the Tantradox's broken, swollen knee with a single, razorlike claw. When the bloody sigil was completed it burst into flame, multiplying the agony of the Tantradox a hundredfold. The Necrodelic lifted the burning, shattered, mutilated knee upwards, jerked the Tantradox as they hung in the air, and slammed the back of Drelrei's knee through the barbed point of the meathook. The hook impaled the Tantradox by the leg, its gleaming tip emerging from the other side, directly in the centerpoint of the flaming pentagram. The Tantradox writhed, screaming and clutching at its leg with pain-contorted faces. The Hellfire threatened to burn completely through the mutilated knee. Chariah stared at the Tantradox with blazing eyes, daring it to tear off its own leg to escape, then daring it not to.