Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

Act 3, Chapter 44: Rat’s race never ends

Day in the story: 15th January (Thursday), I lost fucking track of time in that messGertrude Monkey“We’re running in circles!” Thomas shouted over the screams of one of the mercenaries who had made a fatal mistake and fallen.

The creature reeled his protesting body in with its many arms, pulling him closer and closer until he disappeared beneath the sagging folds of its swollen mass. The flesh of the thing shifted around him, layers of greasy fat and muscle parting to make space before settling again.

Then the thinner arms began working on him.

They moved with unsettling, almost delicate and quick precision. One hand clamped onto his chin, its fingers long and damp, forcing his head back until the vertebrae in his neck cracked audibly. Another arm pinned his shoulder to the glass with crushing pressure. A third seized his wrist.

It pulled.

The mercenary screamed as the limb stretched far past what joints were meant to endure. Tendons tightened and stood out beneath the skin like drawn cables. The shoulder socket bulged grotesquely before something inside gave way with a wet tearing sound.

The arm ripped free.

For a moment it didn’t separate cleanly. Tendons stretched like stubborn cords before snapping one by one, each break accompanied by a fucking sickening twang. Strands of muscle peeled loose from the bone like pulled threads. Skin split slowly, resisting to the very last moment before finally tearing apart.

When the limb came free, it left behind a ragged ruin of meat where the shoulder had been. Thin ribbons of flesh and cloth still dangled between the body and the severed arm before tearing completely.

The creature stuffed the arm into its own body without hesitation.

The limb punched halfway into the monster’s bloated flesh, vanishing between layers of twitching fat and muscle. The skin parted around it with a wet sucking sound, swallowing the arm eagerly.

It remained there, embedded in the creature’s side.

The fingers still twitched.

Meanwhile the rest of the slug-like rat thing leaned forward, lowering its head toward the mercenary’s face. Its jaws opened wider than any human mouth should have allowed, the corners of its lips splitting further as the skin stretched and tore.

It bit down on the man’s skull.

The first crunch was loud enough to echo against the glass.

Bone splintered between its teeth. The creature chewed with slow enthusiasm, grinding fragments of skull while thick strands of blood and grey matter dripped from its lips. Pieces of shattered bone spat from its mouth as it gnawed deeper, slurping wetly at the brain it had exposed.

The mercenary’s body convulsed once, twice, then fell limp beneath the restless forest of arms.

The monster continued eating and moving toward us.

It sucked noisily at the opened skull, dragging its tongue through the ruined cavity to gather what remained. Wet chewing sounds filled the air, accompanied by the dull cracking of bone being crushed into paste.

It was still in the middle of that grisly meal when the impaled arm began moving again.

The fingers curled slowly.

Then the entire limb twitched, as if something inside the creature had started pulling it deeper.

But Thomas was right—we were running in a fucking circle.

Corridors appeared where they shouldn’t have been, and we kept encountering markings that Penrose had supposedly left behind already.

“My notes are moving around us,” Penrose said sharply. “I don’t understand it.”

“Some form of physical space manipulation!” I shouted while we tried to widen the distance between us and the creature that was now crawling even faster.

I turned while running and reached for my submachine gun. This time I intended to use it like a normal weapon.

I didn’t bother aiming carefully. I simply fired a burst behind me, sending a stream of bullets toward the pursuing mass. As they flew, I filled them with my Authority.

They struck with satisfying crunches, shattering as they hit the creature’s flesh. Each bullet burst into shards of glass that embedded themselves deep in its body. And yet, even after changing form, the Authority remained within them sustained by the power of animation.

Tiny shapes began breaking free from the shards.

Parts of the painted design—little black widows I had etched onto the ammunition—crawled out of their glass prisons and spread across the monster’s skin like my personal swarm.

They began biting.

Injecting their venom.

Penrose made his own move too, turning on a heel with his face twisted in a grimace of savage rage.

“Enough!” he shouted.

He hurled several banknotes toward the beast. At the same time, all of his men—Thomas and Ramirez included—stopped running beside him, raised their weapons, and began unloading everything they had.

The corridors rang with the roar of gunfire.

Muzzles flashed. Bullets hammered into the creature’s body, forcing it to halt for a moment from sheer impact. Physics could be a bitch, but sometimes she worked in our favor.

The notes stretched as they flew, lengthening into greenish ropes that shimmered with silver Shadowlight along their entire span. They wrapped around the beast—or rather tried to.

The fat ratman simply swelled its body outward.

The ropes snapped apart, collapsing back into ordinary paper.

Undeterred, Penrose began firing coins instead. They shrieked through the air at supersonic speeds, slamming into the creature’s flesh, with each flick of his finger. They did some damage, but what he did next was more telling.

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Penrose extended his arms toward the monster, fingers curling as if he was trying to grab it from a distance and throw it downward by sheer force of will.

Halfway through the motion he faltered.

He looked suddenly exhausted, as if the beast were pushing back with its own Authority.

Alexandra reached out to me then, offering a plan: something I might be able to do if I tapped into her talents and instincts. But explaining it to Penrose would take time. Time we didn’t have.

*Force resonant gaze,* she sent a hellishly brilliant thought.

“Look into my eyes!” I shouted at Penrose. “Do not resist!”

Our gazes locked.

The darkness of the soul realm swallowed us.

Suddenly we stood beneath towering columns of radiant light—manifestations of our powers. Mine rose twice as high as his.

“What is this?” he demanded. “Where did you take us?”

“I’ll explain later. Time moves slower here than in the real world, and I fucking needed a moment to talk.” I gestured around us. “I need to paint something. Fortunately it’s a simple image. Unfortunately, you’ll have to keep that thing occupied while I do it. Can you manage that?”

Another complication was that this persona of mine didn’t particularly enjoy art. Alexandra could take over if needed, but it still felt… uncomfortable.

“I appreciate the initiative,” Penrose said flatly, “but I disagree. That is a bad plan that will result in casualties, and I would rather keep our numbers as high as possible. Use your railgun pistol and shoot the beast. It was powerful enough last time.”

“My painting would get the job done,” I insisted.

“You assume it would,” he replied. “This thing is already resisting my attempts to pin it with the increased mass of my coins.”

“You don’t even want to hear what I came the fuck up with?”

“No. Get us out of here.”

His tone left no room for argument.

Fuck it.

I reached through my aura and pulled us back out of the gaze.

Only a second had passed in the real world.

Penrose immediately resumed his effort to subdue the beast, his consciousness returning to the body already in motion. I reached for Equinox, while Alexandra in the Domain begun preparing the tools necessary for the plan I wanted to propose. I hoped it would not be needed, but hope alone would not suffice.

“Railgun?” Thomas asked.

I tossed the weapon to him. He caught it with a smile.

“Let’s see if that red paint of yours is worth anything,” he added, and pulled the trigger as if it was nothing, while I was still reaching for the machine gun.

The shockwave that moved from the point of ignition threw me against the wall, just like everyone else in here. Everyone except Thomas himself, who, due to his stature, immense strength, and the enhancements offered by Alexandra, stood his ground.

For about half a second, that is.

Because the glass beneath us gave way too, dropping him and subsequently the rest of us, as we rebounded from the walls we were thrown into, right into the office below.

Meanwhile the beast felt the sting of the master over the night, as a big gaping hole smoked in the middle of its chest.

Gravity changed, dropping us sideways into the building and down toward its ground, showing us that we were past the midpoint, as down was now in the direction of the Mirrored City.

“Get up! Get up!” Penrose shouted twice as he shook off the dust after the fall and stood up.

The thing was, the beast—despite the hole in its body—seemed to be using its terrible amount of arms to force itself back into a standing position.

Thomas, unfazed by what had just happened, raised Equinox again, aiming it at the beast’s head.

Mercenaries started running toward the doors that looked like an exit out of the open floor. The same doors the Shadows that survived our rather uninvited entrance used to escape once they regained their strength.

“Do it,” Penrose said, when Ramirez took cover behind a broken and fallen desk, while he himself made a few steps back.

The next shot was just as devastating as the first one.

It sent the bullet with magnetic coils shining, electricity moving along the short barrel, speeding up the projectile—that thought itself a metallic rod—to enormous speeds that tore through the fabric of reality itself, leaving briefly a gaping hole in it.

The beast, however, managed to cover its head with dozens of arms that bulged with increased muscle mass and shone with sickly pink Authority as they rebounded the bullet upward into the sky between the two cities.

Undeterred by the sudden failure, even despite the kick the shot made him endure by throwing him a good few feet back—Thomas made yet another shot. But even though Noxy tried very fucking hard, that armor made from interlocking arms around the rat was powerful enough to withstand it. Thomas’s body gave, as his muscles even supported by our magic were exhausted from trying to get him through the ordeal.

“Retreat,” Penrose ordered.

All of us moved toward the exit the mercs used earlier. Thomas was supported briefly by Ramirez, and after a few seconds he was running on his own again as the shock from shooting my pistol wore off.

“Can we reach the ground level inside the building?” Penrose asked as we moved into a corridor with a flight of stairs and something that seemed like both salvation and something that could spell our doom: a fucking pair of elevators.

“No idea, but I am not taking this death trap,” I said, watching a smear of blood on the frame of the doors to the staircase. “Seems like your hirelings chose that way.” I pointed at it.

“Move,” Penrose said, and we all went for the doors.

As soon as all of us hit the stairs, two things happened in quick succession. First, we heard the sounds of shots being fired below, followed by some shouting, which did not bode well for our progress. Secondly, Penrose dropped a note onto the ground in front of the door, and it soon rose high, wide, and long enough to cover the entire passable area—blocking it completely.

We rushed downstairs, hearing the impact onto the money-wall. It stopped the beast, which subsequently decided to break the wall next to it instead, showering debris onto the flight of stairs one store above us.

“What the fu—” Ramirez shouted from up ahead, as he was the first one to join the group shooting their way through the office.

For some reason the stairs ended inexplicably into a concrete floor, and we were forced to move into another open space. A space filled with more and more dropping bodies of the rat people.

“How are they here too?”

“Does not matter. Go through them,” Thomas said, pushing me and Penrose aside and going into quite literally a small army of those men. “Torque!” he shouted as he rushed into the mass, knocking the first one down with a punch powerful enough to break its skull and drive it into the ground, while mercenaries shot those coming from the sides.

Together they, punch by punch and shot by shot, carved a quick way for us toward the window, where we planned to jump back into the maze.

Thomas kicked an incoming rat man in the chest with a high straight kick, sending it crashing against the others of its kind. Then he reached for his normal handgun and shot a few more that dared approach him.

Penrose was trying to put more of his blocks behind us, creating a wall made of oversized banknotes supported by spears made of money as well.

“Quite an architect, Phillip,” I praised him while I took out my holy gun, shooting bullets that turned into little drills mid flight, to help the team carve our way through the monsters,. Those ratmen were jumping over the cubicles and swarming us from every fucking direction.

“I don’t think it will hold,” he replied, literally a second before his makeshift barricade exploded forward right behind us. “Case in point,” he added as I watched this monstrosity of a slug rat break in through it. The arms interlocked on its body, creating an armor of bones, muscles, and skin that made this thing look incredibly alien and yet human-like all the same.

“Fucking body horror stuff,” I voiced my repulsion when the explosion from Noxy’s shot threw my body slightly away as the wave of force hit me. The shot thundered in my ears as yet another of his bullets struck the monster dead-on against its head armor. Arms that covered the face broke into shattered bones and bulging muscles, a rain of blood showing the eyes watching us intensely underneath for the briefest of seconds, before other arms caught the ones torn apart and stitched them together to remake the armor.

I stood up from the wreckage of a desk I broke with my fall, noticing that the shockwave got rid of the windows, opening a way out for us.

“Sorry,” Thomas whispered after another of his attempts at killing the beast failed.

Penrose motioned for everyone to move toward the newly made path and we made our way, dropping a few more of the rats, while hoping they would provide a target for this nightmarish creature instead.

Penrose dropped a few coins in its path and they rose to the ceiling, turning into metallic bars that provided yet another obstacle for it.

“I feel exhausted, in my… soul,” he whispered.

When I noticed him struggling, I took his arm over my shoulder, helping him move faster.

Other men stayed a bit longer, firing at the swarm and the big guy, while I made my way out of the window first, jumping out with Penrose under my care, reorienting myself in the new gravity and landing onto what was just a second ago an outside wall.

When the rest of the group followed, we all quickly went running into yet another corridor of metal and glass.