Chapter 284: The Ugly Rat that Polluted the Sea (1)

Not long before Ketal became certain that a being from the Demon Realm had invaded the North, on the other side, Bayern saw another front of that calamity for himself. He came upon a stretch of land that had been corrupted to the root, a plain dyed a flat, sickly green, the air swollen with venom that tried to press into the lungs with every breath.

“Hm...”

He frowned against the sting. The poison here was not the petty miasma that frightened villagers and felled cattle. It was dense enough that even a Transcendent would struggle to endure it for long. Without Myst hardening the body from the skin to the marrow, the taint would seep through the pores and gnaw at bone. Bayern wrapped himself and stepped forward. The venom licked at his boots and tried to climb, only to break like a wave against the strength in his flesh.

The corruption had spread across the ground as far as the eye could follow. From the near stones to the distant scrub, everything wore the same green film. The color blurred distance until the horizon looked smudged and unreal. He listened to the faint hiss riding the wind and felt the prickle in the soles of his feet each time he shifted his weight.

A Poison Demon

, he wondered.

One of those fiends that befoul all things and turn clean soil foul—had such a creature descended here?

He denied the thought at once, not because the guess was outlandish, but because it was too small. Compared to this corrupted land, the Poison Demon was weak. The taste and weight of the taint were different. This was not that demon’s breath. It was stranger, more grotesque, and it bit deeper.

He crouched, skimmed his gauntlet across the surface, and lifted a smear that was half grit and half oily pulp. He sealed a sample away to examine later. Just then, the ground answered him. It rose, tore, and sloughed off what it had been hiding.

Bodies hauled themselves upright with joints that no longer knew their places. Flesh had gone soft where bone had dissolved, and faces could not hold a shape. They swayed and teetered, then staggered toward him with a stubborn, mindless will that did not come from nerves, because their nerves had forgotten themselves.

Bayern’s mouth flattened. He drew his axe against the enemies. The foremost creature burst beneath the swing, reduced to a pulp that sizzled when it touched the soil. He pivoted without haste and split the next one cleanly from shoulder to hip. A third seized at his greave with fingers whose bones pushed through the skin like black thorns. He shook it loose, stepped in, and shattered the skull so it would not rise again.

They did not fall easily. Torn arms still groped. Headless torsos leaned and reached as if guided by a rumor of hunger. Bayern pressed more strength into the haft. Bodies came apart. Those pieces tried to move and then forgot how. He stood among them for a beat and took the measure of what he faced.

“Strong,” he muttered, his brow furrowing.

These were not weaklings. They fell because their opponent was Bayern; each one still carried power on the level of an Advanced warrior. And there were not a handful of them. There were dozens, more shadows forming in the green haze and drawing near.

A small kingdom could be destroyed by what had already come to its feet. Bayern did not retreat. He set his shoulder and advanced. When he met them head-on, his weight turned into a hammer that sent shapes flying. What he struck did not simply fall; it flew apart and ceased to be a problem.

“

Uooohhh!

”

More rose from the poisoned soil and lurched forward. Scores now, their ruined frames trembling as they pressed at him.

“There are more than I thought,” he muttered as he clicked his tongue and mowed them down. His eyes flicked across the field, and a face caught him hard enough that he stopped for a heartbeat.

“You...”

“

Uooohhh

.”

The creature reached for him, eyes clouded and vacant, hands searching without aim. The features were collapsing, yet the outline remained. He knew the breadth of the cheekbones and the line of the brow. He knew the set of that jaw from nights when a younger man had stood straight and recited from a stained training book while firelight sketched angles across his face.

The memory fixed. He had trained this barbarian himself. He looked again and felt his expression harden. One face, then another, then another—every ruined creature pushing toward him had once been a barbarian under his instruction.

“You are already dead, and now you are being defiled. Do not worry, I will free you.” His voice cooled.

The next swings were not rushed, but the weight behind them changed. He cut the way a man would lift a beam from someone crushed beneath it: steady, sure, and without wavering at the edges. Anger showed on his face, not a wild blaze that shook his hands, but a steady heat that kept them from shaking at all.

What kind of demon would stoop to this?

he wondered.

Warriors who should have been laid to rest after brave fights had been dragged into this mockery and used as puppets. He ground his teeth and kept working until the press thinned.

In doing so, he noticed something that did not fit. There were faces he did not recognize, which should not have been strange—he could not know every barbarian in the North. Yet these strangers were more than unfamiliar. Some were not human at all.

“Are they... monsters?”

Among the rotting bodies were warped beasts from the wild, their spines bent wrong and their motions crooked. One moved with speed and force enough to force him into a real exchange.

“

Uooohhh!

”

It came in with a strange timing and even stranger technique, a crooked path that hid its decision until the last step. Bayern focused, met it cleanly, and won, but not without effort. He held over it for a breath, then saw the outline that its ruin could not conceal.

It was a demon’s face. He knew it from old plates and copied drawings used to teach recognition in the field. It was the very Poison Demon he had considered when he first tasted the air.

Barbarians, monsters, demons—every kind of body here had been twisted and rotted in the same wrong fashion.

“Wait, what is happening?” He swayed, caught himself, and forced his balance back. Something unseen had laid its hand across divides that should never have bent, yet they had all given way in the same direction. He stood among the corpses, struggling to order the thought into shape.

However, he was wrong to pause. Something punched up through the green crust with a wet roar and seized his leg in a clawed grip.

“

Urgh!

”

A sound escaped him, raw with pain. Poison surged through the contact, riding the claw into his flesh and trying to seed itself there. He tightened Myst until it rang through his frame and tore himself free, then bounded back, forcing distance.

“

Grrrk...

” He gritted his teeth. The venom clung to his limbs like tar. Myst forced it out, and still it held for a heartbeat too long, trying to enter through any seam it could find. His skin hissed where it tried to bite deeper.

Something very strong had been lurking beneath him, strong enough to make even him grit his teeth, and he had not noticed it. The haze had hidden more than smell and taste; it had bent shape and weight until the ground itself was a lie.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The earth beat like a slow drum. The poisoned fog peeled back as a bulk resolved by degrees, as if the corruption itself had kept it veiled until it chose to be seen. Bayern drew in a short, tight breath.

Its limbs were rotted. In places, the bone was bare, and even that bone looked gnawed. Thick pus rolled in slow threads from open seams. Skin had started to melt, and then left the work half done, hanging in dirty banners that stuck and tore with each motion.

Hideous,

he thought. Ugly in a way that felt like a message.

And powerful.

It breathed, and the air near it turned unfit for lungs. Even a highest-level Transcendent would be choking without Myst woven tight. The poison pouring off it made the world itself feel heavy.

Boom.

It heaved its full weight up and stood on the surface at last.

“A rat...,” Bayern muttered.

A monstrous rat loomed over the poisoned plain, as tall as a house and long as a barn. Its shoulders were thick, its spine heavy, and its tail dragged a furrow behind it with every slow swing. Its eyes burned a pale, feverish green.

It stamped, and the already ruined ground sagged. The green darkened where the paw had pressed, as if each step signed a claim. Bayern’s hands tightened on the axe. The rat was strong in the only way that mattered. He had to mean every movement.

He measured the distance and the reach of its forelimbs, watching the slow, lazy swing of its head that concealed a sudden quickness in the stillness between motions. He noted the rhythm of its breath as it drew in, thickening the air around it, and then let it out again in a steady tide.

The rat watched him as well. The gaze was not human, but it was not dull. It lingered, then the mouth opened.

“You are strong,” the rat said.

Bayern’s eyes narrowed. The creature spoke. He did not waste time on surprise.

“Outside, I found only the weak. Disappointing prey. But you... Yes, you are worth staining. Worth the trouble it took to come out.”

“Who are you?” Bayern asked. His voice was level. “Are you a demon?”

The rat bared its yellowed teeth. “How insulting. Do not compare me to those children. I am a rat born from the mire of filth.”

It straightened and looked past him, over the green-washed earth to the strip of clean sky above it.

“We existed before you. The world was ours. Your petty struggles for territory are children’s games with broken toys.”

Poison fanned outward, a glittering spray that turned the wind sour and thick. The very air began to feel like it would leave a film inside the mouth.

“At last, I have come to where I belong. I will defile everything and make it my domain.”

***

The rat lowered its body and lunged in an instant. Bayern had no intention of dodging or taking the hit on the guard. He was the Barbarian King, and in raw strength, he did not believe he would yield to anyone. He meant to turn the momentum of that charge back on the beast and counter.

Before he moved, his senses warned him. He raised his axe on reflex and set his guard. Thankfully, that choice saved him. Without it, the impact would have wrecked his insides.

“

Ghhk!!

”

The blow to his chest sent him skidding backward. A groan slipped between his teeth.

So powerful...,

he thought.

It was absurd strength. More shocking still, the rat did not seem to be using Myst at all. This shock had come purely from flesh and bone.

I’ve felt this before...,

he thought, thinking back. It was similar to what he had felt when he faced Ketal.

Seeing Bayern block its charge, the rat spoke in pleased approval. “I was disappointed with the tender young things from the Outside, but you satisfy me.”

“

Tch

.” Bayern reset his stance and quickly wrapped his entire body in Myst. Authority that could touch the world settled into his flesh and hardened it.

Clang!

Now he could meet the rat’s blows. Yet that was all. He did not give ground, but he did not overwhelm it either, and surprise flickered in his eyes.

What is this? he thought.

Even with his body reinforced by Myst, he found himself unable to overpower the creature, and the very fact of its existence pressed on him with a weight that felt almost unreal.

The rat slashed a forepaw in a savage arc. Bayern felt a chill across his skin and threw himself out of the strike’s reach. The space churned by that paw quite literally split. Corrosion ate at the air and the ground, and the wound in the world began to crumble by degrees. The rat did not stop. It kept swinging as it charged.

Bayern put strength through his whole frame. As he had done against Ketal, he poured his full power into every stroke and met each attack head-on. Forepaw and axe collided again and again. After one heavy exchange, the rat’s body slid backward.

“Kiik. You’re strong. Very strong,” the rat said. A low chuckle rumbled in its throat, unshaken despite being forced back. It made sense; the strength it carried was not the strength of brute force alone but something deeper and more insidious.

A long fight will go badly,

Bayern thought, gritting his teeth.

The poison spilling off the rat was fouling his airways. Myst protected him for now, but if it thinned, that venom would enter him as he breathed. The concentration was enough to stain even a Hero. Worse, the ground here was saturated with poison. The terrain itself favored the enemy, and while the advantage was not decisive by itself, it meant he could not fight long.

Then so be it!

Resolve kindled in Bayern’s eyes.

The rat lunged and drove its hideous forepaw straight for him. Bayern did not dodge. The claws punched through his left forearm.

The rat’s eyes went round. “

Kiik?

”

Bayern chose to trade bone for flesh. He drove all his weight behind the axe in his right hand and brought it down in a single, uncompromising stroke. The force behind it was enough to split the land itself. The axe smashed into the rat’s shoulder. The shock rippled out and shook the ground around them.

Bayern’s face hardened, the silence stretching heavy between them. His axe had struck true, yet it had not wounded the creature. The rot and poison sheathing the rat had swallowed the blow whole, smothering the force of his strike until nothing remained.

“You would wound yourself just to take life from me. Bold. I find it satisfying,” the rat said, laughing with cruel delight. “Very well. I have decided. You will be the one I defile with my own hands. Accept the blessing of filth.”

As it spoke, pillars of venomous miasma erupted from the ground. The earth itself seemed to breathe poison, and Bayern was swallowed in a flood of green until he vanished inside the toxic haze.