It didn’t like this.

The strong dead human didn’t seem like he wished to harm them, but his mere presence was unnerving, unnatural, and hit one of its few sore spots.

Namely, enemies it could not defeat nor run away from. Or so it assumed, from how fast he moved back when they first met.

It did not like relying on the docileness or benevolence of someone or something, trusting that they just wouldn’t strike out, despite the fact they could do so, and easily kill the wolf and its pack.

Its human did something with the paper binder and almost fell on the floor, and the scared one was there to keep her in place as the wolf tensed, the insectoid leg forgotten on the floor beneath it.

The dead human was not aiming his faceplate in its direction, staring at 'Emreeil' instead, but still, it did not feel comfortable in his presence.

Its human took a deep, sudden gasp, and stiffened, straightening with the ‘Katherine’ human’s help.

Then ‘Emreeil’ made some kind of joyous yipping, high pitched and careless, and it mildly relaxed at the sound, tilting its head in puzzlement as it glanced from her to the dead human, and the strange paper binder he’d given her.

She made a bunch of… bizarre hand gestures with her hand in front of her own face, staggered a little, then straightened again, before ripping the metal mask off and letting it drop to the floor.

She turned to the wolf, and walked to it as quickly as she could, a brisk walk. It let out a low grumble full of confusion, sitting back on its hind legs.

Then she crouched down to its height, and began making the same bizarre sequence of hand signals in front of its head, her fingers exuding mana and leaving lines behind, floating in the air in shapes that twisted like writhing worms and felt like they were making it dizzy just to feel.

It stared at her in confusion, tense.

It felt the familiar sensation of something prodding at its mind, not trying to break through, but asking.

A choice was once more presented to it, one without information or anything more than a vague notion of yes or no, and it stiffened.

Was this control? A choice? A choice that had to do with control, maybe?

Suspicion and anger rose within it.

However, it was two thoughts that made it calm down. One, this was not a choice borne out of the ether, this was something the human had presented. Its human that had also just done… whatever the air symbols were, to herself. And two, the last time it accepted, it got one of its most useful tools.

So after a few seconds of ‘Emreeil’ sitting in front of it and patiently waiting as it glared at her in suspicion, it accepted.

It felt a bizarre sensation, like a hollow tunnel made of mental energy and thought, suddenly forming in its mind, linking them together.

‘Emreeil’s’ lips spread wide, baring her teeth at it, and it tensed further, suspicion rising.

Too many mixed signals. Humans turned their lips up when happy, but baring their teeth while their lips curled up didn't make sense. Was she just... happily threatening it? That didn't make sense.

Baring her teeth without snarling… while staring at its eyes so intently with the big yellow one she had, its mechanical, jerky motions a tad too organic to not be disturbing...

Was she trying to tell it to back off, despite approaching it first? What? Or maybe she was… why was she baring her teeth? It was simultaneously confused at this sudden turn of events and more than a little annoyed.

Maybe she had no idea what she was doing? Humans were terrible at body language, after all. From a more charitable point of view, this could be some bizarre mix of signals that only another human would understand, and the thought made it fractionally relax.

Something was sent through the link, and harmlessly bounced off its mental walls, making any such relaxation flee instantly.

It backed up, and growled lowly in warning as it puffed up, its mind wandering back to the tight cage in that room full of animals, to the sensation of slowly turning into a puppet in its own body down by the tunnels, wondering if there was something she was trying to do here.

It ignored the way 'Katherine' tensed, her hand going to her 'sword' as her fear rose enough for the wolf to smell it in the air, despite her actions making its hair fractionally spike across its back in caution and warning, the starting eddies of suspicion taking root in its heart.

It felt like its very soul seethed in fury at the idea of chains, and though it was not that emotionally unstable itself, it could admit to feeling very tense right now, suspicion dragging faint anger to the foreground.

This whole… thing, whatever it was, it was making its hackles rise. It just wanted to grab its pack and get going, and now it was here, trying to figure out some bizarre… authority challenge? Human ritual? Whatever 'Emreeil' was currently trying to do.

Additionally, something about how she was acting and poking at its head while not showing an ounce of deference was just grating and making all sorts of alarms blare in its head.

The human’s teeth-bearing faded, her lips turning back to normal as she tilted her head in confusion, her hand slowly dropping.

“You’re still thinking like a human. You see a grin, and it sees bared teeth. You see earnestness in eye contact, it sees challenge. You see convenience in your stance, it sees a shady request without the proper submission. You see confidence in your squared shoulders, it sees readiness. Were this a normal wolf that didn't like you for some reason or another, you'd be dead. Stop thinking like a human. You are only making this more difficult. What would a wolf do? What would a dog do?” The dead human droned on strangely, and ‘Emreeil’ startled, her head rising.

“Oh. Oh. That... makes sense, actually. Shit, okay. Uhm…” She spoke, and it glared, confused, and very much not enjoying how it was the only one here out of the communication loop. It had no idea what they were communicating and their body language never made any sense because humans didn’t rely on it.

Stupid humans and their stupid gibbering. Should just leave that to the feathered winged things.

Its human suddenly bent forward, showing her nape in the clearest gesture of submission it had ever learned through distant observation, and it relaxed significantly, now just confused.

So it was not an authority dispute, and she was not trying to threaten it into some kind of mental control submission of sorts...

Which left… what? Was she trying to make some kind of gift, like the dark giant?

Was that a normal thing that human-shaped things could do? The giant was human shaped before it changed to resemble the wolf.

Whatever gift its human might have wanted to give, it doubted it would be anything close to the one from the dark giant, on any level, but it was just curious now.

It stepped forward.

She sent something again, and it washed over its mind like a drop of water on steel. It let out a short whuff, and bent down to lick her scalp, nosing her head to encourage her to try again as it lowered its [Mental Resistance]. It could provide her with this much trust, at least, especially considering how human body language made it confused at the best of times. She likely wasn't trying what it thought she had been.

Still, it felt like it had no skin without the Skill ramped up to its maximum. Like it was exposed in the worst way.

Resisting the urge to slam the Skill back to full power, another something was sent, and stuck there in the forefront of its mind, like an object or a sound it could not remember but was on the verge of recalling.

It lowered the Skill further, and it finally pushed through. A sound echoed in its mind, more like a strange imaginative thought that ran on a separate track to its own mind, but parallel.

“Hello?”

It startled, backing up a step and staring down at the human, wide eyed.

Its human rose, her lips pulled up in a way that indicated she was vaguely pleased, with no teeth showing this time.

Personally, it was just confused.

She could send sounds to its head. Which… would have been useful if they were growls or chuffs or whines or anything like that, anything except the usual human gibberish. Much like when it was trying to learn her human sounds, it chuffed a question, tilted its head.

“This is going to take ages if you keep going like this. Make a link with all of us, make yourself the nexus, and you three keep silent and observe while me and the wolf communicate. This is also the best way to learn how a beast thinks and talks, though I'm mostly doing this to save us time.”

“Oh. Okay.” Its human said, then rose.

It watched with its head tilted as she waved her hand in front of each of them in turn, even the dead human, the process taking little more than a couple seconds, before she gestured with her hand towards the wolf, then the dead man.

Something like a faint connection came to life between them, not a tunnel, nor something that could send information, just a presence.

The dead man turned his focus to it, and the wolf stiffened, feeling like it was under a thousand intently staring eyes, uncomfortable.

The fact its vibrational senses couldn't sense much, if anything about the dead human's head, beyond some muddled sense of liquid full of solids, only added to how unnatural his presence was.

Unless his brain was that slushy liquid full of small... somethings, he didn't have a brain.

Yet he spoke and moved and thought.

As if on queue, a soundless thought made of concepts came from Emreeil, one that wasn’t hers, tainted by the dead man’s mental presence, and it discarded its idle thoughts to focus on him.

The dead man lowered himself, his calves to his butt and his elbows on his knees, just about head-level with the wolf. His thoughts echoed on that strange parallel tract to its own thought process, a sense of him trying to say hello in a calm, non-confrontative manner.

It tilted its head.

It sent back a confused greeting.

The man clicked his tongue.

A complicated bundle of ideas came over the connection it had to 'Emreeil', the dead-but-alive human sending ideas of his own pack, his own group. A human made of chitin, a raging, screaming inferno in the form of a fragile human with a veneer of calmness.

It was followed by a request of an alliance, of sorts, mutual cooperation between their two packs. He sent ideas of protection, distant and from shadows, and thoughts of the wolf’s pack killing people in return for it. He specified people that were already hunting it, then for the first time, mentioned the cause of all this, the one thing it had yet to figure out.

Why it was being hunted in the first place. Or rather, by who.

The dead man sent him a crisp mental image of a man with a long face, black-brown hair peppered with white streaks, his face aged but not frail nor meek. He was attached to the idea of authority and the wolf’s pursuers, their master.

It sent back a simple question, attached to the image of this man.

Why was he hunting it?

The dead man sent him back a rough thought of ignorance.

He didn’t know why, but he did know who.

The wolf took a moment to think.

So the dead human was offering protection in exchange for them killing the people hunting them?

That wasn’t even a question, it was taking that deal. It was planning on getting rid of all of them the moment it could take a moment to breathe and regroup, the problem was getting that moment. It was nigh impossible, not until it reached the burning rivers.

It carefully bundled those thoughts into a small mental ball, and pushed it through the connection, to ‘Emreeil’, who would then send it to everyone else in a bizarre network that it wasn’t sure it entirely appreciated, even if the only permanent connection was with her, and not the rest of them.

It was still hesitant about the two new humans seeing its thoughts when it sent something over.

Regardless, the dead man’s jaw shifted, black fingernails rising to scratch his chin.

An image of metal and glass facemasks for its humans. The idea of metamorphosis, of a butterfly breaking through its cocoon, attached to Emreeil and to the sheer power it would bring to her. Then, another image of some kind of bundle of golden metal circles with engravings on their center, attached to the power of value, followed by the concept of trade and various bundles of information, animals and biology, things so foreign and wide-reaching they made it salivate in pure need.

Humans would trade shiny stuff for a nigh limitless amount of options, creatures.

Food, things it could incorporate into itself.

The human answered its following question before it could actually pose it.

And he did not leave out details.

It was an awkward few minutes as the man slowly sent information to it, and the wolf simply digested it.

It learned of more ‘floors’ to the human nest, beneath the burning rivers, inhabited by golems like the one it had fought, but limitless, endless. It saw abominations and vague images of machinery, of crystals, crystals that could be exchanged for shining pieces of metal that the humans for some… utterly incomprehensible reason, valued highly.

Highly enough to trade the metal pieces for animals, things like the spiked lizard roughly shaped like a dog, like things with wings and feathers and magical crystals growing out of their backs, and a dozen other examples the dead man provided.

Then he offered even more.

Magic enhancers, items of convenience, odd rituals of power.

It took something like ten silent minutes to fully grasp everything the dead man had shared, ten minutes to fully understand its position and plot some kind of path, or course of action.

During the entire duration, not once did Witness of Divinity pop up and tell the wolf that he was lying, which made it a lot easier to trust him.

It accepted his deal.

The dead man rose, nodded, and turned to ‘Emreeil’.

Now the wolf was the spectator, and ‘Emreeil’ was the one conversing with him.

Still, she took care to send their conversation over as it happened.

The rough understanding the wolf got was that her metamorphosis, or cocoon, was ready, and the dead man wanted to take them to it. It would have understood far more had ‘Emreeil’ not been cluttering half her thoughts with the mental equivalent of human sounds.

But if it would make her stronger, it had no reason to disagree, so it went back to crunching through the leg the dead man had given it as a peace offering.

Whatever this was from, it doubted it would give the wolf much. Insects had many legs, and this huge one was a bit too similar to the roof-tumor’s to expect anything good out of it.

Still, free essence as it idly listened in on the mental conversation between its own human and the dead one.

Eventually, the dead man turned, and took out a strange metal stick from his coat.

The stick unfolded, gears and wires extending it to be just a little wider than the wolf’s shoulders, one side flat and the other with a half-exposed line of crystals.

He put it on the floor, and clicked a button on the right side, stepping back.

A strange sound rose, like the humm of electrics gradually building up to a whine, until, eventually, it audibly popped like a bubble, leaving behind a perfectly rectangular…

Cut in space, was the best way it could describe it. It stared curiously, and moved to observe it from the side. It was like a mirror that reflected back a completely different environment, its edge a swirling rainbow, and the reflection within far too stable.

It was so unnatural.

Like it was just a doorway to another place, completely two-dimensional.

The place it led to was another factor to add to its confusion. It leaned closer and turned to the front, head tilted and ears peeled back.

Its vibrational senses weren’t working in there. In fact, they didn't pick up anything at all unusual.

It leaned forward a bit more to see the full structure of the room, one of dark gray stone and blood from what little it could gleam from candlelight and scent, with six giant metal poles arranged in a wide circle, slightly curved inwards towards the center, where a circle of bizarre symbols drawn in blood lay.

Its eyes followed up the poles, and it grew a little more confused than before.

Twelve humans hung suspended in a tight circle above the center of the circle by their feet, gagged and blindfolded and most definitely alive, lightly swinging from their squirming.

The dead human gestured forward, and after a brief flare of ‘Emreeil’ sending apprehension and a request of support, to which it sent back affirmation, she walked in.

It sent a glance behind to make sure the small human and the black haired one were behind it, and then it turned around and walked in, wondering where on earth the cocoon was and what all this strangeness was for.

The golem eye couldn’t see much in this kind of heavy darkness, and she only had one boot left, so the moment her bare right foot met dry stone, she sent out a pulse of mana.

And froze, idly feeling the wolf’s fur brush her legs as it trotted up past her and began to sniff the bloody runes drawn on the floor, the swirling furrows scraped through them.

Ghoul sent a message, intended for everyone, and she sluggishly pushed it to the others as she stood there, stiff.

Symbols and runes with a sense of untouchableness, the ritual circle meant only for her, the fresh blood of the wolf mixing with Emhreeil’s, and above…

The sacrifices.

She felt with phantom fingers a dozen people above her, all hung in the air like pigs in a slaughterhouse in a tight grouping barely six feet wide, crammed into the center of the twenty foot wide ritual circle, help up by the rope that bound their feet and hands.

Blindfolded, ears filled with wax, gagged. Dehumanized.

She felt the metal collars they all wore, their purpose obvious by the way they still had flecks of dried blood on them, staining the runes carved into the metal.

She swallowed, took a deep breath.

The scent of blood was as sickly-sweet and metallic as ever.

Another message from Ghoul.

A warning, really.

Emhreeil’s presence attached to pain and struggle, to a monumental shift. To power.

Katherine put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed briefly. Then she retreated to the side.

The golem eye flicked on, and with it, she could almost pretend the people up there didn’t exist, because the light did not reach them, leaving them shrouded in darkness.

Maybe that was the intention Ghoul had when designing this ritual circle. Or maybe he did that to save Scruffy and Katherine the full knowledge of what she would do to change.

The man in question barely shifted, didn’t breathe nor look around, hands by his sides.

Ghoul sent a question, tied to her, her mental image and idea, and readiness.

“I’m…” She started, hesitated, her attention returning to the people above.

A dozen. Men, women. All young but not children.

One a Guard, the others… who knew, really. Maybe bakers, maybe gangsters. Bad people, good people, she did not know. She sent Ghoul a question, and just like she expected, his reply was simple.

It did not matter who they were, what they had done, what they could have done were they not here at this moment.

To him and the wolf, they were strangers. Strangers were just meat. And to reach their heights, to survive what would likely come, Ghoul believed she had to think the same.

She did not think so, at least not to the extent he did, but she understood what he meant. She couldn't afford to be compassionate anymore. Had the wolf not reached her in time, saving that one girl would have gotten her, Scruffy and Kat killed, or worse.

So even if it stung and raked at whatever remained of her morals, she did, to some extent, agree with what he was saying.

Katherine let out a shaky sigh as the thoughts reached her and she realized what the strange sounds from above were, what their source was, shifting her gaze away from the circle. But she did not move away, nor accuse her. She did not leave, nor try to convince her to seek another path.

Ghoul sent a message to Katherine and Scruffy specifically, one bereft of compassion but with a sense of bridging a large gap of power, of his assistance to help Katherine keep up with Emhreeil and the wolf, and an offer to learn things to Scruffy, beside an idea of a genius woman covered in chitin.

It was not intended for her, but she still dwelled on it for a moment more to stall for time, at least until she realized she wasn’t sure why she was stalling in the first place.

Would her answer really change the more she tormented herself with moral questions? Would it change the fact that try as she might, she couldn’t really find it in herself to give away the chance to be whole again, to be more than whole, just to save a dozen strangers?

She was struck by how quick this had all happened, how quickly she’d changed under pressure. And how there was no one definitive moment she could say made her change, not by its lonesome.

Not one circumstance or person she could really pin the blame to. Only a long line of them, paired with actions and decisions that slowly drove her to this point.

The years of suppressed anger under her mother’s thumb, anger which slowly taught her how to hate, a thing so much more drawn out and caustic than mere anger.

The two years of constantly seeing her image of the world and the people inhabiting it slowly cracking and splitting into fragments that dug into her and scraped away the bright-eyed girl that wanted to be free, leaving this jaded, cynical cripple with only a vague sense of morals left, clinging unhealthily to a genocidal monster because it had treated her better than anyone else in this Dungeon ever had.

That hopeless aching chasm in her chest when she laid on wet stone, melting alive, and had her hopes crushed for the millionth time when faced with complete indifference and contempt, left to die were it not for a strange little goblin girl.

The two rodents she'd boiled alive that taught her how good revenge and sadism felt.

The realization she had as she panted on top of a mangled corpse, feeling better than she’d felt in years, feeling powerful and victorious, tasting triumph that was solely hers for the first time, the rush of being the predator for once, and not the prey.

Stones that paved her path to here.

Ghoul sent a thought, iron-clad and filled with importance, telling her to strip naked, take nothing with her, and to toss the device he would give her out of the circle the moment she pressed the button.

She did not hesitate to do as he said, not now.

“Help?” She asked in Katherine’s mind, and her friend nodded as she slowly stepped closer.

Her cloak went, followed by her shirt.

Each piece of cloth and leather left her bare, reminding her starkly of all the things she hid away, from both herself and the world.

Her upper body was bare. It forced her to feel and acknowledge, properly for the first time, how the way the skin around her chest and breasts was but a twisted mess like strips of burned wax all the way down to her navel, the way not an inch of her damaged skin could properly pick up the temperature because the air going into her nostrils felt a dozen times warmer than the everpresent chill she felt on her skin.

Her pants and undergarments were next, and they forced her to recognize the way her right foot twinged along her shin when she’d try to raise it too high, the way her hipbones and ribs jutted out starkly like a starving mutt in the street, a sight she’d seen too many times to count.

With her clothes in a pile around her, Katherine squeezed her shoulder, more insistently this time.

“I...Good luck. I'm sorry.” Katherine whispered, breathed out, her expression conflicted and lost in a way that showed she did not know what else to say despite wanting to say so much more.

“Thank you.” She whispered back, not sure what she was apologizing about, and then turned towards Ghoul.

“I’m ready.” She said, her voice steady, firm, only a little heavy with the weight of her choice and nothing more.

Ghoul extended a hand to her, a device with a single button on it. He sent a single thought to her, the controller attached to the collars she’d felt above her, a collection of bizarre emotions and ideas that told her quite clearly that she had to be the one to press that button, to kill them.

Her mangled hand reached for the device, the branch-like fingers, burned and abused, wrapping around it.

She felt the lines before her, carved into the smooth stone, thick with dried blood, runic symbols and bones arranged in artful, tiered circles.

She stepped past the point of no return with her back straight and her gait steady, into the circle, the swirling lines and furrows in the stone caressing her feet as if in welcome. She felt doors close behind her, and wasn’t sure if that was a thing of her imagination and disturbed mind or the ritual telling her that to leave was not possible now.

The wolf sent a pulse of excitement to her, and the way his tails idly wagged behind him helped take the edge off the splinter digging into her chest as she finally made it to the center of the circle.

It was rather ironic, all they risked to save that one girl, only to now do this. To kill a dozen strangers which no doubt had innocents mixed in with the Guards and the gangsters, and if she paid enough attention to them, she might even be able to point them out from how they were reacting up above. She did not try to. She didn't want to know.

The hypocrisy, the nonsensical nature of her own actions, it was almost ridiculous enough to make her amused in a dark, ironic manner. But they couldn't take any of it back. She wasn't sure she would, regardless.

And she'd come too far to back out now. Too close to finally being whole again. It hurt, what she was about to do, but the notion of not doing it hurt even more.

Ghoul shifted, a device in his hand again, his other hand open before him to catch whatever it was he was about to summon.

"Click it." He calmly ordered.

With a deep shuddering breath and with a chest tight with guilt, her thumb clicked the button before she could second-guess herself further.

-

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