"The bastard was still breathing. I couldn't believe it."
The Twilight Naga had somehow managed to drag his shattered body back into a fighting stance, but he was a walking anatomical nightmare. He was no longer the sleek, terrifying predator from the illusions. The solar blast had peeled him like a grape. His serpentine lower half was a map of weeping third-degree burns, the obsidian scales long gone, leaving raw, blackened meat exposed to the stale cave air.
It was stomach-turning. One of his arms hung at a jagged angle, the muscle literally melting off the bone in grey, necrotic clumps. His torso was a ruin of charred ribs and exposed sinew, and from the top of his skull, two jagged pieces of white bone protruded like broken horns. He looked like something that had crawled out of the deepest pit of hell, only to be rejected for being too hideous.
The creature let out a wet, whistling wheeze. It sounded like air escaping a punctured lung. "I... will... kill you... you arrogant little insect," he hissed.
Even at death's door, the bastard couldn't keep his mouth shut. I stared at him with cold, exhausted eyes. I didn't want a fight anymore. I didn't want a conversation. I just wanted him dead. End of story.
The Naga tried to lunge. It was a pathetic, limping movement, but his instinct for murder was still there. He swung his remaining clawed hand, aiming for my throat. My body was a lead weight; the exhaustion of absorbing Jessica's white flames was still radiating through my marrow like a slow-acting poison. I couldn't move fast enough.
One of his claws sank into my shoulder, right through the flesh that had only just begun to knit back together. I felt the hot, fresh splash of my own blood against my neck. Gods, I hate this bastard.
In a flare of blind rage, I reached down and grabbed the Naga claw that had been stuck in my own thigh earlier. With a roar of agony and spite, I drove the jagged, curved talon straight into the Naga's throat.
The creature let out a high-pitched, warbling shriek—a sound of pure, unadulterated pain. He tried to pull away, to wrench his hand out of my shoulder, but something went wrong. My blood—my "Shadow Snake" tainted, corrosive blood—was eating through his wrist. The bone had become brittle, decayed by my venom. With a sickening crack, his hand snapped off at the wrist, remaining embedded in my shoulder while the rest of his arm slumped back.
The Naga stared at his stump in disbelief, then turned and began to slither away. He wasn't fast anymore. He was a dying worm leaving a trail of black slime and blood on the obsidian floor.
I wasn't about to let him escape. I reached down, picked up a jagged stone the size of my fist, and hurled it with every ounce of spite I had left. It caught him square in the back of his exposed skull. He went down hard, his body twitching as he hit the dust.
"What... what are you?" he wheezed, his iridescent eyes fading as he looked up at me. "You are not one of the two-leggers. Your aura... it tastes like a Shadow Snake Alpha."
I stood over him, the broken Sword of Qelo in my hand. I didn't care about his questions. I didn't care about his fear. "It doesn't matter what I am," I whispered, my voice cold as the abyss. "What matters is that I am going to devour you, you weak, pathetic little bastard."
I pulled the Naga's own claw out of my shoulder—a process that made me see stars—and then I drove it into his throat. Again. And again. Twenty times. I stabbed until the floor was a lake of black gore and the Naga had stopped twitching.
As his life force flickered out, a deep, dark satisfaction settled in my chest. It was a hunger I hadn't felt before—a hollow, aching void in my stomach that demanded to be filled.
His final words were a curse that lingered in the air like smoke. "You will die in this abyss, boy... do you know why? The creatures down here... they are a thousand times stronger than the one you flew here with. Haha..."
My heart skipped a beat. A thousand times stronger than Folia? The Prince who had carved through armies and survived sun-magic? If that was true, Jessica and I weren't just in trouble. We were walking corpses.
"Great," I muttered, looking at my trembling hands. "A thousand times stronger. I just wanted to get to the Asura Empire. Did I really deserve all of this?"
But the existential dread was quickly overtaken by a much more primal urge: Hunger.
Jessica had managed to drag herself up and had used a spark of her white flame to start a small fire with some dried moss and ork-bones she'd scavenged. She looked at me as I began to butcher the Naga's tail, her face a mask of disgust.
"You aren't seriously going to eat that, are you?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"Why not?" I grunted, tossing a slab of Naga meat onto the hot stones near the fire. "Food is food. I'm starving."
"Don't you know Naga meat is inedible?" she snapped. "It's toxic. It's bitter. It's like eating leather soaked in bile."
I looked at her, a bitter smile on my face. "I take it you've never had a problem finding your next meal, have you, 'Lady Angel'?"
She didn't answer. I waited for the meat to sear, the smell filling the small crevice. It wasn't appetizing. It smelled like burnt rubber and old copper. But when I took the first bite, I forced myself to swallow. Jessica was right—it was horrific. It was bitter enough to make my tongue go numb. But compared to the scraps I'd fought for in the slums of Ahjin, this was a five-course banquet.
I kept eating, ignoring her judgmental stares.
As the meat hit my stomach, something strange began to happen. My mind wasn't my own anymore. Jagged fragments of memory—the Naga's memories—flashed behind my eyelids. I saw the abyss through his eyes. I felt the cold comfort of the slithering shadows. I felt his mana, raw and serpentine, beginning to knit itself into my own fractured circuits.
The "Absorption" wasn't a choice this time; it was a biological imperative. The wound in my leg where the Naga had stabbed me began to itch. I watched in fascination as the skin closed, not with a scar, but with a layer of hardened, greyish tissue. My skin felt tougher, colder. It was as if I was becoming less "Human" and more "Abyss" with every bite.
An Alpha Shadow Snake... I thought, taking another bite of the bitter meat.
If I had to become a monster to survive this pit, then so be it. I looked into the darkness of the tunnel ahead. If there were things down there a thousand times stronger than Folia, I was going to need every ounce of "Monster" I could get.
Until next time.