Free Web NovelChapter 16: The Fleshweaver (2): Killing Them Was the Kindest Thing I Had to Give
The thing reared up to its full height, and the whole room seemed to scream with it — all those human mouths gaping open at once.
A massive arm of flesh came down at us. Anthonius lunged, shield up, and caught it head-on; the impact drove him back three scraping steps across the stone, but he held.
And before the chimera could lift its arm again, Elsa was already on it.
I never saw her move. One moment she was at my side; the next she was standing on the mass, her dagger buried to the hilt in the big central head, the one that seemed to command the others.
"Rest in peace," she murmured.
The chimera collapsed all at once, like a puppet with its strings cut. And as it crumpled, I saw them — all those faces sunk into its flesh, ceasing to grimace one after another. Their features slackened. They looked, at last, like they were sleeping.
And I understood what Elsa had just done. She hadn’t killed a monster: she’d ended the suffering of dozens of people, prisoners of a body that was no longer theirs. Her "rest in peace" suddenly meant everything.
I clenched my teeth.
"We don’t stop," Elsa said, pulling her dagger free. "The demon’s farther down, and now he knows we’re here."
The castle woke up.
They came out of the walls, the ceilings, the stairwells — smaller chimeras, botched assemblies, nowhere near the size of the one in the laboratory but just as wrong. I opened the Eye and drew my blade.
The thing that charged me was like nothing else. Taller, a torso bristling with arms — six, eight, I lost count — each ending in a hand too large, and somewhere in the tangle, a human face set in the chest, eyes rolled back.
It didn’t charge. It reached. The arms came at me from every direction at once, and I gave ground, the Dance carrying me back, slipping one grip, then another. But there were too many. One hand closed on my shoulder, another on my arm — I tore free, water lashing out, and cut two hands clean off. They grew back at once.
My Eye opened another notch, and the world slowed. And in the slowing, I saw it: all those arms, all that reach — and one single place none of them could fold back to. Pressed flat against its own chest. Against the face.
"Dash."
I vanished from inside its grip and reappeared flush against it, under the arms, where they clawed at empty air behind my back. The face was inches from mine, eyes wide, the mouth open on a sound that was nothing like a roar — almost a plea.
I drove the blade up, sheathed in water, straight into the core of the mass. The thing convulsed. And the face, so close I could feel its last breath, stopped straining. Its eyes found mine, held there a moment, then let go. The features smoothed over. It looked, at the end, almost grateful.
The whole mass came down around me, and a blue window lit in the dark.
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I stood there a moment, the dead weight sliding off my shoulders, that face still printed behind my eyes. I hadn’t killed a monster. I’d freed someone, locked away in there, screaming inside a body that wasn’t his. Rest in peace, I thought, like Elsa. And I meant it.
Then the others came.
And that was where it turned bad. Not the fighting — the fighting was easy now. Too easy. They poured out of the walls, half-finished, and I went through them without slowing, the Dance and the water doing the work while my head stayed somewhere else. The first one, I’d felt all the way down; the second already less, and after a few I felt nothing at all. By the fifth, the sixth, I’d stopped counting; I wasn’t even looking at the faces anymore.
And the system kept pace, indifferent, lighting its little window each time exactly as it had the night before, over the man at the safehouse.
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> Level 22 — +1 to all stats, +1 free point
I should have been horrified. A week earlier I’d thrown up over Alexia in a corridor; the night before, I’d scrubbed a stranger’s blood off my hands until the skin came raw. And here I was, stepping over the unmade and feeling nothing but the clean rhythm of the work. Somewhere, far down, that terrified me. But even the terror had gone quiet.
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Of course. The further I walked into the horror without flinching, the harder I became to shake — and the system rewarded that too.
We pushed on through the hell of it, and the castle bled without end. Anthonius opened the way while the scout watched our backs, and Alice kept me standing. Eric, in the center, pale, gripped his sword without ever using it, eyes fixed straight ahead so he wouldn’t have to see the tables.
Then, finally, the castle went silent: no more chimeras, just a long corridor, and at the end of it, a great door of black wood.
Eric, who hadn’t said a word since the laboratory, stepped forward. It was his role, after all: the guide.
"The throne room," he breathed, reaching a hand toward the door. "It’s here."
I didn’t have time to understand.
A line split the air, diagonal, so fast my Eye itself barely caught it. The door cut apart on the slant with a dry crack — and Eric with it, sheared from hip to opposite shoulder. The two halves of his body slid away from each other and dropped to the stone with a sound I’ll never forget, blood spilling out in a sheet.
A heave doubled me over. Alice’s hand closed firm around my arm and held me before I could fall.
The two halves of the door toppled inward, and the throne room opened up before us.
At its center stood a man. Tall, elegant, almost handsome. Skin so pale it looked translucent, threaded with fine seams, as if he’d stitched himself back together piece by piece. Fingers too long. And warm, soft eyes that had no business on a creature like that. He wore something like a surgeon’s garb, stained with old blood, worn the way you’d wear court dress.
Three figures kept watch around him. A four-legged beast, a predator with a man’s torso fused into it. Beside it, a winged thing — a twisted human bust drawn out into great membranous wings. And far at the back, a huge, motionless mass, a heap of fused bodies breathing slowly in the gloom.
He hadn’t moved an inch. He’d just done that — Eric, the door — with a single gesture, through the wood, without our even seeing him raise a hand.
He spread his arms, as if to welcome us into his home.
"Welcome. I’ve been expecting you." His voice was soft, melodious, almost warm. "Some call me the Fleshweaver. Others, the Gardener of Souls. Where I come from, I was given names I’d rather not repeat. But you may call me Lazaüs."
"What’s a demon of your rank doing in a hole like this?" Elsa’s voice was low, dangerous.
He didn’t answer her. His eyes slid over her without stopping, then settled on Alice and me, and lingered.
"And hello to you, heroes." A smile climbed onto his lips. "I was hoping for you."
My blood went cold. He knew. He knew we’d come, and who we were.
Beside me, Elsa had gone rigid. When she spoke, her voice was flat, carrying something that sounded like hatred.
"...So it was you. All along."
But it was Anthonius who broke first. The giant took a step forward, his voice shaking with rage and held-back tears.
"How?" He gestured at the laboratory behind us, at Eric at his feet, at all of it. "How can you do this to people? Cut them open, stitch them back, turn them into... into that? Don’t you have a single shred of empathy?!"
Lazaüs tilted his head to one side.
And what froze me wasn’t anger, or mockery. It was a perfectly sincere incomprehension, as if Anthonius had just asked him a question with no meaning to it.
"Harm?" he repeated gently. "But I do them no harm. Look at them: they were so fragile, before, so easily broken. I make them better — stronger, more lasting, freed at last from bodies that never kept the promise of their souls." He looked at us, and his smile held an appalling innocence. "Where is the harm in that? Tell me. I’m genuinely asking."
And then I understood.
He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t even defending himself. The question of good and evil simply didn’t exist for him; you could put it to him a thousand times, and he’d go on looking at it the way you look at a word in a language you never learned.
This is what no book can ever make you feel. True evil wasn’t hatred, or cruelty. It was this. A creature that unmade human beings by the dozen, smiling, certain it was doing good — and missing, somewhere down at the root, the very piece that lets you understand the question.
I think it was that smile that made Elsa snap.
The air around her began to vibrate. A pressure rose, brutal, immense, forcing me back a step — her aura, loosed all at once, like nothing I’d ever felt from her, not even at the worst of the training.
"Kuro." She didn’t take her eyes off Lazaüs. "The rest, I leave to you."
And she was gone.
There was only a shift of air, a flash — and Lazaüs was torn off the ground, hurled across the room and then through the castle wall, which exploded under the impact in a spray of stone. Elsa plunged into the breach after him, already far away.
But in the instant he’d gone through the wall, I’d had time to see his face. No fear, no pain — just the same serene smile, intact, as if none of this could really touch him. freёweɓnovel.com
And in the throne room, suddenly without their master, the three chimeras slowly turned their heads toward us.
The beast snarled, the winged one spread its wings, and the mass at the back began to move.
I tightened my grip on my sword, and the water rose on its own along the blade.
My turn.
