The super annoying version of Katare is still following him. He didn't mind her when she was being all silent and timid, but the full-fleshed personality is not one Douglas feels equipped to deal with. The internal speaker stays off and not a single word of the endless tirade enters his bony ears.
This way of doing things is rather productive, as the meaning of the runes becomes clearer by the minute. So far, he has figured out that the symbols all represent the edge between two ideas. Whoever came up with this system must have judged a letter or character based system too simple.
Instead, each rune is the edge between two words. The phlogistonation spell Douglas has been studying has a lot of ornamental fluff that seems useless, but the base idea is rather simple. Magical theory is based around two substances, phlogiston and calx. Everything is made up of a combination of these two materials. Phlogiston is the material that burns; calx is the matter that stays behind.
The ice spell forms when the phlogistonated air that comes from burning something is reversed into its energy-rich form. The air is transformed into calx and phlogiston. Except air is devoid of calx, so the material that forms is so pure it freezes.
This entire process is described with the runes in a rather convoluted manner. The spell could be written down as: ’air becomes phlogiston and calx’. This simple sentence would be made up of six runes. These would be ‘nothing-air’, ‘air-becomes’, ‘becomes-phlogiston’, and so forth. All in all, it has taken Douglas an incredibly long time of slow system assisted studying to grasp such an understanding from the messy spell shapes.
And so it happens that Douglas, still busy figuring out the magical runes, fails to hear or see what is coming towards him. The constant screeching of Katare has attracted quite a few Histaff monsters. The limb spiders, infected animals, and meat slimes come near the dirty duo, sniff them a bit, and then move on. Any moving being covered in Histaff infected slime is ignored by all the less than intelligent beings.
Douglas stops moving. Shaken from his studious trance, he looks around. Standing still, he fumbles with the computer controls on his forearms until he manages to navigate the obtuse menus to the audio controls. The vibrations running through the floor are getting strong enough that even Douglas manages to feel them. Also, the woman seems to have been yelling at him. This is nothing new, but the fact that she is now pulling on his arm with all her strength might indicate something important is happening in the outside world.
Douglas is flooded with a riotous raucous the moment he flips the audio setting to ‘on’. He snaps his skull forwards just in time to see a monster barrel through the mall towards him. The woman’s screams are drowned out by the sound of crumpling metal and sundering claws as a bone-clad monstrosity tears through slime and shop. Sharp spikes of bone protrude from layered, white armour that smoothly slides across moving limbs. A thickly armoured head contains a random scattering of red eyes above rows of protruding teeth. Scythe-like appendages chop at each obstacle between it and Douglas.
“… SKELETONS EVERYWHERE! NOOO, DADDY SAVE ME! NOT A WORKED RECOMBINED, NOT A REWORKED, DAADDDYYYYYYY …”
Douglas spares Katare a glance as he starts shoving mana into the spell shape he had been studying. Air snaps into ice, and he immediately looks away. Not before the woman’s skin flash freezes, though. The growing needle of ice swivels forwards and starts growing as Douglas feeds it everything he has. The wind picks up, and the ceiling flashes red as Douglas stares at the hulking mass of bone.
The beast is honestly a beauty, Douglas admits to himself. His perspective might be slightly skewed due to his own osseous nature, but the perfectly interlocking plates of bone and spikes that emerge from complex mechanical hinges does something to his non-existing heart. Even though his empty skull is rather slow, he isn't dumb enough to underestimate the danger that the couple tonnes of frenzied murder machine poses and dares not to be distracted too much.
Douglas shoves all his mana into the spell, ignores the cold that’s seeping through his glove, and aims it towards the ten-metre-high beast. His gloved hand is coated in frost by the time the thrashing monster has closed half the distance. Each rapid footstep of the armoured being sends shocks through the space station’s foundational frame.
Douglas releases the swirling lance of ice.
It shatters against the beast’s thick armour plates and slows it down a bit. Fog and snow appear in a trail that connects Douglas and the being. The beast then roars loud enough to shatter windows and evaporate all the ice. Douglas’ teeth rattle loosely in their sockets and his spine shakes under the spittle-laden vocalization performed by the approaching monster.
Then things go too fast for Douglas to follow. The bone-clad creature is a dozen metres away when it jumps. Douglas feels several of his bones shatter as his suit is hit by limbs and spikes. Spinning through the air, his vision is alternatively filled with the dirty floor, bone white monster, and screaming woman.
Then the woman splits at the waist, her legs flopping against the wall as her upper half vanishes into a dark store. Douglas smacks against a protruding sign, smashing through the colourful board in a shower of twinkling crystal. He bounces off a wall and lands head first, sliding to a stop after smashing a few benches and dried up planters.
Douglas doesn't really feel dazed or concussed, but he does realize something is wrong with his bony body. Stretching his neck, he manages to catch a glimpse of the way he came. The hulking thing of white bone is standing still, sniffing the air as it tilts its head. Only now does he get a proper look of the being.
Douglas truly feels a weird sense of respect and awe for the four-legged beast. Sturdy hind legs that hinge in odd ways are accompanied by smaller and thinner forelegs that contain a large number of foldable blades. Now and then, Douglas can spot traces of deep red beneath its sliding plates of armour whenever it turns. All kinds of spikes, horns, and teeth jut from it in tricky angles, but none seem to interfere with its movement.
Douglas lays still, just observing the thing. The monster keeps looking around for a bit longer before it starts trundling away, casually strolling back from where it came.
In the meantime, Douglas has taken stock of his injuries. His suit has done a marvellous job of containing all his bits. Had he been unsuited, both his legs, the majority of his ribs, and his right arm would have been scattered over a large area. His skull is in an especially precarious situation. His head bounced around inside his helmet with such force that it cracked. A glowing line runs from his neck towards his cheekbones and right through his face. It narrowly misses the middle of his forehead, only stopping halfway to his ear canal.
Unwilling to go back to being a cripple, Douglas quickly but quietly moves his phantom limbs around until all the bone parts inside his suit are once again filled with fractured materials. He rolls around a few times, tumbling the fragments around his body until they all find a place in his mana laden phantom bones to get stuck in. He takes care to move slowly, and even undoes a few bones that have inefficient shards jutting out of them.
His helmet glows with blue light as mana floods between the myriad of cracks. Douglas tries moving but stops rather quickly. The scraping of bone against bone is still as uncomfortable as ever.
He then sinks into a slight bout of internal focus as he guides mana streams to each damaged joint. Some of the blue boxes try bothering him, but Douglas is not in the mood and pushes them away with single-minded focus. The blue screens flicker a bit but stop interfering with his vision.
An hour of targeted mending later, Douglas stands with silent joints once more. He slowly makes his way over to the store he saw Katare smash into, finding her shattered torso inside a small restaurant. He ignores the oddly coloured slime that covers one side of the room and walks over to the woman.
Her face remains blank as Douglas picks her up with casual ease. Her arms flop around as Douglas starts pulling a large number of sharp objects from her form. She remains unresponsive as he slides lar
ge splinters of glass, sharp bits of metal, and a few pieces of furniture from her flesh. One particularly large thorn of a crystal is stuck inside the back of her head, refusing to be pried free by his smooth fingers.
Her skull is pierced by a snapped leg of a chair, temple to temple. He pulls it out with effort, finding that it snatches on a complex web of wires inside her brain cavity. Tearing the thing free with force, he looks inside the hole.
Dark blood drips from brain matter halfway between grey and pink. Looking down at her battered remains, he sees slow trickles of nearly black blood seep from each cut. Douglas is unsure what to feel right now, but he doubts it should be a happy emotion.
He stares down at her crooked arms and dented torso for a long while. So when she starts sputtering and coughing, sending foaming blood from her mouth, nose, and some cuts in her torso, Douglas actually jumps in surprise. Dull eyes meet with Douglas’ empty sockets as small blue flames reappear inside her glassy orbs. Douglas nods once.
“Good.”
He then throws her over his shoulders. He happily marches towards where he saw her legs fall, only stumbling a few times because of the uneven distribution of the partial woman on his back. He ignores all the moist wheezing and bubbling coming from behind him as he slowly searches the hallway.
He finds them beside a vending machine, its glowing buttons shining a light down on the mangled pair of limbs. He grabs her hand from where it flops against his suit, slaps it against some buttons randomly, and tosses her on top of her legs.
Douglas then happily starts undoing his helmet and eating the snacks, ignoring the gory line of blood, innards, and guts trailing behind them.
Chapter Eleven – Fleeting Beauty
Douglas sits down in a sizable pile of snacks. It took him a lot of thinking, but he has realized that he does not want to die. There are so many things to do, so many snacks to eat, and so many user manuals to read, after all.
So the skeleton has taken measures after eating enough food to repair each bone in his body. The remoulding process of shattered bone is less influenced by eating than regrowing his bones, but it still has a notable effect. Having eaten his fill, he is now fully repaired and ready to implement the first step of his plan.
His gloves come off after a mere ten minutes of fumbling with his suit. He then focuses on his right pinky finger, willing the connective mana to vanish. He immediately feels the connective tissue between his joints weaken. Pulling on the upper finger bone, it comes loose rather easily. He happily drops it into his suit through the helmet opening and starts demolishing the rest of his hand.
He stops when two pairs of thumbs and pointer fingers are all he has left. Douglas then pulls both his radiuses free, dropping them inside his spacesuit too. His pants bulge out with the bones dropping near his feet. Clacking his jaw in contentment, he pulls his teeth free and drops them inside. Reaching his ribs is difficult without taking more of the suit off, something Douglas is getting more and more wary of.
His feet surrounded by parts of his body and his arms slowly regrowing, he puts his gloves back on. A warm and safe feeling builds up in his empty head. The realization that he has the very matter his body is made up of in excess, thus greatly expediting potential future regeneration actions, is a nice feeling of safety. He slaps the woman’s hand against some more buttons and continues eating with a grin on his face.
“Thhhhh…”
The gurgling murmurs coming from down below catch his attention. Dull eyes rimmed by flaking blood stare at him. She seems to be trying to speak, but the air whistling through her neck and from between her ribs indicates that her body is not yet up to the task.
Each gruesome injury marking her white skin is glowing with a blue sparkle. Her bleeding stopped rather quickly, and the wounds scabbed over within an hour. She even managed to manoeuvre her torso over the dissected part of her lower half, and it seems to be repairing slowly.
“What?” Douglas asks.
“PPpffffff…”
Douglas just stares into her dull eyes.
“Fffooooo…”
Douglas looks between the bag of foamy sweet things he is holding and the crumpled mess of a woman sprawled out in a pool of blood. He then continues munching on food while occasionally slapping the slowly healing woman’s hand against the shining buttons.
“Foood…”
Douglas drops his shoulders. No longer can he claim ignorance now that she managed to articulate the word properly. Douglas kneels down and, with surprising gentleness and care, starts putting food in her mouth. The food burns with minuscule blue flames as neither of the two chews.
Hours later, the light of the vending machine flickers and dies. Douglas slaps Katare’s hand against the thing a few more times for good measure, but no food falls out. He turns his glowing sockets towards the still lying woman and starts speaking slowly.
“I … want to protect …”
His words come with slow and measured care. The rough and vaguely synthetic voice is much softer than before, only a bare whisper that Katare can barely hear.
“Look …”
Douglas turns his neck in an impossible manner, showing Katare a long slash of clean bone. It runs around his head, showing precisely where bone regrew. His once pristine white skeleton is no longer so neat, all kinds of grime covering every square centimetre, the only clean path the narrow stretch of regenerated matter where his very skull had cracked.
“Forehead damage, I will be gone. How to keep safe and whole?” Pointing at his forehead, he stares into the woman's eyes. “You the same … now.”
Douglas nods once and sits down, obviously done talking. He keeps staring at the mending woman while peering at her with expectant eyes. The two stare at each other again, silence returning back to the dirty halls of the mall. The restless limb spiders, infected pets, and bone filled masses of slime also settle back down from their restlessness.
Then Katare’s face breaks out into sad emotions. She looks down, obviously thinking about something with all her might. Her eyes are moist when she looks at Douglas again, her hand slowly reaching to the back of her head. Her wound riddled body has stopped bleeding entirely, the place where she was torn apart only indicated by ragged and gruesome looking scabs.
A single tear rolls down her cheek, immediately turning red as it dissolves some of the dried blood. Her fingers display a large amount of dexterity and strength as she grasps the glass shard jutting from the back of her skull. A sickening, squelching sound later, the transparent shard falls to the ground, bouncing without shattering.
She then blinks rapidly. More tears flow down her cheeks as her still face crinkles into a frown. Douglas just keeps looking at her without changing his barefaced expression.
“Don’t … know …” Halting words flow from her blue, lush lips as she coughs up some blood. “Other me knows. Need to heal.”
“Strong stuff. Where?” is Douglas’ single-minded reply.
“Workshop? Printer …”
The word printer paints a rather nice picture in Douglas’ mind. The semantic help given by the system has been steadily improving ever since Douglas cast the death spell on Katare. This is the first time Douglas heard the word ‘printer’, but the meaning is clear seconds after he hears it: a machine or person who makes pictures of objects out of base materials.
Douglas nods and hauls Katare to her feet again. She continues mumbling incoherently, but Douglas fails to divine anything meaningful from the sounds. The duo slogs through the wreckage left behind by the reworked Histaff bone monster. The shriek from Katare’s spoiled personality stuck in Douglas’ mind, its meaning imprinted in his memories combined with the majestic sight of the bone-clad being.
Douglas mulls it over slowly, combing through the names the blue boxes have given the things he killed with magic. Complete and reworked are the terms Douglas has come across so far, also counting the way Katare called them. Just thinking about the words does little to add meaning to th
em. Douglas makes a small breakthrough when he starts to suspect that there’s probably something called initial, early, or intermediate too. Then his train of thought is broken when Katare convulses once.
“Okay … I am done. I will not move another muscle. I'm just going to pretend I am not here. I did not just get cut in half by a reworked. I did not just eat more of that horrible chemical junk, and I did not just heal from an iron bar through the skull and a glass splinter through the brain. I am going to relax and do nothing, just sit here and wait for this all to go away.”
Douglas just keeps walking, carefully stepping past large rents in the metal floor and avoiding piles of debris. He listens to Katare’s flat voice with half an ear, keeping his empty sockets trained on the environment instead of sinking into internal study again. The reworked beast has put the fear of Histaff in his skull. The non-existent effect that his full powered ice spell had on the gorgeous bone being is something Douglas is unlikely to forget.
Douglas has been thinking about not existing. What would happen when the source of his animated bones, life, and mana was to shatter? A cold feeling had wrapped his methodical mind when he contemplated that possibility, making the unfeeling skeleton absolutely sure that he never wants to experience that scenario. Douglas also has done plenty of regrowing. The conviction that he will be fine as long as his forehead is intact has cemented in his thought patterns, and his utmost priority is the protection of his skull.
Douglas walks on, slowly learning how to move silently. The first time his spacesuit shod feet stepped on glass, he froze for ten minutes. Moving on after the bone monster failed to show up, he took care to avoid stepping on all glistening trash. Katare remained silent after her dispirited speech, her limp form unmoving on his back.
Now, a slime blocks his way. Douglas looks up at the large, red being, hundreds of cubic metres of murky, red jello with a dense, bone filling. Its surface is covered in thin sheets of bone here and there, small tendrils of white poking from the obstacle at random places. The thing blocks the eight-metre-wide thoroughfare, not allowing him a single way to pass.
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