Amazon Apocalypse 6: Chapter 31

In an instant, I took in my foes. They were hazy black shadows, but that was only to be expected from inhabitants of the shadowrealm.

They were malformed monstrosities made from human shape only in the loosest sense. The one who grabbed me looked human enough until I saw chattering, sharpened teeth where his eyes should be and one big, blistered eye in place of his mouth.

Behind him, a beast crawled on stumps replaced with rifles, with a dagger in place of a hand. His mouth was in the right place, but curled up in an expression somewhere between starvation and agony.

This was an army of things, and they had already been throwing themselves at Charlie and me. His shadow was mostly devoured already, and now there were only traces of it clinging to his real body, which I’d brought with us into the shadow realm.

Unfortunately for them, my shadow was made of sterner stuff.

Behind me, a dragon roared. Standing as tall as a building, it reached down with sword-like teeth, grabbed an amalgam of tank and man, shook it in its maw and ripped it in half. Then, the dragon breathed flame and the monstrosities around us caught fire like they were made of tar.

I withdrew my apocalypse dragon bone blade and swept it in an arc around me. This fight would be much easier if I wasn’t worried about Charlie. Merely accelerating to my full combat speed would kill him, especially in his unconscious state.

Fortunately, most of these things were like D-Grades or C-Grades. Even without using my full speed and strength, they couldn’t keep up with me. I found the nearest edge of the crowd of creatures and hacked my way to it. From there, I put some distance between me and the group and finally had the chance to examine them.

All of them read the same thing. However they might look, they were a singular entity.

Corrupted Natural Divinity (Level 305)

This was some sort of hive creature, though I was drawing a blank at the name. If things like this were a common type of monster, Cyra and Myrina would have surely mentioned it at some point.

The fighting began in earnest then. Even though I’d retreated, I was blasting out spell after spell with Mana Arsenal. But these things seemed strongly resistant to normal spellfire. Somehow, they were distributing the effects of my spells across the entire collective.

I realized I would not get anywhere with half measures. I quickly cast Mage Armor, hoping it would cover Charlie too. I used my Multipurpose Glyphs ability, instantly conjuring some of Reluna’s talismans I’d hidden in it as an emergency reserve. Several of them were shield talismans, and I slapped them on Charlie’s back. The others I flung forward, offensive.

Fire, water, ice, wind, and just about every element shot forward into the mob that was the natural divinity. No elements seemed to have any sizable effect. In fact, all the damage I dealt seemed to be vanishing by the moment. This thing healed incredibly fast.

Just what the hell was this thing?

It was shrugging off my basic spells like they were nothing. It was clear that if I wanted to do real damage to this thing, I’d need to bring out the big guns. Unfortunately, I was in the shadow realm. If I started using my eldritch magic in full, I might end up tearing open portals to who knows where. And I knew plenty of void creatures were just as dangerous as this natural divinity.

I wasn’t outmatched, but I was still stumped. This was a wall I needed to knock down, and I hadn’t brought my sledgehammer.

More than that, though, my time was running low. The shadowrealm was not meant for beings like me or Charlie, and I knew from experience the longer I stayed here, the greater the danger would grow.

I would be fine for another few minutes, but Charlie’s life already balanced on the edge of a knife. Keeping him here while I figured out how to defeat the Corrupted Natural Divinity would kill him for sure.

I used what time remained that I was willing to risk him to put some distance between us and the natural divinity. In the physical world, our fight had taken place in that room underneath the memorial. Now, I took us further away toward the edge of the base.

I returned to normal space somewhere in the air over the base and landed on a roof. There, I lay Charlie down and tried to render basic first aid.

With one of my women, I’d be able to use lifeforce tether to heal them up quickly. Unfortunately, Charlie and I weren’t nearly close enough for something like that, so I was left with only mundane ways to care for him.

Thankfully, I was pretty good at those mundane ways, at least when I wasn’t in the middle of a fight. Charlie had a heart attack, a stroke, and leg cramps all at once. It took me a bit of effort to clear the blockages, fix his body’s chemistry, and generally get things working as they should.

As I examined his body and soul, I realized most of the damage he’d suffered was my own fault. Had I let the ghosts simply do their thing, they would have entered Charlie’s body and taken over without a hitch. The reason he was suffering so much was that I’d ripped him free halfway through the process.

About fifteen minutes later, he was blinking his eyes, staring up at the sky. He groaned and tried to sit up before flopping right back down where he was.

“W-what happened?” he gasped. He coughed up phlegm and blood as he spoke.

“We were attacked by ghosts.”

“Shit! We have to warn everyone. We need to sound the alarm!” Charlie tried to sit up again, this time with more urgency. He actually made it most of the way up before I pushed him down on his back again.

“The situation is a little more complicated than that. We were led into that chamber so we could be attacked.”

Charlie blinked, eyes growing wide with horror. “They wanted us to be killed by ghosts?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think they wanted us killed. They wanted us possessed. I’d have to see the whole process in action to know for sure, but I think whatever those things were should have taken over our bodies.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Charlie shivered.

“Agreed. The only question now is what that thing was and how it relates to this base.” I ran fingers through my hair while I tried to puzzle through what I'd seen.

Just minutes ago, I was ready to call off the whole mission. But that was back when I was still thinking this military base was the least threatening of all the enemy factions. Now I wasn’t so sure I could afford to just turn tail and run. If this thing was getting stronger, there was no way I was going to leave it be until it was powerful enough to stab me in the back.

“My question is how the hell are we going to get out of this mess?” Charlie asked, brows furrowed tightly.

“You’re right. We’ll grab the others before they realize what’s happened. Are you up for a fighting retreat out of camp?”

Charlie scratched his head. “I was thinking more like along the lines of pretending we’re possessed. Fake it and hope they show us the good stuff, you know?”

“Charlie, that...” I was about to dismiss the idea, but then realized I couldn’t come up with a good reason to. It didn’t look like the military guys were part of a hive mind, despite being connected to a creature that was. The possession itself was undetectable, even to someone like me with well-tuned extradimensional senses.

“Sorry, it’s a dumb idea.” Charlie scratched his head.

“--Is smarter than any idea I had. Let’s give it a go.”

I helped Charlie up and off the roof, and from there we snuck over to the memorial. Sneaking through the shadowrealm again would be the tough part, or so I thought. When I checked the shadowrealm, the natural divinity was nowhere to be found. It had vanished, like whatever had stirred it into wakefulness was gone now.

Charlie and I waited impatiently before the door swung open again, and Sergeant Benton came to retrieve us.

“The two of you have survived your initiation. No doubt you feel as though waking from a long slumber. The person you were before is gone, but their skills and abilities should remain. We have need of such abilities,” Sergeant Benton explained.

Speaking risked giving us away, but staying silent risked the same. I could sense Charlie’s heart was still racing, and he was struggling to find words, so I spoke first.

“What’s next?”

“Now, you grow into your new bodies. We are not like the humans who owned these bodies before you, though we were born of their worship. In time, we will conqueror this new world and carve out a realm for ourselves where our kind reign supreme. But that is for later. For now, you must learn to hide yourself. Many of the memories in your mind are incorrect, forged from thoughtless mental influence. Once you are stable, you will be given new duties.”

To me, it sounded like this possession process was an unreliable takeover of someone’s body. The spirits that had been trying to possess us looked malformed in structure. Maybe they were malformed in mind as well, and taking over a body for a time would stabilize them.

One thing was certain, though. These possessed people didn’t think of themselves as human anymore. They could act out the role easily enough, but now that I knew what I was looking for, I got a distinctly strange sense of otherness from Benton and the others.

I suppressed the feeling and hoped it was too subtle for others to notice we didn’t have it. I feared if Benton and the others were at B-Grade or higher and had keener senses, we’d be caught in an instant. Fortunately, things hadn’t progressed to that point yet.

Sergeant Benton led us from the underground chamber to a new barracks, this one much more luxuriously appointed than the one we’d been in before.

Something seemed off about them to me, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. They were all male.

Just before the integration, there had been a decent number of women in the military, but that wasn’t represented here. Now that I thought of it, perhaps the reason Charlie and I had been chosen and none of the girls had been might have been because we were men.

Thinking back, none of those creatures that made up the Corrupted Nascent Divinity were female, either. I suspected that was related. Perhaps it was impossible for the creature to use women as a host for some reason.

“How do you do, fellow possessed people,” Charlie said to the soldiers milling around nearby. He gave them an awkward wave.

It was all I could do to avoid slapping my forehead with my palm. I really wish it had been Suzie or Abby with me for this mission. Either of them would have been more circumspect.

Thankfully, everyone ignored him and continued what they were doing. Most seemed like they had somewhere to be and had no intention of stopping to chat.

“Your spirits will tell you who is in command. Ignore our uniforms. They are relics of the previous owners of these bodies,” Benton advised.

Naturally, Charlie and I had no idea who we were supposed to take orders from or give orders to, since we were just faking our possession. Benton left us a little while later, leaving us free to mingle.

I tried to drum up casual conversation with the possessed soldiers. One was reading a book while sitting on the windowsill. From the tattered and yellowed pages, and the worn cover, it was clearly an old book.

I cleared my throat near him, and he slowly looked up.

“What are you reading there?” I asked curiously.

“Forever Amber. I read this back when we were on our way to the Philippines to fight the Japanese, only none of it seems right to me. Did they change the book?” the soldier scratched his head. His eyebrows were drawn tight in confusion.

I’d never heard of the book, but glancing at the inner page, I could see it was published in the nineteen-forties. The soldier before me didn’t look a day over twenty. There was no way he’d fought in the Second World War. And yet he took the knowledge that he had as given.

I spoke to a few other soldiers, who each expressed similar sentiments in their own ways. They all had memories of old soldiers, though they were mixed and scattered, causing more than a little confusion.

Sergeant Benton apparently expected us to hunt down whoever we felt should be our commanding officer and start working for them. We probably had a pretty limited window where we wouldn’t look too suspicious, and I needed to figure out what we could do in that time.

I turned to Charlie and whispered. “Salute me. Pretend you can sense I’m in charge of you.”

That was something Charlie could perform easily enough, mostly because it wasn’t really acting.

There seemed to be no restrictions on our movement or overarching commands, so Charlie and I slipped out as soon as we were able to obtain proper uniforms. These marked us as different from the recruits, such as Abby, Suzie, and Meghan, who were only wearing camouflage armbands.

“What do we do now?” Charlie asked in a whisper.

I looked at the base around us.

“Now, we figure out how to bring this place crashing down.”