Amazon Apocalypse: Chapter 46

For one long, tense, and desperate moment, nothing happened. Then the endless repeating System messages scrolling past my vision shifted and changed.

System error resolved by administrator Lyra. Now proceeding with intervention.

The very world itself shifted beneath me. The feeling was much like what happened when I used Warp Step. The Chaos Wolf, the otherworldy entity that had taken over my body, vanished like he'd never been there.

Abruptly, I felt like something was pulling me in, and like a fish on a line I was sucked back into my body.

I returned to find myself wrist-deep in the chest of a angry Wolfman now spewing black smoke from his jaws as he stared at me through eyes as black as coal. Whatever Lyra had done to correct the error had banished the Chaos Wolf and given me my body back, but it hadn't fixed whatever the Chaos Wolf had been doing to the Alpha Wolfman. I used Examine to get a little more information.

Servant of the Chaos Wolf (Level 25)

The Wolfman's level had stayed the same, but his name and the feeling I was getting from him had completely changed. My Examine skill didn't even identify him as a Wolfman anymore.

Whatever the System had done had stripped away the fourth level of Mania, and I was back to level three, Blood Frenzy. Apparently that was the highest I could safely push Mania, at least until I figured out how to avoid losing control of my body. I had found my limits, and I gave myself a silent promise to resist the temptation to use the fourth level of Mania. It was too dangerous without greater understanding, and once the initial phases of the integration ended, I couldn't count on the System to protect me the things that dwelled just beyond the touch of my Class.

I extracted my arm from the Alpha Wolfman's chest cavity. It felt warm, gooey, and slimy. I had killed a lot of Wolfmen already, but I had never done so in such a brutal and visceral manner.

Worse as I tried to extract my hand, it felt almost like something was tugging at me, as if I was cutting an umbilical cord for a creature that had grown out of my very flesh. I wasn't sure if I was trying to create the Alpha Wolfman or transform the Alpha Wolfman into the avatar I now faced, but whatever I had done hadn't been good for me.

I used a Warp Step to put some distance between me and the Alpha Wolfman as soon as my hand was free. It was a good thing too because the Alpha Woflman, now the Servant of the Chaos Wolf, brought the dagger in his hands to bear.

It now shone with crimson light burning from within like an unholy candle flame. I felt my gut drop in sudden supernatural fear as the knife headed for me, and I fled wit hall haste. There was dark power within that knife; I could sense it. If that thing had cut me… I didn't know what would happen, but I was afraid to find out.

The Servant of the Chaos Wolf had even greater killer instincts than the Alpha Wolfman used to create him, and he went for the others the moment I was free from his clutches.

The policeman I had saved before was the first to die, and I finally saw what the dagger did. The Avatar of the Chaos Wolf moved like a flickering shadow, traveling so fast my eyes could barely track it, despite my enhanced senses.

The knife was buried deep in the policeman's chest before I could even blink. He cried out in pain, and black, sickly smoke poured from the Avatar of the Chaos Wolf into the man struck by the dagger.

I was able to see the thing long enough to focus Analyze on it.

Unholy Athame (Legendary)

Totem of the Chaos Wolf, the Evil Godling of Forbidden Knowledge.

The otherworldly being that had taken control of me had transformed a humble stone dagger into a legendary weapon just like that. I shuddered. The weight of what I'd just survived hadn't hit me yet, but it was coming. I forced myself to focus and put it off until later. There would be time to deal with accidentally summoning an evil god later. It would be a good story to tell Myrina, assuming I made it out of this in one piece.

The Policeman, now skewered through the heart by the Unholy Athame, began his transformation. The shadows pouring over him morphed and twisted. He grew fur and claws like the Wolfman, but also smoke and billowing shadows from every pore just like the Alpha Wolfman was.

"Chaos Wolf!" I yelled.

The Alpha Wolfman turned. "You dare speak the master's name?"

His voice had changed. The bestial pride I'd sensed before had twisted to become more servile, like a worm groveling on the ground. He would have said more to me, but as he opened his jaws to speak Sheriff Drayton leveled his shotgun and blasted the Alpha Wolfman in the face.

"Carter! What the hell is this?" Sheriff Drayton shouted at me. "Why isn't that thing dead yet!? And what the devil are these shadow things?"

"Working on it!" I said. Then I noticed the shadow things he was pointing out. Apparently, mine hadn't been the only shadow that had crawled away and taken a on a mind of its own. Everyone had lost their shadows. It was strange to see the ground beneath my heels empty, but the same was true for everyone across the battlefield, human and Wolfman alike.

Shadow of the Chaos Wolf (Level 5)

While not particularly strong, these shadows were fast and dangerous enough to be more of a distraction than we could afford in the middle of a fight.

Now those shadows crawled across the ground, nipping at the heels of both forces. A few people went down, as well as a number of Wolfmen. Sheriff Drayton pointed his gun at a shadow and pointed, throwing dirt and debris in the air.

But for all the force of his shotgun, the attack accomplished nothing more than pump lead into the dirt. The thing he was shooting at was just a shadow, after all.

I recognized the flickering shape these things took. They weren't physical creatures, and in many ways they reminded me of the wraith Sakura and I fought at the farmhouse. No, they were exactly like the wraith that Sakura and I fought at the farmhouse. Which meant physical damage would likely not affect them at all. It would take my spells or something like my Mana Bombs to hurt them at all.

But few among the survivors had access to any form of magical damage. In fact, I was pretty sure I was the only true magic user present. The path of magic didn't yield immediate results, as spells and the Caster proficiency took a lot of time to level. Most of the people who tried to follow in my footsteps probably died in the process.

If that had been all, we might have been able to finish the job, or at least leave it up to the shadows while we retreated. But the Alpha Wolfman had a trick up his sleeve that I didn't.

Global Notification:

The Alpha Wolfman has pledged his race to the service of the Chaos Wolf.

All his people now send their devotion to the Corrupted Godling of the Outer Planes known as the Chaos Wolf. All forces aligned with the Chaos Wolf will now be aligned with them, and the Wolfman race has been altered in the image of their new master.

The Wolfman race (Common) has evolved into the Chaosborn Lycan race (Epic).

The change was immediate and abrupt. The shadows stopped attacking the Wolfmen and started seeping into them, much like the black smoke that had flowed from my body and into the Alpha Wolfman's to begin his transformation.

Those shadows seeped into the body and flesh of every Wolfman, pouring into their flesh and leaving a cloud of darkness around each of them. Worse, it seemed to add a few levels to every Wolfman they corrupted. The average level for a Wolfman had been about ten before, with the elites around fifteen to sixteen.

I feared that would be the end of us then and there, but the Wolfmen had fallen to the ground and were writhing where they'd stood. They were helpless during their transformation, and a few of our people used the opportunity to take shots at them. But the bullets seemed to do no damage at all. Whatever the Chaos Wolf had done to his new servants had made them even more resistant to bullets than the rapidly regenerating Wolfmen already were.

That was a very bad sign for us.

Worse, we weren't just up against the Wolfmen. The shadows we were fighting hadn't just come from their shadows, after all. They'd come from us as well, and there had been far more humans than Wolfmen on the battlefield. This transformed what had previously been tough but manageable enemies into something beyond our ability to contend with if we had superior numbers and tactics.

And even more alarming, the shadows hadn't just come from the Wolfmen, they'd come from us as well. That meant that there were still plenty of shadows around to attack us too.

I cursed under my breath, realizing the full scale of what was happening. The victory that had been so close at hand moments ago had been snatched away from us, just like that.

Sheriff Drayton hadn't realized his bullets wouldn't do anything to the shadows and was still wasting ammo at the ground. Most people were doing the same. They didn't have the experience I did fighting intangible foes. In this situation, there was only one right call to make. We had to cut our losses and retreat.

"Fall back!" I yelled. "The shadows are immune to physical damage!"

It was hard to yell over the screams and the thunderous din of battle, but people looked up as I yelled and repeated the call. Marcus and Frank joined me in shouting, and soon word had spread up and down the human line. We were falling back.

I stayed near the front, since I was one of the few people who could actually deal with the shadows. They didn't take much to kill. Just one Mana Bolt would put them down. The problem was there were at least a hundred of them, and nobody but me could do any lasting damage.

Or at least, that was what I thought.

Across the battlefield, one other figure was standing up to the shadows. It was Michael of all people. Unlike his comrades, all of whom were armed with guns and pistols of various sorts, Michael stood in a white vest with a tank of liquid on his back and a hose in his hand. He spread great streams of sickly green liquid from that hose, coating the battlefield in something that smelled akin to bleach.

Whatever he was spraying did damage on more than the physical level. Even the shadows that ran across it evaporated at the touch of the noxious liquid.

Of course! I should have guessed as much, as I'd seen Michael fight before. He'd gained his levels using the equipment of his former employer working pest control. There, he'd discovered he could kill giant monsterous cockroaches the same way he killed the regular kind. He'd kept at it until now, where he must have built his class around it.

"Go!" Michael shouted. "I'll hold the line!"

His abilities were even better suited to beating back the shadows than mine were. He didn't have to kill the shadows, just lay down a line of poison gas to drive them back.

Soon I found myself by Michael's side. With him forming a line and keeping the shadows at bay, I could focus on shooting off my spells. A few hits here and there drove back the newly evolved Wolfmen, now going by the name Chaosborn Lycans.

The former Wolfmen were rolling on the ground and howling to one another as their skin stretched over lengthening limbs. They'd become less human-like and more wolf-like for their transformation, and I feared they would become truly ferocious predators when they finished merging with the Shadows of the Chaos Wolf all of them had absorbed.

Michael's group retreated to the trio of trucks they used for this opperation, loading up a half dozen in each as they piled on top of one another and slammed on the gas with all haste.

Sheriff Drayton's people retreated in a slightly more organized fashion as the police squads jumped into the back of a few tactical vans and started driving for Crownhill.

My group was the slowest to retreat, since we had by far the most people deployed. My truck was just one of many vehicles in the fray. "Get out of here!" I yelled, repeating my order to retreat. A few stubborn people were trying to stick around, but guns and clubs wouldn't do anything against the shadows, and I feared they would do little against the Chaosborn Lycans when their transformation ended.

Frank, Marcus, and Margaret were all resourceful leaders in their own right though, and when I ordered our team to retreat, they started hauling people out of danger whether they wanted to leave or not. Only two women stood behind, refusing to leave without me.

"Sakura!" I yelled. "Get out of here! You can only hurt them with magical damage!"

"You're not holding the line alone!" Sakura yelled, jumping up beside me and Michael anyway.

A moment later, Bridget joined us.

"Bridget, what are you doing here?" I shouted as I fired spell after spell. She held her two bloody daggers in hand. "These things can only be hurt by magic damage!"

As I watched, one of the shadows slipped through Michael's wall of poison and dove right for her. I was too slow to zap it with a Mana Bolt, but it didn't matter. Bridget lunged forward and ran her knife through the shadow.

For a moment, bright blue light flashed, the same shade as my mana bolts wehn I wasn't offsetting their mana cost with whatever ambient mana I could scrounge up.

"I know!" Bridget flashed me a smile. "I have a few tricks of my own."

I stepped in front of her. "These things are tough! Aren't you scared?"

Heat filled Bridget's cheeks, and despite the intensity of the battle around us, she smiled. "I'm never scared anymore. Not so long as I'm with you."

I don't know what the apocalypse did to the office intern, but I liked the fire I sensed behind her eyes.

The four of us fought together and held off the shadows while the last of our people fired up their engines and put some distance between us and them. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Michael of all people, the man who's betrayal had cost me my life. And to my surprise, I found him to be a steadfast and reliable ally.

"That's the last of them!" I shouted as I saw Frank waving to me out the window of a car. "Back to my truck!"

We turned, one at a time as we retreated. I'd been watching Michael carefully the whole time, and to my surprise he was the last to retreat. Even as we ran backward, he layed down a mist of poison fog in large sweeping arcs while jogging backward.

"You guys go ahead! I'll hop in the back!" Michael shouted.

"Sakura, take the wheel!" I yelled. Of the three of us, she was the only one who couldn't do any damage to the shadows at all, so it made sense that she be the one to drive.

Bridget, Michael, and I all jumped into the truck bed while Sakura turned the key. The engine sputtered a few times, and for a moment I felt like it might die at the worst possible moment. Sakura turned it again though and it spluttered to life.

We were off and leaving the shadows behind in the dust. But things weren't over for us yet. Behind us, the Wolfmen had finally finished their transformation into Chaosborn Lycans.

One by one, the servants of the Chaos Wolf stood, led by their leader, the creature formerly known as the Alpha Wolfman.

He covered ground even faster than before. I didn't dare push for the Fourth Layer of Mania, so I had to stick with Blood Frenzy. That left me too slow to truly react in time, and the strongest of the Chaosborn Lycans lunged straight for Bridget's throat.

I watched in horror as sharp teeth ran across her skin like razors, nicking her tender flesh. Shadows flowed from the Chaosborn Lycan like ink, and I was horrified at the sight even as I prepared to blast Bridget's assailant with every ounce of magic flowing through my veins.

But before I landed my blow, someone else twisted the nozzel of his sprayer at the Servant of the Chaos Wolf and pulled his trigger. Michael sprayed our foe right between the eyes. The Chaosborn Lycan yelped in outrage and tumbled. That was when my Eldrich Blast and Mana Bolts both struck it in the face.

It held onto the truck bed with one claw, but Michael and I both had follow-up attacks at the read.

"Goodbye and good riddance!" I spat as I fired off a pair of spells at the Chaosborn Lycan. I shattered the bones in his hand with my next Mana Bolt, while Michael sprayed it in the face. Between the two, our enemy lost his grip on the truck and we sped back toward Crownhill to catch up with the others.

The setting sun cast the sky in an orange glow behind us, and behind us a hundred wolves howled at the rising moon. I realized then and there that we were in for a long night.