Stratothrax
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Chapter 64
🕑 Added 2021-02-17 22:36:29 +0000 UTCRain woke slowly, drifting back to consciousness on a fluffy white cloud of bliss. He felt good, no, he felt amazing, incredible even. He felt stronger, sharper, and more aware, like he could think more clearly, with more clarity, a haze of fuzz seemingly lifted from his mind.
He hadn’t realised how much his torment had been weighing on him, just this small relief was stunning. He almost thought it felt a little too good- Should his revenge have caused him to feel like this not just mentally but physically too? Really? ...Well, maybe, but he found himself struggling to care at that particular moment, he was simply too content that it was in small part over.
He could feel a slight pressure on his stomach and his eyes drifted down to see Opal curled up on his abdomen, her knees tucked up and her black hair fanned across his fur. He could see her face, eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. As he watched a tiny soft snore came from the Goblin.
After a moment of wondering what to do about the adorable Goblin girl he slumped back with a sigh and stared at the ceiling. He couldn't move her, obviously. Too cute.
Instead he closed his eyes and brought to mind something that he had been putting off.
Literally brought it to mind.
When he had touched that level orb in Lynthia something else had happened that he hadn't spoken of. Something new had appeared, as though the touch had allowed a crack for that something to slip through, using the part of him that was still Human to get inside his head where that something really really shouldn't have been.
He had seen how disturbed and unsettled Lyra and Opal had been by what had happened and decided to keep it a secret. Opal thought of him as a monster, he didn't want to risk changing that. Lyra feared him, and the unknown, he didn't want to make that worse.
The thing that he brought to mind flickered and shifted, only visible in his mind's eye, its many colours roiling and changing as they moved across the broken shards.
There were numbers there, and letters. Broken, chaotic, trying to form but failing.
He knew what it was.
When he was a Human he could call something like this to mind, the version that he had when he was Human however was just a plain sheet of paper, a soft bland display of information that he could call up that stated his species, his non-existent Class, and his level. All levelers could do this to varying degrees, it was how a Class imparted more specific information to its user.
Some when they called to mind that information would see an open book displaying their details- Skills, and various other relevant numbers, others would be shown a scroll or engraving, some just saw floating lettering on a plain paper background, Rain’s used to be like that, simple. He had heard high level mages had particularly detailed versions that could even quantify the amount of mana they possessed, or how certain spells interacted, or more.
He had no idea what the fuck he was looking at right now was supposed to be however.
Broken shards of chaos, a fragment of a leveler’s power inserted into a monster, twisted and deformed. An intruder in a violently hostile environment, continually burning away in a vat of acidic fire, but still somehow existing.
Rain tried to focus on it, pushing and pulling at the fragments with his mind, trying to make something of it, but it was no good, it was simply broken, a ruin masquerading as something of use. He could see his name written amongst the flickering colours, and where it might normally display a class, or N/A if there was no class, instead was a shifting morass that tried to sometimes name him monster, which wasn’t a Class atall, or sometimes just errored out. His species was… it seemed like the fragment of a leveling system was incompatible as it just threw up more errors and told him nothing.
He ceased his prodding and studied the colourful shards more closely...
… The colours. The shifting drifting overlapping oil slick rainbows that mesmerised the eye, a chromatic opal magnet that demanded to be seen, to be acknowledged by its owner.
He knew those colours. He had seen them for the entirety of his Human life, not in a menu or book or a scroll in his mind’s eye or anything like that, no, he knew them from the vast night sky, the Many Coloured Moon. Those same shifting colours that lit up the sky at night now also existed inside him, inside his head in a little fragment of a leveler’s power.
The question was, why? Why was the thing inside his mind like the moon in appearance? Why not a book, or a scroll, or a simple stone tablet like every other leveler he had ever heard of?
A tired memory dredged itself free from the murky depths of his past. He recalled ever so long ago hearing from his Father a children’s story. A bedtime tale that described the benevolence of the gods in giving a gift to the sapient when the sapient were falling and dying to monsters, when all hope was lost and the last light of civilization was faltering. That gift was the gift of levels. Power. And the thing that the gods used to administer that system of levels was the moon they saw in the sky each night, the Many Coloured Moon, a machine of the gods that kept balance in the world, the system’s ‘mind’. It was just a story though, right?
If there really was something that watched over levelers and made things work smoothly… then perhaps it didn't understand what he was and was trying to treat him as just another leveler, using that part of him that was Human to get inside of him. He didn't like that thought. Some unknowable device out there trying to force a leveler’s system of power on him.
Except he wasn't a leveler, he was a monster, he just was, and he was sure he wasn't meant for this. This was unnatural. Wrong. That was made clear due to how much the thing in his mind was burning away, every atom of his monster body an anathema to its very existence, with every second dissolving it into nothing, oblivion.
Yet it was still there somehow, and he could call it to his mind’s eye whenever he wished, just as when he was a Human. He wasn't sure what to do about it, it was just sort of there now, a thing in his head that he could call up and see the pretty colours. Hopefully there would be no side effects. He really hoped there would be no side effects. Putting something that was designed to mature from killing monsters inside of a monster struck him as a really bad idea. Maybe it would eventually stabi-
Opal suddenly shifted on top of him and he was pulled from his introspection.
“You woke up!”
Rain cracked an eye and peered down at her. She was sitting up and looking at him. She seemed concerned somehow, had something happened while he slept?
“Yes?”
“I was getting kind of worried you know, you slept a while, I've never seen you sleep so long before.”
“I did? How long was I asleep for?” Rain stretched his limbs and cracked his paws, beginning to properly wake up. If he had slept a while it had probably been worth it to feel this good.
“Well you went to bed after eating that spineless leveler guy and when we found the gold vault, that was at night, then you slept all through the next morning, then the day, the afternoon and then evening, and now it's night time again. So you were asleep for an entire day pretty much.”
Rain blinked down at her. That was a lot of sleep, he didn't think he was that exhausted at all. ...A side effect from killing Adlen?
He slowly sat up. The bed groaned under his shifting weight and Opal rolled into his lap from his stomach.
Strangely, the feeling of weight on his abdomen didn't go away as Opal moved off, in fact it seemed to increase. He put a paw across his stomach. He felt… hungry… and growing hungrier by the second.
“So I slept for a full day, but that means I also didn't eat for a full day, and I barely ate anything the day before, only Adlen. I went to bed hungry. So… so this is the longest I've ever gone without food… without really eating...”
He grimaced as a spasm of pain suddenly ripped across his front, like a rope snapping taut before releasing. His stomach snarled with hunger. It hurt… his stomach hurt and it was getting worse. This hunger was far worse than when he had originally crawled out of the lake at the bottom of the dungeon.
Opal waved a hand in front of him getting his attention.
“Oh I knew you would be hungry so I found all the food I could, it seemed like a good idea.”
She gestured behind her and Rain followed her pointing finger to the kitchen area of the Ranker’s quarters. The counters had been piled high with food stuffs, it seemed the Goblin had ransacked the entire mansion and brought everything edible into this room. It was a lot.
A desperate feeling of gratitude washed over him as his mouth filled with saliva and his hunger roared in his ears. Food, he needed to eat, to feed.
He turned his head back to the happily smiling Goblin in his lap, she was just so good and nice, and her thighs were so delicious looking and he could just lean down and-
He shook his head violently. This, this was bad. Really bad. His hunger was ripping through him like a forest fire now and he was struggling to keep on top of it.
He reached out a shaky paw and pushed the Goblin off of himself, fighting his own body not to grab for her, then rolled off the side of the bed and began stepping toward the food, those steps quickly turned into a run and then a dive toward the kitchen.
Dozens of pheasants and plucked poultry were lined up besides whole roasted pigs and glazed goats and huge grilled flat fishes and more, table after table and counter after counter filled with meat and cheese and bread and anything else that the Goblin could get her hands on. Everything and anything you could dream of, the Ranker’s private luxury, everything that mansion had, all thrown together in one excessively large feast.
Opal had truly outdone herself and Rain was very appreciative of her particular style of ‘let's eat everything!’ food preparation. He threw himself at it, devouring entire chickens within the first few seconds, then ripping through goats and hams and anything he could reach for, just shovelling it into his maw as quickly as possible.
His gut was working at such a prodigious rate that everything he ate just disappeared inside of him with no outward effect, being instantly digested as soon as he swallowed, and then burning for more and more and more.
He ripped through a trio of pigs, a half dozen goats, ten turkeys, and then downed a barrel of milk, ripping the spigot out and literally pouring it down his throat, he tossed it aside and dove into a pile of cheeses, stilton, cheddar, it didn't matter, he didn't even pause to taste it, he just needed to consume as much as possible as fast as possible, to try and fight back against the terrible monstrous hunger that was tearing him apart from the inside out.
This hunger was worse than anything he had ever felt, a literal mountain range of lumber, felled trees stacked miles high, and he was running around with a barrel of water trying to put out the innumerable fires that were eating away at the mountain’s roots, growing ever hotter and fiercer, accelerating into a hurricane of a conflagration, the boiling winds battering him as hill sized fire storms burned away his sanity.
hE nEeDed MORE.
He tore into the last of the food and kept going, it took him a few moments to realise that he had started eating the counter, great chunks torn out of the wood exposing the empty cupboards below.
His eyes were now rabid with starvation, saliva openly falling from his mouth in long strands, he needed to eat, it possessed him, but there was no food left, he had eaten everything Opal had brought, there was nothing left!
He turned, searching desperately, and found Opal and Lyra behind him, they were watching him with concern. He unconsciously took a step toward them, his fur raising, his maw opening. They were there, they were just… there. The two girls took a step back and there was a flash of real fear there.
No.
With monumental iron forged will he wrestled back control over himself, desperately hanging onto some sliver of sanity in the carnal visceral maelstrom. He couldn't eat Lyra and Opal.
But he needed to eat, to sate the fire. The mountain range of screaming raging flames inside him demanded it.
“WhEre. Is. rEd.” he managed to snarl out between heaving breaths, his claws twitching.
