The Mantis Continuum - Book Four - 7. Chapter 7 - Lonklam & Ronging

Ronging lumbered toward the sound of his companion’s voice. They were high in the forested mountains and had been separated. Thech and Jzuna’s powers sent the two monsters on a flight that had left them both far from any human habitation, but neither of them was injured from the fall. Ronging’s flesh had been scorched, but he would heal quickly.

“Ronging! Where are you?!” came Lonklam’s voice from a distance.

Ronging trudged through the snow but the cold did not affect his strange enhanced body; he did not care that he was deep in the high forest. With his craving recently satiated, he merely desired to be near one of his own kind.

“Ronging!” Lonklam roared again.

A moment later, the monsters caught sight of each other. “Finally,” Lonklam said as Ronging drew near to him. “My body begins to burn. I needed to feed on one of those Shifts, and I was denied. We must return to the village.”

Ronging did not reply.

“Come,” Lonklam commanded, and his desire drove him.

It was a day and a night before the two monsters made it back to Hazel Cove, and Lonklam led Ronging to his contact again. It was before dawn when the monster pounded on the door.

A moment later, the little window opened.

“Master Lonklam,” the doorman said in surprise, “what are you…” but Lonklam slammed into the door, breaking it open and knocking the man back. He fell to the floor and looked up at the monster in alarm. “Master Lonklam?!”

“Where is it?”

The doorman quavered, “Where is what?”

“I can feel it on you,” Lonklam growled. He grabbed the man with his multiple arms and pulled him very close to his mouths. Lonklam breathed his scent, but the doorman was not who he was after; humans were not his prey.

“Where is it?!” the monster roared, throwing the man back to the floor. Lonklam stormed past him, and his unearthly senses drew him toward a flight of stairs. He climbed them awkwardly, with the doorman close on his heels.

“Master Lonklam,” he cried out in distress, “there’s nothing up there for you! I live upstairs with my family. My shop is down below and the pleasure dungeon in the basement can be made available, even though it’s very early in the morning, but please don’t go upstairs!”

Lonklam ignored every word and reached the top of the flight. He grabbed a door handle, and the man’s urgency increased.

“That’s my son’s room; he’s just a boy! There can’t be anything you want in there. Please, master Lonklam, let me take you downstairs and we can get you whatever you need.”

Suddenly, the monster cried out in rage, and he smashed through the door like a tornado. Shrapnel splinters of wood darted through the air, and the man’s son awoke in fright. Lonklam grabbed the boy and used his frail little body like a battering ram, smashing the child into and through the second-story wall of the building. The boy was dead before he could scream. The monster fell, holding the child’s corpse, and Lonklam landed on the hard earth with the boy beneath him.

From the hole in the wall above, the boy’s father let out a wail of anguish, as he watched Ronging and Lonklam disappear into the woods with the twisted corpse of his son.