The Mantis Corruption - Book Three - 25. Chapter 25 - Accepted

While Olona and Tisa were alone at home and eating a late supper, the Biological Shift machine appeared in their kitchen.

“Tualu!” Tisa said in an excited voice. “Olona, it’s Tualu!”

His unusual geometric form was limbless and headless. Made of unnatural metallic components and devices constructed by no human hand, Tualu was a sight to behold.

Olona, the organic mechanic, was amazed.

Tualu made no sound, but different pieces shifted and adjusted, creating the outline of a human handprint.

“He wants me to go with him,” Tisa declared.

“Are you sure?” Olona replied

“This is what happened last time.” She rose from the table, stepped up to the Biological Shift in their kitchen, and said, “Hello, Tualu.” She placed her palm on the handprint.

To Olona’s surprise, Tisa and Tualu vanished.

The two of them reappeared in the basement chamber again where the other Biological Shifts were waiting. Tualu was beside Tisa.

“We’d like to officially welcome you to our little group, Tisa,” Lahari stated. “We have a target, and this time, Tualu is confident in the team.”

Tualu made no reply.

“Our intel is a little thin,” S’Kay declared, “but we know that there are only Messiahs, so everyone we encounter is an enemy.”

“Where are we going?” Tisa asked.

“After the battle of Gate Town, some of the surviving Messiahs fled to the Lesser Lighthouse. We need to eradicate them.”

Tisa nodded. She looked determined.

“I think I have an idea,” Gawa stated, and she looked Tisa up and down. “I don’t want to put you at more risk than the rest of us, but I think you should be our distraction.”

“What do you mean?” asked S’Kay.

“Yeah,” Tisa interjected, “I can do more than just be a distraction.”

Gawa continued, “We were wondering why Tualu brought someone who isn’t a Bio-Shift into our team; I think it’s because we need you. You can do something that none of us can.” She looked at each of her unique companions. “Our appearances are too noticeable. We require surprise or stealth to attack, but Tisa,” Gawa said, turning back to her, “you could walk right up to their front door.”

Realization dawned on the others.

“If the Messiahs are distracted by you,” Lahari said, “Tualu can teleport us inside the lighthouse. We will surprise them from within.”

Tisa worried about the idea of going into this first battle isolated from the rest of the group, but she thought of the attack by the Demifae hunters in the alleyway. She hacked her way through all of them on her own. With her jaw set and her brow furrowed in determination, Tisa nodded at the others.

“Very well,” Lahari concluded. “Tualu?”

He did not reply.

The others stepped up to him and each laid a hand against his mechanical body. They looked at Tisa, and as soon as her hand joined theirs, the group disappeared from the underground.

Tisa manifested alone in the darkness. The blinking of the lesser lighthouse was ahead of her in the distance. She looked all around, but there was no sign of the Biological Shifts. A barricade of debris stretched across the peninsula, and as she approached, she drew the attention of the Messiahs.

Tisa shouted lines that she had spoke before.

“I can hear the cosmic music from the radiation of the universe! I can taste the elements that burn in the stars! I can see the world; I can see eons! I look into distant corners of alien galaxies!”

As she began to repeat herself, her words gained the reaction she expected.

“I can hear the cosmic music from the radiation of the universe!”

Curious Messiahs came out of the lighthouse to see who was yelling

Tisa screamed her words at the sight of them.

“I can taste the elements that burn in the stars!” and the Messiahs were met with devastation.

Pockets of darkness opened around the oncoming enemies. However, as they swatted at them as if they were no more than irritating insects, the Messiahs shrieked in agony. One man’s arm was lopped off, went spinning through the air, and landed on the pavement with a wet flub. Another was hacked along the outside of his hand, and he lost three of his fingers and a massive chunk out of his forearm. Both men’s blood gushed from the horrible wounds, and their cries of anguish drew other Messiahs to the front of the lighthouse.

“I can see the world; I can see eons!”

Tisa raged her words at them, words that her missing friend used to say. Tilby’s words inspired the phrases that flowed from her lips. She continued her onslaught, as countless entities appeared from the disks she created around her enemies.

“I look into distant corners of alien galaxies!”

Messiahs rushed at Tisa, but suddenly all the shadow disks disappeared and a large void opened in front of Tisa. From it, a geyser of black radiation erupted that blasted apart the barricade and bored into three more Messiahs. One caught the beam square in his torso and it punched a hole through his chest wider than a grapefruit. Tisa’s assault collided with the second Messiah in one hip, and his entire leg dropped to the stones. He fell beside it, screaming and squirming in horrible pain.

The third Messiah was grazed by Tisa’s blast, and his body was sent spinning. He tumbled beside his fallen companions, pushed himself up, and another disk of darkness appeared before him. From it protruded massive jagged spikes like teeth and a serpentine tongue that wrapped around the man’s neck. The Messiah tried to grab it and pull himself free, but the disc closed over him like a mouth. His head and hands disappeared and a trio of blood geysers sprayed into the air.

In the short time it took Tisa to reach the ruined barricade, there was already an enormous pool of Messiah blood in front of the lighthouse, and no other Messiahs exited the structure as she approached. Tisa could hear screams coming from within, and she raced inside to help. It sounded like the Biological Shifts were already tangled with more Messiahs.

Tisa found a set of stairs that led up to the light, and down to whatever basement was beneath the lighthouse. That was where the voices were coming from, and she raced down toward them.

After Tualu had left Tisa alone outside the lighthouse, he brought the others into a storeroom in the cellars. They could hear voices shouting that the lighthouse was under attack, and the Biological Shifts raced out to surprise anyone they would encounter.

The doors of another chamber swung open, and the two groups were face-to-face. The Messiahs were shocked by the Biological Shifts. They appeared monstrous to the Messiahs, who staggered back.

The warriors attacked.

Gawa poured her terrible violet electricity through her hands into the first two Messiahs that she grabbed.

S’Kay’s feathers bit into Messiahs’ empowered flesh, liquefying their skin and muscles from their bones, leaving them green and hideous.

Ijeron’s body split apart like liquid mercury, and his projectiles pierced multiple Messiahs before he again coalesced.

Lahari was like a whirlpool of terror. She walked into the Messiahs’ midst and devoured their energies with ruthless devastation.

Khano roared like the bear-man he was, and he unleashed a pair of blue beams from his eyes. They cut through a Messiah, who crashed to the stone floor dead.

Yxida stayed behind the others, creating weapons out of everything that surrounded the Messiahs. Barrels changed their molecular structure and she reconfigured them into swords and spears with unnatural density that were able to injure even the empowered Messiahs. Yxida caused a chunk of wall to become a whirling blade that went spinning through the air and cut deep into one enemy’s neck.

Without warning, a disk of shadow appeared in the middle of the fighting, and from it rose a monster. The creature bore a resemblance to a mythological dragon, and its onslaught was terrible. A pair of Messiahs caught the creature’s claws in their chests, and the gashes it ripped open were gruesome. The thing also reared forward and sank its teeth into a third Messiah, biting through the man’s shoulder and upper chest. He wailed in pain that was hitherto unimagined. He fell away from the beast with his arm wagging uselessly, barely still attached.

The dragon vanished and six new discs appeared surrounding another Messiah. Out of them thrust spikes that struck like lightning, piercing multiple holes in the man’s torso. He fell down dead.

“Those are Tisa’s disks,” Lahari proclaimed. “She’s killing Messiahs and she’s not even in here with us!” Lahari released a withered body, which fell wheezing to the floor.

Tisa stepped through the doorframe at the top of the stairs, as the last Messiahs were dying.

The basement chamber was strewn with corpses in a variety of strange states. A few were charred husks of themselves with little bolts of lavender lightning dancing across their frames. Several bodies were in various stages of being melted. A number of Messiahs bore holes punched through their torsos, and quite a few miscellaneous limbs lay beside the bodies from which they were cleaved.

“Through a window upstairs,” Tisa told the others, “I saw a group of Messiahs jump from the cliffs into Teshon Harbor.”

“There will always be more Messiahs out there that need murdering,” Lahari stated.

“I want to do it again,” Tisa declared, “and I want to do it again soon.”★