Infernal Investigations

I bit back a curse as the eyes along Hawkins opened, looking all about. I put a hand on the pincer sticking to my side. I pushed on it and immediately stopped as it felt like my abdomen was being ripped in two. Blood poured out as it moved a fraction of an inch.

Fuck.

Watch members leveled their muskets. Malstein yelled at them to fire at Hawkins. Guns started discharging, a loose barrage of gunfire as musket balls flew. Hawkins shrieked, springing into action as musket balls punched into flesh. Eyes burst, spraying more milk-white fluid as they ruptured, and limbs twitched as bullets tore holes in them.

More importantly, it lifted me up.

I screamed as the pincer raised me, pulling at my torso, ripping the hole wider as Hawkins reared towards the ceiling.

No time to think about the risks. My hand reflexively grabbed onto the pincer, and I called on Diabolism. Chitin flaked under my touch as I poured rot across its surface. Entire plates fell as parts of it dissolved, and with a sudden snap, I fell back to the ground.

I landed back first, rubble from the ceiling delivering two blows across my lower back as I hit it. Groaning, I put a hand on my snapped forward leg.

The Diabolism burned my veins as I forced it into my leg, its tendrils passing through and into the snapped back joint. I didn’t have time to be fragile with this. I directed it to seize snapped bones and tendons and, in a single motion, forced them back into place.

I screamed as my hoof swung back the other way, cracking and snapping. Diabolism sent tendrils into my leg, holding the limb together as I returned to my hooves. Each movement was agony.

It's best not to think about the consequences of putting diabolism through my veins and tendons. I could worry later. I instead turned my attention back to Hawkins.

I’d long been forgotten by the Changer, who was trying to handle the forty or so Watch in the ballroom. Tendrils emerged swatting at them, legs stabbed and thrust, its pincer was reforming as its mandibles closed on a guard, snapping the poor human in half.

Both halves landed near me, and the entrails landed a second later. Okay. I needed a plan. Blindly attacking something like this would only get me killed.

There were always limits to magic. With Diabolism, it was how much you could pull on it before the side effects killed you, either by finally turning on your body or by warping the world around you.

There had to be limits to this. Hawkins couldn’t eternally pull new mass from nowhere. He had to convert magic to mass or energy. Theoretically, he could have a very deep well, but there weren’t a lot of other options.

Opponent regenerates? Rot the flesh till they stopped.

I couldn’t move very fast, and each step made my leg scream at me. Luckily, I didn’t need to move fast. Hawkins focused on a single Watch member at a time as they fired rifles and revolvers or tried fending off his tendrils with blades.

He couldn’t split his focus up. One weakness. My hand still gripped the knife with the paralytic as I got within arm’s length of his main body.

Here’s hoping this felt like a pinprick compared to all the other wounds. I pushed my dagger into the skin, slicing through it. Clear liquid came out first, followed by the milk-white ichor from before. I carved further, opening up more of it before sticking my hand in. It felt slimy, not unlike gutting a fish, as I pushed my hand inside.

That got Hawkins' attention, his body beginning to move, pulling away from me, but my other hand grabbed onto the edge of the cut. It dragged me along, but as it did, I channeled rot right into his body.

Inside him, he felt strange. I couldn’t sculpt, so I instead focused on channeling the rot. The flesh inside was reacting in a strange way. It was liquifying, turning to mush and then to a liquid that stung my hands as it poured past.

Hawkins shrieked, rolling around now, and suddenly, I was lying on top as he rolled.

I kept my hand inside, pouring the energy through. The skin began to melt, ripping open, and the slurry Diabolism had made of Hawkins' innards poured out onto me. The stench made me gag, what little food I’d had at the party making its way up, but I kept my hand inside Hawkins.

He shrieked, rearing up as he flailed about. People were running any way they could through the manor now. Tendrils wrapped around Watchmen, strips of white flesh squeezing them till bones cracked and skin burst. Spider legs stabbed, piercing through skulls and pulping heads.

Some emerged from the flesh near me, half-formed and melting. One tried to wrap around my hand, only to slough down onto the ground.

Flailing limbs began to detach, falling out of sockets turned to mush. The body beneath me began to collapse, skin splitting along more and more lines, fluids and mush pouring out. The struggles grew more diminutive and less forceful. After a while, my biggest concern was not falling through the skin into the soup of organs and flesh as the creature slowly deflated. Eventually, I managed to get my hooves back on the ground.

Next to me, the husk of the body continued to spew ichor and organs, not a single leg still attached. But something was also pushing on the skin from within.

Something vaguely humanoid and pale white emerged from the skin next to me. It was tall, masculine in build, hairless, and had no features outside of a vague outline of eyes and mouth covered by skin. It took a few stumbling steps, an eyeless face looking about.

Then a gun fired, and it fell to the ground, trying to scream through his unformed mouth as its knee shattered. Seconds passed, and it continued to remain shattered and not regenerating.

I stopped paying attention, grabbing the last of my healing draughts from its hidden pocket. Thank whoever was watching I'd landed on my back instead of face-down or it would have been crushed. Thank them for many things, like somehow not breaking my spine. I downed it, pain retreating as it worked. It would close the hole in my side, but my broken leg being held together by Diabolism? There's not much it could do on that.

More Watch swarmed the pale figure, restraining it while Malstein yelled about wanting him alive and not dead. I limped away, making for the stairs. I just wanted somewhere I could sit down and try to lessen the agony traveling through my leg.

I first grabbed my knife off the ground, holding onto it since my bag was missing. Aedelia had fit several hidden pockets on the dress, but they weren’t that large. I limped over the staircase where Malstein was organizing the remaining Watch. It looked like maybe a dozen had died to Hawkins.

“Harrow,” he called out. “I’m not seeing anything immediately diabolic, which shouldn’t be possible.”

“Everything diabolical is caught inside the corpse,” I muttered, gesturing towards Hawkins' chained-up humanoid form. “It’ll need to be purified, but right now, I think it’s still trying to figure out what to do with him. It’s probably why that got spat out, finally. Flesh tried to fight rot, but rot won in the end. He probably reached his limits and decided to escape before the Diabolism really got its hooks into him.”

“It looks like you reached yours as well,” Malstein observed.

“Probably,” I muttered. “Definitely. He’s….a wellspring of life energy? Something like that. I had to smother it. It might not have been involuntary. He might have thought we would be in a stalemate and gave up before I could inflict permanent harm. Don’t trust his knee not regenerating, though.”

Malstein sighed, rubbing one of his tusks as he considered the chained-up pale humanoid. “What I would give for this to be simple. Trying to contain something of this nature…”

“The Watch has got to have mages capable of arranging something,” I said. “Or at least a cell with only one potential exit.”

“The former is hard to pull depending on who has priority on those resources,” Malstein said. “The second is more manageable.”

“Do you want to talk about my using Diabolism again?” I asked.

“Don’t think it’s my place to say anything, this time at least,” Malstein said. “Besides, telling you not to do this doesn’t seem to make you stop.”

I grimaced. I couldn’t deny the point, but the shame from that didn’t cut as deep as it should.

“Circumstances,” I said, looking at the still-rotting and melting corpse. Rot still ate, everyone keeping a healthy distance away from it as it melted and pieces occasionally collapsed in on themselves.

“I will admit this seems dire enough to warrant it. What about the other diabolism?”

I looked at my right leg, little spikes of pain going through it as Diabolism wormed around inside it. Going into veins, holding muscles and tendons in place.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Just…I’m pretty sure when I let it go, I’ll pass out, so I’m holding on for a little longer.”

“Passing out might not be a terrible idea, perhaps,” Malstein said. “You look beat to hell and back.”

“I certainly feel it, but not quite yet,” I muttered, sliding down to the floor. The siren’s call of rest was there, but I couldn’t just let myself sleep yet.

“You have a spare sheath I can borrow?” I asked. “Just don’t want to stab myself or anyone with this accidentally.”

I held up the poisoned knife, sure to keep it pointed anywhere but at the Watch captain.

“Poisoned?” Malstein asked.

“Just a paralytic,” I said. “Thought it would do something, but I think they….altered their nervous system? Something like that.”

“Well, we might get some answers on that soon,” Malstein said, looking at the prone Hawkins.

“I’d love to be in a room with him,” I muttered, which got a wary look. “Just to talk. Not to examine or get some fleeting moment of catharsis. Where’s the other one?”

“Other one?” Malstein asked me.

“A second one was trying to make it from the third floor to the roof via the chimney. They never made it up.”

Malstein shook his head. “If they were on the third floor…I’ve heard noises, but getting up there to investigate has proven difficult.”

I frowned. “Lord Montague?” The only person I could think of who could stall the Watch even a little.

“On the third floor, along with Lady Karsin, some other guests, and guards. He’s refused to let me up there.”

What was on this third floor that he was willing to turn down potential help to keep it a secret? “There’s been two different attacks inside his manor. Do you really need his permission?”

Malstein grimaced. “Technically, no. In reality, yes. If I want to have a career at the end of this.”

“Right,” I muttered, slowly slumping down further. Those pesky realities were getting in the way of a neat and easy end to all of this. That was one thing closed. Now for another.

“Voltar and Dawes?” I asked.

“Vanished. A few people saw them go deeper into the mansion by themselves.”

I groaned as I leaned against the stair railing. “I….why are people so stupid?”

Changers were on the loose, but they had decided to go off alone. There better be a damn good reason.

“I have people looking for them,” Malstein said, finally getting up from beside me. He gestured to a few Watch who began to walk over, muskets shouldered. “You should take the chance for some rest.”

I sighed, not having a good argument. Oh, I could argue that if another Shapeshifter showed up, they’d need me to handle it. But my hoof and leg were being held together by the most slapdash methods. And if I held it together too long, it not healing correctly would be the least of my worries.

Where were other mages, now that I thought about it? Sure, Malstein might not have the pull to bring any in, but Lord Montague should have the resources for something.

“The other guests?” I asked.

“Spread out among the manor. A pain and ones who were on their own are going to be watched carefully, but no indications anyone is in danger.”

“You’ll wake me up in half an hour?” I asked, pulling myself up with a pained grunt and heading to a bench. “Or if something happens that I should be informed of?”

“Sure,” he said, gesturing to the two Watch to help me. Eventually, they got me settled into the bench. “And I’ll see if I can find someone to look at your leg. Just rest.”

I didn’t respond; I just let the diabolism in my leg pull back. Immediately after, sleep claimed me.