Blood Curse Academia - Chapter V.LXIII (5.63) - Corpses (Patreon)

Chapter V.LXIII (5.63) - Corpses

Kizu stood in a wasteland, surrounded by blackened and gray dirt and in a land forever trapped in the gloom of a twilight without a sun.

He stumbled forward, his legs moving oddly and spiking him with pain. It took only a glance to understand the source of the pain. His mangled leg had returned.

Kizu fell to the ground and ripped open his pant leg to reveal the very human, very disfigured flesh underneath. The leg’s bone healed in lumps, tumor-like bulges were formed under his skin.

“How?” His heart was in his stomach. Never before would he ever have guessed he’d feel so disgustingly uncomfortable while stuck back in his original body. Rather than feeling whole and reunited, disgust and revulsion dominated his emotions. His mind raced with possible solutions to remove the bummed leg. But the fact remained that the amputation and grafting that occurred to him on Owl’s Respite had been a fluke, nearly impossible to reproduce. A profound sense of loss struck him as he realized he’d lost his monster leg. It felt more a part of him than the original.

When Kizu looked up from his leg, he realized that the wasteland wasn’t entirely flat, like he’d first assumed. There were rectangular holes dug into the ground in front of him.

He dragged himself forward with an extreme limp, his leg uselessly dangling from him and leaving a line in the dirt. Peering over the edge of the closest hole, he blinked. Then blinked again. A hundred times over. Tears slipped out of his agitated eyes.

The tears fell on Anata’s crumpled corpse at the bottom of the grave. Her Blood Lord eye shifted around in its socket, though the rest of her body remained broken and dead.

Kizu lifted a hand, reaching out in the direction of Anata’s remains. Then wind blew him to the side, sending him tumbling. When he recovered, he found his hand still outstretched, but now in the direction of a new grave.

Anna. Exactly has he remembered his sister from all those years ago, unchanged from his memory. He dully noted that her corpse appeared barely older than the age he was now. The only difference now was her tightly fit dark garb with a cape and massive black sword that rested in the grave beside her.

On his outstretched hand, Kizu found himself staring at the cool enchanted ring. The one Roku had gifted him in her stead. In his mind, he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d still be alive if her friend had given her the powerful artifact instead of him.

“None of this is real.”

The statement reverberated through Kizu’s soul and he looked up to see a familiar tan-skinned man holding a spear.

“Z—Zayne?” Kizu gasped. Unlike the soul fragment’s crisp voice, Kizu’s own throat was raw and dry. He realized he needed water. A glance to either side revealed no water source in this wasteland. Just gray dirt and dead trees in the far distance.

“None of this is real,” Zayne repeated. “You’ve fallen into a trance induced by those mushrooms you stumbled on. An old, but reliable, trap. I’ve seen them cultivated even back in my time among the mortals.”

“Mushrooms?” Kizu’s head swam and he clutched at it in an attempt to end the sudden vertigo. His mind desperately clawed at his memories to uncover how, exactly, he’d ended up in this wasteland.

Lucky for him, Kizu knew a spell for this.

Even if the rest of the world turned out to not be real, he was still capable of casting on one thing. His mind. He activated the enhancement that allowed him to sort through filed thoughts, then scoured his memories. It was as Zayne said, his last available memory was one of his lizard mount stepping into a different biome of the World Dungeon. A biome with mushrooms lining the forest floor. The shift between biomes was sudden, implying a layer of illusions concealing it from view. Still, if he’d been focused on his atlas, Kizu doubtlessly could have avoided the trap.

Positioning himself in a meditative pose, Kizu blocked out everything his senses were telling him. They couldn’t be trusted at the moment. All that remained was himself and his memories.

“Good, you should be capable of breaking asunder this prison.”

Even with his eyes closed, Kizu felt one twitch under its lid. Apparently Zayne was another aspect he was alone with in his mind. It encroached on his personal space, but since Zayne had been a surprisingly respectful roommate in his soul this last half a year, Kizu decided to let it slip this once.

Scanning both his mind and his spellsense, Kizu silently located the door out of this horrific place. He had the means in which to seal away this memory for eternity.

“Wait!” Zayne said. “Do not depart yet!”

Kizu opened his eyes to reveal that he now sat in an abyss of pure white. The graves of Anata and Anna were now utterly gone, smoothed over by the vastness of nothing.

“Why am I staying here?” Kizu asked. Now free of the wasteland, his voice had returned to normal. “I need to get out of my head and return to the real world again. We need to get down to Otochi’s lair.”

“I do not argue with your objective. However, do you mean to do this all on your own?”

“On my own? What do you mean? Ione and….” Kizu trailed off as the soul fragment’s words took their hold. “You mean, they won’t just wake up in a few hours?”

Zayne shook his head sadly. “No. These mushrooms are cultivated to fully incapacitate intruders. Even should you remove your friends from this chamber, I fear they will not awaken for many years, if not decades.”

Kizu stared at the white in front of him. It had formed into a wall equipped with a door. An escape from this horrible place.

“What do I need to do to save them?” Kizu asked. “I assume you have a plan?”

Kizu had quite a few potions on hand, but no matter how much his mind raced, none of them seemed the solution to his current predicament. Perhaps a soul potion might manage something. But certainly not something safe.

He glanced down to the spatial ring on his hand and wondered if any of his potions could even alter this dreamscape while his consciousness remained trapped. It seemed unlikely, as nothing here was real, including his body. His true body was probably face down in a pile of shrooms at the moment.

  “You’ll need to travel over into their memories and pull them out. Break the illusion that traps their minds, just as I did for you.”

“All you did was speak to me. If that’s all I need to do, then I guess this should be easy enough. How do I travel between consciousnesses?”

As he asked the question, a new door. Not leading directly back into the material plane, but instead it was stained black with wisps of darkness leaking from its edges.

“It won’t be that easy, will it?” Kizu realized with a sigh.

“No. I’m afraid this task will be difficult on multiple fronts,” Zayne replied, leaning on his spear as he watched the evil door. “Keep in mind as you travel that time exists differently in here than in the normal material plane. Assuming you aren’t trapped for years, you shouldn’t lose more than a day or so.”

“Assuming I’m not trapped,” Kizu repeated dryly.

Without any reason to delay, Kizu pushed open the door and stepped out of the white void and into the jungle.

The oppressive humidity slammed into him immediately. He was surrounded by plants he recognized. Somehow, he’d been transported to the Hon Basin.

A spike of fear pierced him as he remembered what the witches of the Hon Basin had promised if he’d reneged on his exile. He squashed that fear before it could fully take root. He wasn’t truly in the basin, just a recreation of it from one of his friends’ minds.

He shoved a fern to the side with the back of his hand and grinded the mud underfoot with a heel. Despite his knowledge everything existed in a dreamscape, it certainly all felt real.

“Ione!” he called out, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Basil?”

The only response he received in return was the ever present buzz of insects and distinct howls of creatures.

Then it hit him. There was only one companion that had a reason to be brought here.

“MORT!” Kizu shouted into the forest. “Mort! Where are you?”

His soul tether remained in place but felt slack. That reassured him that Mort lived, though it made finding him more of a chore.

Since passing through the door’s threshold, Zayne had utterly disappeared. As a result, Kizu stomped through the foliage alone, continuing to shout Mort’s name.

Time skipped along as he searched. He had only brief snapshots of his actions, avoiding the jungle’s monster, looking under fallen trees, crossing creeks. And then there Mort was. A ball of brown fur in the mud with his tail bent awkwardly. The monkey’s body continued to shudder, even as Kizu fell to his knees beside his dear friend.

“Who did this to you?” Kizu asked softly as he scooped the small, broken body into his arms. “The witches?”

One of Mort’s golden eyes opened just a slit. It was enough for Kizu to see the monkey’s frantic glance to the side.

Even before Kizu fully wheeled around, the cackling behind him revealed the person’s identity.

The crone’s hunched form stood before him, warts dotting her face and strands of green hair matted against her scalp. Her yellow teeth gleamed as she open-mouth cackled. The foliage around her withered and died from her mere presence.

“Boy—ack!”

Kizu expected the crone to launch into a belittling rant. Especially since this was designed as a nightmare by the shroom spores. Instead, the hag hacked and coughed, as if a furball was trapped in her throat.

“Kkkeekaaaaggg.” The guttural noise was accompanied by her eyes rolling to the back of her head.

Shielding Mort with his body, Kizu took a step back.

The crone collapsed to the ground and convulsed, her body contorting as it spasmed in the mud. An arm ripped its way out of her torso, peeling both skin and cloth aside, followed by another. They gripped the edges of the wound and tore it to create a rift from head to hip. From out of the body of the crone, rose out another, identical, crone.

She took in her surroundings and wrinkled her nose.

“Interesting meeting place, boy,” the old woman said. “Mushrooms, eh? Been many years since someone dared take my visage. Fungal never knew its place in the pecking order.”

She cackled, identical to the noise made by the dead crone at her feet.

“What—”

“His greatest fear was to never have bonded with you,” the crone said, her cackling ceasing in an instant to cut off Kizu’s question. “This is how he pictured his life. Alone in the sludge. A likely turn of events. I’ve always known he was a smart choice for a familiar. One of your few wise decisions.”

Kizu stared down at the shaking brown fur in his arms. Mort remained too fearful to even open his eyes. While their bond was distant, Kizu could still feel the pain and terror emanating from his familiar.

“Is there—”

“You need to force him to see the truth of the hallucination. Or confront the fear.”

The crone muttered to herself incoherently as she paced the jungle. She snatched up a few leaves, chewed on them, and spit the green gunk into the mud. She then wandered off into the jungle.

“Mort?” Kizu said. He shook his familiar softly. “Our bond is still intact. I haven’t gone anywhere.”

No response. After a while of trying to coax Mort with words, Kizu tried to pry the little monkey out of his balled up form. He hoped that maybe Mort seeing him would trigger a positive reaction. Mort’s broken tail swished and curled around his body, the crick in it jutting out.

“Boy!” the crone said from the bushes, causing Kizu to jolt in surprise. “Words, smells, feelings. None of that is real here. Stop waving at the blind, you fool!”

Kizu stared at the foliage where the words had come from. What was real if this was all a dream?

Then it hit him. His bond. He needed to communicate through the familiar bond. Closing his eyes, his mind went back to when he first formed the bond in this very jungle, years previous. It all replayed in his mind. As it did, the environment around him shifted to replay his thoughts.

Mort’s sister had died earlier that day and he’d attempted to avenge her, only to end up beaten and abandoned. Kizu knew the supreme despair his familiar had felt in those hours, as the rain dripped on him from above. He’d nearly drowned in a puddle of mud when Kizu found him.

Young Kizu had scooped him into his arms and rushed the monkey over to the crone’s hut. This hadn’t been the first time he’d seen Mort, as the owl monkey and his sister had been locals in the area for over a year, but it was the first time he truly met him.

The crone had refused to heal the monkey. She’d likewise refused both her potions and supplies. If he wanted to create a healing potion, he’d been told he’d have to scavenge the materials himself. So, short on time, he sought the only other possible option. The pages conveniently open in the tome left out on the brewing prep table. The secrets of the familiar bond.

The process had been painful and bloody. The crone had never removed those memories from his mind. But, in the end, he’d emerged from the experience with another piece to his soul. Both more and less than he’d once been.

Kizu called on that piece of himself now. Despite all the dream illusions, he felt the bond. Faint, but present. He pulled on it, forcing Mort to see through his eyes. Forced him to comprehend the fear and love Kizu felt for him in that moment in equal parts. Then, he mixed in something else. Comfort. Reassurance. Safety.

Mort opened his golden eyes and met Kizu’s. The small owl monkey finally ended his shivering.

“Good. That’s settled,” the crone said, appearing in front of him. “Go down into the lower dungeon floors and retrieve what you left behind. You’ve been far too lazy. Completely knocked my stars asunder. The leech must rise or die by the end of the cycle.”

“The… cycle?” Kizu repeated.

The jungle around them collapsed into the white void he’d been in previously. Mort shifted in his arms and climbed up to take his usual perch on Kizu’s shoulder. While not completely back to his normal, the monkey regained the foundation of his self.

“Survive and we will meet in the west. Die, and it will be the same.” The crone cackled at some joke that Kizu couldn’t comprehend.

The void absorbed all.