Chapter 270: Chapter 270: The Third
Chapter 270 – The Third
On Waverith, Kaden had dragged the war to its end by killing Brain and stopping his ridiculous machinations. But it was not only on Waverith that the war ended.
In the Orobus Tribe too, the war was over.
If before, the settlement of the snakes had been barely good enough for beasts with no real taste for art to live in, now it was no longer a place even such beasts could inhabit. Now, it was only a place to be mourned.
Of course, if they were worth being mourned. But they were not.
The ground was muddy with blood, not red like that of humans, but dark, poisonous green, still releasing a faint stench of rot that spread through the air. Inside those slummy patches of green dirt, bodies of snakes lay scattered, a horror not meant for a tender heart.
Headless corpses, limbs thrown across the ground like a grotesque canvas of gore, eyeballs staring at the sky as if searching for the mercy of gods but finding none, twisted intestines too inhuman to even describe, interlocking with the bodies of the dead in obscene tangles.
Others had their corpses intact but were covered in purple bursts of miasma foaming all over their bodies. Others had their flesh melting like steel under a searing flame, and others still were charred black, as if lightning had rained endlessly upon them.
It was a horrifying sight. Yet this was only the fate of the common snakes. The fate of their leaders, the ones who had caused both Medusa and Inara to escape and come back, was far worse.
Let us not even mind Waly and Old Naka. Medusa was not a woman of mercy, but before Inara and Meris, she would have been considered a newborn child in matters of torture and cruelty.
She had merely melted the insides of Waly and Old Naka, slowly, letting them enjoy the gruesome experience of feeling their own organs, intestines, and entrails liquefying within them.
It was painful.
But the fate of Bety was far worse.
She, if that thing could still be called she, lay on the ground surrounded by patches of ice and snow, and pools of deep black blood that exuded a horrible stench. Her eyes had been gouged out and replaced by icicles as sharp as knives, piercing deep into her sockets, almost touching her brain, but not quite. And that, of course, was intentional.
Her mouth had mutated into a disgustingly oversized maw, ballooning open like a nightmarish sea creature, with needle-like teeth protruding in a circular ring. It was too large for her face, making the already squalid sight even more unbearable.
Even so, an ice spear, translucent like glass, was thrust deep into her mouth, piercing through her throat and lodging itself in her stomach.
The rest of her body was a grotesque amalgamation of multiple monsters — from the land, the sea, and even the sky — giving it a haunting, unholy shape.
But that was not even the most disturbing part of this painting of horror. For Bety, or what had once been Bety, was positioned with her legs spread wide, and through Inara’s precisely controlled mutation, her private parts were left untouched, exactly as they had been when she was still herself.
Even so, they were widened and gaping like a well-used pit. Something both Meris and Inara found fitting. Meris then created ice swords and stabbed them directly into that place, while Inara summoned green worm-like creatures to crawl inside and devour her from within.
And before this disturbing scene, they sat... Meris upon her ice-forged chair, and Inara atop her two-headed wolf, both untouched by the poisonous blood around them, calmly watching as Bety’s mutilated body twitched.
"We kill her?" Inara asked, her eyes devoid of warmth or pity, the green snake coiled around her neck slithering its tongue across her cheek, making her chuckle softly.
"Kill?" Meris echoed, her voice deceptively warm and mischievous. "Why should we kill her?" She laughed lightly.
"We should let her remain in this state for as long as possible."
"Her body then? What should we do with this work of art?" Inara asked before continuing, "My monsters and my mother were quite insightful. They’ve killed almost all the snakes of the tribe, leaving only the old and the young, too weak to protect themselves, let alone fight. With them, we can’t stay in this part of the forest. It’s dangerous."
"So we certainly cannot keep this..." she gestured toward Bety with a dismissive flick of her hand.
Meris nodded. "It’s fine then. I’ll keep her in our family prison. Or..." she smiled, and for the first time, Inara saw something beside her usual lifeless smile "or maybe I can tell my Kaden about it. I’m sure he’d love to see how I gouged out the eyes of one who dared to look at me wrongly."
She suddenly began to squirm with giddy delight, her eyes hazy with manic joy. "He’ll be happy, right?"
Inara stared at Meris as if facing a stranger. ’Kaden Warborn...?’ she repeated inwardly, instantly intrigued by that name.
And this curiosity made her recall something she had quite ignored because of the urgency of the situation when she met Daela.
She didn’t know why, but seeing Daela had woken something inside her. Some memories. Her black hair, her red eyes...
...these features were eerily similar to those of the young, red-eyed man who had once saved her inside this very forest.
She fixed her green, snake-like eyes on Meris, then parted her lips, her voice now carrying a subtle note of nervousness she didn’t even notice, as understanding began to dawn on her...
"Your lover will certainly be happy, Meris," she said first, then added, "But I have a question."
Her words prompted Meris to focus on her, her face still smiling with anticipation at the thought of meeting Kaden again. "Yes?"
Inara paused for a moment, letting the silence settle, while the blood beneath her feet kept flowing, and the body of Bety twitched with unheard cries of pain as the biting cold of Meris’s ice threatened to drive her insane. If she wasn’t already, of course.
After several seconds of silence...
"I met Lady Daela Warborn, and her features reminded me of someone I once encountered back when I was ten."
’But also weak,’ she wanted to add, but she didn’t.
Meris nodded, her eyebrows slightly furrowing in confusion, unsure of where Inara was going with this.
"So I wanted to ask if, by pure coincidence, she had a brother who might be around our age? A young man, with black hair like a raven, red eyes like a pool of blood, and..."
She slowly stopped speaking as she noticed Meris’s eyes growing colder and colder with each word. A wry smile tugged at her lips as what she feared began to unfold.
’Kaden Warborn, huh. So that’s your name?’ she wondered, though it was more rhetorical than anything else.
"How do you know Kaden?" Meris asked, the usual warmth she showed to Inara completely gone.
Inara understood the reason why. A small pang of hurt flickered in her chest seeing it, but after spending time with Meris, she had come to understand her a little. She could guess what she was feeling.
But she was worried for nothing. All she wanted was to see again the one who had changed her life with those dumb, cliché words about weakness.
She unconsciously smiled, thinking back to that incident...a smile Meris didn’t quite appreciate.
"I said," Meris began, as the temperature around them dropped dramatically, birthing snowflakes in the air, "How. Do. You. Know. Him." She said each word with deep, cold intent.
"How do I know him?" Inara echoed.
She paused for a moment, then smiled while shrugging. And at that moment, Medusa and Lari began walking toward them, calling out that it was time to return to Waverith.
But Inara’s response was already carved deep into Meris’s mind, making her relax her murderous intent toward her new friend.
"He saved me when I was nothing but a worm in a world of snakes."
’In a way, he’s a kind of hero,’ Inara added inwardly, chuckling as she stood and offered a hand to Meris to help her up.
Meris hesitated for a heartbeat before taking the hand, scowling at Inara. "He’s mine. There are already several of us."
Inara raised an eyebrow.
"How many?"
"Two."
"Only two? I can be the third."
"Do you want to die?"
"Would you kill your new friend for a man?"
"Fucking gladly."
"Don’t curse, mother says it’s rude."
Meris looked at her with a stare that screamed ’Bitch, you serious?’
But before she could reply, Medusa urged them again, forcing Meris to click her tongue while Inara simply chuckled.
Now, she was eager to meet again the red-eyed—!
Her thought stopped abruptly.
Oops.
’Kaden Warborn.’
Yes... that was his name.
—End of Chapter 270—