The world heated several degrees.
That he’d ceased to breathe, took a while for Rutger to register. Finally, he turned away, went toward Tom, and picked up Maura on the way. He’d only interfere if they started fucking against said wall. They did need to get moving.
The one thing that kept him thinking most, was how quickly she changed from teasing to embarrassed or innocent. He’d noticed her do it before. The nanites? Probably. She’d only woken to them recently, and even he had his problems with those things rearranging his hormones, his body chemicals, his every damn cell, really. He was going to go pound some walls with his fists, once they reached camp.
His pulse was burning in his veins like it did when the PNT was rearing up. Luckily, he hadn’t smote Vargr like the god-monster they liked to call him might’ve done.
21
The rippers hauledthe dead-ish human to the base of the Ghoul Lord’s swathe of writhing tentacles. Avidex twirled some thicker wrigglers over the steaming flesh, tasting and sniffing. Blood dribbled from strips and gouges in this creature’s skin surface. The face was relatively unscathed. Though the heart had ceased to beat, the cells of the skin still lived and so did much of the brain and several organs.
It would make a nice snack, though there was an alternative.
To allow time for his primordial thought processes to decide on a path, Avidex kept the body and brain alive, infusing direct energy that bypassed the need for blood and this oxygen these creatures required.
A Ghoul Lord relied on millennia of banked-up instincts sharpened in battle and apocalypse after apocalypse.
The Way of the Ghoul Lord was simple and effective:
Subjugate the dominants.
Kill the aggressives.
Lure them all.
Keep to the upper surface of the planet, for in darkness lies peril.
If they worshipped anything, it was the life-giving light and the radiation. Bathed in distant solar radiation, they had surged slowly from planet to planet across the universe. Even in the depths of space, with no planetary barriers to block it, the radiation found them and nurtured them, and kept them from burning in the darkness. These thousand or hundred-year journeys rarely rewarded fast thinking. They knew their weaknesses. When the need arose for complex thought, trespassing upon the brain of an enslaved species was the simplest way to increase one’s processing power, as well as gain local lore.
More information was needed.
He snagged a nearby human to piggyback onto the fresher brain’s capabilities—spearing a tendril into the head.
His intelligence ascended. Thoughts accelerated.
Why had the attack failed? Why was the female human not here before it, begging for attention, for ravishment before her painful demise? He needed the satisfaction of eating the enemy that had cut it.
This had been a perplexing result. Only two rippers had survived.
Avidex plunged a tip into the brain area of the dying one and encouraged the tendril he’d planted there to emerge. It squirmed out and rejoined the main body mass, spilling the data it had recorded. Then Avidex paused to assimilate.
In the lower levels, where all was dark, the human prey flourished. They used the darkness to their advantage and somehow resisted the Lure when they kept away from the Top. They had reacted quickly to the attack, killing the ghoul guards with their projectile weapons and cutting blades, also using a large creature with teeth and fur to kill many rippers.
The female had never come close to this guard. Seen from a distance, she’d fought efficiently, the same as she had when she severed the tentacle of Avidex.
Nevertheless, some humans had died.
He linked to the fresh human’s brain thoroughly for some time and harvested some curious ideas.
The darkness and lack of Lure were the main problems.
To remain unshielded in the dark would kill Avidex. His tissues would boil away there, for it was anathema to his species. Darkness was poison.
And so, in the interest of making this escaping girl dead, he would need to confront them more closely, wearing a shield the humans would accept. What better shield than a human? Protection from the darkness and a face they’d like.
Two in one, the fresh human brain offered up as the main idea.
Two in one.
