The ferocious attack caught them by surprise, and the fat leader barely managed to flinch as the sword whistled past his head. The creature's agility surprised Elysia. With a terrible crack, Frey's weapon slammed into the skinny lieutenant's chest, then lopped off the head of a second attacker. The return blow tore through the leader's leather shield and severed the tentacle holding it.
Giving them no time to recover, Frey dashed between them like a deadly whirlwind. The leader ran out of range of the deadly weapon as he babbled orders at his followers. The mutants began to surround Frey, and they were only kept at a distance by the huge eight that the great sword described in the air.
Elysia then threw herself into the fray. The magical sword, Dragon Slayer, that she had taken from Paladin Aldred when he died seemed as light in her hands as a willow wand, and almost sang as he cleaved a mutant's head from behind her. The runes gleamed as they sliced through the top of the mutant's skull as easily as a butcher's cleaver slices through a piece of meat. The creature's brains spurted out like a foul fountain, and Elysia grimaced as the jelly-like substance splattered her face. She forced herself to ignore her disgust at this, and she slashed at another mutant. A jolt ran up her arm; the sword plunged, below the mottled ribcage, into the creature's rotting heart. She saw the mutant's eyes widen in fear and pain, and his wart-covered face was horrified; At the moment of death, the monster whimpered what could be a prayer or a curse addressed to her dark god.
Catgirl's hand was wet and sticky, so she took a better grip on the hilt of the sword to prevent it from slipping, as she was being attacked from both sides at the same time. She dodged a blow from a spiked-headed mace, slashing to the right that slashed a barrel-like mutant's cheek and severed the earflap of his leather cap. The cap slipped forward over the creature's face, covering its eyes and blinding it for an instant. Catgirl kicked him with the toe of her heavy leather boot, and the mutant doubled over; stupidly, she bared her neck for the blow that decapitated him.
Pain shot through Elysia's shoulder as a mace struck her sideways. She grunted and turned away driven by the fury that caused her suffering. The corrupted saw the expression on Elysia's face and was petrified for a moment; then he raised his gun, a gesture that could perhaps be interpreted as surrender.
Elysia shook her head and severed one of his wrists. Blood splattered onto the catgirl as the mutant screamed and squirmed as he clutched the stump of her arm in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Elysia turned around and saw that Frey was swaying as if he was drunk. At her feet was a pile of mutilated bodies, and the catgirl's eyes followed the arc of the massive sword as she took full force from another victim, throwing her mangled body at two crouching enemies. The three of them fell into a tangle, and the sword began to rise and fall as Frey cut them into pieces.
All vestiges of humanity and restraint washed away from Elysia in a wave of bloodlust, fear, and hatred, and she leapt among the survivors. Swift as a viper's tongue, the enchanted sword darted from side to side; the runes glowed brighter as she drank more blood. The catgirl barely felt the impacts or heard the howls of pain and anguish. At that time, she was a machine intended solely for killing, and she did not devote a single thought to preserving her own life, but only to annihilating enemies.
As quickly as it had begun, the battle ended, and the mutants, with the leader in the lead, beat a swift retreat; They ran as fast as their legs would carry them. Elysia watched them flee, and when the last of them was out of sight she turned, bellowing in frustrated bloodlust, and began hacking the corpses to pieces.
After a while she began to tremble, as she noticed, for the first time, the terrible carnage that Ella and Frey had made. She then doubled over and vomited.
♦ ♦ ♦
The clear waters of the brook ran stained with blood, and Elysia watched them, marveling at how numb she had become. It was as if the frigid waters had seeped all the way into the veins. She realized how much she had changed since she traveled with Frey, and she wasn't sure she liked that.
She remembered how she had felt after killing her owner, the first living being that had fallen under her hand. The dagger lowered, and the young noblewoman died. Elysia could remember the look of disbelief on the girl's face, and her own sense of excitement, satisfaction, and arousal. She had ended a life and she took pleasure in doing so.
Ever since, ever since she had sworn to follow Frey, in his doomed quest for heroic adventures, she had killed and killed again. With each death she had felt a little less remorse, and with each death the next death had come a little easier. The nightmares that had once afflicted her had ceased to haunt her, and her sense of revulsion at ending a life had left her. It was as if Frey's madness of hers had rubbed off on him and she no longer cared about killing. Not only that, with each battle, the excitement made her heart pound, each impacted thrust emitted a beam of satisfaction, each lifeless corpse that fell on the ground excited her, and each finished battle caused a wave of pleasure to run through her body.
Elysia she knew had annihilated the mutants without a second thought; after all, they were her enemies trying to kill her and she could feel no real remorse for her deaths, only marvel at her own lack of feeling. She wondered at what point that change had occurred and she couldn't find an answer.
Her new coldness and her mercilessness, coupled with her degenerate new pleasure impulses, were monstrous enough to make her ponder.
She would not be surprised if these new urges caused her to simply pounce after a battle on Frey and breed with him on the corpses of her fallen enemies. Luckily her selo season had passed, but she knew that such a scenario was a possibility in the future.
A new Elysia had been born here, in the wilds, a product of the aridity of the place, the harshness of her life, and the excessive number of deaths witnessed from too close.
She turned her eyes to Frey, and she saw that the dark hero was sitting on a stone that protruded from the stream; he had a hunched back. Around her head was a strip of cloth torn from Elysia's cloak, the wool of which showed a dark stain of Frey's dried blood.
"Will I finally end up becoming like him?" Elysia wondered. "Heartless, ruthless, doomed, dying slowly from a hundred minor wounds, seeking a magnificent death just to find a way to get more pleasure out of killing?" The thought of her didn't distress her, and that in itself was unsettling.
"What have I lost and where have I lost it?" she wondered as she listened to the rippling of the water as if she might be transmitting a coded response to him.
Frey raised his head, and his gaze slowly swept the surroundings.
Catgirl looked at the tangle of bare trees and thorny clumps that surrounded them, and the cold gray of the rock. He felt dwarfed by the lugubrious titanic shadow of the great snow-capped mountains, wondering how they had come to this godforsaken place so many miles from his home. For a moment, it seemed to her that she was lost in the endless immensity of the World, that she had no point of reference in time or space, that she and the dark hero were alone in a dead place, like ghosts floating in eternity held by a chain. chain of circumstances forged in hell.
Frey looked up at her; Elysia returned it with a sense of embarrassment and a flushed face, and she waited for the dark hero to start boasting about her pointless, futile victory.
"What has happened here?" the dark hero asked, and Elysia's jaw dropped.