VRMMO: World's First Glyphborne

Chapter 307: Poison on thy lips

The Hooded man leapt down the colossal ’steps’ of the quarry, with each ’step’ being a drop that was over twenty metres high. Yet despite this, he hopped and dropped without a hint of hesitation or worry, even with the heavy backpack strapped to his back.

His body was seemingly weightless, hitting the ground with barely a whisper, before he sprung into the air and leapt the length of the step in one go. It was like watching someone moving in zero gravity.

The eyes that were hidden beneath the hood had a deep purple film covering them, turning their colour solid, with wicked jagged black lines coursing out from his eyes like lightning bolts, as something seemed to be infecting his blood.

He gazed at the empty space in front of him. However to those strange eyes, he could see the invisible distortion in the air.

It was a hole, barely the size of a penny, floating in the air. To his eyes, it seemed like a pitch black coin. Air flowed into it, like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner, and disappeared to who knows where. The flow of air was not one way however. As air rushed into what could be called the head side of the coin, something else rushed out of the tails side.

His vision made it appear as a thick cloud of purple smoke that build up heavily in the quarry, and was starting to congregate around the small sprouts of plant-life that had grown in the base of the quarry. Something that should have been absolutely impossible given their location and the lack of viable wild seeds.

"Yes My Lord... Yes I found it, just as you said." The young man muttered to himself, staring at the hole as his voice trembled with devout fervour, as well as a hint of fear. Fear that increased as the voice in his head spoke back to him.

His eyes trembled and his face fell, turning as pale as a corpse, as he listened to the voice.

"Surely there has to be some other way to..." The young man started to plea, before his hands immediately went to his head. He clenched it, letting out a few whimpering grunts of pain, before quickly nodding his head.

"Okay, Okay! I understand. I’ll... I’ll obey. I still understand the price that had been paid. I just... Yes sir." He muttered, his tone turning miserable and dejected at the end as he let out a heavy sigh.

He slowly extended his hand, hesitating for a brief moment, before scrunching up his face and fully extending it. His hand pointed at the black coin floating in the air, as if he was about to cast a spell. A spell would have been nicer.

Instead his fingers started to curl and twitch, as if he was having a localised seizure, before all of a sudden SNAP!

His fingers wrenched themselves back, bending themselves backwards or sideways, as they were broken and snapped by an invisible hand. Blood began to trickle from his sleeve, causing him to roll it up and reveal a pale arm with four long, red lines across it.

Starting from his elbow, the lines crawled up his arm, trickling with blood as his skin was surgically sliced open. The lines swirled around his forearm and crept up onto his hand, as each one slotted themselves into the space between his mangled fingers. One for each space.

The next stage was like peeling off a bandage. It was better to do it fast than slow. Unfortunately, the conductor of this didn’t care what was best, and simply opted for slow. As the ’bandage’ peeled away, the sticky residue remained between the two surfaces, connecting them together like bridges, as they desperately tried to combat the force and keep themselves together.

Although in this case, the bandage was his fingers, as they pulled themselves away from each other, leaving sticky, viscous bridges of red between them that were slowly broken as they were pulled further away.

The same happened to his arm, as it peeled at the red lines and unravelled into five fleshy tendrils of meat and sinew, each topped with a broken finger that was still wriggling as the bones inside reshaped themselves.

Claws burst from the finger tips, before they started to slowly move towards the coin. The further the fingers stretched out, the more his arm unravelled. Even then the tendrils were not limited by the human capacity, as they stretched themselves thin and actively rearranged themselves with more cracking bones and wretched pain, all to service the task at hand.

Chunks of blood soaked metal dropped to the ground, as the man’s expensive implants fell from an arm that was no longer there. What had been months of saving, was now discarded like worthless trash as his flesh was repurposed.

However the man in question could not mourn for his lost implants, as he was too busy holding his mind together through the agonising pain. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his jaw trembled from how hard he was clenching it, all to hold in the cries of excruciating pain.

The clawed fingers snaked their way up to the black coin, pressed against its surface, before pushing inside. Even though the coin was merely a few millimetres thick, the claws did not come out of the other side.

Pushing the agony to the side, the man started to chant. His voice doubling over, as a second, deep and rumbling voice spoke in sync with his own, causing the words to resonate with their power.

The words were not of this world, nor were they of the world of Dawd. Instead they were alien and disgusting, causing the world to tremble as if their very presence in the air was poisoning it.

As he chanted those wretched words, the tendrils pulled at the edges of the black coin, forcing it to grow in size. Bit by agonising bit, the process continued, until the black coin was a person sized black abyss that was swallowing more air, and spewing even more of the strange smoke.

However something else came alongside the smoke this time.

A lizard, with a blue-green mixed skin and small curled horns above its eyes, and which was roughly the size of a Yorkshire Terrier scampered through the black abyss. Its little padded feet plapping against the stone, as it tilted its head. Large eyes that showed very little intelligence scanned the environment, each one moving independently, before its head whipped to the meat that slapped down in front of it.

It scampered over, immediately starting to dig in. It heaved a few times, as if it was going to vomit, before spitting onto the meat which started to slowly sizzle. Only once the small patch of spit wet meat started to take on a less solid consistency, did the lizard eat the meat before spitting onto the next patch, and so on and so forth.

The strange man, whose arm had pulled itself back together but which did not lose the red markings showing its new form, looked at the little lizard with a mixture of disgust and disappointment despite being the one to feed it.

Even still, he removed his backpack and gently pulled a large jar from it. From the jar, he lifted a black leech that wriggled in his grasp.

He tossed the leech onto the ground, letting it squirm and wriggle towards the distracted lizard, before the man simply stood and turned on his heels as he strode off. One down, only it knew how many left to go.