Disciple of Vengeance - CC Rasmussen (children's books read aloud TXT) 📗

of which was thinner than the edge of an atom. They punctured the creature along with some bystanders. Janis consumed their lives even as he dodged the counterattack, a wall of flame that swept over him, singeing the hair on his arms and burning his flesh as it careened to the other side of the inn and blew the wall there open. Flames were everywhere, the heat unbearable. He could feel his skin charring black and melting off his body in gobs, but even as it did, the symbiote channeled the stolen life force of other sapiens to repair it, healing him almost immediately.

How long could it continue? Eventually, he was going to run out of people to consume. Qinra had no issue. He would ride this mage into the ground until the man’s essence was ground to nothing. Janis had tried all that had come instinctively. Telekinetic attacks, compressed air, energized molecules. His enemy had brushed them all aside, wounded but ultimately stronger, as though it was feeding off the pain.

Janis grit his teeth. Feeding off the pain. That was it.

The mage lurched toward him, its frame even larger now, the points where he’d punctured it swelling with flames that charred the host’s skin and caused it to sop off the bone. Everything about the mage screamed anguish as the demon inside directed him onward with relentless poise. Janis stood and waited.

He reached out with his mind to grasp for the consciousness across from him. He could just make it out through the dreamy haze of the Shimmer. A packet of personality secreted away underneath the uncompromising rage of the outer entity that twisted around his brain stem, squeezing it into a tiny space still afforded to the man in his own mind. Janis could see Qinra’s avatar feeding off of the suffering it was causing to what was, Janis had to admit, a pitiable sapien.

Janis watched the demon raise its host’s hand in physical reality the way a puppeteer would. Witness the anger and pain manifest as flames in the mage’s bony hand. In the Shimmer, though, he saw an opening.

The symbiote recoiled as he tried to call on its power. It felt displeasure. Understood that there was nothing there for it to consume. It wanted a life. Nothing less.

But it is a life, Janis voiced in his mind. Qinra’s connection.

Elation and hunger surged within him, taking his breath away. Janis reached out through the Shimmer to the mage’s polluted mind and the symbiote followed, riding his connection like a tidal wave and smothering the demon’s connection, usurping it and reaching for the pitiable essence underneath, sucking the mage’s pain into itself.

The flames dissipated in physical reality as he felt the demon try to fight the inexhaustible hunger of Janis’s symbiote. At first, it wrestled with it over the mage’s mind the way Janis’s older brother used to wrestle with him when they were children. Janis could feel its confidence even in the face of the unknown. Imagined it laughing as it grappled with Janis and the dark pit he’d brought along with him. Then, similar to what had happened between Janis and one of his brother’s, he felt the demon’s fear.

What is this thing you have brought into the world? Mindless, endless hunger. I have faced it before… Qinra spoke to him in the Shimmer. The god-being’s avatar struggled but ultimately relented as the symbiote consumed the mind that was its host.

“Enjoy the Shimmer, you worthless shit-being,” Janis replied.

As the symbiote consumed more of the mage, Qinra’s hold in reality disappeared. You know not what you have done. The deepest hunger consumes its host… the god-being said. And then Qinra was gone.

What was left of the mage’s ruined body collapsed to the dust riddled floor like a sheet settling after a wind has passed. Janis strode over to him, dimly aware that outside the building a crowd had gathered. Men in armor with swords. Giant golems at the ready.

The mage was sputtering for each slight breath through an exposed esophagus as Janis stood over him. His eyes were human again, the splits in his skin now a series of scars criss-crossing his body. He tried to speak, but couldn’t find the energy. Janis knelt down and brought his ear close to the man’s mouth.

“How?” the mage managed. There was little of the man’s mind left, but he wanted answers. Janis could see the mage’s memories in the Shimmer as though projected on the wall of his own mind. He’d joined a sorcerer school, but when Orinax promised him power, he fell for the allure. Janis could see the poverty and abuse he’d experienced all his young life. Magic was simply too addicting. Even as the pain grew, he couldn’t refuse.

“He allowed Qinra, lord of deceit, to possess you. He was going to betray you from the start.” The man shook. Nodding, maybe. Janis probed his mind while he could, parts of it fragmenting into the ever shifting dreamscape of the Shimmer, where they would become one with the rest of the madness, lost to him forever. The mage intimated Janis was right. He grasped the man’s fragmenting mind in his own, like a child holding a pile of sand in its small hands. As the pathetic sapien disintegrated to nothing, Janis following him dangerously close to dissolution himself, probing for the presence he’d felt looming behind Orinax while using the transponder. He dug deeper, reaching for any piece of it he could grasp, pushing through the mage’s disappearing mind to get hold of something he could understand. Orinax had recruited this man to be Qinra’s host long ago. He must know something.

He saw her in a flash. By the Channel, Vrear clearly to the south, her purple eyes gazing at him sadly.

You should’ve left it alone, Janis, she said with closed lips. A force struck him like a slap in the face, as though the Shimmer itself had decided he was no longer welcome. The air left his lungs as his body flew back into a piece of rubble at the inn, his mind and the symbiote’s collapsing back into his body in one explosive second.

He grasped the ground and coughed. Sucked in air. The symbiote surged within him, though he could tell that even it was stunned by what had just happened. Janis tried to stumble to his feet, but dropped to one knee as he caught his breath. The mage’s body remained where it was, a puddle of skin and bone, but nothing more.

Soldiers clamored through the rubble that used to be the entrance. Janis pushed himself to his feet. They’d arrest and question everyone they found. He peered through the mountain of debris in the other direction, but there was nothing but the jagged edges of broken stone and metal. He edged up a slab and toppled over the side as the first soldiers entered. He felt like a flicked tuning fork, his body painful and yet thrumming with energy in an intoxicating mix. He stumbled away from the slab towards what he hoped was a path out, weaving over and through the rubble as he heard the soldiers spread out behind him.

He felt the water on his face. He was outside what was left of the inn, Vrear’s lights a welcome sight through the thick fog. He lifted his face up and opened his mouth for the rain.

“Hey,” a gruff voice said. Janis turned and a steel fist hit him in the face. He hit the ground hard, eyes filled with colorful shapes as he took in the foggy sky. “Stay down,” the guard said. He tried to summon the symbiote’s power, but his mind couldn’t settle on anything. It was like he was floating in a storm. He leaned up. The man stepped on his chest. A row of more guards stood lined up behind him, a giant with them. “Get bindings and give word to the Hesiarch. We’ll need a control cable.”

The guards waited. Janis listened to the downpour as he resigned himself to his fate. Whatever a ‘control cable’ was, it couldn’t be good. The rain sounded louder, further away. As he listened, it became clear it was a growing commotion past the line of guards. The one holding him down peered around another for a better look when something barreled through the surrounding guards and swat him aside like a beetle. Janis blinked as he tried to grasp what was happening. “Janis, get up,” a voice yelled. “Hurry.”

Ruck.

He heaved himself to his feet. Guards yelled to his right, but their voices sounded distant in the rain. The Zata kicked its legs out, hitting two aside. The ground shook as the giant lumbered for them. Janis finally snapped to the present enough to see he had only seconds. He leapt up the side of the giant creature and took Ruck’s arm. The boy pulled with all his strength. Janis swung onto the side and slapped the Zata on the back. “Go,” he yelled.

It nearly kicked him off as it thundered down the wide boulevard. Janis grabbed a thin tuft of hair and pulled himself up. Ruck held onto the saddle as if he was hugging his mother. Janis turned and saw the giant running after them, its metal legs screeching over steel and concrete as it gained on them. Janis held on. The Zata took a hard left. Energy bolts streaked around them. One struck a tower to his right, hurling molten rock down on the street before them. The Zata dodged the biggest rocks. Janis tried to conjure a telekinetic shield, but he was too dazed. And the symbiote…

He felt sick, as if he’d eaten rotten meat. He imagined its tendrils seeping deeper within him, gripping him tighter. Ruck was saying something, but he couldn’t understand it. Something had broken in him during his fight with Qinra. He’d consumed too much, had given the thing too much power…

Images flashed in his mind: the Auspicious Gate, giants holding the entrance. The Channel beyond. It was their only chance. Did Janis want to take the risk? He realized it was the Zata, communicating with him through the Shimmer as only sapien minds could learn to do. He nodded. Take it.

Another left turn, another wide boulevard. The Zata picked up speed. Janis held Ruck down. “Stay down,” he said. Ruck grimaced and nodded. Janis looked up and saw the arc cannons on the walls ahead, searching for a shot.

“We’ll never make it,” Ruck said.

Janis reached inside himself, past the sickness, and grasped the intoxicating energy yet again. “We’ll make it,” he said.

The cannons unleashed on them. Energy bolts screamed through the air on a collision course with the Zata. There was no hope of dodging them. Janis calmed his mind and reached through the Shimmer. He saw the bolts as energy concentrations. Waves passing through a medium. He saw that if he just changed the surrounding medium, he would deflect them at little cost to himself. The knowledge simply appeared in his mind, unbidden and obvious. He directed the symbiote’s power and cleaved reality as if it was made of sand, building banks that redirected the waves. In Urias, the impossible happened. The energy bolts that were only seconds from obliterating the Zata and its riders twisted and streaked towards the giants instead. They had no time to move as the deadly waves pummeled into their chests, blowing their insides out behind them. Black, milky resin splattered against the walls. They toppled as the Zata galloped past them and under the gate as it shut, nearly cleaving the noble beast in half.

They were through.

“That was incredible,” Ruck shouted. He turned back as he cheered. Janis bounced on the saddle behind him,