Jaspers hand began to open, halberd slipping out. This could be it. The end. No more pain. Killed by a bug nonetheless, someone would get a kick out of that. It was only a blinding rage that saved him in that moment. Nothing else.
Rage at the people he'd lost.
Rage at himself for slipping.
Rage at the very world he lived in, a world where a whole continent was caged behind walls for the benefit of mad scientists and undead worshipping cults.
With his newfound burst of clarity and rage, Jasper pulled his knee inward with speed that broke the stinger off in his leg. His torso slipped free, and the arthropod recoiled enough for the head of his halberd to sever two legs and the sucker still jammed down his throat.
Jasper decapitated it in one, almost smooth stroke as he stumbled forward face first into the bug's mid-section. The fight was far from over.
His hair stood up and moved against gravity, like the snakes of Medusa's hair. The heat coming off of the corpse before him almost felt cold compared to the sucker still filling his throat. Every inch of the three foot appendage was lightly barbed, making it all the more painstaking to pull out. The thick wetness of blood made the last two feet easier than the first. Finally, the sucker fell into a pool of blood big enough for the thrashing piece to swim in.
Jasper stumbled back away from the dead bug just as the floor caved in completely. Every motion pulled the stinger in his leg this way and that. Jasper gripped the stinger hard, crushing the hollow piece so that irradiated venom poured out over his gauntlets. It came free and fell into the hole alongside the rest of the monster, but the wound closed shut from the shear swelling. Jasper perforated his leg using a knife to bleed the wound and relieve the headache in his knee. Radiation felt weirder and weirder the more you accumulated.
The beads of sweat forced down Jasper's arm could have been angel's tears on the cracked skin, but nerves gave them the devil's heat. Round two could be right around the corner, where there was one bug there were two. Where there was a queen, there was a colony.
The loose trigger finger of a loaded shotgun and a long bone-handled knife in reverse grip led the way. Hands dropped to waist-level; relaxed, but still crossed and ready.
With his dazed vision, the dark streets held no sign of life or trouble here between wooden platforms. That is, not until a bar with a faint fireplace glow illuminating the butterfly doors beckoned with the temptation of nourishment and hydration.
Jasper only knew from the walking distance and the steel hooks that had once held its sign that it was The BowLegged Toad. Now, one of those hooks held the torso of the old barkeep; guts dripping out from his severed waist. The rotgut that used to fill the insides of the three armed man made this bar smell worse than the rest of the town put together.
That begged the questions; Who was stoking the fire? and Who was making the rotgut?
YOU ARE READING
Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King
HorrorOnce upon a time there was a world, much like our own. This world is gone. The machinations and wars of man saw to every manner of apocalypse. What was left is a world as nightmarish as it is fantastical. Gunslingers and swordsmen ply the same trade...
