//------------------------------// // Level Fifteen: Please Approach the Psychopath From A Safe Distance // Story: Delinquency // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Level Fifteen: Please Approach the Psychopath From A Safe Distance The cultists that had gathered around Rubble and were making a valiant attempt to surround him and his friends did so with apprehension they’d lacked only a few minutes ago. One particular member of the group, standing near the back, was torn between a sense of awe and dread. He shuffled back and forth from one foot to the other, trying to find a safe opening to approach. Barring that option, a good opportunity to run away without being chastised or punished by his order mates. He had the sneaking suspicion that if he’d simply waited for them all to be felled he would run the risk of the boy chasing him down. Cinch had long since abandoned the post, citing something about “Keeping them busy.” Which was employer-speak for “Die slowly so I have time to get away.” Not that Rubble had any intention of killing any of them. He wasn’t the sort that detested murder, or always went for a less-lethal option. On the contrary, he was of the school of “kill them all and let God sort it out.” However, he did have a sense of responsibility, and so going to jail for murder wasn’t exactly optimal. So he aimed for shoulders, arms, and ducked low for the occasional tendon or kneecap. While the robed figures surrounding him had the advantages of size and strength, they lacked most if not all of the traits that made Rubble a terrifying fighter: speed, training, and an overabundance of exuberance. It would be fair to say that, given the goings-on at the gym, the other hallways, and the rapidly decreasing morale of his assailants, he was the only one in the building happy to be there. It was amidst this gruesome melee that Spooks, in looking for a way past the mass of fighters spanning from one side of the hallway to the next, caught sight of Sunset. Of course, she had to be on the far side of things. Which, for most anyone else, would be a major impediment. For Spooky Bones, a mild inconvenience. He’d learned at an early age how to sneak around, given his mother’s less-than-sunny disposition regarding her father-in-law. So, much to her distress, Spooks had learned rather quickly how to stalk about unnoticed, in pursuit of the knowledge his grandfather had left behind. He’d only refined this unique talent at school, in his efforts to avoid the bullies who viewed him as an easy target. It also helped that nobody was paying attention to him, given the spectacle his friend was putting on. He grabbed Dusty by the arm, and dragged him along the side of the hallway, ducking into an alcove where normally there was a classroom door. He tried not to think about the foreign organic material that currently occupied that space. Once the crowd had shifted farther down the mutated corridor, he again hauled Dusty with him, as they met up with Sunset. It was slightly difficult to get her attention, as she seemed entirely preoccupied with the fight in front of her, regarding it with the kind of terrified appreciation one would watch a car flipping over on the road next to them. In both cases, the instinct was to freeze and hope that the damage moved away from you. “Sunset!” Spooks hissed, almost in her ear. She jumped and shrieked with surprise, a reaction he had long since learned to ignore. “What the hell are you doing here?!” She looked from Spooks to Rubble and back, still not entirely grasping the situation. Spooks snapped his fingers in front of her face in a rare moment of impatience, and she shook her head, turning to address him. “I came looking for Twilight, she and Pinkie Pie ran off to the Chem Lab!” Dusty looked puzzled. “But the lab’s on the other side of the school.” Sunset threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know! None of the hallways were where they were supposed to be!” Spooks barked a low series of swear words. When the others looked at him, he explained, “That’s psychoplanar terraforming. Which, for those of you who don’t read science fiction, is very, very bad. It takes an enormous amount of power to accomplish, which means the Last is really, really close.” “The Last?” Sunset asked, focusing on the one part of the sentence she understood. Dusty explained, “These robed schlubs called the Beast ‘It That Breathes Last’, which is basically a fancy way of saying they don’t know what it’s actual name is, and want it to sound as ominous as possible.” She gestured at the alien corridor and quickly dwindling numbers of cultists. “AND THIS ISN’T OMINOUS?!” Spooks gave her a stern look. “This is nothing compared to what’s coming. This is just window dressing and the local sales pitch. Trust me, we’ve got a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. What’s the gym like?” Sunset paused for a moment, as she remembered the mess she’d left behind. “There’s a bunch of golems trying to force there way in! Applejack and Rainbow Dash are holding them off, and Rarity’s playing defense, but we’re short a bunch of help! Twilight and Pinkie ran to the labs, and Fluttershy took off to find help!” “Why didn’t you start with that?!” Dusty barked, then popped the wheels on his skates again and buzzed down the hallway. Sunset took a step after him, but felt a tug on her sleeve. She turned to see Spooks regarding her with the same stern look. Which was made distinctly more intense and creepy given the only part of his face she could see were his eyes. “We don’t have the time or energy to chase after him,” he explained. “Besides, he’s fast enough that, even with the changing hallways, he’s our best bet to get reinforcements to the gym. He’ll also be the only person in that room who knows where the explosives are. WE need to go find the girls and Treble. And the OTHER girls.” Sunset regarded him a second, then nodded her agreement. The two took off down the same hallway as Dusty, albeit at a much slower pace, and started navigating the newly-formed maze. ------------------------- Rubble raised an eyebrow as he watched his friends disappear around a corner, a sight that didn’t go unnoticed by his opponents. “Looks like all your backup ran off without you, boy!” One cultist, an older gentleman with a decent amount of muscle, jeered. He took a well-aimed swing at Rubble, but made the mistake of broadcasting his attacks with posturing and loud banter. Ducking under it would have been easy enough, but Rubble favored a side-step, raising his arms and lining his elbows up like brackets around his opponent’s own elbow. The old man’s eyes widened in the split second before Rubble brought his elbows down on the arm, slamming the joint into his braced knee. There was a satisfying crack as the joint inverted under the pressure. Reversing his grip on the remaining dagger in his hand so that the blade sat above his thumb (the other was currently up to the hilt in the shoulder of the portly gentleman who had helped furnish their hideout. He wasn’t sorry), he dropped his arm low and brought it up with an enormous swing that took a large portion of his opponent’s cheek with it. “You call them backup. I call them witnesses,” he growled through a tiger’s smile. A loud shout behind him brought his attention to one of the last cultists standing. He ducked down low, and as the lanky young man stumbled over his lowered form, he sprung up, providing the last bit of momentum necessary to flip the man onto his back. The old man had since scooted back to nurse his shattered joint and bloody cheek, so Rubble had plenty of room to lift up a leg and stomp it as hard as he could on the shoulder of his failed attacker. There was another loud snapping sound, and a scream, followed by lots of cursing as the last cultist rolled around on the floor in agony. Rubble looked around him at the mass of fallen cultists, nursing open wounds, broken bones, or worse. At least, those that were still conscious. Tucking his remaining blade into his belt, his eyes settled on the fat guy leaning against the wall, trying to slowly inch the blade out of his shoulder. He’d made some decent progress, which was immediately undone by Rubble’s heel on the hilt. The old man let out a shout as the blade sunk back in, then whimpered as Rubble leaned forward, putting his weight on the blade. “Right, little fat man who likes money. I imagine there’s not a whole lot you know about what you’re actually dealing with, so I’m gonna ask some really simple questions, and you-” he accented the word by flexing his leg to add a few pounds more pressure, “-are going to give me simple answers. Understood?” His ‘victim’ laughed defiantly. “You think I’m afraid of you?! I welcome the death my master brings! What can an upstart juvenile like you threaten me with?” Rubble rolled this sentence around in his head for a second. “How about the truth?” As a demonstration, he relented the pressure on the knife, walking over to the skinny young man with a broken shoulder. Throwing the man over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, he walked up to an expanse of fleshy wall with no defining features. He looked back over his shoulder and called, “You think death is what waits for you at the end of this tunnel? Try again!” He heaved the man over both shoulders, and dead lifted him a few inches above his head. Which he’d probably be feeling in the morning, the guy was heavier than he looked. With a solid grunt, he threw the cultist into the wall. The effect was immediate, and tortuously slow. As soon as the man met the wall, it latched onto him, loose strands of flesh resembling gray bundles of nerves and skin snapped out, sticking to his clothes and pulling him in. The process was slow, and Rubble stood back as those still conscious watched in horror while the gray matter crept across the man’s robes. When they met his flesh, they began to burrow, melting into his skin and crawling into his nose, his eyes, even forcing their way slowly down his throat. His screams were quickly suppressed by alien tissue, and as the process accelerated, he was absorbed into the wall in moments. He turned back to the old man, crouching down next to him and leaning his face next to the man’s ear. “Now, shut up and listen.” There was a moment of horrified silence, as some cultists backed away from the teen, some stared open-mouthed at the wall, and the fat man with the knife in his shoulder said, in a voice little more than a whisper, “You killed him!” “Nope,” Rubble said simply. “LISTEN.” After a few seconds of silence, a small, familiar sound arose in the quiet. It was muffled, but identifiable: the man in the wall was still trying to scream with all that tissue in his throat. “My god,” the guy said quietly. “Exactly,” Rubble said, in a similarly hushed voice. “Figured it out when I saw the hallway. This Beast you worship doesn’t want to kill anyone. Dead flesh is useless to it. It wants living flesh. It feeds by assimilating living things into it. Bone, brain, blood, skin, muscle, it doesn’t matter. It’s all food to these things. You think you’re worshiping a god? This creature is just a single fish in a cosmically large pond. The Outer Rings are full of these Beasts, and they all hate us. And do you think they’re going to stop at the one? Not a chance. As soon as it’s brethren realize there’s a way into our world, they’re going to force their way in by the dozen. “So, I’m going to ask you some simple questions, and you’re going to give me simple answers, because not even a doomsday psycho like you wants to be a living buffet line for the rest of eternity. And trust me, it will keep you alive,” RM explained. He patted the hilt of the knife almost companionably, making the cultist flinch. The portly old man considered the wall carefully, somehow still able to hear the muffled screams over the beating of his own heart, and his own ragged breaths. “What… what do you want?” “Where’d Cinch go?” Rubble asked. “She… she wants to try to hijack the Beast. She thinks she can control it,” the cultist answered. “How… how do you control that?” “You DON’T,” Rubble said sternly. “You BURN it. Get all your friends that are still awake and have use of most of their limbs. It looks like they’re even less excited about this bait and switch than you are. Gather them all up, and find something that burns. Then start roasting the golems. Burn down the… that,” he added, pointing down the forest of flesh, not having any words to properly describe it. “Clean house, if you can. And if you even think-” he accented the word by pulling the knife out in one swift motion, eliciting a loud cry, “-about hurting any civilians, I will find you, [i[knife first.” He wiped the blade clean on the cultist’s robes, and slid it into his belt next to the other blade. Standing up and walking down the hallway his friends had taken, he heard scrambling and shouting behind him, of cultists trying to get to there feet, and a general consensus that following Rubble’s orders were in their best interest, if only for now. --------------------------- Spooks and Sunset had made it down a few hallways before Dusty zipped past them. He shouted a long string of words that Sunset couldn’t make out. “What?!” she called after him, but he’d already disappeared. Spooks translated, “He said he hadn’t found the gym yet, but if we keep walking we’ll run into Treble and the girls.” Sunset raised an eyebrow, but decided against asking how he understood any of that. “Ok, since we have a lot of wandering to do yet, there’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask.” Spooks was not normally one for grand displays of emotion, but the sigh he heaved and the drooped shoulders were full of exasperation, even for a normal person. “Let me guess, you wanna know why I’m so quiet and creepy all the time?” The redhead waived a dismissive hand. “No, I’ve long since filed that away in the same folder as Pinkie Pie’s exuberance. It’s labeled ‘DO NOT ASK’ in large, bold font.” He chuckled. “Yeah, ok, that’s fair. So what’s up?” She hesitated for a second, thinking about whether or not she really wanted an answer. “I was wondering, given all the freaky stuff you’ve seen today, and the monsters and stuff I’ve seen you guys fight, how are you always so… calm? I mean, I’ve seen you freak out, and panic and all that, so I know you’re not an emoitionless drone, but stuff like this could easily send someone to the nuthouse. Now, Rubble and Dusty, I’m convinced have already been there, and broke out based solely on the principal that there are still monsters to fight, and Treble reacts mostly like a normal person would, by which I mean he screams like a girl. But you seem to just… take it in stride.” Spooks raised an eyebrow at her, and shrugged. “If it makes you feel better, I threw up as soon as I saw that meat jungle back there.” “Actually, it does,” Sunset mused. “But that… even with that, you just press on. With all this alien bullshit going on, you can still keep going, and spout pseudo-scientific nonsense like ‘psychostatic formations’.” “Psychoplanar terraforming,” he said with a sigh. “But yes, I get what you’re saying. Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. It feels like… like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. At school I just feel like a part of the wallpaper. And the guys, man, bless their hearts, but even they get creeped out every once in a while. They still haven’t gotten used to me popping up ‘randomly’,” he said with a hint of sarcasm and air quotes. “But when shit like this happens, it’s like I’m the tour guide. The local expert. Which, given how little any of us actually know about what’s going on, I probably am. Times like this are the closest I feel to being normal. Not to mention useful. I don’t exactly have a lot of other strengths.” “Well, your grades don’t suck,” Sunset said encouragingly. Spooks chuckled. “Yeah, ok. I have a head for facts and I enjoy studying. Comes with growing up reading the Old Man’s journals.” “What was your ‘old man’ like, anyway?” Sunset asked, if only to continue the conversation. “Fucking crazy,” said a new male voice in the conversation. Sunset jumped at the newcomer, then saw it was Treble and the sirens rounding the corner. Twilight and Pinkie Pie brought up the rear, then ran to give Sunset a hug when they all saw each other. “Oh goody, the gang’s all here,” Aria chided.