Becoming Monsters Chapter 61: Stressed Eating
Rage and death were all Honoka knew.
"Unless you want to be monkey poop, follow me!"
Vaguely, Honoka realized someone was talking. There was a haze over her mind, anger feeding upon itself and forcing thoughts out, the monsters before her becoming vessels to pour all the emotions of her undying despairer forth, each cut of her sword adding and adding instead of taking away the fire.
The latest victim managed to snag Honoka in the arm with a mandible, preparing to thrust its fangs down and inject its poisonous payload when Honoka flipped her sword around in her other hand and sliced clean through half of the monster's face. With a flood of ichor, Honoka realized too late that the beast had lifted her ten feet into the air, causing her to land on her back and knock the wind out of her lungs.
"...!" Honoka tried to gasp, but the air wouldn't come, lack of oxygen like a bucket of cold water as her instincts forced her to roll back along the tree branches and into the stair alcove, avoiding the stomping of the next monkey spider that tried to crush her flat. Health and Endurance high enough to matter, Honoka scrambled to her feet and put herself in a guard stance even as one of the skeletal minions of Gwyneth plowed into the monster and both tumbled over the edge into the abyss, giving Honoka a few seconds to recover.
"We have too many injured, gonna take us forever to climb these stairs." Honoka was starting to piece together the low growl of the grizzly beastkin wearing torn army fatigues. He sounded old but there was no lack of strength from the bear as he led the way for the fifty or so people under his protection further up the stairways. "Realistically, these monsters are going to hound us all the way to the elevator and I don't think we will survive a slow retreat like that."
Shaking her head, trying to clear the angry out of her head, Honoka took stock of where they were. Apparently, caught up in some kind of berserker rage, Honoka had lost the last hour of time fighting a guarding retreat from the tree cave all the way back to the stairs. And while the other wives had been concerned with making sure people were safe and protected from dungeon denizens, Honoka just used it as an excuse to bathe in wanton slaughter. Looking down and seeing all the wounds and blood mixing in her battered armor, she stumbled down to one knee as an overpowering wave of exhaustion hit the Ymirian, her sword stabbing into the ground the only prop keeping her from falling the rest of the way to the ground.
"Oh, good, Miss Murder has decided to join the rest of the class."
Honoka raised her eyes upward, seeing a bruised and battered Eve holding a limp purple arm, green blood dripping down her long fingers and onto the stone steps of the stairway. The hobgoblin woman generally gobbled up raucous jokes and breathed out sarcasm, so it was a double dose of shame to Honoka to see the excitable gob girl glaring at Honoka in frustration and disappointment.
"...I'm sorry..." Honoka rasped, still trying to get her breath. "...I completely lost it, I..." Honoka shut her eyes, trying to block out the rage still inside her. "Can you forgive me?"
A month ago, Honoka realized the wives she Collected gave her more than just Attributes and Racial Features to allocate. There was a sharing of emotions going on there as well. Not so much a sharing as a homogenization, like all there emotional quirks were being equalized among the women like a metaphysical osmosis. Honoka had become less anxious as all the women gained a touch of social insecurity. All the wives got something and in return, Honoka got something from all the wives. It was more like all the emotions of Honoka were being spread out among nine women while the emotions of nine women were being concentrated on Honoka.
It had been building over the last month, more and more Honoka finding herself unable to control herself even over simple things. When she got happy, she became deliriously happy. Sadness brought her down to inhuman depths of depression. And her temper...
Taking a good look at the bodies trailing behind her, mounds of them piled high enough the other monsters had to climb over their sisters, Honoka leaned over and vomited bile onto the stone, her mind warring with itself as she wanted to die right there on the ground even as she wanted to scream and keep fighting.
Eve, for all her ribald cackling and good-natured free spirit, sat down next to Honoka on the steps, putting her hand on Honoka's shoulder. Maybe she wanted to ask something else, maybe her intuition picked up on something else, but with the barest of whispers she asked the most important question. "What did your grandfather say?"
"He said..." Honoka had to stop, gritting her teeth as the hate came back, her body trembling. No less than a dozen feet away, Banda suplexed one of the massive beasts while Abra and Gwyneth moved their pets around to plug in the gaps, Padmava staggering her barriers to keep the beasts from overwhelming them all. It was surreal, Honoka having a candid chat while so much fighting was fought nearby. "He called Baby Thomas...illegitimate."
Eve's fingers tightened painfully into Honoka's shoulder, her claws drawing a little blood before she let go and got up. "Ok, I understand and this isn't over with the old fart, but lets see if we can get out of here alive first. You up for pulling another
Miracle Max
and figuring out how we're going to get out of this?"
Honoka got up, looking around at the pitched battle and giving it some thought. Glancing at the ceiling as the cave unnaturally transitioned from wood into stone, Honoka's architectural brain fired up as she started thinking about such simplistic things as structural support. "Hmm? I mean, if only we had a
wheelbarrow
that would be something."
"Eeh, that's pushing it," Eve said, reaching into her belt and tossing Honoka a blue MP potion.
"As you wish," Honoka replied, tossing back the potion and almost throwing it back up, her tolerance reached from all the healing potions she took earlier, only her allocations letting her keep it down. "Get down there and see if you can have the girls pull out when I signal. I'm also about to allocate everything, so get ready to human, but only for a few seconds. It is about to get loud in here."
Eve's eyes widened, but she nodded and hustled down the steps to the base, shouting out orders to the other girls. Honoka pulled up her Status and took a moment to look things over, hoping this wasn't about to kill her.
"θͺη±δΈζ³," Honoka whispered a phrase she always admired from Japanese history for luck - liberty something worth celebrating - sliding all the dials up at once.
The next twenty seconds crystallized into Honoka's expanded Intelligence, her body exploding in a rupturing mess of flesh and limbs.
Painful
wasn't even an apt description, unbearable agony a closer experience while still falling woefully short. Honoka had often described allocation and most every of her Race and Class abilities as pleasurable, even orgasmic (also from actual orgasms). This was not it, a whole new journey into a realm of torment and visceral torment bombarded Honoka beyond capacity of human thought to comprehend.
Before, when Honoka only dialed up five wives and entered the realm of chimera, her body felt like it was at war with itself, every cell feeling like it was on the very edge of tearing itself apart. Even her very Status didn't know what to do with her allocations, turning her into a hideous jigsaw of all the Races Honoka collected up to that point, transforming her into something grotesque. Now Honoka was accessing nine wives, many of whom had transitioned into Legendary Races and were filled with more than triple the amount of Attribute points. No longer was the Ymirian woman feeling as if her body was on the verge of tearing apart, she was actually being torn apart from the inside as her body couldn't contain the thaumian changes and she exploded into a aberration of random limbs and Racial appendages, each part literally clawing through random parts of her body in a hideous mishmash of Races while fluid and viscera splattered outward in a biological explosion.
"OOIIWwwwUuuKKKttTTAAAAA!!" Honoka chorused incoherently from three mouths, the thirty-five feet tall (10.7 m) abomination she had become, with 24 assorted arms and legs and 6 withering tails a mind bending horror those present couldn't help but stare at from all the Charisma emanating from her. While Honoka couldn't express much of anything, the Wisdom score of ninety-four points reminded her to finish quickly and so it was with a heaving effort that the creature Honoka had become threw all her might into the weak point of ceiling Honoka noted earlier, powerful limbs detonating fire and acid as they hit the rocks with rock shattering force.
The stairway, linked between the levels in some form slow transitioning portal instead of physically leading down from one level to another, snapped apart like a rubberband stretched too taught. Rock and wood rained down in equal measure and it was only the quick work of Padmava's Defend The Keep Class Feature creating a large cylinder that they all weren't crushed to death. The space both upward and downstairs were completely caved in, blocking them off not only from the onslaught of monsters, but also their escape.
