Chapter Nine - Vermin.
The lighting within the lair of these miserable Tywyll
cultists was dreadful. Sconces adorned the walls of every room. The temple to
Tywyll, or Interitus, featured an excessive number of candles littered around
the edge of the room and shrine. Rhys had to admit, that while it was still
darker than he personally would have liked, it did create a certain atmosphere
that inspired dread. This was why he had decided to keep the snivelling little
whelp in there. Rhys himself was waiting within the main atrium, ready to
ambush the makeshift party of heroes. One of his scouts had spotted them making
their way down the pile of rubble and towards the cult’s hidden lair. He would
soon be done with this whole miserable mission that had wasted over two years
of his life.
The atrium was lit by the usual adornment of sconces along the walls but it’s
wide-open space also allowed for a candlelit chandelier. The only way in or out
of the lair was an opening about as wide as a set of double doors which led
into the cave tunnels beyond. From within the lair, the atrium had openings
along all the walls. The opening behind Rhys and his cultists led to the
sleeping area, while the one to his left led to the temple, then to his right
were two doorways, one led to the kitchens while the other was a hidden cubby
hole.
Rhys was bored out of his mind waiting for these doomed heroes to arrive. His
foul mood was not helped by the feebleness he felt from being in such proximity
to his God’s orb. Even now he could feel it feeding on him. His eyes felt
heavy, and his body wanted to rest, but there was no time for that. He had
managed to keep himself motivated with the torture of Trevik and another of the
cultists. Even so, this waiting was pushing him to his limits. He looked around
the dark, dank, miserable excuse of a hideout and couldn’t help but resent
every miserable person that called this world home. If Interitus removed this
disgusting planet from existence, then the universe would be all the better for
its loss. As if to prove his point, a couple of mice scurried across the cracked,
uneven, stone floor of the atrium. The four cultists ignored the rodents,
obviously used to such a sight. As the vermin neared Rhys he attempted to crush
them under his boot, but they were too quick, and he missed them. This only
made his mood all the more foul. If those vile heroes didn’t arrive soon then
he was liable to take his anger out on another of these pathetic cultists.
Then he heard it, the unmistakable sound of footfalls against the rocky, jagged
floor beyond the atrium’s entrance, carried all the way to the cultist’s lair
by the traitorous acoustics of the cave. Rhys tapped the button along his
beltline, activating his personal shield, which created a slight blur around
his figure as the distortion field established itself. Rhys bit his lip, hungry
for the upcoming violence. The cultist’s themselves reacted to the noises, all
visibly bracing themselves for the inevitable slaughter to come.
Then Rhys was jolted forward by a force that felt hot and painful hitting him
from behind. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to overwhelm and disable
his personal shield, meaning that the next hit he took would be fatal. As he
turned round to face the cause of this force, he witnessed one of the cultists
take a blast of plasma to the back. Rhys was shocked to see the pious knight
and grizzled soldier launching an ambush of their own.
How had they managed to flank him?
That should have been impossible. There was no time to deliberate on this now,
so instead Rhys let his instincts kick in and he fired, two rapid shots, one
for each target. The soldier’s personal shield saved him as the plasma was
reflected away from his centre mass and instead slammed into the carved stone
wall behind him. The knight instinctively blocked the plasma with his sword of
flames, which saved his life, at the cost of his weapon. The plasma melted
through the forged steel of the sword, turning it to little more than slag. As
the weapon collapsed into two pieces, the holy flame that had covered it was
extinguished.
Before Rhys was able to launch a follow up attack, he heard more phaser pistol
fire from behind him, as well as the dying screams of his final three men. The
other heroes of this makeshift party had flanked him again.
Rhys knew that it was do or die, so he pushed past the exhaustion of his
depleted body and rushed the two attackers in front of him. The soldier was his
first target, so he fired his weapon towards the man as Rhys himself closed the
distance between himself and the now disarmed knight. Weather it was luck or
skill, he would never know, but the blasts found their target as hot plasma hit
the soldier once in the chest, then again in the head. The last thing Rhys saw
before he turned his full attention to his melee with the knight was the
shocked expression of the soldier get eaten down to the muscle as the body
began its collapse to the floor. Then, in an instant, Rhys was in close
quarters with the knight, who had dropped the molten remains of his weapon.
Luckily for the assassin, the knight didn’t have time to raise his gauntleted
hands high enough to block the incoming attack. Rhys smacked the butt of his
phaser pistol into the knight’s perfectly aligned nose, then as the man reacted
to the pain, Rhys ducked down and behind his target. In no time at all, he had
his victim in a choke hold, with the phaser pistol to his head.
Rhys was too good for this backwards mistake of a planet, and there was no way
he would die on this wretched world. He had his hostage, and now it was time to
bargain.
“Stop or I’ll kill this sorry excuse of a knight!” The captain of the UAV-Abyss,
and the ridiculous looking wizard both stopped their advances and became rooted
to the spot. Rhys noticed the captain break her eye contact with him to look at
the body of her loyal soldier. The grief and pain that washed over her sharp
but beautiful facial features were spectacular. The sadistic part of Rhys sang
in joy as he watched her fight back the emotional deluge that threatened to
spill forth. Yet the more pragmatic part of his personality urged him forward,
to make it out of this situation alive. “Drop the phaser pistol, captain!” She
did as she was told and dropped the weapon to the floor, before she kicked it
over towards him.
“You foul man, it seems that we’ve arrived at an impasse, so where do you
intend to go from here?” The wizard asked, the overly long, drawn out nature of
even the simplest statements infuriated Rhys, but he held that anger in check.
“You’re going to move, slowly, over to the temple, as I move towards the exit.
If you’re good, and don’t follow me into the caves, I’ll let this worthless
knight live as I leave this disgusting planet.” Rhys then felt the knight
struggling, so he tightened the grip around his throat, not long after the
struggling stopped as something fell to the floor. Rhys afforded himself a
glance down only to see that it was another mouse. He went to kick the vermin,
but it darted behind him, before it then transformed, in an instant, from a
mouse to a weak, emaciated looking cultist. Before the assassin was able to
react, the cultist launched himself at Rhys, slapping, punching, clawing, and
biting. Rhys was forced to release the knight to fend off the cultist’s mad,
desperate attacks. As soon as he had turned around to fight back, he felt the
blast of phaser plasma hit him in his back. The pain was so intense that it
blotted out everything else. Then he felt Interitus’ orb shatter under the
intense heat of the plasma.
Everything else happened so quickly that he had trouble making sense of it all.
The pain grew worse, as a void began to overtake the world around him. His
flesh and muscle melted, the pain grew and grew, increasing to a crescendo that
never came.
Then everything stopped. The pain, the heat, the adrenaline of the fight, and
any real physical sensation. Rhys felt lighter. Then he realised that he was
dead. He had been consumed by the void explosion of the orb as the thing was
destroyed.
Death was something that Rhys had logically known would happen to him someday,
but he never thought about what came after that. It was a calm sensation. He
used this calm to reflect on the moments that led up to his death. It all
abruptly made sense. The mice that had scampered across the floor of the atrium
before the ambush, they were the knight and the soldier. That cunning wizard
must have transformed them, allowing them to sneak past their would-be
ambushers. The mouse turned cultist must have either been the hero’s captive or
a traitor to his own God.
Then Rhys remembered Interitus and he suddenly became aware of a shape made
from negative space within the void around him. While it was impossible for a
mortal mind such as his to comprehend, Rhys could almost feel the formless
nothing smiling a cruel, sadistic, smile at the soul that would be its newest
victim. The assassin tried to move, to flee the malice of his evil God, but
such a thing was impossible. He was within Interitus’ realm now, and as such
only the God himself had any power within the void.
