I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 42: Feral III

Revan pulled his forehead off the dead creature’s shell.

’Get up. Get up. Just two left.’

His vision swam. Red at the edges. Black in the center.

But he could still see. And what he saw was going to get someone else killed.

Lyra’s creature had backed itself against the cart, using the iron frame as a wall to shield its spine.

It kept its head low and its armored skull facing outward, snapping at anything that came within range. Lyra was circling it.

Trying to find an angle that didn’t exist.

"Lyra!" Revan’s voice came out raw and thin, barely carrying over the wind. He swallowed blood and tried again.

"It’s protecting its back against the cart. Bait the ram."

She didn’t look at him.

"If it charges the frame again, the cart slides on the rail. It’ll overcommit. You’ll have half a second at the spine."

Lyra kept circling. Like he hadn’t spoken.

"Lyra—"

"I know," she said. Flat.

She adjusted her stance. Planted her bleeding leg behind her. Then she did something deliberate — she stepped LEFT, putting herself between the creature and the CT containers stacked on the cart bed.

The creature’s eyeless skull locked onto her position. Its jaw split open, that grinding rattle building in its chest.

It charged.

Lyra threw herself sideways at the last possible second. Both short swords came down, not at the creature, but at the frozen earth — she drove the blades into the ground and used them as anchors, pivoting her wounded body clear of the skull’s trajectory.

The creature hit the cart at full speed. Iron buckled. The cart lurched backward on the rail with a tortured shriek, and the creature’s forward momentum carried it two feet past where the frame had been. Its hindquarters swung wide. The bone plates along its spine separated for a fraction of a second as its body twisted over the rail.

Dain was already there.

The Marshal had staggered across the bone field in the time it took the creature to charge.

He brought the blade down in a savage overhead chop that had no precision and all weight behind it.

The steel edge punched through the gap in the armor and hit the center crystal dead on.

Red glass cracked.

The creature screamed.

A sound that shouldn’t have come from anything with lungs, a high, jagged shriek

It vibrated inside Revan’s skull like a tuning fork driven into bone It thrashed sideways, slamming its armored tail into Dain’s hip and sending the Marshal sprawling onto the frozen mud.

The center crystal was fractured. Red fluid leaked down the creature’s spine in thin streams, steaming where it touched the cold air. But the two flanking crystals still pulsed.

’Hey, old man, you get a golden opportunity and you hit it like you’re just tossing a knife?’ Revan thought, his stomach dropping. ’Fuck... is he really completely out of gas?’

Dain rolled onto his good arm, spitting dirt.

The creature threw its head back and opened its grinding jaw toward the gray sky. The shriek shifted pitch, dropping into a low, pulsing rhythm that was no longer a scream of pain.

A signal.

Twenty meters away, Cassian’s creature froze mid-lunge.

’Oh, that’s not good.’

The third creature, the one Cassian had been lazily toying with for the past two minutes, suddenly disengaged. It abandoned Cassian mid-fight, ignoring the thin blade entirely, and bolted across the bone field toward its damaged counterpart.

Cassian didn’t pursue. He just lowered his sword and watched it go.

’What on earth are you doing?!’ Revan screamed in his head, staring at Cassian who just stood there watching the creature howl.

Dain roared from the ground. struggling to push himself up.

"STOP THAT THING!"

"How curious," Cassian murmured.

’I’m going to kill him,’ Revan thought. ’If we survive this, I am going to wrap my hands around that pretty neck and squeeze until his eyes pop out.’

The third creature reached the damaged one in four seconds flat. And then it did something that made Revan’s blood go cold.

The beast pressed itself alongside the injured creature, aligning bone plate to bone plate. As they stood side by side, the dead armor sickeningly fused together.

The edges of both creatures’ bone plating ground together with a sound like millstones — a deep, shuddering crack that Revan felt in his teeth.

The overlapping plates interlocked, meshing with the mechanical precision of gears. Dried sinew stretched and reconnected between the two bodies. Limbs repositioned, folding and re-anchoring into new joints.

In under five seconds, two dog-sized creatures became one thing the size of a small horse.

The merged creature pushed itself up on six mismatched legs — three per side, the anatomies of two separate bodies now operating as a single unit. The combined spine bore five CT crystals: two from the undamaged creature still glowing steady red, and three from the damaged one — center cracked, flanks dim but alive. The merged skull was wider, flatter, the grinding jaws of both creatures now forming a double-hinged maw that opened in four directions.

Revan stared, a hard frown carving into his features.

’Serial numbers,’ his brain supplied unhelpfully.

’They have serial numbers? Of course they have serial numbers. Because somebody actually DESIGNED this. Somebody sat in a laboratory and thought—hey, you know what would be a great feature? Let’s make them able to combine into a bigger, uglier version of themselves.’

’I genuinely hate the person who made these things.’

The merged creature oriented on the cart. All six legs tensed.

"DEFEND THE PAYLOAD!" Lyra shouted.

It was faster now. Doubling its mass hadn’t slowed it down at all.

It had made it faster.

the combined musculature of eight limbs channeled through six in a burst of terrifying, concentrated power. It crossed the distance to the cart in two strides and slammed into the iron frame with the force of a battering ram.

The cart didn’t just lurch this time.

It lifted.

The left wheels came off the rail for a full second before crashing back down. Metal screamed. One of the CT containers inside shifted, sliding hard against the frame wall. The stretcher mounted on the cart’s side swung violently.

And there was Mirael, already lost to unconsciousness. Revan hadn’t even noticed when it happened, but it finally made sense why she hadn’t made a single sound during the entire slaughter. Her broken arm flopped limply over the edge, her head lolling with each impact.

’’Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Revan’s mind snarled.

’This is truly, goddamn annoying.’

his eyes darting to the stretcher. ’She doesn’t even know what’s happening. If that thing hits the cart one more time at that angle, the stretcher rips loose and she ends up under the wheels.’

"Secure the stretcher!" Revan echoed Lyra, barked at the nearest guard.

The guard — one of the two still standing — looked at the merged creature, looked at Mirael, and ran for the stretcher. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely grip the leather straps, but he pulled them tight and buckled Mirael’s unconscious body down.

The merged creature backed up for another ram.

And in the middle of it all, Sylvia remained perfectly still

She stood six meters from the cart. The creature had just hit the frame hard enough to lift two tons of iron off the rail, and she was standing there like she was waiting for afternoon tea.

The wind whipped her silver hair sideways.

Her violet eyes tracked the creature with clinical precision, but her feet were planted and her spine was straight and there was not a single molecule of fear in her posture.

The creature coiled its six legs, the double-hinged jaw grinding open, aiming itself directly at the cart — directly at the line between the cart and where Sylvia was standing.

Revan’s chest seized. Not from the ribs.

’I genuinely have no idea how to handle this woman anymore,’

The creature launched.

Lyra intercepted from the right. She threw herself into a rolling slash that caught the creature’s front left leg at the joint, one short sword biting deep into the gap between fused armor plates. The creature stumbled. Its trajectory shifted three feet to the left. It clipped the cart’s corner instead of hitting the frame center, and the glancing blow sent it skidding sideways into the frozen mud.

Sylvia didn’t flinch.

She turned her head slightly — a fraction of an inch — to watch the creature slide past her, then returned her gaze to its original position, as if the several hundred kilograms of bone and teeth that had just passed within arm’s reach were a minor inconvenience.

Revan gaped.

’Holy shit, that was actually cool.’

The merged creature recovered. It scrambled back onto its six legs, the damaged front joint sparking with dark fluid. Lyra’s cut had severed something important — the left front leg was dragging now, throwing its gait off.

But the thing was learning. Even combined, even wounded, it was adjusting. Shifting weight to the five functional legs. Compensating. That tactical brain — the one Revan had been cursing since the first creature flattened itself to avoid his sword — was still running. And now it was running in stereo.

"It’s not going to try the cart again," Revan said, reading the creature’s repositioning. "It knows we’re covering that angle now. It’ll go for whoever’s isolated."

As if to prove his point, the creature’s broad, fused skull swiveled toward the two guards near the stretcher.

"Dain, it’s targeting the weak side!"

Dain was already limping that direction, his broadsword dragging a thin line through the mud. His hip was bruised where the creature’s tail had caught him — his left stride was shorter, favoring the joint.

’Dammit. Looks like I’m right. He’s slowing down,’ Revan thought.

’He’s got maybe two more big swings before his body quits.’

The creature charged the guards.

Both men brought their swords up. Credit to them — they didn’t run. The first guard stepped into the charge and swung at the creature’s skull, a wild overhead hack that bounced off the bone plating. The second guard thrust at the exposed side, aiming for the gap between the two fused body segments.

His blade sank four inches into the seam.

The creature barely slowed. It twisted, ripping the sword out of the guard’s hands, the blade still embedded in its side. Then it swept its heavy tail sideways and caught the first guard across the shins. The man went down hard, the back of his skull cracking against the frozen earth.

"Formation! NOW!" Dain reached the fight and swung his broadsword into the creature’s hindquarters — a brutal, chopping blow that cracked one of the rear bone plates but didn’t penetrate.

The creature whipped around, its four-way jaw snapping at Dain’s chest. The Marshal barely got his blade up in time to block, and the force of the bite against the flat of his sword drove him back three sliding steps.

"Revan!" Dain shouted. "I don’t care if your ribs are made of glass — GET OVER HERE!"

’He’s right. Watching from the sideline while people die is something Cassian does. Not me.’

’Or maybe I would,’ he corrected himself, a bitter taste in his mouth. ’Depending on the situation, maybe I’d be just as cold. But not this situation. Not today.’

Revan gripped Volkar’s black sword. His chest screamed at him.

He ignored it. He couldn’t swing — any rotational force through his torso would finish what the fractures had started. But he could stab. He could thrust. He could be one more body in the creature’s field of threats.

He ran.

Well. He moved in the general direction of running. It was closer to an aggressive limp with violent intentions.

Lyra came from the other side.

Her footwork was reduced to a controlled stagger. But her arms still worked, and her short swords were still in her hands, and her eyes held the flat, calculating focus of someone who had decided that dying was acceptable as long as she died doing damage.

Four of them now. Dain, Lyra, Revan, and one guard still on his feet. Surrounding the merged creature in a loose semicircle.

The thing was cornered. It dropped low, that same defensive flattening posture, belly to the ground, spine protected. The five CT crystals — two bright, three flickering — pulsed in an uneven rhythm along its back.

’Six legs, four-way jaw, five crystals,’ Revan catalogued, circling slowly. ’The two bright ones are from the undamaged creature. If we crack those, the other three aren’t enough to sustain this mass. Probably. Hopefully. God, I wish Mirael was conscious.’

Dain growled, the low sound shattering Revan’s train of thought. "Can you get it to lift its spine?"

’Seriously?’ Revan shot back in his head. ’Is this the grand insight from all those years of experience?’

"It won’t lift for an overhead swing. It already learned that trick."

"Then what?!"

Revan looked at the rail beneath his feet. Same rail he’d used to kill the first creature. Same principle — the creature’s defensive instinct to flatten was a liability if the ground wasn’t flat.

But the merged creature was too wide now. It would straddle the rail instead of catching on it.

’Think. Think. What else is here?’

His eyes swept the bone field. Rusted weapons. Old armor. Scattered cargo frames. And — there. The dead first creature, still draped over the iron rail where Revan had killed it. A hundred kilograms of dead bone and meat forming a ridge almost half a meter tall.

A sharp, desperate spark of clarity ignited in the fog of Revan’s pain

’God,’ he whispered in the silence of his mind, ’You’ve never been one to answer my prayers, have You? But here I am anyway, still begging. Please... just let this work.’