Unchosen Champion-Chapter 383: Delirium and Doodads

In a region that had already been surrendered to the forces of mana, embers of human defiance still smoldered. Rather than sparks stirred by a feeble campfire struggling in the dank fog, the glimmer of resistance was ignited in the hearts of regular people who resisted. They had stepped forward, unbowed by the despair of defeat, illustrating the resolve to do whatever was necessary to hinder an unstoppable tide of enemies.

A small band from a tribal village had unanimously agreed to remain in their native land as it was lost. They recognized the price such a decision would demand and willingly offered the payment. They were committing everything to impede the nightmares that sought to annihilate their families, friends, and neighbors, declining the promise of safer havens in favor of giving their enemies a black eye, no matter the cost.

The shadow of Eradication blighted the land outside of their shallow cave, transforming the wilderness into a domain filled with unspeakable foes. The group gathered in the temporary shelter, anticipating the conclusion of their final preparations with grim deference.

Their defeat may have already been certain, but they intended to carve the concept of a Pyrrhic victory into the swarms of exterminators that threatened kin and strangers alike. They would never voluntarily yield. Not to the corrosion that ate at their souls, and not to the monsters that sought to conquer the immemorial roots of their historic home.

Within the group, their eyes shifted from one another, their breathing anything but calm, as they faced a unified destiny together. They were unable to completely quell their doubts while the ritual was prepared, but they forced themselves to remain motionless out of respect for each other. True courage wasn’t demonstrated by the absence of fear. It was established with the perseverance to take action in spite of it. As a whole, they refused to shrink away.

Half of the villagers were still filled with the vim and vigor of youth, barely experiencing a full life before putting it all on the line, while the others had earned the reliable obstinance of those in their twilight years. They each had a different background and had reached various stations in life, but in their last moments they all represented the same unconditional objection toward Eradication. They may have been few, but they were determined.

None of the group shied away from the mystic, silently reinforcing each other as they remained still in the smoke filled cave. He performed his deceptively meticulous work, unbothered by the audience. While they were committing a conscious act of altruistic sacrifice, they were still electing to venture into the unknown. Some nerves were to be expected.

The small flame in the center spat and crackled as it gradually raised a pot to boil. It was struggling to stay ignited with the poor fuel that they had scrounged from outside, but like them, it fought against the inevitable just long enough to get the job done.

The laboring fire barely provided any light on the spectators, but the whites of their eyes caught the struggling illumination as they shifted their glances around the circle. They were already dirty, sweaty, and even wounded, some barely resisting the corrosion that chewed at their mana, shaking with severe feverish symptoms that indicated the end was near, but what they sought would free them from their human toils. Long shadows and sparse incandescence did little to mask their unease as silvery dust was sprinkled into the steaming water and mashed flowers were added into the bubbling mixture with a hiss.

The medicine was a bitter one. A few licked their parched lips, anticipating their dose, while the rest were conscious that their dry throats would make it a challenge to swallow. Though they sniffled at the aroma or simply scowled into the brew, they spoke no last words.

The silence of the cave established its own solemn atmosphere. Their final memorial was held within a humble abode and the celebration of their lives was less than modest. The only hymn dedicated to their souls was the one created by a roiling elixir.

The fuel for the fire was poor and their preparations had been hasty, but the mystic was reliable, respected, and almost like a grandfather to most of them. He had been tasked with officially preparing the bewitching tea for what seemed like generations, serving something similar to their fathers and mothers, and his father did the same for the mothers and fathers of their mothers and fathers, going back through the ages that predated the discovery of the new world.

Before the assimilation had begun, the mystic had been providing the altered state of mind necessary for rites of passage, divination, and communication with their ancestors, applying customs that had been carried across eras more as tradition than any sort of wisdom. The sacrificial group knew what to expect, all having consumed the tea at least once in their lifetimes. The agitation, confabulation, dysphoria, and akathisia formed an extreme delirium that most would only ever agree to experience just once and never again.

With the addition of mana, the mystic’s power had become even more transcendental. He was capable of opening their souls to the horrible power that all humans held deep within. By consuming this level of dosage they would die, incapable of bearing the toll with their mortal shells, but they would go out with a bang that would make their adversaries pay with blood.

When the acrid fumes finally started to exceed the stinging crimson haze, causing their eyes to water and a few to quietly cough, the mystic lifted the first cup to the man on his right, offering him the ceremonial first drink without letting it cool. No words were exchanged, though the man took a single moment to glance around the fire at each of the others before he gulped it down. The decision had already been made before they even entered the cave. The glance was a simple acknowledgment that he would go ahead and await them on the other side.

Before the effects hit him, he turned and walked toward the mouth of the cave, leaving the group as a regular human, still thinking of the young son he would leave behind, and praying that this sacrifice would contribute in some small way to him living a long life. His powerful stance demonstrated his confidence in defeating many enemies, but that was only a hint of the massacres they hoped to be responsible for. By the time he reached the threshold of the cave, the sounds of his bones snapping and flesh tearing were audible to all present, drowning out the quiet fire, bubbling liquid, and their hushed breaths.

He violently convulsed just beyond the mouth of the cave, shoulders and upper back exploding in size, forcing him to hunch forward while thickening bones reshaped his flesh. Muscles revealed themselves to the open air, glowing with dark energy that seared itself into their vision even after they blinked it away.

The energy tore through the surface of his body and sent splatters of viscous liquid back onto the dry stones before the wounds were wrapped and concealed by tougher meat. The individual vertebrae of his spine became exposed spikes of bone dripping with his former lifeblood. He let out one last inhuman roar before loping into the thick red fog as his final hunt began.

At the same time, the mystic was handing the refilled cup to the second person in the circle. She was an old woman who had made beaded jewelry for children before the idea of mana entered their lives. She drank her fill without hesitation, smiling kindly at the others as she embraced the bitterness that reminded her of her youth and the generations that came after.

She made her way to the cave mouth, a bit slower than the first, moving with smaller steps appropriate for her diminutive stature. Her smile had revealed the active growth of her canines before she turned away. By the time she reentered the violent world outside of the cave, she was reborn a touch beyond nine feet tall and weighing in at more than 850 pounds of rippling muscle and dense bone. She disappeared into the haze, leaving at a different angle from the first.

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The next young man first grew a mane of coarse fur, establishing a cloak that could have resisted a bullet before he also exploded in size. The following collapsed to all fours, crawling the final few feet before his new orientation became more comfortable. Around the fire they went, recovering ancient mythical power that had once been merely exaggerated lore constrained to campfire stories, but with mana, reestablished its veracity. They transformed into chimeric wargs that stretched beyond the limits of their remaining control of mana. They were forcing an evolution that took them a step away from humanity in order to retaliate on its behalf, becoming nightmares for their foes. It was just another way of touching upon the power that had been established by the breadth of human culture.

Rather than let themselves be consumed by the corrosion or their kin be destroyed by the forces that accompanied the fog, they chose to transform themselves into resilient monsters wielding untold power. They each left the cave, reincarnating into a form more fitting for the current apocalypse, knowing that they would never escape the necessary delirium that sent them on their spiritual journey.

When the mystic was left alone in the darkening cave, he placed the scalding tin cup to his own lips and drank the rest of his concoction, not letting any go to waste. He gulped the harsh medicine down, ignoring the burning skin of his lips, a tiny bit of the liquid bubbling like acid as it spilled down his chin before he finished. He swallowed all of the rest, dropping the cup into the dying fire with a metallic clang as it bounced into the drained pot. He turned to walk along their final path.

He had witnessed the births of the majority of those who had drunk before him, and with their participation in the ritual, he had overseen their deaths. Only his remained.

It was a surprisingly peaceful end, fully wrapped in the embrace of the hallucinogenic experience long before the pain of the transformation set in. He was already dead before his beast form was born, his consciousness drifting through space on clouds of mist and stardust.

His muscles ripped as raw mana split his skin and crammed his soul. His bones flexed and broke, reforming a cage of armor for mana-tainted organs. His feet became massive claws that left an absurd set of footprints, etching the transformation that had taken place in the dirt for others to hopefully discover in the future, as long as they were successful in conquering their enemies.

Once he was in the open, his bassy howl vibrated through the air, promising pain as it expressed its own. The sound cleared a path in the red haze like a negative image of exhaling on a cold day. A split second window into the memory of a world without the fog lingered for a brief moment in its trail.

None of the new monsters had gone the same direction, wandering on their own whims. The only common factor remaining between them was that they all existed to kill the creatures of mana that had developed in their region of the world. Nothing else would ever motivate them again.

The system had deemed humanity unfit for existence and sicced the forces of mana upon them. The exterminators were invading Earth in an effort to preserve it for external use, cleansing it of the identified threat, but in sentencing humanity, they misunderstood the extremes that adaptive life might take in order to avoid Eradication. The business of handing out extinctions was nasty work, but humans could be nastier.

For all their capacity for unconditional altruism or personal sacrifice, it was only one edge of a range of actions humanity was capable of reaching in desperate times. They were violent and kind, loving and savage. The Eradication Protocol might have been the most desperate time of all.

The forces of mana would be lucky if their lessons were limited to the idea of a Pyrrhic victory. They were dealing with a species that developed some truly grim concepts that should have been outside the realm of experience for any civilized society that didn’t drive itself into self-annihilation. Earth’s history was riddled with examples of uniquely violent behavior that went beyond simple conflict for the purpose of defeating an enemy and into the realm of inflicting maximum suffering at great personal cost.

Any species that would find it necessary to define the ideas of salting the earth or the cycle of revenge was already embracing its capacity for self-destruction beyond the scope of reason. Even the deterrence of mutually assured destruction barely achieved relative peace as they teetered on the edge of the Great Filter. For those defined by the system, all species who had never had to overcome themselves, where bigger numbers meant absolute superiority and a clear hierarchy that placed the forces of mana at the top, humanity’s failure to adhere to traditional rules of engagement would make them a particularly unsettling, volatile, and unpredictable foe.

A pair of ravens watched as the former mystic disappeared into the haze, leaving behind scraps of shredded cloth as he evolved into something meant to introduce the ultimate asymmetric warfare to its enemies. The monster lumbered away with a completely unique gait, mindlessly bloodthirsty in the way only a rabid bear or starving wolf might compare. It was deceptively fast, so strong that it didn’t require a sophisticated running form to launch itself into the distance. Any parasites that it met would be torn to pieces.

The birds shared a look from their perch, treating the dark time of the apocalypse like any other disaster. For them, the desperate times that humans so dramatically resisted were just times.

They lacked the extra cognition awakened by the system, but the look they exchanged was still far too clever to be disparaged. In order to survive environmental pressures on a planet shared by humans, where destruction was a recurring theme, they had already needed to exercise adaptive proficiency far beyond the baseline of the galactic community. Extinction events were practically on a regular cycle when it came to Earth.

The ravens had never seen a creature like what the mystic had become, and they had no concept for its creation. All they knew was that the cave where they had sheltered from the strange weather was temporarily occupied while the ritual took place, and the humans who had disturbed them were now gone.

They tentatively hopped back inside, flapping to various spots along the rock walls, making sure there were no hidden predators with nothing but their keen senses and natural survival instincts to guide them. The cave was completely empty, and the acrid smells would prevent most other animals from trespassing, so they returned to their roosts.

The birds had yet to engage with the system, eminently wise in their simplicity, for the lack of adoption meant that they were completely ignored by the corrosive effect of mana. As far as the Eradication Protocol was concerned, they were the same as the dirt, the rocks, the rivers, and the mountains. It passed over them with indifference.

The vast majority of animals, those who had yet to take the first step for integration into the galactic community and continued to live more or less as they had before mana activated, were experiencing the Eradication Protocol in a completely different way compared to humans. It was more like a world-scaling volcanic eruption, an extended monsoon, a once-in-a-lifetime drought or flood, a massive asteroid impact, an ice age, an out of control wildfire, or nuclear fallout. The side effects were dangerous, of course, but they felt no hunger or thirst thanks to the ubiquity of mana and they instinctively understood when it was necessary to hunker down through adaptive experience.

Every day that went by during the assimilation, more animals started their leveling journey, but the Eradication Protocol was forced to activate and deal with humanity excessively early. In another 100 years, there might have been full adoption of the system from every member of every species of life. Instead, the unchosen and unleveled animals, along with the inert plants and geological features, were the doodads that provided the innocuous ornamentation to a planet. They were not deemed threats to the galactic community subject to the Eradication Protocol, at least not yet.

Of course, they weren’t immune to the active forces of mana. A physical blow would still cause harm, but they weren’t actively hunted. In a world where complex food chains were a natural part of life, acute stress responses were practically universal. They knew when to flee or hide and otherwise avoid attention, especially when unknown threats entered their territory.

Like the majority of life on Earth, the ravens had yet to enter the game spawned by the system, and for that they were rewarded with disregard. They recognized a storm, and so they took shelter. While humans and their designated allies fought a war and resisted corruption, the uncultivated animals patiently waited for the chaos to blow over.

This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢