Avengeance: Chapter Three
Chapter three of a multi-chapter Rain World short story about Artificer.
Content warning for nausea mentions (no actual vomiting) and gore. Contains spoilers for Artificer's campaign; read at your own discretion.
Read this chapter on AO3.
Roiling nausea rouses her from sleep, pushing up from her stomach and through her chest into her eye—hollow, empty, raw, destroyed. Her body burns hot, as if fire itself is flowing through her limbs.
She opens her eyes—her eye. She stands, stares down at the corpse beside her. Its throat is a bloodied mess, its chest has been gnawed open, and shreds of its innards are scattered all over the floor. What little flesh is left on the scavenger is limited mostly to its gangly limbs.
She did that. She ate it. She killed it, and she ate it.
It killed her pups, so she killed it.
Her pups are dead.
Her pups are _dead_.
Her limbs give away, and she slumps to the floor again. Her _pups_. Her world. What would her mate think? She let their pups die. She watched their pups die and she couldn’t—she didn’t do anything.
The world spins. She pushes her face into her paws, but retches as she presses on the remains of her eye. Pain flares through her face, blazing through her from head to tail, every hair on her body ignited, and she twists, clawing at herself, wishing, begging for the agony to stop. Every breath of air sinks into her lungs like water, choking her even as she burns, fire and water working in harmony to crush the life out of her. If death should come, it is not taking her swiftly, and all she can do is writhe.
But she breaks out over the surface of the agony, panting and shaking, but alive. Alive, despite it all. Alive, when her mate and her pups are not. Alive, when all that mattered to her is dead.
She looks back over at the scavenger corpse. At its hollowed out chest, ribs exposed to the world; at its heart, smeared on the floor, half eaten; at its throat, blood still caked around its fur where she tore it out. She killed it, because it killed her pups.
Scavengers killed her pups. Scavengers killed her _family_.
The nausea bubbling through her curdles into a smoldering anger. She stands, the rage growing from a dull simmer to a roaring blaze in her chest, one that mirrors the burning in her eye. She grasps for a weapon, but finds none; she was too focused on running before.
No more running now. There is nothing for her to run to.
Her body is heavy as she slides down from her den, the fire in her limbs weighing them down, but she pulls herself up, putting one paw after the other, breathing one breath after the other, letting the fire scorch all over her body and up to her eye, until it blazes through it in a glory of righteous fury. Through the haze of fire and blood, she marches.
She finds a spear not long after, floating around aimlessly in a puddle of water. Shaking the moisture off of it, she clamps her jaws around it and spits, gnawing on the metal until it comes away stained with red. She does the same to a piece of rubble a few paces away, and she clenches the resulting bomb in her paw tightly, ears pricked for any sound. For a soft chattering, the scratching of claws on stone, or the clink of metal against a pearl.
There, off to the right. Each step threatens to bring her to the ground, but she paces onward, weapons clutched tightly in her paws as she walks closer, close enough to smell the group of scavengers clustered around a clump of blue fruit. All of them have their backs to her, chirping amongst themselves as they chow down on fruit. All of them uncaring to the deaths of her pups. She snarls.
The scavengers turn at the sound, staring at her. One points at her, reaching for its spear as it chatters a warning. Blue and green dance in her vision, twirling in and out of the sunbeams dazzling her eyes, and with a howl, she throws her bomb.
Blood splatters the ground as the scavengers explode, shreds of flesh raining down around her. The water under her paws is immediately flooded with a deep red; she throws her head back and barks a frenzied laugh to the sky as she wades through the carnage. All those cycles she spent cowering at their presence, and for what? She should have just killed them all.
One of the scavengers, the one furthest from the blast, is still mostly intact. She walks over to it and sinks her teeth into its stomach, tearing out mouthful after mouthful of meat. Blood pours over her muzzle, over her paws, mixing into the raw wound on her face, but she eats—she feasts—on the scavenger’s remains. The flesh is juicy, tender, bursting with a flavor that no centipede or eggbug could compare to. It was gorged fat on the food she abstained herself from all these cycles.
Behind her, the alarmed whooping of more scavengers. She whips around with a hiss, lifting her spear. A group of three, pointing at her, spears raised. She throws her own before they can make a move; it strikes the one in the center, the squelch of the metal embedding itself into the scavenger’s chest heralding the soft thump of it collapsing to the ground, before the spear explodes and shreds the remaining two. She laughs again, blood trickling its way down her chest. What was she so afraid of all this time?
More bodies, and only more spears still. She takes the ones that survived the explosion and gnaws on them as she continues forward. They know she’s here now; a pack of five come to intercept her, and she greets them with a bomb. Showers of blood and flesh coat her, but she marches on, each step leaving a bloody imprint on the stone below. Wherever she goes, there are scavengers, and she kills them, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake.
A singular scavenger, its fur the same ugly grey-brown as the stone around it, claws its way out of a pipe next to her, its eyes wide as it waves its spear in her face. She laughs at it, tossing her own spear aside, and she simply throws herself at it, closing her jaws around its throat and clamping down hard. Blood spurts all over her as she rips its throat out, sticky and warm where it makes contact with her skin. The scavenger twitches violently on the ground, helplessly wheezing through its ruined throat. She kicks its body away.
In the distance, she sees more scavengers approaching, all of them armed with spears and bombs. She spits onto a piece of rubble as she waits for them to get closer. Satisfaction burns in her chest, a blazing gratification mixed with the thrill of a good hunt. She will let them come, and she will kill them all.
They murdered her mate, all those cycles ago, for daring to hunt for food. They showed no mercy to her pup, her precious child, having taken only one pearl that they intended to give back. And her other child, their death a casualty of their sibling’s actions, dead for no reason other than the greed of the scavengers.
Everything she ever loved, the scavengers took from her. She will make them feel the pain they wrought many times over.
She will avenge her family.
Chapter one | two | three | four
