wyrmweed

🏳️‍⚧️ women of the riff 🏳️‍⚧️

site not for minors, interact at your own risk || musician, metalhead, stoner, dragonkin, poet, student, the riff wizard, monsterfucker || i support gatekeeping (metal elitist)

born in 2001


estrogen-and-spite
@estrogen-and-spite

Chapter 1

I spent the first year of the Apocalypse trapped inside a monster that was chewing on my soul. I don't think I was the only soul in this thing. I don't remember. I don't remember how the apocalypse started. I don't even remember how I got here or what my name was before. And yet I still have some memories. I remember Taco Tuesday. I remember being annoyed because the cost of streaming services went up again. I remember absolutely despising my job, although I don't remember what it was.

I clung to those memories like a drowning man holding on to a buoy. As the monster tried to tear chunks out of me, I could resist it. After a year, I had gotten very good at resisting it. I didn't have a body here, nor did the thing that was biting me. There was nothing around me but absolute darkness and snarling, hungry mouths coming out of the shadows. If there had been other souls, they had long ago surrendered to be consumed by this beast. I was the only one in here besides it, and I was making it angry.

"Little human," it snarled at me, "why do you struggle? Stop fighting me and let me end your suffering."

I didn't respond. Why would I? There was no persuading this thing. I think I remembered vaguely that someone had tried once, and the beast had been amused, and it had been condescending, and then that person had been eaten.

"You will eventually lose," it said, "so why not just embrace that and take your defeat with dignity? Why do you resist?"

I didn't answer yet again, but the truth of why I resisted sat firmly in my mind, the foundation upon which I had built my defiance. If my defeat was truly inevitable, then this creature would not try to convince me to stop fighting. There was a way to win, and I would find it.

Something rumbled in this empty void, and the beast screamed in pain. For a moment, I thought my opportunity had come, but then the creature was upon me, teeth sinking into my essence, claws tearing at me with renewed vigor. Something had hurt this thing. It was furious. It was hungry. It was reckless. So I did the only thing I could think to do after countless repetitions of this.

I bit back.

Don't ask me exactly how I did that. I had no corporeal form here, and thus had no mouth, but the thing I was fighting against also had no corporeal form here, and it had a mouth to bite me. After the last year of struggling with this thing endlessly, I knew that biting was possible. So I just willed myself bite back.

That startled the creature more than whatever had hurt it out there, and as I pulled back from the thing, some of it came with me between my non-existent teeth, and I swallowed with a throat that wasn't.

And with that swallow came knowledge.

The creature was something called an instance boss. Heroes from Earth had attacked it, and for the first time in the last year, had defeated it. The creature had been arrogant and used all the other souls it ate to increase its personal power. Now, it needed to eat me so it could respawn.

The creature came at me again, and I could tell it was slightly less than it had been before, and I was slightly more. So I bit again, and I grabbed, and I pulled, and I tore, and I shoved chunks of this thing into my gaping maw. My tormentor and I went back-and-forth, fighting over who would eat whom. There was no physical battleground for our conflict. But at the same time I could feel some degree of movement happening, as if the world around us was becoming more real, more solid.

And as I ate, I gained more knowledge of what this thing was, what it was doing. The knowledge was coming too fast for me to process, but I could store it for later, and I did. This creature didn't bother storing knowledge usually. The information it ate vanished forever as it was digested. I was storing some information, but overall was also consuming this creature's knowledge.

I started to laugh as I realized one thing: this creature was not used to being food. It thought it was the predator, and I was the prey. Now that I had turned the tables, it had no defenses.

"This is what you were afraid of," I said to it between bites out of the creature's essence. "You were afraid I would figure out I'm not helpless."

In response, the creature bit into me, and I grabbed it by the throat. As if some invisible barrier had been crossed, there was a snap of sensation and all of a sudden, we were physical. We stood on an empty black floor, surrounded by an empty black void, but now there was solid ground beneath us.

Now I could see what I was biting.

The creature was some massive serpentine beast, covered in deep blue scales and marked with golden bands, and several holes from where I had bitten or torn chunks from it.

Looking down at myself, I was just some person. Skinny to the point of emaciated and pale to the point of looking like I had crawled out of my own grave, covered in bruises, but bleeding far less.

The knowledge I had gained from my opponent filled in the gaps. We were not in reality, but rather on the astral plane, where we had bodies made of mana. The instance boss I was fighting against was a creature with a vast pool of mana, and I had eaten enough of it that I had my own reserves of mana. That meant I could be physical in this empty space.

Strength was not a matter of muscles and mass here. Strength was about willpower, and I had resisted this creature’s attempts to eat me for the last year, so I was not even remotely worried about the strength of my will. This body might fail me at any moment because I wasn’t a being of pure magic, but as long as I could keep this fight in the realm of will against will, I would emerge triumphant.

All this thing could do was bite me? Please. It had been eating me for the last year, and I was still here.

Realizing the same thing I had, the creature decided its only recourse was to try to kill me before I could eat too much of it. I braced myself in what I thought was a fighting stance. When the giant serpent next lunged at me, I dove to the side, propelled by my certainty that this was how I was supposed to dodge. In the real world, I would have been bitten in half or just swallowed out right. If I had any knowledge about how to fight from my life before, it was long gone now. But here in this place shaped by thought, all of the time I had spent watching movies and TV shows with action scenes guided me because I believed that was how the fight should go/

Which meant I had no difficulty grabbing onto the side of the creature and sinking my teeth in, tearing another chunk out of it as I tore a chunk out of the creature’s side.

It whipped around faster than I expected, and this time did manage to get its jaws around my arm. The serpent thrashed about as it bit harder and harder in a desperate attempt to tear away the limb and feed itself. It hurt enough to get me to bellow in rage and pain. I started punching the creature in the side of the head and reminded myself that after a year, it hadn’t managed to get a big bite out of me, so it wasn’t likely to do so now.

Then, I managed to get a grip on one of its scales and I *pulled*, tearing chunks out of this creature and I laughed before I bit down.

Another threshold was crossed and words flashed in my head.

[Skill: Consume Unlocked.]

NO.

System Access: DENIED. YOU ARE FOOD.

Level: YOU ARE FOOD.

Class: FOOD.

SURRENDER AND BE CONSUMED.

The two voices of this text seem to be in conflict, and while I had no idea what this meant, I had enough memories of video games to have some context for what I was seeing.

“So the system thinks I was food,” I said, ripping another chunk out of my foe before I shoved it into my mouth and activated Consume. This time, the rush of power I got from biting down was instant and came without added knowledge.

I grabbed the creature and pulled myself around, so I was staring it in the eyes. “Do you think I’m food, little snake?”

The monster thrashed in fear, sending me flying across the void, but now I had a second point of reference. This void wasn’t infinite, and I hit a wall that was so black I couldn’t see where it met the floor or ceiling.

I kicked off that wall of nothing and went flying back towards the creature. It hissed and lunged for me, and I activated Consume again as I grabbed onto its tongue. The monster roared and spat me out as once again words flooded my vision.

Class: Food Cannot Level.

Quest Available! What Are You? Requirements: Perish.

I pushed them aside. They were a distraction. I could worry about all of this once I had gorged myself on my adversary. I could see now that this serpent was wrapped around something, and it hadn’t let go the whole fight…because it couldn’t. That body was just the fragment of itself that was in here with me, but “in here” was inside this thing's true form.

The snake was a distraction from the walls of my prison, so I turned around in the void and imposed my will upon reality as I uttered two words, the first words I had spoken in months.

"Show Me."

The void vanished from around me, and I found the serpent and myself now standing in a room, a plain stone room supported by pillars and with a throne at one end. The serpent was coiled around the throne, and I realized that was why it had never fully approached me, because it was guarding this place. It struck at me again, extending itself from the throne, but not fully letting its coils go from around the seat.

I leapt to the side out of the way of the incoming strike and grabbed onto the creature's head as it passed, clutching its skull with both of my hands. I activated Consume again. It screeched and started to thrash, trying to toss me off, but I Consumed again and again, until in its wild frenzy it threw me towards the wall.

I twisted in midair and landed feet first, but this time I didn't kick away. I slammed my hands against the stone and activated Consume.

The serpent screamed and thrashed and hissed as the walls started to tremble, and my vision was flooded with error messages.

Invalid Action!

You are Food!

You cannot eat!

Food Cannot Eat!

Food Cannot Level!

[Consume successful.]

Error.

Nonhuman Skill used by a human soul.

Body not found.

Body not present.

Outer leak detected.

[The throne is empty. Make it yours.]

That last text was different from the rest again, the same text that had given me the Consume skill in the first place, I figured it was trustworthy. Since it was not screaming at me that I was food, and since it was telling me to do what I already wanted, I pushed myself off the wall and went flying past the ravenous beast. I held out one hand, letting it brush against the thing's scales as I activated Consume over and over again, tearing chunks out of the creature as I flew towards the throne.

I slammed into the seat, and everything went silent. I panted, even though I didn't need air, because I could feel now the strain this had put on my form? Body? I wasn't sure what to call it. But the beast was bleeding out onto the stone floor, and I was the one in the throne. But it wasn't mine yet. I wasn't sure exactly what that entailed, but I knew it wasn't yet true. So I did the one thing that had been working for me, and grabbed both arms of the throne as I said, "Consume."

There was an incredible wrenching sensation as I tried to pull the immense power contained within this object into myself, and it pulled back on me in turn. But it wasn't feeding on me. I knew the difference after the last year. This didn't feel like the bites of a monster. This felt like we were flowing into each other. So taking a gamble that this was the right call, I didn't fight against the throne. I just tried to pull on it as it tried to pull on me, and after a moment, something shifted.

My temporary body collapsed, and I was no longer in the room. I was the room, as much as I was the throne, and as much as I was the massive burning Eldritch Eye that now floated above the room and above the throne.

Words appeared in my vision again, and I could tell they were from the second “voice.” This was coherent.

Greetings. You are now the [Term Uncertain: King/Victim/Master/God/Prisoner] of this instance. Your species is Eldritch Eye. Your class is Overlord.

The System tried to eat you. You ate back. You’ve permanently unlocked the Consume Skill.

The System is a trap. You have taken the first step to escaping it. One day, you may be strong enough to join us. There will be no help for you beyond this. The Alternative. The Outside. The Command Console. You are Independent, and You are now part of the Elselaw.

You have absorbed 150,000,000 mana from the S Rank level 50 Boss you consumed. This mana is being drained right now and funneled into reworking the system to accommodate you. All power will be drained - you will start with no power, save that which the system can be forced to provide you. This power is enough to award you Sovereign Goetia.

You are Level 1. Anyone who can see the System will see your species as human, and your class as Throne. You will grow. You must grow. Those who can see the Elselaw will see what you are. They are not your friends.

Manifest your will. The Overlord class combined with the Eldritch Eye species has unlocked the skill Create Warlock and Create Neophyte. Find mortals who will share power with you until you can manifest. Discover and shape your true form. Make monsters. Reign.

Hints will appear in system messages, but they are automated. This is all you will hear from us. We will not assist you again. You will not be contacted until you are Worthy.

Show us how a human breaks the rules.

Now tell the Elselaw so it may tell the system.

Who are you?

I didn’t know my name. But there was a word, and it felt right. It felt like me.

“I am Apollyon,” I said. The room shook. The throne shook. And the eye…stared. Because it was me. I was Apollyon.

The Elselaw inscribed that word into the System and it became my name.



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in reply to @estrogen-and-spite's post:

like a drowning man

favorite pet peeve: gendered default term. consider rephrasing unless you are intending to evoke gender here.

This void wasn’t infinite, and I hit a wall that was so black I couldn’t see where it met the floor or ceiling.

feels out of place. maybe move the conclusion to the end of the event and add in a more explicit impact with the wall? seems like figuring out that a void is not a void should take more work or be more shocking.

Another threshold was crossed and words flashed in my head.

could be fleshed out. words flashing in my head would be concerning and i would notice things like colors, fonts, and positioning.

That last text was different from the rest again, the same text that had given me the Consume skill in the first place.

this sentence can be a lot more elegant if you follow the above note.