Threads of the Soul

CRRUNCH

Like an unrelenting trash compactor, a beaked mouth bit down on the contents of its gargantuan mouth. It was not a beak like a bird, instead it was the tough and flat keratin that made up a beak similar to that of a tortoise. Although with the sheer size of this grazing creature, a triceratops would be a more adequate comparison but even that would feel small standing next to this titan.

Bones, glass, metal shrapnel and even hunks of concrete. Nothing was able to resist the tyrannical pressure of the creature's mouth as it crunched and chomped, grazing happily.

Alongside a set of tyrannical jaws, large enough that they could swallow a shorter man whole, it had rough scales running down its thick, muscular neck, leading to a body hidden within the confines of a titanic shell. The topmost part of the shell reaching the heights of 15 foot

At first glance, one might think it was nothing more than a common tortoise enlarged to an incredible degree. But anyone who thought such a thing would be wrong, and would quickly become dead.

Emerging from the rear end of its shell was a tail, but it was not the stubby tail of a tortoise. Instead it was long and prehensile, almost 4 metres in length. Lining the tip of its tail were foot long spines of rigid keratin, much like a thagomizer with a single additional spike emanating from the very tip of its tail.

The reptile's legs were short and stubby, proportionally at least as each leg was still about the average height of a human, meaning that much like its look alike the tortoise, it was slow and methodical with its movements. With two sets of eyes on either side of its head, the colossal reptile had no difficulty locking onto any would-be prey. The frontal pair was small and beady, surrounded by thick rolls of flesh and heavy eyelids to protect it, much like that of a bearded dragon. The rear pair were large and beady, constantly darting around completely independent of each other. When it wasn't searching for prey, these eyes retreated into its head to keep them safe. It wasn't planning to fall victim to the weakness of many video game monsters.

Its true danger lay not in the speed of its movement, nor the ease with which it could find its prey, but of its tongue.

Much like a chameleon, hidden behind the walls of its beak, it had a tongue capable of shooting out dozens of meters. Yet this tongue had its own peculiarity. One moment it could be soft and sticky, enough that it could ensnare countless tricksy prey or small morsels for it to crunch on, but the next moment it could be hard as steel. Rocketing through the air like a spear shot from a ballista, the hardened end pointed like a harpoon, it was capable of shattering concrete or bending steel like it was tin foil.

When the beast opened its mouth, which could put a garbage crusher to shame, you could never know if it was the spear or the grabber that was going to come flying towards you. Then again, some might say it didn't matter in the slightest. Either you get grabbed and drawn into the crushing hell of its mouth, or you get a spear that punctures a hole the size of a watermelon through your stomach.

Blocking was a fools game, dodging was the only viable option.

So that is exactly what Seth did.

Leaping to the side, he quickly avoided the dastardly tongue that had been the end of so many of his puppets. While he could reliably avoid the tongue, his puppets simply didn't have the luxury of his well trained reflexes, the spirit animal was doing its best to control them all and relay the information to its master. But there was only so much he could do within a split second, which usually meant death for the poor puppets that he couldn't control fast enough. His army of loyal puppets had been quickly reduced down until it was just the roided out ghoul, Bearemy the skeleton as well as a pair of his boney brethren.

His alter ego Corvus was, of course, safe as well. With Seth permanently connected and focusing half of his mind on that puppet, it was one of the only ones he had managed to save from being eaten alive, so to speak.

Bob was, thankfully, safe from the initial assault and was currently hidden away from the impromptu battlefield, alongside the young animals and the injured man.

At a certain point, that point being about 10 seconds ago when the last puppet got captured, he had changed his strategy. Trying to avoid it with the puppets was, clearly, not going to happen so he stopped trying. The previous puppet had been captured intentionally, attacking brazenly enough that it attracted the beast's attention and got itself captured by its tongue.

Short of simply leaping into its mouth, it was a great plan in Seth's very humble and incredibly unbiased opinion.

Of course that wasn't the end of the plan, he wasn't a moron. The thing about this amalgamation of reptiles, a reptilian chimera or Repmera, was that it was an annoyingly tough bastard. Never mind getting past the shell, which was like using an egg to demolish a brick wall, getting past its scaly skin was a task and a half. Hence his plan. Sac the puppets and send them into the bowels of hell, literally, to carve it up from within while they worked on figuring out how to defeat it from the outside. It wasn't the world's best plan, but it was all he had.

Fox, the disappearing swordsman, had been hacking away at it whenever he saw an opening. Neck, Legs, Tail. That was pretty much all the options they had as everything else was hidden within that blasted shell.

Seth had no idea how Fox's powers worked, he had yet to get around to actually asking him and it was another issue if he would actually tell. But at the very least, the grey haired man had made it clear that getting within the shell was not something his powers would allow. So that option immediately went out the window. The Repmera was also incredibly defensive of its eyes, covering them with its thick scales or pulling them inside its skull whenever threatened. Thus, that left their options of Neck, Legs and Tail.

Tail was obviously a poor choice. Lizards were known to grow back their tails so already it wasn't much of a viable option. Even if this Reptilian Chimera didn't have that particular gene in the hodge podge mixing pot of its body, cutting off its tail was high risk, low reward with those deadly thagomizer spikes.

The legs had similar issues, highly defensive while running the risk of being stepped on. Not ideal.

Thus, all that was left was the neck, the thing most of them had been focusing on. At first they had all been attacking wildly; Seth controlling his new dagger and some feathers, Corvus using feathers as shortswords, Astra blasting away with her bolts of lightning and Fox appearing now and then to deliver expert slashes. They did have Cynthia and the moist knight helping at first, but they had been smacked away by the beast's powerful tail and had yet to return.

Who knows what was taking them so long.

The problem with that was its thick skin, something Seth had always thought to be simply metaphorical more than anything. But this amalgamation of lizards took it a step forward. On the rare occasion that their blades managed to pierce through or slash apart the scales covering its neck, they never got more than pathetically shallow cuts that barely drew even a drop of blood. Even Astra's blasts were simply too weak to penetrate deep enough into its fatty flesh to cause the creature true discomfort.

It was the same issue that Seth had faced when dealing with the bear, yet on a whole new scale.

Battling with this behemoth, dealing the pathetic amount of damage that he was doing, he felt like nothing more than a lone ant trying to conquer an elephant. In the entire time they had been fighting the Repmera, it had barely acknowledged their existence. The most it would do is pull in its eyes in annoyance or shift its feet, all while gouging itself on the surrounding environment, which only occurred because it missed when it was trying to eat them. The most they had managed to do was give it a small amount of indigestion by sending a raiding party of crazed, suicidal puppets down its gullet.

Yet no matter how dire or fruitless things became, they never gave up. They might have been ants in front of an elephant, but they were not alone. They could work together and topple this mountainous beast, otherwise it would trample over them and eventually discover their colony. It was only a miracle that it hadn't already.

So, when it shot out its tongue again and hit nothing but the concrete where Seth was previously standing, they got to work. Moving as a single unit, Seth and his other half Corvus joined Fox in a single, well placed again. Blade after blade, cut after cut, in the single second it took for it to extend its tongue in attack, the three of them made sure it was the last time.

With one last cleaving strike, Fox's blade sliced cleanly through the last fibrous strand of muscle, severing the tongue in two. Retracting the remaining half of its tongue, the Repmera let out a roar of pain that rattled Seth to the bone and rivalled the dominating cry of a T-Rex.

He had to quickly cover his ears, dreading that the power of the beast's voice might rupture his eardrums. The windows of surrounding buildings quivered, waving as if they were made of liquid before shattering into tiny glistening fragments. Countless creatures of all shapes and sizes leapt from the broken windows, freed from the confines of the wage cages they had been trapped within, yet every single beast fled at the tyrannical presence of the clear apex predator. Perhaps it was a hint the group should have taken.

The ants had finally been noticed and, underneath the oppressive force of the Repmera's rage filled gaze, the power of friendship wasn't feeling so powerful anymore.