No Such Thing as Good and Evil

The two of them walked through the brick archway that signified the entrance to Johnsonville. Much like Fleetwood, there was absolutely no sign of life. The archway was also covered in a sticky, slimy white substance. Shade reached his hand out and touched the substance, then began playing with it between his fingers, while turning and smiling at Faylen. “Seemed someone had a fun night.”

“You’re disgusting.” She admonished. “What do you actually think it is?”

“What does it look like to you?” He said while creating a ball of water in his other hand and cleaning off the substance from his fingers.

Faylen got closer to the substance. It was white, thick and sticky, yet almost thread like. “It looks like a spider’s silk of sorts.”

“Correct.” Shade said gleefully. “I would guess that’s it’s a king or queen Theraphosidae. Which you might know as a tarantula.”

“I thought tarantulas didn’t spin webs? Also, I know they can get quite big, but this substance looks like something massive made it.”

“They don’t spin webs.” He replied. “But they can still use silk. And yes, most are relatively small, but kings and queens can become the size of houses. They’re actually terrifying creatures, though I have a soft spot for them where most others don’t.”

“Do I dare ask why…”

“Spiders and I both share a love for bondage play!” he said with complete seriousness, exuberantly pointing at her.

She shook her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked; I don’t think them wrapping prey up is for sexual pleasure the way a deviant like you does.”

“You don’t know that, have you ever asked one?”

“Have I ever asked a spider if they get their rocks off from wrapping up prey and sucking their insides out? Can’t say that I have.” She huffed. “Can we get back on subject here? I’m guessing like the griffons; they normally don’t appear in areas like this.”

“No, they don’t. I’ve never seen one outside of a cave before.” He then paused and put his finger to his chin clearly thinking about something. “Actually, I’m not sure even if you did fight for real without that worthless bow, that you could beat one of these right now. Maybe I should just go kill it.”

She crossed her arms annoyed as she had been chomping at the bit to prove herself to him. “We came all this way, it took days of walking when we could have just flown, and now you don’t even want me to fight.”

“I don’t want you to die.” He replied. “Though I’m sure the silent bow would think otherwise. Why is she being silent anyway, she did this in Fleetwood as well. Doesn’t want anyone to know about her existence? That’s odd considering she wanted to float into the middle of Merellien to give a sermon.”

“Do you even know what a sermon is?” Lilah said irritated.

“Ah! There she is!” he false lovingly replied.

“Off topic again.” Faylen said. “Why don’t you think I can take one.”

“If it was a king, you probably could, but a queen…those are nasty things. Even bigger than what I said at first. Instead of a house think of a castle. I mean gigantic. They struggle to even fit in the caves they inhabit. They also have the ability to use echos, and have dark affinity. The way you beat them is that they’re rather dumb, not knowing how to properly use their stupid amounts of power, but if they have some sort of intelligent being controlling them, it could be a doozy of a fight. Also, while this is training for you, I’ve wanted to test something out myself for a little while now, so this would be the perfect opportunity.”

“You want to test something out?” Faylen said, annoyance turning to interested curiosity. “A new ability of sorts?”

“Kind of.” He said. “I’m not sure, do you remember when…” He paused.

“What?” She asked.

“Well not to bring up bad memories, but do you remember when you generously offered those slaves a sabbatical from the living world?”

“What a way to put it.” Lilah said, while Faylen just nodded somberly.

“Do you remember how I tried to free all of them before they took their leaves.”

“You threw some sort of liquid at them, and it broke their collars off.” Faylen replied.

“And completely melted their skin.” Lilah added.

“Well.” He said and looked down at his hand, which caused Faylen to do the same. A black sizzling liquid began to ooze out of his hand and formed into a bubble of sorts.

“What is it?” Faylen asked.

“Do you remember how I told you to overheat slave collars to cause them to break?”

She nodded. “Slave collars are meant to stop the person they’re on from using echos, but if someone on the outside pumps more echos into them then they can stop, they overheat and break.”

“Correct.” He said. “I’m sure there is a much more interesting scientific version Aerith could probably explain to you, but I don’t really care about the exact details, just that it works. Anyway, in the moment I was thinking how could I pump echos into every single one of those collars at once, and I only came to one conclusion.”

“IMPOSSIBLE!” Lilah yelled, and as she was strapped around Faylens shoulder, it was right into her ear, causing her to jump from surprise.

“Figure it out?” Shade asked.

“You’re telling me that you’re somehow managing to secrete pure echos from inside your body, manifesting and controlling them on the outside.” Lilah said.

“That’s what I think it is, though I obviously have no idea.” He replied.

“It just can’t be!” Lilah continued. “Do you know how many hours of research we put in to the very subject. Do you know how many times we tried to extract echos from people, how many methods we used, and they never worked, not once!”

“Why not?” Faylen asked. “Don’t echos run through our body like blood?”

“Yes.” Lilah said. “But it’s different then blood. Echos are created by the soul, and the soul has to be inside of a body otherwise it slowly deteriorates. No matter what method we used, when we took the echos out of a body, and disconnected them from the soul, they would dissipate into smoke instantly.” She then gasped as if she had just made a breakthrough of sorts. “But you’re a lucifer dragon. Why did we never think of that? You can control and manipulate souls. It’s how you can eat them and gain their power. If you can manipulate a soul, you could manipulate the power the soul creates. Of course, it’s so obvious! This could change the world forever! The technology that could be created if we had access to pure echos!”

“Yea, I don’t really care about how or why it works, and I certainly don’t want to be milked like an echo cow, I just care that it works.” He then started to manipulate the black blob in his hand into a black, sizzling dagger. “And what I really want to know is how strong it is as a weapon.” He then threw the dagger, and after a few feet it dissipated into smoke. “Though it seems I can only use it in hand-to-hand combat, as it just poofs away once I throw it.”

“You say you don’t want to know how it actually works, but I think you should.” Lilah said, and Shade glanced at the bow, genuinely interested to what it had to say for the first time ever. “If it is like manipulating a soul, maybe you could manipulate it in similar ways. You seem to only be able to maintain manipulation control while in physical contact with it. Faylen though once told me of a time you killed 2 bandits and ate their souls. She told me that you were playing with one of the souls before you went and…. played…with the third bandit. She told me that you were tossing the soul up and down in your hands like it was a ball. That means the soul lost physical contact with you, but maintained its integrity. It might be something inside of you that you can naturally do when it comes to others souls, but you need to find a way to control and use it when it comes to manipulating power from your own soul.”

“Hmmm.” He said, and created another liquid echo dagger in his hand. He concentrated as hard as he could on the dagger, then threw it once more. It again dissipated into smoke.

“Its probably going to take a lot of practice.” Lilah said.

“Well, that’s no fun.” He replied.

Faylen looked down at her own hands. “Is it something I would be able to do?”

“No.” Lilah replied softly. “Sorry dear, but you would need to be able to manipulate souls to do it, at least that’s my working theory.”

Shade looked over to her with a grin. “Maybe if you used the staff.”

Faylen turned her head up and walked the rest of the way through the brick archway. “Guess ill have to live without it then.”

Shade began to walk after her. “I really don’t get this hatred towards the staff, it’s such a great weapon!”

As they made their way through the town, they found it was in worse shape then Fleetwood. Much worse, in fact, it was completely destroyed. The buildings once made of brick were now nothing more than piles of rubble. It looked like a tornado and hurricane blew through the town all at once, with not a single building still standing outside of a few doorways that now led to nothing. All of the rubble was also completely covered in the slimy white silk of the spiders. “This is horrible.” Faylen said while taking in the grim scene.

Shade was a lot less taken aback barely even peering at the destruction. “This is what war looks like. Innocent people getting murdered in droves for power grabs by the already powerful.” He then paused. “This is also what Aerith is hoping I do to Merellien, to the innocent people of Merellien, just to save her daughter.” He then completely stopped walking and began to look around at the rubble, while moving his hands towards his daggers that were sheathed to his waist.

“What is it?” She asked trying to follow his gaze, but he ping ponged from one pile of rubble to another.

“Get ready.” He said. “I think we’re surrounded.”

As if on cue, the piles of rubble began to vibrate, before bricks started moving and hundreds of dog sized spiders began pouring out from the rubble on all sides, skittering towards the pair. The spiders looked like demonic tarantulas, with black bodies, black hair and 16 glowing red eyes on their heads. Shade instantly transformed into his dragon form, and Faylen released her rainbow wings while drawing her dagger.

“I’ll leave these up to you.” Shade said leaping into the air. “I’m gonna go find the queen.”

Faylen leaped into the air as well. “You’re just going to leave all of these to me?”

“Yea, you wanted to prove yourself, right? Hell, you were just annoyed I wasn’t going to allow you to fight the queen, but now a bunch of baby spiders are scaring you? Just think of it as practice for when you’re outnumbered in a fight. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a bit.” He then turned and like a comet, exploded through the air away from the horde of spiders that were pooling below them.

Faylen looked down at the horde of spiders that were now about 100 feet below her. She began to ponder how she could kill them all. Should I just rain fire down on them? No, what if there are survivors in the rubble somehow, I don’t want to accidentally kill them. Maybe thousands of icicles?

The spiders though were not kind enough to give her a chance to think. They began shooting balls of web at her, making her have to weave left and right.

She took the bow off from around her shoulder and tossed it into the air. “Lilah, go off and shoot some of them on your own.” Lilah though just fell like a rock to the ground. While she had recovered enough echos to talk again, she had not recovered enough to float on her own. “Oh shit.”

This though weirdly enough gave Faylen an opening as the spiders all as one turned and looked between her and the bow now in their midst confused. She took the opening by doing the one attack she thought she could do without accidentally killing any possible survivors, the icicles. She raised her hand over her head, and thousands of icicle like spears formed around her, then vaulted towards the ground in a storm. Some of them hit their mark, but most either missed completely, were dodged, or even countered by spiders hitting them with balls of webbing to knock them off course.

This didn’t deter her though as she kept the barrage up, thinking she was safe in the air and that she could out last them in a war of attrition with her massive amount of echos. The spiders though wouldn’t go down so easy. Spiders began jumping into the air everywhere, then other spiders would shoot webbing onto the jumping spider, and use it to swing themselves further into the air, then other spiders would attach to the spiders that swung into the air and swing even higher. Soon, while hundreds of feet in the air, she was completely surrounded by trapeze artist like spiders, some flying up, some falling down. The physics of this doesn’t make any sense! She complained internally.

She went to fly higher in the air, but one of the spiders attached its silk to her. She went to cut it with her dagger, but it wouldn’t budge. Then another connected to her, and another. Soon dozens of strands of silk hung from her like tinsel, before the spiders as one let themselves fall to the ground, taking her with them.

Faylen and the suicide bomber spiders tumbled through the air toward the ground, but this time, before she slammed into it, she remembered to change her own gravity. While she still hit the ground hard, it lessened the blow significantly, and while badly bruised, she was ultimately rather uninjured. She then immediately changed her gravity back to normal and stood up. She was now in the middle of a mass grave of failed suicide spiders, at least 50 of them were splattered on the ground. The other spiders that were in the air were now falling to the ground as well, though these were using their physics breaking flying strategy to get to the ground safely, while the spiders that had stayed on the ground to begin with now skittered past their dead brethren towards her.

She took a quick glance at herself, covered in sticky white silk all over her body. “I’m so glad he isn’t here to see this; his comments would be unbearable.” She said, then looked at the oncoming spider horde and growled. “Fine. He wins.” She said, and took the wooden staff out of her bag. She then closed her eyes. “If there were any survivors in any of these ruins that I kill right now, I’m so sorry, I had no other choice. I couldn’t fail again.”

She then started dumping echos into the staff and the red orb began swirling before turning a deep black. “I’m not sure how this works, but let’s give it a shot.” She then went to create a small fire ball to shoot at the spiders coming from Infront of her. What appeared in front of her though was a gigantic ball of molten lava. Her eyes went wide for a moment while she stared at the massive ball she had not meant to create, before she steeled herself and shot it at the spiders. The ball hit the ground, where it exploded sending molten lava everywhere. Smoke and steam began rising from all around as screeches from melting spiders rang through the air.

The lava explosion though was so big, it even splashed back at Faylen who hadn’t considered that possibility. “Ah fuck!” She yelled as since she was wearing extremely skimpy armor, most of her body was exposed leading to the lava hitting her skin directly on the arms and legs. Ultimately though, she was relatively ok, as her bodies ability to regenerate would fix her skin up in a few hours. The same could not be said for her armor though. When the lava splashed onto her already skimpy armor, it burned most of the recently repaired armor away, leaving her almost completely naked. “I’m sure he’s going to have some snide comment to make about this.” She said looking at the damage.

As the spiders in the air and the spiders behind her began to close in, she snapped back to the fight, looked up and had a moment of inspiration. She shot multiple balls of lava into the air, then created what was meant to be a miniature tornado around herself, but turned out to be a massive tornado with gale force winds. In her mind, what would happen was the spiders would spin around in the air, while the lava would spin with them and burn them to ashes in the air with the spiders not being able to do anything about it. What actually happened though was the tornado launched the spiders, lava, and bricks in all directions. When the dust cleared, there were no spiders anywhere to be seen, not even corpses. The only thing visible to show spiders were even ever there, were small traces of black ash.

She looked at the staff that had clearly increased her power, which helped her easily win, and sneered. “He’s going to be so fucking smug.” While looking at the staff, it made her think about her other weapon, and she began to panic. “Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Where the fuck is Lilah?” Lilah had been in the middle of all the spiders. The tornado she made almost certainly sent Lilah flying away, not to even mention the fact she may have been hit by lava. She flew into the air, and began flying in various direction. Any spiders she found that had survived she hit with an icicle, but that wasn’t her main goal, she needed to find her bow.

“LILAH!” She yelled, but got no answer at first. That was, until she found Shade, who was holding the bow, playing with the string. She landed in front of him and her eyes went wide, but not at Shade holding Lilah, instead, at what was behind him. A now dead carcass of the queen spider. As he had told her, it was the size of a small castle. At least, at one point it was. Now it was in pieces, with thousands of large holes all through out its body, and just like the griffons, its neck was perfectly sliced off. Also dead behind him was another dragon with its tail, wings and horns cut off. This one was blue, and Shade had already smashed in the orb of the slave device, and the torso of the dragon it was once on.

“I always knew Lilah was secretly interested in me. If you wanted me to play with your strings so badly, you didn’t need to fall from the sky like a damsel in distress, you could’ve just asked.” He said, flicking the bow sting back and forth.

“Are you really such a deviant that you are now somehow sexualizing a bow and arrow?” Lilah retorted.

Faylen ignored the banter, instead turning the conversation toward the behemoth that was in front of her. “You…killed that thing. How?”

Shade turned and looked at the former spider queen. “Yea, I was a little disappointed. Maybe I was wearing rose tinted glasses, but I remember them being much stronger than that one was. I shot it with a bunch of bullets, but then decided to try and just cut off its head with the echo dagger, and it worked.”

“Bullets?” Faylen asked.

“Oh yeah, I never really used them in training because, well, they hurt like hell if they hit you. But here I’ll show you.” He then created a bunch of small rocks in front of himself, the rocks were then enveloped by hells fire, then he shot them through the air towards a stack of bricks. The bullets whistled toward the bricks, then passed right through them like a hot knife through butter. “This is what I mean when I say creativity is key. I combined earth, fire, and air into one devastating attack.” He then paused, closely looking her over for the first time since the fight ended. He quickly noticed her holding the staff, as well as all the missing portions of her armor and smiled. “So, which would you like me to comment on first.”

She crossed her arms. “I would prefer neither.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, that wasn’t an option.”