Hatred = 198 = Beast
Hatred = 198 = Beast
A powerful slam and the abrasive crumbling of earth struck my ears. The wall beside me had ruptured, snapping through its archaic wooden skeleton, giving way to a falling mass of rubble and splinters clouded by billowing dust.
Birthed from this smog was an unmistakable silhouette that soon grew a thick pelt—gray and tattered like dead flesh. Dogskin displayed himself, torturing the fabric of reality with his grotesque musculature. Enraged focus twisted his face, exuding spite from beady red eyes as teeth like nails dripped blood and saliva, his tongue snaking between open jaws. His bladed fingers trembled and seized, grasping impulsively in the hopes that prey would soon fall between them. His chthonic gaze chilled my blood, nucleating shards of ice on the surface of my bones that tore me apart without a single touch of his incisors.
At a single glance I knew infinite hatred. It sat laced in his fur and pulsed through his heart and inflated his hulking frame, barely withheld from seeping out, making up more mass in his body than flesh itself.
Dogskin dropped to his massive arms, his leaden coat shaking as he launched himself at me, aiming to shatter my skull between his jaws. I wrenched myself away and raised my sword to retaliate as he curled his body around—impossibly agile for such a behemoth—and slammed his claw into my chest. My head struck the floor, leaving me dazed as torturous vibrations clouded my senses, followed by a scalding pain that spread across the torn flesh.
His jaws gripped my ankle with tangible fury, pinching skin to muscle to bone, tearing through each layer. An aggressive tug on my skeleton instantly dwarfed the previous injury, nearly ripping it out of the flesh that enveloped it, dislodging every joint up to my hip. The tissues in my leg screamed, spewing fire from their throats, begging to be returned to their unfrayed state.
Tension filled his legs like bent steel, exploding laterally with a thrash of his neck, slamming my feeble body into the wall. The impact sent me into a concussive daze, numbing my perception near the point of death so that I could barely discern the shattering of bones and the tearing of muscle. An ambiguous smear of hair and blood replaced my once lucid reality—an image of pure hatred muted by trauma.
I contemplated an encounter with death, knowing that there were two shapes in which she could manifest—death by inevitable nature, and death by screaming, thrashing, and bleeding. I held no doubt as to which method I wished for, as the former would leave my soul eternally aggrieved and hungry for catharsis. Still, my fury kept violence at the front of my head while death merely lingered in the back.
Just as I reclaimed my senses, Dogskin yanked me again with comparable force, further dislodging my hip with a plangent snap and a simmering nodule of pain. I gritted my teeth nearly hard enough to shatter them and clenched the grip of my sword, saturated with such pain that it became only an object to squeeze lest I break my own fingers.
To fight an animal is to war with pure, unhindered rage—a creature that hates not on trivial accounts like vengeance or greed, but because every thrash and every bit of resistance is a refusal of its inherent desire to consume. Dogskin was no animal of this realm, however, with fury limited to hunger alone. His wrath was distilled into its purest essence—unrequited violence. He wished to feed as much as his cognition forced him to hate, boiling both urges in a hot, black soup of malevolence, breeding his rage tenfold as gluttony and spite were never a peaceful mixture.
Dogskin released his jaws from my ankle, the loss of pressure allowing soreness to flare up towards my punctured skin. His open jaws flew towards my head, and out of instinct I quickly thrust my sword against his movement, wrapping my fingers around the blade so that both arms may contribute their strength.
Steel impaled his furious eye as his own momentum shoved its pommel into the floor, further driving his skull into the blade, his teeth landing a finger’s width from my face. From the core of his ravenous gut arose an ear-splitting roar, a wave of hot, rancid breath spilling over me. He withdrew sharply as I held my weapon with resolve, lifting my torso before the blade finally slid out.
Blood gushed from the wound as though spite had pressurized his veins, running down the fur of his snout and leaving a few droplets on my chest. I glanced at the tiny crimson spots—glowing violence at the end of a tunnel of hostility—noticing bits of familiar black sludge swirling in each. His wounds only aggravated my rage, providing me with the slightest morsel of pain to rouse my hunger for more.
I twisted my weight onto my functional leg and rose as quickly as I could against the hindrance of torn muscles and dislocated joints. We had finally reached equal echelons, both our reservoirs of malice filling the air, contesting potencies against one another. The moment I regained my balance was the moment that Dogskin narrowed his unwounded eye on my throat once more.
But I could not have allowed such a titan to strike first, and so I swung with every remaining fiber of might, disregarding how such reckless movement further destroyed my flesh. My blade sliced through thick layers of fur and muscle, severing an arm from his hulking body.
His torso buckled and slammed into the floor, the earth rumbling as he bared his teeth in agony. A fountain of blood painted the floor—even denser and blacker than the last—though his fur obscured the wound even after being sprucely cut.
Just as I tightened my shoulders in preparation to slaughter the beast, he spoke with the articulation of a man. The pained wail I anticipated from a wounded dog emerged with authority, his voice rough and bestial. “I YIELD. ENOUGH.”
I lunged into the strike, my steel falling towards his remaining arm, yet my target came flying in an arc that ripped the blade out of my hands. It clattered against the floor and slid to the wall behind me as I stumbled back, my dominant hand torn open and bleeding.
Dark forces breed,
Bubbling and writhing,
Condensing towards effluvium
That spills from your face.
He let words spill from his tongue again, drenched in even thicker aggression. “ENOUGH. You are full of hate. I can smell it on you. I can taste it in the air you breathe. And I can see it running from your eyes.”
I glanced down at my bare chest—grievously torn and smeared with the blood of multiple species—streaked with anomalous black fluid. And I finally understood that it was not tears of sorrow nor leaking bile.