This Thing Don't Look So Tough

[China]

Continuing on from THIS post.

“-p?”

China slipped off the branch, then flailed wildly, giving a brief shriek of fear and surprise, which sent small birds fluttering from nearby trees, before his claws sunk deep into bark, holding him in place. If he’d had a heart, it surely would have been pounding.

Looking around at his surroundings, he could see that he was hanging from the underside of the branch he’d lain down on last night, before drifting off to sleep, and…

Had that been a ‘dream’, then?

The golem was familiar with the word, but he couldn’t recall ever having dreamt anything before in his life. Was this just one of the many oddities of this new place? This… ‘Omniverse’, as the dream version of the white person—Omni—had called it?

It would seem so. More pressingly, though, there were other concerns right now; ruminating over strange thoughts whilst he slept could wait, “Much-much weird-odd place, where go-vanish all ground-grass? All gone-gone. Me-me not see-spot any, no.”

He shook his head in bewilderment. He could have sworn that he had fallen asleep right up near the treetops, on the very edge of a forest… yet the pine trees loomed all around him in every direction, their upper boughs towering far, far above his head, letting in almost no light. A long, long way beneath him, the forest floor was obscured completely by fog… in fact, he couldn’t even be sure there was a forest floor anymore.

This strange locale terrified him… he wanted to just curl up and hide… perhaps if he went back to sleep, eventually he’d wake up in somewhere that made sense?

Crawling back up onto the top of his sleeping branch, he peered around in the faint hopes of finding a small snack, at least… he’d not be able to rest again until he’d eaten something; of that he was certain. It was then, though, that he happened to look down at himself, and felt some small amount of courage return to him; he was whole again. Unlike in the dream, which otherwise had been very nice, his body here was in tip-top shape, not left in the same sorry state—the same ruined wreck—that Dane had left it in.

He lashed his two tails through the air behind him and smiled. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad after all, even if it wasn’t as cute and cuddly as his dream had been… he stood up on his hind legs, standing straight and tall now, bipedal, his tails keeping him perfectly balanced, he trod lightly across the thick bough, even as it got thinner and thinner nearer the end.

Thinking back on his dream, the Ceramic Beast began to see himself in a new light. No mere failure was he, no simple, worthless mistake. He held out two of his hands before him and looked at them closely, flexing his fingers and admiring the two-inch long talons that crowned them. Omni had made him something more than the Archmage who had created him had ever managed, or would even have dared to dream was possible.

Now, the golem had become something greater than a mere intelligence locked in a thin shell of unchanging porcelain; here, in the Omniverse, he could improve, he could grow. The feeling of hope was both eye-opening and shockingly addictive.

Just think of all the new foods he’d get to eat if he got so strong that no one could stop him...

He’d never tried dragon meat, or phoenix, or leviathan, or hydra…

All the great, mighty beasts that he’d cowered and fled from before, his for the taking...

China stood about as far out on the edge of the branch as he could realistically get. The wood beneath his feet was just barely over an inch thick, and creaking alarmingly. He thrust his arms out to the sides, partly to help maintain his balance, partly just to revel in this freakish feeling, this exhilarating elation, this delectable daydream. All he had to do was remain ‘interesting’ to Omni, and he’d come back to life if he ever died… more powerful than ever.

For all that he’d have loved to hang around marvelling at his own potential and visualising his inevitable ascendance to greatness (and all the bountiful banquets that came with it), the sharp, burning pain in his stomach, as always, chained him to the harsh, violent plane of reality.

Even if, now, he was seeing the world through new eyes. The hunger seemed less like a curse, and more like a challenge, “Yes-yes, it hurt much-lots, but hurt-sore good thing, yes, keep-make busy-busy, not let-allow get boring. Always eat… always hunger… always fight... get-get stronger.”

China bounced lightly on his feet, making his already precarious position more dangerous still. A large part of him—which he tried to think of as being the 'old', weak version of himself—screamed and wept and freaked out inside his head, demanding he scramble back and go hug the tree trunk for comfort, digging his claws deep into its bark in an effort at keeping from having even the tiniest possible chance of slipping to his untimely death.

He ignored that voice of cowardice, though, managing to push it roughly aside, even as he trembled with fright at the thought of slipping and dashing himself painfully against whatever rocks or hard things lurked below. In fact, instead of being cautious, as much to prove to himself that he could as anything else, he edged slightly further out, eliciting some more ominous creaking from the branch. He laughed softly, more than a tinge of hysteria in his tone. Logically, he knew that he ought to still be able to fly—and honestly, as it was upon this assumption, given to him by his dream, that he was basing his entire, new philosophy, he certainly hoped that it was accurate—but even so, he was strangely reluctant to test that out.

The coward in him was too scared of the magic not working properly and sending him plummeting down below, while the greedier, newly realised, ambitious part of him wanted to hold off on confirming it for now… leaving that discovery until the last possible moment before he crashed into something solid and shattered himself into millions of pieces would be absolutely horrifying… and so it would hopefully go some way towards proving to Omni that he was willing to take what he had been told on faith, and so would be engaging in all sorts of reckless activities... and as such would be one Prime worth keeping an eye on (and rewarding with amazing new powers and abilities as well, of course).

He was so scared, and yet… it was really, really weird how exhilarating this felt at the same time. He’d never before let himself even entertain the slightest of ideas that danger could be exciting, yet now, with the possibility of immortality before him—so long as he kept Omni’s favour—the idea of risking everything suddenly held some strange allure to him.

Closing his eyes and mouth for a moment, he focused on changing his face, then, after a couple seconds, opened his now-vertical mouth, splitting his face in two and peering out at the world through his true, third eye. Then he thrust his head back and gave a shriek of mingled joy and terror, far louder than his whispery, quiet, little voice could ordinarily have produced. The discordant, horrid screech carried on and on and on, with the golem looking straight up, paying no attention to his surroundings, in a highly precarious location, intentionally attracting attention to himself. It was borderline suicidal, and yet his craven side—the ‘flight’ part of his ‘fight or flight’ response—couldn’t even object to such idiocy, as the scream was as much a result of its animalistic fear as it was the primal excitement of his more savage half.

At last, the cry cut out. The Ceramic Beast remained leaning back for a few moments longer, indulging in the unusual, dry, hoarse sensation in his throat… as a being whose only experience of pain was the feeling of intense hunger, China was incapable of actually getting a sore throat, no matter how badly he abused the magic which served him in place of vocal cords… but he could feel something there now, at least... and he knew from experience that after shrieking like that, he wouldn’t be able to talk for a little while.

All the sounds of the forest had been drowned out by his screaming, but he could hear them now, in the distance. Crawling, creeping, skittering, chittering things. They sounded horribly scary. They sounded like they’d eat up a poor, little, hungry person for breakfast… China wanted to cower, but instead he hurled himself forwards.

Off the branch, he shot, racing towards the thick, bare trunk of a towering behemoth of a tree, the upper branches of which were still coated with needles, despite the lower part being so unadorned. He would have cried out in terror again, if he’d still had his voice.

As well as moving forwards, he was also plummeting downwards. So fast. The Ceramic Beast was locked in a battle of minds with himself. With every millisecond that passed, it became harder and harder to resist the impulse to try to fly. Of course, he still couldn’t even guarantee that it would work. If that dream had all been a lie, if his newfound ability did turn out to have merely been a limited-time-only fluke, as a result of the laws of physics temporarily forgetting that golems were not a type of bird, then he was going to die here.

And if his dream had also been wrong about coming back to life, by the grace of Omni… then he’d be dying for good. His craven soul had the cold, hard, inarguable force of logic on its side, while his ambition had nothing more than a silly figment of its imagination to support its belief in his power, his potential. There was no way that such an intelligent being as China should be acting in such a foolish way… and yet here he was, having tossed himself off a high place without even knowing for sure he would live through it. It was madness.

As he approached his destruction destination at high speed, the Ceramic Beast wanted nothing more than to curl up into a little, shivering ball and jam his eyelid-mouth closed, to block out the inevitable in his last moment of life, as if by not witnessing his doom, he could avoid it’s harsh reality.

His body, however, had other ideas, and instead his mouth opened even wider, whilst his arms he held out to the sides, as if offering oblivion a welcoming embrace.

He couldn’t have been more than a metre from smashing himself into untold millions of tiny shards when he finally gave in to the clamours of his self-preservation instinct and attempted to fly. He lurched, feeling for a moment like his body was about to implode in on itself as he struggled to combat the allied forces of gravity and momentum. He managed to endure it, though. If just barely.

When he did come to a dead stop, the Ceramic Beast was under an inch from the surface of the tree trunk. Had he been able to bring himself to hesitate but a single moment longer, to further enhance the rush of the fall, the exhilaration of the risk, and (hopefully) the Omni-impressing-ness of his daredevil attitude… he’d not have survived.

Hands and feet slamming into the bark of the barren trunk, he dug in his talons as firmly as he could, to hold him steady as he shivered and shuddered in fear and excitement. Inside his mind, China laughed and sobbed hysterically at the sheer stupidity of the act he had just taken—he would have been literally driven to tears by it, were he physically capable of crying—and tried to ignore how much fun it had been. He failed in that attempt, and his greedy, hungry side grew just a tiny bit more influential.

Externally, his voice was still exhausted by that shriek, though, so he made no actual noise right then, other than those small thuds as his claws buried themselves in wood.

From somewhere nearby, more of those chittering, skittering noises resounded… the forest making the sounds echo a little. And then the golem spotted something. Crawling around from the other side of the tree trunk was some sort of arachnid… though its eight eyes extended on quivering, flexing stalks, like those of a slug or snail, rather than staying put in its head, like they ought to have.

Suddenly remembering his all-consuming hunger at the sight of prey, China lunged. Stretching his body as far as he could, he released his grip on the bark with his upper-right hand, the appendage locking around the food’s body—which was over a foot long—before it could scurry away. The tips of his claws dug into it, cracking through the brittle exoskeleton as if it were no more than an eggshell. It writhed, limbs jerking madly, and succeeded in turning enough to sink its mandibles into his wrist… only to discover the complete lack of flesh and blood beneath.

Normally, this would have been extremely funny to the golem… however, a fraction of a second later, he felt a sudden, intense, burning pain in that wrist. Aside from his ever-present hunger, this was the first time he had ever actually experienced such a thing in his entire existence… and it was by no means pleasant. He couldn’t comprehend how or why the creature’s venom should be able to cause him to experience such sensations when nothing else could… but he could only assume that, like him, this thing had been changed in some way by Omni upon coming here, and that as a result its poisons could affect him, even though his body lacked any veins through which they could flow.

Yanking back the afflicted arm—the food still clutched tightly in his hand—he shoved the eight-legs at his mouth and though it scrabbled and jerked, it could not keep itself from being forced into that great, gaping maw. With a snap and crunch, his jaws clamped shut, biting the food in half and splattering his body with ichor.

Once again, though, he felt a sudden, burning, searing pain, this time inside his mouth itself, as the creature’s toxic insides ate away at the void of nothingness that lay beneath his porcelain shell. Opening his mouth, he failed to scream in agony, for he still lacked a voic...and alas, despite these horrible sensations, his appetite was still far from sated, and so, even knowing the pain it would cause, the Ceramic Beast forced the rest of the food down his gullet.

So sooner had he done so, though, than another three rounded the tree trunk, chittering shrilly amongst themselves. Whimpering with reluctance, the golem used an unharmed hand—his upper-left—to snatch up one of these; grabbing it by the abdomen this time, in the hopes of keeping from being bitten.

It made no difference. Demonstrating an extraordinary flexibility for a creature whose exterior was comprised of hard plates of chitin, the eight-legs bent almost in half, and like the one before, managed to sink its mandibles into his limb—this one getting him in the forearm, rather than wrist—and pump venom out into his insides.

Once more, he bit it in half, though by then the other couple were upon him, and five more had arrived behind them, soon to be followed by a dozen more.

Realising at last that these strange, stalk-eyed spiders actually posed a threat, rather than merely made for extremely unsatisfying meals, China kicked off from his perch, tumbling backwards—completely out of control—down through the air. It was too late, though, for already over half a score of the vile things were scurrying around over his pristine form, sinking in their little teeth and injecting more of their vile fluids into him, bright blooms of pain erupting all over and throughout his body.

He writhed, swatting and clawing at them, crushing or tossing away those he could catch. He was no longer eating them; by now, the pain of their poison had piled up to such an extent that his eternal hunger seemed as nothing by comparison. His mouth was locked wide open; he would have been shrieking uncontrollably, had he been able to do so.

They crashed through a thin branch, taking it down with them, the force of the impact obliterating one of the tarantulas and shattering enough porcelain to carve a long chasm in China’s back.

The golem was so preoccupied that he barely noticed. It was only when fog appeared around them, and quickly thickened, that it occurred to him that the ground was fast approaching, and that he might be terminally dashed against it at any moment… and then it took him a couple seconds longer following that realisation to be absolutely sure that that was not what he wanted.

An end to this new sensation of pain would be nice indeed… but Omni might not appreciate his Primes just giving up and dying; if he didn’t try to live, the white person might rescind that offer of rebirth… China might find himself dead for good.

So once again, he wrenched his body to a halt in mid-air, struggling to maintain the focus necessary to keep from continuing to fall as he flailed and twisted in his attempts at ridding himself of his unwanted hitchhikers.

At last, after a couple more minutes of this, there was only one left, and his voice had returned enough that he could now manage a quiet, hoarse moan of pain. The food was on his right shoulder, and sunk its fangs into his neck. In response, the Ceramic Beast sent himself rocketing backwards—through a few needle-covered branches—to slam, shoulder-first, into the trunk of one of the many pine trees in his vicinity.

The food was crushed, its ichor splattering wood and porcelain alike… but in the process, China’s shoulder had been annihilated as well, and his upper-right arm—still spasming violently from the venom coursing through it—hovered in the air at his side, rather than being actually attached to him any more.

His power of flight pressing him roughly against the tree with such force that he felt as if the world had spun ninety degrees and gravity was pressing him down on some inordinately thick branch, the golem writhed, clutching his arms tightly around himself, struggling—but, ultimately, failing—not to scratch at the sore spots, and carve deep grooves through his own carapace, even though he was sorely tempted to throw logic to the winds and seek to physically tear the corruption out of his body.

At last, though, when China was much worse for ware, the pain faded enough that he was able to regain control of himself… reaching back and digging his talons into the tree, the Ceramic Beast quit using his odd, new ability, immediately slouching as true gravity reasserted itself. Had he been made from flesh and blood, his muscles would have been aching, his breaths laboured, and his skin slicked with sweat… as it was, though, having no muscle, no lungs, and no sweat glands, he simply hung there, immobile, feeling tremendously heavy—as if all his porcelain and all the empty air within had been switched out with lead when he wasn’t looking—and very tired, struggling to even keep his eye open.

Gradually, however, as the final remnants of the agonies he had experienced died out, his old nemesis—that all-consuming hunger—reasserted itself, the fading of the toxins seeming to multiply this pain exponentially, just as their abrupt arrival had for a time silenced it.

He groaned, then released his hand- and footholds, one by one, and slowly began to clamber down through the needle-laden branches of the immense tree, at times slipping and almost falling before he managed to regain his balance, grab ahold of something, or had to resort to using his power again. As he got further and further down, the banks of mist grew ever thicker, closing in on him from every side, until he could scarcely see two feet in front of his face.

It was then, at long, long last, that he stood on something other than a branch. At first, he thought he had reached the ground… but no… it was much too soft and squishy… and slimy.

Slipping down onto all sixes fives, with his upper-right arm still hovering off to one side, the golem leaned forwards, getting as close a look at the spongy surface as he could, his vertical mouth widening to afford him a better view. It was dull green in colour, and covered in a layer of gunge about a centimetre thick. It smelled… edible. Food-y. Perhaps not quite as appetising as some of the meals he’d had in the past, but as hungry as he was, China wasn’t feeling picky.

He sank his fangs into the muculent mass, only for them to fail to penetrate the thing’s rubbery skin. Gulping down a mouthful of vile-tasting slime, he tried again, and this time did eventually manage to keep his teeth from slipping off. The large lump shifted as his fangs dug in, and lovely, sweet blood flowed down the golem’s gullet.

Well, ‘lovely’ might have been an exaggeration, but it didn’t cause him pain to swallow, so that was something, at least.

Doing the best he could to hang on with his claws as well—completely forgetting that he could have just hovered in place—China struggled ever harder to close his jaws and tear free a piece of meat from this great goliath, despite the slick ooze beneath his feet and hands threatening to send him sliding away with every tiny twitch it made.

And then, as his teeth dug in further, a low, loud, mournful moan echoed through the trees, and the thing jerked violently, almost sending him flying. He couldn’t fail to notice the loud cracking and snapping of breaking wood, as branches and possibly even entire trees were knocked down by the passage of whatever this huge lump was.

And then, suddenly, looming out of the fog in front of him, the Ceramic Beast saw a great chunk of slimy flesh approach—in fact, the mist even seemed to thin as it closed in, affording him a better view—which then split right down the middle, two layers of slimy skin peeling back to reveal an enormous, gelatinous eyeball, staring straight at him.

It was terrifying… but with the taste of flesh and blood already in his maw and his belly screaming to be filled, China couldn’t contain himself. He reared back, pulling with all his might, and succeeded in tearing free a juicy hunk of meat.

This time, the big food’s bellow was far, far louder, and its body spasmed so powerfully that the slime did its job, hurling the porcelain golem away, sending him shooting back through the air amidst the sound of more cracking wood. He came to a stop on a tree which was still standing. That was the good news. The bad news was that as he stopped, a pair of the branches had managed to impale him right through the chest.

Swiping at the now-needle-stripped branches with his claws to break off the parts which ended outside his body, the Ceramic Beast then heaved himself free of the pair supporting his weight and fell for a moment, before landing on a lower branch and sinking smoothly into a crouch.

Logically, the best thing to do now—and the thing which he most certainly would have done, ordinarily—would be to leap away from tree to tree as fast as his body could carry him, all thought forgotten as he fled in a state of sheer, mindless terror from the horribly vast abomination upon which he had foolishly tried to feed.

The Omniverse, however, was by no means a logical place. Omni had confessed as much to the golem himself. All he had to do was be interesting, and he could continue to get stronger, and would even be reborn should he fall… as ludicrous as it sounded, in the long term, being cautious and avoiding danger may actually turn out to be more detrimental to his chances of survival than throwing himself headlong into harm’s way.

“Need-need get big-strong, not stay-keep be dead, must-got fight-eat, yes. Me plan-thought much good-smart, yes-yes.” muttering incoherently to himself, the porcelain person slunk forwards along his new perch, as far as he could get before it began to creak ominously under his weight. Pushing aside a few branches blocking his vision, he took in the view before him, and hissed softly.

More of the fog had cleared, and he could now see the true size of the freakish, cyclopean, maggot-like monstrosity he had bitten… and the sizes of all the others around it. They filled the forest in every direction, completely obscuring the earth beneath them, their bloated bodies slumped and squeezed in between trees, though now many of them had risen slightly and turned to look towards the slightly injured one, giving soft moans of their own in response to its wails of pain.

They did all still seem rather torpid, though, with the only exception being the nearest one, with what looked from here like a tiny trickle of blood running down its flank. It bellowed again, twisting and lurching as it tried to get closer.

Being the obliging fellow he was, China aided it in this endeavour by jumping from his spot, launching himself straight at its single, bulging eyeball.