Chapter 148: Infected
Ren stepped closer, feeling that the battle had ended now.
He stood right beside William, looking down at him in the crater, the burn marks still smoking around the edges of where he lay. William’s chest rose and fell in shallow pulls, his eyes half open, blood still running from the hole in his chest. His former elegant look had all vanished at this point.
Ren opened his mouth to speak, wanting to give William a chance to walk away from it all.
A blinding light erupted from William’s body.
It came without warning, white and total, filling every direction at once, and Ren threw his arm up across his eyes and turned his face away, the intensity of it forcing him back a step, his vision going white behind his forearm.
’Shit, he is not yet giving up? What the hell is driving him so much’
He felt the movement before he heard it.
William shot upward fast, the light covering his escape, and Ren spun toward where he sensed him going, ready to attack fast.
William was already behind him.
Ren turned, swinging, and William ducked under the motion with the last reserves of speed he had left, his body moving low and fast, and as he came up he pressed something against Ren’s back between his shoulder blades, his palm flat against the spot for just a fraction of a second before he pulled away.
The spider that Ophelia had handed to William, the one that was meant to ensure that Ren was taken over .
Ren felt it immediately.
Something small. Something alive.
The spider moved before he could reach it, crawling up his back faster than his hand could track, finding the base of his neck, and then the bite came, driving deep into the skin there with a precision that said it knew exactly where it was going.
Ren let out a low grunt of pain.
The spider began to push inward.
He could feel it moving into him, not through his skin but through something underneath it, working its way into his nervous system the way water found cracks in stone, following pathways it seemed to already know the route of.
’So this was the plan all along’, Ren thought, his hand going to the back of his neck, trying to find it, his fingers finding nothing because it was already past the surface. ’Turn me into an infected. Use me as the weapon. Should have seen something like this coming, Tch, I’m to blame here.’
The battle started inside him before he finished the thought.
It hit like a physical force, a pressure that came from everywhere internally at once, pushing against his control of his own limbs, his own vision, his own breath, and the strength behind it was not small. His knees hit the ground. He did not decide to kneel. His body simply went down, fighting the intrusion with everything it had while the intrusion pushed back with everything it carried.
He was sweating.
Trembling.
His hands pressed into the earth and he closed his eyes, forcing his attention inward, abandoning the outside world entirely and pushing his consciousness toward the source of the pressure.
The darkness that replaced his vision was not empty.
He was standing in it.
Across from him, filling the space with a presence that was enormous and patient and had clearly been here before him, was the spider.
Not the physical form. Something that lived underneath it, the thing that had been giving the orders from the beginning, the intelligence behind every infected, every web, every plan that had been moving through this forest.
It was massive even here, in the space of his own mind, its presence pressing against the edges of the darkness like it was already too large for the container it was in.
Then it shifted.
The form changed, pulling inward and reshaping, and what stood across from him when it finished was humanoid and feminine, clad in black and gold, the spider exoskeleton running across her frame like armor that had grown rather than been made. A spider abdomen extended from her back, her arms ending in spider legs that moved with a slow, deliberate elegance that suggested they were as capable of precision as they were of destruction.
She looked at him.
When she spoke her voice was clear and direct, carrying the particular tone of someone delivering information rather than making an argument.
"There is no point in fighting anymore," she said. "The moment I latched onto your neck, this was already decided. What you are doing now is futile."
Ren looked at her, Turning his head to the side a bit as if to get a better look at her face.
Then he smiled.
"Maybe," he said. "But even if I cannot win this, I am going to make sure I either hurt you badly enough that you remember it for a long time, or I ruin this body in a way that makes it useless to you." He held her gaze. "Either way you are not walking out of here with what you came for."
Her expression shifted.
Something moved through it that was not quite anger and not quite concern but carried elements of both, the look of something that had expected resistance and had not expected this particular kind.
"I cannot allow you to destroy the mother’s plan," she said, and her voice had changed, the directness still there but something underneath it now, something that carried weight beyond the conversation they were having. "Her plans are absolute. What she has set in motion cannot be interfered with."
She looked at him steadily.
"The mother is absolute."
Ren looked back at her and said nothing for a moment, turning the word over.
"Mother, probably Ophelia right? She is your mother if I am guessing right. That’s nice, doing some task for your mummy, but you picked the wrong body to work in today," he stated still keeping his smile.