Chapter 891: Filth

With a swing of his staff, Jyuuk struck one of the hundreds of arms still furiously climbing out of the woman"s corpse. Despite being just barely larger than a regular person"s arm, it felt like Jyuuk was striking a truck. It didn"t want to budge, but at least with his physical strength, he was able to still at least fracture its bones. If it had bones, at least.

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It didn"t seem like it had to obey the general rules of biology that Jyuuk recognized.

Rather than actually being some living being that was summoned here, it was more like a force of disgust and dread that was drawn out through this woman"s sacrifice, simply taking the form of hands as if it were the most logical option.

But this dreadful thing didn"t seem to understand what arms or hands even were and how they were supposed to work, just having a surface-level recognition of what they should look like.

Instead of grabbing things with its fingers, the ma.s.s of arms and hands instead wrapped its arms around it like a snake, those arms bending at dozens of randomly placed elbows that branched off into more of its kind like some kind of tree.

The first thing that Jyuuk had to do was to put a stop to the summoning. He had no idea what this was, but Xenia might have some kind of idea. Either way, it wouldn"t help him to try and figure out what it is he was dealing with. He just had to do as Brody would, and smash it all to bits.

With a wave of his hand, Jyuuk"s bestiary sprung from his hip, floating next to him as it flipped open and across its paged. He was looking through, trying to find the best match, until his eyes landed on a particular creature, "Alright, let"s go with that one."

The art drawn onto the pages quickly jumped off it and onto Jyuuk"s body. From under his fur, the colors of the art started to glow, as Jyuuk slowly changed. His body bulked up as his fur turned into chitin. His tail thickened and became flat, hanging from his lower back like some kind of piece of cloth floating behind him.

As the beastman threw his staff into the air, Jyuuk"s hands turned into hammer-like ma.s.ses, his fingers fusing into place, forming a hardened fist.

Jyuuk"s staff soon fell back down. Once it was at the right height, one end aimed right at Jyuuk while the other was aimed as one of the base branches of the ma.s.s of hands, the beastman threw a punch forward. The speed of that punch was strong enough to create a shockwave in the air, heating it up from the sheer friction of the attack.

The staff was shot forward at an unimaginable speed, almost tearing through the arms.

"Oh, how I love the mantis shrimp..." Jyuuk grinned broadly, watching as splotches of wriggling flesh were thrown around the area. As they did, Jyuuk got a good look at their structure.

Similar to the hands themselves, the "flesh" wasn"t particularly right either. It was thick layers of skin and fat and fused muscles, all mixed together like some kind of disgusting tie-dye. Jyuuk shuddered at the sight. Whatever this was, it wasn"t alive, but it most certainly wasn"t dead either. It was like he was dealing with some kind of perversion of either of those concepts.

He had no idea what this was, or how these guys knew how to summon it. Nor did he know why they summoned something like... like this.

As the lumps of flesh tried to writhe their way back to the hands, the hole that Jyuuk had just created in that ma.s.s quickly repaired itself as the hands practically raced to fill it in, melting into the missing area. With a quick whistle, Jyuuk summoned his staff back to him, holding onto it with his foot. His hands weren"t usable right now, after all.

"Well, at least I know I can break it. Might as well give it a shot for as long as I can," Jyuuk said to himself, pressing his staff into the ground. It extended in length and made him shoot toward the ma.s.s, where Jyuuk struck at it with his body that had received the powers of a monster derived from the famously powerful mantis shrimp.

On earth, a mantis shrimp Jyuuk"s size would probably tear itself apart while trying to punch, if it was even able to exert any sort of power in the first place. But here in this world, Jyuuk found a species of mantis shrimp monsters the size of buses that were able to increase their strength many times over, even if not to a proportional degree.

And with one of his abilities, Jyuuk was able to fuse himself with his monsters to a degree. He could edit exactly what qualities he would take on for each monster, and what he chose to do for this one was really quite a simple choice; he put the full focus on the mantis shrimp"s punch.

And that punch showed that it was quite useful right here. With a few fast jabs, dozens of hands were torn apart at once.Though, they seemed to re-form almost as fast as Jyuuk was tearing them apart. Though, only almost. Bit by bit, the beastman whittled down on the thing"s form, until he got all the way to the gnawing hole in the woman"s corpse.

"How could you desecrate a body like that? No matter who they are, the dead deserve some level of respect, and you"re just tearing apart her soul like that? Disgusting," Jyuuk clicked his tongue, looking into the woman"s face. He carefully held his forehead against her"s, whispering something to her that no other soul could hear.

His words, whatever they were, made soft, blackened tears flow out from the dead woman"s body before it crumbled apart into ashes.

Looking to the side, the man that had set up this sacrifice was already dead. Whether it was because of that ma.s.s of hands or because of the shockwaves created by Jyuuk"s attacks didn"t really matter. He wasn"t particularly strong anyway; just knowledgable. And that knowledge was something that Jyuuk needed.

Just in case, he kept up the transformation into this mantis shrimp form, and slowly slid his foot over the ground. He drew a pattern into the dirt, quickly activating it. As the pattern lit up, the contorted body of the man twisted back into a nearly "normal" position.

"What did you summon?" Jyuuk asked immediately, as the undead looked up at him. This creature didn"t have any physical strength, but Jyuuk was forcing the man"s soul into obeying him and telling the truth about any questions he had. After that, the soul would be set free, ready to go wherever it would end up after that. Not that Jyuuk really wanted someone like this around in his legion anyway.

"I called on... the filth."

"... Is that it? It"s called "Filth"? I guess it"s fitting, but... Why? Why did you do it?"

"I... don"t know..."

"You don"t know?" Jyuuk frowned lightly, "Did somebody tell you to do it, or did you just feel the urge to at some point?"

The corpse spoke as the body already started to decompose, "Since... long ago... we have been planning this. The filth... has been with us for... a long...

long time..."

"Oi, answer the question," Jyuuk said in a commanding voice, as the corpse slowly began to smile up at him, something it shouldn"t be able to do. In this state, it shouldn"t have any emotions.

"May the filth... cleanse this world..."

And with that, the man"s corpse fell apart into a goo after rapidly decomposing. It was a rather disgusting sight, but one that Jyuuk was already used to at this point.

"How the h.e.l.l..?" Jyuuk glared at the puddle that used to be a man, groaning loudly, "Did something infect his soul?" he guessed.

Turning around, Jyuuk looked at the ma.s.ses of flesh wriggling on the ground, "So what do you want, filth? What are you here for?"

The false flesh gathered together in a number of small mounds that were trying to once more return to a more tangible shape, like worms climbing on top of each other, trying to mimic the shape of a human. And as they did, Jyuuk could swear that the squelching sound of wet, raw flesh began to form words.