Chương 425: Book Eight, Chapter 92: Aftershock

I fought through the pain and fear as I jumped up and ran toward the center of the cradle, conscious to avoid as much of the carnage as I could as I moved forward.

"How do we release them from these dimensions they've been trapped in?" I asked.

"I told you, it is quite simple. Let me demonstrate," Alasdair said, muffled within Ramona's person, as we approached the pedestals where two breaks in reality floated like windows hanging in the air. One contained Anna, and the other Camden. Ramona herself ran as fast as she could behind me. She was struggling with the psychic damage of being in this place, with the cosmic horror of these creatures, and with the garden-variety horror of the slaughter around us, but she powered through.

"Do I need to climb up on this machine?" she asked as she arrived right under Camden. Her question was answered as the puppeteer bound in the shape of her DNA took control of her right arm and yanked it forward toward Camden, hidden in his flat crack in space-time. It wasn't like with the other shapeless ones. Alasdair was slower. He had to be more careful as he unfolded himself from within Ramona's DNA and reached his 5th-dimensional tentacles out from her hand toward Camden's prison. But it was all for naught.

A loud roar came from the other side of the machine. Had one of the creatures already reformed? The amount of damage they had taken had at least made me think we'd have a few minutes. These cosmic beings could be forgiven for forgetting what they truly were after getting blown to pieces. But unfortunately, one of the creatures had escaped the blast for the better part. It was the one who had taken most of Camden's shape, but not all of it.

He had somehow managed to get off the end of the platform before being fully formed, and as he stood up and stared at us with pure hatred, it looked like his stitches were coming undone as Camden's body began to elongate, his arms, his legs, his neck, all extending out. The bomb had done some damage to him, but most of that had disappeared as the shapeless one began to shift.

The first time I had seen this in the ocean, when one of these creatures had engulfed an entire boat and grown parts I associated with sea monsters, I had assumed this was some sort of natural state for the creature or perhaps a curse by a Lovecraftian master waiting in the depths. Now it seemed obvious what I was looking at. This shapeless one was just remembering things it used to be. It used to be large.

In a past life, it used to have long claws and jaws, each more terrifying than the next, in numbers that didn't quite make sense anatomically. While the abomination before me still resembled my friend Camden, it also resembled many of the scarier things.

"We need to run," Alasdair said.

"We do not have time to release this one." He began folding himself back into Ramona's hand. Even though she strained to force him to do otherwise, it had no effect.

"We have to save them!" I said, but it was no use. He was right. The transformation of the Camden-Shape was nearly complete. It only took me one look at the final product, the cosmic Frankenstein of Camden, for me to be incapacitated. The reptilian claws and predatory teeth put together haphazardly stopped me in my tracks, even with my It's Just a Puppet trope doing its best to convince me not to be afraid. The Camden-Shape rounded the corner and then launched one of its overlong arms at Ramona.

Suddenly, an old trope kicked in. I could feel exactly where this creature's claws were. The silver dagger I had found in Stray Dawn was telling me where the danger was on a level that would rival a spider sense. The trope attached to it was called Selective Sharpness, which prevented me from accidentally cutting myself and also gave me awareness of nearby sharp objects.

I reached down and grabbed Ramona's right knee and pulled her forward, causing her to fall backward just in time for the claw to graze her forehead, leaving the thinnest evidence of damage. If I had hesitated even a moment, she would have been dead. We were technically in the Finale, but unlike most stories where we got a break from the carnage after Second Blood, the fight seemed to continue from one beat to another.

I quickly grabbed for the knife in my belt, and as the horror began to withdraw its claw, I managed to reach out and block any rake-back damage that might have occurred to Ramona or me. Quickly, I helped Ramona to her feet. I wasn't used to looking like a badass, but I must have in that moment. I didn't know if there was any explanation for that in my character's background as a documentarian, but maybe I would throw out an explainer about how I was a fencer in college.

I pulled Ramona away from the console of the shaping machine as the Camden-Shape roared into the air, a thousand different voices all at once, all the things that it ever remembered being screaming at the same time. It then prepared itself to surge forward. Out of the right side of my eye, I could see that Danny, the cameraman, had already gotten his distance.

I looked at the creature as best I could, and I tried to draw on the trope from the silver knife to figure out where the blades and sharp objects would be so that I could dodge them. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. The trope sent me back with a resounding, simple answer. Everywhere. The sharp objects were all over its body. As the creature moved toward us, there was no dodging. There was no escape. Fortunately, we were not its first target. Unfortunately, Camden was.

The creature moved its claw into the void that contained Camden. Its arm traveled a further distance than my mind could comprehend as its claws pierced into the perfectly still face of my friend. It would seem that Alasdair was right about how easy it was for a shapeless one to interact with these lower-dimensional voids, because this monster killed the man whose face he stole like it was nothing. He then pulled his long claw out of the dimensional void.

The prison Camden had been put in didn't change, even as the prisoner inside had been practically beheaded; his skull had been shredded. I gave my character a moment to scream, to cry out for his friend, but in my heart I swore revenge. At least I could tell myself Camden wouldn't feel a thing inside that nearly timeless void. Now the Camden-Shape turned toward Ramona and me. We ran as fast as we could. The Selective Sharpness trope was still telling me there was no hope of dodging, but we tried our best.

Trying to climb over all of the body parts leftover from the bombing was difficult. Even more concerning was that, slowly, some of those body parts began to unfold and then refold back together. While they looked like they were apart, that was a trick of the eye caused by the higher dimensionality of these creatures. In reality, they were all still connected. I looked around for something that I might be able to do to help us survive.

For a moment, I considered trying to lure the Camden-Shape into the compactor to trap it inside a sliver of space-time, but seeing as these creatures were able to simply reach into those voids with ease, they could simply reach out of them just as easily, I had to imagine. We ran, and the Camden-Shape followed. In fact, he remembered that he wasn't human just enough to lift himself into the air and float toward us as a heavy wind began to pick up all around us. I glanced back at him.

He had come unraveled even further from when he was Camden. I could barely see him on the red wallpaper at all. His plot armor had grown so high. I didn't imagine we could ever defeat these creatures if they could turn into monstrosities like this. But then, I didn't have a grenade launcher. Someone else did, though, because all I saw was a flaming orb shooting out of the darkness right over my head and making contact with what was left of the Camden-Shape's chest.

The monster didn't exactly blow up as its brothers and sisters had. It wasn't truly pretending to be human, so it didn't have to pretend to be fragile either. But the grenade did something. The monster had to lose all focus on us as it absorbed the blast. Its shape changed rapidly. As it was focused on dissipating the energy of the bomb rather than attacking, it became gelatinous, like a floating nexus of goo, as the blast wave moved through it.

All traces of Camden were now gone, but as far as distractions went, the bomb did a great job. The giant green creature fell to the ground, and whatever it was, it forgot that it was a shapeless one for at least a moment. It began reforming within a few moments, but it wasn't in a hurry. I did my best to peer into the darkness to try to figure out who had just intervened on our behalf. And when I saw who it was, I stopped in my tracks and grabbed Ramona's elbow to stop her from moving forward.

Walking resolutely out of the darkness, dropping a smoking grenade launcher, was a man I recognized. His name was Antoine Stone, but something was very, very wrong with him. It looked like he had lost weight. His muscle mass was down. A gray tone moved under his dark skin. The only thing that was the same about him was his smile.

"Ramona Mercer," he said, out of breath.

"Care to introduce me to your friend?" I had seen Antoine Stone get retconned into having always been a shapeshifter. On the red wallpaper, it looked like my old friend. He was a player. He had the right plot armor and all the right tropes. He was dressed correctly. There were differences, though. This Antoine had grown a beard, and his hair had grown out, too. His clothes were ragged and worn, having been sweated through several times.

"Antoine Stone?" Ramona asked.

"It can't be. They took you. They... they took your shape." Antoine let out a weak chuckle and then said, "I'd like to think they just borrowed it." I wanted to believe this was him. It made sense on some level. Retconning a player out of existence through no fault of their own was a cheap shot, even for Carousel, and Carousel had once convinced me I was in love with a homicidal bride. With how the shapeless ones worked, it made sense that Antoine, the real Antoine, would be here somewhere.

"If you're the real Antoine Stone," I said, "tell me how you escaped those interdimensional prisons they put people in when they steal their shape."

"I didn't have anything to do with escaping," Antoine admitted.

"All I remember is getting shoved into that machine over there, and then it was all a blur. Time slowed down and sped up all at the same time. I couldn't have saved myself in a million years. No, I was rescued." I wanted to just accept it. I wanted another ally that badly. But my character would be skeptical, and I should be skeptical too, because Carousel could definitely pull another fast one. As far as I knew, there was no restriction preventing more than one shapeless one from taking the same shape.

"And who exactly saved you?" I asked.

"An old benefactor," Antoine said. As he said it, I heard a clang of metal against the stone floor from behind Antoine, then another, and another, as something moved forward out of the darkness. And when it revealed itself, I gasped. It was a large cylinder. I had never seen it up close. The front of it was covered with thick glass, and inside was a green liquid. But it wasn't alone there. There were human body parts, organs to be more exact, most of which were not connected the way they should be.

Instead, they were connected to machine tubes. I saw multiple livers, kidneys, and at least two hearts, along with what remained of a human torso. There were no lungs, just an open rib cage filled with mechanical parts. On the right side of the cylinder was an ordinary human arm, but on the other side was a robotic 3-fingered pincer. 4 metal legs came out of the bottom of this cylinder, and a human head came out of the top, one I recognized. It was Andrew Hughes, the eccentric doctor.

He looked worse for wear, as he too had grown a beard, and his hair was long.

"We will gladly tell you everything we know," Andrew said, his voice sounding strange, with a slight mechanical twinge, "but we need to leave this place before they remember what they are." Ramona was quick on her feet, running back to the pedestal and willing her cosmic parasite to reach its tentacles of light up and grab Anna out of her imprisonment. There was no use grabbing Camden anymore. For a moment, all I could do was stare at Andrew.

On the red wallpaper, he was a player with normal tropes, but he had the wrong plot armor. Last I knew, Andrew had 36 plot armor, but this version before me only had 34. If memory served, that was the exact same plot armor he had entered into Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle Part 1 with. Carousel couldn't keep it simple, could it?

"You look like you could use a smoke," I said. He laughed a mechanical laugh and then said, "You have no idea how right you are."