Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 599: Horror

Seeing the scene behind them almost made Zac forget the primal fear the tide of hands had elicited just a few seconds ago. The whole base had simply disappeared just a hundred meters behind them, replaced by a Void that stretched into infinity. It looked like the series of red barriers had been erected to maintain atmospheric pressure to the base.There were no stars or nebulae in the Void, yet it wasn't completely dark. A thin strand of light stretched across the horizon, like a beam of light that had squeezed through a crack. Zac had no idea what that crack was, but he figured that it perhaps was a path to a real spacetime rather than the void between dimensions.

The scene was pretty shocking, but it was nothing compared to the appearance of the Collector.

The disgusting hand-tentacles were horrifying enough, but its main body easily topped it. Zac had imagined some sort of Lovecraftian horror after seeing the tentacles, but he wasn't sure whether the real Collector was better or worse. It almost looked like an ashy-gray blob of yarn floating in space, but the more he looked the more horrific it became.

Its form was a slightly uneven sphere that spanned thousands of meters across, making it a creature far larger than anything Zac had ever encountered before. He initially thought it was covered with coarse skin or short-haired fur, but a second glance actually revealed that they were just more body-parts sewn onto its real form. However, it wasn't just hands on its main body, but everything from legs to whole torsos and heads.

Worse yet, the bodyparts moved in everything from lackluster swaying to frantic clawing. Zac even spotted a head-and-handless torso desperately clawing at its midriff with its two stumps, probably trying to rip itself off from the Collector's body. The scene made him gape in horror, and an intrusive thought pushed away everything else.

Were the collected bodies still alive?

There weren't only humans attached to the body either, but Zac quickly spotted hundreds of werewolves as well. But that wasn't the extent of it as he could easily discern at least thirty different races in short order. It looked like the Re

Instead, there were a few vials of a milky liquid that had healing properties according to Leviala, but the effect was a lot worse compared to his healing pills. That wasn’t to say that his mother’s family was unable to create proper remedies. The problem was rather that these vials essentially contained run-off of the real thing, siphoned off the base by the natives.

Seeing there was not much of interest he turned his attention to the gadgets. There were two charges similar to the one he looted from Hevastes, but they both were not only smaller, but they also looked homemade. His best guess was that Hevastes’ charger was looted somewhere on the base while the other two were created in its likeness to the best of the werewolves’ abilities.

Still, it was an impressive feat to reverse-engineer a piece of equipment like this, and it proved that the natives weren’t simply scavengers in this place.

There were also two tablets identical to the one in his possession, and Zac simply put them aside as he honed in on a tablet that looked a bit different compared to the others.

“What’s this?” Zac asked as he turned to the Cartava Scion.

“A mapper,” Leviala said as she leaned over, and Zac could see some desire in her good eye. “It’s used to record safe paths. You can also add comments about security measures, spatial traps in it, creating detailed maps.”

Zac’s eyes lit up as he looked down at the smaller tablet in his hands. Wasn't this exactly what he needed right now?