As quickly as he had walked out of the cave, Dust returned.
His first battle just after leaving his safety had been rather abrupt.
But it had also been brutal and eye-opening.
If the Mirehound had not been so severely wounded, he would have had no chance of defeating it at all.
He collapsed to the ground.
His hands were bleeding terribly, nearly torn to ribbons by the Abomination.
'I doubt I will be receiving another Divine Elixir any time soon.'
He pursed his lips but figured he might as well try.
He closed his eyes and drifted into his subconsciousness.
As always, the Voice of God was floating in the nothingness.
He sucked in a deep breath.
"Voice of God," he asked, "Will it be possible for me to receive another Divine Elixir right now?"
{The boons granted by the Divine are arbitrary and are dictated only by the intent of the Divine}.
Dust sighed dejectedly.
"I see..."
{But...}
Dust's eyes brightened, "There's a but?!"
{The Heretic can request for specific items from the Voice of God by trading with it, his questions}.
Dust paused for a moment and raised a brow,
"Hold on... So in essence, you are saying if I can give you my right to ask questions for the day, you can give me whatever I want?"
{That is correct. However, there are a few limitations. The Heretic cannot request for any Marks of Sin to be granted, neither can he wish for items that grant tremendous power beyond his quarter}.
Dust pursed his lips,
"I see. And I have just two more chances to use for the day."
{That is correct}.
Dust nodded,
"Then, I wish to trade one of them for a Divine Elixir!"
Although it was strange, Dust had a feeling this new feature of the Voice of God he had just unlocked would be the beginning of countless surprises for the future.
He gulped hard as he stared at the vial filled with the sparkling, clear liquid.
He huffed out a sigh then exited his subconscious.
When he awoke, he noticed the vial of Divine Elixir right in front of him.
However, he wasn't going to drink it right away.
Dousing a piece of clothing with alcohol, he carefully cleaned his wounds be ripping even more of his clothes to create bandages he wrapped around his arms.
He glanced at the vial of Divine Elixir before wrapping it with a piece of cloth and stuffing it gently into his satchel. Then he picked the satchel up and secured it tight around his waist.
'That is my lifesaving trump card.'
Instead of using it now, he would only make use of it when his life was truly on the line.
Once he was done, he leaned back with a sigh.
The trap of the Dark-Ichor Chimera was truly ingenious the more he thought about it.
'I can choose to sit back and wait for the wounded Abominations to come to me. That way, I can safely accumulate the Marks of Sin. On the other hand, heading into the surrounding area right now is simply too dangerous at my current level.'
He only had to think for a while.
'I will explore only the immediate area surrounding the cave and will only head further once I have gathered a hundred Marks of Sin.'
Dust nodded.
The more he thought about it the more he thought this was the best course of action. He could feel that with every Mark of Sin he acquired, his body changed just a little bit.
The strength in his bones and muscles. The might of his vision. The swiftness of his feet...
Everything was slowly being improved.
Or perfected.
Dust frowned then shook his head.
He let out a sigh,
"The first one wasn't so bad."
He opened his eyes and glanced at the roof of the cave.
He realized there were many things he could have done to reduce the number of injuries he suffered during the battle with the Mirehound.
Just as he fell deeper into his thoughts, the sound of a terrible hiss wormed its way into his ears.
Dust's eyes widened,
"You've got to be kidding me!"
He slowly rose to his feet and rushed to the cave's entrance.
Crawling slowly into the cave, was the largest lizard Dust had ever seen.
It was, for some reason, even bigger than the Mirehound.
Its serpentine eyes were a vivid yellow, glowing ominously in the darkness of the cave.
When they sighted him, they narrowed dangerously.
The enormous reptile had six stocky legs, allowing its softer underbelly to scrape against the ground.
However, to appear more intimidating, its neck was unusually long.
On its back were rows of sharp plates, and its tail ended with a barbed sting that looked rather sharp with a clear liquid dripping out from it onto the ground.
The Abomination sized him up closely before rushing forward with its jaws wide open.
Dust gritted his teeth and leapt backwards, barely managing to avoid the first attack. So much so, he almost didn't see the second one.
The barbed sting was headed straight for his head.
With a powerful swing of the Rippling Blade, he swatted it away with all his might.
His eyes dutifully scanned the creature. But he couldn't find any signs of injury.
He gritted his teeth,
'Crap. This isn't good.'
He quickly changed his stance and began darting around the creature.
He immediately noticed that while its running speed was quite impressive, that speed dropped tremendously if it was forced to make a turn or change the direction of the dash.
'Probably because of those short legs.' Dust thought to himself.
Rolling away from another stab, he tried to cut at the Abomination's side.
Almost instantly, he felt its chilling bloodlust lock onto his with terrifying precision.
His eyes widened as the barbed sting whizzed past his ear. He barely dodged it. Jumping backwards, he instantly could tell that this thing wanted him dead at all costs.
If it wasn't pursuing him seriously before, it definitely was now.
The fight dragged on in a blur of near-misses and bleeding gashes, the creature's short legs betraying it again and again every time he forced it to turn. Dust bled from a dozen shallow cuts before he finally found the opening he needed — driving the Rippling Blade up through the softer scales beneath its throat as it overcommitted to a lunge it couldn't pull out of in time.
The lizard thrashed once, twice, then went still, its long neck finally hitting the cave floor with a heavy, final thud.
Dust didn't celebrate. He didn't have the strength left to.
He dragged himself back toward the alcove where his things were, every step a negotiation with his own body, and collapsed against the wall, chest heaving.
It was only once his breathing had settled that he remembered the Dark-Ichor Chimera's corpse was still there — slumped against the far side of the chamber, exactly where it had died, filling the cave with a smell that had only grown worse with the hours.
He'd have to deal with it eventually. Tonight, maybe.
Wrapping a strip of torn cloth over his nose and mouth, he forced himself upright and got to work, dragging the thing toward the cave mouth a few feet at a time, stopping often to brace himself against the wall and breathe through the nausea.
It was on the fourth or fifth pull that his hand sank into something that wasn't flesh.
He recoiled instantly, scrambling back on his hands until he hit stone.
Something was buried in the creature's chest. He could feel it even from here — a presence radiating off whatever it was, thick and rotten, crawling over his skin like something was trying to get under it. Every instinct in him screamed to leave it exactly where it was and burn the whole corpse without ever looking back.
He sat there for a long moment, staring at the dark shape half-swallowed in ichor and bone, his pulse hammering.
But he didn't leave.
He never could, not when something refused to make sense.
Cursing under his breath, Dust crawled back and worked his fingers into the wound until they closed around it, and pulled it free.
It wasn't large. Smaller than his fist. A knot of something that looked like scorched bone wrapped in a lattice of dark, vein-like threads, pulsing faintly even sitting still in the palm of his hand.
The moment his skin made full contact with it, the world tilted.
Words, no... runes filled his skull, layered over one another, neither of them anything he could truly grasp, but for some reason, he could understand:
"And thus, we shall say his name. The great Siva, God of Destruction, who spat out the great black river that ensnares the world. The scourge of the heavens, the serpent and the bull..."
"On this day, before the eye of the Divine One, I Sekhmet, shall tear every single one of your arms from your body and feed them to my dogs..."
Pain exploded across his back before he could so much as scream a warning to himself.
Twelve points along his spine split open at once, tumor-like growths rupturing through skin and muscle, weeping a thick black pus that hissed where it struck the stone floor, boiling the dirt and dragging it back into the wounds like something feeding in reverse. Dust's vision whited out. He was dimly aware of his own voice, raw and screaming, and of falling, and of the floor rushing up to meet him without ever quite arriving.
He didn't know how long it lasted. Only that when it ended, the pain didn't fade so much as stop existing all at once, like a door slamming shut on a room he could no longer see into.
He opened his eyes to find the tumors gone.
In their place: twelve small, open holes along his spine, each one leaking a thin ribbon of black miasma into the air, and somehow, impossibly, he could feel each one of them as clearly as he could feel his own fingers.
He flexed something that wasn't a muscle, and the miasma answered, coiling and thickening in the air above his shoulder into something that held, however briefly, the rough shape of an arm.
***
{Despair, Heretic. You have been cursed: Arms of Destruction}.
***
Dust stared at the thing floating above his shoulder until it lost cohesion and dissolved back into smoke.
Slowly, his hand drifted to his own chest.
Beneath his torn shirt, dark against his skin, a symbol had burned itself into existence... an eye, set inside a triangle, wreathed in flame.
"Siva," he said aloud, testing the word in his own mouth like it might answer him back. "Sekhmet."
Nothing did.
He sat there a long while in the dark, listening to his own ragged breathing, before he finally found the strength to finish what he'd started with the corpse.