So soon after battling his second opponent, he was forced to fight his third foe since stepping into this cave.
He grimaced as he narrowly dodged another strike from the stinger.
He could only get lucky so many times. Eventually, he was sure to be struck by that thing. And when it happened, he knew he would be as good as dead.
It was much more difficult to battle against such a creature compared to a human. In fact, defeating Phil seemed less daunting than killing this Abomination.
Its defenses were simply too much. It seemed as this no matter where he struck, even his very sharp Rippling Blade was unable to penetrate through.
His eyes widened as the thick tail of the beast suddenly smashed into his shoulder, driving him into the wall with so much force, the as time cracked.
Coughing out a mouthful of blood, he rolled out of place, dodging another poisonous strike.
Breathing heavily, Dust grilled at his chest as he tried to make a momentary escape deeper into the cave.
But the Abomination didn't seem to be a fan of that.
It relentlessly chased him until his back was firmly pinned against a way.
Stretching its maw open, it shrieked loudly and prepared to bite down.
CLANG!
Its teeth struck metal.
Feeling its foul breath filling his lungs, Dust could feel his muscles bulging as he pushed with all his might.
But how could the strength of a single human be enough to overpower that of a horrendous beasts much as this one.
In less than a few seconds, Dust felt his strength giving out.
Without giving him another chance, the jaws of the Abomination enveloped him with a large chomp.
Dust had been eaten.
With nothing but a single bite.
But he was not quite dead yet.
The inside of the creature's throat was slick and hot, filled with digestive juices that burned at his exposed skin.
But the Rippling Blade was still held firmly in his grip.
In the suffocating darkness, he could feel the creature's throat muscles contracting, trying to force him deeper into its gullet.
'Bloody bastard! Not like this.'
Dust gritted his teeth and drove the Rippling Blade upward with desperate force. The enchanted edge punched through the roof of the creature's mouth from the inside.
If he couldn't cut the damned thing open from the outside, then he would do for from the inside.
With the help of his blade, even though its inner muscles were tough— built for swallowing large prey, it still couldn't endure the enchanted blade's edge.
The Abomination's shriek was muffled by its own flesh, but Dust could feel the vibration through his entire body. The throat muscles spasmed wildly as black blood poured down around him.
He twisted the blade viciously and carved sideways, opening a wider wound. More blood flowed, mixed with something that might have been stomach acid.
With every stab and slice, the creature thrashed even more, bathing him with the corrosion acids and blood that made his scream out in pain.
The creature rocked its head back and forth, trying to dislodge him, but Dust held on grimly. He sawed at the soft tissue with methodical strikes, each one weakening the beast further.
Seemingly on one last attempt, Dust felt something rising up from the depths of the Abomination's throat.
It was trying to throw him up.
A look of pure madness manifested in Dust's gaze as he roared and punched his hand into one of the deep gashed he had made.
The pushing force from the surrounding muscle was more than enough to dislocate and fracture his arm immediately.
Still, he held on for dead life and continued stabbing away.
Finally, the throat muscles went slack. Dust felt himself sliding forward as the creature's jaws opened involuntarily. He tumbled out onto the cave floor, covered in blood and digestive fluids that burned like acid.
The massive lizard collapsed beside him, black ichor pouring from its mouth. Its yellow eyes dimmed as it released a final, rattling breath.
***
{Congratulations, Heretic. You have slain a Blackspine Lizard}.
{Marks of Sin: 5/1000}.
***
Dust lay on the cave floor, gasping for air. Tears poured from his face and his skin felt like it was on fire where the creature's digestive juices had touched him. His clothes were in tatters, dissolved by the acid.
But he was alive.
He rolled onto his side and retched, expelling the foul fluids he had swallowed. The taste was beyond description.
If not for a stroke of luck once again, he would have breathed his last.
He grit his teeth.
'Five down.'
He had gathered just five Marks of Sin. Those numbers still seemed a bit pathetic compared to his goal of a thousand, but each one was sure to make him slightly stronger.
He could feel the changes, subtle but real.
His bones were denser now. His muscles were more efficient. His vision was sharper in the cave's dim light.
The transformation was slow, but it was happening.
Dust struggled to his feet and examined the Blackspine Lizard's corpse. The creature's armored hide was indeed thick, but he had found its weakness. The soft tissues inside its mouth and throat were vulnerable.
Every Abomination had weaknesses. He just had to be smart enough to find them. And desperate enough to exploit them.
He looked toward the cave entrance. Two creatures had found this place in less than a day. More would come, drawn by the scent of blood or simply seeking shelter.
Wounded predators looking for a safe place to recover.
They would find him instead. Dust sighed grimly and settled back. For now, he would be focused on treating his wounds and recovering before another battle broke out. Although the Dark-Ichor Chimera's hunting strategy was indeed brilliant, it had the strength to back up and defeat most of the prey it lured.
He, on the other hand, was rather weak.
But that would only be true for a moment.
The look of grim determination appeared in his eyes once again.
'Let them come.' he thought to himself.
He had a thousand marks that weren't going to collect themselves after all...
It was only once he'd caught his breath 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 his palm — slow, patient, wrong.
The moment his skin made full contact with it, the world tilted.
Voices filled his skull, layered over one another, neither of them his own:
*"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."*
He didn't know who was speaking. He didn't know who either name belonged to.
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. Curse acquired: 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.