Chapter 87: Necrophage

Chapter 87: Chapter 87: Necrophage Well, at least that didn’t hurt. Blaze thought, staring at his digit-less stump of a hand. The spear didn’t burn Blaze, it exploded in his hand. He got flung away with extreme force. His tendrils wrapped themselves around him to protect him. However, they were a tad bit late to protect his hand. Blaze’s body smashed into the crater wall, and his body shape got imprinted in it. Dust and debris rained over him, but apart from his missing right wrist, he didn’t feel any pain. The missing fingers didn’t worry him. He could always regenerate it from corpse consumption. A tendril shot towards a sprinter’s corpse and began feeding its body mass to Blaze. ...that’s odd. Back when he sliced his calf, the tendrils quickly regenerated it. However, this time was different. Blaze fed on an entire corpse, but his hand remained charred. He sent a tendril to another corpse. Yet, the result remained unchanged. Worried that he had lost the ability to regenerate, Blaze sliced a chunk of his biceps and fed on a corpse again. The missing muscles grew back in an instant. Let’s... try something else. In a bold move, Blaze sliced his forearm off. After feeding, most of the arm grew back, but not his fingers. Instead, the charred part grew back, stopping further regeneration. What the hell is this? When the spear descriptions said it was a weapon made to be used against the undead, it meant it. The explosion was a defense mechanism built to ensure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Because of its aura, no undead would dare to reach for it. Only Blaze was reckless enough to try. Thankfully, his tendrils wrapped around him in time, otherwise, things would have ended much worse than just losing his fingers. For Blaze, it was an alarming situation. After all, San Diego alone must have had over a dozen Headless creatures. He didn’t even want to think about how many of them would be all over the globe. If killing one Headless gave them the spear, he could only imagine how many chosen would get such a weapon. Wait, it’s not so easy. Blaze shook his head. The spear wasn’t just a reward for killing the Headless, but for soloing an evolved form of the creature. How many humans could survive such an encounter? None. Probably. Even Neha, who was a returner, couldn’t do it. How could someone else do it? Still, miracles happened everywhere. Blaze couldn’t leave luck out of the equation. As someone who always planned based on facts and numbers, luck always annoyed the hell out of Blaze, especially when it was working against him. I can come up with contingencies later. First, I need to do something about this. Blaze thought, waving his stump. Just then, another notification appeared before him. [Emergency response procedures activated.] [Apologies for the inconvenience.] [The subject’s physical nature triggered a protection mechanism on the weapon.] I figured that much. [The subject will be compensated shortly for the mishap.] Blaze waited for the system to give him the compensation. A minute passed, then another, and another. There was no news from the system. Finally, after five minutes, an unfamiliar screen appeared in front of his eyes. [Upon close inspection of the situation, the representative in charge of reward delivery has been executed.] [A compensation for the wrongful item delivery and another for unintentional harm will be awarded to the subject.] Before Blaze could make a sarcastic remark, the shattered pieces of the spear clashed together. Over time, they lost their fiery gold glow and turned black as a moonless sky. The shards fused together piece by piece, but they didn’t form a spear like before. At first, Blaze was confused as five tips formed from the weapon, but as the last piece clicked into place, his mouth hung open. It wasn’t a spear, but an arm, or a prosthetic. Its surface was black and rough, almost like charred bones, with some cracks. From those cracks, thin blue light pulsed and crawled like veins of lightning under the skin. It didn’t have a burning aura surrounding it. Instead, it was enveloped in black smoke coming out of the thing itself. [Accept this arm replacement as compensation.] The system chimed in, but Blaze wasn’t paying attention to it anymore. His right arm moved towards the floating arm on its own. As soon as he got close, the black arm split open. On the inside, it was full of teeth-like spikes. Blaze wanted to retract his arm, but it was too late. The black arm sank its teeth into what remained of his right arm. Blaze didn’t feel any pain, but he could feel the teeth gyrating around his arm as if the new arm was feeding on the old one. It didn’t replace the missing fingers, but Blaze’s entire arm. The black smoke around the limb thickened before disappearing into his body. The blue veins followed, disappearing under his skin. As if signaling the completion of the integration process. It’s... fleshy. Doesn’t feel like a prosthetic at all. Blaze clenched his new hand and threw a couple of punches into the air. He instantly felt the difference. The new arm was quicker. The neural impulses for the arm were faster than those of a human. It must be because of those blue veins. +++ Name: Necrophage Grade: Mythic Abilities: — Eater (Passive): Any living thing touched by the Necrophage suffers irreversible vitality loss up to 5% HP per contact. The hand bypasses all healing factors, armor, or biological regeneration. Lost vitality cannot be recovered by normal means. — Rot’s Branding (Active): Targets hit by the arm are marked as long as the wielder’s alive. Not even camouflage or changing bodies can hide the marked creature from the wielder. — Feast (Hybrid): Every confirmed kill on a living target restores the wielder’s stamina and speeds up rot-repair. After consuming enough vitality, the hand transforms into a charged form for 10 seconds per kill. — Bloom (Charged form exclusive): Any target who gets hit by the charged form of Necrophage three times within a minute dies inevitably as long as they’re the same or lower grade than the wielder. — Piercer (Charged form exclusive): The fingers can extend into razor-thin bone-like spikes capable of penetrating through Kevlar, steel plating, and bone as if it were wet paper. Particularly effective for directly piercing organs, arteries, or nerve clusters. — Unallocated slots: Offers two separate ability slots that the subject can fill with stolen abilities. (Collective’s Compensation.) Drawbacks: — Once attached, it cannot be removed under any circumstances. — The arm is its own entity and needs to be fed constantly. If not fed for a long duration, it began siphoning its wielder’s nucleus, killing them over time. +++