THE LION KING: THE FREAK

The Lion King: The Freak

Chapter 31: Nexus III: The Nightmare Cave

(Thanks for staying with me all this time.)

Nala was clinging to life--barely. Unconscious and short of breath, it seemed that she was suffering from internal injuries that were beyond the capacity of the core group to heal. Potentially, she had a number of severely broken bones and for that reason Freak didn't dare move her--he could very easily injure or even kill her if he did that.

It was just as well that Nala might not survive, though. Freak had done some serious stuff in his life, but he honestly didn't believe that he had it in him to tell the matriarch that her daughter was no more.

He didn't know what he'd say to Simba--provided, of course, that the former King would live that long... if he was even alive right then, as what remained of the core infiltrators gathered and licked their wounds, pondering their next move.

They couldn't sit still for long. Every second they wasted trying to heal was a second during which the odds of returning to an empty or overrun Pride Lands returned.

Freak looked across his forces. Ed, it seemed, had died upon impact; his form had simply lost all coherence when the rebels collided with him. Perhaps he'd thrown himself in between the Nomads and Roderik--but the old lion would never know for sure.

At least the Nomad leader was back on his feet and conscious, apparently not severely injured. His healing factor was great; that was largely why he'd managed to survive to such an age in the first place.

Aoi was alright. But Freak had left Usiku along for a minute too many.

The former assassin was not in mortal danger, but his fighting days were over--for good. Sarabi had survived and gotten along just fine with a paw missing, but going through life without a paw and going through life without a whole foreleg were two completely different things.

The hyena had taken an unfortunate blow just under the shoulder--his foreleg had twisted and dislocated, and that wasn't so bad in itself--but then, he'd struck a tree and shattered the misaligned bones of his foreleg into smithereens.

Now, Usiku's socket was broken beyond repair. So was what used to fit into it.

The limb was doomed and if left attached to the hyena's body, it would literally rot him from the inside out. So, with that in mind, Usiku had gritted his teeth and taken his own foreleg off without so much as wincing.

To be fair, however, he wasn't a complete BAMF--when he was done the gruesome task, leaving all of the core invaders except for Freak gaping in an odd mixture of revulsion and respect, he asked, in a very, very thin voice, if someone could come and help him stop bleeding before he passed out.

Roderik and Aoi were the only ones left. Besides Freak, of course--but he was always there.

The li-tigon sat still with his face blank, hiding all the sadness in his heart away--at least for the moment. He would think about what had been lost in the Forbidden Island later, when the battle was done and the dust had settled and when the dead had been buried. But right then, the Pride Landers and the Nomads were still being killed--the cries of battle and death reached the core group all the way from Pride Rock.

"It's time to get moving," Freak said, approximately twenty seconds after gathering the group up and ensuring that Usiku was relatively stable. "We have to get to their leader... he's on the other side of the Forbidden Island." The li-tigon saw questions on his friends' lips but he did not explain how he knew that--because he wasn't sure. But he did know that he knew it like he knew that the Nightmare Cave that Dietz had told him about would create a new standard for horror and angst in fanfiction.

He let a breath out of his nose all at once, flexing the lower halves of his forelegs. His injuries had healed, mostly, in what he assumed were the final benefits that the act of killing a rebel Nomad brought with it--now, he could only move with the speed and agility that he'd known all of his life.

In just a few hours, Freak had aged years--and the same might be said for Aoi and perhaps even Roderik as well (although, at his age, a few years was really not a significant period of time at all). The li-tigon was not gray-maned, but his coat no longer seemed to have the sleekness, the shininess that was associated with a cat in the prime of his life. He looked old, or frayed--sort of stretched, like butter spread over too much toast.

Even the scar on his face seemed more tattered and dark than it usually did.

Maybe things would reverse themselves when the battle was fought and the Forbidden Island was rendered an area no more evil than the rest of the Land of the Spirits. Freak felt that they would for the core group--but not for him. There was a strange sort of finality to the appearance that had suddenly been thrown on him; the li-tigon had changed his body radically once before in his lifetime--and after this change, that was it. He'd look the way he presently did for the rest of his life, probably: a tired middle-aged feline with bags under his eyes who had done and seen far, far too much.

The attitude of someone that was permanently down and out, however, could come later. And when it did, Freak imagined that he really wouldn't have it in him to resist. What was yet to happen that day would change him forever.

Bodies lay by the hundreds at Kifo's feet.

But hundreds more remained--and if the demon didn't kill them, then they'd go to kill the Pride Landers.

And, so, despite the fact that it was no hard to hold back the bile rapidly rising in his throat, he fought on.

He was running out of gas, though, and each passing second made this fact progressively clearer than the last. His weapons--now nothing more than crappy Chinese AKs--locked up frequently, failing to fire and feed often and at the worst times. Kifo only managed to avoid injury by running fast, ignoring the protests of the thickened muscles of his quadriceps and calves--though he couldn't stop himself from panting and he couldn't pretend that the hazy blur superimposed onto his vision was due to anger anymore because it was due to fatigue.

Now, Kifo was having a hard time producing even ammunition.

He wouldn't give up, though--he'd die fighting, and when that would happen was quite soon. The forces of darkness had completely enveloped him and were only kept at bay by wild, poorly-aimed blows with fists and swords. Clamoring, the Forbidden invaders waited for the moment when the demon would collapse or lose balance--they didn't have to be overly aggressive now that there was no escape for him. Instead, they could just take turns attacking the demon from various sides while a great many of their numbers peeled off to back up the offensive at Pride Rock, where the lions and hyenas there fought on still.

Kifo's efforts were quickly losing relevance. But even the anger caused by the realization of that fact didn't motivate him, didn't overwhelm the helplessness and weakness that he knew he would die with.

Finally the demon dropped to a knee and didn't get up. Breathing heavily, he felt the blows start to come--and now even the pathetically weak hordes of darkness could take--at least to a degree--the punishment his limbs dished out. The walls pressed in around him, getting inexorably closer and closer--

And then he was saved by perhaps the most unlikely of characters.

Why they paid any attention to her at all was difficult to say. At best she could take down two or three of the invaders before she was shot, stabbed, or beaten down and mauled in some other terrible way--so maybe it was because they sensed, somehow, that she was something more than a helpless, defenseless little kitten. Maybe they knew that even if the worst happened and they failed and died--if they managed to kill her, they'd still win in the end.

Whatever it was, though, drew at least eighty percent of the dark warriors assigned to the task of finishing Kifo off away to pursue Kochai with the flagrant intent to kill her.

The demon realized this. And it gave him the strength and the will to stand up, just for a moment; he had to see if Kochai was doing alright--if she could get away then he could allow himself to die, but if not...

And then he saw a divot get blown out of the ground inches from the kitten's tail. Someone with an autoloading shotgun was gunning for her, and his aim was getting better by the moment.

Kifo vaguely noticed that some of the several dozen fighters in his immediate vicinity were working on getting the tip of a spear more than a centimeter or so into his back. He ignored it and focused on calming himself down--he couldn't let his emotions control him, but he could let them power him.

The demon felt blood run through his veins again, hot and alive... and red. The Lion Sheikh has specified, before, that Kifo's blood was black--but now, inexplicably, it was red: almost like he was human again.

Well. Whatever had caused the sudden change wasn't bad, clearly, because Kifo felt more powerful than he ever had before. Breathing rapidly, he took up a new weapon and lowered his shoulder, running directly through perhaps ten Forbidden fighters. With an M249 Para in his hands, the demon started to run and gun, concentrating his fire just above the heads of the crowd of warriors chasing Kochai--if the tigress was hit by a single bullet, it would be game over. Kifo could afford to miss over half of his shots, provided that those that did make contact clipped his enemies in the head.

The demon's feet tore into the ground as he ran, causing deep, distinctive tracks to follow him as he moved to catch up with Kochai's attackers. The closer he got the more rapidly he could fire, until his finger did not let off the trigger for a second. To be sure, he was getting shot in return and when he got closer yet, he imagined that he'd take hits from spears and swords and other hand-to-hand weapons. He shook off his injuries and his pain, though--when Kochai was safe he would allow himself to collapse. When Kochai was safe, he could allow himself to die.

Freak had entered the Forbidden Island with six. Now, two were dead and one of the two that were grievously injured might well die at any time--only two were in any condition to follow him toward the heart of the Forbidden Island.

And they had a lot of hard work before them.

Conditions rapidly grew darker and even less normal as the three best hopes of the Land of the Spirits and its residents continued forward. Odd, unnatural sounds echoed through the mist and shadows around them but they couldn't afford to be intimidated into retreat.

Not yet, anyway.

Freak spoke, then, in a tone that no one had ever really heard him use before. It was neither curt and abrupt nor somewhat slow and thoughtful--he adopted a cadence that was irregular and somewhat monotonous, and rather less deep than what was normal. It was the voice of a poet, not a Warrior King--but it fit with the sad, reluctant smile that the li-tigon offered his two companions.

"We're going to go to a very dangerous place," he informed the two lions. "I didn't learn much about it... but... I don't expect all of us to make it through. I won't back down, I swear," the li-tigon said. "But... if it gets to be... too much... no one will fault you for leaving and going to help in the Pride Lands."

There was no point in protesting; the looks Aoi and Roderik gave Freak told him that they, would not abandon him... unless, well, if they really couldn't go on, then there was no point in trying, was there?...

Their pace was rapid but cautious, because they knew that they were far from their goal and were likely to be attacked at any time. Soon, it grew cold--and this is not a subjective statement made by the Lion Sheikh on behalf of the African cats. No, the temperature had dropped to just above forty degrees Fahrenheit--but, bizarrely, the humidity was high. Simply moving caused the warm feline bodies to collide with miniscule droplets of water suspended in the air, forcing them to shiver to keep warm even as they ran on.

They were moving through a marsh, and although almost anything was preferable to trudging through the murky, algae-covered water that covered several square miles of the Forbidden Island, there was no alternative. Freak felt the mud beneath suck at his paws but he moved too fast to sink in--his mind was only on his goal.

Their path through the darkness was without resistance--and then they came to it all at once; its black, gaping maw emerged out of nowhere.

"The Nightmare Cave." Freak came to a gradual halt, glancing to both flanking cats to tell them to do the same. He moved forward, involuntarily shaking his paws before standing at the entrance of that dank-smelling chasm.

The cave, it seemed, was not made entirely out of rock. Rather, the crumbling structure of the entrance was made out of packed soil littered with decaying organic matter. Freak tried not to pay too much to how much the entrance seemed to resemble the jaws of something that had died, been buried, and then dug up years later.

But the similarities were striking. A few collapsing fingers of stone and earth looked stunningly like twisted, elongated fangs--and then there was the smell.

The putrid odor was nearly impossible to cope with without vomiting or simply leaving, sickened. Freak had never smelled anything so foul in his life--the very air he was breathing was a toxic fume. Horribly, there was a caustic feeling in the atmosphere, like every exposed part of his body was being dissolved--or digested.

Freak swallowed. And for some reason, that action did not comfort him.

"What is this place?" Aoi asked. She'd covered her nose with a paw and seemed queasy, and therefore unsteady on her feet. Terror was visible in the way her prominently green eyes seemed to vibrate within their sockets; the lioness was scared out of her mind. And she hadn't even taken a step into the grotesque hole yet.

"As I said," the li-tigon replied, coolly, taking a testing step forward. Nothing particularly horrible happened to him, however, so he turned to speak to the lioness over his shoulder. "It's called the Nightmare Cave. That's all I got out of Dietz... I don't know what's inside. Maybe it has something to do with nightmares..."

That made Freak think--Dietz might have assumed that he'd spent his life being haunted by dreaming about his admittedly barbaric actions. If he had, he'd been entirely incorrect because Freak had never had a nightmare in his life.

For him, maybe this cave was just another musty hole to navigate through before he could have his goal.

Maybe.

Freak lifted a paw to his muzzle, though, carefully looking into the depths before him. He could see nothing--just black emptiness. As the smell of death wrapped around him, placing a cloth against his mouth and pressing so that the li-tigon found it hard to breathe, he searched for something--anything.

But there was a dropoff, or perhaps some kind of thick curtain that prevented light from entering or escaping. Freak's eyes were powerful and well-suited to night operations, but he saw nothing--he heard nothing, either, and the aroma that the Lion Sheikh has described was completely homogenous.

In short, the li-tigon's senses were useless and would likely remain so until he entered the cave.

Roderik said something then that Freak never heard. The li-tigon replied--he believed--but he forgot what happened to him in the next seconds because his mind was all at once and entirely engulfed by the fact that he had just stepped into the Nightmare Cave.

There was, it seemed, some sort of wall between the Nightmare Cave and the rest of the world. To be sure, there was a strong sense of uneasy souls and death about the Forbidden Island in general--the core invaders had cross a wall of sorts by simply entering it--but nothing could compare to the leap Freak made when he entered the Nightmare Cave.

It was like all of the life had been sucked out of him before his body was allowed to pass. And then, what constituted Freak as a person was returned, slowly, and incompletely.

When he returned to his body, Freak was panting and shivering and struggling to catch his breath. He saw stars and fell over, paws weakly twitching as he tried to get up--but bright splotches of white and blue swam across his vision and through his mind, seeking out and sucking away anything but cold, complete terror.

Something wet was clinging to his cheek--mud. Freak blinked and tried to clear his vision, but his body would not react as it was supposed to.

Pathetically, the li-tigon groaned, attempting to tell Aoi and Roderik to stay back. His voice came out slurred and muffled by the thick slime; fingernail-sized chunks of the soil mixture sprayed from around his mouth as the low, incoherent moan continued for several seconds more. That brief period of time dragged on, and on, and on; Freak was suffering though he wasn't exactly in grievous physical pain. He felt completely worn and tired and defeated: even his coat seemed to sag, only barely attached to his frame by a few sparse bits of connective tissue.

His hearing was gone. A dull, high-pitched ringing had taken its place, continuing to reverberate through the li-tigon's skull for a long, long time.

And then--slowly--the world returned. It did not do in some constant, predictable way. Rather, little bits and pieces of what the li-tigon had come to regard as reality returned at random--his ability to perceive one tone, for example, would come back immediately preceded by the feeling at the tip of his tail. Daltonism held out for so long that Freak felt certain his ability to perceive color would not return, until shades comprised by red and green imbricated into the rest of the li-tigon's vision.

Freak moved one paw. Then he moved the other. And then, slowly, he pressed against the soggy decay beneath him and he stood up on weak and cold but resolute limbs.

He was cold and he was shaking, but he was alive. After taking a few moments to collect himself, ensuring that his body was in the best shape possible, the li-tigon turned around.

He was not surprised by what he saw.

Seeing their leader fall to the ground, convulsing, both Aoi and Roderik had moved to help. They'd assumed that he'd taken some sort of attack--maybe he'd been shot by some unseen gunner with a suppressed weapon; whatever it was, he was down and needed defending. This is what had drawn both lions into the Nightmare Cave.

Now they were both fifty yards away, gaunt and pale and hyperventilating. Aoi was crying noiselessly; clear tears rolled down her pale cheeks without her realization while she resisted the very strong urge to continue to run until she was out of the Forbidden Island entirely--she'd entered the Nightmare Cave for no more than a split second. But in that time she had felt things that she simply could not deal with.

Freak turned to Roderik--the old lion was in no better of a condition than the White Sands female. He supported himself against a tree and struggled to look up while blood dripped out of his mouth, slowly running down his chin and his neck to blossom out through his mane.

Aoi said something then. But Freak couldn't hear it--in fact, he noted, he couldn't hear anything outside of the Nightmare Cave; from within the dark depths came a low, malicious sort of buzz but that was the only thing the li-tigon could hear apart from his own bodily functions.

The lioness seemed to realize what was going on when Freak tilted his head and tapped his ear with a paw, signaling that he couldn't hear. She approached--somewhat--before Roderik managed to follow her, stumbling to a messy halt fifteen or so yards from the Cave's entrance.

Freak was more disciplined than most--the Lion Sheikh assumes that a great many of us might let a word or two slip out when trying to mouth and mime instructions to someone on the opposite side of a thick piece of glass, for example. Freak, however, kept absolutely quiet and simply explained, calmly, slowly, that Aoi and Roderik were to go back to the Pride Lands and do what they could--he would go after the Master of darkness alone.

As the li-tigon spoke, he acknowledged to himself that he had guessed that things were fated to end up like that anyway. Freak had already fought and defeated his twin--in a way--and he had done that alone. As the Warrior King of not only the Pride Lands, but the entire Land of the Spirits... it was his responsibility to confront the dark Master--his responsibility alone.

And so there was no surprise and no new fear when Aoi and Roderik wished him good luck before running to the southeast. There was no purpose in going back to Usiku and Nala to inform them of the situation, and the less time they took to get back the better--even the battle plains laid out for the Pride Landers were not perfect. They could not hold out forever.

There was no reason for Freak to keep waiting. He had to get moving.

Now that he'd entered the Nightmare Cave and tempered himself to the fact that he could only use perhaps fifteen percent of his mind--the rest was occupied either with screaming at him, begging him to leave posthaste or resisting the same efforts--things weren't so bad. To be sure, the lack of visibility was hard to cope with. So was the increasingly rank odor that stifled his breath.

Freak tried not to think of what he might be stepping on as he continued forward. Presumably, there were walls around him but he could not see them--judging from the way sound failed to echo, however, he was not in a large enclosure of any sort. It was probable that he was in a tunnel of some sort, but the li-tigon could not reasonably guess at its size. Any echolocative abilities he had were rendered useless by the fact that his surroundings were not hard wood or stone--they absorbed sound to great effect.

For some time, it actually seemed possible that Freak's ordeal was simply what it appeared to be--an unknowably amount of time spent wandering around in the foul darkness until he found his way out of the Cave. He tried to keep his mind clear, however, forcing himself not to think too much about anything. There wasn't the intuitive prickling at the back of his neck that told him that he was being watched--but still, Freak's spidey-sense was tingling. Something was keeping track of him; it was observing him curiously rather than intently. He didn't know what was going on or how or why, but he was sure that something was coming. Something was coming soon.

The temperature had increased somewhat, but it was still uncomfortably cold. Freak had been in darkness more complete than anything else he'd ever known--so the slightest, most distant ray of light made him look up in surprise. There was something there, something in the Nightmare Cave--it was around a corner approximately... no, Freak couldn't tell how far away the dim glow was because he had no frame of reference. He couldn't even extrapolate the distance from how blurred the lit parts of the Cave were because there was no definition to the Cave's walls. It might have been five hundred yards or five thousand; it probably wasn't closer than that.

Freak knew that he was almost certainly walking into a trap, but the Nightmare Cave itself was a trap. Besides, there wasn't really anywhere else he could go besides toward the light--the li-tigon tested this by purposefully changing his bearing to approximately ten degrees to the right of the far-off glow. He felt his shoulder press into the spongy, moist interior of the Cave and knew that there was only one place to go.

His guard was up, not just in preparation of some kind of direct assault by a living being--the li-tigon imagined himself taking a wrong step and plunging down and down and won straight into Hell and changed the way he walked so that most of his weight was on his hind legs.

He walked for perhaps ten minutes--he kept track, or at least he thought he did, by counting off the seconds not in his head but out loud, very quietly, linearly correlating each successive second to the way he breathed. In this manner, the li-tigon probably kept a relatively accurate count of the time that had passed--he didn't trust the internal activities of his mind to work properly in a place like this.

The closer Freak got, the more nauseated and ill he felt--but he didn't stop. Everyone was in danger and the only one that could fix things was him. Everyone was counting on him to go on.

With a foreboding thrill, Freak dropped into a defensive stance that put his center of gravity well below his feet--it would be hard to knock him down when he was standing like that, and although retaliatory capacities were severely hampered, Freak could defend himself and avoid serious injury easily. Now that he was once again moving normally, rather than at warp speed, the li-tigon had bear in mind that he was not a superman anymore.

For that reason, when the first living being he'd encountered in the Nightmare Cave showed itself, Freak was ready for it.

The canine jumped out of the lit part of the cave, still around the corner and out of Freak's view. It was only visible for a split second, barking loudly and snarling to tell the li-tigon to stay away--it left as suddenly as it had appeared, turning and sprinting back to where it had come from. Something, clearly, had called it back.

Freak didn't go on, however, not for a full second. He was shocked by what he'd seen, although he couldn't be sure of--well, anything. It had seemed, however, that the creature that had exposed itself to him was as dead as it was alive--and it wasn't like the weird, but somewhat cutesy zombies that he'd encountered in the Bloody Shadows. What he had just seen was twisted and demonic, even more so than Kifo could ever have hoped to be.

...But it was probably just a trick of the light, or perhaps some kind of suggestion implanted into the li-tigon's mind by whatever power controlled the goings-on of the Nightmare Cave. What he'd just seen was probably nothing more than a dog--maybe it looked a little odd, but so what? Freak could take on a practically unlimited number of dogs, even in a place and situation like this. After all, he'd spent weeks in the Desert learning to do just that under the tutelage of his grandmother. He was the one that had turned the tides of battles and wars over and over and over again--he wasn't afraid of dogs, no matter if they walked as if alive with their chests split open for him to look at what lay inside.

Freak began to move again, albeit rather more slowly than he would have preferred to. The closer he got to the bend in the tunnel--now he had a good idea of how far away it was--the more his nose told him that there were, in fact, several dogs there. He'd adapted to the foul pit into which he'd fallen, at least to a degree, and that was good. Freak knew the benefits of fighting on one's home turf, so he'd always strived to make whatever was his battleground his home as well.

What was lighting the twisting path ahead was unclear; Freak imagined that it was some sort of bioluminescence judging from its color and lack of intensity. He didn't think it was important, however, and for that reason the li-tigon kept his eyes focused on an area in space just a few inches in front of his nose--like this, it would take him a second to focus on any given entity, it was true, but he was extremely unlike to miss any motion even at the extreme ends of his peripheral vision.

Freak was prepared to defend himself, but he was not prepared to attack in any manner. So, in a way, he was put in a disadvantage when he rounded the corner to see what was going on in full clarity.

The li-tigon's eyes had not misled him, it seemed. The dog he'd seen really was every bit as unnatural as it had appeared--but the Lion Sheikh does not wish to decrease the momentum of this passage by indulging his readers with a lengthy description. When Freak saw what had the dogs' attention, his heart stopped--and then kicked into overdrive.

What he was seeing made no sense. But this was the Nightmare Cave--the regular laws of logic and nature did not apply.

There was a cliff to one side of a large, gaping cavity in the middle of the Cave. The rock there was solid, but tilted--the cliff's peaks were at least 80 degrees or so with respect to the horizontal ground. At the point where it was closest to the ground, the cliff got to within thirty feet of the rotting, wet bottom of the Nightmare Cave--and that was close enough to make the ravenous pack of dogs waiting below salivate and make constantly higher advances up the sheer rock face.

The reason was, of course, that a meal was waiting to drop down to them. And that meal was none other than Sikia.

Seeing her in the flesh... Freak couldn't think straight for a moment. He held back any serious physical response, however, until he realized that the lioness's grip on the rock face was not going to last--slowly, but surely, she was slipping. Her feet scrambled against the cliffside in a desperate but unsuccessful bid for purchase--there was no stopping the inevitable and only very little delaying it.

Freak could have passed the dogs by--if he was in a normal part of the Land of the Spirits. Here, however, there was an impossibly strong force pressing him to engage the dogs and the li-tigon knew that that's what he had to do.

This, it seemed, would be his first nightmare. Freak confronted it defiantly, however, announcing his presence and intentions with a powerful roar--in response, the dogs turned and stared, for a moment, before spreading out into a well thought-out formation.

Meanwhile, however, Sikia stopped crying and turned, eyes wide--and then she lost her grip. Yet, the lioness didn't realize this, even as she fell, with increasing speed, toward the ground and the dogs and a violent fate. She was too surprised and too busy smiling and laughing that Freak was coming to save her yet again.

The Forbidden invaders did not let up. Into the Pride Lands they poured by the thousands; almost all of them died within seconds of getting within range of the Pride Landers' or Kifo's attacks. Still, they did their share, wearing down the defending forces and sapping at their energy--they killed a few, yes, but the real killing would begin soon enough.

The defenders were alive and kicking, and still at good strength. They'd fought long and hard enough to drastically thin the ranks of the invading darkness, but there was no time to relax or exchange accolades--because now, the Forbidden Island's final warriors were marching on Pride Rock.

These weren't the ragtag crowd of brawlers that had admittedly made a good deal of headway in the Pride Lands--these were truly frightening opponents.

In general, they were human, although there were a significant number of other species represented in the best the Forbidden Island had to offer. Armed with good weapons--not the knockoff junk that was standard fare for the rest of the military--they were also armored and in some cases equipped with secondary and even tertiary weapons, such as pistols and blades.

They also had carefully-applied red tattoos on their foreheads and arms and chests. It seemed that the Master of darkness had been doing his homework; paint-spells were now within his capacity as well.

How, the Lion Sheikh hears his readers ask, did this powerful force get into position--in the immediate vicinity of Pride Rock--without being noticed? The answer is simple: they entered the area invisibly. Even then, half of the impressively-built warriors were difficult to see even from close range--and they would be the ones that kicked down the door, so to speak, to allow their more obvious comrades entry into Pride Rock so that the killing could really begin.

One might wonder why the Forbidden forces at large simply didn't amass near Pride Rock and open fire to reduce their enemies' hideout into rubble. The answer was simple--Pride Rock itself was invulnerable, and the more basic laws of the Land of the Spirits still held--it was an area where an external force could not do violence. No amount of snipers or racketeers could have done anything to touch the monolith or the beings that fought there--not without opening themselves up to attack as well.

This level of protection was the only thing that kept the invasion from being a shoe-in for the forces of darkness. The Pride Landers and their Nomadic and Desert friends were able to engage their opponents in a choke point--in this manner, they kept their enemies at bay. While it was true that the killing was not as rapid as it had been when they were out in the open, they weren't in very much danger either--in fact, not a single friendly fatality had been incurred since they'd fallen back to Pride Rock.

That was true, of course, until the unexploded ordnance left at the peak of the massive structure had fallen down, taking everyone in the area by surprise.

Oh, the front had been re-established--but there weren't many lions and hyenas that had avoided a debilitating blast of disease and bacteria.

Uvuli had, somehow. She had been at the front lines when the sneak attack had been launched for that reason, she hadn't noticed what was going on for a few seconds. After taking a karambit to the cheek, however, the young female had leapt back and applied pressure to the deep cut so that it would coagulate and allow her to get back in the game as soon as possible.

It was at that point that she realized that some of her most beloved friends were literally being eaten alive.

Imagine the young female's shock and horror as she came face to face with Shenzi--one who she'd always looked up to--as the former Outlands leader struggled to scrape a growing swath of rotting flesh and pus from her head, succeeding only in spreading the damage to her paws. Now, Shenzi was on the ground, agonized and delirious from her wound--and there was nothing that Uvuli or anyone else could do for her.

As the husk of gray fur and bones that had once been a wise and resilient leader shriveled up, threatening to burst into flame from the powerful exothermic reactions taking place within, Uvuli turned back to the fight with her mind carefully numbed. She focused on doing nothing more than dodging and blocking and hitting back, or at least she tried to. No matter what, she couldn't get the image of her practical big sister's face, inches away, rotting and burning and dying from within.

Freak saw Sikia drop and felt time slow down. He did not break with precedent, however--somehow he recalled with stunning clarity that he did not open his mouth and shout a long, loud, and quite emphatic "no." Rather, the li-tigon saved his breath and used the oxygen left in his lungs to pump power to his legs, because he had to move fast.

The dogs, it seemed, were not completely rational--rather than facing their threat and engaging it with the violence and will necessary to remove it, their focus changed the moment it became clear that Sikia was no longer out of reach. Perhaps that was wise, in a way--if they could kill the lioness before Freak could get to them, then the li-tigon would have no reason to attack them. Not while he had a far more pressing objective than simple revenge, anyway.

The test of gravity versus muscle and determination honed to a razor-sharp edge by years of practice, training, and observation was contentious to the last second. Approximately halfway into her fall, Sikia realized what was going on and turned around in midair, so that at the very least she'd land in position to defend or attack as necessary. She was still accelerating, of course--the brief distance from the cliff to the ground was nowhere near what it would take for her to reach terminal velocity. Freak, on the other hand, now had a warm start and was simply working on speeding up more and more and more--If he could get one swipe on one hyena he'd be doing a lot to help Sikia, much less if he could lower his shoulder and barrel through them all.

What neither the li-tigon nor the lioness had prepared for, however, was what happened next.

Instead of staying where they were and waiting for Sikia to come to them, the dogs attacked, and not in a manner that Freak could possibly have expected.

They jumped, it was true, but the simple upward motion was not enough to carry them to their prey. What allowed them to attack Sikia was the fact that their snouts, horribly, were attached by stretchy ligaments to the rest of their skulls. Some muscle launched the dogs' mouths and teeth forward, trailing saliva and blood and rot until they clamped down on the lioness.

She was screaming before she hit the ground; her form was broken by the shocking assault. Reflexively, Sikia had tried to dodge and was partially successful--one pair of jaws flew past her, doing no more harm than grazing the side of her fair, tawny fur. The rest of the living projectiles, however, found their mark and the lioness was bit on the foreleg, hind paw, side, and the fleshy area just next to her shoulder blade.

Freak saw this, accepted it, and recognized that Sikia was already taking severe flesh damage from the dogs' immensely powerful jaws. The li-tigon had learned the hard way that the canines of the Dark Forest could bite hard, a lot harder than he could. Presumably, this ability evolved due to the canines' lack of size and large, purpose-built fangs like those Freak had used with deadly results ever since the day he was born.

The lioness landed in an injured, bloody mess and in response the dogs retracted their jaws, giving her a heartbeat of respite. That, of course, wasn't enough for Sikia to get back to her feet--she only had time to look up to see her salivating attackers reseat their most powerful weapons inside their skulls before lunging at her with unthinking, unshakeable intent.

That was when Freak arrived.

Instead of stopping and engaging each of the attackers individually, he simply careened through all of the dogs on his left side, preventing Sikia from being surrounded. He did so in his own signature way--by smashing his head down at the last second, the li-tigon felt the grim satisfaction of knowing that he's collapsed the first dog's chest, causing several of his internal organs to rupture or outright burst, dripping viscous, colorful fluid onto the ground below.

Freak kept running, however, rather than simply taking his enemies to the ground and breaking off that attack to clear a perimeter around Sikia. It wouldn't take much more to convert the blow he was dealing from a palpable strike to a real turn of the table--so the li-tigon trusted Sikia to protect herself at least for the moment. He'd be with her again as soon as he could.

Unfortunately, his enemies recovered quickly and seemed to sense what was coming. The dogs squirmed about, so that even was Freak reached forward to wrap his mighty forelegs around the bundle of flesh in front of him, two cleanly escaped. They ignored the li-tigon the second they were on their feet, however, and simply raced back toward Sikia--Freak, apparently, wasn't the only one that could keep his eye on the ball.

Although it was tough to get traction on the yielding, heavily organic ground in the Nightmare Cave, Freak managed. Every muscle and vein in his legs was highlighted, then, as he forced his enemies forward, digging his claws deep into their flesh. His own forelegs were attacked, ineffectively, but this scarcely even registered to the li-tigon--he felt no pain.

Since the cliff Sikia had been dangling off of was only feet away, there was still plenty of rock left in the area the Freak slammed his enemies into. There was a sickly crunch and slight explosion as hair was forced from lungs and blood vessels popped from being overloaded--but the li-tigon did not believe that he'd killed the three dogs that had remained in his grasp, not by a longshot.

To be sure, he'd crushed his enemies into the semi-solid wall in front of him, and that was helpful. While they struggled to escape, Freak could severely injured them to the point that when they came out they would be easy to take down--and that meant that he could get back to Sikia that much more quickly. So, considering his options, the li-tigon took a few steps back--what was the best way to press his advantage?

The answer seemed obvious. His headbutt had worked well to change both the momentum of the fight and severely injure at least one of his enemies--so why not follow up with another similar attack?

With that in mind, Freak began to run again. He struck the dog closest to him directly in the side again, and although that canine's chest was mostly liquid already, Freak felt that he'd landed another serious blow. This battle was far from decided--he could still save Sikia, but to do that, he had to forget about her for the moment.

The li-tigon ignored the indescribable liquid slowly rolling down his forehead and turned to face the two dogs that had fallen away from him. He glanced to the side before assuming a broad but not low fighting stance--he wanted to be ready to move and attack, not dodge and defend.

The three that he'd smashed into the wall were pawing about in the soil and air, both so dark and rotten that they often mixed without Freak's notice. It would be safe to ignore them for the moment--and Freak was confident that he could finish two dogs in short order, no matter how demonic they were.

For a moment, though, the li-tigon simply watched the way his foes moved. Now that he was engaging him in a simple paw-to-paw fight rather than a bum rush, he had to know what tactics they were likely to use.

Their motions were surprisingly fluid although not particularly agile. In a rough semicircle, the two canines paced across the ground before Freak, strategically placed either directly between him and Sikia or in a position to stop him from getting to her in short order. Their tongues--at least two and a half times as long as normal--flickered out of their mouths in sporadic and strange patterns, the twin barbs at the end stretching out toward Freak.

They were sizing him up as well.

Freak was about to attack when he took note of a somewhat significant fact that would force him to change the way he thought about and executed the fight. In general, Freak relied on his sheer physical mass to hold his enemies down while he tore them apart with his teeth; when he was younger or in a hurry or outnumbered he resorted to speed and agility.

All of these general strategies, however, would have to be severely reconsidered if not simply thrown out. The dogs had two sets of limbs: forelegs and hindlegs ending in bald, clawed paws. But they also had a set of... appendages, perhaps, located in the geometric centers of their bodies.

Two large, deadly claws on either side of the dogs poked out of scabbed holes in their chests. Mounted on boney "fingers", Freak imagined that they could be deployed extremely quickly and with reasonable power. The idea of having one of those daggers plunged into a fleshy part of his body--or perhaps between two ribs--was fairly concerning. And so, the li-tigon simply hissed, dangerously, and swiped at the air for a moment.

And then he knew what to do.

One style of fighting that he'd never properly learned was that of the Pride Lands. The Desert style of winning fights involved acrobatic leaping and spinning in the air and the Hindustani way tended toward circling, mostly, punctuated by brief but intense contests of wrestling and biting.

He'd observed that Aoi tended toward a high volume of claw strikes and open-paw strikes to destroy her enemies' balance before finishing things with tearing but relatively shallow bites. And the Nomads seemed to react more than anything else, ducking and dodging and landing hits on their opponents weapons until their disarmed enemies could be dispatched with minimal risk.

But the Pride Landers... they fought with power more than anything else.

Their blows were never backed up by anything less than eighty percent of their full strength. Whether it was throws, or bites, or strikes that were designed to bash and batter more than cut, taking even a single hit from a Pride Lander was an experience that wouldn't be forgotten.

Maybe this was the way Freak ought to fight these mutants.

He tested this manner of fighting in his mind, for a second, and then raced toward the nearest dog.

Freak was prepared for the counterattack that was launched in his direction. The canine's jaws shot out so quickly that if Freak didn't see them--he simply saw a blur near the dog's mouth and threw his head to one side. When a wave of displaced air rushed past him, Freak brought his paw up and grabbed the tube of muscle and connective tissue that powered and attached the dog's mouth to the rest of its body.

That move was unexpected, and the li-tigon's enemies were taken off-guard. Freak followed up, though, and rather than pulling his enemy in he simply bit, hard, yanking his jaws to the side when his teeth met flesh.

A small explosion of blood told the li-tigon that his tactic had worked perfectly; now the dog was injured and lacking in one major weapon. Freak released the slippery flesh in his paw, allowing it to recoil uselessly back into the dog's head--the whole time, he focused not on the damage he had done but on his next move. Sikia could not hold out for long.

Getting flanked was pretty dangerous, particularly by foes such as these. The other dog's jaws were fully functional and while occupied with the injured dog, Freak could all too easily take a shot to the neck. He'd have to be very careful to get past these two without injury.

With that in mind, the li-tigon feinted toward the uninjured canine before dodging to the side and racing toward the hurt canine. As he did, he felt a presence rush past him and knew that he'd evaded a deadly wound.

It was difficult to imagine the state of the dogs Freak had pushed through the wall. The one right in front of him was sickly; the grimy ends of its ribs stuck out from a sunken-in chest dotted, sporadically, with mangy, dirty fur. Despite that, however, it was clear that the animal had a great deal of strength--Freak could see the muscles rolling beneath its skin with startling ease. He couldn't underestimate his foes or take anything for granted around them, regardless of how badly Sikia needed him.

Rather than striking horizontally with his paw, Freak surprised his enemy by feinting, again, and then striking upward with his other paw. For a second, only Freak's hindpaws were on the ground--but his blow connected directly where it was supposed to.

The dog's throat was slit open from bottom up. The deep wound that Freak gouged into its neck cut through muscle, nerve, and cartilage--and if the canine had been alive, then he would have been alive for only seconds longer.

But Freak was fighting a demon. And though the ferocious slash gave Freak a momentary advantage, the fight was not over.

Indeed, now that the distance between himself and the dog had closed, Freak was no long invulnerable from assault. For a moment, the li-tigon tried to dance out of range, but it was to no avail.

A paw, somewhat diminutive in size, lifted off the ground and rested in the air next to Freak's face for the briefest second.

Then, the li-tigon saw stars.

He came to flying through the air, but recovered quickly and twisted about to land on his feet. Tasting blood and feeling a bruise spread across the side of his face, Freak hissed, instinctively, and contemplated his next move.

He couldn't block attacks like that, and he couldn't really dodge them either. These two simple caveats severely limited the li-tigon's options, but he would have to manage.

The mental clock Freak had started at the beginning of the conflict suggested that no more than ten seconds had passed since Sikia had hit the floor. She could probably hold out for another forty--so Freak could still save her... maybe.

There was a flicker of movement behind the li-tigon. Realizing what it was immediately, he jumped and lashed out with his most powerful brute-force weapon--his hind leg.

The small striking end that was Freak's paw struck the other dog Freak was engaging directly in the lower jaw at precisely the moment when the canine had shot its mouth toward Freak. As a result, the transfer of kinetic energy that occurred was so great that when the li-tigon was on the ground again his own paw actually stung from dull pain... but it had done its job.

As Freak watched the shattered mandibles of his second enemy trail, useless and limp across the floor before snapping back into place, he saw how he was going to win the fight--and so without waiting for some concern or consideration to delay him, the li-tigon jumped into action.

The blow Freak threw next was obvious, perhaps insultingly so, but his enemy did not dodge. The striped feline rose into the air, drawing his paw back and letting loose a mind-numbing roar--and then he struck with all the force of a thunderbolt.

The li-tigon's paw, every bit as developed and massive as his grandfather's, arced through the air too quickly to be seen. It struck the dog's face and slowed down the slightest bit; the sheer mass of Freak's padded appendage overwhelmed his slender foe completely.

The blow broke several bones at least and threw the dog's entire body to the side, but Freak didn't give the downed canine a chance to recover or strike back. He dived forward, pinning the canine to the ground in a strange but extremely effective mixture of the ancestral knowledge his lion quarters gave him and the down-and-dirty Hindustani way, the li-tigon dug his claws into his enemy and held him still.

A second later, Freak had locked up the dog's limbs by using his body weight and his own limbs carefully--and then, things were finished with a bite to the back of the neck followed by a quick but brutal tug.

The dog's body and head came apart.

And then, Freak flung the latter part through the air. It missed its mark, but the delay of dodging its comrade's broken body gave Freak time to get to his fee to take out the remaining dog. After assuming a defensive stance with a low center of gravity, Freak hissed, loudly, so that a mixture of blood and saliva sprayed from his mouth.

He was twelve seconds in. There were thirty-eight to go...

But Freak let the dog come to him regardless. The canine was already significantly hurt from the powerful back-kick Freak had delivered to its jaw, but it moved with great speed and malice regardless.

Its assault was surprisingly clever. Rather than simply dashing toward Freak, the dog moved in a sinusoidal curve, zigzagging to the left and right, randomly, to increase the odds that Freak might be taken while in an awkward position. Instead of constantly adjusting his paws, though, Freak simply tracked his enemy with his eyes and waited, watching, with the thick fur that comprised his ruff and mane upraised just in case the worst happened.

Freak's muscles tightened just a heartbeat before he moved explosively.

The dog had moved in for a bite, for some reason, or perhaps it was some sort of ruse to distract Freak and then attack with a real weapon. It didn't work, though--Freak was simply too fast.

The second the canine was in range, the li-tigon tightened his paw into a tight fist and launched it forward. He not just the powerful supporting muscles of his chest and back into it--rather, Freak turned his entire body so that he could engage his core as well as a good portion of his weight.

Feline appendages were not built for punching. But they could be adapted to the task, apparently with resounding success.

Resonance, resonance; aye, that be the word--the manner in which the dog's entire skeleton was shaken due to the powerful hit could be likened to the frequency of an inductor in an LRC circuit. The canine's flesh was not heavy, but it had some momentum--and so while the structure of the demon was stopped in its tracks, the water-based muscles and organs continued on for just an inch or so before snapping back into place, often misaligned and damaged.

Freak's paw hurt; he shook it irritated before gingerly holding it off the ground, watching, for a moment, as the dog stumbled back and fell, apparently incapable of standing. Some nerve must have been pinched or something, because it seemed all but paralyzed from the neck down--and that meant that Freak could finish things quickly.

Thirty-seven seconds to go.

There really was no point in completely finishing the second dog, so Freak didn't bother to. In his race to Sikia, he simply struck the side of the canine's head with his paw--and the sickly pop he was rewarded with told him that there was no need to worry about that demon any more.

Freak's pupils were fully dilated; though, owing to their deep gray shade and the dim lighting of the Nightmare Cave, it would be difficult to notice that. One dog in particular, however, looked away from Sikia--and stared directly into the li-tigon.

When their eyes met, Freak gasped--and then fell to the ground.

His body skidded for several yards before coming to rest. His chest rose and fell rapidly as the rest of the dogs broke off from Sikia to go after him, snarling and racing one another with their claws unsheathed and ready to go.

Something had happened when Freak had looked into that dog's eyes--something absolutely venomous. Freak had felt his blood vessels contract, nearly collapsing in on themselves--and then he looked away and he could function again.

There was no time to question what had happened--Freak had either severely overestimated Sikia's ability to hold her enemies off or he had been counting very, very, very slowly. Either way, it was clear from the way the lioness was bleeding and the way her left hindpaw was mutilated to the bone that she needed him immediately--no more time ould be wasted.

Freak got up and kept his eyes carefully averted from the dog that had dropped him literally with a glance. It wasn't easy--the demons worked as a team, or more accurately a single being. The moved in such a manner that to get a clear look at the rest of his foes, Freak would be guided toward locking eyes with the canine that was hanging back.

The distance between the two opposing forces closed rapidly. The dogs' paths intertwined amongst themselves so that it was that much more difficult to predict which would attack and when, much less how. The lack of traction on the ground made for a great disadvantage for Freak--he couldn't stop or turn on a dime, and to fight so many powerful, quick enemies at once, agility was his greatest weapon.

It looked like he'd have to rely on brute strength alone for this one.

And that was probably okay. Freak had taken apart the previous few dogs without breaking a sweat; more enemies would complicate things but he was sure that he could prevail.

The fight was gory and it was not quick. Freak's attacks were powerful, yes, but they were significantly faster than the blows that one who had been trained only in the Pride Lands' martial art might have thrown. The limited restraint and careful application of force prevented the dogs from getting a significant grab or blow off--the absolute worst Freak took was a painful strike to the nose that disrupted the delicate capillaries in his snout somewhat, but that was all. He was bruised but he wasn't bleeding much, but his enemies lay on the ground, dead--often in different pieces.

Freak finished off the final dog by allowing the canine to get a paw on him--and then picking the demon's body up with his jaws and flinging the slight weight into the cliffside. A dull, resonant crack told the li-tigon that he had no need to get a rabies shot--all the remained was the final dog, still laying in wait over Sikia with his eyes carefully tracking Freak's head.

Freak took a brief moment to look himself over. He was mostly uninjured and his heart rate and breathing were only somewhat elevated. He was dirty, to be sure, but that didn't concern him and it couldn't have been avoided anyway. The marginal lighting in that part of the Nightmare Cave told the li-tigon that his fur had darkened a shade or three--but that only made him blend in more. He was in excellent fighting condition.

So he turned to face his enemy--but not quite. Keeping his gaze locked on the dog's feet, he saw that Sikia was alive and in stable condition--but the remaining canine had planted his foot firmly on the lioness's neck. She wasn't able to fight back, for some reason, but Freak imagined that she was unconscious. The dogs had had a lot of unchecked time with her, after all.

The li-tigon's lips peeled back into a vicious but silent snarl. He began to move forward--first, at a slow, heavy walk, before breaking into a near-sprint, racing at his enemy with the full force and aggression of a hurricane. He tore through the ground in his path, keeping his gaze low--and then, when he was close enough, he leaped into the air.

In a manner decidedly more graceful than a lion was capable of, Freak folded his paws to reduce drag, using his tail to keep himself balanced. The dog hadn't moved--it must have intended to get into a wrestling contest, but Freak had felt the strength of its comrades. It would not be able to stand up to him for long.

After passing the highest point in the jump, the li-tigon unsheathed his claws and stretched his forelegs forward to cut the canine up some before the rest of his weight came down. His path through the air continued--and then stopped sharply.

Freak did not fall and he did not continue past, over, or through his enemy. He was simply frozen in midair, for a moment, suspended in place by intangible strings. The shock lasted just long enough for Freak to fail to act before he was thrown aside with enough force to dash him against the muddy cave side.

Winded and more confused than anything else, Freak considered what had happened as he took in a deep breath and ensured that he was not seriously injured. After scrambling to his feet and wincing at his bruised flank, the li-tigon realized what he had to do--at least, that's what he hoped.

He breathed deeply for a moment, calming his body down. The adrenaline that usually raced through his veins during combat subsided as Freak moved forward--slowly, deliberately, until he was ten feet from his foe. He planted his feet, then, and slowly began to look up.

Freak had entered the Nightmare Cave without fighting. The darkness had entered him and--no, that's not what it had done. Freak had directly faced his opposition and had only passed the entry examination by being as he was and taking the hate, guilt, sorrow, and depravity that had nearly poisoned both Aoi and Roderik.

Maybe that's what he had to do here.

The last coherent thought Freak had before his mind was torn apart was that dogs, really, can have quite nice-looking eyes.

Rafiki's stick was gone. But he was not useless without it--not quite. He'd spent several years training in combat arts, and that was why he could hold his own against lions. Although he was now aging much, much faster than he ever had before in his life, he could help. He could help a little bit.

As an ethical altruist, the mandrill did believe in sacrificing for the greater good, even when it came to one's own safety--even when it came to one's own life. For the first time, however, he saw his own hypocrisy--he'd always preached against egoism and selfishness, but now, when his own neck was on the line, he felt nothing but fear.

Maybe it was just because his enemies were forces straight from the pits of Hell.

He kept walking, though; that slow, somber march forward continued until only a hundred yards remained between him and his enemies.

He could still run, and no one would ever know. They'd assume that his body was destroyed, somehow. He'd be remembered as a martyr and hero--provided that anyone remained to remember him.

That thought might have made Rafiki's decision for him, and the Lion Sheikh would prefer if you were to think of things like that. It was just a complete coincident that a second before Rafiki began to race forward the Forbidden invaders noticed him.

Darkness broke, but light did not come over Freak--not immediately. He knew where he was, though, and what had happened--and he knew how close it had been.

Struggling to align his thoughts, it occurred to the li-tigon that the area around him was no longer washed in a dim light. Regardless, he felt that he had not been moved from the large cavern within the Nightmare Cave where he'd stared the final dog down--with apparent success. He was alone, apparently--he thought that because he wasn't being attacked, despite his pathetic condition.

Freak doubled over and nearly vomited. His bile caught in his throat, though, so instead he simply spat out a thick mixture of congealed blood and saliva. He felt better after that and stood up, somewhat more stable on his feet--though he still felt like he'd been run over by a cement mixer.

And then Freak realized--he really was alone. The cavern was still lit up and he could see and smell and hear just fine--but he was alone. There were no bodies...

And there was no Sikia.

Freak could have been out for hours, but he simply chose not to believe so. He had to get out of the Cave; he had to find the Master of darkness and defeat him... but he couldn't leave the area so quickly. He had to know what happened to Sikia.

And so he looked around carefully. From what Freak could tell, though, everything was the same--the walls were made of the same, homogenous muck and the cliff was dry and harsh and bare. The ground was still soft and wet--everything was the same. Even the pawprints that Freak recognized as his, his enemies', and Sikia's were strewn all about the area, telling a tale of recent and furious combat.

What had happened when he'd looked into the dog's eyes?... Freak couldn't be sure, of course, but he was sure of what hadn't happened--he hadn't died and he hadn't been cast into exile again, perhaps in some other universe or some other dimension. He'd know if that had happened--somehow, he would. The world was the same, as was Freak's place in it... but the same could not be said for Sikia.

Too much time had passed. Freak unsheathed his claws for a brief second, so that twin patterns of neat, superficial pinpricks appeared in the ground before his paws--and then he shut his eyes. After all, he couldn't even shut Sikia's.

"I'm sorry," the li-tigon said. "I couldn't save you... again."

He didn't wait for the familiar hollow guilt in his heart to answer--he simply turned around and began to walk away. The soft sounds of his paws meeting the ground did not echo: he was in a cave that was organic and not tough and solid. And yet, some seconds later, Freak realized--he was listening to eight paws move, not four.

There was someone behind him.

Freak accepted that fact with a dose of unfamiliar fear. His motto--everyone is a threat--is one that he'd unconsciously lived by for the vast majority of his life. In the past months, though, he'd come to forget what was arguably the most important lesson of his whole life--without going around with such a mindset in his first years on the planet, there was no question: he'd be dead.

Now, though, Freak had come to trust, at least to a degree, that the universe wouldn't suddenly attack him without some sort of warning or opportunity for negotiation or preemptive strike. Perhaps that was why he now found his search for a viable course of action fruitless--he had no idea what to do.

In the end, Freak simply turned--very, very, very slowly. His ears angled so that the slightest noise from his rear would set off an immediate chain reaction that would cause him to leap back and prepare to attack or defend or flee as necessary. With his body at full alert, Freak continued to turn... and then he was face to face with Sikia.

She was tired and gaunt and thin and sad-faced. Chunks of fur and flesh alike were missing, and the deep gashes and gouges in her broken body smelled like they'd been left out in the sunlight for several days. She was rotting from within--flies the size of dimes flew freely in and out of Sikia's body.

"You didn't save me."

Freak barely registered those words. He was too busy staring at Sikia and wondering how she could possibly be there, in front of him, alive--what should he do, to make sure that she was even there? This was the Nightmare Cave, where reality and fantasy were too closely intermeshed to be differentiated.

"I am... sorry, Sikia," the li-tigon finally replied in a very slow, measured tone. He ignored the temptation to fidget and simply took a gradual step backward for no apparent reason at all. "I tried..."

But the lioness just shook her head exhaustedly. "You didn't save me," she repeated, and this time, Freak really felt her words.

"Sikia... I am so, so sorry... I tried, I swear..." To attempt to look into the lioness's eyes, Freak ducked somewhat and looked up. But Sikia would not look at him.

"You didn't save me," she said again. "You... didn't... save... me..." Now, there was a heavy tone of malice imminent in the lioness's voice. She hissed, loudly, and the step Freak took back in response was quite intentional and quite purposeful.

"Sikia, I did my best. ...Come," the li-tigon said, in an attempt to change subjects, "I have important work that has to be done... come with me; you can help. After all, you beat the dogs all by yourse--..."

She finally looked at him--but the eyes that Freak looked into were nothing like those that he had known. And, as a side note, Sikia's mouth seemed to have transformed, becoming reptilian in appearance--she now looked like an odd cross between a lion and a dragon; scales covered the lower half of her muzzle and led up to a mouth full of triangular, serrated teeth.

Ash spilled from in between the armored sections of the lioness's outer organ. She continued to transform in plain view--scales continued to replace fur, so that the once-proud, thick gold tufts of hair fell to the ground. At the same time, Sikia's paws changed, becoming boney and lithe, while her digits extended and her claws grew into talons not dissimilar from Kifo's.

"You didn't save me."

Now, Freak was walking backward rather than taking one step at a time. Sikia was not growing, but her felt presence in the area was--and although Freak wasn't tired, the fight he'd just been through had taken something out of him.

"Sikia--"

"You didn't save me!"

Freak had time to duck, and not much else. With a shriek loud enough to hurt the li-tigon's ears, Sikia launched herself at him. In doing so, she opened her mouth wider than was normally possible in an apparent attempt to bite Freak--but she had gained a weapon that he had not anticipated.

Although Sikia's appearance was somewhat draconic, she did not breathe fire. What she was capable of was something nearly as deadly, however--when the lioness breathed in, she sucked away not only air but heat. Just a glancing blow from this heat-vacuum made the moisture in Freak's nose freeze, numbing his sense of smell and bringing a dull, grinding pain to his head.

There was no time to deal with the injury, though--before landing, Sikia turned around so that not a heartbeat passed before she was lunging at Freak again. In moments, the li-tigon was fighting a rapidly losing battle, dodging and ducking and diving to avoid being torn apart by the monster that Sikia had become. Over and over and over she screamed at him that he had not saved her, and it seemed that with each passing second, she grew stronger and he grew colder, weaker, slower, and less capable of defending himself.

Freak took a claw to the shoulder--it a gash about two inches deep and nearly as broad--and that's all it took for him to launch the only counter he could think of.

Suddenly, the li-tigon planted his feet and stopped retreating. He leaped forward and feinted--and then spun out of the way of another vicious claw before inverting his paw and shoving it right down Sikia's throat. That effectively prevented the lioness from sucking the life out of Freak--although she could still bite and claw very effectively. For that reason, the li-tigon didn't give himself time to hesitate: he extended his claws and pulled his paw a short distance in a miniscule amount of time.

Sikia gagged, first, and then choked on the amount of blood that suddenly spilled into her lungs. She tried to swallow but Freak grabbed the soft flap of flesh in the lioness's throat and viciously ripped it off, using his other paw to apply continuous pressure to her neck from the outside, preventing both air and blood from reaching her brain.

In less than a second, the momentum of the fight had been changed. In less than two seconds, Freak had won, staring into the eyes of his enemy until life left them.

Panting, the li-tigon took his paws off of and out of the lioness. As he did so, she shriveled up, in a way, so that before Freak could look away she was no longer a demon--she was Sikia, again, a normal, tan-furred lioness with a somewhat diminutive frame.

And, again, she was dead.

Still, Freak could hear her voice echoing within the enclosure of his mind: you didn't save me, you didn't save me, over and over and over until he could hear nothing else.

For a moment, the li-tigon simply sat still with his eyes shut. Eventually, the voice died down, although the truth of the statement and the sadness caused by it did not and would not. As always, though, Freak ignored his emotions and paused only to close Sikia's eyes--that was all he could do for her before he left her again.

Freak didn't usually take long to leave emotional baggage behind. His life had taught him precisely how to do it--he'd had plenty of practice, he noted, from when he'd left the Pride Landers to when he'd left the Desert Pride to when he'd left Raj and Nasher and an entire subcontinent.

For that reason, he was prepared to act not ten seconds after leaving Sikia's cold, dead body behind him.

It was fortunate, although Freak's next obstacle was not one that required anything but simple instinct to pass. With so much on his mind, it was somewhat nice to simply let go and watch as his body acted for him as it transverse a series of increasingly wide gaps in the ground, jumping from dynamic pieces of earth to static landings without a moment's pause. In many ways, Freak truly was amazing--and that thought brought the slightest glimmer of hope to him, despite the darkness of the Cave.

The li-tigon was on a sort of earthen conveyor belt when he finally felt secure enough to allow his conscious mind control his actions directly. With his paws planted, he was ready to take a blow or move in a single direction with explosive power at any time--and that was lucky, because, all at once, he began to speed up.

Barely, Freak managed to drop his body and cling to the moving soil beneath him. His claws would do him no good, but drag force worked against him, so the li-tigon got as low to the ground as he possibly could and stayed like that.

After traveling over a series of hills and rapid swerves--some of which nearly threw Freak off into locations and depths unknowable--the moving platform raced toward a rock wall approximately thirty feet tall.

There was no way that Freak could duck under it. And he was moving so fast that it took real effort to keeps his lips shut over his teeth--if he hit the wall now, he'd be pulverized.

He was meant to jump over it.

Freak's prowess was already at the far fringe of what a living big cat could be capable of. In some ways, he was supernatural--but a feat like this... it might stretch his abilities to the breaking point. It was too bad that there was no other choice: he was meant to have no other choice.

At the last possible moment, Freak stood up and tensed the powerful bunches of muscle lining his legs. He continued to race forward--and then, a second later, he jumped.

Grace was something that came naturally to him, and for that reason, relatively little power was dissipated by the air via friction. Freak rose into the air with his paws folded beneath the wild, orangeish locks of his mane, using his tail to keep him balanced and on course.

Before he was halfway to the peak of his jump, Freak saw that he would not clear the wall.

Not completely, anyway--but he could salvage things if he was lucky.

A heartbeat before he struck the wall, Freak outstretched all of his limbs and held them out before him to dissipate the pressure of the normal force the stone wall exerted against him. He was winded but not killed--and that gave him a chance to scramble up and over the wall.

He couldn't get a paw over, and, for a wild moment, Freak was certain that he was going to fall--but then, a single extended claw caught hold of a slight crevice in the top of the stone prism. Although liquid fire shot from the end of Freak's digit all throughout his paw, the li-tigon ignored the pain and used that lone claw to haul himself upward while he still had some momentum left.

All things considered, when Freak actually cleared the wall, he did so with some semblance of the grace that had defined his initial leap.

What came next, though, had the li-tigon flailiag in midair. He sent himself into a useless spiral in the process, but he could not slow his descent--much less avert it entirely.

The fall awaiting Freak was far, far worse than what he'd experienced in his welcome to Hindustan. The rock was not sedimentary and therefore somewhat weak--the solid formations awaiting the li-tigon's helpless body were metamorphosed in the pits of Hell itself. The molecular structures themselves were optimized for strength, not the ability to create sharp, cutting edges--this was no blessing, however. If Freak wasn't thoroughly pulverized by the first two hundred yards of irreconcilable rock, then he'd be cut apart by the field of smashed glass and ceramic farther down.

For a moment, the li-tigon considered what to do to best protect himself--then, he simply went limp and allowed the Nightmare Cave to do to him what it would.

The tactic was somewhat wise. If Freak had tensed up any of his muscles, his injuries would have been a lot worse than they already were. Now, however, his body could crumple as needed to avoid any concentrations of pressure--that way, damage was spread out rather than concentrated. He was something of a grotesque ragdoll as he bounced down the sheer cliff, failing to decrease in speed to any significant degree.

After a few seconds of respite, the li-tigon hit the next obstacle with a bone-jarring crunch. Now, he was sliding without much turbulence, tearing off half of his flesh against the jagged surface his weight pressed him against. The pain was incredible--in moments, there was nothing protecting Freak's ribs from being scraped by the crystalline shards and his tail was only clinging to his backside by a few weakening threads of flesh.

Blood loss alone would kill the li-tigon in minutes--contusions and internal bleeding aside. He could no longer ignore the pain--but he had adapted to it, terribly, so that he didn't even notice when he fell off the savage minefield and into open air.

He noticed when he hit the ground, though--because when he did he was broken apart.

His weakened ribs couldn't take the trauma and collapsed, forcing a liter of squashed innards spraying from the li-tigon's chest. The strong bones in his fore and hindlegs remained intact, but whiplash dislocated several of his digits and broke several others. Freak's tail had fallen free at the last second--it landed next to his head a few seconds later with a wet thunk and then lay flat across his muzzle.

Weakened and doubtlessly heartbeats from death, Freak looked up with his eyes glazed over but open. He would have liked to see the Sun--or perhaps the face of one he loved--but this was apparently his fate. He was going to rot where he lay and no one would ever see his body. And it was likely that if anyone had the time to think about him before they died, they'd curse him for failing in his mission.

It was in Freak's character to simply lay there and wait for death, since his fate, it seemed, was inevitable. But something in him balked at that suddenly, unwontedly--and so, the li-tigon struggled, forcing several components of his body beyond the limit in the process. The sheer injustice of the situation was maddening: there was nothing Freak could do to improve things and there was nothing he could have done to improve things. He was pigeonholed into the situation; his actions and decisions had had no bearing on the outcome whatsoever.

He was hyperventilating, now; blood attempted to course through his veins but simply leaked out into the soil all around him instead. Freak had almost nothing left--and so he expended the last ounces of energy left within his body on a roar that was more similar to a scream than anything else. It didn't continue for more than a few seconds, but in that time, the li-tigon ruined his vocal chords while the few tablespoons of blood left in his system sprayed from his maw.

Anger as pure and black as the surrounding darkness had risen in Freak and did not leave even as the li-tigon's time alive wore thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner. This would be his last emotion, it seemed--outrage so complete and shapeless that it overwhelmed his mind.

It was so complete that Freak lost all conception of time and space--at least, that's what he thought until he realized, an immeasurable amount of time later, that he was still alive. And not just that--he was intact and he could move; without difficulty the li-tigon stood up and looked himself over. He was completely uninjured, and the bloody and dismembered body parts that had landed and spilled next to him had somehow reattached themselves.

Freak tried to think through what had just happened for a moment--then, he gave up and began to walk forward again. Many things in life didn't make sense to him, so, it could be expected that nothing in the Nightmare Cave did. All he could do was move forward until he really was dead.

Deep breathing, Freak had learned, was something whose cause couldn't be immediately judged. Its significance or lack thereof was largely decided by context--it could mean, among other things, that someone had just returned from a hunt, that they had narrowly escaped death, or that they were (CENSORED TO MAINTAIN T RATING).

Who knew what it meant in the strange, dank depths of the Nightmare Cave?

Freak certainly didn't--not with any specificity, anyway. The distant, labored breaths had to have a source, which meant that there was someone else waiting for him.

Rather than blindly speculate about who or what might be ahead, Freak simply walked forward and concentrated on the simple things: he kept breathing, kept his heartrate slightly elevated, paid close attention to his sensory input, and, most importantly, he kept his mind clear. He didn't want to be distracted by thoughts in case he was surprised.

The tunnel through which he was now traveling was twisting, so that although Freak's eyes had somewhat adjusted to the pitch black he couldn't see beyond perhaps thirty or so yards. He couldn't tell how far away the ominous, rhythmic breathing was--but he didn't let it get to him. He'd deal with whatever was coming when it came.

Ten minutes later, Freak had rounded another bend--then, he suddenly saw who he had been focused on for the past hour or so. It wasn't someone he expected to see, in a condition that he did not believe was possible in the Nightmare Cave.

He was tied up in a mildly unpleasant manner. A thick noose lay around his neck and his arms and ankles were bound--and the only thing preventing him from falling and breaking his neck was a thin plank of wood protruding from the cave's wall barely high enough for him to balance on with the tips of his toes. He was shirtless and sweating heavily--he'd been there for some time, apparently.

"Raj...?"

The boy's eyes rolled around within their sockets, but he couldn't look far enough to the side to see Freak. His position was so precarious that he could not open his mouth more than a fraction of an inch without losing balance--so he replied in a low, gurgling, nearly incomprehensible tone.

"Scar... if that's you, I'm begging you--help me. I don't know--" he paused and continued a moment later at a much more measured pace, "how much... longer I can stand..."

Freak considered leaving Raj and moving on. He also considered giving the boy's knee a thwack with his paw, just to hurry thing along--but then he realized that he was simply doing useless thought experiments. He couldn't leave Raj, even if in attempting to save him Freak created an enemy too powerful to easily defeat.

The cave walls were not structurally sound, so Freak could not jump into one and kick off in order to enter the air rapidly. He could, however, run to the side of the cave and dig his paws into things and climb straight up--and this was the tactic he used to get high enough to cut Raj's noose free a second before the boy's strength failed.

Raj nearly fell to the ground, painfully, but Freak made a clean job of things and managed to neatly catch the boy before setting him down on his back. After that, the ties that bound Raj's hands and feet were easily dispatched, though Freak let Raj get the rope off of his neck by himself. Although the two of them were the best of friends, Raj was still a human--three inch long claws built for killing being put to use centimeters from his jugular was a cause for concern.

After squirming out of the tattered cords on his appendages, Raj pulled the heavier section of rope off his neck as if it was some disgusting serpent. Then, he stood up, patted himself over--and then, finally, wrapped his arms around Freak.

"You have no idea," the boy hyperventilated, "how close that was. Without you, brother, I'd be dead now--thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you."

Freak heard Raj's words, to be sure--he even sort of patted the boy on the back with a heavy paw. But he made quite certain that the Raj he knew wasn't falling away so that a demon could rise in his place then and there. He hadn't even completely retracted his claws.

But Raj didn't turn on Freak, and no sudden calamity happened--and so the li-tigon slowly allowed himself to consider the panting, sweating human an ally rather than a threat. As Freak watched, Raj stooped over and picked up a G3 sniper variant as well as a weapons rig that included magazines and a holstered Beretta. After charging his rifle, the boy was nearly as deadly in combat as Freak--he could even see relatively well, thanks to the flashlight attached to the forend of his weapon.

"I... died, yes? I remember pulling the detonator... after that, I... can't remember anything. All I can remember was waking up in that terrible position." Raj spoke while checking the far end of the tunnel, opposite the path Freak had taken to get to him. Nothing seemed to be there, so the human knelt and tried to catch his breath. It was hard, particularly since ever gulp of oxygen was so nauseating he wanted to vomit. "So--where are we, Scar? Is this some kind of dream?"

Freak thought, for a moment--then he shook his head and began to head forward again at a brisk jog. Raj got the message and followed, and although the boy's presence was comforting, nothing could change the facts: "This is a Nightmare."

Raj accepted what Freak told him with stunning ease. He was literally experiencing life after death--perhaps that had something to do with how easily he threw away other worldviews. A lolcat might have considered telling the human other things, just mess with the human's mind, but Freak had never been the joking type--and besides, they were both up to very serious business.

The company was nice--but having long-range offensive and defensive capabilities was nicer yet. Raj could easily use his rifle to drop any reasonable threat at five hundred yards or more--long before claws or teeth made an ounce of difference.

Time was presumably of the essence, so the pace the Warrior King and Raj kept was quick. Their surroundings did not change for a spell of time--and then, all at once, they were in a practical other world.

The Nightmare Cave opened up into a large grotto covered in massive igneous shards. The landscape was not dissimilar to the Rocklands of the far south, but there was, of course, less light--missing a step was therefore that much more easy to do and several times more dangerous. The tunnel seemed to continue, about five miles off... for now, though, it was slow going.

At least there was nothing there to attack them.

Freak was allowed the relatively luxury of holding that thought as true for two minutes--and then, a burst of machinegun fire put a sudden end to the eventless jog.

It was difficult to say who the bullets were aimed for, but they missed, slicing directly through the air in between Freak and Raj. Without a swearword or extra movement, they both dropped down and got under cover--that was relatively easy thanks to the environment, but now, more gunners were beginning to pour fire on their position.

Over the supersonic roars of passing lead, it was difficult to hear anything--but Raj got close enough to the li-tigon to speak normally.

"There are at least five of them," the boy said. "I don't know exact locations, but they're cutting us off. We can get around this--"

There was an explosion, then, some fifty yards away from the two. Someone had fired a 40mm grenade or similar device, causing a rapid shudder to resonant through the cave for a heartbeat--then, the smoke cleared and the gunfire continued.

Raj glanced through a hole in the rock formation next to his head, then winced. After gritting his teeth, he pulled Freak in close and spoke with his eyes tightly shut.

"It's Shah," the boy explained. "I don't know how, but I can see him. He's there, with the rest of his gang and some others. I think they have nightvision..." The conversation was cut short as the two mutually and nonverbally decided that it was time to move.

Freak went first, pressing forward, of course, by leading Raj through a few shattered structures of the black compound until they were some twenty yards from their original location. There was, of course, no way to be certain of where the most bullets were flying, but there was no harm, certainly, in having a dynamic position.

"You'll have to go first," Raj murmured. "Stay low and move quickly--I'll go for kill shots; I don't have so much ammunition. I'll get the ones at the 1:30 of where we were facing first--get ready to run."

Freak already had a secondary plan in mind, to help the boy escape as well. It would not be easy, but if Shah's thugs were well armed, and they usually were, then the li-tigon would be able to launch an unexpected counter-offensive--hopefully. For the moment, however, he was simply lying in wait and slowly moving into a position that would give him the most options--Raj was going to start shooting at any moment.

It was easy to hear when the boy began to fight back. Freak was close to him, so when the harsh, staggered coughs of his rifle began to crack out across the landscape, the li-tigon knew immediately. And so he began to move with all haste, at least for eighty yards--then, he ducked behind cover again, sliding into a depression in the ground with his paws over his head to see if anyone was tracking him.

No bullets seemed to follow the li-tigon, however--the air just above him was clear. He waited for about two seconds to catch his breath and confuse anyone that might have caught a glimpse of him--and then he began to move again.

The harsh terrain was rough on his paws. Every step opened a small but painful injury on Freak's paws, owing to how fast he was moving, but he didn't notice.

Raj was expecting Freak to simply move straight forward to where the tunnel continued, and, for some time, the li-tigon did just that. But he had carefully memorized the position of one shooter in particular--when Raj had started to fight back, that had been his first target. The boy's aim was true and so the distant gunman was probably dead or at least seriously injured--but Freak didn't take any chances.

He moved in such a way that he was hidden from view and therefore gunfire from at least that gunner. Of course, Freak could have been more careful and crawled through the jagged crevices scarring the rocky ground, but Raj would not be able to hold out forever. Sooner or later, one of Shah's thugs would get lucky.

Freak finally broke free of the jumble of broken rocks into a similarly desolate but less dangerous landscape. After planting his paws, the li-tigon turned and began to traverse along the outer edge of the formation--he moved quickly but kept low, prepared to dive into cover at any moment. Soon, he knew, Raj's first target would appear pressed against some outcropping with his rifle in his hand--and if he was still alive, then Freak would have to take him down alone.

Luck was on his side, though--the gunner was more or less in the position Freak had anticipated, but a fist-sized exit wound in the back of his head told the li-tigon that Raj's aim had been true. Once Freak saw that he broke into a sprint and pulled the dead man's body away from the rock with a paw, ever ready to jump away in case he was holding the det-cord to a suicide bomb.

The man slumped over without ill effect, though--and after waiting for a few seconds to ensure that things were safe, Freak moved in again and tore apart his vest and gear. By then, it had become startlingly clear that he and Raj had grossly underestimated what they were up against--in the distance, dozens more gunners or perhaps armed robots were beginning to come into play. Hundreds of rounds were being fired every minute, so if Raj wasn't continually moving or behind some particularly tough bit of cover, he was probably already mincemeat.

But if he wasn't, then he needed help--and bad.

The li-tigon had learned from what few--okay, not so few--mistakes he'd made in his life. Very early in his life, he'd learned that unnecessary violence wasn't a good way to do business after getting a face full of venom when he'd needlessly killed a centipede.

When he had been in Hindustan, this lesson had been expanded when he had taken out some angry on an inanimate object--what he'd thought was a rock.

Now, Freak knew how to launch a grenade far while arming it. Hopefully, his man had some of the handheld explosives on him--and, hopefully, he was accurate enough to do some damage. For the moment, however, the li-tigon was uselessly mutilating the dead man's possessions--but he couldn't slow down, not even for safety's sake. Raj couldn't wait.

In the only compartment remaining in the man's pack, Freak found what he was looking for. Two fragmentation grenades now lay in his paws--and a quick check ensured that the pins were fully intact. It was just in time, too, because it seemed that at least some of Shah's finest were moving forward--and if Raj wasn't killed in a direct advance, he'd be surrounded. At that point, Freak would be forced to move on alone; it would be too time-consuming and risky to give the boy any help.

Freak breathed in, once, and then let the first grenade fly. A moment later, he repeated the action so that two gleaming metal rings remained around his index claw. The deadly projectiles had long since vanished into the hazy, smoke-filled air--Freak couldn't track them. He could only hope that he'd been on target.

The two distant thuds Freak had been expecting came some seconds later, one after the other. The outgoing fire slacked but the offensive was not broken--so now, Freak had a decision to make. He could either go on, assuming that Raj would be able to fight his way out and eventually follow, or he could offer the boy direct assistance.

When Shah's thugs began to retaliate with launched grenades of their own, Freak knew that there was no way Raj was getting out alone. He hesitated no longer before diving back into the jumble of rock and moving as fast as he possibly could.

The li-tigon's ears told him that the biggest concentration of enemy forces wasn't far, but two individual fighters had broken from the group and moved to set up pintle-mounted machineguns on Raj's flanks to completely cut the lone fighter off. They had to be stopped--so Freak covertly took them out, one by one, by jumping out of cover and dragging them off before the alarm could be raised. He killed somewhat messily but there was no helping it. No time could be wasted.

Most of Shah's thugs were close to one another--and that wasn't good for the way Freak fought. He couldn't possibly move fast enough to take all of the armed men out before any got off a shot or two, and these weren't just ragtag criminals. Many of them had trained in their art for years and the rest had been recruited due to their promise and talent--Freak would have to be creative to win this one.

An idea occurred to him as he closed in on his enemies. It would be next to impossible to pull off perfectly, thanks to the terrain--but Freak had no choice. He had to have the element of surprise to prevail.

The manner in which the rocks reflected sound was what made the trick Freak had planned so difficult to pull off. There was a reason he implemented it so rarely--and, no, it wasn't because the Lion Sheikh has largely forgot about the strange talent. Ventriloquism was not easy to do properly in the best of times, and now, Freak was breathing hard and in an incomprehensible jumble of solid rock.

If he messed up, he would do nothing more than alert the gunmen to his approach.

Freak had never projected such a loud noise before, but he tried regardless. The li-tigon roared--not for very long, but loudly--and projected his voice several feet on the opposite side of the collection of thugs.

Immediately, the gunfire stopped--and Freak could only hope that his ruse had worked.

He dived out of cover a second later, scaling a ten foot high wall to attack as rapidly as possible. As the li-tigon's head broke out of cover, he saw twenty or so heads facing away from him and knew that he had a chance. Freak kicked off of the rock, hard, and launched himself into what rapidly became a very bloody fray. He killed the first man before he was even noticed--and was halfway through taking the heads off two more targets before they began to realize something was wrong.

Freak didn't need to try to attack precisely to ensure that his blows landed exactly where they were able to. With his claws extended, he drew blurred lines through the air, gouging deep gashes through flesh and bone alike. The second two men the li-tigon attacked went down with broken jaws and concussions, though what ended up killing them was blood loss from the wounds on their necks.

Their bodies hit the ground before Freak's did.

He couldn't kill the next one in his path, not without getting away from the concentration of men to his side. For now, Freak simply lowered his head and ran through the man's comparatively fragile legs, splintering them without effort.

The screaming began, then, but time had slowed down and Freak didn't really have the time to regard them. After turning, rapidly, he jumped not so high but long--on a course that would launch him over the heads of three men that were only heartbeats from getting their rifles into play. Freak went aerial and stayed that way long enough to take out his targets from above--the first two were clean kills, but the li-tigon had somewhat underestimated his own strength. His claws ended up entering the last man's eye sockets and staying there just long enough to mess up his landing.

That was a mistake and a loss of time, agility, and momentum. Freak could afford none of these things.

By now, bullets were beginning to fly through the air--most shots were fired by those farthest from the li-tigon, and he'd counted on that. However, by moving fast and staying within the crowd of humans, he avoided injury and boosted the rate of killing. Many of Shah's gangsters were killed by friendly fire--none of them had been trained to stare down a big cat at close range. With Freak so close by, most of them panicked and spray-fired their weapons uselessly.

Chests exploded in bloody splashes as Freak ducked through the hail of bullets. Bodies all around him were torn apart by a combination of assault rifle fire and the reports of one or two idiots with autoloading shotguns--only occasionally did the li-tigon have to reach up and tear out a throat to eliminate all enemy activity on that flank of the group.

What Freak had to do next, however, was completely different. First, he had to reach the men on the other side--many of which were still firing in panic, though some had started to wise up and break to engage--and then he had to take them out without getting shot in the face.

He had a plan for that, though. Freak noticed that no one had reloaded yet--they were using extended magazines--and that would complicate things, but not make the odds against him insurmountable.

The li-tigon was in a sea of falling bodies. He grabbed one of the dead men nearest to him with his jaws and sidestepped before putting the full weight of his upper body into throwing the lifeless body into its comrades.

The result, of course, was a domino effect that shortly sent not one but perhaps five freshly-massacred corpses tumbling forward at the phalanx of living men. Freak wasn't invincible, though--he took a shot to the thigh while executing the maneuver, but he shook it off. The confusion and minimal damage caused to the formation of gunners wouldn't last for long--he had to press his advantage while he had it.

Instead of rushing at his enemies head on in a manner that might allow a lucky shot to reach him, Freak moved to the side and then dashed forward, in a sort of one-man pincer maneuver. Additional shots rushed by him, tumbling and swerving in unexpected manners due to having traveled through bodies already--but Freak was left unharmed and able to plough through the entire group of humans in one move.

He only had a few seconds to finish them off before backup arrived, but Freak got lucky. One man's grenade became visible, so all Freak had to do was pull the pin and destabilize the handle--and then get the Hell outta Dodge.

With a satisfied grimace, Freak preemptively flattened his ears to protect his hearing. A second after he was out of the picture, the grenade went off, spraying the surrounding area with bits of shrapnel. The men that weren't shredded immediately took only a few more screaming, bloody seconds to die--Freak had broken the back of Shah's offensive.

The rest of the attack group was still firing, and Freak knew that it wouldn't be long before some were sent out to see what had happened. He couldn't take them--they would be prepared for a close-in attack, and in that case, the terrain would work heavily against him. So, while he could, the li-tigon got out of the way and hid in the rocks again, just to see what was going on.

Raj's position was difficult to determine, but, to be sure, the boy was alive. Freak could tell--Shah's gangsters were firing too much and too rapidly to not be taking any fire themselves. Now, however, there was very little Freak could do--he couldn't attack again, at least not for a few minutes. Perhaps he'd take the chance if he became aware of any high-value targets, but as far as he could tell, there weren't any. Shah was among the legions of the hooded warriors, concealing his identity and barking out orders via microphone.

Freak was most useful laying in wait, at least for the moment. When the opportunity showed itself he'd strike--but until then, he had no reason to put himself in danger. Raj could hold out.

He stayed still for perhaps fifty seconds. Then, however, Freak realized--he wasn't supposed to stay and fight. This obstacle was not one that he could get through with simple force: Shah's forces had been replenished somehow; more fighters had arrived as if from thin air.

Freak had done some truly terrible things to live, but he could not immediately recall abandoning friends in immediate danger. It was, in a way, dishonorable--but Raj had told him to leave. And war of this scale and nature was all about sacrificing some lives for more.

Raj would have done the same thing Freak did next--he would have run, fast, at first, in order to avoid second-guessing himself. He would have sprinted until he was nearly exhausted and too far away to return, and he would have done so in such a way that Shah's forces were alerted and set up in case he returned.

Raj, perhaps, would not have turned and looked back despite all that. Raj hadn't been through so much in the Nightmare Cave already.

The one condolence Freak had was that he was reaching the end of the Cave--at least, that's what it felt like. He wasn't sure that he could take much more--in fact, he was quite sure that he couldn't take much more. How he'd managed to get so far was difficult to say, but it probably had something to do with how easily he could ignore his feelings. He'd practiced that for a lifetime.

But things were starting to take their toll. Consequences had never been the same: Freak was overwhelmed with lethargy and the will to do nothing more than roll over and die. His eyes didn't focus unless he concentrated and he walked like a zombie, dragging his paws across the muddy ground. There was no purpose in what he was doing--he had been too slow for certain, he'd spent hours in the Nightmare Cave. By now, everyone and everything was dead, broken, razed from the face of the Earth so permanently that no one would ever remember them. Everything Freak had known was at an end, surely.

But there was a possibility so remote and fleeting that Freak didn't think about it for long. He just kept walking, somehow, although no excuse he gave himself took him far. He wasn't going on in order to amuse himself and see if he could win, and he certainly wasn't going on because he wanted to get revenge. Freak was fairly certainly that he would die within moments of seeing the Master of darkness--if he even made it that far.

There was one obstacle left. And the test it posed would shake Freak to his core.

There was an opening up ahead, far larger than the chamber in which Freak had fought the dogs. Its size could be compared to the landscape not so far behind him where the two brothers would spend an eternity struggling against one another for his sake, but this chamber had a far higher ceiling.

Freak entered and immediately felt concern. Adrenaline entered his system and made him perk up, filling his body with energy that was not his to keep. There was lighting, but it wasn't complete--Freak couldn't see the edges of the cavern or what lay waiting there for him. With a growing sense of unrest, however, he moved forward.

His nose twitched--and told him something that he hesitated to believe for only a moment.

Freak trembled a little bit--but he swallowed his fear down and moved forward one step at a time. The farther into the opening he got, the more sure he was of what was coming.

She came into view not suddenly, but before Freak was ready for it. What struck the li-tigon most was not her size--but who she was.

"Mother."

Chukizo was normally proportioned but scaled up many times. As Freak stood and looked up at her, he realized that in comparison to her, he was no larger than a cub--and then he realized that he was to do his first battle again.

She was hurt, he realized--badly hurt and bleeding, and scrawny from malnutrition. She did not look like she did when Freak had seen her in his dreams--this was how she had been when she had given birth to himself and his sister. It hurt Freak to look at her--she was in great pain and on death's door, and he knew that he would have to be the one to push her over the edge.

But she was still his mother.

Chukizo took in a few ragged, harsh breaths before she could summon the energy to look around to see who had addressed her. She saw Freak and froze--and then, after a moment, smiled a quiet, sad smile.

"My son." It wasn't a question, not really--it would be more accurate to say that Chukizo wanted badly to believe that the incredible being before her was her own but wasn't entirely certain. Freak nodded, though, and, immediately, the tigoness beamed down at him.

"I knew... that you would become like this. You're so big and strong," Chukizo said. Her voice quavered--and it wasn't just because she was losing energy rapidly. She was proud of him, inexpressibly so--she reached out to touch her son but her body failed and she fell. Freak moved instinctively to catch her, but only managed to reduce some of the jolt that her elbow underwent by taking the blow to his own body.

"C-clumsy..." Chukizo let out a rattling breath and then laughed, for a moment, before simply taking a few seconds to rest. She blinked so slowly that for a wild moment Freak thought that she'd left him, just like that--but then she opened her eyes and searched for him until she found him again.

"Come here, my son... let me hold you. I'm finished... all I want is to hold you for one moment. Please..."

Freak was tempted to refuse. Being so cold might harden him enough to do what he was certain he had to do--but he couldn't say no to his own mother. Not when her request was so simple. He would do as she said, for now... but he had to get going. Time was running out for those who still lived.

So, reluctantly, Freak took a few steps forward. When he was close enough to feel his dying mother's body heat, he felt something in him change--for the first time in his life, he truly felt that he was someone's son.

Of course, he'd come close to that before. When he was younger, and his parents had met him for the first time, he'd had an inkling of what he felt then, in the most unlikely of places. Now, though, the li-tigon's feelings were incomparable to anything he'd ever before experienced--for the first time, he felt like he belonged somewhere.

Freak sat down, fully, next to his mother's shoulder. She lifted a paw, then, trembling, and used it to hold him close--it would have been nearly uncomfortably tight, but the tigoness was very weak. Freak could feel it from the way her heart beat--irregularly and softly--she was so close to him that he didn't have to try to hear it. It was as if he was attuned to her, or perhaps made to understand her.

Freak realized that he loved his mother, and he always had. He had just never had the opportunity to show it.

And now that he did, he didn't have the time to do it for long.

Freak was disciplined, though. He only let a few seconds pass before standing, partially, and looking around for the exit to that part of the Nightmare Cave--but there was none. Even the tunnel that had brought him into that massive chamber had been sealed off; Freak couldn't even tell where it had been. He had to move on, somehow--he couldn't stay with his mother indefinitely.

"Son... are you in a hurry?" She was perceptive, it seemed, for being rather past the point of no return. Chukizo had accepted her death--but she hadn't yet experienced it. That would come at any moment. So, instead of getting up and leaving, Freak paused--and then answered his mother with a nod.

"There are many of my family and friends in danger," the li-tigon said. "Everything I know is in danger... Mother, I have to leave."

She nodded, sadly, but understandingly. Before Freak could move, though, the tigoness stopped him.

"Wait, wait... just for a few minutes." She coughed, raspily, before speaking again in a coherent manner some seconds later. "This is the only time we'll ever be able to do this, my son. Please... don't leave me. Not yet..." She was practically begging him--and, so, Freak didn't leave. Not yet, anyway. He shut his eyes and allowed his mother to affectionately rub the smooth bluntness of her face against him--he had never experienced that before, either.

"Tell me, my son," Chukizo murmured some time later--just as Freak saw that there was certainly no way out of this, the final chamber--"do I have any grandchildren?..."

Freak shook his head. He wanted to say more but he couldn't elaborate--he couldn't explain why. He had no excuse, either. He was no longer a late juvenile, he was a full-grown adult. There were so many things that he'd like to have done with his life by now, but things had just kept coming up, one after the other, for the past several years.

She seemed to have seen the guilt and sadness in her son's eyes. But she didn't let it get to her--at least in her last moments, she could be hopeful.

"Then... will I?" Chukizo smiled down at her son and felt him look back up at her as he absorbed her words. He didn't answer immediately, of course--but moments later, he nodded. She couldn't see it but she felt it in some intangible yet undeniable way.

Pressed against the deep tan of his mother, Freak was in comparison vividly colored. His fur was decidedly less sleek, he noted, but it was clear that he had inherited the telltale strip pattern that lined his form from her. Other aspects--the angle of his snout, for example, and the color of his eyes--were also clearly hers. He couldn't allow such beauty to end with him--so, he promised himself that someday soon he'd find a way to ensure that his bloodline did not die.

She began to speak to him again, but this time, there were no questions. Freak listened to his mother tell him about her own life--every bit as lonely and brutal as his if not more. The respite in her solitude and darkness had not come until she was somewhat older than he was now--when Scar took her out of the permanent darkness that was existence.

The closer Freak got to simply leaving, the more Chukizo continued to speak and the more desperate and emotional her stories got. Freak had to leave--but he couldn't without seriously hurting his mother and forever losing the chance to be with her in the physical sense. And then there was the fact that the cave itself had no obvious exit.

The sheer insanity of the situation started to get to Freak. He had to go but he couldn't and he had to stay but he couldn't. All the while, time was ticking down, and down, and down--anything he managed to do was surely becoming more and more uselessly. How many of his friends remained alive was a function of many things, but time was a major factor. There would soon come a point where not even one Pride Lander would remain alive--Freak had to finish things before then to make everything he'd done so far in the Nightmare Cave--and his life as a whole--meaningful.

Chukizo had now begun a long diatribe about the first time she'd taken down a gazelle on her own. It hadn't been easy, but hunger and successive failure had motivated her to be creative and rely on her paternal half to tell her how to provide for herself.

Freak had little sympathy for that. He'd provided for himself throughout his cubhood with one exception--when his mother had fed him for the first and last time.

"Mother." The word was spoken in a curt, somewhat caustic tone; it was the voice that Freak had employed constantly until he'd spent some time learning under the Dark One.

It made Chukizo's ears flatten to hear it--much less hear it addressed to her. But there was surely a misunderstand of some sort. So, the tigoness smiled and looked down at her son after stroking his precious form with her paw once. "Yes, my son?" she asked--and, for a moment, Freak could not answer.

But he was a being of principle and determination. Petty emotions would not stop him for long,

Freak's intention was to tell his mother that he had to leave immediately. If she then didn't help him get out, then he would do whatever he had to do to go on alone. But then, when the tigoness looked down at her son with nothing but love in her eyes, Freak saw what he had to do. It was terrible, brutal, and almost unimaginable--and it was the final, soul-wrenching test that the Nightmare Cave had to offer him.

Freak looked up at his mother. His mouth was dry and no amount of licking his lips or swallowing would help. He wanted to say something but words failed him--so he did what he had to do before his nerve failed him.

The movement was sudden and completely unexpected--there was no way that Chukizo or anyone else could have seen it coming. But Freak did it--and he did it quickly, powerfully, effectively, with the full brutality and lack of mercy that the action demanded.

He jumped up. And then he cut his own mother's throat wide open.

The gaping wound was centered around Chukizo's jugular. Once the bleeding started, she didn't have a chance.

Too sickly and weak to do anything but gurgle and bring herself into a controlled fall, Chukizo died slowly but without any further violence. She might have realized what had happened--and if she did, she forgave her son too quickly to truly appreciate what had happened. Her final action was to look around, anxiously, to see if she could meet her son's eyes one last time--but before she could succeed, she gasped--and died.

Freak watched the entire event unfold. When it had finished, he looked away--and there was a tunnel leading from the cavity. Freak could look at the exit apparent for only a moment before turning away; it was very bright and the light emanating from it was focused and intense. It was sunlight--all Freak had to do to get out of the Nightmare Cave was to walk just a little farther. Just a few more steps.

He did so, of course, but with his mind carefully monitored. The li-tigon sometimes induced out-of-body experiences to protect his own sanity, but he'd never had to make them last for more than a few seconds.

This time, however, he didn't dare allow himself to re-enter his body for a full ten minutes. He was out of the cave in two and he spent the next eight sobbing.

(I rly quit writing kthxbai)

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