Chapter 32
32
The rippers had dragged something to the base of his remaining tentacles. It was the remains of his half-self, Hudex—the bits left after it had died. There was no evidence of the human suit left by then, not after it’d fallen miles to the ground, been carried away by scavengers and gnawed on, then hauled up the side of the scraper. This was barely a handful of his real tissue, burned by darkness, spat upon, shot, stabbed—the list went on.
“I will have my vengeance,” Avidex seethed. “I will.”
No matter how he tried to rearrange what there was of him, the thinking power was sadly lacking. With time, and feeding, he would regrow.
Time was not obtainable.
Avidex gazed upon the landscape of the Top story of this world, at the thinning mass of feeder humans. In the distance, the rising mounds of Queen tissue signaled the imminence of the breeding explosion. They would rise to the stars soon but without him, unless he could regrow. He could not. The part he needed to give to the burgeoning Queen had died below. A half of one’s body was the requirement. Without that a Ghoul Lord was not allowed to donate to the Queen process.
She had done this. That human female.
His need for revenge burned within him. The sweetness of added brain power when he’d used the previous human, the skin-suit one, had helped him to think and it had also tasted good to his tentacles. He snared a nearby drooling human, another female.
Would this work again?
First, he would feed and satiate himself. And so he inveigled his many tentacles into this one’s orifices, watching her scream and squirm and cry out, and moan. The pleasures and the pains and the many horrors inflicted soaked into his mind. Sweet, so very sweet human. With a final pump of his main tentacles into her mouth, ass, and vagina, he wrung a final climax from her and a last weak cry as her body failed. Then he began to consume her, piece by piece, starting at the cute toes. Blood squirted, gouted, and left her flaccid and lifeless, but not before he’d removed the brain, tenderly scooping it out and cradling it to him. He allowed it to sink into his body core.
He kept it alive, nestled in the jelly of his being, and when the shock of its death subsided, he let it join him in thought.
What is my best solution? I seek vengeance. He posed this question to his freshly caught brain.
More , it told him. More brains will help us think.
Ahhh. Of course.
And so Avidex harvested more brains from more unwilling feeder humans, savoring their emotions and fears as he went about the task of building himself into something bigger, smarter, more… skilled at defeating humans. The species they preyed upon often possessed the skills of self-defeat in abundance.
Ideas poured in.
Enlist your fellow Ghoul Lords by showing the dangers of humans. Make a skin-suit army. Create an attack to track the enemy. Gather information. Find the weaknesses of your enemy.
The Art of War from one brain, the training of a soldier from another, the general knowledge gleaned from yet another brain… it was all coming together nicely.
Oh my. Avidex twined tentacles and even clapped them together. Humans were fun things, after you ate them.
Other Ghoul Lords answered his call, and they listened to his plans to destroy the one dangerous human who had ever almost destroyed a Ghoul Lord. They slithered away to find their own feeders to harvest and turn into skin-suiters with the ability to brave the dark and broadcast the Lure.
He splayed out his half array of tentacles and declared bombastically, though in his mind-thoughts only—because he had no human voice-box at this current moment: “Our parting was such sweet, sweet sorrow but never mind, Cyn.” He knew her name now, having gleaned that much data from the incident below. “I’ll be back.”