SCT-Novel Eater Of God I
Eater Of God I
The crimson blade lit up the thing behind me.
A massive, hairless head hovered inches from my face, purple-grey skin stretched tight over a skull that looked too long to belong to anything sane. Two milky blue eyes sat deep in its face, and below them the mouth simply stopped being a mouth and became a thick, writhing mass of black tendrils.
They twitched toward me, slick with dark slime that smelled like rotten meat, old copper, and a biology lab that had lost the argument with God.
I went still because my body, my brain, and whatever survival software came preinstalled with Ezra Bridger had all reached the same conclusion at roughly the same time.
Moving first would be fucking stupid.
The creature breathed against my cheek.
Slow. Wet. Close enough that one tiny lean forward would put those tendrils in my mouth, and that thought went straight into the mental trash compactor where it belonged.
My lightsaber hummed between us. The red blade sat close enough to paint the creature's throat in trembling light, yet it did not retreat from the heat. Its tendrils curled around the glow with awful patience, testing the air like blind worms tasting a corpse.
Okay. Think. Preferably before basement Cthulhu decides my face is an appetizer.
I could not feel it.
That was the first real problem.
Even with Dromund Kaas pressing down on everything like a wet blanket soaked in murder, something that large and alive should have had a presence. A heartbeat. Muscle tension. Hunger. Pain. At least some ugly smear in the Force where living matter pushed against living matter.
Instead, my senses slid past it.
The Force had not gone silent everywhere. The storm still existed above the broken ceiling, and somewhere at the edge of perception the temple still muttered to itself like an old drunk Sith uncle. But within the space around this creature, everything blurred and thinned until my own awareness felt scraped hollow.
I could still see the monster.
I could still smell it.
I could still feel the cold sweat crawling down my back.
Useful things, technically. Primitive things. Caveman résumé items.
Against something made to hunt Force-users, that felt about as comforting as bringing a decorative spoon to a tank fight.
The creature tilted its head.
The movement looked curious, and curiosity coming from a jawless tentacle beast was the kind of detail that made me miss normal problems. Taxes. Acne. Cafeteria food. Literally anything that did not involve ancient Sith basement fauna breathing on my eyelashes.
Its eyes did not track my face.
They drifted lower.
Chest.
Stomach.
Something beneath both.
My grip tightened around Hett's saber.
Slowly, with all the speed and confidence of a man disarming a bomb while drunk, I let my gaze move over the rest of it.
Four thick legs held up a hunched body built for sudden violence. Its forelimbs were too long, ending in hooked digits that pressed into the wet stone. Bone spurs jutted along its spine and shoulders in uneven ridges, and its heavy tail dragged through the rainwater behind it, the tip fraying into smaller tendrils that twitched against the platform.
Scars covered it.
Some had the straight precision of surgical cuts. Others looked like old saber burns. Along the shoulders and ribs, bits of dark metal had grown into the flesh, half-swallowed by tissue over centuries.
Chain fragments.
My eyes flicked to the platform beneath us.
The broken rings.
The massive chains.
The gouges in the stone.
Then back to the thing inches from my face.
Oh, fuck every single duck in the pond.
Ofcourse the creepy creature in the basement wasn't dead. And I had to plant the fucking flag.
But how?
That question rang in my mind. it had been thousand of years at least. Did the creature escape the labyrinth?
Was this thing was a descendant of that thing?
That possibility was worse than the immediate threat, which was impressive, considering the immediate threat had face tentacles and probably smelled my soul.
If these things had reproduced down here for thousands of years, then this was not one monster in one ruined temple. That would mean a colony of creatures invisible to force. A whole hidden ecosystem of nightmare livestock under Dromund Kaas no worse than Yuuzang Vong, because apparently the galaxy wanted to compete with itself for worst dungeon design.
The creature made a soft clicking sound.
Something inside the wet tendril mass shifted.
Teeth hidden deeper in the throat, maybe. Bone plates. Cartilage. An internal blender. I did not have the emotional bandwidth for a full anatomical survey.
"Arachnae," I whispered.
She did not answer.
I kept my eyes on the creature.
"Arachnae, if you're alive and just being quiet because this thing is spooky, I respect the business decision, but now would be a great time to beep."
A tiny sound came from somewhere near the platform's edge.
Very faint.
Very unhappy.
Good. She was alive.
Also probably running seventeen diagnostics titled boss_found_new_bullshit_again.
The creature's head twitched toward the sound.
The tendrils shifted away from me.
My saber rose a fraction.
"Hey," I said.
The creature turned back.
I forced a smile that probably looked deranged.
"Yeah. Over here."
It leaned closer.
One tendril brushed my cheek.
I should have panicked and slashed it, but I didn't want to escalate the situation just in case it was friendly.
The skin went numb.
For a second, the memory of my own face felt distant, like somebody had described it to me in a language I barely spoke.
I jerked back before I could stop myself.
The creature did not follow.
It watched.
Waited.
Can it understand speech?
That was such a terrible thought that I almost respected it.
If this thing came from the lab, if it was tied to the mural, if it had survived in some impossible half-starved state for centuries, then maybe it had more in its skull than feral instinct. The recording had mentioned cognitive increases. Tool use. Rudimentary communication.
Of course, that was in the context of Sith alchemists force-breeding monsters with humanoid hosts, so their definition of "communication" probably included screaming in three dead languages while eating a priest.
Still.
I licked rain off my lips.
"Can you understand me?"
The creature opened its mouth. I expected growl, or some other animal shit. But what rammed into my head was a swarm of screeching voices.
"—log entry, day two hundred and fourteen, seventh generation viability holding—"
"Don't open the lower vault, for the love of the Force, don't—"
"Mother, the glass is cold, I can't feel my fingers—"
"Containment on Shrii-ka-rai specimen unstable after Jedi exposure—"
"Where is the sky, where is the sky, where is the sky—"
"Maternal mortality remains acceptable under revised acquisition quotas—"
"Nameless, they called it Nameless, and we should have listened—"
"Feed the light before the hunger starts screaming again—"
I staggered backward, one hand clamping over my temple.
The saber dipped.
The creature moved.
I shoved the blade up on reflex, and red plasma sheared through the nearest tendril before it reached my throat. The severed chunk slapped onto the stone and writhed in the rain.
A voice crawled out of the pain behind my eyes.
"Shrii..."
The severed tentacle curled toward me.
"Ka..."
The creature's head snapped sideways, as if hearing itself from the floor.
"Rai..."
I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth.
"Shrii-ka-rai."
The name scratched something loose in the back of my memory.
It like finding a note written by drunk Past Me that said, "This kills Jedi, idiot."
Shrikarai.
Shrii Ka Rai.
The Nameless.
Force Eaters.
Things that should have gone extinct...what the fuck is one doing right here!?
I stared at the twitching severed tendril on the stone.
"Well," I muttered, "that explains the anti-Jedi seafood aura."
The creature clicked again.
The voices returned, quieter now, rubbing against each other like broken glass inside a sack.
"Warm boy beneath the rain."
"Open the cage inside the skin."
"Let us crawl where hunger cannot reach."
"The chains stop when the light becomes ours."
"Hunger...Light..."
"Dark....Need..You"
"Become One"
"Let me....IN"
All of it came in different voices. A child whispering from under a table. A woman who sounded too tired to scream. A Sith academic reciting data through a cracked jaw. Something animal using human words because it had eaten enough people to borrow the shape of thought.
The tendrils reached toward me again.
Slower this time.
Almost gentle.
That made it more disgusting.
"You want me to let you in?" I asked. "Into me?"
The creature shuddered so hard rainwater shook off its spines.
"Inside the bright hollow."
"The boy is a door."
"The hunger ends in the door."
"The door opens and the chains fall."
"Together, quiet at last."
My jaw clenched.
The word door landed wrong.
I did not know why yet, which meant it was probably going to become my problem after doing a backflip through several other problems.
"Yeah, about that," I said. "I had a cosmic parasite try to move into my soul recently. Left stains everywhere. Terrible tenant. Security deposit did not cover the damage."
The tendrils stopped reaching.
Every stolen voice cut out at the same time.
"You're gonna need references."
The creature lunged.
For something that size, it moved with obscene speed.
I dropped under the first swipe, rolled through shallow rainwater, came up on one knee, and cut across the rear leg nearest me. The lightsaber opened flesh from hip to thigh, and black fluid sprayed across the platform.
The creature screamed with a crowd's worth of throats.
Good news: the lightsaber worked.
Bad news: the angry Jedi-eating basement squid had working pain receptors and very strong opinions about them.
"Nice," I snapped, scrambling backward. "Turns out you're made of meat. Weird, cursed meat, but meat."
Arachnae beeped from the side.
"Don't judge me. I need morale wins where I can get them."
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[Image of the Creature]
Bonus Art
Spoiler
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A/N: Thank you for your patience and apologies for the delay in chapter release. Real life had been too hectic and this had been an hard chapter for me, and to be honest, its still not the best I feel I could have done. But it had been so long that I thought to update it first instead of getting struck in this. Hope you enjoy it. I will try to update couple more chapters to make up for the gap.
Donate the stones if you have them, gives great motivation!
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