Slime Evolution

Chapter 472 - The Last Request

For a good while, Lohan and Lisa stayed standing in front of the platform, looking at the creature lying on the stone, who remained as motionless as before, even after all of her children had been killed a few meters from her own body.

There was no scream, no groan, and no attempt to lift her head on her part, and even her faint breathing barely made her thin chest rise and fall, as if she had already given up reacting to anything that happened around her.

It was a strange silence, and precisely for that reason it was heavier than any reaction Lohan could have expected, since he had prepared himself for relief, for anger, or even for a new plea for help, but not for that heavy stillness of someone who had nothing left to offer the world.

Lisa was the first to move, taking a step toward her, but she stopped halfway and looked at Lohan, waiting for him to decide what to do next, because neither of them quite knew how to approach someone in that state.

’Maybe she needs some time,’ she said over the link, speaking softly even though her voice wasn’t being spoken out loud.

’Maybe,’ Lohan agreed. ’I don’t know if we should wait a little, or just do this right now... it feels wrong to just kill her all of a sudden.’

The two of them stayed there, side by side, while the reddish glow of the fissures pulsed on the chamber wall and the sweet smell still hanging in the air slowly began to lose strength, now that there was no one left to feed it.

A whole minute passed like that, then a little more, and Lohan was starting to wonder whether she had really lost consciousness when a faint, hoarse voice appeared again inside his head, so quiet it seemed to have been dragged from very far away.

"Is it... over?"

Lisa startled slightly, even though she’d been expecting it, and Lohan felt the light pressure of the creature’s mind brush against his, stripped of any strength.

"It’s over," he answered, in the gentlest voice he could find. "All of them. None are left."

The creature stayed silent for a few seconds, and then something changed in her breathing, a small irregularity that Lohan couldn’t tell was relief, sadness or just accumulated exhaustion.

"They weren’t... at fault," she said, finally, and there was a painful sadness in her words. "They didn’t know... what they were doing. I know that. Even after going through all this... I couldn’t... hate them."

Lisa looked away, and Lohan was left with nothing to say, because any answer he tried to put together in his head seemed far too small in the face of a sentence like that, and before either of them could come up with anything, the voice returned, even weaker.

"Then... now... please." The words came one at a time, as if each one cost her an enormous effort. "Do what you promised."

Lohan felt his stomach, or whatever passed for a stomach in a mass of jelly, clench hard, because deep down he had hoped that, once the violence was over, she would change her mind, and that maybe, with her children dead and the chains loosened, some thread of will to go on would appear in her.

But hearing that voice, and above all realizing it carried no hesitation, he understood that this was exactly what she wanted, and that insisting any further would only be a way of making himself feel better at the expense of her suffering.

"Are you sure?" Lisa asked, anyway, her voice a little choked. "We can still get you out of here, if you want. No one is going to hurt you."

"No," the creature answered, and this time there was something like tenderness in that refusal, as if she recognized the gesture without being able to accept it. "Thank you... but no."

Lisa lowered her head, and Lohan realized she was trying to swallow something, something he felt too, a bitter helplessness that even with the insane power they now had, they had no power at all to give the will to live back to someone who had lost her own.

’I hate this,’ she said over the link, with no energy in her voice.

’Me too,’ Lohan replied. ’But she has the right to decide about what’s left of her.’

His words came out with more conviction than he actually felt, but he knew they were true, because everything they had taken from that creature, her freedom, her body, her children and even her name, left her with only one thing that was still hers, and if he tried to take that too, in the name of a hope that only he was feeling, he would be doing exactly the same thing as the humans who had brought her there.

Before anything else, he had to free her, because he didn’t want her to die still bound to those chains, like one last insult from the ones who had kept her there.

Two small clones detached from him and rolled over to the metal cables driven into the rock, and the digestion did the work in a few seconds, dissolving the thick, rusted links until her thin body was completely free, for the first time in weeks, without her making any move to take advantage of it.

Then, he approached slowly, extending thin, translucent filaments that touched her pale skin with as much care as possible, and used the connection to feel her body from the inside, mapping the nerves, the heartbeats, and every spot where pain still lingered, which were far more than he had imagined.

There were old wounds that had never healed properly, the skin of her forehead still raw where the horn had been sanded down, and a deep exhaustion that seemed to have spread through every cell of her body, so great that he was impressed she had endured so long without falling apart, and at the same time sad to know she had probably endured only because no one gave her the option to stop.

’I’m going to do this with no pain at all,’ he said, and the promise came out firmer than he expected. ’First I’m going to shut off everything that causes pain. Only then will I let her rest.’

’Can I stay beside her?’ Lisa asked, taking another step forward. ’I don’t want her to be alone.’

’Of course.’

Lisa approached the creature’s head and lay down beside her, carefully, resting a paw on the rough skin of her thin neck, in a gesture Lohan had never seen her make.

There was something very simple about that touch, and very hard to explain, and the creature seemed to notice, because her body relaxed a little, almost imperceptibly, under the weight of that paw.

Lohan started with the nerves.

Through the filaments, he sent a gentle wave of Sacred Light, warm and slow, mixed with a toxin he produced with great care, in doses so small they barely existed, and went about shutting off the pain point by point, from the wounds on her forehead to her thin legs, passing through her back, her chest and her throat, monitoring each reaction to make sure nothing in there still hurt.

He could have handled this abruptly, blowing her head apart and ending that suffering once and for all, but he wouldn’t have been able to do something like that.

It seemed too cruel to do that when he could be gentle enough for her to feel cared for in the last moments of her life.

Little by little, her breathing grew slower and deeper, and a strange expression appeared on her thin face, something Lohan barely recognized because he had never seen it on that creature before.

It was peace.

"Is that good?" he asked softly, still without letting go of the filaments. "Is anything hurting?"

"No," she answered, and her voice sounded lighter than at any other moment, as if an enormous weight had been lifted from her. "It’s been... a long time... since not."

Lisa let out a soft laugh and a tear ran down her white fur without her trying to hide it.

"I’m glad," she whispered. "I’m really glad."

It was then that Lohan slowed the rhythm of her heartbeat, slowly, so slowly that the creature probably didn’t even notice when it began to thin out, and the toxin did the rest, with a deep, dreamless sleep approaching like a rising tide.

"Thank you," she said, one last time, almost without a voice. "Finally."

After that, she said nothing more.

Her chest rose once, slower than all the others, and fell, and did not rise again.