I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 22: A very, very gross place.

POV: Aris Ashborne

’It stinks.’

That was the only thought in his mind as Aris sent out a mana blast to intercept the weird mass of flesh.

He hadn’t really put any thought into the attack, his only goal being to keep the man, well, what was left of the man alive long enough for him to think of a plan.

Unfortunately he forgot to hold back, well he did, but it wasn’t enough.

Instead of simply knocking it off balance, the mass just... exploded.

Aris paused.

He glanced at the man, inwardly letting out a sigh of relief when he noticed that he had fallen unconscious.

Good, unconscious meant that he wouldn’t have to do much explaining. As far as explanations went in this damned place.

This dungeon had to be one of the most grotesque places he had ever been to, and that was something, considering his experience as awakened. He didn’t even know how to start describing the place, the sea made of what looked to be blood, and the mountains that looked like it was made out of bleached scales, the sky blotted with what looked like bulging masses of infections.

And the creepiest parts, the monsters.

Monsters was a generous term, considering that there was only two living beings in this dungeon for as far as he could sense. Every other autonomous creature other than Aris and the unconscious man was a corpse, which was.. very creepy.

He was still figuring out how exactly he was supposed to break his fall.

He did have a clean way, but it was going to hurt... a lot.

Well, the good part was no one was going to be here to see him transform.

It happened the way it always happened, a release, a rearrangement, something underneath his skin deciding to stop pretending to be only what it was supposed to be. The chaos that he kept coiled so carefully against his ribs poured sideways into something else, something older than he himself, and his back split open along lines that had always been there even when they weren’t visible.

He bit his teeth, no matter how many times he did, he could never get used to the pain. It was especially bad this time, considering that it had been a long time since he had last let go to this extend.

The wings came out dark. They always came out dark, not black exactly, more the color of something at the edge of light, the deep iridescent non-color of entropy given form, each feather edged with the faint shimmer of disorder held in suspension. They were large. Larger than the frame they came from had any right to produce, which was always the part that would be difficult to explain if anyone happened to be conscious to see it.

Nobody was conscious to see it. Thank the gods.

He caught the air, arrested the fall with a single sharp down-stroke that sent a pulse of displaced wind rippling outward across the blood-sea below, and hovered for a moment in the blotted sky of this wretched dungeon. A few dark spots bloomed in his vision, which made him hesitate for a split second. He then flapped his wings once more, taking off towards the direction of the unconscious man.

A moment later, he was already upon him, he flapped his wings again, stopping his momentum, then released them... well, constrained them back inside him.

He took a moment to study the surroundings.

His attack had properly taken out the flesh.. whatever it had been. The entire thing was now reduced into a spray of blood red mist, covering every part of the area with its grossness.

The man was slumped on the ground. There was an obsidian blade in his had, a glaive, Aris noticed, a traditional blade for someone who looked so young. He was in bad condition, there were countless wounds littered over his body, and his entire right arm was missing.

"So that’s where the arm came from."

Aris tried his best to not breathe in this place, the air was still way too pungent for him, and the stench of iron was stronger now that he was closer to the sea.

He hesitated to get closer to the man, wondering if it was a trap.

He clicked his tongue, and took a step towards him, then another, crouching down beside him with the careful movement of someone who had learned, through experience, that things in dungeons had a tendency to be exactly what they looked like right up until the moment they weren’t.

The man didn’t move.

Aris studied him for a moment. Young, younger than the glaive suggested, younger than the missing arm suggested, younger than any of this suggested. The wounds were extensive but patterned, which was interesting. It was not the random carnage of something that had been trying to kill him. The ’something’ had been trying to take him apart specifically, methodically, piece by piece.

He looked at where the arm had been.

Then at the flesh-mass residue currently decorating the surrounding area in a radius that he was quietly embarrassed about.

’Ah,’ he thought.

So that was what it had been doing with it.

He filed this information in the part of his mind reserved for things he understood and wished he didn’t, and returned his attention to the practical problem. The man was alive. Unconscious, one arm short, bleeding from more places than was ideal, but alive, and the dungeon’s animated corpses were still running their patrol routes at a distance that was going to become a non-distance eventually.

He needed to stop the bleeding first. Everything else was secondary.

Aris looked at his own sleeve, then at the man’s condition.

He looked around him for anything that could substitute as a bandage.

Then letting out a sigh, tore out the sleeves of his arm, quietly wrapping it around the stubble of the remaining parts of the man’s arm.