Wrong Way
"I feel like I'm being bullied," Fate said with an aggrieved expression.
"Kill this chimera and move on, or perish," demanded the directionless voice of the Dracok.
"Not like I have much of a choice here," Fate grumbled. "Can I at least get a sword?"
"No. Use your claws."
"Fuck you too then." Just then, the chimera abomination struck.
Fate jumped to the side as the mass of flesh slammed a meaty arm at him, as wide as a house and as tall as a skyscraper. He hopped onto the arm as it buried itself into the dirt, digging his claws into it and avoiding the biting and snapping heads and swiping claws along the limb.
He started to climb his way up to the center of the mound, but the beast did the work for him, retracting the arm into the lump in the middle at the speed of an arrow and throwing him on its back.
Tendrils of muscle and scale sprouted around him, whipping toward him as the open mouths of crocodiles and dogs formed underneath his feet.
'No thanks,' he said, activating his Manifest Power. He sunk into the chimera, the tendrils hitting nothing but the creature's own flank and the mouths closing on air.
He used his Solid Surfing Concept to navigate his way through the beast, ignoring the pain from the acid touching his solid parts as he fished around for a heart or some other vital organ.
That sense of dread from before was still nagging away at the back of his mind, but compared to Lord Bosina's powers, it might as well have been nonexistent.
'Let's see, how do I kill a chimera?'
For once, that cruddy other life came in handy. His country bumpkin self knew quite a few tales of chimeras and the methods of slaying them.
The only method to truly kill a chimera was by shattering its core. Unluckily for Fate, he had made this task a thousand times harder.
Destroying the core of a single chimera took as much effort as punching through plywood. But when they were all fused into an agglomeration like this, the core of the original merged with the core of the others.
What did this mean? It meant the core was now hundreds of times harder and stronger. If before it was akin to plywood, now it would be like breaking titanium with a toothpick.
Fate thought about using the acid blood to his advantage, but quickly shelved the idea. While the skin of chimeras couldn't handle the acidic properties of their blood, the veins and muscle could do so easily. Logic dictated that the core would be the same.
'He did say to use my claws,' Fate thought. Might as well try.
Swimming through the flesh of the abomination, using his aura to find his way, he finally found what he was looking for.
He emerged into the beast's stomach, setting down on a mound of muscle that poked out of the sea of stomach acid around him. In the center of the stomach, which was two hundred feet across and half as wide, stood his objective.
The core was huge, easily as tall as he was, and as round and smooth as a polished ball of aluminum foil. It was so dense and chock-full of Divine Energy that his aura could only go a few inches in before being rebounded back.
The massive sphere hung about thirty feet above the pool of stomach acid, from cords of muscle and sinew attached to the roof and walls of the stomach. The pitch-black object occasionally pulsed with a dark light, the sinews attached to it flexing when it did so.
Launching himself with his Divine Grasp, he skewered his claws into the wall and dug his feet in, shimmying across without worry of the howling of the beast he was in.
But the beast wasn't going to just sit there and let him kill it. Using that same disturbing ability as before, the upper half of a bear popped out of the wall in front of him and swiped at the assassin with its claws.
Fate threw himself forward, using his Manifest Power to pass through, before turning solid and latching back onto the wall. Then another torso popped out, this one from a ram, and attempted to dash him with its horns.
He pulled one of his arms out and grabbed the thing by its horns, jerking violently to snap its neck.
The crisp snap that came from his actions informed him of his success, but the ram continued to look at him with life in its eyes, partly angry at his audacity and another amused at his failure.
A snake burst out from the fleshy wall underneath him, wrapping around his ankles and biting into his leg. He grimaced and turned intangible, falling down through the several other animals that had burst out of the wall and landing in the acid.
'Well, shit.'
As he sank lower and lower, he realized he'd have to use Solid Surfing to get to the core. He didn't want to do that for fear of the stomach acid that now surrounded him, but it was obvious that the walls wouldn't be a safe approach.
As snakes with goat heads and cat claws swam through the acid to intercept him, he braced himself for pain, waited until he was in the muscley seabed of the acid, and used the Concept.
He rocketed upward, smartly directing his ascent so he flew through that mound above the acid from earlier so the liquid wouldn't slow him down. Snakes and bulls leaped out along with him, grasping and biting at his ankles to no avail.
When he made it to the core, he threw his claws forward with all of his momentum…
Only for them to bounce off like he had hit a steel wall.
He fell back down into the tangle of limbs and gnashing teeth below, his expression one of silent fury. A tap from his Divine Grasp cleared a landing field for him among the angry tumor animals, and he landed on the mound that started it all.
"Just use your claws," he said mockingly. "There's no way that could be taken the wrong way."