CHAPTER TWO
"Benjamin." He looked up sharply. Good. The ancient words came to her lips with ease as she began the ritual. She may not live, but he would have a keepsake of her... in a specific sense. She dug her fingers into her right eye...
Ben stared. His mother was dying, and was muttering something he couldn't understand. On top of that, she was clawing her own eye out. What was all this? Wasn't she in enough pain?
"M-Mom-" He didn't get to finish. She yanked it out, pulling out all of the blood vessels behind it in the process. She managed to rip them off. She put the eye into his empty eye socket, the iris facing her.
Ben suddenly had two eyes that could see. His mother dropped to the ground. He reached out to touch her.
Then the tentacles stirred, worming towards him. He stared, stumbling back. They stll slithered towards him, enveloping him, choking him...
And it all went black.
That was what happened. Now, he was in a black void, looking around, thinking. He took a few tentative steps forward. They echoed, making it all the more creepy.
"What the... Where are you? Mom?" Copies of his voice bounced off invisible walls. His treacherous heart beat faster. He froze. No one was there, it was just some gigantic void. It was creepy. Why was he here? Where was his mother? And everything else, for that matter.
"Hello?"
"Hello, yourself." He looked up. A strange looking guy was walking towards him. Deep blue, or maybe black skin. His eyes remined him of Sandra's -Sandra "White's", at least- whenever she used her powers. Green with black reptillian pupils. He smiled, showing off glowing green teeth. The green was uncanny.
...but at least someone is here.
"Relax, boy." He hald out a hand. "My name is Nergal. As much as I'd like to explain myself, and all of this, there is something very important that I have to tell you."
"What the..."
"First, your mother." The creature closed its eyes and clasped its arms around its back. "This may be hard to believe, but she was not human. She was a Nergal. A Nergal by transfer."
"Mom... Transfer? Nergal... what're you talking about?" His mother's death was the first thing on his mind. This would leave heavy emotional scar tissue. Not to talk of her contingency plan... He wanted to reassure the boy, comfort him until he was better, then gradually introduce this stuff. But he had to go through the process quickly. God knew what would happen if the boy didn't get the insstrucrions... Facts first, then coddling.
"Yes, Nergal by transfer. You see, she was a Nergal demon." He let that sink in. Again, there was no time. "A Nergal, whenever at the point of death, looks for a host to transfer their powers to. Their right eye is the physical catalyst. When the eye is accepted, the receiver undergoes a physical and mental change into a Nergal demon. During the process, they experience the former host's memories. But it isn't like a film; more like a highlight reel, one that you can go over more carefully in your spare time. But now, you need the abridged version."
He touched a hand to Ben's forhead. The memories started rolling. Babyhood. Childhood. Playing wirh friends. Questions. Feelings.
Notable events; her first crush, her first period, when she received her powers, learning to control them, meeting his father, dating, marriage, the honeymoon...
Birth. Watching little Ben grow up. Watching him play video games, worry he doesn't get out enough, convincing him to join the soccer team and resume the instrument classes...
Worry. Ben was sneaking out and coming back late, always with a covenient excuse...
Outrage. Fear. Awe. The heroics revealed.
A blur.
Outright panic when the Invasion started. Worry. Ben was going to fight in the war. Panic. Calm. Deciding to make a clone to take care of Carl, and coming to monitor Ben... Hoping he would understand why she did this...
Ben blinked, then his eyes filled with tears. His mother loved him so much... to this extent...
Nergal comforted the boy as he broke down, reassuring him. When he recovered, he knew that time was ticking. He coukdn't keep the boy here much longer, time bubble or no. The dimension shifted, and Ben disappeared...
The battlefield was quiet. The soldiers who had been tossed backwards since the beginning of the fight inched further backwards, scared by the turn of events.
First an ambush, by an army of Ball-Peen Meanies, Mean Behemoths and Caterplugs, then an explosion, and the Beast was there.
Most monsters had names, like the aforementioned three. Then there were others like Fusion Spawns, Soulo Shells, Death Nettles, Bad Maxes and a host of others. Most were mutations of Spawns that came in contact with objects. The aforementioned ones were permanently mutated and stabilized.
But a new type had come recently. They sampled things at random, forming a body, like most monsters. But after being destabilized, they were still functional. They could still go, absorb other objects, and attack. They were popping up in several places, and it seemed well-nigh impossible to kill them. Nobody could tell if Fuse or Fusion Dexter was creating them. All they knew was that those things were dangerous. The Beast was one of them. A green, sloppy mess of garbage cans, old, rusty cars, a crane and several chunks of buldings. Somehow, it had developed eyes. But unlike most of the amalgams, that sometimes collapsed under their own weight, this one could actually hold itself together. And, it was dangerous. Smashing things might seem routine, but this thing seemed to have enough brain to aim precisely where to smash things. It had racked up a very high killcount.
To say it was scary was an understatement. Fuse seemed to have developed a new plan on how to destroy the earth with those things. They could take them down, but they couldn't take them out.
They needed to get it down and make it stay down. So, for this particular problem case, they decided to send in their strongest hitters: the Ben10 faction. The recruits had been scared, but pushed onwards, encouraged by seeing their hero cut a clean line through the monsters and going in, with Sandra White, a well-known recruit, to kill the monster. They fought as hard as they could, their characteristic thorough job fueled by adrenaline.
Then Ben got an eye ripped out and Sandra was ripped apart.
The adrenaline left, and they started losing manpower. It was a miracle they pulled through it. Only around half of the recruits were left. And they saw their hero strangled by Sandra's tentacles, after she'd morphed into something else.
Needless to say, nobody was going in there. Especially not when the moster was leering over an unconscious Ben 10, reaedy to slam a car over him, then go to them. Then the ground erupted in flames, and the Beast was going to regret ever being created.
Some gigantic monster sprouted from where Ben had once been. Black and green with traces of white and red with sharp green fangs too large for its mouth. Some kind of dragon. But it was wrong. Very wrong. It twisted in abnormal ways and its limns were long and overly thin. The entire thing looked deforned...
...and the unholy smile on its face was not helping its case. Tentacles sprouted from its back where its wings should have been. A single tentacle slid out from the writhing mass and latched around the Beast's neck.
The unholy sounds that came from the Beast's maw seemed to come from the deepest pit of hell.
