-x-

  Chapter 1

  -x-

  Night's Sacred Ground, Nokron, Eternal City.

  -x-?

  Mimic tears were the most basic fundamental unit upon which everything the Nox had built. Their weapons, their equipment, their technology - all of it was merely a different application of the same thing - a mimic tear. It was the pinnacle of their magi-technological achievement, and rightfully so. What else could a semi-liquid living metal that could take freely assume the physical and mystical characteristics of anything and everything it came into contact with, be anything other than a genuine miracle of engineering?

  The problem was that the Nox were not content to leave it at that. They created life - the Albinaurics. They were the next step in the evolution of the mimic tear - to mimic true life with all its complex biological and spiritual processes and not merely be a simulacrum of it. It was to culminate in the eventual creation of a being capable of usurping the title of Elden Lord and creating a new order.

  For obvious reasons, this failed. The Nox for all their genius, couldn't figure out all the kinks in something as complex as the human brain. For all that they got a functioning model, it was also defective and there was nothing anyone could do to fix the fact that the Albinaurics were all paralyzed from the hips down. The Albinaurics ended up marrying each other, and as life often tends to do, the second generation came to be. Evolution, and the crucible was a powerful force in this world however, and it would not suffer a creature inherently born to be weak, especially with how mutable their bodies were, and so the second generation were born able to walk, but their bodies were warped to the point of inhumanity. Things were not going in a direction the nox liked, and so the Albinauric project was scrapped

  Evidently, they did not stop trying, and it culminated in the creation of something... approximating a God, which was then promptly sacrificed and desecrated to create the ultimate weapon against the golden order. A weapon capable of killing divinity. To kill the Fingers of the Greater Will.

  The Fingerslayer Blade.

  Considering how closely it resembled the sacred relic sword the Elden beast had fashioned out of Radagon's corpse... The implications were obvious. Radagon, the other half and the equal and opposite of Marika, a God in their own right. Elyra also tried to ignore the implication of the blade being so small by comparison. There was no end to the depravity the Nox were willing to go to in order to win, after all.

  Evidently, the Elden beast had enough of the blatant blasphemy that was going on in its back yard, and chucked a falling star at them, obliterating the entire civilization at its roots. But in the underground cavernous remnants of the lost city, the finger slayer blade awaited to be wielded by one fated to carve their name into the very stars.

  Until Elyra got her hands on it of course. Indeed, the countermeasures the Nox employed to keep it safe were extensive but they clearly did not account for a lowly mimic tear to suddenly gain sentience and promptly walk down the street and grab it. The other mimic tears, while impressively programmed in their functions, were clearly not all that aware of things. Or if they were, they were spiteful enough of their creators to willfully ignore one of their own absconding with their prized treasure.

  Of course, there were some who were self-aware and intelligent enough to know what she had done, but those ones were also smart enough to keep their heads down and not get caught up in whatever Calamity she was cooking up under their master's noses. They knew better than to get involved, and even more so to avoid the attentions of their cruel creators.

  Elyra slowly crept up on a silver blob of living metal, vacuous and woefully unaware of the existential threat that was creeping up on it from above the cliff. She had been tracking her quarry, designated 'Larry' for quite some time, noting its behaviors and patterns, and had eventually figured out a nice spot to lure him into where he could disappear without a trace.

  Elyra molded a significant fraction of her body mass, and with a speed and force that belied its sheer size and length, impaled Larry on a massive lance of liquid metal, before having it unravel within him, fusing her own metal with his body until the two of them were conjoined, and then usurping his meager sentience and replacing it with her own. And just like that, she had assumed direct control, and doubled her mass. The two masses of liquid metal pooled together into a larger blob, before starting her journey back to her 'base'.

  The silvery mass eventually reached a broken window that led into one of the many, many sealed and abandoned structures that once belonged to the Nox, and then slowly dripped into the room. It had once been a forge from what she could tell, clearly having many of the tools and equipment designed for metalwork, but that suited her perfectly well, considering what she had planned.

  Finally having reached her safe haven, Elyra slumped, relaxing her form onto the cool metal anvil by the furnace. Sighing, she disgorged the loot she had… liberated from latest venture into the lost city, and took inventory of all her things.

  "Three silver tear husks, two seventh tier golden runes, a lightning infused gravel stone, a great ghost golvewort and a fifth tier somber smithing stone. An awesome hall, if I do say so myself." Today was a productive day indeed.

  Elyra took out the somber smithing stone and swept the rest into a chest she had also liberated from its resting place a few months back. Looking at the somber smithing stone in her hand, Elyra smiled. She finally has what she needs for the next step of her plan.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She split her silvery body by half, though she kept a single cord connecting the two halves.

  One half slowly, meticulously, molded and reshaped itself into a facsimile of a human, and the other into a thick rod of solid metal. Elyra transformed her right hand into that of a hammer, and placed the smithing stone and the massive slab on top of the anvil.

  She raised her right hand with a grimace, but then brought it down with all the force her metallic faux-muscles could muster. Pain exploded in behind her eyes but Elyra did not stop, did not hesitate.

  With a skill and experience borne of thousands upon thousands of failed attempts, she guided the hammed back down at the right spot once again.

  Pain. But underneath it all, a slow sensation of power, of unnatural strength and resilience slowly being infused into her very being slowly began to spread. Elyra smiled, a pained but genuine thing, for on her tongue was the oh so sweet taste of victory.

  Her faux-body nearly destabilized from the mind numbing pain but she persevered, bringing down the hammer down again and again and again, slowly but surely infusing the somber smithing stone into very very essence. She had no idea how long it took, but by the time she was done, the smithing stone was gone, and the half of her that was within the rod was far more... Potent than the rest of her. The newly infused metal shined with a soft inner light that was hard to describe, and carried a presence to it that she had only felt from the weapons of the best swordstresses the Nox could field.

  Elyra moved her consciousness into the improved half, taking with her all her accumulated runes and cut her connection to the rest, leaving it to splash uselessly on the floor while she rose, improved in every sense of the term - the sheer power in her liquid metal body, the vastly superior precision with which she could control her base form... All of it was improved by an order of magnitude. When she partially transformed her body into a simulacrum, the control she had over her form was immense, and she used it to mold herself into something that would have been indistinguishable from a human, if not for the uniform silvery veneer that covered her entire body.

  "Hm. Not fine enough to manipulate color, but who cares, I finally have Handz, baby!" It was all going according to cake.

  (A/N Cake means Keikaku, Keikaku means Plan)

  Yes, it was a simple thing to assume the form of someone else, but that was a very static ability programmed into all mimics that had some very hard limitations. Once she assumed a form, it took some effort or a lot of damage to change back into her base state, and once shifted, she was stuck with the limitations and abilities of said copied entity and not her own. And while it had its advantages, the ability to fluidly alter her shape in her base form was more useful, versatile, and felt more natural to her, more often than not.

  "Oh yeah, this is the stuff." She murmured as wolverine-style metallic claws emerged from between her knuckles, before retracting. Then her hand changed into a single long lance of metal, which then… loosened, becoming more fluid - like a whip or a tentacle, and then proceeded to grow thorns and barbs all over its surface.

  A savage grin spread across her face as her entire lower body destabilized, losing definition in exchange for turning into a mass of ever-shifting tendrils that attached to every available surface.

  There was also something to be said about being an unstoppable killing machine that could simply flow around all attacks, not be hindered by any obstacle, and had the smithing stone improved potency to simply cut almost all defenses an enemy could offer. The improved control over her fluid body also gave her an environmental advantage like no other because she could simply form hooks and ropes out from anywhere on or inside her body and start swinging around like Spiderman - or more accurately, like Venom. Maybe she could even create and hide mini-crossbows inside herself that she could bring out instantly in a surprise attack nobody would expect. The possibilities seemed endless, even with the extensive list she brainstormed in her free time.

  "Hm. I also need to go through that list all over again since my limits are different now." She said to herself. "This is definitely worth all the pain…"

  She knew it would succeed because it was possible to upgrade the nox flowing sword... a weapon that was clearly a transformed mimic tear so it only stood to reason that the same would be possible with her own body which was indistinguishably the same thing at its base.

  She also knew it was possible to fuse objects into herself, as she had done with the ghostflame torch a few months back. What? Yes, she had to now live with the knowledge that she was part-torch but the counter argument was that she now had an in-built flamethrower.

  This was why she had taken the Fingerslayer Blade in the first place.

  Though, she had learned the hard way that there was an order to things like this, and trying to fuse an anti-divine weapon with her weak ass metal body would only serve to get her killed. She had also learned the hard way that anything damaged by the god-killing blade was utterly lost to her control, which was what led to her first instance of mimic-tear cannibalism in the first place, subsuming her first victim to replenish her lost body mass in a desperate attempt to survive.

  Evidently she needed to fully upgrade herself to the max, preferably with an ancient somber smithing stone to make an attempt again but such was the way of things. Thankfully, she knew exactly where to look to find the materials. And as she had learned that even with the world being different in reality than the limited perspective a game could offer, things of significance more often than not exactly where where they were supposed to be, even if that place was far more expansive, hidden or elaborate than was originally depicted.

  It was time for her to leave her little forge and take her fate into her own hands.

  -x-