Chapter 17: bd two
The change in Beos was a slow, cold rain that soaked into the foundations of the Black Library. At first, it was a relief for many. No more unsettling offers of fungal salves. No more being seen through by those wide, iridescent eyes that noticed everything and judged nothing. The silence where her hums used to be was just… quiet.
But then the small absences began to pile up, subtle as dust.
Gear stayed broken. Minor wounds ached and throbbed through the night. The perpetual damp chill of the lower barracks seemed to seep deeper into bones, unchallenged by the faint, drying warmth her presence had once subtly provided. The air itself felt thinner, more abrasive, as if a gentle, filtering membrane had been peeled away.
Kael, the partner from the Duskwatch who had laughed along but never directly participated, found himself staring at a deep, suppurating gash on his forearm from a rusty nail. A month ago, Beos would have been there before he’d even finished cursing, her hands already glowing with that soft gold spore-dust that numbed pain and knitted flesh clean. Now, he had to wait in line at the infirmary for an hour, listening to the harried human healer complain about supplies, and left with a stinging, poorly-mixed poultice and a throbbing headache.
He caught up to her in the armory two days later. She was running a whetstone along the curved blade of her glaive with a rhythmic, whispering scrape. The sound was methodical, final.
“Beos,” he said, his voice too loud in the stone chamber.
She did not look up. “Kael.”
“Look, about… before.” He shuffled his feet. “The stuff with Rourke. I never… I didn’t mean for it to go that far.”
The scraping continued. She tested the edge with her thumb, a minute bead of luminous blue fluid welling up where it bit. She wiped it away on her thigh. “It went where it went.”
“Yeah, but…” He took a step closer, lowering his voice. “People miss you. The old you. The helpful one.” He gestured vaguely with his bandaged arm. “This is all just… it’s not necessary. We get it. You’re tough. You proved your point.”
Beos finally lifted her gaze. Her eyes held no anger, no victory. Just a flat, polished distance. “What point did I prove, Kael?”
He faltered. “That you… that you won’t be pushed around.”
“I was never being pushed,” she said, and it was the simple, devastating truth. “I was being offered connection. I misunderstood the offering.” She set the whetstone down. “The misunderstanding is corrected. There is no more point to prove.”
She slung the glaive over her shoulder, the movement economical, and walked past him. He stood alone in the chill of the armory, the ghost of his un-stitched wound pulsing in time with his heartbeat, understanding for the first time that some doors, once closed, did not open again.
Others tried different methods. Elara, released from the infirmary but permanently jumpy, her eyes darting to any patch of shadow, left a small honeycake on Beos’s bunk. A peace offering, sticky and sad. Beos returned from patrol, looked at it, then picked it up between two fingers and placed it neatly on the windowsill for the birds. She did not thank Elara. She did not acknowledge it at all. The cake sat there, weeping syrup in the sun, until a cleaner swept it away.
The attempts at appeasement were awkward, transactional, and they all failed. They wanted a return on an investment they hadn’t known they were making. They wanted the comfort back without examining why they’d destroyed its source.
For a faction led by Rourke, however, the new Beos was an outright offense. He’d been discharged, but he was broken in a way the healers couldn’t fix. He jumped at loud noises. He’d developed a violent, gagging allergy to the smell of damp earth. The sight of his own reflection, which he sometimes imagined was slowly becoming veiled in a fine, white mycelium, could send him into a panic. His hatred had curdled, fermented into something dense and poisonous.
“If she won’t be useful,” he snarled to a gathered few in a dank corner of the training yard, “then she’s useless. A liability. A thing that looks human but isn’t. We cleanse liabilities.”
His new circle was smaller, harder. Men and women whose fear had ossified into aggression. They saw her polite silence not as defeat, but as a smug, alien superiority. Her competence was an insult. Her very existence was a reminder of a vulnerability they had all shared—the memory of wanting her kindness—and they despised her for it.
Their cruelty became tactical, cold, designed not to provoke a reaction but to isolate, to demonstrate her ultimate expendability.
It came to a head in the Sunken Room.
The assignment was straightforward: investigate a concentration of akuma-signatures in a half-collapsed ceremonial chamber deep beneath an abandoned manor on the Library’s perimeter. The team was a mix: Beos, Kael (assigned by a scheduler who either had a sense of irony or was profoundly overworked), Rourke, and two of his newer allies—a hulking woman named Varga and a wiry, silent man called Pike.
The descent was a claustrophobic journey through a crumbling root cellar, down a slick stone stairwell that smelled of trapped centuries. The air grew thick and cold. Their lanterns fought against a darkness that seemed to drink the light.
The Sunken Room opened up suddenly, a vast wound in the earth. The ceiling was a fractured mosaic of marble, held up by listing pillars. Great chunks of it lay scattered across the floor, submerged in a vast, still pool of black water that reflected their flickering lights like a corrupted mirror. In the center of the room, the last embers of a fire—lit by whom or what, no one knew—still spit feeble orange sparks into the damp. The place smelled of wet stone, ancient rot, and something else, a metallic tang like old blood and ozone that clung to the back of the throat.
“Spread out,” Rourke ordered, his voice echoing. “Look for the coalescence point. Varga, left flank. Pike, with me. Kael, check the water’s edge.” He pointed a deliberate finger at Beos. “You. High ground. Scout the upper balcony.”
It was a reasonable order. The balcony was a crumbling stone ledge twenty feet up, accessible by a precarious, partially collapsed ramp of rubble. It offered a view of the entire chamber. It was also isolated, structurally unsound, and the first place any ambush would target.
Beos looked at the ramp, then at Rourke. Her expression was unreadable. “Acknowledged.”
She moved toward the pile of stone. Her movements were not those of a human climber; she was fluid, almost weightless, her feet finding purchase on slick edges that looked impossible. Her fungal cap brushed against the weeping stone as she ascended, her pale glow making her a slow-moving beacon in the dark.
“Show-off,” Varga muttered, watching her.
From the balcony, Beos had a perfect panorama. The ruined fire. The inky pool. Her team, small and bright below. And the coalescence point—not a single source, but a malignant, shifting nexus in the air above the center of the water, visible to her enhanced sight as a bruise-purple shimmer, a tear in the world slowly leaking akuma essence. It was gathering, preparing to birth something.
She should have called it down. That was her job.
She remained silent. She watched.
Below, Kael poked at the water’s edge with his short sword. “Nothing here but slime and bad feelings.”
“Keep looking,” Rourke barked. He and Pike were prying at a sealed stone sarcophagus with iron pry-bars, the screech of metal on stone setting everyone’s teeth on edge.
The temperature in the room dropped sharply. The dying fire guttered, the shadows lunging. The still surface of the black pool shivered, then bulged.
“Contact!” Kael yelped, scrambling back.
The thing that emerged was not a fully formed akuma, but a protoplasmic horror—a mass of hungry darkness given temporary shape by the concentrated essence. It had too many limbs, all ending in blade-like points, and a central maw that pulsed with silent screams. It flowed from the pool toward the closest heat and noise: Kael.
Chaos erupted. Kael’s sword passed through it with minimal effect, the darkness swallowing the steel. Varga charged, her heavy axe cleaving a chunk from its form, which instantly regrew. Pike fired a crossbow bolt that stuck, sizzling, in its mass. Rourke was yelling orders, his voice edged with the panic he’d carried since the spores.
Beos watched from above. Her hand rested on the haft of her glaive. Her breathing was slow, deep. Unnecessary, really. The Sovereign’s teachings on ecosystem management played in her mind. An imbalance corrects itself. Predators cull the weak. Energy is conserved.
Kael screamed as a shadowy limb sliced across his thigh, dropping him to one knee. Varga was being driven back toward a pillar, the thing pressing its advantage.
“Beos! Where is it? What do you see?” Rourke roared, spinning, looking up at her ledge.
She met his eyes across the gulf of dark air. She said nothing.
In that moment, he understood. This was her answer. Her refusal. She was not refusing to help him. She was refusing to help them. The unit. The team. The human construct of mutual survival. She was letting the ecosystem correct its imbalance.
A howl of pure rage tore from Rourke’s throat, mingling with Kael’s cry of pain. “You fungal bitch! I’ll kill you myself!”
The distraction was all the akuma-spawn needed. A tendril lashed out, wrapping around Rourke’s ankle and yanking him off his feet. He slammed into the wet stone, the breath knocked from him, his pry-bar skittering away.
Beos watched him fall. She felt the distant, vegetative pulse of the colony far below, a steady, reassuring hum. She felt the cold stone beneath her knees. She felt the sharp, clean line of her own choice.
And then she felt something else. A small, buried thing, deep beneath the protective layers of hyphae and cold logic. It was a memory-sensation: the Sovereign’s mycelial embrace after her head trauma, a flood of unconditional, wordless sustenance. Not given because she was useful. Given because she was.
Kael was sobbing now, trying to crawl. Varga’s axe was knocked from her hands. The dark mass reared over Rourke, its bladed limbs poised to plunge.
With a sigh that was neither human nor fungal, but something in between, Beos stood.
She did not jump down. She stepped off the ledge.
She fell silently, her hair and tunic streaming upward, but it was not a fall. It was a dispersal. As she dropped, a cloud of spores—gold and white this time, the color of deep-earth nutrients and cellular repair—bloomed from her in a silent explosion. They filled the chamber, settling over the combatants, the akuma-spawn, the black water.
The effect was instantaneous and violent in its peace.
The aggressive, paranoid energy fueling the proto-akuma dissolved. Its form shuddered, blurring, as the spores aggressively broke down its concentrated malice, converting it into harmless, ambient decay. It wavered, deflating like a pierced bladder, and sloughed back into the pool as inert sludge.
On the humans, the spores had a different effect. A profound, calming lethargy. The fight-or-flight terror evaporated. Kael’s sobs hitched into a stunned quiet. Varga’s furious scrambling stilled. Rourke, staring up at the dissolving horror above him, felt a tidal wave of calm so foreign it was like being drugged. His hatred was still there, but muffled, pushed under a thick blanket of biological serenity.
Beos landed softly in the center of them, her knees bending to absorb the impact. The glow from her skin was intense, casting their stunned faces in stark relief.
She walked first to Kael. She placed a hand over the gash on his thigh. The luminous blue fluid from her palm mingled with his blood, and the flesh began to knit itself closed with a faint, itching warmth. He stared at her, speechless.
She moved to Varga, whose wrist was bent at a wrong angle. A touch, a resetting crack, a pulse of soothing coolness. Varga flinched, but not from pain.
Finally, she stood over Rourke. He lay on his back, breathing heavily, his eyes wide with a cocktail of fury and forced tranquility. She looked down at him, her cap casting a shadow over his face.
“I am not a doormat,” she said, her voice clear in the now-silent chamber. “I am not a tool. I am Beos. Of the colony. My kindness is not a resource for you to mine. It is a choice. And today, I choose to give it.”
She turned her back on him, on all of them, and walked toward the collapsed exit. The residual spores in the air swirled in her wake, glowing softly.
“The coalescence point is neutralized,” she stated, not looking back. “The mission is complete.”
She left them there in the sudden, eerie quiet of the Sunken Room, sprawled on the cold stone, healed and humbled and steeped in a peace they did not deserve, forced to contend with the terrifying reality of a kindness that could no longer be taken for granted, only granted as a deliberate, devastating mercy.
when beos sleeps she is dead to the world. one night some of the other omiyoji decide they wanna fuck the mushroom girl, make her their personal fleshlight. beos having believed that she was completely safe in the barracks is completely out, no chance of her waking up. however her body can recognize that something is happening and releases some defensive spores which send the assailants on a hell of an acid trip that takes what they’re already feeling to an extreme. so since they’re all aroused it gets heightened to where they can’t stop cumming, it also forces them to produce immense amount of cum so every orgasm they spurt more and more
The walk back to the Black Library was conducted in a silence more complete than any she had known. Kael, Varga, and Pike trudged behind her, their injuries healed but their minds raw, avoiding each other’s eyes. Rourke was not with them. He had vanished into the tunnels shortly after she’d turned her back, his footsteps echoing away into a different kind of dark. The official report was spare: coalescence point neutralized, minor injuries, field remediation applied. Commander Lysander read it, his eyes flicking from the parchment to her placid face, and asked no questions. The Sunken Room had changed nothing and everything.
In the days that followed, the barracks achieved a new equilibrium. It was brittle. Those who had been in the chamber now gave Beos a wide, careful berth, their fear tinged with a shame they couldn’t articulate. The others, hearing only fractured, unbelievable whispers of what happened, split into two camps. A smaller group watched her with a kind of wary awe. The larger, louder faction saw only that Rourke was gone, broken and disappeared, and that Beos walked back unscathed. Their narrative was simpler: the fungus freak had finally shown its true, manipulative colors. She was a predator pretending to be prey. And predators, in their minds, were to be used or destroyed.
Beos, for her part, slept. True, deep, mycelial sleep. In the colony, rest was a communal sinking into the network, a shared, wordless dreaming. Here, alone, it was a total systems shutdown. When she slept, she was dead to the world. Her breathing grew so shallow as to be undetectable. The gentle glow of her skin dimmed to near darkness. Not even the slam of a door or a shouted argument from the hall could pierce that profound vegetative stillness. It was her one true vulnerability, and she believed it was safe behind the stone walls and the unspoken rules of the institution. She was wrong.
“You see? Told you. She’s like a fucking log.”
The whisper slithered through the darkened barracks long after the last watch had changed. Three figures lingered near the doorway, shadows clotting around them. Jory, a brawny Omiyoji with thick fingers and a permanent scowl, had been Rourke’s drinking buddy. Maren, sharp-faced and opportunistic, had always thought Beos’s helpfulness was a act of weak vanity. And Silas, the youngest, with nervous eyes and a desperate need to belong, went where the momentum pushed him.
“Rourke lost his mind over that? Over this?” Jory muttered, gesturing with a tankard of cheap, sour beer. “She’s just a thing. A weird little thing.”
Maren’s gaze was analytical, cold. “He said she was dangerous. I don’t see dangerous. I see a tool that isn’t being used right.” She took a slow sip. “Lysander keeps her around ‘cause she’s effective. But what’s she good for, really? She eats, she sleeps, she fights. She’s a resource.”
Silas shifted his weight. “I heard what she did in the Sunken Room. Healed them all.”
“And let them get chewed up first,” Jory scoffed, wiping his mouth. “She plays games. She needs to be shown her place. Reminded what she’s for.”
A charged, ugly quiet settled between them. The implication hung in the air, thick as the barracks’ smell of sweat and moldy straw. They’d all seen her, a soft, silent shape curled on her bunk, her strange cap a dark curve in the gloom. The childlike innocence was gone, replaced by an unsettling blankness. That blankness invited defilement. It was a canvas.
“She won’t even wake up,” Maren said, her voice a clinical whisper. “It’d be like using a warm, wet hole. Nothing more.”
Jory’s grin was a flash of yellow in the dark. “My favorite kind. Come on. Let’s give the mushroom girl a proper welcome.”
The decision, once voiced, became an inevitability. Liquid courage fueled a toxic bravado. They waited until the deep watch, when the only sounds were snores and the distant drip of water in the cistern. Then they moved, boots shuffling on the stone floor, surrounding her bunk like hunters closing on dormant prey.
Jory went first. He grunted as he shoved a hand over her mouth, his other hand yanking the rough wool blanket down to her waist. She wore a simple, sleeveless linen shift. She did not stir. Her chest barely rose. “Fucking eerie,” he whispered, but his arousal was a hot, immediate pressure against his trousers. Her compliance—her absolute, vegetative stillness—was its own perverse thrill.
Maren’s hands were businesslike. She grabbed the hem of the shift and rucked it up to Beos’s neck, exposing her body to the cool, dank air. Beos’s form was soft, pale, and lush in the gloom, her skin holding a faint, milk-blue luminescence. The fungal patterns traced over her hips and thighs seemed to pulse slowly, independent of any heart. Silas just stared, his breath coming in short hitches, half-horrified, half painfully erect.
Silas watched Jory’s thick hands slide over the faint, glowing patterns on Beos’s inner thigh. “Hold her legs,” Jory grunted, already fumbling with his belt. The leather rasp was obscenely loud. Beos’s head lolled to the side, her ink-black hair spilling across the rough pillow, her iridescent eyes shut. She was a doll. A warm, soft doll that didn’t breathe right.
“She’s not even wet,” Maren observed with detached curiosity, her fingers pushing between Beos’s folds. “Dry as old paper. Here.” She spat into her own palm, then rubbed the moisture against Beos’s vulva with a clinical, scraping motion.
“Just get her open,” Jory hissed, his cock now out, thick and ruddy in the gloom. He positioned himself at the bunk’s edge, nudging her knees apart with his own. The first push was met with tight, unyielding resistance. He shoved harder, a brutal, grunting thrust that forced her body to accommodate him. A faint, fibrous sound, like tearing wet parchment, made Silas flinch. Jory didn’t stop. He sank in to the hilt, a low groan escaping him. “Fuck. It’s like a hot, tight fist. Just… lying there.”
He began to move, a steady, pounding rhythm that shook the bunk frame. The sound was wet and meaty. Beos’s body jolted limply with each drive, her small, soft breasts shifting, her mushroom cap tapping rhythmically against the wall. Maren watched, her own hand now down her trousers, fingers working in small circles as she studied the penetration. “See? A resource. A useful hole.”
Silas felt his own cock throbbing, a traitorous, heated pulse that drowned out the whispering horror in his mind. This was power. This was what Rourke had failed to do—break her, use her, prove she was just a thing. He shuffled closer, his hand reaching out to touch the strange, cool cap on her head.
The moment his fingers made contact, the change began.
It wasn’t a conscious reaction from Beos. Her mind was sunk fathoms deep in mycelial dreams. But her body, the symbiotic colony that comprised half her being, recognized a catastrophic threat. A violation of the host. Defensive protocols, evolved over millennia in dark places, activated instantly.
From the gills beneath her cap, from the delicate fungal traceries on her neck and thighs, a mist erupted. It wasn’t the gold of healing or the violet of psychic feedback. This was a searing, phosphorescent magenta, shot through with bolts of neural black. It carried no scent they could process, only a sudden metallic tang that coated the tongue and teeth.
Jory was buried inside her, mid-thrust, when the cloud hit him. He gasped, the air turning to liquid fire in his lungs. The sensation of her tight, unresponsive channel around his cock didn’t vanish. It amplified. A thousandfold. Every nerve ending in his groin screamed into a feedback loop of relentless, unbearable stimulation. He came immediately, a violent, racking orgasm that felt like his spine was being pulled out through his dick.
But it didn’t stop.
His ejaculation was a torrent, a shocking flood of semen that kept pumping, drenching Beos’s thighs and the bunk below in hot, sticky waves. The climax had no peak, no resolution. It was a plateau of excruciating pleasure that tipped instantly into agony, his balls cramping, his prostate convulsing, yet his cock remained iron-hard, trapped in that devastating, pulsating vise. “What… what is… fuck… I can’t… stop…” he slurred, his eyes rolling back, seeing not the barracks but a galaxy of pulsing, fleshy orifices all clamping down on him in perfect, hellish rhythm.
Maren stumbled back, her hand still in her trousers. The spores touched the wetness there, and the focused pleasure of her own touch exploded into a supernova. Her clit swelled, aching, a second heart pounding between her legs. Her orgasm hit like a seizure, back arching, a silent scream tearing her mouth open. Fluid—not just arousal but a gush of female ejaculate—soaked her trousers and dripped onto the stone floor. It triggered another. And another. Each contraction wrenched a fresh flood from her, a relentless, draining series of peaks that left her shaking, unable to remove her own hand, her mind reduced to a single, screaming synapse of sensation.
Silas, who had only touched her cap, got the clearest, most horrifying vision. He wasn’t just aroused. He was the arousal. He felt his own desperate need reflected and magnified in the psychic spore-cloud, becoming a palpable entity that wrapped around him, slick and demanding. He clawed at his trousers, freeing his cock, and it jutted out, dripping pre-cum in a continuous stream. He didn’t even touch himself. A second orgasm ripped through him, a white-hot arc of spend shooting across the floor. Then a third, weaker but insistent, a painful dribble. His mind was trapped in a recursion of his own base impulse, a mirror-lined corridor of hunger that showed him infinite versions of his own leaking, desperate form, forever on the edge and forever falling.
Jory, still impaling Beos’s inert body, began to shriek. A high, wet sound. His thrusts had become involuntary, brutal pistoning motions, each one milking another impossible geyser from him. His semen was thinner now, streaked with pink, but the flow didn’t cease. He was drowning in the physical reality of his own violation, his body turned against itself, forced to produce and spend until it was scraped raw. He saw Beos’s face, not as it was, but as a vast, tranquil mycelial network, absorbing his toxic release and converting it, without judgment, into fuel for some vast, uncaring growth. He was just nutrients. A fucking nutrient.
The magenta cloud thinned, clinging to the damp air around the bunk. The three of them collapsed. Jory slipped from Beos with a sickening, wet sound, crumpling to the floor in a twitching heap, his pants around his ankles, his groin a glistening, ruined mess. Maren was curled in a fetal position, a pool of fluid spreading beneath her, her body jerking with aftershocks. Silas simply wept, hunched over his own deflating, aching penis, each sob hitching another drop of spend from him.
Beos lay undisturbed. The spores settled on her skin, were absorbed, and vanished. Her shift was rucked up, her thighs smeared with foreign fluids. She remained in that profound, defenseless sleep, her chest barely stirring. The automatic biological defense had completed its cycle. The threat was neutralized. Not by violence, but by forcing the threat to consume itself in the fire of its own appetite.
The first gray light of dawn found them there. Other Omiyojis began to stir, coughing, stretching. The smell hit them first—the sharp, salty-sweet stench of spent sex, gone sour and wrong, undercut by a faint, eerie ozone. Then they saw the scene.
A choked cry went up. Figures approached, then recoiled. They saw Jory, unconscious and pale, his breeches soaked with bloody semen. They saw Maren, trembling and empty-eyed in her own waste. They saw Silas, rocking and whispering, “It won’t stop, it won’t stop…”
And they saw Beos. Sleeping peacefully on her stained bunk, her strange cap smooth and unmoved, her luminous skin clean and pristine where it wasn’t soiled by the evidence of the nightmare. She looked untouched by the horror that surrounded her, a peaceful island in a sea of violent, self-inflicted degradation.
Commander Lysander was summoned. He stood at the periphery of the crowd, his scarred face a mask of stone. His eyes moved from the broken, weeping assailants to the sleeping woman. He did not need a confession. The story was written in the fluids on the stone, in the twisted agony on Jory’s face, in the terrifying, peaceful contrast of Beos’s slumber.
“Get the healers,” he said, his voice low and final. “For these three. Contain them. Clean this.” He pointed a single, sharp finger at Beos’s bunk. “Do not touch her. Do not wake her.”
He turned and walked away, the weight of a terrible understanding settling on his shoulders. They had tried to make her a fleshlight. And her body had turned their own lust into a weapon that fucked them raw from the inside out. The old Beos was truly gone. What slept in her place was something the Black Library had never bargained for—an ecosystem that defended itself not with malice, but with a perfect, horrific reflection.