PA 3.5: End of a Tail

Chapter XXXIII Part II

"... Some rumors say he even ate the eye afterward," Jason beamed.

"... Like a grape?" Olivia asked, heart fluttering at the conversation.

He shivered. "Y-Yeah, wow."

Capper frowned. "It's been five minutes, where the hell are we?"

Joshua started sweating profusely. "W-What do you mean? We're following you, dude."

Liles shifted his eyes about the floor, "Three minutes, actually..." he muttered to himself, catching a glance from Riley.

"What?!" Capper blurted out, his short fuse burning.

"I literally got here like, yesterday!" Joshua objected, raising his blanche paws in defense.

Capper sighed. "You're right, ugh." He spared a glance around, stowing away his attention-grubbing notebook. "We're not too far off, down here."

"W-What?!" Jason blurted out, bringing everyone's attention back to their conversation. "But, that's like such a huge trope! You'd just get killed!"

"Jason!" Joshua barked.

The blue mutt's floppy ears lifted up into the air with how swiftly he cracked his attention towards the dog.

"Keep it down!"

"Oh uh, I... yeah, okay, sorry," he said, fanning his sweat away with a paw as Olivia innocently giggled next to him.

"I'm s-sorry," Olivia stuttered, moving away from the front of the group submissively, "I didn't mean to freak you out like that, it was just a joke."

"I know, I know," Jason continued to sputter. "I'm just glad I didn't attract any of those-"

A long, decrepit, spindly arm ending in a tumorously proportioned paw slammed into the hallway like a bullet, kicking up Lilles' long black hair and missing Joshua by less than an inch. The sudden tear on the chest of his uniform was the thing to startle everyone, but they were hardly able to recognize the limb jutting from one side of the hall to the other as a threat until the abomination's disfigured, blood-soaked face emerged from the same lockers its arm was jutting from.

"CATMON!" Capper screamed, "RUN!"

Divided in half as the room was by the large appendage, Joshua was the first to turn on his heel and grab both Liles and Olivia by their sleeves, turning them around and staggering them both. The rough movement shoulder-checked Liles, making the poor bombay lose his drawing notebook across the floor. He cried in surprise as the stronger bernese tugged him along in a panic, and the demon's one pearly eye shifted vaguely towards Capper.

A rake-like appendage- a stub of an arm with a dog-sized hand, slowly carved its way through the air, rending the lockers it phased through on its way to slice capper into four pieces. He had no chance to dodge away from the encompassing grasp- forward. Into the oversized palm of the creature who wrapped its boney claws around him, looking to carve him like a hardboiled egg. He grimaced as the claws quickly bit into him, cleaving his uniform and cutting into his fur, tasting his skin and then pressing against it.

"GET."

Riley leapt into the air, wielding the wand like a sledgehammer. It tapped the ceiling with the height she gained, and came crashing down towards the ghost's joint in a crunch that sounded like a trunk of ice breaking and melting.

"OFF!"

The wild slam at least gave Capper an opening, dulling the grip that otherwise was closing around him like garrotte wire. He stuck his right arm out, then thrashed from the ghost's clutches, grimacing as the tips of its claws slit fine gashes along his body, cutting past his eye, arm and thigh. Something felt wrong, weightless, and painful.