Tales of the Snake Men: Book Three – Chapter 6
Chapter 6: The Battle Within
In Tales of the Snake Men: Book Three – Chapter 6, this chapter marks the shift where Khan’s inner war becomes literal, revealing the full form of Slime-Khan for the first time. Skeletor’s purification ritual tears open Khan’s mind, forcing him into a brutal confrontation with the monster wearing his face.
Skeletor raised the Havoc Staff with theatrical precision, savoring the moment like a maestro before the crescendo. The twisted ram skull erupted in cold blue fire—not the warm flames of hearth or forge, but something hungry and alien that devoured light rather than creating it.
The air didn’t just thicken—it curdled. Static electricity crawled across every surface like invisible spiders, raising scales and making armor creak with tension. Ancient runes etched along the staff’s obsidian shaft awakened one by one, pulsing with power that predated the very stones of Serpentis.
The Havoc Staff Awakens
He strode to the containment chamber’s base, boots clicking against stone worn smooth by centuries of forgotten rituals. The Havoc Staff felt alive in his grip—The ram skull’s hollow sockets didn’t just glow—they watched. Malevolent intelligence flickered behind the empty bone, as if something ancient had been bound within and was eager to feed.
Silence blanketed the Chamber of Renewal like a held breath. Along the walls, Snake Men warriors stood frozen in a tableau of dread—weapons half-drawn, muscles coiled, but none daring to move. The air itself seemed to press down on them, heavy with the weight of impending violence.
Rattlor’s hand trembled imperceptibly on his weapon’s grip. Tung Lashor’s usually steady breathing came in shallow bursts. Even battle-hardened veterans recognized the scent of magic this potent—it left a metallic aftertaste and made their fangs ache.
At the chamber’s heart, Khan stood motionless within his transparent prison. The magically-reinforced cylinder hummed with containment spells, its surface rippling occasionally like disturbed water. His red eyes burned with borrowed fire, but his body radiated an unnatural stillness—not peace, but the terrible quiet of a bomb waiting to detonate.
The Slime coating his flesh quivered. Not with fear, exactly, but with the recognition that comes when one apex predator encounters another.
Skeletor lifted the staff overhead, and the temperature dropped ten degrees in an instant. His voice cut through the silence—not shouting, but speaking words that reality itself had to strain to accommodate. The incantation rolled off his tongue, each syllable crackling with power that made the ancient stones beneath their feet hum in harmonic response.
“Vel’tar naskar Snake’thar. Orun’dral keth dawn’mor. Keth’var malach ostoth—sul’nar ekthos.”
Even in the ancient tongue, Hiss understood the words: By the spirits of Snake Mountain, awaken the old flame of the first dawn. Cast out the Slime’s corruption—release the soul to its true master.
The skull didn’t just ignite—it detonated.
Azure fire exploded upward in a spiral that defied physics, the flames climbing like liquid lightning given form. They pulled heat from the air so efficiently that breath misted and metal surfaces beaded with condensation. The fire cast no ordinary shadows—instead, shapes writhed across the chamber walls like living ink, moving independently of their source.
Purple lightning veined through the flames like a nervous system made of electricity, each bolt crackling with barely contained violence. The sound was overwhelming—not just the roar of fire, but the whisper of torn reality healing itself, the shriek of magic forced into shapes it was never meant to hold.
Then—silence.
And Skeletor brought the staff down.
The impact rang like a bell forged in the heart of a dying star. Energy surged downward through the cylinder’s foundation, following paths carved by master artificers who had died when the world was young. Rune-seals burst to life around the enclosure’s perimeter—not in sequence, but in a cascade of illumination that made watching eyes water and weep.
The entire chamber became a crucible of blinding magical radiance.
From the skull’s sockets, twin beams of concentrated purification magic lanced forth—not mere light, but intention given form. The energy struck Khan’s chest like the fist of an angry god, each photon engineered to seek out corruption and burn it away at the molecular level.
Purification Through Pain
Khan screamed.
The sound tore from his throat like something dying—not one voice, but a harmony of agony. His own vocal cords strained against the alien resonance of the Slime, creating a discord that made every witness’s scales crawl. It was the sound of two beings occupying one body, both suffering, both fighting for control of the same throat.
He slammed backward against the cylinder wall, talons screeching against the mystical barrier as they scraped uselessly against smooth, unyielding energy. His body convulsed as cellular memory warred with parasitic invasion from the purification magic.
The Slime shrieked in frequencies that bypassed the ears entirely, vibrating through bone and muscle. It didn’t just writhe—it liquefied in panic, bubbling away from the cleansing light. The substance tried desperately to burrow deeper, to hide in the spaces between organs, behind ribs, anywhere the light couldn’t reach.
But Skeletor’s magic was patient. Thorough. Hungry.
Khan’s body became a battlefield. Muscles locked and released in spasmodic waves. His spine arched until vertebrae cracked. Fangs gnashed so hard they drew sparks from his own jaw, while his eyes rolled back to show nothing but crimson sclera, then snapped forward with burning red irises, then rolled back again —a strobe of consciousness flickering between host and parasite.
“STOP!”
The word exploded from him with enough force to rattle the containment runes–but the voice wasn’t entirely his own. His voice cracked on the second syllable, fracturing into harmonics of pain and desperation.
“MAKE IT STOP!”
His fists became hammers against the cylinder’s interior. CRACK. Mystical energy spiderwebbed across the barrier. CRACK. Sapphire light leaked from the stress fractures like luminous blood. CRACK. Each impact sent shockwaves through the chamber floor, making ancient stones groan in their foundations.
But the prison held. Barely.
The watchers bore witness to torment in different ways. Rattlor’s usual composure cracked first—he turned his head away, unable to reconcile the broken thing in the cylinder with the General who had once stood beside him in battle. His jaw worked soundlessly, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t find words adequate to the horror.
Tung Lashor’s knuckles went white around his weapon’s grip. His breathing came in measured counts—four in, hold for four, four out—the rhythm of a soldier trying to maintain discipline while watching a comrade suffer. But his eyes never left Khan, loyalty overriding comfort.
Even Dr. Ophidian found his clinical detachment wavering. His stylus scratched notes with mechanical precision, but his free hand trembled almost imperceptibly. When Khan’s next scream hit a particularly alien register, Ophidian actually flinched—a barely perceptible tightening around his eyes.
Skeletor remained a statue of bone and malice.
“Oh, how deliciously theatrical,” he murmured, voice carrying the appreciation of a connoisseur.
His skull face couldn’t smile, but satisfaction radiated from his posture like heat from a forge.
“Let the performance begin in earnest. Let the actor… shed his costume.“
The Havoc Staff pulsed brighter, feeding more power into the purification matrix. And in the cylinder, something that had been pretending to be Kobra Khan began to truly burn.
The Mindscape Opens
Inside Khan’s mind, the storm began.
Not darkness—absence. A void so complete it had weight, pressing against consciousness like deep ocean water. This wasn’t the simple black of closed eyes or moonless nights. This was the darkness between thoughts, the space where memories went to die. It moved with purpose, flowing around him like digital static made tangible, thick with the consistency of syrup and the malevolence of a living tumor.
It breathed. Inhaled his thoughts, exhaled corruption. A rhythm that wasn’t quite his heartbeat, but close enough to be unsettling—like hearing your own pulse played back through broken speakers.
Kobra Khan floated in this non-space, his body suspended in currents of liquid shadow that moved like data streams through fiber optic cables. No up, no down. No reference points except the whispers that began as white noise and gradually resolved into words.
His father’s voice: “Disappointment.”
King Hiss: “I trusted you.”
Rattlor: “You left us.”
Then strangers—voices of those he’d hurt while under the Slime’s influence. They layered over each other like audio feedback, building into a crescendo of accusation that made reality itself seem to glitch. Some laughed. Others wept. All of them judged.
Khan tried to cover his ears, but his hands felt wrong—distant, like controlling a marionette through thick gloves. Green static leaked between his fingers, digital artifacts of corrupted memory.
Then—silence.
A heartbeat that belonged to neither of them.
THOOM.
Khan vs. Slime-Khan
Reality snapped back into focus, and two figures materialized from the void—identical in form, antithetical in essence.
The first was Kobra Khan as he had been: lean muscle wrapped in battle-tested armor, scales bearing the honest scars of a hundred campaigns. His yellow eyes burned with conviction, not fever. The insignia of the Snake Men wasn’t just carved into his chest piece—it was earned, every line representing loyalty freely given. He stood with the posture of someone who had never doubted his place in the world.
The second was the thing wearing his face, the thing that he had become: Slime-Khan.
Slime-Khan loomed like a grotesque upgrade gone wrong—organic matter fused with digital corruption. Where the original was lean, this one bulged with unnatural mass. Slime didn’t just coat his armor; it had become his armor, a bio-mechanical shell that pulsed with its own sick rhythm. The Horde sigil wasn’t painted on his chest—it was branded into the flesh itself, still smoking with the heat of fresh violation.
His eyes blazed like LED screens displaying error messages in red. When he smiled, it was with teeth that belonged in nightmares—not fangs anymore, but something between circuitry and bone, dripping with code made manifest.
“Still playing dress-up as a soldier?”
Slime-Khan’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere, processed through filters of malice.
“The uniform doesn’t fit anymore, Khan. Nothing about you fits anymore.”
“You left the door open, Khan. You begged me to come inside and protect you. And I’ve been such a gracious guest.”
The true Khan stepped forward, fists clenched like he was holding onto the last fragments of himself.
“You infected me. Twisted my mind. My body. My memories—”
“This isn’t protection. This is possession.”
Slime-Khan laughed—a hollow, echoing thing that bent the shadows around him.
“Call it what you want. But I was the only part of you strong enough to survive what came next.”
And then he struck.
Without warning, the monster lunged—claws raking across Khan’s chest, not with physical impact, but with force of memory. The blow hurled him backward into a vortex of fragmented pain: The sizzling pain from the Horde Trooper pain sticks, Grizzlor’s laughter as dignity dissolved, Leech sucking his strength to the brink of wanting to die, the sensation of Slime bonding to his body like a second skin, and the moment when numbness became preferable to feeling. Each memory played at double speed, over-saturated, until they blurred into a stream of hatred.
He slammed into the ground.
“You didn’t just accept me,” Slime-Khan pressed, circling like a predator with infinite patience. “You celebrated me. You loved how I made the pain stop.”
Khan spat green static, his hands shaking but still forming fists.
“I liked being numb,” he spat, “It was the only way I could survive what you made me do.”
Slime-Khan struck again—claws like liquid malware, carving chunks of memory from the air itself. Each swipe revealed fragments of the past: Faces of victims he couldn’t save; Khan’s final glimpse of his brothers as Horde chains dragged him away, his body writhing in the Slime Pit as his will dissolved drop by drop; the moment when fighting back became too exhausting to attempt escape.
“Weakness. Pure, pathetic weakness. I made you into something that could survive.” Slime-Khan growled.
But the true Khan stood his ground and didn’t flinch.
“You didn’t make me survive. You made me disappear. And I carry every scream I caused because of you.”
Khan lunged—not with claws, but with something more dangerous. Truth. His hands met Slime-Khan’s in a crash that sent shockwaves through the mindscape, memory warring with corruption in a battle that would determine which version of Kobra Khan would walk away.
The void around them fractured like a screen with a bullet through it, and in the cracks, light began to bleed through.
