Tales of the Snake Men: Book Three – Chapter 7
Chapter 7: The Deceiver’s Mask
In Tales of the Snake Men: Book Three – Chapter 7, the Chamber of Renewal becomes a battlefield of pure deception as Kobra Khan’s stolen body turns the Slime’s favorite weapon—love—against King Hiss.
Back in the Chamber of Renewal, the purification beam reached critical intensity. The air itself seemed to catch fire—not with flame, but with the raw friction of magic scraping against reality. The temperature spiked, then plummeted, then spiked again as competing energies fought for dominance.
The Slime’s death rattle filled the chamber. Not a hiss—a shriek. The sound of connections severing with audible snaps. It bubbled and roiled away from Khan’s flesh like acid meeting base, the reaction violent enough to send wisps of toxic green vapor spiraling toward the ceiling.
Patch by patch, the corruption retreated. First his chest, where the beam struck strongest. Then his shoulders, arms, the curve of his neck—each section revealing what had been hidden underneath.
Scales.
Not the sickly translucent membrane of Slime corruption, but honest reptilian hide. Green-brown, lustrous, scarred in places but undeniably his. Each scale caught the magical light differently, creating a mosaic of identity slowly being reclaimed. At the center of his belt buckle, barely visible beneath the last retreating traces of ooze, the carved insignia of the Snake Men gleamed like a brand of belonging.
Khan’s body convulsed—one final spasm as competing neurologies fought for control. His spine arched. His muscles locked. And then…
His eyes changed.
The red fire guttered out as though a candle had been blown out, leaving behind familiar yellow orbs—confused, vulnerable, heartbreakingly real despite their serpentine nature. For a heartbeat, recognition flickered there. Not the predatory awareness of the Slime, but the lost bewilderment of someone waking from a nightmare they couldn’t quite remember.
A Perfect Imitation
He looked up toward King Hiss, tears suddenly pooling in his yellow eyes — too quickly, too perfectly. His voice trembled with pain… and clarity.
“My King… where am I?“ The voice emerged as barely a whisper, cracked with confusion and manufactured pain.
“What happened? Why… am I in here?”
He collapsed to his knees inside the cylinder, the movement graceful in its apparent helplessness. Every gesture calculated to trigger protective instincts, to awaken the memory of the loyal General who had once knelt in exactly this way before his king.
King Hiss took a like a physical blow as he felt his heart lurch. Centuries of leadership, of making impossible decisions, of hardening himself against sentiment—all of it crumbled in the face of seeing his fallen son apparently restored. His hand moved without conscious thought, reaching toward the barrier that separated them.
“Khan…?”
The name escaped his lips, rough with grief and desperate hope that he’d tried so hard to bury.
But even as hope bloomed in his chest, something nagged at his warrior’s instincts. The tilt of Khan’s head—too precise, similar to a predator calculating angles. The tears that fell in perfect streams, unmarred by the ugly reality of actual sorrow. And there, at the corners of his mouth, the ghost of a smile that had nothing to do with relief.
Khan’s voice softened further, but now it carried the measured cadence of a script being performed:
“You look so tired, my King. You shouldn’t be worrying about me. You should rest. Let me out… I can protect you. Like it should be.”
The words hit every pressure point with surgical precision. Hiss’s guilt over failing to save him. His exhaustion from carrying the burden of leadership alone. The promise of returning to simpler times when he had a trusted right hand to share the weight.
For a split second, Hiss wavered—his mind torn between the longing to believe and the cold logic that had kept him alive through countless battles.
Then Skeletor’s words echoed in his memory:
“It will lie. It will sound like him. Look like him. But it is not him.”
Hiss’s outstretched hand slowly curled into a fist. His eyes hardened. And like a stage light being cut, the performance died.
The Monster Behind the Mask
Khan’s posture straightened. The tears stopped mid-fall, hanging like suspended animation before evaporating into nothing. His mouth widened into a grin that split his face too far, revealing rows of teeth that belonged to something that had never been fully reptilian.
“Almost had you.”
His voice dropped into a register that resonated in the bone, digital corruption bleeding through analog flesh.
“Still weak, I see. Still hoping for fairy tale endings.”
This was the Slime speaking, wearing Khan’s face as a mask, wielding love and loyalty as weapons, speaking through vocal cords it had no right to possess — just like Skeletor warned.
Hiss felt something break inside his chest—not his resolve, but his last illusion that this would be painless. His fists clenched until his claws drew blood from his palms.
“Forgive me, my son.”
The words came out steady, despite the fracture lines running through his heart.
“You’ll have to crawl through this fire alone.”
And in his eyes, something harder than hope took root. Determination.
The Slime Shows Its Hand
The change in the cylinder was instantaneous. The red glow detonated back into Khan’s eyes like fire catching gasoline. His manufactured vulnerability evaporated, replaced by something primal and endless in its hunger. The tears didn’t just stop—they reversed, seeming to flow backward into ducts that had never meant to produce them.
He erupted upward with unnatural speed, fangs bared like broken glass, both fists slamming into the containment barrier with enough force to send shockwaves through the chamber’s foundation. Cracks of sapphire light spiderwebbed across the mystical surface, each fracture line pulsing with barely contained energy.
“YOU DARE DENY ME?!” he roared. “I CALLED TO YOU! I BEGGED! AND YOU TURNED AWAY!”
His voice modulated through frequencies that shouldn’t have been possible for organic vocal cords. Each word carried layers—Khan’s anguish, the Slime’s fury, and something else that might have been the death cry of hope itself. He threw himself against the barrier again and again, muscles bulging beyond their normal limits as alien strength coursed through familiar flesh.
The remaining Slime patches along his back and legs surged upward similar to data cables coming alive, whipping against the containment field in desperate attempts to breach it. Where they struck, the magical barrier sizzled and sparked, sending cascades of disrupted energy across its surface.
“LET ME OUT!”
“I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL YOU ALL!”
The Chamber of Renewal itself seemed to flex under the assault. Ancient stones groaned. Dust sifted from overhead. The containment glyphs pulsed faster and faster, their light bleeding from azure to white-hot as the prison strained against forces it was never meant to hold.
Dr. Ophidian’s calm scholarly demeanor finally cracked. He raced to the control matrix, hands flying over arcane symbols while sweat beaded on his scaled brow. His usually measured voice rose to a desperate chant as he poured more power into the failing seals.
Around the chamber’s perimeter, guards raised their weapons with trembling hands, though every warrior present knew that steel would be useless if that barrier fell.
Skeletor remained an island of calm in the storm of chaos, his bone-white skull tilted at an angle that somehow managed to convey smug satisfaction.
“Ah, there’s the real monster,” he purred, voice carrying the tone of a scientist observing a successful experiment.
The battle wasn’t over—far from it. But the Slime had revealed its hand too early, shown its true nature to the one person whose opinion mattered most. Sometimes the greatest victories came not from strength, but from letting your enemy destroy themselves with their own desperation.
Then—suddenly—the fury ceased.
A Flicker of the Real Khan
The change was instantaneous and absolute. The tendrils of Slime along Khan’s body didn’t just retreat—they convulsed, resembling severed power cables sparking with residual current. The red glow in his eyes faded— flickering with the stuttering rhythm of a dying monitor, frames of consciousness bleeding through the static.
His snarl collapsed into confusion. His body folded in on itself, shoulders heaving as if he’d been holding his breath for years and could finally exhale.
Silence. Not the oppressive quiet of held tension, but the hollow emptiness that follows a system shutdown.
Khan’s eyes closed. Opened slowly—normal timing now, not the mechanical precision of corrupted programming. When his gaze focused, the yellow was clear as amber, as the Slime’s grip slipped. The confusion in his expression deepened as he took in his surroundings, then cleared slightly when he spotted King Hiss.
“My… King?”
The voice was raw, scraped hollow by whatever war had just concluded inside his skull. It carried the bewildered tone of someone emerging from a coma to find the world changed beyond recognition. A breath shuddered out of him—the sound of someone surfacing from deep water, desperate for air that tasted real.
“Where… what have I…?”
He raised his hands, staring at claws that trembled like leaves in wind. Traces of Slime still clung to the webbing between his fingers, glowing faintly with the sickly light. The sight hit him like a physical blow—horror dawning across features that had forgotten how to be vulnerable.
“I… hurt them… didn’t I?”
The question hung in the air as a blade waiting to fall. Not a plea for reassurance, but the terrible recognition of someone assembling fragments of memory into a picture they didn’t want to see. His voice cracked on the final words, twenty years of buried guilt crystallizing into three syllables of self-awareness.
King Hiss opened his mouth to respond, hope and heartbreak warring in his chest—
But the Slime had other plans.
The Red light detonated back into Khan’s eyes like emergency power kicking in after a blackout. His body snapped upright with the unnatural speed of a marionette yanked by ruthless hands. The moment of clarity vanished as if it had never existed at all.
The venomous grin spread across his face, wider than anatomy should have allowed.
“Pathetic.”
His voice carried multiple frequencies now, analog flesh speaking digital hatred.
“He whimpers like a hatchling. Still hoping Daddy will make the pain go away.”
This wasn’t Khan anymore. This was the Slime wearing flesh, speaking through stolen vocal cords with the authority of absolute possession.
The containment glyphs blazed white-hot, responding to the surge of corrupted energy. The magical matrix locked down harder, sealing the monster away from the world it wanted to burn.
A Promise Across the Fire
But King Hiss didn’t step back. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away.
He had spent decades learning to read the battlefield, to see past deception and misdirection to the truth underneath. And in that brief moment of clarity, he had seen something more valuable than victory: he had seen proof. Khan was still in there, still fighting, still capable of breaking through.
Hiss stepped closer to the containment barrier, ignoring the liquid lightning static arcs that danced across his scales, ignoring Dr. Ophidian’s sharp intake of breath behind him. The magical field hummed with enough power to flay flesh from bone, but the King of the Snake Men had faced worse odds with less hope.
He leaned forward until his breath fogged the mystical surface, close enough that his words would penetrate even the Slime’s interference, close enough that somewhere in the wasteland of Khan’s corrupted mind, his voice might find its target.
“I saw you.”
The words carried the weight of absolute certainty, rough with grief but unshakeable in their conviction.
“For a moment… I saw… you. The real you. The General who stood beside me. The Son I failed to protect.”
His voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried more authority than any battlefield command:
“So hold on, my son. Keep fighting. And when you break through, I’ll be waiting on the other side of this fire.”
Khan’s expression twisted—but not with rage. For just a heartbeat, the grin faltered. Something flickered behind the red glow, like a signal trying to break through static. A ghost of recognition. A fragment of the man he had been.
Then the containment glyphs flared one final time, sealing the moment in crystalline silence.
But the message had been delivered. Deep in the digital wasteland of his corrupted mind, Khan had heard his King’s voice. And in the war between host and parasite, sometimes all a soldier needed was to know that reinforcements were coming.
It would take fire to burn away what the Slime had corrupted. And only fire could reforge what would rise from the ashes.
