Into the Darkness: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure (Axe Druid Book 4)

by Christopher Johns

  “Stay safe, brother,” I muttered to his back, and turned toward my route. Motion caught my eye, and James sailed into the room, crashing into an empty cage and then bounding over.

  “Hey, which way to the ass-kicking?” He hit me with a huge grin. I pointed down the stairs, and he took off without a second thought to me or what I was doing, his weapons blazing.

  My friends, I shook my head and bounded up the steps as swiftly as I could. Once I reached the last floor before Lilith’s room, Gerty’s open cage came into view; as well as the drider and pale drow man duking it out with her. The drow had to be a vampire, as his snarling open mouth held fangs that he tried to sink into either opponent when they weren’t focusing on him.

  But Gerty was my prize here, and she looked to be barely hanging in there. I focused my will and summoned Falfyre, the blazing holy sword filling me with warmth and light, then bolted forward with a roaring cry, “For clan Mugfist!”

  I heard her cry in return, her fist raised and new energy flooding her as I whipped the weapon through the vampire’s arm, and it hissed in return.

  “Yer nae a dwarf!” She howled, her eyes moist with tears and pain.

  “No, but I’m clan, and I’m here for you on Farnik, and your kids’ behalf,” I said, then grunted as the drider stabbed a spear toward me and almost spiked me to the floor. I managed to just get out of the way, a line of agony burning across the outside of my right quadricep. “Now, let’s kill these things and get you to my friends.”

  She took me at my word, but the vampire struck out and sliced her across the shoulder, dragging his hand down to her elbow with blood trailing behind.

  She growled fiercely, the arm limp and the muscle torn. The vampire licked the blood from his clawed hands, and his eyes glowed red a second. His cut limb quivered, and I stepped in. I threw Falfyre at him while he was distracted and cast Lighting Bolt into the drider next to me, his health dropped past 50%, then I cast Renewing Flames on Gerty.

  Footsteps behind me drew my attention, and I turned in time to see Tmont slinking up the steps next to Bokaj, bloodied, and limping.

  I cast Heal on him, and he nodded at me in thanks, then loosed two arrows at the drider that sprouted from its eyes and made it cry out in agony.

  “Let’s go,” Bokaj said with a huff, then Tmont knocked me aside in time to help me avoid a clawed hand through my throat. “Good girl!”

  I turned and called the holy sword to me as the bastard tried to slam his pallid, dark-skinned hand through my body again. I caught his hand just in time to have Falfyre slice through his head, stopping just beneath the eyes, then slamming into the chest cavity from behind like some kind of invisible sword master had taken the sword in hand.

  The vampire dropped to the ground in a pile of ashes, and Bokaj with Tmont and Gerty had put the finishing touches on the drider.

  “Gerty, this is Bokaj and his kitty, Tmont, they’re with me.” She eyed both of them silently, not fully trusting me. “Gerty, the Way is long and winding, but I need you to walk with me so that Farnik and the clan can know peace at last. Come on.”

  She nodded once and joined the three of us in running breakneck down the stairs. Maebe saw us and turned with Jafrik in tow to head back down the stairs. I heard Kayda screeching outside, her keening call one of rage and triumph. I touched her mind and looked through her eyes. The battle still raged below with Bea running from each of my friends, luring wounded creatures to them and Kayda shelling out damage where she could with her Lightning Ball and Lightning Bolts.

  I saw one of the hulking vampires frozen solid shattering as it had dropped from eighty feet in the sky, the ice shards piercing enemies nearby. A ground splintering explosion echoed around us; I had to grab the window ledge to my left to stay standing and motion outside drew my attention. Lilith and the Vampire Lord minion cast huge lines of shadow at each other, another line of crimson crashing into the tower and rocking it, some stone falling onto the ground and crushing one of the large spiders in the area.

  Then I saw Maebe descending slowly to the ground on a circle of darkness. As she lowered herself, she motioned with her right hand and three spears of bright blue ice formed before screeching through the air like mortar fire at the Vampire Lord’s feet, flinging her back. Lilith sent a wave of darkness at Maebe, and the fight was on.

  “Come on now!” Gerty yanked on my hand. “This place might be fallin’ over with all that magic they swing!”

  It was a few more bouts of us sprinting down the blood-soaked stairs as creatures of all shapes and sizes littered the landings with blood and gore spattered and frozen in places. I almost slipped and brained myself when another attack shook the tower, but Gerty snatched me up by my armor and hauled me to my feet with a grunt of effort.

  I nodded my thanks to her, and we cleared the rest of the tower, the doorway to the outer courtyard splintered and bowed inward toward us. It had been long enough that my light spell had faded already, but that didn’t seem to matter much in here.

  And as we reached the ground floor, my heart sank. The dead drow and vampire-bitten driders rose from the ground slowly as if reanimated. They had been turned, and they would be ravenous.

  We need to get the hell out of Dodge; there’s no way we can brute force our way through all of these assholes. James panted as he landed just after axe-kicking a drow warrior in the top of the head. Not unless Zeke can cast that spell again.

  I was about to suggest we all get together and teleport away, quest be damned, but a long, loud, and trumpeting burst of sound came from outside the webbing that made Fainnir leap up and down in joy. I turned to look at Gerty, and her face looked haunted. As if she had heard the call of a ghost.

  “They came!” Fainnir howled in delight. “They made it!”

  “What did you do, kid?!” Jaken shouted the question as the young vampires surged forward toward us. Our group consolidated close together to resist the wave of new undead.

  “They be here,” Gerty whispered hoarsely, forcing my attention back to her. “The dwarves be here.”

  A roar unlike anything I had ever heard in my life rose, and I glimpsed motion outside the barrier.

  “WHERE BE THE BASTARDS WHAT STOLE ME WIFE?!” A voice I instantly knew was Farnik’s, bellowed over the combined rage of gods-knew-how-many dwarves.

  I heard, “Stop them!” From two women and caught Lilith and her sister giving orders.

  “Well boys,” Muu took up his hammer and handed it to Gerty with a wink and, “I’ll be needing this back, so don’t lose it, ’kay?” She nodded, and he turned his grin on us. “Let’s not leave the family to fend for themselves. Let’s open the fucking door!”

  My face nearly split in two as chills ran down my spine. “Then let’s open a path, brother. Hop on my back, and let’s go.”

  I shifted into my belgar form and felt a light thud on my back before, “Yeehaw! Mugfist! To meeee!”

  Muu’s shout rent the air, and I charged forward toward the dead, past a blurry form of Fainnir and heard him whooping and hollering as we sped through dozens of vampire driders, drow and the still-persisting vampire bats and hulking vampires. These I mowed over like a man on a mission, even managing to gore one of them through the mouth with my horn as it had tried to bite me.

  “And there aren’t any windshield wipers on this damned thing?” Muu cackled and saw a bright blur pass by my face, and the vampire was gone. “Woah, boy—woah!”

  I put the brakes on and the weight on my back left, then shifted into my fox form and rolled end over end before leaping onto a drow’s shoulder and shifting into my Ursolon form. My crushing bulk brought the woman low; I used her fall and my momentum to crush her skull and turned to see what was coming next with an earth-shattering roar of challenge.

  Dwarves bearing clan Mugfist’s symbol on their plate armor flooded the entrance to Lilith’s webbed courtyard led by Farnik and Brawnwynn. Pebble pointed toward Fainnir; then the gargantuan dwarf Granite’s bulk sprang t
oward a drider vampire with twin battle axes held in his powerful hands, foam, and spittle flying from his mouth and a wild look on his face.

  The drider vampire fell, several legs chopped from the lumbering form as Granite snarled and savaged it with one axe, then threw the weapon in his left hand into a drow twenty feet ahead of him before sprinting forward to drive his knee into the skull of a drow vampire. He grabbed his axe from the first fallen foe, and his other weapon fell in a frantic rhythm until the other was dead.

  Now I could see where Fainnir wanted to be with his skills. If Fainnir could cast in a frenzy like that? He’d be damned near unstoppable.

  “Kill’em all lads!” Farnik hollered, and more than thirty-five dwarves pressed forward with everything they had. Axes rose and fell with a fervor I had never seen, and their voices raised in a dwarven song of battle that seemed to only add to their thirst for blood. Farnik was the worst of them, his chops precise and deadly with little more energy expended than one might use to wave away a fly.

  A group of newly turned vampires bounded my way, their slavering mouths opened impossibly wide at the prospect of food, and I readied myself to take them when a cold mist roiled from our left by the tower and froze their legs solid. Their momentum carried them forward into a sword of pure shadow that whipped by taking them all apart with a hiss.

  The queens worked frantically now, Maebe shoving her fist into Lilith’s large abdomen as the Vampire Lord tried to claw at her back with hazy red energy around her hands. Her look of glee turned to rage as Lilith backhanded her, breaking her neck, it looked like, and throwing her aside. The broken bones snapped back into place, and the lead vampire growled and shot an arrow of crimson energy at them both. Maebe dove aside, the energy splitting a drow, who had been dumb enough to wander too close, in half, and the other went wide into the webbing where Lilith had been.

  Hands grasped at my arm, and I snarled, shoving the male drow that had crawled over to me, his severed lower body pulled behind him by little more than sinew and bone which hadn’t been fully chopped through. His seeking fangs gouged my leg, pain flaring from the wound. I expected to see him healing, but instead, he started to vomit violently before dying.

  Vampires and lycans don’t mix! I growled at myself, feeling like a dumbass for not having thought of it sooner. I shifted into my fox-man form, checking on my friends.

  Yohsuke had joined the fight with Balmur and James, all of whom moved in a tight circle toward the dwarven fighters as swiftly as they could.

  Fainnir had joined Pebble, Gem greeting him and simultaneously crushing a drider’s leg with her great foot. Maebe had dragged Jafrik to her side, and the two of them moved toward the dwarves and looked to be closing in on Fainnir’s side.

  Dwarves hooted and hollered, drawing my attention. I glanced that way to see Farnik split a drider vampire’s skull nearly in half, then launch himself off its falling corpse into the air where he crashed down on a vampire bat and severed its wings midflight. It crashed into the ground twenty feet from the drider, and as if in some sappy romance movie, time seemed to slow.

  He had found her. And Gerty had found him. Covered in gore and blood as he was, she froze and called wordlessly to him even as drow went to attack each of them. She ducked a flashing sword and elbowed the attacker in the knee, using it as a platform to step on as she took a sharp rock and slammed it home two, three times in his throat. She took the sword from his failing grasp and used it to sever the head from the shoulders and hopped off the knee. She still had Muu’s hammer in hand but seemed to like brutal killing more.

  Husband and wife moved toward each other at an all-out sprint featuring the brutal death of any who got in their way. Brawnwynn tackled a hulking vampire, and six dwarves followed him as it had tried to grapple his father from behind on his mad dash to get to his Gerty. My heart sang as they reached each other, lips moving and tears flowing, but there were other problems, and I dragged my eyes away from the scene.

  Jaken and Bokaj looked to be having the worst time of it as more of the undead seemed to want to fuck with the paladin in the group. I’d be going to them.

  I’ll be going on in my werewolf form, so don’t attack me! Everyone was too busy to really respond, but they all yelled or shouted unintelligible things to let me know they were good.

  Time to play, I whispered through my mind and called to the beast within me. It didn’t come at first, but I dragged and fought to make the transformation come.

  You thought yourself rid of me; the werewolf’s voice whispered through my mind. You thought yourself predator enough to consume me, well. See how you like being consumed. You may not die from vampire bites, but your friends can. Your mate can. Those children can.

  I blinked and found myself staring at the eyes of the wolf in the shadows inside me. There was no longer a throne, just a pit of darkness.

  I could keep you here forever, you know. It growled, almost as if it were Pastella incarnate.

  “You wanna play fuck games? “I raised my eyebrows and my voice together. “Fine. Let’s play.”

  The two of us crashed into each other and dragged one another to the ground in the pit, the glowing red eyes before me filled with rage and hatred.

  “All of this is mine—you are mine!” I socked him in the jaw and beat his head off the ground, a mire of thick liquid surrounding us. It was red and black, like defiled blood.

  So, you think, the wolf laughed and clawed at my chest. I have lived within you longer than it seems you have. And I know the darkness that dwells here, I welcome it.

  The liquid grasped at my limbs, not wanting to let go of me, and the wolf took his sweet time rocketing closed fists into my stomach and chest, knocking my breath out as the attacks rained down.

  “I’ll beat myself up, thanks.” I spat in his face and yanked at my limbs, finding them loose enough that I could get a good punch in, but he simply ducked and pressed the arm back into the liquid.

  Where it touched, it burned slightly, but it felt familiar. So familiar.

  Once you are consumed by your rage, you will no longer be able to resist me and my reasoning; his snarling visage crept ever closer. I will devour you, and we will reign supreme.

  So, this was my rage, and he felt that it was his because he understood it better? I almost laughed, but as I struggled against it, I couldn’t bring my rage to my call. It fought me. Why?

  You accept it, but you lock it away, the one force that makes you dangerous. The wolf stuck a clawed hand against my throat and pressed as hard as he could.

  Lock it away; I got angry all the time. People here and at home seemed to have this way of pissing me off that only added to my unending rage and anger. It was almost…primal.

  As my understanding of the emotion within me, and its place in my world and power met with one another, I finally knew what I had to do.

  “You’re right, Wolfy.” I sighed, the liquid rising until it reached inside my ears and slowly worked toward my mind through my ear canals. “I lock it away because I want to fight smarter, but sometimes, you just gotta let loose. Like Maebe said, I have to let it out somehow.”

  He seemed to take the admission of his being right as a sign of sure victory, though I couldn’t hear him anymore, I could still see him laughing and howling into the nether that was this pit within me.

  I summoned the shadows around us to me, within me, and then called to my most feared and well-known emotion. That sense of dreaded purpose within me. The rage that had allowed me to shove my fist through a struggling wolf-man’s chest to clutch his heart as a show of strength to his friend. That hatred that had honed my senses before when my friends were in danger—as they were this very moment.

  I willed it all into me, the feeling of it siphoning into my body, my soul, making me feel both whole and somehow unclean. Unworthy. But I could dwell on that later when things had calmed down.

  If this was my strength, then I would claim this force within me and use it for good. I would
make my presence as a primal warrior known to the world, rage, and all. Starting with this part of myself that sought to claim what was mine.

  The liquid around me swirled and sank into my skin, covering me and somehow just seeping in where it touched my fur and flesh.

  Fear consumed the wolf before me. “I have to thank you, Wolfy. I’d not have unlocked this part of myself without some serious therapy and maybe a little booze, but you managed it in such a short time of being stupid. You should really watch monologues; they’ve ended a few villainous wins prematurely.”

  He tried to grasp my throat harder, his hips covering my own so he could try to control me. I snickered and lifted my hips up and toward my head, grabbing his chest and sweeping his arms away from my body at the same time. His momentum brought me up into a mounted position, and I used the confusion to summon my beastly werewolf form into being.

  I stared down, the red and black liquids still swirled around us and seeped into where it met my legs.

  I slammed my fist into his throat, stopping him from having a chance to plead with me. “Now, I’m going to do what I failed to do before and consume you.”

  He clawed at me, but I was stronger now. So much stronger. This was my rage, my body, mine to control and do with as I would.

  I opened my jaws slowly, then struck like an alligator for the throat, and consumed the beast within me. His strength became mine. His power flooded me, and unlike before, I could feel that it was mine at long last.

  With the grim deed done, I opened my eyes and found my friends surrounding me with their backs out.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?!” Muu shouted as he stabbed at a hulking vampire. “And why do these things keep getting back up?”

  “Zeke!” Yohsuke howled, next to my ear, making me flinch and blink. “Finally!”

  “The dwarves need some help, and the queens are all duking it out,” James explained hurriedly, before a flash of cold and darkness burst from our right, the same time as a red slash carved a diagonal line into Lilith’s tower, cutting it there. The only reason it didn’t plummet to the ground, were the webs holding it in place.