by A. J. Markam
Alaria lost 400 hit points, Meera 300, me another 200.
I healed them all and soul-sucked anything that moved to replenish my own hit points, but it was obvious the difficulty was ramping up.
Finally we reached the other side of the pit and made it into a nightmarish, crumbling temple.
I checked my timer:
2:19:18.
God damn it.
If it got worse from here, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.
It got worse.
A massive slope seemingly made of black organ meat was off to our right, intruding on the temple’s interior like a cancerous tumor.
Suddenly its surface ripped open in a dozen places, and horrific shapes burst forth like demonic fetuses clawing their way out of the womb.
They were human corpses, grey and rotting. Long, spindly, spider-like legs penetrated their decayed flesh and propelled them towards us.
I recognized the smallest as Urik, the dwarf priest of the Church of Eternity – the man responsible for the rogue dungeon core taking over.
His lower half was missing, and his naked upper body lurched like a hand puppet atop a giant black widow.
I said they were corpses because they looked like something out of The Walking Dead: missing ears and noses, cheeks ripped open and pieces falling off, the stench of decayed meat…
But apparently they were still alive.
Urik looked at me with his one remaining eye and moaned, “Please… kill me…”
The women in our party screamed and I nearly shat my pants, but we waded into battle.
Alaria torched Urik, turning what remained of his body into a shrieking, writhing torch.
The spider legs stabbed at us like spears.
We cut them to pieces, but not without taking a couple serious hits of our own.
Then the spider-creatures shucked off their human shells, revealing horrific insect-like faces.
When the corpses hit the ground, they burst like water balloons filled with chicken guts – and dozens of baby spiders emerged from the rotting remains and swarmed towards us.
I used Hellstorm like a napalm strike, turning everything into a raging inferno.
But still more horrors emerged from the gaping holes in the wall of cancerous flesh.
We retreated into the temple, but wave after wave of creatures followed us.
The situation was hopeless. Back when the rogue dungeon had first taken over Vos, I had watched Quint and his men die horrible deaths. How the fuck were we supposed to survive, when seasoned combat veterans trained for this type of thing had failed?
Then something occurred to me: specifically, HOW I had watched Quint and his men die.
Deek had been busy speeding up the reintegration of Alaria’s soul with her body. While he was attending to that, I had taken over his powers. I’d done it using a special interface that was basically the coolest thing imaginable, with hundreds of options for spawning creatures, building structures –
And spying on anybody I wanted to, using God-like video feeds I could direct at will.
It wasn’t the video feeds that I needed now; it was the dungeon-building controls.
Deek wasn’t here, but luckily I had something else that might help.
I plunged my hand into one of my bags and withdrew a small, pink crystal.
It was the dungeon core that Alaria’s soul had inhabited for most of the time we were in Vos – and it had an interface of its own. Though its capabilities weren’t nearly as powerful as Deek’s, the crystal might just be powerful enough to save our ass.
“Cover me!” I yelled at the women, and slammed the crystal into the ground. Despite the floor being made of chipped black marble, the crystal sank into it like a hot needle in a stick of butter.
I was able to access the dungeon-building controls with a thought, and 30-foot-tall walls of pink crystal shot up around us, capped off by a ceiling.
The barriers slowed the monsters down but didn’t stop them completely. The creatures hacked at the walls with their claws and scorpion tails. They bodily slammed into them, causing them to crack and eventually crumble.
But I continued to build furiously, putting up mazes of walls around us.
Meera and Alaria slaughtered the creatures that fought their way through – Meera with her sword, Alaria with her flaming pitchfork.
Stig teleported around and cast fireballs at the abominations while I built new mazes like our lives depended on it. Which they did.
I kept an eye on my timer throughout.
2:01:15…
1:37:26…
0:58:49…
It seemed like an eternity.
And the monsters kept coming.
They began to overwhelm us… slicing us, stabbing us, biting us.
I lost Stig and resurrected him…
Then Alaria.
I brought her back, only to lose Meera.
Despite my earlier advice to the contrary, Eluun pitched in, healing everyone as best she could. She knew I was overwhelmed – and her help probably allowed us to survive as long as we did.
But the extra effort meant she had to resort to more of my healing potions, which I gave her as fast as I could.
The attacks were so brutal that she was reduced to drinking a potion every couple of minutes.
Fight, heal, die, resurrect.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
I cast another Gravesite and nearly died as my attention was pulled away from shoring up our defenses.
Eluun kept getting tagged, and I shoved healing potion after healing potion at her in order to keep up her hit points when her powers were temporarily exhausted.
But we were getting close.
0:22:05…
0:17:49…
0:11:08…
It seemed like an eternity, but we were almost there…
…when the dungeon unleashed everything it had on us.
Wave after wave of screeching, slashing, biting, gnawing horrors burst through the walls faster than I could build them.
And throughout it all, that hellish sound filled my ears:
ch-ch-ch-Ch-CH-CH-ch…
ch-ch-ch-Ch-CH-CH-ch…
I was resurrecting Meera, Alaria, and Stig as fast as I could, but they kept dying.
My own hit points were dropping… 75%... 62%... 49%...
But my timer kept ticking down.
0:09:32…
0:07:29…
0:05:14…
It was just a matter of hanging on for those last few minutes.
Sweat poured down my face.
Please, God – PLEASE let us make it –
And then we were in the final stretch.
0:00:59…
0:00:58…
“HANG ON, EVERYBODY, JUST ONE MORE MINUTE!” I screamed.
Still the nightmares came.
0:00:32…
0:00:31…
“JUST A LITTLE BIT LONGER!”
We were all down to our final 10% of Health when my timer reached zero and the counter on my menu icon jumped up to ‘3.’
I immediately cast the portal to Abaddon.
The fiery ring appeared before us.
“ELUUN, GO!” I shouted.
She ran for the portal –
When a spear-like spider’s leg stabbed her from behind.
It pierced through her back, came out her stomach, and lifted her five feet into the air.
“NO!” I screamed.
Alaria barreled into her from behind, flapping her wings and pulling her off the creature’s leg, and they tumbled through the fiery ring.
“MEERA, STIG!”
Meera grabbed Stig and flew through the portal.
I pulled the tiny crystal out of the ground.
What was left of the crumbling pink walls collapsed, and hundreds of horrifying nightmares flooded towards me like a tsunami.
As I stumbled through the fiery ring, demonic arms and legs and tentacles reached after me –
<
br /> And were cut off as the portal collapsed.
Dismembered limbs fell in a pile behind me, twitching and writhing.
I barely even noticed. I just rushed to Eluun’s side where she lay on the ground, supported by Alaria’s arms like Jesus and Mary in the Pieta.
Eluun’s hit points were barely above zero – single digits and dropping fast.
She looked up at me, her eyes staring into mine.
“Can you heal yourself?!” I asked in a panic.
She didn’t answer.
Her body began to convulse.
3…
2…
“HOLD ON, HOLD ON!” I screamed as I reached into my bag for another healing potion –
And found nothing.
I was out.
There was nothing I could do.
I grabbed her hand… she squeezed it once…
And then she was gone.
23
Alaria and I huddled over Eluun’s body.
Alaria wept; I struggled to keep my grief locked deep inside me.
Meera watched nearby, her face full of sorrow.
Stig stayed quiet, his head bowed solemnly.
We stayed like that for nearly ten minutes.
Finally I whispered to Alaria, “We should bury her.”
She nodded tearfully, stood up, and carried Eluun in her arms.
Unable to dig a proper grave amidst the wreckage of Abaddon, we laid her gently on the ground and covered her with stones like a cairn. Once she was buried, we stood there a minute more in silence.
Alaria was the first to speak.
“We have to make him pay,” she said with barely contained fury.
“I’ll make him pay for this,” I promised. “But we have to get you somewhere safe.”
“What?!”
“If I don’t get the answer to his riddle right, he’s going to try to kill you, Alaria.”
“So get the answer right.”
“I’m going to give it everything I’ve got, but if I don’t… I can’t lose you. I can’t.”
She looked at me angrily. “So what am I supposed to do? Go hide somewhere and twiddle my thumbs while you and Meera and Stig do all the fighting? NO.”
“Alaria – ”
“You heard him, Ian! He said there was nowhere I’d be safe from him, not even Limbo! If you stash me somewhere for safe keeping, he’ll find me, no matter what.” She shook her head. “No. If I’m going out, I want to go out fighting. I’ll take the son of a bitch down with me if I have to.”
I sighed. I knew it was pointless to argue with her – and she was right. There was nowhere in OtherWorld she would be safe.
I wanted to contact Desmond or Satish and make them rewrite the program so there was no way she could die – but I was afraid if I sent them a message, Nix would show up and kill her. I couldn’t take that chance.
So I gave in. “Alright. Is there anything you can tell me about Nix now that you know who he is? Any sort of weakness?”
She shook her head in despair. “No. All I know is that he’s utterly insane.”
Truthfully, I didn’t expect a whole lot of information out of her. Nix was obviously an impromptu villain without a lot of backstory – otherwise his name would have been on my list.
Speaking of which…
I pulled up the quest details. Sure enough, there was ‘Nix’ in the number eight slot… but number nine was still listed as ‘XXXXX.’
“We need to decide what we’re going to do,” I said. “I can take us anywhere, but only 3 times in the next 24 hours. So where do we go first?”
Alaria thought for a second, then said decisively, “Fathmos. We need to evacuate the Naga and the nymphs.”
Those were the two races who had lived at the bottom of the sea as neighbors to Alaria’s perverted, mad-as-a-hatter ex-master, Zali.
However, he’d been crazy in a much more harmless and charming way than Nix. More ‘wacko artist’ than ‘genocidal psychopath.’
“If we get there before him, though, he won’t have left the riddle,” I pointed out.
“We can’t stand by and let other people get slaughtered!” Alaria cried out. “Do you want what happened to the frost elves to happen to anybody else? To Wylla and Mauvia and the others?!”
Shit – she had to bring up the fairies. They would be defenseless against Nix’s onslaught.
For that matter, so would the Naga and the nymphs, but I didn’t have the same attachment to them as I did to Wylla’s tribe.
I sighed. “No, I don’t – but most of all, I don’t want it to happen to you.”
“So we evacuate everyone, then go back after Nix has destroyed their homes.”
“That’ll cut down on my ability to get us in and out of places.”
“You didn’t even have your powers 48 hours ago,” she pointed out. “They’re not everything. We’ll use them to help people, get the riddles – and then we’ll make do after that.”
“And get stuck in another dungeon?” I asked angrily.
She stared at me, resolute. “If that’s what it takes… then yes.”
I smiled grimly. “It’s weird having you being the one arguing to save everybody, and me being the one to say ‘fuck ‘em.’”
Alaria smiled sadly and put one palm against the side of my face.
“You’re only doing it because you want to save me.” She kissed me, soft and sweet, and pulled back. “But we have to save our friends.”
“Alright. We’ll go to Zali’s old stomping grounds first.” I turned back to Meera. “You’re still in, right?”
“Till the very end,” she said, baring her teeth ferociously.
“Stig?”
He gave a sad glance over at Eluun’s grave, then looked back and nodded.
“Okay… let’s do it.”
24
The first thing I did was use my menu interface to delete my last Gravesite. I didn’t want to respawn back in the rogue dungeon if something went wrong.
Now if I died, I would resurrect in the nearest graveyard, wherever that happened to be.
The second thing I did was put on my Ring of Baloq, which let me breathe underwater.
It also extended the ability to all of my ‘demons,’ according to the ring’s description – but I didn’t know if that included Meera or not.
Probably, given that the Collar of Gorbolik made her into a sort of ‘honorary demon.’ But I wasn’t 100% sure.
“I’ll risk it,” Meera said.
Once she was okay with it, I opened up the portal from Abaddon to the seafloor.
I was kind of expecting water to spill out all over the place, but it didn’t. It just sort of hung there, suspended inside the fiery ring, sort of like the portal in Stargate.
We passed through, which was weird – it felt like walking upright into a pool of cool water.
The portal looked even stranger from the other side, spitting off sparks through the water until it collapsed.
Thanks to the Ring of Baloq, I could breathe. Alaria and Stig were fine, too.
Meera looked panicked and was still holding her breath. I didn’t blame her; my first time, I’d been frightened, too.
“Just go for it,” I advised her, my words slightly muffled as I spoke through the water.
She winced… blew out a mouthful of bubbles… closed her eyes as though she was in pain… finally inhaled…
And then her eyes flew wide open.
“It worked!” she cried out, ecstatic.
One hurdle down… and about two dozen more to go.
What remained of Zali’s compound had been wrecked by the army of anti-sex protestors. They’d initially just gone after the perverted statue garden, but then they’d rioted and destroyed the wall around it, not to mention the attached villa. It looked like a bombed-out structure from World War II.
But the rest of Fathmos was untouched. In the far distance, the nymph queen’s palace stood strong and proud.
Which mea
nt that Nix hadn’t gotten here yet.
People strolling along the seafloor stopped and stared at us in wonder.
Fair enough, seeing as we’d just materialized out of a magical portal.
I say ‘people,’ but they weren’t human. There were Naga – giant mermen with reptilian heads, scaly skin, and serpentine lower bodies – and nymphs, who were basically green-skinned human females with dark green hair.
The two races had been at each other’s throats forever. I’d tried to harness their animosity in order to defeat Zali, but the perverted little bugger had undercut me by suggesting a day of ‘performance art’ – basically a massive orgy.
Naga and nymphs immediately stopped warring and started fucking.
And I guess it had paid off, because now Naga males swam hand-in-hand with female nymphs…
…and lots of little Nagas and nymphs, too.
Baby mermen and green little girls.
No war… no violence… just families and couples in love.
I stared in amazement.
“It’s you!” one of the Nagas said in amazement. “You’ve returned!”
I didn’t recognize him – all Nagas basically looked alike to me – but I replied, “Yes, and you’ve got to evacuate, NOW.”
“What? Why?”
“There’s someone coming to destroy the entire area. Trust me, you HAVE to get your people out of here immediately!”
“But – ”
“HE’S GOING TO KILL YOU ALL IF YOU DON’T LEAVE NOW!”
Every single nymph and Naga within earshot looked at each other – and then scooped up their children and swam as fast as they could.
“GET AS FAR AWAY AS YOU CAN!” I shouted, then turned to Meera, Alaria, and Stig. “Go around and tell as many people as possible!”
Because of a bauble I owned called the Galatan Trinket of Speed, we were able to swim superfast through the water. We split up, and I headed straight for the palace.
By the time I got there, word had spread, and the queen was overseeing the evacuation. Nymphs and Naga streamed out of the palace and into the surrounding coral reefs.
The queen and I had had a run-in after Alaria and I had, um, well, double-teamed her daughter in order to start a war.
But getting laid at Zali’s love-in had apparently chilled her out, because she swam over as soon as she saw me. “They said you had returned! Are you absolutely sure Fathmos is in danger?”