by Simon Archer
+30 health every second
+1% health returned for every 5% body recovered and consumed
Corrosive: This creature possesses a very potent acidic component, capable of burning through even the toughest of metals and turning them into sludge and steam. Some creatures aren’t safe even from their own powerful acid attacks and abilities.
+30 acid damage per second from contact with acidic fluid
~acidic components: stomach acid
First note: I couldn’t get eaten, or I was dead. Thirty damage a second only gave me a dozen or so seconds to live before I was washed clean of all my pesky organs. Due to its massive size, it would have been far too easy for me to fall too deep in to ever find my way back out in time to save myself. While my team was full of some pretty amazing people, I couldn’t have counted on a second miracle saving my life from a gross creature.
Second, it was big and sturdy, which meant that it could hit hard and keep on coming if I dragged this fight out too long. That block of health was nothing to sneeze at, and it ignored half of all damage, effectively doubling its health. That was eighteen thousand health to blast through. Damn, that was a lot of health. Too much health. This was going to be a marathon battle like no one would believe.
And Hikki was right about it being an infant, though I didn’t want to believe it. But at that size? The adults had to have been miles long at the least. Titanic might have been too soft a word to use for it, and all of that hype Hikki was giving them was much more reasonably earned. Hopefully, there weren’t too many adults to worry about in this world. I could have foreseen having a group of those things chomping around the underside of cities to sink them into the earth as being a big problem or an evil plan that the baddies would have employed. Such machinations would have had to be foiled well in advance before the worms were really let loose.
One problem at a time, Jeremiah. First, I had to deal with this baby, and then I could fight its parents some other day.
My third observation was that it healed from many places: its own natural healing, the dirt it burrowed through, and its own body parts. Practically speaking, all of those eyeballs we just took off acted like little worm candies for it, letting it just heal itself right back up if it could gobble them up. Anything else we managed to strip off was also a part of keep away for its mouth. Really, letting its mouth do anything was a bad idea for us
Lastly, the text of the last paragraph implied that some creatures weren’t immune to their own stomach acids. If that were the case, it was being murdered by its own body every second. Fortunately for the worm, it had exactly enough natural healing to counteract the damage the acid was doing, creating a stable equilibrium that allowed for it to use the destructive acid for its own digestion. If there was a way to stop the healing, the acid would eat away at the worm of its own accord.
Alright, that was enough theorizing, now that the big thing’s ugly head was rearing toward me. Although, head may have been an overstatement of what I was looking at. It was more like a flower head with five fleshy petals opening up to a bunch of strands with bulbous, spiny growths on the ends. That was where the similarities ended, and the Lovecraftian horror began, with jagged teeth growing out of the edges of each point, teeth and eyes lining the inside of each ‘petal,’ and each strand with spikes fluttering about as they felt around for more to eat.
It roared, flicking out globs of slime and mucus as it charged at me. The tongues slapped the stone beneath me as they slammed down to crush me. Thanks to Bodo and his continued interference on the top of the creature, each attack was veered off just enough to miss me as I hopped from side to side to avoid them. More than a half-dozen tongues to work with, though, and I was hopping around more than a jackrabbit.
And just then, my whole body went… ripply? I might have described it as a tingling feeling, but it wasn’t as if I was getting a blood rush to my whole body. It was more like all of my skin was folding up and scrunching, and my bones were sliding over top of each other and themselves as if collapsing or expanding like a telescope. My muscles constricted and yet relaxed at the same time. The awareness of the presence of all of my organs and where they were inside of me skyrocketed, my mind focused on my intestines that were coiling and bundling within me. Oddly enough, there wasn’t any pain in any of this, but the sensation was highly frightening, nonetheless.
At the end of it, I was naked, my armor and maul disappearing from existence, and yet I was still warm and comfortable. From head to toe, my body had spontaneously grown brown fur, and my hearing was acute to an absurdly fine degree. Most disorienting of all, my field of vision reached near the back of my head, as I could see the labyrinth worm’s fleshy mandibles wrapping around me.
As if by instinct, I hopped away in a massive sprint, my legs moving in tandem underneath me to propel me further and faster than I’d ever gone before. In crazy and sporadic patterns, I was bouncing around the chamber from side to side, keeping the creature’s tongues as far away from me as possible.
“You did it, Jeremiah!” Hikki climbed out of the hole in the tomb wall we’d entered from previously as she shouted out from the side of me. My new eyes vaguely pinpointed her and Delilah again exiting the hole, intuition telling me that the gold knight was behind the wall resting. “You changed into an animal! And it’s one I’ve never seen before! It’s so cute!”
I tried to shout back to her my concerns, but all that came out of my mouth was a shriek of hellish proportions. What the hell had I turned into? I knew that goats screamed, but I didn’t have hooves but paws. What pawed animal had this kind of scream to--?
Oh, my god, I was a jackrabbit. I had accidentally used my Feral Forms ability to turn into a jackrabbit. I was a jackrabbit. Oh, shit, I was a jackrabbit. A fucking jackrabbit. Of all the animals to turn into right now.
Easily one of the weirder discoveries that I’d made with my magic powers. I mean, I definitely felt like a jackrabbit at the moment I changed, but I didn’t know that it meant that it would turn me into one. It wasn’t permanent; I’d seen Hikki change between her forms easily. There was some kind of off switch.
Although, now that I was here, I took a better evaluation of the current situation, finding that I’d outrun the flailing tongues of the labyrinth worm by a dozen yards or so, consistently. After all, jackrabbits were faster than people by far, and I was managing to keep ahead of the labyrinth worm as a human, with some given difficulty. As a rabbit, my speed was more than enough to keep me safely away.
Looking down the length of the creature, I saw that Bodo had been joined by Delilah in the yeti’s efforts to pluck out as many eyes as possible. While Bodo stuck around the head near me, Delilah covered more ground below that, using her magic speed to pluck out many times more eyeballs than had been gouged before. Hikki must have informed her of what my analyst screen was telling me since the monk warrior had also taken to kicking the eyeballs out into the tomb opening like they were soccer balls or hacky sacks, keeping them from the worm’s hungry grasp.
The druid goblin herself was fluttering below as her tiny griffin form, occasionally changing back into a goblin to cast the occasional spell. Every time she slammed her shaman staff into the ground, it manifested vines from underneath that wrapped themselves around the worm, slowing it down.
Yeah, I had time to come up with a plan to beat this thing to a pulp and change back into my human form, no problem. Always nice to have a reliable team to support me.
Obviously, keeping my distance away from its mouth was critical, but just as crucial was keeping dirt and its strewn-about parts out of there as well. All of that would have just undone any damage we did, and those advantages gave it a massive leg up on any attrition wars it wanted to wage against us. Trying to outlast it was just playing right into its nonexistent hands, and I’d have rather died than be outsmarted by a brainless worm.
If we could have somehow weakened its healing, then its stomach acids would have taken care of it for us, and
suddenly the attrition war was ours. Did we just need to hit it hard enough to outpace the healing? That strategy might have worked if I wasn’t likely to overspend on my magic again and burn myself out long before we’d finished it off. As soon as I was tapped out, this thing was heading back to its full health again. Based on how even the number was when I looked at its analyst screen, this thing’s health hadn’t been dented since we’d gotten involved.
Unless, working from the opposite end, I could have made the acid stronger, then I could start cooking it from the inside. The powerup would have had to be really strong to guarantee any benefit, what with the dirt-and-body-eating that healed it as well. And did I even have the capacity to do that?
That was something for human Jeremiah to figure out. Figuring out how to cast magic while in animal form wasn’t this fight’s lesson. If it was anything like what happened before, I just had to imagine myself as a human being, right? With the monkey legs evolved for long-distance running, and the high manual dexterity, and the enlarged cranial space for a bigger brain relative to my body size. I was a man, getting back into the mindset of a human man. Upright posture. Omnivorous teeth. Taxes. Cooking outdoors. Simple answers for complex situations. Refusing to take directions from strangers so I can solve problems with my own skills…
With a zip and a bang, my bones, skin, and muscles grew inside of me, reforming from the rabbit shapes back to my original set of human ones. My armor magically manifested back onto my body, and my maul back in my hand.
Just as I’d done so, the labyrinth worm used the opportunity to close the distance between the two of us, its whipping tongues flailing against the ground as it barrelled toward me. Disoriented by the transition between hopping and running, I had only barely managed to catch myself with an unnatural amount of dexterity before being caught right into the pathway of the jaws.
Luck was on my side yet again. Instead of getting eaten, as I’d expected to be the case from such a sloppy maneuver, the worm itself had been redirected with a powerfully deep slice into the bottom of its neck area. The powerful beast was stopped right in its tracks, bouncing off to the side as its body slammed into the cavern wall. The slice had come from a massive and golden sword, and the sword came from a golden knight, now fully healed up from his wounds and ready to join us.
“Need a little help, friend?” the golden knight stated in an accent straight out of a movie about King Arthur, though it was garbled a bit by the tin sound of the helmet. “This will be my most outrageous battle yet!”
Something about the voice sounded off. Synthetic, even, as if it was being filtered somehow to disguise it. Now that I was closer to the knight, I gave the analyst screen a look, just in case this knight wasn’t quite as noble as he seemed:
Starboras, Child of Fire, demon knight Lv 26
Health: 6500 Magic: 1690
Armor: 100 Aegis: 100
Abilities: Hellish Personage, Armormaster, Sword Sworn
Hellish Personage: As a being from the Hellfire Chasm, this creature’s resilience and power are far above most mortals of similar caliber. Those who underestimate such a foe will surely burn for it.
+150 fire resistance
+Activate - Infernal Hide: +40 armor and Aegis for 26 seconds
Armor Master: With proper training and skill, any shell can become a protective skin. When in any armor, this creature knows how to handle themselves better than others and becomes stronger than opponents who might think themselves equal for wearing the same.
+26 Armor and Aegis from any set of armor worn
+13% movement speed increase in any armor set
Sword Sworn: The blade has become like an extension of their own arm with a lifetime of training and practice. Only a fool is not wary of this creature with a sharp edge in their hand.
+26% damage and speed for any attack made with any bladed weapon
+26% reduction of penalty for wielding any bladed weapon above their skill level
+Specialty - Greatswords: +26 Gladiator skill when using any bladed weapon of sufficient weight.
Hmm. Historically speaking, demons weren’t good at being friends. In fact, the reputation was more along the lines of betrayal and deception, tricking mortals out of their eternal souls. That did not bode well for this alliance we’d made.
With any luck, I’d notice that big knife of theirs sticking out of my back in time to save myself and my party before it was too late.
25
“Ho, friend!” Starboras spoke in their warped, Renaissance voice, “What is your name, fellow adventurer, and what brings a druid so far below the surface? Of course! Where are my manners? I am known as Sir Dawnslayer--!”
“No time for introductions yet,” I interrupted them, though still taking note of the fact that Starboros was just about to give us a false name. “We kill the big worm first, and then we have our powwow about what each of us is doing here. Deal?”
“Of course, friend!” Starboras lifted up their shiny greatsword onto their shoulder. “We hunt together this day!”
“Sure thing, goldie.” I brought my maul up to my own shoulder. “Keep hitting it hard. I’m currently working out an idea that should bring this fight to an early end.”
“A simple stratagem!” Starboras shouted, taking two hands to their golden sword. “Just the way I like it! Huzzah!”
The demon disguised as a golden knight leapt into the air, swinging the sword around themselves and bringing it down upon the side of the creature yet again, cleaving into it again as before. The flesh chunks slowed its descent down to a very steady crawl, leaving it very unsafe for when it was about to get hammered.
My strategizing for making the worm’s acid reflux lethal was halted by my ponderings of this new knight. Without a doubt, our new friend was a demon. Classically, that was bad news. There was a case to be made for an increasing amount of ‘grumpy with a heart of gold’ demons that were coming about in movies and TV shows, but on the whole, demons had a selfish streak a mile long.
Perhaps I had a prejudice, based on the several stories about demons and how evil they were. In fact, in those stories, they were considered the purest incarnation of evil, and capable of powerful curses, spirit possession, and were the source of many a satanic ritual. Even in the most light-hearted of settings, satanic and occult nastiness was never considered a good thing.
But, this particular demon knight wasn’t haunting some catholic boarding school or shooting a horror film. He was here, helping us fight this greater monster and possibly helping all of us leave this cavern alive. And no demon I’d ever seen or heard of, from books or media of any sort, wore gold armor. That was strictly for angelic and holy warriors.
Several stereotypes were being broken here.
There was something about the golden knight that kept drawing my attention. As much as I wanted to think about getting the acid fixed up, I found myself more intrigued by them than anything else. Their movements flowed from one strike to the next, hypnotizing me with every swing of the gleaming blade and scratching at a familiar feeling that was struggling to come to my conscious mind. As hard as I tried to put the feeling to words, the words just wouldn’t come to me.
And that voice kept throwing me off. The sound didn’t come through naturally. Magic had to be at play. Except, it wasn’t changed in a way that I would have expected from a demon voice. If it was warped in a hellish, frightening sort of way, then it would have made sense, given that he was a demon. Fire and brimstone, death and destruction, the whole nine yards. But it sounded more like it was being put through all of a soundboard’s audio filters. Deliberately changed from its original sound. I did not hear the authentic Starboros voice. It was obviously disguised intentionally.
But why would a demon need to disguise their voice? Were demon voices that distinctive? Were people distrustful of demons here, like I was?
Needless to say, Starboras thought that even the casual listener to their voice was bound to be disadvantageous for them
, so he thought to hide it. That went entirely against their over-the-top, larger-than-life personality he’d just shown now. Hell, he jumped into a fight with a creature that was one day going to be capable of sinking countries. He wasn’t exactly hiding. What secret was he hiding, then? Was it the demon identity? As much as I wanted to believe that, my instincts were telling me that this wasn’t so simple. Or maybe he was simpler than I was letting on, like the reasoning behind it wasn’t so convoluted.
In order to figure that out, I had to recognize that I was making inferences based on a lot of assumptions coming from my homeworld. It was all too reasonable to say that most of the creatures and other beings here were probably operating differently than they were on Earth. For example, elves, ghosts, and goblins were all fictional back there but were more than real over here. Just by that alone, it was safe to say that the rules were different here, and I had to think about them on their terms and not mine. Maybe demons were just getting a bad reputation from generations of traditional doctrine I’d been subjected through subconsciously.
Assuming that being a demon on the surface world was, say, normal in the world of Neo Ceissein, which was entirely possible, given how many magical races there probably were around here, that would mean that hiding the fact that he was a demon wasn’t as much of a priority as hiding something else about their identity. But why else would someone want to disguise themselves so thoroughly? The armor fully covered them. It had to be related to them being a demon. And yet I couldn’t shake the fact that something else entirely was at play here. And I couldn’t stop staring.
With Starboros’s aid, the worm had been surrounded on all sides and ways. Delilah, Hikki, and Bodo had all mangled the great beast in their own style, each doing remarkably well at getting the labyrinth worm’s health whittled down little by little.