Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon

by Matt Dinniman

  She glared at me, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she sighed.

  “Sort of,” she said. “I’m a fae, which means I can pull from two different schools of magic. Wind and celestial. You only have one meter, your soul power or whatever it’s called. I have two. With the surgical talents, I can choose which magic it gets drawn from. For the real spells, it’s different. But for healing the kaiju, I get to pick. The wind power drains on its own, but it refills on its own too depending on where I am. It’s pretty much useless down here. It does refill, but randomly, and I’m honestly not sure why. I only drain it when I have to, mostly to cast that Nipple spell to numb pain. I’ve been using my celestial power for the surgery stuff. I can refill it only by consuming the blood of a god.”

  “And that’s what that candy is?”

  “It’s congealed blood nuggets from the chained gods. They’re actually angels. There’s this whole storyline there. It has to do with radiants, and I don’t know all the details. The city of Medina is built around the temple. Celestial power normally takes a long time to run out and is expensive to refill. Unless you have a food box.”

  I nodded. “It makes sense. Sort of. The whole magic system seems cumbersome and overwrought.”

  “You’re telling me,” she grumbled. “At least I’m not a brownie who uses only wind power. Or worse, a radiant. They only use celestial power. That’d be just as bad.”

  Radiants were bird-like humanoids. They had falcon heads and reminded me of Horus, the Egyptian, falcon-headed god. They did not fly, at least I didn’t think they did, but their associated kaiju was one of the few who did.

  “Here,” I said, finally. We’d moved further up than I’d realized, and the wall behind us was actually now the stomach, not the intestine. No matter. The wall looming to our left was the liver. Any further and we’d have to cut through. Several purple waypoints—indicating a deep parasitic infestation—glowed within. We had to stay far away from there.

  I indicated the line of the wall, a groove that was between the abdominal and the oblique. “I’m going to cut a hole deep enough for us to crawl through, but it’s going to be a long cut. You numb as much as you can as we go through. I won’t have time to heal her, and hopefully my soul power won’t run out before we get there.” I shuddered at the thought of suffocating to death inside a tight sleeve of muscle. “After the muscle is a thin layer of fat and then the skin.”

  “Make it as narrow as you can,” Clara said. “Just enough to get your shoulders through. We can rip a little if we have to. Man, I wish I had that Incision talent.”

  I swallowed hard. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Just do it.

  I called up the surgery menu, picked Incision, and the menu helpfully popped up a diagram of the surrounding area. It allowed me to plan the depth of the cut before I committed. I had to plan the cut around the tendons, which appeared to be hard as steel. To get through the muscle took almost all the rest of my soul power.

  I cut, and before Clara could cast her Numb talent, Bast woke up.

  Chapter 15

  Banksy, Clara, and I squirmed our way through the muscle as Bast roared and twisted. The muscle contracted, threatening to squeeze the life out of me. It seemed she was also scratching at herself from the outside with one of her paws, and the entire muscle buckled and rippled.

  “Gah,” I cried in pain as my left shoulder cracked. It dislocated with a mighty crunch that shook my entire body. The bones grated against each other within me, a feeling of rocks scraping against one another, of muscle-pulling pain.

  I couldn’t heal myself. If I did, I wouldn’t have enough soul power to dig out from the skin.

  I pulled myself forward with my right arm. Banksy pushed up against me from behind, constantly getting tangled in my legs.

  We emerged from the muscle, enveloped in a tight polyp between the thick muscle and the gelatinous fat. The world bounced and heaved as Bast roared. Banksy slithered out of the muscle and hauled himself onto my shoulder, which ached. Clara emerged a moment later. All three of us were soaked red in blood.

  The fat layer was comparatively thin, about two meters wide. But, to my despair, I realized it was thicker than I thought it would be, and it took the same amount of soul power to cut through as the muscle, despite the thinner consistency. I had enough soul power to cut a small, arm-width hole all the way through. Alternatively, I could make a bigger hole just enough to get about halfway through. Either way, I didn’t have enough to get through the hide, which appeared to be about another meter in thickness.

  Shit. What am I going to do?

  I couldn’t cast Incision or Scalpel after I made a hole, and I didn’t have any weapons other than my rifle.

  “Banksy,” I said. “Can you chew through this thing’s skin?”

  “No,” Banksy said. “Not yet.”

  “What about you?” I asked Clara. “What else you got in that surgery menu? Or any other spells”

  “Nothing that’ll work here. I have something called Lance and something called Detoxify. I don’t have any sort of attack spells. I have some skill points to spend, but I’m not sure anything will work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to use the rest of my soul power to get us mostly through the fat layer, and then we’re going to brute force our way through the skin. I want you to ease the pain as much as you can. Bast is on her feet now, so there might be a fall. If we can, let’s cling to her stomach once we get outside and hide against her fur.”

  “What do you mean by ‘brute force?’” Clara asked.

  I didn’t answer. “My shoulder is dislocated. Can you ease the pain?”

  She nodded, casting Nipple. It didn’t heal, but the warm, soothing numbness enveloped me. The pain didn’t completely go away, and it still flared when I moved my shoulder, but it was much better. She popped another candy into her mouth.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Get ready to numb her pain.” I eased my back against the edge of the muscle, used the last of my soul points on Incision, and I slowly raised my gun. My left shoulder screamed. Banksy tightened.

  Clara appeared alarmed. “Jesus, Duke. I don’t know if that’s going to…”

  I fired, the rifle pulsing blue plasma into the gore.

  The temperature skyrocketed, and Banksy tightened against my hurt shoulder, whimpering as blood, fire, and bits of fat rained on us. The world buckled as Bast roared. The power level of the gun plummeted, and I stopped firing. The gun refilled on its own, but it was a slow process. We abruptly fell onto our sides and then rolled onto our backs as Bast fell to the ground. The way down was suddenly the way up. The world smelled of charred meat and burnt, bubbling fat.

  “Shit,” I muttered as Bast struggled back to her feet. I peered at the burnt remnants of the wound as the world bounced. I’d blown the rest of the way through the yellow fat, and I’d gouged a deep hole in the back side of the dermis, revealing rope-like nerves and the ruptured remains of small, white glands. The round, bulb-like ends of fur spread about like tree roots. But it didn’t look like I’d made it all the way through. I’d been hoping maybe the follicles or the pores—did lions have pores? I didn’t know—would be wide enough for us to crawl through. But I couldn’t see any way to….

  Your healing efforts have failed. Guardian Bast has succumbed to her wounds. Regeneration in twenty minutes.

  The world crashed down again, harder this time, and if our backs weren’t against a layer of fat, we’d all have been splattered. I stared up dumbly, registering what the notification meant as the world stopped spinning. The kaiju lay on her back, stomach facing the sky, making the way out straight up.

  Bast was dead. Had I done that? It seemed unlikely a single blast from a rifle to the belly could do any real damage. But if she was already in dire health, maybe I had finished her off.

  My body surged as I filled with the guardian’s soul power. It just came and came, overwhelming me, crashing against me over and over like a t
idal wave. My soul power meter surged to the top, then changed color to a golden hue. I instinctively called up Reconstitute and healed myself. I gasped as my soul power refilled itself. It just kept coming and coming.

  Clara groaned next to me. Banksy slithered away and turned to peer at my face.

  “Are you dead, dad?”

  I grunted and pulled up the surgery menu, but it was blacked out. I cast Scalpel instead, turning my hand into a serrated knife.

  “Come on,” I gasped. It was like trying to talk while inside of a hurricane. The soul power continued to whoosh into me. “Climb.”

  “Are you okay?” Clara asked. “Why are you glowing?”

  I dragged myself up the jagged hole of skin. I grasped with one hand onto a rope-like nerve and plunged the knife into the leathery flesh, climbing upward toward the outside world. The whooshing eased. My soul points remained topped up, despite the drain from my Scalpel. I felt the others climbing up behind me. I stabbed upward. The skin ripped easily, like I was cutting through wrapping paper.

  Muted sunlight streamed into the hole.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re free.”

  I dragged myself out of the hole and onto a forest of tawny, matted fur, so thick I couldn’t see in any direction. The temperature was much cooler out here than it was inside the body, and a steady, howling wind caused the fur to wave all around us. It wasn’t raining like it was earlier, but the overcast sky threatened another storm soon. The air felt electrified, like lightning could crash down at any moment.

  Entering the Hinterland

  I turned off my Scalpel and reached into the hole and pulled Clara out. Banksy clung to her legs and hit the skin of Bast’s corpse, swarming around us, sniffing at the ground like a dog.

  I called up my Gross Anatomy mapping skill, but like I suspected, it didn’t work outside of the body. I had a minimap, but it was rudimentary, and it showed me nothing. The entirety of the screen as far as I could zoom it out was blinking red, presumably indicating the dead body of Bast.

  My soul points remained topped up, but the yellow shade to the normally-red gauge started to fade.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re free. We need to figure where the hell we are. We need to get out of here before she wakes up.”

  Clara pointed in a random direction. “The city is that way. Due north. About ten or twelve miles.”

  “How do you know?”

  “World map. It’s a skill. It only costs two points. It needs to be upgraded a few times before it gives decent details, but it’s good enough to point us to the city. Past level 3, the upgrades are cybernetic, so I need to go to Medina if I want to really level it up.”

  I quickly popped up my menu. I still had five skill points banked. The world map skill was there, but I couldn’t choose it until I was level seven.

  “Okay, let’s move,” I said, pushing away from the hole, heading roughly north.

  Thirty seconds later, it became clear we were trouble. Walking on the furry belly of the dead, overturned kaiju was like walking on a waterbed, and pushing our way through the matted fur was worse than pushing our way through a thick jungle.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Clara said. “She’s going to respawn before we’re out of here.”

  “I smell others,” Banksy said a moment later. He issued a low growl.

  Great. I needed to make a path, and I needed to do it quickly. I pulled my gun up. The power had refilled, and it hummed with potential energy. I aimed forward and blasted.

  The fur burned away, melting and curling in black tendrils, revealing a scorched path to the edge of the massive beast between the back and middle legs, which stuck straight in the air like obelisks.

  The dog-sized bug swooped out of nowhere, humming like a buzzsaw as it nosedived at me. Pincers the size of industrial garden shears aimed at my throat.

  Years of games had honed my reflexes. I ducked, aimed, and fired, blasting it out of the sky.

  The monster hit the ground, rolling to a stop, a smoking husk. Its yellow and black fuzzy body looked almost wasp-like, but not quite. Banksy surged forward, devouring it.

  I’d received a decent amount of experience for that single kill, putting me onto the edge of level seven.

  “This is not pleasant tasting,” Banksy said, chewing. “It is burnt. Do not shoot so hard next time.”

  Clara pointed at a dark cloud in the sky. “That was a scout. There’s more of them. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Come on, Banksy,” I said.

  “I’m still eating,” he said.

  “Come on!”

  We scurried away, Banksy complaining. I kept a wary eye for more of the bugs.

  We reached Bast’s flank, and I reluctantly shouldered my rifle as we scaled our way down to the ground. Banksy wrapped himself around my shoulder as we descended. The kaiju’s entire body quivered. When I’d done the character creation sequence, thousands of ant-like demon parasites had exploded out of the kaiju’s body. Would that happen here?

  Similar to that first scene, Bast lay upon a massive field of grass. But the lush, green grass was yellowed and dying. Smoldering craters appeared in every direction.

  To the east, the smoking remains of an ancient city stood. To the west, a thick, jungle-like forest appeared to be just as impassible as Bast’s fur. Low hills and more scattered trees blocked our way north toward our destination, Medina.

  “There are twenty-four regions outside the city,” Clara said as we hit the ground and started jogging north toward the hills and trees, which were about a mile and a half away. The grass here was about knee deep and dry, despite the recent rains. “Each kaiju normally sticks to its own area except in the endgame, which is where we are now. So now they’re mostly crowded in this area, which is where the breach is. The demons will congregate around the breach and the kaiju, so the further away we get from them, the safer we’ll be. The problem is they like to hang out near Medina, too, so we’ll have to figure out a way to sneak past them.”

  I looked around warily for more of the massive beasts, but I didn’t see anything. All I could see were hundreds of moving, black dots in the skies above, swooping and screeching. They seemed to be ignoring us for now.

  “I don’t see any of the guardians at all,” I said.

  She pointed over her shoulder, pointing back the way we’d come. “Most of them are by the breach, just a couple miles over that hill back there. I can see their icons on the map. Some of the others aren’t though. Your Shrill is in the old city.” She pointed east toward the smoking remains of the abandoned city. “If we want to beat this game, we’re eventually going to have to get inside of him and heal him to full health.”

  I glanced toward the city. I felt, something, inside of me, drawing me in that direction. Was that real or inside my head?

  “What about your guardian?” I asked. We crested a small hill. In the distance a herd of turkey-sized, dinosaur-like demons rushed through the underbrush, away from our position. They moved like a flock of birds, raptor-like on two legs, impossibly fast. Their black skin undulated with red lights just under the surface, like they were made of lava. They seemed to be angling their way toward the fallen Bast. We curved away to give them a wide berth.

  Clara continued, breathless as we ran. I outpaced her easily, and I had to slow for her to keep up. Banksy slithered along between us, and I suspected he could move much faster than me. “The fae guardian normally lives just ahead in that woodsy region. His name is Avvinik, the panther god. He is related to Bast, but he is smaller. He’s one of the first kaiju you learn to heal in the game. He’s not there now. He’s south by the breach with the others.”

  The ground rumbled, and a deep roar filled the world.

  “Bast has woken up,” Clara said a moment later. “She teleported when she respawned, but she didn’t go far at all. This area must be her regular stomping grounds.”

  We crested another hill, revealing the staggered line of trees about 100 meters ahe
ad. Something moved along the upper branches. The movement caught my eyes, and I crashed to a stop.

  “Wait,” I said, raising my hand. I crouched in the tall grass. Banksy slithered up my body and to my shoulder to get a better look. He did it easily and rapidly, peeking up like a periscope.

  “I see them,” Clara said.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  Dozens of small, humanoid creatures swung about the tops of the trees. From this distance I could discern what appeared to be huts woven amongst the branches. Their peach-colored skin and round, bald heads made them look oddly like babies. They had fleshy, monkey-like tails and some—but not all—had fairy-like, pointed ears. A couple of them had long, bamboo-like sticks slung over their shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Clara said. “I haven’t spent too much time outside. I only know what little I do know because Anatoly never shut up about this stupid game.”

  “I have no way of knowing if the monsters are hostile or not. Or if they’re above my ability to fight,” I said.

  “I can take them,” Banksy said. He tracked their movement. Every time one swung from one tree branch to the next, he tensed, like a dog anticipating the toss of a tennis ball. His entire length was taut with excitement. I still didn’t know how he actually saw anything.

  On the ground near the trees, a group of the baby monkey things tussled about. A pair of them fell over each other as they wrestled, one chasing the other as they ventured away from the trees and roughly in our direction. High-pitched shrieks emanated from the trees as some of the others hollered down at them. Even their cries were infant-like, like the amplified wails of human babies. The two ignored the call of the others.

  “I think it’s a safe bet most everything out here can kick our asses,” Clara said. “No matter what anything looks like.”

  In other games, they usually made it obvious if a creature was aggressive or not. And in some games, if the mob was too dangerous, there was some sort of indicator warning you off. But here there was nothing. It was more realistic, but it was incredibly frustrating. This was a game where you probably died a whole lot, but the respawn locations seemed to be far away from one another. After a couple deaths, I’d have probably quit, no matter how pretty the game was. There had to be something I was missing.