There was a deep screech of metal on metal, and the Warsinger’s tail pulled free - with the shoulder guard still attached. A wave of light and heat washed over me. When at rest, the heatsinks were held at an angle over the massive turbines that funneled hot air out of the torso. With the removal of the armor and the magical muffling, they roared like jet engines. Like jet engines, they were capable of turning me into mincemeat if I fell into one.
“What is with this fucking game!” I roared, swinging up onto the thin ledge now exposed by the removal of the armor. Clutching the rail, I turned, watching as the Prototype Revenant got its hand in position to try and nail me a second time. The little finger was still stained with my blood.
“Come on!” With an eye on my adrenaline point, I jumped up to the Warsinger’s neck, careful not to fall onto the heatsinks, and drove an Umbra Blast into the exposed cables.
Elemental darkness burst out from the spear of nine spheres like a huge flower, searing through the metal with spikes of ice. When the energy contacted the smoking hot metal, it groaned. The Warsinger stabbed down with its fingers - driving them right into the heatsinks as I leaped the fuck out of the way.
A booming explosion rolled through the valley as the Warsinger hooted and thrashed, twisting away from me and trying to pull its hand free of its own turbines. I was flung off into the air. There was nowhere to land and nothing to do but take the fall.
“FUUUUCK!” Just before I hit the ground, I tucked into a roll and Shadow Danced. I disappeared into vapor, then reappeared, tumbling head over ass and coming to an ungraceful stop on the ground, sans 773 HP: 20% of what I would have taken if I’d not saved it. I rolled to hands and knees, blood pouring from my mouth.
[You are hemorrhaging! Heal at least 386 HP to staunch the bleeding!]
I was going to die. There was no way I could take another fall like that and live. I had five Concentrated Moss Tinctures left. I chugged two, bringing myself back to 768 HP: slightly over half. Stage one of the titan boss fight was over. Now the attacks would intensify, and I only had three potions left.
There was no time to plan before the enraged construct raised a bus-sized foot overhead. I sprinted along a narrow, brittle platform over the honeycomb of sinkholes and crazed stone, barely avoiding the towering leg that plunged down behind me. It broke through the surface of the ground, shattering it and sending chunks of stone zinging past. The ground rippled, launching me up and to one side. I fell awkwardly and was flung as the giant plunged his spear down into the earth as well. I couldn’t orient in time before I smashed spine-first into the side of the cliff, bouncing to a stop among a tumble of basalt rubble.
“Fuck.” Heart pounding, mouth dry, I crawled up and turned to look at the Warsinger.
It was stuck. The enormous foot had broken through the porous volcanic ground and had sunk up past the Prototype Revenant’s calf. It was trying to lever itself up on the spear, but every ton of weight it put on the weapon only drove it deeper into the rock. My pulse skipped a beat. This was my chance.
‘Cojones... ENGAGE!” I banged my fist against the haft of the Spear, shook my head, and ran right at it.
The Warsinger’s head turned to watch me as I sprinted in. Its left shoulder was a smoking ruin, greasy smoke boiling off into the air, but its other arm - and its tail - were just fine. It began to slam the tail down, churning and weakening the ground in its desperation to hit me. I Shadow Danced and dodged, rolling and running on feet and hands alike when I fell, until I reached the titan’s trapped ankle and Jumped straight onto it.
The Warsinger’s resonant moan built like a chant. It splayed its good hand flat against the ground, and the mana in its corona, tail and joints began to blaze bright blue.
“No you fuckin’ don’t!” I vaulted up onto its knee and ran the length of its thigh. “HUURAAGH!”
Sensing the AoE, I leaped - and as I did, a huge cloud of searing cold frost burst out of the Warsinger’s palm like a cloud of crystal shards. Spears of ice erupted from its body and the ground. The river crackled as it froze. The remaining plants shriveled and died. The water vapor sucked in and coated the titan in a layer of frost.
The Tuun boots were all that saved my ass from sliding off the slick metal surface. The cleats shrieked against the ice, catching just enough that I could jump and cling to the Warsinger’s breastplate. That was a mistake. He reared up and slapped his hand over me before I could spider my way across to his other arm. The hand came down over me like a cage, and then closed I dropped, hoping to squirm through the fingers before they closed, but only ended up getting my leg trapped between them. The machine’s joints groaned as it swung me away, upside down, and lifted me up level with its face.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck YOU!” I ranted the whole way up, struggling with everything I had - which against a 200-foot tall magical robot, was just about nothing. I discharged an Umbra Blast, stabbed it with Shadow Lance, tried to dash - but Shadow Dance didn’t work unless you were able to move. The moves chipped at its HP, but none of them made it drop me.
The Warsinger’s jaws parted, and Belt of Tiger’s Spirit or not, my stomach began to quake for real. I was dangling face-down over an interlocking triangle of industrial-sized grinders that vanished into a steaming pit of a gullet. There was still blood and bits of shredded flesh clinging to the machinery.
It lifted me up high. The grinders all activated with a rumbling roar, and began to lower me inside.
Chapter 36
There were some ways of dying I was okay with - like falling heart-first onto someone’s pike, or even just falling from a great height. Gunshots? Fine. Decapitation? Whatever.
But this - this was not okay.
I hurled the second grenade with a roar, and the Warsinger flinched. The thing bounced and clattered on top of the grinders, and when it went off, the machinery stuttered and the huge artifact flinched. The explosion knocked them out of sync and slowed them down, but that was all. Great. Now I was going to live longer.
“Bitch, bitch, BITCH!” I just began throwing everything I had at it. The acids, the bases, the monster blood - still in its bottles - and then all 140 samples of Swamp Hag slime. The slime whipped around and around in long translucent ropes that seemed to get denser and tougher with every rotation until the crushing gears jammed.
WRRRRR. WRRRRR. The jackhammer-like sound of the grinders made my ears and teeth ache to hear it. The Warsinger seemed confused. It intensified the pressure of its grinders, trying to break up the substance fouling them. The Warsinger’s arm began to wobble with the effort of holding me in place, jerking and sagging down with every passing second. I descended closer to the pit of slime and broken glass, quicksand almost as deadly as the mouth itself. My heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest - part fear, part anticipation.
Then it happened. The Warsinger’s fingers twitched spasmodically, and I fell.
I hit Jump, then Master of Blades, then Rain of Glass. The idea wasn’t to deal damage - it was to push me back into the air. I flew back as the bolts of energy smashed into the Warsinger’s upturned face. It gurgled and churned, clutching at its neck.
I somersaulted back and landed on its other shoulder, landing on the armor as it lifted to eject the heatsinks on that side. With a roar, I unleashed one of my rarely used attacks: Shattering Darkness. Matir’s mark burned cold on my skin as I jammed the head of the spear in the joint between neck and armor and discharged a crystalline burst of blue-black energy through my arms. Veins of black ice shot through the thing’s armor, penetrating the nearest heatsink. The blazing red-hot panel squealed, then cracked like a rifle shot.
I jumped out of the way just as the scorpion tail smashed down into the Warsinger’s shoulder. This time, it piledrived the shoulder plate down onto the heatsinks, breaking off the damaged one like a broken tooth and smashing the others flat. The Warsinger boomed, a sonic discharge that made my hair fly up and crushed my breath in my chest, distracting me long enough for
it to snatch me in its massive hand a second time.
The vents on that side exploded, and the Warsinger sunk to its knees. I let out a cry as it began to squeeze, hammering my fists against its palm, writhing and twisting. “Let me the fuck go, you stupid thing!”
My struggling seemed to excite it. The Warsinger lifted me back toward its mouth, spasming on every motion. The drill-like grinding of the caught gears in its head intensified - first a little, and then exponentially. Oily smoke belched from every joint.
“Put me down!” I pulled my knife in desperation and began to stab as hard as I could as the vice grip clamped down, crushing my legs against the haft of the Spear. “Put me down, you piece of-”
My fecal expletive was drowned out by the sound of crumpling metal. The Warsinger swayed, and its grip loosened but didn’t relent as it began to shake uncontrollably on its knees. The grinders built to a fever pitch... then tore themselves apart in a belching cloud of twisted metal and black smoke. The smoke billowed out of the Warsinger’s eyes and mouth as the jackhammering became an insane, eardrum-rending shriek of shattering steel.
A deafening explosion pierced the air. I squeezed my eyes shut as my hearing cut and the world spun end over end, bracing myself against the inside of the machine’s fist like a roll cage. It shielded me from the shrapnel raining down, and then from the shockwave of a bigger, more resonant explosion. The Warsinger toppled forward, and I flashed back to the way the Arabella had careened toward the tundra while I clung to the mast. I’d felt the same way then as I did now- strangely determined, free of fear, wrapped around an icy hard core of self-control and resignation.
The collapsing Warsinger drove up the earth, caved the cliffs to either side, and smashed the ice. The light of the moon was swallowed up by darkness. Just when I thought it was over, we kept falling. The wind whistled through its fingers in the utter blackness.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Matir, if you’re listening, you self-entitled asshole, I’m going to punch Vash Dorha in the dick and tell him to pass it on to you!”
As if in response, the Warsinger’s hand opened, loosened in death. There was a moment of perfect stillness, perfect silence, as if I were falling end over end through a void... and then a thundering crash that knocked my ass the fuck out.
I woke in stages. My hearing back first, then my sense of touch. Then my sight, kind of. I opened my eyes perfect darkness - darkness so thick it felt like I'd been buried in a pit of soft fur. I waited for my night-vision to build, but it never came. There was no light down here at all. I could smell water, dampness, and a faint metallic odor. Not blood - actual metal, like rust. The only sound was a thick, rushing silence.
My skin came up with goosebumps as I pushed myself up to sit, reaching out blindly to feel around for anything nearby. All my hand found was the open palm of the Warsinger. I checked my log: yup, won the battle, but I hadn’t gained any EXP for defeating such an epic boss. Stupid redemption quest.
I went into my Inventory. No torches, but I had something that worked just as well: my [Blindfighter's Fold]. It didn't allow me to see as such, working more like sonar than darkvision. I equipped it and looked around, feeling the environment map on my other senses. I was in a narrow cave, a crack only about twenty feet across that led forward and backward through a narrow crevasse. Wreckage was scattered all around. The Warsinger’s hand had torn off, the fingers lying limp on bare stone. 'Looking' up, I sensed that the ground was very, very far away.
"Shit." I hissed under my breath and crawled across the Warsinger’s palm to examine a nearby hunk of smoking metal. It was one of the Warsinger's clawed fingers. I picked it up, and got a [Trophy of Nocturne Lament]. "Nocturne Lament? Was that its name? Yikes, this thing weighs fifty pounds."
[Quests Updated: Supply Train, Reality at All Costs. Take your Trophy back to Fort Koronya and show it to the Baru, Vash Dorha]
"Sure. I'll get right on that." Muttering aloud here felt like swearing in church. My shoulders hunched against the pressure of the velvet darkness against my body.
I held off on healing and took a minute to assess the situation. Probably the easiest solution was to kill myself. I would have to make a corpse run, but you didn’t drop Quest Items when you died, and I’d have the Spear. I could drink a bunch of poison, stab myself, or beat my head on a wall until I died. Maybe all three, just to be sure.
Exploration was the second possibility. Something about this place was calling me on a gut level. It felt... Matiry. Hallowed, somehow, like the crypt where I'd found the Blindfighter's Fold and my other Tuun gear. That was odd, because as I moved forward, there was nothing to indicate this was anything other than a really deep hole. The crack went for about fifty, sixty feet, then contracted to a point too narrow to squeeze through. Just the thought of trying left me slightly breathless. I stuck my arm in there, moved it up and down. It got wider the lower I went, and when I dropped to my knees, I found a space just large enough for a full-grown man to crawl through. It wasn't a natural, irregular hole, either. It was round, like a pipe. Patting around, I could feel the rough stone giving way to a smooth chiseled surface.
"Well... it's either this, or cap yourself." Suicide was starting to look like the better option. Tight spaces were not my jam. I was a 'wind in the hair, sun on your face' kind of guy. It was one thing to do some whacky stunt and off myself some way that I could laugh about later; quite another to die alone in the dark, trapped beneath a billion tons of rock in a tunnel too small to turn in.
But someone had made this place. If it led somewhere, who knew what was at the other end? Treasure? A mine full of resources? Monsters that had 1 HP but gave 200 EXP each? Or maybe just the satisfaction of confronting something that, realistically, scared the shit out of me. I didn't like to be scared, but I hated being overcome by my fears.
I let out a tense breath, stowed the Spear in my Inventory, and flopped down onto my belly to start crawling before I could think about it too much.
Within twenty yards, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.
"Cock." The tunnel was just wide enough that I could push my pack ahead of myself and commando crawl forward, my armor scraping noisily with every movement. The stone was smooth, but not that smooth. I unequipped my gear down to my underwear, but couldn't lift my butt high enough to get traction. My feet could push me forward, but not pull me back. "Cock!"
The darkness seemed to beat against my skin as I crawled arm over arm. A hundred yards, a hundred and fifty… and then my stamina gave out and I collapsed in the grit. My shoulders were jammed against the walls to either side, slick and itchy with sweat. I tried to look around and bumped my head. My temples began to pound. My throat tightened with sudden panic.
It's just a game, man. It was the refrain I'd used during every VR I'd ever played. I closed my eyes and swallowed, waiting for my stamina to refill. Just a game. Come on.
Another hundred yards, another rest, and the shaft began to slant down. I pushed my pack, and felt it leave the reach of my fingers, sliding down a steep grade just ahead. I steeled myself to die like a teenager in a horror movie and edged forward. The decline made it easier to crawl, but the roof was lower here, forcing my face sideways. The rock pressed down on my back, scraping my skin raw. I was under the mountains somewhere, lost. As I panted with barely controlled panic, I squeezed forward, and ran straight into my pack. It was jammed inside the tunnel.
"No! Come on!" I nearly swallowed a mouthful of dust and grit. My face poured with sweat, dripping to the floor. I clawed the backpack to one side, searching to see if there was anything other than a dead end. A tiny breeze ghosted by, cooling my right cheek.
“Calm, calm, I am so calm.” I reached out with my hand, searching, banging my shoulders and butt against the top of the shaft as I felt for the end of the tunnel wall on that side. There was a space there. Relief flooded my body in a blissful, shuddering wave.
I found that I could wiggle back to get a small amount of reverse traction, eno
ugh to push my gear forward, then drag myself around the corner. It was a sharp ninety-degree turn. The sharp stone edge scraped my ribs, leaving a burning cold gash of pain and drawing a gasp from my throat. But as I crawled, choking and gagging on the dust, the roof began to get higher. The walls a little wider. My stamina was pulsing red by the time I could push myself onto my hands and knees, gasping for breath. Another ten feet, and I slithered out of the shaft and tumbled a short distance to a cold, smooth stone floor.
I rolled onto my back and lay there, gasping and quaking. When I opened up my HUD to reequip my armor, I saw the ordeal had been nearly an hour from start to finish. My HP had dropped fifty points, and my skin was shredded. My right-side ribs throbbed, and when I reached down, I found them sticky with blood. "Fuck. Just... fuck."
The wind moaned softly in this place. I clambered to my feet, swaying in the perfect darkness, and re-equipped my armor and weapons. Everything sounded unnaturally loud. I took a couple of steps forward before equipping the blindfold, but paused when a mirrored tracery of light wound around in a ghostly pattern ahead of me. Another step, and they appeared again, flaring brighter.
Cautiously, I advanced... and the flickering took on a pattern that cast a dim glow across an intricately tiled floor, a buttressed ceiling, and murals. The light was swirling along the walls, weaving through the paintings and highlighting them in strange, haunting ways. It would caress the wise face of a dragon, winking out inside of its eyes, or surround a black sphere with a thin corona of light, like an eclipse. My steps began to cause light to rise and splash on the floor, and when I looked down, I saw that the mosaic tiles were styled to look like flowing water, with liquid mana rippling through the glass.
"Wow." The light led me forward, swimming through the floor and the walls, winding around a dazzling array of painted frescos. The first was a forest scene, depicting a brilliant white dragon with a bright red heart seized in her jaws. Hatchlings hunted rabbits around her feet. Clouds of brilliantly colored butterflies seemed to morph out of the edges of her wings, rising into the air. The mana beneath the tiles flowed into a short column of text in three different scripts: one looping and spiraling like musical notes, one the cuneiform Draconic script, which I couldn't read… and the Tuun script, which I could.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 113