“No! NO! Gods damn it no!” Karalti frantically beat her wings, honking in alarm as the vortex hoovered us toward it. It took all of her strength to not lose control and flip onto her back.
“It can’t keep this up forever! You can do it!” I urged her. “Teleport out!”
“I can’t! It’s dispelling the magic!” Karalti snarled, lips peeling back as she briefly tumbled, flipping over, and began to flap as hard as she could. Just before her stamina hit the yellow range—the tornado left off. My dragon surged forward, panting and panicked, and struggled for altitude as the Voidwyrm lunged out of the sands toward us. I made the mistake of looking back as the monster’s open maw grew larger and larger... an endless black hole that engulfed us from behind, snapped shut ahead of Karalti’s muzzle, and dragged us back down into the earth.
Chapter 58
The Voidwyrm’s gullet was large enough for two dragons of Karalti’s size to fly side by side—until it moved. Karalti bellowed in alarm as the spines of the sandworm’s throat contracted around us in time with the worm’s undulations, forcing her to constantly adjust her turns. We passed the wreckage of the Lockhart, wood skewed on the razor sharp hooks that lined its upper esophagus.
“What do we do!? What do we do?!” Karalti was struggling to control her panic.
She couldn’t see—but I could. I knelt up, squinting through the acid fumes engulfing us. “We tunnel our way back out. Tune into my vision and focus on flying. Keep it together: this shit isn’t over yet.”
The wind moaned in my ears as Karalti followed the writhing contours of the tunnel. It was not quiet inside the worm: the sound of its burrowing roared from every rumbling, dripping surface. There was a rhythmic banging from up ahead: the sound like huge rocks slamming together. Was that it’s heartbeat?
I flicked to the group PM. “Hey! Can any of you guys hear us?!”
[You are imprisoned. PMs have been disabled.]
Of course. I reoriented on the path ahead. “We’ve got this, Tidbit.”
“But it’s still got over eight-hundred-thousand-”
“We’ve GOT this. Believe in us, Karalti.” My nostrils flexed as a fierce, cold anger stirred in me. I wasn’t going to lose my dragon here. Not like this. “Mortal Blows are a game mechanic that mostly ignores levels. So we find this thing’s heart. We cut the arteries, and we kill it from the inside out. The only creature capable of this – the ONLY creature that could possibly do this – is a dragon like you. Small, extremely fast, and very, very brave.”
The booming, rumbling, crunching sound was deafening now, and as the worm reared and straightened out, I saw why. Ahead of us, the tunnel constricted into a narrower hole that opened and closed like a mouth. Behind it, great crushing slabs of bone pounded against one another. There were more [Gizzard Teeth] behind them, grinding sand, stone, and potentially us, into mush.
“We’re gonna have to time this right.” My hands were shaking, slippery inside my gauntlets as I stared straight ahead, not even daring to blink. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Then follow my count.”
I began to count by thousands the way the army had taught me, timing the opening and closing of the beast’s throat. Karalti beat her wings in time with my metronome, and the two of us together were able to spot the gaps. She shot through the first and second sets of teeth. There were three more beyond them, opening and closing at different intervals. We cleared the third just before the monoliths crunched together, but the fourth set was slower to open and I missed a second. Karalti desperately backwinged, wheeling around in a loop before shooting forward, right into the fifth set of teeth as they closed down like a guillotine.
“HASTE!” I shouted.
Karalti’s scales shimmered in the dark as she boosted forward at high speed. I hung on for dear life as she rocketed through the narrowing gap, ducking down. A rotten cheese smell blew across us as my dragon shot through, her tail just barely clearing the crunch.
“Fuck a whole lot of that,” I moaned, looking forward. “And fuck a whole lot of THIS.”
‘This’ was the biggest sphincter I’d ever had the misfortune to behold. Fifty feet around, it was the undisputed King of Assholes. The alpha and omega orifice. It was also the perfect physical embodiment of my current feelings toward Ororgael.
“I have to land.” Karalti gasped, her wingbeats faltering. “Can you light a torch? I don’t need a lot of light, just some.
I did so—and almost wished I hadn’t as the inside of the Voidwyrm was revealed in glorious technicolor. The heaving walls were an extremely unattractive shade of olive green, shot through with black and violet. The ‘floor’ was covered in ankle-deep mucus and a field of fleshy feelers that grasped at my dragon’s feet as she landed. Karalti landed with a squelching sound I hoped to never hear again.
“Here.” I got her potions—Stamina, Mana, Water—and balanced out along her neck to give them to her. She swallowed urgently, her neck rippling. Both of us froze as the Voidwyrm suddenly screamed and began to thrash: Karalti clung on with her claws as the ‘room’ inverted, and our floor suddenly became a wall.
“They must be hitting it with the Symphonic Array again,” I said, clinging to her neck with all limbs like a tree. “Listen. Can you hear a heartbeat?”
“No.” Karalti eyed the sphincter of doom, catching her breath. “Is that the entry to its stomach?”
“I literally know two things about worm anatomy: they don’t have lungs, and they look like slimy noodles.”
The opal seams of Karalti’s scales brightened as she cast Bioscan on it. Surprisingly, we got a readout:
Voidwyrm Empress Gizzard Sphincter
HP: 2500/2500
MP: N/A
The entry to a Sandworm’s intestine. Immune to Acids, Earth Magic. Vulnerable to fire.
“The intestine. Of course, it’s the entry to the intestine.” I rubbed the top of my helmet, and regretted it immediately as my glove stuck to the slick, slimy surface. “Here’s a question for you. Why do you think it is that Archemi has a pee meter, but not a poop meter?”
“I’m gonna guess it’s because all the poop in the world is stored in whatever is behind the big butthole.”
I pulled the Spear from my back. “Let’s just hope the Voidwyrm Empress went to the bathroom recently.”
Karalti closed her nostrils, pawed the ground, and ran straight at the meat wall. She attacked it with jaws and claws, raking at it, then taking a step back to hose it with fire. The body of the worm rumbled like an earthquake, and it moaned, twisting with pain as the fire seared into its flesh.
[Ghost Fire deals 4799 damage!]
The portal opened, and Karalti walked through.
The worm’s gut resembled a weird, green-glowing forest. Things skittered on the walls, mandibles clicking: parasites. But in the distance, we could hear the sound of hope: a deafening heartbeat, growing louder with every step.
“All we have to do is get through here.” I tensed as the roof of the cavern contracted, and a squelching growl rolled through the room. “We take out the hearts. Then we either teleport out of here, or cut our way out.”
Karalti hissed as the parasites oriented on her, mantling her wings and ducking her head as she jogged forward. The air was close in here, thick, acidic, and hard to breathe. Karalti charged through overhanging fleshy stalactites, crushing the silverfish-like creatures scuttling underfoot. The deeper we went, the more thunderous the heartbeats were. Plural.
“Shit. There’s more than one.” I was used to listening to the subtly different tempo of Karalti’s twin hearts beating in sync. “I can hear four of five of them. And they’re not in the normal spot.”
“You’re right. It’s like... they’re coming from all around.” Karalti snapped at a [Sandworm Parasite], driving it back. “We need to find them quickly. My feet are burning. There’s acid on the ground.”
I looked down. There was, indeed, a gross brownish sludge everywhere...
sludge that was slowly rising, leaking from streams on the walls, which were slowly closing in on us. If we didn’t get out of here, we were going to suffocate.
“Find a thin patch of wall and tear through! We need to get out of here!” I held the torch up as a cough built in my chest. The air was starting to sear my throat.
“I can hear the hearts to the left! There!” The dragon charged forward, toward a filmy wall of sinewy tissue. “Attack it! Help me pull it down! I think this is one of its lung channels!”
She didn’t have to ask me twice. I sprung from her back, charging the Spear, and blasted the organ wall with Master of Blades and Rain of Glass. The Dark lances shredded it, spraying us with ichor, and the worm lashed from side to side as we held our breaths and squeezed through. It was kind of like going through an old-fashioned car wash with the rollers and mops, except the rollers were made out of warm meat and the goal of the carwash to coat you, the car, and everything else in as much slime and blood as possible. I sheltered under Karalti’s torso as she burrowed her way through, holding my hands up against jets of nameless fluids.
“This, right here, is how I know Ryuko is a Japanese company.” I grimaced as a thick lumpy liquid hosed me down from face to knees. I was pretty sure it was lymph. I was praying to God it was lymph.
“C’mon, c’mon...” Karalti muttered. The heartbeat was overwhelming now, shaking us on every thump. “Hector! We found them!”
Karalti squeezed through into a tight, close chamber. Above and below us, five huge organs the size of semi-trucks pulsed with blood. They didn’t look like human hearts—they were much less complicated, like huge tubes that expanded along their length and then contracted, filling arteries that stuck out from them like sewer pipes. The entire array of them stretched up and down the cavern, bands of cartilage being all that held up the ‘roof’ over our heads.
“Here’s what I say we do,” I said. “You start digging. I take these out. As soon as those arteries burst, this place is going to flood, and if we’re not out of here when it does...”
“Eew. Yeah.” Karalti rumbled, barely audible over the quaking ba-duk ba-duk ba-duk that rolled the room like an earthquake and drowned out all other sounds. “Go. I’ll try and find a way out. Gar was shouting about spiracles, and we just came through the lungs… so there’s got to be spiracles that open up here!”
I rolled my shoulders, tensed, and sprung out onto the first heart. I landed on it, sticking to it with Spider Climb, raised the Spear high, and drove it down into the surging artery.
[2136 damage! You deal a Critical Blow! Sandworm Artery HP: 1864/4000]
I struck again, dealing another two thousand damage, and the tissues split like tearing fabric before bursting apart. The Voidwyrm screeched, the sound reverberating through its body as blood gushed out in a great torrent, barely slowing as I moved to the next organ. I didn’t need any special attacks: just fire, as the flaming Spear of Creation plunged in and out of the vulnerable organ walls.
“I found an external lung channel! Keep going!” Karalti dug like a dog at the walls of the cardiac cavity, shredding meat with her claws and powerful jaws. By the time I punctured the third [Aortic Arch], the cardiac chamber was knee-deep in blood.
“How are we going over there?” I vaulted over to the next heart, the Spear raised to strike. “It’s starting to get a little close.”
“I know that! This wall has fifteen thousand hitpoints!” She rocked back on her tail and the pad of her pelvic bone to bring both feet up, kicking out with all her strength.
[You deal 5583 damage to Voidwyrm-]
[Critical hit!]
[Karalti deals 6722 critical damage to Voidwyrm Empress-]
[Warning: Mana concentrations-]
“Stop combat notifications!” I snarled at my HUD as the damage rolled in—and my HP began to tick down as the polluted mana-infused ichor sprayed me in a fashionable coating of crimson goo. I tumbled into the sloshing cauldron of it as the Empress gave an especially violent jerk, writhing in agony.
“Help!” I splashed to the surface.
Karalti broke from her excavation, wading over to me. I climbed up her hand as she bit into the next heart, clamping her teeth into it and shaking. I pulled myself up to the slick saddle, struggling to breathe. I was losing 5HP a second now—not good.
“If I die, promise me you’ll get out of here,” I gasped, struggling against burning eyes and sinuses and braced for the next Jump. “When she’s dead, you can teleport-”
“SHUT UP AND STAB!” Karalti worried the fibrous tissue, throwing her neck and shoulders into it. The organ ruptured under the pressure of her jaws: and suddenly, we were both submerged as the worm flipped over, lashing from side to side.
Holding my breath, I swam on instinct, trusting my gyroscopic orientation to help me find ‘up’. I burst out the surface of the liquid to find the last aortic arch pounding violently, fibrillating as the Voidwyrm tried desperately to save itself. I swam to it, arm over arm, called the Spear to hand, and rammed it into the tissue with a harsh cry.
The organ ruptured with a satisfying explosion, pumping blood into the chamber with enough force that it washed me away. Karalti, now barely keeping her head above the waterline, let out a shrill cry as I tumbled off her back and got dunked down into the thick fluid. I didn’t need Navigail to tell me that I’d dealt the mortal blow—I could feel it, as the Voidwyrm lunged up high into the air, keening, and then slowly, thunderously, toppled like a falling tree. I clutched at Karalti’s wing, trying and unable to find space to breathe. I had enough constitution to be able to hold my breath for a couple of minutes, but my oxygen meter was going down —fast.
[Myszno Defence Force has defeated Voidwyrm Empress!]
[All units gain 6995 EXP!]
[Warning: 15% Oxygen.]
“Hold onto me, Hector! I still can’t teleport, but we’re almost through!” Karalti scrabbled, kicking and clawing with all her might against the Voidwyrm’s flank. I clutched onto her, eyes screwed shut against the blood, feeling my HP drain away. My hands and feet were turning numb.
“Stay with me! Hector! You can make it!” Karalti’s voice sounded distant and fuzzy. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to keep my grip on her wing. Something was pulling me away from her. I flailed out, lungs burning for air... and then the current changed, and I was rushing forward. Rushing and tumbling, falling, until I landed with a wet splat.
“Urrgrh.” Coughing, moaning, I struggled up to hands and knees. Blood poured off my body like I’d been doused in housepaint. It was in my helmet, in my armor, in my lungs. I hacked, crawling blindly, only to collapse onto my chest in... sand?
“Karalti?!” I pulled my helmet off and tried to clean the sandworm blood from my eyes.
[Warning! You are suffering from Mana Poisoning! HP: 1630/3229]
I staggered to my feet, remembered I had potions, and spammed three of them. Then I pulled a waterskin, and dumped the whole thing over my head, scrubbing at my face until I could see. Karalti was lying slumped on the ground beside the sandworm, one wing folded underneath her, the other sagging from her flank.
“SHIT!” I ran and waded to her as terror gripped my chest. “Karalti!”
Karalti stirred weakly, groaning as I reached her head and lay hands on her. Frantically, I checked her vitals: her HP was okay, she didn’t suffer from mana poisoning, but she was down to 13% mana and 2% stamina. Any more mana loss, and she would pass out.
“Yaaay.” She gave a little telepathic cheer, letting her head flop back down onto the ground. “We did iiiit.”
I draped myself over her muzzle, hugging any bit of her I could reach, and managed a wheezy little laugh. “We sure as fuck did. All of us.”
“Hector! Are you alive down there!?” Suri’s voice, stiff with fear, broke through the exhaustion. I looked around before realizing it was a PM.
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re okay. Haven’t gotten rid of us yet.” I slumped down against Karalti’s he
ad, sliding to the ground with my back resting against her brow ridge. “Karalti and me aren’t doing so hot. Might want to come pick us up before I die of mana poisoning.”
“Okay: I can see you on the map, we’ll be there! Get out of that wet patch before it turns to quicksand!”
Quicksand. I jerked up, realizing that yes, Karalti was slowly sinking as the Voidwyrm’s blood soaked into the dry sand. “Karalti! Potions, now!”
Karalti struggled up, honking as her heavier hindquarters slipped into the wet sludge. “Ahh!”
I grabbed the last mana and stamina potions from her Inventory, frantically uncorked them, and shoved them into her mouth. Second by second, she was sliding away into the liquifying ground – and so was I.
“HHNNRRRAGGGH!” Karalti tossed the jars away, snatched me in her jaws, beating her wings to keep her chest above the surface. Her scales surged with light: and then we teleported, reappearing high over the circling ships.
“Holy shit,” I gasped, hanging limply between my dragon’s teeth. The Voidwyrm was a twisted quarter-mile long wreck, twitching in a sea of its own blood that was causing it to slowly immerse into the desert. Withering Rose, several hundred yards away, was fine—and as a cheer went up from the ships, the dredgers that had been hanging back out of battle range began to chug toward the fallen Warsinger.
“Gar! Lorenzo! We did it! We did it we did it we did it!” Rin’s voice broke off into a delighted squeal.
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