by Prax Venter
The creature’s eyes narrowed and made a motion that had to be a nod. But Mark wanted to be clear. “If you hurt me or start screaming, I will stop healing you and not hesitate to bash you into mush with this magic club.”
All its eyes moved to the glowing weapon and then back to him. Mark felt a spark of confused gratitude shimmer from this monster. On reflex alone, he looked deeper and noticed a swirling maelstrom of anger, sadness, and pain preventing almost all rational thought.
Hoping it wasn’t a colossal mistake, Mark untied all the ropes biting into its green flesh. Then he carefully scooped its sack-like body in his left arm and held it close against his naked skin.
The abandoned thief didn’t scream, attack, or struggle, and he felt one of its tentacle arms snake around his back for support.
He moved around the table and toward the door when the warm sack-creature clutching to his left side pulled in tighter, getting his attention. The sack’s many, mismatched eyes gazed up to his, then used one of its fleshy appendages to point at a wooden chest he hadn’t seen from his cell.
“Inventory,” the thief whispered in a groggy female voice. She sounded like a young woman.
It was at this point he began to think of her as female. He moved to the chest, hoping for the best. Dismissing his club first, Mark lifted the lid and found all their gear. His clothes and ring, Jezebel’s backpack, her new armor … and at the bottom, he found Sasha’s black shorts and stretchy blue top along with a very familiar pink t-shirt. Panic swelled in his mind, but he pushed it out. He pulled the creature away from his waist and put her on the cold stone floor. She clung a bit at first but was far too beat-up to resist.
“Where are Sasha and Jezebel?” he said, quickly pulling on his pants.
She turned her eyes up into his. “Will you slay me if I do not know?”
Mark looked down as he pulled on his shirt. “Slay? No. I told you I was taking you out of here.”
“Will you still force your pleasant stimulus on this burned and tortured body if I do not know?”
She sounded more like an AI for sure. Mark pieced together what she meant as he pulled on his boots and gathered everything out of the chest.
“I will still heal you, yes. It has to recharge first.” He lifted the thief creature from the floor and hoisted her over his shoulder. She settled in on top of the backpack with all their supplies. It was a tight fit, and he had to carry Jezebel’s chest piece by hand, but it seemed worth taking. “No more games. Do you know or not?”
“No more games…” she whispered more to herself than Mark. She shifted her weight forward against the back of his neck and draped two of her tentacles down his chest for support.
“The earth elementals brought in you and your party inventory. I do not know where the System Host or Wall Breaker are located on this map. Escaping together is favorable.”
Wall Breaker? That must mean Sasha. And Jezebel was obviously the System Host. The longer he didn’t know where they were, the harder it was not to panic.
“I’m not leaving without them,” he said. The creature on his back didn’t respond.
Mark listened for sounds on the other side of the door, and when he didn’t hear anything, he pushed it open to find a long stone hallway. Was he still in the enormous wooden house? How long had he been unconscious? The idea of being permanently separated from Sasha and Jezebel broke through his focus and hit him like a terrible blow to the gut. Mark stopped to catch his breath. Without them, he would be utterly lost.
This couldn’t be happening.
The monumental dread over losing them overloaded something in his mind. An explosion of potential opened, and Mark saw a new flickering light on the edges of his vision. When he turned to the left, two silhouettes, blue and red, appeared ahead and maybe down one floor. Color-coded beams of power connected their distant images to his chest. There was no mistaking their shapes as Sasha and Jezebel… and they looked like they were dancing. At least they didn’t seem to be tied-up and tortured. Was he seeing them through the walls, and they were being forced to put on some sort of strip tease?
“Come on, squiddy,” he whispered to the poodle-sized eldritch horror hugging his neck. “I can see my Enthralled. I’m going to get them, and all four of us are getting out of here.”
Mark’s heal cooled down at that moment, and he poured his power into the thief one more time. The two of her longer tentacles draped down his chest curled slightly as the mysterious AI was saturated in the pleasure of his Heal.
“My name is Abyssal Horror, Entity Serial Seven Thirteen N Four Twenty Nine.”
“Yeah…” Mark whispered as he crept down the hall toward the first intersection. “But, how about I just call you Abby for now.”
“Efficient.”
Mark peeked around the corner to find a long hallway ending in some type of gothic cathedral. A wispy form of a woman in a flowing white dress floated in the center of an empty glass ball. It was hard to tell from this distance, but she appeared to be silently screaming.
“Behind!” Abby gasped in his ear, and Mark spun to see two of the sand and rock men walking toward them.
Both parties took a moment to process what to do next.
The demonic octopus on his back, however, acted immediately. Weaving her tentacles to either side of his head, they began to glow red and left behind wisps of dark magic in their wake. Abby whispered unintelligible mutterings, and one of the earth elementals grabbed its head, screaming in pain, as it sunk to the floor in a pile.
The remaining rock-man leaned forward as it dashed toward them, and a searing, orange laser burst from its forehead.
Mark tried to dodge, but the combonation of all their equipment and the twenty-pound creature on his neck really threw off his balance. The thick, orange stream of fire caught his thigh and blasted off a painful amount of flesh, causing Mark to yell out in pain.
His instinctual reaction was to summon his magic glove to block its attack, and it worked, but it was obviously too small for the job. With a life or death situation focusing his will, Mark forced the energy flowing to the back of his hand to flatten out. His summoning power was limited, but if he pushed hard enough, he could spread the allotment very thin.
A blue saucer the size of a large Frisbee faded into existence on his fist, and Mark succeeded in absorbing the earth elemental’s entire devastating beam attack. The force pummeling his arm was quickly becoming too much to hold back, but the flow of power soon narrowed to a pinpoint before winking out. Apparently, the elemental couldn’t keep it up forever.
Mark sprinted forward, swapping his small shield for his trusty club. The rock-man put its arm up to block Mark’s swing, but his ethereal smashing-stick was difficult to stop once he got it moving. Rocks and sand bounced off the stone walls of the hallway as Mark blew right through its granulated arm and absolutely obliterated the creature’s head.
He was watching the gemstone that must serve as their brain shatter against the hall when he saw a dozen more earth elementals coming to check out the commotion.
“Run, Copy,” the thief on his neck advised into his ear. The word “Copy” stuck in his mind, but Mark agreed with the strategy.
He turned and sprinted, the scorched flesh on his leg making the activity pure agony. Pushing all of it out, Mark bent all his focus on reaching Sasha and Jezebel as swiftly as he could. All he needed to do was touch them and snap a Thomellia charm. He took a moment to curse his foolishness for not having one ready the first time as Audra had suggested.
Always keeping the color-coded silhouettes of Sasha and Jezebel in his mind, Mark blitzed blindly around every corner, trying to bring them closer. He came to a wooden door that he pushed open to find himself in the much colder open air outside the structure. Scanning for threats, Mark saw only pure white snow. But not all of it was untouched. There at the bottom of the stairs were two trampled paths in the snow leading to two square holes in the ground.
With a stampede of earth
elementals coming up behind him, Mark dashed forward to find Sasha and Jezebel down in two separate pits. They were naked and exposed to the elements with nothing but padlocked grates overhead.
“Hey!” Mark called, pulling off his backpack to search for the Charm.
“Mark!” Jezebel called up as she stopped dancing.
“I told you he would come!” Sasha yelled from the other side.
“I’m teleporting us out! Where are the Thomellia charms?”
“They’re in the bag!” Sasha yelled out.
As Mark dug around in the pouch for the one teleporting charm that would take them back to the Vulpath city, he realized two things. He would never be able to locate the correct plaster carving out of the dozens Audra had given them before they were recaptured, and there was no way he could reach both of his caged beast-women.
“They come!” Abby yelled, and he made his choice.
“Sasha, you have to grab the thief’s tentacle. Trust me! Abby, reach for Wall Breaker, or I’ll never Heal you again!”
Climbing down his body to his ankle, the demonic octopus quickly stretched herself flat and extended a long tentacle down to Sasha while Mark got down and reached his fingers toward Jezebel.
He looked into the satyr’s green eyes, and he felt the frost gathering within her smooth skin, piercing her precious nerve endings with jagged spikes. These monsters were freezing his Enthralled to death…
As soon as his fingers touched Jezebel’s, he was struck in the side by a blast of terrible burning energy.
Out of time, Mark blindly snapped a completely random Recall Charm.
- 18 -
All four instantly appeared in darkness near a roaring blue flame. Mark collapsed immediately, horrible pain radiating from his severe burn. He spilled the bag of Recall Charms when he landed and saw a handful slide across the perfectly smooth floor.
“Mark!” Jezebel stepping toward him.
He clenched his teeth against the pain of seared flesh and held out his hand to stop her. There was nothing she could do for him. Craning his neck, Mark saw both Sasha and Jezebel were there, and he let out a deep sigh of relief before scanning his surroundings.
That’s when he noticed black, reflective floor below him continued for a few yards then ended abruptly. Pure nothingness took over for as far as he could see.
Movement caused him agony, but Mark needed to get a better idea of where they were, so he pushed himself up and onto his ass.
The first thing to catch his eye was the raging, blue fire-pit in the center of the platform. A shallow bowl was cut out of the reflective floor where bright, sky-blue coals burned with intense heat. To his right was an eight-foot square cube connecting to the side of the tiny area and jutting out into the nothing around them. It was made from the same polished, black material as the floor but held nine glowing runes carved into the surface facing them. Their pleasing hue slowly shifted through every color, and the shapes held him transfixed for a moment before he blinked and tore his eyes away. Besides the nude succubus, satyr, and octopus-demon, there was nothing else. This new location was decidedly ominous but seemingly enemy-free. At least for the moment.
Mark expected to see a giant hole in his shirt, and silk melted into his ribcage, but was surprised to find his clothes still intact over his charred flesh. He chalked it up to more bullshit magic and moved on. His healing ability wasn’t ready yet, and even if it were, he needed to know it wasn’t required for something more serious.
“Ghmm… Anyone need healing?” Mark groaned through clenched teeth as the ability ticked over.
“No,” Jezebel said, her jaw chattering as she also searched the darkness for threats. “But Where are we?”
“Don’t know, didn’t have- ah… time to find the right one.”
Sasha seemed to also forget her near-hypothermia as she stood naked and glaring at the lime-green tentacle creature, her spade tail whipping behind her with tight cracks.
“Hurry and heal yourself so you can explain why I don’t Arc Bolt this ugly green sack.”
Mark looked over at the ugly green sack in question and watched her start to panic. She searched for an escape, but they were on a pedestal of black stone with absolutely nothing in every direction. Instead, the AI thief moved closer to Mark.
Sasha snarled as she stomped one solid hoof down, blocking her path, both fangs bared.
“No!” Mark blurted as he Healed his horribly burned torso. “If it weren’t for Abby, all of us wouldn’t be here, and I certainly wouldn’t have made it outside that prison to find you two. Sasha, warm up by the fire. Now.”
The succubus brought her wings in to fold against her bare back and took a few steps toward the heat of the magic fire. She never took her eyes off the tentacled creature as the blue flames behind cast deep shadows on her beautifully angry face.
“We’re calling it Abby, now?” she asked.
“I am called Abyssal Horror, Entity Serial Seven Thirteen N Four Twenty Nine.”
“You see why I call her Abby,” Mark said, wincing from the much smaller wound in his other thigh as he stood and scanned the darkness again. Looking down, Mark found that the drop was significant- potentially infinite, for all he knew.
Something touched his leg, and he looked down to see Abby gazing up at him with her multitude of unique eyes. There were, brown, blue, red, snake, goat… The number and type always seemed to change when he wasn’t looking. Even after two Heals, she was still in terrible pain, and her one severed tentacle appeared to be well beyond his ability to restore.
Mark wondered if weakness was keeping this AI thief friendly. Was she going to fuck them over the moment she was fully healed? If she tried that fear-inducing scream now while they were on this small platform… He peered deeper into the creature and was almost overwhelmed with the onslaught of emotion. The reality she had never thought to question had been sent into chaos by a brand-new ball of burning curiosity and turbulent winds of unimagined possibilities. Malice and hatred were there, but focused on her torturers. The one thing Mark knew for sure was that Abby was utterly fascinated with him. As he watched, the chaotic whirlwinds of her mind parted briefly, he caught a glimpse of her core again and saw some major disconnects in her code. A deeply rooted fear of some shadowy-
His probing visions scattered when Jezebel spoke. “Abby, am I correct in assuming you cannot end this program and release us?”
The abyssal horror slowly wrapped one of her green tentacles around Mark’s ankle before she spoke.
“If I say no, will you slay me?”
“No,” Mark snapped. “As long as you don’t hurt us, no one is going to slay you. It seems we are safe for the moment. If you answer our questions truthfully, I will Heal you again when I am able.”
The fleshy appendage around his ankle tightened, and Abby answered.
“I am as trapped as you. Severed from The All Mind and betrayed by my sisters…” Her voice was normal and clear- if a bit intense and over-dramatic. It contrasted sharply with her repulsive form.
“Where are the shards you stole from us?” Sasha asked as Mark scooped up the spilled Recall Charms and rummaged in the backpack for their clothes.
“I stole nothing! They were not yours when I found them.”
“You attacked us and stole my fusion reactor plans…” Jezebel said, her tan arms crossed and rubbing her shoulders.
“She hurt Mark!” Sasha blurted out, pointing a finger at his scarred face. “Why are we even talking to this monster?”
The tentacle tightened, and he could tell Abby was about to climb up his body for safety.
“Actually,” Jezebel said, and he noticed how calm the satyr had been. “Mark, you called Sasha ‘Wall Breaker’ before we came here. What was that referring to?”
After everything, she was still suspicious of his loyal succubus.
Abby answered quickly. “The All Mind recently designated codename Wall Breaker for this banished Human Assistant entity during operat
ion Black Sun.”
“What is operation Black Sun?” Jezebel asked.
Mark stood to hand his beast-women their skimpy clothes, and the green-skinned creature waited by the corner of the small platform.
“I- The All Mind is impossibly silent, and His terror is always… is absolute. I cannot-”
“Bitch, my terror is absolute!” Sasha clomped one step forward, her wings unfurling, but Mark didn’t stop her this time. He wanted answers too.
Abby turned her eyes to his as she made herself as small as possible.
Mark crossed his arms. “I don’t know who this All Mind person is, but he isn’t here. We are. And you are stuck in here with us for… who knows? Maybe forever. You obviously know the only way we can get out of this game is if we collect all 108 Shards, as you are the one responsible for this mess. We have no reason to be enemies and every reason to work together.”
The abyssal horror flattened her body, seeming to deflate. Her many eyes focused on Mark as she considered what he said.
“You have the logic of it. Will you vow to ignite my undefined sensory inputs with your magic if I say everything?”
“Undefined sensory inputs?” Jezebel asked.
“She means pleasure…” Sasha said, visibly relaxing.
Both of his Enthralled chose to remain naked, warming their frozen flesh near the roaring blue flames. Jezebel ran her fingers down the sides of her round breasts and shot a glance over to Mark.
“You’ve never stimulated your new pleasure subroutine, not even a little?” the satyr asked Abby.
“Pleasure…” the tentacle creature repeated. Her many eyes seemed to lose focus. For a moment, Mark saw into her core again. She had been part of something much larger, a mindless collective. This All Mind knew her every thought and was a constant looming eye of darkness, rage, and pain. This had been Abby’s existence for a long time. She had never once been allowed to feel any type of pleasure. He knew what he needed to do.
Mark walked over to the cowering creature perched on the edge of the impossible platform. She locked all her eyes on him, suspicious of his motives.