The spider impaled them with her spear-like legs, running them through from front to back.
And the tube worm darted across the cave floor, gobbling monster after monster.
Eric’s foot soldiers did even better. The demons he summoned cut down the vlasoks in wave after wave.
The toad-like asotidals ripped out their throats.
The squid-like conatrix wrapped vlasok heads with its tendrils and feasted on their flesh.
The myklexinots cut down dozens with its scythe-like arms.
Swarms of bat-like natorus attacked the creatures as they emerged from the stalactites, causing them to fall hundreds of feet to the cave floor, where their bones broke and their bodies splattered.
The spiked jaguar demons, the millipede with the human head, the scorpion, and all the rest – they cut through the ranks of the monsters like acid through flesh.
But the vlasoks fought like hell.
They slashed at the tube worm, gouging its hide, slicing off its appendages so it finally couldn’t move.
They overwhelmed the cyclops, climbing over him like ants on a rat, until they managed to slice the monster’s Achilles tendons. That brought him down to the cavern floor, where they finished him off.
To attack the spider they began dropping like kamikaze bombers from the ceiling, pummeling it with their dying bodies, until it was distracted enough that other attackers on the ground could slash at the joints of its legs. Crippled, the spider fell to the ground, where the vlasoks cut open its belly and feasted on its innards.
Even when turned into howling balls of flame, the vlasoks still rushed the chimera. The snake tail managed to block most of the attacks, but paid a terrible price as its scaly head became blistered and charred. Inevitably one or two of the vlasoks would get in a slash with their claws before they died. After three dozen of those, the chimera could barely stand.
And the demons. A single demon could take out at least five, six, seven monsters. The more powerful the demon, the more carnage it could wreak. But invariably they would get brought down by a coordinated group attack – the scythe demon cut down like a caribou by wolves, the bats taken out by vlasoks leaping from the stalactites and shredding their wings.
In the end, there were just too many of them. They kept coming in never-ending waves, boiling down the sides of the cavern like maggots.
Eric finally understood how they could have destroyed an entire tribe of warrior dwarves in a single night.
Singly, the vlasoks were dangerous enough. In a group, they were deadly. And in the numbers they possessed, they were overwhelming.
So he began possessing the vlasoks and turning them against each other.
He tried taking them over with lower-level spectral demons – and it worked, which was fantastic. It meant he had to spend fewer mana points sending out scores of possessing spirits.
A vlasok would turn on its nearest neighbor, ripping out its throat in a surprise attack.
Others would counterattack – but then a second surprise from amongst their ranks would send entire groups into a frenzy, lashing out at anything within claw’s reach.
They didn’t know who to trust, so they began fighting amongst themselves as much as against Eric’s minions.
Not only that, but once Eric’s four lieutenants died, he possessed the corpses and sent them back into battle. The spider was useless, but the chimera could still spew fire. The ogre, though it couldn’t walk, could flatten anything within reach of its club. And the tube worm fought until it was reduced to ribbons.
And it turned out that dead vlasoks, once possessed, fought almost as hard as live ones. A living victor would turn its back on a dead conquest, only to be slashed across the back and its throat ripped out seconds later by a creature it thought it had killed.
Screams rent the air.
Bodies built up into five-foot-tall snowdrifts of corpses.
And then… everything began to grow quiet.
The last screams and shrieks turned into moans and gurgles of blood.
Hundreds of undead vlasoks – tattered muscles dangling from their bones, eyes gouged out, limbs missing – turned to their master to see what he commanded.
With a snap of his fingers, the spirits inhabiting the vlasoks were released.
The bloody foot soldiers collapsed amongst their brothers like puppets with their strings cut, just more dead bodies amongst the legions of dead.
Eric looked out across the battlefield, at the pools of black blood inches deep on the stone floor and the bodies piled six high.
He didn’t react in horror.
Instead, he saw only possibility.
My God… think of what I could do at Blackstone if I had an army like this…
And then, stepping through the ruined flesh all around him, he continued through the cavern until he found the third small tunnel entrance on the left.
He looked back at the mountains of dead bodies hundreds of feet behind him – and at his footprints in the dust and pebbles on the cavern floor.
Daniel had to have heard the battle, he thought. He’ll be coming for me.
No need to have him interrupt me…
Eric quickly ran another two hundred feet into the mine. Then, using one of the levitation spells he had bought (bought, stolen, whatever) from the Dark Market, he slowly rose into the air and hovered back to the third entrance. There he dropped back onto his feet, sent his light ahead of him into the tunnel, and followed it into the unknown.
58
Daniel
Before they reached the cavern, everything went silent.
In an instant, Daniel saw why.
It was a slaughterhouse. As far as the eye could see, the cavern floor was littered with bodies ripped to shreds. Where there wasn’t a corpse, there was blood.
Smaller black monsters with heads like hairless dogs – that is, those that still had heads.
What looked like a chimera, though he only guessed that from the goat’s head ten feet away from the body, and the severed snake that served as a bloody tail.
Some sort of cyclops that had had all of its skin gnawed and ripped from its body.
A giant spider, disemboweled and ripped into parts.
And a disgusting worm, six feet in diameter and 40 feet long, that had been sliced up into ten-foot segments.
Mira lowered her bow and arrow in wide-eyed shock.
“Oh Gott… I theenk I am go-ink to be sick,” the barbarian muttered behind them, followed by the sounds of gagging.
“So, boy – still think your friend is a harmless little mage?” the dwarf asked.
Simik had no idea.
The scene of carnage that lay before them was even more disturbing to Daniel than everyone else for one simple reason:
He had seen it before. In miniature, perhaps, but he had still seen it.
Daniel thought of the thieves on the roof, how their mangled bodies so closely resembled the horrors all around him now, just multiplied by a thousand.
Did Eric summon dark mages here? he wondered, his stomach sick. He couldn’t have done this by himself.
Or is Simik right about him lying to me, and this is something else entirely?
“What do we do?” Mira asked.
“We find Eric and get to the bottom of this,” Daniel answered.
“What if he’s… somewhere in there?” the goblin asked unsteadily, pointing to the mounds of dead bodies.
The dwarf snorted. “Somehow I highly doubt that.”
Daniel led the way through the forest of corpses, boots squishing in puddles of blood, as the group continued deeper into the mines.
“He went this way,” the dwarf said, pointing at wet footprints on the cavern floor.
They followed Eric’s bloody tracks, though all traces of liquid gradually disappeared within fifty feet and became faint indentions in the dust and pebbles.
Suddenly the footsteps became more widely spaced.
“He’s running,” Simik s
aid.
“From what?” Daniel asked.
“Ask him when we find him.”
They followed the footsteps for another two hundred feet before they stopped completely.
Simik looked around in confusion.
There was no trace of him.
“What do you want to do, boy?” the dwarf asked.
Daniel peered into the dark recesses of the mine.
“Keep going.”
They trudged through the darkness, their crystals lighting the way.
They never even once considered entering any of the small entrances branching off from the main tunnel.
59
Eric
Eric saw exactly where the dwarves’ doom had come from.
At the end of the tunnel was a three-foot-wide break in the stone wall, beyond which was only darkness. When the miners broke through they must have triggered an attack, because there were both dwarf and vlasok skeletons on the ground. If it had been anything like what Eric had just experienced, the dwarves had probably been massacred within seconds.
Eric sent his light through the break in the wall and waited breathlessly for a reaction… but none came.
He stepped through the breach and crawled over several feet of rubble into another world entirely.
What he found was a pitch-black cavern with a body of water – but that was where all similarities to the dwarves’ side ended.
Eric stood on a vast beach of tiny pebbles. To his left and right, he could not see where the beach ended – not with the comparatively dim glow of his spell light. Its beams had been enough to light his way in the dwarves’ caverns, but in here it felt like a single candle flame in the enormity of a completely dark stadium.
Behind him, a rocky cliff face stretched up from the beach and disappeared into endless darkness overhead. A glass-like lake stretched out in front of him. The only breaks in its surface were white stepping stones every few feet, which continued in a straight line out into the water and disappeared into endless night.
The entire place was silent. Eerie. Dead.
He used his mana to increase the light as much as he could – though that wasn’t much, he was the first to admit. A skilled mage might have been able to light the entire space, but Eric could only manage to illuminate a hundred feet around him on every side.
Even then, there was no real change. The beach stretched into inky blackness on the right and the left. The water – and stepping stones – were visible as far as the light of the spell allowed, then disappeared into eternal dark.
He sent the light five hundred feet to the right, plunging himself into darkness. But no matter how far the spell went, there was nothing else to see besides more pebbles and water.
He brought the light back to him, then tried the left side. Same thing: pebbles and water.
He sent the light straight up. The walls sloped gradually upwards, but they kept going and going forever, it seemed. After 600 feet of sloping wall, he could find no ceiling, so he brought the light back.
Then he sent the light out over the lake, following the white stepping stones in the water.
Finally he found something interesting.
After 800 feet or so, the stones reached an island in the lake. The island was like a tiny mountain, maybe three or four hundred feet tall, and on it were the ruins of some strange civilization. The buildings looked similar to those of ancient Greece – but only if the architects had gone mad. Strange angles, crazily sloped roofs, structures that seemed to have more in common with M. C. Escher than the Parthenon. Steps doubled back upon themselves in twisted combinations. Slopes that climbed upwards, and yet were lower than where they started. Impossibilities of geometry – a dozen optical illusions everywhere you looked.
At the very top was a series of pillars that reminded him of Stonehenge.
If the Orb of Therot was anywhere in this dark expanse, that’s where Eric was betting his money.
He wondered if the vlasoks had constructed the temple, then decided against it. They were mindless beasts and nothing more. This was the work of genius, no matter how demented.
He also wondered if the builders or their descendants were still here… and just how hostile they would be to see him.
Game developers, he had to remind himself. Game developers designed this.
But whoever the game developers let take credit might still be hanging around.
Eric summoned the light back to him and started to step out onto the first white stone –
And then stopped.
Whoever had built this place probably didn’t design things to be as simple as a straight shot to the treasure. Hey, come on over and take our most prized possession! There had to be some sort of protection mechanism.
“Vulpist anostika,”he called out, and from the black smoke came the spike-skinned jaguar.
“Cross those stones and go to the island,” he commanded. The jaguar did as it was told.
Its powerful leaps allowed it to skip stones. It bounded from the first stone to the third, then the fifth, then the seventh.
Just as Eric was wondering if maybe his fears had been misplaced, something leapt out of the water.
It resembled a giant snake or eel. The head was three feet long, and its jaws opened into a massive ‘V.’ Dozens of six-inch-long teeth curved wickedly back into its gullet. Round red eyes were set into the sides of its head. Except for the pale flesh inside its mouth, the creature was a mottled grey.
It slammed into the jaguar mid-leap and CRUNCHED its ribs with one snap of its jaws. The demon roared in agony as the serpent dragged it under the lake’s surface.
Seconds later, black smoke bubbled up from the water – the only remnant of the jaguar.
Eric thought grimly about how surprised the serpent must be to find its dinner suddenly gone, vanished from its jaws in a puff of black mist.
Imagine how surprised I would have been if I’d walked across first…
He thought for a second how he was going to get across the lake.
Levitate across the water?
Send demons across, then when the serpents show themselves, send new demons to attack them?
Surely I can summon aquatic demons, too –
Then he remembered the battle with the vlasoks, and realized he had all the help he needed at his fingertips.
“Vexicra nomadik,” he shouted, pointing his hands at the last place he had seen the serpent.
Black smoke swirled through the air and entered the water. Within seconds, the sea serpent lifted its dripping head and reared up ten feet in the air.
Eric sent his light over to it and saw the monster in all its glory. Its formerly red eyes were completely black now.
“Kill anything and everything in this pond,” Eric commanded, then added, “that isn’t possessed.”
The serpent answered with an ear-piercing shriek and dove beneath the surface of the lake. Five seconds and thirty feet later, the water boiled and thrashed with two sea serpents wrapped around each other, savaging each other with their fangs.
Eric thought about possessing that one, too – then decided to see what would happen if he just let loose.
“Vexicra nomadik – vexicra nomadik – vexicra nomadik – vexicra nomadik,” he chanted dozens of times.
Tendrils of smoke swirled out over the water and dived beneath. Within 30 seconds the surface of the lake churned with vicious life-and-death struggles, a massive snake’s nest of slaughter and cannibalism. And that was only what he could see in the dim light of his spell. What he could hear was far worse. Shrieks and screams formed a hellish chorus rising in torment from the darkness.
He smiled, stood back, and enjoyed his deathly handiwork.
After several minutes the shrieking stopped. The tattered, bleeding survivors – all of their red eyes now pure black – swam up next to the white stepping stones. They formed an honor guard of sorts, their necks curving and heads bowing like nightmarish reptilian swans. All of them had
mortal wounds, many with chunks of bleeding flesh peeled away from their bodies, exposing the white bones of their ribcage or the internal organs within.
Eric stepped onto the first stone and calmly walked beneath their obedient gaze until he reached the island. Then, once he was safely on the shore, he released the demons with a snap of his finger.
Every single serpent collapsed into the water and sank lifeless beneath the surface.
Then Eric turned and started up the steps of the island.
60
Daniel
The group passed by several more small tunnels until they reached the end of the main corridor. Massive stone columns lined each side of a fifty-foot-tall doorway. Iron gates which otherwise would have been impenetrable were flung wide open.
The group of five – Daniel, Mira, Simik, Vlisil, and Drogar – stood there uneasily.
“This was way too easy,” Mira said.
“And nothing good can come of ‘too easy,’” Simik said dourly.
Daniel agreed. On a normal dungeon crawl, you would have to go through a series of mini-bosses first, gaining experience and increasing your stats as you made your way to the final boss. You only got to the end if you proved yourself first.
But every single trial had already been wiped out before they got there. All of the mini-bosses – the chimera, the ogre, the spider, the worm, and the giant horde of skinless wolf-creatures – lay dead in gigantic piles back in the cavern.
How the hell did Eric get through all that without getting killed?
Did he CAUSE all that? He must have…
But HOW?
“You know,” Mira said, “since we cake-walked our way in here, whatever’s in that room, we’re probably not ready for it.”
That was the understatement of the dungeon crawl.
“Vhat are vee go-ink to do, go back?” the barbarian scoffed.
“That would be wise,” Simik answered.
“Riiiight. If you guys vahnt to go and leave me all the treasure, fine by me. See you on the outside, doots.”
Shattered Lands: A LitRPG Series Page 25