Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

“Jump!” I screamed at the others, leaping up to cling with Spider Climb once again.

  But the Broodmother didn’t discharge electricity across the floor again: This time, she swung her prehensile limbs like whips, shattering crystal with every blow. It was impossible to dodge. One of them slammed into me across the thighs, hitting me for 310 points and sending me spinning and then tumbling across the floor. Suri flattened herself to the ground while Cutthroat stood over her, taking the onslaught herself, howling as electricity arced across her scales. But then Karalti finally wormed her head, neck and torso through the hole she’d made and belched a narrow plume of blazing white liquid right onto the Broodmother’s bulk. The Ghost Fire exploded into flames as soon as it struck, and the worm shrieked in agony, lashing out with gobs of electrified slime even as crossbow bolts continued to pepper it from afar.

  [Ghost Fire deals 1340 damage!]

  [Rin Lu deals 20 damage!]

  [Suri activates Battle Lust!]

  Panting and limping, I spammed heals and held my distance. Across the room, Suri did the same thing - and then her armor vanished from her body, leaving her in her leggings, a halter top, and a cloud of flaring power as she finally activated her key Path ability: Primal Rage.

  [Broodmother uses Restoration! Heals 1500HP!]

  [Broodmother’s Damage Reduction has increased!]

  “HURRRAAAHHH!” The Berserker, supernaturally fast from multiple stacking buffs, tore in toward the Broodmother and began to chop her like a tree. The boss let loose a jolt of electricity. Suri snapped her teeth like a dog, soaking the damage, and powered on.

  [Suri deals 1890 damage!]

  [Suri’s Rage builds! Damage reduction and attack power drastically increases!]

  Suddenly, I had a bright idea. While the Broodmother focused on Cutthroat and Suri, I ran along the edge of the wall, Jumped and flipped in midair to land on the monster’s back. “Time for some voodoo!”

  I landed the Jump, sinking the head of the Spear into the creature’s rubbery flesh. The slime insulated it from the Fire element the weapon delivered, but I twisted it out and bounced back enough to dash, then hit my Blood Sprint to Blood Storm to Death by a Thousand Cuts combo. They were all Darkness-elemental abilities, dealing reduced damage - but the big slimy bitch wasn’t immune to Curses. A shadowy nimbus pulsed along the seven-foot length of the spear, sucking the light from the air and twisting my guts with a nasty, icy sensation that tore from my body and slammed deep into the Broodmother’s.

  [Broodmother is Cursed! -4% attack power!]

  [You gain +4% attack power and +10% damage reduction from your opponent’s attacks!]

  [You deal 725 reduced Darkness damage!]

  [Suri’s Rage builds! Damage reduction and attack power drastically increases!]

  Suri’s HP was below half; mine was creeping back up into that weird zone between orange and green. Rin was almost untouched, protected by her turrets, but Hopper and Lovelace had been soaking all of that AOE and were starting to smoke and spit sparks. Cutthroat was in the red, clawing slime from the body of the Broodmother even though she had to be in agony.

  The boss began to move just like she had before the Plasma Burst. I made a decision. I vaulted from the Broodmother, bounced off Cutthroat’s back and landed on the ground in front of her. She stopped mauling the boss for a second, turning on me with her hook-arms raised and her jaws gaping. I jammed a potion in her gaping mouth.

  “Drink! Drink it all!” I slapped five assorted healing poultices onto her, until she looked like she was covered in nicotine patches. “No whine! Only drink!”

  The Hookwing glugged in confusion, but her HP ring jumped back into the green as the Broodmother tensed, and then unleashed waves of electricity throughout the cavern.

  [Broodmother uses Plasma Burst!]

  [You take 998 damage! You are Stunned! HP: 66/1362]

  The blast flung us all back, turning everything white. It barely even hurt: a flash, a pop, and I came to on my side, my mouth and nose full of a metallic burning stench. Over the thundering in my ears, I heard Karalti’s bestial roar, and then Suri’s. The sound of one of the turrets firing, and Rin’s squeal of pain as something finally breached her defenses and hit her.

  [Suri hits Broodmother for 1263 damage!]

  [Ghost Fire hits for 1340 damage!]

  [Broodmother is on Fire! HP: 4122/15,000]

  God, we were so close. Groaning, I rolled to my back, just in time to see the Broodmother whip one of her electrified legs toward me so fast that it blurred. The shadow sliced across my face. I braced myself to die.

  Chapter 21

  “SCREEEEEE!” Cutthroat’s bird-like screech echoed off the walls, and then her keel nearly drove me into the ground as she flung herself on top of me. The blow landed squarely across the hookwing’s back instead of my head. Bones crunched and one hind leg gave way. She huffed with pain, falling to rest on her wrist joints.

  [Cutthroat uses Pack Guardian!]

  [Pack Bond: Cutthroat’s HP, Attack and Defense sharply increases! HP: 544/1500]

  [Cutthroat has a Fractured Pelvis! Max HP reduced, Movement -65%!]

  “Goddammit, Cutthroat: I respawn, you don’t!” I slapped every poultice I had left onto her belly, lifting her HP back up to its new maximum - about 70% of her usual total. She hissed at me, mantling over my prone form as Suri charged ahead into the fray. The Berserker’s skin was smoking, her hair standing on end, but every hit she landed on the Broodmother was restoring her HP as her Primal Rage ability built toward its maximum damage output.

  Cutthroat was suffused with a deep red aura not unlike Suri’s as she snarled, limping up to her one good leg. As I chugged potions, she stood over me, blocking and swatting away the cable-like limbs as they flailed over us, soaking Electro Web attacks, fending off slime and static shocks. When I was back to half, I slid out from under her and used the Spear to get to my feet.

  “Get her, girl! Ice cream!” I gave Cutthroat her old attack command, getting ready to Jump. “Rin! Can you heal Suri?”

  “Yes!” Rin cried back. One of her turrets was crumpled on the ground, while the other was on its last legs. The Mercurion made a beeline for Suri, who was furiously hacking into the Broodmother’s bleeding abdomen with her axes. She was hovering at around 30% HP, whaling on the boss with supernatural speed. As her HP went down, her attack rose.

  [Suri deals 1492 damage!]

  [Cutthroat deals 200 damage!]

  [Broodmother uses Restoration! HP: 4130/15,000]

  [Rin casts Haste! +20% movement and attack speed!]

  My AP bar was full from the massive hit I’d taken. Gritting my teeth, I sprung up, dodging the flailing bullwhip limbs, and threw everything I had at the Broodmother. Lances of black energy slammed into it, rocking the giant worm to one side. Suri’s axes broke, their durability gone, and she seamlessly dodged a tentacle, scooped up her sword, and began to lay in with it. Her eyes were molten gold, blazing with inhuman strength as she roared and charged back in to swing.

  [You deal 1983 damage!]

  [Suri deals 1221 damage!]

  [Broodmother uses Restoration! HP: 1726/15,000]

  Across the room, Karalti drew a deep breath. “Hector! Go left!”

  The Broodmother spun its bulk around and began to dive back into the pit of slime. But Karalti was faster. Her breath weapon slashed a line of white magnesium fire down the front of the giant worm, and it wailed long and loud as the fire ripped across its wounds. The limbs, each one as thick as bridge cables, smashed down around us, sending chunks of rock and crystal flying. It stopped trying to run away and began to turbocharge in preparation for one last Plasma Blast: a blast that would kill me, Suri and Cutthroat if it was able to get it off.

  “Fuck you! Fuck YOU!” I vaulted up onto one of the writhing metal limbs and ran up along its bucking length, waiting for the right moment to Jump, Shadow Dash, and then land on the Broodmother’s open mouth. Fighting shocks of electricity, I rammed the bla
zing Spear down its gullet, while Cutthroat buried the full length of her scythe-like claws into the monster’s burning belly. Suri was right behind her, using her sword to crack the monster’s carapace open. Bright blue viscera spilled over the ground, and with one final screech, the huge creature toppled. The whip-like limbs went limp, falling to the ground.

  [You have defeated Swamp Hag Broodmother!]

  [You gain 1600 EXP!]

  [Congratulations! You are Level 19]

  [Congratulations! Karalti is Level 10!]

  [Suri Ba’hadir is Level 21!]

  [Rin Lu is Level 17!]

  I jumped when the Broodmother began to fall, landing lightly just ahead of the wave of bug juice. Suri dropped her sword, then went to hands and knees, heaving for breath and drooling blood even as a faint golden glow suffused her: her level up. Cutthroat limped off-side and sunk down, panting and wide-eyed with pain. Her left leg was hanging useless, the hip joint soft and deformed. Rin was singed, but mostly unharmed. Her turrets, on the other hand, were fucked - maybe beyond repair.

  “FUCK!” I threw the Spear down in a fit of pique, burning off the nervous energy that threatened to turn me into shaking jelly. “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  Scrabbling, Karalti twisted and strained one last time until she slipped through the entry to the Broodmother’s lair like a cork from a bottle of wine. “Yeah! We did it!”

  “Barely. Fuck me,” Suri gasped. She looked up and around, wild-eyed with fatigue. “Cutthroat? Is Cutthroat okay? She’s literally just five points off Level 18.”

  “Of course. Can we find a bug for her to kill or something?” I collected my weapon and went to the ailing dinosaur as she tried to turn around and lick her injured leg. When I crouched in front of it, she growled.

  “Easy, girl.” I held up a hand to her, reaching out to gently examine her pelvis. The flesh around her hip joint was soft, dimpling under even a light touch. “Yeah, this is fucked. I have something that might be able to help her, but... it’s alchemical.”

  Suri spat to the side and rocked back onto her rump. “What’s that mean?”

  “There’s a chance it’ll kill her, or Strange her.” I winced.

  “What are the odds?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  Suri scowled, but when she looked back at Cutthroat, her expression softened. After a few moments, she shook her head. “Do it. If she had a choice between death and never being able to fight again, I know which one she’d pick.”

  “Yeah. It’s important that we keep her out of the sun for a minimum two days after she takes this. This stuff is crazy phototoxic – she’ll take damage on contact with sunlight.”

  Cutthroat fixed me with fierce, intelligent eyes as I pulled my one and only Bonefuse potion from my Inventory. The dark potion cast a deep blue-violet light. I set it aside along with the Spear and held up both hands.

  “I have to set this fracture, girl,” I said to her. “Try not to kill me.”

  The hookwing snorted, nostrils flexing. Her muzzle tracked me as I lay both hands on the injured hip. As soon as my hands touched her skin, she let out a low, rumbling growl.

  “Here.” Suri crawled over took the dinosaur’s head into her lap. She stroked the singed feathers back. The hookwing shivered, and her eyes half-closed with pleasure. “Okay… now. Just be quick.”

  Karalti padded over to us and ducked her head, feet booming against the cavern floor. “Will she be okay?”

  “That’s the plan.” I got my hands in position, and a virtual diagram appeared that demonstrated what I needed to do and how to push. I had to press the heels of my palms in, hook up, then push forward. All the crafts I’d tried in Archemi had this sort of rhythm-based minigame. “Okay… three, two, one.”

  I followed the diagram and put my back into it. Cutthroat screeched, kicking loose rocks along the floor with her other foot, but Suri hung onto her head. The joint slid back into the socket with a crunch. Cutthroat sunk down, whimpering, and nuzzled into Suri’s chest with her snout.

  “Yeah, I know.” I picked up the potion and handed it to Suri. “Here. Remember, no sunlight. Two to four days. She’ll lose one percent HP every minute she’s outdoors in the daytime.”

  “If she survives,” Suri said. Her brows were knit and her eyes were dark with worry.

  Rin and I held Cutthroat’s limbs down as Suri plugged Cutthroat’s nostrils with her fingers and poured the potion into her mouth. The hookwing snorted and gurgled, struggling weakly against our grip. We waited tensely as the bottle drained. When it was all gone, Suri folded the empty flask into her Inventory.

  A status ring appeared over Cutthroat’s body. The dinosaur snapped her jaws at me, hissing sullenly, but as a red line began to creep up from the side of the ring, her eyelids grew heavy. Her neck wobbled, and then, with a wheezy sigh, she laid her head on the ground.

  “Hey! No!” Suri slapped the hookwing’s cheek, to no effect. The woman looked up at me, wild-eyed. “Is this… is she…?”

  As I watched, the ring jumped up a little more. There was no timer, like there had been with the herbal potions I’d used on Zlaslo. “I think this potion takes time to work. Looks like it takes about ten minutes - we won’t know if she’s going to Strange until the end of the process.”

  “Fuck.” Suri’s face was impassive, but she stroked Cutthroat’s neck feathers over and over again. “We need to search this place for Brother Whatisface, but I don’t want to leave her. She’s a cantankerous old bitch, but… fuck.”

  “It’s okay, Suri. I’ll stay here and look after her.” Rin stepped up, her blue eyes big with determination. “Don’t worry. You go find Vash.”

  Cutthroat groaned, semi-conscious, just before I heard a wet crunching sound deep in her pelvis. Suri shuddered and got to her feet. “Christ. This is awful.”

  “Yeah.” I looked to Rin. “You sure?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, pressing her lips together. “I can’t fight as well as either of you, but I know mana and I know Stranging when I see it. I’ll let you know how she goes.”

  Chapter 22

  The crystallized slime plug that sealed the Broodmother’s inner sanctum was wedged in tighter than a three-day old booger. It took me, Suri and Karalti wailing on it for about ten minutes to break it up.

  “Does this place ever stop being gross?” I stepped gingerly into the blue glowing cavern beyond. “Oh. Just look at that. The answer is apparently ‘fuck no’.”

  The cavern was full of eggs and goo in about equal quantities. The eggs were laid in small, mucus wrapped clusters nestled in little hillocks of webbing and bones. Some piles were already hatched and empty. Other nests had zombies bound to them, some of them still moving weakly inside their bonds. And far at the back was a mostly-naked man glued spread-eagle over a nest of writhing, just-about-ready-to-pop baby Swamp Hags.

  “Hey, you big old wrinkly bitch!” He hollered in strongly accented Vlachian. “Guess what the first thing your stupid ugly babies are gonna taste when they hatch? These nuts! That’s totally fucked up! But not as fucked as you’ll be once I get off this nest and ram my fist into your ass and mouth at the same time! Because your mouth is your ass, and your ass is your mouth, and that’s… really disturbing now that I think about it!”

  I had formed a mental picture of the Baru during the course of our journey. Big, brawny, kind of lumberjacky, able to stand toe-to-toe with Lorenzo Soma like a pair of pro wrestlers. The man in front of us in no way resembled this image. Vash Dorha was tall, but he was as lean and lanky as a wolfhound, heavily tattooed, and wouldn’t have been out of place in the grungiest of punk bands. He looked to be in his early 40s, with sharp features that were shattered by a twisting web of deep, gnarly scars. As I’d expected, it was the hair that gave him away as our Baru – his scalp was covered in intricate cornrows, skillfully twisted into a nine-pointed star that came together into a fall of long braids heavy with rings, amulets, beads made of bone and amber, and even human teeth... the relics
of the dead, gifted to him by countless grateful relatives.

  “You had better – oh, hey! I hear feet!” He strained to look at us as we ran to him as a group, Suri in the lead. “OH. HEY. Na-tsho schrodna, my lady, your chest makes this entire seven-day, twenty-three minute, forty-four-second piss-fuck absolutely worth it. Gods have mercy, you are gifted!”

  Suri drew her dagger, glaring down at him. “You’re about to be castrated if you don’t watch your mouth.”

  “Oh, lady of the deep, glorious valley, the things this humble mouth could do for the likes of you,” he replied wistfully. But as I came up on him, his eyes darted over to glance at me, and the pale grey irises turned stormy and dark. “But you. You! Büü yirt! Do not come near me!”

  I hesitated, confused, and then realized what his deal was. I sighed. “Oh. Right. The Moon Pact thing.”

  “Moon Pact thing?” Suri cut away the hardened slime as quickly as she could while keeping her boobs out of nuzzling range.

  “Remember when Andrik beat Rin to death in the Throne Room of Vulkan Keep? And I broke that oath to stop him from killing us all?” I gave Vash a pointed look. He scowled back.

  “Oh, that. Yeah, that wasn’t much fun.” Suri got Vash's arms free, and was working on his legs when the first Swamp Hag larva split its thick, rubbery eggshell and plopped out onto the floor. She raised the knife to stab it, but Vash was even faster than Lucien. His arm snapped up to catch her wrist mid-strike.

  "No, no, no." He shook his head and released her after a second. “Leave the little snot-goblin be.”

  She blinked at him a couple of times, but eased up. “Leave them be? Are you joking?"

  "Do I look like a clown?” Vash's asymmetrical mouth twisted down at the corner – for a second, before his face split into a cheesy, surprisingly attractive grin. “Of course I do! But seriously, there’s already been enough suffering here.”