Two more goblins got between me and the shaman—
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 10/12]
[Hit Points: 15/25]
—but in my ear I heard Ramsey muttering to himself as he fiddled with the machine. “...then pull this here to prime the receiving slot, and, presto! Ha! Two potions of Cure Disease! Now, where’s the float pallet...”
I dropped from Wind Stance into Cat and set my eyes on the shaman, but before I could leap, the bones underneath me began to move. They tumbled down in an avalanche of skulls and vertebrae and rib cages, sending me and the two remaining goblins sprawling. Bisquik hopped onto the stone slab on top of the altar and rode down its descent, remaining standing while we fought not to be buried.
I stashed my daggers as I fell, landing prone on my back, my hands free just in time to catch a human-sized skull as it bounced down the pile and came at me in a headbutt. I was looking for someone to throw the skull at, when, to my gut-churning horror, it snapped at me, overly long teeth and gum-less jaw snapping shut where my nose had been a moment ago. Reflexively, I flung the skull away from me. It bounced, unnaturally, over and up to sit atop the neck of a self assembling skeleton, the empty eye sockets lit with a deep garnet glow.
It wasn’t the only one. The scar on my cheek throbbed in time to the garnet scepter’s pulse while I scrambled backwards through the broken and inanimate bones. One of the remaining goblins freed itself from the pile. The nearest skeleton reached down, picked up the goblin by his tail, and proceeded to bash him against the floor. The goblin shrieked and screamed, but his friend ducked back down into the bone pile and hid, while Shaman Bisquik only laughed, high and mad and sounding more than a little bit like a demon mask I had met once. Other skeletons joined the first one, each mindlessly flailing at the struggling goblin. The attacks were uncoordinated, but en masse, effective. The goblins claws left no scratches on the polished bones.
“Sam?” whispered Ramsey through the sirenstone. “What’s going—ahh!”
One of the skeleton’s heads snapped over towards Ramsey and the duping machine. I spared a glance that way, but he and his half-finished float pallet of potions had hidden behind the machine. Through the sirenstone I could hear him breathing, fast and shallow and scared.
“Hey!” I yelled at the mass of shuffling, rattling, rabble of undead. I picked up a few vertebrae that hadn’t started walking around on their own and hurled them at the mob. “You want some fresh meat? Come and get it!” A dozen pair of glowing red eyes turned and focused on me. Uh oh.
The one bashing the little goblin dropped the pulped corpse on the floor—
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 11/12]
—and came after me, followed by the whole... Voice? You have one of those collective nouns for skeletons?
I didn’t get it, I just ran, and the rattle ran after me—bony arms outstretched, calcified heels clicking on the stone floor.
“Ramsey, how are you doing on the potions?” I hissed into the sirenstone as soon as I judged the clattering behind me to hide my voice from Shaman Bisquik.
“About three quarters, I think. Sam, what the hell is happening out there? What kind of crazy necromancy have we stumbled onto? Goblins don’t do this kind of stuff!” a pause while I imagine he poked his head around the machine to look. “Need me to come help?”
“No!” I toned back down my voice. “I can keep these things distracted. They’re not faster than me and my boots. Just let me know when you’re done.”
“Ok.” A pause, and then, in a quieter voice: “Sam? Be careful.”
The walkway around the edge of the room had no exits, just dark stone bordering darker water, lit by the occasional wall mounted torch placed just before the rising wall turned to vaulted ceiling.
They weren’t fast, but they weren’t tiring either. I’m going to have to take care of them before I run out of stamina.
I stopped, pulled out my daggers, and spun around to face them. The closest one staggered up to me and swung its arm up and over its shoulder in a move only made possible by total lack of ligaments. I dodged and retaliated, but my dagger barely scratched its ribs.
I didn’t even try my usual second attack, but it wasn’t so considerate. The skeleton reached out with one battered foot and kicked me, leaving long gashes in my midsection from its broken toes.
[-5 Hit Points, Slashing damage]
[Hit Points: 10/25]
By then another one was winding up a disjointed arm, and I rolled to my feet and away.
“There’s nothing to smash them with, except each other.” I growled back at Voice. I looked around the room, desperately inventorying things in the ‘smashable’ category. There were the jumbled bones by the altar—
—my own fists, which Voice and I both agreed were a last resort, the duping machine I was trying to keep everyone away from... Although I did have one gleeful vision of getting it onto the float pallet and then running up some momentum on the huge, frictionless mass of it before crashing into the skeletons...
No. Think of something else. Something else, something like... a torch?
Without pausing, I stomped down on one heel and launched myself as high as I could up the wall.
[Jump1 check: Success]
I grabbed at the torch, and then immediately jerked my hand back—
[-4 Hit Points, Fire damage2]
[Hit Points: 6/25]
—and reaffixed my grip to the sconce, bracing my feet on the wall to leave my other hand free. Below me, the walking closet of skeletons massed and scrabbled, trying to climb the wall, or maybe each other. I pulled at the torch handle. It was firmly stuck. Though it gave off plenty of heat, I noticed there were no smoke marks on the walls above it. What kind of torch gives off heat but no ash?
All at once the magic torch came free, and my grip on the wall with it. Uh oh. Stupid gravity... I kicked off the wall, trying to clear the skeletons below me.
I let go of my flaming prize, which hung suspended in the air beside me as we fell, while I reached around behind my head and pulled out one of the healing potions stashed in my backpack. Everything moved in slow motion: the rushing walls, the grasping fleshless fingers reaching out for me, my own hands as I fumbled the cork out of the glass bottle, the unforgiving stone walkway as I smashed into it.
[-7 Hit Points, Falling (Bludgeoning) damage]
[Hit Points: -1/25]
For half a second I couldn’t move, but then the healing potion smashed into the stone next to me, flowing out of its bottle and seeping into my flesh.
[Cure Serious Wounds bestowed: 27 Hit Points]
[Hit Points: 25/25]
I rolled away just as the flaming torch came down, also crashing onto the stone, and extinguishing itself with a clatter. Something detached itself from the bottom of the handle and bounced off into the corner.
[Perception check: Success]
I took a breath to answer, but spent it instead launching myself up and away into Wind Stance as the kicking feet of the tireless skeletons surrounded me. One came at my face, but I limboed backwards and it went wide; another swiped at me with two windmillin
g arms, but I pulled my own arms in, then cartwheeled off them and was back on the run.
I was more than halfway around the circular room and I couldn’t think how to double back without running right through the skeletons again and hoping to get lucky, so I kept going. Past Shaman Bisquik, still dancing on the altar stone and egging his undead minions on.
“Get the infidel! Rip off the squishy skin! Squishy-skins think they so great, think they can do whatever they want to poor goblins! Hah, Shaman Bisquik shows them! They not so great without any stupid squishy skin!”
I’ll get to you in a bit, you wanna-be witch-doctor, I thought as I ran past the pile of unused bones, and past the very small, rather compacted skeleton shambling after us, going, “Death and glory! Argggg!”
I risked a look behind me, and the small skeleton joined in behind the rest of the shamble with a crude, hopping gate. The dark eye sockets rattled as the wobbly skull bounced up and down, and I noticed the scaly arms were not so much attached to the strangely absent collarbones as they were sticking out irregularly from between the slats of the rib cage.
I got enough of a lead on the skeletal pack that I took a moment to stop, breathe, and center myself. Now, what was it I saw roll away from the torch? I searched the cracks and corners of the walkway—
[Perception check: Success]
—and there, glittering between two paving stones, was a rose-cut ruby, gleaming in the firelight like the twinkle in a demon’s eye. I bounded past it and snatched it up without pausing.
I quickly pulled down Cynric’s Goggles and the fire in the gem’s heart bloomed in my vision. So, this is how the torch stayed lit all those centuries. Unfortunately, the extinguished torch was nowhere to be seen.
I stopped running. Behind me, the shamble continued, unrelenting. I pulled out my unlit dagger, and carefully popped the ruby into the pommel; it fit like a puzzle piece, and through the Monkey Grip Gloves I felt the flaming heart of it wick upwards into the blade, setting the metal blade to glowing while it gave off smokeless flames in every direction.
Voice whooped and cheered.
“A flaming dagger?”
I looked around at the other torches on the walls, a slow grin spreading across my face.
“Two flaming daggers?”
The skeletons were almost on me, but I was up and away like a spark on the wind. The second time, I was more careful prying the torch off the wall and got the gem in my other dagger before I even unwound my leg from the sconce. I waited a moment for the assembled mass of walking bones below me to gather up good and close, and then, arms spread like wings of fire, dove down into the middle of them.
[-5 Hit Points, Falling (Bludgeoning) damage]
[Hit Points: 20/25]
The air swirled around me, making streamers of my newly enflamed weapons, while I did the most beautiful rendition of Cometfall Kata ever seen outside the Pearl Islands. The dry bones of the skeletons cracked and burnt as I sliced at them. Even when the blade of my dagger barely nicked the surface, the gleeful flames devoured everything they touched.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out the walking dead: 1/10]
The skeletons swiped back. I dodged and tumbled, trying to see out the back of my own head as I avoided the ragged ends of the broken fingers and toes. A Tumbling Pebbles took out that one there—
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out the walking dead: 2/10]
—and a backhanded swipe to the eye socket imploded the skull of a third.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out the walking dead: 3/10]
I spun around to keep a fourth off my back, jumped over its black-toed kick, and saw the pinwheeling arm come down just in time to throw up my own arm and take the blow on my bicep instead of my eye.
[-8 Hit Points, Slashing damage]
[Hit Points: 12/25]
My revenge attack crippled but did not destroy it completely. I ignored the one coming at me from the side, focusing on the wounded one since the unfeeling dead did not run away or soften their blows for being wounded. One more stab finally severed the spinal cord and collapsed it into a pile of embers.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out the walking dead: 4/10]
Turning my back on the others was not without consequence, though—a downwards swipe to my shoulder stabbed a fingerbone into my neck, and I almost set my hair on fire reaching up to pull it out. Still getting used to these flaming daggers.
[-6 Hit Points, Slashing damage]
[Hit Points: 6/25]
A back handspring out of the clattering mob gave me some breathing space, and I took the moment to down another healing potion.
[Cure Serious Wounds bestowed: 25 Hit Points]
[Hit Points: 25/25]
The magenta liquid flowed into my veins as pure, unadulterated confidence. I repalmed my daggers, settled lightly into Wind Stance, and gave the remaining six skeletons a wild, I’m-even-crazier-than-you-are grin. They didn’t notice. I didn’t care. They came at me, and I went through them like the wind. Three more clawed at me and fell before I needed another potion. I did my handspring trick again and reached into my backpack.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out the walking dead: 7/13]
Only two potions left. If I drink one now, I won’t have enough health to destroy the others before they kill me.
“I could take out one more skeleton before healing. If I got lucky...” But even as I said it, my mind was doing the inevitable arithmetic—I simply wasn’t killing them as fast as they were killing me.
“What is this about getting lucky? Sam, don’t do anything stupid!”
I drank the potion and prepared to toss away the bottle. “Ramsey, how are those Cure Diseases coming?”
“As done as they need to be, if you need to get out of here. I’m like ten short, but whatever!”
An idea dawned in my head. I stared at the bottle in my hand; empty, but it didn’t have to be. If Ramsey can dupe one kind of potion, why not another?
“Hold on!” I sprinted towards his end of the room, holding both flaming daggers with one hand while I reached into my pack for the last potion.
“I’m doing another circuit, but I need more Cure Serious Wounds Potions! Ramsey, I’m going to toss you one!”
I turned my back on the advancing six skeletons and bounded towards the altar, the rattling mob following with the scrape and click of bone on stone, punctuated by the occasional “Arrg! Death and glory! Ow! I can’t see anything, stupid human skull...”
Shaman Bisquik jumped out from behind his stone slab.
“Outta my way!” I told him. “Unless you want to die, which, come to think of it, works for me.”
“Bossy squishy-skin! Shaman Bisquik gonna eat all your squishy bits, then we see who’s boss!” He opened his mouth and shot his tongue out at me. Unable to parry with my awkwardly gripped daggers, I did the only thing I could think of, and hurled the last potion up and over the bone pile in a blind, desperate heave.
“Catch!” I yelled at Ramsey just before the tongue hit me full in the face and began to retract, pulling me forward. I fumbled for my daggers and slashed at the sticky appendage, waiting every millisecond for the fateful sound of shattering Cure Potion, but instead I heard the sharp exhalation of someone landing on their stomach, followed by a breathless “Ha! Got it!”
On my third such slash, Bisquik hissed and let go, retracting his tongue. I blinked. I didn’t know they could do that.
I jumped for him, but he jumped away, keeping the altar between us. One more leap and I would be on the other side, but as I crouched to do so, the rattling mob came up behind Shaman Bisquik. He reached over, grabbed the disguised goblin by the improvised skull helmet, and used his sharpened claws to rip open the little goblin’s throat, showering copper-smelling blood over the altar and the remaining piles of bones.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Massacre the malignity: 12/12]
My cheek burned like I’d been splattered by molten metal, and all around me, the disassembled bones rolled and jerked and clattered together, then rose as a half dozen more mindless undead puppets.
I was surrounded.
[Race for the Cure: Quest Update!]
[Wipe out MORE walking dead: 13/18]
For A Few Minutes More Page 24