Catheroes

by A. J. Chaudhury

  My curiosity however increased. Had the child gone? Gathering some courage, I looked up. The child was still there, his mouth moving swiftly and his hand stretched towards me. I was happy that I no longer had to hear all the vile gibberish that the child was speaking.

  It was at that moment, that staring at the lips of the child, I thought that he was actually making true words… words that I understood, not gibberish. His mouth moved in a way as though he was saying ‘Let me help you.’ I was puzzled. I removed one of my paws from my ear. Instantly the demonic, eerie gibberish hit me. What the hell was this?

  But I was still pretty sure that the lips of the child were making true words and I wasn’t just imagining everything. I looked hard at his lips again. I wished his lips would move slowly. But he seemed to be repeating the same things, and I finally understood. ‘Let me help you, please!”

  Wait a minute. The child wanted to help me? So that was the reason why he was stretching his hand towards me? But why did he want to help me? I was supposed to fight him and kill him, right? How else would I be getting out of the level?

  I was unsure, but my nostrils had hit the dirt now. I thought fast. It was either death or help from the child… the demonic child.

  I must be going mad, I thought.

  I removed my paws from my ears and gave them to the child. The child thankfully didn’t speak anything, sparing me from the fear.

  He grabbed my paws and pulled, surprisingly he was very strong. And with just a single mighty pull, he had dragged me out of the quicksand. I slumped onto the solid ground, drained of energy. There was a large hole in the quicksand that I had fallen into and it was slowly filling back up.

  I turned to the child.

  “Thank you,” I said. The child spoke something. I instantly covered my ears as the eerie voice hit me again. Damn it. I wasn’t going to take my paws off my ears again.

  I turned towards the child with a glare. The child pursed his lips with a guilty look.

  I was still confused if the child was good or bad. His appearance obviously suggested the darker side, but he had also just saved my life.

  “Could you not say anything?” I said, my paws still over my ears.

  The child nodded.

  “Okay, now tell me, are you here to kill me?”

  The child frowned as thought not understanding. He then shook his head vigorously.

  “Then why do I get a feeling of crippling fear whenever you start to speak anything?” I said, “And why is it that when you speak anything, the words themselves do not come out but instead terrible sounds come out?”

  I said all this very fast. And the child took almost half-a-minute to understand it all.

  His lips moved.

  “What sounds?” he seemed to say.

  “The terrible sounds,” I said, “have you never heard your own voice?”

  “No,” I gathered from how the child’s mouth moved, “I have never heard my own voice. But I am cursed, hence my appearance.”

  I immediately understood that the child probably had no idea of the terrible demonic sounds he produced. I reckoned it was the Lord who had made the child so.

  But there was another possibility.

  What if this was a trick?

  I recalled the last time I had thought that I was in the middle of some trick. I had nearly killed Junaki with that believe. While I was still cautious about entirely trusting the child, I reckoned a little bit of trust wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe he could tell me how to get out of the level?

  “How do I get out of this place?” I asked the child.

  “Will you help me?” the child seemed to say.

  “Help you?”

  The child nodded.

  “Go on,” I said, “but speak slow. It’s not easy to read fast moving lips.”

  “Could you please free me?” the child said very slowly.

  “Free you?”

  “There is a chest buried under a pile of stones,” the child explained, “my true soul is in it. Once the soul is free from the chest, I will automatically be free.”

  I considered it. Was this particular level about freeing the child, instead of killing him, unlike the previous levels where I had had to kill the true dwellers of the levels?

  “Okay,” I said finally, “I will help you.”

  A look of immense gratefulness came over the child. He embraced me in a hug. At first it was scary, but then his hug made me recall the many times my master had hugged me in the real world. Oh master, I thought, my heart suddenly becoming heavy with grief. I shall save you today.

  “Where is the chest?” I asked the child once the two of us parted.

  The child beckoned me to follow him.

  We went back the way we had come, towards the spot that had first materialized around me when I had come to this level. But we passed that spot as well. Eventually we reached a place with less trees, but here there was a giant pile of boulders that had been arranged in a roughly pyramidal order.

  “Your chest is inside it?” I asked the child. All the while I kept my paws over my ears. The child might be good, but that vile voice of his wasn’t.

  “Yes,” the child said.

  I considered my options. There was no way I could remove one boulder after another by hand and they were all of considerable size, some twice as big as me. No Touching however fit the job perfectly. I had only used it on the flowers so far. Let’s see if I could move boulders with the spell.

  I concentrated on the boulder at the very top and activated the spell. I made it hover in the air. My mana began to drop slowly and I could feel well the heaviness of the boulder. Somehow, I was able to put it in a place away from the pile of the stones.

  The wave of exhaustion that hit me after I had moved just one stone was incredible. I realised that there was no way I could move any more than three more boulders without depleting my mana. And then I would need to either wait for it to regain or drink a vial. I had few vials, many given to Junaki when she had used her invisibility spell, and I didn’t want to waste any vials on this task. I also didn’t want to wait for my mana to regenerate.

  I observed the boulders for a minute, trying to find a more efficient way. I soon realised that I didn’t really need to make the boulders hover and make them float to a place away from the bigger pile. I could just move them a bit and they would roll down since most of the boulders were spherical to an extent.

  I tried it with my next boulder. With some effort it easily rolled down. The mana used was less than ten percent of what I had used on the first boulder.

  In this way, I began to remove one boulder after the other. It did become considerably harder to do so as I slowly went down the pyramid, since the boulders were placed in a more stable way, but this method still used just a small percentage of my mana. In ten minutes, I had removed enough boulders that the chest placed in the middle of the pyramid of stones became visible. I first made the chest however in air and then I made it float and land right in front of the child. The child clapped his hands in glee. He opened the lid of the chest. A ball of white light was present inside the chest. The child touched it with his hands, and the next moment a notification appeared in my vision.

  Congratulations!

  You have freed Mr. Child!

  You can now proceed to the next level!

  Yet another notification appeared.

  Congratulations!

  You level up!

  Damn, I must have levelled up quite a few times in the past couple of hours. I reckoned coming to the Lair hadn’t been all a waste, even though the main objective was yet to be completed.

  The child smiled at me, even as he and the place began to fade. I removed my paws from my ears.

  “Thank you,” the child said. His voice was soft, magical almost. I nodded at him with a smile.

  ***

  General Information

  Name

  Kitty

  Level

  6

  S
ex

  Male

  Race

  Cat

  Health

  600

  Mana

  250

  Strength

  58

  Stamina

  57

  Luck

  60

  ***

  Chapter 51

  In moments I found myself in the room with the female dogman.

  “You don’t give up? Do you?” she said.Unlike the last time, now her voice was stern.

  “No, I do not,” I said, pleased that I sounded determined.

  The female dogman seemed to consider me for a moment.

  “I see, you are proud having survived so far,” she said, “I hope your pride has not made you forget your friends?”

  I didn’t reply, observing the female intently. Of course I had never forgotten Junaki, Riya and Anuj. But I was also sure that the female wouldn’t tell me anything about my friends if I just asked her. So I kept quiet.

  “Anyway,” she said, somewhat disappointed not to receive a response from me, “you are going to die in the next level. I can guarantee you that.”

  The female began to laugh.

  Her laughter died immediately the moment I began to laugh as well.

  A new place materialised.

  I was in a… desert it seemed. The entire place was covered in sand dunes as far as the eye could see. I was sitting on a chair, my limbs tied to it. A good distance away from me was a square slab of marble. Another good distance from it was a second slab of white marble. Yet some distance away was a third slab and beyond it was a portal hovering in the air. The portal was at least half a kilometre away from where I was.

  Then I realised something about the sand that formed the dunes.

  The sand seemed to me moving. Not, it was not wind that was moving the sand. But the sand was moving on its own.

  I felt like being hit on the face when I realised that the sand was not sand in the first place! It was all maggots! Fierce maggots, and they were biting my chair, eating the legs fast. All the dunes were dunes of maggots! My head felt like it was spinning.

  “Calm yourself,” I spoke aloud, “Calm yourself, kitty. It’s the only way you are getting out of here.”

  I gulped and took in a few breaths for a moment, lowering the rate of my heart beat.

  I took stock of the situation. What could I do about it? What were my major problems at the moment? One thing I was already sure was that I just needed to get to the portal to be done with the particular level. No need to kill giants or hear vile words from mouth of demonic children.

  I had two main problems at hand: the chair and the maggots. Damn, the maggots were fierce. The moment I stepped over them, they would eat my leg. They were already working hard on the legs of the chair and I was beginning to sink into the maggots. Plus, being tied to the chair restricted my movement. I pulled hard at the ropes that bind me, but there was no way free myself from them. After a while I gave up.

  Okay, let’s check other escape ideas.

  How about I make the maggots hover? With them in the air, I could just make my way to the portal with relative ease. But the problem was that there were thousands, if not millions of maggots. Their combined weight would be hundreds of times the weight of the giant that I had earlier tried to lift and failed.

  My chair sank further into the sea of maggots.

  And just then a music began to play. A soft, uplifting music of a violin.

  The maggots could have as well gone dead. Not a single one of them moved. They even stopped eating my chair. Was the level providing me a way to get to the portal? In the previous levels too there had always been one factor or the other that was working for me and helped me, like the flint stones and the thorny flowers.

  One thing I knew immediately was that as long as the music played, the maggots would be still. I let out a grunt and lifted both myself and my chair. It took an enormous amount of strength, and it consumed a lot of my stamina. I couldn’t even stand straight, but I had no option.

  I began to inch towards the nearest slab of marble. The music kept playing…

  The knowledge that I was walking on a sea of maggots made me fell strange. The marble slab kept getting nearer and nearer. I put in all my effort to hurry.

  It was with a great sigh that I stepped onto the marble slab. Barely had I done so that the music stopped. The maggots began to move again, the apparent desert suddenly becoming alive. There were a few maggots still stuck to the legs of my chair and they continued eating the wood.

  I inhaled deeply. The moment the music came again, I would make a run for the next slab of marble. I did get a shock when I realised that the next slab was twice the distance from the slab I was currently on, as the current slab was from my last location.

  The music began to play again.

  I ran. The chair was a chore to carry, but I pushed on. The slab kept coming nearer and nearer. The music would stop any time now.

  I still had a few steps to reach the next slab when the music stopped. The maggots began to bite me. Pain shot up my legs. Gritting my teeth, I pushed on. I wanted to give up at this point, the pain was so high. But I was somehow able to reach the next slab. There I hurriedly got rid of the maggots eating the flesh of my leg.

  My health had dropped by half. I wanted to drink a health vial, but it wasn’t an option. Not with my hands tied.

  I looked at the portal in the distance. It was twice the distance that the current slab was from the previous one. I knew that there was no way I would be able to reach it, certainly not with just half of my health remaining. And I also had a feeling that the music would only play once and after that it would stop altogether. A chill crept up my spine.

  But before I could think much about my situation, the music started to play. I gave the run all I had, although I knew I was doomed. My body ached as I moved over the maggots. Time seemed to slow down. The portal was still so far away. My heart thundered.

  And the music stopped.

  The bites were not as painful as my diminishing hopes. I took the pain from the bites with ease, even as my health fell steeply. The portal in the distance was mocking me. Well, at least I had given my best…

  No, I hadn’t.

  How could I forget No Touching?

  I activated the spell and used it on myself.

  A notification appeared.

  Sorry! You cannot use the spell on your own body. The spell can be used only on other things and sometimes other people.

  Wait. The chair!

  I used the spell on the chair. To the chair was attached my own body, which increased its weight considerably. The chair began to hover, and with it my body as well. My mana began to fall slowly. The maggots were still stuck to my legs, eating my flesh. My health meanwhile continued to drop. I made the chair move forwards, towards the hovering portal. I had to keep my concentration up all the time. The few times I let it slip, I would fall face first towards the maggots, and had to increase my concentration to avoid being hit on the face by a desert of live maggots.

  The portal kept getting closer and closer. I barely had any mana or health left. I let out a cry, making me move faster.

  And then I went right through the portal.

  Congratulations!

  You made it to the portal!

  You can now proceed to the next level!

  Another notification appeared.

  Congratulations!

  You level up!

  ***

  General Information

  Name

  Kitty

  Level

  7

  Sex

  Male

  Race

  Cat

  Health

  700

  Mana

  300

  Strength

  68

  Stamina

  67

  Luck

  70

  ***

  Chapter 52

  The world of the magg
ots faded even as the limits of my health, mana and stamina bars rose. The chair bound to my back disappeared and so did the maggots clinging onto my body. It was a great relief. Though my stamina was back to its full, I couldn’t help but fell mentally drained and exhausted.

  The room of the female dogman appeared.

  This time she didn’t say anything to me.

  Her room began to fade once more. My thoughts went back to Junaki, Riya and Anuj. Were they all okay? I was scared.

  This time, I was in a cold place at the foot of a great mountain. The top of the mountain was covered in snow and a chilling wind kissed my face. I saw that there was a sword lying mere metres away from me.

  “Interesting,” I said to myself as I bent and picked it up.

  Just then I noticed that there was someone else standing a few metres to my front. He hadn’t been there when I had first seen the sword. His back was turned to me, but from the shape of his body I instantly knew that he was a cat. And oddly, there was something about him that felt familiar too me. The cat was also drenched with blood at several places. He was wearing something around his neck. The feeling that I had seen this cat somewhere before grew stronger. But that couldn’t have been possible, right?

  “Hey,” I said to the cat, gripping the sword tighter.

  Slowly, the cat turned. I waited with anxiety for him to reveal his face. The chilling wind seemed to get colder. And then he was finally staring at me right in the eye. I nearly dropped the sword I had been holding. The cat was wearing the tail of a dogman. His face was smeared with blood. I took a step backwards even as my mind refused to believe that the cat was none other than myself. Myself from that dark night when I had slaughtered dogman after dogman mercilessly after being possessed by a mad, almost demonic rage.