by Ryan Attard
"Nah, they don't fit the bill," I replied casually.
Amaymon got one Sahuagin in a head lock and turned to look at me.
"Sea Wurms?" he suggested, twisting the monster's head around completely.
"Not gonna argue with the guy who can do that."
"Smart move."
I shot another eel monster—Sea Wurm—and saw a cloud move deceptively fast in my peripheral vision. Only, I realized it wasn't a cloud but a giant bat-like creature. It looked just like a pterodactyl with the addition of a long tail. Its head was flat and crescent-shaped, with one tip jutting outwards from its chin and the other coming from its forehead. The creature had a white underbelly but when it flapped its wings, its leathery skin showed a beautiful sky-blue color.
The monster took a nose dive towards us. As it got closer, its wings flared and bent backwards. Rather than stopping, it had changed position, now diving claws first, and directing its path towards Jack.
"Ah, a Drake," Amaymon said.
"Jack!" I called out.
But the kid was ahead of me. "I see it."
He held out his arm, and his metal armor disappeared. Instead, his right arm engorged and morphed into a large howitzer canon. As the Drake reached almost point-blank range, he fired his massive weapon. The Drake was shredded and what was left of it was sent backwards with the giant bullet.
The cannon shell went through the Drake and right into one the towers beside the Grand Ballroom, an old dome-shaped structure standing tall and proud, just at the end of the pier.
My ears started ringing from the shot, and the entire battle was still for a second. I looked at Amaymon.
"Who the hell gave that kid steroids?" I managed to say.
If he thought of a good comeback, I never heard it. All my ears picked up was loud whoosh of a seaquake and the surging of the waves. Sahuagin around us fled like gazelles before a pack of hyenas and something told me that we should have done the same. Instead, we simply stood there, waiting for the horror to emerge.
It made an entrance with a small whirlpool and rose from the water like a monstrous god bent on revenge. The only way to describe it was Wurm-like: if Wurms grew to the size of an aircraft carrier.
It had small fins and tiny centipede-like hands, but then again everything would have looked small compared to that mouth.
Oh, dear God, that mouth was huge.
"Abyss Wurm," Amaymon whispered.
It rose up, covering the sun and seemed to hover momentarily as it began falling.
"Run!" I screamed, already sprinting away.
The world seemed to slow down as I took those first steps back to the mainland. I had no bullets left in my gun and simply channeled magic into it. A blast of fire, like a flamethrower, shot upwards to ward off any Drakes or Sea Wurms that thought of ambushing us.
I was the last one from our group to run back. Somehow Djinn was in my hand and blue energy was already flowing through it. When the Wurm descended, its giant weight crushed the Ballroom and half the pier it stood on, yet somehow still leaving one of those ostentatious bell towers intact. The impact sent a shockwave so large that I was thrown off the ground. Any other wizard would have rolled away and thanked his lucky stars for still being alive.
But I was no regular wizard.
"Amaymon," I called out. It wasn't panic; it was an order.
The demon stomped the ground and a boulder rose upwards. I leapt forward and landed on it. The boulder shot up, and I used that momentum to further propel myself towards the gargantuan creature. I was now flying in the air above the giant Abyss Wurm.
I swung Djinn downwards and channeled all my magic into that one strike. The streak of azure energy sliced through the Wurm, cleaving it in two. Abi and Jack cheered from behind me, and I waved like an idiot. Amaymon rolled his eyes at me.
Of course, it couldn't end there. Rumbling echoed all around me, shaking the ground I stood on. I turned towards the lake, just in time to see not one, but six whirlpools forming as that many Abyss Wurms slowly reared their ugly heads into our world. I stared at them, unable to form coherent thoughts.
A plan, I thought.
I needed a plan, something to knock them out with one hit. Otherwise, me, my team, and everyone in a ten-block radius was going to be Wurm food.
The semi-destroyed bell tower that Jack had accidentally shot caught my eye and a plan began forming in my head—the kind that posed a great deal of risk and a good chance of me being maimed in some horrific way.
A plan that would take either a genius or a complete idiot to pull off.
Time to find out which one I was.
Chapter 17
Every time I saw a tall structure, there was a little voice inside my head telling me to release my inner monkey and climb. This time I listened.
Meanwhile, the six giant Abyss Wurms reared upwards like titans emerging from their graves. The sky was now pitch black streaked with lightning bolts and rumbling with thunder. All that energy was starting to affect the Earth's atmosphere, threatening to forever rend the ecosystem we were so dependent on. In my business, we called that a red fucking flag.
"Erik, what are you doing?" Abi called out as I took off in the opposite direction of safety and launched myself onto the mortar of the remaining bell tower.
"Saving the world. Again," I yelled back as I tried not to fall on my ass. "Distract them."
"How?"
I groaned and reached for the nearest handhold. "I don't know," I retorted. "You're the college student here. What good is higher education if they don't teach you how to survive an apocalypse?"
I couldn't hear her reply. The winds picked up, and I was too busy climbing a giant tower and trying not to look at the monsters gyrating a few feet away from where I was hanging for dear life. The bell tower had been knocked slightly sideways, like the Tower of Pisa, so the incline made it less impossible to climb. I leaned from ledge to ledge and foothold to foothold. Below me, the ground shook as Amaymon and the rest of my team distracted the monsters from the tower... and me.
Once on top of the tower, I was offered a wonderful view of Lake Michigan. A lake of violent waves and angry froth as giant centipedes snaked upwards to freedom. The water was an inky black, swirling like a giant toilet bowl. From my vantage point, I could see other Wurms emerging, crossing the underwater bridge between our dimension and wherever the fuck they popped out of.
Okay, superpower. Do your thing.
My plan was simple enough. If I could shut down the Etherium Key by using my special powers, then common sense dictated I would be able to do the same with the portal. Both were made out of the same stuff and worked on the same mechanics. Occam's Razor and the whole common sense thing.
I felt the lull take over as my inner magic sensed a font of power and the familiar hallucination of an obsidian mangrove tree standing in the middle of a vast desert of red sand flashed before my eyes: my inner world, Ashura, a dimension that existed only to house the vast powers that lived inside me.
Shadows began leaking out of me, covering me like a second skin. I extended my powers to blanket the water and, like a river, they swirled with the currents of the lake. I dug deeper and deeper until I had the edges of the portal in my grasp.
More power.
I had to access more power, to lose myself within this ability, if I wanted to forcibly close the portal. Screw addiction. If I didn't shut this down now, none of us would live to see another day. So, ignoring all aspects of common sense, I followed my annoying inner voice, the one telling me to take a step further into oblivion. The shadows grew thicker around me, gaining substance and metamorphosing from gaseous to liquid. I felt my body succumb to the changes. Bones growing stronger and protruding from my joints at the elbows and knees, as well as fingers. The tightness around my chest as a metaphysical furnace replaced what had once been my internal organs. Slowly, my vision became red, superimposing the plane of Ashura onto this one, like 3D glasses on a picture.
Come on, Erik. Getting close.
Soon all this would be over, and we could all go home and deal with our issues over a beer and some fries. All I had to do was try a little harder. I felt the portal shrink as I put more effort into shutting it down. The Wurms that had emerged wrung free and Amaymon began dealing with them. The ones that were halfway through the crossing disintegrated as I literally pulled the plug on that particular space-time spell. There was barely a house-sized hole now, only a small tear. What could possibly come through from that small a portal? It was barely big enough for two people.
I heard him in the distance. He appeared out of thin air, completely evading my enhanced senses. Only the flutter of angel wings gave him away.
Raphael stood centimeters away from me, his wings darker than a storm cloud. "Oathbreaker, I exile you!" He charged into me, throwing the both of us off the bell tower, into the swirling mass of darkened water and right through the portal.
Chapter 18
The new world was cold and wet.
The little voice of reason inside my head told me that if one end of the portal was deep underwater, then it only makes sense that the other end would be…
I kicked furiously upwards, following the beams of moonlight that shone through the black waters. It didn't matter that my muscles screamed in pain or that the water pressure was squeezing every molecule of my body. My head finally broke through the water surface and I sucked in both water and air. I didn't even feel the fire in my throat.
The sky was dark with a continuous symphony of the sound of a storm. Lightning flashed, illuminating portions of the landscape. Waves came crashing down over me and I was suddenly underwater again. Darkness covered me from head to toe, but darkness was always my ally.
Not this darkness. This darkness was insidious and all-consuming. It was death—my death—and I had to fight it.
My head broke the surface again and I began swimming, although I had no idea where I found the energy to do so. I swam and swam, doing a wet beeline towards the island. Already I could see a beach with a small forest of trees in the background.
The wooden javelin landed three inches from my head. I stopped to see who was attacking me and immediately thought of Raphael. Did he somehow survive the Chaos? Nothing followed up the attack but I began making out other forms further towards the beach.
Sahuagin, hundreds of them.
They were all clustered together, their actions blurry and stark. As I swam closer I began bracing myself for a crap load of pain. I was in no shape to fight, and water gave them the advantage. The best I could hope for was to be taken prisoner, give myself time to heal, and then beat them.
Turns out I had worse luck than that.
They were in the middle of a war.
As far as I could make out there were two tribes of Sahuagin, dark ones with a stripe on their backs and dark ones with no stripe of their backs.
Racism is never justified, but seriously, a fucking stripe?
They had spears, clubs and stone hammers. Stone Age weapons. Their fighting style was little more than instinctive wailing at each other like animals. Their agility was tripled in the water and the fight was nothing short of spectacular. And more than a little disturbing. Their tails allowed them to slice through the waves like a hot knife through butter. I saw a few of them jump into the air and dive onto their victims. The screams of rage and pain accompanied the roar of the storm from the sea and the sky, and everything was a clusterfuck of noise and violence.
I swam to the side, parallel to the beach, looking for a patch where the fighting was less prominent. Ignoring the raging war at my side I worked my way closer and closer to the beach. I was now only about a hundred feet away.
The Sahuagin were very close, and splinters of their weapons would occasionally cut through my face or hands. I could practically feel the sand on my boots now. Just a few more feet and I'll be home free, wherever that was.
One of them spotted me and turned in my direction. He clutched a club which was covered in thick, viscous blood and raised it in my direction. Before he could take two more steps, the water exploded and from beneath him another Sahuagin erupted onto him, throwing the both of them away.
Thank you, Fish Face.
I crawled on the beach and heard a shriek behind me. One of the larger Sahuagin was already on top of me, swinging a long length of bone sharpened on one side. I managed to pull Djinn out of its sheath and turned on my back to face him. The fish man swung too wildly and tripped over me, in the process impaling himself on my sword. I flipped us over and pulled my weapon out.
More shrieking and from my peripheral vision I saw a small group of his friends waddle towards me. Great. Out of all the fish men in the water, I had to go and accidentally kill the Prom King.
I tried channeling magic, but it was just too much effort and my body had no time to recover. There were over a dozen of them, so the math was pretty simple. I turned tail and ran, straight into the forest, hoping that they wouldn't stray too far from the beach.
Once again I was wrong.
They chased me but I was quicker, lighter. The land was my territory. Spears and javelins flew close to me and I ducked behind tree trunks to avoid being impaled. Yeah, I was faster but only by a fraction. If they got within hitting distance I was toast.
I smacked into a tree and veered wildly like a drunk person. Right at that moment I felt like giving up. It would have been easy to just say fuck it and lay there on the ground. Maybe it was all just a nightmare?
With the Sahuagin gang nearly in view now, I heard a shriek. Probably another big fish man declaring his alpha manhood or whatever.
The ground shook and I felt a tremor beneath me. The Sahuagin stopped in their tracks and shrieked again, this time in panic.
The Wurm wasn't big, not as big as the Abyss variation anyway, but it was certainly bigger than the fish man gang and that was all that mattered. It landed on top of five of them and snapped its gaping maw onto another pair, swallowing them whole at the same time. The Wurm coiled, squashing the Sahuagin it was using as a pillow and then began eating them one by one with indiscriminate gluttony. Pieces of gore flew about and the few Sahuagin alive had the common sense to turn fish tail and run like hell.
It still did not end well for them. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but it does jack shit against a Wurm's tough hide. They were slow and clumsy and that Wurm was very, very pissed off.
I didn't stay for the show. Mostly because I had no desire to become some monster's dessert. Once again I turned and ran, stopping once at a clearing to hurl the seawater and blood I had swallowed earlier. I ran towards the nearest rocky formation, hoping to find some sort of cave there, where Wurms and angry, barbaric fish men couldn't find me. And all the while the same question kept going on through my head, each time asked with increased horror and terror:
What the fuck is this place?
Chapter 19
Needless to say, I did not get a minute of sleep that night.
I have no idea for how long I ran or in which direction. All I know is that I went up a hill, where there were some rocks I had to climb over, and found a cave wide enough to accommodate me. It wasn't too big or too deep but it was enough to keep the rain off my back. I curled up along one side and watched the landscape. Winds blew the trees from side to side, and occasionally a few branches would shudder unnaturally, marking the emergence of a Wurm followed by the screaming of whatever Sahuagin entered its territory. From my vantage point I could see parts of the shore and fish men as tiny dots sprinkled on top of each other as their battle raged on.
I pulled my coat off and hung it outside the cave, in the pouring rain. Hopefully that would get the fish guts out. I left it for about an hour before I pulled it back in, wiped water off of it and used it as a blanket. The best thing to do would have been to light a fire, but even if I found something dry enough to light, I still wouldn't have dared to do so. Same reason why I didn't dare let myself to fall asleep
; logically I knew the cave was safe. The voice of reason kept saying that I needed my rest and my energy if I were to survive in this place and figure out how to go home.
Then there was the voice of fear. Here's the thing about us humans: we're a perfect dichotomy. The more courage you have, then the more fear you have. I know I'm courageous, and I dare anyone to go through the same shit I went through and keep it together as I have. But that also meant that I had fear. A shitload of fear. And the moment I let my guard down that fear flooded in, completely paralyzing my ability to think rationally.
So I stayed there in my cave, curled into a ball under my fish-guts smelling coat, trying not to despair as I imagined what monsters may be lurking in the shadows.
I was officially in Hell.
***
I was still wide awake when dawn arrived. The sun climbed from the direction of the beach, greeting me with an illuminated landscape of dismembered Sahuagin corpses that floated on blood-pigmented waters. Those who were still alive were dragging bodies away.
I knew next to nothing about these creatures but anyone familiar with the concept of war can understand this behavior. Here's a breakdown of a battle: two sides fight each other over something stupid like skin color or territory. If both are equal in strength and numbers, no side will actually win. Sure, one side will have less dead people or gain some advantage, but really, when you're dragging your friends' corpses across a ditch, you couldn't care less about victory.
The ones with the black stripe had more dead people than the ones without the stripe. The latter would probably get more beach area.
Here's how all of this was relevant to me: I needed to find that portal and get out of this hellhole. The portal was conveniently in the middle of the ocean, which I could only access to once I crossed Sahuagin territory. I could go through the ones with no stripe, who had more people and more ground, or I could choose the guys with the black stripe who had less people, less ground and had suffered a recent defeat.