My arms slipped along the acrid slime pouring out of the six-foot claw, my gloves melted, my hands dissolved down to the bones, which began to smolder, giving off clouds of brown smoke. Thanks to Flight and the divine Reaper’s Scythes, which I pressed on instead of my maimed hands, I still managed to push myself off the claw.
Flying toward Sobek, I moved to the side where his belly gleamed and drove Reaper’s Scythes into him. My Spirit Fast Combo of Justice now included fifty-four moves and took twenty-seconds to complete – roughly half again as fast as the moves would be on their own.
Sparks flew from the reptile’s skin as it contacted the celestial metal of the Scythes. The knuckleduster blades didn’t pierce the skin, but even with greatly reduced damage, the effect was still palpable. By the third Combo, the beast god’s defenses finally weakened – I was striking at a single spot.
Logs of Unarmed Combat leveling up merged with the numbers of damage dealt and taken – the slime from the claw had put an acid debuff on me, which, in turn, was leveling up Resilience.
Breaking through the skin, I struck again at the open wound with redoubled enthusiasm. By then, Hiros’s bolts and Crawler’s fireball finally struck Sobek. Bomber and Crag crashed into his side opposite me with Charge. The beast god must have felt the pain from my strikes; he started to change position, stretching his neck toward me.
Divine flesh gleamed from his ragged wound, gushing out fountains of golden blood. My eyes lit up when I glanced at the damage notifications – seven figures! Tens of millions every hit! A thick and deep bass joined the monotonous hum of the surrounding world, a cry to make the bones ache – Sobek roared. I really hoped it was in pain.
“Well, beast god, time to meet your maker!” I shouted triumphantly. I thought for a moment, looked up at the towering giant: “Maybe he’s already here!”
No longer doubting that we could take Sobek down, I strengthened my assault. Every hit I landed was critical, and with his defenses down, the ancient crocodile had only seconds of real time to live. The battle was like a perpetual motion machine; the damage I dealt with my fists leveled up Unarmed Combat, and the special Path that Oyama had shown me increased my total spirit. Every level-up of Unarmed Combat translated into a second more Clarity.
By the time Sobek had a little over 1% health, my combat skill reached a round number:
Unarmed Combat level increased: +1. Current level: 350 (rank II).
Accuracy and damage of strikes dealt without a weapon increased by 1755%.
Spirit: +100. Total: 35,000.
Now I could stay in Clarity for almost six minutes, which was an hour of real time! And best of all, the level-less skill had improved, making me and my perception even faster! At least, both the reptile and my friends were moving even slower than usual.
Overjoyed at the thought, I didn’t notice right away that my damage wasn’t going through.
You dealt critical damage to Sobek: 32.4m!
All damage was absorbed by ‘Intervention of Nge N’Cullin.’ Actual damage: 0.
Health: 0.27 mil / 27 bil.
Now that sent me into a rage. Damn Nge N’Cullin! Imba immortal beast gods!
I flew around the convulsing reptile and tried to grab him by the tail, but it was too thick. Then I flew to the open mouth and grabbed a fang. My palms, already restored thanks to the Lifesteal built into my Combo, burned anew beneath the acid, but I overcame the pain, tried to take off in Flight…
It worked! Whatever the colossal body weighed, it gave in to my carrying capacity, which was over six thousand tons thanks to my multipliers. I remembered from my history lessons that a T-rex weighed up to fourteen tons. I doubted Sobek had gained more weight than five hundred T-rexes.
Pulling the great body from the ground and smiling at my friends’ stunned, frozen faces, I shot off into the sky. More strength than I’d ever felt surged through me. It felt even easier to pick up the ancient crocodile now than it had to carry Hellfish and Quetzal at the same time in the Cursed Chasm.
At first I intended to drop him from as high as I could, but changed my mind when I rose above the clouds that had formed in a perfect circle around Isis’ Blessing and saw the giant who had spoken to us. He watched me with a smirk, his mighty arms crossed at his chest. He stretched out an arm, waved a finger at me:
“Nuh-uh, Initial of the Sleeping Gods. Little Sobek is under my protection. If you wish to kill him, you must first defeat me.”
He took a step and his face appeared before me. Inhuman but humanoid, hairless. The lips around his round mouth split into six petals. As they opened, they bared row upon row of sharp teeth descending into the deep. His nose was a horizontal slit like a fish’s gill, his eyes whiteless, filled with blue and speckled with black dots swirling chaotically as if in a sky. His skin was segmented into bronze hexagons, a sharp hard hair as thick as my arm sticking out of the center of each one.
The label above his head gave no information but the name:
Nge N’Cullin
No level, no faction, not even a little marker like God.
While I studied him, he patiently waited for an answer. Only then did I realize I was still in Clarity, but the giant wasn’t slowed down. I made sure the Balancer was ready for activation, but didn’t rush to attack.
“I don’t want to kill you or him,” I said, looking into his eyes. “He attacked first.”
“What did you expect? He’s a beast, a predator, and master of these lands. You invaded and started killing creatures without reason. The blood of thousands of barakatas and spinners is on your head. They may seem disgusting to you humans, but you look just the same to them. These creatures are mindless, without the slightest spark of intellect, but it is not you who gave them life, and it is not yours to take! Did your gods not teach you the simplest of truths!?”
“My gods are down there. One of them is, anyway. Why don’t you ask Tiamat yourself?”
“Because I am outside her dream,” the giant answered. “She will not perceive my presence even if she stands right before me. All the same, she may see me through your eyes, and I would not like that. I do not meddle in the affairs of gods, and I have no need of their attention.”
“How is that possible? Everything here in Disgardium…” I waved my free hand around me. “It’s all created by their dream.”
“I cannot answer that question,” Nge N’Cullin shrugged. “Not yet, anyway. But I know for certain that I was created not by the dream of the Sleepers for whom you are Initial.”
“I may be Initial of the Sleeping Gods, but who are you, Nge N’Cullin?” I asked, glancing uneasily at Sobek’s jaws, closing slowly but surely. Much longer and he’d bite my arm off. “And why do I see you, if you’re outside the Sleepers’ dream? Are you a god? If so, then New, or Old? Are you some elemental god? Hmm… Maybe not.”
“All the so-called gods you listed arrived here when I was already wandering Disgardium. Those Who Departed left me to watch the First Beasts, to stand up for them against the New Gods. I am the Watcher.”
“Those Who Departed? The Departed? They created you?”
“The Old Gods called them the Precursors, and when the mortal First People encountered that which remained after my creators, they gave them another name – Those Who Departed. But in your language, your name for them also suffices – The Departed. You have honored their memory. If they were here, you would earn their friendship. That is why you see me.”
“But my friends heard you too!”
“You heard, the words took on shape, shape took on sound. Now they see me, but I am glad you possess the transparency of mind that allows you to quicken yourself. We will speak, I will leave, and your friends will not know what they saw.”
The pieces of the puzzle started snapping together in my head, but I still needed to do something with the crocodile. Another five seconds of conversation and its jaw would clamp shut, depriving me of an arm.
“If I drop him, will he hit the ground?” I as
ked, nodding at Sobek and preparing to let him go.
Nge N’Cullin casually plucked the divine reptile from my hands and tossed him toward some mountains glimmering on the horizon. From my position in the sky, I watched as his body flew a couple of miles, stopped still above the stone forest of Terrastera, then began to descend slowly. Maybe that was the range limit on the power of this strange creature with the even stranger name of Nge N’Cullin.
“My intervention will protect him from death,” the giant explained. “In future, he will be more careful and will not attack you.”
Behemoth had said that the Departed were the first sentients, and creations of Chaos. The Sleeper hadn’t seen them in Disgardium, and Tiamat didn’t see Nge N’Cullin, a creation of the Departed. The puzzle really was fitting together!
I remembered gigantic Deznafar, Battle Avatar of the Departed, whose corpse was raised by Shazz the Lich. Either the Departed were giants just like Deznafar and Nge N’Cullin, or… They needed strong protectors, and created massive monsters for the purpose. It was perfectly possible that they never left Dis, but somehow hid themselves away from mortal and divine eye alike. If the Sleepers themselves didn’t see them… I opened my reputation tab and nodded slowly to myself:
Your reputation with the Departed: friendship.
I knew it! I couldn’t have gained any rep with a faction that didn’t exist! And the giant had said ‘if they were here, you would earn their friendship.’ Maybe the Departed had placed a kind of camouflage on themselves and Nge, hiding them even from the gods, but revealing them to those who had earned their friendship or trust?
My heart started to pound in anticipation of something new, something undiscovered.
“Where did your creators run to, Nge N’Cullin?”
“They did not run!” the giant roared. The clouds behind my back blew away. Peals of thunder rolled across the land, and forked lightning lanced down to burn a square mile of earth below us. “They departed. I do not know where for.”
“Back to Chaos? The Sleeping God Behemoth told me that the Departed were creations of Chaos. That they ran away, frightened by the New Gods.”
“I remember those days,” Nge N’Cullin rumbled. “The Old Gods and Those Who Departed lived in the world. The former resided among the living and strove for nothing but entertainment and greater power. My creators were above all that. The First People were a nuisance to them, and the Old Gods got in their way and tended to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, but there were no serious conflicts until the New Gods came.”
Fortune had told me about that time, but hadn’t mentioned the Departed.
“And what happened?”
“Nobody took them seriously. Whoever heard of gods living in another plane of existence and demanding blind faith? The Old Gods merely laughed when they heard of the New. Why ‘believe’ in someone distant and immaterial when you have a protector god walking by your side into battle, sharing food with you, sometimes even a bed? But, after thousands of years passed, it became clear that it was far easier for the mortals to believe in the New Gods, who demand little – just praise Nergal, visit his temple. You don’t even have to make sacrifices. In their prayers, mortals all over the world gave the New Gods more Faith, which means more strength than the Old ever had. And then, war. A Holy War, as Nergal and Marduk, the leaders of the New Gods, called it. Those Who Departed, until then having lived peacefully in all corners of Disgardium, lost battle after battle, until they decided to leave. Since then, the world has seen none of Those Who Departed. The Precursors decided that a destructive war was risky and senseless.”
“What about you? Are you one of the Departed too?”
“No. You mortals like to create things. Dead things, soulless items. Those Who Departed liked to create living creatures.”
“Like you? Like the Battle Avatar Deznafar?”
“Yes. Deznafar…” The giant sighed. “I felt his Nether-corrupted emanations. My heart skipped a beat when he departed for oblivion once again. The might of the mortals rises. The world is moving toward an abyss.”
“It’s all because of the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague!” I blurted out, hoping to gain the support of this mighty creature. “We plan to go to war with the undead before they spread everywhere. Will you help us?”
“No. I am Watcher. My task is to watch over the First Beasts, to give them shelter, hide them and protect them. This takes all my energy, which does not replenish with my creators gone. The affairs of mortals and the dead do not interest me, and nor do those of the Gods, Old or New.”
“What about demons?”
“Those who drank of Chaos gained immortality, but were banished from Disgardium. To the Inferno, as I believe their new world is called.”
“Yes. I need to get there.”
“You are twice as suicidal as I thought if you intend to do that with the particle of Order that has settled in your soul, Enemy of the Inferno. I wish you luck. If you meet Belial, tell him that Nge N’Cullin remembers his promise.”
“What promise?”
“You have no need to know. He will understand. The Drinker of Chaos was not always a demon, and my word was given to him in a time when…” Nge N’Cullin suddenly breathed out through his slit of a nose and began to shrink. “This size costs much energy, and my reserves are not unlimited. Descend, Scyth. We will speak on the ground.”
As I dropped down, I saw the Watcher moving to the other side of the temple, out of view of my friends. I landed nearby. He shrank down to six feet, and now his face didn’t seem so horrifying – just a narrow line of a nose, a closed round mouth, bright blue eyes, the black dots now too small to see. Judging by the fact that he hadn’t attacked me and had answered my questions so thoroughly, I could continue talking to him.
All the gods I’d met had sent me away after they got what they wanted. This Nge N’Cullin didn’t seem to be a god, but something like Deznafar, only smarter. Was he bored in his loneliness? Beast gods didn’t have a lot to talk about…
But as soon as I thought that, Nge N’Cullin spoke again, and I realized why he was interested in me:
“Tell me, Initial of the Sleepers – what do you want in exchange for freeing my favorite dinosaur from your service? I saw him with you.”
“You mean the Montosaurus?”
“Yes. I cannot demand him, because he chose his path himself and became your battle companion. But I implore you, free the Montosaurus! He is a magnificent beast who has roamed the isles of the archipelago to the west of Latteria since the time before the First People. It is not right that he serve a mortal!”
“With all respect, Nge N’Cullin, he doesn’t serve me. Ask him yourself, if you want…”
I summoned Monty. Due to Clarity, the dinosaur froze in place when he appeared, but the Watcher looked piercingly at him and brought him into the state of ‘transparency of mind.’ At the sight of Nge N’Cullin, the dinosaur started to chirp furiously, ran towards him and… started licking his face. The Watcher of the Departed laughed and answered back with the same sounds.
Then Monty turned his head to me:
“Kra! Tra! Raa! Raa!”
“He asks your leave to go, and promises in exchange to protect the island you settled on.”
“Kra! Kra!” I tried to answer in kind. “Raa! Traa!”
“No, Scyth, he does not need a female,” the Watcher said, shaking his head. “Beast gods do not reproduce. He is the concentrated form of his species, the peak of its development, and at the same time the first of his kind. The Montosaurus, like Sobek, is both ‘he’ and ‘she’ at the same time.”
“Uhm… I didn’t say anything about females! Kra!”
“Traa!” Monty answered, offended. He turned his back on me and twitched his tail.
“Do not offend the dinosaur,” Nge N’Cullin advised.
I was overjoyed. It turned out there was meaning in my every ‘kra and ‘tra.’
“Nge N’Cullin, the Montosaurus i
s dangerous to the inhabitants of my island.”
“I will open paths for him to other places in Disgardium where he can hunt without drawing the attention of the New Gods,” the Watcher answered. “However, he feels an attachment to Kharinza, to the island whose name you preserved, thus honoring the memory of Those Who Departed. The Montosaurus will protect the temple of the Sleepers on Kharinza, and Sobek – the one here, on Terrastera. That is what you require, is it not? I promise you, it will be so. What is your decision?”
I really didn’t want to lose Monty as a pet. But to tell the truth, soon the dinosaur would lose his relevance if I didn’t level him up, whereas if he got his divine powers back, he’d be far more dangerous for any aggressors. Plus, from what I knew, if Monty died as my pet, he’d revive at level one. Better to give him freedom.
Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 18