by Demi Harper
In a matter of mere minutes, the fight was over, and only one raider remained. The boulderskin slithered forward and clamped its long, crocodilian jaws around the waist of the last spear-wielding kobold. The paralyzed raider couldn’t even blink as the boulderskin bit down; forbidding teeth – naturally adapted for devouring shellfish, now made far more formidable – crushed the red-scaled draconid with a grim crunch of armor and bones.
The boulderskin tossed the body to one side. Then it headed back to the lake, sliding beneath the water with barely a ripple. The two whipfish scuttled squelchily across the ceiling to the cave’s dark edges, there to await the next battle.
Once again, a handful of my god-born creatures had managed to put down the enemy, despite being vastly outnumbered. In this case, it had been three against twenty; unthinkable odds… in a regular battle, at least. Evolution had more than evened the scales.
I thought back to the kobold raider I’d seen getting whipped half to death by that evil commander, back when I’d almost drained my own reserves by using Observe to spy on Grimrock’s base. I thought of how easily these kobolds had fallen to my beefed-up minions, and almost felt guilty, as though I had an unfair advantage.
Then I remembered who was responsible for sending them here, and what he hoped to accomplish with their presence. These kobolds might be weak and misled, but they were still here to destroy my denizens, and everything I’d worked for. I could fight them, or I could die.
Well, I was damned if I was dying today.
The next group arrived at the Heart, where Ris’kin and Septimus were more than ready for them.
This group’s leader was more cautious than the others; it hung back from the pit, eying the precarious ledge with suspicion. When it caught sight of Ris’kin on the opposite side, the kobold leader issued a series of controlled yips and barks. The raiders responded by sending six of their spear-wielders to the front of the group, where they took aim at my avatar. Ris’kin bared her teeth in challenge – but stood her ground.
Crap! I thought.
‘Move!’ I commanded Ris’kin urgently.
The spear-throwers released their weapons. They arced through the air with a whistling rush of wind and clattered against the rock where my avatar had been standing just moments before. She’d dodged backward just in time. What had she been thinking?
She cocked her head up toward me in disdain. Then she unsheathed her claws, reaching out to scrape them against the stone, as though she were reminding me of the time she’d regrown one thanks to Evolution.
‘You might regenerate, but you’re not immune to damage,’ I reminded her.
She huffed. Then she sheathed her claws once more – all but the middle one, which she left out for a moment longer than necessary. Her fox-like face held a smirk as she dodged the next volley of spears with ease.
The cheek of her!
We would have words once this fight was over. If her cockiness didn’t get her killed, that was.
Meanwhile, it seemed the kobolds had exhausted their supply of spears. A handful of sword-bearing attackers were now sprinting along the ledge toward Ris’kin, with another line making their way more slowly along the far side. That was Septimus’s cue to join the fight; his monstrous bulk reared from the pit, sending the more cautious kobolds fleeing in the opposite direction.
Something was niggling at me. This raiding party seemed smaller than the others; I’d only seen a dozen or so attackers, and those on the side opposite Ris’kin were now running back down the passage the way they’d come.
Their retreat was futile, though, as Septimus hauled his bulbous body from his pit and lurched down the tunnel after the fleeing kobolds like a furry, six-legged boulder.
My amusement at the sight was cut short when more kobolds began to emerge from the passages onto the ledge opposite Ris’kin – the ledge Septimus had been guarding until he’d taken off in pursuit of what I now realized were decoys. Ris’kin was still fighting the first wave who’d charged her, and didn’t seem to notice the new raiders, five of whom were now racing around the pit to flank her. I was loath to distract her by shouting a warning, but couldn’t help myself.
‘Behind you!’
The avatar’s ear flicked, but otherwise she ignored me. I called to her again, more urgently this time, but again she didn’t so much as acknowledge me. The first of the new wave of kobolds reached her, sword raised to strike—
—and she spun without missing a beat, ducking underneath the swing and driving her right spear through the raider’s skull. Her would-be attacker fell limp.
Ris’kin yanked the spear back, but it was still firmly stuck in the side of the dead kobold’s skull. The avatar planted her foot against the corpse’s back, trying to shove it off the weapon and into the pit. As she turned, a spear came soaring toward her from the other side of the pit. It thumped straight into the dead kobold’s chest.
With one hand still clutching her embedded weapon, my avatar was struggling to fend off her melee attackers while also using her new kobold meat shield to block the ranged attacks. But the spears kept coming, and soon the missiles began to hit their mark. I winced inwardly as first one, then another, then two more spears grazed her flanks, slicing skin and muscle before clattering against the wall.
She kicked the used weapons into the pit dismissively; though I could tell her wounds pained her, I could already see her improved regeneration knitting together the split, bloody flesh.
This couldn’t continue.
In the space of an eyeblink, I pulled up my Augmentary and sought out my blueprints. Aware of Ris’kin accumulating more and more cuts and bruises with each moment I delayed, I grabbed at the basic whipfish blueprint and poured three globes of mana into it.
With a blinding white flash, the whipfish appeared on the wall above Ris’kin and immediately joined the fray. The whipfish lashed out with its tentacle-like appendages, paralyzing the attackers nearest to Ris’kin.
When my avatar finished taking advantage of the reprieve to finally free herself of the pesky corpse and properly dodge the enemy’s ranged attacks once more, I sent the whipfish scuttling up the wall and across the ceiling toward the spear throwers on the other side.
It moved quickly, sending its deadly tendrils whipping out toward the spear-flinging kobolds and immobilizing four of them within moments. The remaining throwers changed their target to the new creature in their midst.
The whipfish was quick, but the kobolds were many, and their aim was annoyingly impeccable. Three throws later and the whipfish dropped, its carapace brutally pierced by three black-bladed spears. The fallen god-born plummeted to the bottom of the pit, where it was absorbed by the stone. Again, I’d regained but a fraction of the creature’s original Creation cost, and still had just four of my seven globes remaining.
I tried not to lament the waste of mana; the whipfish’s life, short as it had been, had freed Ris’kin to concentrate on the sword-wielding kobolds that were flanking her. After easily dispatching the ones the whipfish had immobilized, she plowed through the rest with a ferocity that said she was furious at having been caught at a disadvantage, and those responsible were going to pay.
But there were still a handful of kobolds remaining, not counting those on the other side of the cavern – the ones who’d slain the whipfish – who were once again readying weapons for throwing.
Then a dark shape lunged from the tunnel behind them.
Septimus!
The cave wanderer didn’t bother grabbing or biting – he simply bludgeoned his way through the mob, using his heavy body and massive legs to knock the spear-throwers into the pit. Their yelps and yowls echoed pitifully, but were soon cut short as they hit the pit’s rock bottom.
Ris’kin was still dealing with the sword wielders, though she was fully in control of the situation. Her balance on the narrow ledge was impeccable, and she used her two borrowed spears to thrust and stab and knock her opponents off the edge and into oblivion.
<
br /> I was considering creating another whipfish just to make certain of this fight’s outcome when Ket’s voice entered my mind once again.
‘Corey!’
The urgency in her tone sent a cold stone sinking into my gut.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, dreading the answer.
‘It’s the lake. You’d better come back here. Now.’
Thirty-Three
Carnage
With Septimus’s timely return to the Heart, I felt reasonably safe leaving him and Ris’kin to finish off the remaining raiders on the ledge. I also decided not to replace the dead whipfish right now; it sounded like whatever was happening at the lake, I might need my mana to deal with that instead. I shot off back in that direction, anxiously wondering what Ket thought was so important.
I arrived amid a scene of carnage.
My boulderskin – which had taken down twenty kobolds earlier with the help of two whipfish – was thrashing madly on the ground. Surrounding it were kobold raiders, just like the other groups we’d fought. Except… this group was different.
As well as ten regular leather-armor-clad kobolds were other, larger raiders, a half-dozen in total. Unlike their slightly smaller brethren, these kobolds were armored in some kind of black, natural scale mail. The armor covered their torsos, including their shoulders and upper arms, and came down below their belts almost to their knees.
They wore scaled boots to match, and heavy gauntlets covered hands that were clearly accustomed to wielding the heavy maces that hung at their belts, but were currently clenched around bizarrely long polearms. The polearms were made of the same dark wood and obsidian as the kobolds’ other weapons, and they seemed to somehow be attached to the boulderskin.
When I looked closer, I realized the long shafts ended in slender leather hoops, which the heavily armored raiders had managed to loop around the boulderskin’s limbs, neck and tail. They were using this admittedly cunning method to nullify the boulderskin’s deadly attacks, presumably so that the regular raiders could run past and make their way up the passage toward the Grotto. Judging by the broken and bloody kobold corpses scattered around the cave, the boulderskin had other ideas.
The poles might have stopped the boulderskin from wreaking instant destruction like it had with the previous group of raiders, but they did not negate its power completely. Any enemy who came within the poles’ reach found themselves shredded by deadly claws, whipped by the heavily muscled tail or with their bones crushed by those savage jaws.
Still, it was clear the boulderskin had met its match. This was not a fight it could win alone.
With a single thought, I summoned the three forrels from the nearest passage. Immediately, I sensed them sprinting toward the lake, a heroic backup force that would hopefully break the kobolds’ hold on the boulderskin and allow my forces to power through to victory.
Then I realized; the boulderskin had had backup.
Where are the two whipfish?
A glance around the cavern confirmed my fears. I saw splashes of blue blood-like fluid on the ceiling and floor, but no sign of the whipfish.
‘What happened here, Ket?’
Before she could answer, the boulderskin gave a particularly powerful writhe, yanking one of the polearms away from its wielder. The boulderskin was straining to get at the kobolds gathered in front of the far entranceway; the lightly armored raiders scattered, yipping and growling at the lizard-like beast.
The scale-clad kobolds snarled and pulled harder on their poles, allowing the one who’d relinquished its pole to scramble forward and reclaim its weapon. Together, they heaved, yanking the boulderskin away from the other raiders, who once again began to edge forward in an attempt to cross the cavern.
In the space cleared by the fearful raiders, I caught sight of a familiar, and extremely unwelcome, figure. The kobold commander – Barka – stood in the entranceway, his face fixed in a snarl.
The serrated whip, which I’d seen him use to devastating effect during my observation of Grimrock’s base, was held tightly in his hand, and I could practically sense his eagerness to lash out at his cowardly underlings.
The commander was flanked by two shamans. Just like the one I’d seen in my vision of the kobolds’ settlement, the shamans wore kilts made of ragged strips of leather and hung with morbidly decorative rat skulls. I glimpsed their sacrificial daggers at their belts, and pushed down the rage summoned by the memory of those knives being put to use against my gnomes.
Back toward the center of the cavern, my boulderskin was still struggling desperately, so I used three of my remaining four globes of mana to create a basic whipfish. It instantly scuttled across the ceiling and began to lash out at the boulderskin’s kobold captors, seeking to immobilize them with its paralyzing venom.
But the whipfish’s indiscriminately whipping tendrils hit scale armor more often than flesh; it seemed my creature lacked the intelligence to recognize that some parts of the enemy were more vulnerable than others.
‘Aim for the flesh!’ I yelled into the whipfish’s mind. ‘The heads! The elbows! Knees!’
Ever obedient, the whipfish changed its tactics in accordance with my commands. But it still seemed to be struggling. These new kobolds really didn’t have much skin on display, and reaching their vulnerable bits was apparently tricky thanks to their well-crafted armor.
It’s almost as if they don’t want to be hit, paralyzed and then killed.
Luckily, the forrels I’d summoned finally raced into the lake cavern, the two regular forrels a few strides ahead of the ridiculous evolved squirrel-like one. In an eyeblink they took in the situation: the trapped boulderskin, the scale-clad kobolds, the smaller raiders attempting to sneak around their thrashing prisoner – and immediately split up, approaching the boulderskin’s captors from three different directions.
With their hands full with the boulderskin, the scale-clad kobolds didn’t even notice the forrels’ arrival until they were upon them. Jaws snapped and claws slashed viciously, but the kobolds’ heavy armor resisted most of the forrels’ strikes. The screech of claws on metal-like scale rang around the chamber.
However, the forrels’ attack distracted the kobolds enough that many of them loosened their grips on the polearms. The boulderskin, sensing opportunity, thrashed even harder, and this time it finally broke free.
The amphibian spun in wild circles, the poles still attached to its limbs and tail whipping out to knock down and injure their original wielders. Then it leapt upon its fallen former captors.
Armor was no protection from the boulderskin’s massive jaw strength; its teeth crushed the strange black scale, pulverizing the bodies beneath, and its piercing claws punched through the armor with ease, puncturing flesh and shattering bone.
Meanwhile, the forrels changed tack and darted around the cavern’s edges, picking off the weaker raiders that were still scattering fearfully from the boulderskin’s path of destruction. Two of the forrels were cut down, a handful of the kobolds turning on their pursuers and lashing out with obsidian swords and knives that slashed past the forrels’ snapping jaws and sliced easily into unprotected fur and flesh. However, it turned out the ridiculous squirrel-evolved forrel was more dangerous than it appeared.
Its two pairs of front teeth each formed what was essentially a knife blade, their outside edges sloping to a sharp point; those orange-stained incisors were sharp enough to bite through armor to the bone.
It threw itself in among the kobolds, chomping and kicking, and using all four muscled limbs to wrestle enemy combatants to the ground.
Kobolds fell left and right, dropping beneath the evolved forrel’s fury and the boulderskin’s impossible might. I sensed fighting still going on back in the Heart, and used most of my mana – now replenished to just over three globes again by my worshipers back in the Grotto – to create one more basic whipfish, sending it to the Heart to support Ris’kin and Septimus.
The fight here at the lake was almost over;
a mere handful of kobolds remained, mostly the scale-armored ones but also a couple of lucky ones who’d managed to dodge the whipfish attacks and avoid the forrels’ attention. Then a furious bark shifted my own attention to the entranceway.
Barka, the commander, was pacing back and forth, snapping his fanged jaws and barking orders at his flailing troops. Beside him, one of the shamans raised its arms, beginning some sort of rhythmic, growling chant.
The obsidian dagger glinted at the shaman’s tasseled belt, and once again I vividly recalled the image of my helpless denizens lining up to be beaten and sacrificed at Grimrock’s altar.
Cold rage filled me, and before I knew what I was doing I’d commanded the whipfish to target the shaman. It scurried across the ceiling, whips writhing eagerly—
—just as the shaman completed its incantation.
Dark droplets rained down from the cavern ceiling. For one bewildered moment I thought it was water; then the drops began to patter against the combatants’ flesh and armor below, sizzling with every tiny impact, and I realized the shaman had somehow conjured acid rain.
The conflict in the cavern turned into chaos as every single combatant flinched from this new, all-encompassing enemy. The rain did not discriminate, falling upon god-born creature and kobold alike, coating every one of them in a deadly, stinging poison.
The raiders’ armor did not protect their exposed heads, arms and legs, and they yipped and yowled, some of them lashing out at both friend and foe, others simply crawling pitifully on the ground to try and escape.
The only ones who remained undamaged were Barka and his two shamans, standing unharmed beneath the shelter of the entranceway. The three of them watched with cold eyes as the remainder of their own forces were tortured by the cruel magic.
Meanwhile, my evolved forrel’s fur was blackening and burning before my eyes, and even the boulderskin’s armored flesh was growing pitted and scarred from the deadly drops. The whipfish squealed in pain, the corrosive liquid oozing from the ceiling directly onto its clinging legs and body. Its chitinous carapace was beginning to sizzle and smoke, and its purposeful movement slowed into a tortured dance of agony.