The Gate of the Feral Gods

by Matt Dinniman

  Donut did a little hop and then hit the hobgoblin pus detonator. We were too far away to hear the sound of the bags exploding, but I knew there would now be blood and guts and floor-four wraith body parts spreading all over.

  “Carl, Carl, I went up a level! I’m now 38!”

  “I guess some of those sharks got into the bombs before we could blow them,” I said. I was hoping that would happen. With those missing five days, both Donut and I had lost a lot of grinding time. We hadn’t done nearly as much fighting and leveling as we should have by now, and we needed everything we could get.

  “Does anybody see anything down there?” I asked as we hovered about fifteen feet off the calm surface of the water. The water level had risen somewhat once we’d turned the drain on, but it was still lower than when the floor opened. That’d change, hopefully, once we finished here.

  “I can see the sub on the map,” Katia said. Tran, who also had the Pathfinder skill, nodded in agreement.

  “Donut?” I asked.

  “I don’t see any monsters. I see some small fish here and there, but they’re all white on the map.”

  “Okay. Remember. We don’t roll the depth charges into the water unless I say we do. They are a last resort.”

  Donut jumped from my shoulder. “Aye, aye, Captain Carl.” She paused, looking between me and Katia. “You two be safe. It’s horrible down there.”

  “This is really damn weird,” Tran said as we watched Katia form into the diving bell.

  “Fascinating,” Vadim agreed, walking in a circle around her.

  I continued to marvel at Katia’s growth. She was forming this on the fly without having made it before. We were at the corner of the house, standing on the crumbling ground of the garden. Katia hung off the side, with a single arm anchored to the magical brace that held the balloon high above. The whole house and balloon dipped at the corner as she continued to add weight.

  I remembered when she first started playing with her shapeshifting abilities, it physically hurt her to make even a small change. Now she could contour herself into just about anything at a moment’s notice. She still wasn’t perfect with faces unless she sat in front of her makeup table, but with this sort of inanimate stuff, she was an expert.

  The Akula was 500 meters under the surface. Although that didn’t sound like much, it was an alarming depth. Vadim said the massive submarine had a chamber on the roof to enter and leave, but one of their mini-subs had been docked to it before they started their assault on the bridge. After they’d succeeded, something happened, and the mini-sub had blown, which caused the Akula to fill with water. The nose of the sub was now physically attached to the base of the necropolis below the water line, and the massive torpedo tubes along the bottom were somehow pumping vast amounts of ocean water directly into the structure.

  Like with the extreme height of the Wasteland, I knew diving 500 meters below the surface simply wasn’t something that’d normally be possible. The crush depth of most submarines was around 400 meters. But Vadim and Britney both insisted they’d free dived those depths—and much deeper—with no real issue with the help of the water-breathing scrolls.

  Whatever physics engine was running this shitshow, it was designed to allow us to do the impossible. It didn’t want us dying from stupid environmental hazards, unless it was a deliberately placed trap or mob. Dying from the bends wasn’t nearly as entertaining as watching us get eaten by a shark.

  “Be careful,” I said to Donut as Katia opened up an entrance for me to step inside of her. “Katia is really heavy right now. The moment we drop away, this thing is going to fly up into the air. I don’t want you falling in.”

  Donut just nodded. Despite her loud insistence that she was never going back into the water, I could tell she was struggling with guilt over this. I patted her on the head. “We need you to keep us safe. Okay?”

  “Be careful,” she said, rubbing her head against my hand.

  I stepped inside. Katia was spread thin, which allowed her to make herself pretty large. The three of us—me, Tran, and Vadim—stood in the middle of the shape. She’d helpfully grown three poles in the middle so we could steady ourselves. She called it the diving bell, but she was really shaped more like an elevator with a ring of heavy, dense metal at the bottom to prevent her from flipping. She would grow flaps and pull some mass and attempt to slow our descent as we approached the sub. We wanted to acclimate to the water as soon as possible, so we weren’t sealed in. With Tran’s pathfinder skill and Vadim’s Torch spell, we’d hopefully be able to navigate the drowned halls of the submarine and quickly accomplish our task.

  The boss had been a borough boss, not a neighborhood boss, so the map it left showed Vadim monster types in an area, but he still didn’t have a full map of the Akula, which was unfortunate. There had apparently been a sentinel gun thing that’d been a neighborhood boss, but he said he’d never looted the map. Things had been happening quickly.

  “Everyone read a scroll,” I said. All around us, we each cast Water Breathing on ourselves. All four of us now had enough of these things in our inventory to last at least four hours submerged, four times the amount we’d hopefully need.

  I nervously watched the little needle that kept me apprised of our viewer count, and it was starting to spike. That was always a bad sign.

  “And away we go,” Katia said from a mouth that sat against the interior wall of the diving bell, right next to my ear. I almost crapped my boxers at the sound of the voice so close to me.

  Before I could say, “Jesus, Katia,” we dropped. The elevator hit the ocean and only gave the slightest pause before we were underwater. We sank, and the force of the water rushing inside almost pulled all three of us up and out.

  I kept my eye on our altitude as we rapidly fell. We moved at about five meters a second, rocketing toward the depths. I did feel the increasing pressure of the water above us as we passed 100 meters, then 200, then 300, but it wasn’t nearly as much as it should.

  “I see it,” Katia said after only a minute, her voice carrying through the water. “I’m pulling my mass in small amounts now and flapping my wings. Oh, wow. It’s bigger than I thought. The whole top part is ripped away. There’s a strong current. I can actually see the water getting pulled in. It’s mostly under the sub. It’s like water is being sucked in like through a vacuum cleaner. The whole front of the submarine is stuck in a hole. The whole sub is the pump.”

  I felt us start to slow. The Akula finally showed on my map, the structure stretching to completely fill it. The thing was the size of a small carrier.

  “There are a bunch of jellyfish near the entrance,” Katia said.

  “What color are they?” Vadim snapped.

  “Blue. They’re big.”

  “Okay, good. Watch out for the white ones. The pain amplifiers. They’re smaller. The big blue ones will wrap around you if you get close, but they’ll leave you alone if you avoid them. But you must watch because they drift.”

  “Okay, I’m aiming for an area without them,” Katia said. “Landing now.”

  Crack. We hit the hull, and Katia’s form instantly changed. The elevator opened like a flower, revealing the deep, dark world. It wasn’t completely dark. Some light still filtered in through above, but everything had a deep, blue hue to it. I crouched, still standing atop Katia’s form. It felt as if someone was standing on my shoulders, but the pressure wasn’t too bad.

  The Akula, like Katia had said, was huge. It looked more like a damn spaceship than an actual submarine. The slick, metallic structure spread out into the darkness in every direction. The whole thing vibrated. I could feel the water deep below being pumped through the vehicle. Directly ahead, the sail—the conning tower-like structure on top of most submarines—had been violently ripped away, giving me an unobstructed view of the bottom of the necropolis. From here, it was nothing more than an imposing, dark wall.

  Katia continued to change. She was transforming herself so she’d cover the hu
ll, camouflaging herself. She was going to stay out here and keep an eye out for the large, dangerous monsters while the three of us entered the sub. The ripped away entrance was about twenty feet away. In most subs, the con was directly below the sail. That wasn’t the case with this submarine. According to Vadim, the con (called a bridge by the game), was at the fore of the vessel, just short of the nose. That’s where the stairwell was. I couldn’t see it, but Katia could.

  Vadim had described a room directly below the bridge that I believed was the fire control. That was our target.

  Above, the glowing, blue jellyfish floated like sentinels. Each were about fifteen feet in diameter, and their tentacles dangled underneath them ominously, hovering about twenty feet over the top of the submarine. They drifted aimlessly, bouncing off one another.

  Their dots were white on the map, meaning they weren’t naturally hostile.

  Big Boy Blue – Level 40

  The good ol’ Big Boy Blue is the largest of the jellyfish one might find floating around. They’re a little like that guy you used to know in high school who was always wearing either overalls or a jersey of some sort. The dude is like six foot five and pushing 300 pounds when he was a freshman. He always had a crewcut. Dad’s a trucker. Never talks. Never does his homework. He’s just always, you know, kinda there. He doesn’t mean any harm. But he’s so goddamned dumb he does harm anyway if you get in his way. Plus he always has a super-hot girlfriend for some reason, but that has nothing to do with the damn jellyfish. Anyway, you get the point. Harmless as long as you don’t touch them.

  I put my hand on the now-silver-colored edge of Katia and said, “We’re going in. Be safe. Keep that salve I gave you in your hotlist.”

  “In and out, Carl,” she replied. “If you can’t figure it out, set the bombs.”

  I patted her, and the three of us half-walked, half-bounced along the top of the submarine and headed inside.

  Entering the Akula.

  Vadim cast his Torch the moment we sank through the destroyed superstructure hole into a round room. Mechanical parts floated everywhere as we swam down a tunnel. The water smelled of oil and smoke, and it was oddly calming. Familiar. The whole place was flooded. The hull creaked and moaned ominously.

  Donut: ARE YOU OKAY?

  Carl: We’re fine. We’re moving in now.

  Vadim led the way. “The submarine was in terrible condition when we first got here. There were skeletons of bugbears and a bunch of robots we had to fight on our way to the bridge,” he said. We pushed our way through the tight corridors, swimming by pulling ourselves along the walls, which were warm, not freezing like I expected. “Only three of us survived.”

  “Did you get the gear of those who didn’t make it?” I asked.

  “No. Usually there wasn’t anything left. There was a gun outside the bridge that just blew them up. Nobody could get past it except Chris. He had some ability that made him invisible to the thing. He went past and into the boss chamber alone. When he killed the robot thing with the head in the jar, the gun blew up on its own.”

  “You never had any hints he was really two people?”

  Vadim shook his head. He swam under a floating, blue barrel. The man moved quickly in the water. I grasped the barrel and took it in, and it appeared in my inventory filled with sea water.

  “It didn’t surprise me,” Vadim continued. “Chris was a higher level. Never talked much. Was a fierce fighter, but emotionless. He did have a lot of spells. He insulted us when we didn’t do what he said. Britney never liked him.”

  “That’s most definitely not the real Chris,” I said.

  Tran picked up what looked like a robot arm and let it go. I was taking everything and tossing it into my inventory. Most of this stuff was worthless, but some of it was made out of bugbear metal, which appeared to be very light.

  We passed through what had once been a mess hall. I really wished we had more time to go exploring, but I knew we were on a timer. I finally saw the stairwell on the edge of my map. We were following the water party’s original path through the Akula. I was deliberately making Vadim go first, lest he lead me into a trap.

  “Did you guys loot any journals or notes from the boss?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Vadim said. “There was a note. Chris took it and read it. He didn’t show us, but it had a key code on it to the escape tubes above the bridge. We all agreed to go to the land quadrant because it was the closest, but he somehow ended up with you guys.”

  “He said there wasn’t room for him to get to the land quadrant,” I said.

  “That was a lie. There was plenty of room. We could’ve fit a whole party. But each escape tunnel can only be used once.” He paused as we entered another hallway. We stopped in front of a hatch with a round, spinning wheel dogged closed. We were only a handful of rooms away from the bridge.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This was open. We left all the doors open so we could escape to our sub.”

  I moved forward to inspect the door. Uh-oh. “You don’t see anything on the other side?” I asked.

  Vadim’s gecko face looked grim. “No. But it’s a small room on the other side. Like one of those rooms where you can drain the water away.”

  “An airlock,” I said.

  Katia: Uh, guys, there’s something out here. It’s big. It just swam by underneath the sub. I didn’t get a good look, but the damn thing is bigger than the submarine. It’s gone now.

  Carl: Okay. That’s probably what really broke the sail off the sub.

  Katia: We should be fine as long as you guys don’t bring attention to yourselves.

  I spun the wheel. It turned easily, revealing a small room with a switch on the wall. A red light glowed. I read another water-breathing scroll. “Come on, all of us inside.”

  Tran and Vadim looked at one another then followed me. I shut the door, locking us in. I hit the switch, and the room started to vibrate. A loud noise filled the chamber, my ears popped, and the water started to suck away. A minute later, and the room hissed. I spun the wheel on the second door, and I opened it.

  “Tada,” I said, stepping into the room.

  The water was gone, but puddles appeared everywhere. This section had been drained, but it hadn’t been like this for long. I took a breath. The air felt stale, but it was air. I didn’t receive a warning about low oxygen. I knew if there was none, the water-breathing scroll wouldn’t help. We’d have to flood the chamber again.

  Tran was the first to vomit. We all waited for our spell to fade. When it hit me, I went to my knees, spewing brown water everywhere. Christ, this is awful.

  “Why did I volunteer for this again?” Tran asked, rolling onto his back.

  Vadim was unfazed by the vomiting. “You get used to it after a while. It’s really bad if you’re under for more than an hour.”

  We recovered and stepped into a large, semi-circle-shaped room. The center of the room was filled with removable grates. The metallic room appeared to have no purpose, which was unusual for a water vessel. A hole in the ceiling sparked. That, I realized, was the remains of the sentinel gun. The neighborhood boss. This had been a boss chamber. I didn’t see a place to loot the map. I probably had to go a level higher or lower to grab it. Our feet echoed when we walked.

  The next door was a similar portal to the one behind it. Vadim said just beyond it was the bridge. Within the bridge, I knew, was the captain’s chambers, a separate room which contained the floor exit. There was also a real staircase that went below to the fire control station where we could, theoretically, turn off the pump. And if we went up instead of down, there was yet another room where the three escape hatches were. Two of the three had already been used.

  “That door was open, too,” Vadim said.

  I really wished I had Donut with us. That way we could use the Hole spell to peer inside.

  “There,” Tran said, pointing to the ground. He pointed at one of the grates in the corner of the room. I finally saw what he w
as pointing at, the glint of a corpse’s glow.

  The moment I moved the grate, the X appeared on my map.

  Lootable Corpse. The Bugbear’s Delight. Neighborhood Boss. Killed by System Deactivation.

  It was a small box, hidden under the floor, that one had to destroy in order to turn off the gun. Maggie had somehow circumvented it, which in turn allowed her to kill the borough boss on her own and reap all the experience. I reached down, opened the small control panel, and looted the neighborhood map along with a Blown Heavy-Duty Fuse.

  The moment I took the map, the entirety of the Akula populated on my screen. Multiple red dots appeared, mostly in the lower decks. The map helpfully showed which parts of the sub were flooded and which was dry. Most of it was flooded.

  A red dot moved back and forth across the bridge on the other side of that door. There were also the multiple Xs of corpses. I first focused on the Xs, and my heart quickened.

  The red dot kept disappearing and reappearing. It was moving back and forth between the bridge and the chamber just on the other side, outside the sub. Outside the water quadrant, even.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered.

  “What is it?” Tran asked.

  “It’s a ghost. One that shouldn’t be in here. It’s…”

  Before I could finish, an ear-piercing screech filled the submarine. The entire hull shuddered. A glowing, green head of a goddamned pterodactyl appeared, leaning in through the bulkhead leading to the bridge. It screamed again, and my vision flashed red. Vadim fell to the ground, his health suddenly in the red.

  An aural attack.

  Before I could examine the ghost, it disappeared back into the bridge. But I knew who that was. Quetzalcoatlus, the supposed boss monster of the subterranean level.

  The dot disappeared, but a moment later, I heard her scream again, and it was somehow louder. The entire hull quaked. Tran used a Heal Others spell on Vadim.

  Katia: Something green and glowing just shot out of the side of the submarine and went down. What is that? Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I can see it. The green thing just smacked it and turned around.