The Land: Monsters

by Aleron Kong

  The charges were a minor negative. He had armor now! The original grey color of the glove now had a slight sheen of green and blue. The defense rivaled the base protection of a chainmail gauntlet, yet it was light and flexible. The thing fit like a second skin. It didn’t even register as armor, which meant magic users could wear it with no penalty to their casting abilities. If he could find more scorpions to harvest, he could outfit every mage in the village with armor comparable to his fighters!

  That was why he’d saved the last scorpion carcasses. His plan had required that he successfully make a bag of holding, but now that that was done, he could store the body with minimal degradation. If… when, he corrected himself yet again… he made it back to the village, he’d put it down the Well of Offering. Maybe he could hunt more of the creatures in the future. Again, he turned danger into power.

  Nearly an entire day had passed, but it had been productive. He had a dimensional pouch and some armor. The gauntlet was deadlier than most weapons he’d seen. He’d even managed to make the pincer and bone club into proper weapons. Now that they both registered as a dagger and club respectively, his Small Blades and Mace Wielding skills would give him damage bonuses in a fight.

  It dawned on Richter that he hadn’t eaten for nearly an entire day. Between being distracted and the vague sense of uneasiness in the pit of his stomach, he just hadn’t gotten around to it. As he thought about it, he got concerned. The increased metabolic demands of his new body were real. He knew that. So why wasn’t he hungry? He decided that, appetite or not, he needed to try to eat.

  Richter walked toward the small side cave where he’d stored the last five scorpion babies. It was nearly at the back of the cavern system. When he got closer, he caught a whiff of the larder. A day of sitting unrefrigerated hadn’t been great for the aroma, but it was the only food he had.

  He stepped into the cave and the scent grew stronger. It wasn’t horrible, but it had an unintended effect. The nagging feeling of unease in him flared up in him again. This time was different though. This time, he knew what it meant. With nothing less than pure dread, he recognized what it was. It was something he’d been well familiar with in the past, but his high attributes had kept it at bay for so long that he’d forgotten. When the attack came, it was fast and without mercy. Richter knew in his heart that he had finally met an enemy that could not be beaten, only endured.

  CHAPTER 37 – Day 152 – Juren 3, 0 AoC

  “Begone, demons!” Richter cried at the top of his lungs.

  The chaos lord’s large muscles strained and beads of sweat cascaded off his body. A vein throbbed in the middle of his forehead, standing up like a snake’s trail through sand. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot. They pierced the veil into oblivion.

  Victory was a hopeless dream. All he could do was survive. While he battled his foe, he called upon gods that he knew would not answer. He called nonetheless. In times like this, you did not live your life by reason. You lived it by hope and faith. Richter felt as much as saw a fresh attack coming and he named his impossible foe.

  “Diarrheaaaaaaa!”

  You never knew how it would begin. The attack could be almost spiritual. A flash of pain that would twist your body into knots, but when you looked down, there was nothing there. It was only natural to ask yourself in those moments, how could so much agony have been endured with no yield? Without even a glimpse of a promise that the torture would one day end? That was the insidious cruelty of “Ghost” poopie.

  Another feared beginning was the threat of structural damage. There was always the dread that as the evil left your body, it would leave utter devastation in its wake. Your body would have fought the good fight. It would have struggled and given all that it could. For a few hope-filled minutes, you might think that you would be able to stop the umber flow. You would cling to the gossamer hope that the danger had passed. That even though carnage and mayhem were all around you, the basic mechanics of your body would have survived the hurricane.

  That was when it happened. That was when you knew. The storm had not passed, you were simply in the eye, and that eye was coming for your own nether oculus. Nature, after all, can never be overcome. Ultimately, the ceasefire just made the final loss so much worse. Like a levee being overwhelmed, the eventual flood that finally came would destroy towns, cities and bungholes. This was the false promise of the “Broken Dam” poopie.

  In the twenty-sided dice roll of how these things were wont to begin, there was only one hope of salvation. One out of every million souls condemned to this hell-come-to-life was given a reprieve. Gods, who were both benign and loving, bade evil pass through you in one painful, but short, log ride of agony. And even when you wiped afterward, there was barely anything to clean up! This was the ever-sought-after and elusive “Clean” poopie.

  Whatever primal forces were looking down upon Richter, however, he knew two things.

  They were not benign.

  They were not loving.

  For the chaos lord, it began with a Gatling gun of sharp-edged diamonds leaving his body. In his mind, they made sharp pings as they encountered the rock behind him. Richter did not look, but he was sure the cavern must now be riddled with holes. While the sound effects might have been imaginary, there was nothing fake about the red-hot barrel inside his colon.

  After that came the waterfalls. He’d barely had a minute to recover and wipe the drool from his mouth. Streams of brown, yellow and hate geysered from his body like a firehose from hell. The pain nearly made him pass out.

  “Oh god! It feels like shitting a knife!”

  Several times his eyes rolled back into his head, showing only the whites, before he wrestled his consciousness back under his control. Each demonic spray started with a fiery pain at the exit point. He wondered briefly if invisible spirits of vengeance were rubbing Carolina Reapers on his anus. That, of course, was ridiculous, as even ghosts would have been washed away by the raging rapids eroding the stone of the cave system.

  Despite the pain, if this were all that had happened Richter would have been fine. Indeed, he would have counted himself lucky. He had endured worse. He was a warrior, a skilled mage, a leader of men. Mere pain could not undo him. As the last gallons of the waterfall phase trickled away however, he knew the true bill for his sins had come due. He had entered phase three.

  The pain of this phase was worse than the first two. That was due to a fact that any true torturer would recognize. As wonderful as the sight of tears and splashed blood could be, breaking someone’s body was never as sweet as breaking their spirit. That was why phase three saw the entrance of the most humbling of poopies, a “Dangler.”

  Long did Richter fight to force this brick through the tangled garden hose within him. Small flashes of red showed the HP he was losing. The true tragedy was that the lost health wasn’t enough to kill him. Merely 1 HP here, another HP there. The scant amount of damage waged a form of psychological warfare as he fought to push a lump of glued glass shards out of his battered body.

  After hours of struggle, promises to gods and demons alike, and body contortions that stretched the limits of his superhuman attributes, at long last he was rewarded with a relief that only the thrice-damned would ever know. Of course, in hell there is no true victory. That was when the psychological warfare and the insidious nature of the “Dangler” was revealed.

  Richter had just been thinking he was going to need to poop knife this latest loaf of evil, when he realized phase three was not over. His envisioned salvation had been only a cruel ruse. For the “Dangler’s” true power lay in the fact that the last bit remained attached. Some scientists had though this curse was due to the poopie having a hook at the end, or perhaps a right angle. Some had even surmised that during its slow passage the poopie fused to the nervous system, gaining awareness and a cruel will. A precious few said if you waited long enough, it might even crawl back in. None could say for sure. It was acknowledged that if the last theory were true, it was l
ikely the afflicted never lived to tell the tale, so the supposition was placed in “Unknown Unknowables” right along with One-Eyed Willie.

  None of that mattered to Richter, however, as he squatted, hands braced on the stone of the cavern entrance, hunched over in both pain and shame. His fists ground into the rough rock floor, hard enough to make a bloody slurry in the dust. As he thrust his hips this way and that, trying to dislodge nature’s most hideous tail, he wondered if this was all because of Nexus.

  Maybe he had never actually escaped the Auditor’s realm and everything he had experienced had been nothing more than an illusion. Was he being tortured by the black-and-gold giant? If so, could he apologize and be released from this endless cycle of lament? Alas, not even the Auditor, with his demigod-like powers, would have had the stomach for this form of torment. Richter remained trapped in reality and could only endure the atrocity that had befallen him.

  Richter’s butt waggled like an epileptic dog at a rave, but it was not his actions that finally removed the “Dangler.” It was the coming of the fourth and final stage. He felt it building while he was trying to shake himself free. What came next felt like the orgy love child of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and a sack of half-melted sugar-free gummy bears.

  With the coming of the last phase, his legs locked into a worse paralysis than tetanus could ever cause. Like an animal spotted by a predator, his hindbrain drove him to immobility. His animal mind held onto the same vain hope as a velociraptor’s prey. Maybe if he didn’t move, it would cause the impending doom to pass over him and attack someone else.

  Sadly, that only worked with a T. Rex.

  It didn’t work on raptors.

  It didn’t work on poopie.

  Hope had abandoned him.

  Somehow Richter knew on a deep level that what was coming was one of the most feared forms of poopie. Sometimes known as “Satan’s Curse,” “The reason for brown pants,” or simply “The Finger of God,” what was coming had served to end so many dates on Earth that it was actually the most effective, if unrecognized, form of birth control that existed.

  “Wait. Please wait,” he begged.

  His pleas faded unheard. A pressure built in Richter, like a volcanic bubble in a lava flow. With the destructive promise of Goku’s spirit bomb, phase four grew in power. Richter placed both hands on his stomach, pressing as hard as his sixty-seven points of Strength would allow. He tried to keep the demon fetus within him. With his prodigious musculature he could shatter skulls, rend flesh and even crush rock. No one, however, could stop fate. With a final whimper, he felt the bubble inside of him shift, ever-so-delicately downward, before this most horrible form of poopie announced its birth loudly to the world. A tear leaked from his eye as he stared into infinity, and his soul whispered, “The Twister.”

  “Oh my god!” he cried out in panic. “Oh my god, it’s coming. Am I dying? I think I’m dying! Get out of me, poison! It’s happeninggggg!”

  A vortex of pressurized hatred shot from his raw beef sphincter. With a complete disregard for physics, the chunky brown slurry formed an ever-widening cone behind him. Ceiling, walls, floor, nothing was spared from this demonic whirlwind. Richter’s cheeks flushed with shame as he felt the foul rain strike his thighs and calves with a hurricane rain’s steady tattoo.

  Monsters that had been prowling the area around the scorpions’ nest raised their noses in the air, sampling a new scent. Without fail, even the most powerful creatures turned and fled. While they did not fear battle, deeply ingrained instincts told them that whatever had created the foul miasma permeating the bowels of The Land had contracted a terrible disease which must be avoided at all costs.

  For another hour, Richter hunched upon shaky legs. Each time he thought the torture was over, a fresh round of damnation found him. His stamina dropped nearly to zero and only pure will kept him from collapsing into the lumpy pool behind him. Through all of this torment, Richter had to stare at the debuff Food Poisoning that had appeared during the first phase. The scorpions had found a way to enact revenge from beyond the grave!

  When the monsters’ retribution had finally passed, the chaos lord stood upright on weak legs. A corner of the cave wall was fractured and bloody from the death grip he’d kept on it throughout his lamentations. The only saving grace was that he had managed to shed himself of his scant rags and items before the tragic scene had played itself out. They lay in a pile not far from where he tottered.

  Richter listed from side to side, exhausted and in pain, but also with a relieved smile on his face. He had survived. His gaze fell back on his only possessions and the nearly ruined clothes. He had even saved his only protection from the elements and the rough stone that continually scraped his skin free. At last the nightmare was over.

  That was when a horrible thought occurred to him. His eyes went from his clothes to his hand and back to his clothes again.

  How was he going to wipe?

  CHAPTER 38 – Day 152 – Juren 3, 0 AoC

  Richter leaned his face into the small stream. The cool water felt both good and painful sliding down his throat. It was a bit undignified drinking with duck lips, but he just couldn’t bring himself to swallow anything from out of his hands. All he’d had strength for after his “episode” was to bathe his makeshift bathroom with his Weak Flame spell. The stench had ratcheted up while it had burned, but at least it had burned. Even though magical flames had bathed his hands, he still couldn’t stand the idea of them touching his lips.

  Not yet.

  His golem was sitting at the tunnel entrance again, doing its best impression of a boulder. Not only would it attack any enemies that came near, but it would also hide the entrance of the narrow tunnel. Of course, that didn’t mean much to monsters that lived in perpetual darkness, but it made Richter feel better.

  The scorpion lair had been a godsend. If it wasn’t for the fact that his bum had just birthed a demon, it might have been a great place to wait out the curse. He couldn’t trust his food stores anymore though. Between his body’s accelerated needs and the fact that he’d just lost a quarter of his biomass, he needed to hunt ASAP.

  For now, the worst of the food poisoning had passed. He was hydrated and in a safe place. All he really wanted to do was sleep until the last of the residual stomach tremors dissipated. And if he was going to be out of his head anyway, it seemed like the perfect time to absorb some knowledge. It was time to become a granite breaker.

  Richter lay on the floor of the small cave and made himself as comfortable as possible. If he passed out, at least now he was already lying down. He even pointed his feet at the stream, making it less likely that he’d roll into it if he thrashed around while he was unconscious. Then, ready as he was going to be, he focused on his interface and a prompt appeared.

  Do you wish to absorb the Novice rank knowledge of the Expertise Book: Granite Breaker? Yes or No?

  He chose “Yes.”

  His vision zoomed in on the word. The chaos lord had time to absently say, “Oh,” before blackness overtook his vision.

  Light slowly came back to his world. A woman called out to him in the rolling brogue of the mountain dwarves, “Ach, he be too young, Laird.”

  “He be my firstborn, Aielas. One day, he will lead the clan. If ye want him to command the loyalty of the Stone Wardens, he must learn to break granite.”

  “Do na be telling me what ay already know, Laird!” came the waspish reply. “The seed may have fallen from yer wandering cock, banished gods forgive me, but the bairn grew in my fertile soil! Ay’ll not be having ye tell me what ma own needs. He be only four years of age. It be too early!”

  Laird was about to argue again. He had known it was going to be a fight getting his son away from Aielas. It was that very fire that had attracted him to her five years before. Truth be told, when he was in his cups he still came knocking at her door. If she had ever met him with anything sweeter than a knock on his head with her skillet, they might have more than one child
.

  Before the dwarf could speak though, Richter felt himself stand. While the man and woman had been arguing, the body his consciousness was inhabiting had been quietly observing through a thin curtain. He walked into the outer room and spoke in a young, but determined voice, “Ay am ready to protect our people, mama.” Richter’s tiny fists clenched resolutely. It was only then that he realized how small his body was. Even accounting for the short stature of dwarves, the two adults looked like giants to him.

  Richter marveled at the inner strength he was feeling. He had met several men and women of strong will since coming to The Land. To “feel” it in this small child, however, was humbling. The bairn looked up at his father, “Ay’m ready, da.”

  His mother turned her fierce gaze on him. To the child it probably looked like hell was about to descend, but Richter’s adult view saw the fragility behind the fire. She waved her hand in defeat and turned away, the only acquiescence she would give. Laird led his son outside, a heavy, callused hand resting on the lad’s shoulder. As they walked away, a single tear traced down Aielas’s cheek. She had faith in her son, and in Laird, banished gods help her, but Granite Breaker training killed children every year. Even if all went well, she would not see her child again for several years.

  After leaving the house, what Richter was seeing skipped ahead several times. First, he went to his father’s house, a much larger dwelling. From the reactions of other dwarves, Laird was in a position of authority. The boy was outfitted with furs and led away with about a dozen other young boys and girls. He was the youngest by at least a couple of years. All the children were placed on war boars, with one of the clan’s warriors guiding each beast. With no talking, they left the mountain village and the only world Richter’s host had ever known.

  The next scene was of a thunderstorm above a mountain pass. A sound like boulders grinding echoed through the ravine before a wall of dark water stampeded toward the group of warriors and children. Hurriedly, but with no panic, the warriors took out their maces and formed a line. As one, the weapons were wreathed with a green glow. Seconds before the water hit, the warriors struck the ground with a shouted, “Huu’wah!”