Chapter 351: Trauma Box |
There was a very brief temptation to open the Closet portal right in front of Orexis and just, you know, see what happened. The idea had a low chance of helping us out of this situation–which was better than no chance–but it was an ejector seat duct taped to a barrel of gasoline with a dynamite trigger. Being in the middle of a fight between an ancient dragon and two godly avatars was less a way to escape the grove as it was a way to escape our mortal coil. Dropping everyone who was with me into that kind of a showdown seemed like it’d be an unkindness.
I also didn’t want to risk exposing Closetland to the avatars. I had no doubts that they’d follow us through if I tried using a portal to get Etja out of there. While I was quick on the draw with opening and closing those things, I could barely keep up with a speedy United, much less an avatar.
For those reasons, among others, I did not open a portal right in Orexis’s face.
But I was keeping the option open.
“This reunion is not what I envisioned,” said Orexis. “Etja has been kept from us, our search for her overtaken by greater needs for years. Finally, we arrive to reclaim her, and my joy is tainted by the interference of vermin.”
Orexis flicked a hand towards Guar, whose eyes still burned golden. The Littan was yanked towards the avatar, and I realized mid-flight that the rags worn by both of the godly twins had begun to smoke beneath the light of the Littan’s gaze. Orexis caught the hefty soldier in one of his large upper hands. Guar struggled against the grip, but it was futile. He bared his teeth, and as his glare caused steam to rise from Orexis’s head, the avatar breathed.
Guar’s flesh shrank down to his bones as it dissolved into mist. The bones themselves liquefied, and all of it streamed into the abyss of the avatar’s mouth. It happened so fast that several of us didn’t register it until Guar’s armor clattered to the ground, empty.
The feeling left behind from seeing him murdered was ice in my chest. My mind put the horror away for later, tucked into a box that saw more use than it should.
Tavio’s expression morphed into a grim scowl, but he made no outwardly hostile movements. “Back,” he ordered, strapping on his helmet and moving to help Kai stumble away from the threat. The major’s leg had fully regrown, but hadn’t been armored up again. The blast from Anesis’s landing had left it a freshly twisted wreck.
“Lieutenant Madel,” Tavio said sharply, “withdraw.”
Her head moved upward to take in Orexis, then Anesis behind him. Her hands relaxed and she floated into a slow retreat. The three Littans pulled back with the caution one might take with a wild animal, doing their best not to startle the godlings or draw attention to themselves.
Neither Orexis nor Anesis seemed to notice or care. The former stretched, rising to his full height just shy of his sister’s. All six of his limbs were revealed as he reached towards the sky, groaning like the meal he’d made of Guar had delivered him some kind of ecstasy. Anesis watched her brother, enraptured.
Tavio looked over at me while the twin lovers had their moment, his expression dark but inquisitive. We both knew there was no fight here. It was run or die, but Tavio wouldn’t hang my party out to dry. I waved him off, telling him to take his chance to escape with his people while they still had one.
“I saw three platforms,” Varrin said, shrugging debris from his shoulders as he approached, eyes fixed on the avatars. “Heavy Armor is the only one you have a skill for, although there are likely more. I had less than a minute to look.”
“That’s backtracking.”
“It is fine,” Grotto said, voice low. “Heavy Armor leads to Blunt and Blunt leads to Animal Husbandry. I have that intrinsic, which means you should be able to use it as well.”
“Then we scatter?”
“I don’t think we can outrun them,” he replied.
Xim shook dirt from her hair as she walked up on my other side. “I fucking liked Guar,” she said, anger obscuring her sorrow like a thin coat of paint. She placed a hand onto Etja’s back, then fixed up a few scrapes from our tumble. “Where do the other two platforms lead, Varrin?”
“Athletics and Investigation.”
“I can help us get there,” she said, ignoring the avatars to pull out a pouch filled with ritual supplies. “Hopefully this doesn’t make things worse.” The cleric started pouring ink out onto the ground with one hand while scattering what looked like flakes of dried blood with the other.
The coppery tang of Xim’s work pricked at my skin. The small of my back itched.
“Did anyone see what happened to Ember?” I asked.
Orexis came down and a ripple of power bounced back and forth between his soul and his sister’s. The depths of Anesis’s hollow face glowed with a pale, dirty yellow light. An arc of lightning crawled out from her skull and skittered through the cloud of smoke she constantly wept. She twitched and turned to the Littans who were still in a slow withdrawal. They tensed.
“More plots and plans,” said Orexis, “whispered in the open.” He snapped his fingers and Anesis turned her head towards us. Her focus was accompanied by a low, electronic hum. I glanced down at what Xim was working on, realizing it was an abbreviated version of her ritual to invoke the Eye of Sam’lia. Fingers crawled from the ground like worms beneath the paint of her squirming sigil.
There was an incredible pull on my body as Orexis held one of his smaller hands out towards me, finger sparkling as he used Siphon. It was the same gravity spell that Etja used, and one I was ready for after seeing what happened to Guar. I counteracted the pull using Gravity Anchor, a skill I’d forged while using Siphon as a model.
Orexis’s massive head tilted to one side in curiosity. The finger moved a few degrees upward to target Etja instead, and I noticed that the avatar’s spell was ordinary. It lacked something I’d expected to be there. There was no spark of divinity like that held by my portals and teleports. I held onto Etja tightly and used Dispel to interrupt his cast, still finding myself surprised when it worked. Orexis let out a frustrated snort that kicked up dust for a hundred feet around him.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Sync us with Reveal like you did when we dealt with the Hysteria fragment,” Xim said as I played invisible tug-of-war with a pseudo-god.
Words floated from my tongue like dandelion seeds. “We were in your dreamscape for that.” Anesis twitched as another arc of electricity crackled out of her face and she dug her large forelimbs into the dirt.
“Patience, sister,” said Orexis. “We must take care in extracting our daughter. I do not wish for her to be damaged.”
A sizzling beam of orange light erupted from his hand. It parted around my Shielding, carving through the dirt to either side of me like an orbital laser, forcing Varrin to duck aside. That lasted for less than half a second before my Shielding was annihilated and the beam punched a hole through my chest. The mass of tissue that was kind-of sort-of acting like my heart was instantly obliterated. Orexis stopped the beam and watched for my reaction. I looked down at the hole to see it closing up as Xim healed me. The beams had missed her ritual circle.
“We’re in my dreamscape right now,” she said, turning to me. I could see her brain through her head. Her heart beat in my ears and her stomach growled. “I don’t have time to invoke the Eye. I need to borrow it from you.”
The world around the three of us had the unsettling vibe of the Third Layer wilds, shifting unsteadily with my thoughts, none of which were happy at the moment. Still, it was only an echo of that madness. Outside of the summoned dreamscape, where the avatars were, reality was ordinary.
Orexis snarled and raised both of his smaller hands in my direction, several fingers lighting up. Varrin stepped forward in front of me and Xim, sword raised. Anesis raised her heavy arms and smashed them back down, causing her brother to stop and glare at her.
“If you must occupy yourself with something,” he said, “then kill the rats.”
As if Orexis’s words were a starting pistol, everyone kicked into gear and many things happened at once.
Anesis twisted back towards the Littans. They’d gradually picked up their pace and were now a fair distance away, deep into the Forest and hidden from view, but I could still see them with Soul-Sight. Madel carried Kai while ranging forward. Tavio hung back, shield raised to defend their retreat. They weren't nearly far enough away.
The electronic hum rose to a deafening pitch before a pale yellow beam erupted from the avatar’s face. The world flashed with blinding light and thunder battered the air. When the flare subsided, the forest between us and the Littans was uprooted and burning. Tavio’s shield had a melon-sized hole melted through it, the rest of it blackened. The devastation carried on behind him, the forest swept away along with Madel and Kai, who I’d lost track of in the chaos.
Tavio’s shield arm went limp, revealing a hole through the center of his chest the same size as the one through his shield. Anesis rumbled her way towards him like a giant, six-armed gorilla, the ground vibrating with every step. A field of golden wheat erupted around the Littan, which Anesis plowed through without slowing. An explosion of Divine light came from the center of the crop, scouring the rags the avatar wore, much the same as Guar’s light had.
Tavio emerged with his halberd held in both hands, chest restored and body invigorated with Sumrann’s power. He readied himself to receive the avatar’s charge but Anesis disappeared. There was a split second of hesitation from the Littan as he lost the monster. Anesis was already behind him, bringing all six of her arms to his back, waist, and legs. She had speed enough to kick up a storm of wind, but the avatar stopped its swing just as she brushed against the man’s armor. It looked almost gentle until the world became another flash of light and everything below Tavio’s shoulders was reduced to atoms and scattered.
Anesis released a trumpeting noise that rattled my teeth, smoke billowing out from her. Somehow, Tavio’s head and shoulders had only been thrown a couple hundred feet. My eyes widened when I realized what little remained of the Littan was still moving. The scraps of armor clinging to him turned to fluid like quicksilver, covering his mangled form, then pouring down to recreate his body from liquid metal. He climbed back to his feet, looking more like an unkillable android than a man.
Anesis bellowed in response, her rage scorching the air with the scent of ozone and ironworks. She charged forward. Tavio barely managed to bring up an arm that flattened out into a shield before Anesis walloped him with one of her mighty limbs. There was a gruesome sound of flesh pounding against metal, a wet grunt, and Tavio disappeared into the forest. Trees fell in the distance and a mushroom cloud of dirt rose to kiss the sky, miles distant.
The devastation from the avatar’s one-sided beat down had cleared out a hundred acres of forest, but the destruction didn’t end with broken trees and shattered rocks. The land began to thrash as the remains of every living thing the avatar’s power had touched began to pop and jerk, bouncing like a nest of infested popcorn. As the splintered remains of trunks and tree limbs broke apart, creatures poured out of them, their sizes ranging from humanoid down to being too small for me to make out clearly at a distance. Each one had a body like Anesis, six arms and a cavernous, smoking head. Where they differed was that they glowed with a scorching internal light, their bodies lit up from within to expose ropey veins and a madman’s idea of organs.
Orexis stalked towards us and waved a hand, assailing Varrin with Siphon to push him aside. I hit that with another Dispel while the big guy charged the avatar, and one of Orexis’s fingers glowed blue in response. My mind was suddenly muddled, and a new status popped up on my HUD.
Stupefied: You can no longer cast spells.
There was no timer on the debuff, which was worrying. Varrin met Orexis at the edge of Xim’s dreamscape as the avatar hit me with another spell, causing fungus to start growing out of my flesh. Thousands of stacks of Bleeding were negated by my immunity and thousands more stacks of Toxicity were reduced by my resistance. Xim’s dreamscape filled with cleansing fire, ridding me of some of the poison and healing me from the damage the remainder was doing.
Varrin’s clones had been spent on the United, and he hadn’t had time to recover them between battles, but he went after Orexis like a storm nonetheless. Orexis intercepted each strike with a single hand, using two fingers to catch and divert the blade. Varrin was dozens of times more powerful than he was when we’d first faced the avatar and yet was still woefully inadequate to fight the creature. However, that didn’t mean he was harmless. After a handful of attacks the avatar swapped hands, holding up the first to peer at it. The flesh of his two fingers had several deep cuts that wept dark blood.
“Odd,” said Orexis, before a spear appeared in Varrin’s gut.
One of the avatar’s lower hands had skewered the Ravvenblaq, driving the weapon down through his hip and into the ground. Orexis clamped down on Varrin’s wrist, halting his onslaught, then brought a third hand to bear, grabbing the man by his throat while he let out a ragged hiss of pain. Orexis turned Varrin’s head side to side, peering down at him as though to search his face, despite it being fully enclosed by his ravenskull helmet.
“Why do I feel myself in you?” he asked, empty eyes narrowing.
Varrin’s pained groan turned to a growl. “Because I’ve already killed you once,” he said. “Just a piece, but it was a start.”
“My specter,” said Orexis, sounding thoughtful. “It never returned, but I’d never considered you could have absorbed that speck of power. Perhaps if I consume you I can retrieve it.”
A chunk of the avatar’s head exploded, reduced to a dark liquid that sprayed across the ruined grove. Unbothered, he turned towards a still-standing group of trees, then waved a hand at it. Mushrooms bloomed to encompass the swath of vegetation, quickly turning to rot that collapsed, leaving nothing but foul soil behind. Another spear appeared, held in his second lower hand, and it swept aside a followup arrow from a different direction.
“Chalgoth,” Orexis spat as the missing flesh on his head bubbled up to reform. Varrin took the opportunity to flash out of the avatar’s grip as a ghostly beam of light. He reappeared in front of me and Xim, his glittering cloak billowing out to hold him aloft as his leg failed.
I ramped up Reveal, my presence flooding into Xim’s soul. We lifted her scepter aloft, and the storm overhead shrank into a violent orb that floated down to land atop her implement.
In its place, a single eye opened to gaze down upon us, the force of its presence peeling back the shuddering canopy.