Chapter 352: Run |
“I don’t have time to explain most of this,” Xim said hurriedly. “Varrin, take us to the platforms as soon as we’re in. Everyone, remember the rules for layerwalking the wilds.”
Gracorvus flew back to me just before the light outside the perimeter of Xim’s dreamscape faded, taking the cacophonous sounds of Anesis along with it. It felt like the world had been a stage play and the theatre had suddenly lost power, killing the spotlights and sound system. We stood in a column of crimson light, a pillar of Third Layer reality amidst a sea of nothing.
Xim channeled healing into Varrin to seal up his wounds. I was distracted by the fingers still crawling up from beneath the ink of Xim’s sigil. There was a distant thudding noise and Xim gritted her teeth in pain as the edges of our light shook. Perspiration had started beading along her forehead. It was difficult to tell in the light, but it looked like she was sweating blood.
The fingers started scrabbling at the tread of my boots. A dark shape tried to invade the light at our backs.
Varrin looked us over, then turned to orient himself in the direction of the Labyrinth’s platforms. Another thud caused Xim to stagger, and I reached out to steady her with my free hand, the other still holding Etja over my shoulder. Xim stumbled forward with my support, and the Eye followed her passage, the column of reality moving with the cleric.
We picked up the pace, our short journey punctuated by the distant thud growing ever closer. Blood began seeping from all of Xim’s orifices. Her thick combat robes were slick with it, her chainmail overcoat dripping. The terrain shifted from finger-laced dirt to tall grass that waggled like snakes preparing to strike. Beneath it all was a mesh of metal grating that clanked as we walked, squeaking and rattling like it was barely holding together.
Between the grass and beneath the grate, I could make out a glint off the surface of water, just below us. After looking for a few seconds I noticed a pair of eyes, wide open and with the whites starkly contrasting to the underground gloom. They’d been there the entire time, moving with us as we walked, and it startled me that I’d stared downward for so long and hadn’t noticed. A scent like antiseptic and old age teased at my nose, pulling at some memory I couldn’t quite bring to mind. It fought with the smell of rot left behind by the fungus that had grown out of me and died, leaving a film on my skin and in my beard.
There were faint voices calling out for Varrin, but the big guy ignored them, showing no reaction. A wordless shout came from just beyond the edge of the light. I flinched and Varrin turned his head, but Xim marched onward, expression haggard and determined. The thudding was a persistent beat that rattled her teeth.
A woman joined us, wearing a simple green dress and bone jewelry. Her hair flowed like molten blood, and I nodded at the matronly Sam’lia.
I looked from the goddess, speaking like a disappointed mother, to Xim, who continued to ignore everything and follow behind Varrin. The big guy looked back at the deity, then to Xim, then followed her example and ignored Sam’lia.
I thought back on the talk Xim’s father, Drel’Gethed, had given us years beforehand. It was just before we layerwalked in the Ravvenblaq mountains, unknowingly walking towards Orexis rather than away as we did now. I was certain those were the rules Xim had been referring to. Most importantly, there was one that this manifestation of Sam’lia had just broken.
Do not speak.
If someone speaks to you, they are not real.
I turned away from the false goddess, who continued to monologue about how broken-hearted she was that she’d need to punish Xim and I. She grew more fervent as we ignored her, threatening to excommunicate the cleric for the offense. While the thing had sounded like the goddess at first, as it came unglued its characterization grew farther and farther from what I recognized.
Aside from the rules on speaking, there were a few others.
The fewer the people the more unstable the passage.
Follow the guiding light.
Ignore the terrors in the landscape.
The Xor’Drels will soothe the journey.
Back then we’d been a dozen. Now we were five, counting Grotto hidden beneath a shield on my back, although I didn’t know if Etja made a difference in her current state. That meant things would theoretically be stranger than in our prior walk, but we were vastly more experienced now.
As for a light, all I saw was the one created by the Eye, which I hoped was good enough. The landscape was small, yet the intimacy of the space somehow made it more gruesome than that first walk had been; like everything was too close, standing just behind me and out of sight.
Xim was doing her best, but I didn’t know if she could ‘soothe’ the journey in her current state. She seemed more focused on making the journey exist in the first place. As for me, the role I’d discovered for myself in that first walk was to calm my own perception of the third, then use Reveal to share that calmed version with the others. That created a feedback loop, drawing everyone’s influence on the mindscape into a more pleasant consensus.
While that was all good in theory, the stretch of silent, slow movement was letting the recent traumas rush to the forefront of my mind. That box I was keeping them in hard started to crack. Still, I did my best, recognizing that I was ultimately more in control than it seemed. How much it helped, I didn’t know, but the journey continued without too much insanity creeping in. For now.
The branches of a tree entered our ring of light, although the trunk was out of sight. It was bare of leaves and the ends of the branches turned to follow us. One of them opened, becoming a mouth and whispering to me, “Have you noticed there are no animals?”
Something else whispered by my neck. “It’s a forest. Where are all the animals?”
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Another thud, Xim stumbled, and our ring of light became smaller. Varrin began walking faster, but Xim’s eyes had rolled back and she was barely keeping on her feet. I was forced to squat and pick her up, throwing her awkwardly over my other shoulder. She was heavier than she should have been.
As my arm burned from the strain and I fought against leaning to the left, I realized she must have been 10 times heavier at least. Each thud made her even heavier while the ring of light continued to shrink. Soon enough, I was doing my best to avoid stepping on the backs of Varrin’s feet while we ran.
Finally, we stopped at a dark pit, so deep the bottom was well out of sight. Varrin turned to me, and I got the sense that this was the Third Layer’s interpretation of the wormhole platform. Now we just needed to transition back to the First Layer.
I looked over at Xim, who was a spasming wreck. I looked back at Varrin, uncertain of what to do. My mind chased its own tail in panic for a few seconds, the thudding growing louder, Xim becoming heavier, the light shrinking until Varrin and I were chest to chest. Then I remembered that Xim had needed my revelation of the Eye to accomplish this.
I ended Reveal, withdrawing from her soul and cutting off our connection. The Eye overhead snapped shut, and the world outside the ring of light appeared, coming into view like the entire thing had been hiding in my blind spot. The platform was directly ahead of me.
Varrin had his arms out and I shrugged an unconscious Xim into them, then stepped onto the circle of stone. I immediately hit accept, not even checking to make sure this was the right Dungeon. I trusted Varrin, who was gone already, and there was no time to debate it regardless.
I looked back the way we came, seeing a wave of Anesis flooding towards us, tearing into everything the mass of divine spawn encountered and turning it into more of her. Orexis was a streak through the air and came to a stop right in front of me. He opened his abyssal mouth in a muted scream and brought all six of his hands down to grab onto me, but they stopped at the edge of the circle. I was already in a bubble of compressed space. That didn’t stop the avatar, who squeezed, thrusting his hands into the distortion. I could sense how the appendages were being ruined, looking like they were being crushed but in fact being stretched out for miles. Just as the tips of his fingers began to invade the platform, the connection to the next Dungeon finished coalescing and I rushed down the corridor.
Once through, I turned to see that Orexis had gotten his head through the spatial bubble. His mouth opened wide, hypnotic spirals tugging at my atoms, but his pull ended as the tunnel collapsed.
I took a moment to breathe and collect myself, then figured out where I was. We were in the middle of the bullet-coconut-tree-maze part of the Heavy Armor Dungeon. I closed my eyes and felt around for a portal destination, preferably one that was right by the exits, although the size of this place made that unlikely to be within my range. After rooting around for a bit, I discovered the edge of the zone that abutted the inertia realignment challenge. It was two miles away.
I opened my eyes and looked at the thick growth of trees surrounding us. None of the natural catapults had attacked us yet, which I was grateful for given how exposed Etja was. I decided moving normally between the crowded trunks would be too slow. I didn’t know if this platform had a cooldown before it could be used again, and a quick check showed me that I couldn’t activate it from this direction, not that I wanted to. I also didn’t know whether it would activate for an avatar at all. Orexis and Anesis certainly hadn’t used traditional Labyrinth movement to reach us initially, instead coming down from the warped sky.
I couldn’t bulldoze through the trees like Guar had earlier. Shortcut had a one second cooldown when using it normally, meaning it would take me about twenty seconds to portal through to the edge. Alternatively, I could supercharge Shortcut to get us the whole distance instantly. I decided to do that, even though it would put the spell on a 12-minute cooldown. The inertia challenge was too big for me to bypass with my teleport, so we’d have time for the cooldown to reset while we worked our way through that area.
I cast Shortcut, leaving us on the very edge of the inertia zone, careful not to go too far and get blended. I then looked at the unconscious Etja and addressed the elephant in the room.
“How the fuck are we getting her through here?”
“I have a solution,” Grotto answered.
The Core floated from my back and directed me to summon one of his golems from my inventory. The specific one he’d asked for wore a heavy armor set he’d plundered from the fake King’s Guard back when they’d help kidnap the king for Hysteria. All of Grotto’s golems were modeled after Etja, and he’d already modified this armor to fit her form.
Grotto floated over the mage and began telekinetically removing her Zng-Prismatite composite armor and replacing it with the set from his golem. I turned to keep an eye out for trouble while this happened, and after about a minute, Etja was suited up.
“Right,” I said, seeing the mage in the more robust protective gear. “How does this help?”
Grotto gave me some octo side-eye as he waved a feeler, using Animate Object on her armor and bringing it to life. The armor piloted itself up and onto its feet, Etja bound tightly inside of it. Grotto then floated over to attach himself to her back and covered himself with a shield. The pair of them walked off towards the spiralling trees, moving as naturally as a person who wasn’t in an artificially induced catatonic state.
I followed along, navigating the area’s weird vectors from a distance to give the pair their space while Grotto manually controlled Etja’s armor to do the same. I was occasionally hit with a wave of psychic discomfort as Grotto pushed them hard, trying to get through the area as fast as possible at the expense of some twisted limbs. I did the same, although Grotto slowed down to be more delicate during the length that attacked us with the deadly fruits, Etja being incapable of enduring the kind of harm that plowing through those would cause.
Behind us, the forest exploded like a pent-up volcano had erupted below ground. Light and fire tore through what remained, and Anesis came trundling out from the destruction. She was miles away, just barely visible in the distance as we went over a mountainous rise. Her smoking head turned towards us immediately, and she rushed to follow.
The berserk avatar didn’t seem to consider the inertial distortions, and her entire body began twisting from her brute force attempt to make it through the place. Her limbs broke and tore, pouring out gallons of dark blood, but were never fully severed. She trumpeted in rage and pain as she crawled like a demon across the ground, arms and legs breaking over and over as she gained speed.
By the time we crested the rise and lost sight of Anesis, she was already moving faster than we were. For the next few minutes I heard her roars growing closer, interspersed by the thunderous release of devastating explosions. By the time we were out of the zone, I could see her smashing through the trees, less than a mile away.
I activated Therianthropy, finally in a spot where it would help, and swooped over to grab Etja into a princess carry, Grotto still at her back. I blasted through the treeline and found the Blunt platform, quickly activating it.
In the few seconds it took to gather space and warm up, Anesis tumbled out from the inertia puzzle, body twisted, although she showed no sign that the storm of fruit projectiles had even scratched her. Her form snapped back into place, realigning itself with a series of gruesome cracks and wet, meaty grinding sounds. The noises arrived several seconds after as they had to cross the miles of space being compressed around us.
It took only a moment for her to recover, then she disappeared, reappearing right outside the spatial warping and kicking up wind like she’d summoned a hurricane. She trumpeted and bellowed while pounding its edges with her arms, sounds divorced from her actions by an ever increasing delay. She struggled to yank them out, losing chunks to the warped space with every hit. By the time she brought that limb back down the area had bowed outward like a dent that was getting suctioned back into place, fully restoring it.
A beam of orange death came from behind her and threaded past her arms to strike the bubble.
“Oh, fuck,” I said as the attack came to a crawl at the edge of the bubble, angled downward towards the platform’s runework. I pulled out Gracorvus, crouched, and held it up to intercept the beam making its way through like dripping molasses. The ray fired out, striking my shield, applying an ungodly amount of force to the indestructible item and forcing me to use Gravity Anchor to stay in place. The beam split and scattered into the sides of the bubble, the laser-like offshoots crawling their way back out before shooting off into the forest, passing through trees as easily as the air.
The wormhole finished forming and we backed away, leaving the avatars behind again.