Chapter 353: The Interrex |
We rushed across the destroyed Blunt Dungeon towards the Animal Husbandry platform. I scrambled to activate it as soon as my foot touched its surface.
Error! You do not possess the Animal Husbandry intrinsic skill. This connection can only be activated by–
I skipped the rest of the message. “Grotto!” I said, and the Core activated the thing himself. Space warped and we managed to make the transition before the avatars showed up again. Hopefully not seeing where we went would slow them down even more, although they seemed to have a way to track Etja directly. Still, I could tell that this platform had taken us even farther than the others, plunging us deep into the heart of the forest. With luck, the distance would help.
I spun on the platform to take in the new environment. It was even darker here, the storm-covered skies completely blocked by a canopy that was even farther overhead than I’d come to expect. The area was filled with trees the size of skyscrapers, putting redwoods to shame with their city-block-sized trunks.
Their long, heavy branches were filled with a network of clumpy masses the size of houses, looking like wood composite formed into lumpy, rounded shapes. Some type of goo had dripped between the layers and hardened, like they were held together by too much wood glue. Braided vines stretched between them, the rudimentary rope showing that whatever had made them had some kind of intelligence. As I looked closer I saw that one side of each mass had a grouping of large holes in it.
In the end, I decided they looked like an awful mix between wasp nest and spider monkey habitat, and whatever kind of things lived inside them, they were much larger than either of those things should have been. In a perfect world I would have watched and waited before I moved, making sure the nests weren’t filled with hyperactive, rage-filled simian insects. We didn’t have time for that, so I deferred to my expert.
“Grotto, any idea what we’re dealing with here?” I thought to him. We could hold a psychic conversation without triggering any of the Littan countermeasures since there weren’t any Littans involved. I’d been starting to get annoyed that my familiar hadn’t grabbed a psychic signature from Earworm, but no one had access to the sergeant’s network currently so it didn’t really matter. I wanted to ask him more about his reasoning for that, but now wasn’t the time.
[It looks similar to a Vespa Bifacia nest,] he replied,[meaning two-faced hornets, but this would be the largest colony I have seen. It is unusual for them to gather in such numbers, however, and the hornets do not have the intellect for creating rope. It could be a divergent species or something else entirely.]
“Think anybody’s home? I’m not picking up any souls, but something about this environment screams ‘Stealth’ to me.”
“They hunt in packs like that?”
[No, and there is always a group at the nest. At the very least there would be an eggkeeper.]
“Great. How strong are they?”
[Grade 6, but that is likely irrelevant. I expect anything this deep into the forest to present a challenge if we are swarmed.]
“Fair enough.”
I made the executive decision to keep moving. Our psychic conversation was many times faster than speech, but I was eager to stay mobile. I stepped off of the platform and spent one second waiting for a swarm to hit us. When nothing came, I started walking, moving into a quick runup and taking flight at full speed. Nothing came after us, and my mind ruminated on the whispers I’d heard in the Third Layer: “Where are all the animals?”
At first I’d thought it was referring to the Third Layer itself, to which the answer could be anything. Now I wondered if my mind had taken a low-level anxiety I’d been feeling and imprinted it onto our layerwalk. Ever since we’d been swarmed by the Charl-infected creatures back at the Littan encampments, the wildlife had been sparse. Since entering the Labyrinth, it had been absent entirely.
It was possible the System-controlled environment corralled the creatures and managed where they appeared, but we were now in a Dungeon that was literally focused on Animal Husbandry. After several minutes of flight there were still no animals, making me think there was something else going on. I was really hoping it didn’t involve Charl, but the United was everywhere. I wasn’t getting my hopes up.
As we flew, the forest continued to be eerily still. We passed countless more of the vine-connected nests, and started encountering larger structures made from the wood composite. These were surrounded by wide lanes filled with the ropes. I thought of the area as some sort of city center for the absent creatures, making me feel like we were swooping through a primitive society that had just undergone some kind of apocalypse.
Eventually, a sound joined the otherwise lonely rush of air and leaves disturbed by our flight. A thumping noise came from far off, hitting at quick, regular intervals. After listening to it for a minute, I thought it sounded a lot like a beat, kind of like a concert happening at an open-top arena from a few miles away. Having no other point of reference to follow, Grotto and I decided to head in that direction. As we drew nearer, it became obvious that it was music. Once I could identify what music it was, I realized there could only be one source.
Louder and louder, the music rose. Once it was a hair shy of being painful, I saw distant movement through the trees. It looked like an entire mountain was covered in something. I flew higher as we approached, trying to get a better angle on what I was looking at while still keeping well below the canopy of the gigantic trees.
What I saw was a swarm of thousands of giant wasps, their heads bearing two faces in a more literal expression of the name ‘two-faced hornets’ than I’d been expecting. Each face was like a baboon’s, lips peeled back in a furious display of fangs and dripping venom. Their bodies were covered in fur despite their insectoid shapes, with wiry arms ending in humanoid hands. They bit and thrust stingers into whatever they were crawling around on. It was completely covered, but by its size and shape it looked like the trunk of another one of the massive trees. Then I followed the trunk upward.
It was a leg.
The bottom of the enormous creature’s belly sloped down to my right, and as I watched, an enormous scaly tail swept across the flesh, running down its leg and splattering hundreds of the hornets. At first I thought to back off, seeing as this was about the right size to be another Hierophant, but I stopped myself for two reasons.
One, the fucking music, which could literally be originating from only one source. It was coming from above, presumably on top of this thing. Two, the soul of this creature was familiar.
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I swept upward, cautiously rising while staying clear of the hornets. Despite whatever evidence of their intelligence we’d passed, the things were mindlessly attacking a monster that was annihilating them with casual swipes of its tail, making no attempt to dodge or use any tactics. I eventually found the top of the leg, with the creature’s head rising up through the trees and out of view. Another large reptilian monster ran around on top of it, ripping, clawing, and chewing more hornets into oblivion.
Whatever this thing was, it was big enough for Nottagator to use its back like a battle arena.
Notty saw me and seemed to give me a brief nod with her wide face, running her tongue over her flat, too-human teeth. Another fifty feet up was the source of the music: Cloaky, who flared out in time with each pump of the bass drum while holding Joma aloft above the carnage. The furry Iskarim had her arms crossed, scowling down at the mess below.
I flew up and joined them, finding that there was a small bubble around them where the music was merely ‘dance-club’ loud and not ‘right next to the speaker stack at a heavy metal concert’ loud.
Before I could say anything, Grotto shouted over the noise.
“What is this sonic madness?!”
Cloaky formed a sock puppet head and whipped it around to the Core.
“It’s Britney, bitch!”
Cloaky bobbed his head to the music, and I glanced at Grotto, seeing him starting to twitch his tentacles to the beat. “Was this one pilfered from Arlo’s memories as well?!”
“Yeah!”
“I believe I can manufacture some recording equipment! That way we can catalogue these compositions! For… posterity!”
“Hell yeah, bro!”
I ignored the bait and addressed Joma. “Avatars on my tail! I may have lost them but I wouldn’t count on it!”
The mini-yeti turned and looked at Etja over my shoulder, then floated to put a hand on her back, looking concerned. “What happened to her?” she shouted over the music. “Is she okay?”
“I think Orexis did something to her, but I don’t know what! If me and Grotto can get somewhere safe we can take a closer look! If it’s a Golemancy thing we might be able to undo it!” I gestured down at the slaughter going on, which was definitely not any sort of breeding or raising of friendly critters. “Wasn’t this an Animal Husbandry Dungeon?”
Joma let her hand drop from Etja and looked back down. Her scowl deepened. “It’s totally fucked!” she replied. “They won’t respond to anything I try, and their social behaviors are all abnormal!”
“What’s wrong with their behaviors, aside from the berserker frenzy?”
“The Berserk is Cloaky’s fault,” she said, then titled her head side to side in thought. “He made the right call!” she added begrudgingly. “This Dungeon is at least the size of a small country! I found evidence of three different habitats with their own dominant species so far, but all of them abandoned their territory for no apparent reason! We followed their trail southeast, deeper towards the center of the forest, where we ran into Tomomaru! That’s his iguana down there!”
I looked down at the thing, so large that only its back was within my line of sight between the hundred-story trees. “That’s a big iguana!”
Joma ignored my comment despite its insights. “Tomomaru had been following his own trail from a fourth and fifth species to our west!” she said. “Before we could get very far together we got ambushed by thousands of these hornets!”
“Where is he? I should tell him about the avatars, and I should probably keep moving after!”
Just then there was a puff of smoke and Specialist Rufio appeared from within it, hanging from a length of rope that was affixed to thin air. Enough time had passed that the fur of the Littan’s eyebrow had grown back.
“I will let him know!” he shouted. The man let go of the rope and disappeared into another puff of smoke as he fell. The rope hung there for a few seconds before turning to mist and blowing away.
I frowned. “He doesn’t seem like the Animal Husbandry type!”
Joma shrugged. “He just showed up not too long ago! Says he has a skill called Objective Tracker that’ll take us right to an obelisk! Tomomaru wanted to clear out some of the bugs before we got moving again in case we’re hit by another swarm on the way!”
“Should we help?” I asked.
“Go ahead if you want to! I’m not getting stung!” Her fur rose and the little woman suppressed a shiver.
There was a rumble loud enough to cut through the music. We all looked in the direction I’d come from. The air clapped with a thunderous explosion. Tomomaru rose from the swarm below, casually pulling the man-sized hornets from his body and twisting their heads off. He stopped beside us, staring silently into the distance.
After another explosion, this one obviously closer, he turned to Cloaky.
“Please stop shouting out our location!” he said.
The music came to an abrupt halt. “Sorry!” said Cloaky.
Tomomaru turned to me next. “Orexis and Anesis,” he said. “That’s Yearning and Release?”
“Those are the ones,” I replied.
“We have a good profile on Yearning. Partially because of your encounter with him in Hiward, but also because he is surprisingly safe to be around if you aren’t interfering with whatever it is he’s after. Makes it easy to embed a spy.”
I frowned as I considered what Tomomaru was saying. I’d seen one Littan working with Orexis before, the pipe smoking lady with a wide-brimmed hat. The one who’d helped the crime lord Typhoon kidnap Xim and Nuralie back in the day. “Was… was Nasira working for you?” I asked.
“No comment,” said Tomomaru. “Anesis makes Orexis too dangerous, though. She’s unpredictable. We don’t know nearly as much about her power set, either.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“One of my standing orders is to gather information on her. Or, to gather information on any avatars we find, really. It’s part of why we were willing to risk coming in here.”
“You’re supposed to gather info yourself? As in, personally?” I shifted Etja on my shoulder, getting ready to bust ass out of there. “That’s more or less a suicide mission.”
Another rumble, even closer. Tomomaru took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“The purpose of strength is to bear the weight that others cannot,” he said. “My job is to carry the heaviest burdens.”
As Tomomaru spoke, his body slowly grew, his armor creaking as it grew along with him. The man broke ten feet in height, then twenty. Tomomaru’s oddly compressed soul unfolded, its hues changing as it expanded out to encompass a much vaster potency than a Level 26 Gold. His Copper levels turned to Silver, his Silver to Gold, and his Gold to Platinum. When it finished, the man was Level 52.
While his level had doubled, the power pouring off of him had grown by significantly more than that. Purple streaks erupted in his soul as the evidence of Special Delves popped into being with such spiritual force that it nearly bore a physical presence.
Tomomaru, now a towering figure both in body and spirit, looked down at me. “Take your friend and go,” he rumbled. “I will keep the avatars busy for a while.”
He dropped down to land lightly on his iguana, and I could now see the pair shared an intertwining of souls that went as deep as the one I shared with Grotto. Tomomaru kept growing until he was large enough to straddle the gigantic creature and with a flex of his soul, all the wasps still attacking it died.
He gave his familiar a pat on the neck and the beast turned towards the approaching avatars. Its eyes narrowed right before both it and Tomomaru disappeared. However, the slightest smidge of their souls remained in my Sight, familiar in how it slightly smudged my spiritual vision. The move felt like they were giving me a wink as they stalked off through the forest, since the faint soul impression disappeared soon after, leaving the stadium-sized duo completely silent and invisible.
“Yara’s tits!” shouted Rufio, right in my ear. I flinched and turned to see the specialist hanging upside down from his impossible rope, close enough that I worried he was getting ready to give me a Spiderman kiss. “Tomomaru’s one of the interreges!”
He looked around at the rest of us, who obviously had no idea what he was talking about. “He’s been an interrex this whole time!” he said, holding onto the rope with his legs and shaking his arms at us as though the gestures could impart context. “They rule when the empress cannot!” Not getting the reaction he wanted, he crossed his arms in frustration.
“We need to move,” I said. “Now.”
“Right, right,” Rufio said, gesturing south. “Follow me.”
The Littan kicked off from his rope, which stayed steady as a steel beam, caught another rope that appeared from nowhere, and started swinging away like a jet speed Tarzan.