Chapter 368: Wall of Meat |
On our way to the forest’s center we found Xim and Varrin in a skirmish. A herd of rhinoceros-sized creatures with thick hides covered in bulbous thorns were rampaging through the area. They were fast, despite weighing at least a few tons, and they used the succulent megaflora as platforms to launch and bounce off from.
One charged Varrin and the big guy stepped aside, still faster than his foes. He slashed at its back leg to hamper its movement, although he looked like he was sandbagging. When another ran at Xim, the cleric bashed it with her enormous spiked shield, proving that her own thorns were superior to the beast’s. A quick burst of flame followed, leaving the animal looking only lightly singed. It shook its head and chuffed, looking more confused than anything. Xim then used Infernal Cleanse on the one Varrin had hobbled, even healing the wound he’d made as she did so.
They were through the entire herd in short order, and while they weren’t exactly peaceful creatures once freed of Charl’s influence, they were at least smart enough to recognize a losing battle. They fled, moving at full speed in the opposite direction of where we were heading.
“Rehabilitating the wildlife?” I asked, landing next to Xim. She scanned my group, eyes lingering on Savant.
“Abducting another princess?” she asked in reply.
“No. Well, I honestly don’t know.” I turned to the Geulon shrouded in Etja’s spells. “Hey Savant, are you a princess?”
“I am not a princess nor am I any sort of princess analog, I grew up in Eschendur and rather than royalty we have clergy and people say we do things meritocratically but there’s more than enough nepotism to make that claim questionable but either way I can’t think of any measure by which I’d be considered a princess so no.”
She went on to start describing her life in the swamp and her position in the local social structures growing up. That included a shifting perspective that made things confusing, which I was pretty sure came from her having been two different people.
“Okay,” said Xim, “why have you abducted a young woman who isn’t a princess?”
“Disagree,” said Xim. “Being socially advantaged makes it way more likely that someone will end up meeting you. That means their chances of being kidnapped by you are also much higher.”
A different Guelon appeared beside us. “Why are we wasting time here?” asked Nuralie.
“Strategizing,” I said, once I was done being startled. “Savant is a United, she narrates everything she’s thinking, and one of her powers is True Sense. If she has any others I haven’t seen them. Otherwise she appears ordinary, with slightly more mana tolerance than your average person. She’s also fairly chill for somebody I thought was a member of an apocalypse cult.”
“How does this explain your decision to kidnap her?” asked Xim.
“I’m not–” I began, but Xim put her hands on her hips and gave me a doubtful look. “Fine, I accidentally cut off her arm, so I’ve taken on some degree of responsibility for her safety.”
“Accidentally? Wow. How did that happen?”
“Her teammate hit me with Berserk.”
“And it stuck?” Xim asked, incredulous. “Through all of your mental protections?”
“He hit me with a lot of other things at the same time. It was a mess, and the United aren’t playing by all the rules we’re used to.”
[We have approximately 8 minutes to exit the Labyrinth. Be more efficient with your discussion.]
“Right,” I said. “Go to the center, give the United a chance to surrender, then leave the Labyrinth by entering the Chasm. Use force if necessary.”
“Sounds good,” Xim replied. “Where’s Two of Crowns?”
[Ishi’s party is engaged with the enemy 26 miles east of us.]
“Okay,” I said, spreading my wings, “let’s go give them an assist.”
We took off. Varrin’s bedazzled cape glittered in defiance of the gloomy light as he soared next to Etja. Xim rode Gracorvus while Nuralie disappeared to run along the ground below us. She’d have no trouble keeping up on foot. In the very short time it took us to travel those 26 miles Shog caught up to us. With our friendly c’thon brood king by our side, we were rolling up to this fight with the full band. Everyone from Fortune’s Folly was fully assembled in one location for the first time in more than a year, and I was feeling pretty good about it.
Our single ride-along gave me some anxiety, but I didn’t let the feeling distract me. Her monologue was distracting enough on its own.
“This is a very intimidating group of people who are scary not only because they’re deadly and well-armed but also because they’re all so attractive,” Savant rambled, “and when something like that makes me nervous I like to think about how I know what all of you look like naked but none of you know what I look like naked which reduces the power disparity between us a little and, oh no, now that I’ve said that I know it isn’t true and that several of you do know what I look like naked because you’re so perceptive. This isn’t new information, it just didn’t matter until right now.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
I couldn’t tune Savant out since she made helpful observations here and there, it just required sifting through all the other stuff to find them.
The vegetation filling this area made it difficult to see ahead for any substantial distance, but the battle that Two of Crowns was in the midst of was still obvious from miles away. The destruction that had been wrought stretched well beyond their immediate surroundings. Titanic plants were reduced to slimy chunks, either detonated or rotted from within, the ground that was littered with fresh craters, and mangled animal remains were everywhere, to name a few not-so-subtle signs.
The fight was also a rolling wave of thunder coming from ahead of us, soon accompanied by flashes of light that peeked between the plants well before we could directly see what was going on. A psychic update from Ishi gave me the essentials of their situation, while Shog and Nuralie had plenty to say with their various sensory skills. Savant wasn’t directly participating, but she literally couldn’t stop herself from giving us some helpful information when she noticed it. With everything taken together, I had a good idea of what we were flying into. I slowed our advance to lay out our strategy.
“Okay, it sounds like Vaulty is playing King of the Hill to keep a perimeter clear of cancer man, but Two of Crowns doesn’t want to risk moving through Charl-infested areas. They’re trapped in place, so we’ll be doing a flanking thrust to enable a breakout. Etja, you’re the only person capable of keeping Savant from dying of mana toxicity. I’m putting you on a sniper team with Shog so you can hang back from this mess. Give us covering fire while we advance.”
“Aye, party leader, sir!” she replied with a jaunty salute.
“Shog, your priority is to spot threats and intercept anything coming Etja’s way. You’ve got the mobility to roam, but stay close enough to watch her back.”
“I welcome the challenge. Etja’s pursuers are mighty.”
“Right. If you see an avatar coming, grab Etja and Savant then retreat to my position.”
“Very well. The godlings will face our fury combined.”
“Xim, we’re all safest when fighting from a place that you’ve set on fire since it clears the area of Charl’s bullshit. So, set everything on fire.”
She looked at me with hope shining in her eyes. “Everything?”
“Middle of formation, burninating the entire countryside.”
The cleric grinned. “All shall be cleansed by the Dark Mother’s infernal judgment."
“Varrin, stay on the burning ground. Kill stuff that needs killing and is hard to kill.” The big guy grunted his acknowledgement. “As for me, I’ll protect our center, coordinate with Ishi, and reinforce where needed. We’re cutting through straight to Vaulty, then heading right for the exit.”
In the time it had taken for me to absorb the intel I’d gotten from several sources and organize everyone around the aforementioned strategy, Savant gave the following commentary.
“Do any of you ever think about how when you talk to one another you’re talking very fast or that half of your communication occurs non-verbally? It’s to the point that if any normal person were to overhear you they’d have no idea what you were talking about and may not even realize you’re speaking a language they know and I can see that being weird for the people you govern.”
By the time we started our Two of Crowns extraction, we had a little less than six minutes left to leave the Labyrinth.
*****
Battles were fought in three dimensions, sometimes more if a dimensionalist were involved. While that held true even at the lowest levels of combat, we were a long way from being a group of spearmen occasionally checking on the sky to make sure an arrow wasn’t about to land on our heads.
The ground was more of a point of reference than something our feet were bound to walk upon. The sky above was a boundary with greater consequence than the rocky soil below. Its spatial compression was severe enough to present a real danger, even to our magically reinforced bodies. The ground, meanwhile, was just some dirt and rock. Smashing into it would suck, but it would be an inconvenience at most. My less robust allies might have had different thoughts on the matter, but I kept the sky overhead in mind as our only real barrier to movement.
That forced us to fly low, relatively speaking, and our speed made the thousand-foot-high world feel shallow. Along with the forest’s strange terrain, this made it feel like we were hurtling down a massive, overgrown gorge. Our objective was down and we were falling towards it.
The same held true for our enemy, who occupied every surface in all directions. Charl, in all his many forms, was omnipresent. Our first encounter with the cancerous United now felt like a bad dream given what we’d discovered he was capable of. This was no languidly moving sewer-dwelling clump of cells, but an animal genocide with its own agency.
Packs of dog-sized creatures rolled around in segmented leathery shells. There were just a few at first, but they grew in number until they were a veritable stampede travelling with us. Furry pterodactyl things perched high up on thick, sticky leaves the size of houses. They squawked and jumped from one leaf to the next in pursuit. A thousand somethings that looked like a mix of jellyfish and flying squirrel splattered into towering cacti, reformed, and whipped off to splatter into the next. Then there were palm-sized birds moving like drunken bullets, weaving in and out of our path.
All of them were being controlled by Charl.
It went deeper as well. There were swarms of insects, hell-bent on burying us beneath their millions of carapaces. Pincered beetles, biting flies, stinging hornets of a dozen varieties, from bugs large enough to give an Australian nightmares to things as small as gnats, the life within the forest converged upon us in direct opposition to our progress.
It was all Charl.
Whether the fellow was actively controlling every move of these things or could only influence their general behavior, I didn’t know. I had my theories, but Brae’ach’s Unity powers weren’t the type of thing I’d feel comfortable putting into a box. For the moment, everything was on the table.
And everything on that table was Charl.
Many of these creatures were graded mana monsters, and in only a few seconds of flight we’d seen enough of them to cause another calamity like Krimsim. Fortunately, none of them were a Grade 34 Hierophant of the Abductor. I was hoping there were limits to Charl’s ability to convert the living, and the absence of anything truly powerful was some evidence that there was. However, my fear was that the lack of powerful enemies wasn’t because there were none under his sway, but because they’d already left to go somewhere else.
Whether that was the case or not, we were met with a tidal wave of flesh to bar our access to Ishi’s isolated party. Etja’s death beams cut around us from a mile back, reducing a thousand tons of enraged wildlife to dust and creating a hole in the swarm. Xim drove into it like a demon-fueled comet.
Unlike Etja’s spells, Xim’s skill didn’t annihilate the creatures. It only eliminated the foreign matter that Charl had grown inside of them. For some, this led to large veiny chunks being scorched away by the divine fire, but for others they fell from the air with no harm apparent on their bodies. Xim’s fire didn’t work like ordinary flames, not unless she willed it to. Instead, it would only consume that which was profane to Sam’lia, while leaving everything else untouched.
Charl became dry leaves in an autumn bonfire, whereas the bodies he’d taken over mostly became corpses. We were suddenly faced with the realities of moving faster than the speed of sound through a wall of fresh, fully intact bodies. It was violent, bloody, and more than a little uncomfortable. My mana was still pretty low after my berserker Oblivion Orb, and as I debated whether to spend some of my hundred or so remaining mana to help clear the path, I had a disturbing epiphany.
Charl was a fucking zombie plague.