“Time to play ‘Jellyfish on the Beach’!” I twirled the Spear around like a baton. “Will they get up? Will they stay down? Either way, poke ‘em with a stick! It’s fun for the whole family!”
“Try that one on the left with the funny nose.” Suri held the torch up as I advanced.
Rin stood behind her turrets, her hands clamped over her nose. “I can’t believe I helped develop this game.”
Unsure of what to expect, I crept forward and stretched out with the Spear to tap the nearest corpse. Nothing happened. I came in closer, and jabbed the tip of the blade into an arm. The body lay there, unmoving.
“I think we’re clear.” I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding, then went in for a closer look. There were close to twenty bodies, all of them nude, all of them male. The Vlachian soldiers had Cossack hairstyles: shaven heads with a forelock or a side-part, beards and moustaches. Several tribal Yanik warriors had clay-covered dreadlocks like Zlaslo’s. Their clothing and armor had been removed and left in a moldering pile at the edge of the clearing.
“Rotters, for sure.” I crouched down. The man nearest me was a mess: blackened hands, old stab wounds, torn guts, faces stripped of flesh... and most notably, broken bones. Lots of them. He wasn’t the only one, either. Every man’s face had been pulverized: noses smashed, eyes ruptured, cheekbones caved back into their skulls. I turned to look at the center of the circle. There was a stack of stones there. On top of the small cairn was a crude wreath of grass and twigs, the only plant matter in the immediate area.
I frowned. “Baru are combat monks. Remember what Istvan said about Vash Dorha?”
“That he punched a wyvern to death.” Suri pulled up beside me, her boots crunching on the gravel. “You think he did this?”
“Yeah. Burna is the God of the Dead. I think this is Vash’s handiwork... he gave these men a respectful burial.”
Suri eyed the snaking ring of naked corpses, then the pile of clothes. “I admit I have some questions.”
“It’s a sky burial. He gave these men last rites.” The words tripped out of my mouth almost of their own accord. Somehow, I just knew. “There’s not enough soil in Tungaant to bury the dead, so they’re given rites and left out for the animals. Carrion insects are sacred to Burna. The monks have these dog-sized tamed flies-”
“Okay, thanks. That’ll do.” Suri coughed. “The smell’s bad enough. I don’t need the imagery.”
It was strange. As I knelt there, watching the beetles swarm the corpses, I didn’t feel the least bit of revulsion. Three months ago, I would have. It was the stuff of horror movies, right? But now... no. I knew why the Baru had done this. It was the cycling of the dead back into the living world. “Sure, sorry.”
“So Vash was alive for this fight, at least,” Suri remarked. “But why is it so bloody cold?”
I stood back up and rubbed my jaw, frowning. “The Ix’tamo, maybe? We need to find a trail. My hunch is to follow the cold. Maybe they found something here.”
“It’s warmer to the north and east,” Suri said. “South-west?”
“Let’s do it.”
With Karalti keeping watch overhead, Suri, Cutthroat, Rin and I advanced slowly and cautiously through the increasingly eerie forest. After leaving the sky burial site, there was no animal life to be seen or heard. Not even mosquitoes were stirring in this part of the swamp. There was no sloshing or gurgling of water, no wind... no anything, until we crunched our way across flattened, icy reeds and found ourselves at the shore of a frozen lake.
A serrated crescent of ice marked the edge of the lake, leading back into a cave so dark that even my eyesight couldn’t penetrate it. The moonlight gleamed through leafless trees onto solid ice. At least fifty bodies littered the frozen surface, lying where they had fallen. There was a small island at the center, where a spear-like device hummed, glowed and spat sparks out across the ground. The air hummed and crawled across my skin, and the smell of ozone was almost suffocating. There was a dead Allosaurus at the edge of the lake.
“That’s an Ix’tamo!” Excited, Rin pointed at the device on the island. “See! I told you that’s how the Demon was getting his mana!”
“Sure looks like it.” Suri rubbed at her face. “And it’s busted. My HUD says I’m at risk of mana poisoning.”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t, but I could sense something was wrong. “Suri, retreat to the edge of the radiation zone and let me, Rin and Karalti go out there. I’m not getting an alert yet.”
“My HP is dropping fast. Be careful.” Suri beat a hasty retreat on Cutthroat.
Karalti’s wingbeats grew louder as she circled down and landed firm, setting off a rolling boom. She folded her wings smartly against her flanks, flicking them as she took in the scene ahead. “Woah. What’s that thing?”
“Nothing good. How are you at walking on ice?”
Karalti chirped in her throat, cocking her head one way, then the other. “I dunno. I might be too heavy. I could polymorph, but...”
“No, no polymorphing. You haven’t gotten the hang of fighting in human form yet, but you’re a big badass like this. Let’s go have a look at our dead dinosaur friend over here.”
The three of us edged toward the fallen Allosaurus. It was a big specimen, and it showed signs of Stranging. Its skin was studded with crystalline eruptions, and it had an elongated, twisted look about it that was unsettling. Its dislocated lower jaw gaped to one side. One of its eyes had been pushed back into its skull, the flesh and bone folded around the point of impact.
“Did… Vash do this?” Holding her nose, Rin crouched down to look at the injury.
“Maybe.” Punching dinosaurs to death? I was starting to see why Istvan liked the guy. “Karalti, see how you go out on the lake.”
Karalti bobbed her head, padding forward to the waterline. She delicately placed a three-toed hind foot onto the surface and put her weight on it. The ice groaned, then squealed just before a there was a dull crack, and a long fissure appeared across the frozen surface.
“Nope.” Flattening her horns, Karalti carefully stepped away. Through the fissure, I could see that the water was frozen all the way to the bottom… but the ice was crumbly.
I sighed. “Guess it’s on me and Rin. Go protect Suri and Cutthroat, will you? I don’t want them being ambushed by whoever is coming back for this Ix’tamo.”
“Sure. Be careful.” Tail lashing, Karalti slunk back through the bone-white trees. When she accidentally bumped into one, it snapped like wet chipboard and toppled in a cloud of dust.
Rin pulled up alongside me on her automaton. “How are you at ice skating?”
“Imagine a cross between a pig and a cockroach. Then put it on ice.” I carefully picked my way out onto the lake. My armored foot immediately began to slide forward. But then I remembered – I had better gear for this. I went into my inventory and selected Boots of the Winding Path, the Tuun-made boots with the big-ass cleats on the soles. They appeared on my feet like magic.
“Yeh-hehhh, you icy bitch! Feel my traction!” I threw my hands in the air, and crunched my way forward like a large monster invading a Japanese city.
Shaking her head, Rin followed me out. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just mad with power.”
The diamond-shaped obelisk was driven into the bleached, lifeless earth like a knife blade. It was made of obsidian, metal and crystal, welded together in a seamless symmetrical design concealing a core of brightly glowing mana. The light pulsed erratically, because the crystal face of the machine had been smashed in by a single, powerful blow. Broken crystal ‘veins’ ran throughout the Ix’tamo, leaking through the shattered depression in the center. It cast a sick glow across the bodies laid out on the surface of the lake.
Like the others we’d found, the fallen men and women had clearly been zombies not very long ago. Like the other’s we’d found, they were heavily decomposed, with crude weapons in their hands, piecemeal armor and tattered clothin
g. There were so many and the fight had been so desperate that Vash hadn’t given rites to any of them. The number of corpses was relative to the proximity of the Ix’tamo - the closer we got, the more bodies there were.
“It’s like they were trying to defend this.” Curious, I made a fist and gently rested my knuckles over the depression in the crystal. It was almost an exact match. “Holy shit.”
“So… you think he might be alive after all?” Rin pushed her mask down and activated her spell glove.
“Everything that has gotten in his way so far has been punched to death or broken. And I’d assume that if we have a quest, then he’s more likely to be alive than not.” I watched my health bar cautiously, holding my breath against the gas pouring from the Ix’tamo. “I don’t know if there’s RNG involved.”
“A little, though I’m not supposed to tell players anything about it.” Rin poured over the broken device with gentle hands, utilizing some Craft skill I could only guess at. “But I guess we’re stuck on this server and everyone’s dead now… so, yes. It’s not a certain thing, because NPCs are largely autonomous. Every NPC Seed is crafted from digitized human datasets, so they’re basically like real people. Sometimes they do dumb stuff that gets them killed. But the radiant AI will always try to guide them toward player objectives when possible.”
I went to ask her about the Seed thing, but accidentally drew in a deep breath. My eyes teared up and my throat went dry and rough, just as an alert appeared:
[Warning! You are being poisoned by Mana!]
“Crap. Mana.” I croaked.
“You should go find Suri. This will take me a while to fix, but I can make it work.” Rin was in her element now, furiously applying putty to the cracks on the obelisk.
“Don’t make it work,” I said. “We don’t want it working. Just turn it off.”
“You don’t understand. If I can make it functional, I’ve got some ideas for how we could repurpose it.” She shook her head, focused on what she was doing. “Leave me alone for a bit - I know what I’m doing.”
“Sure. I believe you.” I beat a hasty retreat to my own area of expertise: fucking around. “Okay… If I was a kung-fu master-slash-monk of the God of Death, where would I go?”
The cave loomed at the other end of the frozen lake.
Well, fuck.
I left Leaky Doomsday Device Island and trudged across the ice toward the cave, apprehension mounting with every step. A strange chemical smell wafted to my nose, like battery acid. The ice was cracked and hazed, ground to powder in places… and just inside, revealed by torchlight, was the body of a man dressed like a Tuun warrior in leather and fur. He’d fallen face down, sprawled across the ground. The boots he wore were a more modern version of the ones I currently had on, heavy leather with sharp metal cleats. His hands were sheathed in full-sleeve cold iron gauntlets, like the ones I’d given to Karalti. The rest of him was obscured by a thick, suffocating layer of slime.
“Uh oh.” I broke into a jog and knelt beside him, trying to roll the man over. When I touched the slime, I got a small static shock through my gloves. The stuff clung to my hand, stretching like taffy. Taffy with the tensile strength of steel cable. “Ugh. Nasty.”
With some effort, I managed to roll the body over and get a look at him. This man wasn’t Tuun, and he was bald. That immediately told me that this dead monk was not our man. Hair was a big deal in Tungaant, and the way it was braided and styled could tell you a lot about a person: their profession, their marital status, whether they’d ever killed another human being. The red cloth braided into my hair was there for a reason. I wasn’t entirely sure how Baru wore their hair, but I knew monks didn’t shave: except for the day they took their vows as acolytes. This guy was as bald as a billiard ball. He had to have taken his vows very recently.
With one wary eye on the cave, I patched through to the others. “Vash was definitely here. I found one of the Vlachian disciples who went with him - dead. It looks like something else might’ve been here, and I’d say there’s about a 300% chance our monk and whatever monster finally got the better of him is in this cave.”
“Suri copy. ETA on the Ixa’whatsit?”
“Give me another five minutes! Copy! Roger!” Rin said.
“Copy-Roger that. I’ll join Hector at the cave entry.” Suri’s tone was thick with amusement.
“Uhh… Rin copy? I’m just sealing the broken filter now, and then it should be safe to transport. Will Karalti be able to pick it up?”
“Assuming it’s less than five hundred pounds, sure.” I stood up and ran an inventory while the girls packed their way around the lake. I had ten healing potions, a few antidotes for different classes of poison, a few potions to cure each of the four families of disease. "I'm setting up a camp so we can respawn as close to the fight as possible. Whatever is in there took out the guy who king-hit a three-ton dinosaur. I'm thinking we might be going up against one of those slime worms."
Suri and Cutthroat came into view, with Karalti flying ahead of them. The dragon backwinged and hovered, kicking up dry ice like dust, then wheeled to land on solid ground just in front of the cave mouth. She darted her head to sniff around while I set up our temporary spawn point: a small camp, which was little more than three bedrolls, a firepit, and a basket. Suri slid from Cutthroat’s back as she approached. Her Corona was flashing warningly from the mana in the air, but her health seemed to be stable.
“Here,” I said. “See if you can set this as a spawn point.”
Suri grimaced, but complied. After twenty seconds or so, she shook her head. “Says ‘Error: Invalid Seed Request’.”
“Shit. Sorry. Thought it was worth a try.”
“It’s always worth trying.” Slowly, Suri's gaze drifted to the fallen Baru. "So, is this slime the same narcotic as the stuff that took out those allos?"
"You know, I'm not sure." I took my still-slimy knife blade and touched it to my cheek. There was no torpor alert. "Nope. No reaction. Just feels kind of wet. It zapped me when I first touched it."
“Static from the ice.” Suri scuffed her foot on it.
“Yeah. Dry water. See something new every day.”
"That slime doesn't smell the same to me." Karalti rumbled in her chest, leaning in to sniff, then lick my face. "Kind of tasty, actually. Like... eel?"
“Eel?” There were all kinds of eels that could make our lives hell. Electric eels, poison eels, giant bukkake eels. “Okay. Well... you girls ready to have a bad time?”
Suri swung her sword off her back and around with one hand. The edge of it hit the ice with a metallic clang, the blow hard enough to send hairline cracks through the clear surface. “Point me at it.”
“Yeah! Boss fight!” Karalti tossed her head with a throaty barking cry, which Cutthroat echoed, hissing and snapping and weaving her neck.
“Guys! Wait for me!” Rin squeaked as Hopper ran toward us, Lovelace gecko-crawling over the ice behind her. “I fixed it! Are you okay? What are we doing now?”
Chapter 20
As we advanced through the cave, there was less ice and more slime. A lot more slime. More slime than I ever needed to see or experience. It was white, thick, and the jokes were so obvious I couldn’t bring myself to make them. The apple hung so low that it brushed the suggestively sticky floor.
“Down here in the snot cave, looking at snot stuff!” Karalti sang in my head. “Snot land!”
“I feel like we’re walking through some teenage boy’s secret cum sock drawer,” Suri muttered behind me.
“That’s nasty, gurl. Why you so nasty?” I was in the lead, moving slowly, carefully, and cautiously. Suri was mounted on Cutthroat, who had buffs for rough terrain and sharp claws to cut through anything that stuck to her feet. Karalti followed up the rear, only barely able to fit through the slimed-up tunnel.
“Well, am I wrong? It fuckin’ stinks in here.”
“No.” I eyed a snot stalactite hanging from the ceiling. “This is the place where un
washed Fleshlights go to die.”
“Eww! Hector!” Rin exclaimed.
Suri groaned. “Somehow, you just managed to make this experience even worse.”
“Now you just hold on there a minute. You went there. I restrained myself, but no. You saw that slippery white slope, and yet you slid all the way down. You WALLOWED in it.”
"You can stop now."
“It’s way too late to stop now, sugarplum.”
She rolled her eyes. “Spoken like every man in the world.”
A vibration passed through the soles of our feet, followed by a brief rumble from somewhere beneath us. We froze, rooted to the spot.
“It’s still far away,” Rin said uncertainly. “Below?”
“Yup. And to the right.” Karalti gestured with the tip of her muzzle, nostrils flaring. “Smells like dead things.”
“Sure does.” I began walking again, trying to place my feet as lightly as I could. “This place is starting to give me a giant spider vibe. But where are the little mobs?”
Suri held the torch up, highlighting dark forms trapped under layers of mucus, entombed like flies in amber. “Right about here, I reckon.”
We hadn’t seen a single living thing since entering the Snot Caves. No monsters, no insects. Nada. Part of me was grateful that we didn’t have anything attacking us and sucking up our precious potions. The rest of me was on edge about it. It did remind me a lot of the slime fish’s lair, though this was much larger than the waterhole where the Allosauruses had met their maker. “I hope we aren’t in something’s stomach.”
Suri grunted. “Don’t worry. She’ll be right.”
“Who’s ‘she’?” Rin asked.
Suri groaned. “It’s a saying, Rin. Like, as in, ‘it’ll be okay’.”
“Why don’t you just say that, then?”
“I dunno. Why can’t you UNAC cunts say ‘aluminum’ properly?” Suri made an orc face and crossed her eyes. “Aloo-mi-num! It’s ‘Aloo-mini-yum’, you dorks. It’s got a second ‘I’.”
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 97
