by Jez Cajiao
he offered earnestly, and I held up a hand, stopping everyone in their tracks.
“Yes, but first, Gint, you swear fealty. I’m not letting you get weapons or anything until then, understand?” I said firmly. He cocked his head to one side and made a sound between an inquisitive kitten and a bird, a kind of chirping, before grinning disturbingly again and nodding his head fast enough that he was in danger of giving himself whiplash.
“Giiiint sweeeears!” he said and reached for the nearest corpse again. Grizz reached out to stop him, and Gint snarled, snapping his teeth sharply at Grizz’s hand. “Mine!” he growled, and I had to keep from swearing as Grizz smacked him across the nose with two fingers like a naughty puppy.
“Bad!” Grizz snapped, his Legion Centurion voice coming out as he boomed at the little figure. “Bad Gint!” he repeated, holding up the two fingers warningly.
Gint growled at him again, but impressively, he stopped and watched the fingers, as though unsure what would happen next.
“Grizz, my man, congratulations!” I said, and Grizz looked at me with surprise, straightening up.
“Jax?” he asked, tilting his head inquisitively, and I smiled, nodding to indicate Gint.
“That little bugger is officially in your care once he’s been given the Oath,” I said, and I felt the mana dip as Oracle pushed it to him.
There was a long pause as he froze, confused; then Oracle reached out and touched Gint’s head, frowning.
“Damnation!” she growled, moving closer to put both hands on his temples and starting to glow. She remained there for several seconds before Gint seemed to relax, and then, all of a sudden, he fell to the floor, spasming.
“What…” I choked, reaching out, until Oracle blocked me.
“Wait!” she said anxiously. “He’s been blocked from his screens somehow, and for a long time. I had to undo it, but now he’s getting them all at once.”
“So, what, he’s leveling?” I asked, and she nodded, rising up and casting a pitying look at the body on the floor as it twisted and kicked, crying out in pain and fury. The little gnome’s teeth glinted in the faint light as they continued gnashing angrily.
“Is he going to be okay?” Grizz asked, and Oracle frowned as she examined him from every angle.
“I don’t know, honestly…” she admitted slowly. “He’s over seventy years old, and he’d never leveled properly before, just gaining points by doing things naturally. He’d never advanced any stats by allocation, but now…”
“Now?” I prompted, and she took a deep breath, rotating to meet my eyes.
“Now he’s gaining every reserved point in one go, all the points he’d earned but not allocated. He’s level thirty-seven; I saw that much, and gnomes get plus two points to Intelligence, and one to Dexterity, with a free point to allocate each level, so he’s just gotten…”
“More than seventy points into Intelligence,” I finished, wincing in understanding.
“Exactly,” Oracle confirmed softly, and all around us, my people gritted their teeth in sympathy.
“Will he live?” I asked her, and her expression became heartbreakingly sad.
“I honestly don’t know. I’m sorry, Jax; maybe Nerin or Hellenica could have helped him more. I didn’t realize what the issue was until I’d undone it, and now…”
“And now it’s too late,” I said, sighing. “Okay then, that’s fine. There’s nothing we can do, I guess. Would another round of healing help him?” I offered hopefully, and she shook her head.
“If it would, I’d have done it already. It’s the shock that’s the problem. If anything, his body is growing stronger and fitter; rather than needing healing, he needs to rest.”
“What if we…” I started to suggest, when Bane suddenly tackled me roughly from the side, driving me against the wall as something flew past me, smashing into the barrier and leaving a green smear to slide down it.
“Watch out!” he cried to the others as Tang drew back on his bow and fired a black-fletched arrow down the corridor into the darkness. The bolt struck true, eliciting a shriek of fury from something whose voice seemed to shake the air.
Bane growled long and low before looking to me. “Leviathans,” he ground out, and that single word was filled with fear and hatred in equal measure.
Chapter Eighteen
Two creatures slunk out of the darkness at the far end of the corridor, their skin the color of the walls, allowing them to blend in easily. They clacked and hissed at each other, tracking us warily.
“What are they?” I asked Bane as I studied them. The pair were tall, almost shoulder height, but not humanoid; instead, the closest I could get was a cross between a wolf and a squid. Their incomprehensible bodies were at least a dozen feet long, with four eyes set in a triangular face. Out of each forehead, a long horn jutted upwards, and directly beneath, a vicious beak pointed down. The creatures had six legs, each with bone flanges jutting out from the sides that made them look like they’d be just as happy in or out of the sea.
In addition to the legs, four arm-like appendages protruded out from behind their heads. The limbs moved like tentacles, but after a foot or so, they each narrowed to a long, clearly sharp claw that waved lightly in the air.
I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with Bane, and upon looking over at him, I suddenly felt a low growl reverberating from him.
“Leviathans,” he growled again, and I frowned.
“Really?” I paused, backing up and preparing to fight. “In my homeland, we have legends of them. They’re a lot bigger…” I started, before Bane cut me off.
“Yeah, these are freshly spawned; maybe ten or fifteen years old, that’s all,” he said grimly. “But if they’re here, we’ve got a much bigger problem than I thought.”
“What?” I asked with concern, feeling my nuts shriveling as I watched the creatures moving slowly forward.
“Their mother. A leviathan doesn’t spawn frequently, and they tend to keep their spawn around, as snacks, if nothing else. Leviathans grow to be as large as the food source can supply. They don’t die of natural causes, either, so if you have legends of them and they were huge, they might be true,” Bane admitted, an edge of fear and respect filing his voice.
“So, if there’s a bigger one than these around…” I faltered when one of the creatures suddenly screamed, quickly followed by the second. The noise started high, and then shifted straight into horrific. I winced in pain, the noise reverberating through my skull and making my guts twist, even as I felt my ears starting to bleed.
Bane staggered, all four hands clutching at his head as his knives clattered to the ground. The sonic attack was decidedly painful to me, and it made me fear that I was going to need fresh trousers soon, the way it was twisting my insides, but for a creature that saw the world through a form of sonar, it was obviously beyond agonizing, and I gritted my teeth, scowling at the creatures as they slunk closer down the corridor, still screaming.
“….” I forced out, then gritted my teeth and tried again, louder this time. “……” As soon as the first syllable failed to materialize, I started trying to cast sub-vocally.
When that failed, fizzling out and sending a tearing pain through my skull, I hissed, glanced at the obvious pain that was tearing through my friend and bodyguard, and I let the chains off the low-level fury that filled me almost permanently these days.
I felt the welcome heat building, and I dug deeper, pushing off hard, determined to close the distance as quickly as possible.
Small rocks, fragments of debris, and general rubbish coated the floor, and I sprinted as fast as I could, bounding over the crap that was strewn everywhere and closing the distance to the screeching monsters.
The one on the right cut off its scream, slinking forward and honing in on me, its beak clacking and tongue flashing out as its four grasping tentacles flexed and tugged at the air, as though desperate to drag me into its maw.
I growled as I ran, leveling my naginata
. I sensed as much as felt the others following me, just as arrows flashed past, burying themselves into the first Leviathan’s body.
I saw it flinch back as a long black arrow, Tang’s… a part of my mind coldly informed me, flew past us all, thudding into the shoulder of the still-screaming creature, staggering it and making the sound cut off momentarily. It hissed in fury, and three of the tentacles near its face wrapped around the arrow. Gripping it tight, the Leviathan yanked it free with a small spurt of black blood, taking a deep breath and screaming again.
The sound it emitted was weird; it built steadily, rising from a pitch that was merely uncomfortable all the way into ‘takes paint off the walls’ levels in less than three seconds, all while shaking as though it had a taser applied to its butthole.
The noise reverberated off the walls and funneled down, loud and agonizing enough to make me stagger, even as I gritted my teeth and leveled my naginata, rushing at the closest creature once again.
It crouched, then bounded forward, leaping aside as I stabbed out and thrusting its clawed front foot down hard, slamming my blade aside and trapping it.
Before I could bring my weapon back or dodge, the thing struck, all four tentacles spearing forward, claw tips lunging for my flesh.
They hit me hard; two deflected cleanly off the upper slopes of my breastplate, the Legion-made Cuirass shrugging the blows off. The third slammed into the joint where the pauldron and cuirass met on my left side, and its tip skittered across the attaching leather to dig into a loose section, making me grunt as it drew blood.
The fourth claw struck the bottom of my helm, snapping it down and making it hard to see, until suddenly, the pressure was lifted as the tentacle hastily retracted.
I stepped back, heaving on my naginata and glaring furiously at the creature as Grizz barreled past.
He ducked down behind his shield and shouted something before slamming it into the Leviathan’s face, staggering it back several steps. It switched its focus to him, all four claws flashing around the shield to grip it, pulling him inexorably close as it opened its beak to scream or bite him.
Before it got the chance, though, two things happened. The first was that the other Leviathan, the one that had been keeping us all off balance by screaming continually, finally ran out of breath or mana or whatever. As soon as the sound cut off, it felt like the world came back into focus, and three arrows, a Firebolt, and a full spread of five enhanced ‘Magic Missiles’ slammed into it a bare handful of seconds later, staggering and severely wounding it.
The other thing that happened was Lydia. She bolted past me, then jumped up and kicked off the wall, twisting her body around to face the Leviathan that was grappling with Grizz from the side. As soon as she was in the air and oriented correctly, she screamed out “Shield-Bash!” and the ability took over, slamming her forward with tremendous speed and force.
She hit the creature side-on, slamming her shield, with her fully armored bulk behind it, into the side of its face. The impact culminated in a loud crunch of bone, the two tentacles on that side went flaccid, and the bottom half of its beak dislocated, the beginnings of a sonic scream dropping into a warbling, distressed whine.
Lydia bounced off the beast, hitting the wall and then bouncing forward again as she lashed out with her mace, smacking the weapon down hard into the creature’s left front claw, just as it lifted the appendage to slash as Grizz.
There was a second crunch of bone, and a louder whine, as it tried to pull back before Grizz lunged forward. He swept aside the remaining tentacles that still clung to the left side of his shield and slashed out in a circular rising swing. The tip of his gladius flashed from left to right and sent the remaining two tentacles flying with a gout of sticky blood.
Before the creature could do more than rear back, he’d switched from a swing to a thrust, and the tip of his blade punched into the Leviathan’s throat, biting deep.
It staggered, trying to move back, but Grizz followed it, yanking the sword from left to right, widening the wound before driving it deeper. As I glanced back to check on Bane, I heard the gasping whistle of Grizz cutting into the creature’s windpipe.
Bane remained slumped against the wall, two hands clutching at his head, as another arm braced against the wall, and his remaining limb scrabbled for his daggers on the floor. He was stunned, clearly, but I felt my mana dip as Oracle’s hands began bursting with light, and I knew she’d have him back together in no time.
I nodded grimly in her direction and looked back at the furthest creature, watching as another barrage of spells and arrows slammed into it. It screeched in pain and fury, turning and starting to run for it.
“Hell no!” I snarled, dropping my naginata against the wall and pulling in my power as my lips started to speak the arcane words, my fingers twisting like snakes on acid.
The spell built faster and faster as I poured increasing amounts of mana into it, compressing it and shaping it, more with my mind and fingers now, it seemed, than the phrases and words I barely understood. Whatever Amon’s mind-dump of information had been, it’d filled in tiny gaps I’d never even known were missing from my knowledge, taking all of my spells to the next level.
In three seconds, the spell had taken a basic form; it was bulbous at the back end, closest to me, with a long, thin tip at the further end, a tip that sighted in on its quarry and quivered with a suppressed need to be released. I inspected the additional forms I had laced into the ‘Explosive Compression’ spell, inspired by the spell I’d created when we fought in the Skyking’s Tower. Now they felt… better, more integrated, and infinitely more graceful. I tied off the last section and splayed my fingers, releasing the spell with a ‘Huuut’ of forced exhalation, shoving forward with my hands as the spell took off.
The Leviathan had vanished into the darkness at the far end of the corridor, barely visible as it moved, its camouflage Ability occluding the faint light that occasionally lit the far end of the corridor where it jinked to the right. My spell changed that, flaring with light as it hurled itself down the inky hallway.
It covered the hundred or so yards to the creature in less than two seconds, the acceleration causing the air to shake. Unerringly, it slammed into the back-right leg just as the appendage bunched up, lifting to propel the Leviathan forward.
Instead of its leg slamming down and pushing it further along to power its frantic, injured retreat, the spell punched into the back of the leg, burying itself deep before detonating.
The flesh was shredded a split second before the rest of the back end of the wolf-squid thing, peeling the dark skin, veins, and muscle from the skeleton just before the bones fractured and exploded in fragments.
I’d compressed the spell even more than the last time, forcing it to cover a smaller area as it unfurled, and this time, it was far more horrific for its victim.
Rather than spreading out over a dozen feet, hurling things outward with flames and violence, then pulling them back in to compress them into a tiny area, it all happened in a space the size of an average windowpane.
The back end of the body was smashed outwards, shattering bones and pulverizing flesh, tearing the joints apart, before suddenly reversing and pulling back in. The implosion generated the same amount of power, maybe more, but due to being confined to a smaller space, it dragged the surrounding air and body materials into the rapidly forming tiny marble of compressed flesh at the center of the spell.
The effect from where we stood was impressive, as a flash of light blurred away, smashing into the back end of the fleeing creature before detonating. The flare of light exposed the back third of the Leviathan being blown apart; then the flames spread, compressing down and yanking the creature back into a single point, filling the corridor with frantic, ear-shredding screeches of pain and snapping bones.
As the light died, so did the second Leviathan, and the corridor went quiet as the first fell forward onto its face. Grizz yanked his blade free and stepped back, flicking the b
lade to clean it of blood.
“Well, that was… messy,” Yen commented quietly from just behind me. “Out of curiosity, that spell you just used… what’s it called?”
“Explosive Compression,” I replied shortly, reaching up to wipe at one ear and frowning at my bloody gauntlets in annoyance.
“And where did you get it?” she asked carefully.
“We made it up,” I said, glancing at her curiously. “It’s a bit rough, but it does the job.”
“Yeah… it really does,” she agreed wistfully. “Feel free to teach me that one when you get the chance.”
“You teach me the ‘Flaming Spear’ spell, and I will,” I promised, moving past her and heading back down the corridor to check on the others.
Bane was finally standing, slipping the blades back into their sheathes and nodding to me as I came to a stop.
“You alright, mate?” I asked him, and he nodded again.
“I am, Jax. It seems some of the old tales of Leviathans being an anathema to my race are true, though. I wasn’t much help in that fight, sorry.”
“Don’t be daft,” I scoffed incredulously. “You managed to kick the Skyking’s ass thanks to your abilities; sods law that it’s a weakness here.” I clapped him on the shoulder and searched around for the others. “Everyone okay”? I asked, getting a round of nods and shrugs.
The next few seconds were a mess of health and mana potions, healing spells, and people wiping blood away from noses, mouths, and ears. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling my guts still twisting, and resolved that I’d need a good, long shower when the chance came up again next. Followed by a week of sleep and a good meal to set me right.
“Jax!” a call rose from Yen, and I turned sharply, glancing up the corridor at her. She was gesturing further into the darkness. “Tang’s scouting ahead,” she said in a low voice that carried, and I nodded in acknowledgement before turning back and staring down with concern at the gnome that still thrashed and shuddered on the floor.
