by Noam Oswin
I avoided mentioning anything about my being from another world and also did not mention the time I spent as a worm and the struggles that I faced before becoming a skeleton. The last thing I was hesitant about mentioning, was the name of my Nightwitch – Zlosta’s name. It was not something I was willing to drop so easily.
“You’ve been to the Rift?”
Some other things, I did mention, such as the giant wall that had lain on the end of the Final Sanctuary Woodlands – and the gun-wielding humans called Alhamisians that lay beyond.
“The rift?”
“She’s talking about the giant wall that divides the Northern and Southern regions of Alamir. Rumor has it that it was originally meant to keep away the Druid’s Holy Forest and the Pretender’s Forest in the south from the empires north, but in time the humans pushed back every other race through it until the entirety of the North was theirs, and the other races are left squabbling for what remains of the South.”
“Leader Erzili says that humans are the most dangerous race among all the Alamirians. They’ve got something called sah – say – seiko –”
“Sacrosanct Weapons.” Wunder completed.
“That’s what I said.”
“That is what Erzili says,” Wunder turned to me. “Have you seen them? Supposedly, these weapons are tubes that shoot sacred light faster than one can blink, and a single human wielding them can eliminate a small army of weaker nightmares on their lonesome.”
I remembered the carnage from that failed attempt at an invasion. How goblins, harpies and lamias fell left and right to a barrage of laser beams, the never-ending fire of shots which peppered them all into oblivion. I remembered how the concentrated fire latched onto Zlosta once she was the only one left standing, how her skin melted over and regrew from the infinite, endless assault.
“…I have.”
That was what I would have to face up against if I wanted to infiltrate Alhamis. At the very least, I knew that the lasers could be reflected with mirrors, but that did not comfort me. If the Alhamisians had laser guns, soldiers and infantry, I had to assume that they had artillery, cavalry, and perhaps even aircraft and aerial superiority. I would be going up against an actual military force, only, a military force with ridiculous magical shenanigans that I had no method of anticipating or countering because I was unaware of what they were.
Then, there was their General… Hoplite.
“Your leader, Erzili, seems to know a lot of things.”
The only way a nightmare could know about the Sacrosanct Weapons was if they had faced them – and survived.
“Interested?” Wunder asked, amused. “I must warn you – Erzili bites.”
“Bites?”
“Bites,” Arol added.
I did not have a response to that. Instead, I focused on the scenery of the forest around us. The thick foliage of trees had reduced considerably, become sparser and morphing slightly from forest to plains. I could see clearly in the dark without much difficulty, a trait which both Arol and Wunder seemed to share as they navigated the night darkness without much of an issue. My mind was filled with questions I wanted to ask but was not sure how exactly I would go about asking them.
“So, what are we hunting for exactly?”
“Kobolds,” they said as one, with two different tones. Arol groaned whereas Wunder was resigned.
“Are they common around these parts?”
Arol snorted and Wunder chuckled. “You could say that.”
“They’re annoying!” Arol grumbled. “They just keep rushing in from the lagoon, dozens upon dozens of them, not even caring how many die to that pervy geezer Giggles just so they can try and kill us.”
“Why would the –”
[Sixth Sense – Danger Detected!]
There was a blur of action faster than I could react. A single quill, firing at a rate that was absurd from Wunder’s hand slamming into what seemed to be a random tree in the forest. There was something off about the quill. Something that let it shimmer in the darkness of the night.
The quill spun like a drill through the wooden tree, broke through the tree and struck something. The sound of flesh being torn reached my sensitive hearing. The body dropped to the ground, fur-covered and canine-headed, a quill buried in the center of its head and going all the way through to the back of its skull. It, like Wunder, was naked, covered in thick dark brown fur, possessing clawed humanoid hands and paws for feet, there was no mistaking what it was.
“Hey!” Arol said. “That was supposed to be my kill!”
“Arol, that was a Kobold.”
“I have eyes you know.”
“We’re nowhere near the lagoon. Where do you think this kobold came from?”
There was a moment of silence and I knew immediately that something serious had happened. “Is something wrong?”
“There are three main methods to enter into the Hlahan Forest. The first is the lagoon to the west. The second is approaching from the Pretender’s Forest, north. The third is through Masakh Mountain, south.” Wunder said. “East of the forest is Du Sang Castle, but the Fable Brothers have made it their Domain and going there is suicide. They couldn’t have come from there, they couldn’t have come from Pretender’s Forest, as we’d have run into them, and the lagoon is too far away. That means they came from the Mountain.”
“But…” Arol said, “That’s the memory-thief’s territory. If they came from down there then –”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t quite know if the memory-thief has chosen to ally with the kobolds or if they just got lucky and managed to slip beneath notice.”
“It’s just one kobold right? I mean…” I stopped talking. Somehow, I could hear it now. Hear it softly. “World Map,” I whispered.
Red. Red everywhere. Tiny, consecutive dots of red. More than five dozen, moving forward through the darkness, hiding behind trees. I’d seen the red dots before, when I first experimented with opening my map, then I had not known what they were. Now, I did.
Kobolds.
A squadron of them was approaching. The red dots morphed to brown-headed wolves on the map, slowly encircling the icons of skeleton, ghost and porcupine. Surrounded. I realized. We’re surrounded.
I was tempted to bail out using my [Duality]. So far, I had yet to deactivate it since I activated the Monster Link, and a concurrent reality existed where I was safe and unbothered, sitting in front of a campfire alone. It would be easy, to switch to that reality should things go south. Yet, were I to do that, were I to die in this reality, my experiences of meeting Arol and Wunder would be completely undone. Of course, I would remember them, but they would not remember me. We could probably meet again, but this exact method we met, the exact conversations we had would not happen in the same manner. The memories I had gathered of them so far, only I would know them.
I don’t want that to happen.
“Arol,” Wunder said. “We might need to use our specials.”
“My throat is sore.”
“Arol…” Wunder warned.
“Fine,” she grumbled. “But what about Janus?”
“What about him?”
“He’s in range you know.”
“In range?” I did not like the sound of that. “I’m in range of what?”
“Arol and I need to use a special combined technique that is extremely indiscriminate. You are within the radius and will likely get killed.” Wunder said. “Nothing personal of course.”
Alarm bells began ringing in my head. “How far do I need to get away to be safe?”
“It’s not exactly a distance you can cover in –”
“How far?”
“If you could somehow leap seventy-five footsteps into the air –”
Seventy-five feet. “[Greater Rabbit Leap].”
The air rushed as I ascended into Alamir’s sky, Wunder and Arol becoming smaller and smaller specks in my vision. I knew, of course, that I would still need to descend, as gravity woul
d inevitably make me descend, but my mind was already thinking ahead. Thinking and planning and strategizing the utilization of abilities that I had not used for the longest time.
“[Insect Metamorphosis].”
Giant dragonfly wings sprung from my back, creating gusts of winds and beating at a pace that prevented me from descending too far within the strike zone. As a worm, this was the skill that enabled me to kill Agkistrodon, the Serpent of the Rock, and earn me my first Domain of Refuge Creek. The skill that granted me one trait of any insect, and enabled it to last for exactly thirty seconds.
From my vantage point in the sky, I could not even begin to count the number of kobolds that surrounded Arol and Wunder. I aimed my fingers and prepared to fire [Diamond Bullet] after bullet, but hesitated as I was not entirely sure what Wunder and Arol had in mind.
Wunder’s spines were growing from all over his body, thicker, longer, looking sharper and deadlier with each passing second. Arol was taking in a deep, breath, inhaling and inflating, just as the kobolds burst out of their hiding spots and charged with battle cries.
“[Millennium Needle].”
“[Geist Song].”
Arol shifted, tilting back as she took in a deep, long gasp of air, like a diver preparing to descend a thousand miles into the ocean. Then, coiling her body like a wind-up toy releasing stored potential energy, she shrieked.
The earth fractured into rivulets. Stones shattered into powder and trees burst into a confetti rain of toothpicks. Irrevocable deafness would have befallen me had I possessed ears and had I been closer to the epicenter of the scream.
Simultaneously, spikes flew off the porcupine-man like he was a blowfish exploding, firing off in all directions. Their speed through open-air became ridiculous as they blasted forward using the supersonic force of Arol’s scream. The combination was a ghastly bloodbath. Spikes tore through flesh and bone like harpoons imitating machinegun fire. Kobolds were pierced through the stomach, disemboweled in a single strike, some had limbs ripped straight from the joints, broken and bent backward from different angles. Several were speared through the head, dying instantly.
Those who died on impact were the lucky ones. Those who did not receive the full weight of Arol’s bone-shattering scream, bombarded by debris and shattering trees, blood gushing from the orifices.
In a single strike, more than half the charging kobolds were eliminated. Those behind, managing to survive the worst of the attack, lost the momentum of their charge. A portion of the forest was now cleared of trees and debris and decorated with blood, guts, limbs and kobolds roaring in agony.
“Time for the cleanup.” A long spine elongated from Wunder’s back. He cut it off, and it became flexible. Like rubber. Raising it high, the whip-like spine made tiny cracks against the air.
Crack. The whip connected with a stray kobold, snapping his neck in an instant. “That’s one.”
Crack. More heads turned, more necks snapped. Arol floated around the battlefield, her macuahuitl finishing off those maimed by Wunder’s attack and her scream. She vanished, disappearing and reappearing up and around the place like a dancer of death. She never appeared more than once, never swung her weapon to sever a head or cave in a skull more than once. The red of her cloak was everywhere as if she was teleporting, and I realized she was leaving afterimages in her wake.
Crack. About two minutes after it began, it was over. The legion of red dots – of enemies – cleared out as if they were an amateur paintball league challenging a platoon of military veterans to a friendly game. Environmental factors, numbers, and logistics – all of it was meaningless, irrelevant.
Arol and Wunder made an extremely deadly team. Arol was intangible and phased through Wunder’s area-of-effect attack without care, and Wunder’s black quills acted as reflectors for her sonic scream, making him immune to her own AoE. They played off each other, complementing each other’s strengths, while covering weaknesses. They did such a good job of covering weaknesses that I could not even find any.
“Jesus…”
The smell was nauseating as I descended. Blood. So much of it. So much blood and death. Reeking. Reeking into my non-existent nose the smell of numerous emptied bowels. Kobold shit was not something I ever thought I would smell in my lifetime, and it was now my expletive of choice. Kobold shit. Had I possessed eyes, they would be watering from the stench. Had I possessed a stomach, I’d have thrown up seven times over.
Zlosta’s massacre of her people did not compare to this. The smell was nothing like this. Was it because they had been Druids? Did Druids not empty their bowels when they died?
“Hey, Janus!” Arol waved over to me, a smile on her blood-covered face. Eyes glistening with happiness glee like a child who had just been given an early Christmas present, she blurred and glitched, teleporting in front of me in an instant. I fought down the urge to flinch as her wide eyes sparkled all while she pushed her fingers through a severed Kobold head, and dragged out the insides. “Kobold brains! Tah-dah!”
“That’s… distasteful.”
“You’re no fun.”
“I’ve seen enough massacres for one lifetime.”
“But have you seen… this!”
She held out something long, bloodied and phallic. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Kobold dick!”
I opened my mouth, feeling my mind struggle to come up with something coherent. “Why do you have that?”
“I’m going to use it.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer one that was attached to something living?”
“Not for that stupid.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to make a necklace for you. A necklace of kobold dicks.”
“Ah,” I said. “And what have I done to deserve that honor?”
“You don’t have a dick, but with my necklace, you’ll have twelve, all large and thick and hanging from your neck.”
“My how tremendously generous of you. And here I thought you lacked empathy.”
“I can tell when you’re being sarcastic you know.”
“That’s a useful skill. It’ll certainly make it easier for us to understand each other.”
“Arol, Janus.” Wunder arrived before Arol could ask any more questions. The Barbeast was surprisingly clean. Far cleaner than Arol at the very least, with much less blood covering his form despite doing the lion’s share of the killing. Despite being clean, there was a more serious disposition on his face that was not there previously.
“We need to head back to Fort Zyvar as soon as possible.”
“What’s the hurry?” I asked.
“Too many kobolds.” He said, his tone not pleased. “This was a scouting party.”
“Who sends a small army just to scout?”
“A force that can afford to sacrifice a small army,” Wunder replied. “They plan on overwhelming the Fort.”
“How viable is that? If you two alone are capable of doing this,” I gestured to the bloody, organ-scattered, remnants of the kobold forces. “Shouldn’t the rest of you in the Fort be much stronger combined?”
Arol and Wunder glanced at each other as one, before turning back to glance at me. I could tell that I was missing something.
“You’ve never seen a Horde before have you?”
The term was not unfamiliar. “A massive gathering of monsters… nightmares?” I said. “How many are we talking? A hundred? A thousand?”
“Higher,” said Arol.
“Ten thousand?”
“You’re getting there,”
“…a hundred thousand?”
“Closer,” said Wunder.
“You can’t be serious.” They can’t be serious. “Two-hundred and fifty thousand?”
“Double that, and you’ll have half of the average expected number.”
My mind could not accept it. “That’s absurd. The logistics would be a nightmare. Just thinking about the amount of food that’ll be needed to –” the answer came to me as soon as the question left my mind.
I remembered their ‘rule’ on what was considered food and not considered food. “Ah, so cannibalism?”
“Is that the name of a plant?” Wunder asked.
“It’s when you eat a member of your species.”
“There’s a word for that?” Wunder said. “Strange.” The Barbeast shook his head. “Regardless, we should get going. Erzili needs to know what we’ve discovered.”
Wunder stopped. “…Where’s Arol?”
My gaze swept the area. There was no sign of a red-cloaked, rabbit-eared girl within the vicinity. “She was right here –” I pointed to the spot. “Right here a second ago. I could have sworn…”
A vulture, familiar-looking, swooped from the sky and latched onto the eyeball of a dead kobold. My body froze as I stared at the vulture. It was the same species of the vulture that Oblivion had possessed. This one was different, rather than black and red it was white. Pure white. Albinism, I recalled was the name of that trait. The albino vulture latched gobbled the eyeball, swooping in the air, and perching unto a disemboweled corpse.
“Oh, not this again.” Wunder took in a deep breath. “You don’t need to hide every time you see one of these things. They’re just birds!”
“That is not a bird!” Arol’s voice came from my cloak and almost startled me. Grabbing the hem of the garment, there was a loud cry. “Watch where your hands are touching!”
I let go as if I had been burned. The absurdity of it all stunned me. “Are you… inside my cloak?”
Wunder let out a sigh. “She does this every time. Her possession trick.”
“It’s not a bird!” her shrill voice came from the cloak. “That’s a curse! A curse!”
I turned to Wunder, waiting for an explanation. Then I realized I was a skeleton wearing a mask, so there were no facial cues to indicate I was waiting for anything. “Want to explain why she’s possessing my cloak?”
