by Eric Ugland
And waited.
Time outside the tent was mostly static. The same clouds flew across the sky. Not quite in a circle, but there was definitely a pattern. No signs of life. No bugs in the grass. No wind rustling the leaves of the thousands of trees around us.
It was odd. Disconcerting.
And, through it all, the snores of the otters. And Donner.
Finally, after the second time the three of us had gotten hungry and tucked into our diminishing reserves of food, Skeld woke up.
He scrambled to his feet, fumbling for a weapon before actually looking around and realizing he was safe. Ragnar was next. Then finally Donner, who woke up like he’d just had the best sleep of his damn life. He stretched, belched, coughed, and scratched himself like he hadn’t a care in the goddamn world. Which, in a way, I guess he didn’t.
Despite food being what got them into the mess, they were all ravenous by the time they were fully awake, and between the three of them, they polished off our remaining rations. While they relaxed, we explained what happened and I introduced them to Barry and Barry to them.
Ragnar found Barry delightful, Skeld thought Barry was weird, and Donner just gave me a look like I was a dark wizard who should be put down for the good of all the people in Vuldranni.
Finally, we were ready to step into the next level of the dungeon.
Chapter Forty-Six
As soon as my foot went through the tent, before it even hit the grassy ground below, noise erupted from the jungle. Birds seemed to appear out of nowhere, then flew up and away. Drums thundered out, then echoed off the stone wall of the ziggurat. That was disturbing, but even worse was the primal screams and bestial roars that answered and overpowered the drumming. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, that of impending violence.
“Run,” I said, picking Barry up and took off sprinting for the ziggurat.
A quick glance back over my shoulder made me realize I was much faster than anyone else in my party. Also, the trees were shaking like something was coming through them. Either a few very big things or a TON of little things.
I tucked Barry in the crook of my arm like a football carry. I could feel him squirming a little, trying, perhaps, to get his eyes in a spot where he could see what was going on. I don’t know. Mimics are weird.
I slid to a stop at the base of the ziggurat, and turned to get a sitrep. It wasn’t great. The Lutra were already catching up to me, but Donner was a ways behind them, Nikolai was struggling to keep his speed up, and poor Emeline was way in the back, a mess of tule, silk, and petticoats.
The real problem, however, was what was emerging from the tree line.
Humanoids. With weapons. Screaming, and frothing at the mouth with an obvious desire to kill everything. The creatures were on the small side, between myself and the Lutra in size. They swarmed over every single bit of the ground, absolutely covering it. Thousands upon thousands, everywhere I looked. I just stood there with my eyes wide and my jaw open. It was more individual beings than I had ever seen, not only in the dungeon, not only in Vuldranni, but in my entire dual lifetimes. All of them coming at us, ready to kill.
But there was a decent gap between my party and the oncoming horde. I felt like we had an okay chance of getting up the ziggurat before the mob got us. And then Emeline tripped on her hem, and hit the ground. Hard.
As Skeld got to me, I pushed Barry into his hands.
“To the top!” I yelled over the noise.
Skeld nodded, and scampered up the stairs.
“You help Nikolai,” I ordered Ragnar. Then, despite every fibre in my being screaming I was making the wrong decision, I sprinted towards the oncoming horde.
I covered the distance in the same time it took Emeline to get to her feet and untangle herself from her dress-mess. I slid to a stop, hauled her up over my shoulder, and was moving back towards the ziggurat in record time. If this were an NFL combine, I’d have the commenters checking their records. It’s amazing how much bonus speed imminent death offers.
The horde of whatevers was uncomfortably close, enough so that a number thought it’d be a good time to throw spears. But they weren’t judging my speed well, and I managed to expand the gap significantly by the time I stepped onto the Ziggurat.
I didn’t slow down at the stairs, charging up as fast as my legs would allow, and once again, I screamed some internal thanks to Mister Paul for how incredible my body was, powering me up those green stone steps as if it was a Sunday stroll through the park. Carrying a whole extra human felt like I had a lady’s purse over my arm. I was going so fast that I caught up to Nikolai and Ragnar, and I scooped Nikolai up on my other shoulder. Ragnar dropped on all fours and scurried up after me.
Emeline was screaming something, but I couldn’t understand her, so I tried to keep her shrieks out of my head.
The very top of the ziggurat had a small flat portion before continuing up. From there I could see the whole clearing around us, and appreciated the full extent of the horde. It was everywhere. They were everywhere. Everywhere I could see, from the trees to the ziggurat, was covered, not a bit of the ground showed through that horde. Everywhere.
The only salvation of the top was that there was but a singular staircase to the final structure, where Skeld and Donner stood yelling back at me.
I couldn’t hear them over the cacophony of the approaching wave of death, but I had the feeling it wasn’t something nice or encouraging, like, ‘there’s a giant stone door we can close to keep all these motherfuckers from ripping our flesh from our bones while we are still living.’ I had terrible feelings about how this dungeon challenge was going to pan out. A quick glance behind told me that I had, at best, one minute before the wave of things hit.
Once up the final staircase, I saw what was in front of us. Maybe the final challenge, maybe just the puzzle to get into the ziggurat. Yeah. Puzzle.
The very top of the ziggurat, the cube, had eight pillars supporting a dome. Each pillar had a large dial mounted on it, with eight pictograms inscribed around the dial and eight pictograms inscribed onto the dial.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted.
Nikolai just shook his head, eyes wide while he tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do.
“Tell me you’ve got some sort of plan,” I said, starting to pull things off my person so I’d be ready to get into it with the oncoming horde.
“Die?” Nikolai asked, not taking his eyes from the puzzle. “I see nothing to indicate we even have any clues to this.”
“Well,” I said, starting down the staircase, “I’ll give you time. You solve the puzzle. Ragnar, Skeld, with me. The rest of you, figure out the puzzle.”
The two Lutra nodded gravely, and moved to the stairs. I stopped them and handed the Unfillable Knapsack to Ragnar.
“Keep this safe,” I said. “And you make sure you’ve got weapons for me any time I’ve got an empty hand. I have a feeling I’m going to have to empty this bag here. And if I look like I’m going down, pray the Xiphos has gotten enough durability, and you cut through the stone into whatever is below.”
I gave the Eternal Xiphos of Sharpness to Skeld. He nodded.
The creatures came up the stairs in a fury, looking to unleash hell upon us. They were salivating, mouths open wide, screaming something at me. I didn’t understand it, so I had a feeling it wasn’t words, just roaring.
Thirty seconds to contact. I stood at the bottom of the last set of stairs, getting a sword and sheath attached to my belt.
“I do not think this is a wise course of action,” Nikolai called out from above.
“You come up with something better, let me know,” I shouted, grabbing the proffered spear from Ragnar, who was standing above me on the top of the cube.
As the first creature reached about three levels down, I shot out the identification spell.
Slough Tungebur
Lvl 11 Berserker
Large square heads with low slung jaws were on top,
and I could see teeth like protrusion outside the mouth and matching teeth inside the mouth. Double teeth. Small eyes tucked back on their heads, facing mostly forward. Predators. Decorative paintings, or maybe tattoos, covered their faces, necks and backs. Forked tongues flicked in and out quickly. Their skin was bumpy, mottled, akin to a toad’s. And they ran surefooted with longer limbs, wide feet, short tails, and a remarkable amount of muscle packed on their small torsos. Basic armor, a mixture of wood, shells, and other natural elements, was all they had for protection, and their weapons were mostly obsidian, gleaming black swords, axeheads, all manner of spears, and spear-like weapons. But no bows, at least not that I saw.
Roars echoed out, and their eyes registered nothing so much as excitement. The first one reached me, screaming bloody murder.
I intended to give it to them.
Chapter Forty-Seven
I threw the spear as hard as I could, stopping the first tungebur in his tracks. His obsidian axe kept moving forward, and I snagged it out of the air. It was poorly weighted, the head far too heavy, but it looked sharp as hell.
A quick Sparta-kick, and I made a little room to get a swing around, getting the obsidian axe straight into tungebur number two’s head.
I reached back, and a spear was placed into my hand, just in time for me to start blocking a flurry of blows from tungeburs. They converged on me, but were getting in their own way more than overwhelming me.
I still worried they might, but a quick stab in one, and a smack upside the head to another, and the two bodies dropping to the stones caused the area to be really hard to stand up in, and several tungeburs slipped, and it was a domino effect, and there was a moment of breathing room as tungeburs tumbled down the side of the ziggurat.
Naturally, there were plenty more to take their place.
Hauling back, I threw the spear as hard I could, going straight through three of the assholes, and, as one connected unit, they spun around, knocking more of their brethren off the ziggurat.
I slid my foot under one of their spears, kicked it up, and threw it, hitting home somewhere in the midst of the horde. Throwing things worked reasonably well simply because there were so many viable targets. But it was difficult to hit the tungeburs who were right up in my face. For those, I had to keep other things around. I chanced a glance back to my hirðboys, and Ragnar was there with a sword. I noticed that Skeld, on the other side, held a spear. Choices.
Snatching the sword, I barely had enough time to bring it around to parry an obsidian blade. It shattered against my steel, the tiny pieces slicing across my face and the tungebur’s. But while it definitely hurt me, it didn’t seem to faze the creature. Weaponless, it just went to bite me, mouth opened way wider than I would have thought possible. With no real thought, I brought the sword point down as hard as I could on the tungebur’s head. The creature’s jaws slammed shut, biting its stupid tongue off, which promptly flopped all over the stairs.
The tungebur died immediately. But as it fell back, it took the sword with it.
Reaching back, I grabbed a spear and spun it around my body, thwocking a few of the tungeburs who were too close. Then I kebabbed two, lifting them up into the air before bringing their bodies down as a macabre club, smashing more tungeburs beneath them.
It was a weird fight. Actually, fight wasn’t quite the right descriptor for what was happening. I was so much stronger than these creatures, and I was doing so much more damage. They didn’t even have a chance to get me. There would be incidental damage here and there, but even when one of them got a lucky hit, my chainmail blocked most of the damage. Sure, there were truly minor wounds like when their obsidian blades shattered and cut me, but it was nothing that could ever be able to take me down. Or even slow me down.
One tungebur did get super lucky, taking advantage of one of his brethren dying a gruesome death and holding on dearly to my gloves so I couldn’t get a weapon up. The lucky tungebur scurried up my arm, obsidian dagger poised to go through my eye.
An arrow zipped right by my ear and drilled right through the lucky tungebur’s mouth.
I shot a glance over my shoulder, and saw Emeline give me a wink. I laughed. Covered in blood, I laughed. That’s when I started to get the feeling things were going to get weird.
The stairwell created a natural choke point, allowing me to control the pace of battle. If I wanted to take on more creatures, I went forward onto the flat, where I could use larger weapons and make wide swings. When I took the bearded battle axe out there, I cut them down like I was scything wheat. It was ridiculous. I only had to retreat back to the stairwell because of all the blood and guts, literally. It was difficult to keep my feet there, so I hopped back to the stairwell, throwing the battle axe over to Skeld, and taking another spear from Ragnar.
The spears were going quickly. It was getting easier and easier to pierce multiple opponents at the same time with the spears, almost as if Ragnar was somehow snagging sharper spears from the bag. But as far as I could tell, they were still the same crappy ones I’d taken from the busted castle in the middle of the WarWaters. But with one throw, I got five tungeburs. Five. One spear. That’s a Yahtzee.
Alternatively, the tungebur had spears aplenty. I grabbed their weapons easily, sometimes from dead hands, just as often from live ones. Once I snatched a spear and beat the asshole holding it to death before throwing it down the staircase and watching the spear go through a tungebur and embed into the stone.
I found myself overextended once, throwing a spear without being in range of getting another weapon. But then I just picked up the nearest tungebur and used the poor creature’s body to clear a path through its brethren. I beat tungeburs with a tungebur, and did a surprising amount of damage with him. The first time I ripped the arm off a tungebur, I stopped and had a weird little moment before proceeding to beat the creature to death while he bit at my stomach.
Battle caused time to flow at different rates, so it was really difficult for me to get a good grasp of how long the fighting had been going on. But one thing was clear: the tungebur’s desire to throw themselves into the meat grinder wasn’t fading. At all. They swarmed up the sides of the ziggurat with ceaseless vigor. And despite it being an obvious endless slaughter, they didn’t seem to care.
I started to feel this thudding in my chest. Not necessarily my heart; it seemed more central than that, and had zero bearing on my exertion. It felt like something wanted to get out, like something was knocking. And after every kill, every explosion of blood, every challenge to me and my life, it was another invitation. And with it, this heat washed over me, this primal desire for violence, for vengeance.Welling up from that central spot I tried to keep it down, but without warning, it seemed like everything slowed down just a little bit more. I could see everything in perfect clarity, despite the edges of my vision being tinged in a strange red. I could see how to move to exact greater damage, as if something was guiding my hand, something was telling me how to kill. Well, not how to kill, but how to kill better. With more gore. More pain. I felt like I was seeing slight highlights on small points of the tungeburs, chinks in armor, spots of weakness. And it was easier and easier to guide my strikes exactly where it would do the most damage.
I sliced through a throat on an upswing, then through tendons on the downswing, death on my right and grievous injury on my left. I moved from the staircase, straight-up carving a path through the beasts every which way, trading weapons as if this was the most macabre gift exchange party ever, taking each creature’s as I killed it. I barely held the weapons for more than a second at a time, and each hit I exacted seemed to do massive, disproportionate amounts of damage. At one point, I hit a tungebur’s head with the flat of an axe, and the head fucking exploded, fountains of blood shot up before raining down on me. It was the most disgusting sprinkler system ever invented.
And somehow, somewhere along the way, I ceased feeling like myself, instead, I was death. Spinning death, whirling death, crushing death. I k
illed multiple tungeburs with every touch. They couldn’t even come up the ziggurat fast enough for me, so I went after them, somehow pushing the horde back down the ziggurat. Deep in the back of my head, I heard a voice telling me I should not leave my party. I had to maintain the stairs, to guard those friends while they figured out the puzzle.
But at that point, I could care less about the puzzle. I was caught deep in the grips of a blood fever, and I just wanted to kill, to spill the blood of my enemies. Fuck the lamentations of their women — I wanted to kill their women, their gods, their world. I would have slaughtered every last one of them if I could reach them from the stairs. But I never left the stairs, not for long at least.
On and on it went. In my frenzy, I’d managed to kill enough of them that Ragnar and Skeld would come out and push bodies off the fighting level of the ziggurat. I slid on the blood, tripped on the tripe, occasionally fell to a knee on a knee. But somehow, no matter what I did, how I moved, I was always where I needed to be for another killing blow. Even the throwaway jabs with chipped blades seemed to find arteries to rupture. I felt like I could just do this forever. But another part of my brain snapped into gear, telling me that this might be the perfect farming opportunity to get Nikolai levels.
I smiled, and it must have been a terrifying thing. Because that moment, my smile, was the only time a tungebur turned and ran. It was, however, promptly deceased from a spear to the back of the head. It revolted a part of me, how much I was enjoying the wholesale slaughter of these creatures. And, in my lame defense, they did attack me first. And weren’t willing to stop.
But, as if someone hit a switch, the tungeburs just stopped.
Everything stopped.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Everything.
The world stopped completely.
Well, everything outside of me, I suppose.
