by Dante King
I had shit to kill, and Jeff was at the top of the list.
Chapter Six
“Ma! I be home!” Jeff cried out.
I still couldn’t see anything out of the troll’s hand, but I could hear a slight echo. Most likely walls, either of a cave or some kind of mountain structure. My senses were restricted. It was difficult to make anything out aside from feeling and hearing, and my sight—if you could call it that—was short-ranged and weirdly refracted through the faces of my gem.
“Jeff! You be late for dinner,” a bassy feminine voice answered. “Where’s Charlie? Bertha be waiting for him.”
I mentally grimaced as my mind flickered back to Charlie lying motionless on the side of the mountain with his head screwed on backward. He’d been the first, but when the cavalry arrived, the rest would be next.
“He had an accident,” Jeff grumbled uneasily.
“What kind of accident?” his mother demanded.
“The kind where he be not breathing anymore.”
“You be a fucking stupid troll! He was meant to marry Bertha, make her settle down and be a good troll wife!” I heard a flurry of strikes, felt them tremble through Jeff’s body and then down, through to his hand. It seemed like domestic violence was a standard answer to grief in troll culture.
Good.
“He attacked me, Ma! I don’t know why since we’d been getting along so well. He had this new elf friend.”
“Elf? There be no elves in Shadow Crag. Probably only a handful in all the realm.”
“It was an elf for sure. Jumped off a cliff when I was chasing him. Fell to his death.”
“Strange behavior for an elf,” Ma said. “You must have scared him sorry, Jeff.”
Loath as I was to give him credit, Jeff was lying to her. He knew full well I’d enthralled his friend and forced him to attack. Bless his black heart.
“I did. Then I found this. A pretty. For you, Ma.”
My jewel flickered as Jeff’s palm opened. My vision was still short-ranged, but I got a fractured, red-tinted impression of a face peering down at me.
“What is this? Do you not be knowing it’s a dungeon core?” Ma’s tone was more impressed than chastising, which didn’t bode well. She knew what I was, who I was. Obviously, she was sharper than the average troll, and dangerously so.
I hoped Jeff would buy me some time with his stupidity.
“Dungeon core?” he queried. “Sounds tasty.”
Well, he definitely didn’t disappoint.
I heard a thunderous whack, and I tumbled free of Jeff’s paw to the ground. Each time one of my sides struck the earth, it sent painful reverberations through my core. Inwardly, I was glad I hadn’t thrown myself off the cliff to get away from Jeff—it would’ve stung like a bitch.
“You’ll not be eating the core. We ain’t seen one in the Infernal Realm for thousands of years. Lilith must have brought him here. People are going to want to know about this.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just my luck to run into the brains of the family.
“Like who?” Jeff questioned. “The guilds?”
Another crack sounded.
“Hellfire, Ma! Not my head. I be needing that.”
There was a shushing noise, followed by a murmured conversation just out of range. Jeff’s Ma was clued in—she knew what I could do with my core’s hearing. I’d just have to bank on her knowledge being limited. It was not a good option, but the best I had.
I heard Jeff say something about the guilds again, swiftly followed by another crack and a healthy dose of trollish mother discipline, twice in a single conversation. They knew about the guilds. No mention of Entropy, but that still didn’t make it any better. I needed to create a dungeon; I couldn’t allow myself to keep getting toted around in pockets.
Nor could I let them take me to any guild, Entropy or not.
Either the creature I’d contacted would show up soon with his tribe, or I’d have to get dangerous again and take more risks. It was still far too long until Von Dominus could show up again, so I had to be patient, relax, and think of possibilities. I had to come up with a way to turn this to my advantage.
“Sorry, Mr. Core,” Ma said as she picked me from the ground and dusted me off. “Jeff not be knowing things. He be a stupid troll.”
Hell, why not start sowing chaos now? I let my consciousness flow outward again, and this time, I found the swirling mass of hulking flesh that was Jeff. This time, I projected my voice straight into his mind, without worrying about listening to his thoughts first.
“Your mother displeases me,” I said to Jeff alone. “Do you really want her to end up like your friend, Charlie? Would you like me to take her mind and then turn her upon you? How does killing your own mother sound? Because I will make you fight her, and you will be forced to cut her throat before she drives a kitchen knife through your skull.”
There. That would do the trick. I was incapable of controlling his mother from my jewel, but Jeff didn’t know that.
“Ma! The pretty be speaking in me head!” he howled.
“Shut up, Jeff!” There was another whack. “The core is tricksy. It lies. It bites. And it eats if it not treated nicely. We just be needing to show it our troll hospitality.”
I took my focus off Jeff and found the horrendous form of Ma. Unlike the stone-like mind of her son, the mother troll seemed to have a faster flow of thoughts. Not encouraging, but I wasn’t here to encourage.
An idea struck me.
“I want none of your hospitality,” I said. “I’ve been summoned to your world by Lilith, and you wouldn’t want to anger your goddess.”
“My goddess? Lilith not be our goddess anymore. The Infernal Realm has no god! We’re free creatures now.”
Well, that was unfortunate. Atheist trolls. Part of me wondered how Lilith would feel about this fucked-up little family living in her mountain and shit-talking her. Threatening the troll obviously wasn’t working, so I decided to change tactics.
“If you free me, I will show you to my dungeon. You can scour my floors for plunder. I can assure you it will be more than worth the trouble.”
“You be lying,” Ma retorted. “Your dungeon doesn’t even exist. You are just a core without a dungeon. You don’t even have a pixie to guide you. You know nothing, little core. In fact, I be surprised you’ve even learned to speak. Dungeons are supposed to have tiny minds when they first begin. Must be the work of Lilith. Crafty goddess, that one.”
“He said we could plunder his floors,” Jeff said. “Can’t we do that?”
Attaboy, Jeff. The idiot was biting into my lies, at least.
“There be no floors,” Ma spat. “Besides, we don’t want a reward from him. We just want the little core to stay with us for a while. Ain’t that right, Jeff?”
I heard Jeff groan, guessing his mother had just elbowed him in the gut. Violence seemed to be the universal troll motivator, and I wondered how well they liked it when it was more on the lethal side. I figured I’d find out soon enough.
“Yeah,” he said. “That be right.”
It was time to negotiate again and get control of the conversation. For all that Ma was saying, she didn’t know everything. I had so much more up my sleeve and an army of nonspecific—and hopefully ravenous—creatures on the way to redesign the wallpaper with troll intestines.
“Keep me here until you can sell me to the guilds, is that your plan?” I asked her.
“How about I let you rest on my mantelpiece? There you go. That’s a good core. Jeff, go tell Bertha we be entertaining. Then send a message to Gavin.”
Ma whispered her next words, but I couldn’t quite catch them with my irritatingly limited sense of hearing. I had no idea who Gavin was, if he was involved with the trolls, or the guilds they’d mentioned. I just didn’t know enough.
Retreating from Ma’s consciousness, I nestled my mind comfortably inside my small, blood-red fractals. I stretched my consciousness out again, past Jeff and Ma, but the
white noise of voices was a roaring ocean an eternity away. I heard no sign of that familiar, grating, subservient voice. Where was the creature who’d promised to rescue me? Had I been conned?
Frustration bubbled beneath my jewel’s surface. I couldn’t move at all, nor did I think I’d be able to convince Ma to let me go. I spent some time settling down, examining the sensations flowing through my clean, sharp, reflective faces.
My existence as a dungeon core was a peculiar experience. I didn’t have nostrils but could still sense the aroma of stewed meat drifting from beneath me. My senses were different from being a human or an elf. I somehow bypassed the actual process of perception and moved straight to a kind of understanding of substance. The vibrations moving through surfaces, the particles of the air, the hum of sound.
I could feel the heat from a fire below me, and I let my senses—rather than my consciousness—flow outward. Conducting my investigation with caution, I was wary of alerting the trolls to my actions. The exact type of meat stewing on the fire wasn’t one I recognized from Earth; this was thick, chunky, and beefy with a lot of thick proteins but also carried a large amount of fructose.
If I reached out a little further, I could feel the fireplace’s roughly-hewn volcanic stone. With a little more attention, I almost laughed. Weird. I could feel the connections, the tiny, microscopic fractures in the dark, volcanic stone, similar to the edges of my own being.
A thought struck me. If I could absorb the essence of Von Dominus, could I do it to inorganic material? I stretched out my consciousness to the obsidian, rather than the hushed, garbled whispers of thought in the distance, and pulled at the stone. I felt a soft crack, then, in a moment, essence began flowing into my jewel, just the same as it had done with my avatar.
“Hey!” Ma cried out. “No eating my grotto! Just you wait there. Not long now, and you be seeing troll hospitality.”
I cursed Ma and her higher-than-usual troll IQ. She knew even that much, and was going to keep me here? She was too much of a threat. If I became a bother, nothing was stopping her from speeding up her plans to sell me to the guild or toss me off the mountaintop.
Mentally grimacing, I let my grip on the obsidian’s essence slip. Guess I was stuck here, unmoving until my timer reset, and my avatar could be summoned.
Or perhaps I was stuck until the tribe got here. But that was starting to feel like a lost cause. I couldn’t count on them to rescue me. I had to handle the situation myself.
First, I needed to gather more intel on these trolls, their home, and their capabilities. I turned my attention to my more traditional senses. At first, it was difficult to see even a few inches beyond my jewel, and the process caused significant stress on my form. I had to rest a few times before I could try and practice my sight again, but after a few hours, I could see the room in its entirety.
Moonlight filtered in through wooden window panes, so this cave wasn’t actually very deep inside the mountain. Fur rugs lined the floor, and the preserved heads of hideous beasts jutted from the walls. An elderly female troll sat in a rocking chair by the fire, her rolls of fat tumbling over its arms. The floral nightgown she wore made her look almost comical, except the rest of her was both terrifying and disgusting.
Ma’s bare scalp was covered in growths that resembled parasites, and the only things identifying her as a woman were the mountains of flesh I took for breasts sagging down to her waistline. Her skin was a brown-green color, like the kind of projectile spew that might have graced The Exorcist’s set.
I doubted Ma was even capable of heaving herself from her seat, but I was proven wrong when she exerted considerable effort to stand and waddled toward a bench on the far side of the room. She started carving a carcass with a cleaver, the sheer strength of her chops suggesting strong muscles lay hidden beneath her layers and layers of fat.
All right, note to self: don’t try and take her head-on.
The rest of the chamber was sparse of belongings, but it had two exits. One looked like it led outside whereas the other led to a passageway. I hadn’t seen anything of the troll Ma had referred to as Bertha, but I figured she was either outside or in a room off the passageway.
That made three trolls I’d have to deal with. Ma had sent Jeff to deliver a message to someone named Gavin, so he could be a fourth enemy standing between me and freedom.
The hours passed by, broken only by the addition of a third troll to the grotto.
The new arrival didn’t bode well. Was it a member of the guild, come to take me away?
I prepared myself for the worst.
Chapter Seven
I extended my senses outward to get an idea of what else I was up against. I’d expected Gavin, whoever the hell he was, but this was another creature entirely. The only features making her recognizable as a troll were the leaf-shaped ears angled behind her head, her green skin, pointed nose, and purple lips. She actually looked more like a human, not some creature carved out of blubber and the mountain itself.
While muscular, her body had curves in all the right places. She was Amazonian, almost, standing the same height as my elf avatar. If I’d seen her back home, I’d have assumed she was some kind of Olympic weightlifter who frequented underwear photoshoots and had just gone skinny-dipping in a dark green pool of paint.
A warrior’s braid of silky, almost sable hair snaked over her shoulder and down her back. Purple tattoos curled over her skin, tribal markings whose meaning was lost to me. A tight leather corset flattered an incredibly generous pair of breasts. The same kind of rustic leather circled low around her hips, almost baring a fantastic ass and thighs of pure muscle that rippled under her skin. She was a shockingly attractive creature hardened by the mountain, hunting, and probably no small dose of her family’s abuse.
If this troll was an example of what dungeon core avatars might look like, then I would have no reservations hunting down every last one of them and . . . how had Lilith put it? Conquering their avatars?
“Bertha,” Ma said to the beautiful troll. “You be late.”
This was Bertha? I’d expected some kind of wrinkled, warted, bipedal cow.
“I found Charlie. He’s—”
“Dead,” Ma finished. “We know. Come, sit. We’re celebrating.”
“Celebrating?”
Even her voice was different. Her voice was laced with a smooth and bassy tone like a jazz singer, further marking her as utterly different from the rest of her family.
Talk about a black sheep!
“We found something special. A dungeon core.” Ma nodded toward me, and the other female troll’s eyes widened.
Bertha approached the mantelpiece, and her fingers stroked my sides. Her fingertips were rough and calloused, but warm and surprisingly pleasing.
“No touching!” Ma commanded. “He’s not for—actually, I be having an idea. Come over here, Bertha. There be something I want to tell you.”
Bertha approached her mother, and they whispered together for a while. Extending my senses was too straining, and I decided to conserve my energy so I could play the long game. Whatever they murmured to each other was lost to me.
I wasn’t sure when Gavin would arrive, but I rested while the trolls ate their meal and sang a few songs. Bertha joined in reluctantly, and I spent my time trying to distinguish her jazz tone beyond Ma’s screeching and Jeff’s warbling.
Eventually, the songs concluded, and Ma was the only troll left in the main chamber. My consciousness soon filled with the sound of her snoring. Rested and ready, I reached out with my sight and saw Ma sleeping in her rocking chair. I guessed Bertha and Jeff had retired to bedrooms elsewhere in the grotto.
I checked my timer and felt a flood of elation when I saw it had refreshed. This hour-long time limit was a serious problem, and I needed to extend it as soon as possible. I waited a few seconds and pieced together the best plan I could cook up.
Ma was obviously guarding me by the fireplace. She hadn’t mentioned anything about my ava
tar, and I wondered whether her lack of knowledge about dungeons also meant she didn’t know I could summon one. Jeff also had made no connection between the elf he had seen and my jewel.
The best working guess I had was that the trolls didn’t know I could summon Von Dominus.
A bunch of knives, cleavers, and other carving tools lay on the benchtop. That’d be my first point of call—I could grab a few as soon as I entered my avatar and then deal with Ma swiftly while she was still sleeping.
Or at least, do my damn best to put her down.
Then I could handle Jeff and Bertha. They were stronger than me, so I’d have to take a stealthy approach. I could just book it without them noticing, but if I made it my mission to gore their mother in her sleep, it stood to reason they’d come after me. At least a gruesome death would send a message to Gavin and the guild.
I wasn’t a dungeon core to be messed with.
I summoned my avatar. The elf materialized, unblinking and still, and I felt a rush of anticipation at the prospect of again owning a mobile body. I extended my consciousness to the avatar and then infused it into him.
Ma maintained her snoring and didn’t stir at all. Blinking, I flexed my hands, rolled my shoulders, and let my senses adjust to their new surroundings. Now, I could smell the revolting meat spitted over the fire and feel the warmth through actual skin instead of crystalline fractals.
I grabbed my dungeon heart from the mantelpiece when the hackles on the back of my neck stood up.
“Going somewhere?” The formerly unconscious troll popped her head up as soon as I turned around.
So much for asleep. Shit. They knew about the avatar. Well, I couldn’t do anything except play it cool. I relaxed, smiled, and bared my fangs at her as charmingly as I could. There was no need to turn this into a fight if it didn’t need to be one.
I attempted to move when I felt someone horrifyingly strong catch me in some kind of armlock, twisting my shoulder until I could feel my bones grind together.
“Hello, Mr. Core,” Bertha murmured behind me. “We’re gonna have a good time.”
