The smoke-being reached me.
“So you are going to hit me with those?” it said as it began to surround me on all sides. “And what was that you said to me? The water can kill me? You think you can distract me so easily?”
“You did get distracted,” I said. I didn’t wait. I stuck one stone on another. The smoke-being had probably thought that I meant to hit him with the stones, and now the glowing eyes of the smoke-being went wide in horror.
The smoke-being ignited.
It wasn’t a great thing that he had surrounded me on all sides.
For a while my entire world turned to flames.
You are on fire!
You receive -400 health!
Though I could barely see, I stumbled forward. It was probably by sheer luck that I fell face first on the water. My body was screaming in pain and the water barely provided only little relief. My health began to sink. I was sure I would die. There was no escape from this.
The pain abruptly stopped. A notification appeared in the vision.
Congratulations!
You have defeated the smoke-being!
You go to the next storey!
You receive a new spell: No Touching! You can control things without touching them. How well you can control the objects will depend on their size, their weight and also on your mana level.
Cool, I thought. That was one spell that would come in handy.
Yet another notification appeared, as the water around me dissolved into utter blackness. I felt a fuzzy feeling take hold of me.
Congratulations!
You level up!
***
General Information
Name
Kitty
Level
5
Sex
Male
Race
Cat
Health
500
Mana
200
Strength
48
Stamina
47
Luck
50
Chapter 49
I grinned seeing my health, mana and stamina limits rise.
I reckoned this was my escape.
The room which we had first entered through the door materialised. The female dogman was still sitting on her chair. She began chuckling when she looked up and saw me.
“Ah, so you are in the second storey now!” she said with a small clap of her hands. “I am impressed that you survived Smoke. But do not worry, the others that you are about to meet will surely kill you.”
“Where are my friends?” I demanded.
But the female dogman just kept laughing. She began to fade, and so did the room. Very soon, I was standing in a barren place. Not a single plant grew. However when I turned my head to the side, I saw that towards the east, there was what looked like a great garden of flower. The flowers were growing on an elevated ground. What was interesting was that the entirety of the elevated ground seemed to consist of a giant slab of black rock that seemed to have been formed by the cooling of lava although, there was no volcano in sigh anywhere.
In front of me a short distance away there stood a giant dogman. He was tall. Perhaps he was twice the height of Rupasur. I swallowed. I wished there was another smoke-being that I needed to kill instead of this giant. I was sceptic I would survive this one.
But then, I had survived against all odds till now. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I would win? A feeling of determination came over me. I gritted my teeth.
The giant began to approach me. The strides he took were as giant as himself. I remained where I was standing. No fleeing, I told myself. The only way out of this place was by killing the giant.
The giant squatted down in front of me. He grinned.
“What?” he said in a tone of mockery. If Rupasur’s voice was like thunder, the voice of this giant was like the eruption of a volcano, “How can Smoke be so weak? I had expected Smoke to perform better.” He shook his head, apparently displeased with Smoke.
Then he curled fingers into a fist and threw it at me. I leapt, the fist just missing me.
“Ah,” the giant said, “quite energetic you are, aren’t you?”
I focused hard on the giant. I activated No Touching.
Sorry! What you are trying to lift is too heavy! Try lifting a lighter object.
The giant threw another fist at me. As the adrenaline rushed in me, I did something that I had not planned. I evaded the powerful fist, and immediately I jumped onto the hand of the giant. I began to race up his arm. As I was making my way up, only then did I realise what my subconscious had in mind: to injure the eyes of the giant.
“Ooh! That tickles me!” The giant said. He tried to catch me with his other hand, but I evaded his fingers. Running, crawling, leaping, I reached his neck.
“Enough!” the giant cried, irritated, “Get off me, you little bastard!”
He hit his neck with his palm. I leapt, and his index finger only barely missed me. I landed on his chin and dug my nails into his skin for fear of falling off.
“Urgh, this is getting to my head,” the giant said, hitting his chin with his palms. I leapt again. I climbed up his nose. I could feel the stares of both his eyes focused on me.
The giant seemed to have realised that it wouldn’t be easy getting me off him.
“Okay, what do you plan to do with my head?” he asked.
By then, I was right next to his right eye.
“This,” I muttered. I punched his right eye hard. That single punch seemed to hit the giant with so much force that he took a dozen steps backward, even as his eyelid snapped shut with the pain, and a large tear drop came out of his eye. The giant stumbled and fell butt first onto the ground.
I made my way up his forehead now, as the giant cried out in pain, covering his eye with his hand.
“You filthy bastard,” he roared.
I considered my next move. What would be an appropriate place to strike him next? Some place tender would be nice.
My thoughts immediately wandered to his groin. But I decided that wouldn’t be appropriate. I myself would never want anybody to hit me there. But there should be some other place… soft and tender.
Inside the nostril?
I imagined the mucus in the giant’s nostrils. No. I was too squeamish for that. But I reckoned I could get to his ear at least. The giant meanwhile was frantically moving his head in an attempt to get rid of me. But I clung on. I used my own paws with the claws instead of Human Hands for better hold. Slowly, evading many attempt by the giant to grab me, I reached his ear.
I grinned as I thought of what I would do next.
I sunk my canines into the ear of the giant. The giant cried out and again his hand came for me. He was lucky this time for he was able to hit me with one of his fingers. That one finger had enough force that I was thrown away. I found myself in mid-air, the world around me revolving fast.
I hit the rocky ground hard.
My health fell by half. Had I not levelled up in the previous storey, I might have as well died. My back was flaring in pain, and for a moment I struggled to make sense of my situation, too shocked by my impact with the ground. My brain felt like it was trying to solve a thousand puzzles at once.
I felt a hold on my leg, and the next moment I knew I was being lifted up.
It was the giant, he had caught my leg. His right eye was red and teary, and the spot where I had punched was leaking blood.
I knew the giant was going to kill me within the next few seconds. I needed to keep him engaged.
“How does your eye feel?” I said. My back meanwhile was sucking all life from me.
“Well,” the giant boomed, “you should be worried about yourself right now.”
“You never thought right that someone so small like me could ever harm you?” I said. It was at that moment that I noticed something about the flowers that were growing over the rock in the distance. The stems of all the flowers had great pointy thor
ns. A sudden idea seized hold of me. I activated No Touching.
“Should I just drop you and be done or would you prefer a more painful death?” the giant asked me. I focussed hard on the flowers and began to uproot large numbers of the flowers by sheer concentration. They began to hover in the air. “Or should I first pull out your tail, then your limbs and finally your head? That would be a more… let’s say juicy way to die, am I right?”
“Sure,” I said. I made the flowers come towards the giant at a very fast speed.
“Really?” the giant said, a bit taken with surprise since I had asked for the more painful way to die. “You are interesting.”
“And so are the thorns.”
“The thorns?”
It was at that moment that the first of the flowers hit the giant. The thorns were large enough to tear the skin of the giant and as the giant tried to get rid of them with his other hand, he only tore more of his skin. I kept making more flowers come. Seized by the pain, the giant dropped me.
I had totally not thought about that.
Luck, however, was on my side. I landed on the giant’s thigh that had bent forward as he tried to remove the thorns, and then on the giant’s foot. This cushioned my fall, and when I reached the ground, I only had 25 health less. I quickly took out a health vial from my bag and drank it.
The giant was jumping now. I was making the thorns hit every single part of his great body. I kept making the flowers stream through the air from their original place.
But I was also aware that the thorns alone could never kill the giant, without which I would never be able to get out of this particular level. Think, Kitty, think!
My eyes fell on the giant slab of solidified lava from which I was making the flowers come and hit the giant. I had made enough flowers come that a large portion of the slab was now revealed. I saw that the slab had countless jagged ends, sticking out like giant knives. Some of them were thrice my height.
If the giant fell on them and they punctured a vital organ of his, he would die at the spot.
I began to run towards the slab of lava. Behind me the giant let out a great roar. He began to run towards me with great leaps. He was one sight to behold, I thought, even as I ran like mad. He was totally covered in flowers, head to toe. The flowers, which were otherwise white, had turned a shade of crimson with the giant’s blood. Only the giant’s eyes had been unharmed, though his right eye was still bloody red from my punch.
I finally reached the slab of lava. I climbed onto it. Mistakenly I placed my paw on the wrong place. A stinging pain shot up my paw.
You have been cut!
You receive -20 health!
Shit! Trying to kill the giant here, I might as well die myself. More carefully, I made my way over the slab of lava. I kept receiving small cuts all the time.
“I will kill you little devil!” the giant cried aloud. He lunged forward, something he would have never done with a sane mind. Thankfully the thorns had removed all sanity from him.
The sound with which he landed over the slab of lava made me go deaf. Rocks flew all around me. The giant grabbed me with one of his hands, even as blood spurted out of his stomach by the gallons. He laughed, not minding the pain at all.
“I have got you!” he said.
He squeezed me. Harder and harder. I could breathe no more. I bit his hand in a desperate attempt but the giant seemed to have given up the sensation of pain altogether. I felt myself fading.
And just then the giant’s hand went limp. I dropped out of his grasp and landed hard on the ground below. I was bleeding uncontrollably, but I was happy at least I could breathe now. The giant’s great tongue lolled out of his mouth, even as great rivers of blood poured out from his stomach.
The giant was dead.
I put my hand inside my bag and searched for a health vial. But before I could drink one a notification appeared in my vision, even as I experienced a fuzzy feeling.
Congratulations!
You have defeated the Monster Dogman!
Rewards: You go to the next storey!
Congratulations!
You have levelled up!
My wounds healed on their own. The giant corpse of the dogman disappeared and so did the flowers around me and the great slab of lava I had been standing on. The room with the female dogman materialised.
Chapter 50
“Now, I am impressed!” the female dogman said, and from her voice I could feel that she really was impressed. “Even if Smoke got unlucky with you, Mr. Giant should have been able to squeeze the life out of you. But he failed. You have got skills, yes, and a sharp mind. But the play isn’t over of course. Now you go to the next storey. I don’t hope to see you again!”
“Can you please tell me where my friends are?” I said, but before I had finished, the female dogman as well as the room began to fade. Once again I found myself in a new place. This time in a forest, one with trees that actually bore leaves. The forest was similar to the forest outside the Lair, but I was sure this place had dangers of its own kind that I needed to get over to reach the Lord.
And then something stepped out of the bushes that chilled me to the core.
A child, barely more than a baby, with just a few strands of hair on his head. He was a human. He was very pale. He emanated none of the glow that came with children, human or cat. Around his eyes were dark circles, and his eyes were blood shot. He had cut marks at numerous places all over his body. And his teeth were black as coal. His canines were a bit too long for a human…
The appearance of the child was unsettling to me. Perhaps it was strange that I had come two storeys, but only now did I recall that I was still wearing the Helmet that could be used to control the insects. Before coming inside the Lair, I had been able to feel all the thoughts of the insects. But I could no longer feel their thoughts. I tried to tell them to come with me, but I couldn’t reach out to them at all. The helmet was just a normal helmet inside the Lair, and I reckoned that was the reason why I had totally forgotten that I had been wearing it.
The child meanwhile took a step towards me.
I held up a quivering paw at him.
“Don’t come,” I said to the child. But the child didn’t listen. He came running towards me. My heart raced in my chest, but I didn’t move, so paralysed I was. The child grasped my hand. His touch was cold… like ice. He tugged at my paw, as if he wanted me to do something.
The child opened his mouth to say something. I thought words would come out, I wasn’t prepared for the horror that did. It was the tongue of the devil. Strange screeching sounds that made no sense at all. The more the sounds entered my ears, the more frightened I became. I shuddered. Not even in the face of death had I been so afraid. I pushed away the child’s hand and stepped backwards. The child was continuing to speak in the tongue of the devil. I grew restless. I couldn’t bear this anymore.
Before I knew it, I had begun to run. The child was in pursuit of me. The words of the devil flowing endlessly from his mouth. I could barely think anything that could potentially get me out of this level. My mind was entirely preoccupied with making my distance from the child. I kept running like mad, jumping over logs of wood, occasionally stumbling down, hitting my face on the ground, losing health, again getting back to my feet and continuing on the run.
I began to cry, even as I ran. I had thought I could endure all hardships… but this? This was beyond me. The words the child was speaking made me go mad. I wanted to die at this point. I came upon a place that was filled with tall grasses, which were higher than me. The child was still at my heels. I plunged into the sea of grasses. I didn’t care which way I was running. All I wanted was to get away from the child and his blood curling words.
The grasses suddenly ended. I ran faster.
A bit of soft ground.
And plop!
I was neck deep in quicksand! As I tried to digest my situation, I began to struggle hard, kicking with my legs to come out of the quicksand. But no,
the more I did so, the more the quicksand pulled me in. But the child was coming nearer, all the while the vile words flowing out of his mouth.
I struggled even more and the result was that I could barely keep my nose out of the quicksand. Some dirt went inside my mouth but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t help but be amused by the irony of the situation. The great King Kitty, able to take on scores of dogmen all alone, able to kill monsters and giants many times his size, and yet… today he would be killed by a child.
A demonic child.
I saw movement in the grasses that I had just left. If only they were a bit closer I could have grabbed the grasses and pulled myself out of the quicksand. The child appeared. He had suddenly stopped singing.
He gave me a hand.
Was I supposed to grab it and he would pull me up? Did he even have the strength required? A normal human child would not be capable of that… but this was no ordinary human child. And there was no way that I would give him my paw. I preferred to die in the quicksand.
The child frowned at me. Then he opened his mouth again. The words that spilled out of it made my head spin. I wanted to bury my entire head into the mud and be done with the thing right then, but my survival instinct kicked it, and I prevented myself from doing so. Instead, I put my paws over my ears, muffling the words of the child enough that they no longer bothered me. I avoided looking at the child and stared at the dirt all around me, even as I slowly but surely sank into the quicksand. Just half-an-inch were my nostrils above the dirt.
Catheroes Page 25
