by Eric Ugland
“Good evening gents,” I said. “Care to, uh, leave?”
Chapter 42
I thought the hard part of the questing was over. Now it was time to find loot and escort rescued damsels to their homes before getting a shimmering reward.
I was wrong.
On almost all counts.
The men shouted at me, mostly in surprise. Then they ran right past me and up the stairs, leaving their tools and candles behind. I heard at least one man fall on the steps, but no one stopped.
One person remained behind, looking at the door. Shorter, he had bright red hair and shabby clothing. His shoes were nearly falling apart, and his pants were pretty much nothing but threads.
“Yo,” I said, “it’s kinda time to go buddy.”
“I must open the door,” came his monotone reply. “You must come with me.”
“Yeah, not sure that’s a good idea.”
“It is the best idea,” he said, and reached for the door.
I didn’t make a move because I figured the door would be locked. That make sense, right? If you build a big fuck-off wall in front of a door, you lock it first.
Nope.
The handle turned like it’d been greased recently, and the door swung open. No noise, no nothing. It was the first fully-functioning door I’d seen in the entire castle.
Naturally, my new buddy walked right on through.
“Dude,” I said, following after him since I knew I shouldn’t leave somebody behind, “can you do this after I’m no longer responsible for you?”
He didn’t answer. He seemed to have no notice that I’d said anything at all. The man kept walking.
I looked back at the stairs, knowing that it was the direction I should go, that I should just let this asshole disappear into the bowels of the dungeon, and yet… So many times I’d left something undone because I lacked courage, lacked the wherewithal to do what needed to be done. A few deep breaths, some rolling of the shoulders, and I knew what I had to do.
I followed the asshole.
I expected to feel something like a great weight, or something sort of magical, a tingle across my skin. There was nothing like that. I just walked through.
The torchlight sent bizarre shaking shadows across the walls. I’m sure I would’ve gotten freaked out by them, if not for a blueish glow to focus on, coming from right ahead of me.
I walked forward quickly and went through another door, and discovered where the glow came from. Lights, crystals of some sort, glowing by themselves and embedded in the ceiling. It was a big square room with a rug on the floor and some posh chairs along the walls, low tables in between each of them. It looked very much like a lounge. Two doors were along one wall with two doors opposite. The door I came through was the last, making five total entrances into the room.
The ceiling was only about eight or so feet high, so I could reach it easily. I put my hand on a crystal, and it was cool to the touch. I tried to pull it free, but something held it on, and the crystal stayed firmly in place.
The redhead powered on in front of me, getting to another door, opening it, and marching resolutely forth.
“Dude,” I tried.
Nothing.
I ran after him.
This door lead into a hallway, still lit with the glowing crystals. Everything down here looked well cared for. Old, sure, but totally operational. There wasn’t even any dust on the floor. The contrast to the rest of the castle was stunning.
Red walked down the hall to another fucking door. No pause there either — he just opened the door and walked in.
“Fuckin’ a, man,” I shouted, half-jogging to catch him. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of just strolling into rooms willy-nilly. Something awful had to be down here, and I didn’t want to stumble into it and die. Again. One death was enough.
This doorway led into a large rectangular room. Plenty of crystals in the ceiling kept the space nice and bright. At the far end, the floor looked like it had a hole in it, and the reflections on the ceiling made me pretty sure there was water in said hole. There wasn’t any furniture in the place, but a fair amount of junk was spread around. Boxes, crates, quite a few swords, different kinds of armor in different piles, all over the floor. There were also a few piles of what looked like white rocks from the doorway.
Red marched straight towards the end of the room with purpose and drive and a complete disregard for anything else.
I stopped at the entrance because something felt off. Wrong. This didn’t make sense.
As if to drive home the point, now I could see a vague shimmering in between Red and the pool.
I called out to the man, but, as before, the assbutt ignored me.
The shimmering overtook the man, and held him in mid-air. Red started screaming.
I swore I heard someone else yell. But like, in my head, not out loud.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked no one in particular.
I got no answer.
I walked closer, moving slowly, sword held in front of me until I was about three feet from Red.
His eyes were wide. He looked at me, imploring for help.
“Hold tight there, buddy,” I said, looking at the, for lack of a better word, jelly that had trapped him.
I poked it with my sword.
The jelly didn’t like that, and did its best to dodge me, shifting a bit back. It was big, all the way to the ceiling and roughly cuboid. It seemed like it had been constrained by the ceiling and floor, and so it had a bulging middle and some rounded corners.
Just then, an arm-like thing came out of the jelly, angling towards me as if to grab me.
Because it looked exactly like a clear version of the stuff that’d been shoved down my throat as a kid by well-meaning but unimaginative foster parents, I couldn’t stop hearing the voice of Bill Cosby echoing around in my head.
More by instinct than anything else, I swung the sword across my body, slicing the gelatinous protrusion off.
“H-E-L-L-no, motherfucker,” I snapped.
The jelly shied back while thick viscous liquid poured forth and splashed on the ground.
I swung Dagobert’s longsword back and forth, hacking chunks off the jelly. More and more of the liquid spewed out, oozing all over the floor.
The jelly made another swipe for me, managing to get its pseudo-arm around my left wrist. A quick slash solved the problem.
I shook my wrist out and realized the clear liquid had some sort of paralytic effect. And since I was an idiot who didn’t wear shoes, my feet were getting numb. I was quickly losing any speed advantage I had over the jelly.
Slice and cut and jab and slice. Over and over again until the jelly lost most of its shape, no longer pressing tight against the ceiling. Finally, we seemed to hit a threshold where the jelly could no longer hold itself together. As if a small and disgusting dam burst, all the fluid spilled at once, flowing out across the stone floor.
Red flopped to the ground, sputtering and coughing.
I grabbed the man and pulled him out of the goo. I did my best to wipe the slime off of the poor dude, even going so far as to stick my hand into his mouth, to pull it out.
He finished coughing, and just kind of leaned on me. I let him, and even gave him a thump or two on the back for good measure.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You tell me,” I said.
“I… I do not know who you are?”
“Makes two of us. They say life is a journey of self-discovery.”
“I was breaking the wall, but then I was being eaten by an ooze. Which is real. I had never thought—”
“Do you think we can get the fuck out of here now?” I interrupted. “Side question, you know what the thing was?”
“Jellied Demon?”
“Not what I would have guessed,” I said, peering at the translucent mess around us. “Motherfucker certainly lived up to its name. Speaking of names, I’m Montana. You are?”
“I am—” hi
s eyes glazed over just a bit, and his head dropped. “— Excuse me.”
He started back towards the pool at the far end.
“Wait a fucking minute,” I said, and grabbed at him.
Red tried to hit back and push me off of him, but the guy basically felt like a child in terms of strength.
I tightened my grip, and pulled him along with me as I walked back along the path we’d come in on, a process made easier by the mild lubricating properties of the Jelly’s Goop. I just sort of dragged the jackass along behind me.
He wasn’t giving up though. He bit me.
Which pissed me off, so I hauled off and slugged him.
Pow.
Red folded like a cheap suit, and I was left holding him up completely with one arm.
Maybe I was putting a few too many points into strength.
I resolved to go back upstairs, let Nikolai know what was down here, and then leave it up to someone else to explore this weird place that somehow took over people’s minds. Hell, I just wanted to get out of the area before something took over my brain.
Back in the lounge room, I noticed one thing that was very off. The door we walked into was shut. I leaned Red up against the wall, but he promptly fell over to the side.
I pulled on the door, but to no effect. The thing was locked tight. I kicked it. Nothing. Sword, axe, nothing made the door budge in the slightest.
“Well, fuck,” I said, looking around the room, wondering what the fuck would happen next.
Turns out, that’s something I should stop doing, because that’s when the other doors opened.
Chapter 43
Obviously, the doors didn’t just open. Things started coming through them. Humanoid things, with completely black, latex-like skin. And devoid of things like genitals or, you know, defining facial features. Their hands were especially nasty, with fingers as long as my forearms hanging down. And just to make sure I’d have nightmares about them for the rest of my life, they had slack jaws filled with far too many teeth and sunken hollows where their eyes should’ve been.
“Oh hey,” I said, “just took a wrong turn, looking for the exit. You know where that might be?”
They made a guttural keening, and approached en masse, six of them.
I slid the axe off my back, and reminded myself of the low ceiling. I’d need to make horizontal swings.
While watching the creatures, I really wished I knew a way to get more information about my opponents. Something tugged at the back of my brain, and I suddenly remembered the goblins. That I had a fucking spell to identify things. I shot the spell off over to them, and got back:
Eldritch Thralls
Lvl 5
Okay then. Probably not particularly friendly.
The closest one reached out for me, its stupid long fingers crackling with iridescent purple electricity.
“Let’s not play this game, boys,” I said, and swung for the fences.
Straight through the thing. Axe beats thrall.
It was almost too easy. I’d been expecting more resistance, so I was a bit overextended, and the next thrall in line just reached out and wailed on my side. Its fingers just went straight through the chainmail and seemed to rip my insides.
I screamed and kicked out, connecting with the thrall and causing it to tumble back and stumble into its brethren.
Two got tangled together, and I brought the axe into them both, double-kill style. I left the axe there and rushed at the remaining thralls, a move they weren’t expecting. I ripped the sword from my belt and sliced across, right through the head of one.
Learning from my mistakes for once, I danced back and got out of range of their hands. A bit more of a backpedal gave me working room, and let me see something demoralizing.
I thought I’d killed four of the six, but now only one looked dead. The one I’d bisected was crawling towards me. Just the torso, sure, but the torso was pulling itself across the floor towards me.
Two were struggling to pull the axe out of each other, so while they weren’t dead, they were out of the fight for a moment.
Half-head seemed to be the only one to stay deceased.
“Red,” I said to the unconscious lump of jerkbutt I was still trying to save, “could’ve told me to go for the head.”
I faked to the left, then jumped up and stomped both feet down on the crawler. Thrall head versus Montana feet ended with explosion, and gross thrall goo spewed all over my legs.
I went over for a snap thrust, and both the axe buddies went limp.
The rest of the thralls were short work. Leaking, but dead. Or re-dead. I wasn’t sure where Eldritch Thralls fell on the whole undead versus alive scale here.
I wiped a bit of sweat from my face, but ended up spreading both cube goo and thrall goo across my hair and beard. I needed to get a handle on what was happening around me.
The door hadn’t unlocked. Or moved.
I was still trapped.
In a lounge.
With an unconscious man who seemed strangely determined to drown himself. I think.
I left Red where he was and ran into the store room. The gelatinous remnants were slowly leaking into the water pool at the back of the room. I swore I saw something moving there, but when I got close enough to look into the water, it was just darkness below.
A little search of the room turned up some rope. I mean, there was a ton of other stuff there, but the rope was the stuff I was looking for. I used it to tie Red to one of the comfy chairs in the lounge. I’d gone through too much trouble saving the man already just to have him wander off and die while I finished getting us out of the mess he’d gotten us in.
Asshole.
I went through the doors the thralls had come from, which lead to another hallway. This one had three doors along each side and one at the end. Eight in total, counting the one I came through.
One door was just a hair open, so I edged it all the way with the point of my sword.
A bedroom, like something you’d find in a dorm. But I guess considering the time period I was in, it was a barracks. Small bed, wool blanket. Chest at the foot, small desk, small wardrobe. Crystal up top to light the room.
I poked through the chest. It was mostly sundry items, but everything was very old. Cloth falling apart, yellowing paper, and a jar of something that might have once been food. I slipped the jar in my pouch — could be interesting later. Finally, I found a small bag of coins from the bottom, buried under the rotten cotton, and grabbed it.
The wardrobe held a similar story, except no gold. I did find a pair of shoes though. There was also a little bit of jewelry in a small box. The box went into my bag — being in a game world meant that loot was important. And anyway, I had to refill my purse, considering I’d been so cavalier with money.
The next three rooms were functionally identical. Different clothing styles and sizes, different sizes of purses, but basically everything else was the same. Nothing of note.
The fifth room’s chest had a false bottom. I probably wouldn’t have noticed except that I’d just looked at four identical chests, and so the depth seemed off. I felt around the edges, played with the latches, and finally felt a little hole. I used the pin of a broach and stuck it through. There was an audible click, and the bottom of the chest came loose.
I pulled it up, and sucked in my breath.
Loot.
Stacks of gold coins, a bejeweled dagger, a handful of books, and a small golden box. All went into my bag. I’d sort the shit out later.
I was almost excited to get to the sixth room. But that’s where everything changed.
I opened the door to see an old man standing on his bed, a dagger out and pointed in my direction.
Chapter 44
We stood there for a moment, neither moving, both of us trying to get a read on the situation.
“Evening,” I said.
“I, uh,” the old guy’s voice was rough. Like he’d been smoking and not speaking for a decade. “Who are
you? How did you get in here?”
“Do you need saving?” I asked. “Or do you know how to unlock the door out of here?”
“You just stumbled into here?” he asked.
“Accurate description, oddly enough.”
“What year is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has the world fallen so far we cannot keep track of years?”
“I’m kind of, I mean, I’m an idiot? I guess? I don’t pay attention to that sort of stuff. But I’m a bit weirded out by this place. What is this?”
“But a corruption of what it once was. A folly of—”
“Come on dude, cease the poetics. Where are we?”
“A place of study. A laboratory.”
“So you’re a scientist.”
“I am a wizard,” he replied, haughty as fuck. “Once I was known and feared in all the realms. I was courted by kings and—”
“Let’s tone it down just a tad, hoss,” I said. “No need for horn-tootin.’”
“Horn tooting?”
“And isn’t magic kind of outlawed in the Empire?”
“Precisely why I am down here in the bowels of an accursed mountain. We were forced to hide from the fools and charlatans who make rules based on ignorance and fear.”
“I mean, not for nothing, but maybe there’s something to the rules, considering you were trapped down here, and there’s a bunch of nasty stuff walking around. “
“You have fought the thralls?”
“Yeah. I did, and—”
“Did you suffer wounds?”
“A little one, just—”
“Where? Show me.”
He dropped his dagger and hopped off the bed. I had to catch the old dude and put him back on his feet.
I held up my mail and pointed to my side.
“Gods,” he whispered. I could feel his ancient fingers prodding my side.
I looked down and was shocked. Black flesh pulsated right under my skin, spreading out from the point of contact almost.
“The danger with thralls is not what they are able to do in the moment,” the old man said, focused on the wound while he spoke to me. “They have little strength and little speed. It is more what they do should they infect you.”
