by Eric Ugland
“Okay, so that’s the agachnern,” I said. “Strong.”
“Very,” agreed Morcant.
“Fast.”
“Reasonably.”
“And you said cowardly.”
“After a fashion. He will not go to a stand-up fight, if that is what you are thinking. He will wait you out. Ambush you. Find you at your weakest and then take you.”
“Okay, so we have to bring the fight to him. Can he hear us right now?”
“That I do not know.”
“But we can expect his tribe to attack us?”
“They will likely attack you. I am not sure how Koth sees me at the moment. If he is willing to sacrifice my ability to research for him just because I might assist you.”
“Got it. So these tribesmen, are they big and fast?”
“No. They are small, and mind-controlled.”
“And I’m guessing ol’ M’Gog doesn’t exactly have the best fighting skills on land.”
“I have yet to be impressed with his land skills. And outside of his control, the tribe are innocent and rather delightful—”
“Focus, buddy. Let’s get back to the fight. Any chance you’ve got some big fuck-off spear somewhere in the building?”
“It is possible there is something that matches your eloquent description in the store room. I fear I did not work with weapons much.”
He waited there for a moment, and then I gestured that he should lead because, well, I had no fucking idea where anything in the damn underground bunker might be. Morcant led me over to a door, which I opened, and saw a room full of shelves and chests. No racks of weapons.
I sighed, and started pawing through everything, looking for anything useful. Bonus, I had to ask Morcant what nearly everything was because each time I picked up a magic item and tried to identify it, I got:
You’ve found a [????]. Identify the item to learn more.
Super useful.
There was a ton of random crap in the room. The bulk of it seemed as if came from people experimenting on items with no real direction, academic interest with no real-world uses. So you know, mostly esoteric eccentric nonsense. Earrings to let you speak with ants. A monkey paw that was still alive and working despite the rest of the monkey being, well, missing. A journal that could record events as it saw them, which meant it was full of descriptions of the box and the shelf where it was stored. A helm of encouragement. And so on.
There were also failed experiments, my favorite of which was the anti-arrow armor. The armor turned ethereal when hit by an arrow, so the arrow passes straight through the armor into the flesh of the person wearing it.
Brilliant.
I leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
“Maybe if you tell me what you might need,” Morcant said, “I could help you find something.”
Before I said anything, I peered around the edges of the room to make sure there wasn’t a pool. That there wasn’t a way for the agachnern to potentially eavesdrop.
“I need a speargun,” I said, but immediately dismissed that. If Koth was a coward, he wasn’t going to come at me if I had a weapon like that.
“Koth thinks he’s smart,” I continued. “Right?”
“He is very intelligent.”
“But does he think he’s smarter than you?”
“I think he is smarter than me. As far as I know, he believes he is smarter than everyone.”
“Okay, step one in our plan: he needs to think I’m stupid.”
“Not too hard to sell that.”
I frowned at the man.
He shrugged back.
“So,” I said, “now that we’ve established I look like a moron, what would a moron do?”
“Suit up in full plate armor, a sword, and a ring of water-breathing?” Morcant offered.
“Do you have those?”
Morcant nodded, but kept a rather morose and confused look on his face. “I am sure we have those. But you will not survive against him. I have seen his teeth puncture iron and steel. Even red gold.”
“Red gold?” I asked.
“It is—”
“It’s not germane is it? We gotta focus. Koth is badass. I need him to think I’m going to try and fight him so he comes to me.”
“And then?”
“Then I blow him up.”
“I am afraid I have lost your meaning.”
“Big explosion.”
He looked at me for a minute, blinked a few times, then said, “I believe that would end you as well.”
“Maybe?”
“Your sacrifice would be appreciated, but it presents another immediate problem. I know of nothing which will explode underwater.”
“Fireball.”
“Fireballs and water have strange interminglings. As far as I know, they do not work underwater.”
“You haven’t tried?”
“I have not, no, but my colleagues did. They fizzled.”
“No big boom?”
“None.”
“Okay. Dynamite? Gunpowder?”
“Regretfully, I must admit ignorance of those words.”
“Not a thing, don’t worry about it. Blackpowder?”
“Again—“
“No worries,” I said. I walked down one of the aisles looking at crates and crates of crap. “Well fuck.”
I continued along the perimeter of the room, hoping pacing would bring forth an idea. Dynamite fishing was what I’d wanted to go for, but there was no way to make dynamite. Not to mention the small detail that I had no idea what dynamite was made up of.
Explosions. Underwater. That made me think of a YouTube vid I’d seen where this oil company used an airgun to make a cavitation bubble underwater. The bubble’s inevitable collapse would cause an explosion with as much force as dynamite. Or more even. They’d use the shockwave from the bubble to look for oil. So now I needed to figure out how to make a collapsing bubble underwater. How could I insert a—
“Morcant,” I asked, realizing that I might have found a way to make an explosion and not get caught in the damage, “is teleportation possible?”
“We experimented with it,” he replied, “and we discovered it was possible in a fashion.”
“What does that mean?”
“Limited success.”
“What does limited mean? Give me a little more here.”
“We were never able to get it to safely work. There were always issues getting to the exact desired target.”
“I feel there’s a but.”
“We did manage to make a one-time use tool, which, when broken in half, allowed a user to teleport to the other. But it has quite a limited range.”
“Again, what does limited mean? Ten feet? Ten yards? Ten miles?”
“Fifty feet.”
“That’ll probably work. Any of those left?”
“Several,” he said, already moving. He pulled a small box off a shelf and held it out to me. Inside were small grey discs with a shallow line carved through the middle. He held one out to me. “You break it in half, and leave the left half where you wish to go. When you eat the right half—”
“Eat?”
“You must crush it in your teeth. Then it will teleport your body to the other.”
“How much of your body?”
“All of it.”
“Armor?”
“Yes. Anything that would be part of you would teleport.”
“Buddy,” I said with a big smile, “I think we’re gonna get out of this one.”
“Who is Buddy?”
Chapter Forty-Six
We walked out of the store room, and right into an ambush.
I finally got to meet the tribe Morcant kept talking about. Well, four of them at least.
The tribe wasn’t exactly what I was expecting though. They weren’t human, that’s for sure.
They were, um, otters.
Just larger than any otters I’d seen before, and ones that stood upright and wore clothe
s and had weapons.
The tribe attacked en masse. Four stone spearheads jabbed into my midsection, pushing against the chain mail, but not going through.
Rage blossomed inside my chest, my instinctual response to being attacked. But a thought trickled down from my head, pointing out that these creatures were being used by the Agachnern, and that killing them wasn’t the right thing to do. Not the good thing, at least. And if I was going to be a good guy, then I couldn’t just pull out my sword and go ham on the little guys.
Instead, I swept my arm across my torso to get all the spears off me. Then I reached out to grab the closest otter and toss him far down the hall.
The other three responded by using their spear shafts to club me. I could sense what Morcant had said: Koth M’gog just didn’t have a ton of experience moving or fighting on land. He seemed to be struggling controlling three different creatures — they were all working in sync, but not making ant different movements.
I grabbed a second one and pushed him to the side, tripping him with my foot.
“Rope,” I shouted to Morcant, “get me rope.”
Morcant scurried back through the door to the storeroom.
The two upright otters moved to either side of me.
They charged at the same time. If I just stepped back, they’d end up stabbing each other. But I didn’t want that to happen.
Instead, I wanted to put on a good martial show for Koth, so he would believe that I believed I’d be able to take him on in the water. With a sword.
I drew my blade and swung up, so both spears went over my head. Then I stepped into left otter, pushing him back, while snapping the flat of my blade out and into the side of right otter’s head.
Just as both otters hit the ground, Morcant returned with the rope. Now it was just a matter of grabbing otters and tying them up. The otters on the floor were very groggy, looking both confused and afraid. Which meant, to me at least, that Koth M’Gog dropped possession of the otters as soon as he felt they were even slightly incapacitated.
We put the otters in the lounge, filling up more of the comfy chairs. Red stared at me with fear in his eyes. Fear and confusion.
“Dude, just wait,” I said. “You need to relax and let me handle this. And no I won’t untie you. But you’re probably totally safe here, okay?”
The weird grunts that came from the boy told me he had zero confidence in anything I’d just said.
Then, Morcant and I headed to the room with the jellied demon, on the hunt for weapons and armor.
Chapter Forty-Seven
I kitted myself out like an alpha male douchebag’s wet dream. There was a surprising amount of that gear tucked in the dead jellied demon room. Pouring over the gack in the room netted a ton of crap to put on. A full set of posh clothes, leather armor on top of that, chain on top of that, full plate on top of that. I then found the largest chest I could and chained it to my front, and tied a fucking wardrobe to my back. Glow crystals were tucked in everywhere, so light basically poured out of me. To complete my ensemble of stupid, I got the biggest weapon I could find:
Mammoth-Greatsword
Item Type: Uncommon
Item Class: Two-handed Melee
Material: Steel
Damage: 80-120 (Slashing)
Durability: 80/80
Weight: 52 lbs
Requirements: Str 30
Description: Built by giants, for giants, the mammoth sword is used for the hunting and killing of mammoths. Some fools use them as ostentatious decorations, but none but giants ever wield them in combat. Even among giants, they are often seen as ridiculous.
Ten solid feet of steel nearly two feet wide. I waddled through the room, snapped the teleportation disc, and popped one half in my mouth and tossed the other to the ground.
A bit more waddling, and I was at the edge of the water. The surface was completely still, and completely black.
I looked over at Morcant.
He merely shrugged. It was pretty clear he had zero confidence in my plan.
I took a deep breath, and hopped in.
Even through all the gear, the water was frigid. My muscles locked up and I wanted to scream out. But I held it in, not trusting the water-breathing ring stuck on my thumb.
The crystals turned the black water into a gross green, but I could see. Not that there was much down there, just rough-carved rock walls. Given the pounds and pounds of steel on me, I sunk like a fucking rock, moving fast down the shaft of the pool until I hit the bottom. Silt exploded out from my feet.
In front of me was a horizontal tunnel, roughly twenty feet wide. It extended out past the crystal’s light.
Being underwater and weighted down with a ton of gear, I didn’t exactly move quickly. I lumbered down the tunnel, heading in the only direction available to me. I wanted to get deeper in to make sure the cavitation bubble’s collapses made as tight an explosion as possible. I ran my tongue over the teleportation half-disc in my mouth, and wondered why I hadn’t bothered to do a test run. Why had I just taken Morcant’s word for it? I was about as stupid as the Agachnern thought.
I headed down the tunnel, making plenty of noise as I moved, clanking and banging like I had no idea what I was doing in the amor. Not that far from the truth, really. I gave the sword a few swings, at least to the extent that I could in the tunnel, and did my best to appear as if I was gunning for a stand-up fight with the beast.
“Ah, lunch has arrived,” a voice echoed out.
I paused, confused. He wasn’t making the noise in the water — he was projecting it into my mind.
“You talking to me?” I thought, doing my best to project the thought in the direction I imagined Koth M’gog.
“Oh,” the voice replied in mock surprise, “lunch speaks. How novel.”
His voice was slimy. I felt gross just hearing it.
“But I am quite hungry,” Koth continued, “so please, keep the struggle to a minimum. Drop your blade, and I will kill you before I eat you. Otherwise, well, I have heard my digestion system is rather slow. Tortuously sluggish even.”
“I’d rather just stab the ever-loving fuck out of you.”
“So be it.”
God, the arrogance in the voice was overwhelming. It just fueled my desire to make the asshole pay.
Thing was, as soon as the echo of his last word finished reverberating in my head, he attacked. It was fast, coming out of nowhere. He dropped at an angle from the ceiling of the tunnel, his two hands grabbing my arms and crushing the steel armor with his fingers. Laughably easy. His tentacles slapped all over me, their teeth puncturing everywhere at once. I could feel an intense wave of pain washing over me.
I struggled, unable to move. I had a single move to play, but I wanted the agachnern to get closer. I wanted to make sure he was going to get the full brunt of the blow. So I kept struggling, more and more until I heard the fucker laughing in my head. I could see his maw opening up to take a bite.
Tightening my grip on the sword, I bit down on the teleportation disc, feeling the crunch in my mouth, the gritty rock texture and the horrific taste.
And then nothing happened.
For a heartbeat.
Then there was a brilliant light, and I was standing upstairs, dripping water and blood, a litany of wounds practically pouring the red stuff out of me.
Below, there was a deep and resonant boom, loud enough and strong enough that dust shook off the ceiling. A shriek went through my head, a death rattle of sorts, and the agachnern died.
I know because I immediately checked the notification.
GG! You’ve killed an Agachnern (lvl 43 Defiler).
You’ve earned 5900 xp! What a mighty hero you are.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s a lot of XP.”
“You killed him?” Morcant asked.
I noticed he was standing with his back against the wall, a short sword held in his trembling hands.
“I did,” I replied, tossing a crystal into the po
ol. The water had turned a thick red, and bits of flesh popped up to the surface.
Chapter Forty-Eight
I pulled at a latch, and the chest and wardrobe dropped off me. Then I snatched up a spear and dove back in the water. I wanted to check for loot.
Swimming down was the easy part. It was also the disgusting part, since I was paddling through the liquified remains of the monster formerly known as Koth M’gog. Something at the bottom of the tunnel glowed ever so slightly. I kicked down, and saw small iridescent rocks all across the bottom. I grabbed a handful, and immediately got the notification:
You have found one (15) Agachnern Teeth. You have the feeling this might be useful for [unknown].
Huh. I took a moment and scooped up as many of the teeth as I could, and then swam back up, something which was made decidedly unpleasant given the armor I wore.
I dragged myself out of the water, and Morcant stood above me, mouth agape, sword held against his leg. I gestured for help, but he just stared at the bloody water. I had to roll myself out of the water, and get up using my knees. But I did get a notification.
Congratulations! You’ve completed a QUEST
Freedoooom!
You have freed Morcant Treweek from the horrible clutches of the agachnern Koth M’gog. You have also completed the optional secret criteria, harm none of the tribe.
Reward: 6600 XP and [unknown] and [unknown]
“Dude,” I said, “welcome to freedom.”
Morcant shook his head. “I had no confidence you would pull this off.”
“It’s okay. I get that a lot.”
I struggled with my soggy armor for a bit, until Morcant finally stopped staring at the mess and helped. It was rather painful getting the armor off, requiring a pry-bar at several points. Agachnern were strong as fuck, and I totally won though sheer trickery.
