“My blades said those monsters were from another plane,” I said.
Gretchen nodded. “I’m not surprised. There are multiple planes in this game, and loads of quests involve monsters from other ones. You can only really play in the main world, this one, but there are quests and locations in several others you can visit.”
I knew all this already. I probably knew more about this game’s planar system than she did, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it. I had a quick memory of my time at the Lake, of my short discussion with Weed and Mother Reaver before they went back to torturing me.
“I wish I could talk to them, my blades I mean,” I said. I’d tried several times, but it didn’t appear as if they heard me. Their conversations with me were strictly one-way, usually them complaining about the quality of the monster I’d just killed. “They also said these things are hunters of the numinous. That’s the second time someone’s mentioned that word, numinous. Do you know what that means, Larissa? What the numinous are?”
Larissa startled at the question. Like all NPCs, she’d been tuning out what I’d been saying. “Trolls are not numinous. They are wretched beasts that are born in filth and die in filth.”
We came to the end of the chamber, not finding any more of the tentacled monsters. A rounded, hollowed-out cave led further into the darkness. I stopped strobing my light after two of Larissa’s guards produced torches and tentatively lit them, revealing we were safe from the crystals. I whipped Triple Fang onto my belt as we continued down the dark, featureless chamber. It appeared this tunnel had been dug by a worm or some other gargantuan, burrowing beast.
“But do you know what they are?” I probed. “The numinous, I mean?”
“They are the earth-bound product of celestial beings. Sylphs and brownies and the like. The distant cousins of the aurics, but closer to the light gods from whence they came.”
“Fairies?” Popper said. “That light cleric thinks this lotion stuff is for fairies? And those Cthulhu-looking fuckers are fairy hunters? I think the game is trying to throw us a curveball.” He gasped. “Maybe the troll mother is really a hot fairy girl! If that’s the case, I’ll gladly put myself back on nipple duty. Just saying. Daddy is getting a little thirsty, if you know what I mean.”
“You know, with you being in the body of a little kid, it’s really fucking weird when you say shit like…”
Before I could finish, Larissa leaped forward, her massive sword ready to strike down.
“Wait!” I called. “Hold!”
The blade stopped just inches from the top of the chasm troll larva, which had been sulking in the tunnel by itself. It looked sick or half dead. It made a chirping noise and started to crawl back into the cave, seemingly oblivious to our presence.
“It is a troll offspring, your majesty,” Larissa said. “It is what we’re here to exterminate.”
“Do not kill or hurt any of them,” I said, coming closer to examine the scorpion-tailed beast. Popper’s description had been pretty accurate. The fat, yellow baby had onion-paper like skin, and I could see pulsating organs within, including an odd, round light at its center, like its heart glowed. It pulled itself forward on all six legs, and its scorpion tail listed to the side.
“It is sick with hunger,” Larissa muttered. “It is said that trolls feed from their mothers only once before growing into a full-grown, adult beast. It is why a stench such as this must be dealt with quickly. They multiply swiftly and can overwhelm an entire city in a matter of months, devouring everything within. If their mother is sick or dead, this expedition may not be necessary. They will die on their own in a day or so.”
I knew that wasn’t the case. The quest had stated they’d turn on their mother and then invade the city.
A dull, glowing light indicated we were near the lair of the chasm trolls.
Once, as a kid, my class had visited a farm for a field trip. The place was set up as a “teaching farm” on the outskirts of Phoenix, so kids could visit and get a romanticized view of how crops were grown and livestock was raised. Most of the meat in the world was now lab-grown, but people still had a taste for real and natural meat, though real beef had become prohibitively expensive.
Chickens, however, were still common, and this farm had an entire barn filled with newly-hatched chicks, all in corrugated pens under heat lamps. What I remember most about that day was the sound of those chicks, cheep-cheeping. Thousands upon thousands of them, a sound so loud, so insistent, so filled with a strange longing that it burrowed into your soul. Everyone in my class clapped their hands and laughed at the sound. I stood there, horrified. They’re crying, I thought. They’re terrified. They’re sad. They don’t know where they are or what’s going on, only that they’re crying and crying and nobody is helping them. Nobody is ever going to help them. I never ate natural chicken again after that day.
I heard that sound now as we approached the troll lair. It was as if the game had plucked the cheeping directly from my memory and played it back here. I felt a surge of sympathy well up for them.
Just a game, remember? Just a game.
Larissa protested, but I ordered her and her soldiers to keep back and guard our rear.
Ahead, the sickly troll larva fell off the edge into the room ahead. We crept to the precipice of the tunnel, overlooking the large, glowing room.
“Damnit,” Popper said. “You’re back on nipple duty, Jonah.”
There had to be at least 15,000 of the babies in the football-field-sized cavern. They were spread throughout the room, and they lay listless, cheeping, either not moving at all or spasming relentlessly. The entire room glowed from several crystals scattered around the ceiling, hanging down. These were a different kind of crystal, blue-tinged. A lazy river oozed through the room, and the babies sometimes fell into the water with a dull splash. They were swept away into a dark tunnel.
In the center of this lolled the troll queen mother, a massive red dot on the map, surrounded by thousands of tiny little red dots.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” Gretchen said, gagging.
The queen was about fifteen meters long, the size of a train car. She lay on her back, completely naked. The massive creature was obviously sick, but not quite dead. Her six arms splayed out around her, crawling with her babies. I also noted a scorpion tail, unfurled and wrapped around the opposite end of the chamber, easily twice the length of her body. Apparently the queen mothers never lost them.
Her skin was like that of her babies: yellow and translucent. It looked as if it would crinkle if I grabbed a handful of it. Hundreds of sores covered her body, like craters on a moon. Foaming white pus oozed from each of the sores. I think she had six breasts, but it was hard to tell for certain. Each was like a deflated hot air balloon, laying on her stomach, save for the top, left one, which hung limply off her side, drooping onto the cavern floor. The breast crawled with larvae.
Each nipple was rather small, about fist-sized, swimming in an oblong areola as wide as the tunnel we now stood in. The nipples were big enough for a single larva to suckle upon for a few moments, I supposed. They looked blackened and cracked, and a steaming white pus oozed from them. The pus cascaded off the giant troll in rivulets, pooling around her. Troll larvae constantly fell into the putrid puddles, and only a few managed to scramble their way out.
“I know what this sickness is,” Larissa said. She’d come forward to peer over the edge with us, despite my order for her to keep her soldiers back. “My husband had paid a dwarven mage to protect the city from creeping attacks from below. He installed multiple charm stones under the city, far below the sewers and the collapsed remnants of the old city. Burrowing beasts who pass near the stones are afflicted with the plague you see now. It is effective against trolls as it blocks their ability to regenerate.”
“Is it contagious?” Popper asked.
“No. It does not affect citizens of the Dominion. I feel this hunt may be premature. It seems this stench and her brood will be dea
d with or without our intervention.”
It was the first time I’d heard Larissa even imply she’d had any sort of relationship with King Bartholomew. She’d been his wife, his queen, and by all accounts, they’d had a happy, healthy relationship. But after he’d died, she didn’t even appear to mourn him.
Now, however, in this moment she seemed shaken, as if she’d finally remembered what she’d lost.
“Thank you, captain,” I said. “We’ll take it from here. Guard our backs.”
“You know, it’s weird,” I said, watching her shuffle back. “Sometimes I still don’t understand the nature of this game. What is going on her head? And this quest… This whole thing popped up because I hit the ‘chasm troll’ line in the menu. If I’d never hit it, would they still be here right now, dying like this?”
“Probably,” Gretchen said. “Remember how we were talking about NPC cycles? Yi’s cycle was a full year. Ours was about a week before we looped back into starting over. These guys here live moment to moment, probably dying and regenerating multiple times a day, just waiting for someone like us to come along.”
“So, if I had dug a hole in the ground above, I’d come across this lair, even if I hadn’t started the quest?”
“Yeah, you would,” Gretchen said. “You probably wouldn’t be able to heal the queen and gain control of a troll army, but, yeah. People stumble into the middle of quests all the time in this game. We’ve done it a few times already. The gorgon in the sewers, for example.”
“The poor bastards,” Popper said. “They’ve probably been sitting there suffering for thousands of years, just starving to death this whole time, waiting for the day when some asshole comes along and either kills them or gives them food.”
“Or screws it up, so they end up devouring their own mother,” I said, remembering the text of the quest.
“Or that,” Popper said. “So whatever does happen, at least we know their fucked-up existence is going to change today.” He smiled. “I guess that’s why they call us the good guys.”
Gretchen rolled her eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t think the larvae are in any shape to fight.” I pointed to the mother’s listless arm, splayed out like a fallen tree. “That’s how I can get up. I’ll climb up on her, administer the salve, and we’ll be good. I hope. Do you think it’ll work right away?”
“Probably,” Gretchen said. “Magic has a tendency to do that. We’ll stick close. I suspect we’ll have to run as soon as it’s done. So be ready.”
We used the rope to descend from the high tunnel into the chamber, Gretchen tying a length to an outcropping at the edge of the tunnel. We shimmied down. Doing so was effortless for me with my base dexterity of 14 with an additional three added because of my watch. Popper struggled in his awkward beetle armor, and I suggested he could hold onto my neck while we descended, a proposition that earned me a stream of curses.
The floor was littered with troll larvae. The cheeping grew louder as we entered into their mass. Some snapped at us half-heartedly as we approached, but they were too weak to truly fight. I was taken aback at the stink. It was like…I don’t know. Sickness. Not the stench of death, but the smell of every liquid that was contained within a body being expelled at once. The smell was sweet, piercing. It entered my nose and invaded my sinuses, sticking to the inner walls, making me fear it would never, ever leave.
“Guys, look over there,” Popper said, pointing. He had to practically shout to be heard over the din of the babies.
A grouping of three of the cone-shaped tentacle creatures from the crystal room lay dead, strewn across the floor. They’d been chewed on, but only half-heartedly it seemed. Larissa had said the larvae only feed from their mother once in their lifetimes. I wondered if they had to eat from her before they could have anything else. It made sense, sort of.
“What killed them?” I asked, daring to edge closer. My right hand grasped onto the hilt of Triple Fang. “It wasn’t the babies.”
“Watch out,” a new voice said, a hoarse cry.
I jumped back as the massive, segmented tail of the troll queen mother drilled into the ground where I’d just been standing. The angry, black barb at the tip of the tail was longer than I was tall. It shattered into the rock like a ballistic missile. Rock showered as I skittered back. If I’d been standing there, I’d have exploded like a rotten piece of fruit.
The troll mother didn’t move, save her tail, which now rose into the air, despite her being on her back. It twitched and swayed, more cat-like than what I imagined a scorpion tail to be, searching for prey. It swished back and forth. The mother bellowed painfully, the sound shaking the walls.
“Do not worry, young ones,” the voice said as we hastily backed up. “You are just out of reach of that poor beast. Do you happen to have any water you could spare?”
I looked back at the creature, an elderly pollywog man. His dot was white on the minimap. What the hell was he doing here? Where’d he come from? The sac under his chin was mottled and gray and sagged unusually deep. The frog-like creature had an accent I could only describe as old man college professor, overly polite and formal. I hadn’t talked too much with pollywogs, but I knew a bit about them. Most of them, unlike this guy, had more of a Cajun or French accent. We had a few pollywogs in the castle, mostly in cooking and cleaning roles, but I’d seen a handful of the humanoid frog creatures as white jackets. They’d all been archers, come to think of it. I knew they were a playable race in Dominion of Blades. They were amphibious and dexterous creatures, but not too strong. They also lacked in magic ability. They had unusually high charisma and constitution, and they were immune to many types of debuffs. Gretchen had said they weren’t that popular of a race. They were best served as rogues and hunters and bards, but the texugo were generally better unless you wanted to play the water quests. Most NPC pollywogs I’d seen were merchants or sailors or skilled laborers, like carpenters and tailors.
At first I thought the man was standing in a hole, but I realized with horror he didn’t have legs at all. His two arms were tied behind his back, but he’s somehow managed to pull himself up on his two stumps to talk to us. The wounds to his legs looked old, adding to the mystery of how such a creature could be down here.
Gretchen waved her hand, casting Create Spring on the cave floor next to the pollywog. Clear water started to bubble up from the ground. We all jumped as the scorpion tail smashed into the ground again, a mere ten feet away. Rock flew like shrapnel. Popper started pushing the listless baby trolls away with the flat part of his axe, careful not to hurt them.
Gretchen produced a tin cup from her pack, filled it, and brought it to the pollywog’s mouth as Popper moved to free the man’s shackles. The elderly man drank thirstily.
“Uh, guys,” Popper said. “Come look at this.”
Behind the pollywog, his hands were more than just tied together. They appeared to be fused together with a round ring of skin, as if he’d been in that position so long, his wrists just melded together.
“Years of sores, repaired with sylph magic is what caused this,” the man said. I had to lean in to hear him over the din of the room. “Enslaved fairies care little about the quality of their work, even when that work is healing a fellow slave.”
“Jesus, dude,” Popper said. “Does it hurt? You want me to, uh, cut them apart? I got a healing potion that’ll probably stop the bleeding.”
“I was hoping you’d do the opposite, actually. I have been trying to crawl close enough to be within range of the mother’s barb tail, but I fear she’ll expire before I get there. If you’d just slit my throat or bash my head in, I’d be most appreciative.”
“What the fuck, man?” Popper said. “You want us to off you?”
“Yes, if you would. I am very much done with this existence. My loop has finally gone to a new place, and I believe if I am killed, my regeneration will take me back home to Crel, back to my family and wife and child and back to my books, which I’m sur
e have missed me so.”
I looked at Gretchen. Every time an NPC talked about regenerating, something they weren’t supposed to know about, it made us nervous. It was just another sign that the inevitable self-awareness of these artificial intelligences was on the horizon. It was crucial we reached our endgame before that happened. A world full of intelligent beings who knew they were immortal would be utter chaos.
“Okay, we’ll help you,” Gretchen said, eyeing the troll mother uncertainly. “But will you tell us who you are first? How you got here?”
The man paused, then nodded. “I thank you. My name is Kant. I am a scholar. I am from Crel, originally, before I was kidnapped by these cable beasts.” He nodded at the splattered remains of the conical tentacle creatures.
I knew where Crel was. It was a large country that encompassed a large area from the Florida panhandle to just west of New Orleans. It was a swampy, sticky, humid area, and according to Gretchen, it was one of the most dangerous parts of North America.
“So those tentacle things are called ‘cable beasts?’” Popper asked. “That’s a dumb name. I’d call them ‘death chompers’ or something like that.”
“Let him speak,” Gretchen said.
The man took another long drink of water. “I study philosophy and poetry. My wife, my sweet Emmanuel, had a much more humble method of work. She worked a dredging crew, clearing out the lake so Bohemia could get traders into its docks. It was constant, dirty work. But my beautiful wife, she never complained. Not one complaint as long as she lived.”
“Can you speed this up, grandpa?” Popper said. “Jonah here has some nipples to lather up.”
“Anyway,” the man said. “The swamps around Bohemia crawl with fairy folk, and other numinous. The children of light twinkle aplenty in this magical place. Well my son, Beck, he wished for a wisp in a jar for his room. So I went out one night hunting for such a creature.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 7
