The graphic showed the happy-faced babies zooming in on the sub cartoon, zipping around it Tasmanian Devil-style, and then zooming away, leaving a skeleton of a ship trailing smoke. The babies zipped away into the teeth area while the mama shark swallowed with an exaggerated gulp. The remains of the cartoon submarine bounced merrily into the shark’s stomach, where it was melted by stomach acid. And then it moved to another stomach, then a third, and then it finally depicted the massive creature pooping out a cartoon skeleton of a human wearing heart-covered boxers. And then it showed a cartoon Donut with tears flying from her eyes. The display returned to the two announcers, who both were falling over themselves laughing at the cartoon.
A ten minute timer slammed onto the screen.
Goddamnit, not this shit again.
27
“And here we go!” Kevin shouted just as the world unfroze. The timer started to move.
“Carl, I don’t think the escape hatch is going to work anymore,” Katia called as we tumbled again.
Something smashed against the window. Then something else. The babies. Now that we were in the mouth, it was completely dark out there. The sub continued to twist. The chandelier broke free and crashed to the ground, shattering. Suddenly the interior of the bridge was also pitch black. The only light was from the giant timer and the floating window containing Kevin and Magnificent Troy, but the light did not illuminate our surroundings.
“Vadim,” I called. “Torch!”
“Ooh, Vadim is running away, and Carl hasn’t noticed yet,” Kevin the announcer said.
“He went up the stairs,” Tran called. The moment he said it, I saw his blue dot, almost directly above my own. He’d gone up the stairs, all right. There was only one escape pod left, and it looked as if he was going to use it.
Carl: Vadim. We’re inside the goddamn sharktopus. The escape hatch isn’t going to work!
He didn’t answer.
Katia pulled a pair of regular torches from her inventory and tossed them to the corners of the room just as I did the same. A dull, red light filled the bridge, reflecting our horrified faces as we caught glimpse of the terrors pressed against the glass. Katia let out a gasp. Mouths. Hundreds of round, ravening mouths, filled with teeth. Each mouth was the size of a bicycle wheel. The entire glass display was covered with them. One whipped sideways along the window, revealing there were hundreds more, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands, all beyond it.
“Look how hungry those little guys are,” Magnificent Troy shouted.
I examined the one that was trying to slide along the glass. The monster looked like a huge lamprey eel, but the back half was separated into multiple tentacles. The terrifying creature was about ten feet long from mouth to tentacle tip.
Juvenile Octo-Shark. Level 30.
This is a minion of Lusca.
Ah, the babies. Here’s the thing about Octo-Shark babies. The odds are stacked against them from the get-go. There’s just too many of them. Their mom is really strict and won’t let them leave her mouth. They don’t know who their daddies are, which makes them kinda sad, especially around Christmas. They need constant nourishment. So when food does arrive, they have to fight for their morsels. Only the strongest survive.
Eventually, even Lusca won’t be able to keep up with the demand. That’s right around the time the juveniles start to realize their brothers and sisters are also delicious. In each birthing of 2-3,000 pups, only one or two survive.
In other words, their odds of survival are better than yours!
A distant explosion rocked the sub, followed by a second.
“Ohhh, that was a direct hit! Those depth charges are working great,” Kevin said. “Their design is really interesting, too. He used multi-layered, gunpowder-filled barrels seeded with impact-detonated hob-lobbers designed to explode the moment the barrel crushes under the pressure. He then placed a hole through each barrel except the final one and placed a manual dial on the side, allowing him to choose the barrel’s integrity. The more holes covered, the deeper the barrel will drop before it’s crushed and explodes. It’s a design straight out of earth’s history books!”
“Did you hear what Princess Donut said? She called them ‘death charges’ not ‘depth charges.’ I kinda like that better, Kevin.”
“I do too. But it doesn’t matter what they’re called. You’re not going to knock out Lusca that easily. It doesn’t matter how well they’re designed. She’s just going to shrug them off and ask for more. She is bringing her A-game today,” Kevin said. “But she is moving out of the area. It looks like the rest of the charges are going to be duds.”
“It also looks like that display window is going to break at any moment,” Troy added. “This should be good.”
“Shit, shit,” I said. As the commentators jabbered, I pulled a hob-lobber, yanked the fuse, and replaced it with a piece of hobgoblin pus. I’d purchased a few sets of pus from Pustule the last time we’d been in the Silk Road, and I was burning through the expensive detonator material. I then pulled a potion from my inventory and my duct tape. I taped the potion bottle to the hob-lobber.
There was a much more elegant version of this in the cookbook, though with a different potion. I had no idea if this would work. I looked wildly about the room for a place to plant the bomb where it would be safe from the immediate impact of water rushing in here. I spied the captain’s chair and the minifridge next to it. The fridge was firmly bolted in place. I rushed to the open fridge, placed the makeshift bomb inside, and then I duct-taped the door closed. There.
The timer was already at eight minutes.
The window cracked. The mouths pounded at the glass. Kevin and Troy continued making idiotic comments.
“Guys, into the stateroom,” I cried, rushing to the door to the captain’s chambers. Inside the small room, sitting in the corner and blocked off by a forcefield was the stairwell to the sixth floor.
“Why in here?” Katia asked, lighting and dropping another torch. The three of us crowded in. As I closed the door, I took one last look out into the bridge. The window cracked again, spiderwebbing as Kevin and Troy oohed and ahhed.
“Because this is the only room that won’t break apart, and we can seal it. I just need a minute. Keep your scrolls ready. Tran, tell Vadim it’s too late to come back. Tell him to seal himself into that room up there if he can.”
Even before I’d received the second watch and final piece of the Gate of the Feral Gods, Katia and I had both started playing around with the two pieces. We found if we put the watch in the second spot and closed the top of the winding box, the watch would move on its own to a specific time. After some experimentation, we confirmed the time displayed was the watch’s current coordinates. Katia spent an hour writing down time/location combinations while I prepared for our “in and out” expedition to the Akula.
She’d already discovered several interesting things about the artifact, including a way to very roughly predict what a location’s time would be, especially if I could relay to her the exact distance of a spot from the earth’s sea level.
“If we never find that second watch, I think I can still use this as a sort of reverse compass that tells us exactly where we are relative to other locations. I just need more time to figure it out,” Katia had said before we set out.
But now we had all three pieces and a very pressing reason to use the artifact.
I pulled the first watch now and examined it. It always started ticking on its own if you pulled it out of the winding box. I rolled the time back, carefully dialing in the third hand to exactly where I wanted it to go. A spot just outside the pazuzu town. If we weren’t teleporting far, the artifact would only need a few seconds to set itself. At least in theory.
The magical window with the two newscaster guys didn’t follow us into the stateroom, but we could still hear their chattering. And it was obvious they could still see us.
“It looks like Carl is going to use the gate to escape!”
&nbs
p; “Shut the fuck up, Kevin,” I said as I worked. The sub rocked again, and I pushed the hand too far and cursed.
Seven minutes.
I didn’t want to do this. This was a terrible idea. It would save us, temporarily, but it would also screw over everybody else in the bubble. Mordecai said some of these feral monsters were literally bigger than the bubble itself. What would happen then? Until we took out that final castle, we’d be stuck with whatever I summoned.
And that, I knew, was exactly what they wanted me to do. Once again, I couldn’t help but feel we’d been steered directly onto this path. It’d been obvious that I was headed down here. The game had somehow convinced Henrik to come here first and get himself killed and to drop that final piece of the gate. They set up this boss battle, knowing we’d be placed in an impossible situation. We couldn’t fight our way out of here. There was no fucking way. This was an impossible battle. Even if we could get past the babies, then what? We’d already been swallowed.
There was no way to win. Not unless we had a magical gate that’d let us zap ourselves away.
Carl: Donut. Are you guys almost back yet?
Donut: NO! THE WIND STARTED EARLY! FIRAS SAYS IT’S BLOWING DIFFERENT THAN BEFORE, AND IT’S MAKING IT HARD FOR THEM TO NAVIGATE! WE’RE JUST GETTING HIGHER AND HIGHER. WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO GO BACK TO HUMP TOWN!
Carl: How long?
Donut: LOUIS SAYS TEN MINUTES.
Fuck. That wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to do this. I wouldn’t do this if everybody out there wasn’t in a safe room.
There had to be a different way.
Look for the clues.
“Here it comes!” Magnificent Troy shrieked.
A colossal shattering pitched the sub, and we fell to the side, all of us smashing against the bulkhead. The world did not right itself. I grasped the door to the stateroom, and I clung to it, making sure it was dogged in place. The glass had broken. I felt the bridge getting flooded. The hull quivered as the babies flowed into the room on the other side.
Six minutes.
Already, they started pounding at the door. While I knew the room itself would be safe, I also knew we weren’t safe in here. Not for long. I had no idea what would happen if the octo-shark digested the stairwell, but I suspected it’d quickly pass through the shark’s system, and the entire room would just end up on the ocean floor. Along with a boxer-wearing skeleton.
To my horror, the wheel on the door started to turn. The goddamn things were smart. The door sat at a thirty degree angle. They only needed to open it a little, and the water would push it the rest of the way. I grabbed it and held it closed.
“Okay guys,” I said. “Hold on. This might not go as I hope.” With one hand still on the hatch wheel, I pulled the detonator and slammed down on it. There was a ten-second delay followed by a muted thump.
I kept my eye on the map. The entire bridge was nothing but a sea of red dots. Above, Vadim remained, still alive and alone in the room above us. I could see him pacing back and forth. He still wasn’t answering us.
“Nothing happened,” Tran said after a moment.
“Wait for it,” I said. An X appeared on the map. Then another. And then ten. On the other side of the door, the pounding became even more frantic. It sounded as if thousands of hammers were suddenly slamming against the metal wall.
“What was that potion?” Katia asked.
“The potion of bloodlust,” I said. The number of Xs was increasing by the moment, but even as they did, more and more of the babies were entering the ship. “The berserking potion. I don’t know how many it affected when it spread through the water, but it looks like it worked. They may be babies. They may be half octopus. But they’re still sharks. Even if the potion only affected a few of them, once the feeding frenzy starts, they just go nuts. The description says they’ll eventually kill each other once they learn their siblings are edible.”
“Holy cow,” Katia said after a moment.
With four and a half minutes remaining, only a few of the baby sharktopuses remained. They’d torn through each other like wildfire. One of them was pinging about like a damn pinball, but it suddenly stopped and just started floating there. There were thousands of X’s out there.
“Well that was entertaining,” Kevin said, his voice echoing.
“Yes it was, but what are they going to do now?” Magnificent Troy asked. “Those were just the minions.”
Warning: Your oxygen levels are low. Plus you’re just sitting there being all boring and shit.
“Can’t argue with the AI on this one,” Kevin said.
I growled. “Damnit. We’re gonna have to go out there. Everyone take a scroll.”
The world shifted again. I looked down at my indicator, and we were traveling at a good clip, about 35 kilometers per hour, which was why only a few of the depth charges had come close. It seemed Lusca just swam in circles around the circumference of the water quadrant. I wondered if she knew that most of her babies were now dead.
“Hold on,” I said after I took our water-breathing scrolls. I only had to turn the portal an inch before water started flowing in around the seal. I spun the wheel some more and jumped out of the way as water rushed into the room.
Only it wasn’t really water so much as it was blood and ripped and shredded body pieces of dead octo-shark babies. There was a good five seconds of chaos where it felt as if I was just getting pummeled while the announcers howled with laughter. Eventually it settled. Katia formed a spear at the end of her hand and swam forward, pushing her way through the crowded mess. It was pitch dark. I tried lighting a torch, and it wouldn’t let me. I watched as Katia’s dot descended on one of the remaining babies, and she speared it, killing it instantly. Tran and I followed, pushing our way through the thick mess.
“What are we going to do now,” Katia called.
Two minutes.
I pointed at the hole in the window. They couldn’t see me, but I pointed anyway. “Out of the sub. Swim toward the teeth. We need to be in the front of the mouth when she swallows! Use the map to navigate.”
I had a thought, and I cast Wisp Armor on myself. I started to glow as swirling lights twirled around me. The magic protection spell would last seven minutes, and it filled the room with a pulsing, green and red light, illuminating the mass of half-eaten corpses. Damn, I wish I’d thought of this earlier. I could taste their blood in my mouth. Ahead of me, Katia had formed a single eye on her head, as big as a fist. The eye melded into her body as my light reached it. She swirled in the water and skewed another, killing the last of the ones in the room. Tran had a sword in his hand, and he hacked through the corpses like he was blazing a trail.
“What about Vadim?” Tran asked as we pushed toward the window.
He can go fuck himself, I didn’t say. “He’ll be safe in that room for a bit,” I said as we pushed our way through the corpses toward the exit. “Even if he’s fully swallowed, it’ll take a bit for it to break the sub down. I hope.”
“The crawlers are looking for a place to anchor themselves,” Kevin shouted as the timer reached one minute. “Mama is gonna swallow them up!”
We broke free of the corpses just as we moved into the free water inside the shark’s cavernous mouth. It was boiling hot in here, and despite the light of my body, the water was pitch black. We still within the shark’s cavernous mouth, but it almost felt like open ocean. We continued to swim upward, and I could finally see the roof of Lusca’s alabaster mouth, a wide, smooth plane. The shark undulated, and I caught sight of multiple slits in the roof. As we watched, a single baby emerged from the darkness and fled into one of the slits. More red dots appeared, and suddenly hundreds of the babies were in the water, all ignoring us and disappearing up into the holes. Most of them appeared to be injured.
This was where the babies went, not the front of the mouth like the cartoon depicted.
“We need to get into one of those holes,” Katia cried, seeing it the same time I did. “Hurry!”
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Leatherface.”
“Are you crazy?” Katia called, whirling in the water. “I’m not big enough. I don’t have time to gain the mass. The move is made for the flying house.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Just hold onto the back and keep us wrapped up. I’m gonna cut a pilot hole first, too. Just hold on. And try to avoid the submarine.”
“Do you want me to use the rocket?”
I thought for a moment. We had two different methods to quickly ascend. We had the barrels, which I was pretty sure wouldn’t work at this depth, and we had the rocket, which was nothing more than a pressurized goblin steam boiler that would propel us forward for about thirty seconds. I doubted that would work at this depth also. At least not outside the octo-shark’s mouth. Might as well use it now.
“Do it.”
A fin grew out of Katia’s form, and the small tank appeared. She wrapped it in flesh. The thing was the size of a two-liter bottle of soda, but we knew from experience these things packed a punch when they went off. One of these had helped propel my long-lost copper chopper motorcycle. Thanks to the newly-added pressure valve on the end, we now had the equivalent of a redneck torpedo propeller. I’d only had time to make and pressurize two at my workbench, but we’d used one to test it and make sure it didn’t blow up.
“Uh, what is happening?” Tran asked.
“All you need to do is hold on,” Katia said as she grew wider. A pair of braces grew out of her back, grasping onto the both of us and pulling our bodies against hers. In front of us, now a few hundred meters away and barely visible, the massive form of the Akula’s bow sat sideways in the back of the Octo-shark’s throat. It’d gotten completely turned around, and it faced us. We were well above it, and I hoped we’d remain that way. As the timer plunged toward zero, I kept my eye on the speed monitor, making certain the city boss was still moving at a good speed. She was. Not as fast as the train. But that was okay.
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 40
