Court of Thorns: A LitRPG Story
Page 13
That left the Emerald Wing, a Nature-Fae setting. It had fifteen floors, making it the largest wing of the Labyrinth. Most of the monsters who had escaped the confines of the Labyrinth came from that section. That was probably the place where the Chaos infection had started. Normally, Hawke wouldn’t have considered it for the trip to the Deepest Pits, but if they only needed to go through two levels to get to the end, it was worth the risk.
First things first, though. Hawke had K-Bar lead the team through the ruins toward a crumbling, moss-covered structure. The Green Tower, the entrance of the Emerald Wing. The tower itself had a few rooms with their own monsters and treasure, but they weren’t planning on visiting it. All they had to do was get through the critters guarding the tower’s entrance and head down.
The basic defenders of the tower were called Leaf Knights. The Nerf Herders had described them as suits of metal armor filled with vines and branches shaped into a humanoid form. They were Nature Elementals, much like the pets he and Gosto could summon, a mix of Earth and Life magic. The normal force consisted of twelve minions, all at level ten, plus a couple of level twelve lieutenants. Besides being armed with an assortment of rusty but effective weapons, they could cast a few spells like Nature’s Grip and Deadly Roots. In short, they should be little more than an annoyance to a group of high-level Eternals, but that had been before the place had been infected with Left-Handed Chaos.
They advanced towards the wall fragments surrounding the tower, moving in the same loose formation, except that Hawke had Alba stay in the rear of the group to act as a reaction force; he sent a summoned Animated Shadow to serve as a scout and trap detonator while everyone else prepped spells or readied weapons. They were ready for anything, or so they thought.
The Shadowling turned a corner – and ceased to exist before it could see whatever it had destroyed it. Moments later, a thick dark green cloud rolled out from the tower, billowing out at such speed it acted more like an explosion than any kind of natural mist. Within moments, visibility was next to zero and the spores that made up the cloud attacked everyone within it. Amelia erected a Mana Dome, but the microscopic monsters flowed through it as if it wasn’t there.
Everyone was protected by Hawke’s Portable Bug Repellent, of course. The spell killed the spores as soon as they got close. That didn’t keep the living ‘smoke’ they created from surrounding the party and reducing visibility to a dozen feet or so. The living, polluted wind kept pushing down on them, and as it turned out even dead spores could be a threat, as the lifeless but fine powder they left behind could choke anyone breathing it.
They weren’t unprepared for that, either. Amelia and Aristobulus used Air spells to shield the group and push the dust away. Whatever force propelled the cloud was weaker without living spores adding power to it. As the gaseous mass withdrew, more defenders arrived. Suits of armor strode forward, filled with spongy moss instead of branches and leaves. They had been Leaf Knights until Chaos transformed them:
Moss Knights (Chaotic Nature Constructs)
Level 18 Elite Minions
Health 4,500 Mana 4,500 Endurance 4,500
The monsters’ Health was massive, far larger than what one would expect from even Elite minions at their level. And they moved with a speed and precision that seemed disproportionate to their level. The party spread out to meet the attack, with Hawke at the central point of a shallow triangle made by Grognard and K-Bar. He summoned a Nature’s Guardian to help the other pets watch the flanks of the ranged combatants; that was all he had time to do before the rushing Moss Knights rushed forward. There were twelve of them; three went down under a barrage of spells and arrows, and the rest were all damaged by the time they reached Hawke.
A figure in a centurion’s helmet and segmented breastplate emerged from the flames and smoke left behind by a Fireball and charged, swinging a halberd. Hawke blasted it with an Order-enhanced Hammer of Light, knocking it to the ground, and followed up with Burning Light. The cone of energy consumed the still thrashing moss creature and two of its buddies coming up behind it. Only one lived long enough to take a swing at Hawke, which he easily ducked before delivering a wicked slash that took one of its arms off at the shoulder.
So far, so good, Hawke thought just before the tide shifted.
The green-black mold the knights’ bodies were made off spread out from each fallen body and rolled over the ground like a living carpet, just like the spore cloud. But unlike the spore cloud, the moss somehow survived the bug repellant spell and began to grow over everyone’s feet. Weapons and spells tore off chunks of the clinging fungi, but they proved to be surprisingly resilient. Blaze and Luna took to the air, but everyone else soon found themselves stuck to the ground. As soon as someone managed to free a foot by brute force, a pseudopod of moss reached out and grabbed it.
Hawke used Twilight Step to teleport onto Blaze’s saddle and surveyed the battle from above. It didn’t look good. Almost everyone was immobilized and the mold was beginning to cover their upper legs. The stuff clung on even through Zippo’s Fire Shield, which inflicted a continuous 600 points of Fire Damage on anything that came near the Fire Wizard. Nobody in the team had taken damage, but that would likely change as soon as enough of the mold was on them. Even worse, a second wave of floating spores and intact knights were moving forward, and the spores were surviving the anti-pest spells! Hawke tried a Death Cyclone, using the lower-power version of the spell to avoid injuring his team, but although it cleared some of the spores, it didn’t seem to affect the growing mold. Hawke turned on Advanced Mana Vision to figure out why.
The moldy carpet growing over the party was an extension of a single organism, connected to a network of Chaos-infused Life energy. Every bit of mold was a piece of a larger whole. So was the stuff animating the suits of armor. The party’s defenses killed some of it but the damaged pieces were replaced faster than they were destroyed. Hawke led the Drakofoxes toward the area in the ruins where the spore clouds and the knights had come from, following the trail of Life energy connecting all the attackers.
Problem was, there was an even bigger cloud filling the center of the area, right where the entrance to the next level of the Emerald Wing was supposed to be. The spores managed to block Hawke’s Mana Sight. It seemed impossible to have enough living things – millions? billions? – to create that biological fog, but whatever was in the center seemed to manage the trick without any trouble.
“I’m going in,” he told Blaze and Luna. “You two stay up here and give me some air support. Try to thin out the spore fog until I find a better target.”
Hawke nodded and used Twilight Step to teleport right into the center of the mass. Or at least, he tried to.
The spell – and most teleportation magic for that matter – had built-in fail safes against teleporting into solid objects. Gasses and liquids were either pushed aside by the arriving person or object, or in the case of some ‘stealth’ teleports like Hawke’s spell, the volumes were exchanged: in other words, when he teleported, he replaced a Hawke-shaped volume of air with his body, and sent that air to his departure point. But when you tried to teleport into a solid object – or a living being – the magic automatically moved you to the nearest unoccupied space. In this case, Hawke ended up right next to a wall of waving thorny tendrils. He couldn’t see the monster clearly because of the living mist around it, but he was close enough to sense the unholy mixture of Chaos and Life energies powering it.
That was all he was able to see before a dozen tentacles hit him from as many directions. His Bulwark of Light stopped the first couple of blows; after that, he was pummeled into the ground. Spear-sized thorns punctured his armor despite its enchantments and Hawke’s protective auras. His Mana dropped by several hundred points as the damage he suffered was
magically shunted to his magical energy pool, thanks to Mana Shield.
Hawke’s inhuman reflexes kicked in and he created an Elemental Dome that slowed down the slashing tentacles long enough for him to fire off a Major Death Cyclone that destroyed most of them. He jumped to his feet and spent the three seconds the energy dome had bought him going through his preset spell rotation: Hammer of Light, Burning Light, and Fireball, all cast in the space of two seconds, all augmented with Order and Celestial power to counteract the malicious Chaos running through the monster. He still had no idea what the critter looked like, only that it was at least nine or ten feet tall and seemed to be made of thorny tentacles.
Just before the Elemental Dome dissipated, Hawke spotted a stat box hovering a good twelve feet up, giving him an idea of just how tall the critter was:
Minor Chaos Bringer (Life-Attuned)
Level 18 Elite Lieutenant
Health 9,000 Mana 3,600 Endurance 8,100
Minor? What’s a Major Chaos Bringer going to be like? Hawke wondered while he swung Saturnyx and severed three more tentacles. Unfortunately, the Chaos Bringer seemed to have plenty of replacements ready.
He was only down for a second or two, the time it took him to activate Twilight Step and teleport away, but in that time he took multiple critical hits and lost most of his Mana. A quick infusion from one of the four potions in his magical dispensary fixed that, just in time for part two of the plan.
Hawke ignored the sword while he signaled the Drakofoxes. Now that he had seen the main boss, he could mark its location on the party’s map. They had a target. Time to nuke it from orbit. As the moldy monstrosities rushed towards him, Hawke and the kits cut loose with their breath weapons. A torrent of white fire exploded a few inches from Hawke’s helmet, delivering 240-4,800 points of Mind damage on a continuous stream at the cost of 300 Mana per second. Above him, an identical stream from Blaze and one of pure Elemental Fire from Luna struck the Chaos-Bringer from above.
Minions in the way of the jet of white flame fell apart even if they were close to the torrent, which told Hawke that the critters were vulnerable to Mind attacks. Most of the survivors were stunned by it as well. After a few seconds, enough of the spore mist had cleared to reveal the true shape of the Chaos-Bringer. It was an asymmetrical abomination, a thing of mismatched limbs, tentacles on one side – the one Hawke had landed on – and massive pincers on the other. An eye the size of a weather balloon protruded from the center mass; three others sprouted from long stalks above it, all glaring furiously at its tormentors. Its body was like a diseased slug’s, except for the multitude of limbs protruding along its length and the fact that instead of flesh it was made of a mixture of wood, fungi, and moss. It also had an ammonia stench that would probably qualify as a chemical weapon all on its own.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There was also something wrong with the monster that went beyond its appearance. There was an aura of insanity around it that Hawke had only encountered when venturing through the ruins of the cursed Trogg undercity of Nur-Gamash. Just like its Life energy was diseased somehow, its Chaos power was alien and disturbing. Hawke’s Mana Sight turned into a hindrance as soon as he was able to see all of the Chaos-Bringer, showing him things his mind couldn’t process: depths and angles that made no sense in any sane universe. Only his Tranquil Mind ability allowed him to turn off his special senses before he did something crazy, like stab himself with his sword or drop his defenses and embrace the giant monster like a long-lost lover.
Instead, he kept a continuous Mind-Fire stream going for a full fifteen seconds. He had to take another potion to recover his Mana, but it was worth it. The combined breath weapons managed to turn the giant slug-plant-octopus into a shriveled mass of smoldering matter. Its minions died shortly thereafter and began to rot away with impossible speed. The smell was powerful enough to make him dry heave a couple of times.
Now that the fighting was over, he turned his attention to his reward notifications:
For slaying your foes, you have earned 2,480 Experience (310 diverted towards Leadership, 310 diverted towards Node Mastery).
You have found 18 gold, 1 Master Mana Potions and 2 Master Healing Potions.
Current XP/Next Level: 207,213/250,000. Leadership XP/Next Level: 82,115/100,000
Current Node Mastery XP/Next Level: 37,609/50,000. Current Guild XP/Next Level: 11,103/20,000
I’ll gain a level sometime next year at this rate.
Hawke checked the party interface and his combat log to review the battle. Everyone had made it through, but there had been a few close calls. Gosto had done his best, but as the only dedicated healer in the party, that meant situations where people had only survived by downing a healing potion or activating a long-cooldown survival ability. Hawke and Blaze usually did a good deal of healing in battle but circumstances had forced them to split up from the main group. The worst part was when the mold began to burn everyone with some sort of corrosive secretion. If Hawke had taken another ten or fifteen seconds to kill the boss, they would have lost a couple of people.
You’ve got a point, Hawke admitted.
His tendency to lead from the front – or to hog the glory and kills, some might say – could have gotten somebody killed. On the other hand, Blaze or Luna might have died if they’d tried to face the monster on their own. They would have had to fly close to the ground, putting them in range of the monster’s tentacles and pincers. The Drakofoxes were tough but weren’t as durable as Hawke.
Sometimes there weren’t good answers. You just had to pick the best of a bad bunch.
Eighteen
Hawke went over Amelia’s story as the group descended into the Emerald Wing.
“The way to the second level is a twisting tunnel. There are a few Earth-based traps. Pits that open under your feel, stone spikes set to stab you when you get close. At least, that was how things were last time I was there.”
Things weren’t the same, of course. The tunnel was still there, but it was covered in some kind of phosphorescent fungal growths that would explode whenever anybody got close. Hawke discovered that when a few summoned critters he sent ahead got blown up. The group pulled back and Hawke and Blaze sent several Death Cyclones swirling down the corridor, disarming the biological bombs the old fashioned way: by killing them. There were ordinary traps as well, but Alba, Artos and Hawke disarmed them easily enough. They had to clear the explosive fungi a couple more times as they moved forward.
At the halfway point, spiders showed up.
A swarm of skittering things came around a bend in the tunnel, crawling all over its floor and walls. They weren’t very big, as far as giant spiders went. About twelve to fifteen inches in the body, not counting their legs or, in some cases, tentacles. They made up for it with their viciousness and disgusting appearance. Like everything else in the Labyrinth, they were ridden with Dark Chaos. No two of them were alike, sporting limbs from other species, fungal growth and disgusting combos of both. Some even had humanoid eyes or faces growing out of their bulbous central masses. And again, just looking at those things made everyone vaguely ill. They emitted weird buzzing noises as they ran, and there were hints of words mixed in the static-like noise. It was nothing anyone wanted to hear, that was for sure.
Minor Chaos Crawlers (Life-Attuned)
Level 15 E
lite Minion
Health 750 Mana 750 Endurance 750
“All right, everyone, hold your…” Hawke began to say, just as Zippo cut loose with a Fireball.
The fiery missile landed on the bend of the tunnel, far enough from the party that it didn’t hurt anybody in it. Unfortunately, as everyone found out by the time Hawke finished saying “fire,” there were masses of exploding fungi around that corner that Hawke and Blaze hadn’t cleared out yet.
Everything went black for a bit.
When Hawke recovered, he found himself lying under a pile of rubble. His ears were still ringing from the massive explosion. It took him a few moments to struggle out of the cave-in and assess the rest of the party. Nobody was dead but everyone had taken a beating. Luckily, the explosion had also cleared out the horde of Chaos Crawlers. Hawke began casting healing spells while he helped people dig themselves out from the partially-collapsed tunnel. Tava was on her feet already; she dragged Zippo up by the scruff of his neck.
“You imbecile!” she told the Fire Wizard.
“Don’t touch me!” Zippo yelled back. His eyes began to glow scarlet as he gathered magical energy.
Hawke put a stop to that with Mana Leech. The spell disrupted casting and took off a chunk of Mana from the former Herder. He followed that up with a shove that sent the mage against a wall. Before Zippo could recover, Hawke had him by the throat.
“This is your second screw-up,” Hawke said. “We spoke about using AOEs.”
Zippo just stared blankly at him. Hawke wasn’t sure if the guy was too stubborn, scared, or mentally handicapable to come up with a response. Maybe the guy still hadn’t got it through his head that this wasn’t a game and that his actions had consequences. Maybe he never would. Back on Earth, a lot of people could survive and even prosper despite having a tenuous grasp on reality. A quick look through social media was more than enough evidence of that.