B 2 C 28: SAVE LIL

Gae Buidhe disappears from the air, but Lil isn’t like me. Lil doesn’t have a space skill. They have to touch objects to claim them into their inventory. Gae Buidhe touched Lil, tip first, at high speed. I explode with fury. Lil, my oldest friend, the only reason I ever had the bravery to meet anyone else, to forge a path that met a family. A path that led to unbelievable levels of love. Lil, my dearest, staunchest ally and companion. Lil, a dragon of valor beyond measure whose exuberance and tenacity are pure bliss. I don’t know if I’m more furious at the beaverfolk for this situation, or my own explosion of anger that set Gae Buidhe sailing.

Lil tries to calm me down, “Pard, it’s it’s okay, it’s just a, woo I’m kinda woozy, scratch.”

I’m screaming and I’m crying, Lil is obviously losing vitality by the instant, I see an occasional polygon float away. My throat makes a horrible gurgling, clicking sound as I try to speak. I manage two words, “Ff,f,f,fix Lil.” Using my FFS, since that’s what Lil wanted it to be named, I coat Lil in as thick a layer of preservative frost as I can muster the sanity to create. I JT my inner circle out of the room and erect several layers of walls between myself and them.

The MCF leaders and their lieutenants have been trying to cut me down all the while, since I just slew their elder, but when I finally retaliate, it’s over in an instant. Now that I know my tendrils can wield weapons, I give them each a sword and simply have them whirl at neck level.

I can’t contain my fury though, I smash into walls, I light them aflame, I incinerate the cervid skull. Turns out, it was a wood carving. I gaze for the spot where the secret exit would be, the one that could flood this whole dam again. I literally fight myself to stop from burning it away to see if they left it vulnerable.

I fall to my knees and pound the floor over and over and over, spreading ice further and further out. I ash the entire table in an instant. I start to call forth the most massive radiant copy of Gae Buidhe I can muster, aimed at the secret exit, the flood gate, but my tenuous grip on sanity reminds me that radiant energy is corrupted somehow. I barely manage to stop myself from engaging the radiant summon in time. My mind has just barely enough grip to claim any equipment in the room, summoning it to my inventory. Standing back up, I JT myself into the nearest wall fist first. I repeat it again and again, until my fist is unrecognizable as such, broken and crumpled.

I hear scrabbling, hacking and slashing at the wall behind me. Thinking it’s more of the MCF, I roar a bloodcurdling challenge and start to launch a massive fireball to take down the walls and catch them off guard. Lil’s Lilagnewt silhouette comes crashing through the walls, blocking my fireball just in time to protect Luni and Teuila. There’s a gash across the front of where Lil’s sternum would be. It glows even in their silhouette, and it’s barely covered by frost.

Lil pleads with me, “Come on, come on pard? Please partner? Buddy? It’s me. Please don’t make me fight you.”

I slump, defeated, sobbing that Lil thinks they have to fight me, that I was aiming at them.

Lil calls out telepathically, “No, that’s not it, I knew you’d never do that buddy. Just, I don’t know how to get you to calm down except by knocking you out.”

I gaze around, looking at the mess I made. I’ve utterly destroyed the lumber that spawns against the walls. I needed this lumber, I still need this lumber, the others have to get lumber, Lil has thousands of capacity now too. I destroyed lumber, and our chances to get it from this room at least, between frost, flames, explosions, and sheer ferocity, this entire room is now barren bedrock coated in soot and ice. I gulp back sobs. I tried to be merciful, I tried. Just like on Day One.

The panic finally shuts down my mind, and I’m sent tumbling into an abyssal nightmare. In my mind, all the lumber respawns. Each log grows toothy maws, and takes turns chewing me up and spitting me into other logs’ mouths. The gash on Lil’s chest becomes a fanged maw, and I’m spat from one tree into Lil’s chomping chest. Lil’s face opens up into an array of tentacles that reach for me, and I can’t even manage to scream or scrabble away, I only whimper in panic.

Despair sets its icy grip into my heart, and I reflexively throw up an FFS large enough to turn the entire room, myself and Lil included, into a block of ice.

It feels like several year pass, or at least one year passes in a constant state of terror, until I’m finally able to control my own thoughts again. It may have been condensed terrorspace, like our mental wavelength thinkspace, but still, years of a frightened hell. I need to figure out how to save Lil, before I let go of this FFS.

Okay, okay, think, puzzle this out. I could time travel, my logs could warn me before it happens, maybe I’d stay out of the room, but Lu said I can’t do it, that I’d know when the time is right to practice it. This doesn’t scream out as being a safe situation to practice time travel. Repeating this situation over and over would be even worse than when it happened with Teuila, because I’d have to experience my rampage hundreds of times before I even got back to the point of Lil’s injury.

What else? I could kill everything in here other than Lil, to cause a big enough time dilation to maybe have slowed Gae Buidhe down slightly more. I’ve seen that a massive time dilation can stretch into the past. Or maybe I was hallucinating when fighting the cragbeast queen. Probably better to bet the latter, rather than indiscriminately slaughtering in the hopes of possibly performing time shenanigans.

ARGH! Okay, fine, forget time travel, fix it in the now. Teuila once said that you could maybe gouge out an injury caused by Gae Buidhe, and then, and then maybe, possibly, maybe the regular injury would heal, since Gae Buidhe only prevents its own injury from healing, and you wouldn’t be connected to that injury anymore.

To even have a chance of that working, the location you have to gouge out has to be non fatal. Lil’s injury is right in front of their core, their heart, their sternum, and I can’t tell how deep it goes. I’d have to cut into Lil, with no guarantee that it would work, and hope they can bear the pain, and hope that I don’t hasten their death by cutting too deep. Even then, gouging that much out of Lil would need something to help it heal, or they would just die anyway.

Red potions! But, but I don’t have any. I didn’t get the formula first either, so I can’t just make one right now. Okay, creatures from places seem to drop things that are a bit thematic sometimes. Spicy meat and gemstones from hellhounds that eat minerals and belch fire, things like that. The, the. I gulp. The thing that dropped the red potions, it’s from the pyramid. Wait, no, that’s wrong! It’s from the swamp. It was Octorochi. Staff Ninja wanted Octorochi defeated there, approximately where we finally ended its life. There’s something about that rock. I gaze at my thunder stick in my inventory. It’s my only hope. Staff Ninja was like me, they called out to an enemy, they needed to defeat it.

I need to return and hope for one of three things. One, Octorochi wasn’t the only one of its kind. Two, it respawned if it was. Or three, the rock holds some hidden cache of knowledge, or is home to some creature that can help. Regardless, thunder stick has a date with destiny.

Releasing my FFS on my half of the room, I gulp back sadness, and fight my hesitation to leave Lil’s side. I scream out, begging for Teuila and Luni to be near.

The two girls enter, both looking like they’d been sleeping in shifts for most of a day. I struggle to find my words, to apologize. They ride my wavelengths, they know what I’m feeling. I manage to croak a mild yell, an order, a begging plea, “Te, Octorochi’s demise, Lu, guard Lil.”

With not even an instant’s hesitation, knowing we might not have a moment to spare, Teuila forces herself into the creamy gray silhouette of Valkyrie, snags me and rockets away through the halls. In moments we’re outside the dam, in minutes we’re at the swamp. I could be wrong, it could have been minutes and hours, but I swear I heard several sonic booms at various turns, and it feels like such a short time has passed. Almost no time after that, we’re at the falls in the swamp, and I plea for Teuila to throw me as hard as she can at the rock, to rest while I figure things out. I need her to be able to get us back just as quickly, and I know she can’t manage the form for long like this.

Teuila launches me like a javelin at the rock and I aim the thunderstick directly at it. The speed of my impact causes a literal earth-shattering crack to sound across the swamp. The mini mountainous formation splits asunder and shakes the land and the falls. If there’s any possible way to summon Octorochi, this has to be it. If there’s any possibility of a secret cache buried within the rock, and a chance to uncover it quickly, this has to be it.

I can’t bear to think about what happens if there are no potions, but what if there’s only one potion? Do I dare disassemble it to learn how to make them? What if my skill isn’t high enough to turn it back into a potion? Even if we find a potion, my hands are shaking like leaves. Who is going to carve a chunk out of Lil without killing them?

That’s when I hear it, a swishy, slithering, sliding, swimmy sound, and the undulating waves across the standing water of the swamp that it pushes ahead of it. When I turn in its direction though, it’s not one large Octorochi, but two smaller, uh, Rochis, I guess. Still all fury and cunning, hatred and venom. If I’m getting the morphology right, one is an older adult male, the other is a younger adult female. They each only have two heads up front, and one at their tails. They’re sort of Ouroboros-esque, due to having a head at their tail, but the two up front, and not traveling as a wheel eating their own tails isn’t the same as that legend.

Something strikes me as odd, the young-adult female is tethered to the adult male. I don’t know how I can tell, but that is not her form. There’s something wrong here. She doesn’t want to be following this older serpent. That doesn’t stop her from striking at me however. With her smaller size, and slower speed, I’d be able to take her out more easily first, and maybe only have to take her out if she drops a potion, but something is eating away at me. I can’t hesitate, Lil’s life is on the line!

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But didn’t I just make the mistake of letting my fury kill, and that killing cause me to injure one of the ones I love?

Also, how in all the nine hells do I know the morphology of offshoots of mythological snake figures? Did these broken memories want me to be a, what’s the word, cryptozoologist? Ugh, regardless, adult male Rochi it is. I wish I could just melt down all the copies of this spear. Wanting to be very careful that it doesn’t end up being knocked out of the sky and somehow flying at Teuila or myself, I pull out Gae Buidhe.

Using JT, I knock myself side to side in zigzag patterns towards the male’s tail head first. If I can get rid of that, it won’t have nearly three hundred sixty degree vision, it’ll have blind spots. It’s a bit easier said than done. I don’t feel like I’m at any risk, but I can see Teuila in a nearby tree getting ready to strike, and I shake my head no at her. I need Teuila to be absolutely as full of energy as possible to return us just as expediently. I’m pretty sure her legs are broken, and I’ve got a pretty heavy case of whiplash. The gray silhouette doesn’t have all the ancillary powers at full capacity that Valkyrie would normally have.

The younger snake tries to set a trap for me, getting behind where I will be as the larger one advances on me. She thinks I’m being herded towards her waiting mouths, but I just have to be careful not to instinctively react and slaughter her as she springs her trap. My danger wraps indicate where she’ll be springing from. Unlike the older snake, she actually seems to have some sense of combat, anticipation of dodges and the like. It’s as if she has formal combat training. Even with my danger wrap’s sense, I’m barely able to make it out of their combined trap by JT’ing straight up, stopping my upwards momentum in midair, and switching to a sideways momentum through the tiniest gap in their offenses. She’s able to cover most of the larger predator’s gaps, as the adult male seems to just be more of a wild animal that lashes out. Somehow she’s vastly more intelligent. She’s a person, not a beast, not a spawn, not a boss, I’m sure of it.

My whiplash is making the fight a bit more difficult than it needs to be, since every time I JT, I aggravate it. It feels like I’m giving myself minor concussions every time I start and stop. Oh, oh this is perfect. I’m at the fore of the serpent, and it makes one of my favorite mistakes, lunging all heads simultaneously at me from outwards intersecting angles. I JT between all of the necks and rip through its entire tail with Gae Buidhe, removing that head entirely. Okay, two more heads, main body. Teuila doesn’t look like she’s recovering, she looks like she’s getting worse from her injuries, frickin’ ‘eck.

Something weird is happening with the younger snake, she’s, well, fritzing out is the most polite way I can describe it. As if someone were playing with a screen that only she was on, and messing with the horizontal tuning. I hope my intuition is right about this, otherwise things could be about to get a whole lot worse. If she’s actually about to morph into a full Octorochi, then I’m screwed.

Gorramit will I ever learn to stop getting distracted by introspection!? Agh that’s a gash down the entire inside of my right thigh, and a heaping helping of venom to boot. If I weren’t worried about this thing suddenly sprouting back more heads for each one I take down, I’d vary my attacks more, but I have to rely on Gae Buidhe. As much as I want this spear out of my life forever, it’s a permanent fixture because of situations like this, where it’s necessary.

The younger serpent lunges at me, and I whirl out of the way, barely stopping myself from slashing at her necks.

I think, like Vampguppy, this adult serpent thing just entered a mild enragement stage after losing a third of its heads or health. It’s faster, and its fangs seem to be able to extend outwards as it lunges to bite. I feared Octorochi would do this if we didn’t end the fight in a single onslaught. We barely won in time with that self-sacrificial leap. Sure, turns out I could have kept myself from plummeting, but that’s in the past. Okay, since it now has more reach, it thinks I’ll need to dodge further back. In that case, let it lunge, and go low. When it thinks it has me, leave Gae Buidhe in place.

As the serpent lunges again, I plant Gae Buidhe facing up at an angle towards its throat. Now I JT myself down into the muck as hard as I can, slamming myself into the swamp floor, nearly burying myself. The serpent impales itself, nearly decapitating its own left head according to my danger wrap senses, so I JT upwards to finish dragging Gae Buidhe out of its skull. Once I do, I JT back down again, slashing Gae Buidhe at its neck, finishing off the left head. It took a lot more to deal with since its front heads are so much larger than its rear head.

As I’d feared, the serpent goes into full on ludicrous rage mode. Not only that, but the younger serpent is looking like something from a horror film. It seems like during the fritzing, the younger serpent has a head of incredibly long hair that drapes over its face, or faces, and its movements become erratic. It virtually teleports left and right as it advances. The movements are sickening, uncanny. Somehow though, they’re fairly predictable in nature.

The serpent is now spitting, and it doesn’t seem like ordinary venom, it seems like potent acid. Blocking the acid blasts on my Valkyrie shield actually caused it to quickly eat holes in my shield. It’s destroying magical equipment. Oh heavens if I could get my hands on that, I’d melt down all these extra Gae Buidhe copies in a heartbeat.

Ah! My same thigh! Oh, oh no, oh no that’s bone. I drag myself through the swamp to dilute the acid splash that hit my right inner thigh. It’s a grizzly sight. I equip a fresh set of Valkyrie padded under-armor, hoping to offer it at least a little protection. I also hope to keep it from festering or getting any dirtier. My dominant hand is still pretty shattered from my earlier foolishness in the dam, and it’s been getting harder and harder to aim a decent thrust at the snake.

Worse, the younger snake actually catches up to me, and it feels like she phases through me during one of her glitchy motions. I think I’m going to be sick, it’s like a cold effluvium passing through me. Like how one would expect the ectoplasm of a ghost to feel, especially one such as a banshee. As I’m reeling from the nausea, between the pain and her strange contact, she slams her heads into me, knocking me into the swamp floor. My left arm lets out an audible snap as it bends and breaks, getting trapped behind my back during the landing. I scream in anguish, and just then I notice three jets of acid coming my way. One will hit the younger serpent when she next fritzes to the right, I can’t let that happen if my intuition is correct. I can't afford to let it happen, but so little of my body is responsive right now.

I JT into position to avoid the two acid blasts and intercept the third. I only manage to interpose my right hand in front of the acid blast directed through the younger serpent towards me. I toss up an FFS to absorb as much of the acid as I can, slowing it down by reducing its kinetic energy with thermokinesis, but plenty still makes it through to splash on my fist gripping Gae Buidhe.

Teuila looks like she’s barely holding onto consciousness, and fretting about me all the while. She trusts me, I can’t let her down, she’d never forgive herself, or me, if I died when I told her to stand by. I jam my hand that’s barely capable of being called such into the swamp, diluting the acid. It’s the same hand whose wrist was broken recently, that hasn’t fully healed. The same hand that I used to go berserk in the dam. I can barely hold onto Gae Buidhe at this point, it’s hanging loosely. I told myself I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t risk any more copies being loose out in the world, but I can’t get a manual attack off.

I have to launch attacks using inventory copies of Gae Buidhe at the serpent with JT magic. I don’t have the energy to do umbral shots or stabs. It feels like my mana has been depleting to keep me alive at this point, with as much exposed bone as I have.

Okay, I need to get into a position where I can’t miss, and I can’t lose a copy of Gae Buidhe if it goes flying past my target. There can be no chance at all that it rebounds, ricochets, or flies towards Teuila in any way. I JT myself sharply to one side, through the younger serpent’s fritzing motion, gaining another wave of nausea, on top of the pain induced nausea. When they’re both going to be directly under where I want to be, I JT myself completely skyward, hoping that I’m predicting the female serpent’s fritzes correctly.

The serpent leaps vertically straight at me, I stayed low enough to give it the idea that it had a chance. I fire three copies of Gae Buidhe out of my inventory with JT directly down, the serpent tries to twist out of the way of one, and acid blast the other two, but while it’s busy dealing with those three decoys, I summon one right below it’s skull as I JT myself down with my own copy of Gae Buidhe loosely aimed into its face.

Time pauses. I’m treated to the same cacophony as always from derezzing. On my breakneck descent, I claim all five copies of Gae Buidhe that I’ve been using. Three are heavily damaged from acid. The one I held in my hand has its haft nearly completely eaten through, the two that the serpent tried to blast out of the air are almost toothpicks in girth. The one it dodged is fine, as is the one I set below its skull as we fell together.

The female snake stops glitching, and begins to glow, her form lengthens in some aspects, shortens in others. She takes on the form of a lovely woman, bare of clothing, though with long black locks that cover most of her torso. She doesn’t have legs however, instead she retains a serpent’s tail, though this one, with no additional heads on it, just a tail tip. She’s also many times smaller than she was as a serpent. I believe she’s what you would call a naga, or maybe a lamia.

I claim the items dropped by the serpent, and send a mental call to Teuila. There’s only one red potion. I can’t risk disassembling it. I start to explain our situation before remembering, “I know you don’t know us, but I need someone with a steady hand to rescue my dragon friend, I need someone to cut a wound away from their heart, and administer this potion. Crap you can’t understand me.”

Teuila telepathically sends, “Are you trusting someone that just attacked you to go save Lil?”

I telepathically send back, “It’s all I can do right now.”

The naga actually responds, telepathically to the both of us, “You may trust me, Dehlia, with one task, then I never want to see your faces again. Such potions are rare, and induplicable. You’ve saved my fate, but I hold no love for softskins. May you all rot in the great hereafter. Still, your friend is scalekin, scale-kind does unto scale-kind as one would have done in return. I shall do this task for you. I need a clean blade, and transport to your friend.”

I don’t have time to be floored by the revelation that someone can understand me, that there’s entire worlds of possibilities and different types of peoples out here. Instead I hand my cleanest Valkyrie dagger to Dehlia. I hand the potion to Teuila, begging her to get us back to Lil as fast as she can, through the pain she’s in.

Te stutters, crying, “I, I, I can, I can only take one of you.”

I nod, understanding. Kissing Teuila on the cheek I order her to go, “Go, take her, take Dehlia, save Lil. I’ll catch up. I’m fine.”

Teuila’s eyes flash fury at me, she knows I’m lying, but she can’t bear to lose Lil any more than I can. I have to trust this naga woman, Dehlia, and a half broken Teuila, it’s all I can do. Te’s form elongates as it becomes a creamy gray silhouette of Valkyrie, the naga woman seems to take less affront to this form as it isn’t really soft skinned, it’s no skinned.

Instantly Teuila takes off, and I realize they weren’t necessarily sonic booms that I heard before, that’s just how loudly Teuila’s legs were shattering with each leaping stride. I nearly vomit at the revelation. Lil’s fate now rests in Dehlia’s hands, and your legs Te, heavenspeed to you.

I throw up several times as I try to place several FFS on the worst of my wounds. The frost slows down my vitality loss. My mana hovers near zero, and I don’t dare do anything that might cost energy. I slink towards the split rock via my tattoo tendrils to try to recuperate before I head back to join the others. Eventually I’ll be fine, but right now I’m an utter mess. I need to clean these wounds so Lu doesn’t get mad at me. Also so that I’ll live, that’s important too.