Chapter 20 Over With.
Lenna punched the tip of her sword through the Tunnel Horror’s hard chitinous exoskeletal rings. She made sure to keep the blade horizontal when she did so as she was about to try and filet a monster that could shrug off siege weapons. She dumped power into her sword and pushed as hard as she could until her crossguard was about to make contact with the monster. She shifted her stance and pulled with everything she had in the opposite direction that the worm was moving. Her boots slid across the ground, dragging her towards the wall of the tunnel. She picked up one foot and placed it on the wall and then the other so she was standing horizontally. She planted the edge of her blade, just past the crossguard, on her pauldron and shoved with everything she had.
Lenna felt the pressure lighten ever so lightly and noticed that the monster had slowed down almost to a stop. Her blade was ever so slowly melting its way through the chitin. One inch, then two, then she was on to the second ring as it continued to try and push on. ‘It would rather cut itself in half than stop trying to eat him!’ She mentally exclaimed. Her teeth were clenched as the second ring was gone and she was on to the third. An awful stench of acidic blood filled her lungs as she took forceful breaths to keep her muscles working. Finally the monster stopped moving forward. She managed to extend her legs completely and finish cutting through the third ring before she was forced to drop to the ground.
Lenna took a few gasping breaths before she started to try and saw her way into the fourth ring. The area where they overlapped was too thick to cut through without proper leverage. ‘Damnit.’ Lenna swore mentally. “Isaac!” She called out. “Can you hear me?” She listened as hard as she could but couldn’t hear anything. ‘Wait! The sending stone!’ She ran over to her bag and pulled out the stone. She held the ‘in’ side to her mouth. “Isaac!” She called out again. “Isaac! Can you hear me?!”
—
Being sandwiched between a million tons of solid stone and a monster that turned said solid stone into a fine dust with nothing but some type of corrosive magical effect that was projected a few inches in front of it was… unpleasant. Isaac would rate it a solid three out of ten for the worst experiences he had ever had. That didn’t sound very high but when things like, breathing in lethal amounts of poison, bleeding almost to death, feeling his heart implode, and watching his arms stop existing and then regrow were on the list it was hard to get to the top. Even then he had this odd feeling that none of those things were truly the worst things that he had experienced. They were just the worst things that he remembered.
The shadows surrounding his body were steadily being devoured as he was getting pushed backwards through solid stone. The only reason he hadn’t been crushed to death was that, in the monster’s attempt at consuming him, its corrosive effect was being projected forwards. He ate most of the power but enough still got through to the stone behind him, mostly from the area around him and not by going through him, that the stone behind him was still crumbling into dust. ‘This is bad.’ Isaac thought. There was no way to teleport out. He needed space to teleport out. Any amount of space was acceptable. The problem was that the worm was fatter in the middle so the hole it was making was smaller than its widest part. This is what formed the scuffed up surface of the tunnels so they weren’t all perfectly smooth right after a Tunnel Horror had made them.
Without the space for shadows to exist Isaac was stuck staring down a thousand teeth in eight concentric circles. Then just as suddenly as the monster came, it stopped. The magic didn’t and he could tell that the shadows were beginning to run out. Soon he would be the one getting devoured. His head ached. Not just from the mental strain of controlling more than his maximum mana capacity of mana but also from whatever it was he was trying to compare himself too causing his head to get hit with a psychic sledgehammer. He thought he heard his name being called. He strained to listen but couldn’t hear more. Then he heard it again. ‘Lenna?’ Isaac’s severely mentally strained mind pieced together. It took him a moment to realize he had the perfect item for their situation.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Isaac reached into his Inventory and grabbed the sending stone. Sound immediately blasted out at him so loudly that his control over the shadows momentarily slipped. Half of the remaining shadows were gone before he could wrestle back control over them. “Shit.” Isaac swore aloud.
“Isaac?” Lenna asked through the stones. The audio quality was awful. The sounds were too sharp and echoey.
“Yeah.” Isaac replied. “I can hear you. I’m running out of time.” He confessed. “Do you think you can kill it at least?” He asked. “If it dies then I can punch my way through it but as long as this mana consuming shit is still active it’s going to eat me!”
“Brace.” Lenna told him. “Come forth, ember of a dying star.”
Isaac’s shadows were blasted away as the worm ballooned from the fourteen thousand cubic feet of fire that tried to exist inside of it. Isaac’s arms and knees started to burn. His feet were planted against the wall he was laying on so his knees and arms had been what the monster was trying to devour first. The pain started to die down and slowly, over the course of nearly a minute, the corrosive effect vanished. The monster was completely still. Isaac was now standing half inside of its mouth with a wrinkled nose. “This smells awful.” Isaac commented.
“Yes. It does.” Lenna agreed.
“Now how am I supposed to get out?” Isaac wondered.
“I made a hole in the monster.” Lenna told him. “You should be fine.”
Isaac focused and found the open darkness inside the monster and moved his focus deep into it. Eventually he found a massive open section and teleported out next to Lenna. He turned around and his eyes went wide. There was a massive hole wide enough for Alice to walk through, without bending down or touching the sides, blasted out of the side of the monster. Its blood was still steaming and coated the floor and walls. He looked at Lenna and his wide eyes from shock turned into wide eyes of horror. “You need a bath.” He told her.
Lenna was covered across her entire left side in a thick coating of Tunnel Horror blood. Her aura burst out of her before returning to normal. “Now they are just pissing me off.” She said coldly to no one in particular. Whoever had been spying on them picked that exact moment to take a peek.
“I don’t think we have enough water for that.” Isaac said and dug out one of the waterskins from her bag and started trying to wash some of the sticky acidic blood off of her. His nose was wrinkled the entire time at the smell. Lenna was scowling.
—
“Oh this is going to be fun.” Isaac grumbled sarcastically.
“This might be a bad idea.” Lenna added.
“No, what could go wrong? We’re just going to walk into the town that chased us out with pitchforks like we were witches in Sale- ow, damn.” Isaac rubbed the side of his head in pain.
Lenna rolled her eyes. “They didn’t chase us out with farming implements.” She corrected him. “It was the smith, the one we’re after, and some entitled hag.”
Isaac chuckled and raised an eyebrow in question. “Hag?” He asked. “Aren’t you like seven times her age or something?”
“She can still be a hag.” Lenna retorted. “A hag is a type of monster, you know?”
“What’s it like?” Isaac asked.
“It’s just a witch that took it too far.” Lenna replied.
“Oh.” Isaac said. “That was not nearly as interesting as I was hoping it would be.”
“The world isn’t all grand adventures and mythical monsters.” Lenna reminded him.
Isaac raised an eyebrow in question. “It sure seems that way to me.”
“Shut up.” Lenna whispered. “We are here.”
Sure enough the gate to Ben’s end stood blocking their path a few dozen feet in front of them. “It’s been a while.” Isaac commented. “Bracelet?” Lenna shook her wrist with the bracelet she had gotten from Sera that showed that she was allowed in Safeharbor. “Badge?” Lenna flicked the platinum badge hanging around her neck and it let out a ringing sound before it clanked back down onto her breastplate. “Other badge?”
“You have them.” She replied.
Isaac smirked and pulled both of their badges, which proved that they weren’t doppelgangers, out of his Inventory. “Just making sure you were paying attention.”
“Uh huh.” Lenna half heartedly agreed. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Isaac took a deep breath and walked up to the door. “Ahoy!” He called. “Open up!”