“Hurk!” Micah dropped to her knees as she dry heaved. Cedric patted her on the back, idly noting the silky nature of her fur.
Unlike the previous dungeons that Cedric had encountered, the Mindshatter Tear was perfectly dark. The only source of illumination was the pair of sputtering torches they had lit as soon as they entered. The light was meager but managed to illuminate the edges of the relatively small dungeon.
Or...not edges, because the dungeon appeared to be a gigantic hollow metal sphere. The ground was cold and mirror smooth and slopped up and around until it formed a dome above their heads. Dozens of odd cuboid spikes erupted from the surface. It was as if someone had tried to build stalagmites but only had voxels to work with. They weren’t sharp, but their presence massively reduced sightlines and instilled a menacing claustrophobia that was difficult to shake.
But the dungeon was only spherical at first glance. Despite rising, the ground was no more difficult to traverse than flat ground. Moving along the ground, rotated the entire sphere in a dizzying kaleidoscope that induced a strong sense of vertigo and motion sickness. What made it fascinating to Cedric however was that his body was subtly warped.
“The light...” Cedric raised his hand in front of him as Micah wiped her mouth in the background. The farther he moved his hand from his eyes the more it bent upwards like his bones were suddenly made of jello. “It’s warped somehow? A gravitational effect? Couldn’t be, unless it somehow only affects photons...”
“It’s corrupted,” Micah stood, hefting her spear. “Nothing moves right. Up is sometimes down and the dungeon doesn’t behave as it should.”
Cedric blinked as suddenly a notification blurred into his vision.
AuTTe_ts fou_+: (499/-3)
“Hmm,” Cedric dismissed the broken prompt. “Where are the monsters?”
“I don’t—Is that a mouth?”
On a nearby blocky pillar, a wide fleshy pair of lips oozed out of the stone. The lips were distinctly human, though chapped with a small bleeding tear on the lower left lip. The mouth opened slowly, revealing a smooth gray wall behind it.
Then it spoke.
“...The...light!...light....light...” it rasped.
The words echoed faintly through the dungeon, the weird geometry making the sound appear sourceless and omnipresent. Cedric cursed and hefted his spear as their small group shuffled nervously in place.
“It couldn’t!” The mouth spread as white teeth erupted from the stone in a poor facsimile of a smile. “Unless! Down doesn’t behave?”
“Arty,” Cedric frowned, eyes flickering all over the dungeon. “Destroy it.”
The Arterial Sheildbearer leaped into action. Its augments had changed from the semi-constant stream of upgrades from Cedric’s crystal. Gore Creep was long gone, replaced by Second Wind and Knockback. Arty shot out a stream of concentrated blood, barely waiting a second before a second concentrated deluge joined the first. The two streams merged and crashed into the mouth.
A ghastly screech echoed through the dungeon as the mouth burned. Knockback triggered and the entire pillar groaned as its foundation was rocked by the skill. Cracks shot across the base, and with a resigned groan, the entire pillar separated from the ground. Instead of toppling over, however, it began floating as if to spite the immutable laws of gravity.
“Didn’t expect that,” Cedric muttered, but at least the mouth was gone. Before he could celebrate, a mass of slimy tentacles erupted from the hungry void that had hidden in wait beneath the pillar. The tentacles pulled the main body of a diseased zombie-like wolf covered in open oozing pustules out of the darkness. Despite its near-death appearance and parasitic tentacles erupting from the base of its neck, the wolf turned its two cloudy white eyes upon them.
Abyssal Eyebeast
Stats Invested: ?
Talents Invested: ?
Indoctrinate
8m:20s
Attach to a sentient creature with less health than 1% ability power, taking full control of their body
Summon Phantom Gazer
20m:0s
Summon a Phantom Gazer that lasts in the material realm for up to 1 hour. Phantom Gazers deal 0.6% ability power magic damage to what they see
Desolation
66h:0m:0s
3 ft radius
Indoctrinated host and all Summoned Phantom Gazers explode, dealing 10% ability power as magic damage
Unstable Flesh
-passive-
Casting active skills costs 20% of your maximum health. Health loss is taken from Indoctrinated host first
Cedric narrowed his eyes, preparing to step back through the portal in case things got spicy.
“Droplet go!” Micah tossed her Water Slime forward. It splashed onto the frozen steel floor, then blurred as Glom triggered. The tentacle wolf slammed its tentacles into the ground and launched itself to the side, but Sure Shot activated, and Droplet veered midair to slam straight into the wolf’s face.
An eruption of caustic smoke spewed out of their contact as Droplet sunk four inches into the zombie-wolf’s skull. The wolf’s lower jaw disconnected, clattering to the ground as the Eyebeast’s meaty tentacles rose and slammed into the slime. A ripple of rot washed over the wolf, somehow reducing its already pathetic state further as a human eyeball with an electric blue iris opened on its left haunch. The Phantom Gazer blinked twice then tore out, leaving a weeping ulcer as it floated up above the fighting. It stopped ten feet above the fighting and turned to stare at the slime.
Droplet was far too strong to be phased by the combined assault. With over 2,000 stat and talent points it simply weathered the assault and barely registered the burning gaze of the Phantom Gazer. In response, it extended four of its own watery tentacles and started tearing apart flesh and bone.
“That’s not the tamable Abyssal Gazer,” Micah said. “Use Nukem.”
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“Not necessary. It would be best not to destroy the other stalagmites prematurely—” Cedric replied, then winced as Droplet decapitated the zombie wolf and started ripping out vital organs from its abdominal cavity. It disturbed him that Micah’s stomach rebelled to a little motion sickness and distorted visuals but not the wanton carnage of her companion.
The creature suddenly lost all mobility. It keeled over slowly — like an ancient pine whose roots had rotten — and flopped wetly onto the steel ground. Droplet hopped out of its chest and jiggled cheerfully in victory. It had barely taken any damage from the scuffle.
The battle wasn’t over though. Behind the celebrating slime, the mass of tentacles attached to the wolf’s back twitched and dislodged from the decaying flesh. There wasn’t a main body to the tentacles, each tendril simply bifurcated randomly until the mass didn’t have any conceivable symmetry to speak of.
“Behind you!” Micah called.
Droplet spun, its internals swirling in the reflected light of the torches, just as the tentacle beast engulfed it. Cedric signaled Arty to help, and the large blood monster lumbered forward. Before it could even get near, an unearthly screech emanated from the pile of writhing tentacles as Droplet erupted from the center. Its watery flesh emitted glowing green motes as Life Defense recovered the meager injuries it had sustained.
Melted flesh dribbled out of the cavity that Acidic Touch had inflicted on the eldritch horror. It wriggled for another second, but it couldn’t survive such comprehensive damage. With a feeble whimper, the monster stilled and silence fell over the dungeon.
“Ugh, why does it smell so sour and gross?” Micah grimaced, covering her nose.
“That’s rot. Where I’m from it comes from bacteria consuming dead flesh. Here? I have no idea what is causing it,” Cedric said, idly stepping aside as the floating voxel pillar floated by. He gently pushed on it, and it spun away towards the ceiling. It really was unaffected by gravity. As it rose, its shape grew thinner and thinner until it crossed the halfway point where it flipped in a second like it had passed some sort of invisible mirror.
“Great...Droplet, toss the body back into the Open void,” Micah said. “At least it looks like Droplet won’t have any trouble with the monsters in this dungeon.”
Droplet eagerly complied, struggling mightily with the heavyweight, and eventually resorted to chopping up the beast into little pieces as it chucked the wolf into the void. As it did that, two more fleshy mouths appeared on the next two nearest pillars.
“Body...Open...” The first said mournfully. Cedric turned to it, narrowing his eyes.
“Sour...Behind!” The second cackled. A thick pink tongue slathered in saliva erupted from the smooth stone of its throat. Both mouths were growing at a disturbing rate such that both had lips, teeth, tongues, and even a vibrating uvula visible whenever they spoke.
“They are just saying nonsense, or is there some pattern you can spot?” Cedric asked, signaling for Arty to deal with the two new mouths. Droplet eagerly joined Arty as Nukem floated protectively over the two tamers.
Once again the mouths withered and the pillars dislodged from the ground when attacked. The first pillar joined its brethren in the air, but the second lost all cohesion and flooded the area in a smoking black tar. Arty tanked the thick fluid with Riposte easily but was momentarily trapped as two more Abyssal Eyebeasts hopped out of the dark void.
The wolf was gone, instead replaced by a huge manta ray with twice the wingspan as Cedric was tall, and a lumbering elephant. These creatures looked marginally less rotted than the wolf had been and both instantly summoned a Phantom Gazer as soon as they could.
Luckily, Droplet had no trouble with either of the beasts though it could do nothing as the two Phantom Gazers turned their attention on Cedric and Micah. Cedric hissed as a line of fire radiated down his chest, then vanished as Nukem casually floated down to obstruct the line-of-sight attack.
Arty ripped himself out of the tar, but Cedric signaled him back just in case. Without knowing the Abyssal Eyebeast’s ability power there was no way to tell if they would be able to Indoctrinate the Arterial Shieldbearer. Droplet seemed immune with its high health so for now it was best to play it safe and have it deal with the monsters.
“I guess the stories are true. Monsters from the In-Between are weird,” Micah murmured as she watched her small slime rip apart the two large voidbeasts. Cedric raised a brow at that. The Abyssal Eyebeasts were weird, certainly, but they weren’t any stranger than an Arterial Shieldbearer or a Voidborne Skyshade.
Droplet finished its gruesome task and jiggled back to them. Its watery form glittered in the torchlight as hopped up into Micah’s arms. She grinned, catching it and hugging it close.
“You did so awesome!” She cooed, kissing the ecstatic slime on the dome. She froze as her eyes glazed over to a notification. “What the...”
“What?” Cedric frowned.
“Duration infinite?!” Micah gasped and dropped Droplet like the little slime was on fire.
“Oi, what happened!” Cedric reached over to touch Micah’s shoulder, but she flinched away.
“Don’t touch me!” Micah said. “Just...I...got poisoned or something. It says that it spreads to anyone I touch. I can’t read the name of the ability though. It just says it is dealing true damage to me every second and has an infinite duration. I don’t know what true damage even is!”
“Ok, breathe Micah. Is your regeneration higher than the damage you are taking?”
“It is, barely...”
“Then you are safe and don’t even need to use a potion. We’ll just wait it out until we get back to the gnoll camp and ask for a cleansing potion to clear it. Or is there an augment you can use to clear the status ailment?”
“Gnolls are Tamers. We can’t use Augments,” Micah said, clenching at her spear like she was going to snap it any moment. She did not seem at all reassured by Cedric’s plan. “And, uhm...A cleansing potion won’t work for this.”
“Why not? I thought those potions cleared negative status ailments?”
“They do. It’s just that this...thing is technically classified as a buff.” Micah burst out. “There aren’t many ways of cleansing positive buffs from people. None exist in Gnollan as far as I know, and the only one I know only exists in stories.”
Cedric blinked. A positive ailment that dealt damage? That seemed all sorts of weird. They were in a dungeon in the In-Between though. It almost made sense for ailments to be just as broken in here as the other aspects.
But something was troubling Cedric. It niggled at the edges of his thoughts like an errant breeze on a sweltering day. Micah had only been affected after she had touched Droplet. Who presumably had acquired the ailment from touching the Abyssal Eyebeasts. The thing was, the whole situation reminded him an awful lot of earth-borne infectious diseases.
“Could you show me the notification you got from the system?” Cedric asked carefully. Micah nodded and did something to show Cedric the transparent blue box.
You have been afflicted by: Escherichia coli: -113 true damage per hour for ∞m
Cedric sighed softly as he read and reread the notification. E. coli infections were common enough on Earth. Mostly from raw and processed meats, unpasteurized dairy products, and some vegetables. The most interesting thing about the bacteria was that benign strains coexisted peacefully in the human gut which helped with digestion. Cedric himself had done some undergraduate work with several different strains of Escherichia coli in Cellular Microbiology Lab many years ago.
All that was well and good, but it didn’t explain at all what the slimy buggers were doing in fantasy land.
“Ok, I have a theory. Don’t freak out. This is perfectly safe. I’m going to need to touch you though.”
“Ok,” Micah said warily.
Cedric nodded and gently clasped Micah’s shoulder. Instantly, a notification identical to the one Micah had shown him popped up. A second later, however, his system lit up like a Christmas tree as tens of thousands of notifications blurred past his vision.
You have slain Escherichia coli!
You have slain Escherichia coli!
You have slain Escherichia coli!
...
Cedric squinted as the barrage abated after a few moments. He hadn’t even taken a single point of damage.
“I’m immune,” Cedric stated, lifting his hand off Micah’s shoulder. Of course, he was. He had a healthy immune system that would take care of the infection if the bacteria even managed to break past his skin which they wouldn’t. An E. coli colony had zero chance of surviving on the surface of his skin for long. Not when it had to compete with hundreds of other symbiotic bacterial colonies. The real question was why he hadn’t infected Micah earlier if he still possessed his microbiome from Earth.
“Really! How? Can you make me immune too?” Micah blurted out.
Before Cedric could respond, four human mouths burst out of the next four nearest pillars. They grew fast. Lips, teeth, and tongue were visible in a second. The uvula flashed behind brilliant white incisors as a cute button nose pushed out of the stone from above.
“Words...this language...of dogs in their cages. It is grating,” the first smacked its lips. “Ahh, a friendly face.”
“Why are you still holding back?” The second pursed its lips, turning to face Cedric directly. “Have you forgotten what they said to us? What they did?”
“Even now they hunt you like a dog for bringing about the Balance,” the third whispered. “They think you are a monster.”
“What are you waiting for?” The fourth grinned. “Prove them right.”