The marionette atop Alice had little regard for its own safety, twisting and rotating joints in unnatural directions in its effort to pummel her into a bloody pulp. Each strike made a meaty thud resonate across the empty hallway as Alice desperately tried to push off the construct to no avail.
Once it wrapped its pearly white hands around her neck and started squeezing hard enough to make tears gather on the corners of her eyes, Alice desperately clawed at the thing’s face, and upon finding a small crevice where her hand fit, she plunged however much of her arm she could into the jagged aperture, desperate to do as much damage as possible.
Her hand grazed something warm and slimy, writhing and squirming at her touch, and she almost let go of the thing in pure disgust. Steeling her resolve as her vision started to blur along the edges, Alice made a fist, grabbing whatever made its house inside the puppet's body.
The thing inside jerked, and the ivory marionette mimicked it. Grinning despite the lancing pain that each breath brought with it, she dug deeper, then pulled.
A squirming, bloodied thing full of bloodshot eyes of all sizes and forms wriggled in her grasp, still connected to the puppet by a collection of crimson threads that led to the crack Alice had pulled the monster out from.
Then, its many eyes' pupils burst open in a vile splatter of black and red gore, the inside of its eyes growing teeth not dissimilar to those of a lamprey, but hooked. More cruel, designed to tear and rip flesh if one tried to get them off.
Alice’s panic went into overdrive as the thing launched itself at her, [Torment] gathering around the monstrosity to little effect. In an act of pure reflex and survival instinct, blackened chains burst open from Alice’s palms, slithering inside the many open mouths and twisting themselves around and inside the creature, creating a cocoon of moving black fetters that made a wet thud when it hit the floors as the chains slowly started to inflict a series of small cuts. Alice activated the second half of her spell without even thinking about it, still remembering the hands twisting around her neck, ready to snap it at any moment.
The chains bulged, then compressed further as the thing squealed in a way that made Alice’s vision blur and double, whispers at the edge of her hearing that she desperately tried to ignore.
The beast rasped a wet gurgle before finally going still, the chains squeezing one last time and splattering the floor, walls and Alice with more blood. She didn’t mind, as long as the thing was dead dead.
Alice stayed on the floor, gasping for breath, feeling how at least a quarter of her Ether had been sucked off with that single cast, [Torment] being only a stream she could keep up for a few minutes before needing to stop, whereas [Oppress/Ruin] took a chunk of her total pool for itself with each activation, and not a small part either.
Feeling how it was as good a moment as any to check her notifications, she opened them all with a thought.
Victory!
You have killed [Burrowing Parasite].
You were out-levelled and alone. Bonus granted.
Alice stopped the rest, then looked at the rapidly decomposing carcass, the spark of an idea lighting her mind. Could she identify corpses? She always forgot to actually do it in the middle of battle, a habit she’d have to correct, but she’d like some information on them, if she ever encounters more parasites of the same type.
Name
Burrowing Parasite
Tier
[1]
Level
[9]
Affinity: Profane, Blood.
Alice would cheer if her throat didn't feel like someone had run it over with an eighteen-wheeler. At least the abominable things were within her own tier. Alice didn't want to know what would happen if the parasite had been a tier higher than her.
Skill-up.
[1.1 Wanderlust] up to [1.4].
[1.1 Northstar] up to [1.3].
Level-up.
[1.5 Acolyte of Pain] up to [1.7].
+3 Vitality, +4 Power, +1 Control, +3 Free per LV.
Total:
+6 Vitality, +8 Power, +2 Control, +6 Free
Level-up.
[1.1 Initiate Explorer] up to [1.4]
+2 Agility, +2 Reaction,+ 2 Perception,+3 Free per LV.
Total:
+6 Agility , +6 Reaction, +6 Perception, +9 Free
Alice could never get enough of feeling her body actually getting stronger, point by point, step by step. Glancing at her stats and her hoard of free points, she decided to assign them now, rather than wait.
Free
9→
24
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She assigned two to strength, bringing it to an even ten, then four to Agility and Reaction each, along with eight towards Perception, leaving the three stats at an equal twenty all around.
There was a strange itch within the back of her eyes and the nape of her neck that then spread all around her body. It was kind of uncomfortable, but not painful, so she assumed it was the changes being made. Curiously she had never felt them being applied in real-time like this before. Perhaps it had something to do with the amount of stats being distributed?
Testing her body once the sensation subsided, she slowly flexed the muscles in her hand, feeling them more responsive and vibrant within her mind than ever before, her proprioception now upgraded a significant amount.
She dumped the last eight points divided equally between Control and Will, finishing her free points and leaving her stats higher than they had ever been.
There was something… addictive, each time she saw one of her stats tick upwards. A small burst of dopamine that she didn't want to let go of.
Strength
8→
10
Vitality
20→
26
Agility
10→
20
Reaction
10→
20
Perception
8→
20
Power
28→
36
Control
13→
19
Will
10→
14
Alice tried to stand up, wincing and groaning when ribs groaned in protest. Her vitality may be higher, but apparently it did nothing for her current injuries, at least for now.
Slowly, but still at as fast a pace as she dared, Alice went back towards the fountain room, glad she had thought of testing how the apparent non-euclidean space of the strange building worked just a couple of turns away.
Sighing in relief once she closed the fountain room's door behind her, Alice let her body sink down into the gently waving liquid, its warmth welcoming her, soothing her wounds, thirst and anxieties.
After definitely more time than was necessary for her wounds to heal, Alice sighed within the pool of black liquid, reluctantly getting back up.
She needed to find her gear and, eventually, get out of whatever this place was, then out of whatever hellhole she had fallen into in the first place. She doubted that she'd be able to return to the surface, much less the city, just by finding an exit from this madhouse. Her luck wasn't that good.
Anxiety in her chest but resolve in her heart, Alice set off.
—❈—
Alice carefully mapped out how many turns she took each time she encountered a new door or room. Sometimes it was some kind of dusty closet or ruined room, and other times she found things she’d rather not remember.
The shrieks of the screaming flesh door still rang in her ears, bringing a chill down her spine.
It was after some time that her exploration yielded something potentially useful. As always, Alice turned around and instead of the corridor, she found an incredibly dusty room that smelled of hidden mold, rot and moisture, and Alice locked every muscle in her body in an effort to not scream.
What she had thought were just strange piles of rubble on the corners and along the walls of the room were instead piles and piles of what seemed to be variations of the marionette she had fought before, all of them lying completely still, a thin layer of dust sitting atop them.
Alice held her breath until her lungs started to burn, and when she couldn’t hold it in anymore, exhaled as slowly as possible, not daring to even blink.
None of the puppets moved, and Alice didn’t know how that made her feel.
Alice stepped forward tentatively, prepared to turn tail and run towards the fountain room at the merest twitch. Eyes snapping from side to side wildly, she advanced towards the centre of the room, where a small stone plinth sat, a strange mirror atop it.
It was slightly flared at the top and tapered off to a point at the bottom. She also noticed how it was kind of curved inwards along the sides, as if meant to almost wrap around something. The border appeared to be reinforced with some kind of dull grey metallic-looking material that looked sturdy but she couldn’t identify at a glance.
She strongly stared at the thing and the plinth beneath it in search of traps when a notification surprised her.
Name
Tyrant’s Echo
Category
Armament [Shield]
Tier
[?]
Rank
[?]
Affinity: ?
It was a shield? That explained the weird shape, but not the why, the how, or if she should take it for herself.
Indecision and the flame of greed warred in her heart. She was pretty short of defensive options, and having something to put between whatever wanted to take a bite out of her and, well, her body, would lift a lot of worry from her shoulders.
Now that she looked closer at it, didn’t really reflect anything except an incredibly blurry, still image that was impossible to make heads or tails of. The fact that it didn’t reflect what it had in front of itself but instead some kind of other place didn’t ease her worries, but she stretched out her hand towards it nonetheless.
Quickly snatching it out of the plinth and absentmindedly noticing how lightweight it was, she prepared herself to turn tail and run, should something show up to stop her.
But nothing did.
Alice felt two points of pressure on the back of her neck and her hair started to stand on its end. It was the feeling of being watched, ants crawling across your back, but magnified a hundredfold. Quickly turning around, she started to run towards her safe haven, the fountain room.
The feeling intensified with each step, and she swore that she could almost hear a kind of breathing just behind her, matching her steps, coming closer and closer, just slightly faster than her.
Alice started to sprint, harder and harder, faster than she ever had, breaking her record back on Earth a couple of times without noticing, her legs burning and her chest constricting with each step.
Alice started to shiver as otherworldly whispers started to resonate along the walls, and she almost tripped on her own feet when she felt something graze her back. Holding a shriek of pure panic, she smashed open the door to the black fountain with her shoulder, slamming it close without even looking back.
The alien howl of what she was sure was fury reverberating outside the door and rattling its hinges confirmed how close she had come to whatever that had been.
Panting, Alice waited for it to subside, in hopes of at some point going out again, this time without touching anything strange, no matter how much she needed it.
The enraged wails did not recede. In fact, they seemed to be getting stronger and louder with each passing moment, and Alice paled.
Trapped, she turned towards the only thing within the room. The fountain was still the same as ever, its pitch-black liquid sloshing and waving to the tune of an imaginary wind.
Desperate, she dove inside, and the act sparked a memory within her brain that both terrified her and lit a spark of hope in her chest at the same time.
She remembered the water. She remembered diving inside a black sea of liquid, the same liquid the fountain had. The same substance that she hadn’t found anywhere else.
With her heart in her throat, Alice tried to dive deeper into the fountain, despite having been able to sit within it not a couple of hours ago.
Alice felt like she would cry when she didn’t hit a sudden floor of stale grey rock, but just more and more liquid.
There was a thunderous crash outside that made Alice’s bones rattle within her body, and she swam harder and faster, searching for some kind of exit that wasn’t the one she came from.
When she didn’t find anything immediately and the liquid in the direction she had come from started to violently stir Alice almost lost all hope, until a small light in the distance grabbed her attention.
Like a drowning woman holding onto a wooden plank in the middle of a storm after her ship had sunk, she started to rapidly dive towards the light, the currents behind her getting faster and faster, more violent by the second.
With just a second to spare before she was caught up in whatever had been chasing her was doing to the tar-like liquid, she flung herself towards the light, emerging from the surface of a strange lake within a cave filled to the brim with bioluminescent moss.
Just as Alice allowed herself a brief sigh of respite, the waters to her right moved, the surface breached by a long, sinuous mass of flesh that had rotting chunks of meat missing, and Alice’s stomach dropped.
She wasn’t alone in the underground lake.