[Player Log Start!]
[Log Holder: Verity Monroe]
[Level: 2]
They threw Verity into a vat of mud. It was as disgusting as she made it sound.
“How the fuck is this going to prove my innocence?” She asked her defense attorney as she slowly sank into the thick mulch. The bird hovered above her, looking unconcerned.
“Our ways are not easy for humans to understand. But the strength of a being is most often equated to their character.” Lapika explained, “Just survive the challenges, and we shall handle the rest.”
Verity sighed and laid back, half-tempted to let the mud swallow her whole. At least then she’d be able to try and swim to the other side, where there was a series of bars she could climb up with.
“I wouldn’t recommend that.” Lapika warned, “The mud is sentient.”
“What?”
“It is digesting you as we speak.”
Verity hissed in alarm, pulling her hand out from where it was completely submerged. It clung to her like putty, already drying over her skin. In the patches that were uncovered, it left slightly reddened marks, her skin peeling back from the corrosion.
Now that it had mentioned it, there was a faint tingling all over her body, like crawling ants. She was in a vat of stomach fluids, and that vat really wanted her dead. Time to put those swimming skills to use.
She brought one arm through the corrosive materials, pulling through with all their might until she shifted forward a few inches. A few inches closer, but way too many feet away.
Her hand stung, and when she pulled it out, the fingertips were blistered through. She had to move faster than this. And if she couldn’t do it under her own strength…
[Applying Hand-to-Hand Combat!]
It wasn’t what this Ability was made for, but this was one of her highest level Abilities, and the only one she could think of to whip out in this scenario.
As soon as it came into effect, she felt power surge through her. Her movements became quicker, more deliberate. When she next splashed through the mud, her arm went in cleanly, and her grip on it was stronger, giving her the leverage she needed to pull herself through.
One armstroke. Then another. Distance was cleared. More and more and more. Even as the tetchy feeling of acid melting away at her grew and grew. She was still going to die here. Fuck…
The brief moment of inspiration that had struck her was already bleeding out of her, robbing her off the energy she had gathered up, too. What was the point? Didn’t she plan on dying here, anyway? If she just gave up, she’d be remembered as guilty and pathetic. If she didn’t, then she would just be another problem for the group to fix.
But if she let herself die here, how would they remember her? As just the weak little girl who died in the first round of the trial? Unthinkable. She demanded a death more dignified than being melted in a vat of digestive fluids.
No, Verity needed to survive this. If simply because there was a hand clutching onto the last thread of life inside her, insisting that she continue. She would not die here. Not now. Not after becoming the first of their team to step foot on the corvids’ hidden nest. She still had to lay the groundwork for their mission, so that everyone else would have an easier time.
This was all she needed to send the shock of survival rushing through her body. Followed by something else. Something more.
The mud was thicker as she moved through it, like quickly drying concrete. But she swam anyway. There was steam rising up from around her, clouding her vision. She paid it no mind. If the adrenaline was strong enough to block out the pain of her body melting away, it would do her no good to acknowledge the rest of the evidence.
It was as if time was slowing down itself, sound filtering in weirdly even though she had made certain to never let the mud reach her ears. But she seemed to be making better progress than before, funnily enough. The bars of the ladder appeared to be right in front of her, hazy and blurred thought they were.
The bars of the ladder were right in front of her.
She grabbed the closest rung, the coarse rusted metal a grounding sensation after acrid acid, and pulled. The mud followed her up in thick clumps, unwilling to let go, and she almost thought that it would drag her back. But it didn’t. She began climbing, leaving the sticky strands of mud trailing behind her. Once she was no longer in direct contact with the vat of mud, she snapped out of her daze.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Without the sound of blood pounding in her ears, it felt strangely quiet. All around her, avian eyes stared at her, in various degrees of shock.
No one clapped. Or cheered. Or made any hint that they were happy for her survival. That was fine. Verity had found that she was better at surviving when no one wished for her to do so. She was a contrarian in that way.
Above her, there was a pop up notification, though. One she was certain none of the birds could see.
[New Special Move Unlocked!]
[SM: Death Throes!]
[Details: In severe life or death conditions, the User will receive a boost to get them and their Party Members to Safety.]
Death Throes. Fitting. But also unfortunate timing. Verity was going to die here anyway. Why would she need a Special Move now?
Because she didn’t really want this, the self-serving part of her mind whispered to her. She was just playing an elaborate game, and had convinced herself that her friends wanted her dead, and she was much too caught up with what she thought others wanted than face the facts and do something for herself for once.
The wave of self-hatred welling up inside her would have swallowed Verity if Lapika hadn’t landed in front of her, letting out a caw that sounded more like a laugh, “Well done! I feel like I have made good progress on my part, too.”
“What were you doing?” Verity asked, doing her best to level a glare at it, but she felt too tired to think straight, let alone glare properly.
“Arguing your case from above while you proved your mettle.” It replied, “Now hold still.”
A wave of cold water crashed into her body, leaving her gasping. The shock sent her into high alert, jumping up to attack Lapika, who swooped away.
“Why did you do that?” She growled, muscles seizing slightly.
“To get the digestive juices off your body.” It explained, waving away the crows hovering above, clutching onto a metal barrel.
“So, was it actually alive?” She asked, turning to look at where the vat of acid was lying, still bubbling and churning up plant matter and dirt. It didn’t seem to look alive in any way, but they had made references to it being alive before this.
“Yes.” Lapika confirmed, “The Oasis of Life feeds on organic flesh, and has shown signs of communicating with us, too. Us corvids have been harboring it for generations, because if it was to fall into the seas, the waves would immediately dilute and disperse its parts.”
Verity looked at the pit in a new light. A mostly disgusted light, because that was a fully a stomach she had been thrown into. Urgh. She shuddered, “What now?”
“Now, we usually move onto the next trial.” Lapika explained, “But the sun is going down, and we birds do our best fighting in the cover of darkness. No one cares to continue this trial while we could be focusing our energies on that. You will instead be transferred to a holding cell.”
Right. Because they were still at war. It was hard to remember that at times.
She followed Lapika into the moist, crumbling tunnels of the nest, into a thin cell. She sat and watched as an attending crow brought in a square container. It was promptly heated up by a backpack the attending crow was wearing.
Verity watched it fly away, the now warm package in her hands.
“It is toasted grain.” Lapika explained, “Can humans consume it?”
“Sure.” She agreed, a little distracted, “Did you know those solar-powered backpacks of yours cause mad amounts of cancer?”
Lapika froze, enunciating slowly, “Cancer? I do not know that word.”
“It’s an illness. Tumors and badly mutated cells grow inside a creature’s body. I don’t really know, I’m not a doctor.” She shrugged, words failing her even as she spoke. She didn’t understand medical jargon when it was being relayed to her, there was no way she could repeat it all back to Lapika.
“I am not, either.” Lapika shook its head in regret, “I shall consult my doctors and see if I can translate these unfamiliar terms.”
Then it was flying out of the room, the passage it left through closing behind it, leaving Verity standing in a cocoon of straw and earth. There was no bed. There were no windows. The walls were hard to discern, as they sloped into each other and the floor and the ceiling, no sharp corners.
It was so small, she couldn’t do more than take a step in any direction. The utter lack of light made it hard for her to see. The straw was so thick that not even moonlight was making it through. She plunged her hand into the wall, but it held fast, pricking against her skin and pushing her back.
She was stuck in here, forced to wait for these birds to figure something else.
When she lay down in the small cavity, she found that the nest hadn’t blocked out all noise, after all. In fact, when she pressed her ear against the twigs, she could hear the rustling of creatures deep in the bowels of the nest. The nestlings were awake, chirping up a storm.
There was no way she was going to be able to sleep with her impending death chirping in her ears.
She had been planning to play nice with them. Even this demented cell trapped in darkness wasn’t enough to break her. Or the nestlings. She had a stronger resolve than this.
What really broke her was when she started phasing in and out of sleep. It was impossible to tell how long she’d been asleep. How long she’d been here. It was unnerving. And more unnerving than that was the fact that the lumps under her back were never the same.
Was she being paranoid? No. She was certain that the floor was changing. Which meant someone was changing the floor.
Humannnn. Come visit us?
Great, now she was hearing things. Being whispered into her ears by a musical voice. In less than ten hours – was it even still night anymore? – she had been driven to the point where her senses were lying to her. This was Ben’s area of expertise, but she was sure that this was supposed to take longer than half a day. And she could be absolutely certain that it had been less than half an hour because she didn’t feel thirsty yet.
Human, become one of us!
The words were more insistent this time around. Shit, shit, shit, she needed it to stop. She had a trial to deal with. A death to defy.
Humannn. It’s not hard. Just start climbing up. We’re building you an escape!
The musical voices raised again, building upon each other. They all sounded exactly the same, just slightly misaligned as they filled up Verity’s mind, disregarding her attempts to ignore them. And she was trying really, really hard.
But what could it hurt? She was stuck anyway. She shoved her hand directly above, expecting the nest to hold fast like all the other times.
It collapsed under her grip.
Verity didn’t have any time to be surprised before she was moving up.
[Player Log End!]