Chapter 100: A Couple Kinds At Once

The creature we’d been fighting scared the hell out of me. On a practical level, because it was trying damned hard to kill us and seemed damned good at it. On an intellectual level, because it was so eerie and alien, violating how I’d thought the world worked before Third Eye and even how it seemed to work in the game. On a visceral level, if only because of how my stomach churned if I looked too closely at its “body.”

I’d managed to keep my shit together while we fought, though. Because I just hadn’t had time to process the fear? Partly that.

Partly because the creature was so weird, the instincts I’d inherited from little savannah-dwelling primates didn’t even react to it. My skin crawled when I thought about it, but I had to think about it.

I say all that to explain why, when that roar split the air and echoed and rebounded and filled my ears and dominated my entire world, for the first time in the fight, I froze.

I just stood, mouth agape, arms limp, as the beast reared up from the hole it had torn in the warehouse floor.

How to describe it?

One step at a time.

The first thing I thought of was an eel, because its long head and neck seemed to taper to a sharper, finlike ridge than a snake’s would have.

The second thing I thought of, as I caught a glimpse of its dripping jaws, was an orca, because I couldn’t think of any land animal with such an immense maw, but its teeth looked more mammalian than shark-like.

The third thing I thought of was a worm, as its mouth split further and I realized it had three jointed jaws spaced equidistant around its head. But I wasn’t sure if real worms even had that kind of mouth, or if that was just how sci-fi and fantasy illustrators liked to depict them.

The rest of it, I had no comparison for. A single eye gazed from each of the thirds of its trifold head, set into a sharp, angular structure – a skull? Who even knew – that pointed them forward. As alien as the beast’s form was, I knew predator’s eyes when I saw them.

All of the animals I’d thought of were more or less hairless, so add a bear to the list of comparisons, because apart from a few feet of bald lips around its trifold jaws, it was covered in shaggy red-brown fur.

It was also, though I couldn’t quite be sure when the dimensions of the warehouse seemed to change every time I looked, towering about twenty feet over my head.

I didn’t know if everyone had fallen silent, or if the beast’s roar had just deafened me. I got my answer when Zhizhi’s scream broke the silence.

The sound made the beast swivel one of its huge dark eyes in our direction. I thought for sure it would swing its head down and swallow Lena and Bernie and I in a single gulp.

But it bent the other way, instead, and I found myself shocked out of my stupor. I grabbed Lena’s arm. She grabbed Bernie. Whatever the Daimon thought of the beast, he kept to himself.

Smart move, little guy.

Together, we staggered down the aisle. I braced myself to run toward the flickering lights that marked Donica and Zhizhi’s position.

I hesitated.

Albie remained on the other side of the beast, sandwiched between it and the creature we’d been fighting. When she’d said she’d be safe, had she anticipated this thing’s emergence? I didn’t care how far beyond us she’d progressed in Third Eye, nothing she’d shown us suggested she could even make this monstrosity feel her attacks, much less fend it off.

I clutched my phone.

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“We can’t leave her,” Lena whispered.

I nodded.

Ideally, she’d have followed that up with a suggestion of how we could do anything else. Instead, we just separated and raised our phones and looked through Third Eye.

It didn’t provide any further insights.

No matter how we looked at the beast, it seemed simply too vast for us to interact with. It arched upwards, and as yard after yard of its neck emerged, I wondered how immense its whole body must be. Was it wormlike, snakelike, or was there some greater mass below with actual limbs, dwarfing the largest dinosaur?

It didn’t matter. The sheer size of what we could already see of it made a mockery of any attempt we might make to distract it, much less fight it.

It seemed to do the same to the creature we’d been fighting. The shadows writhed around the hole the beast had emerged from, and hints of distortion suggested points where it launched its devastating blows against the beast’s flesh.

Those strikes had toppled shelves, sent us flying, stripped away five times the HP most Third Eye players had to burn.

The beast didn’t even seem to notice them.

With a motion that looked slow because of its scale, but which I realized when my brain had time to process it must’ve been terrifyingly quick, the beast bent its head over and clamped its trifold jaws shut around a squirming mass of shadows.

And Albie, her small, high voice perfectly calm and clear, said, “Pin.”

The beast’s head arced higher, then slammed nose-first into the concrete. It sent another shockwave rippling through the warehouse; Lena and I gripped each other to stay upright.

Albie walked up beside the beast’s head. She held out her hand. Six times, her fingers flicked in the air. Six times, the Iron floating beside her pulsed, strobing with lances instead of sounds.

After the fourth stab, the shadows stopped writhing; after the sixth, they faded.

Although I couldn’t see the creature’s body with the beast taking up so much of my view, I had to assume it was dead.

The thought made me queasy in a whole new way, not just because another, even vaster monster had taken its place, but because Lena and I had, in whatever small way, just contributed to a fight to the death.

Better the creature than us? Sure, but better it had never come to that.

If we’d never returned to the construction site, would the creature still be alive? We’d come back for Materials, in the hopes of a Reactant or a Refinement, to film a documentary. But above all, so I could prove to myself I wasn’t too scared to go on.

Had we gotten some weird creature killed because I was too insecure to live with the fact the construction site freaked me out?

I swallowed bile.

Or would Albie have hunted it down either way? Was this just what she did, in between the few times she played in the park and let herself be a kid?

No wonder she’d looked scared. She was basically a child soldier.

She didn’t look scared now, though, despite standing right next to a monster my shaking body continued to insist represented a bigger danger than the creature had. In fact, the little smile she wore made her look more like she had in the park.

She rested her head against the side of the beast’s neck. “Good boy.”

The beast curled around, parted its trifold jaws, and –

– didn’t devour her, just pressed its snout against her.

I had, despite the screaming of my every instinct, started to relax, but tension shot through me again. At the beast’s size, any movement, even a gentle one, could crush Albie, like an elephant stepping on a beloved trainer.

It didn’t happen. Albie accepted the nuzzle and patted the beast’s snout.

Now that I could look at it without screaming terror, I realized two things.

First, that its anatomy was even weirder than I thought, with a single nostril positioned down its snout from each eye.

Second, that I’d met it – him – before.

“I guess,” I said – my voice only shook a little, which I’m pretty sure made me history’s greatest badass –, “this is one of the kinds Marroll is?”

Albie raised her eyes to us. “I didn’t want you to see. I didn’t want you to get scared of him.”

“Scared?” Lena tried to laugh. I think. I’m not sure how to describe the gurgling sound that actually came out of her mouth. She forced herself to press on, though. “Of course not. He’s awesome!”

Albie bobbed her head. I assumed the sound that rumbled from Marroll’s seemingly endless throat was the equivalent of the pleased chuff of his canine form.

Lena found it in her to step forward, officially surpassing me in the history’s greatest badass contest.

Albie shook her head. “Don’t!”

“You don’t think he’d hurt us, do you?” Lena asked. Trying real hard to sound dismissive. Not quite managing, between the way her voice wavered and her steps slowed.

“Uh-uh!” Albie balled her fists. Then she shook her head and pointed behind us. “You still have to run.”

“What? No way,” Lena said. “You’re telling me Marroll chomping that thing and you putting six lances through it didn’t kill it?”

“That’s like asking,” Albie said, “if something ‘killed’ your finger.”