Aitra stared at her new bronze-acarite wand beside her new shield, bright and waxed on the floor between her and Silthen’s beds, gleaming iridescent silver as the enchantment did its work.
Were its price not the lives of half her team, she would have been ecstatic.
In hindsight, her frustration at not being allowed to find that Awakened dog she tried to control next to the Bone Pits with her Skill was probably ridiculous. If she had managed to have it as her companion, it would have only added more grief to the whole situation. There was no mere animal that could have survived that.
Her spirit summons had gotten shredded, over and over again until they were wrung dry along with her mana. A flesh-and-bone dog? It would have had no chance. She felt stupid now for having been angry about it.
Her bright blue hair blocked the windows along the top of the room from sight, and that was fine, because it felt like the cheery golden light outside the Adventurer Guild's rooms was mocking her.
Silthen had a similar, empty sort of look on his face, his brown hair as unkempt as the stubble on his jaw, staring down at his mismatched, gore-covered greataxe. The bladed end was a buzzsaw glowing orange with heat as it lay idle, red lightning arcing out of the weapon’s shaft and blade. Torn right out of an Abomination’s arm, quite literally.
It looked so small on that horrific pile of flesh and screaming metal joints, yet it was almost as tall as Silthen himself as it lay on the floorboards.
Normally, he would have a large, proud smile on his face. A Factory artifact, on their third tour of the Dungeon? A great achievement. But just like her, he did not think the price was worth it. No words were spoken between them, the two empty beds in their room almost accusing in their grim silence.
She wondered if when Ankhan had begun trying to convince them to move a bit further down, she should have been more adamant in her refusal. More vocal with the fact just because they only made enough money to finish the month and do their maintenance didn’t mean they gained nothing.
In the end, everyone but her agreed to go a little deeper.
It wasn’t like they went down for miles, or anywhere close to entering a different floor than the fifth. Not even a tenth of the way to another floor. But just three hours away from the portals, they were forced to run back, forced to change their objective from ‘fight and gather golem corpses’ to ‘survive’.
Nakim’s fading screams as she got dragged away into the rumbling darkness played in her ears at night like a cackling, mocking melody.
She didn’t get to see what happened to her. She was glad. She did see what happened to Ankhan. She wished she hadn’t. Just thinking of the sight, that helplessness as she pounded at the glass, not even scratching it, the sound… It made her eyes tear up and her stomach clench in preparation to heave.
A few more minutes passed in silence before Silthen shifted. His eyes met hers as she glanced up at him, equally bloodshot, but not nearly as lost, not nearly as doubtful as her own no doubt seemed.
“It’s not your fault, you know?” He quietly offered, and she couldn’t help but let her face drop into her palm.
“I know that. You’re projecting. It’s not your fault either, you know…” She muttered, and after a few moments of silence, Silthen made an acknowledging noise, not exactly agreement.
As their leader, he was likely not of the same opinion.
“Ankhan would have called us a bunch of Debbie Downer schmucks for moping around.” Silthen mumbled.
She felt a tiny smile curl her lips.
“Then he would have told us to stop grieving a loss and celebrate that we had something to lose in the first place.” She muttered, thinking fondly of the man she had thought as vain and materialistic, only to learn of his past and worldview and gain a sense of understanding of his flamboyant, overspending ways.
“Nakim would have told us to bleed the grief out on the training yard and hold our tears for someone less bitchy…” Silthen said, and she snorted, her shoulders shaking in mirth and sadness, tiny sobs mixing with small chuckles as she covered her face with both gauntlets, her shoulders quivering as she hid her tears from the world, palms pressed against her eyes as she fought to stamp down on her emotions with deep, stuttered breaths.
“Yeah. Sounds like her.” She eked out, her voice breaking twice in the process.
She felt bad for crying so much. Silthen knew them for years. She knew them for six months. It felt like she didn’t have the right to be crying and mourning more than he was, that she was somehow undercutting something she barely got to know before it was gone.
She knew them for six months, and they were still the only real family she’d ever had.
“We’ve got enough to take a small break, you know? Regroup, reevaluate. Then, we can get to finding new members for Silk Kin. If you still want to be an Adventurer, of course. Or a part of this team at all.” Silthen softly offered, and for a moment, she really began to wonder.
Was it even worth it, being an Adventurer? Were the Levels and money worth the risk of losing a friend everytime they donned their gear?
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough money to afford the next trip out of here. It’s too late to back out now. And I don’t want to live in this shithole if I do. I want to get enough money to where the option of leaving for back home is available. I’ll decide then.” She quietly said, and Silthen shifted.
“Of course. And… maybe by then, we’ll have a decent enough team to leave together, go back to The Labyrinth. Well, not the Labyrinth exactly, just, any Dungeon that’s less… less than The Factory.” He mumbled, and she mutely nodded.
Going from killing stone constructs and living armors to this factory of horrors was like going from swimming in hot water to swimming in magma.
“Let’s go get that drink that Ankhan would have bugged us about. I think he deserves it. Then we can check their storage boxes and see what his will said. Nakim refused to write one.” He muttered with a pained smile.
“Okay.” She replied quietly.
She had forgotten about that last part entirely. How long had it been since Silthen had put down a legal will in front of her and asked her to write what she left and to whom, in case she died? It must have been one or two months ago at most but it felt like years.
As she got up and wiped her tears off to follow him, she idly wondered what Ankhan’s will might say. Some heartfelt message, some letter to be delivered to a loved one or a past lover?
Two and a half hours later she could only stare uncomprehendingly at the paper in her hands, the phrase ‘too handsome to die, baby’ being the only thing written on the empty space, in familiar chicken scratch letters. It didn’t even follow the ink lines, written diagonally, half-covering the stamp that assured it was genuine.
Silthen peeked over her shoulder.
Then he started laughing, a slowly increasing, ramping thing, starting from a mild chuckle that upgraded to full-blown laughter over the course of a few seconds.
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Before, a long time ago, before he was capable of referring to himself as anything more than ‘Warden’, without a pronoun nor a mind capable of disobeying, he used to know what to do.
A trap snapped shut in the distance, accompanied by the short cry of its prey.
The prisoners needed to remember that he was around. To remember that Compound Four’s warden was ready for them. To hear his chains rattle and scrape against the floor, hear the sound echo across the hallways so they knew to cower in their corners as he continued his eternal march, in endless circles.
Another trap snapped shut, followed closely by a second, a third, each with their own sound of something fleshy snapping or tearing.
Trapper shifted, leaning the torso of his armor forward, stiffly, his magi-tech core flexing with his will to move the wooden gears inside his body, which in turn moved his limbs.
Another snap. A tiny spark of satisfaction.
It was the closest he could get to that engineered euphoria he once felt whenever his traps would catch an escaping prisoner. He watched the Level he just gained without an ounce of emotion.
The desire to be part of something bigger again was a permanent fixture of his existence by now. Part of something deeper, something more than whatever he had going on, working with people he didn’t know or remember the names of, following the orders of a weak-eyed man that paid him with coins he did not know nor care about the value of.
An Administrator to a prison and its warden can be many things. Weak and indecisive was not in that list.
So why did he follow?
A pair of golden orbs flit into mind, full of steel unyielding, of potential infinite, fearless and savage and wild, gazing at him as if he was but an annoyance, yanking his trap off its arm with enough force to shatter it with a look of contempt that asked ‘is that it’?
There was a certain air about that creature, an air of importance and destiny that he knew he’d never find again.
An idea formed, a slow desire building within him.
He rose with a cacophony of rattling chains and bear traps. He turned. He walked away from the landfill, leaving a dozen different types of traps behind for the scavengers to find and provide him with some Level progress, uncaring of their fate, whether man or beast.
They never gave Levels like manually fighting and killing did, not even close, and he didn't know why, but he didn't much care either. He just liked the satisfaction that even without his eye on them, there were prisoners being caught and killed by his traps, in whatever place he decided his prison would be that night.
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Some idle part of Katherine thought that maybe with a bit of time, she could get used to peeking over fur and seeing nothing but bottomless abyss after bottomless abyss, that that sudden lurch in her stomach and that mental gasp of mortal fear would stop happening.
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By the time their trip had gone on for an hour and the… the creature had started to pant and struggle with scraping down anything and everything it saw and could reach, its arms starting to shake a little, she realized that fear probably wouldn’t fade anytime soon. If anything, the more tired the monster got, the more the fear grew that it would slip and send them all falling to their deaths.
She hated every second of their descent.
Every time the thing leapt across a gap, or simply swung to the side to grab onto a piece of metal more flat, it made her choke on air and let out sounds she didn’t even know she could make, her bladder feeling increasingly loose.
She knew there was a tentacle around her waist that had proven it could lift her with relative ease, so if she somehow slipped her grip, it would probably not let her fall, but there was a spiked fucking tentacle around her waist and that didn’t help.
Fear of the unknown was a powerful thing.
But seeing the unknown up close and personal was honestly worse.
It gave her time to note all the absurd things covering the beast, how its forearm was almost as thick as Emhreeil’s thigh and with enough definition to notice through its thick fur, how there were spikes on its arms and shoulders that would jerk away every time she’d accidentally brush against them like they had a mind of their own, how there were two very human arms on it and the one on the right wasn’t holding Scruffy, so it was free to grab stuff and make their descent smoother which made it impossible to forget that it was there because she kept seeing the damn thing creeping into her field of vision when she least expected it.
Then after a particularly rough landing on a hanging carpet of decorative chain never meant to hold the equivalent of three people made her let out another mortifying sound, Emhreeil reached forward with a hiss of pain to comfortingly pat her back, rub her shoulder.
“Just trust him, alright? He knows his limits. I think. He wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t think he could do it without killing all three of us.”
As if in agreement to a statement she honestly hoped the creature couldn’t understand, the beast let out a strange chuff filled with a sense of… ‘trying-to-comfort’, of sorts, a bizarre inflection to it that couldn’t be natural. It leaned its head back as far as it could to rub the top of its head against the top of hers as she tried to cringe away, feeling the dried blood on its fur scratch a bit of the skin on her forehead.
It was actually… oddly comforting. Some of the fear she had of the monster left her.
Then as its head straightened again and a fourth arm crept into sight so it could shimmy down the length of the chain, she noticed a horrifyingly familiar golden ring suddenly open on the base of its neck. She stared at it uncomprehendingly.
The ring blinked, before glancing down past her head to stare at Emhreeil. The fear that left her quickly returned tenfold, mixed with a healthy dose of disturbed anxiety. She felt a little sick.
“Hey buddy.” Emhreeil reached past her shoulder to rub at the fur beneath the eye, as if this was perfectly normal and expected, and some of her earlier words began making sense.
Why she was so hesitant to speak details of the beast, why she was warning her that she might realize some things about it that would alarm her.
And she was right, it all alarmed her, every inch of the strange creature.
Yet none of it made her mouth dry and forced shivers to crawl up her spine as much as the bizarre, unfathomable ease with which she watched those bloodless claws sink into solid steel like it was literally not even there, over and over and over and over again, leaving behind thin slits inches deep.
She was literally riding on the back of some Tillenhall magical monster that Emhreeil had somehow tamed-... or, not actually.
Not tamed. This thing was not fucking tame. If anything it looked more like it was bossing Emhreeil around instead. That realization made everything worse.
Their descent continued, until eventually, while sliding down the smooth backside of a spire, it spotted a thick pillar of steel that led down to a steel bridge connecting two cliffs made of buildings and houses on two opposite Dungeon plates, and after another heart-stopping leap, began to slide down, fast and quick.
A second after the smog revealed rough outlines and shapes, she couldn’t help but have a moment of panic as she saw the dozens of people on that gargantuan bridge, mere specks of moving black among steel plates almost two hundred feet wide.
Wouldn’t they see them?
Then their descent slowed to a stop, and the creature shimmied around the metal pole, opening the eye on its neck again and turning its head to stare behind her.
She turned, seeing nothing but the large, flat arches that followed along atop the bridge, extending several hundred feet off safe ground, giant Π shaped towers of black-brown steel that extended wires as thick as people down to the bridge below.
It wiggled its legs and butt as it placed itself at an odd tilt, bracing in a way she had grown horribly familiar with as it took a bizarrely deep breath, and she felt her eyes bug out in panic as she realized what this psychotic murder banshee dog was about to do.
The top of the closest tower was at least sixty feet away and half that distance down, there was no way-
Black, coiling smoke oozed out of the creature’s fur and consumed her, devouring all her senses but touch and smell. She stiffened in panic.
Something slammed into her with the force of an iron wall, impact transferred through the creature’s back into her front, and she felt air yank at her clothes as her sense of balance began to spin and flip, her blood and organs yanking at her insides as she soundlessly expelled air out of her lungs in a dark, soundless void.
Another impact from behind her, a duller one, and then a third, both enough to take her breath away but not enough to hurt.
A final bone-rattling impact that rolled with the one who tanked it, who seemed to be the monster, and the mixture of that impact slamming into her stomach, the involuntary clench of the tentacle around her stomach, the hours of gut-clenching fear and tension, and the spinning world around her forced her to punch down and writhe to escape as she felt her stomach heave, legs kicking.
She wasn’t sure what she punched, but the monster jerked in surprise, the tentacle around her stomach pulling her aside-
And out into the world again, away from that endless void, tossing her away with a lagging flick, the tail unwinding and making her spin as acid filled her mouth, the backpack full of their supplies finally detaching from her shoulder.
She barely managed to roll with the impact of her side hitting the ground and push herself up on her hands before she began vomiting on what she assumed was the floor, no matter how much it rocked and spun and wriggled.
A few seconds passed where all she could do was gasp and retch, exhausted, furious and scared and confused and overwhelmed and a dozen other things that all added up to making her feel like she was losing her fucking mind.
Rushed footsteps neared, and a hand tried to clumsily gather her hair, before two smaller ones joined in to keep her black locks away from yesterday’s dinner. Heavier, clicking thuds neared too, irregular to the point of being rhythmless, and she flinched away as a snout prodded her head, the smell of blood and filthy, wet dog filling her senses.
A soft whine that somehow sounded like a question, followed by a lick to her forehead that had her cringing away even more as the last remnants of spit and acid trickled out of her mouth. Her arms were trembling.
“She’s nauseous. So am I, honestly. Just because you don’t get dizzy somehow, you cheating fleabag, doesn’t mean we don’t.” Em mumbled tiredly, as if it could understand her, and at this point, who fucking knows, maybe it did. Maybe it could teach Katherine how to count properly, because why the fuck not. It’s not like this whole situation could get any more absurd than it already was.
Emhreeil’s hand abruptly retreated.
Then, a horrid, scratching, scraping noise entered her ears, like a growling, rasping smoker trying to whistle while taking a deep breath as he talked.
As it talked.
“Eeehmreeeeeeiiiiill.”
Her head snapped up, wide eyed, ignoring the fact that Em was wearing a mask with claw marks at the eyes from wherever she got it from, to focus on the beast a little too large to be called a dog, more of a small bear. A lithe, snake-centipede like bear that was holding Emhreeil’s wrist with one of its human arms.
The furry arm then dragged Emhreeil’s hand back on Katherine’s head as she gaped, and the thing let out a questioning chuff as it tilted its head, eyes on her friend as Emhreeil made a sound she usually did when she was cringing particularly hard or grimacing in guilt.
“Uh, that’s, Katherine.”
“Uuuhthhaaa-”
“Katherine.” Emhreeil repeated, lifting her hand and patting her on the head.
She-
Wh-
She faintly smelled toast as she blinked rapidly at the sight of her friend kneeling by her side, patting her head like a dog as the mutant creature held it by the wrist while she repeated Katherine's name so the monster could struggle to learn how to say it.
It was fucking talking.
Or… learning to. Trying to?
She lurched away from them, stumbling to her feet and swaying backwards.
“Fushin… fhuwat ‘he am-Ijustwhabugfhiun?” She mumbled out, not even what she was even saying herself, just pure gibberish, and despite knowing how it was likely not a good idea to be drunkenly stumbling away from her only allies on top of a giant superstructure hundreds of feet away from safe ground, she turned around, spat the taste of stomach acid out of her mouth, and tried not to sprawl herself out on the metal under their feet while she fought with her trench coat, not bothering to understand what the sounds behind her meant.
After a few seconds of struggling to remember how sleeves and button clips worked, she tripped over her own feet, and found herself saved from meeting the floor by two giant tails.
She almost rolled away and kicked them before thinking better of it and aborting the motion before it began, worried she’d roll right off the fucking tower, and after Em shooed her monster friend away, she was left chest down on the floor, watching lights and distant life thrum in the distance over the edge of the tower’s flat roof, breathing slow and heavy.
“Kat? Kat, are you okay?” Em whispered gingerly, a supportive hand on her shoulder.
She grimaced at the burn in her throat, and said the truth.
“No.” She rasped, and was met with silence as the hand tightened and began to rub at her arm, letting her regain a piece of her senses. “I’m… I need to sleep the shock off. And water. I need water.” She mumbled, and Emhreeil let out an ‘okay’ before getting up and rushing off to their supplies to get some.
The monster thing then padded closer, sensing its opportunity, nosing at the back of her head and ruffling her hair as she grimaced.
It let out a small, short, concerned whine that was more dog-like than anything else she’d heard so far, then immediately ruined it by trying to say her name questioningly in that bone-scrapingly horrendous mockery of speech that made her skin try to detach and squirm away from her flesh, making her feel faintly sick again.
Then, just because it seemed like it was not done making her equal parts thankful and terrified and immensely uncomfortable, it plopped down next to her, throwing two arms and tails over her back, its snout over her neck.
A snout she had watched literally tear people apart limb from limb. Good riddance to those guys, of course, but it was just...
Were she not freezing, and were it less warm than what felt like a radiator on full blast, she would have immediately struggled out of its grip.
As it was, she just gave up.
She couldn’t deal with this, she just gave up. It wasn’t going to eat her, it was warm, and no matter how many nightmares it would give her, she was probably safer near it than away from it right now. Em certainly trusted it. She'd told her how it had saved her a half dozen times for no discernible reason, so maybe she had a good reason to do so as well.
Emhreeil rushed back, and quickly gave her a small cup of water.
“Just rinse your mouth out on this. I’m going to throw away most of our small cutlery stuff, they’re taking too much space, so don’t worry about this getting dirty, we’re leaving it up here.”
She drank, swished the water around her mouth, finding it odd while laying sideways, and spat it back out into the cup, then set it down on the floor. The cup was emptied quickly on the metal roof, the water thrown away from them, then washed with a small bit of water, refilled, and given to her to drink, Emhreeil's motions surprisingly swift and sure as she did all that.
She felt like she was back to being sick in Irythiel’s mansion, Em fussing over her as she fought through a sickness.
Except she wasn’t sick, she was laying on cold metal rather than a bed, and her blanket was made of fur and caked in dried blood and gore.
At least it was exceedingly warm.
It got warmer when Em laid down on the other side of her. Then Scruffy wriggled into place between them.
Then the monster decided to act as a literal blanket on their shitty cuddle pile, carefully wriggling into place to place its upper body on Emhreeil’s stomach, its flanks on their legs, and its massive tails curled over Katherine’s upper body, curling over her head, its numerous arms mostly dedicated to curling over them to keep them in place and warm them.
She was so absurdly exhausted, yet she couldn’t properly sleep for the first hour or so, so high up from safe ground, in such a strange place, covered by a monster that was currently vastly contributing to both her physical comfort and her mental discomfort until the oddity of the mixed feeling was what kept her worried.
But as their breaths all slowly synchronized for some reason, the metal beneath them warmed, and her nostrils got used to the stench of wet dog and blood, she eventually became too physically comfortable and much too tired to resist the allure of sleep.
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