Logan lowered his flashlight and shined it on his missing foot, grimacing when he got sight of his growing limb. It was the size of his hand now but deformed as it continued to lengthen. The sight of it made his already upset stomach slosh, acid sloshing.
Worst of all, it meant that he couldn’t put any weight on it, forced to balance on one leg. The whale was doing who knew what out there, but whatever it was, it involved jumping and turning in circles like an acrobatic.
The fish guts and digesting octopus’ arms flew inside of its stomach, slapping and spraying Logan as he tried to stay upright, covering him with slimy goo as if a monster had sneezed on him. It was like being stuck inside the bowels of an ancient steam-engine, only the bowels were covered in serrated teeth and reeked like rotting cat guts.
Well, at least one thing had worked out for him. His luck might have finally pay dividends. Yes, he’d lost a foot, but at least it hadn’t been his Pink Sock-clad foot. If he lost his sock on a fool’s errand, Lara would have never let him live it down. The Pink Sock was part of an attribute set; he could buy the other sock once he made it back to his Tree Fridge. If he’d lost one of them, he’d never achieve the ability to fly.
But even as he rested his hand against the side of the whale’s stomach, his exoskeleton glove pressing against sharp baleen plates, he could tell that his foot was reforming as he breathed. Peering down and blanching, he watched as his toenails formed, growing like something out of a horror movie. Forget monsters; Logan might as well be the monster.
Well, he couldn’t teleport out of here, not if he wanted to save Ernie’s brethren. That meant he had to force his way out of the whale the hard way, through brute force.
There was a hiss from the side. Logan swung his flashlight and illuminated Vicious. She was stuck to the whale’s stomach, but as he watched, she pulsed, swelling in size, then returning to normal. It was like watching a sponge the size of his fist absorb water and then squeeze it out. At each puff, her blue rings flared in color, becoming so bright that they flashed in front of his vision, leaving bright spots in their wake.
“What are you doing?” asked Logan.
“What Vicious does best. Carve her own way out! Vicious knows not to trust, oh no, she doesn’t trust. That means she needs to be brutal; she needs to hurt the monsters who tower over her, she needs to make the mighty things wish they’d never tried to triumph over Vicious.” She blinked one eye at him accusingly. “Vicious never forgets. Vicious never forgives.”
Somehow, Logan got the sense that she was talking about him and not just the whale.
But as she swelled in size like a pulsating Jello mold, the baleen plates and the whale stomach around her began to turn from a pink, mucous laden color to dark, rotting black, as if the whale had taken on gangrene. Logan was reminded that Vicious was ‘mighty in a small package’ and that her species had virulent neurotoxin.
She was trying to kill the whale.
But although she was giving the thing a stomach-ache, the rotting spots were so small it was like trying to kill an elephant with a pinprick. For all he knew, it might work if she kept at it. Work in days, in weeks. But Logan doubted that these octopuses had days, let alone hours. As for Logan, if he didn’t get out of here, eventually he’d run out of oxygen. Although he had [Deepwater Explorer] he doubted that worked in a cavern full of building carbon monoxide.
In a pinch, he supposed he could use [Life Fabricator] to grow a tree inside of the whale’s stomach, which might give him oxygen, but that would be a last, desperate act.
No, first he’d try the obvious.
Logan set the flashlight down on the bottom of the whale’s stomach and let it illuminate the cavern. Hissing as he inadvertently put weight on his growing foot, Logan willed out his sword from his spatial collar and held it in his right hand. The whale’s stomach was so immense that he had a five feet clearance from the tip of his sword to the top of the stomach. His sword glinted with a blue light, the unnatural metal seeming to thrum in anticipation.
“Here goes nothing,” Logan muttered.
He clenched his teeth, his muscles corded with tension, his adrenaline surging as he picked a specific spot up above, aiming for an area not quite so covered in baleen plates. If this did what he wanted, he’d cut right through the whale, letting water pour in, filling the stomach. Typically, that would be an issue for a normal person, but not for Logan or the octopuses, not with [Deepwater Explorer]. After that, all he’d have to do was keep carving out chunks of flesh, enough to let them escape.
His heart racing, Logan bellowed as he deployed his Pink Sock, envisioning himself shooting upwards like a rocket. The sock obeyed and Logan jumped so fast that his stomach lurched, the tip of his sword…
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Scraping the top of the whale’s stomach like a fork against the bottom of a pot.
Damn.
Even worse, that had jarred his arm, sending a sharp pain through his shoulder.
Growling, Logan tried again, aiming for any spot he could find, anything not covered by the baleen plates. But even in an area not quite so thick, the whale’s flesh was tough, horribly tough like it had armour like Logan’s.
“Useless human,” muttered Vicious.
Again and again, Logan tried stabbing it like he was in a stabbing workout. When that didn’t work, he tried the sides, anything not covered in octopuses, looking for weaknesses.
But the sides were worse than the top and completely covered in baleen plates. Even when he tried thrusting the sword into the pink stomach underneath his feet, the sword went an inch deep and then hit a solid wall, as if he’d hit a concrete layer of bone. Stabbing repeatedly did nothing; the whale didn’t even make a sound.
One of the other octopuses let out a moan of pain, its eyelids drooping. It was a medium sized orange octopus who had two severed tentacles, its face devoid of all color. So far, the others hadn’t talked, but their expressions and their whimpers were communication enough. Logan didn’t know why the ability of speech seemed intrinsic to only certain animals, or whether they all had the ability but just chose not to communicate.
But either way, he needed to move his ass. The whale’s digestive fluids were still at work, doing who knew what to Ernie’s brethren. Having an open wound wouldn’t help.
Logan collapsed his facemask and then ran a hand over his chin as he considered a way forward. Pure stabbing with his sword and talons, or with any of the remaining sharp weapons inside of his spatial storage wouldn’t do shit. He had bombs from Asthea, but although that might work, in such an echoing space, he’d blow up the octopuses and himself in addition to the whale. There was the drugged water that he’d nabbed from the perception trial, but what the hell would that do other than making the whale fall asleep? No, if anything, he needed a stomach purging drug that would make the whale throw up.
There was something else he could try. He’d finally managed to unlock [Liche Devourer], but he’d yet to try the skill. It was an upgraded version of [Liche Siphon], not to mention that the System rated it epic. An epic skill and a massive monster? What better way to test it?
His heart in his throat, Logan reviewed the description of [Liche Devourer]:
[This epic skill allows you to siphon Karma and lifeforce from your enemies and funnel the excess into a pocket dimension black hole. When the hole is fed, unleash obliteration. This skill is insidious, and the enemy will not be aware that funneling is in effect.]
It was way more brutal than [Liche Siphon]. Logan had used [Liche Siphon] to defeat the Silverdagger Clan in the last fight in the trial dungeon; it had always been insidious, leeching Karma from someone without them being aware, but [Liche Devourer] did something else.
It could make a bomb.
In the fight with the Silverdagger Clan, he purposely hadn’t upgraded his wisdom attribute since he’d needed lower Karma to make the skill work; to make it life threatening. With this updated version, it didn’t matter whether he filled his Karma pool. Presumably, he could continue draining Karma. Even if his pool were at capacity, the excess would divert into a ‘dimension black hole’. Holy crap, he could walk around, draining Karma at random, killing people! But that was pure speculation.
He had no idea if that was truly how it worked.
He needed to figure this out. And what better way to do than by using the whale as a guinea pig? Killing the whale wouldn’t solve the problem of being trapped; a dead carcass didn’t lose its stomach armour, but Logan thought he had a solution for that.
But first, he needed to kill the whale.
All right, all right. Kill a whale. Logan was going to kill a whale.
First of all, he needed to do something that would use Karma, something to get this started. There was a mass of digesting fish inside of the stomach, and based on the smell, what had to be a heck of a lot of bacteria. More than likely, that included insect larvae. But did Logan want to hatch something like the flies he’d controlled inside of the trial dungeon? He’d be stuck in a cavern with hundreds of the things. No, Logan had dealt with enough insects to last a lifetime.
He considered the severed tentacles and digesting fish, but to work with those, he’d be hatching another monster. Even though he’d viewed growing a tree as a last resort, he knew how to do it like the back of his hand.
Growing a monster tree took a ton of Karma. But he was reminded of his rat vine back at Hope’s End. He’d latched onto the rats’ lifeforce to grow the thing, which resulted in it warping into a living rat vine. If he did the same here, he might end up growing a warped tree whale.
But wait, wasn’t he in the ocean? Vicious had said that Vancouver Island was the whale’s territory, and if it hadn’t swum out of the area, there was an endless supply of life all around them. Life that wouldn’t cause him to grow something monstrous.
[Life Fabricator] would let him grow a tree out of nothing without a seed as long as he sourced its creation from similar organic material. After all, back in Richton’s Tomb, he’d managed to grow his monster, humongous carbon trees by sucking the life from the pine trees around them. After that, he’d only needed his own Karma to continue growing it.
The whale turned in the water, climbing up, its stomach tilting, fish guts and mucous flying.
“Fuck!” said Logan as he was forced to use his talons to latch onto a baleen plate so he didn’t slam into the top of the stomach head-first. And just like that, Logan went flying once again, the whale at a 90-degree angle before he went the other way as if he were on a rollercoaster.
With a fresh deluge of liquid and seawater, the remains of a still-twitching tuna the size of his torso slammed into the whale’s stomach, forcing the noxious digesting fluid to slosh.
The whale must have just breached the surface on another attack.
And then they moved once again, dropping. It was diving and going for the bottom.
Perfect.