Chapter 36 - Stick the Landing

It was dark down here. The light from the hub room above couldn’t quite reach the bottom of these stairs, and none of the glowlamps I’d come to expect from the popular parts of the undercity were anywhere in sight either.

That was okay. The dark was a nice change.

The stones where I laid felt good against my skin, a smooth caress of comforting coolness after I’d essentially just gone on a mana killing bender. These rocks weren’t quellstone, though some of that had certainly tumbled down here with me.

[HP 19/105]

[MP 1/75]

Status Lost: Mana Sap

My eyelids fluttered, and my vision drifted in the dark. I got the impression the room would be spinning if I was able to see anything. Sweat beaded on my skin, instantly cold, and I felt that cold acutely. Inside, though, I was burning. Everything ached. Disembodied voices jabbered meaninglessly in the darkness.

“I can’t! He almost killed himself getting us down here!”

“If you don’t, all of us are dead!”

“I literally can’t! Look at him! He’ll die!”

Status Lost: Fever (Severe)

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

I tried to shake my head, only having the strength and coordination to twitch slightly, but a tiny new part of my face was now resting on the cool stones. That was nice.

My muscles, the ones I’d tried to move so far at least, seemed to have checked out for the day, and my brain didn’t mind terribly much that it couldn’t muster up any activity.

When had I closed my eyes again? It didn’t matter. Laying down was good. It was right.

If only things weren’t so noisy. An unnatural, discordant choir sang unpleasant songs that shook the air and scoured my tender nerves.

“It’s a tide of them up there! He would want you to do it!” That was Sissa’s voice, strained, fearful.

That made me feel… discomforted. It wasn’t anywhere close to a clear, logical thought, but the kernel was there, a burning coal, hissing and stinging under my blanket of peaceful ignorance. I tried to ignore it, tried to smother it with thoughts of rest.

“Don’t say that! You don’t know him!” Shouted Trix. He rubbed his paws nervously in front of his chest, unable to meet the guard Sergeant’s eyes.

“Neither do you!” Sissa shot back.

I still had something to do, didn’t I? That thought gave my coal of consciousness a puff of oxygen, and, soon, there was a gratifying spark of real thought.

I have things to do.

My prosthetic moved first. I got it to curl its fingers, then to bend at the elbow until my metal hand was up near my face. I watched the fingers flex delicately, one by one. That first, conscious motion was a crack in an already overflowing dam.

I’m not done.

My body seemed to remember how to interpret sensory input again. It was decidedly unpleasant. Living razors had grown inside my muscle tissue, and they busied themselves slithering along under my skin. At least that’s how it felt. I was… damaged. Leaky. The sensation cascaded outward from my core until it was everywhere.

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

“He’s coming around,” Samila observed from close by.

The other two didn’t hear her.

“Get him up on his feet. That’s an order!”

“As I am constantly reminded, I am not a warrior. You can’t order me to kill him.”

“Everyone’s a warrior today, Brother Yik’i’trix. Do it.”

A gentle but strong hand slipped across my chest and helped me get to my knees. My trembling limbs betrayed me, nearly bringing me down again, but the other person held me tightly until I could master myself. Things slowly got easier.

“He’s strong, Fuzzball,” Samila said as she loosened her hold on me and slipped around to my front to look into my eyes, a little knowing smirk on her face. “And we need him.”

I checked my HP.

HP [21/105]

“I’m fine,” I coughed, and something gritty welled up in the back of my mouth. My stomach spasmed, and I vomited. What came out was a substance so hot and foul that it defied imagination as it splattered onto the floor between Samila’s knees. She didn’t flinch, just placing her hands on my shoulders to keep me from keeling over.

“What the hells is that?” Sissa cried, putting a hand over her mouth and nose.

“Brother Ryan? Are you… Light it smells. What…?” Trix sounded like he wanted to throw up too. I wouldn’t blame him, though I would argue I had it significantly worse. The aftertaste was something I could tell was going to linger.

Geddon roared his defiance at unseen foes up above. It was a short roar, crossing over into bark territory like he only had so much breath to put into it.

The XP messages just kept rolling in.

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

“I’m fine,” I said again. I spit a chunky remnant of the hell-vomit onto the floor.

I had shit to do.

“Trix, let’s go,” I growled. I don’t know where the determination in my voice came from. Yeah, the situation was dire, but I sounded so sure of myself. Maybe I was too tired to overthink things.

“Brother Ryan?”

I staggered to my feet. Samila didn’t follow, choosing instead to watch me, head tilted curiously.

I turned to the stairs. Briefly upon reaching the first step up, my knees gave out, and I had to catch myself on the wall to stay upright. That wouldn’t do.

“Heal me,” I said, reaching down to my side where the Volpa’s voice was coming from.

“Brother Ryan, you… no. If you could see yourself- It’s bad.”

“I know,” I replied wearily. For a brief moment, my head spun, and I nearly toppled backward. I caught myself before I could though. I hoped Trix didn’t notice.

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“It will hurt you, Brother,” Trix whimpered. “There’s a cost. You need food. Water. Rest.”

“I need HP.”

“What?” He asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry. I need healing.”

We were close enough to the entrance now to catch Geddon’s silhouette against the glow of the lights. He fought savagely, sword in hand, hacking at ill defined foes around his knees. His shield was gone.

“For the last time, it’s not… It’s not real, Brother Ryan! How can you people not understand this?!” Trix yelled.

With monumental effort, I turned my whole body to look down next to me. Trix’s teeth were bared, and his ears bent back until they were flat on his head.

“It’s real enough,” I replied. “And we need it now.”

“Nothing a Volpa does is real! It’s mirrors and mind games!” He cried. His voice cracked in the middle, and I sensed a deep wound being torn open.

Then anger gave way to shame. He shrank away, turning to hide his eyes. “I fool your body into healing your wounds quickly. With every spell your body cannibalizes itself,” he pleaded. “I am killing you every time I heal you.”

I didn’t have the energy to do this right now. I tried to keep my tone flat but sure. “Objections noted. Still need it.”

“You could die. Don’t make me do it.” He was pleading with me now, acknowledging that he could, indeed, do it. Good.

“Trix, listen to me,” I began, out of breath even before I started speaking. “No one else is dying here. Not him.” I pointed weakly up the stairs at Geddon, my foot already on the next step up. “Not them.” I pointed behind us, over my shoulder with my thumb. “And not you,” I said, reaching down to put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m the only one that can do this. I need to do this,” I insisted. Everyone needed to live, and I could do that for them.

I’d never been so sure of anything in my life, and time was wasting.

“I don’t-”

“Heal me!” It burst out of me, the roughness in my throat made it come out harsher than I wanted, but my words filled the stairwell so completely, they left no oxygen for any more objections. A little more Outers accent, and I’d sound exactly like my dad. That felt strange.

Trix’s little hand snapped up to dig its claws into the skin on my wrist, hard enough to draw blood.

HP [78/105]

Status gained: Underfed (Severe) [-3 mind, -3 body]

The stairs blurred, and I felt myself beginning to topple forward. I braced myself on the wall to keep upright.

I summoned a piece of wood from my spatial storage and Consumed it.

Status gained: Engine [3 MP/sec for 30 minutes]

It would have to do.

I approached the top of the stairs. Much like the last entrance to the secret tunnels, the way out was a rounded portal. While I’d blown the last one wide open and destroyed a good bit of brickwork before, this one’s door had simply collapsed inside, leaving a perfect circle with smooth edges that transitioned from empty air to quellstone as it had been designed to do.

*Thwup* *Thwup* *Thwup* *Thwup*

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

The turret was still active. It couldn’t have much more ammo left, though I’d lost my sense of time sometime between Consuming my first evil rock and now.

Now that I had a bit more HP and was on the move again, I was feeling relatively well. “Geddon! Down!” I yelled as loudly as I could, as forcefully as I could.

After a handful of heartbeats where I thought he hadn’t heard me, suddenly he was there. There was empty air, and then the big man flew down through the doorway like a bullet, sure footed, at exactly the right angle so that his momentum carried him down as far from the entrance with as little effort as possible. Geddon’s armor, slick with black blood, came and went by. His wide shoulders scraped along the stone walls, slammed into me, and nearly brought me along for the ride, but I was able to squeeze to the side as the big man’s angle changed.

I felt like I’d almost been run down by a truck.

“Waste no time,” he barked at me from lower on the stairs. His colossal chest rose and fell with every ragged breath. “Even now, they are entering the circle.”

I reached up until my hand barely crested the edge of the hole and summoned the sheet of iron I’d been saving for this. It was a disk of flat metal, about an eighth of an inch thick, big enough to fit over the entire door and then some. It appeared in a flash of light, the handle I’d Shape welded onto my side of the surface right next to my hand. The weight of it settled to rest over-

*BONSH*

Something heavy slammed into the top, forcing the makeshift lid closed and nearly dislocating my shoulder. Whatever it was that hit me, glanced off the metal sheet, and my soon-to-be door rebounded slightly and shifted to the side before I could catch it, turning a nearly perfect seal into an imperfect one with a small gap on the edge.

“Augh!” I grunted, clutching my shoulder, but the pain only rattled me for a moment. I reached up with my prosthetic and took hold of the handle just as bloody, cracked fingernails wormed their way into the new breach. I held on tight, attempting to shift the weight and get a more perfect fit, but something or multiple somethings had already settled on it.

Iron Grip [1 MP/sec]

Iron Grip is now level 4.

“They’re on top of it!” I shouted. Slapping palms, scratching nails, exposed bone grating upon iron, all of it conducted perfectly through the metal.

“They leap down from the wall of corpses your turret built for us,” Geddon panted. “It was shoulder height when last I looked. A glorious redoubt made of slain foes. Perfect for a final stand.”

I was barely listening. Geddon’s wish for a glorious death might still be granted if I didn’t do this right. I summoned my three bottles of booze and placed them at my feet. Then I reached up and touched the iron lid to begin the process.

Shape [22 MP/sec]

The metal was already touching so much of the quellstone. My breath was stolen from me as I tried to saturate it all.

It took all of four seconds for my mana to go dry. My Iron Grip faltered. I didn’t have the spare mana to give to it. My body felt like it was being shredded from the inside, the way my mana was ripped out of me. What’s more, my prosthetic was tied up with trying to keep the disk in place.

I was going to lose it if I didn’t dip into the booze. It had become a mathematical certainty.

“Help!” Was all I could manage, all the brain power I could spare.

A catcher’s mitt sized hand closed around mine, around the handle, and a bulky presence crowded onto the stairs next to me.

“Hang on!” Geddon yelled in my ear.

He was doing something… no. Someone else was there. Claws scraped over my knuckles, and something long and thin was passed through the metal loop next to my fingers.

“It’s on!” Trix announced. “Pull!”

Then Geddon was out of my personal space. The leather cord they’d fastened tightened around my hand.

“Let go, Brother Ryan!”

I did. The lid shifted slightly as the angle of force being applied to it changed, but otherwise, it held.

There was no time to waste. I was barely holding onto Shape. With my metal hand, I reached down and grabbed a bottle of booze.

“Get back as far as you can!” I ordered them.

Consume Mirebold Whisky? Y/N

Status Gained: Engine [29 MP/sec for 15 sec]

Liquid fire ran through my veins, and my mana flowed in bright rivers through my “channels” as the System put it. It rejuvenated me… forcefully. I felt like a man that had just been given his first drink of water in days, and it was through a firehose.

Split Mind is now level 6.

Status Gained: Burning. [5 HP/sec]

Hello, Burning, my old friend.

“Put him out! Put him out!” Geddon shrieked. Was he afraid of a little fire? For some reason, that amused me.

I had to trust them to tend to my body. What these people needed was a closed door, and I had to deliver.

The iron had to flow, had to bind to the floor. Seamless. Immovable.

The metal deformed, elongated, melted like candle wax under my will into the minute cracks in the Dark Lord’s perfectly laid floors. There was a setback when the disk bucked an inch into the air, stretching and shattering my tenuous bonds. Apparently, something had been able to get its bony fingers into the gap, but Geddon heaved it back into place with a grunt, severing more than one set of dead appendages.

*CRUNCH*

All the while, the Returned kept dying.

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Meanwhile, I burned. I melted. I dripped into the floor. I coated the brickwork, wound my way through the empty spaces and filled them with myself while the world tried to snuff me out.

Consume Mirebold Whisky? Y/N

Status Gained: Engine [29 MP/sec for 15 sec]

Status Gained: Burning. [5 HP/sec]

Status Lost: Burning.

Trix tended to me sometime during.

Status Gained: Underfed (Severe) [-6 body, -6 mind]

I wrapped around the bricks, flowed into all the space. I became a puddle on the floor, one so smooth and natural, the scourge-touched could never think to dislodge me.

My body gave out before I was truly satisfied, however. One moment, I was iron, rigid and in control. The next, I was a heap on the stairs, a desiccated pile of useless bones.

I’d done it, though. That door was good and sealed. No drooling scourge-touched was getting through that, not for a while.

“Brother Ryan?! Stay awake! Do not go to sleep!”

I didn’t feel like listening, though. I was bone tired, and things kept flashing in my vision, too fast to comprehend.

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Scourge Touched Undead defeated.

You have been awarded 35 experience points. [16 base (-2 level, +2 nemesis, +16 group, + 16 chain, -13 non-combat class)]

Level up!

You are now level 10.

Max HP +10

Max MP +10

+1 attribute point.

+1 focus point.

Achievements awarded this level:

Spirit of the Warrior: You gained 51% of your experience this level from defeated foes as a non-combat class. [+3 spirit]

Big Spender: You have spent 10,420% of your total mana pool this level. [+1% mana regeneration per second.]

Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% experience awarded for new designs next level]

Inventor: You have created at least five new designs this level. [+1 Mind]

Boss Killer: You have defeated a foe far above you in level. [+2 to all attributes]

Allocate focus point to increase Depth? Y/N

Status Lost: Underfed (Severe)

Status Gained: Starvation [-7 mind, -7 body, -0.1 HP/sec]

It was too much. I wanted to sleep. Someone slapped me… Repeatedly.

“Whyyyyyyy?” I groaned.

“He’s alive. Gods, by all rights he shouldn’t be. Hold him still.”

It was all so tiresome. I was done, wasn’t I? I’d done what they needed.

Quest Update: ???

What?

??? (Continued): Become worthy.