Chapter 46 - Just Hold On

The turret facing the stairwell, the one that had been hardest pressed up until this point just went dead.

Oh shit.

All things considered, I was lucky to have seen it happen. As deaf as I was just now, it could have taken me a long time to notice, and then I’d be drowning in monsters and never knowing why all the way up until they ripped me apart.

The scourge-touched within the blast zone were slow to get up, their crumpled bodies and shell-shocked neural tissues making them sluggish and clumsy. They were tenacious, though. Some of the more robust specimens were already pulling themselves forward using whatever limbs they still had, snarling and burbling silently as they advanced on my position.

They had no fear, no response to pain or loss, and fresh, grinning faces were starting to stream in. I had maybe a few seconds before the tide would be lapping at my feet again.

I wobbled to where my stash of spare magazines were supposed to be and used my foot to roll the good part of a Returned corpse off of them (where the rest of it was I didn’t know), revealing the slimy but still functional row of spare ammo fans.

Drunkenly and with considerable effort, I bent over and snagged one of the magazines without falling to the ground to join them. The world was spinning around me, and it was all I could do not to lie down and wait for it to stop. My ears really couldn’t heal fast enough.

My salvation in hand, I turned and stumble-sprinted over to the dry turret, smacking the release lever with the hilt of my sword to disengage the empty magazine.

Stuck.

Not thinking, concussed or maybe a combination of both, I then made the obvious mistake of using my fingers to work the lever.

I snatched my hand away with a frustrated growl, one I couldn’t hear but I could most certainly feel. Even through the leather of the gloves, the extreme temperature of the turret’s action cooked my flesh within half a second.

To say that my turret design had heat issues would have been a gross understatement. I filed this flaw away in my mental “to address if I live” folder.

Hot metal: bad. Do not touch.

My metal hand was much more able to work the thing, but the time I’d wasted flash frying my pointer and middle finger came back to haunt me immediately.

I was just disengaging the spent magazine when I caught swift movement out of the corner of my eye, and I pulled back from the turret just in time to get my sword up.

Something hot and wet slapped against my sword arm, my chest, and the bottom of my face. The surprise coupled with the weight and force of it made me take a reflexive step back, but I was disoriented and dizzy. I went down to the ground, hard.

Now on my back and covered in… something, I struggled, kicked my legs, grunting with the effort, though, again, I couldn’t hear myself and not just because I was deafened. My mouth, like a large part of my upper half, was literally covered in some kind of yellow, oily sheet that smelled of rotten lemons, and the grip the sheet had on me was getting progressively more and more thorough. It seemed to slide over me, expand its surface area like spilled liquid over a table.

Bending my neck, I struggled to look down at my feet to see what I was dealing with.

Yes. I was wrapped in something yellow, slimy and vaguely organic. Most of me was covered in whatever it was, and the rapidly vanishing parts of my body that weren’t bound up in puss colored bed sheet were quickly being smothered in the stuff as well. My sword was the only thing free, having punctured its way through the slick membrane by sheer luck or old reflexes from training I barely remembered.

Around my navel, a thick… proboscis?... tentacle?... Something struggled against me, forcing me down on the marble roof and holding me still. It was a tube of similarly slimy yellow that bloated and pulsed to a beat I couldn’t hear. Meanwhile, my fleshy prison expanded to cover more and more surface area. By now, it was fully wrapped around my back and was working its way up my neck.

My eyes tracked to the end of said fleshy tube and saw something along the lines of a giant snake. A fat, giant snake. At least that’s how my mind categorized it at a glance. Its head was at least shaped like a snake’s, but after that, Earth biology became less and less helpful. The body, though longer than it was wide, was only just so, and a plume of yellow spines grew down its back like a mohawk.

This monster, like the other ‘touched’ beings, looked worse for wear, with rheumy white eyes and patches of missing scales, but it certainly had all of its teeth, rows of them.

The thing’s body was as wide as the entire stairwell, and, as it wriggled its way onto the roof, I could see other, less fortunate scourge-touched crushed against the sides of the marble walls.

Where a snake snake was long and generally fit for slithering, this one seemed to locomote more like a worm, except for a prominent, overdeveloped ribcage that started a few feet below its head, the sides of which were pumping like bellows, flapping in and and out, stretching the creature’s grayish green skin then sharply contracting over and over. When its body contracted, the tube attached to my prison expanded noticeably and the yellow flesh tarp tightened around me.

Muscles contracted in the snake’s throat, and the tube that connected us shortened visibly with every second.

It may have been struggling to make it all the way onto the roof, but it was getting ever closer to eating me. It was reeling me in, its inwardly curved teeth ready to grab and never let go.

What’s more:

Status gained: Necrosis [2 HP/sec]

I was being digested. This was the second time in my new life something had tried to digest me without doing the polite thing and killing me first.

Ralqir was a silly place.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Just then, my hearing came back, a whine at first and then things resolved into something akin to normal, in time to experience the sound of the creature *HORF*ing as it pumped biological mystery juice into my yellow flesh sac. It sounded like a giant cat trying to hack up a hairball except far more sinister, which was a feat and a half based on the cats I’d met.

Well, if it was going to do the eating now and the killing later, I was well within my rights to do the killing now and the dying later.

I groaned against the slimy tissue, flexed my sword hand at the wrist, and made use of my enhanced Body score.

The supernaturally sharpened blade did most of the work cutting through the membrane, and, soon, my arm burst from it with a slurping sound I would probably have nightmares about later. The scent of sour fluids and half-cooked armor and skin permeated the air.

I tried to ignore that.

Think about it later. Either that or forget about it entirely.

Then my blade arced over to the proboscis and severed it with two short chops. Clear fluid spewed from both ends of the severed tube, and the creature shrieked indignantly.

Instantly, the pressure around my body ceased, and the yellow sac seemed to shrivel and bunch up around my chest until it flopped to the ground next to me, a wrinkly pile of goo and fibrous muscle more like a tongue than whatever shape it had taken before.

The creature yowled, but it didn’t stop advancing. As it wriggled closer it slurped its remaining tubage up like a meaty spaghetti noodle. That nearly did me in.

Do. Not. Vomit.

Thankfully, the monster wasn’t fast, probably an ambush predator, or maybe it was just dumber and slower after falling to the scourge plague. As it finally freed itself from the stairwell it trundled forward at the speed of a chubby toddler, albeit one with a taste for human flesh. I had to force myself to look away from slowly approaching teeth and fumble for my magazine.

Finally, I slapped the new bullet fan home and engaged the locking lever.

Instantly online, the turret was back to dispensing death with a deafening volley of shots into the creature’s face. Flesh and bone were quickly parted from the rest of the body, the fresh stream of bullets so intensely kinetic, they sawed through the fat-snake’s insides, splitting it down the middle until the turret found something vital or the creature just stopped moving.

You have defeated Scourge-Touched Joroba.

You have been awarded 360 experience points. [150 base (+30 nemesis, +150 group,+150 chain, -120 non-combat class)]

I forced myself to breathe again.

Guess the scourge has gotten to the wildlife too. Peachy.

Then the auto-turret was on to the smaller targets and just in time. The scourge-touched undead and goblins had fresh bodies to throw at me now that the stairwell was unobstructed again, and they were already too many and too close for my liking.

I staggered back to the center of the triangle.

My skin felt like it was on fire. When I moved, I could feel the tender parts of my flesh rubbing together painfully, weeping sores coating the insides of my clothes. Whatever poison or acid the joroba had used was still active in some way, or it just hadn’t gotten to my nerve endings yet.

I couldn’t stop moving, though. The scourge-touched were already back inside the perimeter.

Then I was back to hacking and stabbing everything that moved. What I couldn’t kill with my sword, I crushed with my metal arm, either with Devouring Grasp or through the sheer blunt force of a closed fist and amplified… what was my Body score now?

Not now. Check later.

The lip of the roof was just gone, the courtyard beyond too, their memories replaced by a wall of sagging meat. The dead became the walls of my fortress, and their comrades clambered over them only to die and add to the mass.

They never stopped coming.

I waded through the lucky ones that breached the perimeter, dispatching the fresh enemies first and the wounded ones when I could spare a second, but I took stinging wounds to my legs, my arms, and my hands. For each enemy I ended, another was right there to make me pay a price for it with claws or teeth.

Nothing I did came for free.

The North-facing gun went silent next, as I’d feared it would. I just didn’t know what I could do about it, I was so pressed.

The monsters, seeming to collectively sense their opportunity to end it, boiled up from the corpse wall with renewed vigor for their final charge. I pulled my pistol out of my belt.

Faces appeared before me and were cut down. I hardly had to aim with my pistol, so close was I to my targets. My fat ammo worms punched ragged, gaping holes in whatever they hit.

Slash. Fire. Slash. Stab. Fire. Fire. Slash.

With every downed foe, I couldn’t help but look up to watch more enemies piling over the north wall. They’d figured things out quickly.

And I was drowning in monsters.

My world was steadily reduced to a desperate, bloody struggle just to stay alive. Hands reached for me. Mouths shrieked as they snapped at my face.

Hack. Slash. Stab. Fire. Slash.

They were too many, too close. Their claws raked me even as they died. Their teeth gnawed at my legs.

Gulping for oxygen, blood trickling down into my right eye and tainting the world red, my sword arm hanging limply at my side, I looked up one last time.

The black ones leapt down from the overrun battlements, something akin to glee on their expressions as they rushed to be the first to rip me open. They howled in unison, in anticipation of their triumph.

Only to be obliterated from above.

Too fast to perceive as anything other than streaming gray streaks of force and mass, a volley of projectiles slammed down upon the monsters’ shoulders, backs, and heads. Supersonic wasps of iron and lead broke limbs, shattered skulls and spines. The multitude of corpses the monsters had used for handholds quickly turned to mulch.

*THWUP* THWUP*THWUP*THWUP*

I let out a long, shaky sigh of relief.

Slowly, my blurring vision traced the stream of death up, up from my grim redoubt to the Spire, to Trix’s position on the observation deck. Strobing purple-white muzzle flashes bloomed from the ends of the twin barrels of his gun emplacement, and the lead fell like rain.

Trix was scratching my back.

That meant two things. I had the little Volpa’s attention, which was nice. It felt good to not be alone.

The other thing was that the fight had been going on longer than I’d realized. Trix wasn’t supposed to reveal his position until all of our friendlies were at least inside the Spire square.

My heart thrummed at that thought. They were here, I was alive, and I wasn’t alone.

The hand that had been tightening around my chest seemed to loosen its grip, slightly.

I used the breathing room Trix gave me to grab two more magazines. I replaced the one on the dry gun and then preemptively refreshed the other, less pressed turret. It would have run out soon anyway.

Once I was back in business and my guns were active, Trix seemed to get the hint and turned his fire elsewhere.

That was okay. If someone else needed him, I’d hold. The longer I held, the longer I was doing my job, the longer the rescue team had to run to the Spire.

You are now level 15.

It wasn’t even a question. HP was a resource that I needed right now. I slapped all of my available points into Body and felt myself begin to knit together instantly, my tired muscles feeling that much fresher, and my breathing becoming that much smoother.

Just a little longer. Hold on just a little longer.