Chapter 86 - Ride to Ruin
When the afternoon rolled around, I finally stopped channeling mana and started storing my assembled arsenal. Four functioning kinetic turrets, about twenty new plasma rounds for my arm cannon, a whopping 130 of the new, untested, ‘drone’ design courtesy of our new Frankenstein’s monster of a casting bowl, machine pistol plus extra magazines, legs, sleeve, and breastplate I’d made for my armor set, and a rudimentary helmet and faceguard to keep my eyes inside my head when I was getting swarmed.
All of it was slapdash, crude, and untested. Over half of it had a non-zero chance of exploding if I’d botched the Automation.
It would have to do.
My head pounded for the twentieth time in the past few hours as my mana points sat in the single digits. I summoned the last of two pieces of oiled wood to give me some relief and take the edge off.
Conduit is now level 9.
For the first time in hours, I stretched my aching muscles and rolled my neck to loosen up. My vision swam as my equilibrium got used to being upright again and doing something other than frantically pumping mana into metal.
It was time. I was ready. I had to be ready.
Tiba looked ready too. She’d smeared black streaks of mud across her face and tied additional feathers to the end of her spear. As I watched her burn a sprig of some kind of herb and waft the smoke toward her face, a pang of worry threatened to make me say something I’d regret, but I tamped it down. If she wanted to fight, I wasn’t going to deny her. This was her world, and she had a right to throw her life away just like I was doing. I just hoped she kept herself safe.
We didn’t say anything, just picked up our things and started walking.
Side by side, we squished through the mud of the bottleneck, careful to stay in the middle so as not to expose ourselves to too much sunlight.
Then, well, it didn’t take an expert tracker to figure out what direction to go. We followed the drag marks, the big, dragon-sized drag marks. Southwest. The Tutorial Facility. Nearly everything I could ever want in this world was at the Tutorial Facility. They may have been new at this whole thinking thing, but the scourge had baited their trap extremely well.
Through the silent forest, over downed logs, around great depressions left by fallen mendau, I walked just as I’d done on day one of my tutorial. Only this time, I knew more of what I was doing, of the world, of magic, of myself. I was passing through this place a different man than I was.
The Ryan of before had only been concerned for himself. He ran when he was chased, like a deer from wolves, with no more thought given to the action than the immediate need to live.
Well, I wasn’t running anymore. I’d gained purpose, grim as it was. I knew my enemy was out there, and that was exactly what I wanted. I also knew that only one of us was coming out of this alive. It had finally come to that. They’d engineered that outcome when they’d threatened those I cared about.
Though I still felt heavy, my 53 Body kept fatigue from affecting me, helped me power through the thick brush, climb through the ravines. Navigating the tough terrain was a simple matter now, easy even with Tiba on my back. The presence of my machines rested in my pocket dimension, ready to deploy against any threat. I even found myself wishing for such a thing to happen, an opportunity to start the fight. It never did, though.
From time to time, I made a point to reach down and Consum another bit of mendau to top off my mana pool, ten times larger than it had been the day I’d been dumped in this place.
Alert: Your presence has been detected.
I froze, crouched, heart humming in my chest. Fear was far, far back in my mind, purposefully so. Fear could wait. This was anticipation, need for something upon which to vent my wrath. I wasn’t even wearing my armor yet, but I half-welcomed an obstacle to bulldoze just now.
I scanned the forest to see what kind of scourge-touched had seen me. Nothing had howled or jumped out at me, which indicated a different kind of threat.
Was it restraining itself until I was nearer the trap?
“It’s okay, Ryan. Just don’t run,” Tiba whispered as she gingerly climbed down from my back.
Confused, I glanced over to see her standing tall as she took one step out into the open, exposed, the base of her spear resting in the dirt, and her chin raised in defiance.
What was she doing?
An entire tree bent at the knees and took a long step toward us. In the silence, the deep, groaning and creaking of bark rubbing against itself sounded like bones snapping. Gnarled, gray wood flexed, rose into the air, and slammed down into the dirt dangerously close, burying itself in the dirt. Roots from the surrounding mendau trees popped out of the soil like worms burrowing out of a corpse to writhe in the midday light.
My gaze crawled up the leg, the trunk. Smoldering crevasses split the wood of the giant at the joints. Larger, more significant cracks dripped fire down onto the ground where it hissed and set alight anything remotely combustible on the ground. Its torso was concave, almost, some of the wood missing where one might find a ribcage on a normal person. Inside was a miniature sun that blazed like hell’s heat lamp. He was missing an arm as well, ripped off at the shoulder, the wound still leaking smoke. To top it all off, Kuul’s face loomed over me, his mouth twisted into a loathsome sneer.
“Stop it, Kuul!” Tiba shouted, cutting through the moment sharply. To my and Kuul’s apparent surprise, the giant froze, a look of… disappointment(?) twisting his hellmouth into a frown.
“Stop it now! Stop your hate! Ryan is not the Black Ones!”
At first, it seemed Kuul had finally gotten over his shock at being yelled at by a tiny green girl. He bent at the waist, growling as he reached down to silence her, but something stopped him before he could make contact almost like he’d hit an invisible wall. He didn’t like that at all. His face contorted with rage at the tiny thing that dared give him orders and, worse, coming between him and me. He got down in a bear crawl and gnashed his teeth in protest.
I stood up, my machine pistol at the top of my mind for summoning, but Tiba headed me off.
Instead of standing her ground or doing the sensible thing and running away screaming while I fought the giant, Tiba strode forward until she was within slapping distance of Kuul’s face.
Then she slapped him. She had to get up on her tiptoes, but she slapped him.
“Kuul! I tell you, no killing Ryan! If anything, Ryan kills you!”
That didn’t sit well with the big guy. He straightened up quickly, his expression twisting into an indignant frown and, with his long, muscular arm made of woven mendau roots, slammed a fist into the trunk of a tree. The building sized mendau shuddered, and for a moment I thought it might come down, knocked out like a boxer.
“Enough! That’s enough!”
Kuul growled… petulantly, like the goblin queen had just asked him to eat his vegetables or there would be no dessert.
Tiba was unmoved. In fact, she looked ready to slap the giant again if need be, the way she kept advancing toward Kuul’s feet. She certainly had Kuul’s attention now. He bent down low, growling, as if daring her to slap him again. Instead, Tiba got a big lungful of breath and began to bark in the giant’s face.
“Now, you listen, you crooked old goblin. I am Tiba, healer of the Stone Hearts, Chieftess of the Black Claws, Chieftess of the Skewers, Chiefess of the Mountain Clans, Queen of the Eight Tribes. I bring my people together and save them from the Black Ones. Today, I quest to heal the world just as our ancestors in the stories!”
Kuul growled the growl of a hundred diesel engines idling at once but, surprisingly, did not smash Tiba or me. I kept a part of my mind focused on my pistol and what it would take to summon it.
“Thing that was once my chief,” Tiba pronounced, “You are a horror. You are a terrible nightmare, a curse of destruction given life by a disgraced sorcerer,” Tiba continued, pointing her spear at Kuul’s eye for emphasis. “Kuul, who destroys his own tribe and kills his own kin. Takes my Hunty from me. I want… no… I demand you listen to me. Kneel!”
Something passed between the kaiju tree monster and the little goblin queen. I don’t know what it was, a contest of wills, magic, vibes, maybe something else. Whatever it was, it happened over the course of long seconds where I couldn’t help but hold my breath.
Then, miraculously, a tipping point was reached. Kuul closed his eyes, bent at the knees, and bowed his head until it touched the ground. The leaves underneath him smoldered, and the soil churned as the mendau reacted to his touch. There he stayed while Tiba stood over him, breathing hard, furious and full of authority.
She held her spear like she was considering executing him like a queen from old Earth.
“Tiba, what the hell?” I asked in a whisper, my eyes flicking from her to the… thing that was Kuul. “What are you- He’s-”
“I know,” the queen said. I felt compelled into silence for some reason. Tiba still had capital C Command in her voice. “I’m too small to fight next to you today, Ryan. He is not.”
She clutched her spear to her chest, the way she did the day I gave it to her.
My eyes flicked from her to the killing machine she’d tamed. This couldn’t be safe. “But he-”
“Yes, he takes my Hunty from me,” Tiba sniffed, turning her face to quietly wipe a tear from her cheek with a dirt covered hand. “Yes, he wrongs me. And he… frightens me.” She turned back to regard Kuul’s now prostrate form and put a hand on the bark that would have been the crown of his head..
“But he is still goblin. He needs me. You, Kelub, and Grorg need me too. I am not much of a queen if I can’t face him for you.”
My lips made a sputtering sound as I rooted around in my brain for the right words to say in this situation, but I came up with nothing except:
“And you knew this would just work?”
She shook her head but gave Kuul’s head a pat. “No, but I have a feeling. Turns out, a queen is bigger than a chief. My position is- uh… higher. Now, where do you want us, Ryan?”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Somehow intuiting what his queen wanted, Kuul rose, though he had to support himself on a tree with his one remaining arm to do so. The tree next to him bent, groaned. This close to him, Kuul’s size was impossible to wrap my head around. Even injured as he was, he cut an imposing figure against the backdrop of the foggy forest.
The tiny green girl that lost everything and gained a kingdom.
The chief that betrayed his tribe and became a monster to atone.
Living legends were standing right in front of me. What a tale Ralqir would have to tell after all this was over.
If we lived.
Well, the odds of that just got a lot better.
—-------------------------
So, that’s how I ended up riding a kaiju tree monster into the biggest battle of my life, the first kind face I’d ever seen in this world riding right there with me… Or maybe I was riding with her. It was really hard to tell whose quest this was anymore.
The drag marks led us where we needed to go in more or less a straight line. Tiba and I rode on Kuul’s shoulder, the good one without the missing arm. Kuul’s internal temperature was furnace hot, and any open wound or orifice was dangerous to be near. The shoulder was the only place we could really ride and not be burned to death or at least cooked to a medium rare. Regardless, the heat was oppressive. Sweat poured down my face and out of my helmet to plink off of my breastplate.
Honestly, my armor wasn’t my best work. Made of steel and deep lead, angular, heavy, and too thick by half, the plates that covered my chest, legs, neck, and one of my arms were cumbersome to even stand in, much less move around in a fight. Currently unpowered pistons in all the joints hissed and scraped with every move I made, and every time I needed to turn my head, I had to angle my shoulders to point that way too.
“You think they aren’t killing the others when we get there?” Tiba asked, having to raise her voice to be heard over Kuul’s ailing tree giant noises. Kuul’s footsteps crashed through the forest with muted *CROOM* *CROOM* *CROOM*s, and his body creaked and groaned as it ground together. With every bump, the crackling fires inside of him spewed sparks out of his chest, eyes, and empty shoulder socket.
“Not till they have me, I think,” I replied. “Wouldn’t do to kill your bait before you have your deer.”
Tiba crinkled her nose as she thought about that. “Unless they are so many, they think they have you right away. What makes you so sure?”
“Nothing. It’s just the only way I see this going where we all make it out alive.”
She looked over at me, incredulous, her big brown eyes saying a million things her voice didn’t.
I shrugged. “Like I said. I refuse to choose. We’re all going to make it, or I won’t be around for the rest.”
A sad little smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “You’re a good goblin, Ryan.”
Kuul growled at that, a thing I felt through my feet.
“Hush, Kuul! He’s Stone Heart now! I say so!” Tiba chastised him, punctuating her words with stomps from her tiny feet that Kuul probably couldn’t even feel.
The scourge were staying scarce. We only caught glimpses of them in the trees, the monkey bat type creatures mostly, who swooped away as soon as we got within rock throwing distance… or fire breathing distance. It was only when a pile of what looked like crumbled stone appeared over the horizon did we notice them gathering in earnest, and boy did they gather.
As if they’d been summoned, thousands of them appeared from our flanks, streaming in from the low parts of the terrain, flowing toward the stone landmark. They swarmed like ants over everything, climbed over every tree trunk. They burrowed up from the ground, flew down from perches overhead. Behind us, thousands of bodies flowed and collapsed upon our wake, hemming us in.
A pointless gesture.
You don’t have to worry about me running. You wanted me. You got me.
The pile of rocks, or more accurately: the former tutorial facility, was different than I remembered. I’d left it as a pile of rubble, of course, the victim of time and the elements along with a little help from a boulder that had missed me by a hair. However, now it was a ring of crumbled concrete and twisted metal that jutted out of the ground, a festering sore on the planet’s crust. The scourge swarmed over it, climbed out of crevices and mounted the exposed, rusting bones of the place, sniffing the air and hooting. In the middle of the ring there was now a hole, wide enough to swallow one of the trees, that went down into nothing, darker than dark.
No. That was wrong. The way the light hit it and died… I should have been able to see down into it from atop Kuul. Something else was in there, a black substance that swallowed the light. I had the sneaking suspicion that if I were to get close enough to it, that blackness would smell of tar and rot, and it would reach for me.
I fought to suppress a shudder at the memory.
Kuul lumbered forward until we were a hundred yards from the tutorial facility. Then Tiba gave the order to stop. Our giant rage monster growled in barely contained bloodlust as he turned this way and that, unused to seeing a scourge he did not immediately kill, but Tiba’s command held him fast. For now.
Silence fell over the forest, and we collectively held our breaths.
Then, a glowing, holographic presence appeared next to me on Kuul’s shoulder.
“Greetings, Ch- Ch- Defiler,” a woman said, her voice tortured with the sound of screeching static.
I slowly turned my head until I was looking down into a familiar face.
“Nali,” I acknowledged her.
Nali was looking rough. I remembered her as a short, handsome woman with hard features and kind eyes, the kind of woman with calluses on her hands and fresh baked bread on her windowsill. Now, the hologram was disjointed, the top of her head not quite lining up with her jaw, and her body undergoing some kind of animation glitch where her work apron flapped wildly in an unseen wind until the garment tore down the middle, exposing Nali’s insides as if the apron were her actual skin. Flashes of teeth and sharpened bone no human ever had popped out of her, too fast to really get a good look at, but frequent enough to discern what they were. Then she would reset back to normal. Her eyes, however, stayed the same, sunken looking with black tears streaming down her cheeks.
Tiba took the hologram’s presence a little less calmly than I had. She whipped her spear around at impressive speed to slash at this alien creature’s chest, but the spear simply passed through. The incorporeal nature of the hologram caught Tiba off guard, and she nearly took a tumble from a great height.
I reached out and steadied her. “Hang on, Tiba. I think I know what’s going on here,” I said.
Nali didn’t pay the queen any mind. She was focused entirely on me. “Welcome, D-Defiler, to the e-end of the Animator Class Tutorial. I am Nali, the emissary of this end.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “I was the last Animator you trained before all this.”
Nali flickered. “B- Before what?” she asked.
“Before the scourge,” I said, watching carefully for the reaction I was waiting for.
Nali seemed to freeze, and her face broke into five separate chunks, each having their own reaction to the news ranging from terror to anger to… uh.. Very… intense pleasure. That one, funnily enough, made me the most uncomfortable out of all of them. However, she was back to normal almost instantly.
“I apologize, Defiler. My f- failsafe has been compromised. The possibility of void corruption is h-h- absolute. Please disregard all further advice I give.” Her body contorted, her arms bending backwards before stabbing through her own torso and coming out of the other side. Her head collapsed down into her shoulders until her neck was entirely gone. Very realistic bone cracks and ripping noises accompanied these motions.
Then, like a switch was flipped, she was back to normal, albeit her eyes still wept black.
Her voice, however, was entirely devoid of any sense of humanity she used to have. She was cold now, not robotic so much as alien and uncanny.
“Greetings Defiler. I am the voice of the void. My purpose is to negotiate your destruction.”
Sadness seeped into my core when I saw the change. She may have just been a hologram, an AI, but that didn’t stop me from feeling something when she… when she changed I guessed. Nali as I’d known her, was gone now, replaced by this thing. I had suspected something like that might happen if she was exposed for much longer to the scourge, but I hadn’t expected to witness it. I’d hoped to trigger her failsafe before it could happen and maybe spare her.
“None of the other scourge speak. Why do you?” I asked.
“I am not of the scourge. I am of the System,” Nali said flatly. “The scourge has allowed me to retain what functions I have so that we may speak. I speak for the scourge, because it does not.”
“And you want to negotiate my surrender.”
She bobbed her head.The glossy black of her eyes made her look insect-like in that moment. “Your death and destruction.”
“And you communicate with the scourge on my behalf?”
“No. The scourge does not communicate. It knows. It sees what I-.” She spasmed then, rocking back and forth,her lips peeling back to unleash a scream through her clenched teeth that devolved into digital noise. Suddenly, her face was that of a real-ish woman again, frightened and confused.
“You- You must l- leave. Leave now, Ch- Ch-. It is inside- I am being corrupted.”
I resisted the urge to reach out and comfort her. It wouldn’t do any good. “Nali? What’s happening to you?”
“Run!” she shouted, doubling over in obvious pain now. “Use your quest prompt! Find your way out of this universe!”
“Nali, I can’t leave until I-”
“You should already be running! This universe is corrupted. Its destruction is inevitable!”
“Nali, listen carefully. Is your presence housed somewhere around here, and that’s how the scourge are corrupting you?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Down in the sub-lev-”
Nali flickered again and was back to her disjointed, corrupted form. “Defiler, end your life now, and the scourge will spare your others. Do it now, and they will not be subsumed.”
“No,” I answered with a shake of my head. “No, I don’t think I will. Not until I have proof of life. Does it know what that is?”
‘Nali’ didn’t answer.
“It was smart enough to leave me their things. Smart enough to take hostages. Surely, it’s figured out that I would want to see that they are alive before I cooperate,” I guessed.
“The concept of exchange is new to it. The giving from one to another, the concept of one, is new. However, it anticipated some form of persuasion would be needed. The others are here.” Nali gestured down to the swarming mass of scourge gathered in front of the ruined facility, and the crowd parted…
The bruised and battered forms of my friends laid there in the dirt. Most of them were face down, dirty, limp. Trix was first to move, his head popping up from the dirt and looking around fervently that way he did, ears vertical, listening. When he realized they were being left alone for some reason, he helped the others get to their feet with brief touches on the forehead. One by one, they all staggered to their feet.
Samila was the first to spot me way up on Kuul’s shoulder. I couldn’t see her expression from this far, but I imagined some kind of stoic frown there as she shook her head, ever so slightly at me. She was telling me to let them be. Don’t risk myself. I wasn’t behind the walls anymore.
She wanted me to live.
I shifted my armor’s weight on my shoulders and turned my body until I caught Tiba’s eye to give her the nod.
Then I turned back to Nali. Her stare was blank, but she tilted her head to an extreme angle like no human being would do, listening intently as if she were ready to hear the terms of my surrender.
And I would have, if I trusted for a second the scourge would keep its word, or if it hadn’t just told me my death would just result in them getting better treatment than assimilation. Then there was the woman standing in front of me. No way was she getting away after my death.
“If you can hear me, Nali, hold on,” I told her. “I’m coming.”
Then a hot, crushing weight settled on my back and squeezed. The armor popped and squealed as Kuul’s hand wrapped around me none too gently. Then, Kuul did what he had probably been wanting to do for quite some time now.
He threw me. Hard.
In a storm of sickening motion and ridiculous G-forces, I was airborne, hurtling toward the little clearing the scourge had made for the others.
The ground rushed up to meet me, and I tucked my legs and rolled until I was flying roughly feet first. Then I activated the bracing pistons on my new armor’s joints.
I hit the ground like a crashing satellite, roughly fifty yards off target, just in front of where my friends were held, though I lost sight of them as soon as the impressive wave of pulverized monsters, dirt and debris splashed away from my new crater. My bones rattled in my body, and something inside of my stomach gave the distinct feeling of tearing as I went from terminal velocity thereabouts to zero instantly. However, once I drew my first breath and checked my HP, I knew I was in business.
You take 30 impact damage. (15 mitigated)
HP 271/301]
Deactivating the bracing pistons, I rolled onto my side and groaned as I crawled. Chunks of the creatures I’d landed on peeled away and sloughed off the armor plating to land with wet plops atop their kin. I got up slowly. The armor was heavy, close to the weight of a full grown man even without the rest of the components. I’d made it that way purposefully, thick, cumbersome…
Loaded with terrific firepower.
With a *clunk* I put one plated boot up on the lip of my little crater and braced myself as best I could. My mind flicked to the Triggers on my back I’d kept active.
The scourge wasted no time now that I was down amongst them. They pounced, surged into my little pocket of empty from all sides, all teeth and claws and evil.
Now.
The two stripped down auto-turrets on my back unfolded from the recessed holes I’d built for them and slid up their tracks until they *clanked* into place just above my shoulders like wings. A Trigger in the boxy compartment on my upper back activated its piston ammo feeders, slapping the first rounds of the day into place.
“You want me dead?! Come do it yourself, scourge!”
Then the world became fire, blood and fury.
“Come on! Come on, you little shits!”