Marla and Deacon had put several hours into their quest in the library. Every time they cleared a room, the pull toward new challenges and rewards kept them going. With some downtime between bouts of violence, the two enjoyed an herbal remedy that Bones had formulated. It was a mix of stimulating herbs rolled into a small parchment to be smoked. Halwark wasn’t a fan, and Sonnet was indifferent to it, but Marla and Deacon had quickly grown very fond of what Marla had dubbed ‘lil bones’.
“The team’ll probably freak if we’re not back soon. I say we take on that boss in the next room and call it a night,” Marla said, as her lil bone burned nearly down to its ceramic filter.
Deacon was puzzled. “What boss?”
“Get with the program, dude. The mana density on the other side of that wall is insane. Is something wrong with your extra senses?”
Deacon gagged on having his new senses mentioned. It was like being reminded that he could see his nose, but on a level that conjured existential horror. “Please don’t talk about that. It’s hard enough to drown that out without you saying anything.”
“You’re weird, dude. Okay screw it, let’s kill a boss.”
Deacon had a few reservations about taking on a more powerful monster with just the two of them. However, he had a bad habit of reflecting the attitudes of those he was with, unconsciously. “Hell yeah, let’s do it.”
They put out their cigarette and put the trash in their subspace bags, then climbed a ladder onto the fourth-level catwalk. There was an ornate door in layer with brass artwork and an opaque panel of green glass where a window might otherwise be.
“Whoa, there’s some weird energy about. It feels spatially unstable, or like…” Marla began, trailing off to look for a word.
“In flux,” Deacon offered. Even with his immense effort to drown out his extra senses, the wobbling waves emanating from beyond the door were impossible to ignore.
Marla confirmed Deacon’s linguistic diagnosis with a click of her teeth and a tap on her nose. She then reached above her head for the knob and opened the door, which gave an illusion of breathing as it rhythmically expanded and contracted with the space around it. Inside it was immediately apparent that this space was different from the rest of the library. Some creature had siphoned enough energy from the estate core to burrow out its own little pocket of subspace. It was a large cave, with walls with an appearance like papier-mâché from pages of books, but with a dense concrete heft to them, as they were the bedrock to their own plane of existence. From the ceiling hung a titanic creature of pale flesh. Deacon got the impression that the enormous part of the creature that was exposed was only the tip of the iceberg and that a much larger portion of its body was buried high above.
“Bookworm’s nest,” Marla uttered.
“Huh?”
“A name for this place. It’s got a good ring to it for when bards tell the tales of our adventures.”
Deacon rolled his eyes. Before he could comment, the Bookworm stirred from its rest and wailed a hideous scream, so loud that the pair were pushed back by the sound wave of it. Deacon was stunned, while Marla leaped to action. Kicking off of the cave floor, she bolted through the air like a cannonball, activating her chainsaw midair shooting into one end of the creature and darting out the exit wound on the other side. She still had so much momentum when she exited, that she had a few seconds of hang time on the opposite cave wall.
The Bookworm twisted in pain and lunged to strike back at Marla, but she was far too swift. On striking the cave wall, the creature was dazed for a brief moment, but quickly shook its head and followed up. It contracted, bulging its body as it unhinged its jaw, displaying the jerky shifts of snapping cartilage while its head split into a star, with five subsections of sharp, stake-like teeth. Once its entire head was repurposed into a giant mouth, it spewed neon-yellow vomit, sweeping into a semicircle to distribute the concoction evenly. The pillar of steaming yellow bile fast approaching shook Deacon from his stupor, and he sprinted towards the worm, to reach the opposite side of the semicircle. Small droplets of the vomit had hit him, and he felt an acidic burn on his left arm. The substance clung to him like hot molasses, constantly corroding his skin at the same rate that it healed.
Deacon barked an angry shout and flung his lava spray straight up at it. It shook with pain as its skin blistered around its burns, and retreated slightly into its burrow momentarily. It then swung around and dove towards Deacon to bite. Deacon surrendered to his trust in Marla, knowing his friend would push him out of the way. For now, he needed to get his licks in while he had a clear shot. He fired a rapid stream of crystal darts straight into the bookworm’s mouth, right until the last moment. That was when Marla shot through the air and pulled him out of the way, just as he instinctively knew she would.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Right as the creature smashed into the cave wall, Marla back-flipped away from Deacon and sliced off one of the star sections larger than her own body. The worm fell limp onto the papier-mâché briefly, and Deacon shot chunks of clay onto the edges of two star segments to keep it stuck down.
The worm recoiled, and as it found itself stuck, it tore that part of itself off. The ten-foot severed section leveraged its cemented face to swing back and forth, smashing its flesh against the ground in an attempt to crush the adventurers. The remaining worm wrung something from out from deep within it. Stabbing out from its new mouth, it extruded four black spears of chitin, which pivoted at joints like the arms of a praying mantis. This was the replacement it managed to improvise for its lost teeth.
It was more frenzied in its movement than before, quickly darting to Deacon and getting a good slash on his chest before he could get out of the way. He reeled at his wound, which felt salted somehow. In his moment of reacting to his pain, the worm capitalized on his distraction. It sliced open his neck and stabbed a gaping hole right through his teeth and into his jaw. In that moment he was a goner.
It was critical that Marla was there. She swooped before the Bookworm could finish Deacon off and took the entirety of its attention. She was like a flea with how rapidly she bounced off of the walls. With each pass, she chopped more and more into the worm until it was sliced into ribbons. Substantial chunks of the worm simply sloughed off into piles. As the worm surfaced more of its body to try to reform a head, it only served to feed more of itself into the blender that was Marla. This strategy was only useful for a sprint, rather than a marathon, however, and after a few moments, she was forced to land on the floor, panting.
Deacon’s mana reserves were sapped from his healing power keeping him alive. By this point, large scabs had stopped the bleeding, but further healing wouldn’t be possible for a while. He didn’t have enough mana to shoot lava or even more than a couple of crystal bolts. Potions could have helped, but they were in his bag. Tragically, he couldn’t open a sub-space pocket inside of another sub-space pocket, for reasons that gave him a headache to think about. He could only work with what he had. He couldn’t think of any way dirt would be useful, so clay would need to suffice. By this point, he could blast out all the clay he wanted, on 1% of his mana, while asleep and hungover.
He hurled slugs of clay at the worm while it was still reforming, which got its attention. It slithered towards Deacon, who kept lobbing clay right down the barrel of its mouth until all he could muster was weak dabs of it sputtering out. With the last of his energy, he solidified all of it at once, as he collapsed. Finding itself suddenly stuffed full of concrete, the bookworm attempted to recoil. The hardened clay, however, also sealed it to the mouth of its burrow.
Resorting to the only move it had left, the worm regurgitated more of its caustic acid. It began swelling up like a balloon, to the point its flesh became transparent. Marla then leapt, straight into the wound that never got the chance to be formed into a mouth. With the force of a cannonball, she kicked off of the stony blockage, making enough kinetic energy to sprain every joint and fracture every bone in her legs. The equal and opposite reaction to her action made a wave that carried all of the worm’s acid back to the source and apparently popped something vital.
The Great and Deadly Bookworm withered and died over the heads of the two battered and spent adventurers. As a creature whose physical makeup was so mana-saturated, it swiftly dried into a husk, once slain. Chasms cracked open in its skin as it raisined, and mana-gems rained down from the black cavity within. More magically charged than the ones dropped by smaller monsters, these mana-gems were plumb-sized and ranged from orange to yellow in coloration. As the gems rained down, the cave gradually folded in on itself as the unstable subspace pocket collapsed.
When it became apparent that the room was closing in around them, Marla and Deacon were forced to crawl and drag their broken bodies to the door. They narrowly evaded being condensed into a singularity outside of spacetime as the door flattened into a wall behind them. The only remainder of their reward was the (still considerable) pile of mana-gems that were dragged along.
The pair propped themselves up against a wall and held onto their last vestiges of consciousness. So much raw magic resonated through Deacon that it was nauseating. “I need to level up.”
“Same,” Marla agreed. “Not exactly a safe place to do it, but I think the only way we’re walking out of here is with the phoenix effect.”
Deacon didn’t have the strength to comment. He let his muscles fall limp and cleared his mind. His inner space formed around him, but it was wrong, somehow. His vision of his spiritual refuge sporadically flickered and warped. In terror, the thought occurred to him that he might have multiplied the riskiness of his rushed level up. Ascending to a new rank in an environment stricken with diseased magic now seemed like a stupid idea.
Deacon was dumbfounded when a star symbolizing a whole new blessing drifted up from the reflecting pool. He wasn’t expecting to unlock a secondary blessing so early. He focused on it to learn its name. The response that came to his mind’s eye puzzled him: s̴͔̥͖̐̂̏̉̉͋t̴̡̜̻̞̜͑ͅr̷̹͑͛̌͆̚a̵̡̞̭̜̫̋̎͘ń̷̜̽̀̓̔ḡ̸̢̬̠̯̥̜͒e̴̯̠̱̤͈͑̀̾͜ ̷̦̔̌̏̕͠e̴̫̯̟̦̅̈́̈͗̆͝ṇ̸̺̒̌ȩ̷̡̘͇̝̊ṛ̶̨̃̎́̈́͝g̴̡̺͍̰̜̈́́̿̂y̵̯͕̻̋̒͗̕. He couldn’t intuit any further information from the blessing. Even his new abilities were obscured from him.
With no other choice, he unanchored his attention and simply breathed while he was refreshed into the next iteration of his magical body. Once ready, he let go of his inner space and drifted back to the material plane. He was immediately confused. He tried to open his eyes, but somehow it didn’t seem to work. “Marla?!”
“What’s up, buddy,” he was relieved to hear.
“I’m blind.”