Turns out Homing Weapon was not a Guaranteed Hit, as the flappy asshats were still able to swoop out of the way of my thrown ax, technique be damned. The ability guided the weapon toward my target, but the ax didn’t turn on a dime when the chosen creature dodged last second.
It had perhaps been a bit optimistic to assume that I, with three visits to the ax-throwing range for a round of tossing axes while tossing back beers, would be able to outshoot Nuralie, a trained archer, even with my shiny new method of death-dealing.
After four throws, I’d managed to down just one, and the superstar I’d toppled was struggling back onto its… legs?
The starfish was not in a good way, but it was still in the fight. It had a score of holes across its body, mostly on its limbs where my attacks had been focused. My wand had been next to useless, as the magic bolts it shot had taken chunks out of the surface of the limbs without penetrating. My two Oblivion Orb-infused attacks were the only ones that had gone deep and damaged the internal muscle, and I suspected that the paralytic arrows Nuralie had fired were responsible for most of the monster’s present sluggishness.
I was preparing for round three, estimating my chances of killing the creature with the three uses of Nimean Weapon I had left in my vanishing mana pool when I heard Varrin let out a savage scream.
I chanced a look in his direction and saw him grappled in the center of the mega-hand he and Xim had been fighting, but his greatsword had been run through his opponent’s center. The whole body of the starfish shuddered as Varrin let out a victory cry. Then, it toppled forward onto him.
Varrin’s jubilance turned to violent swears as he disappeared beneath the beast, and Xim turned to scan the battle, eyes fixing on me.
“Aim for the center!” she shouted, then rushed to try and lift the Hand off of Varrin. The thing was huge, but she was no slouch for Strength, and neither was Varrin. They might pull it off.
Even if I’d wanted to help them, I had my own battle to fight before I could.
As the semi-paralyzed Hand stood, I looked over its center, trying to see what Xim had been talking about. I noticed a single, large wound where one of my wand bolts had struck it in the middle, and it was much larger and deeper than any of the others.
“Fucking starfish has a weak spot in the center,” I grumbled as I tossed my ax at another Eye, then pulled out Arbitros. I spun it so that its spike was facing forward and began running at the monster. “Who would have guessed?”
I ignored any semblance of defense, gripping the hammer in two hands and charging, winding up for one big swing. When I got within the Hand’s reach, its three upper limbs all crashed down toward me, but I was already bringing the hammer around laterally while using one of my few remaining activations of Nimean Weapon. The spike hit home as all three limbs smashed down onto my back, and Oblivion Orb popped off inside of the five-limbed monster’s middle.
I was crushed into the ground by its attack, but I felt a shudder go through the monstrous Hand, and then I found myself in the same position as Varrin, buried underneath its substantial bulk.
Perhaps it was their deadman’s switch. Attack the center to kill it, it flops over on top of you, killing you right back.
Fortunately, while the crush-and-tackle combo had taken away a nice chunk of my health bar, I was still far from dead, although I felt the familiar sharp pain of cracked ribs.
HP: 370 -> 298
“Got mine!” I yelled, knowing there was little chance anyone heard me through the corpse encompassing my whole body. It was more for myself than anything.
Several of the sub-hands continued to grasp and claw at my back, but they were rapidly going limp. I was face down on the floor and mildly dismayed when the roots covering it began to wriggle up and around my neck.
“Nope, not doing that!” I said with a groan as I began the most challenging pushup of my life.
I imagined the floor as my most hated enemy, which it may as well have been given that it was actively trying to strangle me, and tried to shove it away with everything I had. I was able to do infinite pushups with a Strength of nine, so I damn well better be able to do one ultra-pushup with a Strength of ten.
My jaw was set and I felt blood pounding in my head as I tightened my core into a sheet of steel and pressed. I went up an inch, then another, until the fleshy roots around my neck were straining and beginning to snap. The creature’s scent filled my nose and I focused on my breath, exhaling the smell of rot and soil through clenched teeth. I was able to bring up a knee and wedge it into the ground, then lock my elbows.
The mass on top of me was heavy, but it also covered a lot of ground. Some of the weight was distributed onto the floor around me, allowing me to form a little Arlo-cocoon in the center. Warm, sappy blood poured down on top of me, and one resilient sub-pinky was giving me a bloody wet-willy.
I managed to crawl forward, snapping away roots from my wrists and ankles as I went, until I found the edge of the starfish and squeezed out from beneath it. I took a deep breath of somewhat fresher air, then pushed to standing. I turned around, realizing that I’d left my hammer beneath the thing. Guess I’ll get that back later.
I checked my HUD and looked at the fight, trying to see where I would be needed next. Six of the Eyes still fluttered. Xim had Varrin by the wrists and was pulling him from beneath their corpse. Shog looked like he’d taken Xim’s advice and had reversed the tide of his fight, now clawing wildly at his monster’s center. The starfish lifted its body from the ground, then smashed down on top of Shog, but the c’thon had the same number of fucks to give as a dagnab honey badger. Etja…
Etja had just run out of mana.
I reached out to Gracorvus, the shield still hanging in the air where it had intercepted the acidic attack on Nuralie, and commanded it to fly toward Etja. It left a trail of caustic smoke in its wake, which was concerning. It would be a pretty dick move to break the gift Varrin’s family had given me on the same day I’d received it.
The Hand that Etja’d been wrangling hit the ground with a thud and flopped itself upright. I ran toward the pair of them, but my shield made it there first, swinging around the Hand and between it and Etja. I didn’t know how anchored Gracorvus was while in flight mode. It had stopped Varrin’s full-power greatsword swing and hadn’t budged when hit by the Bloom’s super-soaker attack.
The Hand showed me that my shield was not an immovable object as its arm bashed into the targe twice, before a third hit sent Gracorvus’ slabs scattering across the battlefield. Either it wasn’t strong enough to weather repeat attacks of that force, or it had been weakened by the bloom’s acid.
I had enough mana for one final Shortcut in me but I didn’t want to burn my final use of the tactic if I didn’t have to. I pulled a spear from my inventory, aimed for the center of the monster’s back, then used Homing Weapon to turn my amateur javelin throw into an Olympic-level shot. The spear buried itself in the Hand, making its limbs recoil backward toward the injury, just as a beam of crimson light blasted down from the sky on top of it.
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The Hand, and my spear, were engulfed by Xim’s divine fire as the last of cleric’s mana bar blinked away as well. The monster cartwheeled, its spinning, flaming body causing me to pause and appreciate the absurdity of my present life circumstances.
The thing had the ‘roll’ down, but had forgotten the ‘stop and drop’ bit. I guess they didn’t teach basic fire safety in divine monstrosity school.
However, the Hand’s trajectory wasn’t panicked or aimless. It rolled right back at the person who’d tried to incinerate it. Xim dove behind the corpse of the horror-star Varrin had killed, while the big man wiped a bloody hand off on a towel I assumed he kept in his inventory for that very purpose.
Varrin tossed the cloth to the floor, then adjusted his grip on his greatsword and prepared to receive the acrobatic charge. His health was in bad shape, and I didn’t like the odds of him in a one-on-one with a Hand of burning death that was graded for someone with four times as many bonus stats, regardless of the monster’s current status as a blackened seafood skewer.
I prepared to cast my final Shortcut to join Varrin in his fight when the Hand began to veer off course. Varrin held his ground, calmly watching as the monster rolled several feet to the side of him, continuing forward until it crashed into the wall beyond.
[I have… isolated the Eyes in the Bloom’s mind… but I need you to appreciate… how difficult this is.]
I looked up to the ceiling and saw the remaining Eyes twisting under Grotto’s mental attack. Some clutched tightly to their vines, but others fell from the air. It was an eerie sight, as neither Grotto nor the Eyes made any sound during their psychic struggle.
But that confirmed the core assumption our entire strategy relied on. Kill the Eyes, blind the hive. Nuralie had already pegged one of the agonized Eyes with an arrow, and I pulled out a pair of daggers from my inventory.
“Always wanted to do this,” I said as I used Homing Weapon to hurl the blades.
I doubted the same attack would do anything to the Hands, since the daggers weren’t magical and I didn’t think throwing a knife with any amount of force was enough of a Strength-attack to use my bonuses from Nimean Weapon. Hell, the daggers weren’t even throwing knives. Just regular daggers for stabbin’ and slashin’, preferably in the dead of night while wearing a tattered and hooded cloak.
The Eyes were not grade four monsters, however. They were grade none, which meant they were about as tough as bats from the way both of the technique-launched daggers tore through their Jack Russell Terrier-sized bodies. One got beamed by the hilt of the dagger, rather than the blade, and the ceiling was splattered with the Eye’s guts.
It was exactly as satisfying as I thought it would be. Who needed talent when you could just throw resources at the problem? That must be how rich people felt. Well, at this point I was a rich person, so it was how at least one rich person felt.
Nuralie finished off the Eye still perched on the ceiling, and I heard an awful squish, then turned to see Etja stomping on one that had fallen. Her bare foot was covered in ichor, and my brain forced me to imagine what that felt like between the toes.
[I have seen and felt many things in my long existence. Nothing has ever made me feel so disgusted as the thought you just had, and I don’t even have toes.]
[I am not responsible for my thought-crimes,] I psychic’d back at Grotto as Varrin found and boot-murdered the last Eye.
The ignited ultra-sea star righted itself and began to wheel around again but toward no one in particular. Shog finally finished dismembering his opponent, spreading his arms and tentacles out and unleashing an otherworldly victory cry. The other two lay dead in pools of thick blood, and the floor was littered with the slain Eyes, arrows sticking out of most of them.
The Bloom was an alien creature with unknowable thoughts and feelings–other than to Grotto, I supposed–but I could tell that it was deeply troubled by what had unfolded. The roots pulled at my ankles with increasing urgency, but they were easy enough to kick off when there weren’t thousand-pound jumbo gymnasts trying to grab you up or lay a smackdown. The Bloom swung its body in all directions, spraying deadly mist into the air and creating a skin-melting deterrent for anyone dumb enough to approach. It even vomited up the half-dissolved Praying Head, like a threatened snake.
Nuralie paced up beside me, sighed, and held out a hand. I placed a fresh quiver in it and she set it on the ground, then produced a large jar filled with a milky-yellow liquid and broke the wax seal around the top. Nuralie gingerly took off the lid and made sure it was stable, tucked in between the roots, before dipping an arrow in it. At last, she drew it back and aimed at the Bloom.
“What’s that?” I asked, nodding at the jar.
“Weedkiller,” she said. “I use it in my greenhouse.”
She loosed the arrow and it struck the Bloom, which whirled in our direction, spraying a fresh cloud of mist.
“You keep a greenhouse?”
Dip. Pull. Loose. Thud.
“It’s for alchemy.” Pause. “And my frogs.”
“And you just keep that in your inventory?”
She raised an eyeridge at me as she nocked another arrow.
“Where do you keep all your stuff?”
“Fair point.”
Loose. Thud. Plant-rage.
“How do you know it’ll work on that thing?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“If it doesn’t, you can throw something heavy at it.”
The Bloom didn’t look like it was winding up for another stream of death, so I was betting it only had the one good shot with that attack. It may have needed to refill its venom sacs. Poison sacs? It’s not like it had fangs or a stinger… either way, we were safe for the moment.
“I’d hate to spend more stamina if I don’t have to.”
Dip. Draw.
“This is why I like alchemy.” Loose. Thud. “I have as much as I can prepare.”
Thirty arrows later, and the Bloom sagged to one side, no longer pumping out mist. Nuralie gave it another ten or so plant-killer arrows for good measure. The rest of us did post-combat cleanup and recovery while Nuralie slowly ensured the monster’s doom, and until the air around it wouldn’t liquefy our lungs. Finally, we began the process of carefully dismembering the entity to reach the sub-obelisk. Everything wet inside of the creature was acidic, and everything inside of it was wet.
Nuralie again proved invaluable for this process, since she had her acid-proof gloves and a resistant smock for her alchemy. I used a halberd, which I discarded halfway through when the steel dissolved, and then a poleaxe, which also made its way into the junk pile by the time we finished.
My armory was taking a serious hit in this fight. The head of the battleax I’d been throwing had broken, the spear was a pile of ash, and both daggers were lost to space and time amidst the roots and bodies. The weapons had been trashed from the force of my throw, and didn’t fly back to me after breaking.
I did get the team involved in recovering Arbitros from beneath the Hand it was buried under. That one wasn’t mine to lose. It was on loan from Lito.
We did some vigorous rinsing of the obelisk from our collective waterskins and canteens before laying hands on it and channeling mana to undo the second lock. Another rumble and one spooky chime later, we were done.
“It’s interesting,” said Xim. “The obelisk is completely unharmed, despite being inside that thing.”
{A little bit of divinely-attuned, flesh-and-steel-dissolving acid wouldn’t hurt one of these obelisks,} Cage thought to us. {They’re tougher than that!}
“And you were worried about my explosion spell?”
{Not really! Just trying to be encouraging. Go get ‘em, big mage guy! Er, big… tank guy! Wait, what role are you trying to be?}
“I’m a-”
“We should move on,” said Varrin. “This already took us longer than I’d like.”
“True,” I said. “We’ll have to make do with the resources we’ve recovered.”
Xim had taken Nuralie’s final mana potion while we worked, and the rest of the effect on Etja’s had run its course as well. Xim had a smaller mana pool, so hers was now looking fairly healthy, but Etja was only back to a third.
I’d taken a break back out in the hall to keep Shog around, where the divine mana interference ended. Walk into the room, divine interference. Step out of the room, mega-mana regen. It was like a game of ‘the floor is lava’, and the logic of it was just as sensible.
{Wards!} was the extent of Cage’s input on the matter.
I was glad that I had one ability that used stamina rather than mana, since I was close to empty on the latter when we left the subchamber. Everything we’d done so far was just to unlock the ‘door’ to the central cage. I hoped we still had enough gusto for whatever we found behind it.