Below the streets of Mirrakatetz were several layers of carved floors, and as we glided down into the dark I could see them pass us by like a highrise that had been cut in half: layers of pipes and chains, rooms with upended furniture, stairwells and hallways and more. Then we landed on a pile of rubble and looked ahead at what must have been a part of Mirrakatetz’s Great Machine.
It seemed to me like a gigantic boiler of some kind—dark red light emanated from a grille attached to a massive metal tank, pipes extending past it into the dark. A chain, its links each as wide as the length of my arm, was stretched taught, emerging from the darkness beyond the machine to be fed into it via a slot on its upper body. Each second the chain lurched forward a few feet and the machine emitted a tremendous grinding noise.
Before the machine, lying on the ground, were more of the demonic spiders—only these weren’t like the ones we’d seen above: they were mutated and deformed. The closest had what might have been sixteen legs all moving in opposing directions, its body a hideous fusion of several heads on one torso. It was twitching and haphazardly skittering across the ground before us, moving in random patterns as its many mouths squealed. Behind it was a sparsely-legged chain of several bulbous spider bodies, immobile in a pool of spewed webbing.
“I hate them, Alatar,” Cuby said, looking away as her grip tightened on her swords.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing her arm and running past the impotent demons. We saw more forms on the ground—a few morthoths with too many arms and no legs, a headless heap of flesh that rolled and bucked on the ground like a fish….
But I took us past all these, flaring my candle-flame to better see in the cavernous dark. Look, Cuby, I said. The potential cost of you losing the True Sight buff is far worse than how you feel when you look at the spiders.
It’s their legs….
If it helps, this is very human of you.
“It sort of helps!” she said as we approached another one of the machines and I turned to follow the chain further. The chamber we were in was massive, several storeys high and as big as a city block, and as we followed its outer walls we found a broad, street-sized hallway much like the one above—and only a little ways into the hallway was a wall of burning red light.
Four glowing runes flanked this curtain of hellish light, each of them set into the walls beside it—but while two of them blazed brightly, the other two were so dim they could barely be seen. And as we approached, two things happened: one of the runes flickered and died, and a bruised, dirt-streaked woman in a tattered brown dress bearing the distinct translucent appearance of an illusion appeared before us.
“Please,” she began. “Free—”
“Where’s number four?” I asked. “Just tell us or point.”
“The gnomes—”
“Who do we have to kill?” I said, cutting her off as my voice rose. “Just show us—quickly!”
The woman seemed taken aback for a moment. “The imprisoned,” she said, pointing to what might have been one corner of the room behind. “She guards the feeding chamber in the chasm below. You must destroy her if you are to—”
But her voice faded as I grabbed Cuby’s hand, yanking her in the direction of the other room and then leaping away as Cuby followed. I’m surprised the true sight didn’t show us she was a demon, I said.
What?
The woman, I said. She’s the final boss.
Are you sure?
Just trust me, I said. We’re in a dungeon. Freeing something trapped behind a curtain of pure energy that can only be opened by killing four bosses—that’s the last boss.
If you’re certain….
We reached the corner she’d pointed to after running past more of the horrifically disfigured monsters, finding a hallway that opened, after a short distance, to a massive chasm that stretched out to either side of us. A dilapidated stone stairwell led into the dark, but I just leapt and used my Charm of Gliding to follow the stairwell down.
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This is good, Cuby said, nodding toward the stairwell. All this vastness. Their group won’t be nearly as fast as we are.
A red light bathed the ground below us, which was clearly strewn with bones, guts, and giblets. I saw the corpses of some of the mutated spiders, and then some of the mutated morthoths, and then we glided past a huge metal apparatus with a hopper that had been stuffed with the grisly demonic remains, spider’s legs and limp arms hanging out of it.
Then we landed—except it wasn’t land. What we’d taken for the floor of the ravine had really been a layer of dirt and detritus that rested atop a hip-deep level of muck, a swampy layer of guts, parts, and stagnant water. The smell of death was overpowering, and both of us gagged as soon as we landed. I searched around for some kind of island, but Cuby made a little table with the Hardlight Construct and we both clambered aboard.
“These sensations are… very unpleasant!” Cuby said, sounding like she was going to be sick.
“The clarity potion isn’t helping with this one,” I agreed.
Then the gory swamp ahead of us bubbled and suddenly burst into a shower of grotesque slop as a monstrosity heaved itself out of its hidden depths. It almost looked like a cross between a spider and a scorpion, but somehow unfinished, as if it had been birthed too early: its segmented body was covered in patchwork chitinous plating, white flesh exposed in spots. A tail rose up behind it, and four of the bladed front legs that I knew to belong to the demon spiders were grafted to its shoulders, probing at the air ahead of it like antennae. Its face was a slimy, distorted human’s—the skin of the jaw seemingly stretched to translucence over a pair of insectile mandibles which drooled a pinkish slime.
Erialda Mel – Level 15 Boss – Prisoner of Flesh
Quest Unlocked – The Prisoner’s Release
It began to skitter toward us, fast for a creature its size, its eight legs grasping the sides of the cliffs around us.
If you need to drink your potion—
“No!” Cuby cried. Then, in the mind link, she conveyed to me her reasoning in the space of an instant: if either of the enemy chosen took the Master of Illusion boon, losing her True Sight buff would spell instant loss to any kind of sophisticated illusion or invisibility spell. Cuby was simply going to power through the disgust and terror of fighting this nightmare in the middle of a swamp of gore.
The boss reached us, and its four grafted leg-blades struck forward. Two of them hit me, but Mana Shield now had 566 Absorb, and took only a little more than 200 damage. Cuby, beside me, took the damage as well—and then she leapt onto the creature’s back and started attacking it with her swords. The stinger came down, fast, and Cuby began using her acrobatics to avoid it—but the stinger attacks kept coming, and she bailed a moment later as it struck her for almost 200 and left her with a lightning-fire debuff that did very little damage on account of her Saint’s Purity and her off-hand’s 50% reduction.
Meanwhile the monster had spat a glob of mucus at me, and I’d used my Moment of Mastery, thinking of the paralytic poison that the spiders had used. I leapt into the air, then glided a short distance toward the metal apparatus I’d seen earlier, the one that was stuffed with mutant demon parts, landing on some of its upper plating to cast another Hardlight Construct for Cuby, who was hip-deep in the swamp once again.
Then I started casting another Moment of Mastery as Cuby leapt up onto another platform of hardlight and attacked the legs of the demon, which rounded on her, letting out a horrid, pained groan as it started attacking her with its bladed appendages and—worse—began to speak:
“Can I come up now, Axxonni?” it wailed in a voice that was so distorted I couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or woman. “I put the meat in like you wanted—I put the meat in good!”
Cuby hit it with a few of my augmented Purging Radiances, dodging the globs of paralytic spit and using her abilities to easily take the damage—the Mana Shield broke, but her Hit Points went down by slivers.
Then Erialda’s tail turned to me and shot a bolt of crackling fire through the air. I decided not to dodge it—and then was surprised as it grew closer, realizing that the bolt wasn’t aimed for me, but for the hopper that had been stuffed full of dead, mutated demons.
The bolt struck their bodies, and I didn’t have time to see what happened—the next I knew I had been blasted through the air to smash into the wall on the other side of the ravine, my body filled with metal shrapnel and my Hit Points at just over 500. The bodies had detonated like explosives.
I fell away from the wall, dazed, and plunged into the corrupted water, struggling to get to my feet as I heard, through the water, the sloshing of the thing’s massive legs. I pushed myself up to my feet, breaking the surface and wiping my eyes—only to see the deformed face of Erialda only feet from my own.
“I put the meat in!” she screamed.
My stomach lurched. I could have retched. A distant part of my mind thought: they could have done anything. Anything they wanted.
But somewhere, at some cursed time, someone—probably a human, too—had chosen this fucking shit over two catgirls.
And I would never understand.