Adgito could smell the vrochthízo long before she saw them. When she, Darron, and Shara snuck by a passageway deeper into the mountain, they were immediately assaulted by an overwhelming scent of rotting flesh. Shara had wasted no time declaring that it was the correct way to go, much to Adgito’s dismay. Adgito had no idea how she could smell things when she didn’t even seem to breathe, but the fact was that she could and the cave smelled awful.
Adgito felt no need to mention this out loud, however. As usual, Darron had a frustratingly good point about Adgito’s body. It didn’t make a lot of sense on a good day, but lava form was extra strange. Adgito felt like a woman-shaped water balloon, as if some thin, overstretched membrane was the only thing keeping her bubbly insides from popping and spilling all over the ground. Yet she could take her hand and stick it right through her torso if she wanted, the strange forces keeping her together not even seeming to notice that they were crossed up.
Adgito picked a small stone up off the ground, marveling at how her liquid body could maintain a grip on it in the first place. With a bit of conscious effort, she let the rock sink into her palm, where it slowly began to melt away and assimilate with her form. It felt like letting a piece of candy dissolve on her tongue, except that it didn’t taste like anything and it wasn’t in her mouth. ...It felt something like that, anyway.
Adgito noticed that Shara had suddenly stopped moving, putting up her hand to indicate she should do the same. Adgito managed to notice before walking into the back of the group, and made a mental note to try and pay a bit more attention so she didn’t accidentally burn anyone. She had already been walking a good ten feet behind the two siblings, but still managed to close most of that distance before noticing what they had been doing.
“I sense one,” Shara whispered, turning towards her. It was so quiet that Adgito had to figure out half of what she was saying by watching her lips. “From here on out, no one talks but me. We’re going to get as close as we can without it noticing us. Nod if you understand.”
Adgito and Darron nodded. The three of them made their way down the cave tunnel, crouching low. Adgito did her best to not glow like a thousand degrees of molten rock, to her complete and utter failure. Stealthy!
The cave got darker as they descended deeper, the narrow walls of the passage having fewer pools of lava to light the way than the massive chamber behind them. However, painful, screeching noises echoed down the hallway as the team got closer, allowing Adgito to easily identify the vrochthízo when they stumbled upon it.
From a distance, the creature looked like the silhouette of a naked child, but its dark profile wasn’t simply the result of poor lighting. Every part of the creature’s body was pitch black, like a cloudy, moonless night, giving the impression of a three-dimensional shadow. The childlike figure was only skin-deep, however. The creature sat hunched over one of its siblings, its back turned to Adgito and her companions. It was using the long, scythe-like blades it had instead of hands to pin its brother to the ground, whose wails of pain erupted with extra vigor as the dominant vrochthízo took another bite out of its victim’s leg.
“What the titan’s testicles…?” Adgito muttered before Shara sent a piercing look to shut her up.
It looked like an elaborate torture session more so than an animal eating. Why not put the thing out of its misery? The other vrochthízo was wailing loudly enough to draw Shara’s party towards it and cover up Adgito’s instinctive swear, so it clearly wasn’t doing any favors to the hungry winner.
Wait, Shara had mentioned something about vrochthízo only eating their prey alive. Is that what this was? Starting with the limbs so they could get more bites out of their prey before they keeled over? No wonder these freaks were such high priority hunting targets, this was messed up.
“Alright,” Shara whispered, “Adgito, this one’s your mark. I want you to try and kill both of them with a blast of lava.”
Hold on, what? Adgito hadn’t been expecting that. Wasn’t this a stealth mission? Lava blasts aren’t very stealthy.
“That thing’s wailing is more than enough to draw attention to the tunnel here,” Shara suddenly explained. “If anything was going to head this way, it already is. It makes more sense to give you some practice with your abilities, before we get into a real fight.”
Adgito supposed that made sense. She didn’t really want to risk firing lava all over a confined space, though. She could kill more than just some monsters if she messed up.
“It’s okay,” Shara whispered without prompting. “That kind of fear will help you focus; it’s good to worry about hitting us. You’ve got this.”
Adgito sighed. Shara was a little bit... too insightful. It probably had to do with that lie detector magic she had, or something. Adgito made a mental note to ask more about that later, a fact that Shara distinctly didn’t react to.
Now, how to do this, exactly? Adgito usually spent what little attention she paid her abilities on not hurting things with them. Actually shooting lava wouldn’t be too hard; the main problem was what lava. Adgito had telekinetic control over the stuff at a pretty solid distance, but there wasn't much to work with down here. A few slowly-cooling puddles were dotted here and there, but the biggest source of lava was Adgito herself, and she probably couldn’t just shoot her own body at it.
Wait, actually, could she? That would be pretty sweet. She could probably fly or something! Adgito tried it for a little while, but like most of her best ideas it didn’t work. She found she could separate bits of lava from her body and control that, at which point it was just regular lava. She could also slurp it back up into her form, making it part of herself again. Neat, but unhelpful; she’d want to fire more than just a little glob to ensure her targets went down with one shot, and it didn’t look like her body would let her remove large amounts of its mass at once. Which was probably for the best, really. Adgito was glad to have any safety features she ended up with, titans know she needed them.
“Why not just crush them by pulling a giant rock down from the ceiling?” Darron asked, crashing Adgito’s pity party and earning an annoyed look from Shara.
“Um, because I can’t control rocks? Duh?” Adgito responded quietly. “I have lava powers, not rock powers.”
“That’s stupid,” Darron asserted. “Magma is just superheated stone. What kind of ridiculous magic would give you supreme kinetic control over only a specific set of chemical compounds, only when mixed into certain aggregates, and only when it’s above a certain temperature? It would be easier to just make a spell that moves anything than to make one with all those limitations.”
“Well I apparently also can’t move myself,” Adgito responded, “so there’s that too.”
“That’s even worse,” Darron groaned, rubbing his forehead. “I swear, your natural abilities are absurd enough to be titanic. You’ve probably got the secrets to some entirely new branch of magic locked up in your aura, and you’re not even remotely interested in exploring them. If you can’t control solid rock, why not try melting a bunch of rock into more magma, and using that?”
Geez. Adgito bet Darron had never had a date in his grumpy, nerdy life. Dude needed to get laid, in her humble opinion. Not that she was really an expert on the subject.
Still, he’d given her a good idea. As Shara stifled down a laugh for some reason, Adgito focused on letting the lava that comprised her feet flow outside the vague confines on her body, applying their heat to the rock below her. The more she focused on it, the hotter her legs became, and pretty soon she began to sink into a small puddle of magma. Darron and Shara backed a little further away as it spread, and Adgito prepared to launch it.
Funneling the extra magma she created up through her legs, she gathered the mass into a bulge in her arms before firing it all as a pressurized pillar. The newborn vrochthízo that had been too unobservant to notice the commotion behind it thus far continued its obliviousness into oblivion, it and its meal consumed by glowing orange death.
“Nice shot!” Shara whispered, giving Adgito a thumbs up. “Now we just gotta work on your speed. Not every enemy is going to wait around to be an easy target.”
The tunnel got darker as they went deeper, until Adgito herself was the only source of light. This rendered further ambushes nearly impossible, so Shara took point, hacking the juvenile vrochthízo open in a couple clean swings. Shara had Adgito fire off her small lava globs fairly often as well, in an attempt to improve her aim. The smaller masses of magma didn’t cause an instant kill when they hit, but they were more than threatening enough to demand attention, creating openings Shara could use to cleave her targets in two.
Darron, on the other hand, didn’t seem to do much of anything, claiming he was “just here for support,” and that he should “save his strength for when he was needed.” What a blowhard.
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The stench of rotten flesh was worse the deeper they got, as were the frequency of vrochthízo attacks. They would often stumble on half-eaten bodies in the dim light, a veritable cornucopia of corpses. Most of them looked similar to Adgito’s first kill: a naked child with hooked, black teeth and a random assortment of other demonic features: claws, scythes, tails with poisonous stingers or blades… each one was slightly different. Some of them abandoned a humanoid look entirely, appearing as some horrifying amalgamate of snake or insect or beast. Shara insisted that those, to, were vrochthízo. They shared the same pitch-black eyes, skin, and teeth as their brethren, if nothing else.
“On your guard,” Shara suddenly whispered, holding up her arm to stop the party. “Mommy’s here.”
Adgito froze. Well, figuratively. This was it, huh? Darron looked intently at his sister.
“She hasn’t noticed us yet,” Shara said, “But that won’t last long with Adgito working as a beacon. She’s already done laying eggs, so this will be a tough fight. She’s… smart. I think she understands language, actually?”
Yeah, Shara definitely had something a wee bit more than lie detection if she was picking up all that. Now probably wasn’t the best time to pry, but boy howdy did Adgito really want to.
“I don’t think we can manage stealth here,” Shara whispered, cutting Adgito off before she could ask. “Darron, you walk in thirty feet behind me. Adgito, light the place up. Darkness is to her advantage. Prepare as much terrain as you can, just leave us an escape route.”
Adgito nodded and got to heating up. It looked like the cave opened up into a larger chamber where the vrochthízo lord no doubt waited. Or at least, Adgito hoped it was a lord? Shara made it sound like there were other titles that were even worse.
Getting her body temperature as high as she could manage, Adgito started to leave molten footprints in her wake as she walked around the room, trying to spread the dim light. The piles of dead vrochthízo were more prominent here, forcing her to incinerate a few instead of going around them. As she got further in, she noticed shattered chips of what appeared to be eggshells scattered amongst the bodies. Fairly soon, there was enough light in the room to see the nest itself.
What must have been hundreds of eggs, possibly more, were piled nearly fifteen feet high in an unceremonious heap. The impromptu structure extended back into the massive cave, beyond where Adgito’s glow currently reached. While many of the eggs were shattered and empty, a terrifying number of them remained undisturbed, no doubt waiting to hatch.
“What a strange set of meals you are,” a voice hissed from the darkness, ragged and cruel. It was the vocal equivalent of dunking your arm in light acid; a tingling, burning irritant that threatened horrifying pain if you left it for too long. “What foolishness draws you here?”
“Oh, we just got lost!” Shara responded cheerfully. “We were hoping you’d be kind enough to direct us to the northwest exit? Your little ones were hospitable but they didn’t seem to know the way.”
Silence reigned for a few moments before a hacking, hissing noise crescendoed in its place, a terrifying rumble that Adgito could only interpret as twisted laughter.
“I’m afraid I must decline, bold human,” the terrible voice spoke, “I have been watching over my kids for so long I seem to have gotten rather famished. I simply must partake in a meal before I will be of any use to you.”
“Ah, a shame,” Shara responded, raising her sword, “Thank you anyway. I suppose we will simply leave you in the company of the children we passed on the way here.”
Without warning, a massive figure burst out of the darkness like it had been fired from a giant’s ballista. At least twenty-feet long, the pitch-black creature’s snake-like body possessed four arms, each wrist tipped with a mantis-like blade almost as long as Adgito was tall. The monster’s gaping mouth and hooked black teeth shreaked past Adgito on a collision course with Shara’s torso. Shara ducked the savage projectile, danced between her outstretched claws and brought her sword up into the vrochthízo’s underbelly. A resounding clang rang out as her blade connected with a hard black exoskeleton, drawing no blood but knocking the enormous monster off-course, causing her to crash into a wall near the entrance to the cave.
If Adgito currently had a bladder, she would have peed herself.
“Oh, whoops!” Shara cooed, circling around the crash site so a second leap wouldn’t send the monster towards Adgito or Darron. “Sorry about that! Are you sure we can’t work this out like civilized people?”
“Aren’t you a cheeky little morsel?” the vrochthizo growled, rubbing her belly with a forearm where Shara had struck her. “That almost stung.”
“More or less than losing all your unhatched eggs will?” Shara asked.
With a roar, the vrochthízo lord charged Shara, barely missing her with blade after blade that would likely cleave the comparatively tiny girl in twain. Shara patiently waited for opportunities to strike and mercilessly took them, but while their force seemed to surprise the monster they didn’t seem to injure it.
Adgito took this time to entrench herself, pouring heat into the ground and making as large of a magma pool as she could manage. If Shara couldn’t slice that thing’s outer layer off, maybe Adgito could melt it off? The lord was pushing Shara back into a darker part of the cave, so Adgito fired off a few lava blobs there to light the way and prepared for a more substantial attack.
Not wanting to blow her entire load and risk hitting Shara, Adgito prepared an orb of magma about the size of her head and launched it experimentally at the first sign of an opening. Adgito pumped her fist as the attack struck true, nailing the monster in the pit of her lower set of arms.
“What is your stupid little glowing friend doing?” the vrochthízo asked with a growl.
“Uh, shooting lava at you, best I can tell,” Shara huffed between dodges. “Is that a problem?”
“No, it’s rather relaxing, actually. I’ve eaten so many salufidi in my time I’ve grown to enjoy their strange indulgences.”
Ah, good. A new low. Adgito was in mortal combat with a house-length monster in the middle of an active volcano, and she had been reduced to a glorified massage therapist for the enemy. She continued pattering the beast with more lava bursts out of sheer defiance, hoping to at least serve as a distraction.
It worked a little too well. Already annoyed with her primary prey’s slippery fighting style, the vrochthízo lord opted to make a sudden turn and launch herself at Adgito, mouth stretched wide with the intent of swallowing her whole. Shara stepped in to intercept, landing a heavy blow on the beasts’ underbelly once again.
This time, the monster was ready for it. She curved into Shara’s strike, whipping her head around and taking a solid bite out of Shara’s right arm, tearing out and swallowing most of her tricep. Shara screamed in pain but quickly regained focus, avoiding the follow-up claw strikes from her enemy. However, with her main arm hanging limp and losing blood fast, Shara had no chance of lasting long without medical attention.
Adgito wasn’t even a distraction, she was a burden. Enraged at her own incompetence, she drew up her strength and poured it into the only thing her current form was really capable of: gathering a massive amount of magma. Heat flared in the room as a giant ball of molten death coalesced above Adgito’s head.
“Your idiot friend doesn’t pay attention,” the vrochthízo lord taunted as Shara’s dodges grew more and more sluggish. “I swim in volcanoes. I drink them. I laid my children in their depths. No amount of heat is going to harm me.”
It was at this point the massive sideways-geyser of magma plowed into the monster, sending her careening across the cavern and barrelling into the far side of the room with enough force to impact her a solid foot into the wall. The magma continued piling onto her, burying the beast under endless litres of molten liquid.
After all, magma is just superheated stone. And liquid or not, that much stone was very, very heavy.
“Ha! Nice job, Adgito!” Shara exclaimed, leaping back to a pile of vrochthízo corpses where Darron had been making himself look non-threatening. “Keep up the pressure, she’s still alive! Drown her out!”
Adgito nodded and redoubled her efforts, pulling the excess magma that had splashed around the impact site back into the main blob. Creating two circular currents, Adgito grinded the monster further into the wall as she struggled to escape.
“Do you think you have time for a deeper check-up, Darron?” Shara asked as her brother started to restore the missing flesh in her arm, “That bite felt… wrong. Like she ate more than arm.”
Adgito was quickly finding herself in an untenable position: the lava she was using to hold the vrochthízo lord in place was cooling off. If it hardened and trapped the monster underneath, that would be swell, but it was far more likely to reach a point where it was too cool for Adgito to exert any control over, but not cool enough to stop the creature from breaking free.
“Your barrier’s a bit weaker than usual,” Darron told Shara. “It’s possible that she consumed some of your magical aura.”
“That sounds… bad,” Shara grimaced. “Is that bad?”
Adgito approached the area she was trapping the vrochthízo lord in. If she wanted to maintain control of the lava, it had to still be lava.
“It’s not good. I can’t heal it, but it will restore itself eventually,” Darron explained. “More than anything it’s interesting. It would take a uniquely specialized system to trap and consume the magical aura in a person’s body when you bite off their flesh. It’s possible that’s what the vrochthízo actually eat: aura. If so, the meat is just a necessary vessel, which explains why they abandon it when their victim dies. Aura leaves the body on death, or more accurately, you die when your magical aura leaves your body. So–”
“Darron,” Shara cut him off, “Focus, please.”
“On what? I already finished your arm.”
“Oh.”
Adgito stuck both her arms into her makeshift magma prison, pouring heat back into the cooling stone and redoubling the efforts on her current grinder. It was at this point when she felt a strange sense of vertigo as her torso was separated from her legs at the waist, lifted ten feet into the air, and flipped upside-down. The vrochthízo lord swallowed.
“I told you, your friend just doesn’t pay attention,” she taunted in her horrible, guttural voice that shook Adgito’s body from all sides. “Although that was a wonderful massage. I feel like I ate a whole village!”
Sliding down the monster’s gullet, Adgito’s surprised and horrified body recognised itself to be in serious disrepair. Seeking outward, Adgito's powers acquired information from the closest and most prominent source, and took it for their own. Adgito felt her torso elongate and replace her missing legs with a long, snake-like tail. She felt her body solidify as a second pair of arms burrowed out the sides of her body. She felt her hands fuse together into long blades, her skin harden into chitinous armor, and her teeth elongate into curved, black fangs.
But more than anything else, she felt the hunger.