“Hoo-ee! Nice job, Darron!” Shara exclaimed, stretching her exhausted limbs, “I can’t even see the entrance to Mt. Phlegethos anymore, and we still haven’t burned to death!”
It had been a hard sprint to reach the cave mouth to Mt. Phlegethos, but the troops that had been dispatched to chase didn’t seem inclined to follow into the volcano. Darron claimed that a normal human would die of heatstroke in under an hour without magical assistance, and it would take a very powerful thermomancer to insulate the kind of manpower Elpis needed to take Shara and her crew down. The risk of being followed by Gadiel was there, but he seemed to deem his work in the city more important than a single fugitive.
“It’ll get hotter up ahead,” Darron claimed. “Let me know immediately if you start feeling uncomfortable. This is my first try at a spell like this, so it’ll take some trial and error.”
As much as Shara’s instincts demanded she crack some joke at her brother, the insulation spell Shara had banked on Darron inventing was serious business. There were dozens of flaws with it– most notably, Darron had designed it to function like a curse, drawing on the target’s innate magical power to sustain itself. While that reduced the strain on Darron, it could be very dangerous if conditions caused it to draw on too much power. Furthermore, if it somehow got dispelled or stopped working Shara would have to drop her barrier completely to allow Darron to cast it again, which could be lethal in an environment this hostile.
“Got it, bro,” Shara responded, and turned to her other companion. “Adgito, are you sure you’re okay without?”
The tall woman had denied getting a spell cast on her and wasn’t looking too good under the sweltering heat. She was sweating like crazy, panting like a dog as she staggered forward.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “I’ll be fine pretty soon. I’m just looking for… ah, here we go.”
The winding cave they were walking down took a bend, and as the trio turned the corner they saw it open up into an enormous, multi-layered cavern of terrifying beauty. Stone walkways stretched across bubbling pools of magma, some of them snaking upward towards the top of the chamber. Multiple stories of rock towered upwards, with magma falls cascading down and around them. The stone looked natural but the delibracy of everything in the room indicated it was artificially shaped, likely with an enormous amount of geomancy. The cavern glowed a soft red, giving the entire room a beautiful, alien atmosphere. Shara couldn’t help but stop to admire it.
“Yo, Darron, look away for a second,” Adgito commanded, as instead of admiring the scenery she immediately began to strip. Tossing her tattered shirt and Darron’s ruined pants towards Shara’s face, she dashed off towards the edge of the platform they were on and leapt off it, plummeting towards the magma below.
“Catapult stone!” she laughed, curling up into a ball mid-air and letting herself impact one of the hottest and most dangerous substances on the planet with a satisfying sploosh.
Shara just watched with a smile on her face while Adgito sunk beneath the surface of the magma pool. She could tell that Adgito didn’t consider whatever she was doing to be dangerous. In fact, Adgito seemed to be looking forward to this, which was relieving. The poor thing had been understandably down in the dumps since the gang had started fleeing from the Elpis army, and it was nice to see Adgito’s carefree attitude returning a bit, for a number of reasons.
From both a personal and pragmatic standpoint, Shara was invested in getting Adgito to continue traveling with herself and Darron. She liked the strange sometimes-woman. Her awkwardness adorable, like watching a three-legged puppy learn to walk. While most people’s would be annoying, Adgito’s social ineptitude was tempered with enough effort and genuine goodwill to be cute, if in a somewhat pitiable way.
Less pitiable was Adgito’s ridiculous powerset. Shara could understand the girl’s unwillingness to use her abilities due to the discomfort they provided, but she couldn’t really empathise with it. Yes, they did make Adgito feel terrible, but Shara had always been taught to not accept physical discomfort as an excuse. Adgito’s powers were unruly, difficult to control, and generally bothersome, sure, but they also seemed to render Adgito nearly invincible under the right conditions. She wasn’t unbeatable, but it would take a significant coordinated effort to bring her down.
Hence Shara’s pragmatic reasons for wanting Adgito to stick around. If she could shape that shapeshifter into even a slightly more competent brawler, the trio would gain a massive advantage in their future engagements with the enemy. An Adgito that is both capable and willing to adapt their form on the fly would decimate an inflexible unit of identically-trained conscripted soldiers. There were also other considerations, like the information Adgito could provide to Elpis if she ended up getting caught. Shara didn’t know how much Elpis knew about her and Darron’s abilities, their plans to reach Hydronia, or any of the other things they’ve shared with Adgito, but there was no point in making their intel gathering any easier than it needed to be.
All of these considerations hinged on one of two things: Adgito being too afraid of Elpis’ wrath to leave, or Adgito simply liking her company so much that she didn’t want to, ideally both. Each would keep the trio together and serve as much-needed encouragement for the lazy and reluctant Adgito to put more effort into training her abilities. Plus, the poor thing desperately needed a friend.
“So, um, is Adgito dead or something?” Darron asked. “He’s been down there a long time.”
Darron had ignored Adgito’s warning and watched with mild disinterest as she stripped and jumped into what would spell certain doom for most people. He had since wandered over to the cliff Adgito had jumped from, careful to avoid the splashes of magma that had pattered the ground, and was waiting for her to surface.
As if responding to his words, a feminine head suddenly formed up out of the magma with a gasping noise. A geyser of magma erupted immediately afterwards, pushing the head up and out of the magma pool towards the ledge Shara and Darron waited on. The head, along with the rest of its body, emerged from the geyser as a glowing red Adgito touched ground beside Darron, who jumped back in surprise.
“Wow! Okay!” Adgito said excitedly, “That was a lot deeper than I expected it to be.”
Adgito’s body was now made, as best Shara could tell, entirely out of magma. Her form kept the same general feminine shape, though it was a bit too goopy to display any private details. She looked like a mannequin-shaped lava lamp, glowing currents of convection traveling up and down her body in hypnotizing patterns.
“Presentiiing… lava form!” Adgito exclaimed, striking a gaudy pose and making jazz hands. “This is one of my personal favs. Nobody tries to hug lava form!”
“Magma form,” Darron corrected. “We’re currently underground. Also, how can you still talk?”
“Huh? Why wouldn’t I be able to talk?” Adgito asked.
“Because you don’t have a throat, or presumably any form of respiratory system. When you open your mouth there’s just more magma behind it.”
“Oh. Really?” Adgito proceeded to stick her hand into her mouth, making a surprised expression before removing it. “Wow, that’s really weird! I wouldn’t worry about it though, it’s probably magic.”
“Well obviously it’s magic. That doesn’t actually explain anything.”
“Okay, break it up you two!’ Shara said, clapping her hands for attention. “We’ve got a ways to go to get through Mt. Phlegethos and not a lot of time to waste. Does anyone know which way we’re going? Adgito, you seem like you’ve been made of lava before. Been here often?”
“Oh, uh, no,” Adgito said, “I was here once before, and I just kinda wandered around until I found the exit. I don’t know much of anything about the layout.”
“All I know is that we’re going north,” Darron said. “I have a magnetic spell that can point us the way, but that doesn’t tell us which passage or walkway will actually lead us there. We should probably aim for northwest, though. If we head northeast we’ll end up in Dynamo and have to cross through a second volcano to get back to the plains. I don’t trust my insulation spell enough for that.”
Shara nodded thoughtfully.
“Not great but not unexpected. Mt. Phlegethos is pretty tall, so we should make good time compared to climbing over it even if we stumble around. I guess we just start exploring in a vaguely northwesterly direction, and hope to either get lucky or run into a local?”
The three of them thus set out, with Darron keeping a mental map of their surroundings so they wouldn’t end up backtracking on accident. An hour into their search, they stumbled upon what appeared to be an exit on its third floor, but it merely led deeper into another, similar magmafall chamber. The view into this new room was equally majestic, but equally unhelpful.
For a while, Shara had been feeling steadily-growing worry from Adgito’s mind, and while she dismissed it initially as general unease at the situation, it was nagging enough that she now felt the need to address it.
“You look like you’ve got something on your mind, Adgito,” she prompted, “What’s up?”
“Hmm? Oh. It’s just that, last time I was here, this place had a ton more… things in it,” Adgito explained. “Living things. Like, there were animals and monsters all over the place, you could usually see a salufidi or two going for a swim, stuff like that. But now it’s just… empty.”
“Wait, I thought this place was too hot for things to live in.” Shara said.
“It’s too hot for humans to live in,” Darron corrected. “All sorts of thermophilic creatures evolved to enjoy the temperatures around Dynamo. I’d be very interested in going there to study if it wasn’t so likely to kill me.”
“So, why’s this place empty?” Shara asked. She had been stretching her extra sense out as far as it would go without so much as a hint at other signs of life.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Darron responded. “Maybe the salufidi cleared out the things living in here to make it easier to travel?”
“Eh, probably not,” Adgito countered, “when I was here the salufidi just kinda didn’t give two hoots about the monsters. I once saw this salufidi chick piss some fire-breathing pig off on purpose so it would blast her and melt all the hardened lava off her body. Those guys are crazy.”
The salufidi are a sapient species like humans that founded and lived in the nation of Dynamo, an area surrounded by active volcanoes like Mt. Phlegethos. Even outside the mountains, the natural temperature of their nation would overheat and eventually kill almost every other sapient race. Salufidi looked very much like humans from the waist up, although they had four arms and were completely covered with brick-red scales. From the waist down, they appeared to be snakes, slithering around on an enormous, legless tail. They subsisted on a diet of minerals that they somehow metabolized by intaking massive amounts of heat. Although salufidi could comfortably survive temperatures in the thousands of degrees, they would begin to freeze to death in what a human would consider to be a lukewarm day. Resultantly, they were seen very rarely outside their home nation. The salufidi nonetheless garnered a positive reputation around the world of Telemera for being helpful and welcoming to anyone that managed to survive visiting them, and had a healthy trade relationship with most of their neighbors.
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“Yeah, I appreciate your optimism, Darron, but if the salufidi cleared it to make it easier to travel, wouldn’t some of them be… I dunno, traveling it?” Shara asked.
“...A fair assessment,” Darron conceded, “but what other than the concentrated effort of a nation could systematically wipe out all life in here?”
“Um, quite a few things, actually,” Shara said, and began to list them off on her fingers. “A natural disaster, a dragon, a plague, a vrochthízo if it was old enough, a titan… frankly, most of those things would have an easier time than a nation, probably.”
Darron frowned and quickly began chanting a spell.
“...Well, I don’t think it’s a plague, at least,” he said once it finished.
“Are we all going to die?” Adgito asked.
“Naw,” Shara said, dismissing Adgito’s fear with a wave of her hand, “if it was some kind of natural disaster it seems to be over now, and if it’s one of the others we’ll be able to handle it one way or another. Probably.”
It was at this point that the party crested over a steep upward slope and beheld the opening to a wide circular chamber. Lava flows crested down the inside of the walls, giving the room a beautiful bright glow and heating the interior like a furnace. Scorch marks pattered the area around enormous gouges in the stone floor, rendering the room a chaotic mess. In the center of the havok lay a massive lizard-like figure, around the size of a small house, with leathery wings protruding from its back behind its massive forelimbs. The dragon, for it was obviously a dragon, lay slumped, with its back turned to Shara and crew, in what appeared to be a rather uncomfortable resting position. Shara didn’t feel like questioning the dragon’s sleeping habits, though, as she was far too worried about how she didn’t notice they were walking straight into its lair.
This was ridiculous! First she couldn’t read a bunch of random people in Terranburg, and now she couldn’t detect a mind as massive as a dragon’s? The beast was well within what should be her detection range, and there wasn’t anything around to cause interference that she knew about. Was she losing her abilities? No, that’s stupid, she could feel Darron and Adgito just fine, but the dragon didn’t feel like anything. Even the immunized people in Terranburg felt like something, even if it was incomprehensible. The dragon shouldn’t be giving off no signal unless it was…
Dead.
Drawing her sword, Shara cautiously stepped into the room. Darron immediately grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back with a panicked expression in his eyes– you can’t be serious, right? Shara patted his hand reassuringly and smiled, motioning with her free hand for Darron and Adgito to stay where they were.
Though her faith in it was a bit shaken, Shara pushed outward with her mental sense as far as it would go, and found nothing but Darron’s fear and Adgito’s bewildered confusion. No other minds. Quietly approaching the giant beast, Shara watched it carefully for any sign of movement, and found none. It wasn’t breathing.
She walked around the dragon, carefully taking the long way to circle it from behind. After getting a view from the front, however, she relaxed and sheathed her weapon. Returning to the other side, she crossed her neck with her thumb to indicate the dragon’s status and waved for Darron and Adgito to catch up.
The view from the other side of the dragon made it overwhelmingly clear that the legendary beast was dead. The dragon’s underbelly had been ravenously torn open in dozens of places. Huge chunks of flesh were missing like someone had taken a shovel to fresh dirt, carving open a shallow hole a little wider than Shara’s head and then moving elsewhere. Some creature smaller than this dragon had bitten it to death, ripping out and swallowing a few dozen morsels from its belly before leaving the rest of the dragon’s body to rot.
Being in the territory of a creature that had so casually eaten a monster of this size was not particularly comforting, and Shara’s suspicion of what that creature was didn’t make her feel any better.
“Darron,” she whispered, “would you guess that most of these bites were made before or after the dragon died?”
Darron stared at the dragon for a while, gears turning.
“...Almost all, if not all of them were made while the dragon was alive,” he responded quietly. “Do you think something was hunting a dragon for sport?”
Shara shook her head.
“No. If I were a betting girl, I’d put all my money on a vrochthízo. The dragon’s not that big, so… a matriarch, at worst. Probably a lord.”
If Adgito’s molten face could turn pale, it probably would have.
“Wait, vrochthízo?” she asked, “Like, the Black Maw? Those things that suddenly swarm through and eat whole towns?”
“Um, kinda?” Shara responded, “Mostly no? Darron, what do you know about vrochthízo?”
“Just the basics,” Darron shrugged. “I know they’re monsters with pitch-black bodies, eyes, and teeth, and that they come in a bunch of shapes and sizes. It’s my understanding that the longer you leave one alone, the more they grow, so people are encouraged to report vrochthízo sightings and get them eliminated ASAP.”
Shara was surprised to have a topic she understood significantly more about than Darron, but she supposed in this case she had a lot more of a reason to know.
“Yeah, that’s mostly correct,” Shara said. “Vrochthízo are one of the highest-priority targets in the monster hunting business, so my family… I mean, my birth family went after them a lot. I raided a few vrochthízo nests with them when I was little, and… we are probably in a vrochthízo nest.”
Adgito stepped back, startled.
“What, like this chamber? Is the dragon corpse full of eggs or something?”
“No,” Shara said, shaking her head, “the whole mountain is the vrochthízo nest.”
A stunned silence hung over the group for a while. Eventually, Darron mentally prompted Shara to continue– You should go into a bit more detail.
“Right,” Shara began, “So, Vrochthízo only consume the flesh of living things, for some reason. Once their target is dead, they just… stop eating. Don’t know why, they just do. But that’s the first thing that makes this look like a vrochthízo kill.
“Second thing, vrochthízo have an insatiable appetite. Not like, ‘woah nelly these guys can eat a lot’ but like literally insatiable. They will keep eating forever if they’re able. I hear they take excess food and pretty much use it to mutate themselves, growing bigger and stronger the more they consume. So yeah. That thing you heard about vrochthízo eating whole towns? That’s definitely a thing that happens, but it’s usually not a swarm of them, it’s usually one really big one. Vrochthízo are perfectly happy to eat each other, so you don’t really see them moving as packs very often.”
“Well… that’s good, right?” Adgito ventured. “One big vrochthízo probably cleared this whole place out by themselves. So… they probably left after eating everything, right?”
“Maybe. Hopefully.” Shara said with a shrug. “Some vrochthízo are as clever as a person, but the vast majority of them are just hungry animals. If we’re lucky, some super-powerful feral vrochthizo just plowed through here because they could.”
“That doesn’t sound like it would be very lucky at all,” Darron commented. “Although I’m curious as to how a single species can have such a wide swing of intellect. That’s very rare.”
“Maybe all of them are smart,” Adgito ventured, “but the hunger just drives most of them mad.”
“Either way,” Shara said, “The best-case scenario is unlikely. Whatever did this wasn’t just taking a casual stroll through munchy town. It, or almost certainly she, systematically annihilated every living thing in Mt. Phlegethos.”
“She?” Adgito prompted.
“I’m pretty sure the vrochthízo we’re dealing with is or was pregnant.” Shara explained. “This focused and methodical wipe-out of all life in a given area is exactly what we look out for when tracking vrochthízo nests.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Darron said. “If vrochthízo have to eat living things, and the mom kills every living thing in the cave except her own babies, what are they going to eat?”
Shara just waited for him to put that one together for himself.
“Oh. ...That’s disturbing,” Darron eventually commented. “Do they eat the mom, or each other?”
“Each other,” Shara confirmed. “The mom lays a huge amount of eggs at once in a giant pile, and they all fight to the death once they hatch. Probably something about only the strongest surviving or whatever. Sometimes, the mom just leaves after she finishes laying eggs, sometimes she doesn’t. Never seen a vrochthízo daddy before, so I assume their mating process is kinda... fire-and-forget? Or maybe the mom eats him, I dunno.”
“When you say ‘huge amounts of eggs,’” Adgito piped up, “exactly how many eggs are we talking, here?”
Shara looked at the bitemarks in the dragon corpse, trying to get a better judge of the mouth’s size.
“It depends,” Shara said. “Vrochthízo can be developing and laying eggs for a very long time, trying to get their clutch as large as possible. It’s usually a good time to ambush them. If we’re just dealing with a lord… maybe between ninety and a couple hundred? A matriarch could probably lay five hundred or more. I’m not sure, though. I’ve never fought one bigger than an adult.”
“Oh, that’s probably not too bad then,” Darron said. “If the eggs are that numerous, each one must be fairly small.”
“Um… no. Each one is like, a third our size? Maybe a little bigger? The babies hatch ready to kill.”
Darron’s mind did its best to wrap around the logistics of that.
“...So the mass of eggs a vrochthízo eventually ends up laying is greater than the mass of the vrochthízo itself? How? Where does it all come from?”
“It’s probably magic,” Adgito commented with a wry grin.
“That still doesn’t explain anything! You can convert magical energy into matter, sure, but it’s inefficient at best.”
“The amount of matter doesn’t matter!” Shara growled. “What matters is that we have a small-scale natural disaster lurking in here with us, and we gotta kill it.”
“...Come again?” Adgito asked.
Shara had not been looking forward to bringing this up, because she knew it was a stupid idea. Three people hunting down something that took out a dragon? It was a relatively small dragon, sure, but a dragon nonetheless. Vrochthízo were nasty creatures, interested only in sating their infinite hunger. Simply being around them drove her mental senses mad, tingeing her emotions with their primal desires. Taking down nests of them were always among the most stressful hunts of her childhood, so seeking one out was far from the top of her list of things she wanted to do. The smart move was definitely to try and sneak through the rest of the cave, hoping not to run into anything else.
Yet the thought of that made her blood boil. She missed her chance to avenge her family, but she wouldn’t be responsible for anyone else losing theirs. Shara had run away from monsters enough for one day.
“Like I said,” Shara explained, “It’s easiest to ambush a vrochthízo while they’re laying eggs. This is a golden opportunity to take out something that, if we leave alone, is probably going to wipe out a few towns before someone else gets around to it. We can’t pass this up in good conscience. We’re not going to.”
Shara could already feel the counterarguments forming in the minds of her companions, but she doubted it would amount to much. As much as she hated to abuse it, both Darron and Adgito lacked the willfulness to argue with her for long. They’d eventually acquiesce, even if they disagreed. Still, it was better to actually convince them.
“Darron, this is just a larger-scale version of what we did all the time back home,” Shara said, cutting her companions off before they started their barrage of complaints. “We’ll be fine, you know that we’ve trained for this. Adgito will be a huge help, too, and she probably doesn’t have to worry about getting bitten when she’s made of superheated liquid.”
“What if I end up turning into a vrochthízo,” Adgito asked quietly, “and I go crazy? What if I attack you guys?”
Was that a thing that could happen? Shara could tell that Adgito didn’t know the answer to that, which wasn’t reassuring in the slightest.
“You’re not just made of lava, right?” Shara eventually ventured, “You can manipulate it too? Focus on using that to support us from a range, and we won’t have to find out. I doubt any of them will try to touch you anyway. They’re not usually fireproof.”
Adgito was unconvinced, but she nodded anyway. Good enough. Darron could already tell he wasn’t going to be winning this argument, and had swapped to thinking about strategy. She’d trained him well.
Now then, what was the best way to track down a very hungry mommy?