14. Jackass

Zacko promptly strode over to the epiglottis, leaving a flustered Serac to scramble after him.

“Wait!” she called. “If this guy is so tough, shouldn’t we… you know, talk strategy first?”

The Manusya glanced over his shoulder, wearing a patronizing smile that irked Serac even more than his irreverent one. His eyes then flashed with Pathsight before he responded, “You’ve got… what, 300 ish Liminal Karma at the moment? Pfft, you can earn that back in no time!”

Serac stared blankly for a moment, not quite seeing the thread of the conversation. “Well, I suppose that’s true… but shouldn’t I still do my best to stay alive? I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of leveling ‘needs’ before ‘wants’?”

Zacko chuckled at this, not in a mean-spirited way, but more like a grown-up laughing at a young child’s blunders. Serac flared her nostrils; she would’ve preferred it if the chuckle had been of the mean-spirited variety.

“Look, sweet—er, Serac. Here’s another thing about Wayfaring, which is that you need to get comfortable with dying. I mean, what’s the point of living an afterlife if we’re not willing to die a little? We level our ‘needs’, yes, to so we can stay in tough fights long enough to win them, but we still need to understand those fights first. Like my mama always used to say, you die and you learn. Now, come on!”

Serac stared dubiously, far from convinced. Maybe she was too much of an uncultured hell bumpkin to appreciate an outrealmer’s disregard for his own life.

Rationally, she understood the safety net offered by the Waystation she’d just tethered herself to. Emotionally, however, it felt wrong to rely on that insurance.

She could, of course, rattle off a number of perfectly sympathetic reasons for her reluctance to die. A natural desire for self-preservation. An aversion to pain. The tedium of having to repeat a task more than once. But there was also something more. Something she felt acutely in the core of her being, yet couldn’t quite put into words…

“Once again, I find myself having to agree with the Manusya.”

Serac jumped. Somehow, she’d forgotten all about Trippy again!

“Here’s another adage I remember from my Wayfaring days: what kills you can only make you stronger. To that, I would add only one qualifier: as long as you take the right lessons from it. Now, as with any reductive statement, it won’t hold true in all cases—especially as we continue to ascend the slopes of Mount Meru. But down here in the untamed wastelands of Naraka, this is the ideal time for you to fail and fail again, so you may learn how best to succeed.”

Jeez, fine, if you both want to see me die so badly… Serac dropped her shoulders and made to follow Zacko into what was by all accounts a losing battle.

As she did, something snagged against the core of her being, a sensation that was nearly opposite to the dopamine rush she’d felt earlier from leveling up. It was something she still couldn’t quite put into words.

The epiglottis slid outward at a grunt and a push from Zacko, producing with it a strong gust of wind that nearly knocked Serac off her feet. She braced against it and pushed on, feeling her Penitent’s rags tauten against her skin as she ducked through the antechamber’s exit.

Outside, the wind immediately lessened in intensity, owing to there being much more room for it to maneuver. The Wayfarer pair had come upon a wide-open thoroughway, one encircled by solid muscle.

The ceilings here were high enough to fit several Jailers stacked atop one another, and the passage itself was just as wide. Serac could easily imagine a large group of inmates being herded into the Damnatorium like cattle, yet somehow, she couldn’t see herself as part of that procession.

She wondered at this—this absence of memories of ever entering the Damnatorium. It was, quite frankly, as she’d suspected. She’d always been here. This was the only life she knew.

How depraved and monstrous a sinner must she have been in her previous life—to have been born a Penitent and nothing else?

“Don’t look so glum,” Zacko called over with casual cheer, evidently having misinterpreted the source of Serac’s darkened expression. “This jackass has got hands, but he’s still a lowly Warden in the lowest pits of hell. Couldn’t ask for a more appropriate first boss on a Wayfarer’s journey. If I’m being honest, I’m a little jealous that you get to kick off your progression in such a sensible manner.”

“You keep calling this guy Jackass.” Serac played along, if only to distract herself from her own thoughts. “Any particular reason why that’s stuck?”

“Why do I keep calling Jackass ‘Jackass’? Well… I think you’ll see for yourself in just a second.”

This inane back-and-forth coincided with a dramatic change in scenery. For the Wayfarer pair had now climbed out of the Damnatorium’s ‘throat’ and onto its ‘mouth’ proper.

It was an enormous dome-shaped room, one that lacked the kind of obvious ‘orifice’ Serac had hoped to see at the end of her prison break. Instead, it was lined on all sides by pink, fleshy walls that glistened and dripped with mucus. Its floor—the ‘tongue’, as it were—was of an unsettlingly bumpy and bouncy consistency, one that immediately challenged Serac’s sense of balance.

But perhaps the room’s most striking feature was its ceiling. This was where the omnipresent mucus was at its most viscous and variform, in many places pooling into globules that hung by tensile strings of saliva.

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What was more, each of these globules was also occupied by Rakshasa-sized figures folded into fetal positions. Indeed, these figures were Rakshasas. Some were no doubt failed escapees, but most were unfortunate souls who never made it past the prison’s mouth before getting their first (and permanent) taste of torture.

“What the hell…?” Serac breathed, horrified and fascinated in equal measure. “Could we maybe get them out, do you think? I mean we’re so close to the exit, it’d be a shame to leave them behind.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” Zacko said, not entirely without a hint of sympathy. “I think they’re already beyond saving.”

Serac had to squint to see what her companion meant. Her eyes eventually met those of one of the trapped Rakshasas. Except they weren’t really eyes—only yawning red hollows where eyes should’ve been. Frenzied Penitents.

“Besides,” Zacko went on, pointing to the dead center of the domed ceiling as he did, “we’re not getting out ourselves unless we deal with him.”

Right on cue, the center of the dome suddenly caved inward, sucking in a large swath of globules and their Frenzied occupants as it did. It then formed its own giant and flesh-bound ‘droplet’, one that descended languidly toward the ground, even as its outer layer fell away piece by piece, revealing the monstrosity hidden within.

The thing dropped onto the surface of the ‘tongue’ with a meaty plop. Even while crouched low to the ground, it was already larger than any Jailer Serac had met or smited, and it also lacked a Jailer’s characteristic flab and pallor. In a word, its physical features were busy, with soggy fur, voluminous hair, and gangling limbs all competing for an uninitiated observer’s attention.

Too many limbs, in fact. For the thing now stood to its full height, revealing the extent of its chimeric morphology.

First, a grotesque imitation of a man’s upper body: sinewy muscles, elongated torso, and mismatched arms. This was attached at the hip to the lower body of an entirely different creature: a quartet of furry, stocky legs, complete with hooves and fetlock joints. Indeed, the shortness of these legs so ill-fitted the lankiness of the upper body as to give the whole package an almost comical imbalance.

Are those… donkey legs? Is that why Zacko keeps calling him ‘Jackass’?

But while Serac gaped at the legs in amazement, Zacko’s attention was trained elsewhere. The Manusya instead pointed to the creature’s face.

“See that?” he said, now with a detectable undercurrent of anger. “That’s our prize. VISAGE. Time to take back what’s mine.”

VISAGE, as Serac might’ve guessed from the name, turned out to be a mask, presently strapped around Jackass’s oddly human-sized face and framed by an expansive mane of wild, graying hair.

This Erudite Instrument, much like REVOLVER, was rather unremarkable in appearance, belying its supposedly magical properties. It looked to be wooden in make, with carvings that depicted the face of a laughing Buddha.

Laughing Buddha? Another idea that just popped into Serac’s mind, with no foreknowledge of her own knowledge. In any case, she now found this ‘facial expression’ to be the most unnatural feature of this chimera that stood before her. An ungodly amalgam of man, donkey, and permanent joviality.

Yet, somehow, her first impression of Jackass was about to go from bad to worse. For the creature’s descent into the arena had caused a number of Rakshasa-filled globules to fall with it.

The globules then burst, throwing more Frenzied Penitents out into the wild. And the first thing that greeted these addled souls were the heft of a donkey’s hooves.

Jackass kicked out with his hindquarters, sending several Penitents flying into the air where they promptly vanished into Souldust. This threw the surviving Penitents into a ‘frenzy’, scrambling and lurching to get as far away from the donkey as possible. The donkey in turn hunted them, stomping some under-hoof and crushing others within his human-handed vise grip.

Serac gaped at this wanton display of violence (put on by a laughing Buddha, no less!), and her only thought was: wow, what a jackass! But she couldn’t gape on forever, for the jackass in question now turned his permanently jovial face onto the one sane Rakshasa in the room, along with her Manusya companion.

Up until now, Serac had still held out a tiny hope that she might be allowed to pass through undisturbed. After all, Zacko was the one who had a quarrel with Jackass, and who was to say the two of them couldn’t work out their differences in a civilized manner? But the hope was short-lived, as Jackass now reached for the metal chain around his hips in a manner that was anything but civilized.

The chain unfurled to reveal Jackass’s tethered weapon, one that was distinct in size and shape from any wielded by his underlings. Indeed, its appearance was so far removed from anyone’s idea of a ‘weapon’ that Serac was surprised that she could identify it at all.

It was a massive, fluctuant bladder of sorts, engorged on one end and tapering into a circular opening on the other. Its sides were covered by rigid metal boards that then jutted and twisted into handles for Jackass’s mismatched limbs to grip.

Serac knew exactly what the thing was called, not by cheating off the phantom knowledge from a past life, but because she had vivid memories of witnessing it in action in her current life. For this was the thing that had stoked many a Furnace while she herself cooked inside them. Yes, it was a bellows.

Driven by equal parts self-preservation and fresh trauma, Serac raised REVOLVER and fired in a mad rush, marksmanship be damned. It was, however, too little too late, as the laughing Buddha had already squeezed the handles, thereby pushing the bellows’ contents out through its tapered opening.

One cartridge of the .44 Special went to waste, swallowed up by a veritable tornado.

The wind, tangible in its force and velocity, expanded outward and ripped through Serac’s all-too-mortal existence. Even as she rose high into the air, she felt keenly the familiar pain of torture as it left its marks in numerical form.

[81!], [81!], [81!] -> [243!]

To add insult and more injury to injury, she landed hard on her butt, which elicited its own notification—Serac’s first (and certainly not last) taste of fall damage: [165!].

And just like that, Serac was already down to her last third of HP ([225/633]). So much for prioritizing survivability!

Who knew there was someone in this Damnatorium that could hit so hard? But if she didn’t know about Jackass before, she certainly knew about him now, because Pathsight made sure of it:

[Designation: BAYU the Unfettered Warden]

[Aberrant Race: Hellspawn]

[Aberrant Class: Dungeon Boss]

[INFERNAL Instrument: DIAPHRAGM]