Hark and Rejoice! You have called forth a level 28 Celestial Badger to your side using the Trumpet of Heavenly Furry. Your new ally will fight to defend you from harm, respond to reasonable requests for aid, and offer its sage wisdom to all who ask until its time here has ended. Truly, your blessings shall be profound!
WARNING! Due to having received the temporary death curse title: “Enemy of the Badgers”, none of the above benefits now apply! The Celestial Badger that you have called forth is also unbound by any restrictions that would have protected you from it, due to the grievous disrespect you have shown its kind! Truly, your regret shall be profound!
A luminescent cerulean badger the size of a mastiff leapt for the nearest undead it could see and promptly tore its entire skull off. The growl it uttered sounded like a series of thunderclaps, and its claws tore through the skeletal warrior’s durable bones like it was slicing up a block of soft cheese. Sean watched it dispatch the first warrior in two seconds flat, but the creature didn’t stop after delivering the true death to the undead. It rode the creature down to the ground, a whirling mass of gleaming fur and claws, and only leapt for the next warrior when its last opponent was little more than a pile of white ribbons.
Yep. That’s enough for me. Sean thought, climbing to his feet as quickly and quietly as he dared. Time to leave.
“Do these windows lock?!” Sean shouted at Gel, indicating the currently closed wooden window on their left. He didn’t really have to shout, but their proximity to the instant-death-badger was getting to him.
“You can lock windows?!” Gel shouted back, clearly just as unnerved as he was.
That answers that.
Sean took three running steps and launched himself at the window, holding his left arm out in a fist to bash it open. With a crunch and a crack as the window swung open to slam the outdoor, Sean’s entire body flew through the second story opening. For a brief moment as the night air rushed past him and the ground grew closer, Sean allowed himself a brief smile. His plan had worked! They were clear! They were—
With a jerk that lurched every bone in his body and bounced the satchel at his hip nearly up to his neck, Sean stopped moving in mid-air. He swung back towards the house, slamming bodily into the wooden logs it was built from. Sean looked up, silently praying that he wasn’t about to see the celestial badger about to leap down on them – and saw that Gel’s axe had caught on the window. It was currently digging a deep groove into the wood, and his right arm was holding them aloft.
“Drop the axe, drop the axe!” Sean commanded his friend.
“I have to reabsorb it, otherwise I’ll lose a bunch of mass!” Gel shouted back.
“Leave it! We’ll get you some more!” Sean reached up, trying to dislodge the weapon from his other hand but it was no use. The weapon was literally fused to his right arm. “We have to get out of here before—”
An explosion rumbled the upper floor of the house above them, and beams of incandescent white light shot out the window and into the night. Sean gaped upwards as the wood around the window they were hanging from charred in an instant and Gel’s axe was melted clean in half.
What the fuck is that thing?! Sean wondered as Gel shouted in pain and began reabsorbing the axe.
Without the top half of the weapon holding them in place, Sean fell the rest of the way to the ground. He landed rough, but it wasn’t enough to stumble so he took off towards the rear of the building. The moment he cleared the edge of the house, he jumped backwards and started swearing.
There were at least a dozen more skeletal warriors closing in on the house in a semi-circle, and if Sean had kept going, he would have run straight into the center of them. One look at their raised weapons was all it took to confirm that these warriors were every bit as hostile as the rest. Sean was momentarily relieved that none of these warriors held a bow, but his irritation at the shroud rose. There was no way he could fight this many which, much as he didn’t like it, meant Sean had only one other route left open to him.
Turning on the ball of one foot Sean sprinted back towards the center street of town, a dozen new armed foes hot on his heels. Gel cackled in his mind as he ran, a wild, pained glee in the slime’s voice.
“This is turning into my favorite night ever!” Gel announced as the slime reformed the mass extending from Sean’s right hand into a clear, sharp dagger. “I just wish we could eat them!”
“If we don’t get out of here, that badger is going to eat us.” Sean shot back, leaping over one of the holes in the street and taking a sharp turn away from the house with the badger. “How long do you think that shroud can hold it off?”
As if in answer, another explosion blew dirt, dust, and shards of wood in all directions behind them. This blast was larger than before and launched one of the wooden logs that had formed the wall into three of the skeletal warriors chasing them – shattering rib cages and bone legs to powder. Enough white light escaped the house to light up the night for half a mile, and all Sean could liken the moment to was the opening lightshow of a metal band he had seen once in concert right before the singer took to the stage.
Even though he knew it wasn’t the best idea, Sean spared a glance back. His disbelief grew large enough to match the fear he felt and a shiver ran through him again to regulate both emotions. The entire rest of the fucking house had just collapsed inward… and now it was on fire!
“About that long.” Gel quipped. “Where are we going, by the way?”
A single badger-sized shadow strutted out of the crumbling front door of the house with all the swagger of a creature that had just literally lit the funeral pyre on the last of its enemies. Then it saw the undead chasing Sean, and the badger roared in fury once more. The shockwave of sound that emanated from the creature shook the dirt around it for dozens of feet.
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“Away from that.” Sean answered simply as he turned back around and began sprinting towards the far exit of the village as fast as he could. “We’re running away from that.”
“That’s a great plan.” Gel agreed, leaning forward out of Sean’s rib cage and swinging his right arm in time with his left. “I love that plan.”
“Would have thought you would want to go back and try to eat it.” Sean quipped, dodging several holes as the celestial badger began tearing into their pursuers. “It’s not like you to pass up a meal.”
“Even I know there are some things you have to save for later.” Gel responded, though the slime was doing a terrible job of hiding his disappointment. “Food that can burn our houses down definitely counts.”
“For now, anyway.” Gel admitted a second later.
“’Our’ houses?” Sean asked, even as he poured on the speed and tried to pump every ounce of effort he could into his legs.
“Of course they’re our houses. Nobody else is using them, and we found them first!”
Sean just shook his head at that, hoping they would make it to the edge of town before the badger dealt with the last of the skeletons. He chanced another glance back, and his long-gone stomach dropped. The thing had torn through half of the remaining skeletons already, and there were at least two more rows of houses before they would hit the forest again.
There’s no way we’re making it out before that thing catches us. Sean realized, and the knowledge settled in like a heavy weight even as his mind raced ahead. He hung his head for a second, trying to push away the feeling of defeat – and then he saw something. A crazed thought struck him an instant later, and screwed as they already were, Sean seized on it.
“Okay, new plan.” Sean told Gel as he turned and jogged a short distance away. Then he turned, facing down the oncoming whirlwind of fury currently shredding its way through his fellow undead. A tingle of fear shot down every vertebra of his spine, but Sean remained where he was.
“New plan?” Gel asked. “We just had a plan!”
“That plan was old and busted.” Sean said, trying to make eye contact with the apparently angelic nightmare of claw, fur, and rage as it dismantled yet another skeleton into its component parts. “This is the new hotness.”
“I feel like you’re trying to reference something I don’t know about.” Gel remarked, raising his dagger as if that could possibly save them. Another skeleton chasing them turned on its own pursuer and died as the slime kept talking. “And while I appreciate the effort, we may be dead before you get the chance to explain. You know, because of the whole not-running-from-the-thing-that’s-going-to-kill-us thing! Did you forget about the death curse!? If the badger sees us, we are dead!”
“Haven’t forgotten about it.” Sean said, waving his shield hand and flipping the badger off at the same time, trying to get its attention. “I want it to see us.”
Gel was momentarily stunned, at a loss for words by the sheer moxie of that statement.
“I—you… what for?!” The slime sputtered, but by then… the badger’s beady, hate-filled eyes landed on them. Its eyes widened, its furious expression intensified, and then its cerulean fur began to glow.
“That!” Sean said, diving into the nearest hole just as the badger exploded into a small nova worth of righteous light. A wave of searing heat passed over the top of the hole, nearly scorching the bottoms of Sean’s feet. Its passing lit up the entire pit as they tumbled downward, allowing Sean to land on his arms and roll instead of taking the landing on his skull.
“Oh. Wow.” Gel’s fear was gone, and the slime now sounded impressed. “How did you know there were tunnels down here?”
As Sean had expected (and hoped), given the preponderance of these pits dug all throughout town, they weren’t actually trapped down here. There were two round tunnels leading away, one ahead of them and one behind, and Sean scrambled forward towards the first. He tried not to think about their odds of running into whatever had dug all of this out.
“I didn’t.” Sean admitted as he ducked down the underground passageway. “That was pure luck.”
Behind and above them, another roar of earth-shaking rage sounded as the badger realized its prey had escaped. A soft glowing light filtered down the pit they had just left, just enough for him to notice it, and Sean dove down the first turn in the passageway. The second he was clear; Sean crouched down and raised his bone shield at what he knew had to be coming. His timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
A column of blazing light shot down the tunnel, boring a flaming hole down the pit. Some of the explosive force arced down the passageway towards them and, after ricocheting off the corner, slammed into his shield.
Your bone shield has been struck by an unknown effect, dealing an unknown amount of damage greatly exceeding its durability. Your bone shield has shattered!
As the prompt has stated, even just that little bit of the badger’s ability cracked Sean’s bone shield like old kindling, scattering it into smoldering pieces all over the tunnel and throwing him backwards. The dirt all around them seared and exposed roots blackened as the badger’s blast tapered off.
Sean didn’t even try to pick himself up. He laid there, perfectly still, grateful for once that he didn’t even have to breathe and doubly grateful that his shield had stopped the badger’s attack from continuing through to hit them.
“Don’t move.” He told Gel. “Don’t even ooze. We need it to think we’re dead.”
“We survived. It’s not going to get a prompt.” Gel pointed out. “Without that, it’s going to know we’re alive. Or that I am, at least.”
A dismissive snort of contempt echoed down the tunnel, followed by a scratching sound as dirt was kicked into the pit. A second of intense silence later, the sound of claws and fur padding away echoed down as well. To Sean, it was the first sound the celestial badger had made this entire encounter that filled him with thoughts of salvation.
“Okay, you got me.” Gel said. “I have no idea how you did that. How did you do that? Do you have something that lets you fake your death? No, I know you don’t. That’s silly…. Wait, do you?”
“It was Lefty.” Sean said, still not quite ready to move. He had no idea how good the celestial badger’s hearing was, but he assumed it would be out of this world.
“Lefty?”
“That skeleton we tossed into the pit earlier. I saw him wandering around down here. Pretty sure the badger just ganked him. That’s why it left.”
“The other passage.” Gel said, realization dawning on the slime. “That’s why you moved right before we stopped.”
“Yep.”
“But, how did you know these tunnels were connected? What if the pit you picked didn’t lead to that one? What if it only had one exit?”
“I told you.” Sean said, allowing himself the barest of movements to rest his skull into the dirt. “I didn’t. That was pure luck.”