Right when Sean could feel his mental grip slipping on the tenuous connection between himself and the spirits, whatever discussion Gel and Saren had been having with them finished. The owlen paladin assumed the same meditative gesture Sean had seen once before, forming a small pyramid between his fingers as he prayed.
Saren lowered his head and reached out, laying a hand on the metaphysical forehead of the young girl. Sean’s left arm pulsed, and the gelaton felt something travel from within the hand down into the conduit towards the spirit. Milah’s face softened, and a serene calm overtook the fear in her eyes.
An instant later, the spirit was gone. Saren immediately raised his hand to repeat the process, but the inmortu’s body began to convulse. The surface of its flesh bubbled and warped like boiling liquid, and a scream bearing an emotion Sean couldn’t identify clawed its way from the undead creature’s throat.
“Don’t let go!” Gel told him with sudden concern. “He’s almost done!”
“I hadn’t planned to!” Sean said, grabbing onto the inmortu’s wrist with his other hand.
For a moment, the two struggled in place as whatever change that was overcoming the creature fought against what was happening. The gelaton looked at the owlen paladin, who had taken a step back and was clearly considering taking several more. Mumbles’ spirit-face laughed in wild, cruel mania while the spirit known as Mala pleaded with them in words Sean couldn’t understand.
Sean turned towards the paladin and shouted at him, his words echoed by Gel an instant later.
“Hurry up, before I lose them!”
Saren looked momentarily shocked, but the paladin’s will firmed and he dashed back in. A quick pyramid gesture paired with a prayer later, and Sean felt that same something leave his reaper’s hand to enter the spirit. Mala’s tearful expression was wiped away as if by a smooth cloth. Then, with one final unknown word, she disappeared.
Convulsions stronger than before wracked the inmortu’s body and Sean leapt backwards. He might have tried to hold on and try for Mumbles’ spirit too, if it weren’t for the fact that his fellow undead was a good deal stronger than Sean himself was. Given that even the tendons and muscles in the creature’s body were already spasming nearly out of his control though, he thought better of it.
Score two for us! Sean thought in triumph. Now we just have to…
Sean’s thoughts trailed off as he watched his opponent. Tendrils of deep shadow sprang up around the inmortu’s form, covering the undead completely in a whirling, writhing mass. Its body actually lifted off the ground for a second as its back arched at what would have been a horrifyingly painful angle if it were alive, and the motion caused Saren to take off into the air with a startled shout. Behind Sean, the two fennekians readied their weapons once more.
“What do you think, can go back in for Mumbles?” Sean asked his friend, readying his shield for whatever came next.
“No point. His mind is long past gone. All he did was laugh, cry, or scream at us. There’s nothing left of whoever he was in there.”
Though Sean didn’t have any reason to disbelieve his friend, Gel’s words didn’t sit right with him for some reason. He still recalled seeing three circuits twisting inside the inmortu. One for each of the spirits. Two had vanished alongside what he assumed was their corresponding spirit, but before they had disengaged Sean was sure he had seen the last still in there.
If he’s still in there, then some part of him still is, too. We can’t just leave him trapped inside that thing. Sean’s left hand resonated with the thought as soon as he had it, and the gelaton made his decision.
“Tell the others I’m going to try again.”
“Wait, what? Why?”
“Have them tear it to shreds. With two spirits gone, I’m hoping its regeneration won’t be able to keep up with us. Once it goes down, I’ll try again.” Sean amended quickly, ignoring his friend’s question mostly because he didn’t understand the answer himself. It just felt wrong to leave someone like that.
The slime seemed to sense something of what Sean was feeling, because a second later he simply responded: “Done.”
“Thanks man.”
“I will eat a man every time you call me that from now on.” Gel said, rapidly changing both the topic and his tone, no doubt as a distraction from the moment. “I am a slime! Half of a gelaton, same as you! Only I get to eat twice as much to feed both of us, so really I have the better job if you think about it.”
“No arguments here.” Sean replied with a grin as the writhing black shadows around their opponent finally began to calm. “I’m just the bones of this operation… and its magical chef.”
“Wait, can you make magical food now? Because I have so many idea–”
“Not the time, Gel.”
“Fine. But after we finish this I demand you elaborate on that statement.”
Sean was about to continue bantering back and forth, when a sudden howl of unworldly pain and rage bellowed out from the inmortu. The skin of its new form was ragged, bleeding a slow, dark sludge from a dozen wounds that had been healed not moments before, and overly calcified bones jutted out at odd angles from its limbs. Despite all that though, its muscles bulged out to comically oversized proportions and it still held its midnight colored blade.
Dark eyes met the gelaton’s burning red orbs, and the inmortu crossed the distance between them in a single leap. It raised its midnight blade high for an overhand strike, and even as Sean raised his shield he knew that it alone wouldn’t be enough to protect them. Saren shouted incomprehensible words behind them and a barrier of wind gushed forth from them, robbing the hulking undead’s attack of the majority of its momentum.
Thanks to the paladin’s quick thinking, Sean’s shield stopped the blow for only an instant before shattering… but that was enough. The fennekians dove forward, weapons in hand. Gel brought the light hammer up in a swinging roundhouse blow right at its face–
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
–only for craggy spikes of rock to jut forward from the earth and stop the blow. These spikes were both larger and more numerous than the ones it had created earlier, and they shot upward with surprising alacrity. The inmortu’s off hand clenched into a fist and both fennekians were intercepted by spikes of their own. Muffled cries of surprised pain came from their direction, but Sean didn’t have the time to focus on them. A midnight blade had already crashed through his shield and was pressing hard against his left hand, looking to sever it.
Sean’s knees began to buckle under the hulking undead’s new might, and he grabbed the blade itself with his right hand. Bracing against it in a way no flesh-covered human could ever hope to achieve, the gelaton barely managed to keep the blade from cutting through. Even so, all he could manage was a stalemate. If it weren’t for the might he had gained from their evolution, Sean was sure he would already be down both arms instead of his usual one.
While they struggled, the inmortu laughed at him with crazed, dark eyes that mirrored Mumbles’ own expression from just a moment before. It shook off its off hand as if for no other reason than to show it could hold Sean down with one arm, and then slammed its second hand onto the hilt of its blade.
In his old life, Sean might have closed his eyes as it happened. He could already feel how his bones were going to splinter under this attack. Could see the scene in his mind’s eye.
But this was not his old life, and he was not alone.
With a cry of pure, uninhibited rage, Gel brought the light hammer back around for another attack. It landed the second the inmortu’s fist crashed down on its sword, perfectly timed to take advantage of their enemy’s utter lack of defense. The blazing white ‘weapon’ crashed into the side of the inmortu’s skull and… punctured through the other side.
Sean tried to process what just happened, even as the pressure let up on his arm. But while the inmortu’s last strike hadn’t been enough to sever a limb, it had been enough to injure him.
You have been cut by an unknown blade wielded by an Inmortu for 4 damage (4 total, 24 base halved due to slashing damage resistance, minus 8 due to toughness).
A wellspring of icy rage rushed through Sean’s mind as the prompt appeared, sweeping his consciousness away. The last sight he registered was that of the silver dagger they had taken from underneath the stables protruding through the inmortu’s left ear… and a ragged grey hand reaching towards him past its blade.
“I’d say it’s probably down for good.” Gel commented drly as Sean’s mental faculties returned. “‘Cause if it’s not, then I really don’t know what else we can do here.”
The slime wasn’t wrong.
Sean found himself standing over their eviscerated undead opponent, holding its still-impaled head in his right hand as his left held a blackened heart that was somehow still pulsing despite the lack of any unsevered connections to its former host. He shook his head, dropping the heart and stepping back. He lifted the inmortu’s head to orb-level.
“Is he still in there?” Sean asked, inspecting the eyes for any glimmer of Mumbles that might be hiding in there.
He resisted the urge to smash the head on the ground as the last of his murderous, damage-sensitive instincts retreated. Not only would that likely be unproductive, but the light hammer still attached to the thing’s face made the prospect more than a little unwieldy. The blazing light was also still painful to look at, so he quickly lowered the head again.
“No idea.” Gel reported brightly. “But he was still screaming at us a few seconds ago, so you may have some time left if you still want to try.”
“Where’s Saren?”
“Over there.” Gel pointed to where the owlen paladin was bandaging up one of the more injured fennekian’s with a torn piece of what looked like the furry creature’s shirt. “That last attack almost got them, but those are some resilient little snacks I’ll give them that.”
Sean let out a small, soundless chuckle of relief. He had hoped they wouldn’t lose anybody else down here. The ‘resilient little snacks’ weren’t exactly their friends, but the pair had fought beside them more than once now.
“Call him over for a prayer or whatever it was he did earlier, I’m going to try and pull Mumbles out again.”
“Out of just its head?” Gel sounded doubtful, but he still did as Sean asked. Saren tied off the bandage he was working on, nodded at the lesser injured fennekian and said something to him, then walked over.
The owlen paladin’s expression was reserved and more than a little wary, but he approached with a steady stride nonetheless. Given what Sean knew he was capable of during his post-damage fugue states, the gelaton didn’t hold the caution against him. Instead, he placed his left hand on the severed head. As he did, a prompt appeared.
You have defeated an Inmortu! You have gained 200 experience points.
If Sean could have blinked, he would have. Another series of prompts jumped towards his vision but he just shook his head and pushed them off for later. Mumbles couldn’t be gone yet. If he was, then how was Sean supposed to free him? The strangely invested maggot caretaker had been weird sure, but Bancroft hadn’t just raised him back as an undead.
Mumbles’ spirit was still tied to this head, even now. Sean could feel it. With enough time, the former caretaker and servant to the necromancer would eventually rise again. Given the almost imperceptible tendrils of death mana even now spreading out from its still-dripping neck, it might not even be that long until it did.
Sean seized on that feeling, metaphorically and physically, gripping Mumbles’ severed head at its base. He had to grope around for it, which was definitely up there in his list of feelings Sean wished he would soon forget, but the resonance in his limb soon flared up. Grey flesh retreated from the contact point like it had been seared off, revealing a disfigured skull structure laced here and there with a winding, dark circuit of what Sean now realized was death mana.
As before, a pale, spectral head popped out of the skull. The former caretaker’s ethereal visage was every bit as wild and crazed as it had been the first time, but Saren stepped up almost immediately. The paladin’s hand shot forward, landing directly on Mumbles’ forehead.
Sean had been ready for the paladin to do so, but he hadn’t been ready for the expression on the twice-slain man’s face. Instead of calm descending on the spirit’s face, Mumbles looked… concerned. Almost fearful.
“Is he… okay?” Sean asked, just as the dead man began to both speak and disappear.
The former caretaker got only a few words out, and for some reason Sean felt like he had just missed something important. He asked the slime to translate.
“He asked us to let the other servants go.” Gel responded, though the slime’s voice sounded somewhat distant. “The ‘kind’ ones, at least. Not sure what he means by that, but it sounds like he heard what we promised the other two.”
“What did you promise them?” Sean asked, curiosity getting the better of him now that the situation was under control. He had been inadvertently left out of that entire conversation, after all.
“Vengeance!” The slime said, hefting his light dagger-hammer up towards the cavern’s ceiling even as the head it had impaled slid off with a wet shlick.
“Just vengeance?”
“And to dig a proper grave for her husband Jerin and the other little girl Milah back at that cemetery when we get the chance.” Gel lowered his hammer with decidedly less excitement as the slime added. “I figured you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course not. First thing on the list after vengeance.” Sean readily agreed, though he couldn’t help but wonder about that book they had come across in the same location.
“Hey, do you mind if we–” Sean’s question died in his metaphorical mental throat as he watched a whip of crimson liquid wrap around what remained of the inmortu’s head and shove it into their combined stomach.
“Really?”
“What?” Gel responded brightly, already whipping another line of semi-solid red liquid at what remained of the hulking undead’s body to grab the rest. “It’s not like you were going to eat it.”