All at once, the salt stops spreading. What was previously molten solidifies into crystals that glow with inner magic, and the vendigator plummets without warning. Ursula and I jump back to avoid the spray of salt, with bullets peppering the salty carapace to little effect. The vendigator snaps its mouth shut and looses a noise from deep in its throat, then splints directly at Ursula.
She hops to the side to avoid it, then spins into a slash with a knife that appears in her hand. A spray of salt and sparks brightens the dark for a split second.
“Shit, that’s tough!” She calls out as her hands find her gun once more, the knife now nowhere to be found. “Gambler! You’re holding the better hole-maker, so once I get this plating off, you make holes!”
That’s one way to tell me to shoot the damn thing. I nod and steady the revolver with both hands, feeling the knife on my arm squirm against the strong influence of Ursula’s magic. My awareness probes at the gun and comes back completely blank–somehow, she’s made it completely airtight to magic. I’ll have to ask her how she did that when the time is right.
I trail the vendigator as Ursula dodges, shoots, and runs. Not always in that order. As I watch, something slowly starts to form in my mind. The thing… might just be dumb as a pile of bricks. It doesn’t use the newfound weightlessness to move any faster, it hasn’t dove into the salt since it surfaced, and it’s kind of just charging Ursula over and over again. No adjustment for a strategy that obviously isn’t working.
“Hey, is this thing kind of… not all there?”
Ursula manages to shrug as she dives out of the way of yet another open-mouth charge. “I… actually, now that you mention it, this thing is pretty damn repetitive. Aren't these things usually ambush predators?”
“I don’t know how alligators work. Or… crocodiles. Whichever animal this is based off of.” I take my finger off the side of the revolver and place it on the trigger. “You’ve got the right side almost completely shattered. Focus your fire there.”
“On it.” She states while standing her ground. When the vendigator charges her once again, because that’s apparently all it can do, she dodges to the left and lets loose a salvo of magical ammo into its right side. “Go!”
Salt falls away in chunks, revealing that the metal underneath has barely taken any damage. From the bullets, at least–there’s significant rust and pitting that definitely wasn’t there before. Probably damage from the magical salt, but if that’s the case… is the stuff not trying to amplify the monster? Is it trying to kill it just like it was trying to kill us?
“Gambler!” Ursula calls, drawing my attention back to the moment at hand. “Hold your fire!”
I move my finger off the trigger and nod. “You see what I see?”
She nods. “Actually killing this thing could be a huge mistake. I’ll get Architect to send over another pillar, and we can–”
BOOM! BOOM! CRACK!
Cacophonous explosions put an abrupt end to Ursula’s statement. March squeals in discomfort to the sound of something clattering to the ground, and the entire room lights up like a mall christmas tree on December first. Molten magical light bleeds down from the ceiling to fill each individual sunflower with more than enough magic to make ten elementals jealous, and in turn, the cannonballs inside of them start to glow with miniature supernovas of molten salt.
Even the one Ursula snapped off lets loose a deluge of molten magcal salt, cascading down to the clover below. Covering the vendigator almost instantly, leaving it encased in a rapidly harending crystal that pulses with a vicious magical heartbeat. Ursula and I share a befuddled look before we back away from the flow, which pours off the crystal and pools around it in an ever growing mass of magic.
“Nothing good can come from this.” Ursula mutters as she finds her way to my side. “I was wondering why the sunflowers stopped firing for a while. Guess this is why.”
Pulses of magic roll off the vendigator like pleas for help. I cross my arms and step back even more as Ursula puts herself between me and the monster; something’s wrong here. Something seriously wrong. It’s pretty damn obvious the salt isn’t trying to help the monster. So what is it trying to do? What’ll happen when it’s done with the vendigator? Will it turn right back around and go for us again?
And… were we not dangerous enough? Why specifically the vendigator? What triggered the salt to go for it that we didn’t set off?
“Eyes on the prize, Gambler.” Ursula warns. The pulses come closer and closer together, then start to break apart into strands of magical desperation. “Whatever the salt’s doing, it’s almost done. Don’t let it catch you off guard.”
It won’t. My awareness makes sure of it, but explaining that fact to Ursula would bring up a few things I’m not ready to talk about. So I put on a face of utter concentration while my mind wanders with myriad possibilities.
Pearl frowns and puts both of her hands together. She laces her fingers then opens and closes her hands, pivoting at her wrists, like a set of snapping jaws. With every snap she slows the movement, until she stops completely with her hands in an open position. Her eyes open wide, and she stares intently at me. Like she’s trying to get something through without saying anything.
I’ve got no idea what it is. But I guess I have to be on the lookout.
Magic dies out suddenly and without fanfare. The vendigator’s eyes blink out, leaving the body an empty husk as the apocalyptic magic just… disappears. Ursula reaches out an arm to keep me from moving forward, but she’s still a few feet away from touching me. She doesn’t put it down as the salt begins to tremble, magic flowing up from the ground into the crystal with a slow but constant pace.
It completely concentrates the large chunk of salt, nearly obscuring the vendigator inside with the raw light of molten magic. Swirls and angular patterns etch themselves into the vendigator’s rapidly rusting body, damaging it so severely that it barely looks like the same thing from a moment ago. After a pattern is made the salt doesn’t leave–it embeds itself in the monster. Creating a mixture between a work of pop art and scrap metal thrown on a slum’s riverside.
Understanding dawns on me as salt works its way into the vendigator’s eye sockets, pushing the glass lights out of the way to make room for crystallized salt. The entire body shudders and twitches unnaturally, like roadkill bulging with parasites, and the salt mound begins to crack. Slowly at first, spilling molten salt and chunks of crystal, but the shuddering quickly turns to thrashing as the vendigator throws away the pieces of its prison.
“Never heard of a machine zombie before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.” Ursula chuckles morbidly. “Got a bad feeling this one will know how to make the most of the salt. Be careful if it knows how to prioritize targets too.”
“Hey, I don’t have to worry about that. It’ll go for you first.” I grin and summon another Worth, which I quickly convert to a single skeletal ghost quarter. “You make an opening. I want to see if something still works on Earth.”
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Ursula looks quizzically over her shoulder. An explosion of salt snaps her right back to the matter at hand. She raises her gun and peppers the salt-infused vendigator the moment it's visible, but wherever the bullets hit, salt rolls off other parts of its body and concentrates on the targeted area. And the moment she stops, it all goes right back to coating the thing in a thick layer of plated armor. It stares at her with molten salt eyes for the briefest of moments, then launches itself at her with jaws wide.
The thing’s movements aren’t even comparable to what they were before. It twists in midair as Ursula tries to dodge, slamming its tail into her shoulder and sending her crashing to the ground in the same motion that it reorients itself to strike the moment it hits the ground. And hit the ground it does; as if gravity suddenly grew a hundred times heavier just for it the thing crashes into the clover in the blink of an eye, then charges the moment all its feet hit the ground.
“Shit!” Ursula cries as she raises her gun to defend herself, sticking it inside of encroaching jaws to keep them pried open.
It doesn’t stop the vendigator’s charge. All of its weight crashes into Ursula head-first, sending the two of them in a salt-spraying crash that leaves a good fifteen foot impact crater. I blink away the surprise from the act that lasted all of three seconds, raise my gun, and hone my awareness at the cloud of magical salt dust where the sounds of a metallic clash ring out from.
“Aaurrgh! You motherless bastard!” Ursula cries out in pain. A deep, fleshy thud rings the vendigator like a gong, and it goes tumbling through the air like a badly thrown frisbee.
I watch it tumble for less than a second before my brain kicks in and reminds me that I’m not just a bystander here. And that I’ve got less than a few seconds before it recovers to charge again. My skeletal ghost quarter rests gently in my palm as I break into a sprint to get to Ursula, who limps out of the cloud of salt with blood dripping down her left arm and a few nasty gashes all over her ripped clothes.
She smiles bitterly when she sees my face. “That bad, huh?”
“Not that bad.” I say seriously, which seems to surprise her. “Just haven’t seen you get seriously hurt yet. Speaking of, how’d that thing do any damage to you? Shouldn’t your stats and spells have prevented this?”
“Not now. Later.” She insists and reaches out with her good arm to point at the vendigator. “We need to get rid of this before it can get worse.”
Worse? Honestly, I can’t really see this getting much worse. Just the vendigator part, I mean–there could always be more of them, but this one in particular feels like it’s reached how strong it’s going to get. Any more salt and the body will rust away, and any less salt makes it completely dead. But the look in Ursula’s eye tells a different story. Plus she’s got a lot more experience with this, so I’ll default to her this time.
“Alright.” I lean in and take one of her arms over my shoulder. “What’re we doing?”
She nods appreciatively and gestures towards the one visible exit. “We make for there. As long as the sunflowers don’t start raining cannonballls down on us again, we should be able to safely make it. Then you can teleport us out.”
I raise an eyebrow, but start moving anyway. Ursula uses my shoulder to steady her aim and fires off a burst at the vendigator, which causes her entire right side to twitch violently. She hisses in pain and lowers her gun, then lets the gun drop and summons her briefcase instead. Except this time, it doesn’t appear instantly. It takes a half-second to form.
“Shit, it’s spreading faster than I thought.” She mutters as she awkwardly fishes around in her briefcase.
I take aim with the revolver and fire off two quick shots aimed directly at the thing’s eyes. They hit their marks perfectly, and salt crystals sprout up to protect the thing. A moment’s distraction is all it buys us, but that’s one moment the thing isn’t flying through the air or charging us.
“I thought you said we had to kill this thing.” I point out as I trail the vendigator with my eyes. “What happened to that?”
Ursula grumbles something under her breath and shakes her head. “Nothing happened to that. But I’m about to lose the use of mana for the foreseeable future, and we need to prepare for that inevitability. We’ll come back tomorrow and finish it off for good.”
The vendigator shakes off my crystalling annoyance and stares me down. I can’t tell if it’s royally pissed or a little impressed with my accuracy–or if I’m just deluding myself into thinking the magically altered machine has the capacity for emotions. Or… thoughts in general. It takes a half-step back and tenses its back legs, and I fire a single shot aimed at its back right foot. Just enough to set it slightly off balance, so its charge goes a little wide and it has to adjust as it flies past us and its tail just barely misses scraping my ear.
“Nice shots.”
Ursula finally raises her hand from the briefcase. In it she holds a glass vial filled to the brim with a chaotic red liquid that constantly shifts between shades, tones, and consistencies. She pops a rubber stopper with her thumb and raises the tiny vial to her lips, downing it in a quick shot. I can see the glowing liquid make its way down her throat from the outside, and when it finally hits her stomach, it branches out to the far reaches of her entire body like another visible circulatory system.
She winces and shakes her head, then pushes off of me. “Damn, I hate that stuff. We gotta hurry. I’ve only got about an hour before this debuff cuts me off completely.”
I knit my eyebrows into a frown. “You’re actually serious? We’re just going to leave this thing here overnight without any assurance it’s going to be here in the morning?”
“That’s the plan, yeah.” She confirms with a nod. “I get that it sounds dumb as hell, but this debuff is a really strong one. Once it takes hold, I won’t be able to use mana for at least a week. So we gotta prepare for the rest of this delve over the next hour, which we can’t do if we’re avoiding a vendigator for the entire time.”
That’s… it’s… just plain moronic. If there’s any kind of hivemind among these things, letting the vendigator live could be the worst mistake of all. Sure, I get why Ursula wants to regroup, but leaving this thing alive could make teleporting back tomorrow a death sentence. I… no. I’m not letting this thing live to see the sunrise.
I turn to her and toss her the revolver. “See you in an hour.”
She cocks her head to the side. “What’re you–”
Relocation flares. A coin in the process of being used up takes her place. March yelps in surprise. Probably because Ursula’s swearing her head off about me sending her away.
“Tell Mercenary that she shouldn’t be underestimating me so much.” I say as I turn to face an unfazed and very aggressive vendigator. “And tell her to do all the preparations she can. I'll join her when this thing’s dead.”
“Sh–Gambler?!” March says in confusion. “Why are… how is… it’s hard to read two maps at once.”
That’s her biggest problem with this? I roll my eyes, then roll my shoulder as the vendigator tenses up once more. Ursula thought this would take a long time. Long enough that she’d bite into valuable preparation time with the both of us working together to take it down. I’m going to savour every second of proving her wrong.
“Well?” I spread my arms, making myself an even bigger target. “I’m waiting.”
Another ghost quarter fills my hand, and I flip it as quickly as possible before filling both of them with relocation. The vendigator menacingly waddles in my direction, then snaps into a lunge with the aid of the salt and clover. In one quick motion I flick one relocation into its open mouth and the other under it. Its jaws close in at a terrifying pace, only matched by the speed of my awareness, and I bend over backwards to give my coins a few more milliseconds to fly.
The first hits the back of the vendigator’s throat. The second catches on a clover and stops a little short of where I wanted it to land. But it’ll have to do. I snap the second’s activation and feel myself get pulled to the coin’s position. My back blossoms in pain as the jagged metal of the vendigator’s tail scratches a bloody line across it as a consolation prize.
“Ow.”
I grimace, then turn to look over my shoulder as the thing twists unnaturally in midair and lands hard. Salt sprays in an unnatural screen, attempting to hide the vendigator from view. My awareness pierces it effortlessly.
Before I can breathe, it’s readying to launch. A wicked grin spreads across my face, and I hold up the skeletal quarter so the vendigator can see it. If there’s even a shred of consciousness in there, I want it to know who killed it.
A stationary projectile flows down from my mind. The coin shivers in an unsuccessful attempt to restrain the spell. It won’t last more than a second–definitely not enough to catch something as fast as the vendigator.
Except I already caught it.
The coin flickers out of my hand, replaced with the disappearing form of one soaked in molten salt and grease. Deep in the belly of the vendigator a four Worth and unstable skeletal coin empowered projectile roars violently to life.