Tlaloc watched the pendejo get tentacled into what he presumed was the giant squid monster’s mouth.
He had to admit that the helmet and the satellites were useful even if he didn’t like the idea that it could and was probably being used to watch him the same way.
He wasn’t too concerned about Eron.
The man didn’t take things seriously enough and being chewed around seemed like a proper humbling experience.
Still, the man had said some wise things.
He had already sent most of his fighters back deeper into the jungle to bolster the defenses around the artillery pieces and to help protect Guillermo. The man’s bees were potent on the attack, but less on on the defense.
He surveyed the ocean from high above on one of his hardened water platforms.
How it stayed suspended there?
He couldn’t say.
All he knew was that it obeyed his will. And that was all that mattered.
“Attack the largest tentacles. Cut the tendrils and free those unfortunate things the monster has enslaved.”
Their minds may have been gone, but their souls couldn’t truly pass on to the next world while their bodies yet lived, even if it was a horrid mockery of life.
“Plant explosives. In the holes if possible.”
Why did everything the spires throw at them have to be disgusting and horrific?
“I’ll maintain a path back to land if you can’t remain in the fight. Eagle warriors and knights. Watch out for the others. I’m counting on you to remove those too injured to continue. The rain will give you strength and courage. It will weaken our enemies. It will heal, but don’t be reckless. It won’t heal that much.”
He whirled his obsidian axe over his head.
The sky had already darkened as he had gathered clouds while Eron had kept it busy and the artillery bombardment had commenced.
Even as he called the storm the shells continued to rain down on the kraken.
Red lightning began to answer his call, streaking across the clouds.
The rain went from a drizzle to a torrent in seconds.
It wouldn’t hinder those that fought on his side in any way.
As for the kraken?
It must’ve sensed the magic as it picked up speed toward the shore.
He saw it cross the red line in his HUD.
Close enough now to reach his location.
A loud thump followed by a pop rattled them to the core.
The empty air above them opened like a great beast’s eye.
“Move!”
It was bad enough that the kraken was the size of a small island.
What creator saw fit to give it the ability to open portals for its tentacles.
One as thick as Tlaloc thrust down like a javelin.
His fighters scattered while he stepped to one side and swept his axe up from ground to sky.
Pink-red lighting played across his bulging arms, up the obsidian shaft to the massive head.
He charred the tentacle as he bisected it along its length.
There was pleasure to be taken from the distant bellow.
Unmistakable pain.
The kraken withdrew its tentacle in two flopping halves back into the portal.
More opened up around them at different angles.
A whip crack smote one of the eagle warriors out of the dark sky.
Tlaloc didn’t know who, but the warrior was dead. Killed instantly by a blow that folded them in half. He would take the toll, mourn and honor their sacrifice after the battle for he knew that there would be more.
Maria snarled as she leapt across his platforms.
The werejaguar warrioress was truer to the name than any from history or the present day with the class.
Claws shredded gray-blue hide as she climbed to the portal before digging in and letting gravity drag her down to savage a tree-sized tentacle.
He glanced back to the bluff they had been on.
The portals had reached it and thick clouds of angry bees droned as they plunged their stingers into tentacles.
Guillermo had used Skills to breed a larger, stronger, tougher strain of honey bee. Their venom was many times more potent and unlike natural bees, they didn’t die to deliver their strike.
The great monster bellowed like the horn of one of those gigantic ships pulling into the port he had observed as a child.
The storm howled in answer with gale force winds that hampered the kraken, yet left those assailing it unbothered.
Lightning scoured its bulk free from the myriad of sea monsters clawing, biting for their pound of flesh.
It truly was like trying to sink a small island.
His warriors flew or leapt through a forest of tentacles.
Finally, one of the kraken’s largest tentacles breached through a sudden gaping portal.
Enslaved people, human and others, emerged from wet oozing holes to fire spells.
Flying warriors fell to their watery graves, yet for every one that gave their lives a dozen enslaved joined them, cut free from the white tendrils.
There was never a place for chains of servitude.
Tlaloc hurled his axe, cleaving through one of the smaller tentacles to sink into the largest one.
He reached out and appeared with hand on axe handle.
The enslaved assailed him from all sides.
It was for naught as his near invulnerable skin shrugged it all off.
The great obsidian axe swept in blindly fast arcs though the massive man wielding them seemed to barely move his arm.
He dismissed the platform of hardened water and fell, cutting tendrils all the way down to the ocean’s surface.
Tlaloc gave them the last true freedom they were owed.
Death.
The kraken didn’t like to be stolen from.
It was as if the jungle had suddenly objected to Tlaloc’s presence by trying to bury him with whipping trees.
The axe glinted, red flashes reflected off the black, mirrored surface. A hundred angles spread the lightning across the gray-blue jungle.
He cleaved and burned.
Punched and kicked.
If there was one that could reduce a small island into nothing, it was him.
He leapt.
Hundreds of meters in a single bound.
The kraken had continued its inexorable swim to shore.
It had well and truly passed the red line marked in his HUD.
Soon it would be unable to proceed further due to the shallowing of the water.
Several hundred meters from shore.
It seemed far until one realized that even the shortest tentacles could sweep the beach from that distance.
As for the longest?
They could reach from ground to top floor of a skyscraper.
With the portals?
They could reach many kilometers into land.
Voices over the radio.
Warning.
Fear.
Courage.
The artillery positions were under attack.
Where was that annoying Eron?
Useless.
He would end it himself.
The axe fell on the kraken like a meteor.
Red crackled across the gray-blue.
It did not smell anything at all like grilled squid.
He planted his feet and pulled his axe free.
Surprisingly bloodless.
The hide looked to be meters thick.
More like a warship’s armor than a living thing’s skin.
Tentacles attempted to sweep him off as he made his way toward the monster’s head and those enormous pools it had for eyes.
He cleaved the smaller ones and leapt or ducked the larger ones.
Time slowed for him.
Seconds?
Minutes?
Hours?
It felt like all.
The chatter in his helmet continued unabated as his warriors struggled and died.
The artillery bombardment had stopped at some point.
They knew to retreat.
So did the warriors fighting over the ocean with him.
Maria and the surviving eagle warriors and eagle knights had made for land.
Swarms of bees continued to assail the tentacles even as they whipped the jungle in search of Guillermo.
Good.
That meant the man was still alive.
Soon?
An eternity?
Tlaloc stood alone with the kraken.
Even the other monsters were gone.
Bits and pieces, torn, broken and charred bobbed in the dark, churning mass of sea water, foam and mingled viscera.
At long last he reached the head.
The full shape of it was hidden beneath the surface.
“You’re dead, monster. Show me an eye and I’ll make it quick. Or would you rather I dig for it?” he smote it with a lightning bolt as thick around as he was.
The acrid stench overwhelmed the death that had lingered in the moist air since the beginning of the battle.
It started with a tremor.
A shiver through a body the size of a small island.
Then a sudden violent earthquake.
Not the gentle, rolling kind, but the sharp, angry kind that threw everything to the floor.
Farther back, the kraken’s gray-blue hide bulged.
Tlaloc shielded his face with his axe blade just in time as the body erupted, showering a wide swath with foulness.
A volcano that spewed kraken blood, flesh and other things instead of smoke, ash and lava.
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It felt just as hot though, until the heat vanished to be replaced by the comforting cool caress of his rain.
The kraken groaned as its body rattled with the last breaths it possessed.
Eron drifted down through the thick clouds of steam with something large pulsating in his hands.
“Killed it,” he spat, “got some in my mouth.”
“What is that?”
“One of its hearts. I’m taking it. It has a bunch more. No idea if it’s useful.”
The chime in their ears briefly took their attention.
“No time for that,” Eron said.
Tlaloc agreed, broadly.
Eron nodded.
“Listen, dude. I’ve got things to do, so I’m leaving this thing with you.”
Disgusting waves lapped up the side of the gray-blue bulk.
A few tentacles continued to twitch and whip around.
The last signals of the dead monster’s brain finally reaching their destinations.
“Tow it out to sea.”
“Sure, if it’s still here once all these World Events are done. But for now? I’ve got to drop this off,” Eron held up the bloody heart bigger than his torso, “and I’ve got bodies to return to Fl— Richellia. Oh, do me a solid, yeah? If you happen to find more human, er, Earthians in this thing, can you set them aside. I figure it’s the right thing to do. For the families, you know?”
Tlaloc grunted.
A reasonable request, though he wouldn’t dig through the dead kraken’s innards to search, nor would he make any of his people do the same.
To him, the kraken was dead, which meant that the enslaved were also truly dead.
Their spirits were free.
The rest was just decaying meat.
Eron turned to leave.
“You know it’d be nice if you were willing to lend that strength and fancy axe elsewhere. Plenty of bad shit like this going on right now. I could fly you over to one right now?”
There it was.
That’s why he had never liked the man.
He glared at the smaller man.
They were eye to eye because Eron lacked the courage to stand on his own feet instead of floating.
“I have my responsibilities. As do you. You chose your burdens. I chose mine.”
“And yet here we are. Me. Killing your burden.”
“You chose.”
“I guess I did.”
The sudden boom caught Tlaloc unprepared.
He staggered back, only just managing to catch his footing on slick flesh.
Eron was gone.
Tlaloc willed his storm to move inland.
His people needed it now.
It was the time he hated most of all.
Time to count the toll.
----------------------------------------
Lucy Vela stripped off her radiation suit.
The green glow in her lead-lined changing room intensified to near blinding had she been not her.
Powers weren’t always a blessing.
She stared at the shell in its bay.
The flat gray metallic surface stared at her, tempting her.
She’d had the power armor for a month now and yet she couldn’t bring herself to put it on despite the promise it brought.
An end to the long isolation. First in out of the way places, then in her current nuclear power plant home.
Cal had promised that the fancy suit would contain her radiation while draining it and converting it into energy.
That the risks of accidentally irradiating people were minimal.
Still, the timing didn’t feel right.
She wanted to test it out without the risks.
It remained in its bay because she feared that her fears would be proved right.
So long as she didn’t know for certain then she still had a hope to cling to.
Otherwise, what was the point of living?
Tonight, the point was to kill the horde of monsters headed her direction.
They had swept in from the mountains, coming out of one of the spires.
Like all monsters, they sounded like nothing more than sharp teeth, claws and a mad desire to kill.
Too many though. With armor-plated hides that would make a mockery of the weapons the people down in the town and the settlements beyond her plant had.
Cal had asked her to help.
Asked.
Not ordered.
She could’ve stayed inside and hoped they passed her by.
Perhaps, shoot the ones that poked their heads around.
Instead, she headed outside.
The heat from her unshielded body had begun to melt things around her as she hurried through the building.
She was upwind from the people, so that was a relief.
It was unfortunate for all the animals and plant life further up the mountain.
The lake feeding the river was also out of the danger zone so long as the wind didn’t shift.
The ground began to rumble.
She could see the thick forest higher up the slope shake.
Birds and other things took flight, screeching their surprise, fear and anger into the night.
They breached the tree line.
Swept over the fence like it was nothing, trampling it in their wake.
It was like the one time Cal had taken her to see a beach because she had wondered what it was like.
He was nice about that.
At least once a month, he took her anywhere in the world she had wanted.
Beaches.
Mountain tops.
Antarctica.
Isolated places far from people where she could push her fear down for a bit.
She saw nothing but a heavily armored wave of snapping teeth and cutting claws.
Lucy raised her hands to the horde.
Her green glow swelled in intensity, turning black night bright.
She blasted them with everything she had.
It was over in minutes.
Like lemmings, they had followed those in front of them to their deaths.
When it was over the parking lot was dotted with lumps of hardened metal.
Armored hides melted by the intense heat, glowing orange as the cold mountain air blew the smoke up the mountainside.
Lucy’s green glow faded.
She could almost see her old skin color, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
She trudged back into the building to put on her radiation suit.
Her night wasn’t over.
She needed to clean up the mess she left.
The anti-radiation foam wasn’t going to spray itself.
At least not yet.
Cal had promised automatic drones for that were in the works.
Somewhere in Central Asia he hunted down the last of Adrelhit the Raper’s clone-sons.
People had been lucky that the horde had emerged from a spire in the middle of nowhere out on the steppes.
The closest they got to one of the isolated villages was the outer wall.
He had destroyed their consciousnesses from miles overhead before they could even start jumping over.
The humanoids were too beautiful that it pushed their appearance all the way down into the deepest point of the uncanny valley. They had chalk-white skin and perfect bodies. He saw all of it because they were naked. All of them.
Each was individual.
Each was connected.
When one died his essence, his strength flowed into those nearby, divided equally.
Their hierarchy had been simple.
The strongest ruled.
He had started at the top.
Killed the strongest and worked his way down.
The weakest scattered across the steppes.
Even those at the base of the pyramid could run faster than a car.
As he had killed the first the strength flowed into the others.
A mistake he had only made once.
He destroyed their minds, left their bodies as vegetables.
That had worked.
The strength remained contained.
He left just enough of their brains to keep them breathing until he could return.
The last group had spotted a caravan of vehicles traveling between cities.
Risky, but who was he to judge.
The white-skinned rapers were desperate to rape and impregnate.
It was their mandate.
Their hard-wired instinct.
Cal had found nothing in their memories to reveal their origin and why something so horrible was brought into existence.
He did find plenty to understand how they existed.
Rape was followed by a quick pregnancy and a painful birth.
The unfortunate woman would then be raped again.
The cycle would repeat until she could no longer bear children.
Death was a mercy at that point.
The children grew quick.
Fully grown in less than a year with all the knowledge and memories of the others.
They raped anyone sapient.
Species, gender, none of it mattered when it was time.
They were all Adrelhit. Less a people and more a plague of locusts moving from world to world in one continuous spree of violent rape and murder.
The Adrelhits didn’t see him as he flew overhead.
Each dropped mid stride.
Their eyes stared into nothing as drool dripped from slack mouths.
The caravan stopped.
Men and women bearing weapons.
He left them to it.
They’d get something from killing the bodies.
He quickly retraced his flight path, putting an end to the brain dead bodies other people or monsters hadn’t gotten to.
The chime in his ears signaled another World Event dealt with.
He tried to keep his thoughts from straying to his wife and son.
There was nothing he could do for them. Not until the other events were neutralized.
Trust was all he had.
Bennett lacked trust.
Not in his friends, but himself.
They had done everything he had asked of them while going above and beyond to make it clear they didn’t see him as a monster as they all tried to find a solution for his growing blood hunger.
But, what if there wasn’t one?
What if it was just his nature now?
The double-edged sword of high levels.
It made sense from a scholarly perspective.
The class came from his subconscious. It was him.
To grow meant to become more of it. A deeper embodiment.
And what was the essence of a vampire if not the endless thirst for blood.
Animals no longer cut it.
He likened it to humans being unable to subsist on a diet of rabbits. Their meat was too lean. Not enough fat. A human would eventually suffer protein poisoning.
Human blood from the blood bags he got from the hospital, clinics or blood banks kept him satiated for a time. Though he needed more and that time had grown dangerously short.
He smelled it on them, heard it flowing in their veins despite the self-imposed isolation.
Insanity was a fear. The maddened bloodlust that would drive him to murder and the moment of clarity when he had slaked his thirst.
Those thoughts haunted his every waking and sleeping moment.
The world events made it worse.
It didn’t take a genius or even a reasonably smart person to be concerned about someone or something called ‘Vukylokyr’. ‘Vitae’? ‘Crimson Era’?
Obvious was obvious.
Cal had checked in with an unnecessary warning.
His old friend had offered to hide him until Vukylokyr had been dealt with.
He had refused for he saw an ending in which he could hold his head high.
It had been a mistake.
The whispers started three days after the spires announcement.
He had realized five days after that it was too late.
Clawed fingers had sunk into his very will.
Oh, he fought it.
Levels gave him the strength for some resistance.
Ironic, that which would bring him ruin would grant him just a little bit more time to prepare for the end.
He couldn’t warn his friends of what was coming.
The compulsion was clear.
So, he wrote a letter and sent his long-time familiars to deliver it.
Dracula and Alucard.
Fancy rats.
Ancient in their reckoning for he had fed them his blood over the decades.
One was jet black, while the other was black and white like a dairy cow.
Both were a lot smarter, stronger, faster and bigger than they had been at the beginning.
They sensed his unease, yet by the grace of God he had somehow kept them free. Unlike the rest of the small animals around the old archive building he called upon to fight monsters and evil men.
They feared for him, but didn’t disobey.
Once they were long gone he commanded the rest to fall upon each other and all the small animals, mutated or otherwise across the entire city.
Mice, rats and bats warred for a day and a night.
Snakes, squirrels, chipmunks, birds and insects were collateral.
The voice in his head hadn’t been pleased.
The people saw or heard the battles in the parks, in their yards, even in their homes.
It was too big to ignore.
Suspicions were raised.
The anti-vampire measures he had pushed for over the past few years were tested and re-tested.
The Threnosh fabricators were asked to make more.
Governor-for-life Alejandro wasn’t a fool.
He didn’t need people telling him what to do.
When the spires spoke one listened if one wanted to survive another day.
Bennett just wished he could tell them it wouldn’t be enough.
Tell them to call Cal and Eron.
To damn the rest of the world for he was selfish in the end.
He didn’t want his people to suffer.
Jake arrived sooner than expected.
As agreed upon, his friend was in full gear.
Threnosh armor integrated with many of Jake’s best magitech spell modules.
“Yo, Bennett, bro? Got your letter.”
Jake stood outside the front doors.
Chained on both sides.
A fiction of security since Bennett just needed the slightest shadow.
“Um, no offense, but a vacation sounds super weird, plus you want me to take care of your kids? I’m like the worse at that. You know how many fish keep dying on me.”
Bennett stood just on the other side.
He had hoped to be gone by now. On his last Quest.
The spires had given it to him when he had firmed his resolve.
Though he understood the odds were slim.
“Yeah, anyways. Bit worried about you, man. Oh and there was that weird stuff with all the tiny animals going crazy and killing each other. We were hoping you could help out with that. Just, uh, anything you can share? Maybe?”
The urge to slink out and sink his fangs into his friend was tempered by the last rays of the dying sun.
Jake was breaking the one rule he had insisted upon.
Trust, but misplaced.
The whispers—
Bennett’s fangs lengthened.
Finger nails grown like thin daggers barely scratched the thick chains holding the thick steel doors he had replaced the original glass with.
An analytical mind warred with the hungry beast.
He wanted it—
No he didn’t.
Jake was also high level. He had anti-vampire spells and other countermeasures
Bennett had helped his friend test all of them.
The outcome of a conflict was uncertain. Thus, it wasn’t beneficial to the voice in his head.
He pulled himself back from the abyss.
Reason and logic won out.
But, it had been close and that was more than enough.
Bennett didn’t hear the rest of what Jake had to say.
He blurred through the building and slipped out the back.
The lengthening shadows protected him from the worst effects of the last light.
One last Quest.