The crew took stock of what they’d used up fighting the sludge beast. They formed a circle and talked out their current deficiencies.
Jose had a few spell casts in him before he collapsed, maybe even only one if he had to alter the formula as fast and loose as he did just moments ago. Matteo and Lysa were also physically spent, with the former having acid burns across his forearms and torso and the latter being exhausted with two spears and a javelin left in her arsenal. Once Joanna was done treating Matteo’s wounds, she’d be down her vial of freezing liquid and a good half of her topical salves.
Carmina was fortunate enough that, aside from a ragged throat and sore thighs, she was fine. It sucked that her bag of goodies were light, a prerequisite for her position and a personal appeal of the profession to her, but not now. Now she was wishing she had the whole world and more to get them through the final stretch of this test.
“I’m gonna run ahead while you all take a breather.” Carmina informed the group as she sorted through her equipment. Matteo gave her a worried look but didn’t voice his concern.
Good. The big idiot was in a worse place than she was. Just because this wasn’t like the Reverie didn’t mean he could be as reckless as he’d been. She’d be screaming his ear out if she hadn’t already fried her throat with all of the yelling earlier.
“You should bring someone else with you. Joanna should be up for it.” Jose chimed in. She had been happy in placing her eggs in this basket and up to now, he’d paid off.
“No dice. She’s only going to slow me down or make noise. No offense, lady.” Carmina replied. Joanna raised her hands up to her chest and shook her head, no offense taken. “We don’t exactly have the luxury to argue the logistics right now. We need to push forward and beat this test before anyone else does or there goes our chances to get a spot on that boat.” And the chances for the two of them to get off this colony and make the trek to find the rest of their family.
“She’s right, Jose. Just let her go, she’s capable enough to handle herself.” Lysa waved whatever Jose was about to say off and pushed him to rest on the damp floor beneath them. The woman was a firebrand and dependable, something Carmina liked in a professional coworker.
Before anyone else could voice their concerns, Carmina walked out of the room and into the monolithic hallway with its statues dedicated to all sorts of people and places Carmina didn’t give a fuck to commit to memory. The stone replication of Lacrumi caused that gnawing homesickness to creep in but she pulled herself away from that headspace and focused on the task at hand.
These hallways were long, dark, and decrepit, and it wasn’t unusual for her to perform double takes at the stone eyed statues looking down on her, judging her. It was unsettling, albeit nothing she couldn’t handle.
Illuminating her Sight, she sent out her feelers towards the hallways exit. It felt like her vision was being doubled, the slow steps of her body moving towards the hallway and the fast incorporeal zoom of her soul experiencing the physical breadth of the room ahead. It was a much more stable replica of the atrium they had escaped from, sans the meat tower in the center and the glowing growth that made her head fuzzy. There was more water to deal with too, its opening narrow but its depth impermeable.
Hopefully this place wouldn’t smell as bad, she thought.
Reeling her Sight back, she began sprinting towards the exit’s entrance and filled in the incomplete picture her initial experience gave her. It was dark. So dark that only the silhouettes of the walls and the vague outlines of crushed debris were visible to her, and only just.
She pulled out a pair of goggles tied to her waist and strapped them on, soul infusing the device to life and coloring the dark world around her in a visible sepia. Crouching low to the ground, she approached the atrium proper, looking at any nook or cranny for an exit on the surface.
There were doorway shaped grooves on either end of the first floor. A gash streaked the ceiling from where another floor was slanted and dilapidated, the source of various boulders and metal chunks across her floor and the first floor. What looked to be a maintenance hatch in the floor of the first floor was pummeled open, a thick still flood of swamp water sitting undisturbed at the cusp of that entrance.
Nothing obvious suggesting an exit. That was expected. Nothing obvious to clue her on her progress, however, made the specifics of this test grate on her nerves.
“I hope the other teams are getting as fucked over as we are…” Carmina grumbled. She walked over to the doorway grooves and, with the use of her Soul, opened the door into a narrow hallway with two living quarters on either end. Taking a moment to look behind her and listen to the comforting groanings of the sinking vessel, she made her approach into the new hallway and began investigating the rooms of the former citizens.
The door handle unlocked with ease, letting out a puff of rust flakes and stale air into her face. The enclosed room itself was inconsequential, a bare living situation with a cot, an empty rusted box for valuables, and a closet for since rotted clothing. Kicking the box open greeted her with more useless junk; a magazine with a faded woman on the cover, a book with no title and more indecipherable language, and a maze with no exit.
A waste of time here then.
She walked from room to room, impassionately rifling through the belongings of the dead for an inkling of information that would set her and her group in the right direction.
“Oh?” Carmina audibly puzzled at the departure found in the third hallway. The hallway was narrow, but it’s dead end was replaced with a proper door, the only one to be found in this stretch. She approached the door and heard the satisfactory click of the handle open up to reveal a more luxurious display. Even the stale air and rusted flames she had held her lungs to expect were absent. The uniform and minimal room was replaced with an ostentatious set of rooms, at least for the bar they’d set for her up to this point.
The living quarters were light with small sconces of crystallized soul, shining on the four corners of the room. There was a proper seat and adjacent table, with a wall displaying the molted liveries of the occupant and their legible family motto, “Para Volar”. The symbol was a heron preparing to take flight.
“Jackpot!” Carmina couldn’t hide the stupid smile on her face. She voraciously looked through the room and when there wasn’t anything of note in the rotted reading material, she explored the two remaining rooms in the suite. The room to her left had a proper bed with fine linen caked in dust and mold. The bed frame was cool to the touch as she felt the carving of refined mangrove wood on her fingertips. She checked underneath the bed for any miscellaneous boxes and found nothing.
The other room had Carmina shaking with excitement. Each wall aside from the entrance side was lined to the brim with hardcover books. The smell of damp paper pulp and ink and the thick curled blueprint paper with brown crinkled edges on the long dark wood desk denoted the richness and breadth of knowledge she was animated to plunder.
She started with the desk, pulling drawers open and rifling through the contents of unused stationery and baubles of unknown importance aside. She read through the opened letters that looked important, the ones set to an individual box marked for retrieval by the carriers of the old colony. Carmina scanned through the letters for anything talking about maintenance tunnels or the forge.
Aloud Carmina read, “...This is the third time I’ve sent a request for you to return my map. If you keep avoiding my requests, I’ll be forced to have Vanguard intervene. Don’t make me do this…” The letters front was unmarked but she was keen to the smell of lemon pulp on the envelope cover. Carmina rummaged through her personal belongings and pulled out her carrier light, shining it down on the seemingly empty cover to reveal travelling coordinates. If picked up from here, the receiver would be located in the maintenance tunnel just outs-
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“Thunk.” Carmina jumped up, muscles taut and ready to run at the first sight of danger. “Thunk.” Another heavy thunk on the metallic walls that were louder than her heart thumping its way up and out of her throat. She strained her ears to pick up on any other sounds the creature, or creatures, might be making. The risk of it or a pack of monsters being capable of following her pulse from this close made her hesitant to reach out with her soul and gather more information to operate with.
“Thunk.” It was outside the study she was in. The shadow it cast was large and squat like a wolf or a panther. She could hear the whip-like swishing of its tongue as it swung in the air with flecks of spittle sizzling on the floor and furniture. Carmina practiced her trance in her head, submerging her mind into a calming dark water before she snuffed out even the spark of life in her soul. She opened her eyes and felt nothing. The physical sensation of her heart panicking was a mere afterthought as she picked herself up from the ground and casually walked out of the room.
She got a good look at the creature in the magical light. It was quadrupedal and wide with scales like an alligator, a snout that opened up in four ways like a flower with the teeth lining the tips of the snout. A human face sat in the creature's throat, eyes and nose missing with a thick stalk acting as the root for the tongue swinging in the air. Avoiding the lashings of its tongue, Carmina walked out of the room into the atrium. The tightness in her chest and cold fatigue on her mind was settling in quickly. She found the flooded maintenance tunnel and dove inside, taking great pleasure in being reunited with the embrace and weight of the water, even if it was that foreign still swamp muck.
Carmina swam through the tunnel with only the gentle swishing of her arms propelling her forward to be heard underneath. Once she felt the surface of the water give way, her head emerged on the other side of the maintenance tunnel in an unkempt hallway crowded with vines and obscured dim working lights.
She took a deep breath and allowed her heart to resurface to the weight of life and all of its needling inquiries. She looked down and saw her hands were shaking, unable to grasp and take a proper look at the directions in her...soaked letter.
“Fuck.” She was so stupid! The directions were still fresh in her mind but losing the concreteness of her lead made her feel off-balanced.
And the thing with the monster. Infected? She could go on with the rest of her life living in peace and it wouldn’t be enough to erase the image of that thing out of her mind.
“Focus. Focus…” Carmina hissed under her breath. Assessing the level of fatigue in her body, she had a minute worth of cloaking in her before she’d fall apart.
Did she have to depend on her ‘gift’ again?
Carmina shook her head, “I can do this. I can do this.” She picked herself up from the floor and walked down the hall, sending an initial pulse to sense the souls of potential denizens. The vines occluded her mental image but she could feel the writhing heat of two creatures patrolling the area, the mass of souls in their bodies expanding and contracting with a life of their own. Clinging to the walls, she crouched as she moved down the hall.
“Kerthunk...kerthunk...kerthunk…” The heavy footfalls of the monster echoed through the hall. Carmina pressed her hand to her chest and thought for a moment before shaking her head. Not yet.
“It should be here…” Carmina looked around her and found the slight crack of a hidden maintenance room. Pressing her fingers on the opening, she gingerly opened the door wide enough to slide into the other side. The maintenance room was packed tight with pipes and papers, the remains of its former occupants melded together in a display of brittle embracing bones.
“Find peace beneath the waves.” Carmina whispered the prayer at the long since departed before focusing on her task at hand. The papers on their desk were kept in surprisingly good condition as she leafed through them. It didn’t matter what their reports were though. The same indecipherable gibberish were written across the pages. It didn’t take long before she found the maintenance map under a stack of toppled papers.
“Let’s see where we are and where we’re headed.” Carmina mumbled under her breath. She scanned the map into her journal and tracked through the tunnels with her index finger until she found the maintenance room she was in. Working backwards, the forge would be out of this atrium, through the hall, and into the other hall they didn’t take.
Shit, the other hall. Her skin crawled thinking about the mess she felt lurking in those shadows. Even if the path itself turned her stomach and it sent them right back into the arms of that...thing, just having a path to follow would remove all of their fumbling. They still might be able to-
An abrasive scraping noise caught her focus. She turned to the slit in the room and held her breath as the snout of those quadrupedal monsters pushed the opening further. Its flesh unfurled revealing layers upon layers of glinting sharpened teeth, its tongue slithering out from its throat to gingerly taste the paper pulp and preserved air.
“Kerthunk...kethunk...kerthunk…” A second monster was fast approaching. Her cloak wouldn’t work in such a confined space if the creature kept lashing its tongue around to find her. Her lurching heart receded as the cold fury deep within radiated outward and consumed her, her skin prickling at the sensation of being in dire straits once again.
She pressed her palm onto her chest and after a moment's hesitation, broke into a full sprint. She tumbled over the desk of papers and scattered as much of it as possible, a cloud of sepia’s and faded ink to blend into. The monster gurgled as it spun its tongue around to stop the advances of its phantom foes. Carmina emerged into the narrow hallway and came face to face with the second monster, snout still long and closed with only the tip of its tongue sticking out from the end of its mouth.
Reaching into her bag, she threw a small metal ball onto the wall near its side. Its tongue shot out like a pointed whip's lash, piercing into the metal wall where the metal ball had connected. She took advantage of the opportunity and ran on its opposite end, the second creature fumbling to get its tongue out of the wall just as the first threw the weight of its body out of the room full of papers.
Her heart was pounding, her feet familiar with the urgency, each leg bursting forward and away from anything and everything that could harm her.
“Gurgowwww!” The creatures gurgled with thick spit and hunger as they hunted for her supple flesh. They were uncoordinated, bashing into each other and scraping their scaly skin on the walls and each other which every step they took, practically on top of one another.
Carmina could see the water she’d come from and braced for the embrace of its swamp grit. Her feet hit the ground with a splash and soon her legs and hips were submerged in the water. She dove inside the moment the floor disappeared from underneath her.
The monsters weren’t far behind with bodies naturally slinking into welcoming waters.
She gripped her heart tight and focused on her mantra, willing her nerves to subside and allow her to find the peace necessary to cloak in that liquid abyss. She had to push away the sickly sweet songs worming their way into her mind from a past that refused to be behind her.
Their presence loomed behind and then over her, hulking monstrosities eagerly searching for their meal as they fruitlessly searched for flesh they would never taste. She paid them no mind, giving them a wide berth as she gently swam her way back to the atrium. A small victory that even the singing was gone.
Squinting in the water and seeing the glowing of magical lights shining down on her exit, she greedily reached out and pulled at anything to get her out of the water.
The cloak restraining her self shattered and the flood of adrenaline coursing through her body was dizzying. She did as best of a scan as she could with her eyes, sending out a pulse to find the atrium empty of anything dangerous, with her pursuers still spinning around in the water for prey that had since evaded them.
Carmina walked quietly up the staircase and out of the atrium, rejoining thos judgmental statues with their stern expressions looking down on all those that entered. Each small step felt grand as it echoed through the hall, one step closer to her family, her victory.
“Frround gggyouu.” The guttural groan of the monster proceeded with the swift lash of its barbed tongue wrapping around Carmina’s ankle and yanking her balance from under her. Her body was so fatigued that even the ensuing panic of confronting the monster wasn’t enough to revitalize her burning muscles.
It reeled her in quickly, the face in the monster's throat buggy eyed with a twisted pleasure. Violence was what had defined her life and it still found her now.
She reached into her chest and felt the skin yield to frigid familiar waters.
“You’ve forced my hand.” Carmina spat at the monster with contempt as her fingers wrapped around the jagged hilt of her seafoam colored dagger. The scent of brine as she pulled it out of her was intoxicating, her clenched fist crashing down and severing the tongue with one clean motion.
“Grrrooowww!” the monster howled in pain as its body recoiled. The hunger in her was unyielding. She leapt onto the creature and stabbed into it, viciously, brutally, each puncture an explosion of red ribbons and jittering meat. Carmina kept plunging her blade into the monster until it stopped moving, a mess of holes and flesh and blood piled up on the floor.
“Are you happy?” Carmina asked with gritted teeth, refusing to yield a single tear in the face of her tool. The dagger in her hand disappeared into salt and water, the image of a smile caught in the reflection of the blade.
She walked to her team and family, a victory soured by the gnawing ache of her bones and the failure to keep her past behind her.