Tension so thick and so soft I could cut it with a fat finger tried to wrap itself around my sizable neck. Being bigger and closer to jacked is not all it’s cracked up to be. Not even the creak of Svalinn’s gauntlets eased the tension worming its way down my spine. This was the moment I’d been working towards for too damn long.
Besides, we had cool shit planned.
Ignore the copious amounts of sweat tickling my spine.
Kraken turned towards me and gave a clear nod from his seat within the extra large golem he was piloting. That meant two things. One, it was go time. And two, Spot and his handlers had already started their job above ground.
With a solid kick, Kraken and the first score of golems exploded out of the thin rock wall separating our latest tunnel from the humongous cavern of the undead. I kept right on his tail, Gungnir extended as a beefed up warhammer. Wielding my favorite in one hand with enhanced strength, I flushed Svalinn’s left gauntlet full of power. A blade resembling a crescent moon expanded mostly out but wide enough to still function as a shield.
Charging into a massive cavern with my team and a full army of golems should’ve been the loudest moment of my life but instead there was nothing but a low rumble as thousands of gigantic feet padded forward on earth that was softer than it had any right to be.
To my right out of a second tunnel whose entrance led to a U-shaped join to our main entrance tunnel, Acantha and Johnny raced behind their own golem vanguard. Their forward guard was armed with huge kite shields with teeth on the edges and one large spike in the very front.
I should’ve been more worried than I was. The thin mists ahead of us preceding the strange boneyard only served to heighten our confidence. Which is why I gave Kraken the barest nod through our tenuous mental link.
My spirit familiar picked up the pace, his piloted golem glowing even more brightly as we charged forward. The first step of the plan was to get as much of my army into the open space as possible. Shield walls need room. This moment is when we would be at our most vulnerable.
“There’s nothing here!” Reeanth yelled, frantically looking around. Johnny leaped into the air with an odd jump that resembled a run. Once, twice, three times, and then four. My cultivator friend’s boots gave a soft chime at each step off of an invisible platform that appeared for an instant.
At the peak of his journey five stories up, he hurled an unfurling scroll that grew as the paper trailed the cypress frame. Mystical letters burned away before a will-o-wisp with arms flared into existence. It was like a miniature sun floating through a portal just for us.
“We get half an hour if it doesn’t interfere on our behalf!” Johnny shouted as he touched down. “And mutant mephits forcibly combined with wisps hate pretty much everything, so make that fifteen. Move! Move!”
I couldn’t let Johnny beat me. My defense is that my next move was at least part of Kraken’s plan. The ground ahead of us broke apart as a solid two hundred golems plus the massive sunstone pylon itself rose out of the softened earth. Sunny reached the pylon first, stabbing both arms deep into its burning core. While moving it forward slowly, the pylon flowed ever closer like molten glass towards the giant bone acting as the spine of the cavern.
My golem army streamed out of the two tunnels in such a tight formation that ants would have been jealous of the prime organization.
“Where is everyone?” Johnny asked, spinning around slowly to scan the mists that randomly thickened before dispersing into nothingness. A deep rumble shook the cavern.
I grinned, pointing up. “My guess, trying to catch my dog.”
“Over here!”
We all spun to see Reeanth pointing gesturing for us to come over. I didn’t even take the time to wonder at how unimaginably huge the strange monolithic femur was. Compare it to standing directly next to the base of a skyscraper, so wide and large that you don’t even notice the curvature denoting the fact that it isn’t square. To me, in this hasty moment of trying to figure out our next steps, that’s all it was, until Reeanth pointed out an arch of complete and utter blackness.
Kraken swiftly launched his piloted frame to intercept Johnny from sticking his hand in. “DON’T!”
“Man! Don’t touch me! Scared the living shit outta me!” Johnny backed off, shaking his smacked hand, glaring at my familiar while glancing suspiciously at the blackness that didn’t change even though Kraken’s brightly glowing form should’ve shed some light in what appeared to be a doorway.
Kraken molded a long, thin piece of crystal off his fake body, disconnected it and pulled the energy from it. Sticking most of it in the foreboding black, he pulled back less than two inches of what was two feet of solid crystal. “That’s why. It’s pure negative energy. This isn’t the antennae, the portal, or anything we want to touch. This is pure death. For them, it’s an elevator. For us, it’s just death.”
He straightened up, looking around. “And we’re on the wrong floor.”
Clumps of dirt exploded upward with a keening screech, a bony hand shooting out of the dirt a few feet in front of a tunnel that wasn’t there a second ago. Hundred more joined their fellows, tearing through the soil with a horrible jerky fervor resembling angry ants boiling out of their disturbed hive
I snarled, tightening my grip on Gungnir. “And this is a trap. It looks half sprung though.”
Kraken’s mental orders snapped out in a hurry, Sunny standing tall and integrating its feet with the remolded pylon that now resembled a hexagonal obelisk with him on top. The walls of the cavern shimmered in random spots as even more things crawled out of them like ensconced tombs. My golem army linked up, forming an unbreakable shield wall at the outer edges while the rearmost lines began to do something I didn’t expect.
In sets of two, the rearmost golems began touching the sunstone obelisk before quickly molding into each other, beginning the process of cutting our numbers in half but the new golems were twice as large. My jaw dropped as fourteen foot golems with even thicker limbs and armor stood guard in front of Sunny. Every ten seconds, another super golem stood ready to deal some serious damage.
What a time to be alive.
“Fuck it! I’m going up!” I cursed, sheathing Gungnir and willing Svalinn to retract until I just had big gauntlets on. Kraken shook his crystalline head before copying the other golems. He walked over to the obelisk and absorbed three golems instead of just one. Within one minute, Kraken towered over all of us, standing at twenty two feet tall with four arms covered in jagged spikes made for climbing.
I suppose he could kill shit with it too.
“Hurry up and shut this down!” Reeanth yelled, standing atop the one out of place golem, eyeing the growing number of undead. More were coming out of the tunnels that we didn’t make but the unnerving part were the ones tearing out of the ground like a B horror movie. They shouldn’t have been able to shriek like that. The disgusting fuckers didn’t have lungs!
At Sunny’s direction, the golems stepped forward and played whack a skull for the ones crawling upward while those with extra long pikes used their range to great effectiveness.
Johnny didn’t hold back, dancing forward like a kung-fu master, his feet lightly touching the tops of the golems’ heads before floating forward. I didn’t have time to marvel at how much he’d changed since our last meeting as Kraken grabbed me with one massive arm and began hauling us up the bone.
“Did you get this idea from Kong?” I asked, unable to keep the uneasy smile off my face.
“Shut up and make sure no aerial enemies get close.”
Slapping my Grimoire with two consecutive blasts of power, my Soul-Bound artifact flipped open to the exact page I wanted. Spinning up a ‘Mana-Shield’ with extra power and two extra stabilizer rune-script lines took zero time but twinning the second spell but at a different axis took five seconds of concentration and I was glad I did both. Needles of bone drew a staccato line across my shield, bursting into puffs of bone dust off to my side while a screaming horror landed on the shield facing up.
One of the four arms from Kraken’s mecha-golem tore the five headed horror off the shield and ground it into the femur like it was just a fucking bug not even worth of consideration. I gawked in awe because that bug was the size of a freaking station wagon. Each of Kraken’s four arms and both feet grew even more spikes as it carried us upwards, an inhuman insect molded from magical crystal.
“Magic is so fucking cool!” I grinned, moving my shields just a bit apart so I could comfortably spin up a ‘Salvo’ spell. My upper shield faced the cavern ceiling as if to shield from a hail of arrows and my bigger ‘Mana-Shield’ was facing out away from the column we were climbing up so as to protect me from the flying monsters that resembled an unholy marriage between a scorpion and a dragonfly.
Bolts of caustic green energy landed on my shield sending up loud puffs of smoke. I fired back with condensed ‘Mana-Bolts’ of my own, the ‘Salvo’ spell allowing me to play the part of a machine gunner. “Fuck your acid covered bone spikes!”
“Protect me better!” Kraken yelled as half a dozen lances of enemy fire melted off a foot.
“This is harder than it looks!” I snapped back, conjuring smaller ‘Mana-Shields’ and setting them to hover in relation to the mecha-golem wherever I put them. The missing golem foot grew back as I spoke.
“Shut up and give me more shields!”
“You’re getting too comfortable with telling me to shut up, asswipe.”
Growling with frustration as the enemy grew even more numerous, I poured more mana through my Grimoire, shamelessly taking advantage of not having to build the bulk of the spell myself. All I had to do was stick relational coordinates to it so it would hover over the right part of Kraken’s mecha-golem and tether it to the Grimoire which had its own considerable store of power locked away.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
My Flesh Golem assisted with managing the hormonal response of combat, evening out the jitter brought on by adrenaline while sharpening my focus. For all the good it did me, it still couldn’t get rid of one super annoying thought. [Fuck! Wish I had my gun right now!] I cursed mentally, trying not to draw excess attention to myself. Kinda hard to do that while riding a massive sunstone golem crawling up a gargantuan femur.
Cudgeling my brain into working like a semblance of its former Sorcery-empowered self, I remembered the boxes of crystal rounds still stored within Gungnir.
I ground my teeth, forcing my brain through the steps. “‘Mana-Bolt’ spell frame but without the mana condensation circuit, reroute the power to the duplicated ‘thrust and shoot’ mechanism, designate pulling objects from Gungnir in the shape of a bullet OR a grenade and . . . . PRESTO BITCHES!”
Taking another desperate minute to link the firing mechanism to my will and tethering the aim to my line of sight as opposed to exactly where Gungnir’s ax-head is pointed got me in the ballpark of my favored result. The first couple bullets flew through the air slowly, more like a baseball thrown by a teenager rather than a bullet hurled by gunpowder.
“Goddamn circuit!” Snarling at the lack of thrust, I added in three more acceleration circuits as each successive ring doubled the speed of the bullet. The next two rounds blew small holes in a daring skeletal flier. “Okay, just two more and . . . . Boom Baby!”
A carefully aimed round detonated against the faceplate of a flying horror turning it and its spine to dust
“New spell! New spell!” I screamed, firing off crystal bullets at any fucker that got a bit too close. “God! This is so much more efficient! Look at’em!”
“That’s actually better than my ‘Gun-Spell’!” Kraken laughed, still hauling us upward. “I never even gave it to you but doubling up on the thrust mechanism is what I was missing. And it only uses a quarter of the energy required for a ‘Mana-Bolt’ spell.”
“The physical element of the crystal bullet is actually superior to a ‘Mana-Bullet’ which is pure energy.” I quickly explained as crystal rounds put holes the size of dinner plates in my enemies. “The mana empowering the bullet just make it far dealier.”
Any semblance of elation was ripped away by the massive jolt that almost tore us off the unholy column. I looked down to see a set of thick claws digging into Kraken’s leg threatening to rip us down in the furious battle below.
Gungnir’s glowing speartip extended fifteen feet as I swiped down, lopping off the offending fingers. As the monstrosity fell back, two crystal bullets put it out of its misery. I didn’t want to use a grenade for two reasons: one, fifteen feet ain’t enough distance to protect myself from the blast, and two, I didn’t want to harm my allies below in case I missed.
“Aren’t we supposed to be going down?” Kraken growled, forcing his massive golem body upwards.
“Bad guys are always at the top of a tower, man.” I laughed, spraying and praying some American philosophy, the howls of the slavering undead cutting off as crystal rounds turned heads to dust. I saved the grenades for tightly grouped enemies or for softening up some of the bigger ones. Two more tunnels opened up. Skeletal elephants from hell with undead polar bear riders stalked through the gaping maws.
Even Kraken stopped in disbelief to watch the latest horrors arrive.
I shrugged. “Well, bad guy leadership is always at the top of the tower. That doesn’t mean they don’t have badass minions.”
Judy howled with excitement, breaking free to engage the newcomers directly. That at least satisfies one part of our agreement. Plenty of undead for her to kill and re-commandeer.
Every step up the central femur support cost three bullets. I’d like to say it's because the zombies actually required three bullets to kill but actually it was due to the sheer numbers of the flying creatures. I just couldn’t get a bead on’em until they dove to attack me or attempted a sideswipe. This made me miss my dwarven rifle even more. The shotgun feature would’ve been invaluable here.
“KRAKEN! THIS AIN’T WORKIN’!”
I felt his groan vibrate through the big golem.
“Must I do everything?”
Holding back unconscionable levels of sarcasm, I kept blasting. “Yes please!”
“I got it! Hold on tight!”
Whipping around to see Johnny unexpectedly standing next to me, my blood covered friend smacked his serpent staff. With a wet cough, it spat out a thick scroll bordered with fine gold filigree and shifting runes.
“This’ll do the trick! Just need some magic blood!”
Trusting the cultivator as he beckoned towards me, I exposed my forearm and let Johnny lightly cut me with one of the exposed fangs. He then grabbed my arm, smashed the scroll against the open wound and squeezed.
“YOU GOT TEN SECONDS TO BRACE! SHIT’S ABOUT TO GET HEAVY!”
Johnny is too dumb to not mean that literally. Doubling the number of shields I had out took five seconds and pumping them extra full took four more seconds. That last second had me clinging to Kraken as if my life depended on it. That didn’t stop me from watching the chaos unfold.
Johnny twisted off both golden caps of the scroll, fed them to his snake staff, then skipped into the air as if the wind itself formed a convenient spiral staircase. For a moment, his veins glowed a dark silver even shining through his clothing.
His words were lost to the deep THRUMMMMMMMING sound as the scroll caught a non-existent breeze. It unfurled in the air just below the screaming mephit wisp that served as our light source. The very atmosphere of the massive cavern began to hum at an even deeper level, disturbing the all too bright light. I could make out details for the mephit wisp, the burning glow giving way to a chained silhouette with four arms straining to break free.
Eternal hatred burned in its pupil less eyes.
“EAT IT BITCHES!”
Johnny’s scream was drowned out by the purest absence of sound.
All of this happened in the moments between split seconds.
The very air itself stole all momentum from the cavern. Every bit of kinetic energy froze. Gravity itself coughed as the magic of the scroll seized power from every external source of movement. I could feel myself about to drift off Kraken’s golem as if gravity had forgotten its usual role.
Johnny’s silhouette scared the ever living shit out of me. In that span of time, he looked like a Dark God incarnate. His body losing definition at the sides as his very being was replaced by the blackness of eternal night, his eyes glowing an impossibly deeper black. I could’ve sworn that it was my brain playing tricks on me, that’s how fast he flickered back to normal.
Gravity returned to normal for me, but the sound of an uncountable million bones shattering was the only thing I heard. The flying zombies fell to the ground like they were shot out of a cannon. The shrieking hordes of the undead fell to the ground as their largest bones supporting their weight shattered into toothpicks. Blessed silence reigned for a few moments before Judy ordered her own cadre of
We were lucky that Johnny had that scroll.
We were extra lucky that he didn’t smush any of us.
Falling lightly back down to the cavern floor, my cultivator friend laughed. “I bought us time and space. Get moving asshole.” He pointed up to the top of the cavern where a tiny speck of light shone through.
The upward climb took less time than I expected. Kraken walked us up with the enduring steadiness of a determined golem and I surveyed the greatly diminished battlefield.
“Yeah, sticking the angel sword in the pylon wasn’t the right call, but flavoring the pylon’s stores of power with leaked energy from the angel sword certainly was.” I looked around far below us, noting that we’d only lost one golem in that short fight. Even now, Sunny and the other golems were already putting their fallen soldier back together. “If anything, that extra holy flavor gave their armor some serious oomph!”
[We’re going to need those swords to get out of this alive, let alone with all of our fractured selves intact.]
I nodded. “Yeah, time traveling portal bullshit from Merlin aside, I’m not going to say anything to jinx us. That would be the absolute height of stupidity.”
Kraken’s golem sprouted two long, thin arms with sharp blades at the very tip and set them to widen the window above us. Loose dirt and stone poured down next to us along with plenty of ice. I shielded my face as wind colder than Satan’s butthole whistled just above us.
“Hold up,” I said, gripping Gungnir even tighter. “How does that make sense? We were in a giant cavern underneath an ice fortress, we climb up a supporting column that looks like a femur, and we reached the outside? Shouldn’t that climb have put us in the center of the castle? Did we take a left turn in midair when I wasn’t looking?”
[The floor or ceiling, whatever we are digging through is thicker than our initial estimations.]
Even if Kraken was being careful, the golem itself could put a freaking excavator to shame. Long blades of magically empowered crystal sheared through the layers of stone and ice like a hot knife through butter and all I did was use a few ‘Mana-Shield’s to protect us from the fallout.
“No time for recon!” I snarled, slapping the golem’s back. “Haul ass! The sooner we get this antenna taken care of the sooner we can go screw with the portal itself.”
Kraken’s golem hauled us out onto the floor, reshaping itself into a massive version of a medieval knight that was just too wide to knock over. Instead of holding a shield and a sword, the shoulder pauldrons were excessively overbuilt so that a quick turn would basically function as a shield. In each hand, spiked maces big enough to cave in a mammoth’s head rested against the ground.
[Look around!] Kraken hissed mentally. [This is too convenient. Nothing’s here!]
He was right. The reason it was so bright and the fact that I was fooled into thinking we had tunneled into the frozen tundra outside is because we were standing like idiots inside a chamber big enough to fit a football stadium. I don’t mean the field itself, I mean the stands, the bloated building with all the shopettes and souvenir stores and hot dog stands, and then the damn parking lot around the building as well. I turned, trying to keep my disbelief from slowing me up.
The walls to the chamber were just under three-quarters of a mile away in every direction and most of them had gaping holes in them. Brilliant sunshine poured in from everywhere and the wind, well the wind made itself known. In fact, it almost seemed pissed that we were here with the way it was whipping past my nose trying to give me frostbite.
“Not only is this creepy, but with the way the wind is blowing, we won’t be able to hear anyone or anything.”
Kraken looked at me, his golem reshaping to be slimmer, taller, and have much longer legs. “True, but that’s not a concern now. We will be seen far sooner than we will be heard.”
I easily jumped back up onto his shoulder. “Guess you’re hauling ass again. We need to either find stairs to the top of this place or climb up the outside.”
Taking a moment to get a hard look, I touched the Flesh Golem hiding within my armor so I could greatly enhance my eyes. The eastern, western, and northern sides of this auditorium were essentially useless but the southern side was hazy in a way that’s hard to describe.
“Go south, that way!” Pointing in the intended direction, I kept my eyes focused on the looming wall. As we got closer, it became apparent why it was so hard to make out. Everything was white. Every piece of the wall, every bit of everything was the exact same shade of frozen, frosty white that was so blank it was hard to look at.
It was hard to make anything out. It all just blended together if you were further than forty yards away.
[How did you know?] Kraken asked, the long legs of his golem eating up the distance.
“Two things, one, the Hungry Ones generally hate light, so if they set something up at all, the good stuff would be in the spot that gets the least sunlight, which in Greenland is the southern part of any building. Two, my eyes kept trying to look away and I’m too stubborn for that shit. What we’re looking for is this way.”
My gut feeling didn’t fail me. My bowels almost did.
We did find a staircase set disappearing into the wall but right next to what we needed was a throne. The throne was most of the wall. I would need an actual jetpack to get up there to sit in that thing.
“What in the fucking fuck has an ass that big to need a seat like that?”
Kraken’s response made the pucker factor soar through the roof. In fact, it wasn’t even words, it was just a picture. Blue skin. Gnarled boulders for toes. Cracked nails bigger than a car hood oozing black blood. Runic tattoos and a wispy beard of a corpse.
“Fuckin’ move faster!”
I did not have time to deal with a Jotun Draugr.