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Chapter 53: Into Darkness

BROAAAAAAAAM!

The worm bellowed out a devastating roar. It was a noise unlike anything they had ever experienced before. The rows of teeth, which looked like spinning saw blades, began rotating rapidly, producing a suction force that pulled towards the worm’s mouth. Sand, rocks, dried twigs and tumbleweeds all skittered along the ground and rose up in the whirlwind being generated by the worm.

The party broke apart, diving for the nearest cover to avoid being swept up.

Calvin quickly analyzed the creature.

Subterranean Sawtooth - Level 34

Looking at the creature in front of them. Calvin had initially suspected they’d met the boss. But that didn’t really add up. It was the first hostile creature they’d encountered. It was only level 34, it had a relatively generic name and…

ROAAAAAAR!

… then there was that. That sound came not from the worm, but from something much deeper within the canyon, and it sounded much, much worse.

The fight was on. The worm slammed its head down toward Calvin and Amy, who were grouped up on one side of the canyon. Amy dropped into her Miasmic Shroud and swiftly moved out of the way. Calvin also dodged, leaving the worm to suck up a mouthful of miasma before slamming face first into the canyon floor, and then burrowing down into it.

The rumbling continued as the creature moved beneath the landscape. Ian was tracking it with his nanovision, however, this wasn’t a perfect solution. At certain points, he would lose the monster entirely. Either it went too deep, or his senses were blocked by some interference in the terrain.

Moments later, the worm burst out from one of the canyon walls, showering boulders and dirt down toward the group below. Another mad scramble had them narrowly avoiding death by falling debris.

This fight was going to be ass. The creature could move through the battlefield with impunity becoming immune to the group’s strikes. They desperately needed a way to change the playing field to their advantage.

As the worm slammed back into the ground and slithered toward the main bulk of the group, Amy went to work.

Getting a healthy dose of toxins into this creature would be game plan number one. She infused her blades with Blight Bloom and sheathed them into her bandolier, withdrawing her already prepared Nightclaw spikes. With another infusion, she sent them flying with Stinging Swarm. A fan of spikes raced out from her hands all down the length of the creature, infusing it with corrosive toxin and the toxic effects of Blight Bloom. The sawtooth didn’t even seem to register the strikes as it charged toward Ian and Marshall.

Amy withdrew her daggers and repeated the process. As the creature pressed forward, she slammed on the pedal, sprinting up toward its head, working hard to get to Ian and Marshall. She jammed her blade into the creature, slicing through the thick flesh as she ran. This drew a long, deep gash filled with all manner of toxic bullshit that was sure to give the worm a bad time.

Pustulant sores began opening down the length of the gash, thorns popped the grotesque bubbles as they grew within the flesh. Corrosive ooze dripped down, searing new wounds into the worm and horrible black flowers began to bloom. Amy did not stop.

Huge spikes of earth erupted out of the ground in the worm’s path. Many of them simply exploded on contact with the seemingly unstoppable creature, some found purchase within its flesh before snapping off. Ian was chaining together Stalagmite in an effort to buy them some time.

Ian and Marshall were not well suited for combat against a creature like this. Fortunately, Calvin and Freya were on it.

A chilling howl tore through the canyon, causing the skies to grow darker. The temperature of the previously sweltering surroundings dropped dramatically. With the wind picking up, the canyon filled with the sound of whistling gusts as the rain poured down. The effect was largely magical in nature. The buffeting winds raged on, but the party stood unscathed, observing its destructive power on the battlefield without feeling its force. Freya had called down a storm.

This was Calvin’s time to shine. In just moments, the worm would slam into Ian’s position, and it was up to Calvin to buy them the time to get the hell out of there. He activated his Primal Rage enchantment on his gauntlet, greatly increasing his speed and power. With three solid swipes, he sent devastating windblades toward the head of the worm. The first missed, carving a large scar into the canyon wall. The second one hit the creature at a strange angle, slicing off a large section of skin on its neck. The third one sliced right in the worm’s wide-open mouth. The blade cut through, and completely destroyed several rows of teeth, flaying the mouth wide open. The spinning teeth were no longer mechanically functional, which seemed to eliminate both parts of the creature’s name. It could no longer spin the rows of teeth like saw blades, and thus could no longer chew its way through the earth and become subterranean. Calvin had discovered its weakness. It seemed pretty obvious now.

Unfortunately, this did not remove the lethality this creature represented. As it lost the ability to use its main attack and movement abilities, it flew into a violent rage. No longer was it content with charging and biting. The entire creature’s body writhed around like a flailing snake.

With its body slamming into walls, crumbling down massive sections in huge slides, the gargantuan mass rolled all over the canyon floor. The group was separated. Amy was cut off from everyone on the opposite side of the worm, and now its body had also separated Calvin and Freya from Ian and Marshall.

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They were all in incredible danger. The creature was far too large and its thrashing in this environment would eventually see them crushed.

That’s exactly what Calvin thought he’d just witnessed. The massive worm slammed its body against the wall right where Ian and Marshall had been. It reared its mangled maw toward Calvin and smashed its head in his direction. Calvin dodged the strike and stabbed up into its neck, trying to reposition toward Ian and Marshall. He noticed just before the creature’s tail end swung around that they were not there, their corpses weren’t there, there wasn’t a gooey pile left over from their inevitable crushing, and that’s when Calvin noted the cave just behind their position. They must have ducked in there.

The tail scraped along the canyon walls as the creature shifted its flailing body. To Calvin’s dismay, this brought tons of debris and dirt falling, completely sealing the cave they must have gone into. Calvin scanned the scene. He tossed two more windblades at the creature, carving significant wounds into it. There were caves everywhere and he figured they must link up somewhere.

Freya, find Amy he commanded.

Freya leaped over the massive creature and, within moments, he received Freya’s call.

Calvin sprinted right toward the massive monster. With a thought, two spectral spears appeared beside him. He sent one straight down the throat of the creature and the other flew right over the top of it. With a defiant scream, he activated Riftwalk and in an instant found himself in the air straight over the creature’s rear half. He was falling now. His spear crackled with furious energy as his Resonant Charge built up in the weapon, super charged by the effects of the storm essence enveloping the area.

There was one piece of kit he hadn’t had the opportunity to use just yet. His boots of herculean momentum. With a thought, he activated them and drastically increased his falling momentum. Where once Calvin was falling at terminal velocity, he was now a human meteor. Trails of lightning sizzled behind him as his spear swiped down.

Just as the spear made contact with the worm, he released a windblade, completing the slicing motion. Due to the speed of his fall, the speed of his swing with Primal Rage and the power he imparted to that swing through his momentum, the wind blade sheared right through the creature before his spear unleashed a charge like none other. The tail section of the worm blasted away from the creature and the rest of its body rocketed backward against the wall with tremendous force. Everything started to crumble. Massive boulders the size of houses were falling onto the canyon floor, thousands of tons of rock and dirt tumbled down in devastating slides that would swallow up the entire canyon.

Calvin quickly scrambled to his feet and shouted for Amy and Freya to get into a cave. He was sprinting after them now. The entire canyon side was slowly breaking apart and as they dove into the entrance of the cave, he could see that they might be just too late.

In an instant, they found themselves surrounded by an impenetrable darkness. Calvin wondered for a moment if he’d just died.

“Amy? Are you alright?”

he could sense Freya and she seemed to be mostly unharmed.

A slight cough rang out from the dark.

“Ack! Cal?” Amy said between coughs, “I’m good. Can’t see shit. You see Marshall and Ian out there?”

“Yeah, they popped into a cave. These tunnels have to link up right?”

Calvin’s charged spear generated enough light for them to see that the tunnel continued into the canyon. Calvin had an unsettling thought… Are these tunnels naturally formed, or were they chewed out by those worms?

The idea that more of those worms could be around was not one they wanted to dwell on at this moment.

“Let’s try and find our way through here. We know generally which direction they would have entered from so we can try and link up that way. Worst case, we have a portal grenade and Ian has his skill, so we’re not completely trapped. If they portal back, I would expect that they would try to contact us.” Calvin reasoned.

So, they carefully plodded their way through the dry, subterranean tunnel.

An experience notification briefly interrupted them. The worm had finally succumbed to its injuries.

“Well, one down.” Calvin said.

The tunnel went on for quite a way; it was uniform all the way through, further leading Calvin to believe those damn worms had carved these out. Eventually, the path led them to a large chamber. Daylight seeped in through several holes in the chamber’s top. Examining the space they found themselves in, dozens of tunnels covered nearly every surface. The worms must migrate here specifically for some reason.

They’d planned on finding a way that headed in the general direction of where Marshall and Ian had entered the canyon walls. Looking in that direction, there were too many options and heading down the wrong tunnel could have them going right past each other.

“Maybe we should post up here for a bit. We can send a couple of Seth’s drones down the tunnels.” Calvin said. It was better than nothing at the moment.

As he prepared the drones for their journey, Freya seemed to get antsy. Her nose was on high alert and she cocked her head back and forth, trying to hear something that seemed just beyond her hearing.

She issued a low growl, warning Calvin and Amy that something was coming.

Because the universe hated them, or the system was a huge bastard, they already knew what to expect. Those expectations held true as a worm burst through the chamber walls on the far side of the space.

This worm was much smaller than the one they’d fought previously and Freya was already in motion. She instinctively knew that calling a storm in this area would likely be a bad move, so she held back her Storm Caller skill and went in for a good old-fashioned bite.

She jumped high into the air to the left of the worm. Its fearsome maw tracked her as she moved. Her paws contacted the wall, and she kicked off, changing direction and landing on the back of the worm’s ‘head’, if you could call it that. She latched down with her Attuned Bite and shredded her claws through the worm’s flesh as she slid down the body of the creature. The worm writhed as it tried to expel the furry demon from its body.

Calvin followed up, two wind blades shrieked out from his spear as he closed the distance. This worm was only about 15 feet long and a much more manageable size for him to take in a straight up melee fight. It was only a matter of minutes before this worm had too been killed. Unfortunately, the rumbling continued, and another worm punched through the walls of the chamber, followed by another.

Calvin and Amy were working in tandem like a well-oiled machine. Amy would send out flurries of toxic blades, covering as much surface area as she could before ducking into her shroud and repositioning. Calvin used that time to build up charge, then released it with Chain Fury. This upgrade to his skill was incredibly powerful. It allowed him to deliver his Resonant Charge at range. The crackling lightning arced between the never-ending assault of worms, cooking many of them to a crisp before eventually petering out.

Freya and Calvin synchronized their storm brands, applying them to the strongest looking worms that plowed through the walls. This would amplify the lightning damage Calvin could do to them. This was a battle of attrition though. The worms simply would not stop coming.

They wanted to flee down one of the tunnels but quickly squashed that idea. If these worms were tracking them, fighting them in the tunnels would be a nightmare. Causing a commotion out here should continue to draw the other nearby worms to this location, hopefully giving Ian and Marshall a chance to find them or portal out. He just hoped there wasn’t an endless supply of these bastards.