Lilyth

Everything inside of me was screaming not to go through that door. The girls were right though. We got the clearest reading from the lair of the apex predator. Assuming that was the difficulty indicator, which it might as well not have been, though we lacked any better one. Sometimes, you just have to roll a dice.

So with a shaking hand, I opened the door and saw that it exited onto a wide path made out of stone bricks inside of a tunnel lit by torches.

The fuck?

‘Last chance to change our minds,’ I said.

Seeing my hesitation, Aki just rushed past me, so with no other choice, I followed her. A message popped up before my eyes.

Leaving: Crossroads

Entering Zone: The Deep Corridors

Difficulty: Medium

Description: Many things lurk along the Deep Corridors. Make sure you don’t become their dinner.

‘I love how all we have to go on is “Don’t get eaten, chucklefucks”,’ I said once we have all crossed the threshold and the door slammed shut behind us. ‘Medium difficulty for me, by the way.

‘Also Medium,’ Caei said.

‘Hard,’ Aki chimed in.

‘Impossible,’ Ren sighed.

‘So… Very Hard for the group as a whole?’ I suggested.

‘Probably,’ Aki confirmed. ‘Don’t let those ratings get you down, Rennie. They mean nothing. Both the Tower of Trials and Akh’ret’s Mercy were listed as Deadly. We made it through those.’

Barely.

Biting back a retort to Aki, I quickly added:

‘I think whatever assigns those bases their rating only on… hard factors. What level you are, what abilities you have and so on. It doesn't view you as a person as a whole and as we’ve seen with my sensitivity to sound… it gets things wrong. So… Ren the low-level archer might not have the best of chances. Now… Honourable Ren of Mer-Cas, Ren the Badass who stole Caeileera's heart twice… she's a different person altogether. She has her lady love and friends from the Tenebral Order by her side.’

I saw that life returned to Ren’s eyes.

‘Now let's go find the way home!’ I shouted trying to sound more confident than I actually was.

One thing I quickly noticed was that the corridor curved slightly to the side as if it was taking us away from the others. There was also a possible incline to it, but this I was less sure about because it was so minimal I might as well have imagined it, and also because any sort of sloping would indicate the presence of a flat frame of reference which may not have existed. And yet… as I looked at the corridor before me it felt as if I was ascending the world’s least noticeable helix.

This place loves screwing with your head it seems, or maybe just my sanity deteriorated to the point that I started seeing things.

My merry train of thought was stopped when a few minutes later we came across the bodies.

There were seven of them and they looked human, but I noticed an elf or two among them. The weirdest part was that they wore urban camo fatigues and black body armour. They weren't decomposed, but, given how we were in a place that didn't exist as we understood the concept, the question of “Do bodies decompose here” was very open. It could have also been the effects of magic. What keyed me to the possibility of their being fuckery afoot were two things. One, there were no visible wounds on them and hardly any blood anywhere. Two, one three of the corpses were holding weapons. The guns of the rest lay conveniently within easy reach of their owners.

I halted my companions with a raised hand, pointed to the corpses and whispered my observations.

‘What do we do?’ Ren asked.

‘You guys retreat,’ Lilyth said. ‘I can survive getting shot if it comes to that.’

Aki looked like she wanted to protest, but simply nodded.

‘Just don’t die, my love,’ she said. Or I will kill you.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

I kept watching the corpses while my loved ones backtracked. Once I felt they were safely enough away I summoned my daggers. The next step was activating [The Swiftness of the Wind]. I got lucky again and it worked, which couldn't have been said for [Silent Step]. I just felt it drain a lot of mana, but nothing happened.

Fuck.

So doing my best to be silent I slowly snuck towards the corpses. That didn't seem to have activated them, which I took as a good sign. One of the “discarded” weapons, a boxy carbine thing, was lying close, so I leaned forward and grabbed its strap. I braced myself for all hell to break loose, but it didn't. I examined the gun using the interface but it was of no help.

Item: Unknown Firearm

Interesting. So either the interface doesn't know what it is or just won’t tell me.

Since I didn't feel to be in imminent danger, I managed to find what I thought was the magazine release. Instead, the gun whirled to life and a display appeared to the side showing characters from an alphabet I couldn't recognise.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Neither Latin nor Raivarian, eh? Where are these fucks from then?

I turned the gun off for further study later and slung the strap across my body. Cautiously, I took the other three guns lying on the floor and slid them across the floor away from their previous wielders. By then, one of the few “normal” physiological reactions I had left - sweating left me completely drenched.

I feel like an EOD technician trying to disarm a fucking nuke.

I was surprised none of my activities caused the bodies to rise.

Are they actually dead, then?

I gave them a more thorough once-over. I still couldn't see much in terms of wounds, but I did see that some of their veins had this metallic-black sheen to them.

Dafuq?

Two of the bodies also had dried-up blood on their chins, which was probably where the blood on the ground came from.

Vomiting blood… poison? Disease?

I looked back at soldiers grasping guns. None of them lay close enough to one another that I could handle two at the same time if need be. Which left me with a very difficult choice.

Do I stab one through the head and pray it doesn't wake the others, or rip the gun out of his grasp in the hope it just wakes him? A fucking blue wire versus red wire choice.

I remembered the gun I picked up. I took it into my hands and examined it again. It was pretty heavy, no surprises there, and a bit unwieldy due to its boxiness, I was used to more sleek shapes, but otherwise had all the required bits in the right places. There were three problems, however.

First, I didn't know if the gun had a safety, or if the designers just called it quits after giving it an off-switch. This, in turn, made me question the whole design. I was no soldier, but even I knew you wanted your weapons to be as infallible as possible. Grunts having to pray that the, likely fragile, electronics didn’t break, meant that either there was more to the guns than my lay-ass could tell OR this was someone’s brilliant idea that made them a prime target for fragging.

Second, and perhaps the simplest, was the recoil. I didn't know how much it had.

And lastly, the noise the gun produced. There was a likelihood it would either wake up all of them or attract the attention from things we wouldn't want to meet.

Fucking hell.

If Sav was here, she would likely scream at me that I was not considering other things, so… let’s just say I was hoping I would live long enough for her to be able to scream at me.

One extra thing I did consider was the backstop. Namely, if I had to fire that thing I would need to do it in the opposite direction from my companions. That did introduce the problem of “then those fuckers would shoot in their direction”.

That definitely struck any possibility of me using that gun unless under the most dire of circumstances, since I had to draw enemy fire AWAY from the girls.

That narrowed the number of armed corpses to check out to one - a pretty handsome elf male.

Such a waste… I thought involuntarily. Focus, you idiot. No horny.

The pretty boy was the furthest corpse from the rest of the party, so I carefully stepped over all the other bodies and kneeled by his side.

And now I must make a choice. Do I penetrate his head or pull the phallic object he has? Well… a girl can do multiple things to men at the same time.

I moved to the side so I was next to his shoulder. Holding my knife over his head in my right hand, I reached towards his gun with my left. I must have gotten a bit too close towards him, as the moment I touched his gun his eyes, so far blank, turned towards me.

Like to look a girl in the eyes as she grabs your gun, eh? I thought as I plunged my knife into his skull.

He shuddered and went still. My triumph was short-lived, however, as I heard the other undead fuckers shuffling and groaning.

I turned towards them and saw that one of them, having simply rolled over to his belly, had his gun trained on me. I didn’t manage to jump to the side before the zombie pulled the trigger and a burst of three rounds penetrated my stomach exiting out of my back, probably making a large exit hole. The bullets hit me with enough force to throw me back. As my sight darkened and numbness spread through my body I saw him shuffle to his feet, only to stop and collapse after his head was penetrated by an arrow.

Aki

My heart stopped when I heard gunfire and saw Lilyth collapse.

‘Lilyth!’ Caei screamed and started summoning a [Blood Lance] but her throw went wide.

The undead that shot our wife started to get up, but it was quickly put down by Ren who held her bow at the ready the entire time Lilyth was disarming the monsters. She quickly nocked another arrow and shot a zombie that was turning towards us, gun raised. She missed and gunfire sounded. I braced myself for pain, but the bullets missed me. Ren wasn't that lucky as she yelped in pain and fell to the ground holding her side.

‘REN!’ I shouted.

‘Aki!’ Caei, who I noticed was bleeding from a graze on her arm shouted. ‘Go h-hel… I- I-’

She didn't need to finish. I began sprinting down the corridor, just as the zombie fired again. I felt a sting on my cheek but didn't stop, raised my hand and fired off a [Lesser Abyssal Bolt] at the monster. The orb of hellfire was far more intensive than any I have ever fired before and the soldier basically exploded the moment it touched him. Feeling searing pain from where the burning pieces of the undead touched me I drew my swords and lunged towards the four remaining undead, some of which were already in the process of picking up the guns Lilyth took away from them. They never got the chance as a pissed-off Demonborn girl beats zombies in the game of rock-paper-scissors. The last one didn't even manage to fully collapse before I was already rushing towards Lilyth, reaching into my satchel to find my Healing Potion.

Lilyth looked terrible. There was a large hole inside her stomach, but to my great relief, judging by the rapid movement of her chest, appeared to be still alive, if unconscious.

Can take gunfire better my ass.

I opened her mouth and began pouring the liquid down her throat. The joy I felt the moment I saw the gaping wound start to fill out couldn’t be put into words. The potion didn't heal it completely, but Lilyth appeared to be in less pain, as her “breathing” stabilised.

I took her hand in mine and waited for several forevers for ashen-faced Caei to arrive. I could see her hands were covered in blood, both Ren’s and her own. She immediately knelt by Lilyth's side, placed them next to the wound and with a flash of green light began to heal our wife. As she did, I heard Ren approach. I looked towards her and saw that she was looking weak and was still holding her now-scarred side.

Caei probably didn't want to waste mana on [Soothe Pain] or healing her completely.

The half-harpy sat by me and we both watched Caei work. It took me a moment to realise all three of us were weeping.

‘All done,’ Caei said in a tired voice after a while.

She immediately took out a mana potion and downed it in two gulps. I looked at Lilyth and saw there was now unblemished skin where the wound was previously. Stains from the blueish liquid that was Lilyth's “blood” were still visible in a few places, but she would likely reabsorb them. The same couldn't be said for the blue-red mess that was on Caei’s hands. I opened my water flask and offered to pour some water over them. She nodded in gratitude and then wiped them on a shirt she took out from her bag.

‘Thanks,’ she panted. ‘Let me take care of you now.’

The moment she said it I was flooded by pain from the graze and burns I got.

‘Please…’ I whimpered.