Five
Marcus was sick of the forest. If he never saw another tree for the rest of his life, it would be too soon. For two days, he had been walking, and he hadn’t seen a single thing that might be considered a ‘trophy.’ He had plucked a few odd-looking plants, their deep purple leaves shaped like little hearts, making him think they might hold some value. But in the end, they only made him break out in excruciatingly itchy hives. If anyone thought they were worth anything, they could keep them.
He decided to camp for the night next to a small pond. It was only fifty feet across at its widest and shaped like a crooked kidney bean. Cattails swayed in the breeze, and small lily pads floated on its surface, violet blossoms crowning their centers. With the tall trees and white puffy clouds marching across the sky, it was beautiful.
He dug his rations out of his pack, laying them out on the ground before him. “What should we have for dinner tonight, dried biscuits or dried meat? Both? Good choice.”
His hammer wasn’t much for conversation, but he didn’t mind. It was all in good fun anyway.
“Help! Help me!” A shrill voice echoed around him.
Marcus shot to his feet, scanning the area. “Hello? Where are you?”
“Help me!”
The voice came from close by, but he still couldn’t see who was calling out to him. He listened intently to everything around him, and then he heard it. Splashing. It sounded like someone was in the water. Marcus took off, covering the short distance between him and the pond, pushing through the tall cattails.
There, in the middle of the brackish waters, was a figure struggling to keep its head above the surface. He couldn’t see them clearly due to the churning waters, but every time they would breach the surface, he could see long strands of raven-black hair.
“Help me!”
“Hold on, I’m coming!” Marcus shouted out to them as he started to strip his armor. His fingers fumbled with the leather straps holding it all together, but he managed to remove most of it in under a minute. The figure in the water was succumbing to exhaustion as their flailing slowed, telling him that he didn’t have much time.
Marcus knew that rescuing someone from the water was dangerous. They were very likely to cling to you and pull you under in their panic, but even knowing that, he couldn’t just let them drown. It would have been better if he had some rope, the pond wasn’t very wide at all and he could have just thrown them a line, but without one, he had no other choice but to jump into the water.
The water was cool but refreshing, the hot summer day heating it to a comfortable degree. He opened his eyes as he swam underneath the surface, but so much silt was suspended in the water that it was impossible to see further than a few feet in front of him. Breaching the surface while taking a large gulp of air, Marcus started towards the drowning woman.
He was a strong swimmer, his large feet and hands acting like flippers in the cloudy water. It only took him half a minute to cover the thirty or so feet between him and the struggling woman. He hoped that she would relax when he reached her, letting him ferry her to the weedy shore without dragging him down along with her.
As Marcus reached the drowning woman, she turned to face him. He was expecting to see a face full of terror and panic, maybe even a little relief when she saw him, but what he saw caused his breath to catch in his throat. The woman’s face was nothing but an uncanny facsimile of human features, where her eyes were supposed to be, were nothing but sunken holes, and her mouth, where she continued to scream for ‘help,’ was nothing but a slit that parted her pallid, waxen skin, and its neck pulsed and wriggled as ‘she’ broke the surface once again.
“What in the actual fu-.” That was all Marcus got out before something wrapped around his ankle and dragged him beneath the surface of the water.
He kicked his feet against the water and whatever had grabbed ahold of him, but nothing helped as he continued to be pulled under. He could feel the water pressure pushing against his inner ear as he went deeper and deeper. Due to the silt, sunlight failed to penetrate the water, and once he went deeper than a dozen feet, he was plunged into total darkness.
Marcus kicked for a few more moments before he remembered the small dagger that was tucked into his waistband. The knife had come with their supplies, a tool that was useful for many other things than just stabbing. But that’s what he would use it for now.
He curled in on himself, his hand white-knuckling the dagger’s hilt. Blind in the dark waters, he could still feel the thick, slimy tentacle wrapped tightly around his leg. Finger-thick spines tore at his pants and chewed into his skin. He envisioned a giant octopus at the bottom of the pond, a massive beak waiting to tear him into pieces.
He wouldn’t wait for that to happen.
Marcus sawed at the tentacle with the dagger, his other hand pulling it off of his leg. Surprisingly, the knife split the flesh easily, freeing him in a matter of seconds. He immediately kicked to the surface, his lungs a fiery blaze inside of his chest. The air that rushed into his lungs when he broke the surface extinguished the agonizing burning, filling them with relief as he immediately started swimming to shore.
Unfortunately, he only made it a foot before more writhing tentacles exploded from the water around him, wrapping around his body and dragging him under once again. Marcus still held the dagger in his hand with a death grip and instantly started slashing at the arms that enveloped him, but for every one he cut off, two more would take its place. Whatever it was that was trying to eat him had many more arms than an octopus.
Marcus knew deep down that he wouldn’t be able to get away as easily as he did the first time, and the only way to escape was to kill the monster. But he wasn’t a fish; he couldn’t breathe underwater, which meant that his time was extremely limited. He needed to hurry.
He started to swim down, cutting off as many tentacles as he could. He could feel the hundreds of teeth like spines digging into his flesh. The pain was intense, but the adrenaline coursing through his veins caused it to fade into nothing but a dull ache. What bothered him more was the burning in his chest that had ignited once again.
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Reaching out, Marcus grabbed one of the undulating arms and pulled himself deeper into the pond. He had to get to the beast as quickly as he could before he ran out of breath. He took solace in the fact that the tentacles didn’t seem to be getting any bigger the deeper he went and hoped that that meant the monster wasn’t too big for him to kill quickly.
His actions seemed to take the monster by surprise as the flailing arms stopped grasping at him and instead pushed him down even faster. Suddenly, Marcus could see a dim glow below him, even through the thick silt. It reminded him of a firefly, a soft fluorescent green light pulsing slowly in the dark water.
With a final heave, he shot down, impacting into a large, spongy mass that recoiled with the hit. Marcus didn’t wait one second before he started to slash at the creature with the small dagger, the six-inch blade biting into the meaty flesh. He didn’t know how much damage he was causing and could only do as much as he could as fast as he could.
Abruptly, the monster shifted, the soft green light swinging around to face him on its long stalk of flesh. The glow wasn’t bright, but it provided enough light to illuminate his immediate surroundings and the circular, teeth-filled maw below him. The mouth was as big around as a basketball and puckered and relaxed in a rhythmic motion like it was chewing.
This thing was much more disgusting than those slimes back in the tower.
With surviving the only thought in his head, Marcus lashed out, cutting a long gash into the creature just above its chewing mouth-hole. With a shudder, the monster used its innumerable arms to grasp at him, pushing Marcus towards its waiting mouth. Using his free hand, Marcus jammed his fingers into the gash he had cut, leveraging his body away from the gnashing teeth. The monster was strong, but he was stronger. Unfortunately, the flesh beneath his fingers gave way, and he lost his only leverage.
An excruciating pain assaulted his thigh as the monster bit into him. It felt like the long, jagged teeth hit bone as it vigorously chewed. A flood of bubbles left Marcus’ mouth as he screamed, much of his precious oxygen leaving him as he did so. In a frantic bid to stay alive, Marcus plunged his entire arm into the slit just above the mouth and just below the stalk supporting the pulsating light.
It felt like his arms had been covered in lukewarm Jello. Marcus’ empty hand clawed through viscous blood and mystery organs as it went deeper into the monster’s body. It continued to chew at his leg as he went shoulder-deep into it, darkness not from the black pond encroaching onto the edges of his vision. Suddenly, he felt something hard, and without another thought, he grasped it and squeezed.
It was hard and smooth, about the size of a grape. Sinewy strands of flesh connected it to the rest of the beast, and as his hand wrapped around it, the monster started to thrash around, releasing him from its mouth. This only drove him on, causing him to pull and tear at the little stone within his hand. With one final heave, he ripped his arm free of the monster, the round stone still within his grip.
Pushing off against the monster’s body, Marcus shot towards the surface. He wanted nothing more than to open his mouth and take in a breath, but he knew that if he gave in to that desire, he would surely drown. He clamped his mouth shut as his chest spasmed, stars flashing into existence around him.
He exploded from the water, gulping down precious air and droplets of water alike. He coughed and retched as he frantically swam to shore in a panic. Feeling the soft mud beneath him, he clawed his way onto shore, using the long reeds to help him climb far away from the dangerous pond. He didn’t stop until he reached the forest, propping his back against a tall tree over fifty feet from the now-still waters.
Marcus’ chest heaved like great bellows as he caught his breath. Once his breathing normalized, he looked down at his mangled leg. It looked like ground beef; his muscle was shredded into an excruciating pulp, and blood continuously seeped from the mess that was now his thigh. At least he didn’t see any bone.
“Holy shit… I’m alive…” Marcus huffed in a strained chuckle, then winced as a fresh wave of pain climbed up his leg.
He peeled the shirt from his upper body, ripping it into long strips of muddy fabric. He wrapped the cloth around his leg, sinching it snuggly with a pained grunt before tying it tightly. He knew he really should have washed the mud off before putting the filthy, make-shift bandages around his leg, but there was no way in hell he was going back to the pond.
Marcus sat there, propped up against the tree. Time ticked by, and soon enough, the full moon dominated the starry night sky. Sanquin fluid still leaked from his leg, turning the muddy bandages into a gory canvas of browns, reds, and blacks. He didn’t think the monster’s teeth had nicked an artery but was still concerned that the bleeding hadn’t stopped yet.
He let out a deep sigh. He needed to get up and make his way back to where he had left his supplies. He wasn’t quite sure where that was since he wasn’t keeping track during his mad dash to shore, but he knew that it would be a long walk no matter the distance. He limped his way around the pond, pushing through the tall weeds and thick brambles.
He gave the body of water a wide birth, fairly certain the monster was dead but not wanting to risk it all the same. Eventually, he found his hammer and pack waiting for him where he had left them. He dug out the water skin filled with fresh water and poured it over his bandaged leg. He knew it was probably too late to prevent an infection, but the act still made him feel slightly better.
Plopping down on the ground with a groan, he bit into the dried jerky he had dropped on the ground when he had first heard the call for help. It was tough and much too salty for his tastes, but it still served its purpose of satisfying his protesting stomach. As he ate, he inspected the small stone he had plucked from the monster’s body.
It was both perfectly round and smooth and emitted a faint light exactly like the much larger stone he had found beneath the tower. Of course, the light given off by the grape-sized stone was much, much dimmer than the other, but that didn’t prevent Marcus from thinking that they were related in some way.
His leg throbbed. Under the moonlight, Marcus watched the fresh blood well up from the wound. The bandages were already saturated, and so his blood just ran down his leg and slowly dripped onto the ground. He looked at the stone in his hand, then back to his leg, then back to the stone.
“Oh, what the hell…” Marcus muttered with a shrug of his shoulders just before he popped the faintly glowing stone into his mouth and swallowed.
All he could think about was how he had fallen asleep with a broken leg and hand, then woken up perfectly healed and feeling better than ever. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the strange, glowing stone was the cause, and could only hope that this much smaller one would work the same way.
The stone went down easily enough, but Marcus could feel it traveling down his esophagus, which was a strange feeling, to say the least. Once it reached his stomach, an intense feeling of heat permeated his body all at once, nearly overwhelming his senses as he gasped for breath. It felt like his organs were being microwaved on high, and even his blood felt like it was on fire.
Perhaps eating the monster rock wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had.
He slumped over on his side, clutching his stomach as the heat from the stone cooked him from the inside out. He had forgotten all about his mangled leg. Sweat poured from his face and soaked the ground beneath him, but his body continued to heat up uncontrollably. He thought about crawling back into the pond to cool down, risking the wrath of the monster if it was still alive, but his body wouldn’t respond to his commands.
Soon enough, he closed his eyes, and the darkness took him.