Chapter 038: The Source
“...do something, what if this thing will catch them!” The first thing I heard after confirming my decision was Simea’s voice.
I opened my eyes. Oh, there they are. Simea, Leria, Lena and Syna stood with their backs towards me while facing the direction from which - I presumed - they came. Watching the door from which we should come (if we survived) or that damnable thing. Huh.
Well, let’s not make stupid decisions. Sure, I could purposefully surprise them or something but I would risk one of them accidentally decapitating me while acting on an instinct.
“Awww, how sweet that you worry about me, Sim.” They almost jumped before turning towards me. I waved them in an exaggerated matter.
“W… what happened? Why are you here?!” Simea seemed to have voiced their common thought.
***
“Oh, so it was something like that.” Simea commented after I finished my answer. We decided to stop for a while. The system message seemed to indicate that the group was outside of effective threat range.
In the meantime Vaera showed up after commiting suicide similarly to me. This should break the Smiling Man aggro and make the damnable thing go away.
“I think that it was linked to the whole trap thing.” I added. “When something was trapped, it automatically visited the place to murder it brutally unless there was someone to order it to stop. Since there were no Decemvirate personnel around... “ I shrugged. “We should make a short stop now.”
“Why?” Leria asked me. “We should obviously push forward, taking advantage of the fact that the cultists who guarded the place met a horrible end. At least before they reorganize themselves.” Ugh. So I’ll have to say it openly.
“Because I need to change my underwear.” That was too much. Even for me. For real, there should be a limit to everything. Especially gore.
The Apostasy - as the period of technological ascendancy was called - was a curious time. According to most myths, Gods (displeased by the fact that people decided that they didn’t need them anymore now that they had a power on their own due to Shadow & Demiurge actions) decided to give humans complete freedom from their meddlings. No archdaemons murdering things, no Chosen Ones and so on.
In time, mortals proved that they really needed divine guidance. Their ambitions brought damnation. As Gods decided to nope out for a while (they obviously knew the end result already and wanted to teach mortals a lesson), the religious organisations went into decline. Without them, the number of groups wishing to shout IT’S NOT GOOD into the faces of the rulers went down by far.
Of course many people still considered things like genocides and ethnic cleansings wrong (most, in fact), but they lacked the necessary backing to say that stuff openly and avoid dying. There was no Church/Temple strong enough to oppose the State. The decline wasn’t instant, of course. But when one country went into a ruthless genocidal rage, its neighbours had to consider using more… extreme means to stop the threat. And so it went.
There were rebellions against such rulers, but most of them failed. Those that succeeded, sooner or later changed into regimes worse than those that they overthrew. Morality and ethics had to bend its knees before the political power. Might makes right become a common view, even in the Imperium.
At the very end of this period a so called moralist movement had risen up. Backed up by Gods, led by Chosen Ones picked from those that remained stalwart in their faith and ethics, despite the generally bleak age they lived in. Rebellions they inspired were connected with sudden resurgence of faith. There was a period where most of the kings and emperors in the known world were Chosen Ones.
Obviously, DFI went political there. Robinson was rather relentless in his beliefs. He actually formed a sort of trans-corporate movement that issued sanctions and withdraw their business from the countries whose rulers were considered ‘evil’ (it was actually ok with authoritarian regimes, so popular today, but if they as much as opened fire against the protesters, they were in for a troubles). Of course, it wasn’t a big movement, but it was obvious that Robinson was totally honest and did that because of his beliefs rather than as an attempt to improve his PR.
People living twenty or fourty years ago would have called bullshit on the belief that no godless or secular country can be truly moral and good. But after the Crash… I lived merely few hundred kilometers from the country that decided to forcefully euthanize people who weren’t useful for the State. And I watched a lot of transmissions showing the Red Terror in the USA that happened right after the Crash, when the country itself was collapsing into a brief period that some people considered a Second American Civil War.
Obviously the DFI exaggerated (it loved to exaggerate). But I was ready to accept that they might have a point there. I mean, an influential organisation believing it has the mandate from the power higher than the country itself, ready to scream BUT IT’S WRONG when country does something wrong… it doesn’t sound that bad, right?
But FOR FUCK’S SAKE, they overdid it. Combining the Apostasy with Doomplace, in a world completely without rules or censorship… Too much. Far too much. I know that Apostasy is an exaggerated version of Crash and pre-Crash West, but just how far the DFI was ready to go in demonizing things it didn’t like?! I know that it was an artistic impression, but…
“Actually… I might need to as well.” Lena interrupted the silence that followed after my words.
Imagine my surprise.
***
Soon after our break (it turned out that me and Lena wasn’t the only people to suffer a hydraulic malfunction) we entered a room that was different than others.
First, it had a withered carvings on the wall. Second, there was an altar-like thing at the back of it. Three, there was what looked like… ancient bed in front of the altar. Of course, only metal frame survived to this day, meaning that using it would be rather… unsafe.
“What is this place?” The rest noticed the weirdness of the room. Leria was the first one to vocalize it.
“It looks like… a shrine?” Simea answered. Yes, well, the altar looked definitely like an altar, so…
I looked at the carvings at the wall. Definitely adult content. Sigh.
“Looks like ritual orgies remain popular even at times of general secularism and religious indifference.” I commented. “It must have been a shrine to Deviation.” Her cult, of course, was the most crazily depraved in the Doomplace. Hence the orgies. It wouldn’t stand in the Imperium. Maybe with exception of the dark elven states, but they were weird.
“So… another checkpoint?” Simea said to me. Oh, now that she says this… it sounds pretty possible.
“Probably.” So, no more will we have to risk meeting the Smiling Man. Unironically wonderful.
So, chapels of Inri, Overtyrant and Deviation. I sense a pattern there. Interesting.
“Let us continue forward, then.” Leria obviously looked forward to murdering more Pentagram cultists. I couldn’t blame her, really.
***
“Now… what the hell is this?” Leria said before leaning on the handrail and looking into the darkness below.
It was a rather massive, but perfectly round shaft. Maybe fifty meters in diameter. Stairs seemed to descend to the bottom of it (however deep it was; we couldn’t see it from here).
But that was a secondary thing to me. Sure, it was a weird structure, but as we had already seen the Decemvirate built many weird things. But the air… something was wrong with the air.
It was red.
Well, not completely red, obviously. But there was a red tint to the air. The walls and handrails seemed to be slightly red (and damp) as well.
“It’s a shaft.” Vaera decided to be a jerkass again. “Which means a tunnel, but one going vertical rather than horizontal.They are often used to…”
“Not that, I mean…” I decided to disregard their little argument.
I saw it somewhere.
This redness in air was obviously unnatural. Probably connected to the disease. I seemed to remember it from somewhere. From somewhere in WR, obviously. Think, think.
“Uh oh.” Vaera suddenly pointed towards me with a wave of his head. “Our boss is about to have another sudden revelation. Which will be followed by a long lecture about things we had no idea about.”
“Why do you know?” Lena asked him.
“Because he remained silent for maybe a minute after someone said the words ‘what is it’”. The whole group laughed. Well, thank you very much.
“Ok, I know I tend to lecture you a bit, but that doesn’t mean I know all answers.” I decided to answer his obvious provocation. “I simply have some knowledge, but…”
Puzzles fell into right places.
Red tint to the air. Disease with blood-related symptoms that led to coma rather than death. Pentagram cult with a reverse red chalice as its symbol. A threat big enough to be considered a reason for an Adventure.
No way. It can’t be a Bloodletter Plague. They couldn’t possibly justify it from the lore point of view, right? I mean, it originates in one of the magical anomalies in the core provinces of Imperium of Karadia and was long ago stopped by the Imperial Magic Guild. Ok, more like its spread was slowed down to a crawl, but it certainly couldn’t just… show up on the other side of the world!
Stolen novel; please report.
Besides, if that’s a Bloodletter Plague, why are we still alive?! Without extensive magical protection we should succumb to it already. It was so insanely virulent… it’s infectiousness and mortality rate rivalled the bloodier.
It’s just impossible, right?
“Aaand… the revelation came.” Vaera sighed theatrically. “Alright, give it already. We are ready for the lecture.”
It brought me back from my thoughts.
“Not now.” I shook my head. “There are still things that don’t fit. Unless we ran into cultists and see them renamed to cultists of the Baptism of Blood cult, or see… the end result of the disease, I refuse to accept this explanation.” It was the worst case scenario. If that really is a Bloodletter Plague… then the whole Ambryxis city might be lost in few weeks top. Especially with the witch-hunters trolled expertly by the cult. “On the other hand, we must prepare for battle.”
“What? Why?” Simea asked me. “I mean, we are obviously alone here.”
Well, she had a point. I mean, it’s not like something could leap at us from the front (we could see few dozens metres of the stairs and there was nothing there. And the route behind us was a straight line. We cleared it properly. Since Leria Smite’d the fleeing cultist sorcerer while running from Smiling Man, there was no threat waiting for us back there. At least since the chapel of Deviation.
“Because of the redness in the air.” I shrugged. “If I identified the disease properly, then the redness IS the disease. There are so many murderous microbes in the air that we can see them with naked eye. And this means that whatever produces it must be close.”
Probably at the bottom of the shaft. The redness seemed to be more intensive there.
Please. Whatever God (be it one from the real world, or one of this game/world) may listen to this. Let it not be a Bloodletter Plague.
***
Of course it was a Bloodletter Plague.
Fuck my life.
The increasing redness was one thing, but after few minutes of descent (the shaft was truly massive) there was a visible, blob of meat on the wall close to us. It seemed to pulse a bit.
The farther we descent, the more fleshy the wall seemed to be. The Bloodletter Plague seemed to be busy converting the shaft into a massive reproduction facility. A hive in which bacterias used ambient magic in the air to reproduce en masse, spreading the disease.
At first it was just a pulsing blot of meaty matter. Then it got worse. When we could finally see the bottom of the shaft, each of our steps produced a squishy sound. Everything seemed red. Walls, stairs, air.
“Wonderful. Bloodletter Plague.” I said. “Some scaled-down version judging from the fact that we are still alive.”
The bottom of the shaft was almost completely covered in the matter produced by Bloodletter Plague. 33% red moss, 33% pulsing meat and 33% blood.
But there was a large, open tank. Maybe ⅓ of the shaft bottom. Once it probably was filled with water. But now that water was completely red, no doubt similar in consistence to blood. Filled to the brim with murderous bacterias tainted with magic.
It was a center of the disease. At least locally. With every passing second more and more of the microbes were created, spreading through the air and creating more and more of this… cyst-like blobs on the walls, that sooner or later changed into almost complete coverage of pulsing meat. That could reproduce and created more bacterias, eventually creating a snowball effect of death and misery.
“The hell is that?” Leria asked.
“Uh. Weird magical diseases created by a mad archmagician called Bloodletter.” All archmagicians had names like that. Weird old custom that DFI never explained. He was born as Flavius Sylvanus Postumus but adopted the new name after he was accepted as archmagician of Imperial Magic Guild. “He experimented with blood magic in a magical anomaly called Valley of Ashes. Deep inside the Imperium. Imperial Magic Guild didn’t bother to control him for real for as long as he restrained himself. It reacted only when he kidnapped a lot of children from a nearby village and ripped their hearts out on some ancient sacrificial altar.” For some reason Imperium then decided that enough was enough, who might have guessed. “So they sent a kill-team that successfully eliminated him… or so they thought.”
“Looks like even Imperium isn’t omnipotent.” Vaera commented. With a notion of sarcasm in his voice.
“Well, it’s extremely powerful, but not exactly omnipotent.” I answered. Well, to be honest I did describe it like it was almost omnipotent. An obvious needle in my side. One I deserved. “In that case they failed to notice that Bloodletter sold himself to Pentagram. He died… but not quite. Soon after his death the Bloodletter Plague started, devouring the forest surrounding the ancient altar.” I continued my description. “Only then the Imperium understood what happened. This wasn’t a plague in the traditional sense of the word. These ‘bacteria’ are in fact a spore form of a rather… insane ancient deity, worshipped by the creators of the said ritual altar.”
“So he managed to free it enough for it to start spreading… but not to resurrect itself completely?” Leria asked. Huh. Right at point, I’m honestly surprised. Positively surprised.
“Precisely. He also managed to cheat death partially by merging his own soul with the disease. After enough of the bacteria will be around, they will both appear. First the Bloodletter, then this deity.” And honestly, they were considered one of the most difficult bosses in the World’s Requiem.” Bloodletter should be around Platinum X, while said deity that spawns right after he was defeated is Mithril V. In its only partially freed state, since the seal on its prison was only partially unmade by Bloodletter before the Imperium killed him. If he is freed completely… well, no idea, but it will probably be much worse.”
As a bonus irony, it was the Xylian Dominion that sealed the unnamed deity of blood that Bloodletter freed. The genocidal ancient empire that created elves and ogres, that was said to rival Decemvirate in its evil (and was many times more powerful than it ever was). It murdered the species that worshipped this being into complete extinction during its ascension. When its machine legions marched to the four sides of the world, exterminating or enslaving mortal species that survived the fall of the First Empire.
“And the cult?” Simea asked another question right on point.
“Baptism of Blood.” I answered. “A bunch of Pentagram devotees created by a Chosen One of entire Pentagram - they are called Nameless Lords by the way - to finish the Bloodletter’s job.” Let’s fucking hope that the last boss of this Adventure wasn’t the Red King himself. Higher Vampire of Sarszimi’s bloodline? Descendant of Vok the Accursed? Nameless Lord of the Pentagram? He was a Mithril level guy that made the Smiling Man look like personification of empathy and good manners. The triangle of bosses from the Red Forest was supposedly responsible for the highest number of party wipes in the World’s Requiem among all bosses. “To be honest I think that they are scaled down as well. This whole Adventure seems scaled down. They were much more professional and better armed in the WR. I have no idea how they transferred the Bloodletter Plague here, but I think we might be fighting some sort of… vassal cult.”
Leria that walked in front of us finally reached the bottom of the shaft. The second she stepped of the stairs, something happened. It was hard to describe. Something around us changed.
“What the…” So Leria felt that as well.
Then I saw something emerging from the blood-filled pool. Oh fuck.
Bloodlust
Unique
Category: Eldritch/Bloodletter Plague
Type: Daemon/Servile
Threat Grade: Silver V
Once she was a potamide, a nymph of still water, inhabiting the main watertank of the Theta Research Station. She spent most of her life pulling tricks while ensuring that the water remained pure and, in fact, had slight restorative properties.
This changed when her domain was infected by Bloodletter Plague. Now she is an insane, omnicidal wreck.
Oh fuck. Hemadryads (hamadryads corrupted by Bloodletter Plague) were one of the most disgustingly troublesome mobs in the WR’s Red Forest. Now it looks like we were supposed to fight a Unique variant of a very similar mob. Silver V, Jesus Christ.
And the air was almost red. The more bacteria in the air the bigger powerups for the mobs. At least we wore gasmasks so the part with debuffs to us wasn’t the case.
The nymph looked like a naked female. Once she probably was quite pretty, but now most of her was covered with those red growths. Plus the red liquid seemed to drip from her bloodshot eyes and mouth. She stood in the blood tank, the water reaching her waist.
Lena and Simea jumped over the handrail. Syna targeted the new threat with her rifle, but her shot bounced off Bloodlust’s magic shield.
The nymph fired an AoE hex. Blood Magic, obviously. It looked like a sudden rain of blood. I wasn’t going to find out how my body was going to react to it, so I used the defensive magic to protect myself. The rest did the same.
Our warriors got close. Too close. The nymph howled.
More things emerged from the blood tank.
Bloodeater
Category: Eldritch/Bloodletter Plague
Type: Daemon/Servile
Threat Grade: Iron X
A degenerated form of a servile daemon serving the Deity of Blood. It can manifest if there is enough of the bacteria in air. They can use blood magic to manifest weapons and use them in combat.
The higher the Blood Level, the more dangerous their weaponry.
They were human-sized, vertical blobs of flesh and blood. Six… no, eight of them. They rose from the blood tank and immediately exited it. Leria was close to one so she tried to slash it. A second before her sword hit it, it covered itself in a shield/armour-like object made from solidified blood that it conjured from a thin air.
Second later it also manifested a massive scythe and tried to cut Leria apart with a horizontal slash. She jumped back, avoiding it.
Well, apart of attacks they seem rather slow.
Another gunshot. The Bloodeater… ‘head’ exploded. It collapsed into a mess of blood. Yes, they never had much to do in terms of defense. But it wasn’t the problem.
The blood immediately evaporated. It was charged with more magic than majority. If we keep slaughtering them, it will only raise the Blood Level of the location, granting more power to other Bloodeaters… and the Bloodlust herself.
Of course another Bloodeater immediately rose from the blood tank.
“FOCUS ON THE NYMPH, AVOID KILLING THE OTHERS!” I shouted, before firing a Destroyer Lance on the Bloodlust. Vaera joined me with a Dragon Fireball. Of course, her magic shield withstood the hit.
Syna crouched, using the handrail as a footing for her rifle. She then opened fire at the Bloodlust. One Arcane Bullet after another. Each of it would be a headshot if not for the Magic Shield.
Bloodeaters moved to block our line of fire. Lena and Leria engaged them in combat. Seems like they decided to forget about trying to attack the Nymph and focused on preventing the warriors from reaching us.
A logical decision. On the other hand, it robbed us from a chance to see the nymph’s head chopped off by a Holy Smite.
I saw the Bloodlust’s mouth open up unnaturally wide while she looked at me with her bloodshot eyes. I was already covered in Inhuman Resilience and Lesser Bend Reality, but I decided to add Localized Distortion.
A second later a ray of blood shot from her mouth. It was the second fastest attack I saw in the Gates of Eternity after the Watcher’s death ray.
Bend Reality broke. Localized Distortion broke. But they bought me enough time to jump out of the line of fire. The ray had enough strength to pierce a hole in the metal wall before it finally run out of power.
Jesus Christ, that was a lot of firepower. Of course, it also increased the Blood Level, even if only slightly.
That was the reason why the Bloodletter Plague-connected bosses were so deadly. They grew stronger during the battle and they did so damn fast. It was a race against the clock, obviously.
Summoning Fiend was out of the question - that battle junky would keep murdering Bloodeaters left and right, making the Blood Level skyrocket.
Come on, Avhar, think of something. Before we’re all wiped out.