"The other gates have closed. We have a little more time yet, and according to the wardens, this wall goes down further than it goes up, so we should be fine if those damned crawling things come at us again; they'll have to surface this time." Thomas listened to the adventurer, one of only a handful still waiting. They had retreated into the gate - tunnel, really. The walls were insanely thick, and the echo was annoying.
"We'll stay as long as we can." The reply came in a thick accent that Thomas couldn't place at all, an odd mixture of guttural and sing-song. Shallor had decided to leave ... a half hour ago? An hour? Several adventurers had died in the last big wave, which had been the signal for most of the others to depart as well; with their reduced numbers, they had moved back into the tunnels, which gave them a little more flexibility, particularly with Thomas performing the duty of mobile wall; he was the last one here who could, as the other defense-oriented adventurers had all died. He stayed. He shouldn't have left, it hadn't done any good, and Madelaine was still out there. He had abandoned her, and she was still out there. He pointedly ignored the featureless face watching him from the side; Faith hadn't said much lately.
"The'd better get here." A third voice, with a small chorus of assents, albeit for different people. They were all volunteers, all of them waiting for somebody to arrive. And some had; a woman who had kept breaking her weapons with the force of her blows, not that she had any shortage of spares, had left when her younger brother had arrived in a group of four. It had apparently been eight, a large party. They were all wounded, and the young boy had been missing most of his arm, a tourniquet keeping him on his feet. He didn't blame her. Three of the eight, silent like him, were garbed in the brown clothing worn by the people of Piketown. Pioneers from a dead plane. He wondered how they felt about that, now that they were fleeing another.
"I think I see something, look over there." Thomas looked.
A korlet blew dirt up into the air some twenty yards away. Thomas considered his health - 186 out of the 354 he'd started with. Then he stepped out into the light, and, crouching, punched the ground with a closed fist, leaving his left hand there. And waited. The ground broke in a line towards him. Thirty yards. Somebody behind him cursed, interrupting the next person to start speaking, and the echoing noises of the two dozen or so people filled his ears. Twenty yards. He watched, and then tapped his knuckles on the ground again, as it started to veer off course; it corrected immediately. Ten. Five.
He closed his eyes against the explosion of dirt, clenched his fist, and opened it against, as wide as he could, when he felt pain, feeling the teeth catch. In a smooth motion, he spun and hurled the vicious little bastard against the wall of the tunnel behind him. He didn't watch the others dispatch it - it couldn't move well on top of the cobblestones inside the gate, and this was a practiced strategy at this point - and simply moved back to where he had been standing, another flow of blood running down his arm. The pain added to the others. But he felt remote from it. He pulled up his health. 157. The things had a hell of a bite to them, considering his 22 damage reduction. So far he'd only managed the trick once without paying for it; at some point in the last few levels his ability to ignore damage outright had increased to 25, which seemed to be on the very low end of what these things did, after his damage reduction.
A few minutes later, and he fished a pair out, one right after the other. 98 health. He was starting to feel cold, possibly blood loss, although he seemed to have a limitless supply of the stuff; certainly he had painted everything around him in it. He hadn't felt cold in ... a while. He considered the feeling, weighing it. He set it aside. He had left her.
Another korlet. He started to crouch, and hesitated. Another. And another. And they were moving oddly - they usually surfaced every few feet, which gave them away. These ... weren't. Four. Five. The ground erupted in gore - but his attention was taken instead by the ridge, long abandoned by the wardens, now darkened by a charging army, already screaming their gibberish. He stepped back into the tunnel, greeted almost immediately by echoing curses and hasty preparations, as their dwindling band of adventurers preparing for a fight against another horde of the bandits - while weak individually, they would almost certainly be overrun. The korlets could wait until this ... threat ...
The korlets weren't a vanguard. They were running away, fleeing a long-haired swordswoman, and an enormous lion-man. Thomas watched, transfixed, as Arias leapt impossibly far, impossible fast - and plunged her sword straight into the ground, just ahead of one of the cracks. Balier was gesturing, and another explosion erupted. And behind them a river of people, impossibly vast to Thomas. He ran out, heedless of the monsters dying around him - and was vaguely aware that he was not the only one.
And then the people cascaded down the hill, and a wall of pink flesh descended behind them. And swept over the rearmost person. And then another. He inhaled, but did not let himself stop running. Okay, bandit dogs. He could ... slow them down. Thomas slowed, staring up at the countless carnaath flowing forth. It felt like a comedic beat when it finally ended. He was pretty sure he couldn't - he froze, Madelaine's dark skin making her easy to spot. She was being ... carried, by two large men in the brown robes of Piketown. They wouldn't be carrying her if she was dead. His chest was a sudden agony of conflicting terror and relief he couldn't ignore, washing him out of his remote position; he almost staggered.
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Thomas inhaled again, and exhaled. 98 health. He stayed conscious into negative HP; he didn't know how much negative HP he was allowed to have before he died. He wasn't going to die. Maybe it would be obvious; he could feel his body. Kind of. In between all the pain. If it stopped working properly, he'd get out. Thomas rolled his shoulders, and began running. He tried not to think about the people still falling under packs of the horrible beasts ahead of him. He tried not to think about what he would feel like in a few minutes. Madelaine was alive, and he'd keep her that way.
He briefly considered healing Madelaine. But he heard Anne's voice, talking about fighting in one of the tactical discussions they had had: Don't pause to stop the bleeding when the axe is coming down. He forced himself to run on. Four more people fell before he reached the left end of the fleeing people. And then he broke out into the open, and was startled, as a wall of unintelligible noise hit him, to realize he wasn't alone, or even the first here; Arias had somehow arrived before him, and was jogging backwards while her blades cut a divot into the screeching wall of flesh. The smell of blood, and something else, damp and rotted and earthy, assailed him as he ran closer, an explosion of earth and dirt and grass and blood ripping into another part of the line. Arrows began to fly around him, claiming others.
But the bandit dogs kept coming, a tide coming in from three sides, and Arias was still retreating. Every foot they claimed cost a yard. He was tiny, and as he collided with the lead wave, crushing underfoot and laying about with his fists, he was immediately engulfed. The feeling under his feet as they exploded under his weight was unpleasant. The weight as the ugly bastards literally climbed over each other to get at him, piling up to his waist, made things suddenly harder. It felt like kicking his way through the ocean, except it was full of pinching crabs who couldn't quite muster the strength to actually pierce flesh. His lungs gave rent to a roar, pushing Call Out in a wave around him.
As best he could figure, they had to do forty seven damage to damage him at all. He knew from the past few fights, most of them couldn't. He turned, and began running at an angle to the leading edge of the wave, aiming away from the citizens still fleeing. Most. Pain blossomed at his thigh. 73 health. The biting thing was hurled with his good hand to the side. More and more of the things were piling up around him; they were up to his stomach now, biting and clawing at him, and he found himself unable to push forward, and indeed increasingly found it difficult to even move his arms for a solid swing.
Okay, he hadn't thought that through. Oh, hey, panic. Thomas hadn't felt that in a while. He landed his last elbow, just as a pain in his back tore through him - and then the sea of flesh was at his armpits. 47 health. He looked back at the fleeing people - they were moving into the gates. Arias was cutting her way to him. More pain. 16 health. And then he closed his eyes against the sight, as a carnaath starting a futile attempt at biting his face from a too-human mouth protruding from its shoulder. It wasn't quite as bad this way. It felt like ... being rubbed and pinched by a thousand hands. The tousling of his hair was annoying, also the saliva when they tried to bite. It was a pity about the smell, which had become overwhelming as the things had started trying to tear his face apart, but on the plus side, he wasn't being assailed by noise anymore, damped by a cloak of things trying to murder him.
The weight was incredible - and he couldn't even buckle under it, because it came from every direction, holding him upright as he was slowly crushed. His panic came and went with each measured breath, each breath getting slightly harder - but somehow the pain began to abate. He felt kind of dumb about dying this way. The next bite to get through brought a wide variety of colors with it; he might have screamed. But the pain abated, replaced with an ever-growing weight. Queasy terror gave way to a calm, remote part of his mind: He'd have to visit a healer before he had sex again; more notable, -9 Health. Okay, ten seemed an obvious place to die. He wasn't sure if he'd prefer being suffocated or being bitten to death.
Two more bites in rapid succession cleared up his confusion on the matter, even if the pain did seem to get smothered a moment later under the all-consuming pressure. -64 health. He didn't take damage less than 25, according to the feat. This seemed to have stopped the damage from blood loss, where earlier versions had failed. It also seemed to violate conservation of matter. Could he even suffocate? The next obvious place for him to die was -100. The third would be his own maximum health, so, -354. 354 might be enough.
"That was ill-conceived of you." A woman watched him from the darkness. He didn't disagree.
The bites started to slow. Apparently the bandit dogs could suffocate, or they just couldn't move enough to try to bite anymore; several mouths of varying configurations being pressed into him while drooling, a fresh new hell. The pressure built. The bites stopped. The pressure built. And then a sudden warm wetness where previously there had been warm flesh, and then another. And then a new pain started, in his chest. Oh, hey, he could suffocate, noted the remote calm part of his mind, before being buried under the weight with everything else. -65 health. -66 health. That hurt, and it just kept getting worse. Thomas tried to - and still couldn't move. -67 health. His muscles burned, but he couldn't so much as twitch, the sudden need to breathe washing his mind blank of any other thought. He needed out. He needed air. -68 health. He had nothing to scream with. -69. -70.
"I can make it stop, Thomas. I can make the pain stop. Just give it to me." -71. He failed to scream again, against an agony that just kept growing, an all-encompassing experience. -72.