In his titanic form, Victor figured he weighed close to a couple of thousand pounds, especially with his helmet on, which added to his mass considerably. Even so, when he slammed Lifedrinker into the gargantuopod’s rear-left flank, despite her white-hot axe head and the imbuement of his spirit, she barely penetrated its hide, and the great creature hardly flinched. When he’d first seen the monster alone in its lair, Victor had estimated it at about the size of an elephant. Standing behind it, Lifedrinker furiously trying to dig into its flesh, he altered that opinion; it had to be quite a lot larger because his head barely cleared its belly.
Sora's fiery arrows were sputtering, the flames failing to ignite the monster’s calloused pink hide. And, as the behemoth shifted, trying to throw Victor’s bear aside, its hip crashed into him, sending him sprawling. He felt like a truck had just run into him. He came to rest against a pile of rubbish that stank of decomposition and shit and immediately struggled to his feet, eager to be away from the smell. The way the thing had rebuffed his attack was infuriating, and Victor could feel his rage Core surge with renewed intensity, pumping more and more of the hot, smoldering power into his pathways. Still, he couldn’t help pausing to stare at the furious melee between his bear and the monstrosity.
The bear, much larger and more primordial than any bear to walk the Earth in Victor’s lifetime, was drenched in blood, his thick dark coat torn in a dozen places by the gargantuopod’s sucking, twisting maw. He roared savagely, his eyes ablaze with a fury akin to Victor’s, and he swiped his great claws with terrible force against the monster’s head, slicing through its groping tentacles and leaving long, bleeding gashes in the more tender flesh of its open mouth.
Victor felt his heart surge with pride, and he almost started to cheer on his big, furry brother, but then, almost as quickly as they’d appeared, the gashes closed up. The monster’s tentacles wrapped around the bear’s right forelimb and tugged it into its maw. It swirled shut like a tooth-lined sphincter, and with a horrible wrenching of its neck, left then right, it peeled the fur and flesh from the bear’s limb.
“You mother fucker!” Victor screamed, horrified as he saw his brave companion stumble back, his mutilated leg flailing in the air as he fell to his side. Victor opened the floodgates on his Core, filling his pathways with fear-attuned Energy, and cast Energy Charge, aiming for the side of the monstrous creature, determined to knock it away from the bear. In a ripple of roiling shadows, he flew toward the gargantuopod, and his collision with its exposed flank was akin to charging a brick wall. Even so, Victor hadn’t met a brick wall he couldn’t do some damage to.
When he slammed into the mound of thick, pink flesh, it rippled like a mud puddle might if you dropped a boulder into it. Moreover, the enormous, stony ribs under the surface cracked like saplings in a landslide. As Victor’s Core drained itself of fear-attuned Energy to protect him, the colossal monster slid a dozen feet from him, writhing and thrashing as its gore-filled maw yodeled out a weird, undulating scream-roar of pain.
Victor had the wherewithal to release his bear, ending its suffering and sending it home to the Spirit Plane. Then, he leaped at the monster, targeting its damaged side. He launched into a frenzy of attacks, hacking Lifedrinker in tremendous two-handed blows, left then right, almost like he was trying to cut through a gargantuan fallen tree.
While he dug bloody furrows in the flesh, exposing splintered bones, the monster roared and thrashed, trying to get to its feet while simultaneously twisting to lash its hook-ended tentacles at Victor. He ignored them as they wrapped around his left leg and arm—they might as well have been clinging cobwebs; they were utterly unable to budge his rigid, titanic frame as he lost himself in the furious frenzy of his assault. More fiery arrows punched into the monster’s hide. There were fewer of them this time, but they seemed to burn more fiercely, and Victor was dimly aware that portions of the creature’s thick, pink hide were beginning to char and turn black.
Lifedrinker took two hits to penetrate the hide, and Victor was swinging in such a frenzy that she must have scored a half dozen bone-deep cuts, burning and charring the flesh on her way through, before the monster finally surged back to its feet and whirled so violently to face Victor that he had to thrust out a boot to keep it from snatching him up in its gaping mouth.
He slid back, driven by his foot on the edge of its sucking maw, and had a brief, heart-fluttering panic as his foot started to slide into the orifice. As it came loose, he stomped into the ground and, still gripping her in two hands, hacked Lifedrinker with all his might into the lower rim of the monster's lunging, sputtering mouth.
She bit between the rows of dagger-like teeth, and her smoldering axe head sank to the haft, fully buried. Victor roared his approval as Lifedrinker writhed and pulled, digging like a parasite into the folds of the softer flesh. He released her and leaped back, avoiding another lunge, and watched with sadistic pleasure as the monster’s maw swirled shut on the axe.
Her haft stuck out of the puckered opening like a toothpick, but only for an instant as the creature opened wide again, coughing gouts of blood, saliva, and gore. Its remaining tentacles grabbed at the axe, wrapping around the haft, trying to draw it out, but Lifedrinker had dug deep, and the worm-like appendages didn’t seem to have much leverage pulling away as opposed to pulling things in.
While it struggled, in a panic to get the hungry axe out, Victor noticed Cam darting around the edges of the chamber, planting thin, metallic rods into the ground. He hoped the weird, youthful caster had a trick up his sleeve to help finish the gargantuopod off. His rage was still high, simmering like recently boiled water in his veins, but he’d let off a lot of steam in his frenzied assault. Seeing Lifedrinker take root, driving the great monster mad as she dug into the softer flesh of its inner mouth, also served to cool his boiling blood. With his banner burning brightly, pushing away the toxic air, he turned to regard his other companion.
Sora stood atop a distant refuse pile, her bow held high, watching Victor, the monster, and Cam. He frowned at her, annoyed that all he’d seen her do thus far was release a few volleys of magical arrows. Was she up to something? Were she and Cam scheming to get him to wear himself out fighting the great monster? Did they intend to double-cross him?
Sora saw him looking her way and nodded. Then he saw the air around her begin to shimmer with blistering Energy. It coalesced like a fine orange mist and then streamed to the point of the arrow she held nocked to her bow. With the fluid grace of a master archer, she drew it back and released the string.
The arrow streaked through the air like a bolt of light, and Victor jerked his head around to watch its impact. The monstrous gargantuopod was on its hind legs, swaying back and forth, maw wide open as it struggled with all six of its tentacles to dig Lifedrinker out of its flesh. Sora’s blazing arrow buried itself deep in the creature’s goo-filled throat, flaring and smoking like a chemical fire. Green and black gas billowed from the monster’s mouth as it howled and jerked its head left and right in a pain-filled frenzy.
Victor knew Lifedrinker was doing good work, draining away the thing’s Energy, likely interrupting some of its abilities. Even so, he wished he had another weapon, something large enough to continue his punishment of the monster.
Rather than dig through the piles of refuse and debris in the lair, hoping to find something to pummel the monster with, he inhaled deeply, stoking the flames of his magma-attuned breath Core. The gargantuopod had given up all pretense of an offensive and was rolling on the ground, shaking the cavern floor, throwing up mounds of rotting meat and slimy detritus as it struggled with Lifedrinker’s deep bite and the flaring arrow still burning a pit in its insides.
As his breath Core swelled and his lungs filled to bursting, Victor stomped forward. Risking a fate similar to his bear’s, he reached out and snatched ahold of the monster's maw as it puckered open. He found grips on the round, smooth sides of the sharp grinding teeth in fingers of steel, digging in, straining with every ounce of his prodigious strength. At the same time, he stepped on the bottom rim of the sphincter mouth, holding the great maw gaping wide around him.
When he felt himself losing, when the weird muscles that contracted that grinding orifice began to pull him in, Victor switched his Sovereign Will boost to strength and roared, pushing and stretching the maw wide. Then, he emptied his breath Core, blowing out every ounce of his magma-attuned Energy in a stream of liquid, orange-glowing fiery rock, dumping gallons and gallons of it into the thing’s throat and down into its belly.
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The horrible damage his magma did to the thing’s insides was enough to send it into apoplectic convulsions, and even Victor’s terrible grip wasn’t able to keep hold. The monster bucked and flopped, and Victor was thrown, head over heels, backward as it rolled around on the ground, desperately seeking a release from its agony but unable to reach the fire destroying its insides.
Victor clambered back to his feet, and he was stunned to see a System message flash before his eyes:
***Cam Lightly has been rescued from certain death and removed from the dungeon. Eighteen entrants remain. Prepare for an Energy infusion.***
Blinking, Victor looked around the room but couldn’t spot the young magician. When his gaze returned to the monster, still convulsing, spewing black and green gases from an orifice that had to be its anus, Victor saw one of the silver rods Cam had planted jutting out of its rigid, pink flesh. “Did the damn thing roll over him?”
To his surprise, Sora responded from just behind him, “No, I shot him.” Victor whirled on her, hands up in a fighting stance, but she smiled and shook her head. “I didn’t break the trust; he was trying to betray you. Those flags he was planting were meant to mesmerize you as you fought with the monster.” She looked back to the giant creature and coughed, unable to easily breathe in the green and black fumes despite Victor’s banner. “Is it going to die?”
Victor looked down at the woman, tiny to him in his titanic form, and contemplated grabbing her and flinging her toward the dying beast. The impulse came on the heels of a frustrated thought about how he couldn’t trust anyone in that place. She could be lying. She could have seen an opportunity to eliminate a weaker opponent.
Scowling, growling faintly, some smoke drifting out of his nostrils, he stepped back to keep her in view while observing the monstrous creature. It was thrashing much more feebly now, lying on its side, exposed ribs heaving up and down as it struggled to breathe through its ruined throat and esophagus. “It’ll die,” he said with finality. “Lifedrinker won’t let it recover.”
“Lifedrinker?” Sora held a sleeve over her face, coughing again.
“My axe. She’s deep in its maw.”
“Ah!” Sora looked up from her sleeve, her eyes bloodshot from the fumes. When she saw Victor’s scowling countenance, she took a step back, releasing her bow with one hand and letting it hang by her side. “I swear, Victor. Cam and I are friends in the city. He will be furious with me, but I told him not to try his scheme. He ignored me.”
Victor kept one eye on the dying monster and shrugged. “So you shot him? I thought he was hard to surprise.”
“Yes, but his talent doesn’t help so much against people he deems friendly. If you doubt me, collect his flags after that thing dies. See what their purpose is.”
Victor did doubt her, and he did intend to examine the silver rods, but no matter what they were, it wouldn’t reinforce his trust in the archer; for all Victor knew, she could have encouraged Cam with the intent to betray him from the beginning. The cloud of noxious gas and smoke around the monster had grown so thick that he was having trouble seeing it. “Wait here if you want,” he grunted, then strode into the caustic haze.
The gargantuopod was barely moving, its breaths shallow and rapid, and he could see Lifedrinker’s haft jutting out of its open, smoking pit of a mouth. He wanted to be close as the axe finished her feast; he didn’t feel good without her in his hand.
Standing beside the monster’s head, the thing seemed pitiful, even though its gaping jaw was probably ten yards wide. “Come on, hombre,” he said, wishing it had an eye he could look into. “Give it up. Time to move on.” In a coincidence that sent shivers down his spine, the thing took a deep shuddering breath, wheezed it out in a cloud of black smoke, and fell still.
Before the System could blast him with a torrent of Energy, Victor grabbed Lifedrinker’s haft and gave her a tug. She slipped free almost effortlessly. She throbbed in his hand, waves of satisfaction rolling into him as he noticed the thick veins of shimmering green Energy that stretched through her silvery metal and into her living wood haft. He wondered if she’d evolve again soon, perhaps after processing this latest feast.
A soft breeze tickled his neck, and when he turned, he saw Sora standing where he’d left her, eyes closed, hands outstretched, her hair whipping in a breeze she seemed to be creating. That’s when a ball of golden Energy struck her in the chest and, at nearly the same time, another hit Victor. The influx was significant, enough to lift him off the ground and fully replenish his Core. Euphoria washed over him, his anger melted away, and Victor dropped to his knees, panting like he’d just sprinted a mile.
When he looked up, he saw Sora lying on her back in a similar state. As he clambered to his knees, then his feet, he turned to look at the dead gargantuopod and saw great balls of rainbow-hued Energy drifting up from the corpse, forming a big, shimmering blob. “Shit, here we go again,” he muttered.
He’d only seen the rainbow-tinted globes of Energy a time or two before, and he knew it would hit him like a runaway train. He was leery of being made insensate by the influx, still suspicious of Sora as he was, but he knew she’d be just as impacted. That said, he stood close to the monster’s corpse, Lifedrinker in his hand. He figured that if he were closer, the Energy would hit him first, which meant he’d recover first.
Sora was still lying on her back when the shimmering cloud of Energy split into two streams, and one slammed into his back between his shoulder blades. Victor started to yell, not in anger but in victory, lifting his arms high, Lifedrinker in one fist as the enormous wave of power washed over him, lifting him into the air. He’d been hit with surges like this before—his greatest post-battle rush had to have been the reaver army he’d defeated single-handedly, but this was up there in the top five. Even as his conscious mind began to depart, drifting on waves of euphoria, he felt sure he’d gain another level.
When the Energy released him, and he fell to the ground, he caught himself on the knuckles of his free hand before he tumbled to the filthy floor. Standing, he looked past the System message waiting for him until he caught sight of Sora sitting on the ground, her bow resting on her knees. She regarded him placidly and nodded at his instant scrutiny. “That was quite a reward you just received. Mine wasn’t so large.”
Victor sighed, stretching his neck until it popped. He should have guessed she’d recover more quickly if the System decided she’d contributed less to the kill. Remembering the battle, though, he frowned. “I thought that arrow you shot into its throat was pretty damn effective.”
As she inhaled, gathering her words, he read the System message:
***Congratulations! You have achieved level 63 Herald of the Mountain’s Wrath and gained 12 strength, 17 vitality, and 12 will.***
He looked at his attribute panel on his status page, wondering how things were shaping up after three levels in his new Class:
Strength:
406
Vitality:
526 (579)
Dexterity:
190
Agility:
213
Intelligence:
172
Will:
589
While he stared at the numbers, inwardly amused by how much they’d changed since he’d first stepped foot into the Wagon Wheel and Yrella and Vullu had taught him how to look at his status, Sora said, “I’m sure I hurt it, and I got a lot of Energy, but that fiery kiss of death was what did the creature in. I don’t know how it’s possible for a giant to breathe fire like a dragon, but color me impressed.” She rose to her feet with effortless grace and gestured with her bow to something behind him. “We received a chest.”
“Titan,” Victor grunted absently while he turned. Sure enough, resting on the filthy, blood and gore-spattered stone floor was a large, ornate, silver-inlaid marble chest.
“Excuse me?” Sora stood beside him, no longer tiny but still quite a lot smaller than he was.
“I’m Quinametzin. Titan. Not a giant.”
“There’s a difference?”
Victor jerked his thumb at the crumpled corpse of the gargantuopod. “Titans can kill shit like that.” He pointed to the chest. “How we doing this?”
Sora lithely hopped past the chest and mounted the corpse, like climbing a hill for her, to pull the silver rod from its side. “Do you want to inspect this? I’d prefer to think you believe me and that I needn’t fear you will smite me down out of suspicion.”
Victor shrugged. “I made a deal with you. A, uh, ‘gentlefolk’s agreement.’ Remember? I’m not going to hurt you unless you betray me or unless we agree to split up. As for that thing, what’s it going to matter? You could have tricked that little guy into placing them for all I know.”
Sora frowned, and her brow narrowed. She was clearly angry at the implication, but it seemed she couldn’t formulate an argument that would counter Victor’s logic. Instead, she tossed the “flag” to the ground with a ping and brushed her hands together, wiping off some unseen debris. “I hope I can earn your trust, Victor. I appreciate your honesty.”
“You don’t want that?” Victor pointed to the rod where it had rolled into a sticky mess of rotted flesh.
“They’re useless to me. They require a mind affinity, and the set is incomplete; he still had more to place.” She walked to the chest and stood beside it. It was large enough that he figured she could get inside if she curled up. “As for the treasure, I’ll defer the first choice of the loot to you. Then we can take turns. Maybe there’s one item in here, or maybe there are twenty. I have no idea what to expect after slaying a monster of this caliber.”
Victor realized he was still gripping Lifedrinker’s haft in white knuckles. He lifted her and looked at her blade; she was unusually quiet, and he wondered if it had something to do with the thick rivers of Energy she was processing. He held her over his shoulder, and his harness snatched her, pulling her close against his back.
He turned in a slow circle, looking around the great chamber. It was big enough to house a couple of full-court basketball games with room left over for the fans. The haze had cleared from the ground level, but near the high stone ceiling, a cloud of black and green vapors still clung. He saw the stone tunnel where they’d entered the chamber and, on the far wall, not too far from where the monster's corpse lay, was another exit.
Victor nodded, and as he stepped toward the chest, he called forth his coyotes, infusing them with inspiration-attuned Energy. Naturally, they came into the world yipping and whining, and Victor laughed. “Hey, hermanos, go watch those tunnels and make sure nobody surprises me and my friend here.” They yipped and split up, darting through the refuse-strewn cavern. Victor looked at Sora, and when he grinned, she returned the smile. “All right, let’s see what kind of loot that big boy had for us.”