Mage Tank

Chapter 7: Fear is the Mind-Killer

To Varrin’s credit he didn’t scream or cry out when the creature snatched him up, he just grunted loudly and then immediately tried going for his sword. The sheath was pinned beneath the creature’s palm, though, and he couldn’t get a good grip on the hilt. I jumped forward and grabbed onto the hand, unsure of what to do, but I pulled at one of the fingers hoping to give Varrin enough room to squeeze out, or at least access his weapon. That’s when the head of the monster breached the surface of the river, and its bulbous orange eyes peered up the bank at us.

Dark, syrupy water flowed off the creature, revealing skin so pale that it was partially transparent. I could see blue and purple veins roping across the creature’s skull, which pulsed with an irregular beat. Its face was wide and football shaped, if the football was about the size of a compact car, and thin hair was plastered to its skin. Its mouth spread out across its entire face and opened to reveal unsettlingly human teeth, ready to rip through Varrin’s armor like a tuna can and mash him into a tasty paste. It dragged the two of us closer, until I was ankle-deep in the water, my boots sinking into the silt and mud of the riverbed.

Two arrows thunked into the back of the monster’s hand, followed quickly by the head of Sayil’s spear. He dug the weapon deep into the hand, between what would have been the creature’s metacarpals if it had been human, then twisted and wrenched the spear from side to side. Abyssal blue liquid poured out from the wound and the beast stopped dragging us closer, then let out a powerful, low moan that sounded like the pitch-shifted sobbing of an infant. It triggered some primal instinct buried in my brain and I was deeply disturbed by the sound.

I bit down on my lip hard enough to draw blood and tried to ignore the wretched terror the cry evoked within me. Varrin had given up on his sword, clawing frantically at one of the creature’s massive knuckles. Sayil released his spear and fell back, splatting into the mud, then covered his ears. His eyes were wide and tears began trickling down his face.

I slapped my palm on the knuckle where Varrin’s gauntleted hands had torn off strips of the beast’s skin and cast Oblivion Orb. I felt bone and cartilage disappear, then moved my hand slightly and cast it again, making a gap large enough to shove my hand into, fingers first. I pushed hard into the wound, tearing tendon and worming deep into cartilage. I cast Oblivion Orb twice more, then went for a fifth, but was met with an icy chill that ran out from my gut and a sharp jab of pain shot down my arm. I checked my bars. I was out of mana.

I pulled my hand out, wet and dripping with dark blue blood, then wrapped my arms around the injured finger and pulled back against it with all my weight. The finger gave, then snapped as I bent it backwards. The creature roared again, and I fought even harder against the penetrating fear. Then, Xim was beside me, laying into the next knuckle with her scepter.

Her swings proved far more effective against the beast’s solid joints than they had against the stickmen, and it wasn’t long before the monster gave up, snatching its hand away and sending Varrin crashing to the ground. The moment he was free he began scrabbling away, but the monster wasn’t ready to give up on a potential meal, and it slapped its hand down, its uninjured finger digging into the mud. It heaved itself up and out of the water.

Xim and I tried to fall back. I grabbed Sayil under the arms to try and drag him away as he continued to clutch at his ears and stare wide-eyed at the monster. Its massive arm pulled its body out of the water, where it began sprawling along the ground like a crocodile with quick movements from side to side. Despite the beast’s humanoid head, its body was long, with three pairs of webbed and taloned feet. Its slick translucent skin was stretched taught against nubs of bones and ribs.

Where the creature’s second humanoid arm should have been there was only a ragged nub, bright pink and with the end of a shattered bone still protruding outward. It was injured, and severely. Something had already fought with this beast and inflicted enough damage to take off one of its enormous limbs. I spared a single second to consider what kind of monster would be able to do that, before the creature’s giant head closed in on me.

I dropped Sayil, realizing that I had no way to drag him away quickly enough. Now that it was out of the water and moving on its six reptilian legs, I doubted that I could escape even if I abandoned Sayil to his fate. Xim stood behind me, resolute and unyielding. She held up her shield, for all the good it would do, and had her scepter poised for a strike as soon as the beast closed the last few feet between us. I looked around for something to use to help her, maybe a rock that I could at least throw and distract it, when I noticed Sayil’s spear on the ground.

At some point during our struggle to free Varrin, it had dislodged from the monster’s hand and plopped down into the mud. I swept it up into both hands, then drove the butt of it down into the ground. I held it like a pike and stood firm, aiming the spear head toward the mouth of the creature. Its head snapped forward and its jaws closed in around me.

I felt the spear drive into the roof of the beast’s mouth, but not before its teeth closed in around my waist, its teeth ripping through my skin and compressing my spine until I thought it might shatter. But, as quick as it had bitten, it reared back before it was able to begin chewing to sever me in two. The spear went with it, lodged into its hard palate. As it recoiled I saw that Xim clung to the side of the monster’s face.

She gripped a tuft of the creature’s stringy hair and squeezed the side of its face with her thighs. Then, she raised her scepter high and swung hard for one of the creature’s massive, orange eyes. It smashed into jelly with the first strike, the beast roaring and shaking its head. It started to raise its hand to swat at Xim, but I dove on top of it. My weight didn’t arrest its movement, but the arm slowed. The limb was long and its grip was incredible, but the arm itself wasn’t very strong, seeming designed to drag prey into the water, not to lift it into the air.

Xim smashed her scepter into the eye twice more, mincing it completely, then hurled her weapon away and back toward the shore. She cocked her arm and drove her hand deep into the monster’s eye socket. The beast bellowed and Xim let out a fierce battle cry as she ripped out a chunk of flesh from inside the monster’s skull. It shook its head and turned its body, trying to flee back into the dark scum of the river, but Xim held tight, plunging her hand into the wound and pulling out another chunk, then another. The beast’s body twisted and it made a terrible, gurgling noise, then it slumped, head plunging into the water. Xim fell, splashing down into the disgusting mess below.

I crawled off the arm and waded in, getting waist deep before finding and helping Xim back up and out onto the shore. We fell back onto the ground, breathing hard and staring at the monster’s corpse, which had already begun to shrivel and decay. A notification popped up.

Your party has slain 1 Atrocidile: Lesser Abomination, Grade Zero. Your party receives the following reward(s):

1: 5 Emerald Chips

2: 1 complete set of Atrocidile Teeth

3: 1 Atrocidile Essence

Party Leader has set Chip and currency allocation to: Even Distribution.

You receive: 1 Emerald Chip.

Party Leader has set item allocation to: Master Looter.

Party Leader receives all other rewards.

Several moments passed before I spoke.

“That was metal as fuck,” I said to Xim. “You tore its brain out through its eye socket.”

Xim shook a combination of cerulean blood, brain matter, and river slime off her arm, then held it out and away from her body. She grimaced, squinting one eye shut and glanced over at me. Then, she smiled.

“I’ll assume that was a compliment,” she said, “and I graciously accept it. Feel free to build a temple in which you may worship me.”

I grinned back at her, then looked around to check on the others. Sayil had come back to his senses, and he crawled up the shore and back onto the flat stone of the cave floor. He looked shell-shocked, staring at the monster’s body, clenching and unclenching his hands. Varrin was farther away, barely visible through the fog. He was also sitting on the ground and looking toward Xim and I. I couldn’t make out his expression but I assumed it was a look of awe and respect. Chilla was nowhere in sight.

As the adrenaline of the fight wore off, my stomach and lower back began to ache intensely where the monster’s teeth had closed around me. I checked my bars to see the extent of the damage.

Health: 130/162

Stamina: 127/132

Mana: 0/45

Poisoned, Toxicity: 32

The bite would have probably killed anyone else in the party. I’d taken thirty or so damage, but considering the natural defense given to me by reaching ten in Fortitude, I’m betting that the damage numbers against someone in the single digits would have been significantly higher. I was also growing curious about stamina. Despite the intensity of the fight, it had only gone down by five. Maybe stamina had as much to do with the duration of my exertion as it did with the intensity of it. My toxicity had gone up by two points, which had to be from wading through the river of gross, and that was just from skin contact. I shivered at the thought of how high it would have gone if I’d swallowed it, or gotten it into any of my mucous membranes.

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I looked Xim over. She’d been completely submerged for a few seconds.

“How’s your toxicity?” I asked. She raised an eyebrow.

“My what?”

“Your poison concentration.”

“Oh,” she said. “Is that what the system calls it for you?” She read something I couldn’t see, then took a deep breath. “It’s at thirty-five.”

“You’re gonna’ need one of those antidotes.”

“I will,” she said, then scanned the area. “I don’t see Chilla anywhere. I can just heal myself for now; lost a bit of health when the thing threw me off into the river.”

She pressed a palm to her neck and I watched the golden light travel up her arm and out into her body.

“Should we look for her?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Varrin’s call, I guess. It may be worth it to stick around here for a little while in case she comes back.” I looked over to Varrin, who’d made it onto his feet and was coming towards us.

“It was a fear attack,” he said through gritted teeth. “I wasn’t prepared for it. My Wisdom is too low.”

Xim stood and placed a hand on his arm.

“Even I barely resisted it, and I lost a few seconds trying to shake it off. It got everyone to some degree.”

The memory of that soul-shaking terror came back to me, fresh as an open wound, and I shuddered. It was the type of experience I knew I’d never forget. That and the giant, pale, human-headed crocodile abomination. Really all of this was going to be unforgettable, but I thought that the bone-deep fear was going to be the most vivid memory I got from the Delve.

A woman’s scream came from the fog, echoing off the stone walls.

I was wrong.

We found Chilla’s corpse about a hundred meters away. She’d either run, or been dragged, down a narrow corridor that branched off from the river chamber. Her abdomen and chest had been hollowed out and the muscle had been stripped from her thighs. There were obvious teeth and claw marks. She’d been eaten by something.

Varrin fell to his knees beside her, reaching out and cupping the side of her bloody face. Sayil stared at Varrin darkly as the young man grieved over Chilla, and I said a quick prayer to any gods that might have been listening that Sayil wouldn’t say anything so stupid as “I told you so.” Fortunately, he refrained from saying anything at all, opting to move a few meters deeper down the corridor, keeping an eye out in case any of the predators returned, still hungry.

None of us were surprised to find her body. We’d gotten a notification a few minutes after our fight with the Atrocidile.

A party member has been slain: Chilla Stormreiss.

All items in the party member’s inventory will be distributed to the survivors upon completion of the Delve.

While the items in Chilla’s inventory were gone, fortunately everything in her pack was still next to her body. That’s how I discovered the grim reason why necessary provisions were kept in packs outside of the inventory. If the party member died, their allies could take what they needed.

Xim drank down one of the antidotes, and she and I moved what we could from Chilla’s pack to our own. Tools, rope, rations, medical supplies, several additional potions and elixirs with various effects, mostly to remedy different status effects. Xim dug out an extra pair of daggers and handed them to me.

“Here,” she whispered, “it’s better than nothing, but don’t expect much. If you don’t know what you’re doing you’re just as likely to cut yourself as the enemy. Don’t have to steal any more of Sayil’s stuff.”

Sayil hadn’t been happy with the fact that his spear was irretrievably lodged in the mouth of the half-dissolved Atrocidile, but he also wasn’t about to wade into the slime river and try to dig it out. He pulled a pair of shortswords from his pack and strapped them on instead, grumbling about things like ‘reach’ and ‘effective range’.

There was also a small journal in Chilla’s pack, with an illustration pasted inside of a younger Chilla in front of a middle-aged man and woman. Her parents, I guessed. We gave that to Varrin, who tucked it away wordlessly. There was more in the pack, but it would get left behind.

After resting for an hour near the body, Varrin waved a hand and I got a new notification.

Party Leader has released Chilla Stormreiss’ body.

Defeated Party Member will be transported outside of the Delve.

The floor of the cave opened up with the sound of grating stone, and Chilla’s corpse and the rest of her belongings descended gently down into the cavity. The stone moved to close the gap, and she was gone.

There was something about seeing her body that was so much more real than everything else that had happened. I’d seen a number of living creatures brutally slain in a variety of ways that very day, but they were all monstrous. The violence didn’t hit home because it was easy for my brain to dissociate from feeling any relation to the things that were being violenced. But a human body, torn apart and laid out to rot, was one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen.

I’d only ever seen bodies in-person at funeral visitations, and those had all been well-preserved and done up with makeup and nice clothes. I wasn’t a complete neophyte when it came to witnessing disturbing scenes. I’d grown up on ultra-violent movies and media, and had spent more time than I should have on LiveLeaks and other similar sites. But, seeing it up close and in person for the first time was… awful.

We spent another hour after Chilla’s body was taken away so we could rest, hydrate, and let Xim distribute another couple of heals. Varrin had gotten a bit squashed by the full-body handshake the Atrocidile had given him, and Sayil was still losing health over time from his toxicity.

There wasn’t much talking, aside from some discussion of our strategy, formation, and tactics moving forward. Our ranger was gone, so we no longer had the luxury of a trained scout. Chilla had also been our main source of ranged attacks, since my only spell effectively made me a third melee fighter. Xim was helpful enough to let me know that the choice to forego a ranged option by an aspiring spell caster at level zero was atypical. Varrin was helpful enough to let me know that it was also stupid enough that he was considering assigning me a conservator after we got out of the Delve, to make sure I wasn’t a danger to myself or others. Ultimately, Sayil pulled out a set of knives with curved blades on either end and fastened them to his belt. He told me they were for throwing when I asked, and it seemed like everyone else already knew that.

When we all stood and prepared to move on, I realized how disgusting we were. We’d only been in the Delve for a few hours, but the two encounters so far had left us covered in a thick coating of filth. Varrin and Sayil were both clean compared to Xim and I, and they were still covered in mud, stickman goo, blood, and sweat. I’d gotten doused with a good coating of Atrocidile saliva on top of that, and was caked from the waist down in drying, toxic river gunk.

Xim was the worst off. After driving her arm up to the shoulder into the mashed eye and brain of the Atrocidile, which was nasty enough on its own, she’d been completely submerged in the river. Her once white robes were stained a dark greenish-brown, the links between her chainmail were clogged, and I couldn’t even make out the symbol on her tabard any longer. I’m sure we had a nice scent to us as well, but, fortunately, the constant scouring of my nasal cavity by the omnipresent, deadly mist had robbed me of any sense of smell.

As for my clothes, my shirt was a total loss at this point. After riding the Atrocidile’s hand, the garment had earned a few new rips and had become more of a vague suggestion of a shirt. I pulled it off and threw it onto the ground, then considered doing the same with my pants. They were still mostly intact, but had enough new holes in them that they’d made their way beyond ‘fashionably distressed’ and now fit more closely with ‘homeless chic’. Plus, they had about ten pounds of sludge caked onto them. My boots were doing ok, but soil squished between my toes with every step, even after taking them off and doing my best to clean them out. In the end, I decided that tackling the Delve with my dogs out and my manly parts dangling in the fog wasn’t a wise course of action. Wisdom was my third highest stat, after all.

Chilla’s pack had held an extra pair of clothes, but with her slim frame I doubted they’d have fit. I also wasn’t totally keen on the idea of trying on the dead woman’s shirts while Varrin literally mourned her loss right in front of me. Anything Xim had was too short and slim, Sayil’s frame was too narrow, and if Varrin had anything that would fit me, he wasn’t offering, and I didn’t want to ask. So, I ended up striding through the Delve shirtless and covered in mud, like I’d just lost the county pig-wrestling competition. (Which is properly pronounced pig rasslin’, for anyone interested in the dialect of my homeland).

First, we backtracked to the river chamber, looking for any additional tunnels or exits, but found none. Xim told me that this was normal for a low level Delve, which usually presented the simplest floor plans and layouts. As the level of the Delve increased, the rule of thumb was that its complexity increased as well, to the point where certain Delves turned into sprawling labyrinths whose main difficulty became finding the exit in time. I asked Xim why there was a time limit, but she shrugged.

“People have theories,” she said. “A lot of Delvers think it’s arbitrary; just part of the challenge to decide who’s worthy of the rewards. Others think that the portals connecting the Delvers to the outside world can only stay open for so long. The supplicants of Astrania believe the Delves are evil, and that the whole thing is a trap that feeds on the souls of Delvers who become trapped. No one knows for sure, though.”

After returning to the tunnel where we’d found Chilla, we slowly made our way deeper. I began keeping time by tracking my mana regen, watching it creep upward at an agonizing pace. After more than an hour passed, the tunnel began to narrow. We had to swap from walking in pairs to moving in a single-file line, with me at the rear, and I started thinking about cave explorers who got caught in tight places underground. At one point I started to worry that the Delve actually was some sort of trap, that the tunnel would never end and we’d walk merrily down it until the ceiling collapsed or it flooded with water or it turned out that we were really inside the throat of some giant space worm, and it was getting ready to swallow. Spending such a long time on edge, waiting for whatever killed Chilla to come stalking down the never-ending tunnel, was getting to me, and I began looking over my shoulder every couple of minutes to make sure I wasn’t being stalked by something. I was doing that very thing when I walked into Xim ahead of me.

The group had stopped, and Varrin sent a message down our line like a game of telephone, with Sayil whispering to Xim and then Xim whispering to me.

“There’s a chamber ahead. Varrin doesn’t see anything alive, but there’s some antiqa in the room.”

“Some what?” I asked.

“Ancient tech. A lot of Delvers delve just to hunt for it, but it’s usually accompanied by some bad business when you find it.”

“What kind of bad business?”

“Lots of kinds. For example, the kind that doesn’t kill you, but paralyzes you and lays eggs in your ear canals, then lets its babies suck your mana veins dry until you die. Or the kind that can take your arms off without shedding a drop of blood, then starts to dissect your hands, but somehow you can still feel your fingernails as it strips them off.”

“You know,” I said, swallowing, “you’re pretty dark.”

“People often say that about those of us from the Third Layer.”

I noticed Varrin glaring at us from up the tunnel and I gave him a thumbs up, feeling like a schoolboy who’d just been caught chatting in class. Xim faced forward and the four of us marched carefully into the room.

The shit inside was wild.