Not Going Deeper

  The echoes of vicious combat rang in my ears as I closed the door behind me, growing only slightly fainter with the wooden edifice closed. The sound of my heart pounding in my chest almost drowned out the rapid fire explosions and pained roars, though the lack of any sound from the wretched unthing was somehow even more unnerving than the plague doctor’s maddened howls.

  The very first thing to meet my eyes was a very clear, concise message from the dungeon, “GET OUT” written in so many layers of blood it was visibly protruding from the wall. I sighed, glancing around the desolate room for any signs of the ambush I was fully expecting. Strangely, I could find a single trace of the cascade of monsters I was expecting amongst the scattered debris and tattered furniture throughout the room.

  There were also only two doors, the one I came through and from which the sounds of inhuman combat still emanated, and another opposite the entrance undoubtedly leading deeper in. “Would that I could…” I muttered, staring into the shadowy holes in the walls. This really ought to be a problem we could easily solve; I don’t want to be here, the place doesn’t want me to be here, we can solve each other's problems really easily! If only negotiating with malevolent land spirits were so simple and clear cut.

  I withheld a sigh, cautiously advancing into the room. I wasn’t even sure what the hell I was doing, going further in to this hell pit was a spur of the moment reaction to being cornered by two monsters well beyond my ability to handle, but given the wave of beasts that attacked my squad en masse earlier I don’t feel much more confident in trying to take on the dungeon than I do trying to slip past the crow and the wretched mockery of mankind dueling behind me. I didn’t come to this room with any plan beyond getting further away from the two unmatchable killers, but now that I’m here I feel like bashing my head against the wall.

  Where the hell was I gonna go? I have no idea how deep this dungeon goes, let alone if reaching the end would even provide an exit (and, to be frank, I highly doubted it; why on earth would a living trap that feeds on death offer an easy way out to its most valuable prey?) if I did somehow manage to fight through untold legions of infectious monsters all on my own. And that was a big if, considering I rather doubt I could have handled the horde that attacked earlier on my own, let alone worse as Roin implied there would be.

  This… is a very bad situation to be stuck in. Not exactly a shocking revelation, but certainly a weighty one to feel settle over my shoulders like a lead scarf. I… can’t continue blindly rushing into this hell pit or I’m just gonna die down here. All I’ve done by pushing the little bit deeper in is put myself in a different kind of danger, not less danger; theoretically, I’d wager that the perils of the dungeon are less hazardous than that wretched unthing on the other side of the door, but for a creature as low on the totem pole as I, the difference was academic at best.

  Ultimately, whether death comes at the hands of an eldritch mockery of a butler or a gibbering horde of crystalline parasite infected pygmies, my torn up carcass will be just as dead at the end of the day.

  Okay, so what can I do? I’ve bought myself time, though I have no idea how much (and thus have to assume not that much), so what can I do with that time? Ideas raced through my mind, intercut with unhelpful interjections of imagined gruesome deaths each potential failure might bring. Ultimately, the only resource that might get me a way out is, effectively, a distraction; or perhaps a terror weapon would be a better description.

  I know how to make a big honking pillar of fire, shadow, or water (though I don’t have sufficient resources available to produce “optimal” results), and I know that the Blight can infuse elements and magic if given the chance. Everything I’ve encountered has been utterly terrified of the Blight, or at the very least hyperfocused on it; while I can’t say for sure causing an outbreak would help me in the small scale, I can say that unleashing a wave of grey fire would serve as one fuck of a distraction.

  Presuming I can manage to infect the fire, anyway (I have to assume that my attempt to infect whatever rune I draw will fail, otherwise I’ll be in a bad way if all my plans rely on the Blight); normal fire would do little to nothing, considering the pyromancer on the other side of the door…Hmm, fire also puts me at too much risk, and provides too much potential ammunition for my enemies. Water poses a smaller, but still considerable threat; drowning or having the flesh power washed off my bones would leave me just as dead as burning or being stabbed by that spear wielding asshole. That leaves… darkness. It’s almost perfect, intangible and unstoppable by conventional means; presuming I can actually infect a rune with the Blight, a tidal wave of toxic darkness sounds like a perfect weapon, and even just a wave of “normal” mystical darkness could serve as a decent distraction.

  Except last time I saw a darkness rune, I nearly lost myself to some strange fixation that overtook me. Exposing myself to potentially dangerous mental influences in the midst of an inherently hostile dungeon with two vicious monsters gunning for me sounded like far from the best idea. If I fall into this strange siren song, even if it wasn’t damaging in and of itself (something I was far from certain of), it would leave me vulnerable to anything else that could then just walk right up and shank me while I’m distracted gazing into the abyss. Of course, if I do successfully infuse the rune with the great grey devourer, the only things I’d need to worry about are Blighted abominations that, at least from my past experiences, seem generally more interested in attacking the non-infected over a carrier like me.

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  I grimaced, glaring around the dilapidated room as the sounds of roaring flames and inhuman laughter echoed out from the door behind me. That audible clash of titans solidified my resolve; the real question here wasn’t whether I could withstand the strange temptation of the darkness rune, but whether I could survive without it. Did I have any other viable options? I barely paused a moment to ponder that thought, I already knew the answer; no, I wouldn’t be thinking about this so seriously if I did.

  The next question turned to materials, and the lack thereof. There were a number of viable corpses just on the other side of the door, but I highly doubt either Zildan or the not-man would allow me to drag any of them in here unmolested if I dared to stick my head back out there. I suppose it only somewhat mattered, I needed Blighted material to have a hope of infecting the shadows; though, even if that aspect failed, turning this place pitch black would still possibly help me slip out, even if I highly doubted either of those monsters would be overly bothered by a lack of sight.

  With a grimace, I wiped my blade on my robe, roughly scratched out sigil of fire on the wall to use as a short lived bunsen burner to sterilize it more effectively, and cut my wrist horizontally with the still heated blade; I wasn’t looking to bleed out even if I was visibly healing by the time the blade left my flesh, just extract enough blood to work with. I focused on the Blight within as my tainted blood poured out, dripping down to pool in my palm and flow over my fingers for a moment before I began to write on the ground with my fingertips, digging my claws into the floor boards to carve the sigil a little more securely.

  I grimaced as I wrote, knowing this was either going to save me, or at least really fuck up everybody else’s day.

  Zildan howled with pain and rage, desperation slowly overtaking fury as his mind burned. His thoughts swirled around feverish, fiery trails, two different brain structures trying and failing to form the same thoughts. His body kept twitching erratically as his slowly changing nervous system and halfway demonic brain kept misfiring and sending painful, meaningless junk signals down jaggedly mismatched nerves. He couldn't stop screaming even if he wanted to, the part of his brain that controlled speech was a barely functioning mix of human and demon tissue that did not function on the same principles.

  In his most coherent moments, he theorized only the fact demons weren't properly mortal creatures had kept him alive thus far. His human half would have died several times over if the far more durable demonic flesh hadn't pumped it full of corrupting yet sustaining energy. He wished he could remember a story his master told him once, but he only vaguely recalled that some demonic cults were known to be able to keep people alive even through tremendous suffering. Usually this was not to the sufferer’s benefit, and he was beginning to think it may have been better to bleed out in that dark pit than to suffer through this.

  The only thing that kept him even trying to fight was the iron pillar of the Order’s code, and his own stubborn pride. His mind was a mess, his instincts firing contradictory advice as his warped nerves misfired, but those central ideals held firm even as his thought patterns shifted erratically; he didn’t know where he was, barely knew who he was, but he knew on a base and fundamental level what his purpose was. The Blight must be destroyed, wherever it could be found; this, the Order had instilled so deeply into him it surpassed his fundamental human nature, and with his higher reasoning impaired, he defaulted to the code without needing to think about it, without even the ability to think about it.

  He didn’t know what he was fighting now, didn’t know why it was attacking him, but he did know it was trying to prevent him from fulfilling his duty most paramount; that was all he needed to know to keep fighting, the only principal his whirling mind could hold firm to. However, his base animal instincts, both old human and new demonic, could still tell when he was losing. This fight was not going well, and even the animal cunning that was in the driver’s seat most of the time knew he was being toyed with; if this… thing, stopped dodging and occasionally slashing thin lines into him where it could have carved deep and true, he’d have died already many times over. That disturbed even the beast he’d become, fear and despair slowly wheedling their way through his animalistic fury.

  Then something shifted, a change in the ambient mana of the dungeon coming from further inside; worse yet, it was one that carried a faint hint of the Great destroyer. The bestial thing Zildan defaulted to registered this subconsciously, growling in rage at the presence of the Enemy but keeping his gaze firmly locked on the thing presently killing him; it was this focus that allowed him to spot an opening, a sign of vulnerability utterly alien on the mockery of mankind before him. For the first time since the hideous unthing arrived, its mask-like expression shifted; the false eyes upon its false face widened slightly, flickering towards the door leading further into the dungeon for just the briefest moment. Zildan did not know what this meant, his mind too lost in pain and mutation to ponder it; instead, his honed instincts drove him to capitalize immediately, lunging forth with spear outstretched to rend the wretched not-man apart.

  The creature disappeared an instant before his spear would have found a home in its chest. It didn’t blur, it didn’t bend or twist unnaturally as it had before; one moment it was standing before him, guard down and about to be impaled, the next it was simply gone from his sight. A confused instant later immense pain exploded out from his torso, and a hand wreathed in gore reached up from his stomach to grab his throat. A sound like static on a chalkboard tore into his left ear as the thing whispered into his right, the nonsensical noises holding not a hint of the cadence of speech yet somehow carrying a clear message directly into his warped mind as his vision slowly faded to black.

  Playtime was over, it needed to clean up and leave, now.