NOVEL NEXT Chapter 26: The Eating Maze
Another story of mine, Planetary Orbital Weapon, is back on Royalroad in full!
The screams of men, howling for an end to their torment, fill the air as Rolly presses her back to the wall, panting for breath. Sweat and blood run down her tattered robe as she frantically presses for air, her arms clutching the rectangular metal staff against her chest.
A mechanical ticking from inside of the hollow core of the thing strikes out, reverberating through her body.
Slowly, the screaming in the background stops, followed only by a long, wet gnashing and tearing of meat as something eats. Any last whimpers that remain quickly drown under the sound of the ripping.
Rolly, scanning the maze-like construction of walls all around her, clutches the staff against her core and runs as the mechanism inside of it winds down further.
Today’s game is simple — in theory.
The staff that spawned in the central node of today’s arena needs to be held for five minutes by one person for the game to end. Every thirty seconds, an internal timer ticks down and moves the score closer toward the end, as well as rewarding the holder with an additional champion-point they’ll be allowed to keep regardless of whether they win or not. This, of course, has made competition very fierce amongst the contestants.
It’s quiet.
Rolly slowly walks through the maze, looking around herself. She lifts her gaze up toward where the bleachers and the viewing public usually are. But they aren’t visible. Instead, darkness hangs over the arena, preventing the contestants from seeing or hearing what’s happening above today.
“She went this way!” calls a voice from nearby, causing her to straighten up and look around in panic.
The eaters have lost her, but now the killed contestants have respawned and are on the hunt for her as well. She looks around herself, her short hair — cut awkwardly straight by a pair of scissors held with her own hands — and an empty soup bowl — twisting with her as her eyes dart from passage to passage of the intersection she’s at.
Picking one at random, she runs that way, hoping she isn’t running straight into a group heading her way.
It all looks the same.
She’s run into a dead end.
“Let’s talk this out!” says Rolly, pressing her back against the wall as the man walks her way, making a show of it as he throws his knife from one hand to the other while he walks her way. Her free palm rests against the stone wall behind her, her fingers lightly slapping the brickwork.
Rolly is out of magic, having used all of her energy in the skirmish before to grab the staff away from the others. As a caster, that means she’s beneficially out of luck. She has the frame of a collapsed pine sapling in the woods and the strength of the half-dead fawn it had fallen onto.
A vibration hums through the wall.
Darkness hangs over the arena. Guttural screaming and the sound of dampened explosions come from the far distance, but here in her immediate area, there is only a heavy silence broken by the crunching of grit and sand as his boots walk closer to her. Her knuckles continue to rasp against the wall behind her back.
“It’s just a game, Rollypollie,” says the approaching man, whom she knows, lifting the knife and getting ready to press it through her. “Nothing personal, but I need to buy some things tonight. Hold still,” he says in a contrastingly friendly tone. “I’ll be quick.”
— The wall behind her shakes.
“My garden tiles are red, but I want to paint them green,” she says, as the man lifts his knife. He stops, blinking for a moment as he processes the sentence. “The birds don’t like them that way!” she explains, completely nonsensically — as is the idea.
“…What?” he asks, stopping for just a second as he catches up, realizing her game.
It’s a last-ditch deescalation tactic she learned once. Out of context, absurd statements delivered in a serious manner can throw your opponent off-guard for a moment in very tense situations. It sounds make-believe, but it actually does work, she’s found. It works at least long enough to buy her the second she needs.
— Rolly ducks as the wall behind her breaks apart, dropping to the ground at his feet as so many different things happen at once, the wayward knife cutting across her arm.
Blood and wet splatter all around her, the ground and the walls splattered with a spray of viscera. Coated with gore, horrible, animal screams filling her ears, Rolly crawls past the twitching, spasming legs of the man. A wet slurping and gorging fills the air, together with his screams that keep going and going, forming incoherent horrors.
One of the legs she is crawling past flops over next to her, detached.
Soaked, she scrambles to her feet, looking back behind her for just a second at the thing that had come out of the wall it was hiding inside of. They travel through the walls of the maze, they’re inside of them — the eaters.
But she can’t see it.
She can only see the man’s spasming, stuttering back, held aloft by something it obscures. The sound of snapping ribs and wet tearing can be heard as his torso floats almost from her point of view, his waist having been nearly entirely disconnected as he’s being eaten alive.
The walls around her shake.
More of them are coming.
She runs, the staff clicking audibly as it continues to tick down.
“…Choose one…” reads Rolly quietly, looking at the little altar she’s come across in the maze.
A small table of ornate stonework sits there. Atop it are two potion bottles on either side of a praying statuette. One is full of a very thin orange, bubbling liquid, and the other one is full of green vapor.
Reaching out and looking around herself for a second, Rolly takes the orange bottle.
The altar clicks, ratcheting, as soon as she takes the bottle from the top. The statuette opens its arms, powered by some simple clockwork mechanism inside the construction, as the tabletop lowers, concealing the green potion away.
She looks down at the potion for a moment.
“This way! She’s this way!” calls a voice from around the corner. Rolly jolts together, looking around for a second as she starts to run.
“Over here!” calls a man from exactly the direction she was heading. She’s cut off, stuck in the middle of a corridor with people coming down it from either side.
Rolly, having nowhere else to go, runs back a few steps and dives behind the altar, the grit of the loose gravel crunching as she presses her back to it, clutching the staff against her chest.
She’s halfway there. Rolly holds her breath.
“She’s halfway there!” shouts a voice, coming closer by the second, as if reading her thoughts.
“Hey, an altar!” chimes in a voice as boots run past where she is. “Shit. Someone snagged it already,” mutters the woman.
Shouts and surprised cries fill the air as what sounds like two groups of people running into each other ring out. In Rolly’s head, she’s imagining how the one group just ran around the bend she herself came from, straight into her pursuers. What sounds like a scuffle begins as people react to the surprise with instinctual violence.
“Stop! Stop!” barks a man’s voice, the fighting slowing. “Everyone stop and steady the fuck down,” he explains, gravel crunching just past the altar. “Or are you trying to attract those things again?” he asks. Disjointed muttering from many people comes his way. “We don’t need to kill each other. There’s no point,” he explains. “We just need the staff, and us slaughtering each other is making it easier for it to slip out of our fingers.”
“Well, then you should get the hell out of our way, Regimond!” snarls another man’s voice. “She must’ve run right past you idiots. We were on her!”
“Birdshit!” barks a woman’s voice. “She didn’t come our way. There’s no way. You dumb bastards probably let her go through you and back around the way you came!”
“Nu uh!” replies someone else. “There weren’t any passag- STOP TOUCHING THE WALL, IDIOT!”
There’s a dull thwacking, followed by someone fussing angrily under their voice.
They all fall silent for a moment, looking around at each other in confusion.
Rolly gulps quietly to herself, looking around for a way out. But there isn’t one. She might be able to sneak past one person, but it sounds like there are at least eight, plus or minus one, and they’re standing literally within arm’s reach of her. If one of them bent over slightly to the side and at an angle, they could probably smell the sweat-mingled patchouli perfume on her neck.
Her eyes wander down to the bottle in her hand.
The staff ticks again.
Her blood runs cold.
In that second, Rolly, without looking, can see in her mind’s eye how a near dozen heads all turn toward the altar at the same time, following the sound of the audible tick.
She chucks the potion out over the top of the altar, the glass bottle swirling through the air and past the open arms of the statuette.
There isn’t time for the sound of breaking glass to be heard before the instant dungeon-shaking eruption shakes the world around her down deep toward the bedrock below. Fragments of broken stone and dirt pelt around everywhere. Dust fills the air, together with tendrils of licking flame creeping into every crevice the fire can reach into with its single chance to consume as the explosive potion erupts.
In that same second, before the flames and the surprised screams have a chance to recede, Rolly breaks out from her destroyed cover. The caster doesn’t spare a second to stop for any of the loose body parts or screams. A fairy flies in a daze through the air, and she swings the staff out, cracking it straight across its small body, sending it against the broken bricks with a crack as she runs out of the chaos.
People start to run after her; she can hear their boots.
But they took too long to get away from the noise.
The things inside the walls come, and they come quickly, and those who didn’t get away in the first few seconds are descended upon and devoured.
Rolly makes her escape, clutching the staff to her core. She’s sure if the crowd could be seen or heard, they’d be roaring right now, and in a way, she would prefer that. However, the magic that currently covers and obscures the arena prevents her from doing so, and forces her to listen to the wet sound of eating coming from not that far behind her until she finally makes some distance.
The maze opens up into one of many arena sections, this one being comprised of two bridges that intersect in the middle of the maze in the middle in a plus shape over a chasm. Falling into the pit is instant death. Rolly dives down, the world behind her crackling audibly as a sharp series of jagged daggers of ice pelt into the brickwork all around her. She rolls, spinning around and lifting a hand just in time. A glimmer of regenerated magical energy flows through her core, out to her fingers, and flickers to life.
The bridge below her feet breaks apart, the brickwork moving by itself in an instant to create a crude wall that hundreds of shards of razor sharp ice blast against.
Her head spins to the right, toward a second passage out to the bridges. A group is running straight her way. Lifting her hand, she aims it toward them, recasting the same spell.
The brickwork of the maze exit they’re running through to the bridge shifts, walling themselves closed and cutting the group off from her.
She doesn’t have time to check behind her at the sound of stamping boots before her world spins and the geomancer flies, a heavy weight tackling against her. “GOTCHA!” yells a man’s voice as they fall to the bridge, the staff clattering out of her hands and rolling away, coming precariously close to the edge.
Rolly lands on her back, struggling to breathe, as the elven man wraps his hands around her neck, squeezing as tightly as he can. She kicks, slapping against his arms and trying to scratch his face, but his arms are too long, and he just pulls back a little as he continues to choke her. Her head starts to feel a strong pressure, like it’s about to burst open. “STAY STILL!” he snaps at her as her vision begins to fade, spit sputtering out of the side of her mouth as her hands slap against him and the bridge.
And then she stops moving.
The elf quickly looks up, checking his surroundings.
— But he finds himself looking at a brick wall that wasn’t there before. A brick wall from the maze itself floats there over the abyss, as if, well, by magic.
He doesn’t have time to look back at Rolly, whose palm is pressed flat down against the bridge, before a wall-monster bursts out of the stonework and clamps down on his head. There’s a sick crunching, and he screams, kicking and trying to pry it off as it bites down on his skull. Rolly, gasping for air, spins over and crawls away, grabbing the staff again. It had almost fallen off the bridge, just barely staying in balance.
Blood rushes through her body, her vision spinning and her senses tingling as she looks back at the screaming mess and the monster.
The wall-monsters — well, she’s never seen anything like them really. She’s never even heard of anything like them — maybe mimics? But these things aren’t like mimics, pretending to be some sort of box or object. Rather, these creatures seem to be able to move freely through the insides of walls and then come out of them near unsuspecting prey. Unless it’s some obscenely obscure creature, she’d suspect that Munera had somehow made an entirely new kind of life itself. Can a dungeon-core even do that?
It looks like some kind of horrific mixture of a centipede and a praying mantis. Its body, protruding from the stone wall, is long and worm-like. But instead of being covered in endless legs, it has rows of tiny blade-like protrusions that are really only about an inch long each. But they’re not meant for walking; they’re hooks. They hold whatever prey they catch tightly against their writhing, sleek, segmented bodies long enough for the mandibled, tooth-filled ‘head’ to bite down on whatever they have caught.
“Look, Rolly!” calls a voice from straight down across from her. “Just let me have it for a minute,” says a man she had seen get eaten earlier. “I need to buy some stuff tonight.”
Rolly steps back, looking at him past the carcass of the eaten man, which now hangs limply against the wall as the creature begins to retreat back into the stonework, somehow taking the fresh corpse inside with it without ever disturbing the brickwork.
The geomancer lifts a hand his way. “You’ll have to kill me for it!” she shouts back at him. “I need this more than you!” she proclaims, holding the staff back with one arm. But that extended arm hits the wall behind her at the end of the bridge, the one she herself sealed a moment ago. “I need these points!”
He slowly approaches her, step after step.
She barely has any magic left. It takes a while to regenerate, and she just used nearly every drop she has to solve these problems just now. She has one spell left in her.
But he doesn’t know that.
Rolly bluffs, pressing her hand forward. The man flinches, slowing down. “Just for a minute,” he repeats, standing there. “Let me gather some points, and then I’ll give the staff back to you,” assures the contestant. He runs his finger over his heart. “Promise.”
“That’s cheating!” remarks Rolly.
“Cooperation is allowed. It’s in the game rules,” he replies, shrugging and taking another tentative step her way. Rolly’s back comes close to the wall, and she almost touches it before stopping herself. He takes another step, coming closer. There’s nowhere for her to go. Down to her left and her right is the abyss. Behind her is the wall, which she can slowly start to hear a chittering and clicking emerging from as something begins to crawl through it toward her.
A minute. She needs one minute.
He takes another step forward. From the remaining entrances, two groups make their way in from each side. The man looks behind himself at one group and then over to the other one coming in from the side as he takes one step more toward her, almost close enough to grab her now.
“Just give it to me, Rolly,” he says, lowering his voice. “And I’ll get it out of here.”
“NO!” screams Rolly, grabbing the staff like a cudgel and swinging it out toward him. The man ducks, weaving out of the way. “I WON'T LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE!” shouts the geomancer. “I NEED THESE POINTS!” she yells, the desperation clear in her tone.
There’s nowhere left to run, nowhere left to go from here. She’s trapped like a rat at the end of its burrow. Rolly swings the staff back in the opposite arc, the man jumping back a step and then lunging forward toward her with a scream, a knife in his hands that she didn’t even see him draw out of his sleeve where it was hidden. The butt of the staff cracks against the side of his elbow, causing his arm to fly up for a second, and she ducks under it, pressing with the full weight of her body up and against the side of the larger man, who yells incoherently, flailing as he falls sideways off of the bridge and into the abyss. His screams carry on for a long, long time, until they eventually fade away into silence. Rolly runs forward as the bodies ahead of her spring into motion, all of them sprinting toward the intersection as both groups on either side follow their unspoken agreement that she needs to be stopped at all costs. It doesn’t matter who else gets the staff right now, as long as she doesn’t get to hold it anymore and end the game in a few moment’s time.
The world glows alight as a barrage of spells fly straight toward her in the same second that a man with a tower-shield bashes her way, holding the massive shield horizontally to fully block off the bridge. She slides down below it, everything erupting into vivid light as the fireball careens straight into his back before he can turn around. The man screams, the flames singing him and knocking him off into the abyss, and she falls to the ground, the fire burning her back. Before she can get up, her arms have already pressed the bottom of the staff out and upward, followed by a wet, disgusting sound of tearing meat. She looks up along the base of the staff, where blood is trickling down, at the impaled, dark-elven woman. The sharpened bottom of the staff presses through her gut and straight into her lower spine.
“STOP HER!” yells someone as the groups fight to have the chance of fighting her, as they’re stuck at the awkward choke point caused by some ten bodies all standing in one tight place, trying to get one person.
Rolly’s eyes open wide, and she rolls to the side, letting go of the staff for a second as the blade of a heavy axe crashes down where she just was. A screaming fracturing of stone metal fills the air as splinters of rubble fly in all directions. Her palm reaches out, grabbing the stone wall she had manipulated before, which is still hanging over the abyss, and in an instant, a long, worm-like body screams out and latches onto the barbarian, scuttling around him as he fights and screams to get away from the creature. Her hands reach up, grabbing the staff from the dark-elf as she falls over, pulling it back out of her body before she plummets into the void.
— Crackling comes from the sound of charging electricity.
The darkness above the arena that blocks it off from sight fades as everything is washed in a blindingly bright blueish-white shine. The air begins to crackle and spark, and the hairs on her body stand on end. Rolly only has a fraction of a second to look as the hair on the head of the next man charging her way rises up, as if pulled by the hands of a ghost toward the ceiling.
She arcs her arm back. Her body lurches as it’s pierced, the man’s short-spear driving through her gut and pressing out clean through the other side. In that same second, she finishes her movement and throws the staff up into the air like a javelin — not intentionally, but more as an instinctive reaction as her palms wrap themselves around the wooden handle of the spear that has been driven through her body. Blood and fluids leak out of the massive wound in her core as she screams.
The world roars, the blue light in the air intensifying, collecting together into a single bolt of lighting cast by a sorcerer in the back lines that thunders toward her like a roaring dragon. It’s too fast to watch for most who blink or shield their eyes in surprise from the brightness of it all, but for those who do, they see the bolt divert from its intended target and straight up toward the metal staff she had thrown. Like a lightning rod, it absorbs and pulls in the electricity in the same second as the spearman catches it. His body spasms and cooks, his face and eyes scalding and then bursting open like a bloated, super-heated carcass that blasts apart from the swelling of the gases inside of it. His teeth and extremities blacken, and the wooden handle of the spear he’s holding through her chars.
Her last spell shoots the bricks of the wall behind her forward, colliding with the head of the spear and violently pressing the metal spearhead straight back out through her front. Strands of red meat and organ-tissue swell out of her ruptured gut as she, in animal desperation and adrenaline, grabs the staff in his hands. He falls over, Rolly stumbling with the weight of his body as he collapses — dead. His hands, however, have been locked firm by the electrocution and hold onto the staff with the strength of a still-living person.
A scream comes her way. She grabs the burnt, bloodied short-spear with her free hand and chucks it as hard as she can, the blade of the blackened weapon lodging itself straight into the eye-socket of the attacker. Their scream changes very quickly to a different tone as they flail and fumble, stumbling into the person next to them and clutching at the rod lodged in their face in agony. “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” screams a man, charging through the crowd and shoving several people straight into the abyss, including the screaming, blinded man. Rolly watches, stumbling and failing to rise to her feet in those few moments, as an orcish man barrels her way, a hatchet in his hands that hurtles through the air. Rolly stumbles back, a wet, thick crack running through her core as it strikes her just below her neck. Her clavicle shatters, the blade of the thrown hatchet cutting cleanly through it as it lodges into her chest. Her arm goes limp, her body failing her as she stumbles back. He pulls a second hatchet from his belt, lifting his arm as he runs her way, swinging out to finish her off with a cleave straight through her neck.
Blood splurts out from her cut throat as she drops to the side, clutching the staff against her core with her good hand. The blade of the hatchet strikes but misses in depth, cutting through her jugular but not her full neck. Rolly falls off of the bridge, a crimson string of blood blasting out of her up toward it as if it were a ruby rope binding her to the top of it. She falls into the pit, wind howling and air screaming as it rushes past her soaked, bloodied robe and her vision grows dark.
The last thing she hears as the light fades from her eyes is the roaring applause that carries through the air.
Rolly hums peacefully to herself, strutting with the pride of the king of roosters through the quarters past many faces that are clearly bitter.
“Fuck you, Rollypollie!” shouts a man as she walks past a group of people sitting together in a circle, looking very tired. “How about you show some sportsmanship and let the rest of us get some points too next time, you greedy bitch?”
Rolly walks backwards, stopping only for a moment to thrust her pelvis toward him with great emphasis, while she slaps the front of her thighs at the same time. “How about you get good and suck iiit~!” she replies melodically, before pumping her arms at her sides as she walks backward toward the dungeon item shop. The man lifts a finger her way. “Loser!” she calls, holding an ‘L’ with her fingers over her forehead.
Finally. She finally has enough points.
Today was a mess; it was brutal; she got hacked to bits, and she can still feel the sensations of metal breaking through the pure sanctity of her body, but she did it. She finally did it.
“Con…gratulations,” says a half-breathless skeleton behind the counter of the shop, needing to wheeze in the middle of the word. It looks at her from behind the bars that separate it from the quarters. “…Would you like… to buy your freedom?” it asks. A bony hand lifts up, pressing lightly against the iron bars as it leans in toward her. “…For a most terrible price…” it whispers, its voice coming from seemingly all around her like a dead autumn wind during a grim night.
Rolly smiles, slapping her hands against the counter. “Can I get uuuh…” her eyes wander to the charts and lists of items. “- A big blanket, wool. Ten long socks,” she says, spinning a finger. “The really thick ones. Um, three bottles of red wine. A privacy cover for my bed. A bar of lavender soap, some new perfume — patchouli — and a reading pass for the library’s back-section.”
The skeleton presses its skull against the bars, its hauntingly hollow eyes gazing into her core.
“The pact is sealed…” it whispers ominously.
“Thanks, bud,” says Rolly nonchalantly, pointing a finger back at it as she walks off. She turns her head, looking at the orc who cut her throat, standing there and looking her way. “What?”
He gestures back to the shop. “You had enough to buy your way out of the dungeon?” asks the orc.
Rolly shrugs. “Sure. But why would you want to get out?” she asks, tapping the side of her head. A group of skeletons runs past her, carrying a load of her ordered items to her bunk. “I’m living it up here better than I ever did out there,” she explains, shrugging and grabbing a bottle of wine from a skeleton’s arms, uncorking it, and starting to chug it down as she goes back to her bunk to get drunk enough for tomorrow’s game.
This place is like paradise; who in their right mind would want to live out there in the real world?