Mage Tank

The first thing that grabbed my attention was the enormous blue and violet octopus wrapped around a dark pillar at the chamber’s center.

At least, octopus was how my brain parsed the creature. After a second of processing, I realized that it was something else entirely. It had a thick cephalopod head with a pair of dark eyes that locked onto us. The body below was a series of large tentacles, several of which grasped onto the black stone structure that I assumed was the obelisk. But, unlike an octopus, the creature was covered in long, downy feathers that swayed and drifted in the air. It gave the c’thon the appearance that it was underwater, or that gravity was something it had decided to ignore. Along the bottom of its tentacles, where I would expect suckers to be, the limbs were covered in hundreds of insectoid legs like the underside of a centipede. The central body of the creature was twelve feet tall, and I had no idea how long the limbs would be once they unfurled from the obelisk.

All around the room were piles of dark bones; the remains of creatures that Hognay had fed to the c’thon. He may have eaten some himself as well. If he’d been here for three months, what else would he be surviving on? In the corner was a set of bones far larger than any of the others. The arm bones of the Atrocidile. Whether Hognay had taken it, or the c’thon had torn it from the monster itself, it didn’t matter. Either situation was terrifying, and I didn’t know which one would be worse.

The most impressive thing about the room was not the terrible creature and the remains of its meals that dominated the space, but what hovered where a ceiling should have been.

Floating above the obelisk was an incredible mass of thousands upon thousands of poison essences. They extended out to fill up the entire space above the wide, circular room, and I got the impression that the mass was even larger than what I could see. The crystals spun lazily around in a whirlpool pattern, the smoking green crystals at its center being crushed into a fine powder that ignited and filtered down into a soda-can-wide beam of brilliant emerald energy. The beam struck the top of the obelisk, which shone bright enough to hurt my eyes when I stared directly at it and left me blinking to clear away the afterimage.

At the base of the obelisk, beneath the c’thon, Hognay sat with his back against one of the creature’s tentacles. It coiled around his body and the tapered tip encircled his neck. I assumed it was doing something about the hole I’d introduced to the man’s throat–he hadn’t even cleaned the dried, flaking blood off of his chest. His eyes were closed when we entered, but snapped open as soon as we crossed the threshold.

Hognay’s expression darkened and he climbed to his feet while the rest of us took in the room, the c’thon’s tentacle releasing him. When the limb moved from his neck I saw that the wound had been completely healed. He wasn’t a particularly short guy, but he was definitely leaning toward the below average side of things. His frame was thick and well muscled, but he moved easily, more like a well-honed athlete than a bodybuilder.

Despite having a body like a greek sculpture, the man was revolting. His thin hair hung limply from his head in oily strands. His face was sunken, with dark bags beneath his eyes and a mouth full of yellow, chipped teeth. He was dirty and shirtless, and I wondered if he’d lost half his clothes while tangling with the beasties down here like I had. His pants were also filthy, but were covered in sturdy-looking leather armor. Aside from that he wore only a pair of lightweight boots, an amulet that glinted brightly when it caught the light, and a mismatched pair of fingerless gloves.

He opened his mouth to speak, making the classic bad-guy mistake of assuming he was about to get a chance to monologue. I didn’t give him that chance.

Our plan was shock and awe, so I opened up with an ability I hadn’t been able to try out yet. I cast Shortcut.

A ten foot crack tore reality open and sucked me inside. The world went black and silent for a fraction of a second, then I was thirty feet closer, standing right in front of Hognay. I shoved a palm into his chest and cast Oblivion Orb.

To Hognay’s credit he recovered quickly after finding me close enough for a warm hug. He was already taking a step back to put space between us when I struck. My hand hit his chest, but he was able to move away the slightest bit before my spell activated. White light shot down my arm and I heard the familiar pop of the spell as it took a bite out of the universe and air rushed in to fill the void left behind. Hognay took a partial hit and he grunted, clapping a gloved hand over the fresh, golf-ball-sized hole in his sternum. He was learning what it felt like to get a scoop taken out of him, and this was his second lesson of the day.

I’d hoped that the hit would be enough to disable Hognay. I didn’t know how far behind the sternum the heart was exactly, and even with a clean hit I doubted the spell would have dug in deeply enough to clip it. But I’ve broken my sternum before. Probably twice, if you count body slamming the tree, but I wasn’t around for the painful result of that injury.

The first time it happened I could barely move for a week. The pectoral muscles attach to the sternum. An injury there can make any movement of the upper body agonizing. Laying down, sitting up, any lateral movement of the arm puts pressure on that bone and inflames any tear or injury to the muscle attached to it. What I’m saying is that a broken sternum should take someone out of a fight, unless your adrenaline is pumping hard enough to let you ignore that sort of wound until you calm down. I didn’t break Hognay’s sternum. I put a hole in it.

He didn’t give a shit.

His eyes glanced down at something I couldn’t see–maybe his health bar–and he took a fighting stance. Blood ran steadily out from the wound on his chest and he tensed his body. Talons tore out from the tips of his fingers and the skin on his hands and arms up to his elbow grew dark and hard, glinting like they were covered in lacquer. He rushed forward and swiped out at me.

I was able to put up the kite shield, but his claws tore through it like it was made of tinfoil. I intercepted two more swipes and the bottom half of the shield was nearly torn off. He knocked the shield aside, then stepped in and went for my throat.

His movements were quick, precise, and furious. I barely got my right arm up in time to keep my neck from being renovated, and the claws cut deep into the muscle of my forearm. A chunk came out of my health bar and a new symbol started blinking above it. My body grew heavier and I glanced at the notification, barely having time to skim the text before turning my attention back to Hognay.

Curse: Weakness 10%

Health: 205/221

A glancing blow across my arm had done half as much damage as the head-on Atrocidile bite, while carrying a debuff on top. A kernel of fear hit me in my gut, then I shut it down and got back to work. The only way out was through.

I readied myself to trade hits with Hognay. He was moving too fast and I was too inexperienced to find an opening, so I planned on letting him land a hit and then planting another Oblivion Orb wherever I could. Having another hole in his body may not kill him, but the more I could disable him the better the fight would go. I stepped into Hognay’s attack, preparing to get slashed along the ribs, when a massive purple limb shot out towards me.

Oh yeah, there was a school-bus-sized octopus monster in here with us.

I had already committed to the attack, and I prepared to get plowed by a two-foot-thick tentacle like I was starring in my own hentai, when a pair of blades came down on the approaching feeler. Varrin went full sushi-chef on the octo, spinning and launching a series of whirling attacks on its limb while his swords glowed with a silvery light. My hand slapped down on Hognay’s armpit as his claws dug into my ribs. I cast another Oblivion Orb.

His claws cut through my skin deep enough to scrape across my bones and I felt a couple ribs crack from the sheer force of his hit. I took out a gnarly chunk of his lateralis muscle and probably severed a couple of his own ribs in return. I tried to trade again, but his claws swiped up across my gut and he knocked me back before I could land my spell. My health bar was plummeting and I’d earned a new debuff from his other hand. I checked my bars, realizing my body was growing even heavier and my vision was starting to blur.

Curse: Weakness 20%

Curse: Blindness 10%

Wounded: Bleeding 30/hour

Poisoned: Toxicity 3/hour

Health: 117/221

Stamina: 130/132

Mana: 20/40

My health and mana were halved, and my list of status effects was growing at a disturbing pace. Hognay’s face was set into a firm scowl, but I could see him grit his teeth against the pain. He moved to a more defensive posture, keeping his arms close to his body with claws raised. He had two fresh holes, each one taking a disabling chunk of muscle out of his body, but I was worse off.

I was struggling to keep my core engaged, the muscle in my abdomen carved up. I could barely move my right hand from the injury in my forearm, and moving the right side of my body at all was excruciating. Even breathing hurt as my cracked ribs screamed with every inhale. I felt hot, wet blood running down my abdomen and seeping into my pants.

That was fine, I was just the distraction.

Xim slipped between thrashing tentacles as the c’thon focused on Varrin’s onslaught, carrying and protecting Grotto under her shield arm. The c’thon had fully disentangled itself from the pillar and was floating through the air, hurling limbs covered in soft, shimmying feathers.

Varrin spun and slashed, glowing blades whipping around him and digging into the c’thon’s legs. The wounds went deep, but compared to the overall girth of the feelers they weren’t deep enough. Still, the c’thon bellowed in reply, unwrapping itself from the obelisk to start taking Varrin seriously, freeing up four more limbs. I could hear the insectoid claws on the underside of the tentacles scrape and clatter along Varrin’s armor, and I deeply hoped I wouldn’t get to experience what those would do to bare skin.

Xim ducked down low and let Grotto zip away toward the base of the obelisk. Now that the c’thon had moved, I could make out a sphere-shaped recess about three feet up from the ground. Chunks of the obelisk had been broken and pried away to reveal the space where I expected Grotto spent most of his life.

While I took that in, Hognay took advantage of my distraction. He leapt forward, driving a claw at me like a punch, rather than a wide sweep like he’d done so far. The hand glowed with an eerie yellow light, and I knew that if he landed a clean hit with that attack it would pierce straight through my body and skewer all the soft, squishy, and biologically-necessary vital organs in its way. I focused as much as I could in that split second, and hoped that spells worked the way I wanted them to.

I cast Shortcut and, just as Hognay’s claws were hurtling toward my chest, a crack opened in reality and sucked me in, then spat me out right behind him. Hognay overcommitted to the attack and was off-balance when his hand found only air rather than the beating heart of his enemy. I reached out and grabbed the base of his skull, then cast Oblivion Orb.

Hognay’s entire body stiffened the instant I heard the pop of the spell. Blood and other fluids spilled out of the new hole in the back of his head and he fell over like he actually had been carved from stone. When he hit the ground his body twitched and shook in some sort of trauma-induced seizure. I watched the display with a macabre fascination before coming back to my senses.

I didn’t think Hognay could survive having a golfball-sized chunk of his skull, brain, and cervical spine suddenly vacate his body, but he had so far shrugged off injuries that should have crippled him. I’d removed half of his larynx earlier and he’d been able to run away like it was a polite karate chop to the throat. No, I wasn’t about to let this half-naked psycho get back up so he could go scoop more organs out of people. I had enough mana for one final Oblivion Orb.

Always go for the double-tap.

As I stooped over with hand outstretched, preparing to coup-de-grace Hognay with all the mercy of a reptile, I found out what those insectoid c’thon claws felt like on bare skin. A feathery blue and violet tentacle wrapped itself around my waist and hoisted me into the air.