Warlock of Ashmedai: The City of God [Progression fantasy/LitRPG]

Some three hundred yards out, purple tentacles covered in small hairs and dripping with black ichor coiled around the tall keep like thick ropes tied around a mast. The keep itself stuck out of the earth with ill intent, soiling the waters of the Unreal Sea around it with all manner of filth. It resembled a giant square nail sticking out of inflamed, milky white corpse-flesh.

At the very top of the ominous structure made of gray stone and ruinous pride sat a tumorous, writhing mass of translucent flesh. An octopus. It is a giant octopus. The horror's singular and enormous lidless eye twitched around from collapsed hovel to collapsed hovel, searching for a meal to sate its endless hunger.

In Oak's experience, no creature of the Dream ever felt sated. He crouched down behind the pile of mouldy planks he and Ur-Namma had hidden behind and sighed. They were in for a rough fight.

"Our Scouts weren't wrong. The fucker is huge," Oak whispered.

Ur-Namma grinned and a vicious-looking glaive materialized in his hand. Its curved, black blade drank in the light like a sandpit drinks down rain, leaving only a void where the metal should have been. "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

"Right."

As bad as the situation was in the real world above the surface of the Unreal Sea, it was good to keep in mind things could always be worse. The ghastly Dream of Al-Badra showcased just how bad things were liable to get if they didn't successfully slay the Demon sitting pretty inside the keep.

Collapsed buildings eaten through with rot and mold flowed into each other, into the sky and through the sickened earth, crawling with vermin and living pus. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. A pile of moldy planks and rusty nails became a stretched tapestry of rotting corpses, which vanished beneath the ground and returned as the decaying remains of a smithy crawling with bugs dripping with feces and putrid blood.

Oak looked at the corpse tapestry and shivered in a mix of delight and dread. It was a jumbled mess of people and livestock, hooves and horns, limbs, and faces all smashed into each other and stretched until you could no longer tell where one rotting cadaver ended and another began.

Petals of rotting blood glided past them, bobbing up and down on the waves of antipathy and tiredness washing over Al-Badra. "There is my ride. Make your way closer and wait for my signal." Ur-Namma's dreamform flowed inside the shadow of a passing petal and the current washed the elf away.

"Right. Nice and easy. Just make your way closer." Oak sighed. Why do we always end up in these fucked up situations?

Nothing for it. Oak wasn't yet as skilled as Ur-Namma in the art of shaping himself, so he cheated. With a snap of mental fingers, he brought forth the ghost of a cat he had killed years ago, and poured himself inside the furred memory construct. Properly equipped for all sorts of sneakiness, he set off towards the keep, moving as low to the ground as he could.

Swiftly, like only a tiny fur ball could, Oak raced from hiding spot to hiding spot, always keeping something solid between himself and the tentacled horror.

There was no reason to give the odious octopus a heads up about the fact he and Ur-Namma would soon rip it to shreds and scatter its remains in the four winds. If things went according to plan, that is. A sophisticated observer might have inquired why they bothered to call 'sneak up and get stabbing' a plan, but Oak had other more pressing concerns at the moment.

The octopus's enormous lidless eye spun in his direction with deceptive speed. He pressed his cat body tightly against a nearby pile of debris, fur standing on end. Hells, the bastard is fast. And ugly. Oak tried to think more unassuming thoughts, lest the target of his ire notice his presence.

Finding things to complain about was no tough task. In the Dream, Al-Badra rested at the bottom of a funnel, pouring every scrap of memory and frayed emotion in the surrounding area down the sinkhole to be corrupted and devoured.

It felt like standing at the bottom of a deep lake, being crushed by an untold mass of water. To make matters worse, Oak could not even see the black sky above, for a thick blanket of yellow miasma covered everything in a cloud of festering corruption.

Not finding anything of interest, the octopus's gaze moved away. Oak breathed a sigh of relief and got moving again. He needed to hurry, or Ur-Namma might have to start the battle on his lonesome. Dashing from one collapsed building to another, he covered a hundred yards in record time. It was spooky. Nothing else moved in the Dream. The octopus at the top of the keep had surely devoured every ghost and poltergeist for miles around.

Before they had set out from the church of the Erelim, Oak had triple checked his wards and his trauma-weapon, but confidence still eluded him. I really need to build a second weapon after this. Something to complement Kaarina's Horror. Examining the thought-plague had taken up most of his free evenings on the road. The research was useful, but he really should have built something practical first.

Oak pushed the recriminations out of his mind. It was too late to think about what ifs. As he examined the route ahead, he noticed a promising amalgamation of moldy planks and tiny bones arching to the sky before sinking through the blighted earth. At the top of the arc, a slimy cord of something that looked like intestines connected to the wall of the keep itself.

A massive tentacle untangled itself from the keep and snapped up into the cloud of miasma hanging high above the Demon's lair. Oak froze in place, eyes fixated on the octopus. There was something in its grip. Please, let it not be the elf. The horror dragged a struggling, six-legged poltergeist out of the cloud. It looked like the cursed offspring of an ant and a spider-monkey.

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Thank the Corpse-God.

With languid, almost drowsy movements, the octopus brought the poltergeist in front of its lidless eye and examined the little growling monster. A horizontal tear opened on the horror's face, wider and wider, until it became a maw filled with nasty looking fangs. The octopus threw its prey inside its maw, and crunched down, silencing the poltergeist's pleating.

Like a flash of black, furry lightning, Oak sprinted to the arc of wood and bone. The distraction would not hold the octopus's attention for long. Paws moving a mile a minute, he scrambled up to the top, all senses on high alert. He had exactly one shot at this. If he failed, ending up like the poltergeist was a frighteningly real possibility.

The cord of rotting intestines hanging from the wall of the keep felt slimy, but Oak's claws found purchase easily enough. Not the best rope I have ever climbed, but beggars can't be choosers. Up he went, running on the cord like a demented squirrel. By the Chariot, I want to be a chooser.

Oak glanced up and winced. Today, choices were in short supply. One of the horror's many tentacles circled the entire keep maybe ten feet above him. Nothing for it. He vaulted over the disgusting appendage and continued running up the side of the keep like a mountain goat.

On the third jump, he almost fell, but luck was with him and Oak arrested his slide down the gray stone wall with two feet to spare, before he would have hit a tentacle. Heart hammering inside his chest, Oak sidled upwards, one paw at a time.

Whew. That was too close for comfort.

Climbing over the crenulations of the keep ratcheted up the tension. Oak crouched between two tentacles, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. The octopus hadn't noticed him. Its massive, contracting and expanding tumorous bulk filled up his vision. The stench was otherworldly. Like spoiled milk and a bucketful of bird droppings.

Now that Oak was within touching distance with the horror, the differences between it and the leviathans he had run into in Ma'aseh Merkavah became all the more apparent. Despite the horror's impressive size, Oak did not feel like his head was about to combust from the mere pressure of existing next to the creature.

It's some type of juvenile leviathan, like a frog's tadpole. Has to be.

Whatever this thing was or had been before, the Demon's corruption had sunk deep. Once, it might have been a proud hunter, prowling the waters of the Unreal Sea. Now, the Rot had reduced it to sitting at the bottom of a funnel and eating carrion.

The Demon had lucked out.

Both demons and angels were creatures of the immaterium. Their souls contained the totality of their existence. Unlike the denizens of Creation, they had no brain, no mind in the material world which could cast a shadow upon the Waking Dream. A theurgist could work no tricks on a demon, but neither could a demon prey upon its victims through the Dream.

If the horror was not sitting right on top of the Demon's lair, Oak and his companions could have marched on the keep without fear of theurgic retaliation.

A petal of rotting blood drifted closer, gliding over the octopus. Oak readied himself. Ur-Namma dove from the petal with a feral grin on his regal face, the tip of his glaive pointed at the horror. Ten elf Wraiths burst from his dreamform like pollen from a flower, and fell in silence with him, swords, axes and spears aimed with carnage in mind.

Oak let the Wraith of the Librarian out to play and struck with Kaarina's Horror. The black stinger curving over his shoulder cut a deep wound into the octopus's flank, sending thought-stuff and mangled memories flying every which way, while the Librarian in full-plate pierced the horror with its spear.

Then Ur-Namma and his wraiths struck home, and the octopus lashed out with maddening speed. One moment, Oak stood at the top of the keep, his trauma-weapon stabbing at the Dreambeast's translucent flesh. The next, he tumbled through the air, wards trembling with aftershocks, not sure which way was up and which was down.

Impact.

Vision swimming, Oak struggled upright from the muck, fighting through the echoes of pain dancing across his wards. Crunching bone. The loss of a child. Wrists bleeding, leaving a trail of red on the forest floor. He shook himself and turned his gaze up. The arc of wood and bone he had used to climb to the keep lay in tatters.

The horror had punted him straight through it.

It was a small miracle Oak's wards had held in the face of the assault. Wasting no time, he brought forth the ghost of the sparrow, clad himself in the trappings of the winged memory construct, and flew back into the fight.

A gigantic tentacle batted at Oak, trying to smash him to the ground, but he rolled to the right and banked inside a cloud of miasma, before rising again, Beak pointed towards the battle.

Ur-Namma stood on top of the massive, convulsing octopus, his glaive embedded in the horror's giant lidless eye. His small army of Wraiths kept the tentacles busy to the best of their ability, slicing and dicing every inch of purple flesh they could reach. Oak could only see seven. The creature had likely scattered the rest in its rage.

Oak's own Wraith was in the process of turning the horror's flank into a frozen ruin full of holes. The bugger was an overachiever of the highest order.

After reaching a sufficient height over the octopus, Oak shed the form of the sparrow and plunged towards the beast below. He landed on top of a cancerous growth on the back of the creature, flailed and almost slid off, but found his footing at the last moment.

With a scream of wrath, Oak burrowed inside the octopus. The roots and branches of his shadow pushed inside wounds left behind by Kaarina's Horror and took hold of the slippery flesh. Then, shadow became a Gallows Tree in truth and they were his branches. His bark. His twisting roots, digging deep and finding purchase.

Like a hog feasting on a piece of carrion, Oak ripped and tore the translucent flesh apart.

For the octopus, it was all over but the wailing. The beast let out a whimpering croak, after which its massive maw slammed shut like a mousetrap, and its struggles seized. Oak climbed out of the crater he had dug in the horror's back and collapsed on top of the Dreambeast, branches drooping with exhaustion.

In the end, the juice was worth the squeeze.

"A delightful spot of fun. Sadly, all good things must come to an end." Ur-Namma cackled and crouched down on one knee on top of the quickly dissolving octopus. The ancient elf dismissed his Wraiths and locked eyes with Oak, glaive dangling lazily from his grip. "The Demon awaits."

Careful, elf. I might just faint from joy.

"Right." Oak sighed. "Let's get on with this bullshit."