Monsterworld, p.123
Monsterworld, page 123
part #1 of Monster Slayer Series
I felt relief in that moment as I returned the classic nerd sign with vigor. Then I pointed down the tunnel, not in the direction we’d been traveling when all this weirdness had ensued, but back the other way in reverse. I had a theory I wanted to test out. Misha had been right to challenge our knowledge of how we “knew” the doors to the sex room would no longer be there if we went back the way we’d come. Not that we weren’t right about that. I knew without a doubt that the room would no longer be there. But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a different room awaiting us.
And, if my theory held true, that room was the key to reuniting with my friends.
Beat’s shadow pointed, too, but in the opposite direction, suggesting we continue to travel in the way we’d been going. I shook my head vehemently and pointed harder in the reverse direction. Beat stopped pointing and looked back toward the group of other shadows, seeming to confer with them. When she turned back toward my shadow, she pointed in the same direction as me.
Yes! I thought. We were in agreement.
I watched as Beat’s shadow picked up another shadow off the ground—Silk’s unconscious form—and then all shadows started back the way we’d come. I followed a few feet behind, so they could continue to see exactly where I was.
We walked for a long time. In a tunnel with no clock, time had a way of running away from you. For a while I tried to count the seconds, to get a gauge for how far we’d traveled and whether we’d walked further back than we’d traveled in, but I eventually gave up. There was nothing to do but keep walking. Twice the other shadows stopped and seemed to discuss the situation. Each time I just kept pointing in the same direction. We needed to stay the course, however long it took. Thankfully, they agreed with me, and each time we continued.
Minutes turned to hours turned to doubt. Had I been wrong? Should we have gone the other direction? Did it even matter? Or was direction meaningless in this place?
My own self-doubt reached a crescendo, the naysaying voices in my head growing from a whisper to a bark to a full-on scream. I was about to stop and do some more sign language with Beat, when we reached a new door. Relief flooded my system and I took a deep breath, silently thanking Minertha for helping me out when I was alone and lost.
You’re welcome, she said in my head, reminding me that the Three were continuing to scry our progress through Annakor. Obviously, the Morgoss were also watching us. Which made the whole thing feel weird, like we were stuck in the middle of the most epic game of tug-of-war ever, the forces of good and evil on opposite sides, with us mired deep in the muddiest bog.
The door opened without me needing to turn the handle. I walked through into darkness.
“Ryder?” a voice said.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Todo,” I said.
“A Wizard of Oz reference,” Beat said, sounding impressed. “Unexpected.”
“I still can’t see you,” I said.
“That’s because it’s dark as shit in here.”
“We thought you’d been taken,” Vrill said. I could hear the strain in her voice. The whole ordeal must’ve been particularly hard on her given she knew what it was like to be abducted by the Morgoss.
“I thought the same about all of you,” I said, hoping she could hear the strain in my own voice. I had feared for Vrill more than any of them given her history with the demon overlords.
“Okay, okay,” Lace said. “Let’s skip the part where we all talk about our feelings, yeah? Anyone got a light?”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d brought a pack that included two small demon’s blood torches. I pulled them out now, placing them on the ground at my feet. Then I fumbled around for my flint, only needing to strike it once, several sparks flaring, hitting the highly flammable demon’s blood, which instantly ignited.
Faces appeared, glowing red and orange.
I handed one torch to Beat while I held the other. “Nice to see you all,” I said, which was a major understatement. In truth, seeing the lovely faces of these women, all of whom had been my friends, occasional lovers, and confidantes in this world, made me swell with joy inside. These were my people.
I kept all those thoughts to myself because of what Lace had said about skipping the part where we talked about feelings. She was right. If we survived, there would be time for all that later.
I stood up.
Something caught my attention. It wasn’t a single sound or a smell that made me uneasy. More like a feeling, a tingle in the back of my neck, rolling down my spine. You know the feeling, right? The one where you know you’re being watched but can’t figure out by whom or where?
Instinctively, I drew my torch over my shoulder and then threw it as far as I could, hoping it would clatter off a wall and illuminate the length of the room. Instead, it vanished into the darkness, as if snuffed out by the shadows themselves.
“Great, Ryder,” Beat said. “Now we only have one torch.”
I ignored her. Something wasn’t right. I could feel the throb of something in the darkness—maybe multiple somethings. I stared past the circle of light cast by Beat’s torch, narrowing my eyes as I tried to penetrate the inky darkness.
That’s when I saw it: the outline. It spanned at least ten feet wide and twice that tall. It might’ve been a statue, chiseled in the stone. I’d thrown my torch right at it, and yet the torch had vanished, like I’d cast it into a black hole.
And I knew.
I knew.
I was looking at one of the Morgoss.
It opened its red eyes.
~~~
A breath of fire erupted from the Morgoss’s mouth, seeming to shred the room in half with its heat. I yelled “Move!” but no one needed to be told—we scattered like fallen leaves under the breath of an icy gust of autumn wind.
The gout of fire illuminated the room while also igniting dozens of demon’s blood torches set into wall mounts. I had dived clear of the danger zone, and now my momentum carried me out of a forward roll and back to my feet. I turned toward my adversary, whose crimson eyes gleamed with bloodlust.
But that wasn’t all that gleamed.
Seeping through the demon’s massive stone chest was the pulsing green glow of a goddess heart. At long last, we’d found Persepheus’s stolen heart.
“Sam!” Vrill shouted and I locked eyes with her across the room. She pointed to one of the corners, where a small table rested idle. Sitting on the table was a stand. Inside the stand was a clear glass orb, its smooth surface reflecting the firelight. It was exactly as the Three had described it. The Revealer. Our purpose for returning to Annakor.
I knew Vrill had seen Persepheus’s pulsating heart. I also knew that she knew that I had seen it. I was torn. We had an opportunity here. Retrieve Persepheus’s heart and we’d have all three goddesses at full power, then we wouldn’t even need the Revealer. Our victory would be all but assured. The only problem: Getting that heart from the Morgoss’s stone chest could very well result in the deaths of all of us.
The smarter move was to go for the Revealer. Escape with it and live to fight another day.
But oh how badly I wanted to get that heart.
I made a split-second decision. “Vrill, Eve, Chastity, Misha!” I shouted. “Retrieve the orb! Lace—protect Silk. Beat—with me! With me!”
Everyone moved as soon as the orders left my lips. They were well-trained, even Misha and Chastity, who’d been living in a tree for gods knew how long. Not a moment too soon either, as the Morgoss was also on the move, swinging a powerful fist in Vrill’s general direction, scraping along the wall and raining down chunks of stone. Vrill and the other women moved like the wind, sprinting away from the fist, which swiped at them and came up empty, cracking the stone ceiling above. The entire room seemed to groan as dust and pebbles misted down.
I glanced back at Lace, who was also following my orders, carrying Silk into a small alcove set into the wall and then standing in front of her with claws extended, ready to defend the other cat-woman to the death if necessary. I was worried about Silk but also frustrated, selfishly, that she wasn’t conscious to unleash the power of Valencia’s Locket on this demon bastard.
I shook that thought away as Beat reached my side. “What sort of impossible kamikaze mission do you have planned for us today, Cap’n,” she said in her best (and worst) British accent.
“The kind where we pretend to go for Persepheus’s heart,” I said, watching the Morgoss as he drew his fist back, red eyes scanning the room to locate the positions of his enemies. “You ready?”
“I was born ready.”
“Good. Follow me.”
I didn’t need to look back to know that Beat would have my back. Instead, I took off at a sprint, hammer pumping at my side. “Hey asshole!” I shouted, waving my hands over my head.
Although I was pretty certain the Morgoss’s primary language was something guttural and nonsensical, they also seemed to understand English. My suspicions were confirmed as the demon’s large stone head slowly turned in my direction. Or I should say our direction, as Beat had already caught up to me. “Uh, Ryder?” she said.
“Go right, I’ll go left. Stab him with the pointy end of your spear.”
I had expected another punch. I was wrong. The demon reared his head back and then roared, the sound so loud I felt my eardrums vibrate. The sound was followed by another fiery stream, which I narrowly avoided as I dove left, hoping Beat had moved right just as quickly. Even still, I felt the heat of the inferno all the way to my testicles.
I came out of the dive at a dead sprint while the demon continued to breathe fire in the area we no longer were. I charged straight at its legs and could see Beat doing the same thing, gripping her spear tightly. She stopped suddenly, cocked her arm back, and threw the weapon. It hit the overlord right in the gut, sticking fast.
“Ur?” the demon said, cutting off the fire and looking down at the spear shaft protruding from its stomach. It reached down and plucked the spear from its rough skin. A trickle of oil-black blood leaked from the wound. “Gaz var me set,” the demon said in its guttural nails-on-a-chalkboard language. Then it proceeded to eat Beat’s spear, chomping the metal in half and crunching down hard.
“Well that worked, Ryder,” Beat said. “You owe me a spear.”
“Put it on my tab,” I said, deciding to take my own crack at the big fella. Maybe an enchanted hammer would have more of an effect. I finished my charge, winding up for a knockout swing and hacking away at its leg. The impact was like hitting a steel pole, reverberating back through the hammer’s shaft and into my arms, leaving my body quivering and my teeth chattering. The explosion of light, however, was more effective than the blow itself, creating cracks in the demon’s hard skin. More of the brackish blood oozed out.
Still, it was nothing more than a flesh wound at best, and now we’d officially pissed the demon off.
It kicked me. Poll: When faced with a giant demon overlord, would you rather be kicked or stepped on? I’ve never been stepped on, so I can only speak to the kicked option. It hurt. A lot. My ribs screamed as I flew through the air, heart in my throat, lungs in my stomach. And yet that was the fun part. The not fun part was when I hit the wall so hard I cracked the stone. My armor split in two and clanked to the ground. I didn’t fall because I’d dented the wall so far in that I was stuck to it.
“Ouch,” I said, unsure how I’d managed to hang onto my hammer. The demon took a big earth-quaking step forward, and I knew it was going for a knockout punch that would send me through the very wall I was currently pinned to. That also didn’t sound like very much fun, so I swung my hammer downward, careful not to hit my own seared balls as I crushed the wall that served as a makeshift seat for me.
The Morgoss swung a big ol’ fist at my face.
The stone holding me up crumbled under the force of my hammer blow, gravity reclaimed me, and I slid down just as the Morgoss destroyed what was left of the wall. I landed on my feet with a grunt, looking up to find a hailstorm of basketball-sized chunks of stone tumbling down. As it turned out, I was saved by the Morgoss’s arm, which, embedded in the wall, served as a shelter of sorts, the boulders bouncing off him and rebounding just clear of where I stood. I wasn’t about to waste the temporary advantage, so I did what any self-respecting God would do when faced with a giant demon overlord whose hand had gotten stuck in a stone wall.
I smashed its toes.
I went for the smallest one first, hoping to inflict the maximum damage possible. It worked, the toe breaking off as the light burst around it. The demon roared, fire shooting out and pummeling the crumbling wall.
I raised my hammer over my head once more, shouting to Beat just before I brought it down: “Get everyone out. Now!”
My next blow removed the second toe. The demon lifted its leg defensively, so I sprang over to the other foot and took out its baby toe over there. Even as the monster tried to extricate its fist from the wall, it started to do a weird dance, like it had to pee, bobbing from one foot to the other while I continued to take shots at its toes.
The more hits I got in, the more it tried unsuccessfully to step on me. I was like the ant that couldn’t be killed, always just out of reach. I knew it was kind of a pussy move, but no one said street fights were fair. Plus, I wasn’t trying to win this fight, just distract this guy until my friends could escape with the Revealer.
“Get out of there, Ryder!” I heard Beat shout. I dodged another stomp and located her position. Ahead of her I saw Vrill, with the orb in hand, exit the room just behind Eve, Misha and Chastity. Beat had rounded up Lace and was carrying Silk. Everything was going according to plan.
Which is, of course, when everything went to hell in a handbasket.
With a powerful jerk, the Morgoss wrenched his fist out of the wall. A Buick-sized chunk of stone narrowly missed me while a softball-sized chunk did hit me, clocking me in the jaw with enough force to make my facial bones click strangely to the side and make me contemplate what it would be like to drink liquefied leafrat through a straw.
While I reached up to touch my damaged face, the Morgoss finally realized the rest of its prey were escaping, turning its attention toward the exit. It roared and fire spewed from its maw. I held my breath as the flames washed over the exit ahead of Beat and the two cat-women. Thankfully, Vrill had already disappeared through the door, but the wall of fire blocked the others’ escape route.
I shoved my jaw back into place with a wicked snap that sent a wave of agony shooting through me. “Arr,” I growled, gritting my teeth. Screw pain—my friends were in trouble. Instead of trying to get to them and creating a single target for the demon to smash to bits, I started to climb the demon’s leg. I know, I know, I had a tendency to go for the high ground in these situations, but the strategy hadn’t failed me yet. It didn’t hurt that the jerk’s stony skin had plenty of ridges and protrusions that made for perfect hand- and footholds.
The demon cut off his latest stream of fire and retargeted Beat and the others, flames licking at his lips. “Down here, motherfucker,” I said, chop-chop-chopping at the demon’s leg with my hammer, taking small swings at the same spot. Each burst of light cracked more of his skin, which quickly became slick with his black blood.
The demon’s head turned once more, until I was caught in the sights of his red eyes. Uh oh, I thought, frantically scaling around his leg just as he sent another jet of flames searing down. The burning fingers of flame missed my body but caught my trailing hand, which was the one gripping my hammer. My fingers opened and I recoiled, dropping my primary weapon. It clattered to the ground below, leaving me emptyhanded and clinging to the leg of a massive demon who probably thought of Godflesh as a rare delicacy.
I hated running from a fight but being smart also meant knowing when you couldn’t win a battle. This was one of those times. So I pretended to be a fireman and slid down the demon’s leg, my burnt hand already starting to swell and blister. I landed boots-first with a thump, reached down to retrieve my hammer, and then ran between the demon’s legs, catching a glimpse of Beat and Lace scurrying out the exit.
Yes, I thought, spinning and running back through the demon’s legs once more, just as he was turning to try to locate me on the other side. The double-move paid dividends as the Morgoss was looking in the complete wrong direction. On tiptoes, I snuck out the exit, looking over my shoulder to get one final look at Persepheus’s heart, which I could see pulsing through his back.
I’m sorry, I thought. And then I ran.
THIRTEEN
DEEP CONVERSATIONS
Chapter thirteen. Great. Thanks for that, author. As if we couldn’t use a little luck right now.
No, we weren’t in Annakor anymore, thankfully. In fact, our escape had been pretty mundane. No more tricky rooms. No more traps. No more Morgoss. Which was all a little interesting, all things considered.
We discussed what had transpired on the walk back to camp. “Vrill,” I said. My Lri Ay friend/lover looked at me with dark, shadowed eyes. I knew facing one of her old taskmasters would’ve been more difficult for her than any of us could’ve imagined. But I also knew she wouldn’t want me to focus on that. So I didn’t ask her if she was OK. She would be OK. I knew that. She was stronger than any of us. She would get through it the same way she got through everything this world had thrown at her—by continuing to fight, each and every day.
Vrill’s head was cocked to the side now, looking at me strangely. I shook off my inner thoughts and said, “You previously told us that the Morgoss were growing more desperate. That their conjuring of the shadow creatures was a last-ditch effort to secure their position in this world. Does that still hold true?”
She nodded, seeming relieved I hadn’t asked her something else. “Before we retrieved two of the goddess hearts, none of us would have survived that encounter back there. The Morgoss are growing weaker. Their control over Annakor is waning.”
