Rogan's Monsters 2: Below, page 14
Class: Wraith hybrid
Dominant DNA: Wraith (38%)
Additional DNA: Human, Whelk, Cane Toad, Rough Skinned Newt, + assorted others (62%)
Height: 3’8”
Weight: 43 pounds
Level: IV
Armor: None
Weapon: Spear, Knife
Capability: Toxic exudate
Additional Warning: Highly Acidic Blood
Even in a world where mutations and hybrids seemed to be normal, the results were shocking.
There was far less human in it than it appeared. The exudate I had mistaken for sweat was toxic, and if my AC lens was right, its blood was like battery acid.
The creature that looked like a boy focused on each of us in turn, and I felt a moment of dread as it gazed upon me.
“What the fuck is it?” I asked, even though my AC lens had given me a breakdown.
“It is one of my sister’s creatures,” Ecco said. “One of those I had hoped to avoid, although the chances of that were slim. They have no name, and are among the deadliest of her minions. There are several tribes of them in the caverns.”
At Ecco’s words, I unsheathed my swords, and Ash stepped in front of Zera.
I didn’t like the loathsome thing standing there, blocking our way forward, and stalked toward it. But I wasn’t all that keen on slicing it up. It looked too eerily human, and the thought of doing so was somehow repulsive.
I would do what had to be done, but only if necessary.
Fortunately, the boy didn’t like the look of me. Its smile grew even wider, and it opened its mouth to do something which sounded very much like laughter, although there seemed to be a distinct lack of humor in the air.
I caught a glimpse of sharpened teeth, and knew in my soul that what my AC lens told me was true.
There was very little human about this boy. I steeled myself, ready to kill it, but before I could reach it, it turned around and seemed to flow deeper into the caves.
I could have chased it. Could have made an effort and cut it down. But the creature was disturbing. Even the thought of it caused a shiver to go up my spine, and something about it made me nauseous.
Ecco had said the creatures didn’t have a name. But I disagreed.
The boy was a ghoul.
Three more times, as we made our way through the caves, we came across another one of the ghouls. Each one could have been a clone of the first, but there were subtle differences. Not in the way they looked, but in the clothes they wore and the weapons they brandished.
Each time, Ash or I approached them, making sure they knew we were armed and ready to fight, and each time the ghoul turned and hurried away.
“You said they were dangerous,” I said to Ecco, and the deerkin nodded.
“In numbers,” she replied. “But they do not attack when they are at a disadvantage.”
“Can we avoid them?”
“I had hoped so. Now, they know we are here.”
It was an ominous answer. But there was no recourse. All we could do was continue, and keep our eyes open for the creatures.
“Are they all the same? The size of children?” asked Camille. “Or are there adults as well?”
“This is what they are,” Ecco replied.
We continued on our way, eyes wide for any hint of attack, weapons at the ready. Where before, we had walked the caves in relative ease, now each one of us was tense. If Ecco’s words were true, somewhere ahead of us was a band of these ghouls, getting ready to attack.
“How many?” Ash asked.
Ecco gave her a puzzled look, and the big woman clarified. “These ghouls. You said there are tribes of them. Do they all travel together? When they gather to attack, how many will there be?”
“I do not know. More than fifty. More than a hundred. Beyond that, it depends on how many they feel will be needed.”
Great, I thought. Just fucking great.
When the attack came, it was something of a relief. If you can call coming face-to-face with more than fifty identical children armed with stone spears and knives, blocking one end of a dim chamber and grinning girlishly from ear-to-ear a relief.
There was no warning, no announcement of hostilities. Just that peculiar nothing sound echoing through the cave, and a sea of pale, sweaty faces staring with unnerving intensity as some of their number let loose with their spares.
There was no time to hesitate. I launched myself forward with everything that I had, leaping and dancing within the confines of the mid-size chamber we were in, cutting the lone spears out of the air with barely a pause. Then I hurled myself into the ranks of smiling, sweaty faces.
But I had made a mistake. I saw it before I even closed in on the first smiling face, but only because I had to cut down another thrown spear. The step I had chosen for the task turned me around, and would have allowed me to do a complete three-sixty without losing momentum. Except that I caught myself halfway through.
Ash had followed me toward the ghouls and had already unlimbered her club. Camille had surged ahead of the others and taken a defensive position with her knives, her intent clear for any to see. If a ghoul made its way past me and Ash, it would find itself facing Camille’s knives before it could ever get to Gamma, Zera, or Ecco.
But that wasn’t what caused me to pause halfway through a maneuver. Behind my tight group of companions, down toward the other end of the chamber, I could see other ghouls approaching as I spun around.
I cursed out loud. I’d thought the ghouls were mindless, little more than beasts despite the clothes that they wore. But it seemed they were smarter than that, and more than capable of planning an attack.
We were boxed in, attacked from two sides and I could only be in one place at a time.
“Look out!” I bellowed, and Camille reacted the fastest. She turned around, and I saw her shoulders stiffen as she realized what she faced.
Before I could move, before I could choose to defend one side or the other, another wave of spears surged toward Camille, Zera and the rest, and I was too far away to cut them out of the sky.
I knew that if the ghouls had attacked from both sides at exactly the same time, there would have been nothing any of us could have done. But the slight delay gave us a chance. I couldn’t reach the other side of the chamber quickly enough with my swords, but that wasn’t my only option.
Even as Zera covered her eyes and Gamma let out a moan of fear while Edda chattered and squawked away on her shoulder, I focused on what I needed to do and let out a controlled burst of chi.
Raw power arced over my companion’s heads, and just as Gamma had done with the flames against the snakes, I turned the spears sailing toward them into dust.
But I couldn’t expend all of my chi in one burst. That route, as I knew from experience, led to disaster. So while my chi burst engulfed the first couple of rows of ghouls, turning their hyena laughs into squeals of pain, it only wiped out about a fifth of their number.
“Ash! Camille! Protect that side!” I bellowed, then resolutely turned back to the larger group, the one that had first appeared.
Then I was among them, spinning and slashing, honing my blades with my chi, and ripping them through the bodies and limbs of an army of ghouls, no longer thinking of them as young boys, but as the monsters they were.
Again, this was the type of fighting I was best suited for, one man against an army of opponents. And with my shorter weapons, being more suited to the location, I could wreak bloody havoc.
The ghouls had stopped throwing their spears, and instead used them in an effort to impale me, while some of them darted forward to slash with their stone knives. But I was too quick, and my blades were too sure and too sharp. I severed hands from diminutive wrists and danced around spears to lodge my blades in faces, throats, and whatever else was in my reach.
It could have been glorious. A fight like the one in the Wastes, where I stood alone like a dam, slowing the tide of an army all by myself. But as the blood of these monstrous non-children started to flow, the character sheet breakdown came back to me.
Blood like acid, it had said, and already I could see, smell, and feel what that meant.
Steam rose from my blades as the acid blood tried to work on the metal. But these were Soul Blades, and I was pretty sure they could withstand that sort of defense. I couldn’t say how I knew that, and once again I wondered if the Rogan Ward I had usurped still existed somewhere in my mind.
My robes and the skin on my hands and face weren’t so lucky. Try as I might, I couldn’t avoid being splattered, and I could smell burning fabric and flesh.
And it hurt like being scalded with boiling water. I wanted to run my hands and face under cold water to stop the sting, but I had to keep going.
“Watch out for the blood!” I shouted to the others, glancing back at the other fight as often as I could, sending pulses of chi as required. I knew they heard my warning, but there was little they could do. With Ash at the fore, swinging her club, blood spatter was par for the course.
I heard the warrior woman cry out not in pain but in anger, and knew it was her response to being spattered. I wished I could do something more to help, but I was already doing my best.
Even so, I redoubled my efforts, growing in anger as I spun and toiled, burying my strikes with bursts of chi in an effort to end this as quickly as I could.
“Lady Gamma!” I bellowed. “Do you have any more tricks?”
But the difficult woman didn’t deign to answer. Either she had no more tricks up her sleeve, or she was too lost in wordless horror to respond.
In the end, it was Ecco who came to Ash and Camille’s aid. I didn’t see it happen, but between one glance back and the next, somehow a wall of rock had appeared between the ghouls and the girls, partially blocking the way. This newly formed wall gave Ash and Camille protection from spears and thrusting knives, and allowed Ash to stand guard and smash anything that tried to pass.
As soon as I saw this, I let out a laugh, and returned to my side of the battle with gusto. Without needing to keep half an eye on what Ash and the others were doing, I grinned at my diminutive foes, ignoring the pain of the burns on my hands and face, and adding more and more corpses to the ground.
Acrid smoke rose from those bodies as the ghouls’ blood attacked their own clothes and the bioluminescent plants they had fallen on. I covered my mouth and nose as best as I could with a fold of my robes and kept going, but the battle was already done. The ghoul-children were still laughing like hyenas, but perhaps there was more nuance in that laughter than I could detect. Perhaps it was the way they communicated, a form of language. Either way, they seemed to be able to act in concert.
Suddenly, as it became clear that they couldn’t defeat me, they turned tail and fled.
At once, I turned back to the others, but the job was done there as well. Ecco hadn’t stopped with just part of a wall. She had continued to grow it as I had fought, until it nearly blocked off the way we had come.
As Ash smashed the head of the last ghoul to enter, Ecco finished her work, sealing that end of the chamber completely shut.
We had won. We had fought off the ghouls. But it was hardly a victory. Camille and Ash weren’t wearing thick layers of clothing like I was. Both of them had fared worse as far as acid burns went. Gamma and Ecco and Zera were unscathed, but they had watched the rest of us hack at creatures that looked like children. Though it was clear that was not what they were, Zera’s expression was just short of horror, with Gamma’s not far behind.
But the worst of all was Ecco. She had suffered burns as well, but worse than that, the effort of sealing the cave had drained her.
She had become translucent once again.
In the aftermath of the battle, with me, Ash, and Camille all breathing hard, the deerkin paused to look at her translucent hands. She gave us a smile. “I will return,” she said. And with that, she faded out of existence.
36
Ash was in a bad way, with burns peeling back the skin over much of her face, left shoulder, and the front of her right leg. Camille, while not burned over such an extensive area, was gritting her teeth against the pain. With so many corpses around, filling the air with acrid stench, I didn’t want to have a repetition of our experience with the poisonous. I didn’t know if the stench was toxic, but didn’t want to take the chance.
“Can you walk?” I asked the two women.
“When the alternative is what?” Camille asked, her tone sharper than normal. “Curl up and die?”
Ash’s only response was a short nod, but that was enough.
“We will find a place free from this smell,” I said. “With some water.”
I offered a hand to each of my companions, and they gratefully accepted.
At the same time, I didn’t want to have to go too far to find such a place. While my own injuries were not as severe, they were still burning. It was maddening, knowing that my own skin and flesh was being eaten away by drops of acid, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
More than maddening. It hurt like a bitch, as painful as anything I had ever experienced. Not even the surgeries I had on my leg could compare–although, come to think about it, there was one experience that was worse. The death of a thousand suns. Technically, I hadn’t survived that one, so I wasn’t sure it counted.
Zera was quick to recover her usual bounce, and moved to offer Camille a hand, while I did the same with Ash. Gamma looked at the two of us with an expression I couldn’t fathom, but instead of voicing her usual displeasure, she nodded sadly to herself. Her expression changed to that of someone accepting the inevitable, and she and Edda, still riding on her shoulder, joined us without a word as we picked our way past the corpses.
We found the type of place I was hoping for within just a short time. It wasn’t a cavern so much as a bulge, a large-ish side chamber with water running into a pool at one side. It was filled with the type of plants that produced edible fruits and leaves, and with just the one way in and out, I thought it was perfect.
By then, both Camille and Ash were in dire need of aid. Zera and I helped them to the pool of water, and they did their best to clean the remaining acid out of their wounds, but that was never going to be enough.
I turned to Gamma.
“Do you still have your healing potion?” I asked her, completely forgetting about her little rules of how she wished to be addressed.
Once again, I expected a tirade, which still didn’t come. Instead, the difficult woman immediately dug into her robes.
“Of course,” she said, as if wondering why she hadn’t thought of it already herself.
She drew out her flask, which seemed to have a much smaller amount of potion in it before, and went to treat Camille and Ash.
I kept watch while Zera helped Gamma. It was an infuriating setback. What if more of those ghouls showed up with greater numbers? I didn’t let my guard down for a moment, not even when Gamma came over to me and offered the potion.
“I’m okay,” I said. We needed to save the potion as much as possible.
She eyed me stubbornly, with a bit of her old imperiousness returning. “Rogan Ward,” she said, “we will never get through these caves without you. And that means we need you to remain as whole as possible.”
I felt the hint of the compulsion and knew she wasn’t going to take no. So I allowed her to put a few drops on my burns. Then, she rubbed it into my skin, her fingers gentle and practiced. When she finished, I nodded my thanks, and she returned to the girls without a word.
Ecco returned sometime later, and after hearing what had happened, agreed that it wasn’t wise to stay where we were. At this point, Gamma’s potion had done its work, and the majority of our burns were healed or on their way to it. So we kept moving, with Ecco leading the way.
37
Most of the caverns we passed through retained a similar feel. Hard, unyielding rock walls, many of them jagged, with stalactites and stalagmites glistening in the light of the bioluminescence. The sound of water dripping never ceased, with rivulets running down walls and sometimes turning into streams. The deeper we got, the warmer it seemed to be, and the bigger the plants became. In some places, they were all we could see, with the plants taller than us. It was like an underground forest, and I had to hack our way through them using my swords like machetes.
Every now and again, we would reach an area that filled the girls and I with awe.
The cave made of crystal was one of these, a shining, brittle landscape with fewer plants, but a lighter overall feel. Every one of us stood at the entrance of that one and gaped for some minutes before we continued.
We passed through a second bone graveyard that put us all on edge, with me looking around for more giant spiders. But this graveyard was different. The skeletons within it were massive. Like those of mammoths, whales, or dinosaurs. Ecco assured us that it was safe, that whatever had caused all the deaths and gave rise to the graveyard had long since departed. As we passed through, I tried to figure out what the skeletons had belonged to, with no real success. All I could tell was that they must have been massive creatures, but the skulls seemed surprisingly small and almost human in shape. I was starting to think in terms of King Kong with too many arms and a much smaller head, and couldn’t help but wonder if Edda had some distant relatives I didn’t know of.
We passed through a cavern with a high, arched ceiling that glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and one where the temperature plunged to near freezing through no mechanism I could figure out.
Twice more, we came across small bands of ghouls, and I tried to deal with them swiftly. But on the whole, Ecco managed to guide us safely.
With every step, I felt we were getting closer to our goal. Not because I knew where we were heading, not exactly, but because I could feel it.
