“Duck,” Xane shouted after concluding his debate with Chay and a cluster of pink, transparent needles shot into the third pseudopod’s skin. Each needle punctured it with a palm-sized hole, instantly squirting blood.
“Rip it,” Chay said.
Fully drenched in red, Goro’s frenzy heightened and with eyes of pure black and muscles bulging like they were breaking free of his body, the berserker opened the creephorror’s wound like it was paper. The mark of madness was draped over his shoulder like a stick-on cape.
The colossal monster retreated deeper into the corridor.
Marcus called back his chakram before the opening was twisted away and it sprung from the gelatin into his blood-covered hands.
“After it,” Chay said. “We’re inflicting damage faster than it can handle. I can’t control any part of it. My magic can’t interface with its nervous system or some random bullshit.”
They reached a cavern like an ancient cathedral ship. It was lit by glowing haze at the ceiling. Some kind of proto-aurora?
The entire floor was the creephorror’s body, sloshing and bulging even between the broken columns that lined the chamber’s rim.
“Oh fuck, it’s big,” Xane said.
“We were told it is a colossal monster,” Goro reminded.
“Yeah but,” Xane gestured. “It’s like, fucked-up levels of big.”
Another wave of paralyzing fear hit Marcus and made him cramp up.
“Doesn’t matter,” Chay said, coldly. “We’re taking the motherfucker down. Don’t get caught out from below.”
Marcus levitated. It took enough of his power to make other attacks difficult and less effective but he could avoid contact with the being.
The others hovered similarly, Goro in particular looking like a terrifying rendition of superman, blood dripping off his feet as he levitated with the grace of raw power.
Chay ascended the crumbled features of a wall, a white cloud surrounding him. Pie was out of the ring and hovered over his shoulder.
The creephorror went on the offensive.
Pseudopods, a dozen of them, shot from the floor and swiped at the pantheon.
Marcus didn’t really have time to check on his buddies, focused on evading. His power was able to shield him if he concentrated on it, but he had yet to pull that off reliably. He channeled whitefire into his arms, held tightly onto his chakram and sliced with the force of a strafing bullet.
He couldn’t avoid touching the creature entirely as it bulged under him but he bounced between pseudopods on his long legs, taking no hits.
Blood welled onto the monster’s skin as its arms bled. Goro ripped, Xane shot and Chay shouted the name of whoever had to watch out.
“Take cover! Everybody!”
Marcus spiraled around.
Gray, man-sized creatures spilled out of wall crevices and onto the creephorror.
Two legged reptiles on hooves. They were less anthropomorphic than Kobolds, more animal. No clothing, no visible genitals, wielding axes, clubs, bow and arrow.
“Shit,” Chay shouted as he dropped into the blood lake atop the colossal monster. “They’re Gawri. They’re immune to dread, somehow?”
Marcus evaded arrow shots from two sides. The pseudopods now served as cover but they were still swiping at him just as before.
“They’re thralls,” Goro noted and snatched an arrow out of the air.
Marcus finally caught a better look at the Gawri hoard. The creatures were half lizard, half insect, smarter than an ape but not by much, often used as thralls. Right between each Gawrus’ pustule-riddled, insectoid eyeballs was a pentagram. There was no reasoning, no retreat, nothing but devoted service.
Suddenly there was fighting among them.
Marcus looked at Chay, who had brows furrowed and hands raised as if… he was puppeteering a Gawrus who choked another.
“Need the big guns after all,” Xane said and made a butterfly zoom like a projectile between aimless pseudopods. It impacted the biggest Gawri cluster with a purple flash, turning into a slicing disk.
Three bug-lizards dropped, one bled.
The puppeteered one was slain and the hoard advanced.
“There’s nineteen left,” Xane said. “Do I use the other motes now?”
The group shifted as the pseudopods became too hard to evade with the incoming arrow fire.
“Yeah,” Chay said. “Focus on them but remember, the ground is still trying to kill us. Marcus, keep ripping.”
“Ay, sir!” the animus-fighter said and twirled out of the blood pool into a swinging bone-shard arm.
Whitefire and monster blood. Balance and focus and excitement.
Chaos exploded and deleted three Gawrus-heads from existence. A frost blast rendered several insensate and dying.
Goro was charging right into a cluster but a pseudopod swept him up from behind. It dragged him into a large wound in the ground.
Was the creephorror trying to drown them in *itself*?
Chay kept control of a Gawrus, fighting by proxy, while he tied up most of the colossal monster’s arms by hopping around the blood lake.
A red monster burst from the creephorror’s skin. A small demon? Marcus charged to slice it. No, it was just Goro, massive and mad and dripping with gelatinous blood.
Xane had found his way to the remaining Gawri army and engaged at medium-range alongside the Chay-controlled beast.
The berserker grabbed a flap of creephorror skin and pulled like dragging a weight on a rope. A strip tore as he walked. Pseudopods, now boneless and flaccid swatted at him but he didn’t let go of the ever-longer strip.
Marcus sent his chakram to cut ahead and made the ripping easier. Meanwhile, he rushed the Gawri that had made it into the center of the creature and kicked them out. Each charged slam of his foot, sent a beast the entire way to the wall.
It felt great to be powerful as fuck.
There were maybe six Gawri left and Xane kept them following him in a circle along the chamber’s rim as he retreated with levitation-hops, firing whenever he had a blast charged.
The creephorror was running out, innards-filled gelatin bubbling from the massive tear along its entire body. It couldn’t knead itself enough to close the wound.
Finally the monster retreated. It vanished into a hole in the wall as if sucked through, its immense body folding and squelching.
Marcus engaged the last Gawrus in reach, slicing its neck.
Amidst the thrall corpses, the floor was still ankle deep covered with blood. But as the main guardian of the vault vanished, the feeling of dread went with it.
Marcus relaxed.
Wings fluttered at the ceiling. Imps dove down and dug into the corpses.
Xane spat creephorror-blood and started cleaning himself, each swipe of his hand getting liquid out of his hair or off his face. He took a deep breath and hit a most-muscular pose. The gunk rained off him, even from his fundoshi which was restored to pristine white.
“Can you do that for all of us?” Chay asked. “We should look, uh, normal when we go back out.”
“Sure,” the mage said. “Going to take a while though. Can we keep going in the meantime? I don’t want to wait till the imps get territorial.”
Under the soft fluttering of wings, the men approached something like a well in the center of the room, which the creephorror had covered — the vault entrance.