Mask of Humanity

Nicolai’s eyes tracked the movements below, observing the battle-lines as they were drawn up. Most of the skeletons had now exited the tunnels and were forming into a generalised mass in the middle of the pit.

Coming after them were the bugs. Rivers of the chitinous beings were pouring from the tunnels and streaming towards the skeletons, where they were forming into a circular mass that surrounded the skeletons and pressed in, snapping and grabbing and crushing the skeletal miners and guards who fought with little energy or will.

The vast majority of these bugs were beetle-things the size of large dogs, their bodies in three sections and with at least six legs. Their heads held mouthparts clearly designed for killing.

As he studied them, he noticed a few variations which mostly showed in their mouthparts.

Some had long scissoring parts that rapidly sprung apart then snapped back together, tipped with sharp chitin. They looked like they would make a mess of anyone made of flesh and blood, but weren’t particularly impactful on the skeletons.

Another variant had a kind of stinger-hammer that stretched back and high over their heads, ending in a rough club of chitin. When they drew close enough, these stinger-hammers would snap down with great force, and seemed far more effective as they crushed skeletal bones.

Scattered amongst this mass of dog-sized bugs were significantly larger beings. They stood tall on four thick legs which merged into a column-like trunk, treelike in nature. All the way up these armoured columns there emerged long insectile arms that ended in blades and hammers of chitin, and at the top of the column-bugs was a bulge that he supposed was their head, pocked with eyes and from which long tentacle-like things emerged which mostly seemed to be used to feel at what was around them.

Where these ones marched into the skeletons, they crushed them beneath their thick legs and laid about with their weaponized arms, moving with little opposition amongst the listless undead.

So far the undead were faring very poorly, the bugs swelling at the edges of the mass they’d formed, crushing and smashing their way into the crowds of skeletons.

But Nicolai hoped that would change when the great column which had passed him by and now tramped steadily down the cork-screw ledge around the outside of the pit, finally came to close with the bugs.

This column wasn’t formed from the stiff skeletal miners nor their ineffectual guards, it was formed of hundreds of the heavy knights, archers, spearmen, and the ones that looked capable of doing magic, wielding staffs and wands that Nicolai was sure were Imbued. He wanted one. In fact, being Nicolai, he wanted all of them.

What’s going to happen here? He frowned down at it all. If the undead won, then life would continue as normal. But if the bugs won… well, he was willing to admit he might be showing a little human bias, a little primitive fear of alien-looking bugs armed with bladed mouthparts, but he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be friendly towards him.

He opted to start walking up the slope as he continued to observe, wanting to be nearer the top in case it all went tits-up, but after a short time was forced to find another crevice to hide in as another column of competent-looking undead wound down towards him.

As he hid in the crevice, the sounds of crashing and smashing intensified, and were joined by sharp cracks and whooshing noises, all of it audible even over the tramp of armoured undead passing by his hiding spot. When he emerged behind them, he looked over the edge to see the battle in full swing. Nicolai continued to gradually walk upwards as he observed.

The first column had ploughed into one side of the seething circle of bugs, which had grown greatly in number to the extent that practically the entire pit was filled with them, except for where the much-reduced mass of skeletons held the centre.

The first column pushed into them from the side, knights and spearmen forming a half-circle that pushed out, archers and magic-throwers behind them.

The mages drew his gaze, as well as some of the knights.

The mages wielded staffs, and wands, and crystals, which launched screaming bursts of fire, hissing waves of icy wind, thundering bolts of lightning that zig-zagged between bugs. The bugs were burned, and frozen, and shocked apart.

Meanwhile the knights swung heavy weapons that launched waves of formless force, hurling crowds of bugs away, or lifted shields that created vague domes of energy, protecting the undead from harm.

Taken together, they were very effective. The big column bugs were capable of soaking quite a lot of hits even from the mages and knights, and did a lot of damage, but even they fell in time, and Nicolai began to relax. It looked like the battle would go in a positive direction, though he was pleased to see a good number of the knights and mages falling. He intended to go down and loot everything of value he could when it was over, and hoped to get his hands on their Imbued weapons.

The battle continued, Nicolai dodging out of the way of further columns until he was almost at the top of the pit. However, up there he found that the Wardens who stood guard at the top remained in position.

Fearing that they might force him to go and join the fight if he got too close to them, Nicolai turned around and retreated a short distance down the pit. He found the same crevice where he’d been storing his Oma crystals, going and hiding inside of it whenever a fresh battallion of undead began coming down the pit.

The rest of the time, he simply watched the battle. Over the next thirty minutes, the undead’s presence down there grew until they occupied one half of the pit, the bugs on the other. Then, something loomed out of one of the tunnels, dragging its bulk into view. Some kind of huge pill-bug with a circular maw that opened wide, and an endless booming echoed up around the pit and into Nicolai’s ears as it vomited a crackling beam of energy that incinerated all it touched.

Blocks of undead fell as the roaring energy melted through their shields, and Nicolai rose from where he’d sat with his legs hanging off the edge, the fight turning from a spectacle to a threat.

There was a flash of light from above and he tensed reflexively as something spun down out of nowhere, zooming directly for the pill-bug. It crashed into the centre of the giant bugs head, blasting it to pieces, and after a frozen moment, the bug fell.

Nicolai watched with wary curiosity as the thing emerged from its ruined enemy, and he saw that it was a warhammer, a very nice-looking warhammer that flew around all by itself, crashing through bug after bug, all of which began to flee back out the tunnels. This would be the one Harold had mentioned, the Artifact.

With its arrival and the destruction of the giant pill-bug, and now its assault on the rest, the battle was over.

As Nicolai watched, the Artifact hammer flew to the very centre of the pit, hovering over the piles of corpses, and it shone with a dull green light. Nicolai observed with great interest. The black blood of the bugs began to move, pouring towards it, forming into thick, dark waves, all of which were pulled into the hammer and absorbed. As soon as the blood was gone, the hammer performed a victorious flip and disappeared into a tunnel.

Was the blood some kind of fuel for it? He was certain there was some strange magic at work in what he had witnessed, as the amount of bug blood it had absorbed would never have fit inside an object the size of the hammer, not under the rules of conventional physics. The hammer also had some level of awareness and intelligence, even personality, based on that happy little flip it had performed.

Very much something I want to avoid, Nicolai thought. A sentient, self-mobile weapon capable of casually laying waste to hundreds of bugs could be extremely dangerous if it took interest in him. On the other hand, he wouldn’t deny that it would be a great victory if he could somehow seize control of it. But all that he knew told him that would not be an option. Kleos had suggested that one didn’t merely need to be a Cultivator to control such things; they needed to be a powerful Cultivator. Nicolai, lacking a true Soul, suspected he would have no chance of taking control of the Artifact.

Nicolai rose and headed down towards the bottom of the pit, hoping to do some looting. The Artifact might be beyond him, but he’d seen plenty of Imbued wands and staffs, shields and maces, wielded by the elite undead. However, thirty minutes later when he reached the bottom, stepped into the bottom pit, and approached, the survivors bristled with hostility, knights and mages and archers turning to face him, raising weapons.

Nicolai stared at them, still and quiet. The nearest dead knight that looked like it might have an Imbued was about twenty feet from him. He could hear bows creaking, see the ready metal of the still-standing knights shining in the light. Some of them began to move toward him.

He took a slow step back, then another, and the undead relaxed slightly, those approaching slowing. He continued back up the slope and the majority turned away from him, though some kept watching him. He let out an irritated puff of breath. No free magic weapons today, he thought, and quirked his lips. It had been silly to think they’d let him freely loot, but worth a try.

Nothing else happened that day, no more mining. All the undead in the area seemed frozen. They simply stood in place, and waited. The ones in the pit continued to guard the arms and armour of their comrades; this seemed to be their primary purpose, now the battle was over. Nicolai lounged around on the slope, trying to think up a way to get to the Imbued, but he drew a blank. Some of the undead in the host seemed of the more intelligent sort, and he knew it would not be wise to tip them off to the fact his band did not control him as it was supposed to.

It made sense to him that now the battle was over, they simply stood guard. Though, certainly, it was very annoying. The undead were clearly aware that when night fell, all of those who had fallen would rise, and their numbers would be entirely replenished. In that regard, so long as they could ensure no opportunistic looters thieved all of the Imbued, or started taking skulls, they could ensure that come the morning they would be back to exactly the same strength and numbers as they had begun with.

Quite wise of them, though in Nicolai’s opinion the undead were lucky the bugs didn’t seem to have any Soul Trapping methods.

After realising that the bottom of the pit was a no-go, Nicolai’s attention had turned to the top. He’d thought that maybe the Wardens might change in their normal behaviour. First he’d gone up top, moving past them, and they let him go as always, completely ignoring him. Then he’d gone down, retrieved a single Oma crystal from his stash, and headed back up.

He was not surprised when they bristled, surrounding him, and one extended chains to him, seizing the crystal. He would have to wait for a better opportunity than this, then.

He saw no sign of Harold. He believed the man had been somewhere in the tunnels. Since the undead now blocked the bottom of the pit, he had no way to go and check. So, Nicolai could only hope that the man had survived.

When night came, he found his way to Harold’s cell. As suspected, Harold was not there either.

No fire, that night.

###

The next morning the undead were all back on their feet, and Nicolai observed as they spent their time cleaning up the dead bugs. That was completed after only a few hours, then the mining resumed, life gone back to normal in the pits. As the skeletons returned to mining, the small army marched back up the slope corkscrewing around the pit to resume their stations or disappear into guarded tunnels.

Nicolai headed into the other tunnels, those at the bottom of the pit, opting to also get back to work. There he encountered Harold, who, it turned out, had survived; though not without injury.

‘It fucking hurts,’ snarled Harold as Nicolai cleaned one of his wounds some time later. This one was a nasty tear in the muscle of Harold’s thigh, long and at least an inch deep. He poured more water from Harold’s red bottle into it and kept rubbing the dirt and grime out from the torn flesh while Harold groaned and moaned.

He’d already fully cleaned and bandaged Harold’s arm, where a bug had tried to tear the limb off. There was a series of deep punctures there, and the bones of Harold’s forearm were quite badly fractured, along with some damage to his wrist. Then there were a few other tears and cuts.

It was clear Harold had gotten in quite a scrape and was lucky to be alive. But, other than the fact that the man’s use to him was reduced by the injuries, Nicolai wasn’t overly concerned. He was much more interested in something else Harold had been saying.

‘You’ll be alright,’ said Nicolai. Unless something gets infected. ‘So what did you see? What were you so excited about?’ The man had been babbling about a glowing thing when Nicolai had found him limping in one of the tunnels.

‘There’s a chasm, it’s where lots of the bugs came from. On the other side, I saw it, shining in the dark. I couldn’t see much, but it looked about the right size for a heart.’

‘On the other side of a chasm,’ echoed Nicolai, frowning. ‘How tough will it be to cross?’

Harold’s breath hissed through his teeth as Nicolai began binding the wound. ‘Not easy. I couldn’t see a way. If we can find some rope we might be able to manage.’

‘You seen any rope around here?’

‘Nope!’

###

‘There it is,’ Harold hissed. ‘You see it?’

‘I see it,’ said Nicolai. Less than hundred metres away from them, in the dark, something shone with a dark reddish light. The kind of light you might expect a magical heart to give off.

‘You think that’s it?’

Nicolai shrugged. ‘Could be.’ He was gazing now into what lay between them and the maybe-heart.

A great chasm cutting through the stone, about twenty metres wide, descending into unknowable darkness.

They stood within a tunnel that simply ended, as though some monstrous being had cut at the stone with a blade hundreds of metres long. Their tunnel exited directly into the open air above the chasm, and they stood on the ledge, gazing into the dark.

Harold was staying a safe distance back, away from the ledge, presumably because he was afraid of falling. Nicolai also remained some distance back, though not because he was afraid of accidentally falling. Rather, his paranoia was concerned that Harold might experience a moment of insanity and push him from behind if he moved too close to the edge. The light of one of the torches wrapped them from behind, attempting to push out into the dark and failing.

Nicolai puffed his cheeks and blew air, frowning into the dark, his mind’s eye spinning back through the tunnels behind them, up the pit, winding through the prisons, zooming past a Warden that stood in the entrance to a cramped, dark tunnel, out past the crypt and through the banquet hall and into his safe place where there rested a ring that would get him over this chasm in about ten seconds.

But it wasn’t here and it couldn’t be here and there was no point thinking on it.

‘Any ideas?’ he asked Harold, who stood to the side of him. The man’s broken arm was now in a sling over his chest, immobilised. With no Orb of Rejuvenation or other methods, it would be quite some time before the man was healed. Months, likely.

‘Nope.’

‘We’ll find a way,’ Nicolai said absently, extending his Soul Sense tendrils toward the heart, through the dark, but they barely made it over the chasm, unable to reach it. No matter.

‘We’ll find a way,’ Nicolai repeated, turning to grin at Harold, then strode over and clapped him gently on the shoulder, aware of the man’s wounded state. ‘Soon, my friend,’ he said still smiling, finding himself abruptly in a great mood, and pleased with Harold. The man had accomplished something useful, and Nicolai’s Seed was progressing nicely.

Harold looked a little confused for a moment, then he returned a sunny grin back. ‘And once we have it, we’ll be flying out the pit. The dead can watch us go.’ He let out a nasty little chuckle, eyes distant, perhaps imagining the whole pit of undead watching helplessly as he was lifted away.

‘Something like that,’ said Nicolai, smiling still as he moved down the tunnel and Harold limped slowly after him. He was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, and his Soul Sense tendrils squirmed with eagerness around him. He had them active at all times, now, gone from being something he struggled to control to a part of him, a new sensory organ.

His mind had been quiet these past few days, giving him time to relax and think. Harold was one issue he’d been thinking on.

Originally his intention had been to abandon the man, but after so much time with the other human, along with his continuous simulation of humanity, he’d realised that this was a kind of test for himself. On top of that, Harold had in fact done good. Nicolai had put no effort into finding the Heart, instead focusing on completing his Seed. Harold had saved him quite a bit of time and effort by finding it for him.

He wanted to be better, right? That was what he kept saying to himself. That he wanted to be more human. He imagined his simulation nodding, approving.

Well, this was his chance.

Something stirred within him. Nicolai did his best to ignore it.