Victor of Tucson

“I don’t know,” Victor took a slow, steadying breath, scanning the wide, low-ceilinged cavern again. “I don’t see anything.”

“I heard something, though; I’m sure of it,” Thayla hissed. Once again, Victor scanned the cavern, running his eyes over the substantial fungus sprouts and the mossy rocks. Moisture hung in a vaporous cloud along the low ceiling, and the air was hot and fetid. Ever so slowly, he moved his gaze over the ground, past the stinky, bubbling pool at the center, and then to the far wall where their next tunnel opened.

“I’ll go first,” he said, at last, unable to see anything but not wanting her to have to rely on his judgment—she’d wanted to stop and watch until whatever it was showed itself, but he was tired of the wait.

“And if you get eaten by some tier-five monstrosity? I’m just on my own, then?” Thayla’s voice was petulant and irritable, and Victor knew she was tired. They’d had to practically dig their way through the last half mile of narrow, muddy tunnels, and if she were half as dirty and exhausted as he was, he didn’t blame her.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said and started prowling forward, Lifedrinker gripped in both hands. The ground was mushy, and it squelched with his steps, so he tried to move slowly, letting each foot sink silently before taking the next step. He was about twenty paces into the cavern, skirting the edge of the steaming, stinky pool when the ground rippled, and he fell to one knee, the wet, spongy fungus soaking into his pants. He froze there, looking around. When he glanced back at Thayla, he saw her narrowed brows and angry eyes and knew she was cussing him out.

The ground didn’t shudder again, and nothing moved, so Victor carefully got back to his feet and started moving again. He’d just passed the pool when the ground surged again, and he was on his butt. Then, one of the slender, slimy fungus sprouts started to move, stretching upward and peeling back like some kind of nightmarish sex organ to reveal a three-foot-long, bone-colored spear. The long tentacle of fungus turned in the air, pointing its talon-like tip at Victor, and shot forward. He rolled to his right, narrowly dodging the stabbing thing.

Suddenly the cavern began to shake in earnest, and more and more of the fungus sprouts rose into the air, peeling back their gray, moist skin to reveal those bone-white spears. Victor heard Thayla’s voice from behind him, “Run!” Then she was tearing past him, running for the far tunnel. Victor cast Inspiring Presence and started to run after her. Suddenly the waving tentacles with bone-spear tips didn’t seem so numerous, and he thought he could spot a route through them. Thayla leaped to her right, avoiding a stabbing tentacle, and then Victor lost track of her as he began to dance with the seven or eight tentacles in stabbing range.

He couldn’t help the bubbling laugh that started to roll out of his throat as he dodged the stabbing, weaving spears. They sank into the ground over and over, and, inspiration guiding his arm, Victor started to cleave the tentacles off as they stabbed into the mossy floor. Before long, he was standing amid a cluster of writhing, waving, gore-spraying tentacles sans spears. He turned to the far tunnel, ready to make his way out of the creepy fungus trap, when he saw Thayla’s spear sticking out of the spongy ground.

Icy panic gripped his heart, and he whirled around, looking for a sign of the tall red-skinned woman. When his eyes fell on the pool at the center of the room, he saw the surface bubbling and something thrashing within. “Thayla!” he roared and charged to the bubbling water. As he got close, his inspired mind ran through a dozen plans to get her out, but then his eyes fell on the edge of the pool, and he noticed the way the ground seemed to surge up and down, and it reminded him of a mouth sucking on a straw. “Oh, hell no!”

Victor brought Lifedrinker down on the gray flesh surrounding the pool, hacking a terrible wound in the quivering surface, and gouts of red-black blood began to seep out. Lifedrinker throbbed and pulled and seemed to sink deeper of her own accord, and Victor knew she’d found a deep well of Energy to draw from. The ground of the cavern quivered and bucked, and if he hadn’t been holding tight to Lifedrinker with his legs wide, Victor knew he’d have fallen into the pool. “Spit her out, you fucker!” he screamed, and then an idea occurred to him. He used Project Spirit, and a surge of rage-attuned Energy pulsed out of him in a cone-shaped, palpable red haze.

He hadn’t consciously decided to use rage Energy with the spell, but it seemed to do the trick; the gray, oozing flesh surrounding the little pool puckered and then began to convulse, stretching up out of the ground like an unhoused section of intestine. As it stretched, heaving and spewing gouts of the fetid liquid within, Victor swung Lifedrinker in a wide horizontal cleave, opening a terrible, yard-long gash in the side of the protuberance. Gouts of thick black blood sprayed forth, along with more of the liquid that had been bubbling in the “pool.”

The cavern floor shook, and the swaying, bleeding, stabbing tentacles went wild in their attempts to reach Victor. None of the nearby ones had their spears anymore, and most had been shortened by his axe to the point where they couldn’t even slap at him. Victor turned to hack one that was still long enough to flail at him, liberally soaking him with black-red ooze. He cleaved it in half, leaving a stump that could only thrash and splash him with more blood.

Victor cast Sovereign Will, pumping up his strength, and also Channel Spirit, filling his arms and Lifedrinker with rage-attuned Energy. Then he went to work, hacking at the now two-meter-tall, writhing, pulsing, bleeding protuberance. Lifedrinker ripped considerable gashes in the thing with each swing, and soon the top half was just a deflated flap of loose flesh, and the bottom was pouring gouts of liquid and blood with each convulsion. Victor was about to deliver another terrible chop to an existing cut when he saw a glimpse of shiny, wet red flesh.

He let go of Lifedrinker with one hand and plunged it into the gaping wound, feeling around. Immediately, Victor’s fingers began to burn, but he shoved his arm in further until he felt something solid, then he grabbed on and yanked with all his rage-fuelled strength. As his arm and hand emerged from the gash, he saw that he had a grip on Thayla’s ankle, and he pulled, backing up a step, delivering her through the slash like a nightmarish birth. She slid free in a splash of foamy liquid and red gore, and Victor stood stunned for a moment when he saw her condition.

Thayla had an oozing, puckered puncture wound through her chest under her right collarbone. Her clothing was frayed and gore-covered, and, worse, her flesh was raw, and beneath her red skin, he could see exposed muscle tissue in many spots, including her cheeks—the thing had been dissolving her.

Victor’s heart began to hammer in panic and anger, and his hand tightened on the haft of Lifedrinker until his knuckles were white. He stood over Thayla, wondering if she were dead, wishing he could heal her somehow, but struggling to contain the urge to turn and keep hacking at the monstrosity living under the cavern floor. “Pinche, mother fucker!” He growled, turning back to the bucking, quivering, fleshy tube.

As he struggled to contain his rage and turned back, trying to force himself to pick up Thayla and run from the cavern, a thought occurred to him: she might not have as much Energy affinity as he did, but she still would heal some if he got her a big Energy influx. A wicked grin spread on his face as he turned back to the gray intestine thing. “You must be worth a lot of Energy, asshole!” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard Gorz’s tinny laugh.

Hefting Lifedrinker into a two-handed grip, Victor stopped holding back his rage and let it flood his pathways, pushing himself to Berserk. The dim light in the cavern grew darker as a shade of blood-red filtered over his vision, and the only thing he could see was the heaving, pulsing, gore-spewing monstrosity. He screamed, spittle frothing his lips, and launched himself at it, whipping Lifedrinker in heavy side-to-side arcs, tearing through the thick, springy flesh of the tube effortlessly. The cavern floor continued to roll and tremble, and the spear tentacles waved about madly, the ones shortened by Victor spraying gore all over the place, painting the room with more red. Victor laughed.

The huge, gray tube continued to thrash its way higher out of the springy cavern floor, and then the ground cracked around it, and a ropy tentacle with a claw-like hook on the end pushed out, sinking into the ground and pulling. Victor hacked it in half, and it sprayed forth a much brighter shade of blood. The sight of it fed Victor’s fury, and he continued his rampage. As he worked his way around the tube, hacking it to shreds, he came within range of one of the tentacles with a spear still intact. It stabbed him through the back of his thigh, and he screamed in pain and fury, whipping Lifedrinker around and cutting it in half.

The tentacles’ waving and thrashing caught the attention of his enraged mind, and, after he yanked the spear from his leg, he went on a rampage around the cavern, running from one spear tentacle to the next, cleaving them off as close to the ground as he could. He felt his rage cooling at one point and pushed more of his prodigious rage-attuned Energy pool into his pathways, extending its duration. Whether he could have chosen not to do so wasn’t apparent or of interest to him; killing and the madness of combat were all he craved. The stab wounds he accumulated in his rampage mostly healed over, and the pain served only to drive his fury to new heights.

He was standing over one of the truncated spear tentacles when the cavern bucked again, almost knocking him over. He caught himself against the cavern wall and spun to see the source of the cracking, screaming, hissing sound that had disturbed him. At the center of the cavern, not far from where Thayla lay, the huge, massacred, intestine-like protuberance was now horizontal, and the creature from which it sprang was worming its way out of the ground. It heaved itself with a dozen of those hooked tentacles, pulling its enormous, slug-like body out of the ground, inch by inch.

Victor charged through the inch-deep layer of red-black blood, splashing with each step, and launched himself through the air, Lifedrinker over his head, bringing her down with a tremendous chop along the side of the quivering, gray-white horror. Pus-like ooze sprayed in the wake of Lifedrinker’s blade, and he felt the axe pull at his hands as she seemed to surge through the flesh, and Victor saw currents of purple-black Energy rushing toward the axehead through the puckered flesh of the creature.

A handful of the hooked tentacles released the ground and swung toward Victor, and he danced back, waving Lifedrinker in front of himself to ward them off. He nimbly sprang toward the rear of the exposed slug body, out of their reach, and began to hack into the top of it where it was just coming out of the hole. Again, Lifedrinker cleaved through the pulpy flesh, pulling runnels of that purple-black Energy into herself. Victor watched the process, cleave after cleave, and realized his rage had faded and that the monstrosity was only weakly thrashing, its hooked tentacles mostly lying limp.

“Die! Just fucking die!” he screamed, moving around it, hacking great gashes into its side and severing tentacles whenever they came within reach. Finally, the thing shuddered, and a massive gout of bile-like fluid poured out of the mangled intestinal protuberance, and then it collapsed, slipping slowly down its hole.

Large, baseball-sized motes of purple-gold Energy started to wink into existence in the air above the gaping hole. Then they began to coalesce into streams—a broad, river-like ribbon flowed toward Victor, and a much narrower but still significant one, toward Thayla.

***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 21 Herald of Carnage. You have gained 10 will, 8 strength, and have 10 attribute points to allocate.***

***Congratulations! You’ve learned the skill Axe Mastery - Improved.***

***Congratulations! You’ve learned the skill Berserk - Improved.***

As the notifications filled his vision, Victor realized he was floating off the ground slightly. He stretched, arching his back and letting the rush fill him, and then he dropped to the ground lightly. He looked toward Thayla and saw that she was stirring, groaning softly. “You gonna live?” He asked, walking toward her.

“Ugh, am I dead?” She pushed herself up to a sitting position, and Victor was relieved to see the flesh had mended on her cheeks and arms. “I leveled? How? Last thing I remember was a spear hooking me and dragging me toward…” she paused and looked at the hole where the monster had slid into the darkness. “Wasn’t there a pool there?”

“Yeah, it was the mouth or throat of some kind of giant, underground, tentacled slug. It was gross as hell. You were almost dead, that’s for sure. Good thing that big, stinky, slithering, butthole was worth a lot of Energy.” Victor reached out, taking Thayla’s hand and helping her to her feet.

“You have a way with words,” she said, examining her frayed leather vest and the nearly-dissolved shirt she wore underneath.

“Well, I’m not trying to be rude, but your braids are soaked with that thing’s spit or whatever, and you kind of stink.”

“My hair!” Thayla was suddenly holding a half-full bottle of wine and pulling the cork out with her teeth, then she started pouring it over her hair and braids, trying to rinse the acidic fluid away.

“You don’t have water?”

“No!”

“Shit, me either. I have the watery wine the captain gave us, though.” He, too, produced a flask of wine and started helping Thayla.

“You realize you’re covered in gore, too, right?” she snapped, though there was relief in her voice as she began to realize her hair was holding up to the acidic fluid.

“Doesn’t seem likely we’ll find a shower down here, though we will pass by a river soon, I think.”

“That’s right, Victor.”

“Thanks, Gorz.”

“This cavern is fucking disgusting; let’s get out of here.” Victor started walking toward the exit tunnel but stopped when he saw something shiny winking in his glow stone. “What’s this?” He was walking through the shallow puddle where the creature had vomited up its guts as it died, and, as he advanced, he began to make out glittering objects. He saw rings, bracelets, a necklace, and quite a few gemstones. Larger lumps of metal looked like they were once pieces of armor or weapons, though they hadn’t fared as well in the creature’s belly as the objects made of denser gold and silver.

“Treasure!” Thayla said, scooping up a gold chain.

“Let’s gather this stuff up on that flat rock, and then we can go through it.” Victor had already started, fishing out a couple of rings and a large red gemstone. Thayla and he, their urgency to leave forgotten, spent the next several minutes sifting through the disgusting effluence. In the end, they had a little pile of gold and silver rings, some of them with gemstones, some plain, and several necklaces and bracelets. They’d gathered a pile of metal armor, mostly worn down to uselessness, but one piece seemed perfectly fine.

Thayla held up the silvery bracer and said, “This thing’s artificed for sure; see the runes? Mind if I try it on?”

“Go for it. What about those blades?” Victor gestured to the pile of sword, dagger, and spear blades they’d found. “Any of them magical?”

“I think one of the spear blades is. It’s perfectly sharp and doesn’t seem decayed.” She pointed, and Victor picked it up. The blade was eight or ten inches long with two razor-sharp edges. He could see the part where the old spear haft would have been mounted, but there was no trace of the wood. Still, the blade was covered in bright silvery runes, and it veritably hummed with Energy.

“Alright, I’ll take this spearhead, and you take the bracer. Then we can split the rest up?”

“Hold on, let’s see if any of this jewelry’s enchanted,” she said, smiling at how the shiny bracer hugged her wrist. Victor nodded and began sorting through the pile of rings. He found two with runes inscribed on them and set them aside. Thayla shook her head after going through the necklaces and bracelets.

“How do we tell what these rings do?”

“Bond with them—I’ll do one; you do the other.”

Victor picked up the larger ring, a thick silvery band with a yellow gem mounted on a square facet. He trickled some of his Energy into it, and suddenly a description in System text appeared before him:

***Ring of the Guest: Once per day, the wearer of this ring can knock upon a mundane lock, and it will open.***

“Weird! I got a notification describing the item.”

“That happens if an artificer takes the time and effort to give the item a description,” Thayla said. “This ring had one also. It’s a ring of whispers, or so the artificer labeled it. It says it can allow the wearer to overhear distant conversations.”

“That’s pretty cool. This one allows the wearer to open locks once per day.”

“Want to trade? Or do you want to keep that one?”

“Let’s just keep what we got for now,” Victor said, then pointed to the other piled valuables. “Let’s take turns picking these others. You go first.” Thayla nodded, then she scooped up a large red gem. Victor followed her lead and picked a glittering blue gem. They continued like that until all the objects were gone, and Victor ended up with eleven rings and necklaces and seven precious-looking jewels.

When they left the putrid cavern and walked a short way down the narrow, much cleaner tunnel, Thayla sighed loudly and leaned against the wall, taking several deep, exaggerated breaths. “Ancestors, it feels good to breathe some clean air again.”

“Yeah, that creature was nasty.” Victor, too, took a deep breath, groaning at how sticky with gore his body still was. He rubbed his hands vigorously, trying to rub away some of the dried blood. Even his neck was tacky, and he rubbed at that too. “I’m dirtier than ever, even worse than when I was fighting in the pits.”

“You were a pit fighter?”

“Yeah, when I first got summoned to this world…” Victor’s heart started to race, and he said, “Wait! What if those rich assholes try to summon us?”

“What?” Thayla scoffed loudly, “Good luck! My will is plenty high to resist an unwanted summon. Is your will that low?”

“No, it's my highest stat!”

“You’ll be fine, then! When you were summoned before, was your will lower?”

“Hah, yeah—I was level zero.”

“There you go. Don’t worry about getting summoned.”

“Really? Just like that? What would happen if they tried?”

“You’d feel them pulling at you, and you could pull back. It’s a thousand times harder to pull someone through space than for that person to simply hold their ground. Summons work differently than portals or teleportation skills. I don’t know why—it's way past my level of expertise.”

“How do you know that? Did someone try to summon you?”

“No. It’s common knowledge; even little kids know it. My favorite nursery story involved a witch that gave people poisoned pies so they’d fall asleep and be unable to resist her summon spell. Then she cooked them into more pies which she fed to their families.”

“Goddamn! That’s a twisted story! That was your favorite?” Victor raised his eyebrow, giving her a searching look.

“Well, there’s more to it! One little girl she summons escapes and makes friends with the witch’s pet forest troll. The troll saves her in the end.”

“Troll? There’re trolls in stories from my world, too.”

“Really?” Thayla straightened up, and the two of them continued down the tunnel, talking quietly about fairy tales, which brought to light that fairies were also a thing in this world. Victor was telling Thayla about wendigos when she held a finger to her lips and touched her ear. By now, Victor knew that meant she heard something, so he slowed his breathing and tried to hear it also.

At first, he couldn’t separate the sound from the normal echoes and scrapes that seemed ubiquitous in the deep, but after listening for a few moments, he heard it—a constant rushing, rumbling sound. “The river,” he hissed softly.

“Right!” Thayla started moving forward again, Victor close behind. The temperature began to drop, and the stones in the tunnel wall grew cool, and soon, the rush of the river was unmistakable. They came to the mouth of the passage and saw that it opened onto an enormous tunnel with a quickly flowing river at its center. The tunnel floor was stony with patches of actual sand here and there in depressions. Victor wondered if the river swelled during certain seasons, and that’s why the tunnel was so much wider than the current flow.

“Look,” Thayla said, pointing along the river, and Victor could just see, in the light of their glow lamps, that, though the tunnel narrowed, there was a clear, open path along the river in both directions.

“That’s the way we need to go to get to the dungeon,” he said, gesturing to the left.

“You think there’s anything terrible lurking in that water?” Thayla was slowly moving closer to the rushing river.

“It seems to be moving too fast for something to be lurking,” Victor replied, moving closer. He knew what she was thinking: it would be very nice to get cleaned up.

“I’ll fill up some empty wine bottles, and we can rinse off back on the shore, so the blood doesn’t get in the water,” Thayla said.

“Good thinking! I saw a documentary about sharks once—they can smell blood in the water for like a mile or something.”

“Sharks?”

“Yeah, um, monsters that live in the ocean.”

“Right, well, here.” She handed him an empty bottle. “Faster if we both fill them.” She held out another, and he took it. The two of them moved up to the flowing river and quickly filled their bottles, then scurried back toward the tunnel wall. They poured the water over themselves, scrubbing away dried blood and grime. Victor saw Thayla fish out a clean shirt from her ring, so he turned away and kept scrubbing at his gore-matted hair.

It took him another two trips to the river to fill his wine bottles before he felt clean, and by then, he was shivering from the cold, his clothes, all but his pants, soaking wet. Once again, Victor silently praised the person who crafted his miraculous black, self-cleaning, self-patching pants.

“Ready?” Thayla asked, her teeth also chattering.

“Yeah, we need to get moving and build up some heat!”

“We’ll be fine! Do you feel that breeze blowing along the river? We’ll be dry in no time.”

“Hmm, yeah, good point.” Victor nodded and started walking. According to the map Gorz had helped him draw, they were more than halfway to the dungeon. He was beginning to feel a lot better about their odds of making it.

“Victor, do you see that?”

“What?” Victor peered ahead into the darkness and saw a bunch of little yellow lights or maybe reflections of their glow lamps. He stared at them for a moment and noticed they kept winking on and off, and then it hit him—they were blinking eyes.