Duskbound

Something had occurred to Velik in the last few seconds, something that he wasn't sure he was right about, but if he was, it was very, very important. Even with a full cavern to spread out through, and with literal miles and miles of flesh that composed its body, for some reason, all the faces and mouths were concentrated here. They hadn't even spread out to take up positions on different walls or the ceiling.

It was possible that was a meaningless choice, that the faces could appear anywhere and had just chosen not to, but Velik didn't think so. Otherwise, they could have appeared elsewhere in the cave network he'd been exploring for days now. All those arms and hands and teeth and whatever else were sprouting like weeds followed a pattern, as well. He just hadn't noticed it until he'd been forced to hold still for a moment and actually taken some time to think about it.

Nothing like that had ever happened anywhere else. No arms had sprung out of the walls to bar his passage in the upper tunnels. No, the cave had been forced to use some sort of solidifying slime monster to trap him inside and force him deeper. It might have a thousand tons of mass to draw on, and it might be able to shape all of that to its will, but distance was a factor. The farther from its core the flesh got, the less it was able to manifest control over it.

The Chalin monster didn't fit into his hypothesis. It was completely disconnected from the rest of the cavern, but at the same time, it had so many limbs that it was always touching the ground somewhere. Maybe that was enough, or maybe the Chalin portion of the collective of minds had separated itself completely in order to control the monster.

Can they do that? Could there be ten or eleven more fully autonomous bodies being built behind other walls right now? If there are, and I kill them all, then what happens to the core itself? If I find and destroy the core, what happens to the minds trapped in this body? Could I have saved Chalin and the rest?

Find your adventure at empire

He wasn't sure if he could take the handicap of hunting the core without fighting back against the monster in front of him to the best of his abilities, but he figured he had one good shot to try. If his theory about proximity to the core was correct, and he assumed that, unlike a standard dungeon core, this one was mobile, that meant all he needed to do was figure out where things were growing fastest and strike there.

Oh, and survive long enough to do that. I'm not even sure I've got enough left in me to use [Dread Lance] again, but I'm going to destroy the core. Shit, that means I've got to stay ahead of this whole nightmare scenario for at least another minute or two.

The Chalin monster was gone, more or less. The back few arm-legs were whole, though charred black just like the wall Velik had been pinned to, but the rest of the flesh had broken down or been hurled away from the kinetic energy of the skill. All of the severed limbs that had been nearby were similarly gone, either disintegrated or just blown away to get tangled in the growths farther back from the point of the explosion.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

His best guess was that the brain was moving through the mass of flesh overhead. That was why the longest arms came down from the ceiling, and why the attack had started from there. It wasn't until the brain had moved behind that wall that things had started really growing out of the floor, and that had slowed down again once he'd blown open that hiding place. The core could obviously move, but it was giving its position away now that he'd figured out what to look for.

The faces were all yelling at him again, but this time, it was a lot harder to shrug off the voices. Really, only the fact that they were all screaming different things was what kept him from being overwhelmed. It was easier to ignore the noise when he couldn't figure out what they were saying, but it did clue him into a problem.

The amulet Torwin had given him was no longer hanging from his neck. It might not even be in one piece, given that he'd taken a good deal of damage from his [Dread Lance], but at the very least, the cord it was hanging on had snapped. Velik didn't have time to go searching for it, though. He'd just have to resist whatever mental connection the dungeon core was trying to form with him.

He didn't want to think about what would happen if he couldn't.

New arms were growing out of the wall, slowly at first, but speeding up as the core shifted position. It was closing in on him, or at least getting him in range. Now that he knew to look for it, he was amazed he hadn't noticed the lines of growth before. Then again, the floor hadn't been quite so thoroughly covered and he'd been all over the cavern, leading to the arms growing in a trail that chased him around and tried to predict what direction he'd move in.

Now that everything had already popped out of the flesh layer covering the cavern, all that was left was to make it grow faster as needed, and he didn't need [Apex Hunter] to see that. Velik eyeballed where he thought the core was based on which arms were biggest, then started circling around to it. He didn't know how smart a dungeon core was, but this one was an anomaly anyway, and this would work better if it didn't realize what he was doing.

As he'd expected, it kept shifting positions, trying to maintain the same distance, but Velik thought that if he really tried, he could close in on it before it could react. He just needed more time, and the way he planned on gaining that was by letting loose with [Savage Rhythm]. His spear arced around him, slicing through anything and everything that he passed in a continuous blur of movement. Full arms were hacked off at the joints and sent flying away, where they were sometimes caught by hands perched atop other arms and replanted into the floor.

All of it was a feint, just a way to buy time. It was working, too, until flaps of skin unfolded in the walls and let new monsters into the cavern. There were the expected centipedes, but there were also a dozen or so scorplings, including several of the smaller assassin scorplings, and a few smaller samples of the flesh monster Chalin had controlled. That was going to complicate things.

The simple truth of the matter was that Velik had been awake and fighting constantly for three days now, maybe longer. He'd lost track. Barring a few breaks that never lasted longer than twenty or thirty minutes, he'd been on the move the whole time. He was tired, and using the hasting potion in conjunction with [Savage Rhythm] hadn't done him any favors.

It was a miracle he was still on his feet. For all the power his race and class had granted him, he was still mortal, and he knew he was reaching his limits. Grasping hands he'd easily evaded ten minutes ago snagged at his clothing as he slipped by. Monsters coming at him from every side should have been no issue to sort out. Instead, his mind fumbled to figure out what would reach him first.

He could feel the magic building in him, whatever it was. Mana, maybe, or something else – he didn't know and he didn't care. The important part was that he'd drained it with his last [Dread Lance] and he needed more time to get enough back to use the skill again. The monsters weren't going to give him that time, and he wasn't sure he had it in him to keep fighting much longer.

He skewered a scorpling being propelled across the ceiling by the forest of hands, then swung his spear hard to dislodge the body. It crashed into a centipede weaving its way through the arms growing out of the floor, not killing the monster, but certainly stunning it for a moment. Another centipede immediately took its place, crawling over the insensate body of its companion to reach Velik.

Chest heaving, he forced himself to move faster. A second scorpling dropped down from the ceiling on him, too fast for him to stab it midair. Instead, he raised the shaft of his spear overhead as a shield between himself and the monster, flinging it sideways the instant it impacted. Its stinger-tipped tail whipped toward his face, but not fast enough to make contact before it was out of range.

A hand grabbed his foot at the same time he was dodging the first flesh beast to reach him, causing him to stumble a single step. That was all it took for the monster to ram into him. Thankfully, it was much smaller than the one with Chalin's face on its meatball head, but 'smaller' was a relative term and it was still four or five times heavier than Velik.

I can't keep going. What I've built up is going to have to be enough.

Velik had a good guess about where the core was, somewhere overhead and sliding through the fleshy ceiling to keep him in range so it could sprout more interfering hands to pluck at him. Right… there!

He took three steps—all the space he could claim in a straight line—and jumped with all the strength he had left in him. A flesh beast lunged in front of him, rearing up on three of its six legs, but Velik twisted in the air and stabbed his spear into its chest. He landed on the monster feet first, kicking it backwards from the impact, and tore the spear free.

In a way, the interference was a good thing. He'd been stretching how far he thought he could jump and knew he wouldn't have made the landing from his starting point. As the flesh beast slammed into the ground, he jumped off it and reached his target. Without hesitation, [Dread Lance] roared out of his spear as he stabbed it into the palm of a hand hanging above him.

Energy arced upwards, proliferating through the limb and engulfing the ceiling. Flesh exploded again, showering him and every nearby monster in chunks of meat, and something huge slowly slid into the new hole Velik had made.

Even as it sagged down into the room, smoke and ash swirling around it, a tendril of flesh whipped out from the hole and caught the lump of what appeared to be blood-splattered bone.

No, you don't! Velik snarled and forced himself back upright. This was his chance, and he wasn't wasting it. Ignoring the scorpling closing in on him, he leaped straight up, spear leading.