Duskbound

The spear wasn't getting through that layer of bone, not at the angle Velik was working from. Maybe if he'd been fresh, it would have been a different story. But that wasn't the case. His hands were trembling with fatigue and his breathing was ragged and labored. So, the bone wasn't the target. The fleshy tendril trying to haul it back into the ceiling was.

The blade parted the skin-wrapped muscle easily, and the sphere of bone crashed to the floor. Cracks radiated outward from the impact, proving that the shell was vulnerable after all. Velik landed right next to it, paused to kill the scorpling that was flicking its stinger forward, then spun the spear around to face the point down.

A blast of pure noise overwhelmed him, blacking out his vision and causing him to sway. Dimly, he recognized the sound as screaming voices, united in their demand that he stop. Without the amulet, he wasn't nearly so well protected, and part of his mind simply shut down under the onslaught.

Give up, the voices whispered in his head. Lay down your weapon. Be still until we call for you. Your power came from us, and it will return to us.

Part of him recognized those thoughts as outside interference, his enemy at work undermining his will to fight. But it was just so damn tempting that he almost did it anyway. He didn't need a malevolent voice whispering in his ear to rest. His own body was screaming that at him every time he so much as twitched. He'd fought through the pain and the heavy weight of exhaustion, and all for nothing.

He was no closer to winning this fight now than when it had started. The enemy was too much for him, unbeatable, and he'd been a fool to ever set foot in this place. It was easier to just surrender to the inevitable. It would hurt for a moment, and then everything would finally be over. Besides, the dungeon was right. He was part of it, or at least he was supposed to be.

Fuck. That.

The thought came unbidden, a spark of anger that was almost suffocated as soon as it surfaced. But once it had ignited in his mind, it started spreading. No one, not Deshir, not the lumberjacks he sometimes saw in the forest, not Torwin or Jensen, and certainly not some disgusting monster in a cave, got to tell him to lie down and die.

Velik fought. He'd been fighting for ten years, and he wasn't going to stop today just because his arms were heavy and the monster wanted him to make things easy for it. With his blood pounding in his ears, he snapped back to reality. The bone sphere was still in front of him, but a new hand was growing from the flesh-covered ground beneath it, cradling the sphere in its palm and lifting it back up.

A scorpling had crawled up his back and was perched there, clinging to him with its legs digging painfully into his sides and its stinger poised inches from his neck. A single twitch would no doubt cause it to strike.

[Savage Rhythm] was still coursing through his body. It wasn't as strong as it had been earlier, but it would be enough. It had to be enough. Velik's hand shot up and grabbed the tail just behind the stinger. Immediately, the scorpling tried to force the barb into his neck, but the difference between their physical stats was so huge that it was no contest. Spinning, he pulled the monster by its tail and gritted his teeth against the hot lines of pain its legs drew across his ribs as it was dislodged.

He slammed the scorpling into the next nearest monster, a flesh beast that had taken a step his way as soon as he'd started moving. Without waiting to see the result of his attack, he released the scorpling, grabbed his spear in both hands, and drove it straight down through the bone shell. Wrenching it back and forth powerfully, he widened the hole and scrambled the meat within.

Immediately, the entire cave shuddered. The very walls quivered, and the screaming voices reached a crescendo before abruptly cutting off. All of the limbs growing out of the walls, floor, and ceiling fell limp. The only things that didn't stop were the monsters.

Velik ripped his spear free, flinging blood through the air as he met the charge of the next monster. At this point, his movements were entirely instinctive, some combination of [Apex Hunter] guiding his senses while [Spear Warden] moved his body. The fight dragged on while great gouts of blood exploded out of the walls for seemingly no reason.

Flesh necrotized in front of his eyes, not that he had time to stand there and watch it, and chunks of it started falling out of the ceiling. More than one monster was crushed under the monumental weight of it all, and Velik himself was struck on three separate occasions. For all that, the battle didn't slow down, not until all the monsters were dead and he was standing on a pile of chunky meat and body parts.

Everything was quiet, almost unnervingly so. It wasn't until the flesh lining the cave died that it really hit Velik how it had warped noise, how everything had a grotesque, wet, slapping sound to it. Now that he was surrounded by bare stone walls, the acoustics had completely changed.

What a weird thing to notice, he thought to himself as he tried to focus on more important things.

The core, if that's what it even was, was split open down the middle, with the savaged remains of that huge brain he'd seen visible inside. It didn't look anything like the massive pillar he'd seen in that dungeon he and Chalin had entered years ago, but then, nothing about this dungeon was normal. He still wasn't even entirely sure it counted as a dungeon. There certainly hadn't been any sort of notifications about entering one or defeating it.

Then again, he'd gotten a lot of notifications for killing monsters and he definitely hadn't read all of them. Going back through them now, he saw one that was unusual.

[You have slain a Shifting Flesh Amalgamation Core (level 47).]

"Was that you, Chalin?" he asked the dead lump of brain matter. "You and everyone else trapped here? Did this monster consume all of you and take on your memories and skills?"

He'd probably never know the truth for sure, but maybe things would make a bit more sense once he got a bit of sleep. That wasn't going to happen in the caves, though. Even if he'd felt safe, the smell of rotting meat was quickly filling the tunnels.

Slowly, wearily, he started making his way out of the cave complex. At one point, it occurred to him to check his mana compass, and he smiled when he saw it now pointed steadily southwest instead of spinning around wildly. Whether this place truly had been a dungeon or just one massive creature, he'd killed it. Hopefully, the endless tide of monsters flowing out of the forests and into the frontier lands would finally be stemmed.

Once he was on the surface, he immediately walked to the nearest stream and hurled himself bodily into the water. Twenty minutes wasn't even close to enough to get the stench out of his hair and off his skin, but the [Mending] enchantments in his clothes were hard at work taking care of that. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing.

Then he found a place to sleep and, for the first time in half a week, closed his eyes for more than a few minutes.

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He woke feeling strangely refreshed and weary at the same time. The few hours of downtime had revitalized him, but he needed a lot more to regain his full strength. Food was also important for that, but he was confident he could last a few more days before that became a real problem. Plenty of time to hunt.

Another pleasant surprise that he'd failed to notice in his near-fugue state when he'd been trudging out of the cave was that he'd made substantial gains to his level and skills. The messages had been lost in the constant noise of kill notifications, meaning he'd gained, not one, but three levels since the last time he'd checked. He didn't know how often that happened, especially for somebody already in the mid-thirties, but he was guessing it was pretty rare.

[Apex Hunter], [Dread Lance], and [Savage Rhythm] had all gone up a rank as well, and he had free points to use on his stats. Without hesitation, he dumped all of them into mystic, bringing it up to 38. [Dread Lance] was powerful, but needing so much time between activations was a handicap that had nearly gotten him killed.

[Name: Velik]

[Race: Human (Duskbound)]

[Class: The Black Fang]

[Level: 38]

[Physical: 113(+18)]

[Mental: 61(+2)]

[Mystical: 38(+20)]

[Free Points: 0]

[Decarma: 14688]

[Skills:]

[Apex Hunter (Rank 6)]

[Spear Warden (Rank 8)]

[Dread Lance (Rank 2)]

[Savage Rhythm (Rank 3)]

[Gear:]

[Harbinger of Dusk (+15Ph, +5My)]

[Hunter's Cowl(+2Me)]

[Stalker's Boots(+3Ph)]

[Survivalist's Shirt]

[Self-Repairing cloak]

[Mystic's Earring (+15My)]

Finally, he'd somehow gained nearly ten thousand decarmas. That confused him at first, because there was no way he'd killed enough monsters to gain so much, but when he went digging, he found a strange message that explained where the decarmas came from, even if it invited more questions than it answered.

[You have completed a quest: Save the frontier from the source of the corruption.]n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

[Reward: 7500 decarmas, 1 class orb with unique class, "The Flesh Crafter"]

Where did this even come from? he wondered. He'd never even been given a quest by the system, so he wasn't sure how he could have completed it unknowingly. And that reward had him crinkling his nose in disgust. Was that Chalin's class when he became… whatever that thing was? Is this the seed to making a new monster just like him? Why would the system give me this as a reward?

The temptation to destroy the class orb danced through his mind, but it was tempered by the fact that he wasn't entirely sure how to do so and an entirely rational fear that messing with the orb would somehow trigger it, overwriting [The Black Fang] with a class he was completely sure he wanted nothing to do with.

Sitting around wasn't going to help him find any answers, and he was sick of dealing with all of this, anyway. Groaning, he climbed to his feet and started walking south. Torwin can sort this all out. I just want to kill monsters.