Duskbound

Chapter 76

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.

[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.]

[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.