Vraxious- Forsaken Lands
Vrax watched from across the square in his elevated perch as Torvald shook the sack full of Bogarts and a single Dandelion with the myriad of improvements he had made. This is going to be interesting...just remember, Torvald, toss them lightly; we want them to run some and disperse some before...the big finale.
The scene below Vrax was bizarre chaos and violence. The gliders were still harrying the edges of the crowds with phantasms but with much less impact than before. The phantasms they summoned to battle the bogart were much lesser in number and size. Vrax figured they were probably running out of mana after their rather intense opening to this shit show.
The Dreadfeast had oozed away into the shadows somewhere after puppeting the armless corpse of the voidcaller like a grisly sock puppet and catching a few arrow wounds in return for his performance. The swarm of bogarts below still numbered over a hundred scattered around, and the element of surprise was solidly gone. Most now rounded on Torvald, where he stood as a giant glistening hunk of bait on a low rooftop.
Torvald bellowed, letting as many bogarts as he could swarm towards his low-slung building until he had to start kicking them from the edge as they climbed over one another to get to him. He kicked one off the roof so hard it landed near the middle sacrificial plinth and then reached into his bag of goodies with a grimace on his face. Torvald pulled a wriggling bogart with a gag in its mouth from his bag. Its veins and arteries were highlighted a bright green as thousands of dandelions swam through it with every heartbeat. He gently tossed it off the roof down the clambering ramp of its companions and then did it again with the other three bogarts, making sure to toss the final one off towards the labyrinth of small stalls that many of the other foes were coursing through.
There were a few tense moments as Vrax watched the infected Bogarts be unbound; two were simply screaming and insensate at this point, not even able to walk. The third and fourth, though, stumbled through the crowd and stalls, clawing themselves open trying to make it stop. Then one of the infected bogarts near Torvald died, its heart stilled. It never even hit the ground. The moment the dandelions sensed their host had perished, they rooted into bone and flesh and drew deep of the now nearly shredded insides.
The first Bogart to die erupted as thousands of dandelions fought for the bounty of its body all at once. It was a dark sight: the creature simultaneously imploded, skin sucked tight against bone, and hundreds of newly formed dandelions burst free, violently misting the air above with a cloud of starry glowing dots. The glowing seeds plunged down into the hoard below.
One then another fell victim to the infectious rain; they would stumble, bodies losing control as more and more of the vicious invaders joined the swirling feast within their bodies. Stumbling figures would suddenly lock up before becoming scattered sculptures releasing a plume of death above themselves. Then it would happen again and again; the cycle continued. Only a scant few figures in the market were seemingly unaffected.
Vrax was horrified at how well it worked; the bogarts deaths dramatically cascaded into a cloud of dandelions above and within the market so thick he could barely see Torvald through the darting, hungry seeds chasing the few uninfected with endless need. Vrax waited a few more heartbeats until all he could see were the dead or dying within the swirling green haze. Then he leaned down carefully, dropping beside where the foul effigy was. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel its foul protectors circling like hungry sharks somewhere in the haze.
Vrax activated his stigmata. Calling both retriever hives to the barren second floor with him. The effigy didn’t rot away like it should have; instead, as the wave of necrotic energy from the cycle hit it, it burned, burned with an angry ethereal green fire. The effigy screeched in pain, and something within the Hungry Haze clambered from where it had hidden within the blood below.
Vrax’s eyes widened in horror as three heads crested the lip of the platform he was on. Each was a patchwork amalgamation of rotten animals and monsters roughly stretched across what must have been the draconian skulls of long-dead Voruks. The body was a vile, ill-fitting joke; the carcasses of innumerable deer stretched so that their many long-dead hooves moved it like the legs of a centipede. The limp tail trailing after it as it hauled itself up with the maddening twisted clatter and splatter of its hooves was made of still-living humanoids twisted together into a rope nailed into its spine; the end of this tail held a hunk of metal with jagged spikes the size of a Bogart body.
“Fuuucccckkkkk……” Vrax mumbled to himself, stepping back slightly as the abomination twisted towards him, dozens of eyes from the discordant heads loosely locking onto him. Vrax used Identify and really fucking hoped Sunshine was back in action. [Chimeric Idol Tier-1] (lvl 44).
The hives flanking Vrax saved his life with their reflexive aggression. Dozens of retrievers leaped over his head, creating a curtain of blades that draped between him and the Chimeria just as its centermost head snapped forward, extending so far that vertebrae and ligaments snapped its flapping jaws closed around razor-sharp umbilicals directly in front of Vrax. He stumbled backwards before the writhing teeth or his own plant could shred him. The chimera shook its head like a wolf with prey around a dozen umbilicals, oblivious to the devastating damage it sustained as eyes popped and oozed and the lower jaw was nearly severed.
Vrax leapt to the side and slid off the edge of the building, using the cooperative vines for his descent. He didn’t slow his escape as he shouted to Torvald, “Plan B! I'm the lure! Break the fucking shrine!” The effigy burned in a ghostly green fire towering above him, but the flames were eating away at it painfully slowly. Vrax didn’t know if once it was gone the chimera would “die,” but it certainly wouldn’t hurt their odds. Vrax heaved a full smelter moss jar up at the effigy as he ran. The bright orange flash cutting through the green haze briefly let him see the torn heads of the chimera as they finished off one of the hives with a twist of its jaws, tearing the hive into three rough chunks. Then it careened over to the edge of the wall, clattering over the edge like a burning, demented, undead centipede, more falling than climbing the last few strides.
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Vrax flared his stigmata garden again, dropping a lurker to hopefully slow the chimera. The next few minutes were a mad scramble of dives and vaults; Vrax dodged, sprinted, and climbed like his life depended on it. The chimera skittered over and through buildings just behind him the whole way. When they reached the edge of the market boulder, Vrax leapt onto a massive carpet of glowing green moss that blanketed a good portion of the ground. In the flat area of the Garden dome just beyond the boulder, he used his stigmata to summon sunshine back behind him on the edge of the boulder.
The Chimera crashed through a market stall and came face to face with a Maneater Daisy taller than Vrax that hit it like a bolt from a ballista, its initial impact tearing one of the heads free from the body and stuffing it into its maw. Before they both descended into a tumbling, thrashing battle of two unfearing apex predators. Vrax rushed to the end of the patch of moss near the massive square exit ruins and looked back with bated breath.
Sunshine was latched onto the two remaining heads with its tendrils, the mouths burrowed into where the chimera's brain should be, greedily gulping down the undead slurry it found there. All the while, the chimera thudded its metal tail into sunshine, slowly tearing through its torso. It was a horrible, brutal stalemate as they both eviscerated each other. Then the chimera used a skill. Vrax saw the mana filter through the air, making a visible thread that bound it to the effigy burning in the distance.
The chimera Began to knit back together the hunks of flesh littering the ground around it, slowly dragged back to it by an unseen force; piece by rotting piece it was made “whole” again. Finally, in the middle of its slugging match with the somehow still functioning sunshine, its head leapt back to its body and reattached with the sound of tearing fabric.
“Oh fuck me…..” Vrax said with concern as the chimera fought its way past Sunshine’s tendrils to lock all three maws around it, roughly tearing it in half around the middle and discarding the severed halves to either side as if they held no appeal to it. Its dull gaze locked back onto Vrax nearly one hundred strides away, and the thread of magic above it quivered with black magic. The humanoids stretched across its tail began to sing in agony; words without meaning only carrying suffering and dark will echoed across the clearing, washing against Vrax.
Vrax braced himself, expecting a wave of fear to course through him or a beckoning call from beyond that he would have to resist; what happened was far worse. He struggled to keep his sense of self as the last moments of every being sacrificed to make this undead abomination played through him in flashes. He was the goblin dragged screaming from its tent as its children were devoured alive before him. The brave stag helpless as his family was stitched together one by one. The last heir of a merchant family realizing he had wasted his last chance to redeem his family name before the claws struck.
Vrax cradled his head as his heart hammered, trying to separate them from him. The creature in the distance laughed soundlessly. That was enough; Vrax latched onto the laughter of his father, of a hundred pranks he had yet to tell him of, and used that to anchor himself. With the stability of a lifetime of desires unmet and his formidable mental resistance, Vrax slowly raised his left arm and extended his middle finger.
The Beast did not like that it galloped over the edge of the boulder like a crashing wave towards Vrax and onto the patch of moss. Vrax ran as fast as he could the other way. The chimera made it another dozen uneven steps before the hundred-stride patch of adapted Smelter Moss it was running across detonated.
A wall of green flame as bright as the hottest forge surged outwards nearly thirty strides into the air. The glass dome nearby simply liquefied, dripping down like fragments of liquid diamond. The cobblestones of the square turned to molten stone, and the shockwave was so fierce that many nearby ancient structures were finally brought low. Vrax looked out from his sheltered hole in the ground nearby at the slowly rising mushroom cloud of green smoke. The world was nothing but flames and a high-pitched ringing sound in his ears, the dust, smoke, and pieces of ash slowly drifting down to blanket the ancient city for a thousand strides in every direction.
Vrax just closed his eyes for a moment and prepared for the unlimited potential the system offered those who braved its challenges. His armor flared with power as the essence washed into him; he gritted his teeth and opened his notifications through the pain. He ignored the hundreds of kill notifications; his eyes locked onto an honest-to-gods [Achievement].
Explorer Erni-Von Hillbach – The Forsaken Lands
Erni stood on top of the monolithic tower in this ancient city, his hands trembling on his telescope, unsure what in all of the nine hells he had just witnessed. His guards behind him were on high alert, weapons drawn. Corpus the mage had erected a jagged ruby shield around the rim of the tower; Hans had his massive shield and mace out and was trying to see over the edge of the shield.
“What in the actual fuck was that, Erni? You said some idiot low-level newbies were sneaking into that camp you have been staring at for two days, and then everything went tits up. What the fuck was that screaming about monsters and gods? No, fuck, what the hell was that?” Hans excitedly gestured widely towards the burning, half-melted courtyard in the distance raining ash and smoke and the green fog that seemed to move with a will of its own, slowly spreading around the old Elysian gardens.
Erni slowly turned towards Hans, taking slow, steady breaths. “Whoever the hell that was, we do not want to meet them; they command beasts of nightmare and suffering.” Erni took a deep breath to collect himself some more. “He summoned some flower monstrosity to fight the idol before he caused that explosion. Does that sound familiar to anyone else too?”
The mage Corpus turned a bit pale. “Oh fuck me, that’s the Paladin of the Forsaken Lands. We should move. I have no idea what he's using to obscure his actual level, but we don’t want to deal with this. Hurry up and draw your maps; we are leaving.”
“Wait, who?” Hans asked in confusion. He hadn’t been back in town for a few months, holed up with whoever was on duty from the explorers guild.
Thankfully everyone in the tower were experienced dungeon delvers that had been to some of the secret dungeon floors spread throughout the Forsaken Lands. Corpus turned to Hans after making his shield a bit higher. “No one knows anything for sure about him yet, but he apparently supplied the Godsbane with a new monster design it used to fucking ruin the paladin initiates. A mad mage in cahoots with a dungeon—is that enough reason for you?” Corpus nervously peered through the telescope.
“Gods I can see him; he’s down there on the edge of the wall of fire just staring into the flames… What is… There’s some eldritch abomination of a flower crawling through the fire to him… What the hells am I watching?”
Erni pulled out a notepad. “Quick, I barely saw him before it all happened. Describe him in detail.” Erni began jotting notes as Corpus continued with an audible gulp.
“Tall, easily a head over most men, mottled cloak all burned to shit now…. He is wearing plate mail made of wood; it looks like the seams are burning with that same green fire...hmm, he's wielding a... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING??”
They all froze as a sick, cheerful voice echoed through the city, “Yes… Yes, darling, how droll; we will have to have another party soon!
Corpus pulled away from the telescope, a deep furrow across his brow. “I would like to leave now; he just hugged something from my nightmares that was carrying a literal bushel of legs.”