Vraxious- The Forsaken Lands
The trek into the valleys and crags of the nest was interesting… Torvald was as useful as a pig at an eleven brunch. Stumbling blindly behind Vrax, oblivious to the dozens of vile slugs that had oozed towards them across the badlands. Vrax finished off another [Soul Render Grub Tier-1.](lvl9) With a particularly petty twist of his spear, flaring smite into a spinning wire that rotted through the guts of the creature, its insides all gulped out of its mouth onto Torvalds boots.
Duchess had devolved from silently assassinating grubs creeping towards Torvald to simply murdering the shit out of anything not currently being stabbed. She was getting increasingly frustrated, as they could barely hurt her with their disgusting proboscis-like mouth that turned inside out when they struck, and worse, they apparently were too dumb to feel fear.
The latest one that slowly began inching towards Torvald she pounced on from nearly twenty strides away, impaling it with her tail and disdainfully flinging it to splat against a nearby canyon wall, obviously bored with these things. “The peasants offerings are trash; we should just burn the village and start again!” Duchess angrily mimicked.
Torvald shook the bloody goop off his boots, holding his nose against the stench. “Where did you hear all these things?! That merchant must have been lying his ass off about how they got you.” Torvald said to Duchess while carefully stepping over a rotted corpse.
Vrax reached back and put a hand over Torvald's mouth to shut him up; around the next canyon turn, he had seen the mouth of a cave. The ground around it was practically a carpet of every kind of corpse imaginable in various states of decay. They had found the nest entrance, but more importantly, they had found the first Render that wasn’t in the larval form. Vrax squinted in confusion, flashing identify he wasn’t familiar with the new threat, [Soul Render Collector Tier-1](lvl24).
They were vile-looking, roughly the size and shape of a bear with pustulent oozing flesh, but the ribcage area was spilled open; a mass of tentacles poured out of it, groping at corpses on the ground, occasionally stuffing one back into its torso. The head was just more tentacles, these ending in vibrating, twitching, uneven-bladed protrusions.
“Yikes, it’s not that high level, but we know how fucking little that means at this point.” Vrax whispered, and Torvald grunted in agreement. Both of them had had more than a few rude awakenings to the fact that levels were not a direct indicator of danger, just how much essence something had used to advance itself. Hell, Torvald and Vrax were great examples of that.
“It looks like something you would make,” Torvald whispered, peeking around the corner with Vrax. Duchess peeked around Torvald's shoulder too and made a strangled huffing sound, obviously not a fan of the smells here either.
They were about to charge out and rush the collector when a sudden wishing crack of something moving too fast to track boomed overhead. Vrax pulled himself and Torvald tight against the canyon wall, eyes trained up. A black speck tore through the air overhead, heading directly towards them. Another cracking sound shattered the clouds above, scattering the sky as the creature exploded through it in a whirl of wings. It was moving so fast Vrax couldn’t identify it before it hit the Collector and the ground so hard the canyon shuddered, a mesa in the distance teetering to its doom. Oh, that's fucking beautiful, and oh gods, are those feathers made of blood?
The creature impacted through the collector, hitting the ground with a deep thud as it made a noticeable crater, the impact turning the corpses on the ground into deadly fragments of bone flying at near supersonic speeds. Vrax couldn’t see many details of the now swaying creature through the plume of red dust it kicked up; only small red objects flaking away from it by the hundreds sailing into the horde of enemies around it with an enchanting whistling sound.
The dust slowly cleared, and the collector rained down around them in horrible meaty chunks as far as the eye could see. Vrax’s eyes widened as the creature laid utter waste to the twenty or so grubs outside the cave entrance blast zone in a matter of seconds. His identify finally took hold: [Skybreaker Tier-2](lvl38). It looked like a four-winged falcon if a falcon were the size of a warhorse and had feathers made of molten hate that dripped away and regrew constantly. The beak of the Skybreaker split open four ways, and it crowed its supremacy at the bubbling remains of the Renders, one more feather drifting from it like a hypnotic leaf before plunging like an arrow clean through the one grub that had avoided dying in the impact and ensuing maelstrom.
Then the veritable tide of blood and bile spattered across the mesa began drawing inwards, inching across the ground until it met the tips of the Skybreaker's wings; the gore, viscera, and bone slowly morphed into new feathers that snapped into place all along the creature. Vrax looked to make sure the Dreadfeast wasn’t about to get them killed, but Duchess had decided now was a good time to not be here anymore and wasn’t even in sight. “Fucking craven-ass wannabe dragon,” Vrax barely whispered to himself, still keeping tucked away.
Stolen story; please report.
The creature finished absorbing the massive pile of corpses and exploded skywards again, almost immediately disappearing from sight as it flew low to the ground, carving furrows of dust in its wake. Vrax squinted after it, rubbing some dust from his eyes, and gestured towards the cave, already slipping around the canyon wall towards the cave mouth.
The cave immediately stung Vrax’s nose with the sour, sickly sweet scent of rotting meat and something else that was horribly acrid, like long-unwashed urine. He unsummoned his armor for a moment just to smear a bit of forest-made perfume under his nose; it was just some pleasant-ish-smelling herbs. Gods, if I throw up with my armor on, I don’t even want to know how that would work. This is already one of the worst monster nests I’ve been in, and we are only at the entrance.
The floor was a slurry of red sand and bodily fluids. The stone walls dripped with some kind of orange excretion from the grubs; every so often a body was halfheartedly entombed in the dirty orange substance, and a few still weakly twitched. Vrax barely dared to breathe as he crept further into the looming darkness. This place held an oppressive, all-consuming sense of brutal indifference. Nothing here would feel the slightest shred of remorse for the atrocities it inflicted upon other life.
“I know I normally complain about them a lot.” Torvald said with some obvious trepidation in his voice and then continued, “But I, uh, really wouldn’t mind if you pulled some of your bullshit out right now, even the new dandelion variant you ended up not using last fight. These things have blood, so it would work…probably…”
Vrax opened his stigmata garden list for the first time since evolving it.
[Stigmata Garden 12/12]
[Acidic Lurker]
[Acidic Lurker]
[Razor Retriever Hive]
[Razor Retriever Hive]
[Sunshine] 2 Slots
[Maneater Daisy]
[Maneater Daisy]
[Cascading Vein Diver]
[Cascading Vein Diver]
[Gullet Diving Dandelion]
[Gullet Diving Dandelion]
Vrax smiled a bit; it was a pretty decent arsenal, and he was liking his new names for some of the adapted plants that were becoming mainstays. The dandelions in their different forms and the maneaters were almost certainly going to stick around. The retrievers really still needed some work to be more than deadly area denial weapons, and the acidic lurkers kept getting shredded before they did much lately.
Vrax looked back at Torvald in the gloom of the cave, only lit by the faint glow of his armor and the one magical lantern Torvald had clipped onto his belt. “I’m at least going to unleash the daisies into the tunnels, but let’s get farther in first. The last thing we need is them running off a random branch and not being helpful.”
They wound down past several junctions that joined with the main tunnel they were traveling in. Vrax kept guiding them downward; the tunnel emptied out into a large cavern, the air was an uncomfortably steamy haze thick with the cloying scent of decay. The center of the cave seemed to be a natural water basin formed from the stalagmites above dripping water onto the stony floor over eons. But what would once have been a pristine oasis in the dark was now a charnel house.
The water basin was home to a squirming mound of grubs climbing over each other, piling bodies and organs in haphazard stacks. The water was so tainted it was closer to a basin of half-coagulated blood. Collectors meandered in and out from the far end of the cavern, stuffing themselves full of dripping cargo before shuffling away into the darkness. The walls were lined with still twitching sacks of that orange bile that the renders seemed to seal prey in.
Torvald nearly gave them away with his dry heaving noises. “Vrax, let the damn murder flower out; it doesn’t have a nose. I’m going to be throwing up the whole time I’m fighting in there.” Torvald gasped out, shying farther from the food storage room.
Vrax held up a hand as his brows pointed down in concern. “Hold on, something isn’t right. This nest is old, like old-old. They have already turned the surroundings into a barren hellscape; we should have seen something more dangerous than a collector by now.”
Vrax let his enhanced hearing wash through the room; the unholy squelches of meaty things dominated the soundscape at first, an ungodly cacophony of flesh and organs. He carefully filtered out the disgusting noises one by one until it was only the muted whimpering and thuds of the trapped yet still living beings along the walls and something else: a deep, powerful heartbeat accompanied by sharp, short breaths.
Vrax focused on the out-of-place heartbeat, peering past the writhing mass and towards a smaller pile of offal that looked much the same as the others; a single shield-sized black eye blinked once from within the pile. What the hell is that… Vrax identified the pile, or rather the creature that had nestled itself within the pile, as the most awful form of camouflage Vrax had run across yet. [Soul Render Sentinel Tier-1](lvl30)
Vrax spent another few minutes scanning the room, but everything else was what he expected: a swarm of lesser grubs, one or two of the Collectors at a time, and the single sentinel watching over it all from its pile.
“Alright, Torvald, the pile of grubs in the center I’m going to drop sunshine into along with a few retrievers; they should be able to deal with that. That level thirty sentinel and the Collectors are both going to be dangerous though. If you get the Collectors, I’ll ambush the sentinel with my garden and one of the new dandelions.” Torvald simply nodded and did his best to start creeping towards the other entrance the Collectors were using.
Vrax waited for him to get about halfway and then sprinted straight into the edges of the brackish water. His stigmata flayed the skin in bubbling sheets from all of the grubs near him in a disgusting display moments before Sunshine and two Maneaters broke from the bloody water like eldritch gods bathed in sacrifices and fueled by violence.
Vrax ran towards the pile that held the sentinel. The singular massive eye had snapped open, and the creature began unfurling itself from its cover. “Oh fuck...I should have saved Sunshine,” Vrax mused, sliding to a stop a good five strides away from the first combat life stage of a soul render he had ever seen in person. It smiled at him from where it now loomed, its head nearly scraping the cavern ceiling.
I'm going to go ahead and use the really mean new dandelion. I am NOT getting any closer to that fucking thing.