Arthur Decius- The Forsaken Lands
Arthur cursed under his stifling helm as he reduced another humanoid corpse trailing veins behind it to a pile of ash with a focus of will angling the sun's rays to sear down on it in a column of light like a magnifying glass held by God. So much had changed in the last weeks; the only one of his original cadre to survive the dungeon had been Solamin; the others had been taken by the profane daisies. And the recruits they had padded his squad with had equally not proven up to the task. He still didn’t know why the leadership allowed him to continue plumbing the dungeon, saving those he could from its predations. But in the end he had left with one paladin and three adventurers he had never imagined he would have the pleasure of fighting with again.
Inquisitor Sky had changed all of that in a heartbeat, yanking him from his training cadre and telling him to pick four others to join him on the hunt for the paladin. At first Arthur had truly felt it must have been divine intervention allowing him to mete out the justice this foul Paladin of the Forsaken Lands deserved. Now he wasn’t so sure. His immediate autonomy and the undercover nature of his mission had shown him some uncomfortable truths.
His order wasn’t loved; hells, this far out they were reviled as bullies and tyrants. He still held firm to his belief that he was doing what was right, but the way so many of his betters spoke of people as nothing more than pawns and cattle was wrong no matter how they tried to frame it. And the time he had spent in Hopes End learning about the paladin and his childhood…. Arthur had much to ponder, but now was not the time.
Solamin was in front of him, his shield braced against a swirling mass of claws attached to something that was once a glimmer, but the invading veins puppeting its corpse had changed it; limp wings trailed grotesquely behind it before suddenly fluttering as it tried to maneuver around Solamin’s shield. Solamin wrenched it from the sky by its wing, pinning it back to the ground with a slam of his shield backed by a pulse of magic that brought the weight of the heavens down upon it, cratering the ground around them. Arthur held firm in the second line, waiting for Aurora’s magic. She whirled from behind the beast in a dazzling swirl of purples that left spots on his vision, holding her crystal-capped staff high. She channeled the currents of magic around herself into the mind of the Infected glimmer its struggles against Solamin’s shield slowly waned as its eyes clouded with a light violet hue, its mind falling into her grasp steadily.
It went quickly after that; Solamin retreated so Arthur could lunge in, burning the creature from the inside out with a stab to the chest. The marshy patch they were fighting in grew still as a crossbow in the distance found its mark with a satisfying thunk and deep wump sound as its deadly payload crushed the final infected beast. “Ha, got the fucker! Aurora, gilded pricks? You all good?” The always sarcastic voice of Carver called out to them.
Solamin grumbled loudly. “We are fine, you crass cutthroat. Did you need assistance? Or are you just seeing if I have died yet so you can steal my armor?”
Arthur chuckled slightly. “I don’t think your armor would fit him…”
Aurora chimed in on the ongoing joke. “You try and fence a paladin’s helmet one time, and he never lets it go!”
Solamin stared at her seriously. “My father gave me this helmet; it holds the hopes and pride of a brave family line dedicated to the service of Rembrand. Also, I really enjoy the cooling enchantment.” He finished with a slight smile.
Arthur took stock of everyone as they gathered back into a loose formation. “Where is our battlemaster at?” As if on cue, a tree in the distance snapped, followed by a harsh curse. Ura came flying out of the nearby trees, peeling small octopus-like creatures off her. Why? Why does fucking everything in this place want to eat me?” Ura was the same height as Solamin and probably had him in the muscle category, where he was clad head to foot in armor, though Ura wore simple loose-fitting clothes with a sword longer than she was tall held in her hands and a very drippy face of warpaint that at one point was a stylized skull.
Arthur couldn’t help it. “Well, I mean, you and Solamin would by far be the best meal; Carver probably tastes like spoiled mead, Aurora probably tastes like static and purple, and I’m just bitter and gamey at this point.” He delivered it in such a deadpan that Ura froze, confused if he was joking or not, until Carver's barking laughter cut through the trees in the distance.
The weedy man practically swaddled in brown leather armor covered in vials and crossbow bolts apparated out of the nearby forest, still laughing. “I didn’t think I’d see the fucking day; you finally got that stick out of your ass and figured out how to make a joke!”
Arthur turned to him, ignoring the jibe. “Any signs?”
Carver shrugged. “Of ridiculous man-eating trees and bugs? Yeah, lots. I even saw a snake explode when a bird looked at it too hard. But of glowing green eldritch horrors? No, I haven’t seen a damn thing so far other than…” He trailed off as they all saw a cottony green creature drift by in the nearby treetops, cooing to itself quietly.
Aurora furrowed her brows. “What in all the hells is that?”
Arthur was staring at the new creature intently. “A Devourer...but they aren’t supposed to be green… Follow it, from a distance; if it smells blood, we might be in for more of a fight than we expect.” Arthur set off as a light jog after the creature, followed by his groaning party members.
Ura looked at everyone jogging away incredulously. “What about lunch? Or a fucking water break!?”
Vraxious- The Forsaken Lands
The troll burst over the top of the stairs, heedlessly scattering a fog of dandelions across the street as he trampled them. The one gullet diver didn’t even make it off its stalk before a rough foot squished it into the cobblestone as the beast roared in rage and confusion. It shook its head wildly as dandelions sunk into its eyes and nose, but that barely slowed it. A few stuttered steps later and it was charging toward the first line of Retriever hives, oblivious to the plants shredding it from the inside.
Vrax cringed at the sight; the beast’s entire vascular system was glowing as it charged, and that had only made it angrier. It seemed like its healing was vastly faster than the damage the vein divers caused. It plodded straight past the retriever hives; dozens of glowing green retrievers sailed forth in a staggered shower of blade-like ropes cascading over the troll's sides and legs. They immediately began scurrying in dizzying patterns, further wrapping up the troll's arms and legs.
The troll kept plodding towards Vrax, straining against the retriever umbilicals as they cut its flesh into a messy patchwork pattern. It whirled its massive stone club through a bundle of umbilicals and then another, ripping the hives themselves from the ground and continuing forward with the hives dragging along behind it. Its flesh constantly and nearly immediately was shoving the umbilicals out before sealing shut again only to be cut nearly bone deep again moments later.
“Ha, ha…wow, uh…it just doesn’t give a shit, does it…” The troll bellowed madly as the second line of retrievers and the lurker mushroom attacked it. It leapt into the air nearly to the rooftops to bring the club towering downwards onto the lurker mushroom in a violent explosive spray of acid and fungal bits. It stood there for a moment, breathing heavily as bits of the flesh sloughed away from acid only to instantly scab over the nearby skin, spreading like a plague to seal the wound. Slowly it looked over the dozens of skittering creatures on its body and fine sharp cords digging into its flesh.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
No… Don’t start being clever; just keep running and let the umbilicals dice you, please…
It paused for an oddly long time, almost like it was talking to itself, before clumsily grabbing handfuls of umbilicals and ripping them free one by one. They would pull taut, carving through flesh before snapping when braced against the bone. It was gristly and horrifying to watch, but it was effective. The final handful it wrenched free severed a finger that landed lazily on the ground in front of the troll. It extended its hand forwards, reaching for the finger, and its veins reached outward, grabbing the severed digit and snapping it back into place with a sucking sound.
Uhh...are all trolls like this? Maybe I should have brought more monsters…
The troll then systematically savaged the hives with its club, leaving nothing more than pulped smears on the ground leaking viscous green sap through the cobblestones. It looked forward towards the two untriggered hives and lurkers and lumbered over to a nearby ruin. It wrapped its meaty hands around a stone chunk the size of a cart and ripped it free from the wall in a shower of dust and masonry. Then, like a shotput throw, it took two steps before heaving it through the air in an arc.
The hunk of stone hit the first hive dead on, ripping it roots and all from the ground and through a nearby wall. The troll huffed approvingly and went to grab another even bigger chunk of a building.
I may need to rethink this…The smelter moss might keep the fucker from healing… The acid did more than the wires did, and hells, the dandelions are still coursing through it to no effect.
Vrax slid from his perch, dashing for the smelter moss patch while the beast struggled with a massive hunk of stone. He used his summon ability on [Adapt Life] once again, this time hoping to get Duchess to come fucking help him. He swept a hand through the quivering moss as he ran, adding it to his garden, and came right up next to the beast as it turned, a stone lifted over its shoulder, effort evident on its face.
Vrax hit it while its hands were full. He summoned the smelter moss under the beast and sunshine behind it. His garden used the pulped remains of his own creations for fuel, reducing the hives to bubbling black sludge and ripping the life from a swath of hanging vines across a building. The vines had literally been holding the building up; it came spilling forward in chunks into the street, part of it landing across the troll's leg in a stroke of luck.
The adapted smelter moss moved like living, hungry lava oozing between the beast's toes and crawling up its leg in a tide. Wherever it touched the skin, it blackened and smoked, cooking the beast up to the knee almost instantly. Between the living fire plant cooking its left leg and the hunk of building trapping its right, the troll didn’t notice the flailing mass of tendrils looming behind it, nearly as tall as it was.
Vrax grimaced at Sunshine; it looked much the same as before structurally, except it had grown another stride in height. It would now dwarf even Torvald. The blessing it had received from eating the Rembrand paladin was very on brand for Vurune.
All across its green epidermis small daisies now bloomed and rotted seemingly at random, but at the peak of the bloom, for a few seconds, another of its gnashing tendrils would erupt from the flower to savage its foe for a few moments before rotting away. What that meant in practice was that his eldritch abomination now had blooms of life and rot constantly roiling across the surface of its body that it could attack from. It was fucking maddening to try and make sense of what Sunshine was doing in the midst of combat now.
The troll experienced it firsthand. Sunshine dug into its exposed back with a fervor that horrified Vrax. Thorns wrapped around the troll’s throat while the maws snaked into its jugular. The rest of the indecipherable number of tendrils burrowed into the creature's back, pulling free chunks of flesh that were tossed into the always hungry maw. The troll struggled violently, swatting its club backwards into sunshine with heavy thuds that scattered stone and raised dust clouds from the sheer force.
Even with all this, though, the troll struggled on, pinned in place and cooked nearly up to the hip now as the smelter moss crept higher. Blow after blow landing into sunshine slowly turning its torso into a mess of plant strands. The troll's wounds still healed; blood ran back up to the throat, sealing it again and again. Sunshine ripped a vertebra free from the creature, and it sagged for a moment as its body lost the ability to communicate with the brain.
The troll's veins reached from its back and snatched the vertebra from inside Sunshine's maw, pulling it back into place with a crunch. Okay, what the fuck? How do I kill this thing? The smelter moss is working pretty damn well, at least. The troll reached down desperately, pulling the carpet-like smelter moss from its leg and threw it over a nearby building. Its hand blackened from the attack, but it was no longer being slowly cooked from the toes up. Oh, come on…
The troll finally managed to get face-to-face with Sunshine. Now too close for its club, it resorted to ripping handfuls of plant fiber free, then it placed its hands inside the vertical maw, pulling with insane strength until one half of Sunshine's face simply tore free with a splat. The troll's wounds were still knitting but not quite as fast as before, Vrax noticed. And its angered face was starting to look desperate.
The troll adjusted its grip on Sunshine, one hand closed over the top of its head, the other wrapped around its bottom half with crushing force. Before it could try and rip Sunshine's form in half, a tongue wrapped around its head from behind, and then another and another. The troll stiffened in skill-enforced horror; Duchess laughed at her new prey as she oozed over the lip of a roof like death itself.
“Thank fuck! Took you long enough!” Vrax shouted, clambering up the rubble toward the troll now that it was busy trying to not have a heart attack. Vrax didn’t hold back; his first sweep was a roiling blade of pure devastation, slitting the troll’s belly open and rotting away at the insides. Vrax stuck again, putting as much mana as he could into a single smite. The aura of it was so much that his own cloak started unwinding at the edges as he shaped the miasma on the tip of his spear into a flat blade as wide as he was tall and threw it point-blank into the troll's throat.
The duchess ripped her tounges back angrily to avoid the blow. It pierced square into the beast's Adam's apple, the magic washing outwards, unmaking the beast's throat and then spine. The troll's head tilted to the side and dripped off its body, landing next to Vrax with a thud. Oh, thank all the gods; let's see you come back from that.
Dutchess angrilly snapped towards him with her jaws. “Father, that was mine!” she cried in a little girl’s voice.
Vrax was about to make a snappy comeback of his own when two things happened: first, the troll's head started slowly regrowing, sending a river of rot onto the ground next to him as a new spine protruded from the blackened stub of its neck. Secondly, a veiny red mass the size of his fist plopped out of the torn-open stomach cavity in a flail, two oversized eyes rolling around wildly. The fleshy mass snapped its eyes onto him and then spoke in a nasally high-pitched voice, “My flesh palace! Look what you have done to it! It was dumb and stinky, but it was the best I could do out here! You went and ...and…ruined it!”
Vrax was at a sheer loss as the angry blob of veins addressed him, “Uhh? Sorry, I mean it’s coming back to life here in a second…but yeah…” Vrax looked over at Dutchess, who trilled in sheer excitement, clamping all her claws into the body and positioning her maw to rip the head off again as soon as it regrew. “I don’t, uhh, think that thing is going to have a good time…” Dutchess surgically removed both arms with quick slashes of her tail to make sure the troll wouldn’t be able to dislodge her.
Sunshine, as ragged as it was, was still busy blending the troll's one uncooked leg. That thing's going to die eventually, right?...I'm starting to feel a bit bad here… Dutchess waited just long enough for the troll's eyes to reform and let its glazed expression turn to one of terror before she began savaging its head like a dog with a squirrel.
The blob looked up at the atrocity. “Yeah, no… I just need to find a new flesh palace, a better flesh palace. You are a bit skinny for my tastes, but you seem competent, good skin too… How would you like…” Its voice was abruptly silenced as Vrax scooped it into one of his thicker specimen jars.
Vrax screwed the lid on tight. “Shhh, don’t worry, little abomination. I’m sure I’ll find some use for you.” The blob of flesh and veins visibly gulped somehow, eyes widening in concern.