Vowron Prime
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Soulweaver 95: Gates of the Dead
🕑 Added 2024-08-28 18:00:07 +0000 UTCNOTE: I'm out this weekend, so I'm releasing the rest of the week's intermediate tiers now(I have to manually release these/Patreon doesn't let me schedule them).
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My first instinct was to run for the passage, but I quickly realized what a deathtrap that would be. Sure, the giant ice serpent couldn’t move as freely in there, but neither could we. It took up the full width, leaving us nowhere to run or hide, and we definitely couldn’t outpace it. All it’d have to do was follow us in, and we’d be dead meat.
As bad as the lake was, it was the only place we’d have a chance. At least out here, we could see the massive thing flop slowly back down onto the ice.
“Remember, the goal isn’t to beat this thing,” I said. “We just need to get it to give up and go… away…”
Ground and pleas for help interrupted me, but there was nobody around.
Then I looked down. Into the ice. At those shadows we’d seen earlier.
Not shadows. Corpses. And they were calling out to us.
“Please! Oh, Wisdom! Please, have mercy. End my pain!”
“It hurts! It hurts so much! Make it stop! Make it go away!”
“What is this madness?” Richard said, voice cracking in fear. “Are they all… Are they alive?”
I picked up my pace, more out of primal terror than anything. Was that the fate that awaited us if we lost? To be entombed in the ice? Alive, but not?
“We cannot let the fear overcome us!” Aerion shouted from behind me.
Aerion was right. That was a surefire way to die. Or worse…
I forced my thoughts back on topic. On escaping this nightmare. I really had no idea if that was even possible—maybe this was the sort of serpent that got pissed and never gave up… But if it was like any normal creature, it’d have a sense of self-preservation. Even the monsters in Dominion’s dungeon had shown a desire to hang onto life.
The only question was whether we could get it to see us as threats or not. At the very least, the serpent didn’t seem to have any attacks, other than using its massive size. That itself put it in a class below the Obsidian Dragon.
“Here it comes!” I said, as the giant snake’s head plunged down towards us, its jaw open wide.
Before we came up with any sort of real plan, we needed to test the waters. As such, our immediate goal was to not get eaten.
Richard rode on my back, while Aerion was about a hundred feet away. It made no sense to give the serpent one target.
As I’d hoped, the thing targeted Richard and me. Well, as much as anyone can hope for a colossal being of pure ice to try and kill you.
Being big wasn’t always an advantage, however. It made the serpent’s every movement potentially lethal for us, but it also meant the thing couldn’t change direction very fast.
And it sure as hell couldn’t move quickly enough to catch Richard and me as I leaped out of there, narrowly avoiding being eaten.
“Did it… work?” I asked, trailing off as I saw the result for myself.
The serpent’s head crashed into the ice, sending chunks flying in all directions, but instead of diving under for another strike, it abruptly halted.
Then, slowly, its head came up and swiveled around, locking onto Richard and me. It slowly opened its colossal maw, allowing us to see inside. Past the razor-sharp fangs, and inside. It looked much the same as the outside, being made of ice. No flesh or a gullet or anything even resembling a digestive tract.
And then it did something very un-serpentlike. It roared. It roared so hard, I nearly toppled over from the force of its ice-cold breath.
“Uh, Richard? I think you just pissed it off.”
“Seems like it,” Richard said. “Sorry to say it, mate, but I don’t see how I’ll be of much help with this one.”
“Well,” I said in despair. “It was worth a shot.”
I took off,ignoring the wails of the buried dead as I headed in a direction perpendicular to the serpent. I hoped forcing it to turn to follow us would at least buy us some time. I didn’t have a clue where Aerion was—on the other side of the thing’s gargantuan body, most likely. It wasn’t after her, though. So long as she avoided its tail, she’d be fine.
The bigger question was—what the fuck were we supposed to do? We couldn’t run, we couldn’t hide, and we couldn’t kill the damn thing, either.
About ten seconds into running, I spotted Aerion jumping high into the air. Now that the serpent was traveling on the surface of the ice, its body was actually not that far off the ground, and since it was chasing us, and since we didn’t move especially quickly, that meant parts of its body was more or less stationary.
Just that neither Richard nor I were in a position to take advantage of that, being, essentially, bait.
“Nice, Aerion,” I muttered as I bolted randomly to the right just as the snake made lunge for my previous position.
Aerion landed on the side of the serpent, driving her old dagger into its side, using that as a platform to jump onto the top of the beast. From there, she sprinted along its topside, rapidly approaching our position.
I didn’t even need to think about what to do. Timing my throw to coincide with Aerion’s arrival on top of the serpent’s head, I hurled Light of the Fearless at the elf, who caught it deftly.
We’d tested this before, and it seemed anyone could activate the blade’s abilities, not just me. A feature that came in handy just about now.
Aerion’s motions changed. Her previously elegant movements became tinged with aggression, and I knew she’d activated [Reave]. Now, we were on a timer. Either we took this snake out or escaped from it in time, or Aerion would keel over, and that was that.
That was okay. Because now, in this limited window of opportunity, we finally had a strategy that might work. Aerion was in the right place at the right time.
And she was doing some serious damage.
Each slash sent chunks of the serpent’s icy skull flying as she carved a ditch in between its eyes, and if I wasn’t mistaken, it felt like the ice chunks got larger and larger with every strike.
The serpent, predictably, roared in panic, forgetting all about chasing Richard and me. It also meant the serpent went careening away, and in just a few seconds, its head was over a hundred feet from our position.
“Fuck. I have to get to her!”
As strong as Aerion was right now, she was also vulnerable. And I didn’t know what sort of decisions she’d make while under the influence of [Reave].
“Sorry, Richard. I’m gonna have to set you down,” I said, leaving my poleax beside him. I’d need two hands for what I was about to do.
“No worries, mate. Go save your friend. I’ll be here.”
“Right. We’ll get you treated the moment we can,” I said, dropping my shield and poleax beside him. The shield, so he at least had some defense if any other enemies popper up. The poleax, because I knew I’d lose it if I took it with me. “For now, try to put pressure on your wounds and stop any bleeding.”
I barely heard Richard’s “You got it,” as I jumped up and grabbed onto one of the serpent’s scales. Lacking Light of the FearlessI had to do this the hard way. The good news was I was so far back on the serpent’s body by now that this section had none of the frantic, panicked movements of the head, allowing me to climb my way up.
One shudder or jerky movement, and I’d have been flung free. As it was, though, I made it, and then I was the one running along its back. I ran like a madman, figuring I had seconds now, before the thing realized it could simply dive under the ice to safety.
I didn’t even have that. To my horror, the serpent’s head rose high into the air—with Aerion hanging onto it—and crashed into the ice, disappearing below.
The rest of the snake’s body rapidly followed suit.
And I was running right at it.
The fuck was I supposed to do now? Jumping off was the sane move. But Aerion was still attached to the thing’s head when it went below.
“Aw, fuck! I am so gonna regret this…”
I got as far as I dared, flattened myself against the serpent’s back, grabbed ahold of its scale, and hung on for dear life.
“I am so gonna regret this,” I muttered, just before the thing’s torso sank beneath the frozen lake.
— —
I’d swum in some chilly lakes before, so I thought I knew what I was signing up for. I thought I could handle it.
I didn’t, and I couldn’t.
The sheer chill of freezing water was difficult to overstate. Especially when you were subjected to immediate, total submersion.
My hands immediately started pulsating, and my body started to convulse from the shock, nearly forcing out the breath I’d been so desperately holding onto. It was like I’d just been subjected to an electric chair.
I didn’t lose my breath, though. Forcing the convulsions under control, I willed my mind steady. There was something odd about the act. Like it was easier than it ought to have been. Like I had more control over my body’s subconscious actions than ever before. I felt like I had an inkling of the stat responsible for this, but there’d be time to experiment with that later. For now, I counted my blessings and worked my way forward along the snake’s back, one scale at a time.
I wasn’t far from the head now. Every now and then, I could catch glimpses of it, with a streak of white that I assumed was Aerion’s hair, moving around. I couldn’t be sure, though. Seeing anything underwater was difficult at best, and absolutely pointless at worst.
Then there was the question of how long we could actually stay under here before we had to surface, and whether or not our air supply would last until it did.
Because we weren’t just under a lake. We were under a frozen lake, and trying to hack through a layer of ice while low on air sounded like a great way to drown.
In hindsight, maybe not the best decision coming down here, but when the other choice was leaving Aerion to fend for herself? That wasn’t a choice at all.
After what felt like eons but was probably only about thirty seconds, I finally arrived at Aerion’s position. She was desperately trying to enlarge the gash she’d made in the serpent’s skull, but fighting against its panicky motions and also trying to hit the thing proved to be too much for her. There just wasn’t a good way of finding the proper leverage needed to brace herself.
That was, until I came along. With one hand securely on a scale, I held Aerion’s hand with my other, allowing her to stand on the thing’s back and hack and slash away with my sword.
Even underwater, [Reave] proved to be a godsend, allowing her to wreck the thing’s skull. I knew, because I felt all of the force through my arm, as she pulled on me to push on the sword, driving it deeper and deeper.
This was realistically our only option. Fuck the snake up so much that it decided enough was enough, and broke through the surface.
We’d been underwater for about three minutes now, and while both of our lung capacities had expanded thanks to our Vigor, I doubted we had more than another minute or two left in the tank.
So it was a good thing that the snake finally decided it’d had enough about fifteen seconds of abuse later, and went vertical, aiming for the surface.
I yanked Aerion down beside me, and she had the good sense to stick Light of the Fearless inside her belt and grab onto the scale with both hands.
I’d expected some colossal shockwave to hit us as we broke through the ice, but surprisingly, I didn’t feel a thing.
It was the debris that did us in. Because while the serpent’s head made a hole big enough for it to pass through, it just wasn’t big enough for a couple of tagalongs.
We slammed into a broken block of ice face-first. Aerion was wrenched off—whether because [Reave] ran out, or because her grip was bad, I couldn’t tell. I managed to cling on by the skin of my teeth.
We almost had this. I could breathe again. I was in position to complete what Aerion had started. Activating [Aim], I fired my mace out of my Inventory, aiming it down into the icy gash. The force of its ejection blew another chunk out of the snake’s head, causing it to buck and turn violently.
I grabbed the handle of the mace and lifted for another blow, but something in my peripheral vision caught my attention.
A dark blur some distance ahead.
I looked up just in time to register the sight, but not fast enough to do anything about it.
I watched in horror as the serpent opened its maw… and swallowed Richard whole.
