Mage Tank

A deep voice echoed from the portal, purring like a lion as it spoke.

“Slayer of Ihbriobrixilas,” it said. “I am pleased to hear your call.”

Tentacles continued to spill from the portal, and a heavy, muscled leg stepped out. The flesh was dark green, the muscle corded, and the foot never touched the ground. A long arm emerged next, gripping the edge of the dimensional tear and pushing its body the rest of the way into our universe.

The thing that emerged hung in the air, defying gravity like the last true c’thon I’d seen. Unlike Ihbriobrixilas, this one was not a full-on feathered octopus clone. It still had a large and feathered cephalopod head from which the many tentacles spilled like a gruesome beard, but below that was a humanoid body.

The limbs were too long, its hands and feet with too many joints, the digits spreading out into the air like bony serpents. Its musculature was impossibly lean, lacking any trace of fat to hide the striations and pulsing veins beneath its boreal skin.

It wasn’t as big as a school bus like the c’thon from my Creation Delve, but the fucker was still eight feet tall. Its black, oblong eyes scanned the battlefield, then settled on me.

Shog’tuatha: C’thon, Grade Five.

“This is a good fight,” it purred. “I am pleased to be greeted by such lurid death.”

“You’re on my side, right?” I shouted, smashing another Praying Head.

“Of course!” it bellowed. “Ihbriobrixilas consumed my brother and fled to this realm like a coward! I am proud to serve y-”

“Good! Protect Etja’s back!”

The c’thon’s arms dropped and it glanced at the golem, then flew through the air and behind her. Its feathered tentacles began wrapping up Praying Heads and tossing them away while its taloned hands reached out and struck long gashes across the eyes of others. One of the feelers trapped a Head within it, and the limb stuffed the monster behind the c’thon’s nightmare beard. There was a sickening crunch, loud enough to be heard over the moaning. When the tentacle came back out from behind the mass of feelers, the Praying Head was headless.

“Bah!” Shog’tuatha shouted, spitting gore onto the ground. “God-spawn! I cannot eat this.” It tossed the corpse away in disgust, then went back to ravaging the rest.

“Fallback formation!” I yelled. Nuralie dove over a pair of Heads, rolling back to her feet and hitting another point-blank with an arrow. I waded out into the fight and hammered aside a few more, making way for her to dash behind me and line up beside Etja.

Xim continued to dart backward, heaving a few Heads from her body, then barreled at our formation. Varrin roared and cast his whirling attack again, slinging seven of the monsters from his large frame and then sprinting to us.

Varrin, Xim, Shog’tuatha, and I fought in a four-person perimeter around Nuralie and Etja. Nuralie fired arrow after arrow between us into the line of monsters, their numbers dense enough to make it easy work for her.

Meanwhile, Etja danced. A ring of Praying Heads floated from the ground, and the melee fighters took them apart. The line behind that began to crumble to dust, flowing into Etja’s upper pair of hands that she held up and out as she moved. More Heads skittered in and she fired beams of blue light out at them. All the while one of her lower pair hands was held at her waist, a point of orange light growing on a fingertip. Each time she cast a spell, it pulsed and grew larger.

Finally, it grew into a blazing orb and Etja stopped.

“Down!” she shouted.

All of us crouched low, Praying Heads immediately dogpiling onto us. Shog’tuatha glanced back at Etja, then floated up into the air beside Grotto.

A beam of orange light erupted from Etja’s orb, sending a devastating ray out into the Praying Heads. The attack was visually identical to the beam Orexis had fired at the Dukgriens, and it cut through the Heads as easily as the half-god’s attack had cut through stone. Etja spun her body in a circle, a lethal, disintegrating line passing through swaths of the Heads. Her mana bar plummeted, and before she could complete the circle it was exhausted. She collapsed to her knees.

She’d killed at least fifty Heads with that attack.

The rest of us sprung back into action, the herd of Heads thin enough now for us to continue the slaughter without being overwhelmed. There were another five minutes of ceaseless hammering, arcing blades, scepter strikes, pillars of crimson light, volleys of arrows, and a healthy dose of tentacular strangulation.

With one final cleave of Varrin’s greatsword, the last of the Praying Heads was cut down and the fight was done. Xim went to check on Etja, whose wounds had the appearance of pierced flesh, but were dry.

“You don’t have to worry about bleeding I guess,” Xim said, wiping some tacky blood from her eye as she inspected Etja’s leg. Her face sported a few long slashes. “Normally I’d offer to heal you, but Arlo’s aura will get you back to full pretty quick and my mana only goes so far.”

“Aura?” said Etja.

“If you check your health regen, you’ll see it’s much higher than it should be.”

Etja’s eyes glazed for a second.

“It says twenty-five. Is that high?”

“Twenty-two of it’s from Arlo.”

“Oh!” said Etja. “Then it is a lot.”

Varrin walked up and looked Etja over.

“We’ll need a thirty-minute breather for her to recover,” he said. “It gets us some mana back as well. Does anyone have anything Etja can use for armor?”

“I think I can do something for myself,” said Etja. Her face scrunched up and she held her arms out, but nothing happened. She stopped after a few seconds. “Ah, I need to get my mana back first.”

As soon as the words came out, Nuralie plopped a mana potion into one of Etja’s hands.

“Oh, thanks!” Etja said, peering into the bottle’s murky blue contents.

“You drink it,” said Nuralie.

Etja nodded, then tipped the bottle back, draining it in one go.

“I see. It raises my regen as well, but with mana… by sixty! Thirty-eight more than Arlo!”

Nuralie looked over at me and gave me a rare smirk. I wiped a spray of gore from my shades, doing little more than creating a smear.

“My aura’s free,” I said, giving her a grin in return.

“I don’t see anyone paying me for my potions.”

“Good point. We should reimburse you once we’re outside.”

Pause. “That would be nice.”

“It should be standard,” I said. “Since alchemy costs money and we all benefit from it, we can dedicate a portion of what we make.”

“But first,” said Varrin, “survival.”

Then, we got the loot notifications.

Please select a method of loot distribution:

1) Free For All

2) Master Looter

3) Need Before Greed

4) Turn Taker

5) System Selection

I read through the message and mentally selected Need Before Greed.

Please select a method of chip and currency distribution:

1) Free For All

2) Master Looter

3) Even Distribution

4) System Selection

I scanned the options, then selected Even Distribution.

Your party has slain 176 Praying Heads: Aberration, Grade Zero. Your Party receives the following rewards:

1) 176 Ruby Chips

2) 176 Minor Tongues of Prayer

3) 15 Minor Aberration Essences

Party Leader has set chip and currency allocation to Even Distribution.

You receive: 35 Ruby Chips. The remainder of 1 Ruby Chip has been randomly awarded to Nuralie of Vyxmeldo’a.

Party leader has set loot distribution to Need Before Greed. Please select your need for the following items.

I then received 191 notifications asking me to vote on the individual items.

“What the hell?” I said, looking at the massive list that broke out every Tongue of Prayer and Essence into an individual loot roll.

Varrin walked over and patted me on the shoulder.

“This is why I prefer Master Looter.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Well, get to voting I suppose.”

In the end, everyone passed on everything except for me. I hit need on every item since I had the inventory space and we didn’t have time to prioritize it. I’d distribute the loot if and when we made it out. I toggled the distribution to Master Looter, and we moved on to figuring out the lock that Cage wanted us to open.

First, though, my party members had some things to say about the sudden appearance of Shog’tuatha.

[I do not like how this creature is looking at me,] Grotto thought to us. Shog’tuatha was still hovering near the c’thonically-disguised Delve Core. The true c’thon’s tentacles reached out toward Grotto, who floated away from them. Shog’tuatha pursued Grotto, and the process repeated. They were going in circles.

“You look like the spawn of Ihxiobrixilas,” said the summon. “But your mind does not smell of c’thon.”

“Shog,” I said, “please don’t molest Grotto.”

The hulking creature peered down at me.

“This entity is engaged in a deception. If it threatens you I will consume it.”

“No, Shog. Grotto is my familiar. No eating Grotto.”

Shog gave Grotto another once over, then floated back to the ground and hovered beside me.

“You know that it is not a true c’thon.”

“Yeah, no, I understand. It’s a disguise to help him blend in.”

Shog reached up with a veiny hand and stroked his face-feelers.

“I did not know c’thons were well accepted in this dimension. I shall tell my brood-mates.”

“No, that’s not what is happening here,” I said. “It’s a long story, but Grotto gets away with looking like a c’thon since people think he’s my familiar. I don’t think most people would be happy to see a c’thon.”

“They shouldn’t be,” said Shog. “They should be afraid.” He looked around at the rest of the group. “Perhaps you could acquire more familiars. I find that existing in a stable physical form is pleasing to me. My brother would readily join me here.”

“I thought your brother got eaten by Ihxiobrixilas.”

“I have thirty-eight brothers.”

“Then which one do you mean?”

“Gods above, Arlo,” said Varrin. “Why in all the hells would you summon a c’thon?”

“I swear I had no fucking idea it would be a c’thon when I cast the spell.”

“Then what did you think it would be?”

“The spell says it’s something I have ‘affinity’ with. Why the fuck would that be a c’thon? No offense, Shog.”

Xim gave me a hearty side-eye.

“Pretty obvious to me,” she said.

“Obvious? How is it obvious?”

“Your first big kill was a c’thon,” she said, beginning to count off on her fingers. “You’re wearing a c’thonic vest and a c’thonic boa. You’ve practically lived in those since we finished the Creation Delve. The color scheme of your whole armor set is based on a c’thon. Your familiar is decked out in c’thon materials, and Grotto has adapted some pretty c’thonic behavior.”

[What insolence is this?]

“You’re always waggling your feelers and grooming your feathers.”

“It is important to keep your plumage in good order,” Shog said, still stroking his feathered limbs.

“Also,” Xim continued, “you’re from another dimension, like the c’thons.”

“I also used to wear leather and eat steak,” I said. “I’m from the same dimension as cows. Why wouldn’t I get a bull?”

“Would a bull have been helpful?” Xim asked.

“Maybe it could have been a super-bull.”

Xim squinted at me.

“Are super-bulls real?”

I sighed.

“No.”

“I was also eager to serve the slayer of my sworn foe. And you have been embraced by the Third Layer of this dimension.”

“One,” I said, “how can you tell that? Two, why does that matter?”

“Three, I can scent my kind. The c’thon’s reside within the Third Layer of our home dimension.”

“I don’t think you understand how to use the numbers the way I was using them.”

“Yes, I do. I was answering both questions at once. The sum of one and two is three.”

“You’re both prone to useless tangents,” Varrin offered.

“You both have beards,” Nuralie added.

“That’s probably the biggest factor,” said Xim.

“That isn’t a beard. That is tentacles.”

“I am proud of my beard,” Shog said, affronted. “A c’thon can take many forms, and this is the one I chose for this world. A beard is a majestic attribute and a symbol of both fertility and virility.”

“Sounds like affinity to me,” said Xim.

“My mother wears the largest beard I’ve ever seen while she mates. It is why I have so many brothers!”

“Shog, my man, that’s gross,” I said. “Look, while you guys are recovering mana, I’m in a minor deficit with this guy out. The Divine mana in here screws with my absorption ability. Out in the hallways I had much better regen, so we should figure out what Cage needs us to do.”

“You could dismiss it,” said Varrin.

“It has a twenty-four-hour cooldown. I’d like to keep him around.” I looked to the sky. “Cage? The fuck are we doing?”

{Glad you all remembered I existed! I wanted to let you have some space after what any reasonable person would consider a highly traumatizing experience but it sssssssseems like you guys aren’t worried about nearly dying at the hands of hundreds of divine monstrosities.}

“Eh, it’s been a weird month,” I said.

“I’ve seen worse this very day,” Varrin said softly.

{Right. The lock override is at the center of the chamber where that nest of ‘no thanks’ was gathered up in a pile. Fortunately, it’s pretty resilient, so you didn’t blow it up! That would have been a problem.}

“This is a communication issue,” I said as I got a few dirty looks from the group. “We should be made aware of the location of sensitive infrastructure prior to entering a space where we expect heavy fighting to occur.”

{I’ll make a note of that. If you move to the center of the chamber you’ll find a sub-obelisk. It might be buried under some, uh… you’ll see.}

We made our way directly beneath the massive figure suspended in the center of the room where the lower mound of Praying Heads had been formed. There was a hard, slimy mass of an organic substance similar to the legs of the creatures. There was a network of cracks in it, and a chunk had been blown away on one side, revealing a pulsating mass of flesh within.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

{I think this is their birthing mechanism, but who knows! An egg for heads? An egghead? Just pry all that gunk away and the sub-obelisk should be at the center.}

I swallowed back an approaching gag and started to chip away at the stuff with the spike of my hammer. The hardened surface broke away easily, allowing the contents to spill out behind it.

“It is like the ovum of a nostworm,” said Shog. “A delicacy. It is too bad these are inedible.”

“Shog, five-minute timeout from speaking.”

Shog grumbled but refrained from further commentary. Once the mass was removed, a dark obelisk was revealed, about six feet in height.

{The unlock requires four of the five technicians to consent, so four of you should each place a hand on one of the obelisk’s faces and channel mana into it.}

I forewent any further questions, afraid of opening my mouth lest my stomach give an evacuation order. The mess at our feet did not smell good.

Varrin, Xim, Nuralie, and I placed our hands on the obelisk and gave it a gentle pulse of mana. Runes along the sides of the obelisk lit up, and there was a deep grinding sound in the distance. Then, a little chime played and echoed throughout the chamber.

“That’s kind of cute,” said Xim.

“That somehow makes it worse,” said Varrin.

{Great! Now, you just have to do that one more time, wake up the sleeping avatar of a grumpy god, then stop a divine specter from collapsing the dimensional space and dooming everyone within a hundred miles of the reality anchor back in Hiward!}

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

I couldn’t wait to get away from the weird mass and out of the chamber. The sleeping god above us twitched, and the runes around the room flared. Cage guided us to the exit on the opposite side of the chamber from where we entered, and we hastily beat our retreat.