The Dark Lord of Crafting

As far as I knew, the System didn't care if I was careful or not when I harvested fragile materials, but I was going to go about this cautiously, anyway. Tiny taps, never touching the crystalline structures themselves. It took a while for cracks to form, but a maxed out Mining skill and Pickle Rick were enough to do the job. The cracks widened, spidering across the block, and the atreanum wailed.

The sound began as a distant ringing, dissonant, grating, and increased in volume as the block continued to break apart. That was fine. This was fine. I kept tapping.

Plep.

A single atreanum coin was as big as a combined token. Might have been a meta-material thing. It looked more like solid ink than metal, and if there was an etching, I couldn't make it out. Light would have had to reflect off of its surface for me to see whatever symbol was baked in. Under my thumb, it felt like there was something there, but the coin looked like a hole in my hand. A cartoon cut-out. An absence in the world.

The surrounding rock was all bedlamite, but the sense of wrongness was still present to my left. I dug out a few more blocks, bug-free, and found a second slab of atreanum. Following this procedure, I harvested a total of four blocks of the rare material, the leftovers, as the main deposit must have been in the cleared room behind me.

If Atreanum formed where a massive entity died, why wasn't there more of it, and why was it so spread out? With four coins, my crafting options were limited. The sense of wrongness was gone, though, and I had no other information to go on to locate more of the meta-material. My pick wasn't giving me any indication that there were valuable materials in the vicinity. This was the place, and its supply was tapped out.

Four would have to be enough.

I converted the pick back to medallion form after noting a chip in its edge. Mining atreanum was rough, even on a tool made by the Dark Lord. With the torch and my ax in my hands, I made my way back out of the hole, found no monsters waiting for me, and had to repeat my performance with the plank bridge to get back around to the safer section of the ridge.

Rather than reharvesting all the planks, I left it leaned up against the mycelium hill. The less time I spent here, the better. The humid environment was causing me to sweat through my tunic, and I didn't smell any better than the swamp. But there weren't any lillits around to be bothered by the failings of human biology.

Esmelda was in another world. I didn't really hate demons, at least not in principle, any more than I hated monsters. I hated they were trying to kill me and ruin my adopted world, but I struggled to think of any sapient individual as all good or all bad. Zombies could suck it, of course, but they were basically hungry fungus robots, not people. I'd spent most of my life around individuals that could have easily been labeled "bad" by society, and they wouldn't have been entirely wrong. But most of them had been pretty chill.

One of my friends in prison had been a murderer. I'd known a lot of murderers, actually, but not all of them had been friends. He'd been an interesting guy, and he was already around sixty when I met him, so he'd calmed down and accrued some perspective on life. That happened a lot. Young guys did crazy stuff, awful stuff sometimes, and then they got locked up. Prisons don't rehabilitate anyone per se, but if you put a kid in a cage for long enough, they will eventually grow up. Or most of them will.

To be fair, some guys never grew up. The murderer, Richie, had done a lot of harm. And he definitely had some mental health issues, but we got along fine. Of course, Richie had been human. Demons were supposed to be evil by nature. Normally, I wouldn't say that any group was evil by nature, but if there was going to be an exception to that, demons were an excellent candidate.

Bojack had done a lot of evil that specifically affected me. He'd kept me captive, and was holding my wife as a hostage to ensure my good behavior. The holding me captive bit didn't bother me. It wasn't like I'd ever blamed the prison guards for doing their jobs. Of course, they'd never cut my hand off or murdered me over and over, but this was a very different context.

If it had just been me, I could have seen Bojack as redeemable, horse-head and all. But what he was doing with Esmelda was unforgivable. Were all demons like him, though? Bedlam wasn't actually hell. The One Who Knocks wasn't actually the devil, despite some behavioral overlap. With no help forthcoming from Mizu or other heroes, was it possible that somewhere in Bedlam, there were entities who didn't have to be my enemies? Who could be reasoned with?

I hooked my ax around a nub of fungus and pulled myself up onto the ridge. There was someone waiting there who looked a lot like me.

"Felt you," Bill said, giggling. "Felt you so good."

He was naked, and without leather armor to cover his body, the similarity in our appearance dropped off sharply. He might have been man shaped, but the human skin was mixed with patches of grey-green rhino hide, and the single, lamprey-mouthed tentacle looped around his waist grew out of his navel. Bill was sexless, like a Ken doll. Count the small blessings. At least I didn't have to see zombie genitalia.

Why hadn't he attacked me while I was climbing up the ridge?

"What happens if I kill you here?" I asked, getting the ax up in front of me. I’d stuck the dim torch through my belt, putting Bill at the edge of a thin circle of light. Keeping it had been a reflex, but Bojack had said torches would attract entities. I'd ditch it after this. "Do you die for real?"

"Never." Bill's mouth split in a wide grin, exposing his uneven teeth. "We live forever, together, here."

"No, thanks." I inched forward, and Bill inched back, placing himself near the opposite side of the ridge. Should have brought a bow. I didn't want to get that close to the water.

"Are you not trying to eat me?" I asked.

"William," he said, it sounded like he was tasting the word, "friend."

I'd just been thinking about the possibility of there being a potential ally for me in Bedlam, but this was a hard pass. Bill wasn't exactly a zombie anymore, but I couldn't imagine this being anything other than a trap.

"Sure," I said, "let's be friends." I edged forward until we were only a couple of paces apart. Instead of moving away, my doppelgänger giggled to himself, his head bobbing from side to side like he was listening to a K-pop jam. His tentacle remained wrapped around his torso, which would considerably slow down any attack from that limb.

I went for it, hoping to lop off his head with the first swipe. Using Stormbringer was, if anything, overkill. Bill ducked, slipping under the ax and hugging me like we really were besties. He couldn't bite through my armor, and shouldn't have been a threat on his own. Maybe he knew that. Leaning forward put me off balance, and Bill twisted his body, half-switching our positions relative to the verge.

I got my free arm between us and pushed, swinging the ax down with the other. There wasn't much force behind it, but the blade buried itself in his calf, hitting bone.

"Hah!" Bill cried, like he'd found had a welcome surprise. Instead of fighting to hold on to me, he crouch and rammed my midsection with his entire weight. It wasn't enough to make me fall. I knew it wasn't. There was still room between me and the edge of the ridge. But the mycelium shifted under our feet, the spongy ground suddenly offering no more support than a moist paper bag.

A cloud of spores poofed around us, and we tumbled together, rejected by the ridge. Feather Fall kicked in, and Bill wasn't holding onto me. I heard him say "together" before falling past me into the water. I tried to hook my ax on a mushroom nub as I went by and ripped right through it, leaving me a few seconds to contemplate my fate as I dropped gently toward the freshly disturbed surface of the lake.

Fiddlesticks.

I was still close to the edge of the water, and could either try climbing up the ridge, which I no longer trusted, or swimming to the shore a few dozen yards away. In heavy armor. Bill hadn't resurfaced, but he probably didn't need to breathe.

My feet went in, and I felt the lake filling up my boots as the rest of me followed. Adjusting my grip up to be just under the head of the ax, I tried kicking and stroking to keep above the surface and immediately failed. This was it. I'd dressed in plate and I was going to drown before the kulu nabbed me.

My head went under. I held my breath.

It was fine.

The water didn't enter my helm. Instead, there was a thin barrier of air between my face and the lake that allowed me to breathe normally. Maybe it would run out in a few seconds, but the Aqua Affinity enchantment on my headgear was at least giving me a chance. I was sinking, but not as fast as I should have been, and when I tried to swim forward instead of straight up, it at least got me moving.

Captain's log, before going diving, put Aqua Affinity on all your armor, not just your head.

The lake water was too murky for me to see much beyond my body. It wasn't a light issue. The torch was illuminating surrounding area, there was just too much detritus in the water. Something grabbed my foot, but it wasn't a tentacle. As I looked down, Bill's grinning face greeted me. I gave up on swimming just long enough to swing the ax.

It dragged, but it was still absurdly sharp, and it took off a few of his fingers. Bubbles escaped his mouth in a cloud as he tried to laugh, and I kicked him in the head.

Bill went away.

The shore wasn't far, and I hadn't run out of air. I pumped my legs as hard as I could and the lakebed rose us to meet me. It wasn't that deep, at least not here. And so far, no squids.

Shouldn't have jinxed it.

Once I hit bottom, it was easier to walk than to swim. No fish and no seaweed in my way, but plenty of fungi. I kept glancing back. The visibility here was a little better than where I'd fallen in, and Bill wasn't coming after me. The lakebed was rising; I was almost to the shore. Then one of my legs jerked out from under me.

It wasn't Bill. I flipped myself over to see a tentacle as thick as my arm had latched onto my greaves and was dragging me into the deep end. One hit from the ax opened a gaping wound in its rubbery flesh, but its grip didn't weaken. I sat up, my butt bouncing along the lake bottom like I was on a carnival ride as it pulled me deeper, and hacked it off.

The severed appendage remained suckered to my leg, its end writhing as inky blood further clouded the water. Ahead of me was darkness. I grabbed the torch from my belt and launched it forward like one of those rubber torpedo toys for a pool. It went faster and farther than I could have hoped, revealing the chasm a few yards ahead of me, and a forest of tentacles swaying like stalks of grass in the wind.

I tried to run, not terribly buoyant, but still bouncing across the lakebed. It was the slowest moonwalk ever. I glanced back in time to see another limb reaching for me. My ax glanced off its skin as it snaked in, barely leaving a scratch. It grabbed my waist, which at least put me in an excellent position to chop at the pink rubbery line that stretched into the abyss.

More limbs were incoming, and the torch was doing something odd. It had lost its momentum and floated down toward the chasm, but now it seemed to be stuck on something. None of the arms had grabbed it, but if it was still sinking, it did so in slow motion. It was mostly wood, though, so maybe it could float. Only, if it floated, why would it sink first?

Too many tentacles around for me to ponder the physics. I walked backwards, swinging the ax and taking chunks out of the grasping meat tubes as they came. At least they didn't have mouths. The field of swaying limbs stretched on for hundreds of yards. There had to be thousands of them. Could they all belong to one monster?

Thankfully, the majority were minding their business, but just the edge of the forest still comprised dozens of twisting, sinuous limbs, all acting as if they had minds of their own. Some of them had eyeballs mixed in with their suckers, which explained how they could react to me the way they were while the main body hid below.

I was moving back a step at a time, unable to turn and moonwalk away. My air hadn't given out. Thank the goddess for magic helmets, but fighting in the water came with a lot of extra resistance. My arms were burning, my armor was fully saturated below the neck, and the limbs didn't let go even after they were severed.

One of them grabbed the butt end of the ax and tugged. I kept my grip, but it pulled me forward and made it impossible for me to attack until I freed the weapon. Then a second got my arm, and I became the pool torpedo.

It didn't drag me down, instead lifting me up into the forest, spinning me around to wrap me like a boa constrictor intent on suffocating its prey. I couldn't see the kulu. The limbs sprouted out of pure darkness that the nearly immobile torch did nothing to illuminate.

With my free hand, I dug a fistful of coins out of my Warp Stone pouch and tossed them down. If I couldn't ax the giant squid, at least I could drop some rocks. The tentacle grappling me didn't draw itself down into the blackness. Instead, once its grip was secure, it arched, punching down like I was its fist and the darkness was my face.

It was fast. Coins were still tumbling through the water, and it pushed me past them into the black. Then I was spinning again as its grip on me unwound. The tentacle whipped, flinging me like a fast-ball, sending me careening into the deep.