Chapter Thirty-Seven
With the way Deprivation Cage and Labyrinth had both failed repeatedly recently, Vester was actually shocked they kept the Boss down long enough for Ripper and Woody to sever the major arteries in the dragon’s throat.
Reve had shoved so much lake water into the dragon’s chest through its muzzle that its torso now looked swollen, and Li Ra had reduced the beast’s eyes to dissolved ruins. The thing twitched, but still hadn’t tried to fight back.
Vester couldn’t tell if it was just the combination of skills and attacks keeping it crippled, or if he’d somehow created a greater trap than expected by mixing Deprivation Cage and Labyrinth. Regardless, he was glad it was working, and hoped the thing would do them the honor of dying soon.
His mana was slowly recovering, and Vester sighed to see that Kora was starting to look healthier as well. The kitsune gave a harsh gasp and then coughed out several mouthfuls of blood, but after that she resumed breathing without Krysta having to continue mending her lungs.
Their Prismatic Paladin was not happy to have been taken down so easily, and Skylar had to come over and help restrain her when Kora tried to push herself back to her feet to take another crack at the dragon. Finally, Vester himself had to step in and put a hand against Kora’s breastplate.
“Stop,” he said firmly. “Krysta just helped your lungs grow back. If that shit had hit anyone but you, they’d be sludge now. Take a moment and recover. The Boss is finished, mostly. Anytime it twitches I’m renewing Deprivation Cage on it, and my Labyrinth hasn’t broken yet. We’ve got it contained.
Just rest.”
Kora’s milky eyes glared through him for a moment, then she let out a shuddering breath.
“Okay… sorry,” she managed. “That just reminded me of the attack that blinded me.”
Five tails whipped behind her, then dropped to the ground.
Vester didn’t hesitate to take her into his arms and hold her close.
He could feel her trembling through her armor and understood she was suffering some mental demons.
“We got you,” he whispered into her ear. The soft triangle of fluff flicked to slap his nose, and he had to resist the urge to sneeze as tiny hairs tickled his nostrils. “Your frost slowed it down and gave us the upper hand. You did your job. Now rest.”
As if to punctuate his declaration, a vicious crack echoed through the cavern and Ripper’s tentacles wrenched one of the dragon’s vertebra free. The golem shoved the huge bone cylinder away, and Woody climbed into the gory wound to continue attacking the dying monster.
“How much health does the damn thing have?”
Li muttered. The oni had dropped down off the stone she’d climbed and was now standing next to the others.
Only Reve was outside the Sanctuary, and she was circling close enough to duck into it if the dragon suddenly revived.
“I must have fired my entire mana pool twice into its eye sockets. It shouldn’t have a brain left.”
“This entire fortress has been a rampant perversion of the forces of Life and Death,” Krysta said wearily. “The dragon is like a living undead somehow. What I’m worried about is if it returns to the bone dragon when we kill this side of it.”
Vester grimaced, but he couldn’t deny sharing some of Krysta’s concern.
In many ways, the undead dragon had been harder to fight.
“Skylar, can you focus Woody and Ripper on completely separating the head and pulling it away from the body?”
When she nodded, Vester used his illusion to cast his voice up next to Reve: “Try and harvest the body once the golems tear the head free.”
“I’ll help them!” Reve declared, then she dove to grasp the torn scales and began using her Telekinesis to try and rip them free from the dragon’s neck along the path of Skylar’s puppets.
Decapitating a creature that refused to die was nauseating, but Vester knew it couldn’t feel the pain in its body while under Deprivation Cage’s effects.
Though… that actually makes it more nightmare inducing, he mused. The idea of losing access to my bodily sensations and then waking up to find myself just a head is not a pleasant one… and technically something I could actually experience in this life.
He shivered at the idea, and Kora hugged him a bit tighter. He wasn’t sure if she was doing it to comfort herself or because she sensed he was having disturbing thoughts, but he welcomed the touch and tightened his own embrace in response.
Krysta, meanwhile, had set up a proper campfire and began cooking. The pandali kept glancing at the dragon, then the rest of the Party, while casting repeated scowls like it was personally offending her. Vester wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her look so upset before.
“You okay, Krysta?” he asked.
“No,” she responded curtly, then she sighed.
“In my old life it was thought that necromancy wasn’t a real magic—that no one could master death and force it to obey. The healing arts were… well, for my people they’re sacred. Tending life, making people better, that’s the whole reason I was sorted into Toad House.
Our magic is all about taking care of people.”
The frustrated woman waved her hand to indicate the entire cave around them. Just like in the watery tunnel, the vast bare stone was littered with bony growths, tumorous pustules, and generally unhealthy-looking bits that Vester didn’t want to examine too closely.
“This entire place spits on everything my people believe in!”
Krysta exclaimed. “It’s like using healing magic to kill people… I hate it. It shouldn’t exist.”
Before Vester could offer her comfort, he saw Skylar wrap her arms around Krysta’s shoulders.
The djinn rested her cheek against Krysta’s face and hugged her tight.
“You’re not wrong,” Skylar murmured softly. “Life magic should be used to heal, restore, and animate. It should be a gift and a blessing… not whatever this place is. This entire fortress is cursed, and I hope when we complete the Quests here it burns to oblivion.”
Vester cocked his head, thinking hard, then he glanced up at where Reve was still working to help Ripper and Woody tear a dragon’s head off.
He began inscribing a large circle on the ground with Trickster’s Cane, then drawing in the ritual to summon a god.
He’d memorized this diagram to the point where it was child’s play to substitute Non’s symbol for Julius’.
Once he was done, he exerted his energy and ignored his headache to fill the channels with gold. Because he’d drawn the symbols himself, filling the channels with gold took far less energy. That meant he completed the job without returning his head to a state of severe pounding.
The dull ache wasn’t fun, but he could tolerate it.
“Reve, can you come down here?” he called to her.
The Avatar of Life glanced back at him, confused, then descended until she was standing next to him.
“This is the ritual to summon the God of Life. As his Avatar, you have a unique connection that makes it work. I… think perhaps you should call him and request he purify this place.”
Reve stared at him; the rest of his Party stared at him; in fact, the only beings not staring at him were the golems still carving their way through the dragon’s neck.
“Am… I allowed to do that?” Reve asked tentatively. “I have never directly summoned my god before,” she admitted. “He has answered my prayers, but he’s never seemed quite so conversational as yours.”
“Won’t know until you try,” Vester offered. He forced a little cheer into his tone while stepping out of the way so she could take the central position in the ritual. “If it makes you feel better, when I last spoke to him, Julius seemed very fond of you. I think this’ll go over well.”
“I really should stop forgetting Vester is so casual about gods,” Skylar managed after a few seconds. “But still, it’s weird that he just name drops them like that.”
“Agreed,” Li Ra said with a nod. “Then again, we’ve met Non and gossiped with her about his skill in bed, so maybe we need to adjust our thinking?”
Vester turned to look at them. “You did what, now?” he asked, surprised that they’d admit what he’d suspected. “Say that again…”
“Nope!” Krysta interjected, suddenly looking far more alert. Her ears flicked, and her huge tail actually wrapped half around Li Ra to yank the oni back so Li was behind her. “Not blabbing about girl talk with you. You go do god stuff! Li, help me cook!”
The Wilderness Sage knelt by Krysta’s cookpot and began taking out herbs and spices. Then Li started cutting them and passing them to the pandali so they could season whatever she was making. It smelled like soup to Vester.
“Hmmm,” he hummed, staring at them for a moment. He turned his eyes to Kora and Skylar, though they looked anywhere but at his face. When he turned back to Reve, the tall Avatar of Life was half-hidden behind her wings.
“I shall summon the God of Life now,” she announced in a tone that implied she would not tolerate any interruptions. Reve folded her legs beneath her, rested her hands on her knees, spread her wings to form a sort of dome around herself, and then began channeling mana into the ritual diagram.
Vester could see that Reve’s mana control was incredibly precise; she filled the pathways slower than he did, yet the energy moved with a slow, measured pace that ensured every speck of gold was fully saturated before it progressed.
With how she took her time, Vester wasn’t actually shocked that the last bit ignited at the same moment Ripper succeeded in tearing the dragon’s head free.
A pillar of light ignited into the sky from the ritual circle.
Woody touched the dragon’s neck and huge portions of its body vanished, leaving a sludge of innards, veins, arteries, and viscous fluids behind. Skylar grunted and staggered a step from the sudden influx of material into her inventory.
Stage Four Quest Complete.
Stage Five: Destroy the Heart Rot Core.
A cat, not overly large, with thick, fluffy gray fur, a flat face, and large orange eyes suddenly appeared on the ground in front of Reve. Julius flicked his tail, licked one of his little muffin paws, then lashed out at the air around them.
Five arcs of incandescent energy seemed to tear the fabric of reality while streaking upward from the god’s position.
Everything in their path simply vanished and left behind a void Vester couldn’t begin to describe.
It didn’t even feel like a vacuum, because the carved pathways in the air were somehow the absence of a vacuum.
The roof of the cavern split in five places, yet none of the dangerous water flowed in through the exposed cracks. Instead, the edges gnawed outward until they met, which formed a great, gaping nothingness over their heads.
Then Julius let out a quiet mrow and flicked his paw again.
This time the energy was a purple so black Vester wasn’t sure why he perceived a color at all.
It took the form of a huge paw stamping on the emptiness, and the edges of reality began closing.
The corrupt landscape was gone, replaced by healthy, fresh stone, soft glowing mosses, green vines, and luminous mushrooms.
Then that life energy swelled out from the spot he’d stamped and began to cover the rest of the cavern.
Vester wasn’t sure how, but he knew the same explosion of healthy growth was taking place along the entire path of Julius’ attack. His theory was confirmed when another notification popped into his view.
Stage Five Quest Complete.
Hidden Objective Complete.
Julius turned back toward Reve like he’d done nothing at all, hopped into her lap, and bumped his wide head against her chin until she started scratching him. His purr seemed to fill the entire chamber, and Vester shivered as all of his aches and pains disappeared all at once.
Every member of his Party gave a similar twitch, and he knew Julius had to have healed all of their wounds simply by existing near them. Then he licked Reve’s nose a single time and vanished from sight.
“Well… guess that worked,” Vester whispered. “How much you want to bet the hidden objective was finding a way to purify the fortress?” he asked, mostly himself. Then he nearly jumped out of his skin when Reve suddenly yanked him into her lap through a flex of her Telekinesis.
“Your suggestion was brilliant!” the Avatar of Life exclaimed. “The God of Life said he was proud of me and that my baby will bear his blessing!”
“Your…” Vester felt his brain short circuit and began blinking rapidly. Vaguely, he remembered being told by Non or Julius—his brain was far too scrambled at the moment to remember which one—that Reve was certain to get pregnant if they had sex. “We’re having a… baby?”
Despite his surprise—and Vester was very surprised—the news filled him with joy.
He wasn’t certain how pregnancy worked on this world, or with Reve’s species in general, and he was certainly going to start panicking once the shock wore off, but in that moment he felt a simple, uncomplicated happiness for the jubilant expression staring at him.
Then Reve started kissing him and Vester had trouble thinking of anything coherent.
He could hear his Party cheering in the background, with Krysta announcing she was going to make a cake, and Kora swearing an oath to always protect their child… and if he heard right, Li whispering that Reve had all the luck. Skylar was just clapping, the sound deafening in his ears.
If the entire fortress hadn’t begun shaking right then the situation might have devolved into a celebration Vester likely would have cherished for years to come, but they all sobered when the sound of cracking, grinding stone began to fill their ears.
The Party swiftly gathered back into combat formations, with Li Ra darting out to claim the dragon’s head using Chaos Thief. Ripper and Woody came to stand on either side of Skylar, and Krysta doused her campfire while cursing about her meal being ruined.
Because rising before them was a new formation of dungeon stone and a stairwell leading down.
The message couldn’t have been any clearer: the Great Dungeon wanted them off the eleventh floor, and the vicious, booming roar of a distant dinosaur echoed to remind them of what waited them if they chose to ignore the hint.
Together, they began to descend.