Chapter 37: DD2 Chapter 031 – Death Knell

Slate tiles fell like rain from the rooftops of buildings, chimneys exploded into fractured bricks, and wooden shutters railed against their window frames with every thunderous beat of the dragon’s wings overhead. A potent cocktail of acid and terror pumped through Eliza’s veins as she ran, her lungs struggling to suck in enough air for the next desperate step, while her pursuers slithered ever closer. She could hear the whistle of the wind beneath its wings, the vibrations that reverberated through its broad chest in the final moments before the dragon unleashed its breath weapon and bathed the road behind her in scintillating golden flames. The swarm of tentacled horrors that had been nipping at Eliza’s heels flash-cooked in an instant, and their inhuman cries were swallowed up by the roaring fires that clung persistently to the stone surfaces of the street.

The bard staggered forwards for a few more feet before she fell to her knees and vomited. The relief of living for another few minutes was mitigated by the sickening sounds of people dying, and the creatures’ inky flesh popping like hot fat on a fire. 

It was too much for her ears; she could hear it all with her skill, and she wished dearly that she couldn’t. Eliza had thought that she’d become inured to death during the protracted rioting which had seen sporadic battles occur throughout Rhelea for well over a week, but what had started in the market square had proven her wrong.

Flashing images of steel-ranks battling atop the stage, of Typh changing into that beast, and people dying in droves all around her momentarily superimposed themselves over her vision. Eliza clamped her eyes shut, willing the uncomfortable memories away, and when she opened them moments later she was rewarded with the increasingly familiar sight of lances of light filling the air.  

Contrasting beams of black and gold crisscrossed the sky with rare appearances of other orphaned shades that originated from other isolated spellcasters. Spellfire was continuously exchanged between the dragon up above and the ground, with the vast majority of the arcane bolts anchored to the market square she had so recently escaped. It was all so very loud, the constant whooshing, roaring, and keening of combat magic, to say nothing of the explosions, or the anguished cries of pain that swiftly followed. If her own ears weren’t protected in part by her skills, then her sensitivity to sound alone would have been enough to make her join her voice to the near constant choir of terrified screams. 

Eliza allowed herself a single choked sob as she took in the sight behind her: a burning street covered in corpses and the foul ichorous substance that those creatures turned into when they died. This was her home, but now Rhelea was a battleground between a dragon and creatures she couldn’t comprehend.

A large blast of darkness touched down in the centre of the street, missing the dragon who had flown past by several long seconds.

Creation rocked and Eliza’s fledgling attempts at rising to her feet were thwarted. The taste of mauve filled her mouth and the desire to heave up her guts again was almost overwhelming. Slowly the bard picked herself up, turned around and ran, pushing past the other shell-shocked people that filled the street as burning wreckage, intermingled with pieces of meat, and a light dusting of snow fell from the sky.

She made it another two hellish streets before she ran afoul of another stream of monsters. It was patchy, nowhere near as dense as the initial floods were, but there were still more than enough of them to tear their way through the crowd of fleeing civilians that Eliza was a part of. Screams rang out where the two groups met, and tentacled flesh practically moved through humans, seemingly without resistance, misting the air with blood as classers died without the usual release of mana.

Eliza fixed her eyes ahead of her, refusing to look back over her shoulder as she tried her best to ignore the sound of pained cries and blood spurting onto snow. She ran harder than she had in years, harder than she ever had as an adventurer, and while she wasn’t faster than the horrors, at high-pewter, even with her modest dexterity score, she was far from the slowest in the crowd.

That was what counted.

The number of people running down the street with Eliza had thinned noticeably over the past few minutes. Some had taken branching paths down side-streets and alleyways to try and escape the stream of pursuing monsters which promptly split to better chase after all of their chosen prey. More died abruptly when a tentacled beast leapt forwards and cleaved through someone’s back. Intermittently, people would stand and try to fight, but with the exception of those who fought at the armed barricades left over from the riots, those who attempted that were swiftly overwhelmed.

With an ionising whine, a thick line of black fire traced a zig-zagging path across the road just ahead of her, swallowing up a family of three and a fleeing soldier, who Eliza couldn’t believe had made it this far, let alone outpaced her in all that armour. The ground was still smoking, like the corpses she refused to look at, but the formerly straight road ahead of her had become a forked intersection, where new routes through the destroyed buildings led onto the neighbouring streets.

Without hesitation, Eliza, along with a handful of others, turned and ran over the smouldering wreckage of a townhouse to her left. The ruin of the building she travelled through waited until they were half-way across before it started to collapse when bolts of golden light hit the ground nearby and everything started to shake. The bard dodged falling bricks and furniture, her violin case tucked protectively against her chest as she scrambled for safety over the uneven ground.

She emerged alone, coughing and covered in stone dust on a new street that had yet to be touched by the violence that was consuming her city. Eliza desperately wanted to take a break and to hide in one of the pristine looking buildings, but as if to highlight the transient nature of her safety, twin horrors covered in eyes and fangs broke out from the rubble behind her with their multi-eyed gazes fixed solely on her back.

The tentacled creatures lacked a tag. If they had classes or levels, that was a secret that the bard doubted she would ever find out, as she had no intention of actually trying to kill one. Escape was her one and only objective, something that was looking increasingly unlikely as they sped after her.

The horrors were hard to describe with any real detail. They were a mass of sinuous, inky-black limbs that seemed to lack a fixed number or even a centre. Just too many teeth and eyes studded haphazardly along each tentacle with no signs of a mouth anywhere in sight, and yet they cried incessantly, letting loose discordant howls of joy that reminded her of dogs on a hunt, even if the sound was nothing alike.

Her class wanted to stay and pick apart that noise, to dwell on how it was produced. The conflicting pitches, unnatural volumes, and reverberations made no sense to someone as familiar with music as her. But every other part of her didn’t want to die, and so she ran.

Whatever she had done to deserve such a fate as this, she didn’t know, but it was clear enough to her that one of them was going to kill her. They were faster than she was, and there was no-one left for her to outpace and leave to die, a grim realisation that she felt more than guilty about. 

Not that she didn’t already have enough things to feel guilty about.

The past week had been a blur of anger and grief, first for her friend, then her old life, and finally her city. It was only as Rhelea burned with the rage of the mobs stoked on by her words that Eliza realised the home she had made for herself was dead. In many ways it died the day that the dragon killed Galen; everything else after that was just a long goodbye. She knew that she could have stopped it, or at least stalled it for a while, but she hadn’t. Instead she had ridden high as The Bard of the Rebellion, stoking the flames of outrage and giving Phioplies a pyre worthy of the stubborn woman. 

In the distance another building was struck by black light, and exploded. Large chunks of masonry rained down over several streets, eliciting a new wave of screams, too many of which cut off abruptly, and her attention was brought back to her own life-or-death predicament. 

Eliza turned and sprinted down a narrow side street, a hand outstretched to steady herself against a cold wall as she made the sharp turn. She had barely made it more than a few steps inside before she slipped in a patch of ice. The bard tumbled head over heels, her hands and knees coming away bloody. Only it wasn’t her blood. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the dismembered remains of what used to be the better half of a person while a large mass of black tentacles and teeth munched away on their flesh. The unpleasant sound of teeth slicing through bone like butter unsettled her on a deeply primal level while she stared at the many-eyed horror and it stared back.

An unnatural scream emanated from within it, a scream that was repeated from her rear where the other two monstrosities arrived, and then again from her own mouth as relying on [Troubadour's Voice] she contorted her vocal cords into the same discordant cry. The monsters flinched back, hesitating for the briefest of seconds while she clambered to her feet, picked up her violin case, and sprinted past the one in front of her. 

Eliza’s throat ached like she’d been singing for hours from that short cry, but it had worked. Her skill had proved unusually reluctant to mimic the sound, but before she could celebrate or dwell on that any further, she had to push more stamina through her ailing legs as all three of the horrors recovered and started racing to catch up with her.

The new street was not nearly as pristine as the old. While it was further away from the square, the horrors were everywhere and engaged in a vicious battle with Traylan soldiers and former rioters who were steadily losing ground. She weaved between bitter struggles, noting how steel swords that lacked skills behind their strikes bounced off rubbery flesh and fanged tentacles sliced through boiled leather and chain with relative ease. 

Old barricades were now manned by a mixture of armed forces that pointedly refused to retreat when it was obvious even to her that the defenses weren’t worth the wood they were made out of, let alone the lives that manned them. With the fortifications designed to control the rioters in place, the monsters were funnelled into approaching in a relatively narrow path where they would be struck with long spears and crossbow bolts long before they could reach the defenders behind the barricades. 

In theory. 

In practice the horrors ignored the bristling wall of spears that grew increasingly ragged by the second, their hide being largely immune to whatever the pewter soldiers could do to them, and the few injuries that were inflicted seemed to regenerate quickly. And that was when they didn’t decide to just crawl along the fronts of the buildings that lined the streets, or clamber over the rooftops to attack the defenders behind the barricades directly.      

Eliza didn’t stop running or even slow down. She spotted a gap in the defenders and ran through it, her pursuers joining the fray and likely punching fresh holes into the barricades’ defences.

Eliza had prioritised her vitality and her charisma scores to keep herself looking young and pretty for Riyoul. While her dexterity wasn’t too far behind her primary attributes, she fundamentally lacked the skills, not to mention the inclination, to make herself into an efficient killing machine. She couldn’t lift a wagon above her head, or cast destructive spells like the ones being exchanged over Rhelea’s skyline. She couldn’t shrug off sword blows, or heal, but when it came down to running for her life, she was passably good at it. 

Even so, it wasn’t enough. 

She had picked up another horror a few streets past the barricades, and the relentlessness of the creature's pursuit had led to her finding herself cornered in an empty courtyard. It was a paved open space, sandwiched between three large buildings with doors to each one, walled off with an open archway that separated it from the road. Carefully cultivated plants lay dead in flower beds, and children's toys—left thankfully abandoned—lay scattered beneath a relatively thick blanket of snow.

Eliza had run inside out of desperation, hoping to find a place to hide. Her half-empty stamina pool and burning muscles had reminded her that just because she had the stats to go on, she by no means had the practice required to push past her all-too-human limits.

“Gods or anyone else who is listening: if I make it out of this I swear to you that I’ll tag along withan adventuring band, at least until I hit bronze. I won’t sing for coin anymore, I’ll… I’ll do something useful with my life beyond stroking the ego of some sadistic little fuck. I promise, just not like this. Not now...”

She swallowed the please, hating the too familiar sound of her own begging, but maybe she should have ignored her recovering pride and scraped a little lower, because it was soon made apparent that the gods were not listening. 

The monster slowly crept into the courtyard. Its bulk—somehow larger than the others—filled the stone archway that was her only entrance to and exit from the relative serenity that her refuge provided. The creature’s unnatural cries filled the small space for a brief moment as far too many eyes fixated on her.

She took a step back, body flat against the side door of a house she knew wouldn’t open. Still, she scrabbled at the door handle not daring to take her eyes off the thing before her. 

It slowly slithered forwards, like it was taking its time to savour her fear. Its unnatural movements were all the more unsettling for how damned quiet it was when it wasn’t screaming at her.

When it was closer, a tip of a tentacle reached out for her and she tried to hold back a whimper. A wet limb trailing mucus ran up the outside of her pant leg as protruding teeth and mismatched eyes far too large for the offending limb to naturally support made their presence known. The former left a shallow wound in her flesh, and the latter made eye contact with her while she screamed. A large chunk of her stamina went into it [Troubadour's Voice] as she increased the volume to a near-deafening shout. 

The monster flinched back. Recoiled even, and for a moment she felt a mote of hope swell within her that she might somehow survive. 

Until she saw a flicker.

All the eyes along a single tentacle erupted into a fountain of black blood which covered several feet of the courtyard. The air flickered again, and another tentacle erupted in gore. Then another, and another after that. With each flicker more or less timed to the beat of her heart the monster was maimed, but as the beast was sliced apart in front of her, Eliza felt that glimmer of hope die.

“Riyoul,” Eliza said accusingly.

There was no answer, only a slight pause in the rate of the monster’s systematic destruction as it was hacked apart by what she instinctively knew to be the invisible rogue. The horror put up a fairly good fight all things considered. Its limbs thrashed about in its blindness, whipping through the air frantically while Eliza crawled away from the carnage on her hands and knees. The monster only stopped flailing when every tentacle had been viciously severed from its surprisingly small, almost spherical body. The thing was still biting ineffectually at the snow-covered ground right up until the moment Riyoul finally made his appearance.

“The trick to it is they’re not very bright. Can’t see for shit either, even with all of those eyes,” the rogue explained, a long knife in his hand carving a line through the monster’s flesh far too large for the blade to have created without a skill. “And then there’s the fact that they’re bloody stubborn. Things will keep trying to grow new tentacles until you get the core.” 

Riyoul reached inside the gash he had made, and retrieved a small, red, gem-like object which he held out for Eliza to see. He waited patiently for a few seconds before he crushed it into a fine dust in the palm of his hand, and the remains of the monstrosity on the ground promptly melted into a large pool of black ooze that pooled around his boots before crawling away out of the courtyard.

“Now, what do you say to the man who saved your life?” the rogue smiled.

“Eat a dick.” 

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“How quaint,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “What about to the man you tried to murder?”

A part of her screamed at her to be afraid, that he was about to kill her, but Eliza found that she was too tired to care. 

“I hope you choke on it,” she spat, her bravado earning herself a deep belly laugh from her tormentor.

“Gods, how I’ve missed that attitude of yours. You know, you used to be so full of life and energy before you smoked it all away. Drowning yourself in your despair with drugs and booze… you’re like Myorik in that respect. Too big on the escapism to ever do anything with your life.”

“My life was fine before I met you.”

“Was it really? You were just a cheap whore before I found you. One with delusions of grandeur, a nice rack, and nothing much else,” he said, still grinning. “Gods, you don’t even like to fuck, what were you thinking choosing that line of work?”

“I was free.”

“You were nothing before you met me,” he reiterated. “Before I plucked you from anonymity, before I gave you levels and a story. I made you special! Me. I didn’t even fuck you once I learned you didn’t like it, and this is how you repay me? By trying to kill me?”

“You expect me to thank you for not raping me?” she asked incredulously.

“It would be a fucking start. After all I did for you, spreading your legs once in a while is really the least you could do considering how useless you are,” Riyoul said with a nonchalant shrug and a wry half-smile smile that belied his tone.

Eliza took a deep breath and decided to be brave, or more accurately, she found that she didn’t have it in her anymore to be scared.

“I don’t owe you anything Riyoul, least of all my body; you ruined my life.”

“Oh don’t be like that, like them. I was good to you, wasn’t I?”

“After years of living in constant fear of being replaced, of joining the long list of people you disappeared. After you beat me, cut me, invaded my home, and my life, you have the temerity to suggest that you were good to me?” 

“I could have been much worse, if you hadn’t tried to poison me you could have lived for—”

“I know about the other bard.”

“Oh…”

“That’s all you can say? Oh? Did you really think that you had me so cowed that I wouldn’t even try to fight back when I found out you were grooming my replacement?” she asked, the vitriol in her voice surprising her even as she continued. “You’re a coward, and I’m not scared of you Riyoul. Monsters are literally running rampant through the streets of Rhelea. Whatever you think you can threaten me with, it kind of falls flat in the face of everything I know burning to the ground!”

As if to punctuate her words a great beam of black light ripped through the sky while the very air they breathed vibrated in response. The dragon flying aloft that they both knew to be the woman known as Typh was hit square on by the spell. The black energy tore a large hole through the dragon’s chest and exited out through its back and severed one of the draconic beast’s massive wings in the process. Typh began to fall to the ground spinning in a wild and uncontrolled corkscrew as she lost control of her flight. She hit the ground hard, collapsing a large building nearby which sent a fresh wave of dust and debris into the air as the structure fell in on itself, entombing the dragon within.

“You might have a point there,” Riyoul deadpanned. “It would appear that I took too long with Melite and Pirria.”

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did; Melite spilled your name before I got to cutting, but Pirria kept her mouth shut right until the end. A true friend, that one.”

“Fuck you!” she yelled, feeling waves of guilt crash around her.

“Alright, if you insist,” Riyoul said, a hand falling to his belt. “One last time before you die, for nostalgia's sake.”

Eliza screamed and pushed as much stamina and rage as she could through [Troubadour’s Voice]. She didn’t know why she did it, but rather than a human scream, the discordant howl of the tentacled horrors escaped her throat, perfect in pitch though massively amplified in volume. Her throat cracked and bled. The strain of replicating a noise that not even her skill-enhanced ears were prepared to truly listen to caused a new pain to blossom in her throat and chest. Her skill begged her to stop while something inside her class threatened to break and Riyoul staggered backwards, the man whom she despised seemingly hurt for the first time.

Only Eliza realised that it wasn’t really the first time. Pirria’s tonics had worked in part; while the iron rank rogue had survived their initial application, the telltale signs of the alchemic potions working away were there. Riyoul was weak, his eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, while the skin on his face was waxy and pallid. As the man recoiled from the power in her voice, she saw how his knife-hand trembled, how old and frail the rogue looked.

“Stop that, it—” 

Reassured by his reaction to her cry, Eliza pushed even more of her stamina through her skill and screamed again, even louder than before. Then, with her lungs still straining, she leaned even harder on her skill, pumping whatever she had left through it. There was resistance, but as she focused on her hate for him, on every beating and violation, her willpower did something she was taught it could not do. The limiters built into her skill waned, and a flood of her remaining stamina poured into [Troubadour’s Voice]. Her killing intent seeped into the language that she did not understand, and then it stopped, her voice broken, her stamina empty, and her skill unresponsive.

“What in the gods’ name was that?” Riyoul asked, seemingly concerned as he raised a long knife at her in a shaky hand.

“...” 

Eliza opened her mouth to speak, only nothing came out. Pain poured from her throat in the place of the words she had expected. Her skill felt wrong, [Troubadour’s Voice] failing her for the first time in her life; even its passive benefits were simply gone. The loss hit her like a wave, but she had already lost so much, and before she could dwell on it any further they answered. 

Inhuman cries echoed out from all sides of the courtyard.

Dozens if not hundreds of them.

Riyoul paused, a hand still on his belt when the first horror lept at him from the archway. The rogue flickered out of existence as the monster practically exploded in a fountain of gore, but before the bloody chunks of meat could even hit the ground two more had appeared. Tentacled horrors entered the courtyard faster than she could count, and each one headed straight for Riyoul. His invisibility eventually failed him as he reappeared panting and wounded, pieces of him missing as the swarming tide of carnivorous monsters whittled him down before her very eyes.

For a time she stood there, too tired to be afraid, her back against the wall that had failed to provide her with refuge. She watched with no small amount of contentment as the man whose terrifying presence had dominated the majority of her adult life died. It was a slow death, a messy one. His skills and expertise, not to mention his alchemically enhanced strength and dexterity, allowed him to cut down the horrors by the dozen, his knives in too many places at once, but whether it was the potions that had weakened him, or simply the unrelenting swarm of monsters that she had somehow summoned, Riyoul was only a man. And a man had limits.

She didn’t get a system notification when he died. A small part of her felt relief that the mana that had once comprised the man she had hated would not become a part of her. Instead, the creatures that still swarmed the courtyard in front of her seemingly absorbed it all without even a mote of energy going up into the air.

I did it... I’m free...

The thought brought a whole host of messy feelings with it, things that would take a long time for her to unpack. Which was a shame as it was looking like she was about to die.

Inky black monstrosities filled the courtyard; every open space and surface was covered with the undulating forms of the creatures, not one of which she was capable of ending even in her well-rested prime. Tapped out of mana, perilously low on stamina, and without the use of her primary skill, how was she going to get out of this one?

As one the creatures turned on her. A sea of mismatched eyes burned deep into her soul as they looked at her with hunger. 

A horror writhed towards her. 

Then they all did.

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