Chapter 66: DD3 Chapter 012 – Seeing Yellow

The tunnel opened out into a large cavern where the floor was mostly even. Quite how large the subterranean chamber actually was or how high the ceiling went was anyone's guess. The thick blanket of blister fog made it impossible to see past the boundary of the mage’s arcane barrier. But if it was anything like the others, then beyond the small bubble of good—if increasingly stale—air there would be a ceiling some additional ten or so feet away.

It was in chambers like this where they’d been contesting the Queen’s forces for months. Each cavernous battleground connected the orderly passageways beneath the palace to the literal warren of underground tunnels that ran throughout Helion. Victory here was unlikely to ever lead to them storming the inner city in the same way they’d smuggled a small army of goblins into the then Nauron estate. There were simply too many well-defended chokepoints for that, but every soldier stationed down in the dark was one less manning the fortified walls above and while Arilla had enough troops to rotate tired besiegers away from the frontlines, the Queen did not. 

The warrior led her party forwards into the dense fog. Loose stones crunched underfoot while she carefully scanned the surrounding wall of impenetrable yellow for any signs of movement. [Slayer’s Sight] let her make do in the absence of light, and her accompanying party likely had skills or items of their own that accomplished the same feat, but it did fuck all for the limited visibility. Being surrounded on all sides by the impenetrable, deadly gas was incredibly disorienting and more than just a little bit claustrophobic. Occasionally a swirl of motion would appear in the fog, leaving them to guess whether it was just a gust of wind or a warning of an imminent attack.

If it was the latter, then they wouldn’t know until it was right on them.

Every noisy inch they travelled only reinforced how vulnerable they truly were. While there were signs of a battle up ahead, the fog seemed to absorb what should have been echoing clashes, and all she could reliably hear was her own breathing and the steady crunch of loose stones underfoot. 

Looking over her shoulder through the thin slit in her helmet, she could see that her worries were shared by the three classers accompanying her. The healer looked like he was about to shit himself, while the short blades in the ranger’s hands twitched noticeably with every barely perceived sound. Only the mage, his face set in quiet concentration, looked focused rather than afraid, although Arilla strongly suspected that was more to do with the mental effort required for him to maintain his spell.

Travelling deeper into the yellow fog, their roving patch of visibility bound by the edges of the arcane barrier, clipped the body of an earth sprite. When they moved closer to bring it within their bubble of breathable air, Arilla was struck by how large it looked. The hulking creature had a wide hole running through its boulder-like chest and the surrounding rock had splintered outwards from the wound. Glittering veins of copper, silver and a myriad of other precious metals could be seen running through what remained of its shattered torso. The exposed ‘innards’ that were splayed out on the floor looked more like a piece of fine art than something that belonged inside of a body—it was a distinct improvement over the usual blood and guts anyway. 

“Whatever did this was big. It looks like the sprite was run through by a spear about as thick as my thigh. The blade was serrated on one side. Definitely a natural weapon, maybe a horn? If so, that would make it at least five feet at the shoulder. Although, if it's not a horn that goes out the window,” the ranger suggested, crouching down low next to the corpse while he traced the edges of the wound with his fingers.

“Anything else?” Arilla asked.

“I can tell you that whatever can punch all the way through a high-bronze earth sprite can do the same to you. I don’t care how pretty your armour is. It’s not stopping a direct strike from what did this. And well…” the ranger trailed off.

“‘Well’ what?”

The man lowered his hand towards the ground. He gently swept away some loose bits of gravel before he firmly placed his palm on the cavern floor and beckoned for Arilla to do the same. She complied, tugging off a gauntlet and after clearing a space, touched the slightly damp ground with her bare skin.

“Feel that?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure what I’m feeling,” she answered, trying to understand the complex pattern of vibrations that were running through the floor. 

“That's a shame,” he sighed. “The floor’s practically dancing. Movement from something large. Several somethings with several legs if I had to guess.”

“How large?” she asked, standing up straight and putting her plated glove back on.

“Large enough that we’d be hearing them if it wasn’t for the damn fog. There could be a fight happening not twenty feet away and we’d struggle to hear it. Doubly so behind this barrier.”   

“Well, fuck.”

“Aye. Fuck.”

Arilla had many more questions that she wanted to ask—chief among them, how could the ranger tell so much from just looking at an earth sprite’s corpse, followed by who taught him to read movement through the floor like that. Either feat could have been a skill at work, but Arilla strongly suspected that it was experience. Experience gained from hunting and killing the lumbering giants, and creatures just like them, for coin and levels. 

It was easy to forget that every one of the high-level classers she relied on had earned their power through butchering their nonhuman allies. Arilla couldn’t even say that she was an exception to this violent trend, and the earth sprites had certainly suffered more than most. Properly processed, their bodies were worth a small fortune in mana enriched metals. Those same veins that she found so pretty ensured their species was never truly safe around humans. The monetary value of their bodies only increased with their level and age, adding significant wealth to the allure of their ‘kill xp’.

They swiftly moved on, heading deeper into the fog and towards the faint sounds that made their way through the omnipresent yellow gloom. The density of the bodies littering the floor continued to increase. When the ranger stopped to examine yet another corpse, Arilla caught the man discreetly palming a large chunk of natural silver, which she in turn pretended not to see. After the fifth body showed the exact same wounds, they stopped pausing at each one they passed, and Arilla finally noticed that the loose stones crunching underfoot were the chips and fragments from the sprites who never made it out of the cavernous chamber.

It was a sobering realisation, one that her accompanying adventurers had almost certainly already made. Their fear made more sense in hindsight, and it was almost embarrassing that her ignorance had been misconstrued as bravery. There were still so many things she didn’t know, and likely never would. Her rapid rise to high-bronze had skipped over so many formative steps that a warrior was supposed to tread. All the stupid novice mistakes adventurers typically made, the hard lessons learned, and the frustrations of the long grind were experiences that she would simply never have. And now that she was ‘Lord Arilla Foundling,’ it wasn’t like she could just stop and ask someone to explain what should be common knowledge to an adventurer like her.

The changes coming to Creation meant that she was probably just the first of many to race through the lower tiers. If the Great Wards truly did break, then in a few decades every classer would passively level to 100 and beyond if they were fortunate enough to survive the accompanying turmoil. Her trouble with her class would become a lot more commonplace under such dire circumstances, and she was genuinely afraid about what would happen to humanity if everyone was as fucked up as her.

A line of blazing silver light cut through the fog ahead. The wide arc struck something large that recoiled. An aberrant creature was briefly illuminated while it shrieked in pain. Its loud cries pierced through the muffling fog. The arc struck again and then silence. The argent flames guttered out, and the figures that had briefly appeared in the distance were lost to the fog. 

Arilla urged her party forwards, and they were swift to comply, racing over broken ground that grew more scuffed and scratched by the second. They were about to reach the site of the previous battle when a chitinous leg belonging to a creature similar to what they’d just seen passed through the mage’s shield before withdrawing. The sound of it—and several others just like it—clacked about on the hard stone of the cavern floor just ahead.

“Definitely not a horn,” Arilla grunted, looking up at the translucent roof of the arcane dome. 

“Aye, maybe you’re right at that,” the ranger agreed.

“Gods help us,” the healer offered.

It had been too fast for her to get a good look at it, but if she had to guess they were dealing with some sort of giant crab thing? Whatever it was, it was big, twice her height at least. Its long segmented legs were covered in a hard-looking exoskeleton that ended in natural blades. They were far thicker than the ranger’s thighs at their widest point and well over eight-foot in length. The tips narrowed down to a knife’s edge and were sharp enough to have left deep scratches along the rocky floor.

They had moments to strategise, but no matter how fast her mind raced, she couldn’t get past the fact that she couldn’t see it.

“Ideas?!” Arilla yelled, unsure if she kept the note of desperation out of her voice.

“We could retreat?” the healer suggested.

“It’s not the worst idea,” the ranger agreed.

“Don’t ask me, I’m reinforcing the shiel—”

Two legs came down. This time rather than passing through the translucent barrier, they impacted against the edge of the shield. The mage cried out and fell to his knees while spidering cracks spread across the arcane barrier. The two massive legs drew back, only to hammer down again and again on the mageshield which fractured more and more with each strike. 

Inside the tight confines of the magical dome, all Arilla could hear were screams. Her caster’s cries were thankfully starting to calm down, now that the healer had linked their hands together—reinforcing the failing shield. While the beast’s remained as loud as ever. Whatever it was, its predatory shrieks were earsplitting and distinctly animalistic. The low warbling howls were definitely not the kind of sounds she expected a crab—even a monstrous one—to be capable of making.

“Can you hold the shield together?” Arilla barked.

“No,” “Yes.” The healer and the mage giving conflicting answers weren’t helping her confidence in their abilities, but when the creature reared back to attack again, she knew she had to call it.

“My name’s—”

“I don’t care, can you mark it?!”

“Yes, but—”

“Then just fucking do it!” she commanded.

The ranger extended an arm, pointing a short sword at their obscured foe and a soft glow manifested around the edges of the creature’s legs. Arilla didn’t know if the effect extended past what she could already see, or if it did anything beyond outlining its silhouette, but she didn’t have the time to find out. 

Between her armour, her vitality, and her twin defensive skills—[Slayer’s Resilience] and [Slayer’s Steel]—she was confident that she could handle the blister gas’s effects for a while. Looking back at the comparatively frail forms of the two casters she’d been assigned, she knew that she couldn’t say the same for them. 

“Fall back as far as he can maintain his marking skill. I’m stepping out.”

Arilla didn’t wait for them to agree, fearful that they’d try and stop her. Instead, she sprinted towards the creature. With a lungful of fresh air, she passed through the translucent barrier and entered the thick yellow gas which audibly hissed as she charged through it. Her stamina and mana pools immediately started to drop. Her precious resources were being pulled in two directions by both her skills and her armour. The runes scrawled along the outside of her steel plates began to shine brightly while the enchantment dampened the effects of the fog.

Huh, it tingles.

Without the mage shield in her way and with the aid of the ranger’s skill, she could just about make out the majority of the creature’s silhouette. What she could see however was not good. 

The large crab-like creature walked on six or more oversized legs. Its roughly oval-shaped body seemed to be all mouth, opening and closing in hungry anticipation of its next meal. And above that was the limp body of a child? There was a small humanoid figure attached to the monster that seemingly ended at the waist where it was fused to its much larger, more monstrous half. 

Worst of all, above that limp humanoid form, was a tag.

[Tainted Spawn level 4].

Arilla’s blood ran cold. Her confident steps faltered, but before she could come to a complete stop the tainted spawn skittered around her while the barely visible dome retreated into the fog taking the rest of her party with it. Massive bladed legs plunged down while it rotated on the spot, each one large enough to bisect her lengthways. The ground shuddered with successive impacts, and she desperately dodged around the descending limbs.

She tried not to think about what this meant. The implications could wait until she was safe.

Arilla reminded herself that she was here to find Caeber and get out before her own army collapsed the cavern and the connecting tunnels around her. She did not want to overstay her welcome puzzling out this latest bit of dire news.

She felt the warrior in her chest rattle its cage and, bowing to the inevitable, she let it out. With a vicious smile spreading across her face, she stopped dodging. She spun around and all that heavy steel she wore only added to her momentum. With her zweihander held in two hands, she put the weight of her whole body into the swing. [Slayer’s Strength] flared, consuming the stamina she needed to ward off the toxic fog, and with the System’s power flooding her veins, her sword cleaved its way through the nearest leg.

Which then exploded.

Where her sword had cut into the creature’s tainted flesh, still outlined in red by the ranger’s skill, a blast of fire erupted from the wound. 

The monster staggered back, its oversized mouth booming out a loud warbling howl while Arilla blinked the stars from her vision. Burning ichor spurted from the stump she’d created, coating half her armour in still smouldering black. The familiar stench prompted scenes from Rhelea to flash through her mind, and she looked past the ghostly horde of imagined horrors to focus on the very real tainted beast in front of her.

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More bladed legs plunged down. She dodged the first strike and parried the second. Another boom immediately followed, the force of it resonating down her blade while a miniature inferno blossomed in the fog. Nearly a year's worth of intense combat experience saved her from just standing there in shock. Instead, she trusted her instincts and rolled with the momentum of the explosion. Her sword swung around in a reverse arc and intercepted another overhead blow which would have ended her. Her zweihander sunk deep into the bladed limb before it was rapidly propelled out of the wound, the resulting detonation sending her back down to her knees and blowing the rest of the half-severed limb off into the distance.

“This would be really convenient if I had a bow,” she grimaced.

Her ears were ringing, and Creation shifted beneath her feet. Her arms ached far more than she’d have liked them to, but she had to admit that the ranger’s skill almost made the fight easy. Painful and jarring, sure, but not particularly hard. The fires had startled the beast, and the explosions hurt it far more than her own strikes had. She could certainly exploit that further if she was willing to suffer through the recoil. 

With half a thought she increased the mana flowing through [Slayer’s Resilience]. This was going to hurt.

Crawling fires spread across the tainted creature’s body. Droplets of toxic yellow fog boiled into an equally repulsive vapour. It was illuminated far better than Arilla could have ever hoped for, and she watched it haemorrhage ichor before her eyes. It faced her, staring her down despite its lack of eyes and too stupid to know any better, it came for her.

It only had four legs left and, settling into a slow spin, it used all of them to unleash a continuous flurry of stabbing attacks. The sound of sharp chitin clashing against her sword grew louder, each collision earning them both an incendiary blast as she sheared off slivers of its natural weapons with every exchange. Its bladed legs grew sharper and hotter while she was buffeted backwards from the successive blasts. Her controlled parries were acting like a whetstone, and the ranger’s skill as the forge. Soon red-hot knives were flashing down and Arilla spent as little stamina as she could get away with avoiding them while she waited for her moment.

It steadily forced her back, her dexterity keeping her from tripping on the loose stones that littered the floor.

When she saw it, she didn’t hesitate. Aware that her time was limited, she slipped between its glowing strikes and jumped upwards at its underbelly with all of her skill-enhanced strength. Caught in the process of rearing back to begin its attacking pattern anew, Arilla crashed into the tainted creature’s underside where chitin crunched and the ranger’s skill activated once again. The explosion hammered her into the ground, costing her more of her health than she would have liked to admit, while simultaneously adding to the impact of her leap, sending the creature racing up into the sky…

Where it hit the ceiling at speed and subsequently exploded again. The force of that sent it rocketing towards the floor, which caused another blast and all Arilla had to do was stand back and watch. At some point the ranger stopped maintaining his skill and the charred battered husk of the tainted creature unceremoniously fell to the floor for the last time and was still.

*Congratulations on defeating a level 4 Tainted Spawn, experience is awarded.*

*Congratulations on defeating an end-stage tainted creature. For your service to the System, additional experience is awarded.*

She felt the usual rush of mana that accompanied a kill notification. This one was noticeably larger than she’d expected to receive given the creature’s comparatively low level of 4, but it was nowhere near enough to get her to her next level. 

“That wasn’t so hard.”

Arilla walked over to what remained of the monster and, after checking it for any suspicious glows, kicked it over, right way up. She had to get uncomfortably close to the smoking corpse to make any details given the blister fog, and when she did see, she struggled not to recoil. What remained of the goblin’s upper body had been partially pulped from the numerous impacts, and been burned nearly beyond recognition, but the rest of it wasn’t much more pleasant to look at.

Deep veins as black as night contrasted sharply with its anaemic looking green skin. Its eyes were nothing but dark pits and its face was contorted into a grimace of horrific pain. There were lingering signs of restraints around its wrists and throat where its flesh had been rubbed raw by manacles and had yet to heal. The goblin was on the thin side, but perhaps her perceptions were skewed—it had been a long time since Arilla had seen one whose diet wasn’t supplemented by meat pies and the giant rats that infested Helion’s sewers. 

She debated taking the goblin half of the corpse with her, but ultimately decided against it. Arilla muttered a quick prayer for the poor creature's soul and was about to move on when the fog around her began to shift.

Whether it was the muffled sounds of her—admittedly very loud and very bright—fight that had drawn them in, or some unexplained effect of the ranger’s skill didn’t matter. What did were the three hulking silhouettes belonging to more tainted spawn that emerged from the fog.

One had been an easy kill, three all at once was bound to be a considerably more challenging fight. Her assumptions were swiftly proved correct when the creatures’ erratic movements, when coupled with the thickness of the fog, caused their forms to blur and shift together. Countless attacks raced towards her, each accompanied by a swirl of toxic gas and, darting back, a cloud of shattered stone erupted where she had just been standing.  

With the taste of acrid fumes on her tongue, Arilla ran away. 

She simply had too many disadvantages to risk the fight, and killing all the creatures down here wasn’t the point anyway. She needed to find Caeber.

It wasn’t as hard as she’d feared. Unburdened by her ‘adventuring party’ Arilla was able to cover a lot of ground. She was hardly the fastest classer, having built herself for strength and durability, but with [Slayer’s Promise] reinforcing her attributes she was significantly faster than an unclassed human. The ground raced beneath her feet. The heavy metal of her thick runeplate barely slowed her down, while the harsh stabbing sound of onrushing monsters clacking against the hard stone quickly faded away into the distance.

Her eyes scanned the ground in front of her, searching for signs of recent battle while her lungs tried to process the steady build-up of fumes that made her cough and splutter. More signs of battle meant more monsters, both dead and alive. She raced past fresh corpses, seeing them neatly severed into messy chunks and tried not to fixate on those who had gathered nearby, who were quickly added to the small horde pursuing her through the fog.

A blaze of silver erupted in the distance, and she raced after it, arriving just in time to catch the Shining Knight slice a tainted spawn in half with an almost casual swing of his sword. As usual, Caeber elected to wield a one-handed longsword, forgoing the protection of both a shield and a helmet. Considering the battered condition of his usually pristine armour she suspected that this time he might regret that choice. While she watched him, embers of silver fire licked along the edges of his body. The magical flames consumed both the fog around him and the ichor that had spattered against him. Just by standing close, Arilla could feel the burden on her lungs lessen and she found herself panting to catch her breath.

“You shouldn’t be here, Arilla,” Caeber chastised.

“Neither should you,” she answered.

“I don’t have time for this. You need to leave while you still can.”

“I will. Just as soon as you come with me.”

“I’m not leaving. This is a fight I can’t walk away from.”

“No one is going to be walking away from this fight if we don’t leave. We’re collapsing the tunnels and conceding the underground. We need to go before we're both trapped down here.”

“I know. It was my idea to order the collapse. We can’t let it get out.”

“It?”

“Arilla… You’ve seen earth sprites fight before. Given how strong they are, did you really think that a few dozen taint-warped goblins could force us to retreat? I’m talking about that,” he said, pointing his sword off into the yellow gloom.

Arilla’s eyes followed the warrior’s outstretched arm, and what she saw pulling itself out from the fog was enough to make her forget all about the creatures hurrying to catch up with her. 

It was as immense as it was horrible. In places, the beast resembled a massive centipede and in others a squid. Large pieces of segmented plate were built into a towering form that must have brushed against the ceiling. It dragged itself forwards on legs that resembled those belonging to the tainted spawn she had fought earlier, but as her eyes travelled down its long form, its trailing frame degenerated into a messy bunch of slithering tentacles studded with mismatched eyes. Obscured by the fog she couldn’t say how long it really was, but she saw enough undulating coils dip in and out of visibility to know that it was long. At the front was a bulbous reptilian head and when its oversized mouth opened up, in addition to countless rows of serrated foot-long teeth, was the limp form of a knight in the familiar armour of the Queen’s Alchemic Guard.

[Tainted Spawn level ???].

“What in the fuck is that?” Arilla swore.

“That’s a really good question, but you should stand back,” Caeber said, taking a step forwards to put himself between her and the lurking monster.

“No. I’m not letting you kill yourself fighting that thing,” she said, unfortunately coming to the conclusion that she was serious.

“I’m not asking for your permission, Arilla.”

“Mara wouldn’t want this for you,” she said, and Caeber immediately froze. 

“Mara’s dead. What she wants doesn’t matter,” he said, but there was a sudden fragility in his voice that she disliked. For all of the iron-ranker's superior strength and skill, she didn’t fancy his chances—not when he sounded so painfully lost.

“What about Julian? He’ll take you back. We both know he will, just don’t fight that thing. Run with me,” she implored.

His broad shoulders slumped, and he took another step away from her.

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t. It's too fast when it actually gets moving. It will chase me. Someone has to stay and fight it until they collapse the cavern. And no offence, but you wouldn’t last more than three seconds against that thing,” Caeber explained.

“Maybe I wouldn’t. But if I leave you alone, you’ll do something suicidally melodramatic,” Arilla said.

“I wouldn’t.”

“You definitely would.”

“Fine, maybe I would,” he sighed. “You sure about this?”

“I am.”

“Okay, but I’m taking the brunt of this, you’re backing me up. We’ll switch if it gets too much, and… did you lead a pack of them right to us?” he asked, his eyes widening as he looked over his shoulder.

“Maybe?” she grinned.

“Shame there’s not a bard around, this will make for an interesting tale if we survive,” the Shining Sword laughed before settling into a more poised fighting stance. 

Arilla laughed with him and readied her blade. They had some killing to do.

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