Chapter 68: DD3 Chapter 014 – Ambition

The smell of meat roasting over the open fire filled Tamlin’s nostrils and tickled his imagination with half-forgotten imaginings of real food. The texture of rich steak, soft to the touch with but the faintest hint of resistance from where it had been seared by the licking flames. He’d watched, his lip bitten in silent anticipation, while Ilvane had delicately salted and spiced the meat. The young ranger had explained the need to enhance the natural flavours that came from the marbled fats running through the animal’s flank without overpowering them with dried herbs he’d brought with him. 

To Tamlin, it was all sorcery—far more incomprehensible than the magic he couldn’t yet manifest. He’d never learned to cook, and after his mother had passed, his father had barely even remembered to feed him. After that, it had been the orphanage’s gruel, and then straight into Typh’s care. The dragon’s patronage should have seen him fed with luxuries comparable to a King, had Tamlin not crippled himself and consigned his diet back to gruels and soups so thin that they’d have given the orphanages watered-down meals a run for their money.

The scintillating hiss of hot oil dripping from the suspended meat and landing in the fire drew him out of his self-pity. His stomach grumbled painfully adding to his moroseness as he looked down at the unappetizing bowl of broth he’d requested for himself.

“Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” Ilvane asked.

“No. I’m fine, thanks,” Tamlin said. 

“Suit yourself,” Ilvane shrugged. 

The ranger turned away from Tamlin and sliced off a bit of still-cooking meat with his belt knife, which he promptly ate in one bite. Jealousy bloomed in Tamlin’s heart at the casual display of normalcy. The necromancer forced himself to tear his eyes away from the slowly rotating spit and brought a spoonful of the watery broth to his mouth. Unlike Ilvane who smacked his lips in satisfaction at his tantalising meal, it took all of Tamlin’s willpower just to swallow. 

His broth, like every other broth he ate, was bland. Any lingering flavours had been thoroughly drowned by the hot water he diluted the thin slivers of unseasoned meat with. Still, even this ascetic meal wasn’t enough to save him. He could already feel his stomach begin to cramp in anticipation of the food’s arrival.

It was a small pain, one he was used to and more than capable of enduring, but when everyone else was about to feast on Ilvane’s cooking—Arbor notwithstanding—it was hard not to be bitter.

“When do you think the others will get back?” Tamlin asked, trying to take his mind off the painful chore of eating.

“Why, aren’t we enough company for you?” Ilvane smiled.

“It’s not that. You and Arbor are fine,” he said, gesturing towards the ever-silent woodling standing still by the fire. “I just worry. Scouting is dangerous and rogues always die first.” Rather than sharing his concerns, Ilvane laughed, momentarily forgetting to turn the meat over the fire while he looked at Tamlin incredulously. “What?”

“You’re not very good with people are you?” Ilvane smirked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” the necromancer asked.

”They’re not really scouting ahead, Tamlin.”

“They’re not?”

“Well… I’m sure they’re doing some ‘scouting.’ Especially if that involves finding secluded spaces where they won’t be overheard, but Almira certainly isn’t bringing Drue along with her for that. That boy may be good in a fight, but stealth is hardly in the warrior’s skillset.”

“You don’t mean…” Tamlin trailed off, finding the notion surprisingly uncomfortable.

“Yes. I ‘mean,’” Ilvane said. “The two of them have been together since the dragon pulled us out of the academy.”

“But the two of them go scouting every day.”

“Yes. They do,” the youth laughed.

“Why? What does she…”

“See in him? I don’t know, Tamlin. Maybe it's his broad shoulders, chiselled jaw, or abs you could literally grate cheese on. I know you don’t like him much, but he isn’t actually a bad guy.”

Tamlin grunted in acknowledgement. He hadn’t known any of them for long. It had only been a little over a week since they’d left Helion and daylight behind, but already Almira had proven her worth as more than just a capable member of the team. Drue however, had been less impressive. The warrior was competent, especially for his level, but there was nothing he could do that Tamlin’s necromantic minions couldn’t do better. The only thing giving Drue some passing relevance were Typh’s ‘restrictions’ that severely limited both the number and quality of his little undead horde.

Something about the two of them being ‘together’ irked Tamlin far more than it should, and it wasn’t just him coming across like a fool for not noticing it. He was trying to place the familiar yet elusive emotion when his minions picked up Drue’s heavy stomps approaching the campfire. 

Almira was nowhere to be seen, but for a rogue that was almost to be expected. No sooner than he began to look around for her in earnest, did the woman suddenly appear by the fire. Reclined and in good spirits, Alimra reached for the meat on the spit, only for Ilvane to bat her hand away along with a scathing look for good measure.

“Ouch!” she protested, cradling her hand dramatically as if it had been wounded.

“Next time you lose a finger, wench,” the ranger grinned.

“We all know how much you like those, Ilvane,” Almira teased, waggling two of her slender digits for effect. “Are you getting so lonely by yourself in your bedroll that you’re having to resort to dismembering your allies to satisfy your needs?”

“Hardly. We both know you’re not exactly my type.”

“Hmm, maybe we could get Tamlin to loan you one of his minions for a quick minute. Surely one of them is manly enough for you.”

“Gods above help me. Consorting with necromancers, cultists, and vampires! And now I’ve been offered the forbidden flesh of the unliving in my hour of need,” Ilvane sighed, before turning to Tamlin with an exaggerated wink. “Well, what do you say, Necromancer? Think you can help me out?”

“Uhmm… what?” Tamlin had never exactly been a social person, but this kind of teasing banter was completely foreign to him. He felt like everyone else was following a script that he’d been denied access to. The familiar ease in which they joked with one another was something he couldn’t begin to imitate, let alone join in with. No matter how much he wanted to be one of them, there was the impenetrable barrier of his own awkwardness that he just couldn’t get past. 

He was reasonably certain that Ilvane didn’t actually want to sleep with a corpse. It was an invitation for him to say something witty and fun—a metaphorical olive branch offered to the group's newest member, but all that came to Tamlin’s mind was that he was so unlike them.

Ilvane and Almira were both of mixed blood. Their apparent nonhuman ancestry had manifested itself as a trait on their statuses, [Elf Blood], and [Vampiric Blood], respectively. Rather than consigning them to a life of frailty and pain, these traits were positive if anything, and in addition to some minor physical changes that grew more prominent with their rising levels—pointed ears for Ilvane and teeth for Almira—they also influenced their class choices. 

According to Ilvane, at level 5, one of his rank up options was Elf tagged, at 20, two of them were, and the ranger was growing increasingly confident that at level 50, three out of his three choices would follow that trend. Why the System, or the Gods, were so intent on pushing Ilvane and Almira down a less-than-human path, Tamlin had no idea.

Typh’s amnesty for forbidden classes had saved them from being culled by the Inquisition. But contrary to what the dragon had claimed, it wasn’t the same. Only Drue had a forbidden tag to go along with his forbidden class, although like Tamlin, the ‘warrior’ used a skill to hide it.

And Tamlin didn’t exactly like Drue, for reasons he had a hard time vocalising.

“What’s Ilvane want?” Drue asked, finally stomping past Tamlin’s silent wall of the unliving to re-enter their camp, where he took a seat on the ground next to Almira.

“So many things. Unfortunately, they will all have to wait until we get topside,” Ilvane answered.

“Gods, I miss the sun—don't laugh—and actual wind. The breeze you get running through these tunnels always stinks of death or some monster or another,” the rogue chipped in.

The three adventurers, who were supposed to be his peers, took turns to reminisce about the inconsequential things they all missed about Helion. They laughed and joked while Tamlin stared at them uncomprehendingly.

“Why are you talking about the surface?” Tamlin asked.

The laughter stopped, and this time it was their turn to stare at him in silence.

“Because… we're heading back? The boss monster is dead, so once we’ve carved it up for parts, and looted anything worthwhile… then we’re done here, aren’t we?” Almira said.

“I’m afraid there’s been a miscommunication. That’s not a boss monster,” Tamlin said, gesturing to the large lamia corpse only a dozen or so feet away. “It’s a floor guardian. We’re just getting started.”

No one said anything, and Tamlin wondered if he’d made some kind of a mistake. Incomprehensible looks were shared between them, and eventually, Almira turned back towards him with an easy smile that he doubted was genuine.

“Tamlin, that thing nearly killed us. We’ve been underground for over a week. I understand that you’re in charge, but it will take us days just to get back to the surface. We need to rest, we’ve all gone up five levels from this floor which is amazing, but we shouldn’t rush this. We can come back better prepared for a longer delve.”

“You’re right. I’m in charge and I say we go deeper. Everyone’s gear is intact, no one is injured, and we’re all resting now—it's not my fault if you choose to exert yourself rather than recover. Five levels in over a week isn’t amazing—it's slow. I don’t want to waste another week travelling up and down dank tunnels when we can just go to the next floor of the dungeon now.” 

“Tamlin, five levels in a week might be slow for you, but we aren’t looking to be the next great terror that shakes the foundations of Creation,” Almira said somewhat melodramatically. “Rushing through levels gets people killed when caution wouldn’t. We need to go back, rest properly, and adjust to our raised stats. Then we can come down again and clear the next floor safely.”

“Then you’ll die,” he said, and a vicious part of him smiled when he saw the rogue’s hands drift towards her weapons. “Relax. I won’t hurt you, but in case you hadn’t noticed, a dragon just took Terythia’s untakeable capital city. Coastal nations are dropping like flies, and an eldritch abomination just ate half of Rhelea. This is the end of days, Almira. If you want to pretend to be safe until something with actual power decides to kill you and everyone you hold dear, then go back to the surface and be cautious. But if you want to be a terror that shakes the very foundations of Creation, then you’ll come with me, because five levels in a week is too slow, and I’m going deeper into this dungeon until I get what I want.”

“And what's that?” she asked, her mouth half-open with something he couldn’t place.

“Power.” 

Tamlin didn’t have to say anything else to persuade them. They ate, they rested, and then with the lamia rising, green fires blazing for eyes, they all went deeper.

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***

The second floor was much the same as the one above, with very little in the way of mysteries, traps, or puzzles to break up the near-constant escalation of increasingly challenging fights. The dungeon had been used by Terythia’s monarchy for centuries to train Alchemic Knights from raw recruits still new to their classes into steel-ranked behemoths, and that violent legacy was on display everywhere.

They had crossed miles worth of densely packed rooms and killed anything that so much as even twitched at them. Almost every traversable space featured a different kind of obscure magical beast, forced to remain within the confines of its assigned territory by the dungeon core's persuasive whispers. Tamlin wondered what it would be like to hear them for himself, but of his party, only Arbor was capable of direct interaction with the core and the woodling didn’t talk. 

Typh’s rules meant that he was only ‘allowed’ to maintain four minions—not including Tallow—and he was forbidden from raising their levels beyond the average of his human-ish allies. Improving his undead, level by level to match the slow growth of his party was grossly inefficient. Tamlin winced at every bit of preventable damage dealt to their bodies that arose from their reduced efficacy. To get the best out of what he was permitted, he was constantly tweaking the composition of his corpses, swapping out old bodies for new, and generally experimenting with his limited ability to alter their anatomy like never before. In a sense, it was a fascinating challenge to have to optimise his minions like that, but the necromancer within him chafed under the restrictions imposed by his draconic mentor.

As much as he wanted to bury himself in the experimentation that naturally arose from this external limitation, he knew that wasn’t what he was supposed to be focusing on. 

Typh wanted him to make friends.

Initially, Tamlin was against it. Other people were hard to talk to and they never gave him the respect that he was due, but having seen Almira and Ilvane fight, he was keenly aware of how vulnerable he was in their presence. Tamlin’s physical body was his greatest weakness, and having classers like them protecting him was the surest way to resolve that failing. But people were hard, much harder than magic or pain and he frequently wondered what he could do to fix what was so obviously wrong. 

The joviality of the earlier floor had long since faded. Their days were now filled with close-calls and near-misses while Tamlin stood back with his tallow homunculus and directed his other minions to supplement his mortal team’s lacklustre performances. He hadn’t been aware of it at first, but the tension had risen along with the levels of the monsters they killed. No matter how much they rested in the dungeon, his party looked tired; paler skin, sunken eyes, a general lethargy that should have been banished by their rapid level gain.

He didn’t understand their reluctance. Classers were supposed to want to level and he was giving them levels in spades. He contributed as little as possible to every fight, intent on ceding the vast majority of the kill xp that would have otherwise been wasted on him.

No one complained, in fact his party practically jumped to do as he commanded. In every measurable way, they were the perfect allies—three elite units to round out his squad of the dead. But Tamlin could see it in their eyes, that persistent reluctance to go on that was never outright vocalised. They joked around less, had arguments over little inconsequential things, and no longer made the same efforts to include him in their joking banter which had taken on a noticeably grim undertone.

Tamlin knew he was making a mistake in pushing them so hard—that he should stop. But Tamlin had issues with stopping when he knew he was right. Creation was ending and if he wanted to be something other than a victim when it came for him, then he needed levels fast. He’d already wasted so much time just getting permission from Typh. He was loath to waste any more on unnecessary journeys to and from the surface in the pursuit of rest.

The necromancer looked to Arbor, the party’s healer and Typh’s silent minder. That she thought Tamlin needed a babysitter at all was galling, but the woodling’s watchful presence kept him from bending any rules and allowed him to take more risks. 

Which was a very good thing.

He was after all pushing his living companions quite hard, and he had no intention of letting up until they threatened to break. Even then, he might push a little bit after that too.

He knew they’d thank him for it when they hit bronze.

***

Tamlin sat in his chair and tried not to look bored. The result of the ongoing battle was not in any doubt, because it never was when he was present. His wasn’t the most comfortable seat that he’d ever sat in. Despite the impressive set of attributes running through his homunculus’s body, at the end of the day it was still made out of tallow, and animal fats were not typically used to construct furniture for a series of obvious reasons. Chief amongst his complaints was that the chair had too much give to it. When he drummed his fingers on the armrests provided, the sound was far from satisfactory.

He was still disappointed that Tallow’s body could only be altered with his skills to tweak the composition of the fats and to increase or decrease their quantity. As a result, his dreams of incorporating blades of bone into the little abomination were progressing slowly, but he had taught it how to assume the shape of a chair, so that was something.

Too infirm to run himself, Tamlin’s chair skittered along the ground for him, dodging shrapnel and shockwaves in accordance with his will. Tallow’s four waxen legs smoothly glided over the paved stone while the necromancer sat back with his staff over his knees and tried to let the others win without him.

As if trying to prove the futility of that action, Drue chose that precise moment to take a longsword through the chest. The warrior predictably screamed when the obsidian blade erupted from his back amidst a spray of gore. The musclebound youth’s hands then grasped the floor guardian’s wrist and surprisingly, he managed to prevent the level 35 beast from retrieving the weapon lodged inside of him.

Arbor quickly cast a spell and verdant growth sprouted out from around the wound. Clumps of moss and wildflowers replaced torn and bleeding tissues. The magical flora was a large part of the woodling’s unique brand of healing magic, and while it was undoubtedly effective, apparently it was extremely disconcerting to experience. Tamlin had no idea what it actually felt like, and he had only vague memories of receiving healing in general. In his entire adventuring career, he’d yet to experience taking a wound that wasn’t self-inflicted, to say nothing of this particular delve.

Drue stopped screaming and started to yell instead, a subtle difference that Tamlin didn’t care for. While the warrior noisily began his transformation, Ilvane hammered the six-armed lamia with a volley of glowing arrows that rocked it back onto its tail. Almira appeared from a patch of darkness and leapt onto its back. The rogue’s daggers flashed in the flickering light of the chamber before she plunged them both into the floor guardian’s scales. From there she proceeded to climb the beast, dagger over dagger, one bloody ‘handhold’ at a time.

This lamia was much like the one from the floor above—an oversized humanoid torso fused at the waist to a large snake's tail—except where the one Tamlin had collected for his diminished squad came with two arms and no weapons, this one had six of each. The obsidian longswords that it held in each scaled hand shone with an unearthly light and it had proved to be more than just proficient in wielding them. 

Before Drue could finish his transformation, the six-armed monster finally brought down its remaining five swords on the immobile warrior. A skill-enhanced arrow through the wrist brought that number down to four, and when Almira rammed a long knife into its spine, an arm went limp bringing the incoming attacks down to three. It was at this point that Tamlin stepped in—figuratively speaking, of course. His lesser—albeit necromantically augmented—lamia slithered forwards, catching two of the arms with its hands and taking the weapon wielded by the third in its chest while it wrapped its tail around its larger cousins.

The new floor guardian was stronger than Tamlin’s, even with his bronze rank necromancy closing the gap. His undead minion however, was large enough that its tackle forced the guardian to relinquish the weapon stuck in Drue. The blade and the man then fell to the ground, while the pair of snake monsters thrashed about on the paved stone. Tamlin’s three remaining minions darted forwards from the sidelines—some obscure troll analogue and two boar-like monsters—where they proceeded to savage the larger lamia with their sharpened tusks. 

With the beast thrashing on the ground, the rest of the chamber became markedly safer and Tamlin slowed his chair's evasive movements to a gentle stop. He listened to the guardian’s loud cries, mirrored by the total silence of its already dead co-combatants. He watched on impassively as its claws found flesh, but then went on to elicit stagnant blood that seeped rather than flowed. 

Their victory was a foregone conclusion if Tamlin just watched and waited—but that wasn’t the point of this whole exercise. 

He looked over to see the warrior finally rip the obsidian sword from his chest with a spray of algae and red. Mossy leaves quickly filled in the gap in his torso and his tag flickered before switching outright, revealing Drue’s unpalatable truth.

[Diabolist level 34].

Drue’s form blurred, momentarily out of focus, and when he returned he was different. 

Metallic orange skin had replaced his usual chestnut brown, while his muscles had bulged and elongated unnaturally. Long, bloodstained claws extended from the tips of his fingers. Bone spurs poked out through the back of his armour—the leather of which was already tattered along the spine from previous transformations. Sweeping ivory horns extended back from his brow and cloven hooves had replaced his feet which now bent backwards on digitigrade legs. Drue looked like an unattractive cross between an orange lizard and a muscular goat. There was very little in common between the seven-foot-tall diabolist and the five-foot-eleven warrior, he’d come to know, but if Tamlin was supposed to be scared, he wasn’t.

With the obsidian blade in Drue’s hands, he raced forwards. He arrived at the dogpile of thrashing beasts, the smallest of which was more than three times his new size. The diabolist brought down his stolen sword on the floor guardian. The aura around the blade flared orange the moment before impact.

The enchanted weapon cut deep, penetrating the floor guardian’s thick scales like they were made from butter. It immediately tried to pull away from Tamlin’s minions to face this new threat and lacking any reasons not to, the necromancer commanded his undead to back off, allowing Drue to face the six-armed lamia by himself. 

Along with a good chunk of its health, the greater lamia had lost its swords to the floor in its previous struggle and seemed too incensed by Drue’s attack to attempt to retrieve them. Uncaring that it had lost its greatest advantage, it laid into the transformed diabolist with four clawed hands swinging while two more hung uselessly to the side. Drue was admittedly fairly good with a blade. He used the enchantment on the sword to great effect, batting away grabbing limbs and scoring numerous gashes in the lamia’s scaly hide. 

Ilvane never let up with his arrows, firing heavy stamina-infused shots into the beast. He struck unerringly at the creature’s face. Most of the ranger’s arrows glanced off its thick scales, but enough of them hit the creature’s vulnerable eyes. The first such arrow blinded it, the rest just caused a lot of very obvious pain.

In the end, it was Almira who brought the fight to a close. She reappeared on the lamia’s back and resumed her bloody climb. While it roared in pain under Ilvane’s assault or swung its sword at the demon in front of it, the comparatively smaller strikes of her knife went unnoticed, or at least without a response. When she reached its neck, Almira threw her head back and with bared fangs bit into the larger creature’s jugular.

That the beast even had a jugular was a gamble as far as Tamlin was concerned, but perhaps she had a skill for that—he’d never asked. Within a handful of seconds, the lamia was slumped down on the ground, struggling to lift its head in an ever-expanding pool of its blood. A few seconds more and it was unconscious. A minute later and it was dead. 

Instead of celebrating, the triumphant rogue merely sat atop it, cautiously fingering her canines with a look of concern on her pleasantly pale face.

“I think I chipped a tooth,” Almira complained.

She had, but it was nothing that Arbor couldn’t fix, although she did complain about splinters in her mouth for the rest of the night. They made their camp in the shadow of the lamia’s corpse and for a while Tamlin was hopeful that the continued evidence of their success would be enough to spur them onwards.

While Ilvane cooked and Tamlin experimented with grafting a third skeletal arm to his lamia from the first floor, Drue and Almira disappeared for a while as they always did after a hard fight. When they returned, things seemed lighter for a while. Conversation flowed and jokes were made while everyone else enjoyed Ilvane’s latest culinary accomplishment. In the morning, no one argued when it was time to go down to the next floor and he almost felt good about the change in his party’s attitude. 

But when Tamlin effortlessly pushed his magic into the six-armed lamia and it rose to its full height, he saw them look up at his latest minion, to him, and then to each other. This time their wide-eyed look was not incomprehensible. Tamlin knew it all too well.

It was fear.

He knew then what he’d always known from the start, but had been too hopeful to admit. Typh’s entire plan was doomed from the beginning. The others may have had forbidden classes, but they were nothing like him.

He was a necromancer. He was exceptional—a prodigy. His name was Tamlin Stroud, and by the time he was done, he’d have shaken the very foundations of Creation.

Even if he had to do it alone.

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