Chapter 26: Road To Ruu

It was hard for Pothesly to watch one of her last living daughters leaving her side. Tonight, and the night thereafter, she won’t be home for dinner. Emera dressed herself in armor similar to that of a barbarian, and was determined to rescue her goddess. She left the local battle for her sisters to handle, Emera having an eye for bigger fish. And I couldn’t blame her. She had mentioned something inside her changing after she’d seen me. Like a lost hope coming back to her from realizing the legendary blood squire was here to help her people. With a reborn faith, a deeper passion for slaughtering those demonic bastards in their own turf grew. I liked the sound of that, and I was ready to carry my party to victory, one quest at a time.

We had to take this alternative route, and I was grateful that one was even available. We rode on Pochi to our first destination, Branchoe, Litheenia. AKA, the barren lands. It was worse than the location that I and Faye had been in when we’d first dropped into Relo-Hell, because this time, there were people living in this desolate area. Scarce vegetation, terrible exposed living quarters, the birthplace of blooming disease and poverty. I gathered from the location where the Peacekeepers routinely scouted that this area was the furthest from it, explaining why these people truly stood no chance in finding refuge in the capital Estiba. I wasn’t sure why the Peacekeeper anchors refused to go inland, because these desperate people were just in need of saving as those along the border.

I kept my comments to myself. I knew I couldn’t save everyone, not right now. Instead, me and my party descended somewhere safe, and walked the rest of the way, making sure to keep our eyes open for any outside nations.

Particularly Wrath’s, Pride’s, and Greed’s.

“These sulfuric fumes are thick along these parts,” Faye said in between her coughing, Maelise and Emera seemingly unfazed. As for me, it was no walk in the park, but I’d gotten used to the smell by now, however unforgiving Branchoe was.

In the dense fog, my eyes surveyed the area, until one particular girl caught my attention. She was running away from something, and I was eager to know what.

When I moved, so did my girls. I stopped right at the entrance of a narrow dead end alleyway, skirted with garbage, filth and flies. The further I cautiously walked in, the more I realized that this area was a gravesite, countless dead bodies, both mangled and chewed upon. This was the kind of smell that my nose couldn’t take, and it felt like I was seconds away from losing my breakfast.

“I beg you! Please leave me alone!” the little green girl with a lizard tail coiling on the ground cried, posing us as a threat. But then the real threat came cutting through the corner, a green woman with white beady eyes and battered blood stained clothes.

She dashed to us like a zombie, her mouth stained with bits and pieces of torn flesh. I pulled out my shotgun only to hear the girl stop me right before I pulled the trigger. “Please don’t! She’s my mother!”

Those words seemed to have paralyzed me completely, allowing the demon to jump me. She was strong for a thin woman, her strength dropping us both on the ground. I wrestled with her, holding her mouth back from taking a nice chomp out of me. She looked rabid, and hissed like a diseased one too, until Maelise unloaded an ice arrow into her skull at point blank range.

To our astonishment, it didn’t work. In fact, when the ice arrow started to surround her head with ice, steam started to come out. Somehow she could generate heat in concentrated areas, which wasn’t the greatest news for me. I was still holding her back, her hands starting to warm up, until Emera took a step forward and crushed her head with her bare hands.

“No!” the girl screamed, dashing right toward me as I hovered her decapitated mother away from my blood splattered face. “Why did you kill her?!”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because she was trying to eat up my Serrian?” Emera said with a sassy tongue. “Looks like she already had a bite out of you,” Emera observed, pointing at the girl’s bleeding arm with her eyes.

“She didn’t mean to!” she wailed, cradling her mother’s body in her arms.

Emera offered me a hand up, and I wiped the blood off my face. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure, squire. But, you could have easily disposed of that demon. Why did you not pull the trigger? It was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate your new special skill.”

I had a feeling that Emera already knew the answer to that. She was just disappointed that I couldn’t go through with it.

Faye knelt down to her and offered the girl assistance, to which the girl looked back at her skeptical.

“Are you really a white mage? I’ve never seen one in Litheenia.”

“Faye here is special,” Emera said with a proud smile on her face. “She helped my mother, once. She can help you, too. Stick out your arm.”

Instead of listening to Emera, the little girl glared at her. “Why should I listen to you? You killed my mother!”

“Gluttony’s curse got to her, child. There was no saving your mother. Unless the idea was to have you join her in the afterlife?”

“Pull in the shots, Emera. She’s still just a kid,” I said to her. I knew she meant well, but she was being rough on the girl by being brutally blunt, especially after her mother just died by her hands.

I crouched down in front of her with a gentler approach. “Let Faye heal your arm. I promise, we are only here to help. My name is Knives, and this is Emera and Maelise. And we are on a mission to rescue Onessa.”

Her eyes grew. “You are?” She looked down at my hand, then back up to me in awe. “Are you the legendary blood squire?”

I smiled, the girl immediately offering her wound to Faye. Faye healed her quickly, the vibrant glow emitting from her arm leaving her marveled.

“There! Does that feel better?” Faye asked her warmly.

“Yes! Thank you!”

“I’m sorry about your mother. I wish she didn’t have to go out this way, but you are strong. You will push through. What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Jezza.”

“Do you have somewhere safe to go, Jezza?”

She looked down in sadness. “No. I am an only child. My mother… she… she ate dad. And then, she was trying to eat me. I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t listen! All she saw was meat! I couldn’t get through to her no matter how hard I tried!”

“The curse of gluttony I assume?” Emera asked, and the girl nodded.

“In liquid form.”

“How many forms are there?” I asked curiously.

“Gluttony’s curse is a near seasonal phenomena that we have to prepare ourselves for,” Emera explained. “It’s his way of taking Litheenia out without using men to fight in the battlefield. It has been proven to be effective, especially in poverty stricken places such as these. It comes in mist and liquid form. A carrier from his nation usually carries the disease, and the way to beat it is by killing the carrier. Then the disease dies instantly.”

“The curse is turning people into cannibals with endless hunger for flesh.”

“Wait a minute, how come you aren’t diseased?” Maelise asked, taking a step back and secretly fanning me to follow.

“It only affects the adults,” Jezza clarified. “Particularly the ones who drank from the well.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“Yes, because the well was sealed off once people started realizing what was going on, but someone opened it back up again overnight, because that well is our only source of fresh water.”

“Demons would rather be cursed than grow thirsty?” Emera said. She couldn’t understand the concept, but I sympathized with them. I’d been poor, too. Desperation makes people do irrational things.

“Well then, our mission moving forward is clear. We need to find the source and terminate it.”

“Not before we slaughter a horde of turned Litheenians!” Maelise cried, pointing her arrow down the way we came at a cluster fuck of hungry Litheenian women.

“Shit…”

Faye grabbed the girl and dashed further toward the dead end, while Maelise, Emera and I fought off the horde.

“Ice pulse!” Maelise cried, shooting an arrow dead center. It shot one of them in the chest, freezing her, and pushed them further out, where we could have more room. There were about eight of them, and the last thing I wanted was dealing with these confrontations with these turned Litheenian women, but we had no choice.

“Without killing the source, we have no other option but to slay them,” Emera reminded me.

“Yeah, I hear you…” Didn’t mean I had to like the idea of killing the ones I needed to protect.

Fucking gluttony making my life hell again, even in Relo-Hell.

“I would grow and stomp on them, but you need to deal the finishing blow, right?” She winked at me. “Well, have at them.”

One by one they picked themselves up, the first to come at me letting me know that she wouldn’t be taken down easily. She was quick on her feet, dodging my bullet easily. I guess it was time I tried out my special move, tapping into my mana, and calling out, “Single Bullet Berserker!” Just like that, my gun fired with a recoil I thought I couldn’t handle. My round caused her head to explode, as well as the heads of the three demon girls lined up right behind her. A shockwave followed after, so strong that it blew Maelise back, and broke the corners of the two buildings we were between.

I caught Maelise in my arms like a baseball, and heard Faye behind me summoning her Light Shield for protection. The devastation that followed was nothing I expected, the debris from the buildings burying the zombie women with my single shot.

“Butcher, were you trying to get us all killed?!” Faye snapped behind me.

Whoops.

“Ah, so that’s what it does,” I said, eying my gun like a new toy to play with.

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After we escaped the area, we gathered more intel from Jezza. She remembered seeing a strange fat man by the well the first time the cases started to spur up. He was in a long coat, his face concealed. But when he had turned round to leave, she made a mental note of which direction he had gone.

There was no sure way of knowing where he was currently hiding. Emera had the most experience behind this curse business, and she mentioned that they rarely strayed far from the location of their curse. Even so, after we dropped Jezza to a local shelter, me and my party spent the entire night looking for this hungry bastard.

We had started searching ten hours ago…

“Enough is enough!” Faye cried, ready to keel over. “Butcher, this was not part of the agreement! I was to heal this party’s wounds, and restore their mana! Times of extreme exhaustion via hiking was never mentioned!”

“It’s good exercise,” I said as the full moon’s light paved the way down the forest.

“I can see you’re getting exhausted too, blood squire,” Emera said, probably telling from the weight in my voice. “Besides, we should be looking for the artifact.”

“We are killing two birds with one stone.”

“Except both of the birds are in no mood to be seen,” Maelise grumbled.

“I doubt we could see much at night,” Emera followed. “We should turn back around and find shelter.”

“Wait. Up ahead, I see something,” I replied, my party and I reaching a cavern.

“All right. If no one could see the red flags posted along this entrance, then allow me to be the first to announce them. This is a bad idea!” Faye warned us.

“If you want to stay outside, be my guest. I just hope whatever it is that’s howling in the night doesn’t find its way here,” I countered, hearing Faye suck her teeth behind me. 

“It stinks,” Maelise said, churning her face, and coming from her, that meant that she wasn’t talking about the sulfur smell. In fact, I suddenly caught what she was referring to up my nose. It smelled like a petri dish of ripe corpses, which meant that we were headed the right way.

“Come on.” I led my party inside, and it didn’t take long for the narrow space to widen, and soft light to start glowing. The deeper we went, the more torn corpses we began to see down the torchlit path. It was a filthy lair, with flies buzzing, maggots along the walls, and rodents skirting along the ground. Faye was especially disgusted, and Emera had to carry the princess past a certain line just so she could continue forward with us.

“I beg you, Butcher! Please turn back!” Faye cried, and not a moment after, I started to hear chewing, from a few sources, actually.

Maelise gasped, and we all halted. This huge hunchbacked swine was head deep inside someone’s guts on the ground, and it looked like we had disturbed his dinner.

“He’s at level 78, Knives,” Emera warned me in a whisper, after she tapped her forehead twice with two fingers. “Be careful.”

He finally caught our attention, him and the rest of his party goers munching on fresh Litheenian bodies. This time he didn’t have his cloak on, the rolls of fat on his back glistening in blood as he turned to us with a simple drape around his waist. He in fact looked like a pig with his short snout, his floppy ears, and his beady white eyes.

He grinned ear to ear, the green demon getting up on his feet. “Well, what do we have here? A priest, a warrior, a ranger, and a… myth,” he said with a raspy voice, corking his eyes at me askew. “How very bizarre, for the legendary blood squire of Lust to be here, instead of storming Greed’s castle.” He proceeded to slicing down his forearm, then dipped his finger over the spewing blood for a taste. The only logical explanation for that strange gesture was him reading our stats, and I was right, noticing a big grin stretch on his hideous boiled face. “My, my, my… now that’s very interesting… Even with your levels combined, you are far from matching with the good god himself. That does explain a few things. Are you four here to boost your stats?”

“Truth be told, that is just an added bonus. What I’m really interested in is slicing the head of the fucker responsible for all of this.”

“Well, here I am! Oglor in the flesh! Or, fleshes, really. But could you honestly blame me, though? These Litheenian people make it so damn easy. They are like sitting dumb ducks in a pond, ready to be plucked up and devoured. And I am a sucker for eating my way to a new millennium! Heh, you know how that goes. Them’s the rules, am I right? Although, I can’t say that I’m hating it.  I mean, how else would I get to enjoy myself? Eating… well, between you and me, there’s no better feeling in the world. It’s a euphoria I can’t get enough of. And the more frightened the prey, the tastier their blood. Somethin’ to do with those stress hormone in the body.” He sucked his teeth. “Mmm, sets my tastebuds on fire.”

“Hell, are you done hearing yourself talk?”

“Blood squire, if no one has told you this before, you are way over your head. You cannot save these people. You are wasting your time! It is prophesized that Onessa falls, one of the first to fall of the seven. There is no stopping that. And once Greed executes her in three days, you’ll realize that this crusade was all for nothing. If you were smart, you’d hang the towel for these defenseless Litheenians and work for a true god. That kill system of yours, can’t say I ain’t a little jealous. Just think about it; the more you kill, the stronger you get. No one here has that luxury. If you think about it, there’s no limit to how strong you can become! You can be a god yourself! You’re wasting precious talent on a dying nation.”

“Shut up!” Maelise cried. “Stop trying to contort his mind into teaming up with your despicable kind!” Maelise shot her arrow, and Oglor snatched it midair. The tip of her ice arrow was inches away from his snout, and he snapped the shaft. But Maelise wasn’t done. She said some words and her ice dispersed into the air, the magnitude of her magic surpassing the small little arrowhead that Oglor had stopped and penetrating his skull.

Soon enough, Oglor and the rest of his nine minions started to choke, clenching their necks and bucking down in pain. The throats and mouths of the minions started turning lovely shades of blue, Maelise cooling off their air supply. But even though Oglor was doing the same gesture, his skin wasn’t turning… because he was playing us…

He chuckled mockingly, tossing the broken arrow aside while I pulled out my gun. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

Neither could I.

Shot after shot, I finished all eight of his incapacitated followers with head shots, cementing my kill and triggering my kill system. When I pointed my gun at him, he laughed, then caught the bullet I launched at him with his bare hands. “I’m not going to be that easy to defeat, human. What kind of beast do you take me for?” Just as he said that, I heard stomping from behind him, and emerging from the shadowed depth of the cavern came a horde of huge wild boars.

“We need to run, now!” Faye cried, hiding behind Emera.

“As if he would let us,” she replied to her in a low whisper, standing her ground to defend. “These are heavy hitting grunts as well. Fast on their feet. Stick with me, and you’ll be safe.”

“Food that delivers itself. Gotta love it! Have at them, my wonderful pets!”

This was no light task—in this wave, there were at least twelve of them, and counting.

Seemed like my single shot special wasn’t going to get a chance to tango in this fight. Not unless I wanted to bring the whole house down. It was the same reason why Emera didn’t go full giant mode either. The space was restricted. We’d bury ourselves alive.

The disadvantages didn’t deter us nevertheless. Emera took on Oglor with her bare hands, with the help of Pochi keeping our healer safe. As for me, I chose a different weapon to fight, Pothesly’s gift to me, The Executioner Soul Sword.

I slashed the boars in waves, the coverage on its swing absolutely obliterating them. Despite its girth, my stance was unwavering. I got adjusted pretty quickly, while Maelise changed it up with a flame ring attack.

The raw smell of roasted boar swallowed the cavern, Maelise lodging the arrow into one of them, where the arrow head exploded inside the creature, unleashing a ring of flames. It acted as a barricade for the rest of them as they began to swarm in. I reloaded for a second time and finished the next wave, killing the remaining four with direct headshots beyond Mae’s ring.

Once the cavern was clear, Mae and I focused on the bigger fish, the last enemy standing. Emera was having a hard time evading his elongated jowls, the invisible armor he had on him causing a problem for her. Emera was definitely the tank in our team, but matched against a level 78, her blows did little damage. I saw her toss another hook shot into his face, and all she managed to do was numb her knuckles. I stepped in just as he dashed at her, his speed too fast for a man his size.

Despite that, my overhead swing of my sword didn’t do much damage. I got him right at the nape too, and all I heard was something like metal cracking. Could it be his invisible armor? For once, he seemed slightly worried, grabbing my sword and following up with a clean punch for my face.

I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of landing it on me. I ditched the sword he had a good grip on and rolled, Maelise following up with an ice shot at the arm he was holding my sword with. This time, he didn’t get to block it in time, and once his arm started to cover itself in ice, I slipped my blade back before his other hand took the wheel.

“Power Strike!” Emera roared, capitalizing on Oglor’s distraction with me to ram her fist right into his jaw. The punch pushed him back into the shadowy depths of the cavern, giving us time to strategize.

“Armor is his specialty, and the more we hit him, the more we absorb his mana supply,” Emera said.

“And the downside is, without me using my berserker shot, I’m dealing baby hits on this guy.”

Emera grinned. “Don’t worry, Serrian. Maelise and I have a few tricks between the both of us. All you have to worry about is dealing the final blow.”

I smirked. “Seems a tad greedy, but I have no choice.” I turned to Faye. “Get ready to tap into your mana Faye, so you can restore theirs. I’ll help Pochi guard you.”

She nodded. “All right!”

We had a plan, and once Oglor stumbled back to us with a half beaten face, I had more confidence that it’d work. That punch was a direct hit against his health. He had not gotten enough time to armor up.

“You bloody bitch…” he growled, his eyes on Emera.

“Come on big boy, give me your best shot!”

My party executed the plan flawlessly. Emera used more of her specials to force Oglor into using his armor, and every time he defended his skin, he used up his mana. Maelise covered Emera when he would counter her, her ice arrows doing a better job of slowing him down than her flames. All the while I acted like a shield for Faye, who constantly restored their energy. The small increments counted regardless, and when I opened Oglor’s stats and his mana was deplenished, I sprung up and beheaded the swine.

With my swing, we ended the curse, alleviating our Litheenian people.

“Another victory!” Faye chanted, and I couldn’t agree more. My entire party spread good moods all around. Except for Mae, who was crouching down, distracted with something along the edge of the cavern.

I approached her, noticing that she was rummaging for something underneath a pile of rubble. “Mae, what is it?”

“I could have sworn I saw something shining. The impact of Emera’s Power Strike tumbled some of these rocks over and,” she stopped, and then stood up and pivoted to me with a gem. “Look.”

My eyes grew. “It’s Ruu.”

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