Blood Shaper

Book 2: Chapter 37

Kay saw another set of runes or shapes carved under the mantel of the doorway, but they didn't have any time for him to stop and look at them. They pushed through the small doorway, which felt like it was built for the regular-sized Rittians, which were roughly the same height as dwarves.

"How did that big fucker even fit in here? He's three times the height of the ceiling! I have to bend a little to fit!" Claudia complained as they pushed further in.

"How did he grow a mouth on his chest that fucked with our brains while it screamed?" Kay snapped, "I don't know anything about what's happening; we just need to kill all of it, so it stops being weird."

The party glanced at him for a moment.

"You alright?"

"No, actually. Whatever is off about this whole thing is in the Rittian's blood, like I said earlier, and that giant pool of it from all the dead feels terrible to me. Like, I'm going to throw up terrible."

"Oh, well… Sorry." Claudia turned and kept going.

"Don't worry about it; let's just end this."

The tunnel continued to be cramped and narrow, and it took them some time to navigate through it. Leya was the only one who didn't have to hunch a little as they did their best to jog while bent over. Kay felt even more vindicated in his decision to leave Darten behind on the surface.

The small tunnel was much longer than any of them had anticipated, and it took them a few minutes to reach the end. When they finally got there, they saw the remains of a metal door ripped off its hinges, leaving an open doorway for them to pass through. On the other side was a long, rough-hewn room. Where pieces of the tunnels they'd traveled through and all of the rooms they'd entered had been worked, with unnatural sharp corners and obvious tool marks in the stone, this looked like a natural cavern, with stalactites hanging down across the ceiling and cracked bits of the wall making small cubbyholes and interesting shapes.

At the far end of the room, opposite the entranceway, was a tall, angular structure that stood against the back wall. It was made of black stone that looked like obsidian, with sharp edges and points. It was blocky and built strangely like someone had stacked disparate pieces of stone together and fused them somehow. The strange symbols that covered it seemed to twist and flicker as Kay looked at them, and they glowed with red and green lights.

"Evil Santa?" Kay murmured to himself as he saw the light show dancing across the front of the strange obelisk-like structure.

"What?"

"Nothing. What are they… doing…" Kay's voice trailed off as he watched one of the three "regular" Rittians in the room complete the ritual they'd been performing.

It was a short ritual. The Rittian stepped up to the altar because that was what it had to be and cut themself on one of the sharp points. They then flung their arm out and painted their blood across the flat surface of the altar, and the blood seemed to seep into it. Or maybe it really did seep into it, as the blood vanished a moment later. The Rittian held their arms aloft and stood there, motionless.

That was when the giant translucent tentacle drifted down from the ceiling and wrapped itself around the rat person. Kay watched as the tentacle, which was covered in gaping mouths just like the rat monsters from earlier, lifted the still Rittian into the air, then tossed them into the gaping mouths covering the bulbous round body of the massive creature floating in the air above them.

The being flickered like bad TV static as another of its tentacles floated down to grab one of the other two Rittians who had just completed the ritual. That one got thrown into another random mouth that covered almost every inch of the monster, except for the one massive eye that sat in the center of the thing's body. It looked like an absolutely gigantic and really fucked up, Beholder, with way too many mouths instead of way too many eyes and a lot more tentacles than Beholders usually had. Not that Kay had even seen a Beholder in real life, but he'd played enough Dungeons and Dragons to know that there were only supposed to be ten of them. Not countless numbers of them that seemed to vanish right before his eyes before suddenly reappearing in another position on the creature.

The last rat person was picked up and thrown into one of the waiting gullets, and as they were touched by the tentacle, Kay saw that their body shimmered for a moment, and then they too were translucent. As the last remaining "regular" Rittian was eaten, the giant being turned its singular eye to stare down at the giant rat-man, who stared back up at it silently.

"What. The. Fuck?" Claudia cursed, staring in revulsion and surprise at the thing.

Stephen shrugged. "Well, that's what we need to stop from destroying us, but other than that, I have no idea."

Kay continued to watch the creature, a terrible idea forming in his head. For a brief moment, he looked into the dark void between the teeth of one of the enormous mouths.

Clutching his head and bowing over in pain, Kay fought against the flood of images that started trying to eat his mind. At least, that's what it felt like as an alien and monstrous intelligence attacked him in his own brain. Reality seemed to warp before his eyes, strange, incomprehensible words echoed in his ears, and then it was gone.

Kay found himself on his hands and knees, gasping and sweating, with the rest of his party gathered around him with worried expressions.

"What the fuck, Kay?" Claudia demanded as she helped him to his feet, "Are you okay?"

"No, no, I'm not. That thing is some kind of elder god type old one thing, and we're in big fucking trouble if it makes its way into our reality."

"What?"

?════════════════════════════→

Quest Update!

You have discovered that the unknown being controlling the Rittians is an Eldritch Being! Prevent it from entering this existence to remove the threat and complete the Quest!

?════════════════════════════→

"And the Quest just said I'm right. Awesome."

"What are you talking about?" Stephen asked, "What's an 'elder god old one type thing', and what do you mean about our reality?"

"Short version," Kay pointed up at the Eldritch Being, "That monster is some powerful creature from another reality trying to force its way into ours. The universe or plane or whatever that it's from is so different from ours that its very presence will drive us mad. If it makes its way completely into our world, we're absolutely fucked, because its very existence is antithetical to us being alive and sane!"

"How do you know this?"

"I've read a lot of the Cthulhu mythos books."

"What?"

"Outworlder stuff! Don't look in the mouths, and don't let it touch you."

The giant Rittian let out a terrible scream from both mouths and whirled towards the party. "You foolish sacrifices! ?×|??↓au? will awaken, even if ?×|??↓au? is weaker than planned! You will not prevent awakening!" With the torso-mouth screeching, the giant charged at them on all fours.

The many tentacles of the Eldritch Being started to converge on the altar, and the carvings on its surface began to glow and pulse with green and red lights.

Stephen dashed forward to intercept, and Claudia prepared a spell, glancing over at Kay as she did, "Why is it telling us its plan?"

"It's a being from another reality with literally incomprehensible goals, and he's its crazy minion. Why is it doing anything? Just kill him and fuck it over!" Kay staggered to his feet and picked his sword back up.

The rest of the party joined in with Stephen to combat the giant, and they slowly started to beat him back. Stephen had been holding his own against the giant the first time they'd fought, and with the other three concentrating on wounding the chest mouth over and over to keep it from screaming again. Slowly, one cut and burn at a time, they started to whittle down the enraged giant rat-man.

The Eldritch Being's eye turned towards the fight, and one of the mouths growled in displeasure. Strange images of a dog eating rotten flesh and someone slurping up a soup made of feathers danced across Kay's thoughts, and he threw up in his mouth a little. One of the tentacles pulled free from the altar and floated towards the fight.

Kay saw it coming and shouted, "Get back!"

The party jumped away, and the tentacle phased into the back of the giant. A pulse of energy flowed down into the giant's body, and he threw back his head as he screamed in mingled pain and ecstasy.

As the party watched, the giant grew another two feet, and his already large muscles bulged beneath his skin. Now a twelve-foot monstrosity, more and more mouths opened across his body, and his tail warped into a mimicry of the Being's tentacles.

With a roar, the giant leapt back into the fray with them, and the fight started again.

Kay was forced to dodge massive swings of the tentacle tail that moved independently from the rest of the enemy's body as he dove towards Stephen with his massive clawed hands. The giant's claws rent through the edge of Stephen's shield as he jerked it back from the attack. The giant's second swing caught Stephen across the shoulders, and then he reared back and clenched both fists above his head. The giant swung down with incredible speed, and it looked like Stephen was going to get crushed like a can. At the last second, Stephen managed to impose his shield in front of the attack, and the giant's fists slammed into an invisible wall just in front of the shield. For a moment, they stood there frozen, then a massive invisible force threw the giant head over heels into the air.

Kay, now free from the whipping and biting attacks of the tail, glanced over at the altar. The Eldritch Being's tentacles now seemed a lot more solid, and as he watched, that solidity traveled further up the tentacles and into the creature's body.

"Fuck!" He rapidly searched his mind for a plan and grabbed at the first decent one in his head. "Leya, break the altar, now!" He pumped every bit of blood that he'd been saving into his Blood Boost and threw himself at the giant. "Don't let him stop Leya!" He shouted at the other two as he ran past them.

The fight became a wrestling match as Stephen and Kay slammed into the giant, cutting, stabbing, hacking, punching, and throwing him around in an attempt to keep him back from Leya, who stood in front of the altar, her eyes closed and brows narrowed in concentration. The giant shrieked in wordless anger as he battered and clawed at the two of them, trying to force his way past. Every time he managed to make a small break for it, Claudia blasted him with white-hot fire and forced him back a step, long enough for Kay or Stephen to start hitting him again.

A full minute passed this way, and Kay started to get tired. He could see his companions starting to droop as well, and the giant only grew more enraged and energetic. The giant managed to capitalize on one of Stephen's mistakes as he didn't get out of the way in time and bodily threw him out of the way so that he could dash towards Leya.

"I got it!" She shouted as the giant rat-man barreled towards her. She stamped once on the ground, and a crack traveled from her foot and towards the altar.

Kay threw himself between Leya and the clawed knife-hand aimed at her neck, using a tendril of blood to literally drag himself in front of the attack. The giant's claws pierced through his blood-reinforced armor and dug into his side. Kay screamed in pain as he slammed his full palm down onto the giant's head. Half of him wanted to say some cool line, but the rest of him just concentrated on sending a pressurized blood bullet into the giant's brain. The giant's head ripped in half as the blood gouged its way through, and the giant collapsed at Kay's feet, painfully tearing his claws out as he collapsed, dead.

A loud cracking noise drew Kay's eyes, and he turned to see the misshapen altar split in half and crumble to pieces. The glowing light of the symbols dissipated as they were destroyed, and the only remaining light in the chamber was the light of Claudia's floating fires that she'd maintained the entire battle.

The other two made their way over to Kay and Leya, and Claudia grinned at them as she walked around the dead body of the giant. "That wasn't so bad, now was it?"

"I don't think we're done." Stephen countered as he stared upwards. "That thing is still here."

They all looked up to see the Eldritch being still floating there and glowering at them malevolently.

"The Quest hasn't finished or updated."

"Well, then what are we supposed to-"

A deafening crack interrupted Claudia's question, millions of times louder than the destruction of the altar, and the party watched as a truly enormous split in the rock started spreading from the site of where the altar had sat. Kay saw that the altar itself had been part of the rock floor, and now destruction was spreading from its ruined base.

"Run!"

They turned and started sprinting back to the entrance as the ground beneath them started to give way and fall in pieces into the suddenly revealed abyss below them. Claudia and Stephen made it into the tunnel first, where the shaking of the ground seemed much less pronounced, and Kay pushed Leya along as he ran. The floor crumbled just behind them as they sprinted, and Kay felt a piece of rock beneath him start to go. He scooped Leya up into his arms and jumped towards the safety of solid ground.

He landed in the doorway of the tunnel and rolled to safety with Leya still in his arms. Letting her go and standing up, he brushed himself off and glanced at his companions. "Well, now I think that-"

A squeezing sensation around his torso made him look down, and he saw a fleshy-mouth-covered tentacle wrapped around him. He glanced over his shoulder to see one of the Eldritch Being's tentacles stretched out from him to the main body of the creature, crossing a seemingly impossible distance to grab him.

"Oh, for fucks sake!"

The tentacle pulled, and Kay went flying towards the creature and down into the darkness.

"Why does this shit keep happening!?"

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