Investments 14.6
When Mouse and I returned to the city, the discount deep ones were waiting for us.
It didn't matter.
As I focused on the Teleportation Mark I'd left behind, I got the sense something was there. Preparing for it, I made a dozen throwing knives, handing half of them to Karen, and we emblazoned our Marks upon them. Growing an Orichalcum short sword, I laid a hand on her shoulder, and prepared for combat. Reaching out to my destination, we shared a nod, and the world shifted.
Over a dozen short, squat fish-men were there, holding twisted metal formed into crude tridents. Letting go of Mouse, I took a step towards the closest one and brought my sword down, cutting effortlessly through the monster as it started to raise its own weapon. Behind me, and half a beat after my step, Karen tossed the three knives she was holding in a wide arc, starting to unsheathe her sword as she disappeared.
One of the deep ones, showing a surprising amount of reflexes, dodged one of her knives, only to gurgle if fright as she reappeared over the fallen blade, slicing downwards through the creature as if it wasn't there, blue-black ichor painting the rubble behind it.
The others trilled in alarm, turning with their tridents raised, and charged us, the fifteen still alive doing their best to kill us. Mouse pulled her sword back, and disappeared mid-slice, coming down on another fish-man near a different one of her knives. I stayed on the ground, opening my arms wide to invite them to attack me while Karen picked them off.
One stabbed at her, rusted, twisted steel bouncing harmlessly off her shield as she deflected it upwards, slicing in a rising strike which cut it from stomach to head, a spray of dark liquid arcing high into the air.
The others charged me, with a wet, gurgling war cry that was as off-putting as it was annoying. One threw a spear, a purple hexagon appearing before it could hit me, blocking the shot. Right, need to make sure that doesn't happen, I thought, mentally sinking further into the 'Vejovis' persona to try to keep the other powers from auto-activating.
Grabbing the falling weapon, I moved to strike the closest fish-man with my short sword, and it tried to parry with the tines of its trident. However, my blade cut through the cross-bar of the weapon, the points skidding harmlessly off of my armored chest as my sword continued its arc through the creature like I was slicing through gelatin.
Marking the crude javelin, I hurled it at another deep one at the back, ready to throw a spear of its own. Overdoing it, the creature seemed to explode, the projectile slamming down with a thunderous crash, the metal deforming and breaking the Mark I'd left on it. The others fell on me, spears and tridents stabbing, hands grabbing, but my armor held.
"Vejovis!" Mouse Protector cried, popping right next to me, slashing one creature apart before disappearing as three more stabbed for her.
"I got this," I called over to her, my armor making me invulnerable as I slashed out with wide, cleaving strikes, taking one out after another.
A deep one launched itself from the rooftop, set to come down on me, trident first. A flying bit of steel gleamed, catching it in the side, only for Karen to appear next to it, midair, cutting its head off and kicking it away before disappearing once more.
With over half dead, the fish-men broke, running for the building the report said they were nested in. Unholstering a knife of my own, I threw it, softly for my enhanced strength, the knife still practically buzzing through the air before it sheathed itself in the lead monster's back.
Reappearing over it, I stomped down, crushing the deep one in an explosion of gore as I swung out, catching the one right behind it across the chest, killing it as well. They started to pull back, only for Mouse Protector to mirror me, her enhanced strength enough to copy my move, even if less messily spectacular.
The three left between us broke, one left, two right. We both started to move to the right, but I broke off, using my flight to change direction in an instant, catching the sole runner and bisecting it as Karen took out the other two.
The road, which had sprung to life with the sounds of monsters, fighting, and death, went silent once more. Making a frog to hold my sword, the open sheath easier to work with, I pulled air along its length, cleaning it off, and put it away. "You good?" I asked Mouse Protector, walking around several bodies towards her.
She stood there, staring at the last deep one she'd killed. Hearing me she shuddered, letting out a long, low breath, and flicked her sword outward, spattering the fluid on it across the ground before sheathing it. Turning towards me, her eyes were a bit glassy, but that faded, and she nodded, determined. "I thought there was something fishy about this town," she jibed.
I chuckled at the lame joke, relieved that she was okay. "So that takes care of the forward party, and the guards, though the rest probably heard us."
"There are more?" she asked, looking around.
"Report said at least thirty, though that was mid-day when they were just guarding their nest, so if they're nocturnal then the others might be out and about," I answered. "Now, do you want to do this the easy, sloppy, and destructive way, or the hard and thorough way, that may let us save someone."
"I. . ." she trailed off. "I don't know. What would you do, if I wasn't here?"
"Hard way," I replied without hesitation. "We could very easily blow up this building, hopefully killing everything inside. However, the report said they didn't kill everyone, but grabbed a woman and dragged her inside. Now, that didn't happen, because that mission never occurred, but if they grabbed anyone else. . ." I trailed off in turn.
She looked at the darkened entrance to what looked like it might've been a restaurant. "Hard way is we go in?"
"Hard way is we go in," I confirmed.
"Wouldn't be much of a hero if I pussied out now," she sighed, mostly to herself. "Gimme a mo', and I'll be good to go."
Nodding, I looked over the bodies, finding the specimen that was the most in-tact, one of the ones that Mouse had beheaded. Grabbing both parts, I teleported back to base, popping around a bit until I found the Mark I'd left in cold-storage. Having talked to her about the issues topside, Panacea had agreed to look over the biology of anything I found, to better use her powers in the future.
Mind you, that was after an argument where she insisted that she wouldn't make more of whatever I grabbed, and she finally realized that I wasn't arguing at all, but agreeing completely with her, but that seemed par for the course with her.
Returning to Karen, she looked up as I waked over, unsheathing her sword once more. "Okay, we goin' in?"
"I'll go first," I commanded, "I'm armored three different ways, so I can take the hits. You play assassin, popping in, getting your hit in, then popping out. And if things get to be too much-"
"Go back to base," She agreed, turning towards the building in question. "Figures it'd be a Thai place. I hate Thai food."
I walked up the entrance, the inside a mess of rubble piled up into defensive formations, though nothing manned them. "I don't think the kind of restaurant has anything to do with it."
Continuing inside, I took control of the air and pressed it down slightly, trying to set off any traps. Either the force wasn't enough, or there weren't any, so we continued deeper in. Feeling outwards with my supernatural senses, there was some insect life above us, in the partially collapsed floors, but nothing below us. I could feel that the building went down a bit, the lack of Minerals to manipulate telling me as such, though not the shape of the area. Entering the kitchen area, the smell of rotten fish assaulted me, a dark slime covering the floor, a gaping hole in the center of the space.
"Tell me we're not going down there," Mouse pleaded, peering down into the ten-foot-wide pit. The bottom a steep slope downwards into the dank darkness, in which hid two more fish-men, waiting for us.
Glancing around, I saw no one watching from the entrance, so extruded two knives from the metal plate in my belt, not bothering to Mark them. Infusing Momentum in them, I held one up, aiming it carefully, before letting it go. The blade silently accelerated, crossing the distance in an instant, burying itself into the first deep one's skull completely, dropping it with a wet splat.
The other looked over at its now dead companion, bulging eyes able to see even in this near-total darkness, and started to breathe in, likely to call for reinforcements, or out of anger. It didn't matter, as I aimed and released the second knife, dropping it too.
"Um, V?" Karen asked a little nervously. "What'd you just do? 'Cause I know I have cool 'see in the dark' vision now, but not that dark vision."
I didn't say anything, manifesting a small star, which caused her to swear a little, then a lot as I drifted it down the tunnel, lighting up the two ambushers. "You want me to go get you a light?" I suggested.
Peering into the long, dark hole Karen hemmed and hawed. "How about you leave that thing up here, and I watch your back? You said there might be more out there, how 'bout I make sure they don't make it down here?"
Looking down the muddy, slimy tunnel, I nodded. "Sure." Making a small, blood red sun, the better to preserve her night vision, I left it hanging directly over the entrance, dismissing the purple star. "If things get tough, don't worry about leaving me on my own, head back."
She hesitated before nodding, backing away from the pit entrance with a relieved sigh. No longer bothering to walk, I flew down into the gaping maw before me, past the burning star that was causing slime around the edges of the pit to steam slightly. I went further down, down, down.
The tunnel twisted in on itself, occasionally branching outward, but consistently moved south, deeper into the yellow zone. At every fork I paused, listening carefully with Aerokinesis, but nothing disturbed the air down those side caves, not even the slight movement of breath. With the insect life on the surface as a guide, I must've gone down two hundred feet before the tunnel opened up into a larger cave, and I found the nest proper.
The exit was most of the way up the enormous cave, easily fifty feet tall and sixty feet across, a carved-out walkway descending down the edge to the lower level. The bottom of the cave was flooded with two feet of water, and down there the deep ones moved, at least two dozen of them sloshing around as they carried things this way and that. The smell of fish, rot, and death intermingled until they became something else, something entirely unique, which assaulted my sense of smell, even as I tried to strain the air before I breathed it.
Small, greenish glowing orbs, like dying, diseased incandescent bulbs, were clustered around the rim of the chamber, ranging in size form the size of oranges to beach balls. Some were broken open, their membranes drooping, and as I watched one of the larger ones ruptured, and a small, gaunt, fish-man clawed its way out.
Dominating the cave though, was an enormous egg, thirty feet across, and glowing a dim bluish-green. Inside something floated, vaguely humanoid, and stirring occasionally. Shifting to Shadow, I took in the sight below me, cursing that Shards pulled from popular culture, as whoever had originally had the power that made all of this possible was obviously a fan of H.P. Lovecraft.
That said, Brockton Bay was no Innsmouth, and I was no poor researcher, stumbling across things so great I had no hope of defeating. That said, I also wasn't a Lawful Stupid Paladin, yelling about evil-doers when I could gain some vital intel first. Drifting into the walls to keep out of sight, I followed one of the tunnels, which submerged down into the water fully. One of the monsters going down it was carrying something barely recognizable, but as I followed it, the brackish water washed off the slime covering it enough to show it was a rotting pot-roast, still in its plastic wrapping.
Tracking the creature, it moved deeper down, navigating several branching tunnels, finally coming up out of the water into a pitch-black cave. In it was something, I wasn't really sure what. It looked like the deep ones, but the limbs were too long, the stomach too distended to be one of the rest.
The fish-man approached the creature, so weighed down by its gut that it could only uselessly wiggle its gaunt limbs. Ripping off the plastic, the deep one approached the malformed creature, gurgling something, causing the creature to redouble its efforts to try to move. Horrified but fascinated, I watched as the deep one force-fed a large portion of the rotting meat to the creature, ripping it off in chunks and shoving it into the fat, helpless monster.
Its job done, the fish-thing creature gurgled something else, taking a bite of the meat itself, and returned the way it came, leaving the other creature to shudder and wave its stick-like arms feebly.
Once it was gone, I drifted out of the wall, to get a better look at this creature, and figure out exactly what was going on. Maybe it was. . . I actually had no idea what was going on, the entire situation too strange and alien for me to make any reasonable guesses. Whatever it was didn't sense my presence, allowing me to view it in detail. The limbs were long, very thin, almost like something one would see on those 'heroin-chic' models, only more so. The head was wrong too. The fish-men had heads like, well, fish. No neck at all, their heads coming directly from hunched shoulders.
This one did have a bit of a neck, the fish-like head just that, fish-like. I could see hints of something else there, and, as I squinted, I could make out a few strands of long, filthy hair that I'd first mistook for muck still attached. The rest of it, now that I looked, had more humanish features. While the fish-men had humanoid pectorals, they lacked any nipples, which this creature had. Continuing to stare it shuttered, a wet splashing sound coming from its lower end, and a glimmer of light shown from golf-ball sized spheres it, for lack of a better term, seemed to excrete.
I'd been starting to lean towards some kind of infiltrator, the force feeding required for it to fill out its very un-fish-man like body, but, as I stared at those spheres, like the ones in the main chamber, I realized it wasn't fat, it was gravid with eggs.
Part of the report, the one about the fish-men grabbing one of the women in Charlie's team and taking her away, resurged. The person in question had no memory of the incident, indicated she'd been killed before the day was out, so I'd assumed they'd just wanted, as horrible as it was to say, fresh meat. But. . . but if she hadn't, if she'd died trying to get free, just like the woman who'd gone after her?
Hesitatingly, I approached it, letting a hand drop out of Shadow in the now dimly lit chamber. The creature, its eyes bulging, but less than the fish-men, saw me, and gurgled, though I couldn't understand it. The sound had a fearful intensity to it, and just the hint of words, that made me pause.
Reaching out with my uncovered finger-tip, I pressed it against her, and tried to heal her. The power wouldn't flow, not like I wasn't touching something living, but like whatever I was touching was actively resisting my power. With increasing trepidation, I pushed harder, and harder still, feeling as if, if I just used enough power, I could do something.
I felt something give and my power rushed out to her, more than I ever had done to anyone, save Sundancer. The creature, the woman, in front of my gave a gurgling shriek which started to shift to something else, something very different, before she shuttered and went still, my own power cutting off in an instant, unable to do anything to non-living biomatter. As I looked at the corpse, it'd regained a little of its human features, but was still a twisted, mutated thing.
Mouse was right not to come down here.
Dropping fully to Shadow, I moved back, watching, as, moments later, several fish-men burst from the water, scrap-tridents in hand, looking all around. As an insubstantial shadow in a dark room mostly phased into the wall, their madly rotating eyes went right past me.
Gurgling to each other, they moved towards her stomach, which was likely full of eggs, one monster sliding out a rough, sharp, crude knife from its belt, and I pulled back through the wall, having seen enough. Because I had to know, I drifted to the other rooms in the area, only three others holding what used to be women. I made their deaths instantaneous, and painless.
Other rooms held a variety of things, from stockpiled, rotting foodstuffs, to piles of scrap-metal, to one room covered in odd symbols. I felt a sense of dread looking upon them, but the cold, calm anger I felt didn't so much as budge, so I assumed there was no Master effect to them, only a worry as to what they could mean, which I knew to be foolish, as there were no Great Old Ones here.
Only Entities, which were enough.
Returning to the entrance to their lair, I found two more deep ones making their way upwards. Once they were out of sight of the others, I dropped out of the shadows behind them, creating two momentum-infused knives and silently ending the pair of monsters.
There was no one to save here, and I had the samples for Panacea. Hopefully she'd learn something, and someone would be helped by this clusterfuck. I knew I couldn't leave a single creature down here alive.
Moving to the top third of the tunnel, manually checking that nothing lived in those side alcoves, I grew a wall of steel, blocking it off entirely.
Then a second.
Then a third.
I staggered all five, so that even as one heated, the air between them would insulate the others, pulling the trick from Kaiser, and I returned back to the cave. What I was going to do might collapse the chamber, but I didn't care. I could rebuild over this horror, and we were in the yellow zone, where no one was supposed to go, and Mouse Protector, if she was still at the mouth of this dank hell, was sixty feet north of the main chamber. If worst came to worst, she could teleport out and escape.
There would be no such escape for the filth below me.
Floating over the top of the cave, I created a sun, a blood-red piece of burning malevolence that was a poor shadow of what I felt towards these things. Then another, then another, more and more until I had a constellation of hate around me, growing them ever larger.
By the time I was done, I'd been spotted, the deep ones below gurgling with fear and anger, dozens upon dozens of the vile things. Some threw twisted, rusted scrap spears at me, but any that had any speed to them were instantly blocked by glowing hexagons before they struck, and those that weren't either missed or only nudged my armored form harmlessly. One caught on a star, melting, the molten metal dripping on the enormous egg below me, which quivered, the creature inside shifting more and more.
It wouldn't matter, they'd all cook soon.
Directing the twenty stars around the room, I dropped them simultaneously, growing them from ball bearing to soccer ball size as I did so. The air pressure in the room had been slowly rising, the main source of ventilation blocked and my stars heating the room, but it didn't seem to bother the creatures below me, who flinched away from my fiery orbs even as they threw weapons at them, to no avail.
They touched down simultaneously, sending twenty gouts of steam up into the air, requiring my concentration to hold in place. The creature cried out in shock, and possibly in pain, as I dropped the stars to the floor, more and more water rushing in and turning to steam as the temperature spiked. My own power started to negate the scaldingly hot vapor around me, but I overrode it.
I wouldn't burn.
The fish-men rushed around the giant egg, chanting in their inhuman, gurgling voices, and the egg started to shutter more and more. Creating another sun, I dropped it down to the egg itself. If these monsters loved this thing so much, they could have it. Over easy.
The star hissed and burned, but had trouble piercing the membrane, deforming it instead. I narrowed my eyes in confused annoyance. I'd burned through an Endbringer's flesh with my suns, what made this overinflated piece of caviar so special?
More and more steam filled the air, a thick haze that obscured my sight, but I could still see enough to matter. Some of the deep ones had collapsed, and it would only be a matter of-
The egg shook, violently, whatever was inside thrashing, trying to break free. I finally pushed my star through, flash-boiling the liquid inside, only to see the dark shape inside the glowing egg reach up and crush the star, popping it like a balloon. Creating another one, spinning it into a dart, I fired it down as the creature shoved it's enormous clawed hand up through the tiny puncture, ripping the hole wider.
The dart burned the creature, forcing its hand back, but it swatted at the piece of star, dispersing it. I created another dozen. Even if it could dispel the effect, this abomination would burn, but it reached up with both hands, one noticeably smaller than the other, and ripped the egg in half, rank green glowing fluid pouring out and over the deep ones, smothering my suns which started to burn through it, but slowly.
The creature would've been easily thirty feet tall, if it was fully formed, but it'd hatched too soon, its limbs uneven and the entire thing a pale, maggot white. It gave a gurgling scream which terrified me in a way that was hard to understand. It was a deep, primal, mindless fear, turning my limbs to jelly, even as the hatred I had of these things, cold as an arctic winter, deepened into a burning black blaze of loathing. I might feel terrified, like my heart would beat out of my chest and I would surely die if I faced this thing, a feeling that not even the Endbringers had inspired, but my body was not only flesh and blood, but steel as well.
Wrapping myself up in metallic tendrils, extending them outwards to form a larger form, I was once more ready to face this unnatural beast, but it had not laid idle. As I'd firmed my conviction it had laid into its lessors, even as they seemed to worship at its feet. Taking handfulls of the things, it shoved them into its gaping, jagged toothed maw, it's gullet constantly moving as it consumed the others.
As it did so, it darkened, gaining color as its limbs matured unnaturally quickly, growing to its seemingly full height in seconds. It still reached for more, but I charged blasts of Light, raining death and destruction in a rain that shook the still heating cavern. Denied it's meal, it turned to my floating, armored form and shrieked, sending twin spikes of fear and hatred coursing through me. I struck down at it with Light blasts, enough to level a building, but it covered its face with one giant, webbed head, and reached up blindly for me, missing me but leaving ripples of air-pressure in its wake.
In return, I grew the suns embedded in the steaming floor to the size of barrels, making a second set and lining the top of the room with them as well. The heat was extreme, enough to kill anything not specially protected.
It didn't seem to notice.
Another gurgling shriek and it leapt for me, the gouges in its hand left by my assault already healing. I tried to dodge, but the fifty-foot high, sixty-foot wide cave didn't allow me much room to maneuver and it clipped me, sending me flying into a wall.
With a wet cry of victory, it strode forward ponderously for me, arms reaching out and mouth opened wide. A blast of Light between its teeth to its soft palate sent it staggering, and gave me enough time to extend my armor outwards, into the Orichalcum Giant I'd battled Leviathan with. Compared to that monster, this thing was pathetic, no matter how it tried to Master me, and I would show it the error of its ways.
Fully formed, I strode forward, catching a clawed swipe with one arm as I punched it in its fishy face, feeling something break, but only a little. Its follow up swipe struck into my constructs head, a useless, stupid gesture, as I saw the cartilage I'd broken reset itself, the creature bellowing at me, serrated teeth like swords feet from my face.
Infusing myself with Light I punched it again and again, as it ripped back into my ever-shifting metallic form, both of our attacks burning its flesh, only for it to heal between strikes, as it still slowly grew.
The chamber lit once more, the glowing green eggs having long since burned up, the walls of the cavern we fought glowing a hellish orange. The creature's flesh sizzled and steamed, but it did not stop, ripping into me over and over again, as I gave back as good as I got. With every bit of metal torn away, I felt a bit more tired, pulling on some inner reserve to replenish it.
I didn't know who'd give out first, if we kept going this way, but while all it had was brute force, I had other powers at my disposal. I could feel the walls slowly melting around us, the molten rock pooling at our feet. Even liquid, it was still Mineral, and as I blocked one punch, then another, the enormous deep one surging forward to try to bite through my chest, giant teeth grinding against my armored costume, I reached out to it.
The original user had never done anything like this, likely burning to death if he tried, but I had a vision and drive that he lacked, as well as the power to use his ability to the fullest. It was reluctant to move, like trying to shovel molasses, but the magma responded to my call, surging upwards around the creature's legs as it howled in agony.
Shoving it backwards, even as it tried to bite through my armor with everything it had, I pressed it up against the wall, making more and more suns, melting the rock as I pressed it into the liquifying stone. I covered it, slowly, and it thrashed more and more as the lava worked its way up its waist. It screamed, and I felt like my mind would shut down from the twin emotions of hatred and terror that raged through me, but I pressed harder, forcing it into its molten tomb.
Changing tactics, it let go of me and slammed against the wall, over and over again, magma raining down on both of us, my own metallic body starting to soften, before there was a crack like lightning, and larger pieces of rubble, still solid rock, started to rain down on us.
Content to let it be crushed to death, I tried to let go and shift to Shadow, but it held on, trying to take me with it. Dropping my control of the lava, I directed the rubble away from me as I mentally disconnected the metal of the Giant's hands, fatigue hitting me like a hammer, but darkness encircling me as I shifted, leaving the creature holding two white-gold hands made of quickly softening metal, the orichalcum fully separated from me and the protections of my Immunity.
Letting the roof fall, I shrunk back in on myself, the anger and fear fading, though adrenaline still pounded in my ears. Rising up through the falling rubble, I cleared the collapsing building and dropped back to normality, the light of dawn, having broken while I was down there, bathing my form and starting to refill my Light reserves. Vejovis once more.