Chapter 21: Unfinished Business (Patreon)

***Casey Thompson***

“What’s a dungeon schism?” Casey asked quietly.

“When two dungeons love each other very much…” Feej said with a patronizing tone.

“Quiet. Your hostility accomplishes nothing,” Kor Tekalis said, glaring at the keegan enforcer. The stick-thin woman returned his glare.

“If we hadn’t been dragged down by spineless human nature, this mission would be over already,” Feej said, loud enough for Casey and everyone else to hear. Everyone ignored her. The keegan woman obviously had a chip on her shoulder, and there wasn’t really much point in addressing it.

“Why hasn’t he killed us?” Casey muttered to herself. They were rendered incapable of moving, and their Myst was completely sealed, which also shut off their Abilities. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t just finish it.

A chill went through her.

Waste not, want not.

He’s going to experiment on us, then sell us back to the emperor like a head of cattle!

He's going to experiment on me! Again!

Casey’s heart pounded in her ears, sweat beading on her forehead as she recalled the invasive nature of the bastard’s ‘experiments’.

“I don’t presume to know what goes on in that monster’s head,” Kor Tekalis muttered, still more than a head taller than her, even kneeling. The older Tekalis’s words dragged her out of the rabbit hole of unthinking terror. At least, momentarily.

Why should I be afraid? I should be pissed!

Casey glanced over at the sindio, who was humming to himself as he tested all the lines and made sure the belt designed to feed the nuke through the silver gate was in working order. It moved the massive metal bomb back and forth with a high-pitched whine.

“Why didn’t you kill us!?” Casey demanded. Kor tried to shift his body to cover Casey after the outburst, but the damage was done.

“Oh?” Vex glanced over at Casey, his hands still busily at work.

“Why didn’t you just put us out of our goddamn misery, you sadistic fuck!?” she shouted, some of the pent-up anger from her last ‘visit’ boiling over.

“Because you’re all steeped with Causality Myst designed to deliver you safe and alive to Pikaku in a few months’ time, my dear child. It’s a…what was the technical term…a ‘bitch and a half’ to remove, requires a fancy ritual, would take all day for each of you, and I just don’t care about any of you enough to waste that kind of time.”

“That’s Emperor Pikaku,” Kor said. The leader of the assault strained against his bond like someone had just insulted his honor.

Maybe someone did, Casey thought.

Vex snorted. “I didn’t vote for him.”

Casey couldn’t tell if Kor was flushing with anger—the melas was almost red already—but he did darken significantly. Both his skin and his expression.

Skree!

A cry like that of rending steel sounded from down the hall, followed by the clatter of chitin against marble. A moment later, a massive, moving shield of organic armor came lumbering down the hall.

Upon finding living creatures in the room, it paused momentarily as if surveying the situation. The chitin shield split in two, revealing itself to be two flattened pincers that acted as a shield. The creature’s face sent a chill down Casey’s spine as it drooled hungrily, its many mandibles making come hither motions like fingers as it drooled at them.

A spike dominated the center of its mouth, the tip of a round tongue composed entirely of tensed muscle.

Damn, that is ugly.

It began lumbering towards them, hunger evident in its hyperfocus on the restrained enforcers.

“Try it, monster,” Kor said, looking up at the drooling monstrosity. “You’ll find my flesh tougher than you can handle.”

“What on Pharos is taking Lien so long?” Vex demanded, waving a dismissive hand.

Casey saw a faint flash of sharp-looking Myst coalesce into a sphere before it leapt from the sindio’s finger and splashed against the creature, seemingly under its own power.

The monster paused for a moment, as if confused, before collapsing to the ground in bloody chunks.

Out of the pile of carnage, three more motes of sharp light leapt out of the body, heading opposite directions from each other.

One of them went straight for Casey.

Kor threw himself in front of her, and Casey spotted the mote land against Kor’s shoulder. Somehow it had changed shape from a sphere to a miniature copy of the monster it had just rendered into soup.

The tiny insect monster made of Myst landed on Kor, and every muscle in Casey’s body clenched, waiting for the enforcer leader to collapse into pieces.

Instead, the Myst creature just…fizzled out like a candle run out of wick.

Deeper down the hall, Casey heard the distinctive sounds of bloody flesh hitting the floor as the other two motes found prey.

Goddamn, what the hell did we get ourselves into?

***Jebediah Trapper***

Jeb groaned, his entire body feeling like an enormous bruise. All his compressed wall of air had done was soften the blow of the explosive somewhat.

That was a lot of C-4, he thought, the barest shreds of his consciousness beginning to reassert themselves through the white noise of the concussion.

“Who’s still alive?” Jeb groaned, unable to hear his own words. “Sound off.” All he heard was ringing that drowned out everything else. Gonna have to buy an ear doctor after this, or maybe bum a heal off Amanda.

Jeb scanned to the left and right, spotting Ron and Zlesk struggling to their feet.

Well, at least they’re alive, Jeb thought, his grunt of effort fading into the ringing whine as he shoved himself to his feet. He could feel all his extremities, which was a good sign.

Jeb paused as he realized the floor was perfectly flat and dry, free of muck. The Dungeon core rolled down the hall, which seemed to shudder under its passage as if it were revolted to even touch the thing.

The explosive blew us through the ceiling, Jeb thought, glancing up at the muck-dripping hole in the brightly-lit ceiling.

Jeb waved until he got Ron’s attention. “I think we’re in Vex’s dungeon,” Jeb said.

“~?” Ron shouted back at him.

Jeb shook his head and staggered to his feet, grabbing Ron by the sleeve as he passed, heading the opposite direction from the core. He snagged Zlesk on the way by and kept running as, a moment later, an army ant began tentatively poking its forelegs into the new territory.

Jeb glanced over his shoulder and spotted the army ants begin to flood into the new tunnel system. They moved erratically, as if they were being prodded by electric shocks just from being inside the dungeon.

And they didn’t like it.

With a howl, they attacked the very walls of Vex’s dungeon, slamming their oversized claws into the stonework.

Jeb frowned as he spotted a brief plume of Myst escape from the wall, like steam from a broken pipe.

A moment later, a beam of brilliant white light shot down from the ceiling and caught Ron in the chest.

Ron frowned for an instant, before the necromancer burst into ash, the various artifacts he wore tumbling to the ground, embedding themselves in the cremated corpse.

Jeb’s heart stopped, along with his feet, holding Zlesk back.

That’s what Vex was talking about earlier. The defense system. I knew about this. I KNEW about it and I should have fucking remembered! Why didn’t it just destroy us as soon as we fell into the dungeon?

Jeb glanced over his shoulder at the wreckage created by the blast of C-4. The security system had been damaged in that section of the hall. That’s why any of them were still breathing.

Jeb’s eye twitched as he began burying the self-recrimination. Just keep moving forward, doing the best you can.

Before Jeb could get too deep into burying his guilt, one of the many rings that Ron had been wearing, in the shape of a snake eating its own tail, began to glow white-hot before detonating in front of him, creating a little crater in the pile of ash.

Jeb heard footsteps behind him, and turned, expecting Meyers, or Vex, or some other enemy, but instead he saw Ron, running up behind them with a curious expression. The ginger frowned, his run slowing to a stop.

“~?”

“How are you not dead?” Jeb asked, forming his Myst into subtitles and pointing at the pile of ash filled with magical doodads.

‘You don’t know everything about me,’ Ron wrote with his neon violet Myst as he gave Jeb a wan smile. The kid looked paler than usual as he looked at the pile of ash, like he might throw up. ‘I got some pretty sweet loot for finishing the Impossible Tutorial, remember?’

Jeb raised a brow. Apparently, the wealthy necromancer had blown a secret get-out-of-death-free card, and the proximity to his own pile of ash was messing with the kid’s head.

We haven’t got time for him to stew on the teleporter paradox, Jeb thought.

‘You realize this means I can loot your shop without consequence now, right?’ Jeb wrote to take Ron’s mind off of it.

‘Over my dead body!’

“Yeah, that’s kind of my point,” Jeb muttered, glancing down at the pile of ash filled with magical gear, noting the fact that there was an identical set on the Ron time-clone.

‘Don’t you dare,’ Ron wrote in front of the pile of loot.

Jeb mentally checked his feelings about the Deal with Ron to not loot him or his shop as long as the necromancer didn’t die, made a few months back when he’d been stabbed through the gut and fading fast.

The compulsion to not loot the young man’s property was no longer there.

Ron had died, breaking his side of the Deal with Jeb, but he was alive now. The ouroboros ring had bent spacetime in such a way that Ron from a few seconds ago replaced current Ron.

Magic is so cool, Jeb thought, shaking his head.

‘Don’t go any further,’ Jeb wrote, pointing down the hall. ‘You just got vaporized. There’s a security system that needs to be disabled.’

The three of them glanced behind them at the oncoming swarm of monsters, able to approach them in a formation nearly a dozen wide, with how wide the sindio’s halls were.

Disabling security systems was generally a lot easier than most people thought. It usually involved breaking something or someone. The most advanced security system in the world could be disabled with a rock and some elbow grease. Humanity had long since discovered that it was far easier to break things than it was to create them.

‘I need some zombies’, Jeb wrote, pointing at the approaching swarm.

‘Well, get to work,’ Ron replied with a shrug.

Jeb rolled his eyes and started placing traps on the floor back the way they had come.

Then, when the second row of creatures were at the angle where their shields no longer covered their nerve center, Jeb’s traps fired out of the floor, driving telekinetic spikes into the brain of the middle one.

It fell to the ground, twitching, rising as black ichor-dripping zombies a heartbeat later as Ron picked up the slack. Another heartbeat later, it exploded violently, catching its teammates with shrapnel made of poisonous chitin, dropping an entire wave, who then proceeded to stand up and hold off their brethren further down the hall.

Ron was going all-out.

Zlesk, meanwhile, rested his arm on the hilt of his sword, seemingly impressed at Jeb and Ron’s combo, and temporarily out of a job.

Half the zombies went toward keeping the monsters at bay. The other half, Jeb rigged with traps and sent marching forward.

When the beams of vaporizing Myst shot out of the walls, a piece of rubble on the zombie was launched at the origin in response, smashing deep into the wall, effectively disarming the trap and creating more rubble ammo for the next wave.

“There!” Jeb shouted, pointing at a small side door. Ron caught where he was pointing and nodded.

Jeb briefly considered the possibility that touching the handle would vaporize him. Let’s roll those dice. He lunged forward and flung the door open, dragging himself and the others into the room, which turned out to be a janitor’s closet.

There was barely enough room inside for the three of them to stand alongside the mop and bucket that smelled faintly of mold and cleaning supplies, and the various tools and replacement parts for non-critical parts of the complex.

Bolts, hinges, that sort of thing.

“Okay, so now we’re trapped in a closet,” Ron wrote, glancing at Jeb, then up at the illumination Myst shining helpfully down on them. “I fail to see how this gets us any closer to where we wanted to be.”

Jeb slid past Ron and put his hands on the door, focusing on his other newest Myst technique: honeycombed reinforcement. Jeb fixed his Myst into the door and held it in place with tightly interconnected hexagons, each packed with a little bit more Myst than they needed, in order to leak if they were broken, filling in damage.

“Whoa,” Ron wrote, leaning close to the door to inspect the technique and simultaneously invade Jeb’s personal space. “Where did you learn that?”

“A book I took out of someone’s head,” Jeb wrote in glowing orange, taking his hands off the door as he finished.

A moment later, there was a thump as an insect smashed into the door, causing a handful of the honeycombs to crack, spilling reinforcing Myst through that area.

The next hit did even less damage, and so on, until the creature finally gave up.

“So now, we’re waiting in a closet for…what exactly?” Ron asked.

“You’ll know it when you hear it.”

“You realize we can’t hear, right?”

“Give it a couple minutes.”

A few minutes later, when Jeb’s hearing was finally starting to come back, he heard the sound of battle: metallic clangs and explosions that shook the earth.

Jeb took a deep breath, then peeked his head out of their little hidey-hole.

Ideally, that’s Vex dealing with our Meyers problem, and we can hopefully sneak away while he’s busy.

Unfortunately, it was not Vex. It was the butler.

The melas was floating above the insects, with the dungeon core floating between his hands, suspended on puppet strings of pure Myst

How the hell is he doing that? Jeb thought to himself. As far as Jeb knew, the core just gobbled up any kind of Myst you used on it.

Then a black army ant, sleeker, shinier, and more streamlined, stepped out of thin air and joined the brawl, attacking its own kind with its dart-tongue.

Is he using the core to summon them out of thin air? And under his control?? How?

The black army ants were outnumbered, but it didn’t seem to matter much. With a casual wave of the butler’s hand, a section of wall peeled off and shot through the swarm of crimson shielded insects, nearly taking Jeb’s head off in the process.

“Okay,” Jeb said, pulling his head back into the closet ahead of the sliver of hardened stone. “We got their attention. That part is taken care of. Now we just have to wait for…”

“Trapper!” Meyers’ voice rose over the din. Excellent timing.

“Alright, now we can let the two of them fight to the death and gang up on the winner. Tactics,” Jeb said, relaxing back against the wall of the janitor closet.

“Jeb!” Nancy’s voice cut through the noise.

Jeb’s eye twitched.

That mother…fucker.

Of course Meyers would bring a hostage as insurance if she were forced to go into what was obviously a trap.

Jeb’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth creaked against each other, sending tiny lances of pain through his skull.

No, we can still work with this, because I know something she doesn’t. She’s not going to leave here alive.

“That’s twice she’s broken a Deal with me,” Jeb muttered. She’d also made a Deal not to try to kill him. That Deal was already in default, and Jeb looked forward to taking his payment out of her senseless body.

“You’ve got three seconds before I cut her head off and go get another!” Meyers’ voice cut through Jeb’s angry thoughts.

“Be ready to cover my ass,” Jeb whispered to his buddies before hauling the door open and coming out of the closet.

The hangar-sized hall was still filled with monstrous insects locked in a vicious battle, but the butler’s new creations were starting to turn the tide. He sported a look of intense concentration, his body wavering in midair slightly as he glanced over at Jeb rising above the melee.

Jeb tore his gaze back to Meyers. The old woman floated just inside the hole in the ceiling, between Jeb and the butler. She held Nancy’s wriggling body tight against her chest, a fuckoff-big knife braced against the little girl’s neck.

Meyers herself was looking at the dungeon core on the puppet strings, her expression feral.

“Get that ball back for me, Trapper, or she dies,” Meyers said, pressing the edge of the blade deeper into Nancy’s throat.

The melas glanced between the two of them, his midair posture subtly shifting. Getting ready for a fight.

Jeb eyed Nancy.

She’s got roughly 35 Body, which would make her a bitch to kill with a weapon unless her neck was actually severed ear-to-ear. There’s a good chance Meyers doesn’t know exactly how unreasonably strong Nancy’s body is, too, which would make her initial cut too shallow.

Meyers was a pilot. Ergo, she likely didn’t know basic manners when slitting someone’s throat.

Jeb did.

You’re in my world, now, bitch.

“Nancy, you remember the starfish thing?”

Nancy nodded and scrunched her eyes shut, anticipating the pain. It didn’t feel good hurting a little girl, but Jeb’s alternatives were dogshit.

“Shut your fucking mouth and kill that alien piece of shit!” Meyers shouted, her face red.

“Snake basket.”

The trap Jeb had set while hiding behind Eddie launched itself forward in the blink of an eye, angling toward Meyers’ face in the shape of a powerful spear of force, backed by a huge amount of Myst.

The slender crone grinned, raising Nancy in front of herself and created a wall of compressed air between the two of them.

Compressed air could stop his telekinetic blades, if it needed to. After all, Jeb’s telekinetic spears and blades were just air held in place by telekinesis.

What compressed air could not stop was electromagnetic radiation.

Upon reaching the general, the spear of telekinetic force branched, winding in on itself violently, converting itself to heat Myst at the last second, detonating in a powerful explosion of heat and light.

BOOM!

The sound tortured Jeb’s already damaged eardrums and made his eyes water, but he couldn’t blink. He had to follow up. Jeb stepped on the gas, lunging through the air toward Meyers before she had a chance to respond.

The heat bloom penetrated Meyers’ translucent shield like it wasn’t even there. She had been peeking out from behind Nancy, so the bitch took third degree burns across the left side of her face, charring her left eye closed and incinerating her tight bun of silver hair.

Nancy had taken the brunt of it, her body burning anywhere it was exposed.

The little girl’s face and arms were turned an angry, boiled red, having shrugged off a little more damage than Meyers due to a slightly higher Body.

Meyers tried to cut the immortal girl’s throat, but she’d already raised the girl up, and her thrashing made it impossible to seal the deal, so to speak. A moment later, Nancy dropped to the ground, badly burnt and bleeding from a shallow cut to the neck…straight into the melee beneath them.

Jeb spotted Zlesk and Ron sprinting for the girl the instant before he made contact.

He put Nancy out of his head and focused on the fight.

Jeb tackled Meyers into the wall of Vex’s dungeon just as she was bolting for the exit, driving the wind out of both of them.

Here comes the punch.

Jeb flared the miniature sun in his chest and pushed back violently as Meyers aimed a rapid punch at his gut, fist covered in tightly wound Myst, trying to turn him inside out. The concussive blast of wind scattered against Jeb’s chest, refusing to penetrate his Myst-laden body and maul him.

You’ve never fought someone with just as much Myst, have you? Jeb thought, aiming a left at Meyers’ remaining eye while his right grabbed the oversized tooth on the leather loop hanging against his chest, tearing it off his neck.

Jeb’s left arm was deflected and caught in a vice-like hold while his right moved out of her field of view. Jeb slammed the poisonous tooth through the general’s shirt and in between her ribs then squeezed the porous tooth, flooding her with poison from the enchanted trophy.

Meyers grunted before increasing the torsion on his arm.

Pain!

Jeb’s mind tried to flee for a second as his arm let out a horrifying crack, sending waves of pain all the way up his shoulder and echoing into his ribs. A moment later, she kicked him away, his arm flopping uselessly beside him.

She patted the side of her ribs, coming away with a spot of blood, but not an alarming amount. Not even close.

“You sacrificed an arm to shiv me?” she asked, incredulously. “It couldn’t be deeper than an inch. I barely felt it.”

Of course you didn’t feel it; the poison has a numbing effect, Jeb thought, keeping one eye on the butler. The fancily-dressed melas continued to float in the center of the hall, watching the two of them with an amused expression as he continued to clean up Meyers’ mess.

The newly summoned insect creatures weren’t in control yet, but they weren’t far off. Jeb had to assume they were under the butler’s direct control, and the longer they let him just sit there, the more powerful he became.

This does not favor us… Now that he and Meyers had started fighting, the butler was using Jeb’s idea of sitting back and finishing off the winner! What kind of jerk would do that? Jeb thought, shaking his head.

Let’s see, I’m down an arm, while Meyers is poisoned by a venom that attacks the nervous system and makes recognizing you’ve been poisoned more difficult. That butler over there is totally unharmed.

If Jeb wanted to win, he’d have to get trickier.

Jeb started weaving defensive traps against anything except for Meyers.

Jeb glanced at Ron and Zlesk. The two of them were carrying Nancy back to the janitor’s closet. The little girl was still breathing, with Ron’s shirt wadded up against her neck.

“How’s your depth perception, Meyers?” Jeb asked, dropping Gresh’s Subtlety into his pocket and pulling out R-R-RubU’s Mysteries. The little ivory pipe was still covered in the grime of years of smoking, and Meyers gave him an odd frown when she saw him put it in his mouth.

She should be running away. Her eye is gone, she’s outnumbered and wounded, and her chances of winning are infinitesimally small. She’s got no obligation to stay and fight it out, not like me and the butler over here. There’s no reason she should stay and fight, but...

The first stage of Gresh’s Subtlety: bad choices. Meyers’ prefrontal cortex was ever-so-gradually being numbed to sleep.

Rather than bolt for the ceiling like she would’ve if she weren’t intoxicated, Meyers ran a hand down her charred eyelid and snarled at him, blackened lips peeling away from unnaturally white teeth. Probably implants.

“Hey, you’re the one that tried to kill a kid. Don’t blame me when it blows up in your face,” Jeb said around the pipe, raising his hand placatingly and channeling his Myst through the device.

“How about a temporary cease-fire?” Jeb asked, thumbing towards the butler, who was content to let them beat on each other. “Or that guy will beat us both.”

“I’m going to cut your head off and shit down the hole,” Meyers growled, lunging for him.

Okay, then, Jeb thought, exhaling through the pipe as Meyers impacted against his gut feet first.

Their horsepower was nearly equivalent, while Jeb had focused on power, versus her speed. Jeb leveraged his superior power to drag their tangled brawl past the butler, barely able to keep his head enough to pay attention for a coup de grâce from the melas.

That’s what I would do, anyway.

Oddly enough, the butler didn’t deign to attack the two of them. He simply floated out of the way, likely suspicious of some kind of trick.

And rightly so, Jeb thought, exhaling another bubble between parrying another wild punch from Meyers.

The poison was doing its work well, causing the woman to take wild, unprofessional swings at Jeb that he was able to just barely dance around, leading her around the massive hall by the nose. She was acting almost drunk, her form was sloppy and her hands were starting to shake from nerve damage.

And somehow she still thought she was winning, grinning at him with manic energy.

That’s a nasty poison, Jeb thought, feeling the weight of the fang in his shirt.

Jeb led her around the massive hall three times before he found a spot he liked.

Meyers was on top of him, her back facing directly towards the exit above them as she tried to scratch his eyes out, almost animalistic in her ferocity—although her strength was rapidly dwindling as the poison numbed and ate away at her nerves.

The butler was about a hundred feet to the left, still watching them struggle, his elbow about three feet away from one of Jeb’s bubbles. There was another bubble hanging just below the gaping hole in the ceiling.

Jeb had a brief flashback to his time in the Tutorial, during his fight against R-R-RubU.

Yeah, that’ll work.

Jeb bunched his legs up and kicked Meyers off of him. He’d been matching her dwindling strength to add to the illusion that everything was fine, but now was the time to bring it home.

Meyers was flung away, catching herself unsteadily in the air, and looking at him with a confused expression. It was written all over her face: How did this fucker get so strong?

“How’s that poison treating you, general?” Jeb asked around the pipe with a smirk.

Meyers glanced at the hole in her side, her eyes widening. Her brain might be foggy, but pointing out the poison’s effects likely cleared away a lot of it.

Jeb leisurely began spooling out a massive amount of Myst, nearly draining himself dry, sparing only what he needed to stay aloft. His enemy was going to burn.

Meyers finally made the right call, but it was too little, too late.

Jeb felt like he was riding pure lightning as he created a feedback loop, holding on by the skin of his teeth as he translated the string of kinetic Myst into an extra thick rope of heat Myst, ready to melt some face.

Meyers turned to run, heading for the exit, and Jeb sent the finishing blow after her.

The heat Myst screamed after her with only seconds to spare before Jeb lost control of it. Meyers dodged at the last second, nimbly allowing the heat Myst to shoot past her before she reoriented on the gaping hole in the ceiling, bursting with laughter.

Now we see if I was right, Jeb thought, watching her disappear into the ceiling.

The compressed heat Myst continued to travel forward, slamming into the bubble just below the exit, its original target.

With the barest effort of will, Jeb directed the energy to be transferred to the bubble beside the butler’s elbow.

Boom!

The melas butler was sent spinning to the floor, a good portion of his left side simply burned away.

Clang!

Meyers plummeted back down the hole in the ceiling, her neck twisted at an awkward angle, blood streaming from her nose.

Jeb could barely make out the shape of a light pole, illuminated by Vex’s dungeon.

I knew those odds and ends should have been melted by the dungeon.

Like Ron had said, living things resist the effects of the dungeon’s transformation. Meaning all that pristine debris above them must have been alive.

Meyers had just been swatted like a bug by a solid steel streetlamp.

Thanks, Casey, Jeb thought before lunging forward again.

Jeb slammed into Meyers’ twitching body, holding it into the muck with his knees, taking his Appraisal ring off with his teeth.

She wasn’t dead yet. Therefore, she could still pay for breaking their Deals.

“We’re not done here,” Jeb growled.