Becoming Monsters 2: Ch. 61.5 (Patreon)

Becoming Monsters Chapter 61.5: Delving Too Deep

Cleo was both exhausted and elated.

“Is that it?” Rosalia asked, sweat and blue monster blood plastering her loose hair against the long scar running down her face. “Did we do it?”

“…I’m not getting any reading,” Armond stated in the back, his voice typically rife with pessimism now only a little hesitant, as if he couldn’t believe the glowing crystal in his hands.

Cleo’s shoulders slumped in relief. If Armond couldn’t find anything with his aelf scrying, there was nothing to be found. “I’m calling it: mission accomplished.”

The group of men and women were standing in a circle in the middle of a desolate field, the ground so torn up around them and littered with the unspeakable horrors that had died trying to destroy the group already getting absorbed back into ground. This floor had a low ceiling, stalactites close enough that some of the monsters lived and launched their attacks upon delvers from above. The oddity of the dungeon had all the rocks in this floor be a smooth or jagged obsidian, giving everything a slick and unworldly appearance to it. Even the ground was more obsidian, although the fighting they’d been waging for the last day had turned much of it into a fine sand, giving them all a space to stand and not worry about falling onto a jagged rock in a fight. Around them, in a dome of yellow flickering power, a defensive barrier shone that had kept them alive when all other defenses had failed.

Carnival, formerly out of the French Quarter Dungeon where they had made a name for themselves and now killing it in Harvardtown as the rising stars of Boston, collectively cheered when Cleo twisted the top of her staff and the electrified dome of power surrounding them dissipated with a crackle and pop. The group of twenty-three high level delvers let it all go, crying and hugging each other and laughing as loud as their dry and exhausted throats would allow. It was like watching physical catharsis, the relief each member of the guild showed so raw it would be painful for any outsider to watch.

“Alright, enough touchie feelies!” Jake shouted, carefully pulling his steel helmet off his head so the dent in the side he got yesterday didn’t rip open his stitches. “We’re still deep in the bottom Twenty-Three levels of the dungeon and it will take me six hours to get the portal locked so we can get out of here. Get a camp set up and then start on the perimeter spells, because I don’t want to be eaten by some Rando after we finally beat the dungeon surge.”

There were plenty of good-natured cussing and ribbing, telling Jake exactly where he could stick his perimeter spells, but the guild was close knit and quickly started unpacking all the things a group of people would need to rest and stay safe in the dungeon. Tents, a few camp stoves, cots, shovels, large scrying crystals linked to a central alarm, dry rations. Rosalia might no longer be in the Marines, but she knew how to set up camp like one and it didn’t take long for Carnival to turn their little corner of the dungeon into a home away from home.

I should step back from leading these misfits into raids, Cleo though as she hobbled over to one of the camp chairs that was set up next to a small camp fire, the old injury in her leg giving her grief at the moment. Fifty-six is too old to be blasting Shoggoths at the bottom of a dungeon.

Besides, as Cleo watched Jake and Rosalia together, the two of them effectively herding tired and beat delvers into giving just a little bit more to get the camp ready and start cooking the first meal they’d had in two days, Cleo couldn’t help but smile and know the guild was going to be alright.

“Tea?”

Raising her head, Cleo smiled at the latest girl to join their ranks, the only native to Boston on the roster, Tegwin O’Maddy. An odd looking girl, her dolphin beastkin gray skin always glistening even in the desert floors, her Class ability to desiccate water out of anything had already saved their hides more than once. Formerly a corporal in the Army, she finished her two years and decided delving would be fun. She had her M16 strapped over one shoulder, even if the guild ran out of ammo four days ago, but otherwise her fatigues were only a little singed and dusty, her Class letting her stay wedged in the middle of the scrum.

“Is it jasmine?” Cleo asked, sniffing the steaming cup and scrunching her nose.

“It is definitely not jasmine,” Tegwin replied, squatting down onto the ground and flopping her tailfin out behind her. “Peter pulled it out of his bag, threw it in a kettle and proclaimed it SomeTea. Best we got until we pop back up top.”

Cleo sipped, gagged, then sipped again. SomeTea was better than no tea.

“What’s a Rando?” Tegwin asked, picking up one of the obsidian rocks and flicking it idly away.

“Random encounter,” Cleo replied, slowly letting her muscles untense after the grueling week they had had. “Dungeons spawn two types of monsters: Randos and Sets. Sets are the most common type of monster, they are put in a place by the dungeon and will respawn exactly the same after a set amount of time. Makes a dungeon predictable, so occasionally a dungeon will throw in a random monster that has no business on the floor they appear in.”

“Yeah, makes sense.”

The two drifted into companionable silence for a while, the guild finishing setting up camp and moving around in a slow, tired manner as they got ready for a quick rest before the journey home. Sometime later both women were handed bowls of hot soup and they ate slowly to savor the taste of food.

“Is it really over?” Tegwin asked cleaning their utensils and stowing them before returning to sit next to the veteran delver.

“Not entirely, no,” Cleo Tate replied, leaning back in the chair and resting her eyes for a bit, though there was a smile on the side of her mouth as she got a chance to relive her old days as a High School History teacher. “The surge had been going on for about a month, only in the last two weeks did it get bad enough to shut down levels. Now that we’ve culled the source of the surge, it will still be a month before the monster levels get back to normal, but as soon as next week the FDR will start opening up access to certain floors. By the end of the year it will be like it never happened.” Reaching out a hand, Cleo lightly clapped the dolphin beastkin’s shoulder. “Sorry, your first week on the job was probably the hardest it will ever get.”

“Only downhill from here,” Tegwin replied, her chirpy voice heavily laced with sarcasm and they shared a laugh.

Getting up with a groan, Cleo took advantage of one of the few perks of being in charge and stumbled to her own tent, flopping down onto her cot and falling asleep almost instantly, the warm air of the dungeon and the light hum of the perimeter crystals a familiar blanket to her old bones. As her mind drifted, she hummed in perfect pitch with the wards as if they were a lullaby.

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Cleo wasn’t sure why she woke up. Opening her eyes, she quickly jumped back and nearly summoned her staff, only belatedly realizing the small object sitting on her cot wasn’t moving. Leaning back down and squinting - giving a small curse at not putting any points into Perception this last level up - Cleo made sure not to touch the small figurine.

Whatever it was, it was finely crafted. A little girl in blonde pigtails wearing a cute blue jumper, there was something Cleo couldn’t quite put about her face that sent a shiver down her back. She stood on a small disk of white stone that glowed a faint blue, but otherwise the figurine appeared harmless.

“Caution won’t kill you, but the opposite might prove true,” Cleo mumbled her personal motto, waving her hand over the figurine while casting a simple detection spell. When the thaumian resonance came back with nothing, Cleo pick it up and was a little surprised by the heft.

Looking around her tent, Cleo furrowed her brow as she stood up and slowly walked outside. In all her time inside of dungeons, this wasn’t quite the strangest thing to happen to her, but it was in the top ten. Mixed with the niggling thought that something was off, Cleo decided to take a walk.

“Hey, Boss,” Peter said from his spot at the fire, the rotund youth getting more SomeTea brewed in an old pot. “Still got another hour before Jake gets the portal attuned if you want to catch a few more Zs.”

“I’m up, no chance of that right now.” Holding the figuring in her hands and adjusting her robes back into place, Cleo looked around the silent camp and tried to find her pet magical analyst. “Armond’s tent looks empty, is he on patrol?”

“East circuit, said he was getting some faint readings in that direction, went to check it out.”

“Hmm,” Cleo muttered, unable to dismiss her feelings. Armond was paranoid beyond belief and spent most of his waking moments chasing after shadows, but he had saved their lives more than once because of his constant pessimism. “I’m going to find the aelf, should be back before the portal is ready.”

“You want company?” Peter asked, already getting up out of his camp chair.

“No, this could all be a bunch of nothing.” Cleo did snap her fingers and held out her hand, her staff flying from inside her tent and slapping into her palm, walking steadily out of the camp in the direction Peter indicated Armond had gone.

“[…huh huh…yes, deeper…yes!…]”

When you spend so much time around the same people, some things are bound to happen. Cleo was neither surprised nor embarrassed by the sounds coming from Jake’s tent. In fact, Cleo knew from experience that Jake was both energetic and attentive, his Casanova ways a pleasant distraction on a lonely night.

“[…I’m, I’m…aaaAAiiOOh!]”

Ok, a little surprised, the panting voice was clearly Rosalia reaching her own climax, but the two had been drifting towards becoming an item for what seemed like years now. Grinning at young love, Cleo rapped her staff gently on the pole of the tent after giving the two of them a few seconds to bask in the afterglow, causing them to yelp inside.

“Less boinking, more portal attuning,” Cleo said, her voice not bothering to hide her amusement as she walked off towards Armond.

The monster carcasses were gone at this point, the rocky gravel they had created in their battle slowly sifting back into the jagged and dangerous terrain of this Floor. There were other dangers about, but they were almost laughable to the passive Class defenses of Cloe’s magery such that she experienced little more than a few thaumatic bumps up against her robes before they faded into nothing or went to look for easier prey.

After walking for ten minutes, Cloe grew worried and quickened her pace. Armond was a powerful Scryer and a seasoned delver, which is why he should have known not to venture this far into one of the Twenty-Three without backup. Only something…

Cleo stopped suddenly, coming around one of the larger pieces of obsidian. She’d found Armond. Some of him, at least.

Grieve later, survive now. It was the unofficial charter of anyone who had ever set foot in a dungeon, the air bursting with loud thunder as she activated her defenses. The dungeon hadn’t even sucked up the blood splatter from whatever had gotten her old friend, so it couldn’t have happened more than half an hour ago. Why didn’t the perimeter crystals pick up…

With a moment of clarity, Cleo turned towards the camp and realized what had been off. The hum of the perimeter crystals had been humming at a different frequency than normal. Four years they had used them at their camp, they rang at a pure B Flat to her trained ear. While she had been at the camp earlier, she had heard the hum - would have been obvious if they hadn’t been working and the hum was gone - but the tone had dropped to a G or F. The change was enough to tickle her subconscious, but not enough to sound the alarm.

Which is when the monsters appeared.

“PARA BELLUM!!”

When the Mother Of Thunder spoke, it was backed with the crack of a lightning bolt as wide as a house, scattering the frontrunners of a horde unlike any the skilled delver had ever seen stepping out of the haze of an illusional veil, the entire horizon of her vision taken up in monstrous ranks. And as those monsters disintegrated, replaced so quickly with ever more beasts, she realized with mounting dread that those monsters were not the mass of gibbering anarchy she had become familiar with in all her years of fighting the beasts.

They were calm, collected. Organized. And marching steadily towards her guild.

Taking a stand, the lightning mage twisted her staff and prepared to do battle. Level thirty, a seasoned delver, there wasn’t much she couldn’t take out on her own.

It wouldn’t be enough.

A deaf person would have felt Cleo Tate’s warning and opening salvo, so when Jake jumped out of his tent wearing only a pair of jeans, the young black man was already forming the guild up into a respectable battle group, his mace in hand as he ran towards the center of the camp and his attuning portal.

“Let me go!” Rosalia screamed, half dressed but fighting against three other guildies holding her back. “I can help her!”

“What’s happening?!” Tegwin asked, already forming that liquid ball of hers that would give the first line of monsters to reach them a run for their money. “I thought the surge was over!”

“This isn’t the surge.” Jake was sweating, pushing his Jumper Class to the limit as he tried to find any safe Floor to open a portal into, Harvardtown now being out of the question. Taking a moment to look at the impossible collection of monsters surrounding them, he shook his head and pushed down the instinctual need to just run away screaming. “This is…I don’t know what this is.”

“I imagine its what’s going to kill us all,” Peter muttered, handing the last of the potions to the casters and stuffing his face with a whole loaf of bread as he tried to prepare for the battle only minutes away from sweeping over them. “Then Harvardtown, Boston.” Taking a critical eye to the size of the army, he shrugged. “Most of the East Coast.”

No one replied because Peter wasn’t exaggerating. Not only in numbers, - though it looked like they were witnessing millions instead of thousands - these skilled delvers recognized high level monsters when they saw them. Dragon types - whole guilds would be decimated trying to take down a single one - flew in the dozens, and they looked to be the midrange of the army headed their way. This wasn’t an army, it was a force of nature that would destroy everything they knew.

“It is an army bred for a single purpose: to destroy the world of men.”

Looking over, Jake managed to scrounge up a smile at Rosalia. The young Latino woman had accepted reality and wasn’t smiling as she slumped down next to Jake. Reaching deeper inside and seeing if he could get them out of here, the second in command of Carnival pushed his own emotions back for the good of the group.

“Got it!” With a thaumian snap, a circular portal opened in front of Jake, leading out into the rain of Floor 43. Even without the elevators, that was close enough they could hike it up to town if they needed to. “Everyone get moving, this one’s too unstable for me to hold it for very long!”

“What about Cleo?” Tegwin asked, hesitating as she launched her ball of water towards the faster moving monsters that were already hitting their perimeter shields.

Jake grit his teeth and looked back towards where the opening lightning had struck earlier. “Do you hear anything?” he asked in a ragged voice.

“…no.” Tegwin slumped, her eyes also looking that way.

Because, as all the members of Carnival knew, Cleo Tate was many things. Blunt, selfless, determined, able to talk for hours if someone was willing to listen, sometimes distractable, a terrible cook. However, in battle, there was always one defining trait the Mother Of Thunder had above all else: her magic was very loud.

The silence was confirmation enough.

“Grieve later, survive now,” Jake said, making sure the last of the guild was inside the portal before shutting it down, his teary face the last thing those monsters rushing the camp saw.

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“…cough…”

Cleo knew she was dying, knowing from experience what a collapsed lung felt like. If she had any potions left, maybe she could have gotten to Harvardtown in time, but leaning up against the back of black glass and struggling for every breath, Cleo didn’t have much hope of living another ten minutes.

With the realization, Cleo gained a bit of peace. Jake was a good man and would get the guild out of there. He would also know what her silence amounted to and that was encouraging, not depressing. Looking down at the bloodied stump of her right hand bleeding out onto the shattered remains of her staff, Cleo smiled as she pictured the face of her husband Norman who had died at the Change.

See you soon, Care Bear, Cleo thought, another wracking cough forcing her eyes open as she looked at the figurine in her hand.

“I’m sorry it came to this.”

Blinking, for a moment Cleo saw double. Standing in front of her, appearing out of the air as if she was one moment not there, the next leaning down and smiling at Cleo, was the girl from the figurine. Small, blond with pigtails, wearing the clothing of a child. Now that Cleo was staring right at her, it was clear this was a young woman with some kind of growth or hormone problem. The eyes, though, were like ice they were so blue.

Blue…

Cobalt blue. Exactly the color of Honoka’s eyes.

“Know that I do this with the utmost respect.”

*shnt*

“You are the kind of person that could have been an asset, when the end came.” The girl’s voice was high pitched and had the tone of a petulant child, even if the delivery was like a world-weary adult. Reaching her small hand down she picked up the figurine of herself out of the limp hands of Cleo and studied it with a sad smile, the other hand still sliding through the old mage’s chest like parting water, plunging entirely through Cleo’s heart with as much effort as someone waving goodbye.

In Cleo’s final moments, despite the pain and the knowledge of her death, it was the final words the old woman heard that managed to chill colder than passing through the veil.

“Thank you for helping me save the world.”