CHAPTER 28 - SCURRY, SCURRY, SCURRY, SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!
Levan didn’t know how many miles away Sal had to swim for his full body to be visible again.
Now that Levan understood the distance, he couldn’t unsee it through the volumes of water on the other side of the glass.
“This way,” Sal said, and swam to Levan’s right. “It is how they left, when they left me here. Where their priests went when, for the last time, they visited me.”
Sure enough, around the small window to the water above was an archway and a passage.
“A key,” Sal said, “To my prison. ”
His voice was growing quieter, his presence shrinking in Levan’s mind.
“Some still live,” Sal said. “…Or rather, perhaps it is more accurate to say they do not die. They still treasure it, treasure me, I can feel their…jealousy,” Sal said, voice sad. “If only they knew.”
“I know not what chamber they keep it, but I know it is still here,” he said, as Levan neared the archway out of the temple and further into the bismuth pyramid.
“Thank you. No matter what, I shall treasure my memory of you, Leg-Walker, for as long as the memory stays intact, and…and hopefully well beyond.”
Levan nodded, then stopped.
“Levan,” Levan said, just before turning the corner. “My name is Levan. It was nice to meet you, Sal. Wish me luck.”
“Levan!” Sal gasped. “Luck…I…I wish it upon you!” the squid said. “A hundred-thousand years! For a hundred-thousand years, I shall wish for nothing more!”
Levan shook his head.
“Just the next 16 hours, Sal. After that, I won’t need it,” he said, and kept walking.
“One way or another,” he thought to himself, just before rounding the corner.
“One way or another,” Sal solemnly agreed.
****
The temple was degrading.
Time was wearing it away, inch by inch, eating at the pillars with its sea-crust and limestone rust, with dried leaves and the shell remnants of crustaceans.
Tubes of dehydrated dark green kelp crunched under his feet, and his boot and the salt on the stone floor worked together to grind the crunchy kelp tubes into nothing, like somehow Levan was working towards the same purpose as the crust and the salt—an agent of a deep-sea king.
Though the bones of the bismuth metal held the frame of a temple, ancient and geometric, the degradation and water pillars built upon them cast them in a new shape, a new internal structure, making new doors and corridors.
Levan kept his ears perked, primed.
A shadow would dart.
A creature would scuttle, always in the shadows, always from one crust-burrow to the other.
Levan would turn with each scuttle, [ Iron Sword ] in the low guard Burton had taken all of ten minutes to show him.
Then he’d let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, and keep on through the temples.
Left and right, winding in tunnels that seemed to narrow and close in. A ceiling that started to get lower and lower, closer and closer to his head.
Always a V-shape, even as the finely constructed arches became less defined, they held that V. That arch.
Like a croquet ball, he rolled from arch to arch, following them as they shrank and bore down on him.
Arch to arch, not making a sound.
Just finding the next arch, traveling to it, winding him further inward.
The arches.
The arches!
The bends.
This was the right way.
He knew it.
Then, finally, a salt-encrusted tunnel leading not through, but down.
Levan took a deep breath.
He loomed over the drop, tried to see what was on the other side.
Another floor, much like this one, stone with sea-remnants, waited perhaps ten feet down. A bit much for a jump under normal circumstances, but…
Levan lowered himself around the ring, feeling suddenly vulnerable and paranoid once he was waist-deep in the hole. Like something lurking in the room was waiting, saw his dangling legs from below like a shark to a swimmer.
Impatience got the better of him. Impatience, and the image of the creature waiting to devour his legs, and he dropped.
He fell through the salt-encrusted breach, dropping through the thin sliver of light.
He rolled as soon as he landed, moving as much momentum as he could forward instead of straight down to save his ankles from bearing the full ten-foot drop.
He hit the ground and rolled, feeling the salt crystals rolling on the leather of his sleeve, grinding against his ears in his somersault.
It was heavy and awkward, and the stone shovel and stone axe fell from his shoulders as he rolled—but it saved his ankles and left him successfully in the chamber below.
Levan brushed himself off in the darkness, and a foul salt smell filled his nostrils. Reaching down to pick up the tools, he froze.
The thought of his dangling legs, a snack…
Levan threw himself suddenly to the side.
A hulking dark form followed, rushing past Levan and colliding with the wall.
The room shook, the salt crystals on the floor rattled, and Levan barely had time to throw himself to the other side before a claw, lobstered and shelled, crashed into the wall where he’d been.
It thundered into the wall with force enough to drive it partially through, pulverizing the sea-crust into a cloud of salt, dust, and dead crustacean shells.
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Levan was already scrambling out of the way as the second claw came, this one smaller and lizard-like, a three-pronged talon that looked like it belonged on the foot of a terror bird, rather than any sea creature.
It swept at him, seizing hold of the first thing it found and crunching it in the talon.
[ Broken: Stone Axe (Aetherized) ]
[ Aetherial Stores have been updated! ]
A small whisper of green dust escaped the wooden haft of the stone axe as it broke. Levan squinted in the light it provided, barely able to see.
What he saw was the shadow of a shelled creature that stood on two legs, bristling in spines and carapace, with a bent and overbearing torso that loomed towards the ground. It couldn’t stand on its own two legs. Instead, it used the right claw, shell-pressed to the stone floor as its third and necessary support.
It flinched back slightly from the spark of aetherial dust that escaped the broken tool. Then all went dark again, and it lunged.
Pick a direction!
Levan saw the creature in his mind, loping on the massive right claw it used as a walking stick.
Right, Levan decided.
His left.
He ducked and scrambled to the right, his own hand flying out to push him off against the stone when he lost his balance.
The heavy claw came again to pulverize the air where he had just been, the weight of the creature’s limb pulling it forward as if chasing after.
Brief panic bubbled up in Levan’s psyche, but he quelled it.
One hand held the [ Iron Sword ], and he opened the other, stretching the fingers, waiting.
“Blade,” he began, and the creature struck again.
Levan went left this time.
“I call you from the Aether.”
[ Item Equipped: Short Sword ]
Green dust swirled around the sword as it materialized in his waiting hand. Levan braced himself and swayed through it, like dancing through a curtain.
It stung, burned his face, his hands, but Levan glided through it, dissipating the aether particulate through the chamber where it spread like bees from the nest, fireflies from the brush, embers from the campfire.
He saw the creature’s face, angled down at him, hateful, empty orbs that reflected the light of the sword in deep-sea yellow, impassive on an unfeeling face, with searching antennae growing from the mouth three feet long each, swaying back and forth silently. There was a hint of that spade-shaped, shovel-face, reptilian features of the Lost Ones, but they had been warped and shelled and encrusted into something else.
Levan charged forward, and the lobster monstrosity hurled itself forward at the same time.
Slam.
Slam.
Slam.
Every few steps, the creature’s right claw would pummel the stone floor as it used it to keep balance.
On the left side of the creature’s body were a pair of asymmetrical limbs that curled and uncurled, and moved separately from one another. One was made from the shell but split and bristling with a razor-sharp curve to it, like a lethal courtier’s fan. The other limb grew out from beneath it, like a cancer started at the tricep, but grew longer than the limb that had given birth to it. This one was just a mess of spines, brutal, with some broken, and some even stuck into the creature’s own shell, revealing white flesh beneath scoured with black infection.
Slam.
Slam.
Slam.
The monstrosity reached Levan, swiping this time with the mess of bristles and spines.
Pain stung as spines bit into his shoulder and upper arm, barbs taking extra flesh as Levan gasped and pulled himself free and past the creature.
He turned before the creature could, hot anger suddenly filling him.
I am not dying on another plane’s other plane in a metal temple a thousand feet in the air in a lobster monstrosity’s dark, salty, hunting ground.
He swept the short sword downward, cutting at the back of the creature’s legs.
It was hard to get an angle in; the hunching shell that covered its back sank down to cover the back of its knees. When the [ Short Sword ] bounced off harmlessly off the carapace, Levan lingered, maybe longer than was safe, and stabbed again with the Iron Sword.
It bit into crustacean flesh, and the creature let out a hissing scream no vertebrate could have produced.
When the creature’s giant claw swept above him, it was close enough that Levan felt the disturbance in the air on the top of his head, felt the small hairs on the claw tickle the hairs on the top of his own scalp, sending shivers down his spine.
The creature moved the double-limbed arms at him, and Levan shifted all his weight to his own two swords in a reckless, swinging parry.
He battered the blow aside and edged backward as the razor-fan limb cut at his sleeve, tearing through Levan’s leather armor like scissors gliding across paper, nearly severing his arm.
[ Item: Leather Armor | Armor, Chest | Damaged ]
Levan brought up his own sword to cut the rest of the dangling sleeve off as he danced out of the way of another blow.
I can’t believe I’m holding my own, he thought.
Scurry.
Slam.
Still moving backward, Levan let the creature close on him, antenae swaying with unemotional anticipation of food.
He studied it in the light of the sword—the outer shell, curved up and over the creature’s head, down its back. The limbs, the underside of the creature—including an undulating mess of micro-limbs down its stomach, pale from hiding in the shell for so long. The head, within that shelled hood, with those horrifying eyes and swaying mouth-antennae.
“Come on, then,” Levan said.
The creature made an alien chirping sound in reply, lunging forward.
Scurry.
Scurry.
Scurry.
Slam!
Slam!
Slam!
Levan circled the creature, mind working to rapidly form a plan as he swayed backward from another swipe of the claw.
He could evade it, he thought—for a while.
Scurry.
Slam!
Slam!
Slam!
Its legs could only carry it so far without it needing to plunge the meaty claw into the ground to keep itself upright.
The longer it went without relying on it, the farther the lobster went on its two legs, the harder the slam when the claw was needed to brace itself.
Scurry.
Scurry.
Slam.
Slam.
The spined and razor-fanned limb came swiping again, and only a last-second decision to dodge the other way saved Levan from decapitation.
Levan struck out before he was ready, trying to put some damage on the thing.
He swiped at the creature’s underbelly, as the undulating pale limbs that lined the stomach.
He shaved a few off like barnacles from a ship, but the creature curled inward in reflex.
The claw wasn’t the bait.
That was the bait.
The shell curled around his sword, and more limbs fanned out from beneath the shell, bristling tail carapace limbs that swung downward.
Levan released the sword just in time as the monstrosity swept downward and scuttled backward, taking the sword with it, folded in the curled shell.
In the animal kingdom, that’s an arm gone, Levan realized. Or, if it was trying to bite you…
The lobster brought up the sword in reflex, mouth opening from four directions, revealing a throat of angled spines meant to keep things down.
Levan shuddered, pondering that eerie reflex—swipe, de-limb, fall back, snack.
It gnawed on the short sword, testing it with its throat spines.
Then, all at once, his plan came together.
“Aetherize!”
[ Item: Short Sword (Aetherized) has been added to your Aetherial Stores ]
The sword exploded into a cloud of Aether Particulate, and the lobster monstrosity screamed in a high-pitched shriek, its throat attempting to reject the sword that was no longer made of regular matter.
The axe was on the floor near the center of the den. His shovel was broken. But his pickaxe was still slung on his back.
The only question is….is it strong enough?
“I call you, stone, from the Aether!”
[ Item Gained: Stone (Thassal) ]
The dark slate-like stone he’d gathered from the surface appeared near his feet in a wisp of pale light.
Levan dove in as the creature recovered from the Aetherized short sword.
And he struck out with the other.
He aimed for the same spot on the opposite end of the torso, lunging forward and striking at the creature’s underside.
The sweeping blades came on reflex once more, closing in around the sword just as the other side had done.
“Aetherize!”
[ Iron Sword has been Aetherized! ]
[ Item: Iron Sword has been added to your Aetherial Stores ]
The creature hissed and closed in around its torso, staggering backwards as the aether particulate burned the pale micro-limbs on its stomach.
Fast.
I have to do this fast.
Levan slung the pickaxe from his back, both hands freed.
He aligned the Thassal Stone with the head of the pickaxe.
[ Recipe Discovered! | Stone (Thassal) Pickaxe ]
[ Ability Activated: Fabricate ]
The black slate bent and stretched over the head of the pickaxe, coating it in a thin layer that melded coat after coat until all of the Thassal Stone was used up.
Come on, come on, come on!
The monstrosity was up and lunging toward him, still squealing and screaming.
[ Upgraded: Stone Pickaxe to Stone Pickaxe (Thassal) ]
Scurry.
Scurry.
Slam—Levan grabbed the pickaxe from the floor.
Slam— he retreated backward, baiting a swipe.
Slam!
The creature reached him, and the broad claw swung past him.
Levan leaned backward, letting it miss him by inches. If the creature had swung with the other limbs—the spines and the fan—he’d be dead.
But it was the claw.
Levan readied the pickaxe high overhead.
The monstrosity lunged forward, and Levan swung down with all his might.
He drove the pickaxe, black slated, strong and sharp, into the shell, straight at a fold in the carapace where the creature’s head met its spine.
Crack.
The tool broke through layers of hard carapace with an awful, splintering sound and a crunch that sent shockwaves up Levan’s arms. It was a brutal strike, the application of force upon a weak point that sent all buckling down.
The pickaxe pierced the shell and drove through, passing through flesh and into the monstrosity’s brain.
It was dead before it hit the ground.
