CHAPTER 32 - SO CLOSE

  He didn’t know where the short sword was.

  Driven into the center of some reptile’s belly, or pinched in the vices of some dead crab-thing’s armor.

  He didn’t have the energy to Aetherize it. Not if he was going to go through with his plan.

  Everything on the whole crab-encrusted plane was chasing him.

  Maybe not everything—

  But he was pretty sure it was everything.

  The Lost One hunters, that crawled on their bellies until leaping up to bite him.

  The suffocated priests, unable to scream, with their condensed pain so great it could only come out as lightning.

  The things in between, too: half crawling, half upright. Half with broken weapons and crude armor, half with claws and gnashing teeth.

  All with claws and gnashing teeth, actually.

  Levan thought only of the artifact, wracking his brain for a backup plan.

  His primary plan—knock the artifact off the platform it was mounted on—had been a great plan when the artifact had looked like it was the size of a bowling ball.

  Then the room had scaled up around him, and the artifact with it.

  Now, even tackling the 12-foot tall, roughly spherical object at the center of mass didn’t look like it would move it an inch.

  He still had the pickaxe on his back.

  “If you’re going to go down swinging with a crafter ability core, might as well go down swinging a pickaxe,” he thought grimly.

  “Aetherize,” he breathed, thinking of his short sword. There was a range at which he could Aetherize an object. Beyond that range, and the world’s mechanics no longer thought of the object as “his.” If it wasn’t his, he couldn’t aetherize it. The more he aetherized and called the short sword, though, the easier it became.

  Maybe I should have spent a little more time on the skills that would help me survive this, he thought.

  “Blade,” he grunted, kicking one of the crawling lost ones in the jaw and sending it flying off the base of the pillar. “I call you from the Aether.”

  The short sword materialized in his hand in time for him to stumble into a lost one wearing ragged leather armor with a weapon that looked something like a sickle covered in shark teeth.

  He tackled it blade first, driving the two of them towards the edge of the pillar base and the ten-foot drop there. He shoved the thing off the sword and pushed it from the pillar.

  Pain flashed at his leg and he spun and kicked out, a lost one hunter clamped around his leg.

  Teeth sharp as razors pierced through the leather armor, bit through skin.

  He tried to kick it off but the creature clung, weighting down his leg and sent him stumbling.

  The best he could do was stumble towards the artifact.

  He half-ran, half-kicked his way down the pillar as more closed in.

  So close. So close. So close.

  He dragged his leg along, turning at an awkward angle to stab the thing through the head with the [ Iron Sword ].

  It went limp, but the grip stayed.

  He kept pulling on, the reptile still stuck to his ankle as more closed in.

  It was looking grim.

  Beyond grim.

  Failure—death—was starting to look inevitable.

  Trying to help a friend, I guess.

  “I am so sorry,” Sal said in his mind, “I value you beyond eons for your attempt.”

  More priests entered from the side corridors, climbing and scrambling onto the pillar base on the other side of the temple to launch bolts of blue and black lightning at him across the way.

  More of the semi-evolved lost ones barged in behind the priests, gargling war cries and charging after him with makeshift weapons.

  A blast of lightning from the priests caught a good third of the semi-evolved lost ones as they charged him, killing them and sending them to the ground, trembling and twitching. The priests didn’t seem to care that they’d killed so many of their own.

  So close.

  So close.

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  Something bit his left thigh. Another lost one hunter.

  It bit deep into the flesh, gnawing at him, grinding away and clinging to him.

  Still running, he leveraged the short sword in the thing’s mouth between the teeth.

  “Aetherize!”

  The creature hissed and released as the short sword turned into aether particulate.

  The dust drifted into the rend in his thigh, and the pain was immense. It took all his willpower and focus to keep making his way down the last stretch of the pillar base.

  So close.

  But so many.

  I should call the short sword back, but—

  He was so tired. The wear and tear, the bites and claw marks, the scathing close calls with the lightning from the priests—his sprint down this lying temple.

  He couldn’t handle the lost ones with the weapons. He couldn’t let them get close.

  He hurled the iron sword, a side-throw chuck with his wrist, not meant to cut or cause damage by itself.

  He aetherized the weapon midair, and it exploded into a cloud of aether particulate the moment it landed amongst the lost ones, who ran through the pale green dust before their momentum could lead them anywhere else.

  Choking, struggling, they slowed, and Levan pressed on.

  Another bite at his thigh sent his pain receptors into overdrive.

  He reached the edge of the pillar base, and shoved himself over the side before he could think twice about it.

  It was a ten foot drop—dangerous, but, tired as he was, he still did his best to make sure it was the infuriating lost one hunters to break his fall.

  He hit the ground hard on his hip, rolling over a lost one.

  Its teeth crunched under his weight, and he was up, fighting the pain in his legs, closing the distance to the altar and the artifact atop it.

  They scrambled after him, falling off the cliffs, blind with chase before twitching upwards to pursue him further.

  They were faster than him, and that was before the exhaustion.

  Think of something.

  Think of something.

  Pain ripped at his lower back.

  [ Item Condition Warning: Leather Breastplate | Armor, Chest | Heavily Damaged ]

  Something ripped at him, tearing through the armor, drawing long gashes against his back. The breastplate, no longer stitched around the back, started falling from the front, off his arms, only the strap of the tools at his back kept the front still on.

  He felt weak.

  Straggling.

  Struggling.

  I’m being torn apart.

  He needed to get them off his back.

  He needed to—

  He needed to get them off his back.

  “Aetherize,” he said.

  [ Item Lost: Leather Breastplate, (Aetherized) ]

  The armor exploded from his chest, erupting in a cloud of aether particulate. Whatever had been clinging to his back from the armor fell away with it, and he heard the muffled screams of the priests as the shedding dust found them, too.

  Some fell back, but others pushed forward, hot on his heels.

  “Aetherize,” he said.

  [ Item Lost: Stone Pickaxe (Thassal), (Aetherized) ]

  “Aetherize!”

  [ Item Lost: Stone Shovel, ]

  “Aetherize.”

  [ Item Lost: Stone Axe (Aetherized) ]

  He trudged on, a cloud of ghostly emerald dragging behind him like a cloak.

  The particulate screamed in his lungs. It pierced his tear-ducts like spears. It acidified his calves, and wrapped his exposed back and chest with burns like ceremonial bandages.

  But he pressed on.

  He had a plan.

  Obvious, it seems, now, he thought.

  Assuming I live.

  Before him the artifact loomed, a sphere twelve feet by twelve feet, attached to the mount it was based on, covered in the physical remnants of whatever ocean-born madness had taken over this place.

  So close, now.

  There was a jolt of darkness that left afterimages in his peripheral vision.

  He only realized the priest’s lightning had struck him when his muscles didn’t respond, paralyzed.

  “No,” he whispered. “Please.”

  He felt something…pushing at his forehead. At his cheeks, at his jawbone. A light tugging, almost gentle, at his skin.

  The crustacean platelets gathered at his forehead, crusting his skin, searching out for one another with tiny tendrils like centipede limbs, finding one another and stitching together.

  They were pulling his cheeks to meet in front of his mouth, pulling his forehead over his eyes.

  No, no, no, please.

  He was so close.

  Even if it was too late for him.

  His muscles were waking up from the initial paralysis, and he tried to drag himself to his feet. He made it a few steps, then collapsed.

  It’s over.

  [ Codex > Communication > Search ]

  It was the Codex.

  “I’m sorry, Codex—be began, then he thought of the screaming, suffocating priests, and realized just what the rest of his existence was about to be.

  “Get out, Codex! Get out! You shouldn’t live in my mind anymore! Not for what’s to come!”

  [ Codex > LLLLLLLLLLLL > Communication > Sea LLLLLL EEEVVV rch > Desired Mess AAAAAN NNNaging Leevvv Fou aaaann nd ].

  Levan felt himself stopping. Felt himself giving up.

  He turned, seeing the priests approaching with their uneven, swaying walk, their tattered robes shifting madly.

  He saw the lost one hunters, skittering and licking their lips.

  [ Levan ]

  “I’m sorry, you guys,” he thought to the Codex, to Sal.

  [ Levan ], the Codex said once more.

  What?

  [ I Believe In You | You Can Do It ]

  Levan smiled, and made a sound like a laugh.

  Stupid.

  He moved, a little, mostly dragging, really.

  Like that…like that would do anything.

  Like it would change anything—Like hearing that was some kind of magic words.

  Dumb.

  He dragged himself along by his forearms.

  Wouldn’t it be crazy, though…

  He pushed himself up, started stumbling forward, half with his legs, half falling back to his arms and up again.

  …if that worked?

  Would never happen.

  Not in real life.

  He picked up speed, no longer falling back to his hands and knees, as the plates consumed his face, pulled his brow over his eyes to welcome him into his new doomed darkness.

  He was running now.

  There were three hunters that tugged on the sleeves of his pants, two locked onto each ankle, weighting him down. Four of the reptile creatures crawled on his back and made their way onto his shoulders. He thought of his silhouette as seen from the side—a wave of mutated lizard monsters, with a vague human shaped crest, crawling to the tide.

  “Hey Codex,” he thought, as his vision darkened. “There’s an Ability Core I think I quality for now that I absolutely would not have qualified for on my home plane.”

  [ Is this…Humor? ] the Codex predicted, with an almost hesitant curiosity.

  “Don’t spoil it,” he thought to the mental presence.

  It wasn’t the kind of ability core he’d have qualified back on earth.

  Levan was 5’9, and quiet.

  Never really picked in sports.

  Never really bulked up.

  But here I am.

  [ What is the Ability Core Referenced? ]

  Levan would have smiled, if he could.

  “It’s called a Defensive Lineman,” he thought to the Codex.

  Then he dragged the enemy team those last few feet.

  His fingernail—just barely—scraped the carapace of the shell surrounding the artifact trapping Sal in his eternal prison, and Levan spoke the last word he was capable of speaking before his mouth would be sewn shut by shell and carapace forever.

  “Aetherize.”