Chapter 218

◈ Chapter 218:

A panthara missing one of its legs limped up beside Vash and set the butt of the Quistis made steel spear it held against the ground, angling it so that if Rain came on, he would impale himself on the thing. Judging by its blood covered state it had been salvaged from one of the other dead panthara.

The point was carefully angled up to aim at Rain's head.

"Do not worry for him. This will be a quick death. I will ensure the spear pierces the eye socket and in doing so instantly destroys the most critical partition of the brain. His end will be swift and painless."

"What- what are you talking about??" mumbled Lyra, not quite believing what she was hearing.

Vash glanced down at her momentarily.

"I am not completely without heart despite my anatomical lack. You may have visiting hours once a week, if I am available, to meet with the brute. He will not be able to converse with you of course being a mostly mindless undead, but I am sure it will bring you great comfort to see his corpse being treated well. Certainly then, you will agree that this is a far better result than him simply running around in the dungeon as a mindless thing until he is torn apart by one of the panthara hives."

Lyra gave Vash a flabbergasted look.

"I'm not letting you turn Rain into an undead!!" she cried, even as Rain took another step toward her, his lips drawing back to show red coated teeth.

"I understand you have an emotional attachment to the brute. You care for him, otherwise you wouldn't insist on that messy and impractical intercourse, and even more absurd reproduction of all things… But at this point, there is clearly no other course of action. He was too slow to acquire the one known as Brax, thus there is nothing left of him, he is gone. This will be a kind end, I can do that much for him."

"Oih! Boner!" came a voice, and Vash jerked, a spasm of irritation running through not only him, but the undead panthara, the enormous steel spear jerking to the side and off target.

"Do not call me that! That is not my name and you agreed to never call me that again!" he cried turning on Opal, his previous composure evaporating with a word.

"I will call you that if you're going to do stuff like this."

Vash bristled. "Then what other course of action would you have? He is clearly gone in the head!"

Opal looked at him silently for a moment. "And you didn't think to ask me what to do? What? Are you too proud to take advice from a little gobbo like me?"

"I am not—

"Oh just shut up and watch," said Opal as she dropped through the shadowed floor.

A moment later, she was falling from the ceiling and landing on top of Rain, her legs going around the back of his neck.

Lyra's heart jumped into her throat, afraid that a paw was about to reach up and crush the life out of the small goblin girl. But it seemed Rain was so focused on reaching her that he hadn't noticed the additional weight, apparently assuming it was yet another panthara holding him back.

Opal reached out and with both hands took hold of one enormous ear and pulled it back, leaning down with the same motion so that she could speak directly into Rain's ear hole.

She began urgently whispering.

At first, nothing seemed to happen. Rain didn't react at all. But then, slowly, his motions came to a faltering stop, and his head tilted as he listened to the goblin now whispering furiously and enthusiastically into his ear.

Both Lyra and Vash watched in disbelief as Rain went from hunched over and focused on nothing but prey, to straightening up and becoming aware of what was happening, blinking a few times as higher consciousness returned to him.

Opal patted him proudly on the head and beamed down at the others.

"See!"

"Well, if I had known that was possible I would have held off." grumbled Vash. "I hardly want to snip the sapling I am cultivating prematurely you know."

Rain let out a long groan and dragged a bloody paw over his face.

"I… I need to find Brax. This can't go on. I can't…"

Lyra licked her lip as her frayed nerves settled. "Yeah, no freaking kidding! Gods Rain, you almost gave me a heart attack! You were… It was like you weren't you anymore…!"

Rain rubbed his brow as the mass of undead panthara pulled back around him, allowing him to step free.

"I wasn't me. It's impossible to think, or do anything— everything is just urges." He blew out a breath as a smiling Opal sat smugly on his shoulders. "I can't even tell anything is wrong because my mental voice is just gone, anything like that is just gone, and it's just needs and hunger and trying to feed that hunger."

Rain turned, trying to gather his scattered mind, only for a motionless Quistis to come into view.

The lamia was standing stock-still and staring with her brow furrowed. For a moment he thought she was staring at him, only to follow her line of sight to find… Vash.

Her eyes took in the dozens of undead and half-eaten panthara shifting around and organising into rows, and then the slender knight with a battered wolf helm overseeing them.

"What the FUCK have you done!" she hissed.

Vash turned in surprise.

"Ah."

Yes, ah. In the heat of the moment, they had forgotten that there was someone with them who had absolutely no idea of just what Vash was.

"You keep this- this thing! This evil with you like it's nothing?!" screeched the lamia.

"Pleased to make your acquaintance," said Vash. "Allow me to truly introduce myself. I am Vash, the arch-necromancer. In life, the greatest necromancer of my century. In death, well, a slightly less great necromancer, but something of an aficionado of the finer points of undeath."

Quistis stared even harder at the thin knight. Her hand twitched, as if she were considering dropping the roof on Vash.

"It would have been impertinent to say such a thing before as you weren't aware of my nature. But now that the cat is out of the bag as it were, may I just say you have an excellent body, extremely suitable for undeath with exquisite anatomy. I would take great pride in adding you to my collection," said Vash. "I would even ensure the full removal of all those nasty little bits of metal, once dead of course."

Quistis's stare went up ten notches in intensity. Rain half-expected Vash to ignite under such a severe gaze. Vash's idea of a compliment was doing the opposite of helping.

"This vile little twisted group, I thought it unnatural before, but seeing this, I now know you all for what you are. Evil. You are evil. There's no other explanation for keeping company with an evil creature like a necromancer."

"Says the leveler who has caged and slaughtered gods know how many innocent monsters." spat Opal from atop Rain.

"That's completely and entirely different!" snapped Quistis.

"No it isn't! It's exactly the same! You didn't care about any of those monsters. They're just things to be killed to you, which actually makes you the 'evil' one."

Quistis did not look pleased by that statement.

"Hmm, despite being a mere goblin, she does hold a rather cutting point, wouldn't you say?" said Vash. "You made a butcher's house. To kill monsters. And to those monsters, you are 'evil', as crude and unnuanced a term as that is. So, you will of course now sympathise with me when I say I do not appreciate being bludgeoned over the head with such a dull minded accusation."

"What I do is natural. Interfering with death's domain is not," she spoke vehemently. "The horrors that come of necromancers are unspeakable, kingdoms of death and decay, millions of levelers dead. You and your kind are vile abhorrent things that should not be allowed to exist," she raised a hand as if to obliterate the necromancer.

"Don't," said Rain, his voice low and uncompromising. "You have no say in this. You will do as I say and put up with the necromancer. Do not mention him again."

The hand stopped, shook with tension for a moment, before reluctantly pulling back, dropping down by her side.

Quistis seethed, but seeing that Rain was in no mood to be challenged, chose to remain silent, instead merely staring her intense dislike of the thin knight.

"Why, thank you brute," mused Vash.

Rain turned to him. "I have recollection enough to know that you intended to end my life. Don't think I don't know that."

"Ah, but I was only thinking of the best for you. Would you want to spend the rest of your short life in this dungeon as a mindless beast? Yet another monster to be hunted down by levelers or panthara? A monster. An enemy. An animal. They would hunt you down and kill you just for existing."

"I'm not an animal."

"Yeah, he's a monster, and if that really did happen, he'd end up as king of the dungeon!" said Opal, leaning down over Rain's head to glare at Vash.

"Oh yes, and I suppose you would be queen?" sneered the necromancer.

Opal's eyes narrowed.

"If you--"

"Enough," said Rain. "I came here for Brax and I'm out of time. Tell us, where is the barrier? Where do we go?"

Vash seemed to deflate a little. "...The estate's barrier fails to reach down into this dungeon. We have already passed beneath it and are directly below the Fenhorn estate. Now I suppose it is just a matter of picking the correct spot to bore upwards. I somehow doubt you want to pop out in the ornamental garden."

"Then where?" asked Rain.

Opal tugged on his ear and pointed.

"That way, not far, and we'll be right below his fancy house."

It only took a moment to ready, Rain quickly tossing a cleaning potion over his body as he issued a command, and then Quistis was waving her hand with a huff at the rough rock wall.

The stone parted, and the group stepped into the tunneled out space. Only for a moment however, as the stone fell away in front and they found themselves emerging into an open space, a cavern that Rain realised, his brow rising, that was simply enormous.

"What is this place?" murmured Rain, staring around more than a little awed.

They'd come out on a ledge overlooking a cavern, but that was underselling it. The cavern was so vast that clouds clung to the ceiling not far above the ledge, punctuated by great crystal formations the size of towns that cast the cavern in bright light, crystals that Rain realised, Quistis had based her own illuminating crystals on. And below, the forest-covered ground rolled for miles, spilling up against the cliff like walls of the cavern in the distance. There was even a breeze that ruffled his fur!

The rolling floor of the cavern wasn't entirely forested and toward one end the trees had been cut back, leaving a wide open space before a structure built up against the cavern wall. A fortress, a great pile of crumbling masonry that looked as if it had been there for a thousand years, fresh towers and walls repeatedly built over those that had fallen, and a larger frontal tower carved with great runes of enchantment, a keep.

Levelers lined the walls, shouting with agitation. It wasn't hard to see why, a line of cavebear-like monsters but with green scales instead of fur exploded from the treeline and barrelled toward the walls of the fort across the cleared ground, a horde of scruffy goblins following in their wake, and more, a flock of what he first took to be birds dropped down from where they had been hiding in the cloud cover.

No, not birds, Harpies, and as he watched, they manipulated longbows held with their dextrous avian feet. Talons and pads gripped down on the wood as bowstrings were drawn back and then released, a flight of arrows descending on the levelers lining the walls, many of which cried out in alarm and fell back, or hit the ground stone-dead as bolt found flesh.

Below, the cavebears crashed into the walls with an echoing boom, sending a shiver through the stonework and visibly rocking them back.

This was far beyond anything he had seen in Lynthia's dungeon. It was more like a full-scale war than any kind of hunt!

"This is Florens' dungeon?"

"It isn't normally like this, but that fort, Lighthold, is one of the most important landmarks there is. A valuable crossroads and a place of sanctuary. Hundreds of thousands of levelers' lives have been saved by it, mine included, so it's important to control. But the trouble is it attracts quite a lot of attention being so exposed, and some of the more problematic monsters will take it for the same reasons. It's been a panthara stronghold in the past…"

Rain listened and watched, brow raised as a creature stepped from the forest, a creature as tall as the tree tops. A monster, he saw with increasing surprise, with multiple heads… A hydra?

"Oh! oh! That's a hydramancer!" said Opal, leaning down over Rain's head to peer at the distant beast. "It's a good thing we're really far away, even being noticed by one of those things is bad news!"

Rain squinted at the apparently dangerous monster, the threat it presented momentarily drawing his intense instinctive attention, his hackles rising.

The thing was bipedal and massive, with half a dozen long scaled tails dragging for half a dozen meters behind it creating tracks in the earth. It wore armour, and clothes, of a sort. A mishmash of cloth and random armour that didn't fit and had to be strapped onto its body with lengths of rope and leather over a ragged dark blue robe, all clearly scavenged from levelers it had killed. From the pulled-back hood of the robe emerged a mass of long necks like a dragon's, that ended in feral-looking dragonesque heads with narrow snouts, each head with a pair of heterochromia glowing eyes of varying colours and topped by either a beaten and bent open helm or a blood-stained cap. The whole thing together gave an impression of a ragged homeless mage, robes and all, who had lost his mind and wandered into the wilderness to live as a hermit.

Large clawed hands with seven fingers each limply clutched a tall staff capped with a rough-cut chunk of what appeared to be coal. Its feet dragged along the ground, almost shuffling, and the heads gently weaved and bobbed amongst each other, scales sliding in a slow weaving motion almost trance like.

Suddenly the thing seemed to snap from its sleepy fugue state and became aware that a great battle was before it. The staff rose and a chromatic compound of electricity flashed from its many eyes, arcing out in countless thin jagged lines against the black coal of the staff held before it, only for a microsecond later causing the now pure white coal to erupt. A lightning bolt as thick as an oak tree cut the very air in half in a flash of eye searing light that made the ground quake and caused Rain to wince in pain as the thunderous echoing sound met his sensitive hearing.

The super-sized bolt of white lightning struck the great keep and in a moment it was obliterated, every brick and block of stone coming apart and separating to shower down over Lighthold, a rain of stone and dead, which created even more dead as those within the fort were pelted with masses of stone, hundreds crushed to death in an instant.

The cavebears and goblins roared with delight and surged over the gap in the wall where the tower had been.

Lyra looked on in dismay. "I guess the city won't be keeping it for much longer…"