Chapter 215

◈ Chapter 215:

Rain's head pushed through the cloud of wool, and he was once more given a view of Lyra's woolspace.

It was somehow even more of a mess than last time he had looked. The gold he had shovelled inside hadn't helped with that, and what remained of their possessions that were still inside were scattered across dunes of gold.

He half imagined Lyra and Opal's attempt to empty the place, Lyra standing stiffly in the vault as gold poured out of every scrap of wool on her body, trying not to panic, it must have been an amusing sight.

There was of course one thing in the space that was the immediate focus of his attention,

The stone sphere.

The sphere had moved since he had last seen it, apparently shifted by the washing waves of gold.

Had he been around he wouldn't have let Lyra empty without some significant precautions. But thankfully it seemed the sphere had never had a chance of rolling out as it had become wedged tight against the felled statue of Lyra. It wasn't going anywhere, and even more thankfully appeared to be in perfect unblemished condition.

He wasn't one to be easily disturbed, but the sphere was so unremarkable, and so silent, that it almost emphasised that there was supposedly something unnatural inside of it, an invisible thing that had crept in from beyond the walls of this place, a place terrifyingly unknowable.

He was thinking of where best to place the barrels when something caught the edge of his hearing.

For a moment he thought it came from the sphere, but then realised it came from behind, his sensitive hearing picking up the slightest sound from outside of Lyra's woolspace.

He pulled back for his ears to be assaulted by shouts of alarm and turned to find the table had been transformed, layers of iron and bands of steel writhing across its surface and draping down the sides to form impenetrable walls. The dining table was being rapidly transformed into a heavily armoured fortress!

Through the few remaining gaps in the rapidly building fort could be seen the flash of a tail and the motion of black scales.

Putting an alarmed Lyra down, Rain stepped forward and thrust a paw against the thing, claws digging into steel, the metal deforming around his claw tips, and then being ripped out as he pulled back, layers of steel and iron coming apart with an ear shattering shrieking and crashing.

He pulled the table fort open to find Quistis cowering within, her expression pale and haggard, her eyes as round as saucers, and her chest rapidly rising and falling as she hyperventilated.

She looked at him, and for a moment she genuinely looked relieved to see him, which wasn't something he had ever thought to see from the lamia.

"D-don't make me go back in there! Please!" she gasped, eye twitching madly.

Rain pulled back.

"What happened?"

"She, ah, may have overheard me talking about getting her to remove the thing in my woolspace."

If this was the lamia's reaction to just the suggestion, then it might be some time before she could be coaxed into getting rid of the creepy sphere.

Not ideal, and he couldn't use his Home Skill to calm the panicked lamia down either, not while Warwick was here, he didn't want even more people to know of it, there were enough as it was.

In the end he left her there, much to Warwick's annoyance, and busied himself pushing through all of the barrels into Lyra's wool.

Fortunately by the time he was done it seemed that Quistis had calmed down. Almost looking a little embarrassed as her fortress disintegrated and she rose from beneath the table. What remained of the family's breakfast had been crushed flat by the weight of so much metal on top.

She coughed awkwardly and gestured. The plates reformed, and the crushed flat knives and forks reformed. Her Skill wasn't transforming the material, just rearranged it, so it would remain permanently repaired. The same couldn't be said for the family's breakfast however, and Pickle looked down forlornly at the brightly coloured millimetre thick smear on her plate that was what remained of her breakfast.

“Are you really just going to come up here, steal our stores, and just leave?!” squawked Warwick seeing Rain heading toward the trapdoor.

“Yes.” said Rain.

“It's not stealing when we gave you tons of gold, obviously!" said Lyra waving over her shoulder.

“Still damn well feels like it. And what the hell have you done to my home! Why is there a hole! Explain!”

Warwick stepped stiffly up to the trapdoor and looked down, only finding a spiral stair dimly lit with a few crystals embedded in the walls.

“Did you put this thing through the entire building?! Can't you take the damned stairs like a normal person?” He paused. “Actually, I know you can't because you keep destroying the damn things with your weight. But you can't just build a new set of stairs like this! Hey! Are you listening to me!”

But Rain was already descending. Behind came the harpy and Quistis and then Opal and Lyra coaxing the fanged goblin and Beryl over to the hole which they frantically scrambled down.

It was a procession, and one that Pickle immediately joined, because what else was she to do but follow the Fluff?

This of course led to Pickle's brother and sister following, and then Velatha chasing after her children, until it was just Warwick left standing at the top.

He made a strangled sound of frustration before stomping down after them.

Going down was a lot easier than climbing up, and the descent passed quickly. First the flat blank walls embedded with the occasional glowing stone, then the occasional window, earth spilling through onto the stair in trickles, and then as they descended deeper the radiant glow of the cathedral like crystal, chromatic lights dancing off the walls as the crystal pressed up against the windows.

Pickle made exclamations of appreciation discovering this, holding up her white furred paws and watching the rainbows shift upon them.

That was nothing though compared to the family's reaction once the stair passed through the vast crystal and into the cavern proper.

A gasp of delight escaped Pickle and she rushed up to the one of the open arched windows, leaning out over the sill in an alarming way as the sprawling town became visible, a mirror to the slums above, a version without millennia of grime, only pristine buildings and cozy streets. It had a strangely welcoming feel to it bathed in the soft warm sun-like light of the grand crystal.

Warwick staggered and fell to his knees at the sight. He was left holding onto the sill of a window and given a view from far too high up of something that shouldn't have existed. His jaw hit the floor.

"Wh-What what have you done?!" he half screamed.

He leaned out from the window, fingers like claws as he gripped the stone and boggled down at the impossible.

“Why is this here?! What is this below my home!?!"

Admittedly it must have been a bit of a surprise for Warwick to discover there was now an entire town sitting below his house.

"It's a town, obviously," said Opal, "A town for monsters."

"A… A… town…f-for what?" mumbled Warwick as his voice trailed off in disbelief.

It took a while for them to get moving again, in the end Velatha had to help a stunned to silence Warwick down the rest of the way.

They eventually emerged from the bottom of the spire at the back of the mansion, and Opal led them across and into a smaller square, one behind the mansion. Probably for the best in Rain's opinion, Warwick looked liable to have a minor heart attack if he saw the unsettling statue of himself.

There Opal ordered Quistis to draw long stone tables from the flagstones, growing them from the stone around the center of the square. Plates and cutlery rapidly popped into existence across the tables, metal forks and knives clattering against ceramic, and then in the center, a stone ring within which some kind of oil was created and pooled, just waiting for a flame. Metal spikes and spits rose from the stone ready to take food.

Velatha, despite the strangeness of it all, seemed to take things in her stride and offered to help, even when monsters began filtering in from between the buildings. The same could not be said about Warwick who was looking increasingly bothered by all that was happening.

With her expertise she saw the barrels stowed and then the ones to be used split open, salted meats dragged out and spitted over a fire now blazing.

More monsters slowly drifted in, drawn by the scent.

Warwick glowered at the fire being stoked by Velatha then looked up at Quistis.

“I hope you know that if enough smoke builds up in this hole you've dug beneath my home then everything in here will die, which might be the ideal outcome come to think of it.”

Quistis pursed her lips. "I've built and destroyed grander things than this below Florens. This little town is nothing compared to decadent sprawling palaces and castles that I have brought into existence for fleeting moments in time, now returned to dust and earth. I have long experience, so you will find additional chimneys added that were built along with the stair, thus any and all problematic smoke will find its way out from this chamber, and appear to come from your hovel of a home.”

“...Wait what?!”

The conversation and argument washed over Rain as he waited patiently, watching as food was prepared and handed out to the decidedly unsure monsters, each of them awkwardly holding a plate before a slab of steaming meat was dropped on it.

The monsters stirred and shifted, an ever increasing crowd that mingled and mixed, drawn by the smells of cooking. Rain watched them in silence.

He had hesitated to tell Opal no, that he did not want to be made the figurehead of this place, it was against his nature. But there had always been something else plucking at the back of his mind, something stopping him from putting his foot down like he might normally, something wordless.

And now, looking at these monsters, he knew what that something else was.

The town was perfect really. Hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of monsters could be brought down here, packed in tight and crowded in, drawn from the city above or wherever, it didn't matter, even levelers were welcome here, in fact he wanted as many levelers as possible to come down here.

The sound of the crowd of monsters seemed to twist in his ears, becoming eerie, sounding like weak injured prey, like watching a scattering of rabbits on a grassy field, the scent drawing him in, gaze sharpening, heart rate rising.

Rain breathed and the scent of cooking filled his lungs, and below that the clarion scent of life, the rapid beat of so many hearts, the bustle of clueless prey, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, millions.

The monsters and levelers would come, and once they were all inside he would seal this place off from the surface leaving no possible way to escape, and then he would kill and eat every single last living thing down here, until the streets ran red with rivers of gore, a hunting grounds that was teeming with prey, so much to kill, so much to ea-

This wasn't a town, it never had been. It was a trap, a massacre waiting to happen.

He blinked, and the thought slipped away, already a formless shape that he struggled to recall, like waking from a dream that he couldn't remember.

Still, he didn't need to know the details to feel the hunger that had been there, the desire to devour all those around him, no matter what.

He turned as the others were distracted around the fire and stepped away, a few long strides taking him to an alley out of sight in a moment.

There he leaned back against the alley wall and let out a long slow breath, trying to let the tension leave his body, a tense urge to…

It felt like avoiding crowds would be a wise move in future. Something about seeing so many small moving living beings, like a herd or flock, mingling and shifting really made his hackles rise and his blood heat, it made thinking clearly very difficult.

He half wondered if this was how a cat felt seeing a mouse skitter across the floor, unable to do anything but pounce.

Either way, whatever this was, it was getting worse. Missing out on eating Eliza the watermage had been a critical and grievous mistake.

“It's getting worse, isn't it brute?”

Rain turned his head slightly to see a tall knight with a battered wolf helm, a green light emanating from within. Vash.

The knight had his gauntleted hands on his hips and was looking Rain up and down.

“What of it? What do you care?” he replied in a guttural snarl. He did not need a judgemental audience while trying to gather his scattered mind.

“I don't as far as your general good health goes.”

The knight tilted his head.

“But if you truly become a mindless thoughtless thing it will be a tremendous pain in my bony behind to keep you alive for any extended period of time, which is critical to you becoming that much stronger and more powerful, and thus on your inevitable death, becoming my most potent creation.”

Rain squinted at him. The necromancer's change in attitude was an... improvement... of a sort. But Rain wasn't sure he liked this new approach, Vash seemed to see him as a highly valuable object to be added to his collection more than anything.

“What are you suggesting?”

“I have heard and seen enough at this point to admit that your folly has some... merit to it. Rushing to this city and your death seemed an inanity at first, a hopeless errand. But in retrospect perhaps it was an unthinking instinctual need, a need to find and devour the ones  you hunt, because for some unidentified reason, that is the best way for you to remain whole. I took note of your change when you devoured the one known as Adlen, the troublesome one with a spear. In the aftermath of that you became more sapient for a time, although that is slipping away now, perhaps accelerating."

Rain snorted bitterly.

"If something doesn't change I will kill them, Lyra, Opal, Pickle, Warwick's family, all those here, and you, I somehow doubt your skull can survive my stomach."

Vash nodded, the green light in the ragged wolf helm glowing with steady intensity.

"It seems to me that you are no longer left with a choice, or possible way to delay. We must invade the human known as Brax's estate and assassinate him before it is too late for you.”