Mage Tank

Sayil’s body was even worse off than Chilla’s had been. It had also been hollowed out, but more meat was stripped from it, leaving little more than bones and tendons behind. Even his face hadn’t been spared, and ragged tufts of fur gave way to gaping holes in his cheeks, the white of his teeth visible through them.

Varrin hurled his battered shield against a wall after studying the body, clattering loud enough to make me wince, and the sound echoed down the stone corridor behind us. He leaned against the wall and slid down to the ground, tossing his helm aside and gripping his dirty white hair in gauntleted fists. I watched him, trying to decide whether he was overwhelmed with anger or guilt, maybe both. He may have just been overwhelmed in general.

Varrin had been the one to decide on the difficulty of the Delve, a decision over which Sayil had made his feelings abundantly clear. Now that the Littan was dead, an unexpected pang of anger shot through me.

When we’d lost Chilla it had been a somber moment, but on some level she had gone into this with eyes wide open. She’d defended Varrin over the choice, and I suspected that the two of them had decided on platinum before they’d even entered the Creation Delve. So, when she had died, the loss felt more like it was at the hands of the Delve.

With Sayil, the blood was on Varrin’s hands. He’d made an arrogant choice, and now he was learning about consequences. I wondered how much of that he’d had to face up to this point, as the child of some sort of noble. I couldn’t stop a bitter feeling welling up in me–that privilege had sheltered him, as it so often does. But I also didn’t truly know the man or his upbringing. I left my assumptions behind and surveyed the room. Varrin could figure himself out in his own time.

Sayil’s body was in a large chamber lined with tall alcoves. The hall ended here, and there were no other notable exits, aside from a large crack down one wall that might have been wide enough for a small human or other compact creature to crawl through. I suspected that whatever had killed Sayil had escaped through the crack, though I found it difficult to imagine something that small being able to eliminate Sayil so easily. There were no obvious signs of struggle in the room, nor any tracks that I could see.

Within each alcove was another harvester like we’d seen in the fields. Black tubes sprouted from their chests which, upon inspection, looked like they were fastened to the harvester and could be removed. I considered that one of these could have been the cause of Sayil’s death, but the one back on the farm hadn’t been subtle. Even while fighting the Gekkogs, I figured there was a pretty good chance we’d have heard one of these things stomping up behind us. There was also no blood or other viscera on the things, and the only active one we’d encountered hadn’t shown any hostility toward us.

There was also a thick layer of moss, or whatever the local equivalent was, growing up and over the feet on the harvesters. If any of them had moved, the moss grew back up onto their feet real quick. As it was, I didn’t think any of the ones in this room had moved for a long time. Still, I couldn’t eliminate the possibility, so I kept an eye on them as I walked back over to Xim.

She was leaning over Sayil, still peering at the wounds and turned his head from side to side to get a closer look at… something. She shook her head and started running her hands along his arms.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Bones,” she said. “He doesn’t have any broken bones.” She held his hand up and looked at me. “No wounds on his fingers either.”

“Oh. So, that means what? He had good calcium intake as a child?”

“His swords are sheathed. His throwing knives and all still here. It doesn’t look like he fought at all. But,” she gestured back down the hall, “there’s no blood trail leading to the body.”

“Still not following.”

“If he’d been ambushed there should have been a struggle,” Xim said, standing and wiping her hands off on her tabard. The act probably made them more dirty, if anything. “Unless whatever attacked him killed or disabled him with its first attack. Now, everything in here has tried to eat us. Everything except these things.” She waved a finger between the harvesters. “Monsters we’ve encountered attack with natural weapons. Claws, teeth…”

“Magically enhanced pointy bits,” I added.

“If he were attacked back where we were fighting, then he would have likely been bleeding. If so, we would have a blood trail. If something hit him and knocked him unconscious, then dragged him down here, his skull should have cracked.” She knelt and turned his head from side to side again, a little less than gently. “But there are no obvious signs of attack with a blunt instrument.”

“Got a theory?”

She shrugged.

“It looks like he came down here and just died. Then, something ate him.”

“Maybe he did run away, found a dead end, and got jumped by something out of that crack in the wall.”

“I thought for sure that it was those Gekkogs that killed Chilla,” said Xim. “That they’d come back here to their nest after their meal. But after seeing this, I don’t think that makes sense.”

I looked at the large crack. It was possible that a Gekkog could have gotten through it, but I agreed that their behavior didn’t line up with what Xim was telling me.

“We have a mystery monster who’s picking us off one at a time?”

Xim sighed and started rifling through Sayil’s pack, pulling out any supplies that might be useful. I went to the body and, after glancing at Varrin, who was still grappling with profound guilt and despair, decided to do a little bit of corpse robbing. The term didn’t have the same ring as grave robbing, but Sayil wasn’t in a grave. Although, maybe the Delve could be considered a tomb? I took his swords.

At first, I tried to get his sword belt around my waist, but it was too small. I settled for taking one of the swords off of the belt and holding it by the scabbard. It was an upgrade over my dagger, although I wasn’t confident that I’d be able to wield it any more effectively.

Xim eyed me.

“Guess you did end up stealing some more of Sayil’s stuff.”

“I am covetous. It’s my fatal flaw.”

Varrin got back to his feet and glared at us.

“Can you two take this more seriously?” he growled.

It was the wrong thing for me to hear at that moment.

So far, I felt like I’d been giving Varrin a lot of slack. But that reproach sent an ice-cold lance of rage right down the middle of my body. Maybe if I hadn’t been bleeding from the eyes, covered in shit, and fresh off of finding the second mutilated corpse of the day, I would have been a bit more chill. As it was, that statement sent me right over an edge I didn’t even realize I’d been standing next to.

I strode over to Varrin and stared him down. He was head and shoulders taller than me, but he still looked young enough to get called into the principal’s office, and he was starting to act half that age.

“It’s called a coping mechanism, fuck-face, and it’s the sort of thing that lets you choose between having a laugh and burying somebody, so you don’t want me to take this seriously. If I did, you’d end up right next to Sayil.” I gripped the collar of his armor and pushed him back into the wall. “You’re the one who put us in this situation. Xim and I didn’t ask to get caught in orbit around your monumental dumbassery, but here we are. You’ve already gotten your girlfriend and this poor bastard killed with the quality of your leadership, so don’t you even dare take a self-righteous tone with me.”

I let Varrin go and took a couple steps back. The lordling eyed me intensely, his expression going from shock, to rage, to a sort of hollowed-out anxiety. He looked away from me to Sayil’s body after a few seconds, and I took a couple deep breaths. The breathing exercise didn’t help much, since it felt like huffing carolina reaper sauce. Eventually, I managed to put my less comfortable feelings back into a box and stuff them deep, deep inside. There’d be a healthier time to deal with those later. For now, I needed to get back to surviving in the calmest way I could.

“This is a dead end,” I said. “We’ve got what we need from Sayil, so go ahead and do your body-release thing, then we need to move on. We’ve got three more exits to check and the clock doesn’t stop while we all engage in honest and constructive communication.”

Varrin’s hand clenched around the hilt of his sword and his jaw tightened, but he waved a hand and we got the notification telling us Sayil’s body was being taken outside the Delve. The ground opened up, swallowed the beast-man, and we moved on in flinty silence.

There were no more Gekkogs on the walls of the farm area, and we kept our eyes up as we made our way around to the second hallway. Another ten minute hike brought us to a second chamber identical to the one where we’d found Sayil, but the harvesters in this room were on the floor in pieces.

Most looked like they’d been disassembled, but two had obviously been torn apart. Soft, spongy material made up the ‘flesh’ beneath black skin, with thousands of small veins running through it, brown and desiccated. The bones were silvery and metallic, and their stomachs opened to reveal a large, membranous sack where the crystallized essences were stored after dropping down the hole in its chest. The disassembled harvesters were partially full of crystals, but the two that had been ripped open had their membranes slashed and any essences that had been there were gone.

We studied the scene wordlessly, then moved on to the next hall. At the end was a stone panel that could be lifted to reveal a wide shaft that descended in a slope deeper into the facility, reminding me of an old coal chute. Poison fog billowed out of it when opened, and I speculated that this is where the harvesters dumped the essences after gathering them. Or a garbage disposal. Either way, it was better than a dead end, but none of us were eager to go sliding down it.

The fourth hallway was shorter than the others, and led to a series of rooms that were full of what looked like benches, desks, and even beds carved from the stone. The rooms were filthy, covered in a thick coating of dust and grime. If there had ever been any bedding or other degradable items beyond the stonework, it had long since rotted away. After briefly exploring the rooms and finding nothing of interest we went to the end of the hall, where there was another descending stairwell.

I took the lead this time, Varrin following behind Xim and I without a word, and the stairs went much further down than was reasonable. After descending for twenty minutes my mind began to return to the paranoid fear state from the endless tunnel above.

Would this ever end?

How far down had we gone?

I felt like we could have gone down the length of a skyscraper at this point, but I’d never gone down that many stairs before. I started to wish for an elevator, but disregarded that idea after I considered all the classic horror-movie tropes like being trapped inside, falling to our deaths, or having a liquid metal murder-robot from the future land on top and start trying to carve its way inside to kill my son.

When we finally exited at the bottom, any relief I felt at being out of the Delve’s version of SCP-087 was quickly extinguished. We were in a perfectly circular, perfectly dark tunnel, with none of the glowing rocks that lit up the rest of the Delve. After a minute of us all staring down the tunnel, trying to will our eyes to pierce the inky dark, I broke the silence.

“I know I’ve already said this once today, but that is fucking ominous.”