Outside Influences

Bel mercilessly ripped the essence from the dying giant. Her own core bloomed triumphantly with the addition, swelling an additional two thresholds.

If I survive this, I’m going to be pretty strong, Bel thought.

Shouts of alarm were sounding throughout stone passageway as the giants woke from slumber and realized that they were under attack. The sounds of hunting horns followed, rallying the giants to their defense.

At the moment, they would be worrying around the ear-splitting noises that Bel assumed were Crystal’s doing. She glanced at the giant’s corpse and grimaced. “There’s no way I can hide that,” she sighed. “And there’s no way someone doesn’t notice it.”

Even worse than the body was the smell of blood that was permeating the air. The scent cast a spell upon every caged creature in the hallway, snapping them to attention. The prey animals, already on edge from the loud noises, bleated and hooted as they panicked in their cells. The carnivores yowled and gnashed their teeth, clearly preparing for a fight. Bel shook her head at the rapidly escalating disaster and looked around for a hiding place.

The shrine, she thought, no one will look there now.

She skittered like a skink over the stone floor and scrambled onto the same broken crate that she’d previously used as a step. Her hands had just closed over the edge of the shrine’s alcove when she heard a shout of alarm from her blind side. Her head pivoted to reveal another guard. He was half-dressed, grasping his unbuckled belt in his hands, and gawking at her with outrage.

Bel’s tongue clicked in irritation. Why couldn’t you stay in your room until you finished putting on your pants? she cursed.

She dropped to the ground as he jumped forward, narrowly avoiding a swipe of his massive hand, before rolling backwards to get away from his stomping feet. Luckily for her, he let go of his pants in all of that motion and they fell down around his ankles, tripping him head-first into the alcove. Bel took a step forward to take advantage of his state, but quickly backpedalled when he pulled an ornamental trident and net from shrine’s hunting scene.

Why couldn’t he have fallen face first into that? she griped. Bel glanced at the weapons for a moment, wondering if they were actually functional. The flickering torchlight glinted from the menacing tips of the trident.

Bel hopped backwards to gain some distance between herself and the giant while he took a moment to fumble with his belt. Fight or flight? Or do something clever?

She looked around quickly and her gaze fell on the row of animals that lined the passageway. While the giant buckled his belt, Bel ran to the nearest cage, thrust her hand into the lock, and liquified it. Bel jumped onto the cage bars and kicked, swinging them open. The cage held a giant-sized rocky worm, as big across as she was tall and covered in sharp spines that ran from tip to tail.

Bel grinned as it surged forward, wasting no time to escape the cell. The beast’s muscles rippled as it moved past her, its spines jabbing vigorously to provide friction with the ground. She grinned in triumph when it turned towards the shouting giant.

The grin fell from her face as the worm dove headfirst into the rocks and burrowed down through the stone, leaving nothing behind but an empty hole. A quick check revealed that its cage had a metal floor. Poor guy just wanted to be free, I guess, she sighed.

Bel ran to the next cage as the armed and properly clothed giant circled around the worm-hole. This time when she used liquify on the lock she tried to remember to only send energy through the parts of the ability that were necessary. It was going to be a long night, and she couldn’t wear herself out so early.

The cage swung open and a large and wild specimen of the fox-worm creatures burst out. It snapped at her with its dart-shaped face as it escaped, but she was still on the other side of the swinging door so it quickly trotted past her. Unlike the worm, this animal did rush at the giant.

The giant flicked his wrist and cast his net. She had been hoping that it would be an non-functional ornament of the shrine, but under some ability from the giant it stretched and rippled like an octopus’ tentacles, quickly entangling the fox-worm and crushing it into a defenseless ball. An incredibly fast stab of the giant’s trident finished off the beast.

Stupid abilities, she cursed.

Anticipating the disappointing end to the fox, Bel had already run towards the dead guard. She’d spotted a set of keys hanging from the giant woman’s belt and, given her success so far, she was going to have to free more than a few more animals before one of them took down her pursuer. She quickly slipped the arm-length piece of iron from its ring and lugged it towards another cell. Inside was one of the mouthy slime balls that she’d seen earlier, its tentacles writhing with agitation. It looked and smelled hideous, but since it was mostly mouth and teeth she hoped it would be dangerous.

Bel leaped up to the lock, shoved in the key, and turned it without a second thought. She pulled the gate open and watched with anticipation from behind the bars of the door as the odd creature rolled out.

The giant was only a few of his enormous strides behind her and quickly stabbed out with his trident to catch the beast before it could exit the cell. Bel clicked her tongue in frustration as the trident pierced the squishy body of the ball-like creature, but gasped in surprise at the result. To her surprise, the tentacled terror simply flowed around the attack. It parted like water and flowed up the trident’s tines, recombining into a single ball as it rolled up the haft of the weapon, up the giant’s arm, and straight to his face.

The results weren’t pretty. Bel had seen plenty of death, but this made her throw up; the tentacle ball digested its victims by extruding a stomach from inside of its bulb-like body and quickly engulfing the giant’s head. Blood and gore leaked down as the creature dissolved the giant, and Bel emptied the contents of her stomach.

Bel stumbled back, putting more space between her and the green tentacle monster as it did its thing. She averted her gaze as she moved to the body of the fox-worm to drain it of essence and gain another threshold. Unless she’d lost count, that put her at the forty-eighth threshold, twelve short of reaching her third core.

She turned and contemplated the tentacle-ball and its victim. The way that it had flowed around the giant’s weapon…

Something about it had felt like her own liquify ability. Bel wondered if it had done something similar to Dutcha’s ability that would turn her body into a liquid, but with a second part that would put it back together.

“I really want that ability,” Bel muttered forcefully. “I really want it.”

It’s probably big, and complicated, but I probably already understand it pretty well, right? I just have to kill it and then I can take it from the monster’s core.

Bel licked her lips with anticipation, but she hesitated. The ball was probably more dangerous than she gave it credit for and had dispatched the giant with relative ease. On the other hand…

“No risk, no reward,” she muttered to herself, “and it’s distracted right now anyway. This is probably my best chance.”

Bel strode resolutely to the corpse of the first guard and tugged her makeshift spear free of the giant’s neck. She grimaced at the blood and did her best to rub the haft of the spear dry on a clean corner of the guard’s shirt so that it wouldn’t slip through her hands at a critical moment. She couldn’t help but think with longing of the bird man’s divine spear – now wielded by Crystal – that would have magically returned to her hands, clean and perfect.

“One wish at a time, Bel. Don’t get too greedy.”

She stalked towards the green tentacle monster, slowly spiraling around it as she looked for an opening. As far as she could see, it was a slimy ball with tentacles and a mouth, with no particular weak points. When some of the tentacles paused their aimless writhing to track her movements, Bel realized that some of the tentacles ended in eyeballs. Disgusting, but it offered her an opportunity.

Bel pounced and the eyestalks fixed on her sudden movement. The slimy ball slurped its stomach back to its insides as Bel attacked, revealing the naked skeleton of the guard as it shifted it attention to her. Its tentacles reached forward with anticipation and it toothy maw yawned wide as she sailed close, but just before she entered its grasping range Bel glared.

She could feel her ability straining against the energy in the monster’s core, so she pushed harder, expending more energy to strengthen her opening attack. Bel could tell that it wouldn’t quite be enough to immobilize the creature: the best she could hope for was a slightly distraction. That was fine.

Bel spun her body and hurled her spear with all her might. As expected, the slimeball’s body turned to a liquid as it flowed around Bel’s weapon.

A moment later, Bel struck the side of the creature as it was still reconstituting itself. She forced her hand into the gelatinous flesh and forced liquify into its body. The slimy mass under her hand quivered and strained, but she had momentarily trapped it in its liquid form. It tried to open its mouth and bite, but its teeth weren’t solid enough to penetrate her skin. It tentacles grasped at her limbs, but she shredded them as she tore her way through the beast.

Finally, she found a small, slightly firmer blob that looked important. She grasped it firmly and tore it in half before ripping it from the from the creature’s still-liquid body. Bel could feel its immediate death, and quickly pushed her senses into the creature’s core.

She couldn’t help but rush like an impatient child to a surprise gift. This ability was so good, I have to get it!

And she was certain that she would be able to understand it too, even if it was complicated. It has to be similar to liquify, she thought.

Bel felt around the slimeball’s core and quickly found the pattern; it was large and complicated, but she still thought she could handle it. She bit her tongue as she concentrated…

Some parts were familiar, but some parts…

Bel grit her teeth as she tried to trace all of the unfamiliar patterns of the ability simultaneously. Her face pinched with effort as she moved through it, but she kept making tiny mistakes as her attention wavered. The mistakes lead to larger errors, which and soon she found herself retracing other parts of the ability to make corrections. There were parts that were familiar as she’d hoped – some patterns were a little bit like liquify and others a little bit like minor body modification – but a great deal of it was made of unfamiliar patterns that made tracing them difficult.

Bel whined with frustration as she felt the beginnings of the core breaking up under her clumsy attention. Rather than trying to rush through the rest of the ability, Bel instead focused on looking it over and understanding it as well as she could with the few seconds she had remaining.

Then the core broke. She pulled at the dissipating essence, but was barely able to scrape a single threshold from the powerful monster. Bel almost broke down screaming and yelling, but the sibilant sounds of her agitated snakes and the occasional rumble coming through the rocky walls reminded her of the current situation.

No use crying over the ones that get away, she told herself. She shook off her frustration and the green globs of mucus sticking to her hands as she once again trotted over to the cages.

Her mind stayed with her failure though. I rushed too much, she thought regretfully, the liquify part of it was familiar, but I was rushing the rest of it too much. Maybe if I get another chance…

Bel clicked her fingers when she had a flash of inspiration. Dutcha’s path has that terrible self-liquify ability. I’ve never taken it because it’s stupid, but I bet it’s pretty similar to whatever the slimeball is doing. If I start from there, I bet my next attempt will be easy.

Bel closed her eyes and quickly found the small ability in the constellation of abilities from the divine spirit of chaos. She traced the minor ability onto her core without a second thought. As she’d expected, it was similar to what she’d been tracing from the slimeball,.

“I’ll study this later,” she promised herself. She couldn’t keep some of her attention from drifting to the now almost-familiar ability patterns as she half-focused on the physical world.

She pulled the key from the cell where she’d left it and looked around at the rest of the cages. The giants outnumbered Crystal by a large margin and had the edge in a fight, even if Technis’ patchwork people were unreasonably strong and Crystal had the element of surprise. Bel wanted the fight to be close though, so she needed to distract the giants so they couldn’t fully organize. That meant causing more trouble.

Luckily for her, there were still plenty of cells full of animals, which meant plenty of opportunity for more chaos.

Bel began opening the cells that contained thunderhooves and the rock burrowing worms first, since they were less likely to attack her. She didn’t really expect much from either, but she hoped that the more stuff she released the higher the chance of something surprising happening.

Despite the menacing look of their spine-covered bodies, the worms were universally duds. They left their cages, hit the rock floor outside of their cells, and burrowed straight down. Bel snorted with displeasure.

The thunderhooves were somehow even worse. They rushed out of their cages only to mil about with confusion, huffing and pawing at the ground.

“C’mon you guys,” she complained with exasperation, “when you’re wild you rush anything you don’t like.”

Bel waved her arms at a group that was wandering around the passageway like a herd of lost children. “Go on, stomp your hooves and blast some rock or something!”

The nearest animals tossed their heads and clomped their hooves against the ground, but none of them used any of their dangerous abilities. Bel growled with frustration and increased the pace of cage opening. In just a few minutes she’d released around twenty of the thunderhooves, five rock burrowing worms, a pair of small, fluffy creatures that flapped down the hallway, and a big snake the slithered straight through one of the holes left by the worms.

She was contemplating a pair of sky shrimp when a loud snort from the herd of thunderhooves drew her attention. Bel spun around to see that the herd had organized itself into a line, with a particularly large individual with impressive horns standing in the center.

The large buck stamped his feet on the ground and Bel’s eyebrows rose when the rest of the herd stiffened to attention. She watched with rapt attention as the new leader organized a charge against the flat wall on the far side of the passageway.

“What in hells are you trying to do?” Bel wondered aloud.

The herd struck the wall hoof first with perfect synchrony. The wall rippled like water and powerful reverberations spread out from the impact points. The ripples rose like waves and spread through the walls and ground, sweeping Bel off of her feet. The wall that had been the focus of the herd’s ire disintegrated, revealing another row of cages from an adjacent passage. The cages were full of more thunderhooves, fox-worms, sky shrimp, and slimeballs, and all of their cages were now missing their back walls.

The herd of thunderhooves saw that they were mere steps away from some of their natural predators, turned, and stampeded. Bel let out an undignified yelp as she dove out of their way and climbed up the bars of a cage for safety. After a few moments of disorientation, the predators instincts took over and they jumped into the fray. Some focused on the nearest prey while other simply ran to escape their captivity.

More thunderhooves rushed past her, small groups breaking off together to blow holes in other parts of the wall. As more wall came down, more thunderhooves and other animals were released. It was a cascade of destruction that set the giant’s building trembling with the power that Bel had released. Pandemonium broke out in mere moments, turning the underground city into a nightmare of braying, hissing, and screaming.

Bel watched with shock as wall after wall was blown away by the herd. With the twisting turns of the giant’s home suddenly missing, Bel realised that the size of the space had been much smaller than she’d thought. Only a hundred strides away from their starting hallway, the thunderhooves blew through a particularly thick wall to open Bel’s line of sight to a large, open cavern. On the other side of the cavern, Bel could see a massive set of doors, easily twice as tall as the giants, that marked the entrance to their domain.

The metal doors had been blown inward by some massive force, curled up like paper, and tossed halfway across the cavern. The area in front of the entrance had been a battleground between the giants and Crystal with her incredible supply of versatile wands. The flat surface was littered with spikes of stone and smoldering holes blasted straight into the rock floor. The giants had formed a rough shield wall around the entrance, but the stampede of animals quickly ruined whatever equilibrium had been reached in the fight.

Everything turned into a free-for-all brawl without any sense or structure. The giants, Crystal, and the crazed animals all fought to maintain control of a safe space around themselves as the scene devolved into a horrible fever dream.

Bel hunched her shoulder guiltily as she watched the destruction unfold. That was probably my mom’s influence, right? I’m not going to believe that was all my fault.