Downtown Druid

Book 3 Chapter 30: I Have Seen Suffering

“Looks to me more like a dead rotting leviathan with a madwoman standing in front of it,” responded Dantes as he took inventory of everything around them to prepare the best wand and strategy for that moment.

“Dantes is right Serpica. You must see how mad all of this is,” said Traizen, his voice anguished. He looked around with a look of anger and disgust on his face. “You are using the gifts that she gave you to corrupt the Mother’s children. To act against her will. The suffering you are causing…”

“The suffering I am causing!?” she asked, her voice trembling a bit. “I have seen suffering. My locus was a battlefield. I watched as the ‘civilized’ races tore one another to shreds. I watched villages pillaged, their elders beheaded and their women raped. I’ve watched forests cut down to build machines of war, and the land salted to keep the enemy from ever growing new crops.” She shook her head. I once tried to force peace. I made my locus a den of horror and death to stop them from fighting over it. Poisonous plants blossomed across all of it, and brambles with thorns the size of daggers covered it all. For some time the fighting ceased, and things were…peaceful. Then one of them found a single nugget of gold in a river just outside of my locus. That was all it took for the fighting to begin again, for my locus to suffer. I still remember when the last river was torn to shreds after that war ended. I remember seeing a man smiling as he watched, a golden smile. The despair I felt.”

Traizen stepped forward. “You never told us Serpica. You never came to us for help. We could’ve done so much for you. There was no reason to bear all of that suffering alone.”

She laughed. “I wasn’t alone, and I’ll never be alone again.” She peeled the mask from her face, it came away along with a thick coating of pus and pieces of her skin. Her face was rotted, her flesh coated with pustules and sores, her eyes half eaten away, and exposed bone peeking through her jaw. “I carry life within myself now. The largest source of life that was left in my locus. Disease, plague, that is the gift the Mother gave me. She trusted me with the life of her most numerous children within myself. With it, I will end the civilizations that destroy the world for shiny rocks and foolish notions of honor. Starting here.”

Traizen began to cry, tears streaming down his cheeks. “That is not the Mother that granted you that. I cannot imagine how painful it is to be without her love. Its absence has damaged you beyond all reason.”

“I am closer to the Mother than the rest of you ever were.”

Traizen shook his head. “I’m afraid the only god there is left for you is the Father. I hope he welcomes you with love when I send you to meet him.”

Serpica screeched and launched herself at Traizen.

Traizen touched the bearmark across his heart and charged her as he wept, becoming a massive white bear as he ran toward her on all fours before they slammed into one another.

Every other creature in the room began to move the second Serpica screeched. Dantes and Jacopo tensed, expecting them to charge them, but instead they all swarmed toward the corpse of the leviathan. Dantes changed his target to Serpica and began moving toward her struggle with Traizen, but as he aimed his pistol at her, one of the writhing masses of flesh on the Leviathan sent out a fleshy appendage toward him like a whip. Dantes’s new cat-like reflexes saved him as he leapt backwards before he even realized what was happening.

The lump actually began to move toward him, crawling forward on a mix of cat, rat, and dog legs as it dragged itself forward with tendrils covered in motley combinations of fur and teeth, and tipped with points of bone.

Dantes aimed his pistol and fired at it, causing it to spray a thick vile ichor.

It ignored the wound and sent more tendrils at him. Dantes dropped his pistol, and dodge backward, throwing Jacopo into the air where he shifted into his two-leg form before landing on top of the lump.

Before the mass of flesh could react, Jacopo began to raise his gauntleted hand, each finger pointed in a sharpened blade, and began to tear at the flesh of the thing, rending it and sending chunks of it flying in every direction. They’d commissioned his new weapon after their encounter with Godfrey on the boat, and its use had come quite naturally to him.

It screamed, sounding like the horrendous combination of a dog whining and a group of rats being burned alive.

Jacopo leapt back up into the air, shifting into a bat, and Dantes jumped and shifted to join him. The other masses that dotted the leviathan had all begun to move as well, some towards Dantes, but the rest moving straight toward where Serpica and Traizen were fighting.

Traizen was covered in slashes already, red blood dyeing his white fur, but two of Serpica’s spiderlegs were shattered and regrowing, and a shuck of her chest had been ripped away by sharp claws. The flesh mass closest to him sent out a tendril, but he quickly snapped it with his jaws where it froze before shattering beneath the force of his jaws.

Dantes and Jacopo flew around the pulsating masses that were heading for them, dodging their horrible tendrils, and instead each targeted the ones moving closer to Serpica and Traizen.

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Dantes shifted into himself and landed, perfectly balanced, right between Traizen and one of the masses as it was beginning to extend its tendrils toward him. Dantes matched those tendrils with his own wooden fingers, tangling them before they could hit him, then he sent his will through the wand in his palm and sent out a blast of flame on the now perfectly centered flesh golem.

Jacopo landed on top of a spearlike tendril just as it was about to hit Traizen, he grabbed it and yanked the lump toward himself before once again leaping forward and clawing at it in a flurry of claw strikes until it stopped moving.

They looked up from their respective kills to see that all of the remaining lumps were heading toward them, and more were emerging from the flesh of the leviathan, tearing their way through its skin in a sickening caricature of birth.

Dantes and Jacopo readied themselves for the incoming assault, when Lorna and Beast emerged from the underwater section of the facility. Beast bit into the nearest fleshy monstrosity and then began spinning, throwing blood and viscera everywhere as it did so.

Lorna sent out the long vines she always had wrapped around herself and her hair and grasped another of the flesh golems. She dragged it toward herself, and once it was close she changed into a swamp dragon to match Beast, bit into it, and began spinning and tearing it apart in the same way he had.

Dantes drew his dagger and jumped toward Jacopo, shifting into a rat as he did so. He caught him and threw him at another flesh lump. Just as Jacopo had, Dantes shifted into himself and used the increased weight and momentum to drive the dagger deep into it, hearing the crunch of bones as his feet slammed into it..

Jacopo followed that up by catching a tendril that whipped out toward him and severing it, before running on all fours to the next one. In the course of the fight, he and Dantes found themselves in the center of a massive group of the creatures, near the body of the leviathan itself. Everything became a blur. Dantes and Jacopo shifted to dodge tendrils, as Dantes used his wooden hand to spear them, or send out bouts of flame or frost from the wands he extended from his palm. They caught blows for one another, pulled each other out of the way of strikes at the last minute, and dealt finishing blows in perfect unison. They could see through one another’s eyes, feel what the other was thinking. Dantes started to make wilder and more risky strikes as Jacopo bled into him, and Jacopo began to chain his strikes together in a more violent and efficient way as they carved their way through.

Murk and his sister were the next to arrive. With a howl that made even the diseased piles of flesh tremble in fear, they ran into the building through the front door and immediately began tearing into everything they could. Ripping off chunks of meat with tooth and clay. They seemed able to locate exactly where the blobs were vulnerable even though to Dantes it all looked like the same sickening flesh.

The Twins and their falcons flew in next, but they didn’t stay falcons. Instead they shifted into massive horned creatures, looking like a cow with a hunched back and a lot more fur. They stampeded through the creatures, crushing them beneath massive hooved feet. When they turned around to do it again, one of the flesh mounds sent out a tendril sharpened with fangs and bones, and pierced one of the twins through the gut as she ran over it.

The falcons and her sister cried out. Dantes wasn’t able to see what happened after that, as more of the monsters closed on him and Jacopo.

Coal and his warthog charged in next, with both Mor-Gan-May and her raccoon on their backs. As they charged, Mor-Gan-May and her companion began throwing vials expertly at each of the nearest masses. Flasks of black, green, red, and blue liquid shattered. Some of them resulted in explosions, others released a potent acid that began to melt them away, and a few even seemed to just harden, locking the fleshy slimes into place.

All together they finally started to push the horde of plagued flesh back. It was a brutal slog of a battle. No one was uninjured, Jacopo was covered in small wounds, and Dantes had a small piece of his ear taken by a near miss by a toothed tentacle, but eventually he reached the corpse of the leviathan from where the enemies were all spawning from.

Dantes shoved his wooden hand into one of the openings and sent a blast of flame through it. The smell nearly made him vomit, but he held on.

As he did that Mor-Gan-May and her raccoon began throwing more vials into it, burning away at its flesh and sealing it.

Traizen was still struggling with Serpica. He was covered in wounds, blood dripping off of his snow white fur. Serpica had lost both of her actual legs, and one of her arms, but continued to strike out with her remaining diseased skin and wooden bone appendages. A look of pure madness on her face.

Traizen roared, and a kind of pulse of frost emanated from him, pushing Serpica back and causing her skin to become covered in small icicles.

She seemed to fall back, her remaining limbs bending, then she dissipated into a cloud of flies and moved toward the leviathan corpse, what parts hadn’t yet been destroyed.

Thing and Fizz chose that moment to reveal themselves. Their skin shifted from the same gray shade as the walls, into a rich green, revealing two massive versions of the strange lizard-like creature that Thing had been in the form of earlier. They sent out massive tongues like whips and devoured hundreds of the flies that made up Serpica in an instant.

She changed back into herself, and what was left of her landed on top of the back half of the leviathan’s corpse. She raised up her remaining hand and a half dozen diseased pieces of flesh exploded out of the body and began to wrap themselves around her.

The druids all turned their attention to her, and began to move to stop her from whatever new horror she had planned for them.

The pile of sickened skin and viscera started to rise, with only Serpica’s head protruding from the top of it, the only part of her that still seemed whole.

“I would have granted you all, this city, the slow death that it was giving to the Mother, but it seems I will need to take all of the life of it into myself in order to finish this!”

As everyone approached her, readying different attacks, she rose at the top of the fleshy pyramid, cackling wildly as she rose into the air.

There was a gunshot, and Serpica’s head jerked backwards. The rising mountain of flesh ceased growing, and started to slowly tilt backwards.

Everyone looked at Dantes, expecting to see his pistol in his hands, but his attention was turned toward the glass ceiling. A dwarf wielding a massively long rifle that had been slipped through the glass gave him a small wave, and then began to retrieve his gun.

Dantes smiled at him, wiping some of his blood from the back of his neck with the back of his hand.

“That’s Lead in the Chamber. I thought since I’d missed last time, I’d have someone else try to take the shot.”