Predator - Chapter 24

Bruce activated Eyes of the Void the second his foot touched the ground of the third floor.  Information poured in, and his eyes widened involuntarily.  A cold chill ran down his spine, dousing the sore muscles and frayed nerves from his ascent up the staircase with a bucket of ice water.

“Kassar?” He asked worriedly.  “Would you mind to tell me why Eyes of the Void seems to think that most of this floor is covered in huge blobs of monsters?  I thought these things were supposed to get easier the closer I was to the surface!”

He felt something shifting deep inside his spirit as Kassar roused himself from yet another rum induced hangover.  Bruce had tried his hardest to teach the alien warrior how to play shuffleboard, but Kassar hadn’t been able to figure out how to moderate his strength.  His stones were incredibly accurate, but they arrived at their targets with far too much energy.  At one point, he had even managed to break a couple of the stones, something that Bruce hadn’t even thought possible in the spiritual realm.

Before too long, the sulking alien had given up on trying to learn the mysteries of shuffleboard, and had turned to drinking concoctions out of a coconut with a straw and a small umbrella stabbed into it.  The one time that Bruce had gotten a whiff of what Kassar had been drinking, the smell had half burned his eyebrows off.  He wasn’t sure whether the ghost had pulled out some dark memories of the cheap rotgut he had drank around bonfires in his senior year of high school or if the alien just liked the taste of drinking straight up gasoline, but either way he wasn’t going to be sharing a drink with his depressed mentor.

“If the Eyes say monsters are everywhere,” Kassar slurred grumpily, “it’s because they are.  Probably hundreds of weak ones.  Just deal with it.”

“How am I supposed to deal with-“ Bruce didn’t finish the sentence, instead breaking into a run.

A tendril of monsters, dozens if not hundreds thick, was snaking through the corridors of the labyrinth, reaching out toward him.  Kassar evidently wasn’t in a mood to explain the intricacies of the floor and its denizens, and Bruce wasn’t inclined to learn more about the creatures without the alien’s assistance.

He whipped around the corner at a sprint, changing direction at the next intersection as he sensed another tentacle of monsters coming his way.  Frantically, Bruce searched while he ran, putting as much of his focus into Eyes of the Void as the pattern could take.  The smaller globs of aura that represented his assailants snapped into focus, a buzzing swarm that filled one hallway after another around him.

Bruce changed direction a second time.  Four of the hallways around him were filled with teeming clouds of the flying creatures, all of them actively flying toward him.

There was no doubt in his mind that the monsters had found him.  Bruce wasn’t sure if they were using scouts or if the labyrinths denizens had their own version of the detection patterns he had been making good use of.  Either way, it was an important lesson to not assume that a monster couldn’t do something just because he hadn’t seen a creature on a previous floor do it.

He jumped over a five-foot-long stretch of floor that glowed dimly red.  The trap didn’t seem to carry anywhere near the energy Bruce had seen on previous floors, but at the same time, he didn’t want to measure its power personally.

Behind him, the four separate streams of monsters coalesced into one, rushing down the corridor toward Bruce.  He barely registered the ease with which he had cleared the trap, his new strength and dexterity already second nature.  Once his feet touched down, Bruce smoothly transitioned back to running, barely slowed by the roadblock that would have been fatal to him barely a month ago.

So long as he kept running, the cloud of monsters chasing him weren’t able to catch up.  In fact, Bruce was very slightly outpacing him.  Distantly, part of him acknowledged that this was probably a factor of the increases to his Body and Agility.  He didn’t have much of a frame of reference to know how much stronger or more nimble he was now than when he first entered the maze, but the walls of the featureless gray hallway seemed to be blurring past much faster than he remembered.

Ahead, the corridor narrowed, bringing a frown to Bruce’s face.  As far as Eyes of the Void could see, there weren’t turn offs.  Rather the hallway shrunk from fifteen feet wide to barely six feet, creating a cramped environment that barely gave him room to sprint.

The frown transformed into an epithet that tore itself from his throat.

Red.

The floor and walls ahead of him were stained crimson, reflecting traps that covered every surface.  Unlike previous areas where a trap would only block off a chunk of a floor or a wall, letting a canny traveler slip past them safely, there was simply no way to push through the corridor except through sheer force.

“Kassar!”  He shouted, mentally gauging his speed and the distance to the start of the traps.  “I think the labyrinth is cheating!”

Once again, the bulk of the spiritual presence buried deep in his mind shifted, as if rousing from an uneasy slumber.

“It’s not cheating,” the warrior grumbled.  “it’s just a trap.  The Great Predator has always been allowed to set traps for the unwary.”

“I know,” Bruce replied through gritted teeth.  The red zone was maybe ten seconds away with the buzzing swarm of monsters trailing him by twenty to twenty-five seconds.  “But there is no way around it.  Every other trap has had a way to escape.  I thought you said that there was some sort of treaty forcing fair play or something.”

“There is,” Kassar responded, slightly more awake, “but this entire passageway is a trap.  You were supposed to avoid it altogether.  At this point, anything is fair game.”

“Seriously though Bruce,” he continued crossly.  “I thought I told you to deal with the monsters.  There might be a couple hundred of them, but that means that they must have barely any strength, especially if they are trying to force you down a trap corridor rather than engaging you directly.  Just stop wringing your hands and fight.”

Bruce took a deep breath, turning to face the oncoming cloud of monsters as he activated his hammer, shield and armor.  The patterns crackled into being, lighting the walls of the hallway with a flickering purple glow as he set his feet and prepared for his opponents to round the corner some twenty feet in front of him.

He wasn’t entirely sure about Kassar’s reasoning.  It only made sense to try and force an opponent, even one you would likely beat, into a disadvantageous situation.  After all, ‘likely beat’ was not any sort of guarantee and people suffered injuries during routine scuffles all the time.

Still, on one point Kassar was right.  There was nowhere left to run, and he was on the third floor now.  Theoretically, the enemies he was encountering here should be easier than the blind charioteers he was fighting on the lower level.

Theoretically.

The swarm rounded the corner, and Bruce caught sight of his opponents for the first time.  Each of them was about as large as his fist, a partially translucent hovering green sphere that glowed with its own internal light.

They rushed toward him, moving almost as fast as a sprinting human.  Bruce could outrun them if he had an open tunnel, but he had a nagging suspicion that the floating globes wouldn’t tire or flag.  If he ran long enough, eventually he would collapse from exhaustion only for the monsters to pick his bones clean.

With a grunt he heaved his hammer at the advancing attackers, activating Gravity’s Hammer as he threw the weapon.  Almost immediately he could feel the new enhancement at work.  It was like a thin tendril of mental energy connected him to his pattern as it crackled with barely restrained lavender violence.

It spun tightly, end over end, for almost a second before the flat head of Bruce’s weapon hit one of the monsters.  The creature shattered, its green, glassy skin unable to survive the force of the blow even before Gravity’s Hammer propelled the shards of its body at supersonic speeds into its companions.

Only the enemies nearest Bruce’s target died from the shrapnel, but their suddenly inert bodies dropped back into the oncoming swarm, becoming stumbling blocks for the rest of the stampede of monsters.  The creatures behind them crashed into their corpses, slowing the entire procession long enough for Bruce to tug on the mental string connecting him to his hammer.

With a fizzing sensation, almost like he was drinking something overly carbonated, the weapon reappeared in Bruce’s hand.  He didn’t waste any time, activating Gravity’s Hammer as he threw it a second time.

This time his aim wasn’t quite as accurate.  Bruce hadn’t spent much time training with the hammer as a ranged weapon, and his amateur status showed as the haft of the hammer spun upward, hitting the ceiling before deflecting downward toward the glowing spheres.  It landed sideways, not killing any of the monsters but knocking almost a half dozen out of the air and slamming them into the ground.

He re-summoned the weapon, not bothering to throw it a third time.  Rather, Bruce dropped to one knee and squared his shoulders, raising his shield at a slight angle.  He barely had time to set himself when the first of the monsters hit his defenses, bouncing upward and past Bruce into the narrow trap-filled corridor.

Just as the first globe hit the wall, disappearing in a shower of sparks and arcing lighting that jumped from one enemy to the other, Bruce exploded out of his crouch, hammer swinging.

The first attack shattered an enemy.  Bruce didn’t even bother adding Gravity’s Hammer to the mix.  Shrapnel wouldn’t help the situation much, rather, Bruce was a larger target than any of the orbs.  He was more likely to get hit by the fallout from his own attack than any of the enemies.

Then the creatures swarmed Bruce, slipping around his outstretched shield in order to ram their bodies into him.

With each blow, the sphere that hit him dimmed slightly, erupting in a flash of light that drove a needle of pain into Bruce despite his armor.

He swung his hammer again, haft cracking open an opponent just before the head of his hammer killed another one.

Individually, their attacks didn’t do much, but Bruce could feel the slivers of pain beginning to mount.  He turned his back to one of the nearby walls and kicked off the floor, crushing two of the orbs between his armor and the fake stone.

More of the monsters slammed into him, most bouncing off of his shield and into the trap hallway where a tempest of lightning.  The creatures died by the dozen, not even forcing Bruce to swing his hammer as the electricity continued to discharge itself into the swarm.

He staggered a step toward the wall, swinging his weapon blindly into the neverending cloud of opponents.  Each swing killed one or two of the energy mites, but it hardly made a dent in the deluge.  One kill or a dozen, it didn’t really seem to matter in the face of the endless swarm rushing toward him.

Bruce gave up trying to use his hammer, letting the weapon dissipate as he shifted to a two handed grip on his shield.  He dropped to one knee, trying to minimize the extent to which his body was exposed to the flood of monsters.

Still, one by one they slipped under his guard discharging against the glowing armor that covered his stomach and chest.  Even as the balls of energy bounced past Bruce, dying in the angry crackle of the traps behind him, he could feel the pain of their strikes beginning to accumulate.

Worse still, in the wake of the pain, his body was starting to grow numb and heavy.  Where the spheres hit, the glow from Bruce’s armor began to fade away as the energy from his attackers damaged and unraveled the pattern.

He ducked his head further down, doing his best to plant the bottom of his shield into the not-stone of the floor even as he pressed his right side into one of the corridor’s walls.  It felt like his shield was under a waterfall, a constant thundering roar of oncoming monsters shaking and rattling the defensive pattern before bouncing free and into the trap chamber beyond.

Through Eyes of the Void, Bruce could see the vast river of assailants flowing through the passages of the labyrinth toward him.  At the very edges of his vision, he could make out the ends of the monster stampede.  Hundreds if not thousands of the spheres stood between him and freedom.

Bruce took a deep breath, trying to ignore the dull numbness that was beginning to sink into his limbs.  It was time for a change of plans.

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