Crowned in Black: Chapter 36

The first things I heard were the clanging of metal and screams, but it was the pain that brought me back to awareness. My head throbbed with pain so intense that it woke me. My eyes flickered open, revealing nothing but blurry darkness. For a second, I wondered if I'd been shot, downed in the jungle at night. Then I realized that I was in Archemi. I could remember my name. I knew I was in the Gate of Endless Night... and then everything else progressively flooded back into my memory. My head pounded, face and body heating… but it didn’t hurt. Or more accurately, I had a splitting headache, but wasn’t also writhing on the floor screaming.

"Whuu...?" Where was the amnesia? The hallucinations and dissociation? I pushed myself up, confused in a completely different way than I usually was post-mortem. Mind you, I felt like warmed-over ass. My void-scarred arm felt heavy and odd, as did my chest. But I knew I was Hector Dragozin-Corvinus, prince of Vlachia, rider of dragons and slayer of big bad evil stuff. I was also extremely naked. And I'd lost my torch.

"Fuckity fuck FUCK." Scowling, I grasped the Spear and lurched up to my feet. My head spun. I felt weird, like I was looking through two pairs of eyes for a moment... as if I were somehow me, and also someone else at the same time. But then the feeling passed, and as it did, my head stopped pulsing and hurting. First, I remembered what had happened to me to kill me. Then I realized that the clanging and shouting from inside the maze meant that my friends were fighting something that had spawned in there.

"Shitballs." I cursed again. There were no more torches, and zero light in the maze. But then Karalti shrieked in pain, and I realized there was no more time. " Karalti! Hang on!"

Buck-ass naked, I ran into the maze, turned a corner... and realized something. There was no light, a supernatural darkness that suppressed even magical darkvision. But as I drew closer to the walls, a fine violet pattern of energy crawled under the surface of the obsidian as I brought the Spear close to it, sigils that pointed the way forward. I ran with one hand on the wall, following twists and turns until I burst out into the room with the drawbridge, the one leading out into the meat grinder beyond.

Suri, Karalti, Gar, Rin and Lovelace battled at least twenty malformed humanoid things made of the black ooze that seethed around the drawbridge. I felt a flash of pain behind my eyes as I focused on one and my HUD brought up a tooltip: [Mirespawn - HP: 3400/6000] Suri was tanking in front, holding them off with AoEs as Karalti and Rin cast magic from behind, and Gar did his best to shoot any that broke through Suri's defense. They needed crowd control. Now.

"AHHHHH!" I Tarzan-yodelled and ran in, springing up into the air in a blur of brilliant pearly energy and flapping fun-time bits. Said fun-time bits suddenly got very tingly as I slammed down into the pack of [Mirespawn] with a mixed Light and Dark elemental version of Master of Blades. Lightning seared through them, ripping the more weakened horrors apart as I sprung from a seething puddle of mud back into the air. WIth the Pearl of Glorious Dawn active in the Spear, the shards of energy formed by Rain of Glass were searingly bright, crackling with jolts of blue electricity as fifteen of them spun into a cloud around my falling naked form, then poured down on the enemies below.

[You have killed Mirespawn! You have killed Mirespawn!]

[Mirespawn releases Death Burst! You take 1799 damage!]

As they died, each mud monster overcharged and exploded. One of them caught my naked form and flung me out of the air, hard. There was no armor to cushion the blow as I tumbled and then slammed to the ground, coughing. I flailed up Suri ran past me, putting herself between my fleshy slug self and the monsters. Her greatsword sliced one of them in half, sending both toppling to the ground, where they burst into bubbling tar. Another one, limping on a quarter health, froze solid as Rin cried out the words of a spell. Karalti darted in after it, fist raised.

"KIAAI!" She smashed her iron-shod knuckles into the face of the Mirespawn, shattering it. The rest of its body crumbled away. Others lurched forward, but my DPS had turned the tide. It wasn't long before Suri cleaved the last one in two, bracing behind a magical shield cast by Rin as it exploded. The shield flared with vivid blue light, soaking the Death Burst before collapsing.

[You gain 1024 EXP! Karalti gains 1024 EXP!]

As peace once more reigned across the land, Rin, Suri and Karalti all turned to me in concern as I peeled myself off the floor. Then Rin noticed I was still stark naked, shrieked as she covered her eyes, and spun right into Gar's chest as he'd been about to speak. The blow knocked the air from him and sent him staggering back a step.

Karalti held her hands up, and advanced slowly. "Hector... I know you probably don't remember anything-"

"I'm okay, Tidbit. Somehow." I planted the Spear against the ground and struck a noble pose, because if I was going to be naked, I wasn't going to be afraid.

Karalti paused, and blinked rapidly. “Wait. Really?”

"I’m just as confused about it as you are.” I shrugged. “Head is hardly even hurting, either. I don't know what changed, but something did... have a feeling it's whatever OUROS did to me a few deaths ago."

"Oooh. I remember your head didn't hurt when you learned Meewfolk, either." Karalti scratched her head as she cocked it to one side like a bird. "Which means... whatever happened must have been after you got your butt kicked by Ororgael that one time."

"Thanks." I made a face at her.

"You gonna put on some clothes, champ?" Gar scowled at me. "Because I'm already tired of looking at your dick."

"My dick is tired of looking at you, too. No hard feelings, though." I stepped behind Karalti, lay my hands on her waist to position her gently but strategically in front of my hips, and peered around at Rin. The Mercurion still had her hands over her eyes. "Hey, Rin, I'm censored now. Can I have my gear back?"

"S-Sure." She cleared her throat and sidled over, still not daring to look. The stuff from her Inventory manifested above her hands and tumbled to the floor, and then she scuttled away like a blue blushing crab.

"I swear that girl's never seen a cock in her life," Suri sighed.

"No, I haven’t! Not until just NOW! There's a reason I picked Mercurion for my race, okay!?" Rin called back over her shoulder.

Suri set her greatsword against the ground and leaned on it. "Because Mercurion blokes are all built like Ken dolls?"

"Yes! Among other things!"

Gar laughed hoarsely. "Other things? Wait: are you telling me they got a socket down there to hold whatever tools they want? Dildos? Or one of those rabbit vibes that spins around and lights up?"

Rin put her face in her hands. "Agggghh! First Suri and Hector, and now you're doing it! Why am I even friends with you guys!?"

Everyone - including Rin - laughed helplessly as I requipped my gear, sans underwear, and chugged a couple of potions. My boxers were stuck in the deathtrap maze. I had become the Commando Commander.

"Alright, so." Once the mirth had faded, I gestured at the maze with both arms. "That thing is impossible. Literally impossible. It's an actual meat grinder. There's no way through it."

"Bullshit." Gar scowled, ruffling his shoulders like an irritated crow. "Just because you went in there and died doesn't mean it ain't passable."

"Then you try it. Go ahead, big man. Be all you can be." I made jazzy hands at the ominously silent doorway.

"Fine, watch me. Puta." Gar pursed his lips, made sure his pistol was loaded, then marched off toward the drawbridge.

"The other entry to the maze is still an option," Suri reminded me.

"Yeah. But I want to watch THIS." I pointed at Gar's retreating back.

Gar's boots clumped across the wood as he headed for the door, holding the torch out ahead. He strode inside, pausing when the doors slammed closed. We heard a startled squawk, then cursing in both English and Spanish. The cursing got louder and then was ONLY Spanish... and then there was a blood-curdling scream that cut through the sounds of mechanical grinding, buzzing, stabbing and pounding from inside. I was about to quip something when the black mud began to bubble and seethe, and more [Mirespawn] emerged like zombies crawling out of the depths of the ocean... but these ones had red-tinged halos and weird, seething auras. The first wave didn't have a challenge rating, but these ones had single red skulls next to their names on the HUD. They were a higher level, and slightly higher leveled than we were. They also had 8000 HP instead of 6500.

"There has to be something we're missing!" I bounded forward as Suri took a turn to buff, flaring with a red crackling aura behind me. As I closed in on the nearest [Mirespawn], it threw an arm toward me and shot out three piercing tentacle-like claws. I dodged it, Jumped, and landed on it blade-first. The thing reeled back in agony. I landed and prepared to rush in to finish it off… only to feel my feet trapped from below. Vines of the same ropy slimy red-black substance wound around my feet from the floor, trapping them in place.

"Fuck! What is it about Matir and fucking tentacles!?" I twisted and turned the Spear as the [Mirespawn] lurched toward me, arms outstretched. As it did, an inky black mouth opened the whole length of its 'face', ebony fangs dripping with ichor. To my right, Suri was struggling with the same problem: entangled, with spawn closing in on all sides.

"They don't like light! Or fire!" I drove the Spear forward to keep the drooling oily jaws back just a second longer. It screamed silently as Light energy suffused its body, turning it incandescent before it exploded. The snap of light and plasma burst from it and struck others, sending them staggering. It gave Suri enough room to start hacking into them with massive, cleaving blows.

"HRRRAGH!" She snarled with effort as she drove one, then another to the floor. Rin had magical shields cast around Suri and herself: more stabbing tentacles flew out at them, but either struck the shields or Suri’s armor. "If we're missing something about this, I don't fucking know what!"

[Mirespawn] shambled toward me from all sides. One of them reached for me, but a bullet blew past and caught it in the face. Gar, staggering out into the melee with one hand over his crotch and the other clutching his pistol. I hadn't realized his gun was soul-bound.

The shot gave me the space I needed to leap. I grasped the Spear in both hands, raw power flowing through the the weapon from my fingertips to my back. For a moment, I felt like a spider at the center of a web of pure energy – energy that divided, forming a mandala of boiling Light that spread into twelve lances blazing with ghostly transparent flame. It was over in a second: the lances rained down on the shambling [Mirespawn], impacting them so fast they blew through them in bursts of crackling electricity. Brilliant white bolts of it rebounded back to me, slithering over my body as I burned the rest of my AP and triggered Rain of Glass. I flung the attack outwards with a cry: a rain of translucent, singing knives chased several of the spawn and shredded them apart. Death Bursts rumbled through the room. Suri took two, and one of them caught Karalti and sent her spinning… but as the vapor cleared, all of us were still standing. The room was covered in smoking mud.

[You have defeated Mirespawn! You gain 1344 EXP!]

While the others went to loot, I turned to Gar. "Right. So, you see what I meant when I said that thing is impossible."

"Yeah." Gar shoved his hands into his pockets, and gazed stonily toward the door to the murder maze. "If you really hit the gauntlet and ran, you might be able to make it a ways before you got killed. If it's short, we could run to the end, but... didn't sound short to me. Think you're right, and it's a dead-end."

"We're doing something wrong." I sighed, and ran my hand back over my hair. "Suri, me and Gar are going to go check out the other side of the maze. Rin, Karalti, can you start searching for hidden switches, doors, that sort of thing? Whatever you do, don't go into the maze."

"Sure!" Karalti rose, and held out something that looked both dangly and unpleasantly dead. "These guys have gross loot. I dunno if this stuff is even good for anything."

If Karalti said something was gross, it had to be pretty rank. She usually just crammed monster parts into her mouth. "Well... let's keep them for now. Might be good for alchemy or something. We'll be back in a minute."

"Don't get ground up by anything," Suri said with a snort.

Gar and I were both pretty conscious of that as we retraced our steps and explored. The right-hand path of the maze turned out to be a small dead end: a blank wall with the symbol of Matir emblazoned on a metal seal. I tried pressing my hand to it, bleeding on it, touching the torch to it, but it was completely unreactive. We retraced our steps back to the girls to find them still patting over every inch of wall.

"I don't see or sense any mechanisms at all," Rin said miserably, as we drew up beside her. "Was the other way safer?"

"There is no other way," I replied. "Dead end."

"Guess I'm next up for the kill room, then. Because we've found fuck all since we started looking." Suri rose from a corner and dusted her hands off. "If I boost my defense, I should be able to make a go at tanking it. And Gar: why're you still naked?"

Gar was, indeed, still extremely naked. He sighed testily. "Why'd you think? My gear's still in the fucking murder-maze."

The thought of Suri walking into that hot mess made me uneasy. I looked over to Karalti, who was using a stick to poke at the bubbling, unresponsible mud. "Karalti, you sense any magic we can't see?"

"Nuh uh." Karalti didn't turn around: she just shook her head. "Only magic thingies are the walls and the torches."

"Wait..." I looked to the torch I was carrying, the one that had miraculously spawned back in its holder in front of the maze. "We're in the Dragon Gate of motherfucking Darkness."

“… Yeah? Last time I checked we were, at least.” Suri gave me an odd sidelong look as I proclaimed the obvious. "You sure you're feeling alright, Hector?"

"Yes! I mean like... " I wheeled my arms and the torch around for a few seconds as my brain desynced from my mouth. "I mean that… why the fuck are there eternally burning torches conveniently waiting for us at the entry to a maze in the Gate of the Darkness element?"

Gar, still trailing just behind and to the side of me, opened his mouth for a moment. Then he closed it. "No mames… I should have spotted that."

"We can't do this maze WITH light. How the fuck are we supposed to handle that-" Suri flung an arm out, pointing at the death trap "-AND fight monsters in the dark?"

"If we all die, we'll come back, and the torches will be there." I shrugged. "It's worth a shot. The walls reacted to the Spear as I walked past them in the dark before, like they were pointing the way."

"It's... worth a shot?" Rin shrugged, wincing nervously.

"Yeah! I'm not afraid of no dark." Karalti bobbed back up to her feet. "C'mon, though. Let’s do something. I'm getting sleepy."

As one, we trudged back to the entry and returned our torches. The lights dimmed behind us as we stepped into the corridor, the light completely extinguished only a few steps from the threshold. I found a wall and held the Spear out, and sure enough, the whispering hiss of magic filled the air as the barely visible violet lines glimmered in the unnatural gloom. Karalti was right behind me, navigating through the Bond as the others tagged with her. Rin had her hand on Karalti's shoulder, followed by Gar and then Suri.

“Shoulda kept that black light torch,” Suri muttered to herself.

We emerged into the bridging room. In the dark, I noticed it was slightly warmer than the maze preceding it. The drawbridge would be right ahead... and the man-eating ginsu chamber beyond that. I followed the wall around to the left, looking for clues as I waved the Spear over the stone like a wand, but nothing appeared. The only clues in here were auditory. The drawbridge and the metallic floor beyond it would sound different to the stone we currently stepped on.

"I'm going to try it again." I drew a deep breath. "Not looking forward to it, but I'm going to try again. We'll see if the traps activate now. We'll go to the middle of the chamber: you guys form a defensive line and get ready in case the same shit happens."

"This'll be interesting." I heard the scrape and clink of Suri pulling her sword from her back.

By ear alone, I oriented on the bridge and crossed. It was worse than the first time, because now, not only did I know what to expect, but I couldn't see where the bridge ended and the killzone began. Creeping along only prolonged the agony, so once I heard the sound of the mud behind me, I put my head down, snorted like a horse, and ran until I felt the floor click under my feet. There was a whirring sound, like a gyro spinning deep within the structure around me... then nothing. No saw blades. No poison darts. Blessed, merciful nothingness. I paced forward a bit, patting around, but nothing activated. The doors behind me stayed open.

"We're good!" I called back. "It was the fucking torches!"

A few minutes later, the others joined me, and we began to fumble around in the maze. There were no guiding lines in here, nothing except the suffocating darkness. The covered box dulled sound and made conversation difficult, pressing in around us. After what felt like hours, we turned around after a dead end, and something caught my eye to the right. A glimmer, which manifested into a rippling blackfire sigil of Matir as I drew close with the Spear.

"Here's the real one. Thank fuck." I drew a steadying breath, and pressed my hand to the lock.

A pair of metal doors parted with a soft woosh, opening up into yet another vault of black nothingness. My Gift of Matir darkvision was still not doing anything for me, so I used the Spear like a cane, tapping forward and stepping out behind it. Wherever we were, there was the sense of being somewhere very, very large. The others shuffled in behind me. I could smell Suri's woody perfume to my left, Karalti's sweet, lotus flower and rain scent to my right. Rin and Lovelace followed up, then Gar. As he entered, the doors behind us shut with a resounding boom, leaving us alone in a void of space.

The rumble of Matir's heartbeat passed through the room. Faint, at first... then growing louder. As it did, a soft humming chorus filled the chamber. Strange, shadowy shapes began to pull out of the darkness ahead of us, fluttering like ghosts... I was pretty sure I was hallucinating as Matir's soft, whispering voice filled the chamber.

"Artisans, Warsinger, Paragons..." it breathed, flickering around us in all dimensions. "My Herald, and my daughter of the Black Sun. You have come so far, so fast. All of you have exceeded expectations. Yet before you dare change this world, one challenge remains. Prove yourselves to me, Triad of the Sixth Age. Prove to me you are worthy of the power you seek to take. Or perish eternally."