BT - Book 1 - Chapter 65

Trevor crouched Next to Micah just inside the door to the boss room.  The chamber was almost unnaturally large given the cave they’d journeyed through.  Micah could barely make out the ceiling, but the far end was flat out too far to spot anything given the dim lighting.

The chamber was modeled after a graveyard.  Tombstones jutted up out of dark soil as far as Micah could see.  Periodically, the partially obscured shapes of zombies shambled through the dark and misty expanses of the boss chamber.

Micah frowned, squinting slightly as he tried to make out the boss.  There wasn’t really any sound other than the magically generated wind blowing through the necropolis.  Trevor shifted slightly next to him.

“Where is it Micah?” His brother hissed, eyes flickering over the sparsely populated graveyard.  “All I see are goons and shadows.  We’re in a boss chamber, so where is the boss?”

Micah squinted for a second before summoning the Ageless Folio.  He’d only raided the Crypt of Rot a couple of times in his past life, and the final encounter had never stood out to him.  His lips moved soundlessly in the half light of the chamber as he read the notes he’d taken on a previous run.

Sighing, Micah closed the Folio before turning to Trevor and the animals.

“The boss is something called a cemetery titan,” Micah recited, biting his lower lip as he looked at the graves laid out before them.  “It literally is most of the battlefield.  Once we kill more than a handful of the zombies out there, it’ll appear on the battlefield.  Apparently, it’s skin and armor is the gravestones, and its muscle/sinew is formed from the dead tissue of the zombies shambling around the boss chamber.”

“And it just waits for us to kill a couple of monsters  before it forms up around us,” Trevor frowned at the shambling zombies.  “That sounds awfully like it’s supposed to catch you by surprise and trap you.  I’m not really sure I like the idea of fighting a boss that actually has a game plan.”

“Apparently it can literally fire zombies as projectiles,” Micah continued unhappily.  “The titan is about twenty to thirty paces tall, so fighting it up close is hard, but everyone that tries to back away from it gets swarmed with the minions it catapults at them.  Even if you can dodge the original strike, every miss creates a low level opponent that stops you from being able to flee and avoid the monster properly.  Worse, it can absorb almost any dead matter, including zombies, to heal itself.”

“Fuck,” Trevor spat ton the ground as he relied quietly.  “That really doesn’t sound pleasant.  Do you even think we can take it?”

“It’s just a bit over level thirty,” Micah shrugged slightly.  “If I empower the Luoca with haste and regeneration it should be able to wear it down up close while we finish off the zombies around it and burn their corpses.  I don’t think it can absorb ashes.  Afterall, I beat it in the last timeline.  It’s not like the thing is completely invulnerable.”

“I really don’t like that daemon,” Trevor glanced at the Luoca uncomfortably.  “It’s a perversion of the natural order, and even before you told me all of those horror stories about losing control of your rituals and having those things in your soul, I still wouldn’t trust them.  I can’t believe that the sixteen are okay with you playing around with that kind of cosmic terror.”

“I just have to keep it under control,” Micah’s eyes flitted over the barely concealed menace of the huge daemon.  “I got impatient last time.  Impatience and ritual magic don’t mix well.  Impatience and daemon summoning are even worse of a combination.  In the months since I’ve summoned it I haven’t grown horns or developed at taste for human kidneys.  I’m pretty sure that everything is fine.”

“Pretty sure he says,” Trevor shook his head, a hint of a smile hiding on the corners of his mouth.  “Just make sure that when you start wearing people as suits that you stay away from me.  I spend a fortune on keeping my skin properly moisturized.  I wouldn’t want that all to go to waste just because you want to turn my torso into a vest.”

“I’ll make sure to save you for last,” Micah quipped back.  Trevor’s trademark levity was coming back, even if he still looked a little upset over their talk regarding Claire.

“So Micah,” Trevor stretched, cracking his neck and shoulders.  “What’s the plan?  Do we run in there and just stab things with our spears until we can’t stab anymore, or are we going to put some more thought into it.”

“There,” Micah pointed to a mausoleum roughly in the center of the graveyard.  “I think that becomes the core of the cemetery titan.  It would make sense for the titan to form up around that building.  If you and I patrol the outskirts killing zombies, we can send the Luoca in right next to where the boss will spawn.  It will get a couple free attacks in after it starts to constitute itself, but before the titan reaches its final form.”

Micah jumped slightly as a cold wet snout pressed itself against the back of his neck.  He turned slightly, still a bit jumpy, to look at the stag.  It exhaled with an exasperated chuff.

“That is a good idea,” Micah nodded slowly.  “Actually that’s an amazing idea.  I can’t believe I didn’t think of that in the last timeline.”

“I have to ask,” Trevor shook his head slightly.  “At first I thought you were just really good at body language, but that can’t explain it.  Micah, can you actually understand what the deer is saying?  Is this some sort of telepathy, or am I just going crazy?”

“The ritual for telepathy is a lot of work,” Micah frowned slightly, cocking his head at Trevor.  “I could probably forge a connection between the stag and I but that would be days of research and a decent chunk of attunement.  It just doesn’t really seem worth the investment.”

“Okay,” Trevor visibly struggled with keeping himself calm.  “If you don’t have telepathy what just happened?  How did it just give you a plan?  Hells, what is the plan?”

“Simple,” Micah smiled, crooking a finger at the Luoca.  “We just send the daemon into the mausoleum itself.  When the cemetery titan awakens, the Luoca will be in the absolute heart of the beast.  All it has to do is rip itself out and we’ll be victorious.”

Trevor was about to say something, but he stopped.  He glanced at the Luoca and then at the mausoleum before looking back at Micah thoughtfully.

“If it can avoid getting crushed or magically purged when the boss is summoned,” Trevor agreed slowly, “that would probably be the easiest way to do it.  Still, how do we know that your daemon will survive the transition?”

“It’ll be fine,” Micah grinned mischievously, “when Luoca’s interact with ordinary matter, Luoca’s win.  I think the worst case scenario is that the daemon melts the boss’ heart after it wakes up and fuses the rock together, making us chip it out.  Now get ready.”

“But-” Trevor began only to see the Luoca move silently toward the center of the graveyard.  He glanced back at Micah, but the young boy was already on the move as well.

“Shit,” Trevor hissed before following his brother toward a pair of zombies shambling along the cavern wall.

A pair of thrusts later, each brother’s spear stroke crushing the skull of an undead, the reanimated corpses dropped to the cemetery floor.  On the other side of the boss chamber, the stag and the panther disposed of an undead of their own.

One minute later, another two zombies were disposed of as both pairs of combatants crept around the edges of the cavern.  In the center, the Luoca had killed four or five zombies before melting the door off of the mausoleum with its wings and crawling inside.

It was a strange sight, the human head of the Luoca just sticking out of the small crypt that could barely contain its gigantic insectoid body.  Micah rolled his eyes as the disinterested daemon laid down and closed its eyes.

He might not have the same connection to the daemons that he’d been afflicted with in a previous life, but Micah recognized the look of boredom on the monster’s face.  Unless the creatures were actively plotting or engaging in slaughter, the mortal world just seemed to bore them.

Micah snorted slightly as Trevor and him snuck up on another zombie.  Maybe there was something to his brother’s concerns.  The daemons’ sadism really didn’t lend itself to a ringing endorsement.

His spear blurred through the unsuspecting undead’s neck, dropping its head to the ground where the butt of Trevor’s spear quickly crushed it.  Still, as problematic as the daemons were, they represented raw and unfiltered power.  He might not be able to use them in the final fight with the Durgh Khan, but things weren’t going so smoothly that Micah could afford to turn up his nose at a tool he would need to get him to that point.

Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted as the chamber began to rumble.  Every zombie near the center of the boss room began to glow a deep red before they melted into a flurry of flesh and sinew that flowed toward the mausoleum.

Micah flinched as an explosion echoed through the room.  Then another.  One by one gravestones ripped themselves out of the ground with resounding cracks before flying through the air and slamming into the growing mass of flesh and stone forming itself in the center of the room.

“No need to be sneaky!” Micah slapped Trevor on the back before sprinting to the nearest zombie.

This time, the creature saw him coming and its face twisted into a feral snarl as needle claws sprung from its fingers.  It lunged for him, much quicker than any zombie Micah had ever seen.  Mentally, he reassessed the creature.  Ghouls.

His spear punched through its chest, shattering ribs and goring organs.  Micah pulled his weapon back, sawing slightly to the side in order to completely open the creature up.  It collapsed at his feet.  Ghouls might be an order of magnitude more powerful than simple and brutish zombies, but it would still take a mass of the things to seriously threaten him.

Micah frowned slightly as he quickly glanced around the boss chamber.  Now that the cemetery titan itself was assembling, the dim silver orbs spaced around the chamber flared to life.  Maybe he shouldn’t have rushed in so quickly.  Even with the titan consuming a huge number of the undead, there were a lot of them still roaming free.

Well, roaming wasn’t the best word.  They had been roaming before.  Now all of the free ghouls had stopped and were staring at the intruders with baleful milky eyes.

He began running toward the next undead.  As long as he kept moving, they wouldn’t be able to mob Trevor and him.

That didn’t mean that the ghouls weren’t trying.  Micah didn’t have even a fraction of his attention to spare for the center of the chamber.  Outside of loud thuds and some frankly disconcerting screams and wails, he had no idea how the Luoca was doing with the cemetery titan.

Silently, Micah lamented the loss of the burning tethers that he’d used in his last life to control the daemons.  He wanted to cast regeneration and haste on the Luoca, but both of those were touch spells.  Something he couldn’t exactly do from a distance.

Originally he hadn’t cast either spell because of their moderate and short duration respectively.  Micah had no idea when they would kill enough of the weaker undead to trigger the boss showdown, and he didn’t want the spells to run out of efficacy before the battle even began.

Unfortunately, Micah hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might not be in range to touch the Luoca during the battle.

Micah clenched his jaw, sending a pressure spear blasting through the torso of one ghoul while his actual spear crippled a leg.  The ravenous undead tried to roll toward him, clawing wildly at Micah’s ankle as he danced by.  Trevor ended the creature with a simple thrust empowered with his martial art.

Gasping for air, Micah dug deep into his physical reserves, widening the gap between himself and Trevor and the ghouls.  He whirled around and paled slightly.  There were hundreds of the undead, faces locked in snarls, chasing after the two of them at full speed.  On the far side of the chamber, the animals were leading their ghouls on a merry chase, easily outpacing them.

At least the cemetery titan appeared to be struggling appropriately.  The massive gravestone covered creature was a tripod, sporting three legs, each the size of Micah’s torso and three arms, each about half as thick but ending in massive spikes and maces made from shattered gravestones.

It was on its knees, two of its tentacles like arms clawing wildly at the mausoleum lodged in its chest while the third swung about wildly, knocking chunks of stone off of the ceiling as it groaned and thrashed.  Black ichor poured from the mausoleum as it shook and bucked in the cemetery titans bulbous torso.

“Why the fuck,” Trevor puffed, his eyes bulging out of his head as he ran past Micah, “are there so many zombies?”

“Ghouls,” Micah replied, spinning and pacing Trevor in a second.  There was something to be said for the enhanced body attribute of a physical focused class.

“Not,” Trevor shouted, not even looking at Micah, “my question.”

“It’s a party encounter,” Micah yelled back, frantically looking for a good spot to make a stand.  “We have a support caster, a melee fighter, a rogue and a deer.  All of my area of effect spells are low level or rely on poison, and I don’t think poison is going to do much against ghouls!”

“At least do that root thing,” Trevor was covered in sweat.  “It might not kill them but if we can damage their legs we can harry them from range and pick them off one by one.”

Micah nodded, spinning as he prepared to cast root spears.  He was just in time to see the mausoleum in the titan’s chest explode in a shower of dark energy.  Almost casually, the Luoca soared downward on its insectoid wings.

All of the ghouls stopped running.  Micah blinked.

A second later, one by one they began dissolving into ash.  He heaved a sigh of relief.  Even though the huge swarm probably couldn’t have killed him, Trevor was another story and undead were notorious for carrying hard to cure rots, hexes, and taints.

Across the chamber, a pillar of light ignited, immediately drawing Micah’s attention.  Then another lit the boss cavern.  Where their animal companions once stood, now there were two cocoons of pure energy throwing off a rainbow of color and power.

A smile lit up Micah’s face, almost as bright as the flares that marked the animals’ evolutions.

“Telivern,” Micah whispered the word, almost reverently.