Two Fleshweeper Shoggoths moved into the alley, their limbs gliding unnaturally as dozens of tentacles propelled them forward. The C-Rank monsters were on our tails, and with the accretion disk setting, fighting them in the curving main street would only result in more specters being hit and disintegrated.

But that wasn't the only reason to stay off the main street.

In the handful of minutes our retreat from the burning inn had bought us, Yasmin and I had enacted our plan.

So, when the Shoggoths slid into the alley, they hit my lightning trap Binding first. It rooted the first one in place as electricity coursed through its tentacles, almost seeming to unravel the facsimile of a woman. Its chest and stomach came apart for a second.

Ellen threw an Orb of Darkness into the gap. It slammed home, and the Shoggoth screamed in its grating monotone.

"Keep retreating," I hissed at Jeff and Yasmin. "We can't fight them in a stand-up brawl."

Yasmin nodded. She ducked low and disappeared behind a low wall as she crept down a flight of narrow, winding stairs. Her Mana was almost completely spent; she'd used it all on the myriad of traps the alley was packed with.

The traps weren't there to kill the Shoggoths, though.

Jeff shook his head. "I leave when you do."

"You're being an idiot," Ellen said. "Go clear that basement with Yasmin. We'll be right there."

He flushed red, but the second Shoggoth slid onto a Binding that sent a single spiked rod of iron up into its body, impaling it in place. I started counting down from ten. By the time I hit six, Jeff was falling back.

At zero, Yasmin's binding faded. The monster had adjusted its entire body around the spike, and when it disappeared, the thing fell awkwardly to the side. Its body caught itself on a dozen tentacles, and it kept sliding down the alley toward us without standing up.

"Time to go," I said quietly.

Ellen nodded, and we retreated—carefully avoiding a pair of lightning trap Bindings and another spike trap. The alley wasn't designed to kill the Shoggoths, but we'd picked our traps carefully; none of them cut, slashed, or ripped. The last thing we needed was more enemies we couldn't kill, and they seemed to reproduce through cuts.

Sure enough, the lead Shoggoth hit another spike trap, then the second found a pit that took nearly a minute to escape from. By the time they reached the top of the narrow staircase, Ellen and I were at the bottom. We ducked inside—just in time to watch Jeff kill a long, wide flap of flesh that had blended in with the floor. Yasmin had a triple band of suction marks around her torn-off sleeve. Blood oozed out of the center of each mark.

"Sorry," Jeff said.

"Later," Yasmin hissed. "I missed it, too. Remember the plan."

The three of them ran across the candle-lit room to the far door, while I settled in at the closer of the two. They were narrow, but thick—oak and portal metal. And the basement itself had a wooden ceiling supported by pillars. As they ran, Yasmin activated one final Binding and placed it to the left of the door, giving me a narrow space to squeeze through.

Then it was just waiting.

The two Shoggoths squeezed through the narrow doorway. I readied my dueling blade, then stepped in front of them. A tentacle lashed at me, but I fired a single Zephyr at my attacker, then shifted stances as I backpedaled.

Then I activated Gustrunner.

Yasmin had loaded me up with every movement speed buff she had, and I'd done the same. The wind whistled past my head as I ducked around the two horrors and slammed the door shut behind me; I cut a rope, and a massive crate fell from where we'd precariously balanced it. The monsters pounded on the door.

If our timing was right…

Yep. Ellen's spell hit the lead Shoggoth, and I heard her voice yelling something muffled. A second later, the far door slammed.

I took off in a dead sprint, heading for the top of the stairs, and turned left, further down the alley. Right now, I needed distance before Yasmin's Binding went off.

I turned onto the next street, ran past a swarm of Shift Souls, and turned left a second time. With all my buffs, I got to the other side of the building we'd ducked into just as Jeff led the team out. "Did it work?" I asked.

Yasmin shrugged. "They're stuck, and the Binding fired, but I'm not sure if the building's going to burn."

The trap had been simple: bait the Fleshweeper Shoggoths into the alley, then into the basement. The doors were thick enough to block them, and we'd rigged up barricades to keep them pinned—hopefully. Then, Yasmin's oil slick Binding would go off once they were stuck, hitting the candles around the room and turning the basement into a furnace. That would, ideally, be the end of the Shoggoths. But even if they survived, it'd buy us time—time we needed to link up with the GC team.

"Only one thing we can do," I said. "Let's keep moving. Our target's around here somewhere."

We hurried through the twisting streets, which had stopped simply turning. The further in we got, the more like an MC Escher drawing the portal world got. At one point, I found myself fighting a squid-headed corpse with a spear upside down, while the rest of the team followed the helix street around its loop.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

None of the rules of this world made sense. Or, rather, they probably did, but not to us.

The team was close, though. A half-finished chapel with a single squat tower loomed in front of us, its front door caved in. It reminded me a little of the cathedral we'd fought Lorak the Desecrator in, but unlike the medieval-esque building, this one's stained glass depicted bloody sacrifices, women dancing around a greenish fire, and symbols that seemed to crawl across the lead frames and colored panes, making my eyes swim.

The outside wall had half-collapsed around the door frame, covering the right side in a mound of rubble twice as high as my head. As he closed in, a tremor shook the cobbles below our feet, and dust filled the air.

"In here," I said. My danger sense had been increasing as we got closer. "They're probably in trouble in there."

Jeff stood at one side of the door. He peeked around the corner. "I think we're in for it here," he whispered. "It's a brute."

I stood behind him and took a look.

Tremblemonger: C-Rank

It was, in fact, a brute. The monster was an octagonal pillar of black stone polished to an almost mirror shine, with a single, massive tendril of flesh wrapped around it. The tentacle bunched around its base, growing thinner as it reached up toward its top, which almost touched the chapel's pointed-arched ceiling. It lifted the pillar up, then slammed it down. The building shook, and stone bricks fell from one of the windows as the stained glass shattered. A muffled scream echoed and then cut off from the top of a narrow spiral stair in the corner.

The impact also blew me off my feet. Jeff rode it out, but even with his armor and bulk—and with the wall's protection—he was forced two steps back.

Stamina: 271/330, Mana: 201/430

That'd be plenty. We needed to kill this thing before the tower came down. I rushed the Tremblemonger, stabbing at the flesh tendril. The battle trance came over me. My sword's blade punched into the monster. Yellow-green bile spewed out as the tendril burst like an overfilled balloon. It burned; I wiped it out of my eyes with one hand and sliced a thin cut in the monster with my sword.

Shadow Boxing ripped across the Tremblemonger. It spun shockingly gracefully, and Ellen's Unique skill gouged grooves in the stone; screams echoed as her skill chipped at it. Jeff had taunted it, and for a moment, it locked onto him. The pillar swung, and Jeff braced himself.

The bracing didn't matter. The pillar had to weigh five or six tons, and it caught him, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him into a wall that came apart from the impact. Worse, the screams had stopped—but the tendril I'd wounded seemed to have healed itself.

He shook off the blow as I switched to my casting stance, poured my remaining Mana into a Slicing Bolt, and doubled it with Lightning Strikes Twice. The razor-sharp wind-and-lightning spell shammered into the tendril. It flailed uselessly as even more bile and blood erupted from the twin wounds—one on top of the other in an 'X' pattern.

The Tremblemonger came apart as the tendril ripped itself into two under its own weight. The massive stone pillar seemed to hang in the air for a moment. Then it hit the ground.

And the chapel shook. Its floor cracked, and a fracture ran up from the door to the arched ceiling. Bricks and stones rained down around the Tremblemonger as the damaged tendril wrapped itself around the pillar and slowly lifted it up again.

I was halfway up the stairs before it hit the ground. I'd heard that scream earlier; this had to be where the GC team was. Reddish light poured in through a shattered wall, and I slammed face-first into another blood-red specter that disintegrated without even slowing me. The rest of us could finish off the Tremblemonger. I had a team to evacuate.

The tower shook beneath my feet; I put a hand on the wall to steady myself, and it felt warm against my palm. Then I kept going. A door stood in front of me. I kicked it, and when it didn't open, I yelled at the top of my lungs. "Rescue's here! Open up and get moving!"

It took a second, but the door opened; I stared at the halberd in my face as the fight slowly lowered it. "Did you think I was lying?"

"Yes," the man with the weapon muttered. "This place is awful."

The Tremormonger's pillar hit the wall, and the tower's outer wall came off. Rubble crashed into the street below. "No time to explain. Get moving!"

"Got it," a man with, of all things, a violin in his hand said. "Let's go."

The violin-wielder and the fighter pushed past me and down the stairs as the chapel continued to collapse around us, but one person stopped as her eyes met mine. She stared for a second. "Kade?"

I shook my head and pointed at the stairs. A few steps had already fallen away and lay on the floor below, and the stairwell was choked with dust. "Not now. Later."

She nodded, in shock, and kept going.

There were only three left.

Arturo—whose Unique skill, Song of Battle, had pigeonholed him into the support role—had taken over from Dan Trent when the tank had died fighting a swarm of Shift Souls and a Shoggoth. April Schmalz hadn't died. Not exactly. She'd been infested with something, and nothing Sophia or the rest of the team could do fixed it. They'd locked her in a building somewhere. And their last member, Hailee, had escaped.

Douglas, the halberdier, shrugged. "At the time, we figured the best chance of her surviving was to clear the portal and get her help on the other side—assuming she's not a monster now."

Jeff nodded. His eyes were hard, and he wouldn't meet my gaze. I knew he was furious, though; we'd set out to rescue the team and lost almost half of them before we'd even made contact. He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off.

"Jeff, we'll have time when we get the survivors out, but for now, we need to stay focused. Linking up was our first goal. Now, we need to track down the miniboss, then clear the portal's boss."

"Right," he managed to grind out through his clenched jaw.

"Arturo, we should group up together. We've got a mage, tank, support, and striker. That'd give us a balanced team of seven to work with," I said.

The man paused in the middle of re-stringing his instrument. Then he shook his head slowly. "I can't speak for them. This is our first portal clear together, and she's not supposed to stick with us afterward. She's a hospital carry." Something about how he said it sounded derogatory, and my grip tightened on my sword. "I'll go with you, though. Best chance we have of getting out of here."

"I'm in as well," Douglas said.

I turned toward Sophia. She, Yasmin, and Ellen were talking in the corner; her eyes looked shell-shocked, with the thousand-yard stare in them. They were in the middle of saying something to her, but we couldn't afford to wait. I walked over, knelt, and put a hand on her shoulder. "Sophia, we've got to clear this portal. Otherwise, it'll break, and what happened to your team here will only be the beginning. Can you keep going?"

Sophia's arms hugged her once-white robes around her knees as she sat on the floor. They were covered in red, yellow, and brown-gray filth now. She wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Sophia?" I asked.

Ellen stared at me. Then she looked away as Sophia's arms came off her knees and wrapped me in a hug. Her tears wet the side of my face. I patted her on the back awkwardly. "It's alright. We've got you now. We're just going to track down the portal's bosses, and then we'll be back in Phoenix, and you won't have to do this anymore."

I hoped it'd be that easy, but I doubted it.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.