Charnel House

I moved so fucking slowly in the direction of the exit. The abomination might be directly in front of the door, and I couldn't even be sure that it wouldn't see me as soon as I left the fog, but I just didn't have any other ideas at the moment. If I still had my fucking smartphone, I probably would have lit up its flashlight- even with the light giving away my position, I just felt so powerless because I couldn't cast any of my spells here.

I stopped. Wait, that wasn't actually strictly true. One of my spells did target not someone within my line of sight, but someone or someplace that I could imagine. It took twelve syllables to chant and I didn't have an immediate use for it aside from providing me a source of light, but it was something. I could remember the words. I had cast Conjure Pseudoportal successfully twice. I would have liked to fumble for my journal and ask for my companions to prepare a bright light, but both of my hands were full of my arcane tools, and I also didn't remember which page of the journal the Chat was on by heart.

I turned around and moved back towards the rear end of the cafeteria. It was always hard to tell in the middle of a high-stress situation, but I thought that the ten minute duration of the magical fog was likely coming to an end. The barrier was also definitely down. Probably. So I wanted to get back into the kitchen area, as far away from the monster as possible. I still heard it breathing far behind me, but I didn't expect it to stay there for long, once it realized that I wasn't going for the more obvious option.

Moving in pitch blackness, slowly, silently sweeping my staff in front of me, I moved away from the noise, more than I was attempting to actually orient myself in the dark room. I knew how impossible it was to walk in a simple straight line in pitch darkness without assistance, so I didn't even try. I would just try to hit the opposite wall, and then feel my way to the door, hoping it was still open. My progress was painfully slow, as I knew that not making any noise was far more important than speed, but it ended up taking so long that I started wondering what the extended hammering of my heart would mean for my long-term health. Ah, fuck it, I could just put some stat points in healthiness later if I lived through this.

My staff hit something again, and I held my other hand in front of me. My hand found empty air, and at first I thought I had hit another overturned desk or some other piece of debris, but as I took that tentative step trying to see if I could step over it I hit the wall. Of course. This was the window to the kitchen. I grabbed the bar, pushed myself on it in a sitting position and was just starting to slide over to the other side when I heard the abomination scream and launch several spikes. It must be able to see in the dark, and the fog spell must have just run out. I fell on to the other side of the kitchen window, and felt the impact right behind me.

For a brief second I noticed that the hole in the wall where the fridge had been was still visible. It was a rectangle of a darker shade of black, in the perfect, impenetrable blackness of the room around me. I didn't have time to think about it, as I started chanting the pseudoportal spell focusing on Artemis. With her Guild work she was the most likely of all of my allies to be in a well lit space. The incantation was insanely long, as I heard the stomping of the elephantine feet approaching me, but faster than it took for it to cross the whole cafeteria.

I completed the spell and was nearly blinded by the relatively bright light in the Lounge. Artemis' face went from surprise, to confusion, to a firm and determined pointing behind me, together with speech that didn't pass the pseudoportal made by the spell. I started chanting the greasefire spell before I rose and turned, and then I stood the monster was less than ten feet away from it.

But I had the first half of the spell finished, and so another pseudoportal to the elemental plane of grease or whatever burst open and I directed it at the monster's feet. Still under the effects of my curse it slipped and fell with a heavy thud and I repeated the first half of the incantation two more times before finishing it off with the second part.

Fire rained on the abomination and it screamed and hissed and burned. It is an unfortunate truth that, for a moment, broiling and burning flesh of any creature smells quite a lot like barbecue. It was standing up again, of course, but it wasn't launching any more of its spikes. I cast icicle after icicle after icicle at it as it stood, each bashing more of its scorched flesh away, and even as burning oil dripped off of its body it was somehow recovering its focus.

Then it began walking towards me again, and I realized in horror that it would easily climb through the kitchen window, it would still be on fire, and it would be grasping for me with its razor-spiked hands. I flashed back to my first time encountering a flame elemental, and once again, like every single fucking time that happened, I wasted several seconds casting the flame resistance spell by reflex. And by the time I was done, it was inside the kitchen with me.

I backed away from it, seeing Artemis' face, screaming with worry, firing an icicle after icicle, I was so much faster with them now, launching more than one per second. I hit once, twice, three times, before the creature slowed. Four, five, it made almost no progress and I was gaining ground between us. Six, seven, it was hurt, it was on fire, and covered in ice-shard cuts. Eight-

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Lurch

I vomited blood as my mana ran out and I cast an icicle spell from my hitpoints.

The creature was fucking nearly dead, but not nearly enough that I thought that the remaining two or three icicles I had in me before certain death were enough to bring it down. So, I was fucked. Again. I staggered, but managed to stay on my feet as I took steps away from the monster. I was out of mana. That meant that I was basically in the same state that I had been when I first encountered the monster. That meant that, at best, I should be running away screaming, and was most likely dead. I saw the body of the monster pulse and twitch, as some of the remaining spikes on its upper body moved, as if it was trying to fire them, but, for some reason, couldn't.

I guess I had been thinking of them as pneumatic, and pneumatic projectile launchers did require compressed gas. Maybe it was out? It didn't really fucking matter, did it? I was being backed into a corner, and it could easily take me apart with its hands even if it wasn't covered in sharp spikes of various lengths and materials. Blisters and burns had joined the otherwise already horrific visage of the monster, but it had apparently already launched its face-spikes, leaving a trypophobic array of raw meat holes where its face should be- but there were eyes in between some of the holes where the eyes should be.

It was upon me by the time I had finished internalizing its face situation. I dodged the first few of the wide sweeping grasps, but it was just too close, and it grabbed me with both hands around the top of my chest and began squeezing.

I. Was. Going. To. Die.

A spike of adrenaline came to me, a last-ditch effort of my body to keep itself alive, my mind running through all of the tools I had at my disposal. The rod? Useless. More spells? Not strong enough to break the painful grasp. Abilities? Mostly utility.

I saw a look of pain and horror on Artemis' face, and I remembered another tool. I was cursed by a devil from hell. I could multiply the suffering of a thinking creature, in order to empower my spells and recover my mana. My first thought was, of course, not to hurt Artemis. Her pain was merely a reminder that I had the ability. I focused on the curse and on the monster holding me, and it did nothing. Then I thought about Artemis. I knew that she would understand- her pain could give me a boost, it would be temporary and probably not harm her permanently. I had almost convinced myself, reaching for the infernal power radiating from the brand on my skin, when I considered another possibility.

Artemis was not the only suffering creature I could see that could think, if not very well. The monster was squeezing slowly- the strength in its fingers was immense, and I had seen it move faster than I could run but it was, what? Enjoying itself? Whatever, I focused on myself. I activated the curse. I felt quite clever about it- infinite mana hack, so long as I was already hurting, which was basically half the time anyways.

I should really have expected what came next. First, every other smell in my nose and lungs was burned out instantly by an explosion of sulfur. It burned like a motherfucker, and I thought that that might be as bad as it got, but then all of my wounds felt like boiling acid had been poured into them. I hadn't had much acid in my wounds before, only a bit of lemon juice here or there. So, multiply that by a hundred and make it boiling and apply it to all my wounds. That was the feeling. It was too much to comprehend or bear, but there was something in the infernal curse that briefly expanded my mind just as it brought me to the edge of what I could tolerate, moving the goalposts of my pain tolerance until I experienced an exquisite enlightenment of pain. It should have been distracting, and it should have been exhausting, but for a brief moment after the worst of it passed, it felt like a dose of hypercharged ammonia in my nostrils. Uncomfortable, painful, disgusting and an absolutely fucking instantaneously waking me up to full alertness.

I trusted the curse and I launched an icicle at the face of the monster. Block-shaped, not sharp, and the block of ice exploded out from the portal at a speed I could have sworn was faster than it had ever done before, and covered in a thin layer of black soot, slamming into the face of the monster holding me with the force of an anvil. Many cracking noises followed- of bone, of ice, of keratin horn and, as the lumbering behemoth fell on its ass, kitchen tile.

It let me go as it fell back, and I dropped two feet to the floor, and I nearly collapsed. My chest was soaking with blood from dozens of tiny wounds, as my lungs struggled to gasp in air around certainly bruised and probably broken ribs. Still, I managed to stay standing long enough. I didn't know how much mana the curse had restored, but as I saw the creature once more struggling to get up, I cast the grease-fire spell over its head once more.

Choking, steaming, screaming all the way down, the monster finally started to slow down its twitching movements. The bone behemoth struggled weakly towards me, throwing a few half-hearted spikes towards me with a flick of its hand as it died. The razor-like spikes detached and flew out of its hand, and it did hit me, though with every other wound in my body still burning from just the memory of the curse, the few additional shards of metal truly barely registered.

And then it stopped twitching. Instantly, I heard the familiar scratching coming from my Journal. I was still standing. I hadn't expected that. Slamming a knife with both my legs and arms broken as we both went down in a bloody mess was honestly more what I had expected. But it was done.

And as the monster collapsed to the floor, it began rotting away. It happened in front of my eyes. I don't know why, none of the other monsters that I had killed in the Tower before had rotted into a puddle, but it was the Tower. I could hardly be expected to predict what sort of odd ways it would act. For a moment the smell became unbearably disgusting, even through my sulfur-burned nostrils, but almost as quickly the smell receded, as the body- and, in fact, all the meat an organic matter in the cafeteria- rotted away, swiftly passing through stages of decomposition until only dust remained and then that was gone too.

The light of my fire flickered. Then went out. Then the pseudoportal followed.

Bzzzt

One by one the fluorescent lights of the cafeteria came back to life. I was looking at the cafeteria as I had first seen it. With the exception of a chest made out of meat and bone at the very center of the room.

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