Dungeon Item Shop - Chapter 399: Sludge (Patreon)

Everything shakes, rumbling and quaking as a gloopy, fetid, wet mass presses itself out from beneath the crust of the world. Thick, viscous black ooze shoots out between the cracks in the paved streets, spraying out through the breaking foundations of the houses like pus from a deeply infected wound, held under pressure.

Fresh flies up a few feet more into the air, looking around at the sinking city around herself, bathed in the light of the witches’ moon. It looks like Perchta is making her move.

“Hey!” Someone calls from down below. Fresh blinks, looking at the person. A dark-elf stands there on some rocks, waving towards her with both arms. “Help! Please!”

Fresh tilts her head, looking at the stranded elf. She seems familiar. The witch narrows her eyes, thinking for a moment about who she could be. “Ah!” She has a realization, remembering who the stranger is. “Hi!” she waves excitedly. This is one of Veli’s friends. She looks around herself, wondering where the fairy is. She hopes that he’s okay. She likes Veli and while it’s sad that he’s outgrown them, she still considers him as someone she cares about. “How’s it going? How’s Veli?” asks Fresh, hovering down towards the elf. She looks around, watching as the remnants of their shop and home crumble apart, splashing into the growing stream of sludge that has now consumed the entire street. “The neighborhood’s really gone downhill, huh?” she jokes.

Fresh blinks. Maybe that was insensitive? She’s always so bad at these things. She hopes the stranger isn’t offended, she wouldn’t want her to tell Veli that she had made some tasteless remark.

Suddenly, something grabs her leg. “Hey! Let go!” snaps Fresh. The broom wobbles as the stranger yanks on it, trying to pull her down lower. Fresh tries to shake her off, but the stranger is clambering on to the shaft of the broom. “It’s not strong enough to hold two people!” yells Fresh, trying to keep her balance as the broom wobbles around back and forth, struggling to stay in the air. “Stop!”

The dark-elf isn’t listening, grabbing onto Fresh and the broom, trying to pull herself up. Fresh slides sideways, clamping her legs together and locking them together over the top, so that she doesn’t fall off of the broom.

She looks down below herself, staring at the black-water only inches from her face. She sees no reflection inside of it. “Let go!”

The broom lowers down closer to the sludge and Fresh panics, not knowing what else to do, she grabs the woman’s leg and bites into it as hard as she can. Something screams in pain and she feels something strike her hard against the back of her head.

(Fresh) has bit (???) for {5} DMG !

Applied Status: Grappled

152/157

(???) has struck (Fresh) with her fist for {6} DMG !

Applied Status: Dazed

36/42

Fresh yanks herself away in surprise, her legs still clamped around the broom, her hands still wrapped around the dark-elf’s leg from when she just bit it. Everything’s a jumble and a second later, there’s a splash.

Fresh pulls herself back up, looking through dizzy eyes as the woman kicks and flails, spluttering as she swims, her body submerged beneath the water as if the five inches of obscured road were now as deep as the ocean. She screams, splashing and flailing, her hands and arms striking against the rocks of the ruins as she tries to climb up, smashing her fists bloody against broken glass and metal in a frantic terror. Blood sprays everywhere from a cut on her wrist, as she tries to grab onto a broken window.

The woman lurches, letting out a wet noise and then, she’s quiet.

Fresh covers her mouth, looking as the dark-elf’s head flops lifelessly to the side. Her mouth opens, falling slack as something crawls through it. Small, inky tendrils creep out of her lips like the roots of a black fungus, like a pair of hands, grasping her cheeks so that whatever is behind them can pull itself out of her throat and as her mouth falls open, in that second before she sinks down beneath the surface of the water, Fresh is sure that she can see a single, jaundiced yellow eye, staring out from inside of it.

The elf-vanishes, sinking away beneath the murk.

Fresh wipes her face on her sleeve, rubbing away her tears and rubbing the back of her head for a moment as she watches the water. Deciding it’s best to keep her distance, for obvious reasons, Fresh hovers up higher.

She hopes that Veli isn’t going to be sad about this.

More importantly, she hopes that her friends are okay. Basil should be fine, given where she is right now. But Jubilee and Shamrock are certainly stuck on the ground, for better or for worse.

Should she go outside and take the red-wizard’s flying boots? Jubilee could wear them and then Shamrock, well, he’d have to leave his armor behind. But they could make it work somehow.

Fresh frowns, looking towards the east.

There isn’t anything there to see. The fighting has stopped. There aren’t any explosions, there aren’t any screams, there’s just… nothing.

The hairs on her neck stand on end as she looks around the city, realizing that it isn’t just the east that is quiet. Apart from some smoke, rising to the sky, there is nothing to see anywhere. There aren’t any sounds either, no screams, no fighting, no worried voices or people planning things or talking about this or that, no growls of monsters or quakes of destruction, caused by powerful spells. Not even the wind moves through the city, leaving her surrounded by the total sensation of void, except for the unnervingly loud striking of her heart and the ringing in her head.

Fresh holds her hand over her chest, trying to slow her breathing down.

The black-water continues to rise, reaching the elevation of where their windows used to be on the ground floor and now, as the city is consumed by a lifeless, colorless ocean, Fresh sees something moving beneath its surface.

She sees many somethings.

The water ripples and moves, like the body of the real ocean, pushed back and forth by waves. But the disturbances here that she sees aren’t waves. The black-water flows in one direction, the current of unspeakable things washing towards the only part of the city, untouched by the chaos and destruction, until now; the southern end.

And with the flow, the thing that looks like the ripples of a streaming current, are just long, warped, distorted faces that appear as if they’ve been grabbed in their eye sockets are being yanked away into the depths, their screaming visages being torn towards a point of convergence by long, gangly, greedy, witchy fingers. Despite the torment on their faces, the faces of the many, of the every who have been consumed by the black-water, not a single peep can be heard throughout the entire city.

The black-water hasn’t just taken the people of this city, the humans and the elves of all kinds and the orcs, it has taken the monsters too. The kobolds, the mush-mushes, the undead, the goblins, anything and everything that could be taken, has been taken.

There’s a reason that the south wasn’t attacked.

Fresh hovers higher into the air, looking as the flow of souls, as they all come together into a twisted, gnarled mass in one black pool, centered around a single, small shrine which now that it has been disturbed, now that the fabric and the ornaments have been ripped away by violent forces, appears to be a simple fountain.

Each side of the city was attacked by the dungeon from that direction and the dungeon to the south was home to the entity which now makes its move; Perchta.

A face appears in the water, dozens of houses falling into a sinkhole as it emerges. It is a twisted, misshapen thing, like a skull that has been stomped dozens of times over, it’s flatten and squished and its features are broken and wrong, its vocality is the first noise that breaks the deafening silence.

It screams, as a thousand lashing tendrils, dotted with another thousand gangrene eyes, shoot out of the cold, empty sludge, thrusting out of its mouth, out of its eyes like worms rising from an unburied corpse.

All of them look her way.