Chapter 43: Keep these chucklefucks alive

Cy casts as many empowered [Ensnaring Roots] spells as he can, dragging the roots through deep stone, not magically begging or convincing the plants to dig where he asks but demanding.

He weaves a net in the holes and tunnels surrounding them, making the obsidian and loose stone dome look like dropped swiss cheese being swarmed by ants at a picnic. Ants that are really fucking big.

Cy spares a glance at Mato as the old man pulls bolt after bolt from the little black pouch at his side, wondering for a single moment where the geezer got all the bolts, and instantly regretting it as another of the black chitinous insects chews through his roots like its only tissue paper. He thrusts out an arm, feeling heat flow through it from his chest like boiling blood bursting from his veins.

The air superheats in a line from his fingertips and explodes with a pop, bursting open shells in the conga of crawling mouths that fill the tunnel. Their corpses also work as a blockade.

Cy tries to think over the din. The smashing and grunting, the fleshy whirring of the bugs’ mouths, the twanging hand crossbow, the shouting orders, Izzy's roaring guitar— it's all very overstimulating. But he's been in far worse scrapes, so he half-assedly dissociates and manages to get a thought in edgewise.

Stone only slows them. Wood doesn't bother them. They chew through anything in their way though, so…

Cy focuses. He mentally marks the criss-crossing roots strung across most of the tunnels surrounding the major breach and lining the dome. One, then a dozen disappear as bugs chew through them, and he acts fast to have as many as possible.

He subtly points at each of his allies, casts [Heat Shield] on each of them, and speaks a skill.

“[Immediate Superheat].”

The roots burst and pop as their internal moisture reaches pyrolysis, killing any bugs nearby, but the thicker roots “survive”, their outsides bursting into flame as their insides evaporate and turn into little bombs of pressure and heat. The wood screams with gasses— and Cy sighs as he comes to grips with the fact that he just lost a lot of goodwill with the nearby flora, and won't be getting any more help from the local plants any time soon.

A crawler, braver than its sisters, charges through a steamy tunnel and comes into contact with one of the roots. Mouth wide, it attempts to simply bulldozerly chew through— and a bubbling puddle of black goo and steaming vapor adds to the obstacles in the tunnel. Even chitin melts.

With the flanking threats taken care of, Cy breathes, and refocuses on the group, holding the tunnel widened into a full breach admirably. It seems like the group is starting to form a default strategy; Izzy buffing the group and forming walls to funnel monsters towards Demarcus, who holds the opening with everything he's got as Mato snipes the most dangerous threats or the ones that manage to get past Demarcus.

In his opinion, they're putting way too much on Demarcus as their only frontliner, and they kinda suck at dealing with swarms and large groups. Those situations are usually where a [Mage] comes in— Cy could just superheat the adjacent tunnel and cook them all alive— but that's not his job. He's just here to keep these chucklefucks alive and leveling.

Which is also why he debates telling Izzy the important bit he realized once the first 10 bugs became 100. He examines his surroundings for any new tunnels, and makes up his mind.

Cy taps the wailing bard on the shoulder where she half sits against a leaning stone and yells over the noise.

“Hey Iz!”

“What?!” She yells back, teeth grit, and her voice accidentally coming out like singing.

“They navigate through vibration, so your playing is kind of a beacon!”

“Shit!” Izzy yells, cutting off her playing.

Her [Walls of Sound] fall and Cy feels the grim rage and determination leave him and his muscles untense as her [Song of Spite] ends.

Bugs flood through the breach, and Demarcus is briefly overwhelmed, taking a few heavy hits from their forelegs onto his chest and a whirring mouth scraping up his armored elbow.

Izzy quickly resumes, playing off the pause like a dramatic rest.

“Ugh! Should I stop playing?!” She asks Cy.

Cy unhelpfully shrugs.

“Up to you! Might be better to bring them all to us while we've got a chokepoint! You're here to clear them out anyways!”

She keeps playing, which Cy gives a nod of approval to.

Cy stands there, appraisingly, and fires a [Stone Spear] into a breakaway crawler that got past while Mato was reloading. When the flying stone stalagmite fails to do much harm to the creature designed to eat stone, he finishes it off with an old, reliable [Firebolt].

Cy sighs, bored.

Demarcus shouts something lost in the music and Mato bursts forward, taking wide sweeps with his knives, his curved kukri doing its job as a reaping tool and slashing through the horde of bugs before him.

Cy picks a bit of dust out of his ear with a pinkie.

Izzy starts to sing, and it's something probably pre-written; a bit more structured and thought out than her improvised lyrics and not quite relevant to the situation. It's just a chorus she then plays around, but it's good. Got that punchy ‘fuck you, I'm perservering’ vibe that's really fitting for [Song of Spite].

Cy takes a break from listening to summon some water in a new side tunnel that a crawler breaks through, and superheat it, making it untraversable for the bugs.

Mato and Demarcus are uncoordinated in close quarters together, slightly hunched. Demarcus’ big wind up swings force Mato to jump back, and an injured crawler gets through the opening, breaking for Izzy. Cy readies his Pokin’ Stick but holds back as Izzy kicks the bug with her good leg.

The insect gets pushed back and its legs flail. A piercing foreleg stabs out to steady itself, and slashes across Izzy's other leg in a graze. She cries out in pain as her wounded leg is worsened, irritated flesh torn open and pushed aside by a new wound, and blood pulses beneath her bandages.

Cy smacks the bug back as the [Wall of Sound] skill fails, and the swarm of crawling black masses burst forth.

Cy curses an ‘oh shit’ as he begins readying an appropriate spell, the temperature already rising in the room as he takes an impossibly deep breath— but his sound is lost as Isabella pivots.

The [Punk Rocker] cries in pain, and her playing falters, but— unbidden— her mind goes back to those lessons her father drilled into her head. Every time she was losing her mind, when her heart was breaking, when she felt she could tear down the sky in righteous fury or hopeless frustration— he taught her how to show him. How to use it. All art has pain in it.

Her cry of pain, broken with breath, takes on a different tone as she sucks in air. Her scream is in tune with her and the world, hitting that resonant frequency of heart and pain. She lets it all out, and it begins to die with just how damn tired she is— and doubles back down to show how that doesn’t matter. The guitar comes back in sibilant screams, resounding out, few and far between. The power of it is not I'm the notes played, but the notes not played— each absolute chord demanding its space and time, defying any notes played between to not besmirch this moment, and giving the scream above it direction and anticipation.

[When There's Nothing Left to Sing, Scream].

When her eyes open, she sees the group frantically bashing in the heads of bugs fallen and writhing. The coal crawlers begin to twist and right themselves, and in the silence she hears the group loudly shouting over each other, the words getting jumbled but— she gets the idea.

Don't stop.

Izzy’s most powerful skill bursts from her heart and pours from her mouth as a melodic scream, perhaps unintentionally adding in [Disorienting Wail], and her friends get to work.

At first, they fell, same as the bugs; disoriented, shaken, and nearly throwing up. Mato and Cy recovered first, while Demarcus’ brain got painfully massaged in his vibrating metal helmet.

Mato rights himself, strangely resistant to the disorientation— unaware that is thanks to his [Greater Proprioception]. He fights for another second or two before his vibrating eyeballs can recognize the insects writhing and dying around him.

While Mato stands and fights, Cy does what any [Mage] would do, and casts a localized [Silence] spell on himself. He takes in the situation, casts the same on Demarcus, then Mato, and while the two set to work doing their underhanded coup de graces, Cy isolates the spell around their ears and away from their mouths— which is just good practice when you're only using [Silence] to not hear something.

Demarcus feels a second wind of inspiration and vigor as he kicks the bugs while they're down, too busy curb-stomping oversized blender ants to reflect on the ethics or efficacy of his [Fight Dirty] skill.

Izzy's voice grows hoarse as they work their way out of the obsidian dome, but she plays on, limping behind them. They enter the attached tunnel the bugs spewed forth from, and grimly set to work like farmhands, walking down row after row of fallen bugs, severing heads like harvested pumpkins— or just smashing them. Each step feels resistance that their boots burst down past as they squish through exoskeleton.

As time scrapes on— 10 seconds being an eternity when holding a scream or fighting for your life— more and more of the crawlers die. Most die from the sheer sound, sensitive as they are to vibration, and the survivors that were either made of hardier stuff, further away, or managed to tear their antennae off, are finished by steel and leather.

Izzy sucks in a breath, panting, and is halfway through contracting her throat and squeaking out the beginnings of another scream when Mato seizes her shoulder.

“It's alright! You can stop! We're good! It's alright. It's alright.”

He has to repeat himself several times for her to understand, lost in the haze of pain and fury, and then several more to comfort her as the buzzing adrenaline drains from her body.

Mato looks up from where Izzy collapses against a wall, slumping down to the ground now sticky with hemolymph. He shouts over to Demarcus and Cy, double-tapping the bugs still in one piece and examining a wooden support beam, respectively. Mato calls out to them.

“Anyone else injur—”

In the deep dark, the ground sunders.

Farther in the tunnel, past the flickering light of Cy’s spell, something colossal makes itself known in the darkness through an explosion of sound and stone, scattering bodies, and a horrible silhouette.

The tired and bloody fighters stare at that moving shadow, stunned for a moment by their bestial instincts praying that this thing will just pass them by in the night. But the moment of frozen fear passes when that shadow shifts, entering the light like a nightmare walking into reality.

Smooth shell covers legs like inner city trees, not black but charcoal grey. Additional legs sprout from additional segments of an insectoid body, thundering in syncopated rhythm as they find their balance, pulling more and more of a bloated, overlong form from the earth.

An eyeless head the size of 4 fridges (or 8.5 mini-fridges, by volume) leans down into the light and a void of a maw opens in 4 segments. 4 mandibles the size of each human morsel before it opens outwards, and the light catches on little striated bumps in a mouth beginning to spin, hard papillae that would force anything within the mouth down its inescapable gullet.

“Yeah, no.”

Barely visible, a small steaming vial goes flying into that gaping maw of the colossal insect, and a star is born inside the creature's gut.

A horrible screaming hiss dissonates between the crawler’s screams and the flashboil of its insides as a hole is burned clean through it. Its guts, bathed in white-hot flame, flop out of it and onto the cavern floor, where they immediately begin to burn the other bug corpses, the dust in the air, and even the stone, before Cy says “[Contained Reaction].” At which point the flames retreat from their crawling across the ground and instead grow voraciously, contained around the massive insect's body— which falls atop its melting guts. The fire explodes, violently consuming the dead goliath.

“There’s always a queen, isn’t there? Sorry gang, made the call. Don’t think y’all are ready for that one. Then again, if you did survive it, you’d probably level like crazy. Oh well.”

“I’d back up by the way if I were you. That stuff is nasty and I’m not even sure my skills can contain it.” Cy says, shielding his eye from the supernova of color at the end of the cave.

His allies fall back, Mato staring, entranced and horrified.

The fire rages, seeming to fill a column of space designated by Cy’s skill. As the creature is reduced to a quickly evaporating puddle, where even the stone beneath it begins to melt.

“[Douse Flame].” Cy says, pointing his other hand at the huge flame, which quickly and unceremoniously extinguishes— before immediately relighting.

Cy sighs. “[Nuetralize Reaction]. [Douse Flame]. [Heat Sink Absorption].”

This time, the fire stays out, and the spiking temperature slowly stabilizes.

“W—” Izzy begins before coughing, hacking, and clearing her voice to speak in a hoarse voice.

“What was that?”

“Hm?” Cy says, looking up from where he has approached the puddle of crawler queen.

“Oh. You mean the bug or the fire? The bug was a crawler queen, juvenile, pretty much brand new and pumping out only the digging workers— the ‘coal crawlers’— which is weird for a new queen.”

“The thing I burned it with was FOOF— dioxygen diflouride— which I might have wasted. It was kinda overkill but… adult queens are a lot worse and I couldn’t tell its size in the moment. Better safe than sorry.”

“Don’t mess with the corpse by the way. God help you if my skill didn’t neutralize everything.”

They stare at their friend for a moment— their friend who just immolated a massive insect queen like it was nothing— and he stares back, challengingly to hide a modicum of sheepishness beneath it.

Mato shakes off his shock and memories and speaks up.

“Anyone hurt?”

Izzy raises her hand in the dim firelight.

“I’ve got a new cut, and I think I need to be rebandaged.”

Demarcus slumps against a larger stone.

“I’m bruised to all hell, and I think I twisted my ankle a bit, but I’ll be alright.”

Mato cleans and re-dresses Izzy’s leg, and she jokes and mocks through gritted teeth to distract from the pain.

“So do you just carry napalm with you at all times, half-baked?”

“What, you don’t? I never leave home without it.”

Mato looks up from his work, face very serious.

“I heard your skills, so I have to assume ya got safety measures. But you damn well better know what yer toyin’ with there.”

Cy looks slightly insulted at the distrust and insinuation at first, but his face is quickly schooled into something serious.

“I do.” He says.

Demarcus stands and walks closer to Cy as they walk along the pit that used to be the semi-centipedal body of the crawler queen. Cy examines some of the wooden support beams as they talk.

“That was pretty fuckin’ sick man. That was the brightest fire I’ve ever seen. So, you’ve got some fancy chemistry stuff now huh? Got more alchemist skills?” Demarcus asks.

“Yeah, a few. It’s not my main focus though.”

“What level even are you, now?”

Cy laughs a bit. “Honestly, it’s probably better you don’t know, for now.”

Demarcus’ head tilts in confusion, and then suspicion. “What? Why?”

“It’d just make things a bit complicated. I’ll tell ya in a bit.” Cy says. “But look,” he continues, changing the subject.

“This looks like it was a mining shaft at one point too, but it's been sealed. We’re gonna have to update our message so the rescuers know where to look.”

They begin walking back.

“But there’s something that’s tickling my brain.” Cy says, walking back towards the other two, who meet them by the dead queen.

“This was a brand new crawler queen, who only had the digging workers, who were digging willy-nilly all over the place, even breaching the surface. I mean look around.” He says, gesturing to all the tunnels dug into the rocks.

“This isn’t how a hive gets made. They’re way more organized and have more than just digging crawlers. A juvenile queen usually takes all kinds of drones and soldiers from the original hive to expand and— well, they don’t do this.”

“Happens in some insect colonies. If the main hive gets destroyed, a few survivors would run off and make a slap-shod new hive with a young queen in a random spot.” Mato says.

“Alright, sure, but that begs the question;” Cy says, and then drifts his [Light] spell over the deep tunnel the queen crawled from, descending into pitch black.

He lets his [Light] float down it, and at the bottom of a pit close to a hundred feet deep and nearly vertical, the firelight reveals a sudden shift in color and reflects off something metal.

“What were they running from?”