Gennady left his bag of mana tools behind, taking only a single handheld rifle, while I left the ball of light at the corridor behind us; there was no need for illumination here when we were facing Abominations because they themselves would offer us the light source we needed to see. And true enough, when Gennady and I peeked our heads over the cliff edge, there was an ethereal glow.
The radiance of hundreds of luminescent yellow cores, shining faintly through the darkness. The light glowed brighter, then darker. Brighter, then darker. Oscillating. Fluctuating between a shimmer and a glint. Almost like a pulse.
There were hundreds of Abominations at the bottom. The intensity of their glows were not uniform, and more than that, I saw bodies without the blue bulbs sticking out of them, that still had the glowing yellow cores on them. They were… eggs? Or something like that.
It reminded me of fish eggs. Except bigger, glowing, and instead of hatching, it slowly sprouted out bulbous protrusions from the body, creating a second skin that took control over the corpse.
"Holy Hell…" Gennady uttered the Goblin curse softly. "This is my first time seeing an Abomination’s lair. This is how they infect the dead? They’re like parasites!"
They’re worse than parasites. I did not audibly agree with him, but I did mentally say it.
I watched as one of the bodies— a regular antelope— with one of those yellow cores sticking out of its neck stirred. The body had to have been rotting for weeks, although there were no swarm of flies hovering over the corpse; blue flesh had grown over the skin, covering the antelope’s head, neck, and part of its front legs, but it stuck close to the body.
Suddenly, the antelope’s body jerked, the core glowed even brighter than before, shining so intensely that I had to squint for a moment just to see what was happening. Then, the blue flesh began to inflate, turning spherical in shape as it grew larger and larger. The Abomination slowly stood to its feet, letting out a soft chirping noise.
So that’s the sound from earlier. New Abominations being born.
I turned to the man lying prone next to me as we slowly crawled away from the cliff.
"The Abominations must have taken over the Crawlers nest. You can see some remains of webs still hanging around," he said. "Now, we need to destroy it completely. Cause a cave-in or something. There’s a lot of them— and I saw some Horrors too! If we let this mass of Abomination grow even bigger than it is, this could become a repeat of what happened at the Free Lands."
I cocked my head. "...isn’t that what we came here to do?"
"I…" the Dwarf trailed off. He was nervous. Sweat was forming around his neck, and his forehead was a wrinkled mess. "Yeah. That’s why we came. We just have to—"
Gennady froze, staring at something behind me. I did not hesitate, I turned around, lashing out with my dagger, and stopped myself as I saw a woman.
Poking out of the pit was a decrepit woman. Her eyes were hollowed out, and her skin was shriveled up to a ghostly white. Her hair was a tangled mess, dropping down her back as she turned her head, almost as if she was inspecting me. The head tilted lower, and lower, and lower. The head… hung loosely off her body, tilted down at an angle no living being could turn.
Then its eyes snapped open.
Two pure red pupils that shone in the darkness stared down at me, and the woman shrieked. It pulled itself up out of the crevice. The woman rose up, revealing two other bodies holding her up, conjoined into an Abomination, barreling towards… Gennady.
The Dwarf was overcome by shock. He stood, eyes bulging out of his sockets, as he fell backwards at the sight. He raised a shaking finger. "A-amalgam—"
And the Amalgam was consumed by flames. My Fireball launched it across the pit, onto the other side in an explosion.
The sound of the blast was accompanied by hundreds of chittering noises. I immediately hauled Gennady to his feet, as I yelled.
"Try and take out as many as you can! We’ll only bring down this cave if we have no other choice." I did not trust a collapse ceiling to do this job— not when Abominations were involved. We had to ensure they were all wiped out.
My shouting seemed to break the Dwarf out of his momentary stupor. He scrambled for his weapon, and came up beside me at the edge of the pit. I was already hurling spells down the hole when Gennady started firing his rifle.
The Abominations came up like a swarm. Climbing up the walls without any care in the world for falling back down. There were so many of them; enough to have caused significant damage to the city of Locke if they chose to attack now. I launched Fireballs, Wind Blades, Stone Spears— every powerful spell I knew— down at the incoming Abominations.
I had aggro-ed them, and they were now coming for me, no longer treating me like I did not exist. They would not stop until they ripped me to shreds, turning me into one of them. I was trying to cast spells and pre-cast spells simultaneously; it was difficult, and although it somehow worked, it only slowed down my barrage of attacks. Maybe if I had more practice, I could make it more efficient, but for now, it was not helping.
I impaled a group of Abominations with my Frost Spear, as I rained down Fire Arrows upon the entire pit. Gennady’s rifle was somehow more powerful than a regular rifle while just as efficient, yet even with his help, it was still not enough. The first of
