== VORTEX QUEST 1-9 ==
== THE VAULT 1: AMONG TROLLS ==
The borrowed Wyvern dropped the pantheon off at a crawlway entrance flanked by horn-studded cairns.
The demigods wandered the tunnels, clad in Chay's shadow to blend into dark corners and crevices, their white fundoshi now over balls `signed' by a True Daemon.
Marcus was ready for action. The pit fight had been exhausting but being freshly filled with nectar and having failed to cream out a load left him antsy.
He kept cupping his balls as if to assure himself they weren't currently getting ripped off. Once Gallant had a solution to this betrayal, Marcus would go back to Hrailoth and slice him up.
Xane had used the time in flight to refresh his butterflies. They jumped off his head as he cried out.
"I did it!"
"Shush," Marcus made, a second ahead of Chay.
"I made a third mote," Xane said, quieter. Three white butterflies danced around his head. "And there's no one fucking here anyway. There's not even lanterns."
Nobody bothered the gang, as this was border territory and few had reason to cross the line. Algae was retaking the tunnel walls, swaying like seaweed in the breeze.
The men reached their target without issue – a secret ravine.
At the end of a jagged, low canyon was a small ectoplasmfall, green goo dripping from a skull's mouth and carving a smooth ditch with its gentle, shallow flow, lined by stone skulls and piles of gnawed bones.
Gnarled trees bent over the creek, more root than trunk, with spiky leaves in dull red. A large, ethereal bird took on a black, solid form and fluttered away.
Chay kept everyone shrouded in light fog and advanced. He was invisible in his own mist, but the others had to stay low and advance from cover to cover.
They stepped into the creek of ectoplasm. The substance was somehow as viscous as honey but splashed as easily as water. Marcus felt the stream's weak resistance on his feet and calves, disappointed it wasn't cool but perhaps even warmer than the air. He'd stay sweaty.
"Should be two guards," Chay whispered, "but I'd like to try a distraction." He unfolded his fan without a sound and let Pie run onto the creek surface as heavy smoke. "Hey cutie-Pie, how are you doing? Want to bite some ankles? Yeah, right in there. Nom nom."
They didn't know how smart `cakes' really were but Pie seemed to get the gist of it. She zigzagged to an opening where the fall wasn't touching the rock and slipped in.
Rough voices behind the gentle green arose, confused, then angry.
"Yap, there's only two." Chay said. "Charge!"
Xane sent a blast into the curtain of ectoplasm to break an opening. The four demigods' bodies still got lubricated from the spray, but it helped.
The Hellions were barely armored, their skullheads not covered. Pie had sank her teeth into the neck of a hellion who tried to grab her but caught only smoke.
The other had grabbed a battle axe, but Marcus was already on him. The martial artist had launched himself high and twirled to slam one foot after the other into the guard's throat. Marcus dropped his whitefire-lit hands onto the skullhead and pushed the Hellion back through his spread legs, right into Goro's hammerfist. The guard was rammed into the ground and a stomp made his skullhead split open.
Meanwhile Xane had send a force blast to the Pie-wrapped guard's legs that sent him to the ground. The mage followed up with an ice shard right into the bone-like eyeball, threaded between the rings of Pie's snake-tail.
"Good kitty," Xane said and charged a final blow of lightning.
Pie let go of the enemy as it smoldered and got scratched behind the cloud-ears by Chay who nodded at the wall.
Beyond the Hellions station, where bottles of green beer and a runic card game laid, was a simple door of reinforced Elderite. Beside it was a chipped metal box, framing a palm-sized soul stone – one of the red garnets where tadpole-shapes drifted.
These soul stones powered machines throughout the abyss. To deactivate the door's force field, you needed a key – or something more powerful.
Xane retrieved a tiny vial of Hrailoth's blood from the leather strip on his left arm. As the most artistically inclined he'd proved most reliable at drawing runes.
Marcus watched back muscles flex as the short bodybuilder drew with careful but confident strokes.
Chay gestured at the Hellion corpses. "Make it look like a robbery. No one should be too suspicious."
Marcus rummaged through the armor of one felled enemy, Goro through the other. They gathered a stack of five obols and a canteen embossed with the pandemonic word for nectar.
Red lines traveled across the door, lighting the plasma-fall hideout ominously, then retreated into the soul stone box. The door was open.
"We should, uh..." Chay said, eyes on the canteen. "To make the robbery more plausible and... Fuck it. Don't make excuses for addictions."
Xane grabbed the flask, popped up open and smelled the fumes. He looked like he was exaggerating an orgasm for comedic effect. "Open up," he said. "I'll make sure everybody gets a quarter."
Marcus jostled Chay aside to be first. The mage drizzled a sip into his mouth.
The lithe Filipino animus-fighter got slammed by visions of Xane with a Daemon-like dick, hammer-fucking Marcus' face. At the same time he got the relaxation of joy of a deep tissue massage, a long hot bath and a few glorious rounds of sex with the hottest chicks.
Then it was over and for a second he felt the urge to make his chakram slice into the shorter man's arm so he'd drop the canteen and-
Marcus stopped himself. He stumbled back and breathed deeply, thinking about pussy and tits and female ass while fingering his nipples.
"Okay, let's go," Chay said, ushering Pie to seep back into his ring with a few fan swings.
===***===
The cave was wide enough to be a garage, but twisting randomly. Illuminated by frozen torches, which the men now knew were powered by soul stones somewhere in the interior, the pantheon crept forward.
The main chamber was larger than a football field but segmented by random stalagmites and columns.
It was a forge, hot with several glowing plates and fired up hearths. The smell of ash, metal and sweat drifted on a dry breeze. Chains clanked all around.
It was run by Trolls.
The troglodytes looked like parodies of bodybuilders. Around seven foot tall, they were so insanely broadly built they still looked stout. Despite torsos wider than humanly possible, their muscles still grotesquely bulged on their frame. Fairly small heads, a near absence of a neck and total hairlessness contributed to the dumb brute aesthetic.
Their skin was green, but with tan or even bronzed undertones. Troll faces were a cross of human and bull, many even having a nose ring dangling over their fangs. Other piercings indicated status and accomplishments.
They wore little more than leather pouches on belt to keep their crotches covered. Leather and chains were the theme for their habitat as much as their fashion.
"No Troll chicks, huh?" Marcus asked with an elbow into Xane's side.
The Korean shrugged. "Wouldn't be all that into them. These things weigh, what? Around a ton?"
"Muscle pussy is still better than none."
Xane shrugged again. "Can't even fuck so what's the point of pussy?"
Goro hummed. "Your lack of imagination disturbs me."
Xane gave his friend a look and Marcus tried to high five the tall guy without getting a response.
An especially broad Troll swaggered toward them. The creature had to move side to side on legs so massive he looked like he was seen through a funhouse-mirror. He had two-inch nipple rings and a nose ring tied to his bull ears with a loose gold chain on either side.
He wore an iron chain around his neck and one as a belt. Both looking far too heavy for Marcus to lift without godly powers. A few rune tattoos on his biceps rippled as he moved his arm.
Chay raised his hands. The language of greenskins, Troglo, was pretty straight forward, almost stereotypically caveman-like.
"Oogaloo Boogaloo," Chay shouted and pounded his chest. Marcus and the others imitated him. This was his new favorite language.
"Rvebnar sent us!" Chay continued. "Steam is not reaching the proto-pitch hub."
The Troll's voice was like a normal man's, making it seem high by comparison to the body. "Seal?"
Xane held up an illusion he'd conjured behind his back. A disk of two crystal snakes biting each other's tail. Hrailoth hadn't had a sample of Rvebnar's seal so the Korean mage had only been able to use a reference drawing.
Chay dropped the money they'd taken from the Hellions into the Troll's large hand as a `tip'. It was good enough to distract the overseer, but the green tinted super-hunk had open skepticism written all over his face. "Our Anemometers are fine."
"If it were a simple problem," Chay said, "we wouldn't be here. We'll check the secondary hydro-nacelles."
The Troll took on a thinking expression. Then waved them to follow.
His package was huge. Marcus didn't like noticing it, but it was the only clothed part on the Troll's body. The black pouch could have held a football with room to spare and was clearly stuffed to burst.
"Don't stare," Chay whispered.
Marcus tore his eyes off the Troll as the super-hunk turned around, his bulging glutes trembling ahead.
"Hard not to," Xane said. "Didn't even look big on his frame but up close... Fuck, they're all equipped like that."
"Jealous or gay?" Marcus asked.
"Fuck off."
Chay gestured them to keep it down. "We're not here for dick measu- Fuck..."
The pantheon and their guide passed a trough.
Three Trolls, seven to eight foot tall, pierced and rune-tattooed, chain-hung, were pissing side by side.
Troll dicks had no riffling or extra bulges, just being veiny like a human's. Their roughly eight inch length was impressive but not impossible. What made them insane was the circumference. All three Trolls cocks were shaped like stout bullets, as thick as they were long, eight inches across. Below hung a pair of balls to match.
Marcus had sat on a man's dick yesterday and it had spread him severely. (It had also felt great while high on unicorn dust but he wasn't going to mention that.) And he knew there were chicks, and homos, who could take whole fists but that felt kind of gross and gimmicky to him. Troll dick on the other hand were literally impossible to take. No way a human ass or pussy would survive this.
"Note to self," Xane whispered. "Don't get raped by Trolls."
"Promise me," Marcus said, "if one of those things are about to enter my hole you just fucking kill me."
Goro gave an amused grunt. "Who says you're his type?"
Marcus huffed. "Not the moment to grow a sense of humor, dude."
The pissing bull-man vanished from sight as they entered another cave where soul stones powered machines of heavy iron. Chain-link connecters, a furnace, leather treatment of some kind, water filtration... The working Trolls had their ridiculously wide backs to them.
Eventually they reached a large array of pipes - the pumps. Close to their real target.
"Good," Chay said. "This could take a bit. We'll find our way out."
The Troll shrugged, his chains clanking. "I'll check on you."
He left them, just as they had hoped.
===***===
Rvebnar's vaults was a secret even to the Trolls here. Their valuable industry was a convenient excuse for the Champion to keep security at the entrance tight. By sneaking through a side entrance to pass as emissaries of Rvebnar, the pantheon got access to the vault with nobody suspecting a thing.
A minute's walk from the pump was a grate, covering a vertical shaft up. Difficult to ascend for anyone but demons – or demigods.
Once they were up, Xane lit the tunnel with an orb in hand. Marcus added his whitefire, making his faux-hawk `burn'.
"Here's comes the challenging part," Chay said.
They faced a dark brown surface clogging the corridor, veiny and slowly moving like a cluster of sloshing bags under a tarp.
The Creephorror – a colossal monster - caused dread in all who saw it and Marcus was pretty sure if they hadn't been warned about it, he'd already be turning to run. He had goosebumps, although it didn't look like much given his total lack of body hair.
Even the ever-composed Chay had to take a deep, slow breath.
"Okay then," the leader said. "Ignore the dread sensation, it's fucking with us but not that much."
Goro grunted. Xane readied a bolt shimmering in every color of the rainbow. "Full spectrum blast ready, boss."
"We killed things this caliber before," Chay said. "Let's add another. Go!"
Marcus had his chakram fly ahead and race across the pulsing veins in the creephorror's skin. Red fluid leaked, looking just like human blood, which made it more unsettling than any of the actual blood Marcus had seen so far – or maybe that was just the dread speaking.
He was gripped by fear, his whole body quivering with the urge to turn and run.
A pseudopod shot forward, effortlessly stretching bleeding skin. The monster's false arm with the diameter of a large melon grew bone-spikes as it zoomed at them.
Xane fired. Red blood splattered and bone shards clanked against the walls. The pseudopod had been shredded apart.
Chay was yelling his assessment. "Don't bother with lightning or acid. Skin is weakest at the veins, hard to cut but easy to tear. Vulnerable to... what was that purple stuff?"
"Chaos?" Xane half-asked. "Difficult to make."
At the word `tear', Goro had rushed ahead and sunk his fingers into the blood. He ripped black skin, exposing more disorganized innards swimming in some kind of gelatin.
A bone shard the size of Marcus' arm was ejected like a boomerang and slashed Goro's bicep.
The berserker retreated for a moment and Marcus sent his chakram into the colossal monster to blunt any follow-up tosses.
The creephorror kneaded itself and the wounded part slid aside for fresh skin. Two shard-punctured pseudopods emerged and swung for Goro.
Marcus stepped in, arms pumped full of animus-magic. A hit of his burning fist sent the pseudopod into the ceiling and it retreated into the creephorror, while the other was pummeled by Goro.
A third `arm' emerged, rushed at them and got stopped by Marcus' fist-blow redirecting it up. He could give Goro a run for his money, his magic was just more about agility than raw strength.
"Duck," Xane shouted after concluding his debate with Chay and a cluster of pink, transparent needles shot into the third pseudopod's skin. Each needle punctured it with a palm-sized hole, instantly squirting blood.
"Rip it," Chay said.
Fully drenched in red, Goro's frenzy heightened and with eyes of pure black and muscles bulging like they were breaking free of his body, the berserker opened the creephorror's wound like it was paper. The mark of madness was draped over his shoulder like a stick-on cape.
The colossal monster retreated deeper into the corridor.
Marcus called back his chakram before the opening was twisted away and it sprung from the gelatin into his blood-covered hands.
"After it," Chay said. "We're inflicting damage faster than it can handle. I can't control any part of it. My magic can't interface with its nervous system or some random bullshit."
They reached a cavern like an ancient cathedral ship. It was lit by glowing haze at the ceiling. Some kind of proto-aurora?
The entire floor was the creephorror's body, sloshing and bulging even between the broken columns that lined the chamber's rim.
"Oh fuck, it's big," Xane said.
"We were told it is a colossal monster," Goro reminded.
"Yeah but," Xane gestured. "It's like, fucked-up levels of big."
Another wave of paralyzing fear hit Marcus and made him cramp up.
"Doesn't matter," Chay said, coldly. "We're taking the motherfucker down. Don't get caught out from below."
Marcus levitated. It took enough of his power to make other attacks difficult and less effective but he could avoid contact with the being.
The others hovered similarly, Goro in particular looking like a terrifying rendition of superman, blood dripping off his feet as he levitated with the grace of raw power.
Chay ascended the crumbled features of a wall, a white cloud surrounding him. Pie was out of the ring and hovered over his shoulder.
The creephorror went on the offensive.
Pseudopods, a dozen of them, shot from the floor and swiped at the pantheon.
Marcus didn't really have time to check on his buddies, focused on evading. His power was able to shield him if he concentrated on it, but he had yet to pull that off reliably. He channeled whitefire into his arms, held tightly onto his chakram and sliced with the force of a strafing bullet.
He couldn't avoid touching the creature entirely as it bulged under him but he bounced between pseudopods on his long legs, taking no hits.
Blood welled onto the monster's skin as its arms bled. Goro ripped, Xane shot and Chay shouted the name of whoever had to watch out.
"Take cover! Everybody!"
Marcus spiraled around.
Gray, man-sized creatures spilled out of wall crevices and onto the creephorror.
Two legged reptiles on hooves. They were less anthropomorphic than Kobolds, more animal. No clothing, no visible genitals, wielding axes, clubs, bow and arrow.
"Shit," Chay shouted as he dropped into the blood lake atop the colossal monster. "They're Gawri. They're immune to dread, somehow?"
Marcus evaded arrow shots from two sides. The pseudopods now served as cover but they were still swiping at him just as before.
"They're thralls," Goro noted and snatched an arrow out of the air.
Marcus finally caught a better look at the Gawri hoard. The creatures were half lizard, half insect, smarter than an ape but not by much, often used as thralls. Right between each Gawrus' pustule-riddled, insectoid eyeballs was a pentagram. There was no reasoning, no retreat, nothing but devoted service.
Suddenly there was fighting among them.
Marcus looked at Chay, who had brows furrowed and hands raised as if... he was puppeteering a Gawrus who choked another.
"Need the big guns after all," Xane said and made a butterfly zoom like a projectile between aimless pseudopods. It impacted the biggest Gawri cluster with a purple flash, turning into a slicing disk.
Three bug-lizards dropped, one bled.
The puppeteered one was slain and the hoard advanced.
"There's nineteen left," Xane said. "Do I use the other motes now?"
The group shifted as the pseudopods became too hard to evade with the incoming arrow fire.
"Yeah," Chay said. "Focus on them but remember, the ground is still trying to kill us. Marcus, keep ripping."
"Ay, sir!" the animus-fighter said and twirled out of the blood pool into a swinging bone-shard arm.
Whitefire and monster blood. Balance and focus and excitement.
Chaos exploded and deleted three Gawrus-heads from existence. A frost blast rendered several insensate and dying.
Goro was charging right into a cluster but a pseudopod swept him up from behind. It dragged him into a large wound in the ground.
Was the creephorror trying to drown them in itself?
Chay kept control of a Gawrus, fighting by proxy, while he tied up most of the colossal monster's arms by hopping around the blood lake.
A red monster burst from the creephorror's skin. A small demon? Marcus charged to slice it. No, it was just Goro, massive and mad and dripping with gelatinous blood.
Xane had found his way to the remaining Gawri army and engaged at medium-range alongside the Chay-controlled beast.
The berserker grabbed a flap of creephorror skin and pulled like dragging a weight on a rope. A strip tore as he walked. Pseudopods, now boneless and flaccid swatted at him but he didn't let go of the ever-longer strip.
Marcus sent his chakram to cut ahead and made the ripping easier. Meanwhile, he rushed the Gawri that had made it into the center of the creature and kicked them out. Each charged slam of his foot, sent a beast the entire way to the wall.
It felt great to be powerful as fuck.
There were maybe six Gawri left and Xane kept them following him in a circle along the chamber's rim as he retreated with levitation-hops, firing whenever he had a blast charged.
The creephorror was running out, innards-filled gelatin bubbling from the massive tear along its entire body. It couldn't knead itself enough to close the wound.
Finally the monster retreated. It vanished into a hole in the wall as if sucked through, its immense body folding and squelching.
Marcus engaged the last Gawrus in reach, slicing its neck.
Amidst the thrall corpses, the floor was still ankle deep covered with blood. But as the main guardian of the vault vanished, the feeling of dread went with it.
Marcus relaxed.
Wings fluttered at the ceiling. Imps dove down and dug into the corpses.
Xane spat creephorror-blood and started cleaning himself, each swipe of his hand getting liquid out of his hair or off his face. He took a deep breath and hit a most-muscular pose. The gunk rained off him, even from his fundoshi which was restored to pristine white.
"Can you do that for all of us?" Chay asked. "We should look, uh, normal when we go back out."
"Sure," the mage said. "Going to take a while though. Can we keep going in the meantime? I don't want to wait till the imps get territorial."
Under the soft fluttering of wings, the men approached something like a well in the center of the room, which the creephorror had covered – the vault entrance.