Enough time upon Althanas would expose a man to just about anything, however Storm Veritas was convinced that at the end of his rope, his story would be amongst the most bizarre and absurd that any human would be able to recall.
This came with the obviously presumptuous assertion that today would not prove the end of that rope in the first place. After all, while the healers at the Citadel had alluded to the safety of any combat he would engage in, it didn’t seem very safe to the minotaur which had been left in puddles. There also certainly weren’t any elements of fair warning which prepared him for the second opponent, one that seemed to slither out from the darkness behind him, a creature which seemed both indifferent to him and constructed for destruction.
So some goliath, goat-bleating shitshow or this waddling, twisting swamp monster. What in the actual f*ck did I do to deserve a draw like this?!
As the horrific swamp monster fired off a few scurrying, fanged lillypads, a small smile formed at the corner of the magician’s mouth. Grand theft, regicide, and mass murder were all crimes that could be attributed (fair or not) to his resume; there was no sense in the lightning wizard playing any type of victim here.
The plant-beast was a staggeringly horrific sight. Although generally walking upright, she (he guessed and or concluded, from a slightly higher pitched inflection of voice) was an amalgamation of nightmares heaped up in a pile of twisted vines that roughly replicated sinewy muscle. Her scent was that of soured death, so at least her charm was more than one-dimensional. Storm supposed that based on her obvious lethality, the apparent peace offering was not one to pass up, although her terrible visage left her impossible to trust.
“Thanks, careful, some big son of a bitch is around the corner. Based on those thunder-clap footsteps, I’m hoping… Shit… praying he isn’t as fast as he is big.”
Veritas stepped out from the hallway back into the better-lit aria. The flat-capped room at the center of the great pyramid remained vacant, however the hallway across from him harbored in its bowels something terrible. A shrieking, wailing sound came from the two little ferocious plant-things, as he saw a flickering set of lights ahead. The coiled back in an orange horror as their bodices popped with flame, leaves curling and black smoke pouring from their tiny corpses. Further back in the darkness, the great monster waited.
So fire can hurt the leaf-creature; guess that’s not much of a stunner. How do I keep the big thing focused on the NatureGirl over here?
An empty slot where a brick once lay created a small orifice in the otherwise depressingly smooth walls. Retrieving his twisted kriss dagger, the magician leapt with a simple, fluid hop to the hole, effortlessly toeing the hole as he drove the dagger furiously into mortar above between two larger stones. The mortar yielded in a high-pitched ker-ching and crumbled free, providing a Storm a two-point hold on the drafted sidewall some eight feet from the floor. From here, he was a long distance from safe, however he could move, leap, and dive to almost any point within the room. More importantly, from here he would stay out of eyesight from whatever abomination was going to come down the hallway after dispatching those little ankle-biting bastards. In a small voice, he whispered back, barely audible.
”Sorry about your little friends. Sit tight and look scary.”
From his newfound height, Storm lifted a single finger over pursed lips, indicating a desire for silence from his newfound floral friend. When hell came through that doorway into the larger space, he intended to welcome that bastard with six shades of hell.
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