Brad the Impaler: A LitRPG Adventure, page 51
“This blood bath is pretty gross.”
“What’s it do?” I asked, curious about the item. I didn’t trust the designers to not dump something detrimental in his Inventory.
“Hmmmm, that’s interesting.”
“What? Details, Slash.”
He looked at me, unhumored. “You know you could just pull up my Inventory yourself.” He sighed and almost put a paw to his face, stopping short and looking at the blood-covered appendage. “Yick. Since I’m your, air quote, mascot, my Inventory is accessible to you just as yours is to me.”
I flipped through the tabs at the top of my screen, navigating to my Inventory screen. I was just about to tell him I didn’t have access to his when I noticed an obscure box at the side of the screen that simply said MASCOT. I clicked it.
“Oh, this works.”
“Of course it does. See? Now you don’t always have to ask me what I’m carrying.”
The blood bath was an awesome drop. It took up one of his slots, but added no weight. With his limited carrying capacity, that was crucial. The boon the item held made it invaluable.
“You can take a bath in this thing and immediately restore your full Health.”
“It’s blood. I’m not taking a bath in blood.”
“If your Health is too low, you will.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
“I’ll dunk you if I have to.” I kept reading the description. “Well, shit. It’s only for dogs.”
“I can give it to you, and you can take all the baths you want.” He stuck his tongue out. “The only good thing about it is that cats aren’t allowed to use it.”
At the bottom of the description, I saw what he was talking about. The blood bath would be destroyed if a cat used it.
“That would be a fun way to get rid of it. Imagine throwing a cat in there. Something like a Birman. Hey, or an American shorthair. Oh. Oh. What about a Persian?” He chuckled devilishly. “I know a few I’d like to do that to.”
“Focus. Fully restore your Health. Don’t make me give you a bath.”
“It was always awkward when you did that in your kitchen sink,” Slash said. “You spent too much time cleaning my dick.”
“That has to get washed, too. Especially the way you dribble piss.”
“But not for as long as you did.”
I didn’t respond as we floated around a slight bend. A red hue illuminated the far wall of the tunnel.
“Shhh,” I said, holding him tight. “Not sure what we’re about to head into, but we know where this ends.”
Slash didn’t say a thing, probably picking up on my nervousness. The only noise came from the gurgling blood.
Voices murmured around the corner, an echoed element that gave me an idea of the size of the room we were about to enter.
We were running out of time to examine the properties of the Crooked Cross. Any smart player wouldn’t go into the battle against a level boss without being as prepared as possible. The main objective of this level was to kill the Vampire King, but there’d been a set of mini-tasks to complete. Mini-tasks that weren’t so mini when they set you up to fight off a hundred hemogoblins, including a giant, avoid aerating yourself, extinguish a walking mountainous candle, and dance with the queen of death after putting on a humiliating exhibition for a few hundred of her buffet attendees. The Crooked Cross had to have some worth.
And around that bend in the tunnel, we were going to get a big clue what purpose it might serve. I still had seconds to pull it up in my menu. I switched to my MISCELLANEOUS tab. The Crooked Cross wasn’t there.
“Whatever you’re doing, hurry,” Slash said nervously.
“I can’t find it.”
He sighed. “I told you to get better at your menus. You should have spent more time—”
His comment was cut off with a yelp, and the world fell away. I tried to shout, but got a mouthful of blood for my troubles. Breaking the surface, I gasped and spat out what I could. Grasping for a handhold, my hand swatted at nothing, smacking the river’s surface.
The blood churned. We dropped again. Before we went under a second time, I saw enough of the river’s course in the pale light to make out a series of rapids. Details were difficult to make out because everything was so dark, and I was kicking and pulling with my one free arm to find anything to grab onto.
The blood churned, swelled, and fell. We were pulled around a slight bend, closer to the red light. A second after I broke the surface and spotted a boulder. Twice as wide as me, it blocked our path. I kicked to turn, taking the brunt of the impact on my shoulder. I think Slash yelped, but I couldn’t hear much over the roar.
The river fell away again. I caught enough breath to avoid another mouthful of blood. Slash hacked when we surfaced. The river was calmer here. We’d found an eddy. The current pulled us around in a tight circle. Maybe fifteen feet in diameter.
“You okay?” I asked as I tried to gain perspective on our situation.
“I stiiiiiiiiink,” he howled.
“Slash, are you okay?” I despised speaking with an authoritative tone even before this new, twisted reality that allowed him the power of speech. Now that we could clearly communicate, talking to him like that made me feel even more nauseous.
With each rotation around the small pool of relatively calm blood, we were being pulled farther toward its edge. Another handful of laps, and it’d jettison us back into the rapids. I scrambled to get a sense of what lay ahead. Though the tunnel was dark, swirling in the eddy gave me time to see how much stronger the light was up ahead. The river dropped at least twice more that I could see. We’d have to be ready. As it did, the tunnel’s ceiling sloped down, cutting off my view of anything ahead.
As Slash coughed and hacked in my arm, I wondered how much longer I could keep us afloat. I was already struggling and failing whenever the rapids pulled us under. Though I couldn’t tell how long we’d been pulled along its course, I knew I had maybe a few hundred yards of fighting left in me. If we didn’t find something to climb onto, some way out of the river, we might not make it.
For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see a reprieve from the constant churn. We were now a rotation or two away from being thrown back into the tumult.
I’d given up on trying to read the description for the Crooked Cross. Taking a glance at my blood-soaked pup, the way his big, black eyes seemed to shake in distress helped me tap into my energy to get us out of this.
I grabbed for a boulder as we were whipped around. My fingers grasped the sharp, wet edges, but only for the briefest of seconds. Torturously, the river’s pull ripped my hand away. We were sent careening over the edge.
I kicked to the surface, my legs burning.
The rapids were a tangle of dizzying swirls and raucous roaring. I’d never felt this disoriented in my entire life. Not the time I was five or six and lost in a retail store. Not the time I was stationed overseas and had something slipped into my drink at the Kaiser Skybar. Not the time I thought my size would make a mosh pit at a Five Finger Death Punch concert an enjoyable activity.
As the river spun and tossed us around, a tidal wave of blood that had lashed back after colliding with a rock sprayed my face. I would have sicked up if I had the chance. My stomach was twisted but also felt bloated by the constant upheaval. Each time I saw the swells and bubbles, I knew we were about to be turned inside out. Each time a jagged rock poked out of the river, I exerted ten times my reserves of energy just to avoid the collision.
My head throbbed. My lungs burned. My muscles ached.
An approaching roar put all the previous ones to shame. It sounded like the entire manor was crumbling down on itself. A million blocks of brick falling inward. Slash yelped. I squeezed him when I saw the churning lip of the falls.
“Hold on!”
His claws dug into my arm, biting sharply. I had bigger problems than that.
The falls approached. Red light was cast on the ceiling of the tunnel, highlighting its uneven surface. I wrapped my other arm around Slash just before the river pushed us over the edge.
The world fell out beneath us. I kicked my legs, but somehow, in the moment of madness, I didn’t loose my grip on my main man. He twitched in my arms.
There’s something that happens in the seconds where someone confronts the reaper. Our body shuts down our capacity to think, to rationalize, to observe our world beyond the most immediate threat. Somehow, I knew I still held Slash. Before we fell, I knew my priority was protecting him. As we fell, I committed to that job. But beyond that, I couldn’t tell you the first thing beyond the sensation of having the world pulled out from under my feet and the utter incapacitating realization that I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
I tried to keep my eyes open, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. I looked down at a wide pool of calm blood zipping up toward me.
I pulled my legs toward my stomach just before we hit.
Contrary to popular opinion, jumping from heights into a body of liquid is not a task for the weak of heart. It might be liquid, but it hurts when you puncture it from any height above twenty or so feet. If my teenage years taught me anything about peer pressure and how much jumping into water off cliffs hurt, it was that.
We smacked the calm pool. Blood exploded into the air. Every inch of my skin felt raw and violated. My tailbone pulsed. Stretching my legs to kick was difficult for the first few seconds, but I pushed us to the surface.
“Hoooooooooly fuuuuuuuck,” Slash howled, looking at me with his soft, puppy dog eyes and grinned. “That was fucking epic! Can we do it again?”
I grunted a laugh. “Maybe another time.”
I looked up at the bloodfall we’d just survived. The drop was probably forty feet. Just enough to hurt, but not enough to kill.
As I kicked to turn us away and find the shore in this brighter submersed cavern, a deep laugh that had an air of wispiness to it reverberated across the stone ceiling and walls.
Slash looked over my shoulder and yelped, before lowering his head and growling. I kicked, turning.
On the shore, the Vampire King stood, arms crossed. He loomed over the floor of the cavern, the rust-colored stalagmites, and even the stairs leading to his throne, larger than some of the office buildings I’d worked in.
As I treaded in the pool of blood, I glanced up to the corner of my mindscreen and saw my Health level.
I wrapped my other arm around Slash. “Buddy, we’re fucked.”
56
Call to Arms
The Vampire King’s presence was commanding. Repulsive. Antagonistic. Threatening. Imposing. All those and more. Yet, no matter how my mind struggled to comprehend his size, I was drawn back to him in something that rivaled reverence without consent.
Over twenty feet tall and broad-shouldered, his skin was as pale as Lady Anebelle’s. A trait I was sure all these inbred fuckers shared. His eyes glowed like the sun, white-hot. I couldn’t make out irises or pupils. I couldn’t look into them for more than a few seconds.
His hair was dark and long, looking very much like every hard rock singer from the Seventies.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” Slash asked, shaking in my arms.
I didn’t need to focus on the name floating over the Vampire King’s head; the yellow letters bordered in gold, flaming ropes. “Yeah.”
The Vampire King hadn’t moved. He crossed his arms and spread his legs, forming a twenty-five-foot-tall pyramid like he was striking a decent replication of old pro wrestling postures he’d seen over the ages.
“His armor is cool,” my pup said, like that made any of this easier.
“Yeah,” I said again, my mind swirling as I tried to figure out just how in the hell we were supposed to defeat something that size. The game let us get away with the Living Inferno, but our goal here was to kill the Vampire King. That was the level’s overall objective. The boss fight. We’d used up our run-to-stay-alive chances. Now, we stared down the put-up-or-shut-up moment of our time in Darkworld.
I should have seen it coming. Even before this craziness kicked off when I opened the chest, I’d noticed an abnormal number of bats in the Olympia sky. I’d fought that baby vamp in a park in my city. A bat surveyed the hillside at the start of the game. A squad of the fuckers had attacked us in our camp. From the beginning, the underlying theme of Darkworld had been about the undead. Of course, fighting their king was how they intended to end this level.
Now, we just had to find out if that meant the end for the Vampire King or for us.
The Vampire King’s armor that Slash admired, and which was admittedly kick ass, gleamed black in the brazier light that cast the cavern in red light. Conan the Barbarian would have been proud to wear it. So dark, I couldn’t see the welds from this distance, the metal shimmered when the firelight hit it at just the right angle. His black helmet was fashioned like a bat’s head, complete with long fangs and pointy ears. The deep-set eye slits didn’t prevent me from constantly being drawn to his white-hot eyes burning behind the shield. Above his etched breastplate, two-foot spikes covered his black pauldrons.
“His gauntlets look like the ones Rob Halford used to wear back in the day,” Slash said.
“Your knowledge of Judas Priest is as interesting as it is a testament to how much TV I let you watch.”
“What else do you want me to do when you’re gone all day? There’s only so much I can play with Pussy.” He sniffed. “I miss her.”
“I know, buddy. We’ll find her.”
“Will we? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“We have to kill that thing first. Don’t you remember that part?”
How could I forget?
The air grew thick with tension as I paddled to the far shore, away from him. The Vampire King’s hot glare followed us, his head rotating slowly as if on a rusted crank, tracking us all the way out of the pool.
Behind us, the roar of the bloodfall faded away into my subconscious. It was a design element, either for aesthetics or for distraction, and I wasn’t betting on the former. As hundreds of gallons of blood poured into the pool every minute, the cacophony it created covered the sounds of anything the Vampire King had readied. Footsteps of his minions. The clinking of a metal trap. Anything. I ignored the noise and focused on the abhorrent ruler of the undead.
His gaze was piercing, I’ll admit. A congruity of monochrome. At once, he gave nothing away while displaying his power to attract. A vampire trait, I realized. Lady Anebelle had done the same thing. She almost had me willingly give myself over as a post-dinner treat.
I thought about those poor people the vampires had laid out for dessert, devouring them while they were still alive. I hoped they were NPCs and not sentient bastards who’d fully realized the terror of their last moments.
“You invade my home?” the Vampire King spoke, his voice deep, resonant. A question, yet not one. A command to be followed. Even enthusiastically.
This time, though, I felt the tug of charisma.
“Slash. Heal yourself. Eat every beefy treat you have if you need to, but do it now,” I whispered. Thankfully, my pooch didn’t argue. To the Vampire King, I said, “We’re not invading your home. We’re here to kill you.”
I hoped the bravado would trigger his. He might be undead, might be a video game character, but he was male. If the bastards who programmed this game were true to reality, they’d have shoved an overload of testosterone code into his brain and trigger his need to chest puff like most guys.
I needed time to pull up my Inventory and equip myself, but also use the healing wraps and maybe even potion.
“Kill? Me?” he said, as his arms slowly moved to his side.
I scrambled to open my Inventory, mentally clicking through the tabs. The last time I’d played with the menu, I’d forgotten to return it to the main character tab. That had always been my starting point, yet that’s not the tab I was on.
Because I was concentrating on my menu, I almost missed the Vampire King raising his arms.
Slash drew my attention. “Brad, something is happening.”
Fuck. I flicked through the tabs.
Slash yelped. “Brad?”
I clicked on the WEAPONS tab, armed myself with two stakes, and closed the menu. Now that I’d found my WEAPONS tab, I could easily get to the POTIONS tab for the wraps and single potion. His plea forced me to get a check on the situation before I snagged those.
Good thing, too. To both sides of the Vampire King, hundreds of gray oval sparks snapped in the air and formed into central points. Six in all, three on each side of the boss.
“What the hell?” I asked, about to return to my menu, when all six ovals expanded in a sudden burst.
Slash yelped and raced to the side of the cavern. I dove for cover. Nothing happened. No shrapnel. No explosions. No howls of pain from my pup or triumph from the oversized undead. What I saw when I peeled my head from the cover of my arm was far worse.
Six vampires stood at the Vampire King’s side, three on each side. Instantly, I remembered why they looked so familiar. I’d seen the outfits and sculpted hair. The dark eyes that seemed to watch us constantly. The way the firelight danced off the necklaces, the monocle, bracelets, and gaudy rings brought my mind back to the first time I saw these particular vampires.
In the hall, after avoiding falling onto the spike trap. These were the vampires from the paintings, just in somewhat-living flesh.
“Brad?” Slash asked meekly from around the corner.
“I’m here, buddy,” I said, reaching my arm out, hoping it’d encourage him to join me. A breath later, I heard his nails clicking on the stone.
The six rocked on the balls of their feet, ready for permission to attack. Their undead eyes, very much alive with their shared hunger, were locked on us. Two of the six were women, and their vicious sneers promised as much pain as their male counterparts.
