Chapter 150: Thirty Seconds

Will broke into a sprint. Under no circumstances did he want to fight a Raid Boss in an enclosed area. Ancient papers were scattered into the air as Will flashed past them, a gale of wind following his passage and disturbing things that hadn’t felt a breeze in thousands of years. Will mentally tracked his progress. BANG! – the seamless door leading to the maintenance room below was torn off its hinges just behind Will. Will thought, sprinting down the hall and hitting the metal box, jumping straight up through the little hatch in the ceiling and sprinting up the shaft. Platforms of solid stone jutted out of the square shaft to meet Will’s feet as he sprinted upwards, a tar-black humanoid body arriving in the metal box beneath him. Will picked up speed as the creature climbed up into the shaft, its sticky hands clinging to the walls without effort. After about fifteen seconds of sprinting straight up, Will’s mind registered something was wrong. Will covered his head and grabbed himself with his Phantom Snakes, launching himself up, with the intention of breaking through the stone ceiling of the building. Will felt the sudden acceleration and the wind resistance, but… No impact. Will glanced down at the Raid Boss beneath him. It was still the exact same distance away, despite having slowed to a crawl, limbs tentatively touching the walls as it pulled itself forward, like an insect. Will glanced back up and threw his axe above him, then launched himself up at a greater speed, aiming to catch it. The axe sailed ahead of him as though he were standing still. am Will thought, looking back down at the creature. He was caught in some kind of Ability that limited the range that Will could get away from him. and was constantly shortening it. Especially since Will was trapped in this narrow shaft. He’d had options when he was on the floor below. The Sin Amalgam was approaching, albeit slowly, creeping forward with malicious intent. Something told Will that Sin Amalgam couldn’t move quickly while it was pinning him down. Will reached out with Middle Phantom Snake and grabbed the Sin Amalgam and pulled it towards him up the shaft while also lifting himself and placing his hand on the wall. Will felt the wall drag along his fingers as he rose up, roughly the same amount that he’d raised the raid boss. At the speed it was going, it would be nose-to-nose with Will in about thirty seconds, and Will didn’t like his odds when that happened. Despite being affected by an Ability, Will hadn’t felt it latch onto him. …Usually he could feel that. Will briefly entertained the thought of dragging it back up to where the rest of his team was and they could all pile on it together. The only problem he had with that, was that the Ability he was trapped in was likely an area-of-effect, rather than a targeted ability. If it had been targeted, he would’ve felt it. Will suspected he was in some kind of bubble of inward facing space that prevented living things from escaping or using superior maneuverability. If he swung by the caravan, that ran the risk of civilians being drawn into this thing’s sphere of influence, not to mention his Party, none of whom had damage types that were particularly useful against this thing. Will imagined a dozen people trapped in this thing’s area of effect like insects trapped in amber, all struggling to push it this way and that, unable to pick a direction to move until eventually they were drawn into it. Will had been assuming it was similarly resistant to physical damage, like the zombies. Was a sense of hopelessness part of this creature’s bag of tricks or was Will just slipping? Will cut the Amalgam into a dozen little chunks using Middle. Or…he tried. The blackened chunks were suspended in midair like they were tethered to Will, rapidly recombining in a matter of heartbeats, and still approaching. So physical damage wasn’t the answer. Will briefly wondered if it would burst into ghost-smoke if Mason were to burn it. Will grabbed Sin Amalgam around the waist and flew both of them to the first floor in the blink of an eye, crashing through ancient desks like piles of loose leaves. Will forcibly shoved the creature out into the main courtyard while Will waited behind the nodules inside the building. Up close to the nodules, Will could hear a strange buzzing sound, like a single massive beetle trapped in a cardboard box, and Sin Amalgam was systematically vaporized by the building’s traps, unleashing massive gouts of black smoke into the air. Massive gouts of smoke that kept approaching Will. It was approximately a third closer to him now than it had been in the shaft, maybe fifteen feet away and meandering closer. Will thought, narrowing his eyes as he realized he’d screwed himself pretty hard. Middle couldn’t wrap around a column of smoke to move it around. Will directed the polymorphic armor of his Phantom Snakes to form a bubble around the column of smoke, then squeeze down on it. Will ended with a bubble of metal about the size of a chair, slowly approaching him no matter how hard he tried to push it away. It was like a law of nature, and there was no circumventing it. He could move it around, he could move himself, but he could reduce the distance between them. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Searching for idea how to handle this creature, Will’s gaze caught the grate that led to the refiner. The clogged refiner that wasn’t working. Will chided himself. It would either work, or he would be dead. Will spent the next two seconds flying back into the building and down into its bowels, the scenery flickering past him in a heartbeat until he came to a halt in the maintenance room just outside the gunked up refiner, the bubble containing Amalgam floating just behind him and continuing to approach. Will’s body suddenly felt heavier as he switched from the Coiled Serpent Amulet to the Wand of the Undead Retainer. He didn’t need more strength. He needed more hands. Disposable ones. “Billy-bob, Stevie, Noob,” Will said. The three undead butlers coalesced out of the ether, lined up and bowing. “How can we-“ “Shut up, I’ve only got a few seconds. Grab all the tools you can carry and bring them down those stairs,” Will said, pointing. “Inside is an ancient machine. We are going to clean, maintain and reactivate it in the next ten seconds. Go, GOGOGOGO!” The three undead butlers snapped to it, each grabbing an armload of maintenance tools and tossing them down the stairs before grabbing another, once they had stocked up to Will’s satisfaction, Will Sprinted down the stairs, kicking a box of tools ahead of him. The damned thing was only about two arms lengths away. Will maneuvered Sin Amalgam into the corner of the room and released it from it metal bubble, allowing it to balloon outward, dominating the space as it continued creeping closer. Will formed the Phantom Snake’s armor into enormous spatula-like objects, scooping up huge amounts of goop from the walls and floor and flinging it outside into the maintenance room. Will could almost touch the thing with his fingertips. “This looks broken, do we have a spare?” Stevie asked an instant before Billy-bob tossed him a part from the pile. “This rubber hose needs a patch!” Noob cried from the ceiling. “Patch!” Billy-bob tossed him the patch. Will made his snakes into pipe cleaners and ran them through every pipe he could see. “I’m gonna squeeze down and check the inner workings!” Stevie said before vanishing into the ceiling. If he reached out behind him, he could touch it, but Will didn’t want to give it the satisfaction. He kept working until the last second, ignoring the creeping doom like it wasn’t there. Will scooped out all the tar-like gunk he possibly could. The room was nearly clean. It was a massive improvement, but it wasn’t enough. “I know I give you guys a hard time, but you’re the best butlers I’ve ever had,” Will said, giving the three spirits a thumbs-up. It wasn’t saying much because he’d never had any butlers before, but nobody wanted to go out whimpering like a bitch. A man should die saying something real. It was the principle of the thing. Will took a deep breath as he felt black, sticky fingers that seemed to suck the heat out of him coalesce out of the swirl of black smoke, drawing him inside the roiling cloud of smo- ***Patil, Head Undead Refinery Engineer*** Patil woke up and yawned, crawling out of bed and trudging to his coffee machine. Why on earth the engineers had to wake up at four in the morning to maintain the refiner instead of later at night, when they were still awake, he had no idea. Well, he did. They were short-staffed. Patil knocked back his morning brew and put on his high-visibility outfit, giving his customary prayer to the idol of Tek’tut’kanlay hanging over his doorframe before heading out. Patil thought as he walked out of the government-controlled apartment complex along with a flood of other workers going to their own stations. Being the lead engineer, he was expected to be there before anyone else, always with the right answer to any problem. It was a heavy burden, but people could get used to anything. Patil stopped outside the fence and waved to the truck driver waiting for him. The driver gave him a thumbs-up and oriented the rear of the vehicle on the gate. Stifling a yawn, Patil opened up the gate and waved the man through. The driver parked halfway through, and they both made sure none of the subjects could squeeze through the gap. Patil thought, testing the gap between the fence and the truck with his finger. Finally, he gave the driver the signal to open the back. The door slammed open, creating a ramp, and the refinement subjects tumbled out, like they’d been stacked on top of each other rather than simply standing shoulder to shoulder. “It’s more every day.” A junior accountant said as she arrived beside him. “Don’t you wonder we’re getting more every day? Where are they getting so many people?” Patil thought sourly, but he didn’t let it reach his lips. The deliveries were getting more and more frequent and less organized. It stank of desperation. A bad sign. “They’re not ‘people’, they are refinement subjects, and our job isn’t to waste time with question that don’t serve a purpose, it is to keep the refinery running for as long as Tek’tut’kanlay requires it of us.” “…Right.” Tek’lami said, nodding, obviously unconvinced. Once the delivery was done, Patil went downstairs to monitor the refinement process. “The speed is a bit off,” Patil muttered to himself, watching the numbers on his monitor. Once the seed was refined and the machine turned off, Patil went down into the belly of the beast through the staircase in the maintenance room. They were working with a skeleton crew recently, just a handful of people to run this entire facility, and so Patil had to do a lot of the work himself despite having the kind of seniority that would’ve normally saved him from doing the dirty or dangerous jobs. Patil thought, spotting a glint of gold in one of the exhaust grates, collecting gunk and creating a blockage. It was a wedding ring. A popular synthetic Relic that allowed matched sets to send each other a handful of scripted sensations. A hug, the joy of seeing their partner happy. That sort of horseshit. Patil didn’t have time for romance, and he wouldn’t have pursued it even if he had. Women didn’t make a lot of sense to Patil. Men either for that matter. He was a curious man, though. Patil thought, inspecting the ring. There was an inscription inside. “Didn’t Ji’petul get reassigned to the frontline?” Patil wondered aloud. Patil heard the distinctive sound of a truck door being opened, along with hundreds of subjects spilling out. locking the door to the refiner was step number five, and they were already on number 9. This shouldn’t even be able to happen, unless… Patil shoved the ring in his pocket and sprinted for the door. Locked. “HELP!” Patil shouted at the top of his lungs, hoping someone could hear him. all he could hear back to the sound of subjects being vaporized. An ominous black smoke began to pour in through the grates above him. Patil thought, his skin turning cold. The black smoke sought him out like a living thing, clinging to him, piercing into his skin and flooding his veins with corrosive darkness. “HELP!” Patil shouted again and again until the concentration of smoke rendered him unable to breath. He collapsed to the ground, his vision darkening. In the far periphery of his senses, he could barely make out the refiner humming to life. It was a beautiful thing, the blue light of miasma flickering and spinning, coalescing into something tangible from invisible vapors…like cotton candy. In Patil’s vision, the refiner got larger and larger as he was inexorably drawn towards it, unable to move or look away as it dominated his vision, until the refiner was all that he was. ***William Oh*** Will gasped for breath as the suffocating memory was ripped away from him, uncovering his face. Will glanced behind him and saw his body was entirely coated in Sin Amalgam, but beyond that, the spinning turbine in the center of the room was rapidly getting faster and faster, Miasma beginning to spontaneously glow and flicker as the undead essence was concentrated and sent up the pipe. There, near Will’s feet, a trail of black smoke was being bled off Sin Amalgam and drawn into the machine. “HOLD ON!” Stevie shouted as the three spirit butlers emerged from the wall, grabbed Will’s hands and hauled them out of Sin Amalgam, placing them on a stone ledge where safety rails used to be. The three ghost butlers were immediately drawn into the turbine as soon as they had secured his grip. Will’s entire body went perpendicular as the pull grew exponentially, the ancient stone cracking under his fingertips. Sin Amalgam didn’t want to let go. The tar-like, clinging smoke had re-congealed around him, attempting to invade his body and use it as an anchor to remain in world. Will thought, gritting his teeth and finding another handhold, dropping his body to the spinning turbine. The pull redoubled, and Will’s weak left hand lost its grip, leaving him flapping in midair like a windsock, tethered to the ground by his fingertips. The more Sin Amalgam was drawn into the machine, the more strength Will could bring to bear, and the more Aspect of the Immortal Serpent was able to reinforce his grip. Will’s fingers kept their grip, and the ghost was peeled off of him, faster and faster, until with a shriek more felt than heard, the last bit of Sin Amalgam was drawn into the machine and the turbine came to a halt, dropping Will to the floor. “How long was I out?” Will rasped. Silence. “How long was I out?” Will asked again, hoping that the ghost butlers hadn’t been erased by the machine’s refining. “About five minutes.” Billy-bob said as he coalesced in front of Will. “Felt longer.” Will groaned with relief, turning over onto his elbows and studying the immaculate machine in the center of the room. “You guys do good work.” “All part of the job.” Billy-bob said, the three of them bowing.