Chapter 180

Tension built in Luke’s neck as he stared back down the tunnel. There was something there, but he couldn’t find it. And that didn’t happen to him, not anymore. Not even Lath had been able to sneak up on him, and the inquisitor had had a skill specifically to help him be quiet and unobtrusive. Admittedly, he hadn’t used it much in his hunt for Luke and Zea.

[Detection] saved Luke’s life. It drew his eyes to a streak in the darkness, something there and gone in an instant, and the only reason Luke kept his head on his shoulders was his immediate reaction. He dove to floor of the tunnel and rolled past Gotayi’s corpse as something streaked through the air overhead and skidded to a stop thirty feet past Luke’s position.

It rebounded instantly, but this time Luke saw its approach. He timed it, slid to the side as it was going by, and smacked a hand out to catch it by the face. His attacker contorted in the air and tumbled to a stop, untouched. Before it could throw itself at him again, Luke said, “Spectacle, stop.”

“Why? Are you different from all the other demons?”

“I’m not a demon,” Luke said, annoyance in his voice. [XP Mask] was starting to become more of a problem than it was worth. “I’m just a guy with a bloodline skill that lets me hide my XP.”

Luke turned off the skill and let his XP presence slip out. Spectacle froze in place, his head cocked to the side. “Impossible,” he uttered.

“No, seriously, it’s for real. I already had this conversation with those Jigon-Sai guys.”

“No, not that,” Spectacle said. “You have the SysAdmin bloodline.”

“You… You know what my bloodline is?” Luke asked.

“Only from the stories.”

“What fucking stories!”

Spectacle glanced behind him, shook his head, and said, “Later. That demon is going to bring this whole arena down in a few minutes. It’s only slowed down because it killed almost everyone and seems to be making some sort of effort to fling the bodies into a mouth that came up through the floor in the pit.”

“Shit. Everyone’s dead?”

Spectacle nodded once and walked past Luke. “Come with me. We’ve got a lot to talk about if you really are a descendent of William Bennet.”

“That’s my dad,” Luke said. “He went missing from my world nine months ago. I guess time works differently here, and it’s been centuries since he died.”

“I don’t know,” Spectacle said. “You should talk to my aunt. She knows more about this than anyone else in the family.”

Spectacle kept walking, and Luke fell into place behind him. “My friend is farther ahead,” Luke said. “We should catch up to her in a bit.”

“The dwifkin you were standing with during my show?” Spectacle asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s a thousand feet in front of us, not moving.”

“How the hell… Oh, your [Tapestry of the World]skill?” Luke asked.

Spectacle paused, then nodded. “You can see my status,” he said. “That’s… weirdly violating.”

“Sorry.”

It hadn’t escaped Luke’s notice that Spectacle hadn’t put away that black-metal sword yet, nor had he removed the mask covering his face. Maybe that was just a sensible precaution in case anymore giant demon tongues attacked them, or maybe he was protecting himself from Luke. It had only been thirty seconds ago that Spectacle had tried to kill him, and despite the man’s apparent knowledge of Luke’s family and bloodline, Luke had precious little reason to trust Spectacle.

Perhaps more important was the question of why Zea had stopped. Luke had assumed the tunnel would hit the surface somewhere outside the city, that way new monsters could be smuggled in unnoticed, but maybe he’d been wrong about that. Maybe it spilled out into some guarded warehouse, or just ended at a locked door Zea couldn’t get past. He couldn’t imagine why it would terminate well short of the city limits, but he also couldn’t think of a reason Zea would stop if she had room to keep moving forward.

“Do you know what those demons were?” Spectacle asked.

“Uh, maybe. They kind of looked like these purple things that had tongue-shaped tentacles coming out of their mouths. But I think the bodies were just kind of like clothes they wore to move around, and the actual demon is just a mass of tentacles. Only, the ones I fought had tongues that were a few inches wide, not a foot or more, and only ten or fifteen feet long, not fifty.”

“The lashers, yes. I thought they bore a resemblance myself,” Spectacle said. “But I’ve never seen them traveling outside of their flesh carriers, nor have I seen any that approach that size. It concerns me. What if…”

“What if what?” Luke prompted.

Spectacle shook his head. “I’m probably wrong. And it’s complicated. I guess in broad strokes, there’s supposed to be different tiers of demons, and the higher up you go, the bigger they get.”

“That’s interesting. How do you know all of this stuff?”

“Also complicated,” Spectacle said. “This isn’t the first time we’ve had demons on Aros. There are records.”

“Doesn’t sound that complicated.”

Spectacle ignored him and said, “Your friend is just ahead.”

The tunnel curved to the left, then abruptly ended at an immense underground canyon. It was a hundred feet wide and filled with loose stone. Zea stood at the edge, peering off into the darkness. She glanced over her shoulder as Luke and Spectacle came into view, paused, and gave Luke a questioning glance. He just shrugged in reply.

Spectacle brushed past Zea and looked down into the canyon. “Something dug this out. Something big.”

“One thing or many things,” Luke said.

“We already know the tongue demons can burrow through stone,” Zea said. She looked over at Spectacle and added, “Making new friends?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Luke told her. “But he’s certainly interesting. Seems to know a lot about my family and demons in general.”

“That’s suspicious,” Zea said. She looked over at Spectacle and said, “Anything you want to add to the conversation?”

“Not really,” he said. “I don’t care if you believe me. Right now my concern is escaping from the demon or demons, and for everybody’s sake, I hope it’s ‘demons,’ plural, and not one massive lasher.”

“What if it is just a single huge demon?” Luke asked.

“If the history books are to be believed, then it would take someone over level 60 to kill it.”

“Fuuuuuuuuck,” Luke said.

“Well put,” Spectacle told him dryly.

“Fuck all that,” Zea said. “Focus on what’s important right now. Can we get across this?”

“I can,” Spectacle said.

Luke considered the canyon of open air separating him from the tunnel they’d been following. He could see the opening directly across from them, fifty or sixty feet away. If he got a running start and used [Burst Step] at just the right moment, he thought he could make it. Besides, even if he failed, it wasn’t like he couldn’t climb back out. He doubted the fall would hurt.

“Probably,” Luke said.

The black-clad man took a few steps back, then sprinted forward and leaped out into the canyon. He made the jump with grace and landed on the far side a second later. “Guess he wasn’t lying,” Luke said. “I’m going to assume I’m carrying you.”

“Unless you’ve got a lot of rope for me to climb down and then back up the other side,” Zea told him.

“I do not. Hey, what’d you do with that cash box?”

“Dumped the box into this hole. The money’s in my pack.”

That was probably for the best. It saved him having to lift the weight, not that ten or twenty pounds was much to him these days. Every bit helped though, especially when he was making such a long jump. Luke considered using [Life Surge] for the jump, but on the off-chance that Spectacle betrayed them, he wanted to save that.

“Okay, let’s do this,” he said. He took a few steps back, beckoned for Zea to jump up into his arms, and got himself into position.

“You sure you can make this jump? She asked.

“Nope.”

“What do you mean ‘nope?’” she said, alarm in her voice.

“Means maybe I will, maybe not.”

Zea started struggling to get free, but Luke held her tightly. “You put me down right this instant!” she demanded.

“Hold on tight,” Luke said, pushing off the stone while Zea screamed.

* * *

Hakiro was well accustomed to perceiving the world around him without using his eyes. They hadn’t worked right since he was a child anyway, showing him mostly blurs of movement and washed-out colors, especially in bright lights. When he’d gained his first level, he’d immediately put his AP into perception, and that trend had continued until he’d reached 20.

It hadn’t fixed his eyes. He’d given up at that point and turned to skills. That had been time consuming to the extreme. As he understood it, most people perceived the system as words they could read, but Hakiro was forced to listen to endless lists of options. It was simply maddening listening to a dry repetition of lists of skills over and over again. It was a minor miracle he’d managed to find anything of use at all.

That was long ago. Now he ‘saw’ everything, for lack of better term. There were no blind spots in his [Tapestry of the World], just an endless sea of information that got fuzzier the farther away from it was. He clearly saw the stranger across the chasm, heard him argue with his partner, and perceived the pressure the man exerted against the stone when he pushed himself into a jump.

It was because of his skills and his perception that he knew the instant things went wrong. The demon had found them, and it was coming. Tremors shook the stone, just as they had back in the arena. The demon burrowed through it with incredible speed, faster than an average man could run on flat ground. It must have been some demonic magic that allowed it to move like it did, though the chasm it had cut through the earth probably helped speed it on its way.

Before Hakiro could so much as call out a warning, the demon burst out of the darkness, its huge central maw hanging in the air at a level with the two strangers while a hundred tentacles lanced out to catch them and block all possibility of escape.

The stranger saw the demon coming a second after Hakiro did, and he reacted admirably. With his last instant of freedom, he twisted in the air like a cat and hurled his diminutive partner towards Hakiro.

“Catch!” he bellowed as the woman went flying straight at Hakiro.

“Luke!” she all-but-screamed. Then the tentacles flashed through the darkness and engulfed the stranger.

Hakiro caught the dwifkin with one arm, spun in a circle to diffuse the momentum, and set her down on her feet. “Run,” he ordered. “Do not let his sacrifice be in vain.”

“We can’t leave him,” she said, pulling out that strange whip he’d seen her wield back at the arena.

“We cannot fight this creature. It is a paragon, an elder demon, one of the primordial progenitors of their kind.”

“I won’t leave him.”

Her voice was cold. The whip flowed out, shards of bone running its length, and she hacked down at the tentacles. If the demon even noticed, it paid her no mind. That did nothing to stop her; if anything, it drove her into an even greater fury.

Hakiro made to grab her and pull her away, but then he noticed something that made him freeze in place. The stranger, Luke, had been buried under tons of demon flesh, should have been crushed to a lump of meat and his remains tossed into the demon’s maw.

Except, somehow, he had resisted the incredible pressure. Somehow, and Hakiro couldn’t imagine how, he was still alive.