Chapter 179

Author's Note: The God Machine: Book 1 is up for preorder for audiobook/ebook/KU and will go live in 2 weeks,  but you can buy the paperback copy today if you'd like. More  importantly, you should now be able to leave ratings and reviews, and I  would be extremely grateful if you did. I'm trying not to hang my whole  writing career on any one book, but it would mean a lot to me if this  launch went well. Thanks in advance to everyone who decides to help.

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It took the tentacles seconds to bring the roof of the tunnel down and bury it. Behind them, the tentacle he’d stunned with a [Power Strike] was already moving again. Both enforcers turned to face it, but Luke was far faster than either of them.

He pulled Zea back from the reach of the tentacle that the enforcers were struggling with, then pivoted and dashed forward to strike the base of the offending limb with a kick. For something that was able to bore through stone, it was surprisingly malleable. The tentacle buckled under the kick, but didn’t tear or otherwise show any visible signs that it had been injured. Luke didn’t even want to think how tough it must be that he couldn’t do any appreciable damage to it without resorting to [Power Strike].

What it did do was start vibrating in place, so fast that its outline blurred and little chunks of stone came loose around its base. When it lashed out again, Luke jumped straight over its side swipe. The enforcers were not so lucky. One of them went low, just under the tentacle’s bulk, but the other was struck in the chest. That guy blew apart in a shower of blood and gore, like he had been struck with a foot-wide chainsaw blade.

“Holy fuck,” Luke swore.

The blur disappeared, leaving a standard tentacle again, but Luke was hesitant to approach it. He didn’t know the limits of this skill, if that was even what it was, but he had a very clear mental image of trying to punch the thing, only for his hand to disappear in a cloud of bloody mist while chunks of bone splattered across the front of his shirt.

The enforcers were armed with clubs, which under normal circumstances would be more than enough. They had a decent range, would leave bruises, and, if necessary, could break bones. That was all it took to keep a crowd of somewhat intoxicated fight fans in check most days. Against an invasion of giant tongue-shaped tentacles, it was worthless.

The enforcer that was still alive broke his club against the springy tentacle with an inarticulate cry of rage. A second later, he was flying through the air to smash heavily into the stone wall. His corpse flopped onto the floor, leaving behind a streak of blood that ended in a slowly growing pool.

“I regret leaving my mace at home,” Luke told Zea. “Don’t know if it would do anything, but I’d feel better having it.”

Zea pulled out her whip, charged the enchantment with a flick of her wrist that caused the pieces of antler to spread out and form its length, then sliced it across the tentacle. It bit in deep, deep enough to tear out a chunk of fibrous, mushy plant-material, but not enough to cut all the way through it. Undeterred, she worked the whip to arc out and back in several more times. By the fourth cut, she managed to slice all the way through the tentacle.

A twenty-foot length of it crashed down to the floor, far too late to do either enforcer any good. It also didn’t stop the stump from writhing around, though Luke wasn’t quite sure if that was from any sort of pain or just its regular motions. It didn’t bleed or drip ichor or anything like that either. Mostly, it looked kind of like cutting a vine.

“Now what?” Zea asked. They were safe for the moment, but both enforcers were dead and their way out was buried under thousands of pounds of loose stone. It would take hours to dig through that, even as physically empowered by the system as he was.

“Find a different exit, I guess,” Luke said, but he had his doubts about the viability of that plan. There were eight different tunnels leading in or out of the arena, and every one of them was either clogged with people fleeing the attack or already collapsed. Whatever the creatures doing this were, they were coordinated enough to corral their victims in. Even as he watched, a trio of tentacle vines burst out of one of the remaining open tunnels in a shower of red gore, killing a few dozen people in under a second.

There was only one spot that was clear of tentacles. Inside the arena itself, Spectacle had put his blade to good work. In the thirty seconds or so that the attack had been going on, he’d severed no less than sixteen tentacles that had broken into the pit. Even as Luke watched, he activated one of his skills and blurred forward too fast to track. Two more tentacles collapsed to the ground behind him as he returned to normal speed on the other side of the pit.

Plenty of people had noticed that Spectacle was hacking apart any tentacle that was near him and had fled into the pit hoping to shelter under the protection of his sword. Spectacle did not appear amused by this, not that Luke could blame him. Having a surging crowd chasing after him made it much harder to move freely.

Much to Luke’s annoyance, he found himself almost missing that stupid sword he’d waved around during his own performances. A mace would be better, of course, but something to cut through the tentacles would be an acceptable substitute. Spectacle certainly made it look easy.

Perhaps the gladiator would save the day. He was well-equipped to dart about, hacking down tentacles, but at the same time, more and more kept coming up. It would take two or three Spectacles to stay on top of the tongue-tentacles, and there didn’t seem to be a limit to how many burst through the stone.

Luke and Zea surveyed the arena for a few seconds. New tentacles appeared faster than they could be destroyed. Quivering piles of meat, bones, and blood coated the floor. All but one exit had been caved in, and that one went down even as Luke started to point it out. The only man successfully resisting the attack was being handicapped by the press of people trying to stay close to him.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Zea said in a quiet voice.

“Let’s circle around to the north wall,” Luke said. “We’ll bust down that gate leading into the offices. There are no tentacles in there.”

“What if some pop up and drop the ceiling on us?” she pointed out.

A new tongue-tentacle broke out of the stone between them. It shot directly at Luke, who let [Unarmed Martialist] guide his limbs into a flurry of punches and kicks that battered the tentacle but failed to actually destroy it. Zea’s whip flashed left, then right, then back again, and the tentacle plopped onto the stone while the stump continued to wiggle about.

“We don’t have any better options that I’m seeing,” Luke said. “We need to get down to the weapons lockers if nothing else. I’m doing fuck all to help right now. If we’re lucky, the back way out will still be there.”

Together, they edged around the arena. Luke ran interference on tentacles that got in their way, even though he couldn’t put them down. They didn’t have time for Zea to hack the tentacles apart, not as fast as new ones were still coming up a minute after the attack had started. The worst parts were when they encountered pockets of other people trying to fight back. Most of them were just regular people wielding nothing but belt knives. Luke scooped one up off a corpse, but it broke immediately upon being stabbed into a tentacle, which hardly seemed to notice.

He should have brought his ever-sharp knife with him, though he was well aware that ever-sharp was not the same as ever-durable. Chances were it would have broken just as quickly as the cheap one he’d scavenged off the corpse. Stolen weapons were not doing much good though, not even as much as his own fists. Every time Luke hit one of the tentacles, he was reminded of the first one’s blurred outline as it shredded a human being in under a second.

When they made it to the cage door, Luke ripped it right out of the wall and ushered Zea in. They needed to move quickly, not in the least because if any tentacles found them in the hallway, there was very little room to dodge and a very low ceiling. The odds of that happening were only going to increase as other people followed them through the new exit, and he could only hope that if and when the demons attacking the arena dropped the tunnel, Luke and Zea would already be out the other side.

Luck was with them for once, and they fled down the tunnel to the storage area, where he grabbed three different swords and slung them over his shoulder. “Overkill?” Zea asked.

“Probably not. They’re not great quality,” he said. “I’ll have to be gentle just to keep them from bending or breaking.”

“Where to now?” she asked.

“The monster holding area,” he said. “There’s a tunnel that goes all the way out of the city. I think they use it to bring in new monsters.”

“That’s going to be miles long,” Zea said.

“If you’ve got a better idea…”

“Fuck. No. Okay, let’s do it.”

The duo rushed off again. It was weirdly quiet now, with the screams mostly gone and the rumbling as tentacles broke through stone absent. As they ran the length of the service tunnels circling around the arena, Zea asked, “Do you think there’s anybody alive back there?”

“I don’t know. I hope so,” Luke said. He didn’t think it was likely there’d be any survivors, not by the time it was over. The only question was whether the demons would fully emerge from underground to attack the city or if they’d be content just killing a few hundred people in the arena.

“Look, blood,” he said as they turned a corner. The wall had been blown out and a single mangled corpse was lying there, but a trail of blood led deeper down the tunnel. Someone had escaped the demon’s tongue-tentacle, though not without great cost.

“Nothing we can do about it,” Zea said.

“No. I just hope the blood doesn’t lead other demons this way. We don’t really know how these things sense the world around them.”

They reached the holding area for the monsters and paused. It was in ruins, with great portions of the ceiling collapsed and all of the monsters dead. Thankfully, there were no tentacles there at the moment, but for all Luke knew, they could come rushing back out of the holes they’d left behind. He charted a path that avoided them as much as possible and led Zea toward the back of the cavern.

“How did you even know about this?” she asked.

“Saw it when we were first negotiating.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she muttered.

“Wait,” Luke said, freezing in place. “There’s… something… I can’t tell what it is. A person, maybe?”

Luke advanced cautiously, Zea right behind him. They didn’t go twenty feet before Luke figured it out. “Gotayi,” he said.

The fat pit manager had drug himself almost a hundred feet down the tunnel before he’d succumbed to his wounds. Clutched to his chest was an iron box, locked. Luke picked it up and felt the weight shift inside. A single shake was enough to confirm his suspicions. “Looks like he tried to grab whatever money he could get away with and made a break for it. Maybe he’d have made it if he’d left it behind.”

“No point in leaving it with him,” Zea said.

“I suppose not. It’s not like he can use it- Wait. Do you hear that?”

“No?”

Luke peered through the darkness and his hand clenched on the hilt of the stolen sword. Again, he wished he had his mace. “Take the box,” he said harshly. “Run for the exit. I’ll catch up when I can. There’s something behind us.”