Chapter 311: Handicapped
“Phew! Looks like we are eating cricket tonight!,” Rocko said to himself as he hauled a boar sized, first tier Copper Cricket on his back.
While the bottom layer was mostly ground dwelling scavenger type insects, occasionally stuff from the middle layer will pop down here in an attempt to grow stronger, lay eggs, or… something.
Rocko never really got that far in regards to learning the habits of insect beasts, he just knew which ones were edible at this point.
“Hmmm. Maybe I should try baking it tonight instead of-”
“Papa!”
“Huh?”
Rocko turned towards the voice calling out for him, confused as to why his daughter would br all the way out here, since she was usually the type to do she what was told. Thankfully, all he saw was a Mimick Wasp, a first tier wasp aether beast known to mimick the sounds of others as a means if attracting prey.
“Bah!,” Rocko clicked his tongue in disdain, “fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice-”
“Huh?”
“Butterfly!”
“Ouch!”
“Oh great, a whole colony of them huh?”
Rocko was about to chastise the first Mimick Wasp for trying to fool him, but then a whole group of them started talking. He was about to go on his merry way and ignore them, but then he heard one of them say something that made his blood froze.
“Spider leg!”
“Haha, nice try…wait.”
As Rocko suddenly stopped moving when he heard that set of words, the Mimick Wasps, unaware of its meaning, simply repeated that same phrase in that exact same, little girl voice.
“Spider leg!”
“Spider leg.”
“Spider keg?”
“SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!”
Rocko dropped his latest kill and bolted in the direction of the only place in this whole fucking jungle he knew that fit that description.
‘Please be safe, please be safe, please be safe!,’ he thought to himself as he ran as fast as he could towards the accursed location.
As his feet pounded against the jungle floor, he felt as if a fire was ignited in his heart.
If only he knew how true this statement was….
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“GAaAaHGHh!,” the owner of the demented arm snarled from behind the door as he reached passed it’s threshold to grab Nausicaa.
While the thing did managed to grab her, it appeared to lack the strength to pull her back in.
Namely due to its arm spontaneously and rapidly combusting and rotting on the way to her.
Zhen Liu had literally watched the arm go from healthy and creepy, to rotting and creepy as it went through the door. He was confused at the sight, but luckily, Logos and Pathos had answers…sort of.
‘A what seal?’
=A Blood-Soul seal. They’re a forbidden type of aether seal that a practioner can make at the cost of their life in order to make an area inaccessible to a designated party.=
=In essence, looks like a previous adventurer established this one to make sure that the abomination inside couldn’t escape.=
‘Why…why did that sound like foreshadowing…wait, not the time! Hurricroak! Nepherage!’
[On it!]
[Magma Cutter!]
[Vice Crush!]
The two kaijin immediately lashed out at the arm and sliced it at different part of it’s length, effectively releasing Nausicaa from the arm’s grasp, which quickly fell apart due to the damage it took.
The two of them decided to do two different cuts as opposed to a singular one, on the off chance that the abomination that owned this arm had some form of healing factor.
It’s a lot harder to restore two separate pieces of flesh than one, especially when both pieces were cauterized by fire and lighting!
“Yes!”
Unfortunately, like a cheap shooting bitch, a pair of tentacles that looked like a thousand demented millipedes stitched together flew out of the door, falling apart by the second and grabbed the hand and Nausicaa before reeling them both back like a fishing line at a speed that made it so any of the other kaijin or Zhen Liu could nothing more than chase after it through the door.
“After them, now!”
<=Wait, don't!=>
Well…just Zhen Liu anyways.
When the trio attempted to go through the door and after the tentacle, the strangest thing happened.
As Zhen Liu crossed the door, Frosttusk immediately changed back from being armor into being a kaijin, while Razor Maiden and Spring Brawler we’re forcibly summoned. At the same time, Nepherage and Hurricroak bounced off an invisible forcefield like they just ran into a glass door.
Fwoosh!
*CLANG! CLANG!*
Pop, pop, pop!
“Gah! What the hell?”
“Uh…oh…”
“Why were you three summoned?! Maestro!”
Zhen Liu stopped at the last moment before going too far in, allowing him to see that as of this moment, he didn’t have any kaijin back-up with him.
“Oh shit.”
He was just about to turn around and see what caused the kaijin to somehow get blockaded, but the sound of hideous laughter stopped him from doing that.
“yEEsssSssS, yessss, been sO loNG siNce I hAd a fresh mEaaaaal!”
Zhen Liu hesitated for a moment, thinking about his own mortality for the first time in weeks, but then…
“Milord, what are you doing?!,” Nepherage asked while banging against the barrier, “go rescue the girl now! We got this!”
“I…okay!”
Part of him had expected his kaijin would protest about going in by himself…he honestly should have expected that the “heroic” one would encourage action over hesitation, even if he was technically “handicapped” as a result.
‘Whatever the fuck this bastard is, I hope he doesn’t mind me replacing his meal of Nausicaa with his own ass!’
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“Hush…little one… don’t you cry…mama is here…so you won’t die…”
“Ma…ma… don’t know…what that is…but that sounds…nice,” the girl mumbled as she walked down, down, down the steps of the spider’s leg.
The song had such a tight grasp on the child’s mind, so much so that the girl failed to realize that all around her signs of death and despair.
Skeletons of warriors, that looked to be running in fear.
Spider carapaces trapped in aggressive poses, the last thoughts in their heads being that of desperation.
Scorch marks, scratch marks and desperate scrawlings in the walls.
All obscured by the sweet sound of a demonic lullaby.
“Don’t worry…of dying…my dear…Mama will hold you close…won’t need…to fear…the reaper…when I’m the one who’ll reap….”
“Okay…ma…ma…”
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“What the fuck?! A door?! When? How?!”
Rocko arrived at the Spider’s Leg with the dim hope that maybe, just maybe, he would find his baby girl just napping at the leg’s trunk without a care in the world.
Instead, he found no girl, but a creepy ass doorway that lead back down to the tunnel, back to the monster within.
A part of Rocko wanted to escape, to leave this place behind once more.
The girl technically wasn’t his, so what did it matter if she died?
It would just be another horrible accident in this terrible – “Pa…pa…”
“Baby girl?”
From the depths of the door, he heard his child call out and say a sentence that shook his core.
“Pa…pa…should meet…ma…ma…that way…we are…happy…together.”
At first, Rocko was shocked at the idea of the girl’s mother somehow surviving that fall, but then he put two and two together and realized what was actually happening.
“That bastard…is his using a fake mother…to lure her in?!,” Rocko growled in anger as he tightly gripped the saber at his hip.
Rocko swore he was shaking with anger at the cruelty of this moment, but an outside observer would see that it was also the sword buzzing with rage.
With his resolve now hardened by the idea of not only rescuing his daughter, and punishing the freak of nature using a fake parent of all things to lure her in for heaven’s know what reason, Rocko re-entered the cursed place where his friends all fell, promising to return from it with daughter in hand.
‘I’m coming sweetie! And if they touch a single a hair on your head, I will burn this place to the ground and that bastard’s soul too!’
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“TAZZTY, tAsssty, finally! BeEnN sooo LoOnnG! Grub cAN FiNAlly EaT againnnnn!”
‘Well, that’s a new memory for the suppression vault.’
It didn’t take long for Zhen Liu to rush into the chamber and find a hiding spot away from the abomination…although, a part of him wished it did take longer.
‘Seriously, my kaijin may look inhuman, but this is… indecent.’
He wasn’t sure if all abominations looked like “Grub”, but it was bad.
Emaciated, yet bulbous.
A solid shape, yet swarming all over.
Faces covering the body that decided to turn the uncanny valley and make it the uncanny trench.
‘And I have to fight it without any kaijin…great…’
