BECMI Chapter 314 – Gargantua

The Mick moved slowly through the dwarven tunnels, the rest of the team holding back while he scouted. His Armor was stealthslaked and would remain silent even if he scraped it along anything, but that wasn’t going to happen, as his Vajra stood out two inches from his skin and gave him both awareness of what was going to touch him and the ability to subtly deflect such stuff away from contact.Unlike the Grandmaster, his feet still touched the floor, but not even the dust stirred at his footsteps. The beat of his heart radiated out from the contact, permeating through the stone and carrying his ki with it, returning in a pulse of awareness of everything in contact with it.

This was Schmeideberg, a proud and isolationist dwarven kingdom, one of the last holdouts in the Last Range of mountains, stubbornly holding to their autonomy as Eismoor expanded with unprecedented speed. The way the new realm had dealt with so many dragons had been a source of fear and not inspiration to these dwarves, afraid they might be next on the chopping block, especially after so many of their distant kin capitulated and joined the strange new and extremely expansionist nation taking form here.

Then something truly monstrous had assaulted the main holding of the dwarves, breaking into and seizing the Forge of Power that was the absolute heart of the dwarven community. The Clanholder, a skilled and powerful dwarven warrior certain of his own ability had led the elites of the dwarves into battle to reclaim the Forge.

None of them had returned.

The dwarves had managed to barricade the smaller tunnels. Thankfully nothing had come through hunting hungrily for more dwarves, but with their best and brightest slain, and the loss of their Forge, the humiliation had been too great.

The Keeper of the Forge, an aged dwarf-priest of great age but only middling power, had swallowed his pride in the face of their loss, and sent a messenger asking for help from Eismoor.

And so the Mick, his bondmage Laurentine, and the rest of his team were here now, troubleshooters meant to shoot some trouble.

But first they had to know what they were fighting. The takeover of the Forge was disrupting Divinations in the vicinity, so Scrying and were returning nothing, and the dwarves had been no help. Any dwarves who had seen what actually attacked them had vanished, which was quite ominous.

But that was why The Mick was here now.

He had his own dreams and ambitions, mostly about overthrowing the MacKlannisters, butchering the lich dominating his clansmen with its necromancy, and freeing them from the yoke of their magical kin, who almost inevitably were corrupted by the politics of Zanzyr and the dark studies of the clan.

His sister Isadora, although a full Mage and closing on Archmage now with service to Eismoor, vastly preferred not going home to Zanzyr, where she would be roped into service as a powerful noble and leveraged into the politics of Caergard.

That she was serving the woman who’d made such a mess of the MacKlannister power and authority wasn’t mentioned at all, of course, if they had any idea.

More to the point, her children had the potential to be Forsaken, and that status was far rarer and more valuable than just another wizard at this point, even if the Powered were so useful overall. Isa spent a lot of her time building infrastructure for the continuous flow of people coming from Darkmoor, happy to be of help and vastly accelerating the building processes.

His Laur had reluctantly but finally embraced her bloodline bias towards Fire, and was working up the Fire Elementalist Circles, taking her training in Erendyl, instead of her native Frier Principality of Vascouz under House Tilian. The arrogance and elitism of the Frier lass hadn’t held up under the continued presence of the Lady Edge, Commander Briggs, and Grandmaster Sama, let alone the powerful and varied sciences the Moorians were bringing from the past.

It was science that included explosions and mastery of fire to make an Overmagus weep in desire, among other things, beyond just shooting beams of light and hot plasma and steel pellets ten times faster than sound…

The breach through the stone outer wall of the Forge chamber was in front of him, faint sunlight filtering through from the shadows outside. Stone slabs, dust, and rubble were strewn around, but he was quite mindful of the fact that the dwarves had insisted that any of their kin sent forward to investigate the breach, inside or out, had simply gone silent, not even given the chance to scream a warning.

That was pretty damn fast and foreboding.

Crystal and Shadow was a strange combination of the Dragons to take, given one was all about armored tankiness and the other all about sneak attacking the shit out of people. Moon was required to balance the two flows of ki properly, and Crystal wasn’t respected for its swordwork in the same way that Ocean, Storm, and Fire were.

He was attempting to work on Ocean, but the sea wasn’t in his blood, and he hadn’t even mastered the first Way. It just didn’t seem to gel for him, which was a pity.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelFire for the genuine story.

Sun, however, seemed to be calling to him. It was the Dragon meant for someone working in a group, for soldiers and officers, and that aspect got along surprisingly well with both Moon and Shadow.

It made him a very good Operator and Soldier, as needs required, just not a Champion or Duelist, which was rather fine by him.

He took a step up into the range of the scattered rubble and settled dust, and went absolutely still, his ki and Vajra literally freezing him into motionlessness.

There was something plucking at the edge of his Tremblesense there. Something under the rubble and the dust, and it wasn’t stone.

He was also sure he saw the edges of some dwarven armor at the edge of his sphere of awareness, buried under the stones.

Very slowly, the members of his Fellowship watching out his eyes through the enhanced Markspace, he stepped forward one more pace, just a drifting shadow moving with the vagaries of the light.

Long tendrils, woven through the stones like serpents, covered by dust, all leading back to the same source. The damn things were at least fifteen feet long…

One more step. He was basically less than a foot away from the leading edge of one of the tentacles now. They were covered in enough dust that he could only vaguely make out its form with his eyes before it snaked under the rubble, leading to…

An insectile head, eight different tendrils leading up to a circular mouth, two bulbous eyes that were basically just points of darkness underneath the stones, heading up a body at least two feet thick that led beyond the range of his Tremblesense under the rubble.

There were also the remnant armor and weapons of at least a dozen dwarves buried under the rubble, disguising the presence of any predator. No bones, but those were likely at the far end of the creature, beyond the range of his Tremblesense.

-That’s a bloody carrion crawler,- Kormac /murmured into the Marklink, the young Caer Forsaken from the MacGully clan staring at the image of the thing’s head. -But it’s freaking huge!-

-The tentacles all bear a fast-acting paralytic. Eight of them coming out from one this size? Every dwarf who came in range was paralyzed and became a meal before they could even scream,- Laurentine /told everyone else coolly. -Look at the bulges and lesions on the tentacles there. This thing was forcibly mutated to its current size. I imagine the chitin and plates of its body are broken and cracked, as well.

-This is the work of Gargantua!- she /summed up.

Various curses echoed through the Fellowship, and then fed uplink to their superiors.

The wizard calling himself Gargantua was at least a Grand Archmage, and completely obsessed with making bigger, stronger, ‘better’ monstrous creatures of all types, perfecting his process and adapting it to all kinds of creatures to make more dangerous and powerful versions of them… who happened to be in great pain and constant hunger, and were thus extremely violent and prone to lashing out at the suddenly smaller creatures of the world.

-Floor to the left,- Kavva, the elfin in the party, /pointed out sharply in the Mick’s display.

His Tremblesense could feel the wear in the stones from the tread of many boots over the years, sense the marks of pick and chisel and hammer, even where dwarven hands trailed along the stone in familiar touch, drawing strength from them.

There was a spread of indentations in the stone, as if long nails or claws had pressed into the stone and left marks behind. Everyone looked at the mess of tracks etched into the stone, and silently let the elfin continue.

-The circular indents are from the legs of the crawler… but there’s at least two different sizes there, maybe four, I’d have to get a visual look.- Kavva mentally squinted at the display, but the Mick couldn’t make it resolve any better without being on top of them. -Those deeper ones are from claws, from a hand, not a foot. Something with long arms moving on its forelimbs as it came in. It could be an ape, but given the depth, I’m inclined to say a Gargantuan troll.-

Gargantua routinely left the subjects of his processes scattered all over the place in the north and wilder areas, having more sense than to drop them on civilized areas and provoke a wild hunt for himself and his laboratories. Normally dragons hunted them down as threats, challengers, and big walking meals, and outraged druids tended to do the same, while jotun hunting parties considered them fun targets to go after.

He’d personally seen the corpse of a Gargantuan troll, the damn thing over thirty feet tall, unnaturally muscled and warped, with monstrous claws, thick hide, and fully Giant-level Stature effects allowing itself to move with speed and energy despite the massive weight increase.

They’d also seen one Gargantuan hill giant, risen in height and power to something exceeding even a Storm Giant, more powerful than even the rare Mountain Giants found only far from civilization. Ogres and bugbears had been the most common nifloids subjected to the procedure, with spreads of lesser magical Beasts that were easy to capture, or potentially just create from nothing, also encountered here and there.

With fewer dragons and druids around to take care of them due to unfortunate misunderstandings, the disposal of the creatures fell to the defensive forces of Eismoor. Gargantua was not very popular as a result.

-A troll and a pack of crawlers together is not natural in the slightest. The crawlers should be using the troll as a paralyzed and unending food source, not fighting dwarves,- he /reasoned out. -Furthermore, they aren’t going after the available food, and a Troll that size could eat dozens of dwarves all by itself, let alone the crawlers.-

-They came here under control of Gargantua, might even have or in, which is why the dwarves never saw them approaching, despite the fact they should be visible literally a mile away,- Laurentide /conjectured, and nobody disagreed.

-Slide left around the creature. Get a better view of the floor. This creature could be dangerous, but a team of dwarves should have been able to hack it dead, then drag their paralyzed kin out of range. There was something else involved here,- Kavva /requested coldly.

The Mick moved away from the wall, extending his shadows right into the light and cloaking him from view in the scattered dust particles, even with no cover to hide behind. He stirred nothing as he stepped slowly out and around, Tremblesense giving him perfect awareness of every stone and where to put his feet as he stepped past the unmoving bulk of the carrion crawler, whose tree-trunk girth and many circular, caterpillar-like legs became more visible as he maneuvered in stealth and silence.