Obviously the game cut away and left out the descriptions, but the writing was on the wall. When the writers created an isolated encampment of cannibal heathen barbarians cut off from the outside world for centuries, they created an environment that would be gut-wrenchingly bleak. The game artwork just showed some huts with the temple in the background, with a couple lines of text about cannibalistic sacrifices... but I'm inside the game. I don't get cutscenes, montages, or convenient wipe-transitions to leave behind the unpleasant details.
There's a world of difference between [ Victory! Gain XP! Checkpoint! ] and the snap of sinews under stress and the sound of tearing as fasciae gives way. The way that the vibrations travel up the spear haft when a blow sinks deep and chips against a bone. Small quantities of blood have no smell, but large amounts will stink for a dozen yards even before the bladder and bowels release.
And, there's something about watching a person getting eaten. It's not just what you'd expect. I've seen people die. Some, very painfully. I've been around dead bodies. But watching something that is recognizably a person getting turned into meat in a mouth- that hits different. Harder.
I needed to catch up. I left the ground and flew, overtaking the advancing adventurers. Quarl was at the back, running while he worked the winch on his crossbow, winding back the string. "Never mind that," I said, and gave an offhanded gesture. The string pulled back and set on the hook, and the winch folded itself away. He stared at me in disbelief, but I didn't have time to explain to him that affinity means communication. The crossbow knows what it's job is, and I can cycle mana through it to help it do that job better. The crossbow is steel and oak, and with less than a word from me it can re-cock itself. He fumbled for a fresh bolt, and I had to trust he'd find his targets. The others needed me too.
They had kept a tight formation as they ran through the village center, but the next wave of barbarians flooded out from a gap in the huts that probably counted as "a cross-street". They placed for a fight, and the two groups crashed into each other with weapons and skills, but another band was coming at them from the left, to hit them on the flank and get their undefended side.
It was a good plan until I crashed into them like a cannonball. With my mana channels full of the essence of steel, and conquered air flinging me forward at hurricane speeds, I bowled over four of them with nothing but my own body. I crashed down and tumbled, and when I blinked twice there was a stunned, battered barbarian woman on top of me. One of the warrior caste, hard muscles and blood-grimed teeth. I bunched up, knees to chest, and planted my foot on her stomach, then hurled her twenty feet into the air.
By the time she hit the ground I was back in the mix, fighting alongside my team. Steely fists bashed against arms and shoulders, knocking them back, and bone-tipped attacks chipped themselves against my armored body.
I could hear Maspers holding things together. "Do you have that one? Good! Tiviti, a step back, I can't guard your side!" His communication was keeping us together where some of our more independent elements might have created breaches in our defense.
These barbarians did not go down quickly, they were tougher and more highly-skilled. And one of them was a mana warrior, facing off directly against Thumper. His eyes and mouth were streaming a yellow light that hovered like a thick fog around him, and the same sickly light was trailing from the runes carved into the nailmonkey claws he was dual-wielding. Thumper was holding him at bay, and her sword was delivering death by a thousand cuts. Every second she left another deep nick on his hide, and he was having no luck getting through her guard with technique or with brutish smashing strength.
That was when I dispelled the sheep.
Every warrior in front of us flinched, gasping, reeling back. Thumper's sword flicked up, took the mana warrior through the eye socket, pushed through the bone at the back and into the brain. She whipped to the side, slicing straight across, and then jabbed again for emphasis. The tip of her blade exited through his opposite ear. To either side, Larianne and Tiviti were finishing their foes in less dramatic fashion but just as effectively. I was able to get the one in front of me, bashing his head down and cracking bone.
My gambit was straightforward: the barbarians gave their best spoils to the warrior caste. When they stumbled across a paddock of sheep last night, they had butchered them in place and stolen them away to share among all the soldiers. After all, they wanted to make sure their fighting forces had plenty of energy. But when that mutton disappeared, all the proteins that had been digested and integrated went as well. Just the loss of that mass inside their stomachs would be crippling, the abrupt vacuum would bruise their tissues and drop their blood pressure for several minutes. Even worse for a creature that has so little margin against starvation.
Not the first time that I've used this trick to take out enemies. There's a reason that the folk tales advise against taking food from sorceresses.
Something tugged hard at my cloak from the left, and I glanced over, then down. A barbarian with a dagger in her hand was holding my cloak in a rictus grip, her hand bunched the folds of fabric, and a crossbow bolt was pinning her to one of her comrades, also dead. The woman had been inches from cutting me when Quarl killed her.
"Thanks!" I called back, and re-wound his crossbow for him. I blinked, and spotted a notification that The Assassin's affection quest had updated for another five experience points. I chuckled, and took stock. Licard was laying a hand each on Sir Maspers and Tiviti, mending minor injuries. The rest of us were panting for breath, but we did have a minute of peace. By the sound of things, there was fighting ahead of us and around us, but not heading our way. Probably my best chance to let them know what's coming. "Everyone," I said, "we're about to go airborne. Something you need to see."
The village was shaped in a crescent, the clearing lower than the forest around it. The eastern edge butted almost right up to the edge of a massive sinkhole, easily a hundred feet across, that plunged straight down into an unrelieved darkness. In the summer it would be incredibly scenic, lush green jungle, quaint barbarian village, mysterious plunging cavern, and a roaring waterfall. But today there was no roaring waterfall, just a glittering icefall; the stream was frozen almost entirely solid, a pillar of ice that disappeared down into the darkness.
An icicle the size of a freeway overpass was hanging down into that vast chasm, and the surface of it was writhing.
"Oh, what-" Kimothy murmured.
Thumper was louder and more direct. "Holy shit."
The surface was writhing with lean and translucent bodies, pale and malformed, something unlike any creature known. Something without eyes, without restraint. They were naked and lean, and seemed completely unfazed by the wintry temperatures. They smelled living things, edible, and if their hunger might be sated these thing did not know fear or hesitation. Each of them that reached the top sprinted off towards the smell of warm blood-filled flesh, provoking a new round of screams and horror. We could see the press of screaming barbarians fleeing ahead of this threat, but never fast enough.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I proclaimed, making a gesture as if I were beginning introductions. "I give you The Blind."
"What are they?" Quarl demanded, sighting down his crossbow. I like his priorities. Get a target, then ask questions. I especially like the part where he did not start shooting until he gets answers.
Tiviti drew her sword and smiled brightly. "Ah, these are familiar. I fought them before in their territory, where all was dark and damp. They swim swiftly and with skill, but I can see already they are clumsier and less sure here. Adapted to their own environment but not this one."
"Don't underestimate them," I said. "Now, let's move. People are dying."
Floating a dozen feet above the village changed the whole perspective. At the top, the village was laid out before us and we could see everything. And as soon as I lowered us below the level of the roofs it was all just confusion. The group paused, stumbled on themselves, lost momentum. Fortunately both Sir Maspers and I remembered enough.
Bare feet slapped against frozen mud, wild-eyed people dashed back and forth and yelled in their own language. They were a nervous people, living in a lost clearing inside of a jungle of secrets and threat. Every day for them was lived on the ragged edge of panic. And today they were far over that edge. Today, nine outsiders bearing weapons and spells was the least of their problems. The brightly-colored folk with despair in their eyes ran down every opening that could be used as a street.
To our left, a wave of fleeing folk thinned and split like a bubble popping, at first they filled the street and then they were past, revealing what had chased them. A half-dozen creatures with pasty anemic skin scuttle down the street, stumbling into walls and into each other. Their confusion and inexperience with this terrain has them throwing a lot of their motion in the wrong directions, but their fury and ravenous need drives them with frantic energy. Even stumbling sightlessly they can keep up with the fleeing barbarians, tracking only by scent and sound, fumbling their way over uneven mud. They were gnashing and chasing after the barbarian people who had just washed over us and behind us, leaving us standing in the middle of their path.
[ Blind Patrol: Strength 9, Damage 9 ]
"Those," I said, pointing. "Kill them."
My party was happy to get clear instructions that made sense, and they lunged forward. The first of the Blind caught Quarl's attention and the steel string thrummed a low C note as it hurled a steel-tipped dowel rod into the narrow-peaked chest of the creature. Its color was was fungal-pallid and wan but its energy was frantic and frenzied. The impact of the crossbow was enough to shock every flake of ice off of its body. It was momentarily surrounded in an aura of finely-planed snow, its mouth sagged open in shock. Crooked needlelike teeth cragged out of the lipless maw, and the slime of its skin had frozen to a crackling layer and now sprayed a crystalline mist.
Then the moment broke and it was a dead monster on the ground. Tiviti's long legs took her far out in front of the party, lunging towards the center with her sword trailing behind her. The Blind converged at her, stumbling over each other to latch their ever-hungry jaws around her, but she got one foot on the ground and pivoted hard, all of her momentum whisking to the side now. Her trailing arm swung behind her in a long, lazy arc, the sword it gripped was transforming, taking a heavier longer cutting edge. While the monsters plunged for where she had been, she was moving past in the opposite direction just out of their reach, and the sword was swinging like a scythe at her side. The pivot from her feet coursed up through her, gathering strength from her springing knee and twisting hip, her torquing abdomen and each unfolding joint of her wiry, taut-muscled arm. The sword she carries is not a needle of steel anymore, but a shimmering sheet of silvery steel that gathers the momentum of her movement into a long sweeping arc. Her body is not built for power, but Tiviti's grace is as lethal as Licard's burgeoning muscles. The top halves of two monsters float upwards, still groping with misshapen claws for where she was a second ago, their legs stumbling nervelessly to the ground. The impact of the unbalanced dismemberments hitting the ground is accompanied by the splattering sound of entrails gushing out of the bisecting wounds.
Thumper is entirely airborne, and the tip of her rapier is drawing in on the center of the far-right monster like it was being pulled by a string. Her body shoots forward like a loosed spring, and with no magic in her blade she is putting perfect technique behind well-made steel to devastating effect. The bulging torso of the eyeless creatures strains under their shroud-thin skin, the ribs standing out sharply with wide divides between them. She is only guessing where its heart will be, but her arm is a piston thrusting the blade directly for the center of its chest. The stiletto-thin blade divides the skin and sheathes between the ribs, pivots ninety degrees inside the wound, and then pulls free, and about a half-gallon of impossibly deep red blood all hits the ground at once. Where the body-warm blood hits the snow it sends up a cloud of steamy mist, and Thumper's enemy is wooden-stiff when it faceplants into the puddle of its blood.
The steam and mist and frost are all bundling in the air, every bit of moisture that hazes the battle is at the command of our sorcerer, Kimothy. He has looked unsure of himself for a day now, uncomfortable in the jungle and the monsters. But as soon as he was around people, even nearly-naked emaciated barbarians, who were screaming and running from monsters, he has had a sudden new mien of purpose. A mother with two children dangling from her arms flees past us away from the Blind, and Kimothy has wrapped a gauzy scarf of fog and fug and fugue around a monster's neck, cinched it tight, and with the strength of a gallows garotte he snaps the creature's neck, flinging it to the side and then spreading the glittering frosty mist to cut off retreat for the last monster.
Sir Maspers steps forward and brings a blade with him. His style is tight and economical. No miraculous grace or power, just the simple physics of sharpened steel moving in a sliding motion against unprotected flesh, applied where vital blood flow approaches the vulnerable surface of the neck. The monster's greasy tissues leave a film on the knight-captain's sword, and he is already planning ahead before the body slides off the blade. "That group to the right," he said. "We bring them down, Natalie will be near enough the ice column to bring it down and cut off their reinforcements."
From where I stood, I could not even see the group of monsters he had chosen for us to kill. But he's a high-level skill build, his Awareness rank is probably in the thirties or fifties or something. The crowds of civilian barbarian citizens parted in front of us, trying to find anywhere safe. But they fled from us, from the Blind, and even from their own soldiers. When they would flee too far and approach the woods they would turn around and wash back, trying to find safety somewhere in the overrun village. Their panic cut down visibility, but they did not impede our movements. And with Maspers leading, we could make good time on a good target.
"Don't worry Larianne, you'll get some of the next group," I chuckled.
She looked at me incredulously. "Do you think I want that?" she snarked. "Nat, I fight with my hands. I don't wanna touch them!"
And honestly: fair. The monsters are gross. Slick slimy skin that cracks with sores in the exposed cold, distorted joints like a mean-spirited mockery of humanity. Their off-centered hands had every finger tipped in hooked, jagged claws, and their bulbous eyeless snouts gaped with a distorted carousel of points and chisels. External gills hung draped around their necks like blood-colored frills that pulsed and writhed ceaselessly, and half the creatures had blood spilled down their fronts or scraps of flesh dangling from their teeth.
And another band of them was boiling down the street towards us. They darted back and forth, tangling limbs, bashing into each other or anything else around, trying to find anything they could shove into their maws. Only their single-minded purpose and frantic energy moved them through this terrain. Ten of them now, a significantly greater challenge than the last band.
Maspers gestured. "Kimothy, split them in half, hold a few of them back. Quarl, lead the way."
The fight breaks out, and I'm about to start flinging blades of steel and gusts of wind, but Maspers catches my eye and gesture to the sinkhole. He doesn't speak, because already the clash of steel and screech of hellish monsters has drowned out anything so mundane as words. I nod, and turn my attention. The pillar of ice is, in fact, just inside my range, and I'm not sure exactly how Maspers knew it so precisely.
Ice streams from the river bed down into a darkness that seems absolute. The creatures are clambering up it, their claws are surprisingly effective at gripping the ice and their joints and limbs move with a mechanical regularity, scaling easily. Every second, more of the Blind are here on the surface, finding something to rip and eat and ruin. I start melting the ice, returning it to water. There was a lot of ice, and there's a hard limit to how much I can affect at once. I tried to position my efforts so that the water flowing downward would slow down the climbers below it, pushing against them or loosening their grip.
It does not work, the fish-men from the frigid darkness know more about how to climb wet walls than I know about how to knock them loose. So I concentrate on bringing the bridge down, the pillar they climb. Instead of slapping my power against the surface, I apply it as a blade, cutting inward at an angle, ice giving way to water and forming a deep narrow notch in the ice. Creatures keep climbing up past it, but stopping these two or three is less important than stopping the hundreds that are behind them.
Another notch, lower, cutting inward and upward. I can carve out a larger chunk of ice if I apply my power smart. Rather than erode it from the outside inward, I cut deep, angling to connect the two cuts together. A scrambling eyeless fish-thing crawls up the ice pillar, and its claws sink into the crevice I've cut in. There is a cracking sound, and a chunk of ice the size of a wheelbarrow breaks loose with the creature atop it, tumbling downward. It vanishes into that darkness without a sound, a howl, nothing. I start to cut the next-
"We're moving up," Maspers said, nudging my elbow. I snap to awareness, and give him a nod. I follow after them, there's another fight. This is a smaller group of monsters, they've got it under control. I ignore this to go back to work cutting down the pillar. Closer now, I can reach the far side. I cut a deep narrow notch in. A crawling creepy tries to clamber up past the gap left by my last effort, the deep V-shape cut out of the ice. It cannot get a grip, and has to turn itself and scoot to the side to climb around the affected area. I've narrowed the path, created a bottleneck.
Oh, I don't need to destroy it right away, I just need to make it unclimbable! I half-laugh at myself, ruefully amused at how long it took me to realize this. The fish-fiends are finding cracks and textures in the flowstone ice, digging in with their fishhook fingers. I just need to smooth out the ice so there's nothing for them to catch!
The essence of water persists in the form of ice. And both ice and water have this in common: they want to be smooth. The ice cooperates with my suggestion, and the surface ripples as it evens out the irregularities, seals the cracks, absorbs the ridges. I start working on a band around the circumference, a few feet from top to bottom.
"We're clear to move up again," Maspers told me.
"Finish this first," I said, distracted.
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The fish were slowing down, they hit the polished section and groped around for a handhold. A traffic jam built up, below the circumference. I was not all the way around yet but they had a hard time finding the path through. I extended it downward, to stop the few creatures that had figured out to lunge upwards and dig their talons into the ice above my polished band. I widened the gap, five feet. When I blinked out of my fugue, the team was fighting again, another clot of creatures.
These were bigger, and moved with more speed and assurance.
[ The Fanatical Blind ], in my view. A higher degree of challenge, not just cannon-fodder like the others. In fact, each of them was probably the equal of the people I had chosen for my team. But there were five of the fanatics, and nine people on my team.
I lacerated one with a whirling storm of icicles and frozen blades, and my friends all piled in when I created an opening. Two of my allies for each of the fanatics, it was over quickly. I tried to tune out screams nearby us, and the sickening crunches and slurping smacking sounds that ended those screams. I think the barbarian people are as willing to eat The Blind as vice-versa.
Closer now, we approached until we were stopped by another gang of monsters, and I could finish wrapping the polished surface around the far side, finishing the circumference. Some of the Blind tipped off and fell away as I smoothed away the ice underneath their talons, denying them a grip. Creatures clotted underneath the band, scrambling to find a way past. When the crowding got too much, some of them slipped and fell off. There were no more of them scrambling to the top to join the fight, the way was now blocked.
No more reinforcements for the The Blind.
"I've stoppered them up, now I'm going to break the ice," I said out loud. My teammates said something. There was no sound of combat, they must have won. I started cutting into the ice again, below the band. I occasionally turned small pockets of ice into water to send another creature tumbling into the abyss. I don't know what was down there- water, stone, or ice- but the fall was at least a couple hundred feet and from that height it's pretty much all the same.
It's weird to me that they don't cry out as they fall. I've never heard one scream or yell in distress. They will vocalize anger or hunger, and they have some sibilant communication. They're not stupid, they are quite sapient. But they have no sounds to make when they're in trouble. As I cut through the ice, I have time to wonder about that.
My best guess? Screaming in fear is a reaction based on calling for help, letting others know you're in trouble so they can come help. I don't think the Blind have an instinct to ask for help when they're in danger. For them, assistance is something demanded of the weak by the strong, not offered to the weak by the strong. As soon as they're falling to their death, they know that nobody will come to their rescue, so they just go quietly.
A cracking sound shoots through the air, with a percussive background. I expected a creaking but instead there's a grinding noise like gravel crunching, and then the pillar breaks off underneath, tipping away. It takes a worryingly long time for me to hear the smashing sound of ice shattering in the depths of the sinkhole. Whatever colony of the Blind is down there, it is still a long way from the surface. And it's going to take a long, long time for them to figure out a way to get back up to the surface.
Another crack, another boom. A grating sound, like a manhole cover dragged over concrete- ice never makes the sounds I expect it to. There is movement at the top, something sliding. Water starts to trickle down, a tiny waterfall opening up. And then a massive shelf of ice topples over the edge of the sinkhole- the frozen plug that formed the top of the icefall-pillar, and held back the flowing river. A slab of ice the size of a house tilted, rocked, and then heaved over the edge to tumble down into the darkness. The facets of the ice caught glints from the sunlight for a few extra seconds once it dropped into the darkness. And after it, a stream of water started chattering down, shimmering spray and broken flow carrying crackling sheets of ice that broke off in segments, carried over the edge one by one.
The ice had probably been forming a long icicle all through the winter, and then one particularly harsh freeze dammed up most of the waterfall from the top, slowing the stream down enough that it could freeze more solidly as it went, building up from the bottom. After a while it got thick enough to support weight, and accreted more layers of ice as the slow-moving water built up over the next weeks.
And then the Blind in the cavern at the bottom, hungry and angry that the slow trickle of nutrients was gone, came to investigate and found a ladder that leads to a whole world where edible things can grow and thrive.
"All right," I said, breaking away from the ice. "Let's save a village, yeah?"
