The deer carried Arcen around like a sack of potatoes. His flailing limbs hit so many things that he couldn’t feel them anymore. He couldn’t free himself from the flower deer’s mouth no matter what he did. It had layers and layers of muscles that kept sucking him in for the entire duration like a cylindrical conveyor belt.
As scared and frustrated as he was, he realized he couldn’t just free himself without a plan. The speed at which the deer was running around and the heavy thumps of its hooves on various surfaces made it very clear that if he fell out of its mouth, he would be trampled to death.
He had to wait for it to stop if he was to get out of this situation. He kept speaking to the tower preemptively. The word ‘Detonate’ was always at the top of his mind, he kept it ready to fire off at any moment.
He almost fired it when the creature slowed down. There were places along the way where he felt like they were passing through a veil. The deer slowed down as soon as it hit these ‘gaps’. It was some sort of penetrable wall made of strange material that felt like electricity on his skin.
The deer didn’t slow down enough for him to risk using Detonate. It always burst out of the veil and quickly started running again.
Every time this happened, the muffled sounds around them changed. He could feel the air itself shifting, and temperatures fluctuating, terrain and surfaces changing almost instantly.
He was counting the chambers when suddenly, the flower deer hopped up a ramp like a mountain goat, and jumped up, launching itself at a diagonal angle. The veil was on the roof this time, and it was much thicker than the veils between chambers.
He’d seen this before on documentaries. The veil that separated tower floors. Only one or a few chambers on a floor had these small chambers with translucent holes on the ceiling or the floor. These holes were made of the same strange permeable material as the chamber veils. The thickness slowed everything down almost to a halt at the center.
Arcen nearly fired off Detonate to free himself, but he held off when he couldn’t feel the ground anymore. If the deer dropped him here, he would sink through this material and fall whatever height that it climbed up to reach it. He held off, gritting his teeth. The deer exited the veil at the top on the exact angle it jumped into it from at the bottom.
He tried to keep count, but the deer kept going through a horizontal, vertical maze that he quickly lost track of. It could’ve been hundreds of chambers, tens of floors. It always went up, never once down.
It came to a stop when Arcen was at the edge of passing out from the stress. He couldn’t believe it at first. His mind was slower now, and it took him longer to realize his battered limbs were dangling in the air. The deer had come to a stop, and it was lifting him off the ground for some reason.
Panicking, he opened his eyes and stared directly at the deepest point of the throat of the creature. He targeted a point as far from his face as possible.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The flower deer’s throat blew up right before his eyes, The pink flesh of its inner mouth ripped wide open, blackening where the detonate hit. The deer’s petals tightened, crushing him further.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The second one hit the ripped flesh from before, and this time, it blew a hole in the back of its neck. The petals tightened even further as the deer flailed him around.
Fuck! I’ve got to hit the brain!
He didn’t know where the brain was, but he targeted the roof of its mouth instead of the throat.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The petals loosened, and the deer’s legs collapsed instantly. It came crashing down.
But there was no ground beneath his feet to stand on.
“Oh god!”
He screamed, trying to touch the ground with any part of his foot. There was none. The flower deer tilted forward and its petals flared open, tossing him out.
I’m on the edge of a fucking cliff!
He’d realized it a bit too late.
He was falling into a pit, and the deer he just killed flopped over the edge, and fell right after him.
The fall wasn’t as high as he thought. He braced for impact as he fell feet first. He hit a surface that felt softer than soil or rock, the impact knocked all air out of his lungs.
He tried to stand up, but his body didn’t do what he wanted. The ground felt sticky and soft, like half dried sludge. He couldn’t free any of his battered limbs from it no matter how hard he pulled. He’d fallen here feet first, and he had his arms in front of him to protect his face. That was the exact pose he was stuck in.
“Help!” he yelled, his voice still strained with the deer saliva that he’d swallowed while in its mouth. It wasn’t loud enough for anyone to hear.
It took his eyes a while to adjust to the darkness of the pit. There were faint luminous structures all around him. The ground was indeed some sort of sticky fluid, exactly like half-dried sludge. It was mostly transparent with a slight orange tint. The flower deer he killed had landed just ahead of him, planted into the pool of sludge head first.
Where the fuck is this!
It was impossible to move an inch from where he was. He saw several corpses scattered around the pool and a huge blackened mess at the center. The pool was swirling imperceptibly slowly, gathering everything that fell into it at a funnel-shaped dent at the center. The sludge was thick enough to grind everything against each other while twisting and breaking them apart.
Looking around, he saw gigantic petals similar to the flower deer all around the pool. The glowing structures around him were inner sides of these petals.
This is a flower?
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
He was in the center of a giant flower the size of a house, at the bottom of a large pit.
As he thought about all the ways to free himself, more flower deer appeared over the edge of the pit. They were bringing all sorts of things to drop into the pit. It was like a conveyer belt of living and dead things.
They dropped an entire family of what looked like baboons with red and blue markings on their faces and horns on their foreheads. Most of them fell toward the center of the pool. One of the adults fell next to him. It was barely alive as it fell, but the impact snapped its neck. Two of the small ones had survived the fall, but they were at the center of the funnel, where the sludge twisted faster than the rim.
They kept screaming constantly, their voices as shrill as whistles and their pained wails as loud as car horns. Arcen couldn’t even cover his ears with his hands stuck in the sludge. Their voices rattled his brain. He couldn’t concentrate on anything anymore.
I have to kill this flower before it kills me!
He focused on a point next to his hand on the sludge.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The sludge exploded in a white cloud of funky smelling vapor, leaving behind a small crater with some clear liquid sizzling and bubbling in it.
Well, shit.
Detonate was too small to break anything critical. He couldn’t fire it directly next to him to free his limbs. It exploded whatever he looked at. He didn’t want to test it with his own limbs. There was nothing he could do besides blowing up holes into the sludge.
He had no way to help the screeching creatures. They managed to rip themselves off the sludge due to their thick coats of fur, but they both fell deeper into the funnel. Slowly, they twisted into each other as the sludge rotated around, their bones crunching and snapping as time passed.
The screams reached their loudest at some point, and he couldn’t bear to hear them anymore. At this rate, they were going to scream for hours.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
He aimed it at the back of the head of a screaming baboon. It was young and small enough for the Detonate to engulf its entire head. The head splattered to pieces, silencing it immediately. As soon as its head blew up, he was looking directly at the twisted face of the other baboon crashing into it.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The face exploded, and it was completely silent again. His ears were ringing. He could still hear their screams inside his head. Their bodies twisted into each other, crushed against the weight of the sludge.
He felt horrible about killing those monkey children, but their heads exploding was a far more merciful death for them than being twisted and stretched for hours. In their absence, he was left the only living thing in the flower again.
I want to get out!
He tried all sorts of things and screamed for help for hours. Eventually, his voice gave out. He was exhausted.
The flower deer dropped more corpses into the pit as he drifted in and out of sleep. A familiar figure fell right at the edge of the funnel.
Torga!
Arcen didn’t want to watch as the man slowly twisted into a mess. He’d seen enough already. He closed his eyes.
When he woke up again, Torga had twisted into a pillar at the center, thoroughly mixed with other creatures, corpses and debris. There was nothing left of him. He’d died and been digested by this tower. Arcen felt hopeless staring the twisted pillar of flesh at the center of the tunnel.
It was going to happen to him too. He’d slept too long. He was only two meters away from falling into the same funnel and twisting into the same pile of flesh that was Torga and the dead baboons.
Can’t let that happen!
He hadn’t tried everything that he could. He still had a lot of Aura left. He still had one thing that could put a dent in the sludge.
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ GOLD ─╮?
╰ 0 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ AURA ─╮?
╰ 7,865,676 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
He had enough Aura to use Detonate thousands of times.
With renewed resolve, he used it ten times at the same spot. He managed to dig about a foot deep into the sludge. The residue hot liquid sizzled, bubbled and slowly settled back at the bottom of the crater. The residue was clearer than the orange-tinted sludge. He could see through it like a clear patch of water.
He targeted the bottom of the hole through the clear liquid to test it. The new crater cut deeper, splashing the settling hot liquid everywhere. It felt worse than melted wax. He had to pick a different spot. One that was far enough away to not splash directly at him.
As he probed for the perfect spot, he started analyzing the funnel. The sludge was clearly draining down toward something. The ‘food’ that this flower ate was slowly being led there, likely to some sort of an orifice that was its mouth. It seemed like the perfect place to dig towards, about three meters below surface.
He picked the perfect angle that intersected the center of the flower. He started digging. He made changes to his targeting pattern as he went along. He realized he had to dig his own funnel. That was the most stable shape that allowed for further digging.
Eventually, he managed to dig a large crater that was about the size of the central funnel itself. The corpses nearby spilled over into the hole he was digging, boiling in the hot liquid. He kept going without pause. Detonate had about a second and half delay. He had to keep using it to prevent the liquid from hardening back to sludge.
He only paused when he dug to the bottom.
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ GOLD ─╮?
╰ 0 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ AURA ─╮?
╰ 7,352,076? ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
That added up more than I thought.
After more than six hundred of chained Detonate, he finally hit something other than sludge. He knew he hit something when he felt a tremor below him. All the luminous petals around him shuddered. He was about two feet away from falling into the funnel.
The crater he was digging was now a lake of hot, bubbling liquid. He had to wait to target the bottom of it. Misplaced Detonates were bad news. He’d gotten splashed with the boiling liquid twice already.
He threw five more Detonates at the exact same point just to be sure. Suddenly, the petals went limp, curling inwards. The flower deer screamed above him. The sludge spiral stopped, and the pool relaxed back towards the edges.
He’d killed the flower. He had to find a way to free himself from the sludge.
╭ ╰︶?? ERITHERIA ?? ︶╯ ╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTRIBUTE INCREASED ╰︶
????
DESTRUCTION + 2
[12]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Completely exhausted, Arcen drifted back to sleep.
He woke up when he got splashed in the face. A thick layer of slime was all over his face, and he couldn’t see anything through it, He wiped his face furiously. His hands hurt like hell. He couldn’t move his fingers. He felt like he was trying to wipe his face with tree branches.
Then he noticed it.
My hands are free?! I’m free!
He was at the bottom of the sludge pool. It had drained out after he killed the flower. He’d slowly drifted to the bottom. The slime was the residue liquid left by the collapsed sludge.
The splash had come from his left. He could hear and feel movements.
Another fucking creature?!
He turned slowly, ready to fire Detonate at whatever it was. There was a figure hunched over at the center of the flower, messing with something there. Arcen couldn’t tell what it was from the faint silhouette. It was perhaps a horned baboon. An adult, by the size of it.
It was digging at the center of the flower, splashing sludge residue with each pull.
He didn’t wait for the creature to notice him first. He aimed at its head.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
The creature moved immediately. He saw its head fly off instead of exploding. It screamed like a man.
That’s weird?
It was no baboon.
It was a man wearing a black fur outfit with long boots. Arcen had struck his helmet with a Detonate.
The man yelled at the top of his lungs into the darkness, rubbing the back of his head furiously. Seemingly unable to tell which direction he was attacked from.
“H-hey!?” Arcen croaked, his voice cracking at his throat. He was beyond thirsty. His mouth felt as dry as wood. He couldn’t talk even if he wanted to.
The man flipped around like a creature. He quickly dashed over corpses, drawing a knife. He jumped and rolled towards the source of the sound and immediately slammed his knee into Arcen’s stomach, knocking all air out of his lungs.
“H-help!”
Arcen coughed, his words stuck in his dry throat. The man raised his knife, ready to slash across his neck.
“W-Wait! help me!”
The words didn’t come out right. The man swung his knife down. Arcen saw it for a split second, right before the tip touched the side of his neck.
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ SKILL ╰︶
????
DETONATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╰︶ACTIVATE ︶╯
