Godsforsaken

Chapter 9: Hunted

The next morning I woke up to Yume warming up the leftovers from last night's dinner. As she noticed that I was awake she immediately cast her mind probe spell again and Syr joined us for breakfast, not that she could eat anything.

“Is it supposed to be this foggy?”, Yume asked eventually.

I had noticed that, too. The fog was rather unnerving and the weather didn't quite explain it. I also started getting a feeling that the woods were getting dangerous, dark and evil. When I mentioned that to Yume she agreed that something felt off.

After we finished breakfast I was sure there was something around us, watching. I was sure Yume noticed it as well because there was a low growl coming from her throat that made her whole body vibrate, though she didn't even seem aware that she was making the sound.

We packed up and set out, the fog getting thicker, and finally Yume held out her hand and a ball of light blue fire appeared in the palm of her hand. It illuminated our surroundings fairly well but the fog was so thick it was having a hard time penetrating more than five yards around us.

“I don't like this”, Syr said. “There is something out there in the fog.”

“I am unfamiliar with the monsters of this realm”, Yume said. “Do you know what could be out there?”

“A lot of things. Taking everything into account though and considering we're more than a day's travel from any settlement I fear we may be in the territory of a wendigo, possibly more than one.”

Syr sucked in a breath.

“What is a wendigo?”, Yume asked.

“I used to think they're humans who were twisted into monsters when they had to resort to cannibalism to survive while lost in the woods. Actually, that might still be the case. But a few days ago Syr told me that they're apparently the spawn of an Outer God.”

“What are Outer Gods?”, Yume asked.

I wondered how to explain that one. “Surely you know of them, even if it's under a different name. Gods who do not belong in this world, whose worshipers are trying to open the way for their gods to enter and ruin this world.”

Yume's eyes widened. “Oh, the gods from beyond the stars you mean. Yes, we know of them. What do you call the three biggest ones?”

Yes, she had definitely heard of them. “There is Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat in the Woods with a Thousand Young, Hastur, the King in Yellow who rules a kingdom of the dead and Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos who drives the world to ruin through strife and madness.”

Yume nodded. “Yes, that fits what I've learned. We call them the Dark Mother, the Corpse Emperor and the One Who Wears A Thousand Masks.” All good names in my opinion.

“Yes, well, if the one who took Syr's body wasn't lying wendigo are born from the Dark Mother's power.”

Yume made that low growl again. “Then we should destroy them, here and now.”

I smiled. I liked her attitude. Damn the Outer Gods and all their spawn. “Normally I would agree but this is the worst situation to fight them. We should find our way out of this fog first. If that's not possible we need a more defensible position at least. We don't even know how many are out there.”

As if to punctuate my worries there was a blood-curdling shriek behind us to our left. I expected to have to stop Yume from running away, but she was smarter than that. She turned her back to me, trusting me to do my part while she guarded my back for me. Syr had vanished so as not to get in the way. She wouldn't be a physical hurdle but she was opaque and hid what was behind her. I could still feel her presence in the back of my mind, though, worried and apprehensive.

“Felix?”, Yume asked. “Do you have a second sword you could give me?”

“You can have mine”, I said.

“But...”

“I'll use my greatsword instead. If my longsword is too heavy for you already you wouldn't be able to handle that one.”

“Alright”, she said and took my longsword as I pulled out my great sword. The moment I started digging in my bag of holding something pounced, but I'd been expecting it. I started pulling Qi into my arm while I was still pulling out my greatsword and by the time I had removed the weapon from my bag the energy had traveled all the way to the tip. Instead of thrusting like I'd trained I slashed diagonally upward as I pulled the sword out, catching the thing in the ribcage before its huge talons could touch me.

It was fast. Fast enough that it managed to jump back even as I cut through it. Had I not used a Qi Burst I probably would have missed the creature entirely but with the technique to speed and power up my slash I had gotten it good. As it stood there it touched a clawed hand to its chest and stared at the blood it had gotten on the hand. And while it did I got a good look at the creature.

It was clearly humanoid, though the proportions were all wrong. Its arms and legs were way too long and the forearms were especially out of proportion, as if the creature was spitting on the golden ratio with which the human body was designed. Its hands, likewise, had fingers that were way too long and the tips looked razor-sharp. And I don't mean it had pointy nails, I mean the very tips had formed into bony little spears. The skin over its body was stretched so tight that I could see all the bones. The only two spots on its body that did not look horribly emaciated were its belly, which was swollen, but not swollen like it was stuffed with food but like it was distended from lack of food, and the spot over its heart, which had a large canker on it that beat like a heart. Its head was stretched horribly, as if it was halfway into a transformation into something like a goat or rather a stag, judging by the antlers coming out of its head. The face was stretched into a muzzle like that of a bovine but with a mess of needle-like teeth clearly visible. Its eyes at first glance looked like empty sockets but deep, deep down in those dark chasms I spotted tiny little orbs, orange with thick horizontal bars for pupils. The entire body was hairless and the skin was an off-white color, almost snow-white but slightly grayish, except for the purple tendrils extending outward from the canker in its chest.

I'd never actually seen a wendigo before but this thing sure fit the bill, if about an order of magnitude more awful than any description of the beasts I had ever read.

After it finished staring at the blood it let out another shriek and then scuttled back into the fog.

“Did you get it?”, Yume asked. She was still standing with her back to me, not turning her eyes away.

“I hurt it but it's still alive”, I said. “These things are fast.”

“So were you. I could feel it. That was fast enough. When we get out of this I'll teach you another technique.”

“When, not if?”, I asked.

“The power of positive thinking”, Yume said.

She made the light blue flame float over our heads so that she had both hands free and then got into the stance for her Qi Projection. I didn't turn to look but I felt her build up the Qi for it and a second later she sent out a slash that went into the fog and elicited a shriek from a wendigo. I was fairly certain it was a different one from the one I'd harmed, simply based on how the shriek sounded nothing like that of the other, except that both sounds were guaranteed to feature prominently in my future nightmares.

But Yume did not let her guard down. She got into position again, waiting for them to make a mistake.

“If I dig around in my bag and act distracted, can you use that Sen technique of yours if one attacks me?”, I asked her.

“Sure, just give me a sign.”

“Alright, three, two, one...” I counted and started digging in my bag of holding, my sword stabbed into the ground next to me. This wasn't just me playing bait, though. I was grabbing my crossbow. No sooner had I grabbed the weapon that I felt more than heard a wendigo jumping at me and I hissed “Now!”

Yume did not hesitate for even a second. She slashed through the air and immediately a half sphere of slashes appeared around us, three of them cutting into the leaping wendigo. As it scrambled back I drew the crossbow and put a bolt into it as it reeled, hitting it right in the canker. I wasn't sure whether it was the canker that animated it or whether the heart underneath kept it alive but either way between the three slashes and the crossbow bolt the wendigo died right there on the ground.

I felt like pumping my fist in celebration until we heard three distinct howls of anguish echoing around us.

A second later another wendigo jumped out of the fog and pulled the dead one with it.

Another heartbeat later the sounds of tearing flesh, chewing and swallowing could be heard. Well, they were cannibals.

“Make a break for it while they eat?”, Yume asked.

I considered for only a second. “Yes. But keep that Qi technique ready.”

We hurried along in the direction we'd picked out before the fog had settled in, which was fairly tough going given that we could barely see a few yards ahead of us, but finally we made it to the perfect spot. The fog had cleared up a little and we found a clearing. I stopped, drank from my canteen and handed it to Yume, who accepted it gratefully.

“You want to make a stand here?”, she asked after she'd stopped guzzling.

“Yes. Unless, of course, they gave up on us after we killed one of them.”

“No way”, she said. “Not if they are truly creatures of the Dark Mother.”

“True.”

We positioned ourselves once again with our backs to each other but this time with several yards of space between us. The fog here was much thinner and thus allowed us to see much further. I was able to hear a rustling in the underbrush that started off faint but kept getting louder, so I knew we had a minute and I used that time to scatter a few traps, namely an ice trap and a good old-fashioned arachne silk tripwire thin and sharp enough to cut the feet off anyone who ran through it at speeds. The ice trap was a horribly expensive item but I would have no use of it if I was dead so I decided to use it then and there. For a weapon I drew a spear, something I usually didn't like, but in this case I had a plan.

When the first wendigo came hurtling into the clearing it behaved exactly as I expected. It charged straight at me at inhuman speed – straight into the tripwire. Its foot went flying off as it rushed into the thin wire and without the foot its body fell over and spun through the air, straight into the spear I had braced against the ground. It kept thrashing around on the spear even though it had gone all the way through its gut and out its back, mangling the spine in the process, so I pulled a dagger and, with a burst of Qi, slammed it into the wendigo's canker heart.

By the sound of a sword swishing through the air I could tell Yume was also fighting one of them. That left the third one...

I spun around to the blind spot between Yume and me and that's all that saved my life as the third wendigo jabbed a claw into the place my head had occupied a moment ago. I cut into its overextended arm with my dagger and it jerked back with that arm but swiped at me with the other. I almost avoided that swipe, but a claw grazed my scalp. I danced away to create distance and the wendigo seemed content to let me so it could assess the damage I'd caused it. Me, I didn't bother to check how badly I was wounded. I didn't feel woozy and head wounds all bled like crazy and so it would probably look worse than it was.

It shrieked and came at me again. Athena's bush, these things were fast. I twisted out of its way and nicked it with my dagger as it hurtled past me, then it jabbed its claw into the ground and used that as a fulcrum to twist back around, kicking up dirt as it turned 180 degrees around its arm buried in the ground, and came right back at me again.

We went on like that for a while, me dodging its swings and cutting it, it slashing at me and sometimes managing to graze me. I was accepting the wounds as a necessary price to pay for what I had planned.

It charged me again and I allowed myself a smirk as I dodged away and it hurtled forward – straight into the ice trap I'd set.

Ice traps were expensive single use magic items that resembled blue sea urchin except the spikes weren't actually sharp spikes but sensors. Place one on the ground to arm it and then the next life form over a certain size or weight that came within three feet of it would cause the trap to spring, flash freezing the area immediately around it. Even just grazing the ice trap's area of effect would cause severe frostbite. Hurtling straight into one was damn near lethal.

The wendigo had hurtled straight into mine. It had used its freakish speed to twist away at the very last second but that had still frozen the left third of its body solid. It tried swinging at me with its one good arm but I pulled out my greatsword and used a Qi Burst to cleave through its entire body lengthwise, carving through its canker heart and its skull at once.

With two wendigo down I turned to Yume and went to help her. Her odd garment was slashed in a few places but the wendigo hadn't managed to do much damage to her body underneath. The loose cloth had done its job in confusing the attacker, it seemed. The wendigo, meanwhile, had a few good cuts along its body and kept jumping back into the thicker fog among the trees after every failed attack. Finally Yume stomped a foot forward and yelled:

“Enough!”

Then she did something odd. There was a light blue haze around her as she created three light blue flames with her fire magic, then started infusing them with Qi. They grew and twisted in on themselves, growing denser and becoming thin, long snakes of fire the movement of which reminded me of her swishing tails. When the wendigo came at her again she sent the three flames at it. It used its freakish speed to dodge around them but they twisted oddly and kept closing in on the wendigo even as it tried to back off again and then Yume sent out another pulse of light blue haze. Two of the fire snakes vanished as if they had never existed in the first place and at the same time a Stupor spell slammed into the wendigo, stunning it and making it unable to dodge the third and final snake of blue fire as it hurtled into the beast's chest and then began twisting around it, immolating the creature.

And then I had to scramble to catch Yume before she hit the ground as she collapsed from sheer exhaustion.

**

I had split a minor healing potion between us to heal the cuts we'd suffered in the fight and after that it had only taken her a few minutes to recover. She tried to sit up sooner than that but I kept holding her.

“What about the other two?”, she asked.

“Already dead, relax.”

She finally did relax at that and snuggled into me as we sat on the ground. With the wendigo dead the fog was lifting by the minute and I suspected their presence had caused it in the first place. “You seriously killed two and I only got one? That's embarrassing”, she mumbled.

“You're the only one who beat one with brute strength. I needed tricks and traps.”

She snorted. “All part of your skills. I wouldn't have thought to use those tricks and wouldn't have had the gear with me if I had. Besides, that last attack took all I had.”

“Still, it was amazing”, I said. “What did you do there? I thought you said your fire magic wasn't that strong.”

“It's not”, she said. “Only one of the flames was real, the other two were illusions. And the third was only that strong because I pumped it full of Qi. I was using the illusions to try and herd it into the real one, but it was too fast so I had to improvise.”

“Why didn't you use Stupor from the start?”, I asked.

“I actually tried that, but their minds are weird. A fully powered Stupor could only stun them for a moment, no longer”, she explained.

“Yeah, I think I know what's up with that”, I said.

“Do tell”, she said.

“See, I think that growth over their chest is what animates them. They were so emaciated they should have been dead of hunger and yet not only were they alive, they were stronger and faster than they should have been. I think that canker was pumping them full of some sort of Outsider juice that was keeping them alive. And I think it controlled them.”

“That's disgusting”, Yume said.

“Pretty sure you're right”, Syr said as she appeared next to us, sitting down against us. Yume had reestablished the mental connection after resting for a bit, so she could hear Syr just fine. “I've heard my body call these cankers a boon, that they were 'fixing the flaws of the human form'.”

“Yuck”, I said. “She hasn't tried to, ah, 'fix' your body, has she?”

“No, apparently she likes my body just fine. Well, minus that one modification”, she said. Right, the blood milk. Thankfully Yume didn't ask for clarification.