Godsforsaken

Chapter 45: The Congregation

I really couldn't blame Alisha for her reaction. Yes, her shrieking had given away our presence and yes, that had been highly inconvenient, but that didn't make her reaction any less understandable. Those fuckers had just fed a baby to an Outsider tree. We had seen our share of horrors, even just today, but killing babies was beyond the pale even from what I had seen of worshipers of the Black Goat before. And, judging by the two babes still lying on the stone altar, the sacrifice wasn't over yet.

And so I did not particularly care about them noticing us already. None of these bastards would be leaving this temple alive.

“Intruders!” one of them shrieked and the man I took to be the high priest responded:

“Get word to the forces on Mount Olympus!”

One of the clerics tore away from the group and ran towards a passageway in the back of the temple.

“Oh no you won't,” Yume hissed and flash-stepped over to where the man was running, then drew her blade and cut him down in a single savage slash.

“Continue the sacrifice!” the high priest bellowed. “Beg the tree of life for its aid! Everyone, call upon the goddess! We need every miracle to stop them!”

Absolutely not, I thought. They would not be sacrificing these two children. Over my dead body. “Alisha, Anna, Meli, mow down the back line!” I ordered. “Selene, Athena, with me! Yume, save those babies!”

“Athena?!” the high priest shrieked. “Everyone, capture the wayward goddess!”

Athena gave me a worried look as we charged at the congregation but I gave her a reassuring shake of the head. There was no way I would let these bastards capture her.

Dozens of clerics shouted the names of miracles and I could barely make out individual words but the moment I made out the word 'Augur' I knew to look up. I had never quite caught the full name of that spell but I knew what it meant. Above us dozens of dark portals opened up and out of each shot a collection of tentacles with razor-sharp spines instead of suckers, each attempting to grasp and tear and shred at us.

Alisha, Selene and Yume knew well enough what me looking up meant so they checked above their heads and dodged accordingly. Melinoe, who always seemed to have half an eye on Alisha, noticed and followed her lead. Anna took a moment longer to realize what was going on but as an archer she was always more aware of her surroundings than others so she noticed just in time and danced out of the way. Only Athena didn't know what was going on and was about to run right into the path of a tangle of grasping tentacles but I tackled her out of the way, both of us tumbling across the ground. As we came up we saw a dozen tornado lances shooting over our heads and striking a group of clerics, shredding through them in a torrent of red and black flesh and blood.

But it didn't stop all their miracles, and not all of them had been the tentacle portals. The ground beneath us began to bulge and bubble and Athena, Selene and I had to jump away as fleshy growths burst out of the ground, growing rapidly and twisting into shapes out of nightmares. Grotesque heads of no creature known to god or man rose out of the fleshy growths and snapped at us, their necks long enough for them to lunge like striking snakes. Spine-tipped tentacles, bulkier and more solid than the short-lived ones conjured by those portals, grasped at us, giant maws opened up in the carpet of pink flesh, and enormous shields of bone, looking like giant scapulae, rose out of the ground to stop us from charging the clerics Alisha, Anna and Melinoe had left alive.

But that still left the clerics in the front line, who charged at us through the twisted flesh that didn't hinder them in the slightest. And as they charged at us I saw that these would not be as easily dealt with as the back row.

Not all clerics were built alike. They weren't all squishy casters like Alisha. Some, like the warrior priestess we'd seen with Albrecht, were formidable fighters who happened to know magic and miracles. They were still clerics and not paladins, but they neglected their magic training in favor of building up their bodies, using magic to enhance their combat prowess if at all. And those, it appeared, had been particularly compatible with the vile blessings of the Black Goat.

The beings who charged at us were human clerics only in the most generous of terms. They wore holy robes, splattered with blood and viscera as they were, but those robes did a terrible job hiding the grotesque beasts underneath. They were still humanoid in shape, though almost deformed with glistening pink muscle, their arms extended until they almost galloped on all fours as they charged at us. They ran on their feet and the knuckles of their clawed hands and from underneath their hooded robes we could just see that their skulls had elongated until they looked almost bovine. Almost. Goats didn't have rows of needle-sharp teeth that extended all the way from ear to ear. Their eyes were glowing orange orbs with horizontal slits for pupils but unlike those of proper goats they glowed in the dark, illuminating just enough of their awful features to look truly horrifying.

These mountains of claws and muscle would have been terrifying to face on their own but they were still clerics, trained for combat since long before they became hulking goat monsters. The foremost of them lunged at us from behind the wall of twisting flesh and as he sailed through the air a film of brown magic threaded through with greasy black covered his entire body.

“Back!” I bellowed and Selene and Athena fell back. I, however, did not heed my own advice. Instead of backpedaling I summoned Qi into my legs and jumped far into the air.

The beastly cleric slammed into the ground where I'd just stood and, as I had predicted, his impact created a massive crater, spikes of rock shooting up and outward to stab at anything that would have been foolish enough to not get out of the way. But I hadn't just gotten out of the way. I had gotten into the perfect position to strike back.

It didn't even take a Qi technique. I twisted in the air and then let the downward momentum of my fall do all the work, burying Helios Edge to the hilt in the cleric's head, then twisting the blade through a full arc as I landed on the ground, carving about three quarters of his head off, showing off a nasty cross-section before his body collapsed. But I didn't pay much attention to it, instead focusing on the other clerics charging at us.

So focused was I on them, in fact, that I almost didn't notice the dead cleric's body convulsing alarmingly beneath the robes.

“Felix, look out!” Athena shouted and I jumped away from the corpse just as a dozen spine-tipped tentacles exploded out of the cleric robes, grasping for any prey they could catch.

I was about to thrust Helios Edge at the grotesque sight but then the body did something I hadn't expected. The tentacles stopped grasping for prey and instead buried into the ground, then hoisted the cleric's body up into the air, looking like nothing so much as a gallows made of meat and viscera with a body dangling off it. More tentacles burst out of the severed head, forming a horrible mockery of a face, two tentacles tipped with orange goat eyes standing out from it like the eye stalks of a snail.

The tentacles started moving the body towards us and as they did the body started twitching again, spreading its clawed arms wide.

I aborted the thrusting attack and instead went for a Qi Projection, carving vertically through the grotesque creature. It fell apart in a shower of dark blood but before the two halves could hit the ground more tentacles shot out from the inside, trying to bind the halves together before they could fall. I shook my head, refusing to let this go on. I drew the sword we'd found after killing the Dark Lord of Shub-Niggurath, the one that could prevent creatures of the Black Goat from regenerating, dashed in and slashed at both halves of the cleric. Only when I was done with that did the body finally collapse for real.

As I looked up I saw a new emotion on the other beastly clerics, who had been staring at our fight instead of intervening. Fear. They were terrified. I wasn't entirely sure what they were afraid of. Was it the fact that despite all the promises of eternal life they had no doubt been given I had managed to kill one of them? Or had that grotesque transformation made them reconsider the gifts they had so eagerly received thus far?

I didn't care either way. They worshiped an Outer God and had been in the middle of sacrificing children when we'd arrived. They would all die.

“Athena, Selene, let's do this. Overwhelming force!”

“Understood!” Athena yelled, then began to charge one of her divine miracles. We had wanted to preserve all abilities with limited uses per day for as long as possible but unlike Selene and Alisha Athena was not limited to a certain number of miracles per day. And she was taking advantage of that. “Pierce them, Palladion!”

Instantly an enormous spear of light shot out of her palm towards the cleric closest to her. I had seen her cast that miracle before but not since she'd gotten the hang of Qi manipulation and the difference was like night and day. It had been a powerful miracle before, a piercing beam of light that could skewer anything, but now it was more like a pillar of light that was sharpened on one side.

The attack didn't so much impale the beastly cleric as it tore it apart, the spear of light almost as wide as the beast's entire torso. It ripped and tore, the corrupted flesh sizzling where it touched the condensed divine power, and by the time the miracle had run its course there wasn't enough flesh left for tentacles to shoot out of.

Selene, meanwhile, had her own trick up her sleeve. As soon as a cleric reached her she slashed her sword at it with a Qi Burst. The cleric jerked back and only took a shallow cut across his chest but it was enough for the sword's enchantment to take effect. It didn't physically grow cold but it was able to trigger weaknesses to ice.

Most forms of regeneration were hampered, if not entirely stopped by fire. Most monsters with regenerative properties could heal burn wounds but it was achingly slow to do so, to the point where that was one of the easiest way to kill such creatures. But frostbite could do the same. For want of a better word, it stopped regeneration cold. And in the end the grotesque tentacles keeping these beings going were just another form of regeneration. Now, of course the regeneration of the Black Goat couldn't be stopped by just fire or ice, hence my need for the enchanted sword earlier, but fire and ice could still pause it momentarily. And that's what Selene was going for. Qi Burst after Qi Burst flowed out of her as she rapidly placed one slash after another, not leaving the creature any chance to retaliate, to retreat or to recuperate. She hacked off whatever bits she could with expertly placed cuts, making them tumble away and by the time the freezing effect wore off and tentacles could shoot out and grasp for the missing parts those missing parts were yards away.

It was a horrid sight, seeing her deal with that creature. She just kept on chopping off more and more of it until what was left was just a bloody torso, its ribcage carved open to reveal a tangle of tentacles that pulsed like a heart, and only when she lined up a mighty thrust and skewered that part did the creature stop twitching.

With three of the beastly clerics dead the rest of them faltered, even more clearly than after I'd cut down one of them. Now that I thought about it, I realized why that had bothered me: Creatures of the Black Goat did not usually show this level of self-preservation. Nearly all of them, even the mutated cultists, fought like madmen, utterly unconcerned with their own well-being. In fact, the only being aligned with the Black Goat we had fought who had acted like this had been Wilhelm, back in the Crystal Crown's dungeon. So if acting with self-preservation was a sign of being a willing participant in the Black Goat's vile cult rather than an unwitting pawn then that meant that all of these clerics were complicit. They had not simply been corrupted by a masterful manipulator, they had chosen to follow the teachings of the Cancer of the Woods.

Apparently a lifetime of religious cuckoldry left one vulnerable to the whispering of an evil fertility goddess who promised power and pleasure in equal measure.

But thankfully their hesitation didn't slow us down. They all had to die anyway – their corruption had spread too much to save them – but knowing that they weren't just unwitting pawns still eased my conscience. And spurred my determination.

A barrage of arrows, tornado lances and bolts of Melinoe's weird purple magic crashed into the clerics cowering behind the wall of meat, causing yet more devastation. Apparently our casters had come to the same conclusion I had.

“Don't falter!” the head priest bellowed. “Keep them busy! I will rouse the Great One!”

That made me look up and I just saw the head priest dropping an ornate staff to the ground before he ran over to the altar, apparently attempting to pick up another one of the children to feed to the tree.

But he hadn't counted on Yume.

The little fox flash-stepped over to the altar, picked up both of the children, and then flash-stepped away again, apparently bringing the children to safety, before reappearing before the head priest.

“You!” he growled. “What have you...”

But he didn't get to finish the sentence. Yume's sword flashed and the head priest staggered back, a deep red line spreading over his torso. He touched a malformed hand to it and stared at the blood.

He blinked, then blinked again, and then sprinted toward the giant maw in the tree, apparently attempting to sacrifice himself in order to rouse it.

“Oh no you won't,” I hissed and then used a flash step myself, appearing right in front of him.

He got a determined look on his grotesque, goat-like face, his eyes narrowed and he clearly decided that his best course of action would be to shove me into the tree's maw but he evidently hadn't realized just how strong I was.

My hand snapped forward and grabbed his collar. Once I had a good hold on him I charged up a Qi Burst and then flung him into the air, where half a dozen of Alisha's tornado lances struck his body and turned it into a shower of blood and viscera.

“That tree still needs to go,” Yume said and I nodded and concentrated, drawing forth as much Qi as I could as fast as I could, and then thrust my sword at the tree.

“Prominence Nova!” I called out and in addition to the lance of white-hot flame the thrust had produced four more such lances snapped into existence all around the tree, carving into it and reducing it to ash and ectoplasm.

“They slew the High Priest!” one of the clerics called.

“They killed the Great One!”

“Run! We can find shelter on Mount Olympus!”

Shit. We'd inadvertently caused a stampede. There was no way we could stop all of them and if even one managed to break through...

But Yume had a different plan. Suddenly her aura snapped into life, larger than I had ever seen it. She was a specter of light blue haze, a giant flame in the shape of a fox.

“Sunder and burn,” she said and though it hadn't been a scream her voice still rang out like a thunderclap. She swung her blade through an arc and immediately the ground on the way to the portal split open and massive, blue flames shot out of it, barring the clerics' path.

I had never seen Yume perform a feat of magic of this magnitude. Even just a few fireballs tired her out, never mind... this. Her fire magic was simply not that strong compared... to... her...

It was an illusion. She truly was not that strong, she had simply created a massive illusion to stop the clerics.

And bunched together in front of the wall of fire as they were it only took Alisha a single barrage of tornado lances to end the entire rest of the congregation.