Chương 209: Chapter 285: True Face

The unnatural stone protrusion from the forest was some kind of hive. Hundreds of identical four-limbed creatures bustled around, each accomplishing their own tasks within the hive, reminding The Devourer of wasps and ants, albeit mammalian. A shudder of instinctive terror flooded its body at the thought of ants. It didn't matter how many you could eat, there were always more, and they would eventually win. Best to avoid them. And yet…

These ants bore more concentrated miasma than anything save the large scaled worlds The Devourer had consumed a few days ago. The Devourer knew that these creatures could slake its thirst. Maybe I'll just pick off a few of them and leave, before the hive gets alarmed, The Devourer thought, casting a net ahead of itself. William Oh Carrie met them in the center of the small fort, giving them the tour of the dozen or so buildings along the town's two intersecting roads.

"A few days after…Marigold, was it?" Carrie Envar asked, glancing up at the dragon.

"A few days after she attacked, people-""I did not attack. I inquired…with enthusiasm," Maribelle said, holding up an index claw.

"And it's Maribelle." Carrie glanced over at a smashed portion of her fort, then back at Maribelle, her eyes narrowed. Summer, the inky black parasitic creature that was the primary focus of Carrie's class, was draped over her shoulders, taking the form of a cloak. It was no longer a little thing that could be concealed beneath her clothing, and it had instead entirely taken the place of some of her Relic Slots, namely the torso and legs.

I wonder if that's a restriction of the Ability, Will wondered as Carrie seemed to size up whether or not she could get away with attacking Maribelle.

"A few days after Maribelle's enthusiastic inquiry about the location of her brother, people started dying."

"How?"

"Some of them trip and break their neck, some of them kill themselves. Some just…die in their sleep. We're up to eleven now."

"And nobody saw it happen?" Will asked. How can someone trip and break their neck on this Floor? Will wondered. A person's neck at this Floor was stronger than the floor it was impacting against, and could certainly support someone's entire weight.

"Plenty of people saw it happen," Carrie waved dismissively.

"That's why everyone's scared out of their damn minds. Climbers want something they can fight, not random accidents and mental illness."

"Maybe we can bring some of them back to life and ask if they saw anything." Will asked.

"That was the first thing we tried to do. Climbers are worth a lot more than the price to resurrect them on this Floor, so I paid the local priest of Andover. It failed."

"It failed?" Will asked.

"He said the body had 'lost its memory' Carrie said, giving air quotes.

"Then the priest died too in a horrible sex accident, so we're kind of up shit creek without a paddle at this point." Will had just had resurrection explained to him a few weeks ago. As long as the miasmatic structure of the Class lingered inside a well-preserved body, it was able to be resurrected by someone with the right Ability. So if the body 'lost it's memory', doesn't that mean it lost it's Class? Will mused, peering at Carrie.

Carrie's Class was tightly packed with miasmatic structures, arranged elegantly and focused on her connection with Summer, indicating that she had carefully chosen all of her Upgrades to synergize with and feed into one powerful Ability. Unlike Will, who was a jack of all. When Will looked at his own Class, it looked like a tangled jumble of contradictory, roughshod hack jobs that barely accomplished their goal. The fact that Will's Class worked as well as it did was a miracle.

"Can I see the corpses?" Carrie's eyebrows rose.

"Sure." Will followed Carrie down into a cellar beneath the local tavern, kept near to freezing by clever use of magic and venting. Besides some carrots and potatoes was a stack of bodies on a rough-hewn pallet. Will knelt down and held his left hand over the nearest body.

"You have a resurrection Ability?" Carrie asked, brightening.

"What? No." Will replied, channeling Charge through his hand. Carrie clicked her tongue.

"Can't believe I fell for that nonsense." 312-> 307 Charge remaining. The heavy miasma in the air crackled as it was exposed to its activator. A small amount of the Charge made it through the Miasma-dense atmosphere and entered the corpse. From his experiments, Will expected the Charge would touch the dead body's dormant Class, the miasmatic structure would wick the Charge up through its body like water saturating a piece of cloth. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

It should cause the dormant miasma in the body, the Class, to temporarily glow in high relief… but it didn't.

"How did this one die?" Will asked.

"Died in his sleep." Carrie said.

"I don't want to make grand assumptions based on too little information." Will said.

"But I think…something ate his Class."

"… What?" Carrie"His Class is missing." Will said.

"Just…gone. I think whatever killed him got rid of his Class. In fact, he might've died simply because he lost his Class and miasma sickness finished the job while he slept."

"Well, that's terrifying." Carrie said with a shudder.

"Something we can't see is picking people off one at a time. I can't tell them this thing can remove Classes. The Stronghold is already holding on by a thread. If they hear about this they'll abandon ship immediately."

"Many before you have tried and failed to establish one of your little colonies on this Floor." Maribelle's head spoke from the entrance to the cellar.

"There's no shame in being the latest in a long line of honorable failures."

"It might be best to send your people down to the Rotwitch until you figure out what's doing this," Will added.

"And how many of them will come back, Hmm?" Carrie asked, arms crossed.

"You know as well as I do that if I do that, the desertion rate will explode and I'll be stuck rebuilding this place from scraps. Will did know that. Lords were supposed to present a façade of absolute power. An evacuation would tarnish that image, and many of the Climbers would see the retreat as an opportunity to take their earnings and leave.

"Yeah," Will agreed.

"Less people would die, though." Carrie grunted sourly, acknowledging the truth of Will's words.

"Let's just figure out what's doing this and kill it so it doesn't come to that." Carrie said. Easy enough to say, Will thought. Will's head reared up as his mental map suddenly flooded with fear. There was someone feeling the immediate terror of death right there. Will leapt to his feet and shoved his way past Maribelle's face, orienting on the figure flooding the street with terror. A shirtless Climber panted, shortsword drawn. Will… couldn't see his face.

His head was wrapped in complex miasmatic structures that Will had never seen before. The closest thing Will could compare it to was… An illusion? Will thought, frowning. No, it was far more complex and robust than one of Travis's illusions. It's structures were different, too. It wasn't fooling the senses or creating a body. It was tapping into something more primal.

"Are you okay?" Will asked.

"Stay back!" The man shrieked, holding out his shortsword in trembling hands, holding it between them like a man trying to ward off a demon with a holy Relic.

"Stay back! I'm leaving. I'm getting the Abyss out of here!" The weave of miasma tightened around the man's head, slowly sinking into his skin where it began to touch his Class. I need to help him, Will thought, taking a step forward.

"You…you're it. You're the one doing this!" He shouted, backing away as his breathing and heartbeat redoubled. Will hadn't heard a heartbeat quite that fast in…ever. Something was causing his body to experience extreme terror, and Will was pretty sure he was looking directly at it.

"You've got an Ability on your head that's harming you. I want to help you." Will said, preparing miasma in his left hand. If I can get close, I can rip that veil of Miasma off of him. preferably without getting any of it on me. Looks nasty.

"STAY BACK!" The Climber shrieked, his short sword glowing as he flailed, sending a flurry of ranged attacks towards Will. Will dove around them and lunged forward. The man turned to run, his toe catching on a loose cobblestone, causing him to trip. He broke his fall with his right hand, the fist holding the sword angling it right up under his jaw. In the space of a breath, the Climber was dead. Will halted his lunge.

"What…the Abyss?"

"Yeah, I was pretty weirded out the first time I saw it, too." Carre said with a scowl as she arrived beside Will.

"Don't touch him," Will said as Carrie knelt down.

"There's something on his head." The miasma web around the man's head cinched tight and fused with his Class before yanking it straight out of his corpse. A Class infused every portion of a Climber's being. From their bones to the hair and skin and everything in between. It was so thoroughly enmeshed that a person's Class mimicked their shape perfectly. Which explained why Will saw a ghostly clone of the man being pulled out of his physical body and dragged down the street, kicking and screaming.

"FUCK!" Will shouted, sprinting after the man's soul as it was hauled down the street on a gossamer thread that seemed to emerge from nothingness.

"What is it?" Loth asked, trotting along beside him.

"Chasing his soul!" Will shouted, juicing up his left hand. Carrie shared a look with the others and shrugged, sprinting after him. Will turned a corner and came to a screeching halt, his breath leaving his body. Under the eases of the smithy was… something, spilling out into the air and the building around it. Sharing a space, but not interacting with it, being on a different fundamental dimension. It looked like a static vortex of interconnected miasma.

Like one of those dreamcatchers that Leon sold in his general store to tourists. The general shape was where the comparison ended, because it was far more complex. The shape appeared to be something like a funnel, composed of opposing concepts braced against each other, creating a far stronger whole by binding each other with the tension of their contradiction.

Where the opposing miasmatic structures slipped past each other, they blinked with small pulses of energy that were picked up by other connections in the web, then carried on to the rest of it, creating hypnotic patterns in the funnel that made Will want to stop and stare at it. What am I thinking, I AM staring at it! Will brought his attention to the man being sucked intot he vortex like a particularly tasty noodle, throwing his simplistic original magical attack: Will's Magic Missile.

The sphere of miasma whipped forward and tore through the gossamer thread drawing the Climber's Class into the hungry-looking vortex, shattering its hold on the man's Class. The funnel twitched. It shifted subtly and Will could tell the monster was looking at him. A series of eight eye-shaped structures bubbled up to the surface of the funnel and regarded Will with predatory consideration Food or threat? Will looked back at it.

"Will, you just attacked the ground." Carrie said.

"Shh. I'm staring it down."

"Staring what down?" Carrie asked.

"It's some kind of…miasma monster." Will whispered, making a sketch in his legend.

"It's right there." A tentative spool of miasma emerged from the center of the funnel and snaked slowly towards Will. A test, to see if Will could see it. To kill him if he couldn't. Will brushed the miasma thread aside with his left hand, dispersing it with a burst of unstructured magic. The funnel's eyes widened in surprise. Suddenly, the funnel withdrew into itself, collapsing into a tight ball in the blink of an eye, sending miasmatic structures spraying in every direction in the process.

Will stepped in front of his companions and created a shield of miasma. Wherever those threads landed, the building fell apart, and it couldn't have collapsed more quickly if someone had been hired to pull all the nails out. Will saw the miasma threads try to fuse to the shield he'd created, and he dropped his connection, letting the miasma slough off before all the threads could connect to him. Save for the first thread.

It touched his left hand, sinking into his skin in a tight helix, and an instant later, a nail in the wall was sent flying towards Will's face. Will interposed his left hand, throwing up a blast of miasma as a precaution against more strange miasma hidden in the attack. The nail sank into Will's hand, striking the exact spot where the thread had buried itself in the meat of his palm. The thread of miasma changed under Will's gaze, becoming the nail in his palm, before vanishing.

Well, that's strange, Will thought, pulling the nail out of his hand with a frown. The thread and the nail seemed like… two identical images of the same thing that had fused into one as they began to share the same spacetime. Like when someone held out a finger and crossed then uncrossed their eyes. The two identical fingers resolved into one. Is it manipulating fate?

"Where did it go?" Carrie asked.

"No idea. It made a distraction and ran away as soon as it discovered I can see it. It's smart…. whatever it is."