Scales like Stars Pt. 11

Merton sobbed. Great. Whacking. Heart sucking, lung destroying sobs. He curled inwards on himself, his arms wrapped around his shins. He sobbed - and then choked out a loud, blubbery: "What the absolute livery fuck?"

The space surrounding the transparent cocoon of life sustaining dragon-shifted cells that sheathed his naked, goo-slick body was filled with wreckage and with corpses. Humans, goblins, kobolds, even a few dragons and orcs. All of them tumbled together as they spilled out of wrecked and still burning starships and sea-going ships that had been shoved to the stars with nothing more than a prayer and a spelljammer helm. But the thing that he heard, the thing that made him jerk his head up and look around was...

Was...

"Arf arf!"

The sound was unmistakable. Anyone who had been alive for the past few decades had heard it at least once. It was used in joke videos and on Rick and Morty and a few movies trailers and who knows how many TV shows. It was the first sounds that came on the track for X Gonna Give it To Ya by DMX, famed star of acclaimed horror film Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpant who also had a side career of rapping sometimes.

Then the sound cut off. In its place came the normally welcome sound of Julia's voice. "M-Merton?" she sounded as if she was literally talking through a softball sized chunk of pain jammed down her throat. "Merton? Come in?"

Merton slapped his palms against the skin of his cocoon. "Julia?"

"Oh god, I got him!" Julia's voice sounded like it had snapped. "Relix, he's alive! Merton, we detected what...what Brash did..." She gasped. It was a shuddering sound, like her whole body was shaking. "Merton, are you okay?"

"I..." Merton paused. "I need a ship. I need it right now."

"What?" Relix asked. There was a faint squeak and a clatter and Merton was treated to the slightly amusing mental image of his wife shoving his girlfriend out of the way to get at the magical microphone they were using to talk to him. "You need to get back here right now! Wait just five minutes, our engines are all screwy."

"Why?" Merton asked.

"W-When Brash died, he reflected the planar energy from the hellcannon back into the Warsphere. Now, it's been partially sucked into the Abyss, and everyone's portal tech is offline." She sighed.

"Admiral Xu is dead, and the surviving human commanders are working to recover people from the most hurt ships, but there are still a few Dominion ships out there shooting at anything that moves. Anda few who are surrendering until our ships get nearby then opening fire with what guns that still work..." Julia said. "It's a freaking mess."

Merton rubbed his face against his palms. He tried to comprehend the amount of lives lost...and found he couldn't. All he could think of was that one thing he had heard. Arf arf. Arf arf? Why the flying fuck had he heard, if only for a few seconds, the sounds of DMX's rapping? As he worried at at that thought, Relix swore. "Scrying has an Asp fighter coming towards your position. Screw it, Speccy, get the emergency teleporter online!"

Merton's brow furrowed. He looked out through space and could see the slender, triangular dart of the Asp fighter. It was moving forward slowly. Carefully. Like the pilot had no idea what it was what he was looking at and wanted to be sure. But past the Asp, he could see the Warsphere. Huge, even at this distance, he could see that it was actually slowly collapsing. Huge chunks of it were crushing downwards, as if the middle were being hollowed out by a vacuum cleaner. He could imagine the portals to the Abyss within that thing, ripping and tearing adamantine plate and corridor material apart. They had...maybe...two hours before the entire 'sphere was gone.

Good thing too. He hated to imagine what all the standard debris was going to do to Earth if any of it drifted too close.

Drifted...

Drifted...

He had drifted after seeing Brash go on his suicide run.

And what had he heard?

"Okay, hold perfectly still..." Relix was saying.

"Don't!" Merton shouted.

"What?" Relix and Julia yelped at the same time.

"Denouement!" Merton exclaimed as the Asp fighter got closer. Closer. Closer. The narrow nose of its fuselage looked as if it was about to poke the skin of the bubble. Merton didn't care. He had a sudden fire of hope burning in his chest. It hurt nearly as bad as the pain, but it gave him nothing but energy. He grabbed onto the skin of the bubble and dragged himself to the very edge, so he could look out at the kobold pilot. The black scaled kobold was looking at him through a thick faceplate on his muzzle-equipped helmet.

"Gesundheit?" Relix asked.

"We're not in a story, Merton!" Julia said. "The ending isn't over till your butt is on Earth!"

Merton glared at the kobold. He made this as clear as he could. He pointed at the Kobold. Then he pointed at the Warsphere. Then he looked at the kobold and slowly drew his finger across his throat. The kobold sat in the seat of his fighter. He sat there. Sat there more. Merton didn't break eye-contact. He tried to exude menace. As if he was some great and powerful wizard. A controller of dragons. An emperor among emperors. The kobold slowly looked back over his shoulder, then back at Merton.

Merton pointed towards the warsphere more forcefully.

And sitting in the cockpit of his Asp fighter, the black scaled kobold considered his options...and then seemed to say: Eh, fuck it.

The nose of his ship darted underneath the cocoon and then he accelerated forward. Merton sat back in the cocoon as Relix shouted. "What the absolute hell are you doing, husband!?"

"I'm saving our son, Relix!" Merton said, laughing. "I was listening to his fucking playlist! Brash loves DMX!"

"What?!" Julia squeaked.

"Anything you heard might have been the last flutters of biomotonic energies!" Relix said, her voice choked. "Merton, Merton! Don't! You're not even a level 1 wizard, that's a Warsphere full of-" Her voice faded into static as the Warsphere came closer and closer and closer. It swelled before Merton and he clenched his shoulders. The retro thrusters on the Asp fired and the kobold made an abortive grabbing gesture with both hands as he was reminded of the simple physics of Sir Issac Newton.

The bubble of life supporting cells flew off the front of his fighter, like a hood ornament that had been unscrewed, or a basketball from the snout of Air Bud.

As the bubble continued forward, going roughly 50 KPS, Svenk Blackscale sat in his seat, blinked a few times, then said: "Not Svenk's fault!"

***

Merton had a few seconds before impact to bring up his arm. When the weakened adamantine armor hull buckled under the impact of his psi-shield, a shock radiated through his whole body and he skidded along deck for what felt like half a football field before coming to a stop. He groaned, then coughed, hacked, coughed again, and forced himself to his feet. He was standing in a long, narrow corridor full of wreckage and bodies. The bodies weren't dead...rather, they were all alive and twisted and wriggling. Like maggots. Their pulsating white skin made Merton want to heave. Knowing they had been goblins or orcs or something until a few minutes before made him feel even sicker.

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that he had hit the armor plating of the Warsphere, smashed through, hit the corridor, then skidded to a stop. No air rushed out through the hole in the ceiling. But he kind of wished it would. The air that hung in the corridor smelled of the Abyss.

Merton had never imagined what hell would smell like.

Okay, that was a lie. He was a Dungeons and Dragons DM. At least a quarter of his life had been spent picturing what hell was like. But finding out he had been so catastrophically wrong was not exactly the happiest moment in his life.

The air stunk of evil. Not like sulfur or rotting bodies or gunpowder or any of the other scents that had been linked to evil in Merton's brain by the complex interplay of emotions and evolution and memory. No. It was a smell that went past the logical and hit the emotional parts of his brain with a hammer, designed out of pure instinct, and that hammer rang out: Run! Run! Run! Run you idiot! every time he breathed in. But Merton found something out about himself right then and there.

Evil didn't smell so bad when you were coming in after Brash.

He looked back at the place he had entered by. There, he could see smears of the cocoon that had carried him here, and a tiny glinting filament of wire dangled from the bit of cocoon that had caught on the jagged edges of the hole. He hurried over, grabbed the wire, then hefted it up. It lay down to the ground, where it was lost in the muck and twisted metal that covered the floor plating. The worst thing was that the corrupted floor didn't even feel hard anymore. His bare feet sqelched and sqolorped (it was a word, look it up) in the viscous wrongness that the Warsphere had been consumed by.

But Merton didn't care. He hefted up the wire, and saw more of it coming off the ground, drawing taut.

A string, leading him into the darkness.

"Let me see, I hold up the yarn and a giant kitty comes out to show me the way out of the labyrinth, huh?" Merton whispered to himself. He followed the wire - his free hand clenching as he formed his psi-sword. He might not have time to learn many spells. But he had time to practice that. He grinned as he twirled his sword. A few days of sword training with Gunny was surely enough to stand up to devils from the depth of the Abyss. Right?

The corridor remained dark, illuminated only by the pale green glow that shone from his sword. He walked past burnt out consoles and doors that had become serrated with teeth along their inner edges. Merton decided to not go into any of those. Instead, he followed the strand, his ears straining to hear anything beyond the faint groan and grinding of the sphere as it shuddered under the stresses of the Abyss.

Rounding a corner brought him face to face with the first crew-member who had either been incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky. Unlike the many who had been turned into Abyssal maggots, this one had been turned into a Vrock. Imagine a vulture with slitted eyes, arms, claws the length of a raptor from Jurassic Park and just enough intelligence to enjoy tearing you apart, and you got a good picture of a Vrock. This one was casually chewing down on an orc's corpse, tearing and ripping bits of internal organ from them.

Merton stood stock still.

And it was at this moment that his brain decided to remind him that he was, in fact, buck naked.

Merton leaped forward, forcing himself to move with a roar of pure rage. The kind of rage that came when you took fear, then turned that fear into righteous anger. And here, he learned why in Hackmaster, every segment of combat during a surprise round counted as a full round for melee attacks. The Vrock had barely enough time to swing its beaky heady around and squawk the Abyssal version of OH JESUS FUCK before Merton brought his psi-sword down into the forearm it lifted up to defend itself.

If psi-swords proved to be less effective than +1 weapons, Merton would have had to enjoy the five or so seconds of stupefied shock as his sword bounced off that arm before the Vrock disemboweled him.

Instead, he had a few stupefied seconds of shock as he gaped at the huge, gory mess that was now the wend of the Vrock's right arm. Its claw and most of its forearm was on the ground, smoking, while thick purple blood fountained out of the arm, indicating the creature's poor blood pressure. The blood coated Merton's face and chest like he was Bruce Campbell on the set of any Sam Raimi movie, and the only reason he didn't drop his psi-sword was because he was pretty sure he couldn't actually let go of the thing. Rather than doing that, he just flailed, swinging wildly as the Vrock squalled and squalled and more and more blood went flying. When the squalling stopped and Merton realized he was swinging down into deck plating, he stopped, shook his head, wiped some blood away from his eyes and gagged as he saw that there was nothing left of the hideous thing save for a single wing, a bit of beak, and a huge undifferentiated mess of blenderized organ.

"Ugh!" Merton coughed.

A loud hissing and screeching noise came from further down the corridor. "Uh, uh..." Merton looked left, then right, then back. One of the toothed doors he had walked by seemed to be watching him. Merton gulped, then said. "Don't eat me, and you can get at least two Vrock! Promise!"

The door paused...then opened. Merton frowned, then walked forward. He placed his psi-sword so the blade would plunge between two of the biggest teeth on the door, then leaped forward. The door tensed, but did not actually slam shut. Instead, he now stood in a room that reeked of evil and whose walls had become studded with egg sacks and whose floor was amazingly sticky. Merton stood in the room as the two new Vrock came around the corner.

"Hey, birdbrains!" Merton shouted. "What killed zee dinosaurs? Dee ice age!"

The Vrock screeched in uncomprehending fury.

The quips weren't really for them. They were more for him - to shut up the voice screaming at the back of his head: Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck you are going to DIE.

The Vrock charged forward. These ones actually held weapons. One of them had a laser pistol, though he held it more like a club than a firearm. The other one was carrying a short stabbing spear with a monomolecular edge and crackling, electro-static base. They charged up, into the door frame. Merton closed his eyes at the hideous CRASH-sqworlt noise that came next. When he opened his eyes, the door was opening with a satiated belching noise. Blue and purple blood dripped from the frame, and a single Vrock limb had made it into the room: The arm holding the laser pistol.

"I hate this place," Merton whispered. He banished his psi-sword, then quickly tied the filament he was still clutching in his right hand around his wrist. Once it was tied fast, he summoned his sword, picked up the pistol, then rolled his shoulders. "Okay. Time to Rogue Trader this bitch."

The next kilometer or so of corridor passed in an unending blur of continual tension. Every corridor, every turn, every doorway brought some kind of new hell for him to wince at. There were burbling corridors whose entire floors had been consumed by boiling blood, which required him to hand over hand along bone-like encrustations along the ceiling, thanking God and his wife for the biological augmentations he had been given. Yes, it had mostly been the dick, but she had also given him the body of an Olympic gymnast, presumably because Relix loved rubbing up against six pack abs. Then there had been the large chamber that had surely once been a mess hall that was now nothing but a single spinal column made up of every single soul who had been in the room, fused into a single snake that coiled around and around and around the table that still dominated the room - slipping between struts. Despite the fact that it was nothing but bone, it breathed and burbled in its sleep. Then there were the corridors with supernatural blackness that was so deep that even his psi-sword didn't make any light. In those, he had to simply follow the strand and try not to breathe - painfully aware that he was walking past sleeping forms that seemed to be as large as houses, and whose exhalations filled the air with the sweet smell of grape and rotting flesh.

Finally, though, he came to a doorway that wasn't completely corrupted. The symbols of the Chromatic Dominion were still carved on it, and there was no sign of teeth.

This immediately made Merton suspicious.

Then he heard the unmistakable sizzle pop pop pop of a fully automatic pulse laser rifle and the squealing screech of some demon or another. He looked around for a control, spotted it, saw it was locked, shrugged, and fired his pistol into it. The beam was invisible, but the impact it had on the panel was obvious and quite dramatic. Glass melted, then exploded, smoke flew out, and the door groaned open with a squeal of metal. Inside, he saw that corruption had only touched the very edge of the room, like a tacky Halloween decoration.

In the center of the room sat a statue of five headed dragon. Each dragon head glittered and glowed - each one a different breathtaking color. There was a ruby red head alongside an obsidian black one, a marble white one, an emerald green one and a sapphire blue one. Each one looked down, as if everyone in the chamber had come to be judged by them in particular. There were several orderly pews, but those had been mounted against the two doors that entered from the sides. This, plus the cross shape of the room, and the robed orcess in the room all made Merton think one thing.

Temple.

Two kobold guards in full power armor, with heavy weapons mounted on arm-braced gimbals, were firing into a hoard of spined demons that struggled to get past the barricades that had been thrown up. The Orcess, a curvaceous green beauty with an ankle length black braid that wound from her shoulders to the ground and was the only bit of hair on an otherwise bald head, held up a staff and bellowed out in galactic common: "You shall not pass!"

A black chain made of solidified fire appeared between the power armored kobolds and the devils. It started to whirl about like a fucking cat-o-nine tails, smacking demons, tripping others, drawing itself between gonads to slap demonic balls. The demons squalled and gave the kobolds just enough time to lift their forearms and fire what looked like two dozen micro-frag grenades into the masses from their armor mounted RPGs.

Merton, though, was in the right position to see the chain wrapped, blue skinned demon step in through the door behind the group. The demoness had a single chain twirling around her right arm that looked for all the world like a weapon Kratos would use. It rasped along the ground with a faint scree scree scree that was entirely lost in the roars of explosions. The chain continued along her athletic arm, around her breasts, her hips, even her face. Every bit of exposed flesh had more chain-links worked into the skin, making her look like a cenobite crossed with a hell's angel. Merton sprinted forward, shouting.

"Look out!"

His pistol sizzled and he burned two blackened holes in the demoness, causing her to jerk backwards before she could bring her blade down into the orcess' back. Merton lunged with his psi-sword, but the demoness swept her blade up in a curving arc. The blade slashed along his thigh - drawing a shallow line of burning pain as he twisted aside, desperate to turn the blow into a glancing one. He hissed as blood started to flow along his skin. The demoness twirled her blade and then threw it at him like Jackie Chan. Merton dove to the side, skidding behind a pew. That gave him only a few seconds of respite, because a blunt chain smashed into the pew's center, wrapping around it, crushing it in half, and yanking it aside.

As splinters filled the air, Merton fired four more shots, point blank, into the demon's chest. She had shifted her posture so that the blasts struck her chain, which turned cherry red but did not quite melt. She hissed with laughter, then swung her blade in curving arcs. It slashed along the ground, sending up sparks, each blade sweep getting closer and closer to Merton's bare feet. He pushed himself frantically away, butt squeaking along the metal deck plating as the demoness walked up closer and closer, her eyes sparkling with sick amusement.