Duskbound

The centipedes practically stood still while he killed them, offering no appreciable resistance to his spear strikes. The moment they were dead, he was in the air, rising on a powerful jump and spear in both hands to swing the bladed edge through an arm like a lumberjack felling a sapling. It wasn't what the weapon was designed for, but [Shape Shifting] helped and he had strength to spare.

He'd already severed three arms when the pained screams started. Even in his hasted state, he could hear them reverberating weirdly through the cavern, but they didn't hit as hard mentally. Something about the potion was increasing his perception to match his new speed, a good thing since otherwise he'd be unable to control his own body, and that change to his brain was making it a lot easier to pick apart the weird mental connection the monster had forged.

The potion didn't last long, and he wanted the room cleared of anything remotely resembling a threat before it wore off. That meant killing not only the monsters directly below him, but also taking care of the ones streaming in through the openings made by the retracted flesh walls. It probably wasn't possible to kill everything simply because he expected monsters to keep coming in long after the potion wore off, but if he could give himself a big enough window of uninterrupted time to deal with the wall of faces, he'd consider it a win.

He came down on the centipedes like a hammer, slamming both feet into one of them and driving it into the ground. At the same time, his spear took another centipede through the head, darting in so fast that it was like hitting a stationary target. The monster didn't even react to the spear coming its way, just let it split its face in two.

[Savage Rhythm] started up again. More speed pushed through Velik's limbs, so much that he could feel his muscles straining to keep up with his mind. Is the potion having a bad reaction to the skill?

It didn't matter. He could fight through it. He had to. The only other option was to let himself be captured, and that was no choice at all. Velik killed the centipedes in a blur of motion, all of them collapsing in a heap of blood, broken chitin, and dismembered limbs. [Savage Rhythm] continued to build up, and he turned his spear on the closest of the grasping hands, cutting them loose to litter the ground.

More monsters came flooding into the cavern, but in painfully slow motion. Velik cut his way through them, too fast for them to react, and cleared a dozen out of the closest opening before retreating back into the main cavern and repeating the process on the next hole. In a matter of five seconds, he completed a full circuit around the room.

He still had twenty seconds of hasted movement left, some of which would be spent clearing out the hands chasing him around the room. They didn't seem like much of a threat at the moment, both because the arms were starting to get tangled up around each other and because they were so slow that there was no chance of them catching him. But he could see the nubs where more arms were starting to grow out of the ceiling. More worrying were the nubs coming out of the walls and floors.

It won't matter how fast I am if there's nowhere to go. I need to do something about this, but I don't know what.

There had to be tens of thousands of pounds of flesh the monster could use as raw material to shape new limbs lining the various caves and tunnels. For all he knew, its reach stretched all the way to the surface. Nothing he'd done seemed to actually slow the monster down, and he wasn't even sure he'd actually hurt it. The screams could just as easily be anger as pain. With the sound distortion from his haste potion making it hard to understand the noise, he honestly wasn't sure what he was hearing.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

There was a weak spot somewhere. Maybe it was the faces, or maybe it was hidden away, but Velik would find it. He knew where he was going to start, though. With nothing left to distract him from a monster that [Apex Hunter] wanted him to tear into, Velik burst forward. His spear hacked through limbs, its shaft given more flexibility by [Shape Shifting] and the blade thickened and sharpened on one side to give it a strong cutting edge.

The screaming intensified, every face joining in now. If Velik thought it had been loud before, he was just now realizing how little he'd understood the capacity for sound the wall of faces possessed. The whole cave was rippling, flesh jiggling around like an energetic fat man dancing for a lively audience. Even with his potion-enhanced speed, it was a challenge to keep his footing.

Read the latest on empire

There were six faces he recognized across the wall, and another ten he didn't. Several new ones had grown out of the skin, filling in gaps between the noses and mouths while he'd been distracted by the other monsters. Velik didn't think about it too much. He just chose the most convenient one that wasn't familiar to him.

He kicked off the ground in a flying leap, spear leading the way, and slammed it into the face hard enough that he was sure the blade would strike stone behind it. It sunk four feet into the wall, but if there was rock behind the façade, he couldn't reach it. That didn't stop him from ripping the spear free and stabbing it into another face.

He was about to destroy a third one when something hit him. It expanded out of the wall in front of him, a hand sized to wrap around his entire body and already curled into a fist, and sent him flying even as his spear sliced a gash across its knuckles. Velik spun twice in the air, his spine and hips working to reorient him, and he landed on his feet with his weapon still in-hand.

Twelve seconds left.

Two of those were wasted cutting away new growths of hands reaching for him. A few came up directly from the ground, nothing but hands with no arms attached to him that grew so quickly they almost grabbed onto his ankles before he could get away. Once again, Velik grew concerned that he was going to be in trouble once the haste potion wore off.

The huge fist sunk back into the wall, sending a ripple through it that reminded him of a rock dropped into water, only without the splash. In its place, two faces grew back again. One was the one Velik had been targeting when he'd been hit, but the other was a face he'd already destroyed. They're not a weakness then. This thing is some sort of flesh shaper. I need to find its vital organs, but they could be anywhere. Screw this. I'll never hit anything important if it can move everything around, not unless I do it all at once.

[Dread Lance] arced down the length of his spear, primed and ready for him to discharge the skill as soon as he made contact. However the monster perceived the world around it, it was able to process things fast enough to react to Velik's enhanced speed, and it knew better than to give him a clean shot.

It must have cost the monster something extra to do it, but it was capable of growing new limbs fast enough to interfere with Velik. Arms shot out of the floor so fast it was almost as if they materialized fully formed instead of grew, but it wasn't enough. Seven seconds left.

He slipped by them, his spear held overhead with its deadly payload waiting for him to reach his target. The arms lashed out, hands grasping at him, but they were too slow. More grew out of the ground, and when he swept past them too quickly for them to do anything, another massive fist jutted out of the wall itself.

This time Velik was ready for it. He jumped straight up, pulling his legs up to clear the limb, then slammed his feet down on the back of it. It smacked into the ground, but it wasn't designed to have that range of motion. Rather than bending at a nonexistent wrist, the wall itself tore open. It was the perfect target, and without hesitation, Velik slammed the spear into the wound.

Every time he'd used [Dread Lance], he'd been hit with the backlash. The skill was wild, uncontrolled, and even with a weapon as long as a spear, it seemed it was impossible to avoid being caught in the edges of the blast. But perhaps he just hadn't been doing it right.

This time, the energy flooded the wall, which immediately ruptured. Chunks of meat and buckets of blood went flying in every direction, plastering Velik with ichor as the flesh exploded. The debris flew at high speeds and it had mass, but without any chitin, teeth, or bone in it, it wasn't nearly as deadly as the last time he'd been hit with shrapnel.

The fist he was balanced on sagged down, fully severed from the wall by its own weight. Velik was about to retreat—the last few seconds of his haste potion best used to assess the damage and decide on his next move—when he noticed something behind the wall. It was another chamber, one hidden by a full ten feet of muscle and viscera, exposed only because of the sheer destructive force of [Dread Lance].

The chamber looked like something choked with cobwebs, except the webs were made of sinews and nerves and long, stringy ropes of arteries and veins. And in the center, suspended by it all, was a wrinkled mass of red flesh that looked suspiciously like an oversized brain.