Not just the Room is a Nightmare...

I slapped my hand on Tremble, who woke up after the injection of Soul Essence. “Like, wow. Did you even have a Null against her?” he protested, clearly aggrieved at how easily I had been killed.

I sighed, despite myself. “She was casting at Twenty, with Spell Penetration at +9. No, I didn’t have a Null until you boosted me. When you did, one chance in three it would protect me.”

“Twenty!” He fell silent for a moment. “Damn. I thought Casters topped at Ten, just like you will.”

“Caster Level can keep rising through a lot of methods. They could just tie it to the giant’s hit dice, for example. The Curse itself is probably a Twenty, it just emulated its own power.” I thought about that, and shook my head. “It could make every single Caster here Cast at Twenty. It probably will. We’re fighting a semi-sapient Curse of Divine origin. Magic is where its strength is.”

“What do we do?” He sounded frustrated.

“Die by other means. We’re lucky you weren’t reduced to slag, mostly because I Soaked most of the lightning and kept you behind me on purpose. You need Impervious right away.”

“Three days. I would love to get Giantbane for you…”

“You gotta exist to get me that. I really don’t want to start all over from scratch with a new Sword, you know? And I’m gonna keep dying regardless. It’s three deaths. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, okay.” He sounded a little sullen at how he was letting me down, but he realized that getting broken would put him even further behind the curve. “So, what can we do about her?”

“Stay out of her line of fire. I have to turn that corner and get down the stairs before she opens the door. I’ll have to do a flying charge into the guards that are coming up, and make a royal nuisance of myself moving into other areas, see what we can stir up, stretch my legs out before I die.”

“It looks like a huge manor home.”

“Yes, nobility at the least. The crest on the uniforms and the furnishings was quite distinct, but it didn’t have the feel of royalty, which would probably be in a castle instead of a manor, and the crest didn’t feel like mercantile wealthy. A duke or count, possibly.”

“Why did the scale shift on us like that?” Tremble asked, looking for an explanation.

“My guess is that it isn’t a day between my deaths. Dream, and Nightmare, don’t follow the same rules of time that the living world does. It could be several living days between me dying and waking up.

“So, the Hagborn is probably older and moving around, and so nothing seems as big as it used to. It affects the Dream. I’m betting if the room actually changes, so will what we fight, like the mobile-constructs. I have a strong feeling they’re going to be replaced with toys and dolls very soon, the Curse is just taking time to change.”

“Ah. Well, they were dying too quick, anyway,” he sniffed. “That woman, the Caster… the mother?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I agreed, as I unscrewed his pommelstone and emptied out the Hollow inside. “The Hell?”

Yeah, it was gory, having wadded-up sinews and skin mixed in with pieces of gold and silver. But only one of the sinews was preserved. The others… had become some bluish-grey thing that looked rather spongy with purplish blood on it, although it was still a tendon.

“That… does not look right?” Tremble offered for me.

“That is correct, it is not right.” I still had the skin and one tendon, so I could get started on the tanning and treatment, if nothing else. “Those are the tendons we took off the maid...”

I could see he was looking back and forth between them. “I didn’t shift loadouts at all between the kills…” he told me.

“No, you didn’t. What this means is… interesting.” I drummed my nails on the ground here in my mist-cell once. “She’s not a giant. Or rather, she’s not a human, and the Curse knows it, and unthinkingly replicated it.” I eyed the tendon. “That color blood and flesh… I think she’s a doppelganger, probably put in place by Hagmom.”

“Well.” He digested that. “One more Bane for the Slaughter?”

“Shapechanger, yeah. Very useful once you get the Detect for it, too.” He hummed thoughtfully. “Well, let’s get to work. I’ll do a double Craft load before we set out, prepping the Girdle and starting to Burn gold to it, after refining you some more.” He obligingly shifted into Firephasing. “Unfortunately, our need to make you Impervious is going to stop our refining at 33, and you’ll be stuck at Zeks and Arsenal II. I’ll be able to reach 33 before the structure is complete, but that’ll be it.”

“Well, it’s not far off what we knew was coming, anyway,” he said encouragingly. “And it’s not like there isn’t a lot of other stuff we need to do.”

“True.” I sighed, and began to get to work. I mentally thumbed over Null Mastery/3, the first of my Masteries I had to start increasing, and began to work.

---------

I didn’t leave the room this time, mostly because I didn’t get the chance.

Dops could read thoughts, and this time the dop actually Scanned the room before she walked in, as if it was the most normal thing she could do.

And it punched my Null, because Tremble wasn’t in Guardian config.

She shrieked in alarm, grabbed the broom there, and was swinging at me even as she entered the room.

Wow, was that annoying, because the guard would be here in literally seconds, along with the dog!

That said, my thought at the dop as it Scanned me was, You are so effing dead, dop.

That was enough to freeze her up, and then hamstrings and Achilles were severed as I got underfoot of her and cut. She folded down, shapechanger or no.

Her head and torso turned impossibly, but I was waiting for just that, and she turned around to snarl and swing at me with a hand that was half a cleaver, only to see me crossing above her arm and arrive underneath her throat with a serene cut across all them huge blood vessels, dop or no. Two steps up on her maid’s outfit as she grabbed at me, and I drove Tremble into the side of her jaw and wrenched through the cortex beyond, jumping away as she fell.

And because I could, I took the silver earrings she was wearing with me. I noted that she had no necklace or ring today… but she had plain silver bracelets on now.

I also noted the hue of her lifeblood spurting out rapidly exceeded the limits of her shifting ability to conceal, and abruptly turned a kind of gooey blue-purple.

I hacked her bracelets into pieces, but I had less than thirty seconds before the guard arrived, with his dog right behind him.

Happily, the fact she was so unnaturally twisted and leaking weird blood seemed to get his attention for a minute, so when I jumped off the small vanity to the side of the door, I still got him across the throat before he was aware that I was there.

He staggered and fell forwards as his life fountained out, stumbling and falling over the corpse of the dop maid.

Damn dog wouldn’t let me loot my tendons in peace, but Tremble was in Guardian config now, and this time we charged right through the blast of flame that filled the room with no problems whatsoever, once again taking out an eye, much to its disbelief. This time I avoided the follow-up jawbite and kick, cut off its nostrils, and as it whined and bit at me, Soak flowed away and I chopped its neck half-off in passing. It gurgled in confusion, staggered, and fell, still trying to come for me, but unable to make it to me.

Cutcutcutcutcutcut…

More feet pounded on the stairs. The door at the end of the corridor creaked open. I stuffed my harvest into Tremble and sighed.

The two guards reduced the room to splinters trying to hit me with their sabers, and my Soak plummeted like a rock thereby. I did get one down and in range of a drive-by throat-cutting, was nearly split in two, and grabbed onto Guard Three’s hand as he pulled back, turning over and up his arm to his shoulder, and ramming Tremble into the side of his neck.

He shrieked with a gurgle, grabbed me with his other hand, and hurled me away into the hallway. I crashed into the fine oak paneling back first, the last of my Soak went poof, my bones admonished me not to do that again, and I fell to the ground.

The matron glared down at me, that Wand in hand, and pointed at me.

I jumped and twisted; the Bolt shuddered past me and blew a great hole in the wall. Hah, Evasion, Guardian, and Bodywarding for the win! She danced back with impressive speed, I only left a cut across the front of her leg, slicing through the silk as she backpedaled, and I pressed after her.

She tried that Fastcast Shards trick, and I rammed Tremble through her foot with Great Emphasis, rather disrupting that with a bit of stick-a-nail-into-it pain.

The next moment I was flying through the air, punted with great force in a long arc down the corridor away from her as she screamed and swore at me, her dainty meter-long foot in its embroidered slipper leaving a trail of blood in the air.

Damn, nice form, I had to admire. My bones were creaking and ready to break, and I could barely think… and just about then I hit the ground and rolled haplessly, trying to disperse the equivalent of being hit by a small car moving pretty damn fast.

I looked up as the lightning came in again, and although I was already mostly dead, I dove off to the side and down the stairs she had conveniently sent me right next to. The lightning did quite the number on the ankle-deep rug.

Tremble was whooping as the fourth guard came out of the hallway on the right and saw me falling-jumping down the meter-high steps, his saber in hand as long steps brought him up towards me very quickly.

He wasn’t expecting me to jump as fast as I did, and he took my charge right in the eyeball as I avoided his flicking lunge.

Unfortunately, giant constitution and all, it didn’t kill him. He grabbed the post of the railing, and drove his face, me, and Tremble down against it.

Several hundred pounds of skull crushed my chest flat, and drove Tremble deeper into him for the kill. I could die with the trade-off, tough bastard…