Even in Nightmare!

I had tipped over Binder/2, I had sent the 4 Skill Points to Sailor as I had Binder/1, and I had finished my Crafting and mixing for today.

It was time to put it to the test, as a foggy evening turned to dark, and the Mask I’d Tattooed on my face lit up and let me ignore that darkness with Devilsight.

Huge forms were gathering further up the hill. The Brine Zombies were already dead, or more undead might have been crawling out from the wreckage of the Beatrice that I’d burned away.

Tremble popped his pommelstone, and I grabbed the first of the four Growth Potions in there. They’d take effect at level Eight, and then be doubled by the Girdle… but I was still restrained by my Null nature to the max of ten minutes to slaughter as many Jotuns as I could. It was a pure comparison of damage against a weaponless foe with great numbers, testing to see if I could slaughter them faster than their numbers could generate hits and bring me down.

There would be no wasted damage, no wasted overkill. Through double Swarmbane and their hordemind, they’d be eating all of it!

“You ready for this?” I asked Tremble, popping the cap and skating up the hill as the zombie giants lumbered down towards me.

“Oh, yeah, baby!” he answered, and I sucked down the Potion.

It tasted like wet moldy feet, but needs must. Even as it went down my throat, I could feel it working, ectoplasm streaming in and mass accumulating. Everything began to shrink around me as I grew in perfect proportions to double my height, four foot-something to eight foot-something… and Tremble’s blade doubled in length.

From 4-32 to 8-48 base damage, and then the Holy Water configuration set up, and the acid damage on the blade became some really, Really, REALLY potent holy water!

I met the first ones on the lowest rolling level, and the slaughter started. Their moans and bass-driven howls would have driven a normal person mad with terror.

They only told me where their most vulnerable points were, a foot or two below the things making the sounds.

I began to kill with a rolling explosive swirl of glowing, fluid light, incredibly beautiful if anyone was there to see it.

Giant zombies.

They didn’t have the primal DR they’d had while alive, and they didn’t have the massive Constitution bonus they’d had before, either. Just undead with more Hit Dice and Toughness, actually easier to kill than before. Auto two-hit kill. One hit with a crit, which meant getting up under their ribs and spraying the Holy Banewater up into their upper torso, up and into the neck and through the spine. Auto-kill on a charge.

It was fast killing, faster than anything I’d done in a long time. Their arms were long, but no longer than my reach for the moment. Everything became arcs and vectors, equal parts precise calculation and free-flowing intuition through the press of massive bodies. First hits were generally limbs melted through, before sending peace up into their main body cavities.

Arcs and whorls swept through the air like the birth of new moving flowers. In their wake, massive zombies folded, their undead flesh dissolving like melting wax, and if there was no vivic fire to clean them up, that was totally okay for now.

I started at the path side, worked my way across to the ramp side with an elegant savagery that was very cathartic. I wasn’t jumping, spinning and dodging so much, I was killing them as they reached for me, and they were dying before they could hit me.

Growth Potions were going to change a few things for me, it seemed.

Up the ramp side, into the once-slaughtered knights, and as I worked through them, the inhabitants of the house began to shamble out to join in the fun. Even had on the same clothes, now all rotted and half-falling off to fit the theme.

They all burned and melted in an unrelenting chain of Ripostes, Sword beats Fist, Cleaves, Hews, Finishes, and Whirlwinds. I cut my way through the press, multi-ton bodies dissolving around me, unable to press me enough to restrict my movements before they died.

One hundred and eighty-four zombies died, plus fourteen zombie Hell Puppies. The ghouls that the sailor officers, the knight commanders, and the noble lords had turned into were the only blips in the fighting, but only the wight that used to be the Count or Duke or whatever held me back more than a few breaths, as he was the only one wielding a weapon.

I Finished one of his guards, Hewed into him, parried his life-sucking Sword into another guard, then repeated the Hew to him off a One Strike with a spinning leap that took both of their heads in the same slash.

It hadn’t taken me ten minutes. I’d moved too fast, covering ground as fast as I could to max out the benefits of the Potion.

“Firephasing, all Fire, Sundering!” I snarled, and as Acid turned to Fire, I smashed it into the wooden exterior of the mansion, plowing through the façade and into the wooden siding and beams behind. Tremble whooped as fires exploded around us, and with the efficacy of dream, caught and expanded with unnatural speed.

I raced into and through the mansion, gouging the walls, floors, and doors as streams of fluid fire followed me.

I left the shattered kitchen in flames, stepped out to the back path, and walked back out towards the front of the house as the two minutes dead time ticked down, and the duration of my Potion faded away with it.

I stood there at the corner of the yard, still trashed from earlier that day, wondering what the Curse was going to come up with next.

The stacked, half-dissolved corpses of the zombies began to twitch under the blossoming fire of the burning mansion. I blinked at them.

And then their heads all blew apart, exploding messily. Those who didn’t have heads instead had gore erupt from their necks like a garbage disposal exploding.

All of them now had rather large and impressive clusters of black and phosphorescent green tentacles suddenly sprout from their necks, flailing about wildly before settling down. Their corpses began to flow back together under an invisible power.

“Vivus next time,” I said in no uncertain terms.

“I hear that,” murmured Tremble. “The Hell is this…”

“Aberrants. Moits of the Elder Gods.” The corpses were starting to stand up as they were pulled together, still showing signs of being half-melted, but mobile and working regardless.

The configuration on Tremble changed back to the new Cerulean Seal Pattern, as we liked to call it.

“I have the impression this will be a lot more difficult than zombies?” he asked softly.

“A human-sized one can have twelve hit dice. A Huge one… don’t know. Basically Olympian-plus… I don’t know. Double, at least.”

“Ugh. I have the feeling we’re going to beat ourselves against these for a while.”

I accepted the Potion that came out of his Hilt Chamber, shaking my head. I’d made four, but I wasn’t going to last long enough to consume the other two. Two claw attacks, multiple hentai tentacle attacks, with the cooperation Feat cheats (not that I should complain)… okay, I was going to die, but we’d see how many I could kill first…

One hundred and eighty-seven Huge Moits. Nope, wasn’t getting through that. Tomorrow, I’d use vivus, dump the Holy Banewater, and leave no bodies behind for this crap.

They still didn’t have reach on me if I stayed this size. I wasn’t getting the huge damage push from the Holy Water… but I could and would Wardance this.

Tremble began to Sing, and I charged at the Moit occupying the Duke’s body in a blur of motion. Convenient how a Growth Potion didn’t require actually adjusting to a new size here in dream, reality instead re-sized to a new perspective…

As the mansion burned, I hit the first of these creatures still three times as tall as I was, and they shrieked in Aklo about hunger and mating and other things appropriate for a bad hentai flick. Tremble hit them singing about the crushing power of Fate coming down on them for having the bad luck to meet me, and we started the dance and the grind as thrice-used bodies began to fall apart again, and this time burn away.

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Getting out before the hentai gets bad...

I woke up. First thing I did was a cellular-level scan making sure there wasn’t something implanted in me that I didn’t want, because I didn’t put it past the Curse to attempt something like that.

Yeah, there was something nestled up against the back of my spine. The Moits had somehow managed to put a slug in me… after I was dead.

My Vajra surged, and my blood turned wildly corrosive, something aqua regia might tip its cap to. I definitely didn’t protect that slug as I split open several veins around it, and it shivered and screamed about horrors from beyond Creation as my blood began to reduce it to sludge, and then all my cells linked up and sent a blast of bioelectricity through it to make matters less comfortable for it.

It lost any influence over my motor systems, I reached out for Tremble, sat up, and to his “Hey!” punched him into the back of my neck, perilously near my brain.

Hissing, bubbling goo ran down the back of my neck and back to the floor. Tremble made appropriately disgusted sounds as he watched it run out of me.

“So, that’s how they reproduce?”

“Yeah, they stick a slug in your brain.” I used Healing Soul to seal the wound, as clean as any surgeon could have made it, and so easy to bind shut… after my Vajra shoved a good half-pound of Aberrant sludge out of me, as well as any cells I considered compromised.

“Vivic all the way.”

“It’ll probably bring in some ‘innocent civilians’ and do the same thing.” I exhaled as I closed my eyes, ticking over Binder/3. “We’re just going to have to skirmish them down, long and involved. They still couldn’t keep up with us, and if we have to, we can just go into the burning mansion.”

“We should have set it on fire a while ago,” he judged.

“Honestly, I was expecting the Curse to go with some rampaging fire Elementals or Salamanders again on the spur of the moment, but, eh. That sure did surprise me.” The noise of so many things babbling so many horrific things they were going to do to me in Aklo meant I’d had to cut off my hearing and Tremblesense, at the end.

“What are you doing?” he asked me, able to hear some undercurrents in my voice.

“Excising parts of my memory related to what they were saying last night. You get that many creatures speaking Aklo, the maddening, insanity-inducing power of it multiplies. I had to render myself completely deaf, or I’d probably be having a psychotic episode right now, or would when I faced them again.” I slid tactfully away from the slime, which was burning unwhite nicely. “This is going to be unpleasant, but the basic tactic seems to work. Using a Growth Potion can save us a lot of healing. I’ll keep four Healing as a Reserve, and make more potent ones to replace them as needed, but Growth is definitely going to dominate going forward.”

“At least the comps are easy to get!” We only needed giant blood, after all.

I pulled my mini-lab out of his Hilt Chamber, some empty vials, and a small jug of giant blood taken from the Duke, definitely the toughest of all of them.

I could make four Potions a day as a Rune Chemist/4, up to the maximum of a goldweight in power comps, which were not hard to get for the minor Potions I wanted.

A Growth Potion for the Sailors, and another for the Dogs and Knights, would conserve a lot of Healing power for me.

Stronger healing Potions, a day at a time, using up the rest of my limit for what the Growth Potions did not.

Then we’d see how hentai those bastards thought they could be, if they came back…