I walked off without saying a word to my team. The activation of Deja Vu while attempting to negotiate with the Harpy Queen had left me in an extremely foul mood. We cleared the edge of the airfield several minutes later headed cross country for the next destination on our morbid tour of post-System Show Low.

A loud yawn from behind broke my internal brooding. I slowed to a stop at the top of a rock outcropping that was surrounded by large black pines to assess my group and consult Veep. “Veep, how long have we been here?”

“We’ve been here for 29 hours, 43 minutes, and 12 seconds.”

It was clear our attributes allowed us to stay active longer. I felt like I’d barely been up half a day. Keeg and Albert similarly looked as if they could go for quite some time. On the other hand, Carly and Stephen looked like absolute shit. Courtney didn’t appear as bad off as the others, though it was clear she could use some rest as well.

“We’re about a half mile from Fool Hollow Lake, let’s set camp and continue when everyone is better rested.” I said to the younger members of the team, “I’ll take first watch.”

Looks of relief washed over their faces as Stephen and Carly practically collapsed while Courtney just nodded with a languishing stretch. “How are you three still chugging along so well?”

“What’s you guys’ Endurance?” I answered her question with one of my own.

Her eyes glazed over for a moment before refocusing, “Two-oh-six.”

“Whoah! I’ve only got thirty-four!” Stephen exclaimed at his lover in awe.

“Sixty, here.” Carly shrugged with another big yawn. “What you sporting?”

I chuckled as I responded to her question, “I’m at three hundred, four fifty with equipment bonuses.”

Keeg and Albert nodded, indicating similar numbers.

A brief discussion about attributes ensued where I discovered roughly how much of each the others had in the their most important attributes. For instance, Stephen was packing Intelligence and Wisdom to the tune of over four hundred each. Though, other than Perception, his other attributes were abysmally low.

Carly was similar to Stephen with over three hundred points in what we deemed the primary caster attributes, with a handful more spread across Endurance, Charisma, and Agility. Her Perception was half as much higher than her agility at over a hundred points.

Courtney’s attributes were spread out rather haphazardly. Endurance and Wisdom were over two hundred with Intelligence and Charisma only a few points away from that minor milestone. She had a fair amount of Strength and Agility as well. Overall, she was an all-rounder in terms of attributes.

While we talked pop-up tents were quickly erected and sleeping bags were unfurled while Albert went about setting a fire. I was about to question the wisdom in that when he looked up and spoke, “Lots of things on fire, one more won’t be noticed.”

His logic was sound and I could find no fault in it so I proceeded to walk a patrol fifty meters from our camp while the others quickly fell asleep. A couple hours later Albert approached silently from the camp with a tin can of steaming refried beans in his hand. I took the food happily, eating while standing.

“I didn’t sleep much before the System. Now, almost never. I’ll take the next watch. Get some sleep.”

I looked at the old man as he spoke noting the weariness in his eyes. He wasn’t tired, he’d just been through a lot more in his life than anyone else here except for maybe Keeg. With his peace being said, he looked off into the night and I left him to it. He doesn’t need my shoulder to cry on.

I woke several hours later the smell of cooking meat. Having only rolled out a sleeping pad and pillow, rather than popping out my tent, I was able to look up and see Albert and Keeg fussing over a particularly large specimen of jackrabbit. Soon the others were woken to the succulent smell of fresh food. And though we ate in silence, everyone’s mood seemed to have significantly improved.

When we had finished eating, we packed up our kit and continued our journey towards Fool Hollow Lake. “Let’s hope before the end of the day we’ve bested the Lich, taken the city, and are on our way home. This block on our communications is irritating me to no end.”

“Aye, it would be good to reconnect with my people, at least those who remain.” Keeg looked off into the woods with his last comment.

I was about to respond when I saw Albert freeze and cock his head to the side. He stared intently into the dark woods in front of us for what seemed like an eternity. Soon I heard the rustling of leaves all around us. He looked at me and I nodded, my rail pistol already in my hand, a battered axe in the other. Keeg similarly unsheathed his sword and took up the lead position, preparing for a head on fight.

The three youngest members of our group, also having the least amount of perception, paused to stare at us.

“What is it?”, Stephen asked quietly.

“Something.” Albert responded curtly, swiveling his head up and to the right where a branch snapped in the darkness.

“Is surrounding us.” I supplied barely more detail as another heavy thump echoed from our distant left.

We stood stiffly in a semi-circle, straining our senses to the max. Soon the wood went completely silent. Whatever was stalking us had finally reached its preferred position.

“They’ve stopped moving.” I whispered to the group.

Soul Tracking has increased in rank!

An amorphous shape barely revealed itself ten meters to our left. “My left, ten meters.”

Soul Tracking has increased in rank!

Another barely concealed silhouette wriggled against a large tree trunk from behind my right shoulder at about fifteen meters, “Right, back, fifteen.”

“Half a dozen at our forty-five”, Albert supplied.

Keeg silently shifted to whisper back at us, “I sense nothing front; they have completely flanked us.”

The other three strained to see what we had picked up on by virtue of skills and superior attributes. From the looks on their faces though, they had failed despite the creatures being almost on top of us.

Several long minutes of silence dominated the clearing where we had frozen in place waiting for our stalkers to make their move. When they did, it was chaos. The trees closest to us exploded into splinters and dust, momentarily blinding and deafening us.

I activated my newest ability, [Eye of the Reaper], allowing it to guide my pistol onto the pair of targets I had previously identified. The rail pistol snapped, sending rounds down range so fast that they seemed to hit their targets as soon as I pulled the trigger. A grey shape exploded into gooey green chunks several meters from where I stood. The other one followed a half second after the first, sharing in the same grizzly death.

Keeg was swinging at the blurring grey shapes with grit teeth while Albert worked my AK back and forth on full auto. Over the cacophonous sound of the AK barking across the clearing I barely heard the muffled screams of Carly and Courtney. Stephen was slinging [Gravity Spikes] and [Void Beams] to our rear, slicing down a multitude of slower moving grey tentacles.

“GET THE FUCK OFF ME!” Carly roared while flaring her energy, freezing a trio of the large gripping tentacles as they tried to grab her. The tentacle swarm changed tactics and swatted her down hard, her head bouncing off a rock. Not allowing her to recover from being stunned the tentacles moved with blistering speed to scoop her up and drag her off into the woods.

I turned my attention to the muffled struggles of Courtney who was having a far harder time fending off the assault of tentacles. Each arm was thoroughly restrained by an individual tentacle, another wrapped several times around her feet, while another attempted to force itself into her mouth.

“MMMMPH! ....ECH! N- MMMPH!” Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as the tentacle finally found its way into her throat and pulsed with what I hoped was only a paralytic of some kind. Before my party could react to the lightning-fast assault she was whisked away just as Carly had been.

“WHAT THE FUCK!?” Stephen yelled as he chased after his lover.

“MOVE!” I barked as Stephen broke through the tree line. The rest of us charged after him as quickly as we could, dodging rocks, trees and fallen branches. Stephen used his own [Lightspeed Movement] skill with no regard to his mana consumption. Despite being slower than the three of us, he was easily leaving us in his dust.

“I THINK THEY WERE ONLY TARGETING THE WOMEN! I FEAR WHAT THAT MEANS!” Keeg yelled as we ran.

“THEIR POSITIONING WAS OBVIOUS!” Albert added from the rear of our running formation.

“LET’S JUST CATCH STEPHEN BEFORE HE GETS HIMSELF KILLED!” I yelled back as I decided to put my significant Endurance to the test, forgoing dodging the obstructions and just barging straight through at full speed. I dipped my shoulder and barreled head long into the trees that crossed my path, exploding them into kindling as I pressed on. My companions fell in behind me, clear of the obstructions they focused on staying on their feet as we dashed madly through the forest in chase of Stephen.

We cleared the tree line as Stephen stumbled into a scene of slimy horrors. All around Fool Hollow Lake were the shattered and broken bodies of hundreds of women. All around us they laid in various states of disrepair, stomachs and chests opened to the air, major organs spilled across the ground. I bumped my foot against half a woman’s head, her remaining eye staring up at me with the salty crust of long shed tears caking her blood smeared cheek. Her body was eviscerated, parts of which were mixed in with another young girl's legs.

Above the lake a quartet of tentacles held Courtney’s limp form in the air. Her clothes had been shredded allowing tentacles to penetrate all of her holes, pulsing ominously up from the depths of the lake. Stephen picked himself up where he had stumbled upon emerging from [Lightspeed Movement]. Despair and indecision crossed his face as he stared up at his woman.

A blast of cold from further down the beach caught our attention. Carly shattered another tentacle that had attempted to pull her in. She saw us staring at Courtney and yelled, “FUCKING HELP ME!”

“On it.” Albert said as he took aim at a tentacle that attempted to reach up from behind her. He fired, blasting the offending limb then jogged over to help her return to us.

“The fuck is it doing?” I muttered.

Keeg waved a hand around at the dead that littered the beach, “Impregnating her.”

Not gonna let that shit continue!

“Stephen! Get ready to catch her.” I called out as I began shooting down the tentacles. Small blackish purple ‘eggs’ fell from several of the broken tentacles while Stephen carefully caught her in a bubble of inverted gravity, drawing her in to his arms and quickly removing what remained of the pulsing tentacles.

Carly and Albert returned to us taking shots at the occasional stubborn tentacle. I looked down on the broken woman that had accompanied me since we had cleared the Nightmare Dungeon at the prison where I used to work. She was beginning to regain consciousness when I noticed something moving just under the skin of her stomach. For a moment I thought I was seeing things when Keeg commented about the movement as well.

“It’s as I feared.” He looked down in pity at the woman.

Stephen spun his head around in confusion, “What? What do you mean?” Then he saw the same movement we saw across multiple points across her body. “WHAT IS THAT!?”

Before anyone could respond Courtney began convulsing, her eyes shifting wildly across each one of us, her fingers digging into Stephen’s biceps. Carly stared in horror, then began checking her own body for any of the wriggling things under her skin.

“Keeg, you’re the next best thing to a healer we’ve got, can you do anything!?” I asked while Albert continued shooting away probing tentacles.

“Eh, maybe, I only have one actual healing spell, let me try.” He raised his hands over her flinching and shaking form. “[Holy Light]!”

“EEEEEEEEAAAAGH! UGH!” Courtney screamed out as the wriggling worms under her skin turned red hot. Smoke and the smell of sizzling flesh drifted up from where her skin burned from the inside out. Her body tensed one last time before she heaved a heavy breath.

Her eyes focused on Stephen as tears rolled down her cheeks, “There’s m-more! H-hundreds! I CAN FEEL THEM! They’re EATING ME!”

Sure enough, more wriggling worms began moving under her skin, more than before Keeg had hit her with his one and only healing spell. Which, all things considered, seemed to do more harm than good.

“HIT HER AGAIN!” Stephen demanded from behind flooded pleading eyes.

Keeg looked at the man apologetically, “I- I, my ability just burned off a dozen of those things and caused her more damage than healing. If I try to burn out hundreds.” He left the consequences up for interpretation.

“But...”, He looked around as she began another round of convulsing. A particularly large worm had crawled up her neck into her jaw. She began to frantically claw with one hand at her cheek. Blood pooled at her fingers as the worm squirmed away from her manic grasp.

“FUCK!” She roared as the worm exploded out of her jaw in a spray of blood and tooth fragments. Her eyes rolled up into the back of her head as Stephen stared in shock. Keeg tried to stomp on the three-inch worm and failed as it dove into the broken bodies of the women that had come before.

“GAH!” Another bare scream as another worm exploded from her elbow, leaving her right arm useless. Stephen attempted to cover her wounds that were beginning to multiply. Her hip, shoulder, and stomach exploded with worms next. Chunks of flesh and bone sprayed in various directions as the little bastards escaped her body one after the other.

Soon her protestations ceased as her body was eroded by the escaping worms. The deluge of sickly grey maggot like worms bursting from her body left Stephen no choice but to drop what remained of Courtney and back away in impotent frustration.

Throughout the ordeal, Carly and Albert fought off the ever-increasing swarm of larger tentacles that reached up from the depths of the lake in front of us. Stephen stared numbly at Courtney’s wrecked body as the last of the worms slithered free. I couldn’t decide what to do at the moment, we needed Stephen in the fight. However, there was nothing I could do to fix him right now. And right now, the waters were churning with more of the aggressive tentacles.

Keeg had already joined the fight, hacking and slashing down the offending tentacles as they sprang forth from the water. I pulled my plasma pistol and hand cannon free, sparing the anguished man one last glance before I got to work.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! WHY! GOD DAMN IT! WHY!” Heat flared behind me followed by an oppressive weight smashing into my back. A searing beam of light burst through the wall of tentacles in front of me. Keeg stumbled to the side, almost getting clipped by the emotion fueled spell. It bored into the lake, vaporizing water as it devoured its way towards the source of the tentacles that had taken his lovers life.

I looked back towards a positively glowing Stephen who was sucking in a heavy emotionally anguished breath. Rage covered his face as he focused on a shadowy form shaking loose from the bottom muck of the lake, barely visible through the recently generated steam. Thousands of grey tentacles blanketed the shoreline, flash boiled by Stephen’s supercharged attack.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaNGK!!!

A keening wail echoed up from the creature at the center of the lake that caused my bones to vibrate and my teeth to hurt. Keeg clasped a hand over his ears, while the rest of my team grimaced in agitation.

The Horror of Fool Hollow Lake has been woken, prepare yourselves.