87. Down by Two

Down by Two

I frowned as some subconscious voice screamed that the whole situation smelled wrong, which counted as a pun, I guess.

We were missing something. Something we could not see. Something that felt a little familiar.

I checked the air around us again with Force Sense. If something was in the air, maybe I could find where it was coming from?

That attempt partially worked.

It did not reveal exactly what was in the air around us, because the sense was nowhere near sensitive enough, but it did detect that something was present.

It was not gas. I could not sense gas at all. It was more like… dust?

“Guys, I think I need to sit down,” Chi Li murmured, and then actually sat, slipping as she did. “I think those earlier fights exhausted me more than I realized. What about you?”

“Just a little sleepy,” Zhao Mancheng grunted. “I think we can rest for a—”

“No!”

“No!”

Zhao Linshou and I shouted at the same time, glaring suspiciously at everything around us.

The old hunter raised his portable cannon, but there was nothing to shoot and no visible enemy to fight.

“We need to leave. Right now. All of us.”

I completely agreed, though I was not sure why.

Zhao Linshou gave me the answer.

“There is no exit in this room. The enemy wants us to stay here. We came in ready to fight and push through the last few rooms. Now there is a strange smell, and you want to sit down and rest?”

Yes. That was it.

That was what my intuition, or paranoia, had been trying to tell me.

Instead of watching ourselves or the room around us, I stared harder at the only other notable thing in this place: the captives.

They were not in cages that would be hard to escape. Nobody guarded them.

They had not even been trapped, as we had half suspected.

Or so we thought.

When I pushed Force Sense to its limit, I detected slightly denser particles in the air the captives exhaled.

Maybe mist, maybe dust, maybe something else. The only reason I could notice them at all was that there were enough of them before they dispersed into the air.

Then tentacles shot out of every captive’s mouth, searching for things to grab.

Hundreds of tongue-like things wrapped around me in the instant of my surprise, cocooning me from head to toe.

They did not feel like tongues. They were more like flexible wires made of tough fiber wrapped in a thin layer of greasy flesh.

They were right under my nose, and the nauseatingly sweet, rotten smell became clear.

We might have noticed it earlier, but two straight weeks of human corpses and mass death had trained all of us to tolerate that kind of stench.

When I tried to escape the first time, the tentacles tightened. To my surprise, their grip was fairly strong.

Right. Constant Force only prevented me from being trapped through supernatural means. These tentacles were clearly physical, and their disgusting worm-like writhing against my body made that very easy to remember.

I flew upward, but their weight dragged me down.

Through the thin cocoon, Force Sense showed hundreds of fake captives trying to hold me in place, tangling together like a carpet woven from pure ugliness while more tentacles grew out of their bodies.

I was almost certain I knew what they were.

Improved versions of the plant zombies I had fought before.

Faster, stronger, tougher, with tentacles more resilient than the originals.

Unfortunately for them, since our last meeting, I had become stronger too.

By an order of magnitude.

Those tentacles were more like strings than ropes, and enough strings could hold someone down when leverage was unavailable.

But Nearby Object Manipulation meant I always had leverage and a way to use it. In a few seconds, I tore the cocoon open.

Those few seconds, however, had been enough for the others in the group to be caught in similar cocoons. The enormous explosions and ripping sounds coming from one of them indicated that Zhao Linshou was still fighting.

I was flying toward him when Chi Li’s cocoon exploded, and an enraged witch wrapped in flame burst out.

“How dare you touch me with your filthy limbs?!”

Her clothes were torn, and in some places even burned through.

Not by her own fire. Somehow, her flames were repairing the damage to her outfit.

Her long red hair was a mess, and she was crying.

“Die!”

Apparently, she had taken the revelation that the captives were actually grabby monsters very personally.

A ring of green flame expanded from her, instantly withering every tentacle it touched and setting their owners alight.

Zhao Linshou had already blasted halfway free, and I pulled him out immediately.

But Zhao Mancheng made no sound.

Too quiet.

I tore open the last cocoon and found him bleeding from thousands of wounds left by tentacles trying to burrow into him. Both his arms were broken where the tentacles had taken his guns.

“I said…” he gasped, coughing blood and failing to stand, “…we should have left them.”

Then his eyes closed and his head fell back.

I touched him and saw at a glance all the internal bleeding inside his body.

There was a lot of it.

I began treating him with Nearby Object Manipulation, extending the ability into his body, pinching wounds closed, setting broken bones, and drawing blood away from places where blood absolutely did not belong.

It was easier and faster than any comparable surgery, but that did not make it easy or fast.

It took me fifteen minutes to stabilize him enough that he would not die immediately. I could only hope his superhuman recovery could resist whatever toxins were in him.

By then, Chi Li had set everything on fire, and Zhao Linshou had sat down to rest.

Once Zhao Mancheng was treated and did not promptly die, I sighed in relief and lay down on the floor.

Then the old hunter reminded me that we had no time to rest.

“Girl, I am done,” he told me, setting Little Black across his lap.

“What does that mean, old man…” My tone was less patient than it should have been.

In my defense, well… no, I had no defense.

“Those damned tentacle zombies hurt me badly. Right leg’s broken. I’m sleepy as hell, and that ain’t normal. Little Black is bent too badly to shoot straight.”

He took out the flask he always carried and emptied it, the way he had already done at least six or seven times since the mission began.

“I don’t think I’ll be coming with you to repay that bastard host for his hospitality.”

“His name is Mort. The one time I met him, he sounded like a self-important noble prick.”

Losing Zhao Linshou’s support was a serious problem.

Aside from Chi Li, his gun and abilities were deadlier against individual enemies than anyone else’s, and we had not yet met an enemy he could not harm at all.

With Zhao Mancheng’s life still uncertain on top of that… now it was just us.

And my best friend was still nowhere near fully recovered.

“Hey, that name’s funny. Bit too theatrical, though.” Zhao Linshou mused, somehow emptying his flask again.

Leaving aside where all his alcohol came from, how could he drink that much? Did he have a superpower that gave him an endless liquor-stomach?

“How is it theatrical?”

“Well, if you know Hebrew… it means ‘death.’” He shrugged. “Pretty fitting, by the way. Guess his people are not great at names.”

“More like aggressively goth.”

We both laughed quietly. His laugh turned into a deep chuckle, then into a coughing fit.

“You and the red-haired girl give him a good beating for us, all right?”

“Absolutely,” I promised.

And I intended to keep that promise very soon.