Monster Breeder
159. Return Under the Mountain, Part 3 (Suka)

Spoiler

Body Horror

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A pale hand emerges from the darkness to clutch a rock, the hidden owner using their grip to lurch forward into view. The creature… one of the Webling queen’s ‘prototypes,’ is a disgusting horror the likes of which will probably give me nightmares.

Not the topmost portion, that of a normal humanoid woman, though her fingertips are bluish, the gums of her wickedly grinning face recessed, and her eyes are sunken as signs of poor blood-flow and circulation. It’s at her waist and below that makes my gorge rise. A second pair of arms, these the scythes of a Black Widow, pull the rest of her body around the corner.

The top half of a mermaid, two Black Widow torsos, and a Lizardman have been stitched together with each head attached to the base of the next spine with connecting skin flaps, basically ass-to-mouth with monstrous biology. Four sets of eyes glare at us, three of which peer over the curve of their partner’s spine, each with an intense hate kindled by a life of pure torturous existence.

In the short seconds before combat begins, I push down bile while internally noting the terrible Hybrid monster’s many limbs and segmented movements remind me of a centipede.

Then it charges us. The strange monster is surprisingly nimble for having so many limbs to coordinate, but it’s either had a lot of practice or something about its Hybrid nature accommodates that need.

Megan, Sue, and I leap aside while Cottontail cartwheels away, Performer's Body doing admirable work, but Dura stands her ground. The Ogress catches the Hybrid Centipede’s rush, locking hands with the Mermaid upper body. At first, I think it’s going to be a one-sided beatdown due to Dura’s Ogress strength, but there’s a factor I haven’t counted on. Four sets of abdominal muscles flex, four sets of spines arching as Dura is lifted off the ground and flung into the ceiling where she crashes against stone that cracks around the site of the strike, showering us with dislodged debris. Then the Centipede pulls Dura down to slam her into the floor, the impact even shaking the ground slightly.

The Centipede is stronger than it should be, almost as if the physical ‘stats’ of the composite monsters have been added together! I guess Hybrid monsters are stronger than their components working in unison.

I shoot a jet of flame at the Mermaid top half’s face, Megan darts around to attack from the flank, Sue spits a stream of Water Magic from her mouth, and Cottontail reaches into her doffed hat. The Showbunny’s hand moves on instinct, pulling forth and throwing a succession of carrots with surprising precision—aiming for vulnerabilities with Accuracy-boosted vegetable daggers. With us attacking from multiple angles and having two Third-Tier monsters on our side, I fully expect our opponent to be riddled with blows.

What happens instead makes my jaw drop.

The Mermaid Centipede intercepts my flames with a conjured stream of Water Magic, producing a cloud of steam that soon occupies the roof of the cavern, counterspells Sue’s spit, blasts Cottontail’s carrot daggers off course, and forces Megan back with a firehose to the face. That’s when it hits me—the Mermaid Centipede has four Multitasking focuses like Alex! Even a basic spell like Mermaid Water Magic is potent when multiplied by four. 

While we’re on the back foot, it spits a net of spider webbing from the Mermaid’s lips at Megan, entangling the Denki Nezumi. Then the Centipede makes an odd *click* with its mouth, creating a spark courtesy of the Lizardman in its components that ignite the flammable threads. My eyes widen as a line of fire burns straight toward Megan even as she attempts to struggle free in a blur of movement.

Cottontail bathes her sister in water from her squirting flower (protecting Megan from the heat of the flames) while Sue resolves to continue occupying one of the Centipede’s multitasking focuses with Water Magic. There’s an advantage in simply being a nuisance, after all.

Megan, meanwhile, strips the sticky webs from her body and rolls them into a ball once given a few seconds to free herself.

Dura rises from the ground on one knee and tackles the Centipede’s middle to keep the Hybrid monster off balance. It returns the favor by raking Dura’s back with those Black Widow scythes. The Ogress would be sliced to sashimi if not for her innate Toughness and boosted Constitution attribute. In fact, her upgraded Strength allows her to begin a stranglehold on a Widow’s waist where the Centipede doesn’t have the advantage of leverage to resist.

I’ve had enough of sitting back in this fight, rocketing into the air on bursts of flame from my paws while staying under the cloud of hot steam on the ceiling. I dodge a stream of Water Magic midflight with a double-jump and hook an arm around the Mermaid’s neck. Spinning around, I plant my paws on the small of her back and pull with all my increased Strength until I feel a snap. The Mermaid top half goes limp, neck broken, but the remainder of the Centipede body segments continue to fight.

Cottontail closes her eyes and throws a carrot dagger blindly, the root vegetable bouncing off a stalactite to slide home in the second Black Widow’s segment’s left eye. Dura’s grip tightens on the first Black Widow, and Megan closes in to strike the Lizardman body in the throat with a leaping jab.

The entire Centipede finally, mercifully, goes still. It only took the five of us concentrating our efforts on the horrific monster to bring it down.

We all take a second to breathe while post-battle adrenaline pumps uselessly through our veins. I can’t believe a Second Tier Hybrid was so strong; it could’ve killed anyone but Dura if it got its claws on us. This feeling of mortality… I thought I’d left it behind after casting myself into the Treefolk bonfire. And yet here I am; stop shivering, damn it!

*Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap!*

“Well done! I’ve never seen such a display of might and magic before. It’s too bad you broke our playmate, though…”

“Tch.” I hate this kind of bullshit. “Show yourself!” I shout while barreling around the tunnel corner with flame-propelled steps.

“Get back here, you dumb bitch!” Megan yells as I rush off on my own, but I’m too pissed to listen. Pissed at the cryptic stranger and pissed at myself for feeling scared after a largely uneventful battle.

That posturing asshole has it coming! She can’t expect to get away with taunting us and shoving that horror-show of a monstrosity in our faces. I’ll run her down and give her a piece of my mind!

But there’s nothing when I make the turn, just an empty corridor of natural stone.

“So, you wanna play hide and seek, huh? What a great idea! You’re not like my Web-headed sisters at all, or the prototypes.”

That voice is coming from further away now, I’m sure of it. No way am I losing in a contest of speed! Stalactites fly by in a blur as I barrel down the tunnel with my afterburners going at full blast.

“Oops, looks like you went the wrong way, tee hee~”

She’s behind me, now? What the fuck?!? Then I emerge into a huge chamber and realize I’m hearing the voice’s echoes as they bounce off the far wall. My mysterious enemy must have thrown her voice ahead of me to make it seem like she was far away after ducking into a side-branch somewhere back there.

I… got played.

Why? Where am I? The stench of rotting meat answers that question handily. There are fewer webs here, but the evidence of the butcher who made the Centipede lies scattered everywhere. Bodies, pieces, and failed experiments that died mid-stich riddle the cavern floor. That, and a disgusting black liquid oozes around the stalagmites before latching onto a corpse.

The flesh of an incomplete Mermaid/Lizardman Hybrid withers and melts before my eyes to reveal bone and disintegrating cartilage. If my eyes don't deceive me, it started rotting a moment before contacting the awful dark fluid. I’m almost hypnotized by the gruesome sight, but I snap out of it when the black liquid gathers into a ball that launches itself at me.

A Black Slime. In the back of my mind, I recall Opal mentioned her family was slain by one. 

I dodge with a burst of flame, my skin crawling when the projectile monster’s blight aura brushes against me, a near-miss measured in inches, and tag it with a stream of fire from my palm even as my nose belatedly tells me I’m surrounded by flammable gas. The Black Slime ignites with an intense blue laminar flame that spreads to the ooze covering the floor as it lands. I suppose that makes sense given it seems to magically radiate decay.

Then the entire cavern is engulfed in that same blue flame while a burbling roar rises from the far end. A small hill wreathed in fire swells into view, revealing the Large Black Ooze lurking in this chamber. The resultant explosion of thousands of liters of methane igniting at once rushes toward me at a pace even I can’t outrun.

I don’t know if I can control that much flame—but I know my fate if I answer this existential question in the negative.

Reaching out with my metaphysical senses, I grasp at the fire and momentarily hold it in a bubble around me, forming a hemisphere of swirling luminescent gas. Something within me strains against the conflagration. There's too much pressure from the explosion; it's too powerful for me to restrain. I-I can’t. I just can't! I'm going to die here...

“Abracadabra!”

Cottontail is there at my side riding on Megan’s shoulders, the electric mouse girl the only one of my companions fast enough to come after me. The Denki Nezumi is stronger as a Third Tier, but I don’t know if she could’ve carried her sister all this way without the upgrade to her Stamina. Regardless, we’re all about to be consumed by blue flames… except the Showbunny produces a plain white sheet to cover the three of us.

The booming rumble of the explosion ceases completely and utterly the very moment Cottontail’s weird sheet blocks my vision. Megan, Cottontail, and I pant for breath under the covers, exchanging concerned and confused glances while the Showbunny concentrates. There’s no heat from the flames either, I notice. I’d have thought the sheet would burn, but it’s as if we’re floating in a vast void separated from the burning caverns by endless miles of empty space.

Another few seconds pass as I grow increasingly worried, but Cottontail grasps the sheet in the middle and rips it away with a polished flourish. “Ta-da!”

The heat and sounds of fire, the dim blue light of the burning Slimes, and the smells of roasted rot hit us in a wave. We thankfully and inexplicably somehow missed the explosion as if we’d vanished from that moment and reappeared after the worst had passed.

“Hrk!” Cottontail clutches at her throat, a gesture Megan and I copy as we realize the flames consumed all the oxygen in the chamber. The Showbunny fumbles for her paper fan and starts waving her arm frantically to stir a breeze with her simulation of Air Magic.

Wind rushes into the chamber, filling our lungs and stoking the flames burning the Black Slime. That burbling roar rolls over us again as the enraged Large Black Ooze lurches toward us. It’s a move that demands a flight or fight response, and Megan makes the call this time.

“THUNDER…!!!”

The Denki Nezumi girl crouches like a sprinter aimed at the approaching Ooze as her hair’s glow intensifies and limning arcs of electricity ground themselves from her body to the floor. Shit, okay, we’re doing this!

More Black Slimes come forth from the burning corners of the chamber, abandoning their charred carrion for fresher prey. Their attack vectors are no more difficult to read than First-Tier Slimes, but these dark blobs are multiple times more corrosive and deadly.

“G-go away!” Cottontail waves her fan at them to little effect, diverting their trajectories barely enough to protect her defenseless sister.

My streams of flame deal with them much faster, seeming to evaporate their flammable bodies as fast as a candle burning at both ends. I dash around Megan while lancing every Black Slime that tries to get at her while she’s concentrating. Except, there are a lot of them; I’m guessing they were originally attracted here by the surplus of dead and decaying bodies.

The Large Black Ooze looms over us like a thunderhead, a dark wave wreathed in blue flames about to crash on top of our trio. I summon all my power, every ounce of Focus and drop of will to beat back the enemy with a torrent of fire jetting from my entire upper body. The revolting goo burns, my flames turning blue on contact, and evaporates whatever I hit, but the Ooze doesn’t have a Core. The damage I’m dealing doesn’t matter as more sludge rises high to soon engulf us. Worse, I can’t defend Megan while engaged like this and Cottontail is getting overwhelmed by the number of Black Slimes attacking from all angles.

Dura and Sue finally enter the cavern breathing hard, both drenched and dripping water, wet feet slapping against stone. Sue must have soaked them both to protect them from the fireball coursing through the hallways after the explosion and backtracked the scorch marks to find us. The Ogress immediately summons her metal-studded club and smashes a Black Slime to smithereens. A stream of Water Magic from Sue’s mouth knocks another pouncing Black Slime away from Megan, filling the ceiling with steam as she puts out the flame but struggles to disrupt the gelatinous monster’s form.

Thankfully, they bought us the last few moments we needed.

“…CRASH!!!”

Megan launches herself like an arrow at the heart of the Large Black Ooze, the girl surrounded by a nimbus of Electric Magic that vaporizes any goo on contact. A streak of light cuts through the darkness behind my eyelids as the Denki Nezumi splits the dark wave in two, causing it to fall away on either side instead of crashing on us.

Booming thunder momentarily deafens me, but I’ve been through this before, and I don’t just stand there stunned while the Ooze recovers. Yeah, it’s not dead. Instead, I leap into the air and blanket the floor with fire. Cottontail fuels the flames with a constant stream of fresh air from her fan while a depowered Megan creeps around the edges of the cavern. Dura smacks any Black Slimes that form nearby with that studded club and Sue corrals the sludge into piles with her Water Magic that I ignite into mounds of blue flame.

The four of us clean house, purifying the chamber of rot with a constant stream of fire until my flames finally return to orange. Megan rejoins us and we all heave sighs of relief with the danger passed. Phew.

“You’re lucky my sister and I bailed your bitch-ass out of that,” Megan points an accusing finger at me.

I reluctantly nod my head, “Y-yeah… I got a little carried away and fell for that obvious trap. My bad.” A good leader knows when to admit fault. I apologize and express gratitude so we can move on, “Thanks everyone, for having my back. I owe you one.”

Sue is pleased by the praise and cheers, “No pwoblem. We’wre a team!”

“Dura lookin’ forward to cashing dat in.” The Ogress gives me an eyebrow waggle that tells me my tongue will be getting a workout tonight.

“It’s alright, Miss Suka. I got mad too,” Cottontail admits, thinking back on the Centipede battle, “Making us fight that poor creature was really mean.”

“Mean? I thought we were having fun~?” The creepy voice comes from behind us, and it’s very close. “I even brought us some more playmates!” We turn as a unit to see our enemy enter the chamber flanked by two more Centipedes.

She’s… not at all what I expected. Beautiful, for one thing, in an alien way. Her nude body is entirely covered with a segmented black carapace that glistens by the firelight. She has a ‘triangular’ figure with wide hips, slightly narrower shoulders, thick thighs that give her a sexy, swaying gait, and a fine bust that’s bigger than mine by a significant margin. Sheesh, even the bug monster? Whatever. She’s bareheaded, though the chitinous three horns on her cranium remind me of a rhinoceros beetle, or maybe a tiara?

There’s a flash of grey fur as Peter the killer stage rabbit darts from the shadows to leap at the bug girl’s throat, and I’m confident all this dramatic buildup is about to end in a massive anticlimax. Except Peter doesn’t bite through her neck. Instead, she throws her head back and her entire throat opens to reveal a massive pair of jaws that catch Peter between their teeth. She crunches down, breaking the rabbit’s spine, and Peter dissipates into a cloud of dark smoke that slinks back into Cottontail’s hat in a thin stream.

“I was right!” she says while closing that extra mouth to realign her head and torso. Each segment of the creature’s carapace stirs independently in a full-body shiver of excitement, briefly showing a glimpse of many hidden jaws containing white teeth framed by the pink flesh of myriad maws. I suddenly have a sinking feeling that I know what happened to the missing  child-like Tier 1 monsters that once skittered about these caves... The Darkling Horror gives us a manic grin showing too many teeth and exclaims, “This will be fun~!”