Outworld Liberators

The Infant Living Ghost Pagoda drifted nearer and bent its massive head toward the maze of crevices. For a breath it only stared, its face tightening with something like suspicion.

Through every segment of its warped body, it caught the faint, distinct signatures of four living beings hidden in the stone.

It moved closer to Fay, Oswin, Jenkii, and Jackson.

All four began circulating qi through their organs, forcing blood and breath into stillness, willing their hearts to slow.

Jackson went further than the rest. His eyes glazed over as he used the Sanguine Triumvirate Arts to stop his heart outright.

For all the backwardness of Samsara, the cultists had created a monstrous and brilliant method. Too many techniques could be folded into that single art, and this was one of them.

The creature licked its lips. Then it frowned.

Its steel flesh began to press and reshape itself, forcing its bulk toward the angled cracks above the four disciples.

Like all things born of the Ghost Realm, it carried a flaw that looked almost like instinctive self-sabotage.

A Living Ghost Pagoda in its infancy had not yet chosen its final form.

Until maturity claimed it, the thing could not resist the urge to squeeze into winding spaces, to test itself against hollows and jagged seams, as if stone might tell it what shape it was meant to become.

So it kept inching forward. Slowly. Patiently. Horribly.

By then Jenkii was already trembling. Her eyes had gone bloodshot. She looked at Oswin, desperate, almost pleading without words. Everything in her wanted to run. To bolt. To trust motion over terror.

Still, Jenkii only ground her teeth. She knew there was a reason they had come this far. All of them had. No one entered a secret realm for safety. They had come to wrench a fortuitous encounter from its depths and carry it out with bloodied hands if need be.

Above them, the face of the Infant Living Ghost Pagoda drifted lower.

Its small beady eyes were made for distance. They could pick out motion from miles away.

Now, at such nearness, they searched the cracks for the faintest sign of life, the tremor of a breath, the twitch of a pore.

Yet the four disciples remained still. Too still.

For a moment, the creature doubted itself. But the scent was real. So was the vitality.

Red crept across its steel skin in feverish patches, and its bulk began to tremble.

It had never, in all its life, tasted living flesh so rich with vigor.

Just ten meters below lay the fortune it hungered for.

Ten meters. Eight meters. Six. Four.

Soon the four disciples could feel its breath, metallic and hot, washing over them in waves.

Inside its half-parted mouth, rows upon rows of steel teeth spun against one another with a faint grinding shriek that scraped at the nerves.

Two meters. One. Closer still.

Then Oswin moved.

Both his hands rose at once. Hand cannons sprang from his palms and locked on the Infant Living Ghost Pagoda's eyes just as its face came within half a foot of the crevice.

Light flashed. Thunder cracked through the stone.

"Run!" Oswin roared.

The others broke at once, bursting from cover and throwing themselves down the path.

Behind them, Oswin held his ground for one heartbeat longer as his hands kicked out three full blasts in savage succession, each shot aimed to buy the others one more breath, one more step, one more chance to live.

The creature did not roar in pain.

It stood in silence as they fled, eerily calm despite the blasts that had nearly taken its eyes.

At the last instant, it drew its eyes deep into its innards and saved them.

All across its frame, stolen eyes from things it had devoured twitched and rolled in their sockets.

As it began dragging its body free from the crevices, it still took care not to break the stone around it, as though even in pursuit it obeyed some buried instinct.

The winding maze still stretched far ahead. They were not out yet.

"Up. We go above right now," Oswin ordered.

He reeled in the ropes linking them together, and at once the four disciples began vaulting upward through the broken paths and jagged rises, with Oswin the diviner taking the lead.

They ran as if death itself were snapping at their heels, forcing qi through their limbs far beyond what their bodies could safely bear.

Behind them, the creature began to plea.

"Love, Jenkii, do not leave me. My heart will break in this cold, damp place."

"Steel man, soften your heart for me."

"Blood fellow, come play. Teach me the blood."

"Fay, Fay, I know you know me, Fay. You have read of me, have you not? I am a kind and docile creature."

Its voice was almost tender. That made it worse.

Oswin did not look back. Panels within his body split open, and the thruster arrays hidden inside him flared to life.

He shot forward toward the exit nearly a mile away, his body rocketing through the maze.

"Faster, everyone, faster," Oswin shouted, and this time even his voice cracked.

To the ignorant, it might have sounded like a thing that could be reasoned with. Perhaps even tamed.

That was a deadly mistake. It was nothing like the zombies or chimeric beasts that once had lives of their own before being raised again through malice and resentment.

A Living Ghost Pagoda was different. It was not born of Cornerstone Setting. Not of Gilded Core. It was birthed by the Ghost Realm itself, and such creatures entered existence already standing at the peak of the Nascent Embryo Stage.

What chased them was not a monster that had become twisted.

It had been born monstrous.

The instant the Living Ghost Pagoda pulled its head fully free of the maze, it flashed sideways and snatched up the curious Light Goblin Fairies that had strayed too near.

It watched the fleeing disciples even as it chewed, gobbling the tiny creatures with wet, grinding bites.

When Fay and the others glanced back, they saw it only as a distant silhouette, staring after them with a blood-slick grin.

Helplessness struck like a blade to the gut. So did fury. It was toying with them.

Then the great creature drew itself straight. Its body aligned in a single terrible line, and in the next breath it shot forward like a vessel crossing the void.

The air burst apart around it. A violent boom tore through the maze as it vanished from sight and appeared ahead of them.

It caught itself against the wall with eerie grace, its massive frame clinging there without so much as scraping the surface, then lowered one vast hand to bar their path.

The four disciples dropped to the ground.

Tears streamed down their faces. Jenkii even let out a raw, broken roar, as though their whole adventure had come to die in this cold place.

The Living Ghost Pagoda smiled wider and drank in the sight, eager to savor their despair.

Then its pleasure soured. Something was wrong. The fear was there, yet it felt thin. Weak. False in some subtle way.

Like being promised extra strong liquor and given watered ale instead.

Its grin faltered. At once it thrust out a massive hand, already entertaining sweeter cruelties in its mind. It could keep them. Break them slowly. Fatten them on dread and pain.

Twenty years of torment did not seem excessive to such a thing.

But when its hand swept through them, it touched nothing.

The illusion ruptured.

Resting in its palm were only four drops of blood, each from a different body. Four little bundles of hair. Four small swabs of sweat.

Its face, bright with cruel delight only a moment before, began to harden.

Slowly, the Living Ghost Pagoda drew open its true, tiny beady eyes and looked around.

Then it saw it. An array.

A hidden formation guiding those scraps of blood, hair, and sweat through patterned motion, weaving them into false bodies, false tears, false despair.

The Living Ghost Pagoda shut its eyes, as if it could dismiss the sight before it as some bad dream.

Then it opened them again. The array was still there. Its roar tore through the cavern.

Stone shuddered. Dust rained from above. The sound of its fury rolled through every tunnel.

Yet even then the Living Ghost Pagoda forced itself back into a semblance of calm.

It tried once more to bait them out. Only now, that learned and almost scholarly voice was gone.

What came instead was a deep, scraping shriek, so harsh and jagged that perhaps only the fat boy Almsgiver himself would believe such a creature capable of sincerity.

"Big Sister Fay, save me. I do not want to be here."

"Big Brother Jackson, please, do not go."

"Brother Oswin, I will even let bygones be bygones."

"Love Jenkii. I am a creature of sincerity. Please."

Oswin barked out a laugh. It was half mockery, half nerves, and he turned toward Jenkii with the look of a man who had decided terror was best answered with insult.

"Were you not looking for a lover? That thing back there is strong, sturdy, and only a little on the larger side. Love does not judge, right?"

Jackson's nostrils flared. He coughed into his fist, trying to preserve the cool composure he had already lost.

"Fuck you, Oswin. Truly. Fuck you. You go if you love the creature that much," Jenkii snapped, still badly shaken by the thought of that thing latching onto her like some monstrous suitor.

"Yeah. Fuck you, Oswin. Come, Jenkii. Let us go together," the distant Living Ghost Pagoda said.

Fay let out a short laugh. Even so, a small and deeply unhelpful part of her felt envious.

She found herself wishing Radeon had ever chased her with such lunatic devotion.

"Fay, your mind is in the gutter again," the distant Pagoda quipped at once.

"Fuck you. Stop reading my mind," Fay hissed.

They kept running. Then, all at once, the stone and winding dark fell away, and they emerged beneath a great tree at the edge of a swamp.