#29
AI-assisted content.
TDBB: Golem Toph 3.29
Harley Quinn hit the swampy muck with a loud, wet squelch, her shoes sinking ankle-deep into the mire. She didn’t care. Driven by a sudden, manic surge of adrenaline, she lunged blindly through the thick, weeping mist of the bog.
Behind her, Ivy’s frantic warnings were entirely cut off by the heavy, rhythmic thud of Harley’s heart beating in her ears.
"Solomon! Grundy-bear! Over here!" Harley cheered, waving her arms.
She burst into the center of the clearing and froze. Solomon Grundy was sitting heavily on a massive, ancient log. The wood beneath him wasn't just old; it was actively liquefying into a foul, bubbling black sludge under his immense weight. He didn't look up as she approached. His massive shoulders were hunched forward, rocking in a slow, agonized cadence. The heavy, hollow rattle of his voice scraped through the quiet air, delivering the final lines of the corrupted nursery rhyme:
"...Buried in mold on a Thursday... grew a new bone on a Friday... woke up the dead on a Saturday... silent and cold on a Sunday..."
He paused, a wet, shuddering breath tearing from his throat. "...And the rot goes round again."
Harley skid to a halt, planting her hands firmly on her hips. Her usual total lack of survival instinct took the wheel. "Grundy! You selfish big lug!" she yelled, pouting dramatically. "You’ve been holding out on us! We thought you didn't want to play in Gotham anymore, and this is where you've been hiding? No snacks, no phone calls, entirely quiet? I thought you were ignoring me!"
Slowly -- terribly slowly -- the massive titan turned his head.
Harley’s voice choked in her throat. The manic smile vanished from her face, and she took a sharp, subconscious step back, swallowing hard.
The giant zombie didn't have his usual dull, empty grey eyes. Instead, they were burning with a volatile, churning muddy-olive glare -- a sickly, unnatural mixture of deep earth-brown, toxic swamp-green, and necrotic black. He looked completely different. His skin was sloughing off in patches, replaced by jagged networks of calcified, black stone and weeping fungal veins.
"Uh... Grundy?" Harley stammered, her voice dropping an octave. "You look... way meaner than usual. And you stink. Like, way worse than the Gotham sewers, big guy."
The zombie just stared right through her, his jaw working silently.
"Harley! Get away from him!"
Ivy finally broke through the suffocating brush, breathless and visibly flagging. She didn't waste a single breath on a lecture. She lunged forward, grabbing Harley by the meat of her shoulder and violently yanking her backward. Ivy's skin was unusually pale, her fingers trembling slightly as the ambient, parasitic drainage of the area gnawed at her connection to the Green.
"Ivy, look at him," Harley whispered, pointing a shaky finger. "Something’s totally busted with Grundy."
"I see it," Ivy hissed, her eyes locked on the colossus. "The Rot has gotten entirely inside him. He isn't chattering his old rhyme, He's channeling a cosmic infection. We need to get Toph and leave right--"
Before Ivy could finish pulling Harley into the brush, the giant began to rise.
Grundy kept going up and up, towering over them like a moldering mountain. The root-muscles in his chest expanded, splitting his tattered suit jacket down the middle. He opened his massive, cavernous mouth, the rattle in his chest vibrating the very marrow of their bones as he restarted the cycle:
"Solomon Grundy... born on a Monday..."
BOOM.
The twisted, weeping trees at the edge of the bog violently burst apart. The scrap-metal van golem charged into the clearing, big, bold, and flashy, its heavy tire-axle legs churning up massive waves of black mud. It announced its arrival with a terrifying mechanical screech as its emerald headlights cut through the gloom.
Riding high on its neck, Toph was furiously stamping her foot against the chassis, completely shattering the horror-movie tension.
"What the heck is wrong with this stupid place?!" Toph bellowed, spitting a piece of rotten bark out of her mouth. "It’s like trying to walk through hot soup! The bedrock down here is completely slippery and dead -- I can’t see a damn thing clearly!"
Ivy winced, her stomach dropping. "No! Toph, stop--!"
She hadn't accounted for Toph's immediate, hot-headed bravado. The moment the golem's heavy footsteps shook the bog, Grundy’s muddy-olive eyes snapped over to the mechanical intruder. He raised a massive, moss-slicked hand toward the sky, and the dark woods answered.
From the pitch-black shadows beyond the clearing, things began to crawl, slither, and limp into the light. Dozens of shapes emerged, forming a dense, suffocating circle around the trio. It was an undead menagerie. Mottled, skeletal deer with weeping fungal eyes; massive, pale-fleshed boars trailing grey mold; and a towering, half-decomposed elephant, its ribs exposed to the cold air.
They converged in a seamless, unbroken ring, locking them tightly in the center of the bog.
Grundy never stopped chanting, his voice booming over the scraping of bone against stone:
"...Choked on the vine on a Tuesday..."
"What's up with this guy?" Toph growled, dropping into an earthbending stance on the golem's neck, sensing the sudden mass of bodies crowding her perimeter. "And what's with the zoo?"
"Toph, listen to me," Ivy called out, her voice tight with an urgency she rarely showed. "I know you can't see them, but we are in massive trouble. The animals... they're entirely dead. The Rot is piloting them. Do not let them touch the golem!"
"Screw the animals," Toph barked, her jaw setting in pure defiance. She was hungry, disoriented, and completely done with the eerie atmosphere. "I'm going straight for the head!"
With a feral shout, Toph slammed her fists forward, driving her will straight into the core of the van-golem. The mechanical titan responded instantly, its heavy suspension-coil legs launching it through the thick mist. It pulled its rusted door-panel arm back, the gears screaming under the strain as it targeted the towering zombie.
Grundy didn't even raise his arms to defend himself. He just kept walking forward into the path of the metal beast, his dead eyes fixed on them.
"...Rotted away on a Wednesday..."
CRASH.
The golem's massive, rusted iron fist landed flush against Grundy’s chin with a bone-shattering, metallic impact. A concussive shockwave rippled outward, spraying black muck across the entire clearing. The nursery rhyme abruptly stopped.
Grundy's head snapped violently back from the sheer force of the blow--
But his feet didn't move a single inch.
For a split second, the forest was entirely silent save for the ringing of iron on dead bone. Then, the horror set in.
Where the golem’s rusted metal fist pressed against Grundy’s chin, the vibrant green vines inside the arm began to turn a sickly, bruised black. The rot traveled up the limbs like liquid wildfire, spreading through the chassis at a terrifying speed. The rich, emerald glow of the golem's headlights violently flickered, sputtering like a dying candle as the necrotic energy actively siphoned the lifeforce straight out of its core.
"The hell is this?!" Toph snarled, her feet reading a sudden, hollow deadness in the machine beneath her. "It’s sucking the engine dry!"
"Toph, pull back!" Ivy screamed, clutching her stomach as she felt the localized agony of the Green being snuffed out. "He’s eating the magic!"
"I don't back down!" Toph roared. Gritting her teeth, she stomped her foot against the spine of the mech, forcing a massive surge of raw earthbending power through the leg joints to try and force the machine to jump back.
But Grundy didn't give her the chance.
With a low, guttural growl, the giant zombie brought his massive hands down, clamping his fingers onto the golem's door-panel arms. He began to actively dismantle the machine with terrifying, supernatural strength. With a horrific screech of tearing metal, Grundy ripped the left arm completely out of its socket, scattering dead, blackened vines into the muck.
Toph slammed her wrists together, her face flushed with exertion as she fought a desperate tug-of-war against the monster. She bent the surrounding scrap metal, trying to reinforce the joints, pulling loose gears and frame plates to hold the torso together. "I said, stay down!" she yelled, throwing a rock pillar up from the mire to strike Grundy's chest.
The stone shattered against his skin like glass. Grundy stepped forward, completely unbothered, and drove a massive fist straight into the center of the van-golem's chest. The metal caved inward with a deafening crunch. He reached deep into the cavity, grabbed the central mass of glowing emerald roots, and squeezed.
The remaining green fire in the headlights flared violently one last time, then died completely. The autonomous hum in the chassis fell completely silent, the gears locking up into a dead, hollow weight. The golem was gone.
Before the lifeless hunk of metal could collapse into the swamp, Grundy ripped his fist free, tearing the entire front grille off and bringing his heavy foot down to stomp the torso into the mud.
"Look out!" Harley shrieked.
With her seismic sense entirely blinded by the dead tech and the soft, decomposing earth, Toph relied on pure instinct. She launched herself off the neck of the collapsing mech just as Grundy’s fist pulverized where she had been standing a millisecond prior.
She flipped through the air and hit the ground hard, tumbling through the thick, stagnant mire. The moment her bare skin slid across the muck, a cold, numbing sensation washed over her. The earth here was slippery, and heavy with decay.
Toph scrambled to one knee, spitting black sludge from her lips, her sightless eyes wide as she realized she was completely grounded on a floor of literal rot.
Thanks for reading. I also have advance chapters if you want to read ahead.