Prytaneum
Black Light
Time seemed to slow as I instinctively called to my power and felt it rushing out from my abruptly pounding heart. As the ceiling collapsed, I could feel countless pieces falling like a thousand stones into a lake, each one making what seemed to be countless ripples as they fell. It was a bit hard to focus on something like that when my instincts and every other screaming part of me was focused on the giant plant monster was tearing its way into the room with the probably intention to eat us, but if there was something you learned as a demigod, it was that something didn't have to look impressive to kill you. If I didn't do something, odds were good we'd be crushed under who knows how many tons of rubble. Seeing as that would suck, I should probably do something.
So resisting every urge I had to react to the monster above me, I went down instead of up. Touching my hands to the surface of the Pantry waters, I slid them across it—and it rose into a storm of fluid motion. The fluid followed my will, curling up around me and Welf in a sudden wave and drawing us into a twisted stream. Wasting no time, I guided the torrent straight towards Lili, pushing myself to get to her before the rubble did, and opened my arms. Instead of splattering against the surface of the stream, I willed it to let her pass cleanly through and snatched her up in my arms, letting the waters carry us clean across the room.
A moment later, the rubble landed with a thunderous crash, startling and shaking the floor beneath our feet with a worrying crack. Dust and Pantry water sprayed, but the sound of the impact drowned out all other sounds for a moment, and by the time it had faded, the cries of the new monsters had filled the room instead.
It was only then that I got a good look at it. My first impression of Venus Flytrap had been close, but didn't quite encapsulate it. There were…I counted seven heads on the thing and I was willing to bet that none of them ate flies. Given their size, I was filling pretty sure about my 'Man-Eating Plan' hypothesis, which was made somehow more disgusting by the sights within their snapping plant-maws. Each of them had a human like mouth within their own, gums melding seamlessly into their outer mouths, and I could see blood of various colors staining the teeth—and several of those mouths were happily busying themselves with the monster corpses Lili hadn't gotten to and which hadn't been buried under the rubble. The rest were looking our way, despite their utter lack of eyes.
And in case you've never been eyed up by something that didn't have eyes before, it was uncomfortable as all hell.
Where the hell had this thing come from? When I glanced up, I could see into the broken floors above us, but there was only darkness at the top. I hadn't seen anything like this on the Upper Floors and it really didn't look like it fit in with the crowd, but how had it gotten here? How had it gotten above us? What was going on up there!?
All good questions, but they were going to have to wait for later. It was already coming for us.
"Shit," Welf groaned, pushing himself up off the floor, in the middle of the pool I'd formed beneath when we stopped. He and Lili were clearly disoriented and were struggling to catch up with what was going on, so I had to act fast.
Without hesitation, I rose and drew the Pantry waters with me as I did. Not wanting to take any chances after that close call, I didn't pull my punches—in fact, I formed the water into a hand the size of the front of a semi, clenched it into a fist, and hit the nearest one with a blow that could have pounded a car into a pancake.
But when I drew the fist back, readying myself for another swing, the head I'd tried to crush rose as if nothing had happened and continued right on towards me. It managed to draw closer when, for a moment, all I could do was stare in disbelief, but then I started, water hand lashing out to grab it by the stem and pulled it back with some effort, one hand raised.
"What the hell are these things!?" Welf shouted, eyes wide as he staggered to his feet.
"Was kind of hoping you'd know!" I shouted right back, voice tinged with the strain. Maybe I'd underestimated how tired I still was or maybe, more worryingly, these things really were as strong as they seemed to be. "Lili!?"
"Lili's never heard of any monsters like these before!" She yelled to me, still on her hands and knees after the abrupt ride. She was staring at the monsters with more than a little terror, though. "But…but something like this shouldn't be on the Upper Floors!"
"The festival," Welf said, voice too low to be intentionally speaking to me as he sucked in a quick breath. "Something must have gone wrong with the festival! Percy…they had monsters from below the twentieth floor up there! This thing could be…"
I swallowed, glancing up at the broken ceiling again, and took a moment to forcibly remind myself not to worry. As densely populated as the surface probably was, a good chunk of the people up there were adventurers, many of them above Level 1. More than that, they probably had guys like the Loki Familia on hand, just in case everything went to hell.
They'd be fine. I was less certain about us. Because that's what Welf was trying to say—that this thing was dangerous, even beyond the obvious plant monster thing. While the thirteenth floor had a mixture of Level 1 and Level 2 monsters, the twentieth wasn't going to have anything less than Level 2 and, depending on the floor, could even be Level 3.
And this thing was no Level 2, I could tell that much right off the back. Beyond that, I was less certain, having never really fought a monster above Level 2 before. Going off the way it had shrugged off a hit that I was more than sure could have crushed a Minotaur, it could definitely have been a Level 3. Or rather, I hoped that it was just a Level 3.
Behind the head I was holding at bay as I tried to think of a plan, another head swayed slightly before flashing towards us with startling speed. The thing wasn't as fast as Aiz by any means, but it was fast enough that I had to struggle to keep track of it, even as it approached from the opposite side of the room. Apparently seeing it move as well—or maybe just start to move—Welf lifted a sword to block and I immediately knew it was the wrong move. Or rather, that it wasn't a move he could survive doing.
Not even having time to shout a warning, I tugged the head I was holding sharply away from us and then leapt again, drawing up the water into another spiral as I grabbed Welf with one hand, scooped Lili up with the other, and leapt away from the two monsters. The head we'd evaded crashed teeth first into the wall that had been behind us and casually scoped up a boulder-sized chunk of it and ground it to dust with its teeth.
"Shit," Welf said against the sounds of the stream, voice more subdued this time as he looked back on what had almost been him, head sticking out of the water.
This time, however, they were after us and didn't seem inclined to give up after a single failure. The head I'd pushed aside recovered quickly and was quickly joined by several of its friend, all of them speeding towards us at once. I managed to dart left to evade the first attack and turned my river sharply to the left to evade the second, but the third came too close for comfort—close enough that I had no choice but to let Welf and Lili go so they weren't caught up in it, catching them in a pair of hard-water shells.
The head slammed me into the nearest wall—nearest being a relative term—and the only thing that kept its jaws from closing on me were the fact that I had my hands on its tooth barbs. Even so, the outer jaws gradually inched closed, steadily overwhelming me even as my hands began to bleed, and I had a sudden mental image of being eaten by Audrey II.
"No," I said, struggling to speak. "No. Cool song or not, I'm not feeding you, damn!"
In that moment, the water that it had knocked me out of washed over me and I felt my strength surge, rising just enough to let me wrench the things jaws slightly away from me and slip away, moving through the air in a sphere of water. But again, the thing recovered quickly and swung back towards me.
But this time, I punched it in the face.
It sounds cooler than it actually was. I hit it, slamming my fist into it hard enough to crush a Minotaur's skull, but it felt like punching a steel wall. It squished slightly and distorted somewhat under my hand, but it felt hard—hard enough that I felt my knuckles bruise and tear, while the thing just bounced away; knocked for a loop, perhaps, but not hurt. All it did was buy me enough time to draw Riptide again and take a swing at the thing's stem. Seeing as it was so thin and was the part the people-eating bit was attached to, I figured it was probably a weak point of some kind, or at least comparatively fragile.
Apparently, it didn't get that memo. Even with all my strength behind it, Riptide sank barely halfway through—and I'd cut down trees with lighter blows than that. At the touch of Riptide's blade, however, or perhaps just the pain it caused, the creature writhed and contorted, shaking me off and throwing me away. I hit the ground hard enough to make things crack, landing a ways away, and looked up just in time to see a pair of mouths close on my friend, held tightly in floating balls of water. I realized how bad that was about the same time I realized I'd been in too much of a hurry to give them a way to breathe, but I didn't have a chance to do anything but shove all the desperate power I could into my hold on them and brace myself as the monsters chomped down.
The shields held. Lights seemed to go off behind my eyes, searing flashes of pain crept into my gut again, and I fell to my knees—but they held.
Which sadly didn't make my friends any safer, seeing as they were still in the literal jaws of the beast. I tried to wrench their mouths open, expanding the spheres and their jaws along with them, even tried to cover the surface with spikes, but the plants didn't let go. Changing tracks, I made the water behave more fluidly again, letting the force of the creature's jaws literally push them out and send them hurtling towards me. Holding out a hand and taking a moment to enjoy the lovely stabbing sensation my power was causing me again, Pantry waters bubbled up from the rubble and swirled around us in a large shield that was almost immediately under attack from all sides.
Screw Level 3. Something like this had to be at least Level 4. Going just off how well I'd managed to deal with just one, the growing pain and returning exhaustion I felt, and everything else…I doubted I could beat it—and I definitely couldn't protect Welf and Lili if I seriously tried. I'd need to be really, really lucky to get us all out alive if I tried that and my track record for protecting my friends was…
No, I thought. I wouldn't let it happen again.
"Okay," I said, looking around desperately for a way. "Time for Plan B."
"Since when do we have a Plan B?" Welf asked, coughing and spitting up some water. Lili looked even more disoriented now than she had before, seeming about ready to vomit. Getting thrown around and nearly drowned could do that, I guess; I'd need to apologize for that if—when we got out of here.
As I was thinking that, however, my eyes caught sight of the cracks the rubble had put in the floor and I got an idea. Maybe not a good idea—in fact, at a glance, it seemed like a horrible idea—but a better idea than staying, as long as it worked.
"Uh…" I replied, already starting to regret this. "One sec."
I glanced back up at the ceiling, looked towards the monsters around us as they steadily wore away at our shields, and then looked at my friends. There wasn't time to think this through, to hesitate, or to regret.
So instead, I simply acted and sent out a quick prayer. Though it should have been simple enough, there was one demigod lesson that had taken a long time to really sink in—but it had eventually and this was it. Whatever thought they knew about me or said or did, at the end of the day…
I'm my father's son.
Angling Riptide, I drove it point first into the ground. Fissures spread across the floor of the Pantry, extending oddly through the living stone, and water seemed to erupt from inside them, widening them further. That same water curled around me and my friends a moment before something gave way beneath us, the earth around us breaking apart. A moment later, we began to fall and I wasn't sure how far or where we'd land, but this was my part in the plan.
The funny part is, it was the part I was least sure on and yet most comfortable with. The second half, I was completely certain of the results of and that's what set me on edge.
But with no other choice and my friends on the line…I whistled for Mrs. O'Leary.