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The Gamer Chapter 1699 – Serpent’s Graveyard 1 – Enter Barrier Underground
🕑 Added 2024-06-14 16:01:27 +0000 UTC
“There it is!” Nahua exclaimed.
Even with his vision unbothered by the night, John found it a little difficult to make out what she was pointing at between all of the trees. It was a hole, barely wide enough for a person of John’s size to fit through. A rather large size, he had to remind himself. He was no longer as lanky as he used to be and even then, he had been much taller than the people who used to live in these parts.
One after another, they squeezed themselves into the hole, following the native demigoddess leading them. The hole continued down as a slanted shaft for nearly seven metres. The stone was smoothened in the most basic sense from hundreds of people making their way down over the generations.
The tunnel ended in a short fall. The cave underneath was barely above half a metre high. “We’ll have to crawl for a little bit, hope you do not mind spiders,” Nahua said in a sing-song voice and got flat on the ground. As she wiggled her way out of the clearing of the access hole, John got a very nice view of her ass. The back of the loincloth had been eaten up by the twin hills of her very nicely shaped buttocks. They jiggled and shifted wonderfully as she made her way forwards.
Worse was when he dropped into the now open space behind her, got on all fours, and crawled after her. The entire time, he was looking at brown heaven. Heaven, of course, being defined by the most squishy combination of a round butt, jiggly thighs, and the very much visible smoothness of her sex. The pelvic curtain of the loincloth did not hide anything in this situation.
Under other circumstances, John would have gotten a very certain erection. As he crawled, he had other things to worry about. All he did here was acknowledge that she had a very nice set of hips on her.
‘I swear, if I did not have that mental connection, this would be the fourth time I’d get a paranoia attack,’ John thought. ‘I am not being overly arrogant by trusting that she’s not double crossing me, right?’
The question went out to his pride-watch crocodile. ‘I have not observed any signs that she is lying,’ Stirwin answered. ‘She is our only reliable lead as well. If this is a trap, we have to spring it.’
John suppressed a sigh. Even at level 698 and with most of his harem with him to back him up, he hated springing traps. There was always a tiny chance that someone had something that could do some permanent damage.
The ceiling slowly rose. Nahua got on her feet first, leaving the rest several paces behind. “You will not stand in the way of Nahua-xoco-atl-xolotl!”
The declaration made John hurry as much as he could without breaking any of the mundane stone. For the time being, they were still in real space. He knew what Nahua was addressing before he fully emerged in the large underground chamber.
There were people in it. Two dozen of them, standing and squatting by the walls, staring at him, Nahua, and the others gradually emerging from the crawl. All of them had black hair, tanned skin, and dark eyes. They wore simple t-shirts and jeans. The clothes were out of place here, in this cave covered in Mesoamerican wall paintings.
Revealed to the mundane, this cave would be an archaeological site on par with many great temples. They wouldn’t know why it was here, but it did not take knowledge of the Abyss to recognize the care that had gone into it. The tunnel, the crawl space, and this ten-metre-long chamber were all fundamentally natural, but had been chipped into a more pleasing shape by masons at the back-end. John could only assume that the entrance was kept as it was to make it appear less important.
‘I still don’t sense an Illusion Barrier,’ he thought.
“Did you not hear me?” Nahua asked the one person standing right before her. “Out of my way.”
The man stared at her unblinkingly. “Are they…?” Rave whispered.
“Ants,” John confirmed.
The people they were looking at were just the human disguises for another wave of ants preparing to head out into the wider world. There were only two ways for Abyssal creatures to move about the mundane and invisibility was the typically more difficult strategy. Best to have a human disguise, however thin it was.
“What if I ask really, really, really nicely?” Nahua asked and put her hands behind her hips. Cutely she leaned forwards. “Then again, why do I bother with loathsome creatures like you?”
Noxious fumes flowed outwards from the demigoddess. The axolotl gills sprouted behind her ears while the ants all around showed little, belligerent smiles on their false faces. The amusement turned into shock and coughing. They had expected the pathogen they all carried within themselves already and were instead subjected to Nahua’s Empty Rot.
The sweetness of Nahua’s smile twisted into cruelty, while the low-level ants one by one collapsed to the ground. The Empty Rot had been advertised as the boiled down version of Abyssal diseases and John fully believed it. Rashes appeared on skin, the epidermis cracking and revealing the folded up ant bodies underneath. One after another, the furred, scaled insects peeled out of their mundane shells. Their true forms coughed up even more blood. Flesh under carapace turned into slouching rot. Muscle fibres atrophied into nothing.
Nahua’s petite frame shook as she giggled and giggled to herself. It only stopped so she could push out yet more of the miasma through her teeth. The poison whistled between her pearly white teeth. She placed a hand on the side of the face of the one ant that had stood before her, spasming as much as the rest of them. “Spreaders of the Purple, waste away and die as you deserve.”
The ant surged forwards in one last moment of adrenaline fuelled power. Mandibles sunk into Nahua’s oddly soft stomach. Broken skin bubbled a purple as royal as it was sickening. Shocked, the ant pulled back. Its mandibles remained behind, the liquid disease having rotted them off where they had touched the axolotl demigoddess.
Nahua laughed. She laughed like Eliana laughed when she was truly enjoying herself. It was the laughter of a tortured woman that was now everything but weak.
After several minutes, the ants had melted into a fuming sludge. Like the Giant’s Puss, the Empty Rot devoured everything about its victims. ‘A truly striking resemblance all around,’ the Gamer observed.
Nahua raised a hand and the pathogen all around obediently swirled upwards. Fog and sludge all gathered up above her palm, consolidated, and ultimately fell into it. Inspecting the plague peach for one moment, the demigoddess stuffed it in her face and swallowed it in one gulp. “Delicious!” she cried out, unexpectedly. “Mhm, that’s dangerous, that I have to kill to make things taste good…”
“Best not get tempted,” John warned her.
“Macuilcozcacuauhlti shall not have my soul, delicious as things can be. I know to eat in moderation.” Nahua glanced over her shoulder to look at him with calculating eyes. “Why is it that you only seem to be more interested in me after I showed you this ugly side of me?”
“Truth be told, I have a very special taste in dangerous women… That being said, I do feel like that was unnecessarily cruel. You could have at least put them out of their misery.”
“The heart is most valuable if it beats until the final moment.” It sounded like a saying she had translated into English. “And you, like, totally could have stopped me whenever you wanted, big man,” she added in her cheery chatter.
“Well, yes, but I did want to see your powers in action.” John also couldn’t feel that sorry about giant ants that barely cleared the bar for sapience. Observe had and still did describe them as unquestionably loyal soldiers of the hive. “If you would show us to this graveyard?”
“Of course.” Nahua sashayed her way forwards. John made a deliberate effort not to concentrate too much on her hips. It occurred to him that she had the build of Chel from the Road to El Dorado. Making that connection only made her more dangerous.
‘She is using her ass to entice you,’ Stirwin warned John. ‘And nothing else. I will remind you that her Libido is zero. This is deliberately manipulation.’
‘I know, I know… Momo, please keep me under control.’
‘I hate that that’s my job.’
‘Don’t lie, you love that that’s your job.’
Momo poked him in the ribs, while their expeditionary force walked after Nahua. “What a terrible waste,” the archaeologist lamented and gestured at the walls. The lower edge of the paintings was damaged, likely from the occasional rainfall that would have partly flooded this cave.
“They just washed their feet,” Nahua joked.
Most of their people around did laugh at that one. At the moment, that was John, Rave, Aclysia, Beatrice, Claire and Momo. Five elementals hung about incorporeally, the sixth was in item form on John’s waist. A fighting force worthy of taking over a large Kingdom.
At the end of the cave was a picture of a crucified, winged serpent. The wings, extended head and tail were all wrapped around the crimson spokes of a wheel. Nahua put the tip of her middle finger on the head of the serpent, then slowly traced the curve of the wheel. “Huitzilopochtli, your daughter asks for access to this pocket of your realm,” she chanted in Nahuatl. “Let us walk the graveyard of the feathered serpent’s many lives.”
The end of the cave distorted, deepened, then opened. Additional enchantments activated, covering the physically impossible phenomenon from any mundane eyes, had there been any. Once Nahua’s hand had made the full circle, she stepped aside and pointed inside. “Do please take point, I am so fragile,” she requested sweetly.
John gave her a deadpan stare and she just kept up the fake innocence. “Aclysia.”
“Of course, Master,” the dragon maid said and stepped through the portal. The rest of them followed on through the swirling space.
‘Pocket? Just another weird surprise…’ the Gamer thought. ‘At least a portal into an Illusion Barrier isn’t entirely unheard of.’
“Aha!” Momo let out a most joyful sound and ran forwards. “What’s this! What’s this!” She flew around the large, circular chamber they were in. Judging by the texture of the walls and the lack of natural light, they were still underground. Momo was inspecting the various intricate wall paintings. “What is this?!” she screeched when she came across a painting that was utterly covered in sticky purple webbing.
“May I remind you why we’re here?” John asked and shot a Blast Ray.
One of the massive, winged ant-creatures had dropped from the ceiling. The silver projectile turned the contents of its head into purple gunk that splattered all over the wall. “Don’t make it even worse!” Momo shouted. “There could be priceless-“
“Get behind me. Now,” Aclysia ordered and Momo flew back over. Six corridors connected to this chamber. One led back to the place they came from, the other five went out in all directions, both in cardinal directions and elevation. All of them were skittering with activity. The ants had either been notified by the death of their comrades or some other mechanism. Maybe it was just Momo’s excited shouting.
‘It was almost certainly your excited shouting,’ John thought at the support.
Who did not even try to argue that one. ‘…Yeah, probably.’
“Request: outline our strategy?”
“Nahua, you said this place was several days worth of exploration, correct?” John asked. From the name of it and Nahua’s chant, it sounded like this was a part of Huitzilopochtli’s Sanctum. If that was the case, it could be however large that particular god could make it. That it was a ‘pocket’ suggested there were more.
“Yup, yup,” Nahua chatted. “The realm of my father is truly expansive.”
The first of the ants were spilling out of the corridors. John let them come in close, before he toggled on the one minute cooldown on the Companion Cube. An Unstable Arcana rippled out that incinerated the ants within half a second. ‘God, it’s satisfying seeing that Skill actually kill something,’ John thought. ‘Too bad it’s not the mana efficient way to deal with the rest of them.’
That honour went to the elementals. All of them manifested and scattered out, each of them covering one of the tunnel entrances. Gnome turned one ant after another into pulp. Salamander decided to have some fun and used six spears of flame to skewer her opponents. Sylph zapped down the corridor and then back again in a flash, leaving electrocuted ants in her wake. Undine stretched out into an ocean of gnashing teeth, shredding the ants as they closed in. Siena sliced and diced all that came close.
“No need for us all to stick together,” John decided. Since all of the back teleports were off cooldown, they could split up with minimal danger to themselves, as long as he separated them all carefully. “Claire, I want you to take Siena along. You two should make for a good duo.”
“Curses! Why must my powers make me so self-sufficient,” Claire cussed and shot an envious glare at Momo. “Why can’t I be as individually helpless as you?”
“You want to never get shields and buffs again?” Momo drawled.
“Aclysia, you’ll take Sylph with you.”
“Affirmative, Master.”
“Beatrice, you take Gnome.”
“Affirmative.”
“Momo, you’ll be accompanied by Salamander.”
“See, I don’t get to stick around this guy either!”
“We’ll try to remain within operating range for Undine to manifest from people’s shadow. Generally, she’ll stay with me, Jane, and Nahua.”
This distribution of power, John reckoned, made every group fairly flexible. Everyone had either one fast and one slow person around or had their weaknesses balanced out in other ways. Some of the groups had higher combat prowess than others. As long as all could stand their ground, that wasn’t too bad.
“Move out!” John shouted, just to have said it once.
The maids immediately obeyed, moving at their individual highest speed towards where their assigned elemental partner was. High-fives were exchanged, then the duos slaughtered their way down four of the five corridors. Only Undine remained, Rave right next to her. “What’re ya waiting for, tiger? The leader said ‘move out!’.”
“Did you forget the part where I am that leader?” the Gamer shouted back and picked up a couple of rocks.
“You? A leader? Psh, can ya believe that guy, Undine?”
Nahua chuckled. “You lot are sooooo funny,” she chatted. “Almost makes one forget that you’re invaders.”
“Yes, yes, we are the horrid, inhuman, terrible people.” Boredly, John picked out three of the pebbles, the ones that looked the most unassuming, and dropped the rest. Those three he then threw, one after another, into different corners of the chamber. “Alright, now we can go – Nahua, you’re overdoing it.”
“Noted,” the axolotl demigoddess cheerily said and let go of the arm she had just hugged.
She was using her sex-appeal to manipulate him, but there were definitive gaps in her knowledge that logically came from someone who was just mimicking the part. Even if she came to like him in more than a passing sense, 0 Libido was 0 Libido.
Occasionally, the way she was trying to nudge him was awkward.
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