Kingdom Come: Ch 19

3 hours later.

The Endlar Swamp was humid. Very humid. A croaking, humming, brackish, dreary thousand-acre morass that stood between us and a sizable number of zombies. A faint methane perfume hung over the still brown waters. Foxfires bloomed among the whispering reeds. Weeping willows hung down over the river, motionless in the unnaturally warm air. Sweat crawled down the back of my neck. 

“I’m officially jealous of you, Rin,” I muttered, ducking as Karalti crawled under one of many slime-draped trees. The Fortress was barely a thousand feet behind us, and we were headed due south, following a glowing quest icon on a largely-undefined map.

“Me? Why?” Rin squeaked. She had stayed up all night to modify her turrets, turning them into what amounted to small hovercraft. Hopper and Lovelace had sacrificed some defense for these features, but they could now float, climb, swim, and wade. Rin was riding Hopper. In this environment, that was more important than armor plating.

“Your lack of bodily fluids,” I replied.

“Wh…what?”

“Sweat, kid.” Suri’s beautiful hair had frizzed up and darkened, clinging to her face and neck. He’s talking about sweat.”

“Oh! Me too! I’m glad I don’t have to worry about it anymore!” Rin paused for a moment, then winced. “I mean… sorry that you don’t feel well?”

I snorted. “Don’t sweat it.”

Suri groaned. “Badum-cha.”

“What? That wasn’t a pun. I didn’t mean to.”

Karalti was unaffected by the heat and water, large enough to wade through the marsh without needing to swim. Cutthroat seemed to actively enjoy it. I’d been worried about her praying mantis-like claw arms – they didn’t look made for swimming – but she simply folded them against her chest and paddled like an alligator, weaving smoothly through the water with Suri on her back.

“Look!” Rin hissed. She pointed ahead of us, shrinking back on Hopper. “Do you see that? Is it a zombie?”

“Pretty sure that guy is too dead to get up again.” I replied. “Keep an eye out for clues to Vash’s path through the swamp. If anything twitches, we let our mounts take it out. Only get off into the water if it looks like your ride is in trouble.”

“Don’t worry about zombies. Worry about scavengers,” Suri grunted. “Allosaurs are big, bad bastards. And they eat carrion.”

“Hopefully they don’t eat Baru,” I replied. “Because I don’t want to have to lug a barrel-load of Allosaurus shit back to Istvan.”

“You can just bring back the gauntlets, numb-nuts.”

“What? After I dig them out of the dino-poop?” I made a face. “Smell anything, Karalti?”

The dragon wove her head, breathing in deeply. “I smell... crocodiles. Aaaand... dead people. And monsters. Lots of monsters. Up ahead.”

No sooner had she spoken than the stale wind moved a little, and the smell of decomposition hit me like a punch to the nose. Fighting the urge to cough, I nodded, and checked the direction of the wind against our quest marker. “Yup. The dead people smell is coming from the south-west... same direction as our quest.”

“What if the army is out there?” Rin pinched her nose, then pulled a mask out of her inventory and equipped it.

“We kill ‘em.” Suri loaded her crossbow and cocked it. “Nothing like water-logged corpses to start the day off right.”

I grinned, and banged the top of my helmet with a fist. “Breakfast of champions, right, Tidbit?” 

Karalti made a happy trilling sound in her throat. “Smells like lunch to me.”

We were out of the No Man’s Land and well into the swamp now. The water was thick with cattails, a forest of them reaching seven feet or more, but it was getting shallower and shallower as we went, while the stench of decay grew thicker. Then the Mark of Matir turned cold on my skin, just before I heard a soft moan drift through the still air.

“Shh. Stop.” I held a hand up. “Listen.”

The others froze, and the sound of multiple feet shuffling in the mud drifted to our ears. There was another soft moan. It sounded… waterlogged.

“Undead,” I hissed. “Ready?” 

“Yeah.” Suri used a handful of muddy water to push her hair back and out of her face, slicking it against her skull. “Rin. You know how to fight zombies?”

Rin was very tense on the back of her turret, holding onto it with a vice grip. “Shoot them in the head?”

“Bingo.” Suri brandished her crossbow suggestively. “And if you can’t do that, take out their limbs. The buggers can’t fight if they can’t walk.”

We nosed out of the cattails into an open muddy pool churning with activity. There were twenty of them: male, female, even children. They varied from the relatively fresh to the extremely decayed, from skeletal, leather-skinned walkers to shuffling, bloated white bags of flesh that barely resembled people. But before they noticed us, we saw that they were united in a singular purpose. 

They were digging.

Every one of the zombies had a trenching tool, which they were using to tirelessly shovel mud and silt into makeshift dams. There were huge mounds of mud and reeds to either side of the work crew. That explained the drop in the waterline. Before I could make out anything else, though, the unit swiveled their heads toward us, letting out a chorus of roars and gurgles.

“Icecream!” Suri bellowed Cutthroat’s attack command, and held on as her hookwing went charging into the fray.

Rin screamed and briefly covered her face, but fortunately, her turrets were semi-autonomous. They began firing on the undead, and Karalti and I charged forward with Cutthroat and Suri at our side. The dragon and hookwing were immune to the stench, biting and slashing with abandon. I held my breath as I plunged my spear down, chopping into spongy skulls and mushy shoulder joints. When Karalti had enough room, she opened her jaws and spewed a plume of Ghost Fire across the rank. The zombies didn’t react to being set on fire or scream as their armor melted and their flesh charred. They simply struggled as they burned, falling to their knees and then onto their faces.

[You have destroyed Dredgers!]

[You gain 120 EXP!]

“God, these guys are gross.” I coughed at the stench. “And weak. Surprisingly weak. I was expecting stronger enemies.”

“Me too. But look: only four of them had any armor on, and their gear’s shit.” Suri pointed at two of the burning corpses, then another pair on the ground. “These people are… were… civilians. Disposable workers.”

“Looks like it.” I glanced back to see how Rin was doing. She was hanging far back, but gave me a shaky thumb’s up. “Let’s keep going. We-“

My next words were drowned out by a chorus of roars. The water began to vibrate and slosh as the footfall of several very large, very fast somethings gained on us from the east. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. 

“The fuck is that?” I hopped up to a crouch on Karalti’s back as three towering dinosaurs burst out of the trees to our left. They were larger than Cutthroat but smaller than Karalti, with narrow, keratin armored snouts, powerful grasping forelimbs, and lots of teeth. Allosaurus. “Holy shitballs.”

“We can take them!” Suri wheeled Cutthroat around in the mud as the Hookwing bashed her claws together and roared in challenge. “There’s only three!” 

“No there isn’t!” Rin clutched onto Hopper as her turrets ran by. “Run!”

I was almost about to agree with Suri when another three Allosaurus charged out into the open. In the lead was a huge, brutish albino [Alpha Allosaurus]. Its hide was studded with shards of dull red crystal, and its eyes blazed like magma, set deep within its skull. It fixed on us, and then opened its jaws and bellowed a cloud of stinking ozone gas. The other five lowered their heads and charged, surrounded by a glowing orange aura - some kind of buff.

“It’s Stranged! Tactical retreat!” Suri turned Cutthroat around and dug her heels in.

“We can still take them! We just need some space!” Karalti plunged through the thick undergrowth, clearing a path for Cutthroat and Suri - and, unfortunately, the Allosaurus. 

“No we fucking can’t! Not on this terrain!” I yelled back. “Up! We need high ground before Cutthroat runs out of stamina!”

The Alpha bellowed, lowering his head to chomp and snap at Cutthroat’s fleeing tail. The hookwing screeched in reply, running and hopping from one piece of dry land to the next, weaving through trees the Allosaurus pack bulldozed aside. Wood splintered and crashed, sending smaller creatures flying. None of them were stupid enough to aggro on us. The collective weight of the running pack of dragon and dinosaurs rattled the earth like an avalanche.

“We need to kite them into a trap and either lose them, or rain down fire from above!”Rin shouted to us in PM. “Can you get off the ground?”

“Agreed! Get in the air as soon as you can!” Suri’s Ride skill wasn’t anywhere near mine, and she was struggling to hold on. She had lost her reins, and had her arms wrapped around Cutthroat’s neck. Only her formidable strength was keeping her on the hookwing’s back.

The Endlar was unmapped, so all we had to navigate by was the quest marker: a glowing beacon ten miles south-east of our location. There was no high ground and no open space in sight. Frustrated, I knelt up and turned to look back, bobbing on Karalti’s back as she ducked and weaved, splashed and leapt. The Allosaurus were showing no sign of slowing down or losing interest. Even if I jumped and rained down Master of Blades thru Glassbreaker on them, there was no fucking way I’d land on the ground and live to tell the tale. The terrain made turning around and facing them in any meaningful way almost impossible.

“There! I see something!” Karalti couldn’t knock over entire trees like the heavier dinosaurs could, but she could plough through brambles and cattails like they weren’t there. “Open area!”

“Be careful of quicksand! If we sink in a mire now, we’re dead!” I dropped into flight position, catching the saddle grips and shoving my feet in the stirrups in anticipation of an emergency takeoff.

We broke out of the treeline into an ankle-deep, slushy brown marsh. The reeds around the waterline were trampled and black, slimy enough that I felt Karalti’s foot slip a little as she charged toward the water. There was a strong rotten meat smell in the stagnant air, and bones half-hidden among the sick vegetation. The water here was very shallow, except at the center of the mire, where it plunged down like a funnel into the mud. The place screamed ‘ambush site’.

“Eww.” Karalti began to lift her back legs. “This place is slimy.”

Slimy? I looked down to see that the ‘water’ was clinging to my dragon’s foot like taffy, soft and stretchy. Zlazo’s warning back back to me then - the Swamp Hags.

“There’s a Swamp Hag nearby! Let’s kite them straight into the middle of that mire.” I clenched one of the grips. “Suri! Rin! Go around the waterline! Whatever you do, don’t take Cutthroat in there!”

“Yah!” I heard Suri spur the spitting, raging hookwing to the limit of her endurance behind us. “Copy that, Hector! We’ll get ahead of you and you can drag them in!”

Karalti bellowed, a guttural sound deeper than the Allosaurus charging through the swamp behind us. She threw herself into the stagnant air, stumbling forward on the downstroke, and just barely skimmed the deepening pool of slime as we lifted. My head lurched, and when I looked down, I saw a behemoth shadow start to rise from under the surface. “Watch out!”

The dragon snarled with effort, lurching into the sky as the liquid beneath us began to bubble. The Alpha Allosaurus, oblivious to anything but us, ran straight into the marsh and jumped. It caught the end of Karalti’s tail, jolting us back and nearly throwing me forward over her shoulder and into the water.

“Hector!” Karalti squealed, striving to stay in the air as the dinosaur set his teeth in and tugged. I turned, leveled the Spear, and was about to charge Umbra Blast when the muddy slime sucked down into the hole like the tide going out just before a tsunami, and something monstrous surged up in its place.

My first thought was that the Swamp Worm was some kind of fish, like the mother of all carp. My second thought was that it was a leech the size of a train carriage. The third was some variation of OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK as a huge blue-gray worm leaped from the water like a playful whale, spewing slime in all directions. It struck Karalti like a whip, entangling her legs and dragging her down just a little more every second.

Every one of the Allosaurus had charged in after their leader, straight into the trap the giant mud-carp-leech creature had laid. It slithered out, blind and slippery, and spewed something from a hole-like mouth onto the dinosaur. The Alpha roared as the liquid slapped against its skin, letting Karalti go and spinning around toflee. It collided with its packmates, which gave the hole-fish time to spray the group of them together like some kind of awful reverse bukkake.

My dragon’s wingbeats began to falter. “Hector? I’m sleepy.”

“What? Hey! No, wake the fuck up!” I refocused on Karalti as her head drooped and then jerked back up. “Look at Suri! Get to Suri and Cutthroat!” 

[Karalti is gaining torpor!]

Holy fuck: it was the slime. The Allosaurs were crumpling to their knees in the mire, drugged to unconsciousness. The giant hole-fish flopped forward on its belly and sucked the paralyzed Alpha’s head into its mouth, working over the forty-foot long dinosaur like a snake over a mouse. 

“Stab her!” Rin shouted from the bank of the marsh. “That’s how you cure Sleep status!”

“No! I’m not stabbing her!” Frantic, I ransacked my inventory, but I didn’t have any stimulants. “Okay, yes I am!”

In desperation, I pulled one of my old shitty daggers and stabbed it down at the base of Karalti’s neck.

[You stab Karalti for 5HP!]

“Huu... wha? Ow!” The dragon half-heartedly adjusted her wings: not enough to stop our short descent into the mire.

“Pull up! Pull up!” I banged her scales with the hilt of the knife.

My shouts bought Karalti back to her senses. As her long back feet grazed the back of the worm, she yarped and began frantically beating her wings, laboring back into the air with a great whomph whomph whomph that sent water flying everywhere. Cutthroat shrieked from the bank; Karalti replied with an oddly similar cry as she clumsily swooped over to land beside Rin and Suri.

“Jesus motherfuckin’ Christ.” The Berserker was watching the carnage in the swamp in shock. Two of the Allosaurus were asleep, while the remaining three attacked the monster who was almost done engulfing their paralyzed pack leader. “That was a bit full on, wasn’t it?”

“A bit!?” Rin rounded on her.

She shrugged, still staring over my shoulder. “A bit as in a lot. What the fuck is that thing?”

“That, my friend, is a bonafide Short-Jawed Mudsucker. And we are absolutely not ready to fight it.” I clapped Karalti on the side of the neck, suddenly aware of how much my hand was shaking. “Phew. Least we got a nice adrenaline rush out of it. I feel ready to kick some ass, or run screaming from the next pack of Allosaurus like a little bitch.”

“Realistically, everyone is a little bitch versus a pack of Allosaurus.” Suri sighed. “A Short-Jawed Mudsucker, huh?”

“That’s right!”

Rin scowled at me. “That is not what that thing is called.”

“Sure it is. The Short-Jawed Mudsucker, scientific name Bukkakus Maximus.” I chortled.

Suddenly, Karalti reared up and bellowed. “Crabs!”

“What? Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me.” Suri snarled, swinging her sword around as eight horseshoe crab-like things burst out of the undergrowth and charged us, barbed whip tails swinging for our necks. Stingcrabs.

“I’m beginning to see why the Demon’s been bogged down.” Resigned, I spun my Spear around, yodeled, and jumped down into the fray.