Author's note: This chapter is almost 5K words, so it'll go up on RR as two. Posting it here as one!
Logan lowered his flashlight and shined it on his missing foot, grimacing when he got sight of his growing limb. It was the size of his hand now but deformed as it continued to lengthen. The sight of it made his already upset stomach slosh, acid sloshing.
Worst of all, it meant that he couldn’t put any weight on it, forced to balance on one leg. The whale was doing who knew what out there, but whatever it was, it involved jumping and turning in circles like an acrobatic.
The fish guts and digesting octopus’ arms flew inside of its stomach, slapping and spraying Logan as he tried to stay upright, covering him with slimy goo as if a monster had sneezed on him. It was like being stuck inside the bowels of an ancient steam-engine, only the bowels were covered in serrated teeth and reeked like rotting cat guts.
Well, at least one thing had worked out for him. His luck might have finally pay dividends. Yes, he’d lost a foot, but at least it hadn’t been his Pink Sock-clad foot. If he lost his sock on a fool’s errand, Lara would have never let him live it down. The Pink Sock was part of an attribute set; he could buy the other sock once he made it back to his Tree Fridge. If he’d lost one of them, he’d never achieve the ability to fly.
But even as he rested his hand against the side of the whale’s stomach, his exoskeleton glove pressing against sharp baleen plates, he could tell that his foot was reforming as he breathed. Peering down and blanching, he watched as his toenails formed, growing like something out of a horror movie. Forget monsters; Logan might as well be the monster.
Well, he couldn’t teleport out of here, not if he wanted to save Ernie’s brethren. That meant he had to force his way out of the whale the hard way, through brute force.
There was a hiss from the side. Logan swung his flashlight and illuminated Vicious. She was stuck to the whale’s stomach, but as he watched, she pulsed, swelling in size, then returning to normal. It was like watching a sponge the size of his fist absorb water and then squeeze it out. At each puff, her blue rings flared in color, becoming so bright that they flashed in front of his vision, leaving bright spots in their wake.
“What are you doing?” asked Logan.
“What Vicious does best. Carve her own way out! Vicious knows not to trust, oh no, she doesn’t trust. That means she needs to be brutal; she needs to hurt the monsters who tower over her, she needs to make the mighty things wish they’d never tried to triumph over Vicious.” She blinked one eye at him accusingly. “Vicious never forgets. Vicious never forgives.”
Somehow, Logan got the sense that she was talking about him and not just the whale.
But as she swelled in size like a pulsating Jello mold, the baleen plates and the whale stomach around her began to turn from a pink, mucous laden color to dark, rotting black, as if the whale had taken on gangrene. Logan was reminded that Vicious was ‘mighty in a small package’ and that her species had virulent neurotoxin.
She was trying to kill the whale.
But although she was giving the thing a stomach-ache, the rotting spots were so small it was like trying to kill an elephant with a pinprick. For all he knew, it might work if she kept at it. Work in days, in weeks. But Logan doubted that these octopuses had days, let alone hours. As for Logan, if he didn’t get out of here, eventually he’d run out of oxygen. Although he had [Deepwater Explorer] he doubted that worked in a cavern full of building carbon monoxide.
In a pinch, he supposed he could use [Life Fabricator] to grow a tree inside of the whale’s stomach, which might give him oxygen, but that would be a last, desperate act.
No, first he’d try the obvious.
Logan set the flashlight down on the bottom of the whale’s stomach and let it illuminate the cavern. Hissing as he inadvertently put weight on his growing foot, Logan willed out his sword from his spatial collar and held it in his right hand. The whale’s stomach was so immense that he had a five feet clearance from the tip of his sword to the top of the stomach. His sword glinted with a blue light, the unnatural metal seeming to thrum in anticipation.
“Here goes nothing,” Logan muttered.
He clenched his teeth, his muscles corded with tension, his adrenaline surging as he picked a specific spot up above, aiming for an area not quite so covered in baleen plates. If this did what he wanted, he’d cut right through the whale, letting water pour in, filling the stomach. Typically, that would be an issue for a normal person, but not for Logan or the octopuses, not with [Deepwater Explorer]. After that, all he’d have to do was keep carving out chunks of flesh, enough to let them escape.
His heart racing, Logan bellowed as he deployed his Pink Sock, envisioning himself shooting upwards like a rocket. The sock obeyed and Logan jumped so fast that his stomach lurched, the tip of his sword…
Scraping the top of the whale’s stomach like a fork against the bottom of a pot.
Damn.
Even worse, that had jarred his arm, sending a sharp pain through his shoulder.
Growling, Logan tried again, aiming for any spot he could find, anything not covered by the baleen plates. But even in an area not quite so thick, the whale’s flesh was tough, horribly tough like it had armour like Logan’s.
“Useless human,” muttered Vicious.
Again and again, Logan tried stabbing it like he was in a stabbing workout. When that didn’t work, he tried the sides, anything not covered in octopuses, looking for weaknesses.
But the sides were worse than the top and completely covered in baleen plates. Even when he tried thrusting the sword into the pink stomach underneath his feet, the sword went an inch deep and then hit a solid wall, as if he’d hit a concrete layer of bone. Stabbing repeatedly did nothing; the whale didn’t even make a sound.
One of the other octopuses let out a moan of pain, its eyelids drooping. It was a medium sized orange octopus who had two severed tentacles, its face devoid of all color. So far, the others hadn’t talked, but their expressions and their whimpers were communication enough. Logan didn’t know why the ability of speech seemed intrinsic to only certain animals, or whether they all had the ability but just chose not to communicate.
But either way, he needed to move his ass. The whale’s digestive fluids were still at work, doing who knew what to Ernie’s brethren. Having an open wound wouldn’t help.
Logan collapsed his facemask and then ran a hand over his chin as he considered a way forward. Pure stabbing with his sword and talons, or with any of the remaining sharp weapons inside of his spatial storage wouldn’t do shit. He had bombs from Asthea, but although that might work, in such an echoing space, he’d blow up the octopuses and himself in addition to the whale. There was the drugged water that he’d nabbed from the perception trial, but what the hell would that do other than making the whale fall asleep? No, if anything, he needed a stomach purging drug that would make the whale throw up.
There was something else he could try. He’d finally managed to unlock [Liche Devourer], but he’d yet to try the skill. It was an upgraded version of [Liche Siphon], not to mention that the System rated it epic. An epic skill and a massive monster? What better way to test it?
His heart in his throat, Logan reviewed the description of [Liche Devourer]:
[This epic skill allows you to siphon Karma and lifeforce from your enemies and funnel the excess into a pocket dimension black hole. When the hole is fed, unleash obliteration. This skill is insidious, and the enemy will not be aware that funneling is in effect.]
It was way more brutal than [Liche Siphon]. Logan had used [Liche Siphon] to defeat the Silverdagger Clan in the last fight in the trial dungeon; it had always been insidious, leeching Karma from someone without them being aware, but [Liche Devourer] did something else.
It could make a bomb.
In the fight with the Silverdagger Clan, he purposely hadn’t upgraded his wisdom attribute since he’d needed lower Karma to make the skill work; to make it life threatening. With this updated version, it didn’t matter whether he filled his Karma pool. Presumably, he could continue draining Karma. Even if his pool were at capacity, the excess would divert into a ‘dimension black hole’. Holy crap, he could walk around, draining Karma at random, killing people! But that was pure speculation.
He had no idea if that was truly how it worked.
He needed to figure this out. And what better way to do than by using the whale as a guinea pig? Killing the whale wouldn’t solve the problem of being trapped; a dead carcass didn’t lose its stomach armour, but Logan thought he had a solution for that.
But first, he needed to kill the whale.
All right, all right. Kill a whale. Logan was going to kill a whale.
First of all, he needed to do something that would use Karma, something to get this started. There was a mass of digesting fish inside of the stomach, and based on the smell, what had to be a heck of a lot of bacteria. More than likely, that included insect larvae. But did Logan want to hatch something like the flies he’d controlled inside of the trial dungeon? He’d be stuck in a cavern with hundreds of the things. No, Logan had dealt with enough insects to last a lifetime.
He considered the severed tentacles and digesting fish, but to work with those, he’d be hatching another monster. Even though he’d viewed growing a tree as a last resort, he knew how to do it like the back of his hand.
Growing a monster tree took a ton of Karma. But he was reminded of his rat vine back at Hope’s End. He’d latched onto the rats’ lifeforce to grow the thing, which resulted in it warping into a living rat vine. If he did the same here, he might end up growing a warped tree whale.
But wait, wasn’t he in the ocean? Vicious had said that Vancouver Island was the whale’s territory, and if it hadn’t swum out of the area, there was an endless supply of life all around them. Life that wouldn’t cause him to grow something monstrous.
[Life Fabricator] would let him grow a tree out of nothing without a seed as long as he sourced its creation from similar organic material. After all, back in Richton’s Tomb, he’d managed to grow his monster, humongous carbon trees by sucking the life from the pine trees around them. After that, he’d only needed his own Karma to continue growing it.
The whale turned in the water, climbing up, its stomach tilting, fish guts and mucous flying.
“Fuck!” said Logan as he was forced to use his talons to latch onto a baleen plate so he didn’t slam into the top of the stomach head-first. And just like that, Logan went flying once again, the whale at a 90-degree angle before he went the other way as if he were on a rollercoaster.
With a fresh deluge of liquid and seawater, the remains of a still-twitching tuna the size of his torso slammed into the whale’s stomach, forcing the noxious digesting fluid to slosh.
The whale must have just breached the surface on another attack.
And then they moved once again, dropping. It was diving and going for the bottom.
Perfect.
Logan used his talons to latch onto another baleen plate, keeping steady while he opened his senses and scanned everything in a wide net, this time, trying to go farther than he’d ever gone before. With the whale constantly moving, it was challenging as fuck, but in a way, Logan could use this as practice. He could hone his ability here and make it easier once he was on solid ground.
He’d treat every setback as an opportunity, and being stuck inside of a whale was a heck of a setback. Logan felt as if he was getting whiplash as he used [Life Fabricator] to sense the auras around him, latching onto a turtle, only for the whale to keep diving, wrenching Logan’s senses with it.
Scanning over plankton, bacteria, and tiny, microscopic organisms, he finally latched onto a school of cod, a hundred who were swimming in erratic patterns. As the whale dropped below the school, Logan furrowed his brow and clenched his other fist, jabbing his still healing foot into the bottom of the whale’s stomach and using the pain to force himself to concentrate. Logan continued latching onto that school of fish as if his life depended upon it, his mind feeling like it was a stretched rubber band at risk of fraying.
Down and down, the whale dropped until it left the school of fish behind, ten meters, twenty meters deep. As his senses stretched, a shard stab of pain radiated behind his left eye, and a gush of blood poured down his lip and coated his mouth. Then with a last gasp, Logan let the fish go, bringing his senses to the here and now.
Retching, he spat out a wad of blood, sweat beading on his forehead as he tried to steady himself. He’d never wanted the fish’s lifeforce; that hadn’t been his goal. His goal had to train himself to latch onto an animal’s aura and keep latching even as he hurtled past it at speed. For it was all very well and good to have a skill the System rated as legendary, a skill that let him create whatever he wanted as long as he envisioned it, but his problem was focus. When he was on a time crunch and dealing with an immediate threat, he couldn’t use [Life Fabricator] because the skill took too long for him to deploy it. That’s why he’d needed a cushion when he’d created the rat vine while fleeing the rat army. He didn’t have enough experience.
If [Life Fabricator] was the difference between winning and losing, he needed to get better at deploying the skill. That would take practice.
Logan hunched over and rested his hands on his upper thighs as he caught his breath. To the side, Vicious was still at work, swelling and pulsing in place as she injected neurotoxin into the whale’s stomach. By now, she’d increased the rotting, dark spots around her to the size of two dinner plates, but she was flagging, her mouth wide open, her face pale as she strained.
“Are you okay?” Logan panted as he willed out a bottle of water from his spatial storage.
Her eyes flared in anger. “Don’t look at me, betrayer, liar, fraudster. Keep to your own pathetic work! Vicious will do what she must.”
Logan grimaced. He’d tried to give the thing the benefit of the doubt; she was stuck in a tiny body and underestimated by everything she came across, but Logan didn’t think he deserved quite that amount of abuse. Once again, Logan realized that he’d lucked out with Ernie, lucked out to the extreme. Throughout the System Integration, many times, Logan had been down in the dumps, defeated, and it was Ernie who’d cheered him up and talked sense into him. If he’d originally been bonded to an octopus like Vicious, Logan didn’t think he’d be standing here to tell the tale.
Willing the water bottle back into his spatial collar, Logan peered down at his foot, smiling when he got sight of his fully intact limb. Damn, was [Regenerate] ever paying dividends! It had been barely half an hour, and he was already back to normal.
Gingerly, he tried putting weight on it, then jumped, bouncing. Kickass. With a blink, Logan willed out a fistful of sand and reformed his missing boot, sculpting it around his new foot.
Cracking his neck, Logan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Anticipation thrumming through his belly, he opened his senses, scanning for auras and trying to judge how far down they’d dropped. As he’d suspected based on the tilt of the whale, they were still falling, deep to the bottom floor.
But just because they were deeper didn’t mean that there was less life. There might even be more, a mass all around them. A shark that flared bright, swirling colors between red and orange, to a squid that radiated a more even-tempered blue. Not to mention the thousands of algae that were barely blips.
But Logan wasn’t looking for that.
No, he was looking for something different. Although seaweed was different than pine trees, they were still plants, and there were thousands of them down below, covering the rocky, ocean floor in a carpet of green that swayed back and forth in the underwater current.
Logan narrowed in on the seaweed and latched on with all his willpower like his mind was a vise, the strands of seaweed stuck inside. And then like threading a needle and connecting it with a fishing line, he used the life inside of the plant to grow what he wanted.
This was the easy part. Growing a tree was simple, by now, as easy as breathing. Logan envisioned a small tree to start, a sapling, with roots that sucked the liquid from the whale, spreading like a spiderweb. They wrapped around the baleen plates like snakes and created a solid base.
Logan opened his eyes and gazed into the beginnings of his tree. This would be the tricky part. While he continued growing it, he thickened the trunk, fattening it into a narrow sapling. Logan thought of Karma. Specifically, the whale’s Karma. Back in the attribute trial, he’d figured out [Liche Siphon] by thinking of it like he was sucking from a straw, draining Arsen’s pool at the same time as filling his own reservoir. After the first time, deploying the skill had been easy. Easy enough that he’d managed to level it up to a massive degree.
Logan was convinced that [Liche Devourer] had to be the same. The description of the skills were too similar. But with a whale that was thirty times the size of Arsen, he would need to adjust his thinking. No, this time, he envisioned the whale as having a Karma pool as big as a lake, so deep and endless that he could never drain it. Forget a straw, no straw would drain this thing. Logan envisioned that lake as overflowing, cresting its bank. And if a lake overflowed, the excess had to go somewhere.
Like a river, it flowed out of its immense pool and diverted into… Logan’s. Logan envisioned the lake and the river merging into one, combining and flowing back and forth. For the whale’s Karma wasn’t the whales, it was Logan’s and they were one.
Grunting with effort, his mouth in a grimace of pain as blood continued to pour out of his nose, Logan raised his tree, forcing the truck to climb as he pulled up his Karma pool:
1200/3600.
1700/3600.
2200/3600.
Shit! It had worked! Logan bit his lip and tried to hold in his elation. It was taking everything he had to hold his concentration, his mind pulled in three different directions at once. But he couldn’t deny that [Liche Devourer] was working—there was no other explanation. Logan’s wisdom attribute was at 587, which meant that he had a 587 Karma generation. 587 per minute. Instead, his Karma was replenishing at 500 per second!
But to keep the flow, he had to keep working. By now, he could release his hold on the seaweed. The whale had changed direction, going back to the surface, and his rubber band was in danger of collapsing. But he no longer needed the seaweed; it had served its purpose. Now, all he needed was his own Karma to continue growing the tree. But he needed to grow it like a crazy person to keep pulling as much Karma as possible from the whale, keeping [Liche Devourer] ever flowing.
He—
Ding!
[You have fed the blackhole. Liche Devourer at 1% satiation.]
What the hell was that? Elated, Logan pulled up his Karma pool again:
3600/3600.
It had fully replenished. Shit, he knew [Liche Devourer] was still active, he could feel it. Did that mean that the excess Karma had been diverted into his dimension black hole bomb? But even with that, he could tell that he hadn’t fully drained the whale’s Karma pool, the volume of water in his ‘lake’ had decreased, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the bottom. Just how much Karma did this thing have?
Logan blinked and then ground his teeth in resolve, a muscle on his neck twitching as he took in his half-grown tree. Unlike his massive carbon tree monsters, this one looked deformed, brittle, barely alive. Without any sunlight and by sucking mucous, acid digesting water, he couldn’t say that he blamed it. But whether it was mutated or not, it was alive, and that was all he needed.
Clenching his fist and spreading his legs wide apart, his other hand latched onto the baleen plates for stability, Logan used [Life Fabricator] to force the tree to climb. He thickened the trunk until it was the width of a sewage pipe, trying to strengthen and provide it with stability. But unlike with his other trees, he didn’t bother growing lush leaves and branches. Oh no, he was trying something else.
His sword hadn’t been sharp enough to break through the baleen plates, but what if he pressed an endless force against it instead? The force of a tree’s trunk that continued to grow, never stopping?
Logan raised his hand and gestured as he sculpted the end of the tree, forcing it to morph until he’d etched a narrow, sharp end. It was like a spear, a spear that kept rising and pressing against the top of the whale’s stomach. But just like his sword, the baleen plates must have been as strong as stone. Even as he ground his teeth and forced the tree to keep climbing, the spear end compacted, like pressing the end of a pencil against a tabletop. Eventually, the pressure would give. Either the table wouldn’t be strong enough, or the pencil would break.
And this whale’s stomach was no rickety table. It was solid like oak.
His tree splintered even as he asked it to continue growing. But there was no way he could stop. If he did, the whale’s Karma pool would replenish, and then he’d be back where he’d started, with no way out. No, he needed to grow this thing, endlessly grow this thing, forcing it to need so much Karma that the whale’s Karma wouldn’t keep up.
The top of the tree smashed against the whale’s stomach, splintering wood flying, shards hitting the octopuses who grunted or let out whimpers, while Vicious hissed. Logan clenched his jaw, his frustration rising, and this time, he concentrated on thickening the trunk, building rings, making it as thick as his waist, then doubling it once more.
Only after that was done did he raise it once again, forcing the tip of the tree to push against the top of the whale’s stomach. It didn’t splinter. With a cracking sound, the baleen plates split, shifting and pressing against the whale.
There was a curdling scream, a bellow that made his ears ring. Logan suddenly went flying, his legs bashing against the top of the stomach, then the bottom, guts and mucous hitting him full in the face. Logan gagged, but then he dug in his talons.
He’d angered the whale, but the baleen plates held. Cracked, crushed, but the tree was still splintering. At worst, he might have given the damn thing a case of bad heartburn. But there was no stopping. If he stopped, the whale’s Karma would replenish.
Ding!
[You have fed the blackhole. Liche Devourer at 2% satiation.]
Logan pulled up his Karma pool again:
3600/3600.
Fuck. It had replenished once again, and he could tell that the whale’s Karma pool was only half empty.
It wasn’t working.
It wasn’t working.
And worst of all, the damn stomach was filling up with wood splinters and chips, crowding against the octopuses and crushing them. With a growl, Logan threw three bucket sized handfuls into his spatial collar, trying to clear space, while at the same time continuing to grow the tree.
As the whale turned in the water and did a barrel roll, Logan held on for the ride and desperately tried to think of something else. He needed to do something that would require a massive amount of Karma; this tree wasn’t cutting it. He couldn’t thicken the trunk any further or be at risk of putting the octopuses in danger.
The blood in Logan’s head rushed as the whale dropped, his feet flying in the air as he held on with his talons, bark and splinters raining down on his armour. The whale was going back to the bottom again, this time violently, as if for the first time, it knew there was a serious problem inside of its gut and it was trying to break Logan’s concentration. Even as he continued growing the tree, Logan searched, scanning for anything that would….
The seaweed.
Who’s to say that he couldn’t grow the seaweed? There were hundreds of the buggers, thousands of them on the bottom of the ocean. The hard part was already done; they existed. What if Logan made them explode with growth, grew them so rapidly that he made them reach for the surface of the ocean?
“Fuck you, Moby Dick!” Logan screamed, clenching his fist once again and latching onto the seaweed with everything he had. It was a plant, a plant that took nourishment from the bottom of the ocean, its roots interlaced and sucking in nutrients. Logan wrenched, his head on fire with stabbing pain as he latched onto five, ten, twenty, thirty, as many as he could, forcing Karma inside of the plant and accelerating its growth.
It was back to visualization. Visualization had always been his ace in the hole. Logan envisioned those thirty plans multiplying, leaf after leaf, stem after stem growing and shooting for the sunlight that was up above. The plants surged through the water, the green shoots acting like Jack and the Beanstalk, going so fast that the whale’s tail brushed against the top of the shoots as they spread and multiplied.
At the same time, he forced the tree inside of the whale to keep growing, pressing the trunk against the stomach with punishing force. Now the baleen plates weren’t just cracking, they were being pushed up against the fleshy parts of the whale, going into its blubber and cutting through veins.
And yet he hadn’t received a notice from the System that he’d funded the blackhole, which meant that he was still sucking Karma from the whale at a rapid rate, so quickly that it couldn’t keep up.
It bellowed, a sound of anger and pain, its whole body shaking as it—
Karma deprivation.
Ding!
[You have defeated a Level 190 Rabid Humpback Whale! Experience points reduced and awarded based on contributions made.]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
Fuck yeah, he’d killed the thing! [Liche Devourer] had sucked it dry of Karma, killing it in one swoop! Logan whooped, thrusting his fist into the air, warmth infusing his body as he crowed in triumph. He’d done it! He’d owned that fucking thing! “Hell yes!”
To the side, Vicious gasped, her blue rings flaring and pulsing. Logan had to assume that the System had considered her efforts of injecting her neurotoxin into the whale as participating in the kill, giving her a massive level increase.
Gradually, the whale carcass tipped to the other side, the tree making a wrenching noise and the other octopuses letting out shouts of alarm.
Right. Killing the thing hadn’t solved the problem of being stuck inside its gut, but Logan had a solution for that. He couldn’t use this while the whale was alive, but just like scooping out an excavator’s worth of dirt from the ground, scooping out whale blubber shouldn’t be a problem for his spatial storage.
Logan got to work.