’Fucking hell.’
Grey slammed into the ground and flipped head over heels. It felt like his back had snapped in two along the length of his spine. It seemed that carrying a chainsaw on your back everywhere you went came with drawbacks beyond its heft.
The feeling of its teeth splitting his backside in two wasn’t fun at all.
Grey pushed down the pain. He could feel that some aspects of his Mental Fortitude Mind Resistance helped, but even so he barely caught wind of a blur as it smashed into his chest.
The flat of his Curved Rusted Saw pressed into his chest, his broken ribs rattling and causing him to hiss out a breath of pain.
"You little fucking shits."
Grey coughed out a mouthful of blood, but that didn’t stop him from using Magnetic Push. He repelled the Curved Rusted Saw from his chest, deflecting the baby and sending it flipping back.
But the ugly little bastard actually flipped once and landed in a superhero pose before launching itself forward again. At the same time, a second baby vampire had caught up, and there was a third just behind it.
’I’m going to be overrun like this. Dammit!’
Grey reached for his back. Holding his curved saw in one hand, he bit onto the rip cord of the chainsaw with his teeth and yanked with a twist of his neck.
It revved to life.
Grey held a blade in one hand and a chainsaw in the other, his crimson eyes blazing with murder.
"Come on then!"
The baby vampire had already lunged at him and Grey swung his chainsaw to meet it head on. The idiot baby tried to bite at the rotating teeth just like the last one had, but Grey tilted the angle just as it approached.
Time seemed to slow around him, his Goblin Warlord Spirit pulsing within him as he pushed his Frame to the limits. He was no longer using the Ability passively, he was calling on it consciously and focusing not on the weapon in his hand or how to use it, but instead the angles, predicting his enemy’s next movement, and calculating trajectories.
He took in all the information in an instant and shredded the baby vampire’s head in two on a single point of contact.
The second baby vampire had scaled the wall to the side, the claws on its feet and hands letting it run across it as though it was solid ground.
It lunged through the blood of its sibling, its maw opening wide as it bit at Grey’s skull. But it was like Grey already knew it was coming.
The downward stroke of his chainsaw blade didn’t pause in the slightest. It completely missed the second baby vampire, but that was never his goal in the first place.
The rotating chains met the ground before the second baby vampire was even halfway to him. The sudden acceleration ability of the Skrill Chainsaw revved into effect and Grey’s body shot forward as though it was fired from a cannon.
The second baby vampire was taken completely off guard, the original trajectory of its flight completely worthless as Grey’s curved blade met its head long before it was ready.
Grey roared, splitting it in two.
Magnetic Pull.
Grey just barely got into range of the needles he had left behind with his maneuver. He didn’t forget about the third baby vampire. In fact, he already had something waiting for it.
The needles were yanked from the corpse of the very first baby vampire he had killed, pelting the third baby vampire from the back.
It shrieked in pain and horror, jumping and spinning in both an attempt to dodge whatever other assaults could be coming and to see who was attacking it from behind.
Clearly, it thought that maybe Amunet had caught up.
It was wrong.
And whether it had been wrong or not didn’t matter in the slightest as Grey was already upon it.
Magnetic Pull.
Metal Affinity.
Grey yanked on the needles with both abilities at once. And then, with Magnetic Push, he thrust his curved rusted blade forward.
The spin of the baby vampire was completely stalled as it was yanked through the air toward Grey.
It met Grey’s blade a moment later, the tearing of flesh and breaking of bone echoing through the halls.
Grey huffed for breath. He looked at his stamina bar and it had already ticked down to seven. He hadn’t even done a full activation of his Neural Frame but it had already...
’Now six. Dammit.’
He cut off the engine of his chainsaw and looked toward Amunet.
"We need to go!" he called out.
Amunet was fighting off the last of the baby vampires on her side, but more were coming. If not for the somewhat narrow width of the tunnel and the fact some of the coffins were dangling a decent distance from their opening, they would have already been overrun.
She clearly understood this and didn’t need to be told twice. In fact, she had half expected Grey to just go off and run on his own.
Instead, Grey appeared next to her and punted the head of a baby vampire.
"FUCK THAT HURT!" Grey was half convinced he broke his toe, but it was too late to regret it. "Go! Go!"
He turned and darted away, ignoring the aching in his foot. Luckily, the feet of his Nexis Suit had managed to protect him from much of the impact, but it seemed he had finally found the limit of the thing.
Grey turned back and reached out a hand. "Take it! Otherwise, we might fall into another illusion!"
Amunet hadn’t immediately accepted his hand, but when she heard this, she knew they had no choice. She could only trust Grey for now.
They raced down the hallways, curving through paths.
’Dammit, where do I go, where do I go?’
Grey looked over his shoulder and though they had rounded enough corners that he couldn’t see them directly anymore, he knew those damned baby vampires were on their way. And who knew how many other dangers there were in this place?
’Think, Grey. Think.’
They skated around another corner.
’The description was meaningless. But—.’
Grey thought of his Legendary Quest. This Rare Instance felt like it was almost certainly related to it, but when he recalled the description of the Legendary Quest, there was nothing about it that gave him any clues either.
Frustration threatened to bubble over as Grey found himself getting more and more tired. His lungs were practically on fire and he felt like his stamina would tick down to five any moment now.
They rounded another corner and skidded to a stop.
Up ahead, there was nothing but a fog of black so dense it threatened to swallow up everything.
Grey’s heart jolted as he remembered something.
"Let’s go! You’re going to have to trust me!"
There was a small yank from Amunet’s arm, but Grey’s assuredness completely overwhelmed her hesitation as he bulldozed his way directly into the darkness.
The endless caverns and tunnels began to shake. Dust and rock fell from the ceilings, but not a single sound came from the endless darkness ahead.