== VORTEX QUEST 3-12 ==
== (UN)FAMILIAR TERRAIN ==
He hated the phrase "be ready for anything" because it demanded the impossible. Every preparation was a tradeoff.
But if any place demanded being ready for the impossible, it was the crucible leading to the realm of a mad god. Or a sleeping one, or a fractured one. The pandemonic term was difficult to translate. Goro understood well enough, though -- no need to talk in circles.
As the group dropped through the freaky rainbow maw, Goro dipped into mania enough to make his muscles battle ready, feeling the beautiful, dense fibers pulse with power, expanding his frame ever so slightly at every bump, his mullet now flowing as a proud mane to his shoulder blades.
He was much heavier in this charged state -- a tradeoff -- and the chipped concrete tiles trembled under his large feet as he dropped from the kaleidoscope with a modicum of elegance.
Wait, concrete?
The area was lit by a bright, omnipresent haze and Chay immediately started fanning out puffs of smoke, reducing Goro's vision. There was only so much mania-powered sight could do to penetrate the leader's mist.
They were in a ruined building, sloping roughly thirty degrees.
The exterior wall had broken away, granting sight of limbo's void where constellations shifted. The interior walls of concrete, glass and steel showed the signs of decades of abandonment, thick vines in green and purple growing within the wear-and-tear cracks and creeping over shattered windows.
Not many ambush opportunities, but also little space to take cover.
Xane was moving farther in. Goro soundlessly followed.
"Is this... a mall?" the thaum-mage wondered.
Their room was one of many around an atrium, three stories tall with the lowest floor half underwater. Limbo's light falling through holes in the sheet metal roof onto dense jungle vegetation gave the place a post-apocalypse ambiance.
"Might have been," Goro responded.
The implication of an entire mall falling into the abyss was grim. Was earth not as stable as they had thought?
He jumped to the upper floor where more signage seemed intact, landing on slippery purple moss.
On first glance, the signs were in Japanese although he recognized none of the brands. Hell, he didn't even recognize the characters, though many were strongly familiar. Maybe it wasn't Japanese. There were English ones, too... Or was that Cyrillic? Or...
"Can anyone read this shit?" Marcus yelled from below.
Goro dropped down again. Marcus had uncovered a dead neon sign with a mix of Kanji and Greek letters -- mirrored, twisted and erroneous.
The six naked Hellions were securing a perimeter around Chay. One, who had managed to get a spear through the portal, gestured over the place. "It's all fake. We call it Mockery for a reason."
Commander Zero-B crossed his arms over his ripped pecs. "Don't try to understand it. King Jnessos went mad trying to 'understand', trying to learn and improve and achieve."
"Hard same," Marcus mumbled. "Poor bastard must have been in my algebra class."
Chay was looking at everything and nothing with that intense, hard gaze he had when he was capital-A Analyzing. Part of Goro was afraid of being exposed to that gaze, in a... strangely good way.
"He was trying," Chay said and rubbed his temples, "to imitate humanity. He had -- has? -- a fascination with the alien and grotesque, by demon standards. He's amazed by the way we order things and create. He wanted to study us like an ant farm, maybe create a bridge between the abyss and- Oh shit, there's the threat."
Goro had already spotted the unrest on the water that half the atrium floor was covered with. There had to be a basement or two, under the muddy liquid. Whatever moved below had to be absolutely massive.
A hydra rose from the brown waters, pushing aside steel rods and rotten logs like mere twigs. Six heads, then nine, then a whole dozen. Brown, toad-like serpent heads on long necks were arranged around a thirteenth, black, draconic head with red eyes.
"Keep it busy," Chay yelled. "Still looking for the exit. I'm going to puppet the rightmost snake."
As expected, the rightmost serpent's teeth dug into its neighbor's face, causing confusion among the heads.
Goro lunged, his tattoo already dancing across his shoulder. He clashed with a random neck and slammed his hands together, breaking the scales and digging into the flesh.
The Hellions screeched. Some kind of mind attack was happening but Goro's esper-wyrm training was paying off again.
He got whipped around as the head tried to fling him off but he only hugged harder, choking the beast with every mighty limb, his naked superhuman body's weight keeping the snake bent in a way he hoped was cumbersome, if not painful.
Explosions went off around him. Projectiles were thrown. Marcus' razor-ring cut where it could, blinding snake eyes and racing along arteries. The chakram came dangerously close to Goro a few times as the hydra tried to use him as a shield.
By sheer pressure and whole body flexing, he managed to tear the neck apart, blood and bone fluid coating him in a thick shower.
