The Long Way 20 – The Trail of Destruction

They remained there, huddled up together, imprisoned by their individual trauma.

Reysha’s mind was confined to the realm of dreams, where the horrid reality of her guilt and the emphasized destruction she had witnessed in her drugged-up state could be broken down into the realm of abstracts.

Aclysia sobbed. Sobbed and sobbed, unable to keep the stream of tears or the swirling of her thoughts under control. Nothing clear could be seen, nothing clear could be thought. Over half a year since the day Apotho was freed, and now the sight of one of the Deathhounds returned her to her powerlessness and the stress of despair.

Apexus was seething with anger. The initial threat had passed, his survival instincts had calmed and now he held both of the women he cared more about than anything else in this world. He knew he couldn’t protect them from that creature, a servant of the traitor that had exploited and broken the slime’s young naivety. Thus, he raged, raged at what could be the dying of their lights.

He refused to go quietly into the night.

Grabbing his two dearly beloved, he carried them away from there. Whatever they did next, doing it there would have been counterproductive, perhaps even dangerous. As far as Apexus knew, it was unlikely that the Deathhound would turn around. Turlesh was headed down the same route that had eventually brought them to this point. He couldn’t hear them anymore. Regardless, the slime exercised the caution his instincts told him to.

Inadvertently, his decision stirred Reysha out of her dream of fire and brimstone. Outside the confines of her mind, she felt everything but safe. Her first action was to scream at the top of her lungs. The unreasonableness of this, the deadliness even that it posed, forced Apexus to take drastic measures. Placing the tiger girl down, he hurriedly placed a hand on her mouth.

The reaction was, expectedly, violent thrashing. Reysha’s claws, demonic and catlike, left and right, cut into Apexus’ chest. Her sharp teeth managed to catch two of his fingers. She chomped at him with the genuine desire to defend herself to the death. A correctly placed bite like that would have taken his fingers off. As it was, the bones merely broke under the strength of her jaw. Surrounded by mostly membrane and muscle, there was little slime around the finger. A happy circumstance, as it prevented her mouth from melting.

Biting and slashing him like this kept her scream muffled and slowly tired her out. Next to them, Aclysia stared, unsure what she was looking at and unwilling to comprehend anything. This state subsisted, until Reysha went from violently erratic to exhaustedly panicked. “How… How could it find us?! TELL ME, ACLYSIA, WHY THE FUCK IS THAT THING HERE?!”

Apexus was about to reign the redhead in again, when she stopped making any sounds beyond choked sobbing. Crawling over, she grabbed the angel by the shoulders and started shaking her with what little strength remained. The logic to asking her first and foremost was purely habitual. Reysha had come to expect the angel to have an answer to whatever issues there were.

The question slowly registered. As if a switch had been flicked, her mind suddenly grasped at the purpose. What had been disoriented nothingness rapidly formed into the most focused thoughts imaginable. Conscious and subconscious, the need to distract herself from the reality of the encounter and the need to avoid it in the future, locked together into a moment of brilliance only possible during extreme stress such as this.

Aclysia remembered what had just happened. The Deathhound was just a shape in that memory, a shape that moved in patterns that seemed to make no sense. Was it smelling to track them? If the sense of smell had been strong enough to track them down to this point, it couldn’t have missed them, no matter how much the slime crust on their bodies may have competed with their natural scent. Hearing couldn’t explain it either. Was the demon here because it had heard rumours? Impossible. Even assuming it had extracted intel from random people it had found, things didn’t line up. Nobody could be interrogated to find out which Leaf they had gone to. Nobody on the Leaf could be interrogated to point directly at the Long Way dungeon. It was, fundamentally, impossible to find them this quickly without having some sort of tracking ability.

‘How does it work? How does it work? How does it work?’ “How does it work? How does it…?” she repeated over and over again in her thoughts and voice.

Aclysia did not remember every step they had taken while they had occupied that healing fountain chamber, but she did at least remember certain positions where they had dwelled. The Deathhound had visited several of them. Could it be that it was following them in a chronological order? Could it be chasing down their steps? That would be an ability on the level of an Art. It wasn’t an absurd hypothesis to make. More importantly, Aclysia could find no other possible answer.

“The demon is following our steps in the order we took them,” Aclysia told them, her voice calm and emotionless. “It will eventually succeed in hunting us down.”

“No, it won’t,” Apexus denied and stood up. “We have to make it to the portal.”

“Since it pursues us on our trail, it will have killed all bosses on the way,” Aclysia offered the immediate counterargument, feeling nihilistic acceptance quickly settle into the void that her now unoccupied mind created. “There is no hope.”

“There is little hope,” Apexus corrected. “My melody, please we have to…”

“Even if we go,” Aclysia interrupted, pulling her knees up to her torso and burying her head between her knees. “What price do we force on others? It can follow us to any destination. Anyone living where we have walked is going to encounter this spawn of the Hellroots. We are bringers of death… would it not be useful for us to…”

“I WANT TO FUCKING LIVE, ACLYSIA,” Reysha shouted and grabbed the angel by her white hair, forcing her to raise her head. “Get that into your immortal, dumb-fucking head! I will die if we don’t run. Apexus will die if we don’t run.”

“How much is our life worth…”

“EVERYTHING,” Reysha shoved the angel back, making her land limply on her back. Tears of panic and confusion streamed down both of their faces. “Get your head out of your fat ass!” she threatened to climb on top of the white-haired woman and start punching her, but was held back by Apexus. Adrenaline, or whatever substitute they had, was pumping through their systems.

Aclysia was no exception. Her mood transformed yet again, suddenly, and she jumped to her feet. “STOP BEING SO ARROGANT! What right do we have to threaten everyone in our path?!”

“We did not choose this,” Apexus chimed in, as calmly as he could. He was less saying things to take a stance and more to put some kind of reasonably loud voice in there.

It succeeded somewhat and he could soon let Reysha go, the two women staring at each other blankly. “We have no fucking right, but I also have no obligation to die because of shit I can’t change. I’m not as happy to martyr myself as you are.” Stabbing the angel in the sternum with her demonic left finger, the tiger girl quickly added. “Plus, what the fuck do you think we actually achieve by dying, huh?”

“We… we wouldn’t bring needless demise to others!” Aclysia already felt that there was a flaw in her argumentation, but shoved it aside.

Not kind enough to let the metal fairy reason her way out of this, Reysha growled, “That thing murdering us doesn’t make it disappear. It just goes back to fucker at the heart of this and continues doing its bidding. You won’t diminish the suffering in the Omniverse just by making sure you aren’t involved in it.”

That left the metal fairy speechless.

Apexus, even if he tried to be the neutral voice here, agreed wholeheartedly with Reysha. This was not their fault. All that could be asked of them was that they minimized the suffering their pursuer caused. A demand that they lay their life down so that it may hunt elsewhere was just as selfish as their desire to stay alive. At least, that was how the slime looked at it.

“I won’t let myself be killed,” Apexus formulated the hard core of the entire argument. They could reason around that all they wanted. Running may have been futile, it may have brought more suffering to more people than necessary, but he would not roll over and die because something was likely. Any course of action or inaction that had, at its base, him forfeiting his life was fundamentally unacceptable. “My melody, Aclysia, do you want this to end?”

The question was difficult. The moral compass of the angel was firmly set to minimize suffering that plagued the Omniverse. Reysha’s point had already undermined that and Aclysia’s love for her companions now competed with the nihilistic acceptance that poisoned her thoughts. “Of course, I don’t… it’s simply impossible for us…”

“There is no virtue in immediate surrender,” Apexus told her.

Taking a slow inhale, Aclysia tried to clear this fog that had descended on her mind. ‘My loss is easily accepted, but theirs is final,’ she reminded herself, finally managing to make her reason supersede the shaken instincts. “I apologize, darling,” she finally said, mustering as much resolution as she could. “Let’s survive.”

________________________________________________________________________

Knowing when to rest was impossible for the three of them. They didn’t know how fast the Deathhound would move through the dungeon. The Deathhound had been ten days behind them, on their route. Given that it would have much less issues with whatever dungeon monsters it encountered and could stay on a steady move, it would need less than half the time to bridge the same distance. The labyrinthine structure of the Long Way worked somewhat to the trio’s advantage, as the many corners, ups and downs prevented the demon from using the whole speed it was capable off.

Simultaneously, it was to their disadvantage, because it slowed down their own advance. They had to take time to eat and sleep already. Rest was neither thorough nor satisfying. As a long-term strategy, their bodies were bound to collapse. In the short term, stress and adrenaline fuelled their engagements. They fought with less caution, because they couldn’t afford it and because their pain reception was muted in response to the danger closing in. Simultaneously, they were so paranoid that no ambush surprised them.

They advanced faster than could be reasonably expected, not because they worked particularly efficiently but because every fibre of their beings demanded them to. The excellency in combat and situational awareness was paid for in gradual degradation of their physical states.

Reysha was the most affected, the lack of proper sleep and time to groom resulting in dark bags under her eyes and matted, dull hair. Her equipment was covered in dried gore and damage from attacks she would have usually managed to avoid.

Aclysia's usually so orderly appearance was similarly disrupted. Robes had been torn by attacks she had blocked out of necessity. Several strands of her white hair had curled or otherwise stuck out of the flowing hole.

Apexus was almost the least affected, courtesy of his lack of clothing to be torn. However, he had lost his hair. An enemy had grabbed it in a tussle, the slime had cut it off, causing them to lose their balance as the thing they pulled on suddenly came off. With how little time they had to eat, this was not a priority for him to regenerate. All he got was a bit of stubble among long strands that had not been ejected at the time.

They continuously moved at the edge of exhaustion. They walked when they couldn’t sustain jogging, but even those steps were rapid. Every muscle burned, but the sensation was entirely shut out. They kept going deeper and deeper into the Long Way, praying that they would hit the end. Each day was worse than the last, the mounting drawbacks of the massive pressure adding to the certainty that the Deathhound was catching up.

They avoided the upper layer, even now. It was the quickest way to advance, but it was also the only way to reliably head back. Without a map, they could accidentally stumble into a path they had used  before and that could put them face to face with Turlesh. The middle and lower layer had to do. They slaughtered their way through every monster they encountered, ran more on instinct and experience than proper strategy, and paid for it with wounds at several encounters. After every fight, Apexus and Reysha savagely ripped a couple pieces of meat out of the cadaver to have something in their bellies and then left the rest.

Then, they finally found the boss room.

It was a large gate of grey stone, set into an arch. The cobalt room around them was gorgeous, covered in reliefs of the other bosses on the Leaf and divinely created landmarks like the massive bridge to the west. The three of them appreciated none of it, only splashing some of the healing fountain water over themselves to heal whatever wounds they had recently sustained and hydrate.

They exchanged no words. They hadn’t in several hours. Aside from orders, warnings or the occasional reassurance, they didn’t have the energy to talk.

Apexus put his two hands on the door and pushed.