Chapter 61

Chapter 61

Chapter 61

She’d gained a new silencing ability or trait concerning the movements of her body, in addition to the elongating razor-sharp tongue she could now use as a weapon.

As he silently admired her new look. She dropped from the ceiling and sputtered a cough of irritation.

“Ugh! I can’t seem to get this shape shifting thing under control!”

Riven watched as she furrowed her brows in concentration, saw her nose began to shift slightly - but then it quickly reverted back to the normal, symmetrical features she originally had a second later. “I’m sure you’ll get it under control soon enough. How do you like the changes?”

Athela brushed the silky black hair out of her eyes, hissing in irritation at the failure of her shape shifting, and stood to her full height while looking her new body up and down with her glowing red eyes. She turned around, looked at her backside, felt up her bare muscles and wiggled her eyebrows Riven’s way seductively. “How do YOU like them!?”

“Oh shut up!” Riven laughed and threw his cloak to nail Athela in the face, knocking her over as she screeched in protest and toppled over. It was obvious she was going to have a lot of coordination training to do before she got ahold of her new body, as a simple act like that would have never knocked her over while she’d still been a full-blown spider. “Put that on and stop playing around. We have to get out of the dungeon and I’m truly tired of being here.”

“Indeed!” Athela spluttered as she spun a cord of blood-webbing from her fingertips and launched them at Azmoth with a splat. “YUS! I STILL GOT IT BABY!!! You can keep the robe too, I don’t want it. I’M A FREE SPIRIT! Your mortal clothes can’t hold me down! Oh, and Azmoth - I like the tail!”

“Thanks Athela. You look pretty.”

“How sweet of you to think so, Azmoth! I wish I got compliments like that from our master, but he’s too busy eating people to realize perfection when he sees it!”

Riven stared blankly back at them, then sighed and shook his head. Despite her shenanigans, he was really glad to have her back. Same with Azmoth. He’d missed them both, and he was looking forward to introducing them to his sister. He hadn’t told Azmoth or Athela about Allie just yet, but he was sure that they’d get along.

***

“Exit Dungeon.”

Light bloomed overhead and directly in front of him as he spoke the words aloud.

The portal erupted before them in the form of a set of translucent stairs leading up to a spinning vortex a couple yards above them.

This was it. He was finally getting out of here.

Riven and Athela both turned to look back at the huge fire-attuned demon who was picking himself up off the ground and looking absolutely miserable in the downpour. He looked SO miserable in fact, that Riven though he was going to have a mental breakdown at any second. With the way Azmoth’s large armored body shook with disgust as he spat repetitively, Riven couldn’t help but loudly snicker.

“You’ll be fine.” Riven said with a laugh as he waved a hand at Azmoth as if to tell the huge brute to get over it. “It’s just rainwater.”

“AZMOTH DOES NOT LIKE RAIN WATER!”

The flustered infant demon bellowed a roar to the heavens with all four obsidian sets of claws stretched out, and a blast of flame tore skywards off his armored body. His immense muscles, completely devoid of skin between fused metal plates, tensed and rippled in the exertion as he screamed an angry tantrum upwards into the shimmering sky of rain and stormclouds.

“Oh don’t be so dramatic!” Athela crowed with amusement, extending her four long spider legs to prop her up and hoist her over the ground with stunning speed to tower over even the more brutish demon for just a minute. “Just flare up or something, it’ll evaporate. You’re hotheaded as it is already and no doubt you shan't have a problem purging some tiny, itty bitty droplets!”

Athela cackled and avoided a swipe from one of Azmoth’s claws, and she glanced over her shoulder to catch Riven staring. She raised an eyebrow teasingly. “What are you staring at? Did I do something wrong?”

Riven shook his head, unblinkingly, and he slowly stood up with his black, gnarled black staff in his hand. “I’m not staring at you... I’m staring at that.”

Athela and Azmoth both turned to where Riven had nodded, and a moment later they wore the same expression as Riven. There, only a dozen yards off, was an overgrown gas station.

The structure looked like it’d been torn out of the earth along with half of the connected parking lot, then had been transplanted to land smack dab in the middle of nowhere while leaning crookedly at a slant along the hill’s side. The glass door was ripped off its hinges and had been thrown to the left, and a couple of the windows were shattered – showing a dark interior that Riven’s eyes could now easily penetrate.

There were shelves that’d once held food, now all empty. A cashier’s station had been hammered with a club or baseball bat, leaving dents and bent metal along the counter. The lights along the ceiling all lacked power, and as Riven came closer he saw there were two half-eaten human bodies on the floor.

The sight was gruesome, and the remains were starting to decay with a swarm of flies circling the corpses. Riven bent down a few feet from the bodies, evaluating the shredded T-shirt on one and the half-torn jeans on the other. Both were young men, and had obviously had some very violent last moments before passing. Whatever had eaten them was very big given the size of the bite marks on what remained.

“Brutal.” Riven stated glumly. “I’m really hoping this place isn’t as bad as the dungeon we...”

His voice trailed off as an unfamiliar scent hit his nostrils like a tidal wave. It smelled like wet dog, and came in conjunction with the sound of a beating heart that was growing faster and faster in pace. Riven’s new vampiric senses also picked up the crunching of leaves from the tree line a little ways away, and his red eyes slowly rose to peer into the forest from over the border of his runic mask.

It likely didn’t know he could see it at this distance and kept to the shadows, hulking down between two bushes and reading itself to spring forward. It was something like a cross between a gigantic wolf and a bear – but was neither. It was covered in brown fur: too large to be a wolf, too elongated to be a bear, and had small tufts of darker black fur coursing down its back.

[Mountain Warg]