Today's Earth date: November 30, 1991

I dated two different girls back on Earth. I don't know what the average is for a male high school student, but I wouldn't say I'm inexperienced with relationships.

What I've found in Vientuls… I've never felt like this, and I don't want to leave it behind. I didn't ask to risk my life fighting demons. Chosen Heroes have fallen in battle in previous cycles, so choosing between facing down hordes of hellspawn and enjoying a quiet life with a beautiful woman is not a hard choice at all.

I'd rather stay with her.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

"Lollipop."

"Arrow."

"Mace."

"Lamppost."

"Spoon."

Wayne grinned at Sammy and nodded furiously, the Pictionary display over his head tracking his smallest movements. That combined with the bounce of the wagon made the picture pretty shaky. Then Wayne made a digging gesture to help the cook continue guessing.

And that triggered a failure notification. He had broken the rules of the game by giving Sammy a clue.

"It was a shovel," Wayne said, dejectedly.

"Can anyone else draw or only you?" Vanilli asked.

"As far as I know, only me. I'll keep practicing."

"How much can that help?" the demon asked, dryly.

Fergus giggled.

Happy to change the subject, Wayne looked at the map on his HUD and announced, "Vientuls is just up ahead."

Instead of continuing their banter, the party set to gathering their things in preparation for arriving in town. Wayne didn't mind the silence.

Halfway up a small range of mountains, Vientuls was the last stop before the Forest of 10,000 Cuts began. Little of the town was visible yet, but Wayne had read and heard that it was about three times the size of Asplugha. The majority of the structures were built from plentiful mountain rock, a pale chalky colored stone, and a few were built from heavy timber. The town walls matched the stone houses and encircled a relatively active trading community.

Vientuls was either a traveler's first stop after exiting the Cuts, in which case they welcomed the reprieve of cool air and open roads, or it was their last stop before entering the Cuts, in which case they were preparing to navigate the humid, dangerous growth of the jungle valley between Vientuls and Iomallach.

Jungle alone made traveling a challenge, but in addition to the dense foliage awash with hiding places for predators and snakes, the Cuts had above-ground coral reefs woven throughout. According to scholars, the coral survived the draining of the ocean by a miracle of evolutionary adaptation. Some of the coral was as tall as the trees, while other pieces of coral were hidden in overgrowth just off the road. Where the coral was visible, they added a kaleidoscope of pastels to the dense green of the valley. Where the coral wasn't visible, razor sharp edges awaited any traveler unlucky enough to stumble upon them.

Vientuls, by comparison, was an unremarkable mountain town, like any Wayne might see driving through West Virginia back on Earth.

Unremarkable to Wayne at least. Vanilli, however, was in awe of what little he could see during their ascent. Fergus was more than happy to regale the demon with everything he knew about their next destination.

In addition to the spiel about what to expect when they passed through Vientuls to enter the Cuts, Fergus said, "The view is supposed to be breathtaking. The gate to the Cuts opens onto an ancient stone bridge built high over the jungle. It leads to another rocky outcropping with a smooth enough slope for a road down into the valley."

"How old is ancient?" Vanilli asked.

Fergus pulled his head back and blinked his eyes. "I've never thought about a specific threshold for when something is 'ancient.' I want to say really old, but that's an embarrassing measurement for a Royal Scholar."

"Few thousand years, at least," Wayne helpfully added.

"I would agree," Fergus said, nodding.

"So, not very old?" Vanilli asked.

"Perhaps not with your personal context," Fergus admitted. "What would qualify as ancient for a demon?"

"A megaannum or two."

Before Sammy could ask, Fergus answered, "A megaannum is a million years."

Wayne interrupted and pointed to a series of signs illustrated with fading paint. "Are those for real?"

Each sign advertised a different type of Chosen Hero attraction, from Horcus' Mystery Theatre to a Chosen Hero gift shop to Laszlo's Palazzo which featured an illustration of the Paladin singing and playing a guitar for several creepily-enthused children.

Why was it so easy for art depicting children to be unsettling as hell? Wayne shuddered at the memory of the many Earth horror films that featured some variation of a little girl with matted hair saying weird shit in the dark.

"Standard fair for waypoint towns like this," Fergus said. "Just think, in a few more days, we'll be living it up in a Blackwell manor."

"This is fairly tame as far as Hero traps go," Armond added, recalling his time traveling in the military. "Stopped at this one town that had Hero-themed inns, restaurants, and an amusement park."

Humans from different worlds weren't all that different from humans on Earth it seemed.

As the party crested the final rise, arriving at the last stretch of flat road leading to the front gate, Wayne readied the writ he had from the Governor of Cuan. He fully expected Outlawson to raise alarms any time they entered a new town. Other than personally running ahead to deliver the warning, Wayne didn't have any ideas for how they could make the giant wagon-pulling bug less threatening.

Bug faces up close were always disturbing for Wayne, so he couldn't imagine how to put lipstick on that problem.

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And there went the panicked shouting.

Before Wayne could ask someone to take over driving Outlawson while he went ahead to explain, Armond raised a hand to call for quiet.

"Does it sound like the shouting is going away from us?" he asked.

Hector nodded. "Does to me."

"Be right back," Wayne said.

Wayne spammed Blitz to cover the two-hundred yards between his party and the town. As he approached, he saw the gates were unmanned. That fit what Armond heard. If a problem was on the other side of town and was bad enough, the guard here would go to help.

Probe.

At the very edge of his map, when it was fully zoomed out, he saw a large red dot. It was the size of nine typical monster dots clumped together.

"Big monster attacking the other side of the town," Wayne said to his party via his Voice ability. "We should–"

"Already unhitching Outlawson," Fergus replied. "We'll be there as soon as we can."

The potential Outlawson scare was worth it to get help there more quickly. Wayne went ahead, slightly sad that his first view of the town was under these circumstances, but the classic fantasy flavor of Vientuls architecture and layout was picturesque regardless.

Which made the white kaiju snail chewing on the town gate stand out even more.

The antennas of the slimy monster bounced up and down as the lips of its wide mouth gnawed on a parapet. Mucus ran down the walls like syrup on pancakes.

More red dots began to appear, blinking into existence one by one wherever the mucus dripped.

The snail's excretions spawned sentient slimes, which appeared as "werefail snails" on Wayne's HUD. The biology didn't quite track, but that's what Wayne witnessed. The newly-birthed monsters scattered, attacking in every direction. For now, the town guard seemed to have them contained, but the gate was dissolving. Once the snail got through, Vientuls would be a buffet.

Skycat sped ahead to begin softening up the snail with Missiles enhanced with the fire from Flame Bracelet. The Camera ability labeled the monster "pale weresnail," but Wayne didn't have time to unpack what a name like that meant. He would need to do as much as he could until more party members like Fergus and Margo arrived to amplify the damage dealt.

In the time it took Wayne to fully cross town to reach the gate, the slimes had exploded from manageable numbers penned in by swords and spears to a surge of uncountable monsters breaking through the guard lines like sand running through fingers.

Wayne spotted how the slimes were able to multiply so quickly and sent Skycat in to test an additional theory.

"Melee damage splits the slimes into more slimes."

"As in one slime becomes two?" Fergus asked.

"Correct. Fire magic kills them for good. Other types of magic might work also."

After assigning Skycat to exclusively search and destroy runaway werefail snails, Wayne landed on the end of the gatehouse opposite the hungry colossus. Up close, its skin had the spongy texture of a human tongue, and it painlessly absorbed every block of ice Wayne threw with Sword of Water. He debated going back to using Missile, but the places where Skycat's barrage had made contact were little more than fading singe-marks.

With several orbs of fire orbiting his waist, Wayne switched his tactics and moved in with his sword.

With a tortured twitch, one of the eye stalks twisted to focus on the strange man charging with a sword. A jet of viscous fluid shot out of the eye with one powerful pulse.

Easy Out.

The fluid stuck to the brickwork as if it were slime, but only for a moment. After that brief and very dramatic pause, the fluid ate through everything it touched like water on cotton candy. Mindful not to step in the sizzling goop, Wayne renewed his advance, but watched both eye stalks carefully. So far, just the one took potshots at him as he approached.

Wayne angled his sword downward and hit one last Blitz to close the distance, the force of the mid-air dash dragging the tip of his blade across the snail's undulating neck. The slimy flesh parted with ease, Wayne's cut gliding through swift and smooth.

And just as quickly, the flesh mended.

Another three passes, this time with Flame Bracelet making his sword glow white with heat, and the result was the same. Any damage he did quickly healed over as if it had never happened.

Dodging acid eye beams, Wayne cycled through his memories as well as his spells and abilities, looking for ideas for what to try next. He vaguely recalled a cartoon where the villain had salt shaker fingers, and the heroes were ninja slugs–so they lost immediately. But that wasn't helpful.

He didn't have a giant salt shaker, and he didn't see any other options he hadn't already considered.

A laser shot down from the sky and into the snail's head, obliterating one of its eye stalks. That was one of Fergus' spells. His party had arrived to help contain the slime outbreak.

Wayne noticed that the eye stalk did not immediately regenerate. He counted fifteen seconds before a new stalk sprouted from the snail head and resumed squirting acid tears. All of his attacks to the body had begun healing almost immediately. Were the eye stalks different because they were more complex structures?

Or was that a mechanic?

Skycat pulled away from its seek and destroy mission and careened at the weresnail, drawing the fire of the eyes. As soon as the eyes were on the fighter plane instead of him, Wayne Blitzed in.

His sword got stuck in one of the stalks. That same eye swiveled to see what had hurt it. Wayne released his sword, leaving it embedded in the snail, and grabbed the eye with both hands. He wrestled to point the eye away as it spewed blast after blast of acid, whipping him around like he was trying to wrangle an errant firehose. Each time the force of the fight brought his feet back to the snail's head, he kicked the blade of his sword to drive it deeper.

The process was slower than he would have liked, and he had snail lubricant in his eyes and up his nose, but the sword was nearly through.

"Fergus! When I say, use Tsu on the boss again. Target the eye stalk without me attached to it."

"No promises."

Wayne grabbed his sword, wrenched it free, and delivered one more swing to cut the stalk from the snail.

"Now!"

The space laser struck again, melting away the last remaining eye.

The weresnail roared, but its limp jaw couldn't hold its mouth completely open, so the deeply vibrating rage pushed through two mostly closed lips. They fluttered, morphing the roar into a vaguely whimsical pfffbbbttt.

The monster released the melting gatehouse and backed away, scooting to the edge of the great bridge that crossed over the Forest of 10,000 Cuts.

Then it sucked into its shell, pulling its foot in tight to seal the entrance like a drawbridge.

Arrows and spells came off the walls, pelting the shell. Most of them were from the guard and local adventurers. Wayne added his own volley, hoping to put a dent in the monster's armor while it wasn't attacking.

The shell started to glow.

Wayne had seen this boss ability before.

"Stop!" he yelled, trying to get the attention of the small force defending the gatehouse. The guards who did hear him looked at him curiously, confused as to why a strange man was shouting orders.

"Try to get them to stop! Don't attack the shell!"

After a brief hum, the weresnail's foot flopped down and a beam of white light shot out and carved through the Vientuls walls like a cosmic death ray.

Then the weresnail emerged again, spawning new werefail snails from its sticky body and firing acid beams from its eyes.

Wayne called for Fergus to repeat their previous strategy. After he cut down one of the eyes, Fergus was to blast the other. They repeated the sequence successfully, and the weresnail again backed up, half of its body now on the bridge. It retreated into its shell a moment later.

This time, none of the defending forces attacked the shell.

When the snail emerged yet again, Wayne and Fergus again targeted the eye stalks. This time, when the snail slid backward, the ancient stone bridge began to crack, fissures and gaps spreading out from beneath the weresnail like it was standing on ice.

The eye stalks went mad, shooting acid beams in every direction with complete abandon, and then the bridge gave way. The weresnail crashed into the forest below.

Wayne watched as the dust cleared and saw the weresnail's shell had shattered, and several large pieces of coral sliced through the body, reminding him of a sushi roll.

"Weresnail is down…" Wayne said to his party. "But I think it attacked because of us."

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