Belly of the Beast

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I thrashed and freaked out instantly, pushing away from the odd tentacle. As soon as I began moving rapidly, it came for me. My thrashing arms and legs were quickly restrained by the unseen monster and another tendril was moving towards my neck. Fuck it, time to face a phobia. Speaking as quickly as I could, I cast the fire protection spell, the shape of the sigil just a flash in my mind before I activated it. I soaked the inside of the fridge with flammable oil with the first part of the fire-ball spell, then filled the fridge with fire.

Shit. Fuck. Fuck.

The resistance worked, so even as the tiny space filled with hot fire, I wasn't burned, I just felt uncomfortably warm. The smoke though, was impossible to breathe. Even as the fire consumed all the oxygen in the tiny space and replaced it with grease-smoke, I saw the creature that I was trapped in the space with, and gasped in horror unwittingly. The far side of the fridge was covered in dozens of tendrils, what may have been either dozens of separate creatures, or one mass, attached in a layer to the back wall, protruding with many tentacles. Each tentacle was a mass of flesh, hair, teeth and occasional eyes.

So, for a second, the shock was the main thing, but as soon as I inhaled the pure smoke that rapidly filled the fridge, the burning sensation in my lungs completely overwhelmed any psychological reaction with a purely physical one, as I began to retch, gasping in more air and kicking out more desperately.

On the plus side, I was definitely hurting the thing that I was in the fridge with, but on the other, it wouldn't matter if I was dead from choking on smoke. The monster at the back of the fridge screamed, though I didn't see any mouth(s) on it. Wait, hold on, what if-

I forced myself to hold my breath. The bindings on my limbs grew limp and I turned awkwardly, my limbs pressing against the door and side-walls in the too-tight space. Then I pushed forwards with my knees and hands, into the monstrous wall of flesh. It gave. Not like, I pushed through them gave, but there was enough give that I knew I wasn't pushing against meat covering a solid wall, but against a wall of flesh. It was so hard to think, my lungs were burning something fierce from the smoke I had drawn in on the last inhale.

Can't speak, can't cast spells, can't squeeze through, can't- wait, the knife. I reached for the kitchen knife I'd gathered off the take a weapon leave a weapon desk back in the original Adventurer's Guild. It was safely secured in its new sheath, which was the only reason I hadn't cut myself with it. With desperate exertion I stabbed into the wall of flesh. The blade went almost all of the way in, before I thought I felt some give. The wall must have been ten inches deep. I withdrew the blade and placed it as high up as I could and I stabbed in once again.

There was another scream from the creature- I could only assume it screamed through some orifice on the other side. With my weight and my strength I pulled down through the meat, cutting a narrow, straight hole in the back of the fridge. As my blade went down through its flesh it screamed and twitched. When I was about half-way through it stilled, but I kept cutting all the way down. Then I made like Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, and dove into the wall of flesh face first- nothing else mattered if I couldn't get my head into a space with breathable air in the next few seconds.

I came out into darkness. I breathed in, and, while there was smoke that had followed me through the hole, the air was breathable, even if it stank like burnt hair and grease. I pushed forward, now using the stronger muscles of my legs, and with some effort pushed myself into the darkness beyond. I wasn't going to trust that I was alone again, so I cast only the second part of the grease-fire spell, producing a brief flash from a pseudoportal to elemental fire.

I saw, well, how do I explain it. Human language sort of failed. When we talk about seeing darkness, or seeing nothing, it sounds like I'm talking about not being able to see anything. But when the fire flashed in this back-room of the Tower, for a brief flash I saw a point of light inside darkness, inside nothing. Imagine floating in space, so far away from any star that you cannot see anything. Then imagine that there were no stars. Then imagine that a flash of light shines on that area. What I saw was nothing, it was darkness, but I briefly saw it from a small island, a small bubble of orange light.

What the fuck was inside the walls of the Tower?

Well, whatever it was, at the very least there was one important difference between it and the void of space. There was air here. Breathable air, or else I would be falling unconscious and dying right now. And as far as I could see, there truly was nothing here except for myself. I had no idea if you could say that it was a closed space. It both did and did not feel like it, but I had no desire to crawl back into the fridge through the corpse of the meat-wall creature. I didn't feel much confidence that I could face the abomination with my leg cut up and my lungs burning, so I was going to at least give my ability a chance to heal me. Even if it wouldn't work, I needed time to catch my breath and get my bearings.

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I sat. Not in a formal meditation position, but simply as comfortably as I could manage with my injuries. I breathed, and slowly took deeper breaths against the protestations of my own lungs. I meditated, focusing on my breathing, on the darkness around me, and I managed to make myself think of it as comfortable. I took deeper and deeper breaths, and I observed my body and my thoughts, my feelings, the adrenaline and cortisol running through my body. I sat there for what felt like forever, or until time lost meaning, and then, gloriously, I felt the shredded skin on my leg starting to knit together.

I was afraid. But the delays and forced detours and all the pain I had been through, physical and psychological, in aggregate, finally annoyed me enough to overwhelm that more base feeling. I wanted to be fucking done with it. I ripped off the ragged lower half of my right trouser leg, threw it at my feet, oiled it with the grease-fire spell and set the pile of rags on fire. I could see the disgusting creature that had functioned as the back wall of the fridge clearly now, and again, I was just more tired and annoyed by being disgusted than I was actually disgusted. I tore it to shreds with my icicle spell, until I could see into the empty, locked fridge.

It was just flimsy metal and plastic. I cast the conjure icicle pseudoportal horizontal to the door, and formed the ice into a solid block, and it fell out of the portal sideways, at terminal velocity. At this level of spellcasting, with the tier of the spell raised as high as it was, the block was the size of a hefty bowling ball, and when it crashed into the door, the whole fridge shook. The ice broke against the door and shattered in a few large chunks, and I thought I could see light coming from a gap as the door was forced open by a fraction of an inch. And maybe even as the fridge was smashed away from the wall, I could see it in the space between the cafeteria and the void.

I had become quite proficient at enunciating the words of the spell quite quickly. "Cri-alo-nix, cri-alo-nix, cri-alo-nix" I shouted thrice in as many seconds, sending three more blocks of ice towards the door, and each crashed and shook the fridge, and each time the light was a little more visible and there was more groaning of metal and splintering plastic. I still had my spellbook, hanging off my wrist, though my staff must have been yanked off my hand somewhere in the confusion before- there was no way it would have fit in the fridge. I was making a terrible racket, and if I had attracted the behemoth to my location, I wouldn't have enough time to cast the invisible barrier spell. It only took me two or three seconds by now, but it'd take the monster a lot less to rip me to shreds.

Fuck him.

"Cri-alo-nix!"

With a final shouted command to the arcane weave I crashed a block of ice into the wall one last time, and the whole fridge creaked, detached from the wall into the void, and fell into the cafeteria. I jumped out, and looking back I saw a perfectly black fridge-shaped rectangle behind me. It looked like a painted tunnel on a cliff-face must have looked to Mr. E. Coyote. Perfectly black, but just odd enough that I might try to run through it if I wasn't sure what it really was.

I glanced around the kitchen area quickly. Obviously the behemoth wasn't directly in front of me, or I would have seen it and started screaming as it tore me apart already. Small, meatly creatures here and there, nothing big enough to pose a danger, low, red lights, crates of basic food-stuffs covered in growths of flesh in their cans and packages. And my staff. I dashed to it, before even looking around more for the monster I was here to face.

I stood up, getting my breathing under control. My heart beat rapidly in my chest and my brain insisted that I breathe more quickly, but I managed to control that impulse. All the mental and willpower stat points I'd spent were good for something after all. The room was simple, like any school cafeteria kitchen. The ovens, appliances and utensils in the back, a window separating the kitchen from the cafeteria itself. The fridge that I had come out of was in front of a closed door that was to the right from the entrance to the window. I could see about a third of the cafeteria area from where I stood, and the abomination wasn't there.

I walked up to the wall and whispered the first spell I ever learned focusing on it- Seal Door. The door could not be opened until I willed it open, or the forty-minute duration ran out. I didn't want to give it an easy ingress point.

Having a chest-high bar between the monster and myself seemed like a better idea than opening a door where it could be just on the other side, so I walked with more confidence than I felt towards the window, keeping my eye on the window, trying to keep as much of the cafeteria beyond in my line of sight. It all smelled like slightly-off meat, sounded of fluorescent light and dripping liquids, and the light was muted, as many of the lamps had to shine through a membrane of skin and blood.

I saw it again, knelt over and eating something on the floor of the cafeteria. Had it somehow not heard me blasting open the fridge door, or was it too stupid to realize that I had broken through it? Was it just relying on me freezing in terror again when I saw it-

And just as I thought it, I realized it wasn't happening. I was still terrified of the monster, but the artificial, freezing terror from before wasn't coming back to me. I grasped my staff and smiled. I cast the invisible barrier spell from my staff without uttering a word, almost completely sealing off the window that was the only entrance the monster could use to get to me.

Then I said: "Hey, loser! Payback time!" and cast the grease-fire spell on top of its head.

The abomination looked around in confusion, and when the boiling, burning grease fell on top of it, it screamed in pain and surprise. My heart was racing. Door sealed. Window sealed. Line of sight. The spell did damage. The Seal Door spell even fortified any walls it was attached to. I was trying to find some error, something I missed, but I was pretty sure I'd just won.

The monster turned to me, as he shook off the burning oil, and screamed again, this time in fury. It raised its spiked, clawed hands and screaming ran towards me, the elephantine foot-steps thundering towards me.

It reached the first set of knocked-over tables, slipped and fell on its ass. Oh right. The Curse of Misfortune. I laughed out loud as I unleashed a barrage of icicles on the monster, sure of my victory.

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