Becoming Monsters 2: Ch. 50

"What?" Honoka asked out loud, snapping back to reality as the box faded. Once again, her Status reminded Honoka that no matter how much weirdness happened, the Ymirian could still be surprised. Right now, in the submenu beneath Banda, it showed Honoka allocating her holstaur Race. It also displayed Honoka allocating Banda's cleric Class. Confused, unsure how this worked, Honoka put her hands on herself and hoped for the best.

"Not sure what the rules are, but I need fast healing...um, Teteoh. If we can do this now, I promise to work out the details later." Then Honoka held her breath.

"Whooooaa!" Honoka yelped, all four of her hands glowing with searing light, her body flooding with heat. And kept flooding. This was unlike any of the other times Banda healed Honoka, it was like a flamethrower infernoed inside her body and then kept pumping jellied napalm. Yanking her hands away, Honoka shot up, spinning her upper body around in daze.

Dolly looked at Honoka as if she grew another head. "How did you..." Dolly shook herself in confusion, but prioritized as she notched an arrow and peered towards the gate where a growing wave of screams emanated. "Ya know what? Yer Class is wonky an' I can be curious later. How's yer MP?"

Honoka shook herself as well, gulping at a single digit of mana reading from her Status. "Too low."

Dolly nodded, reaching into a small pack and tossing Honoka a potion vial. Dolly's expanded breasts got in the way and rippling enough to elicit a moan out of the cheetubus. "Only one I got, make it count. Speakin' of potions, be thankful Miaka knew where Diane's case was an' was able ta get a Hunger Potion down my throat 'fore I killed anyone."

As Honoka gulped her vial - wincing because she forgot that important part of allocating succubi - Miaka shouted something the Christian woman was willing to forgive, allowing for the circumstances. Frantically flapped her way back to the center of the yard, Miaka skidded into the packed dirt with a worried face. "Redcaps, thousands of them! Coming from all sides!"

The three women arranged themselves to go back to back to back, screams and gibbering madness climaxing on all sides, the dungeon cavern creating a reverberating echo. Miaka continued while she fed extra shells into her shotgun, and the news wasn't good. "On top of redcaps, there's something else flying in that I can't make out, but it is huge." The shorter woman finished and checked the draw on her magical bastons. "I'm...I am not sure we can win this fight."

That wasn't an option, so Honoka focused on one problem at a time. Besides, she was forming the inkling of a plan. "What are redcaps?" Honoka asked, browsing her new menu and seeing what she could bring to the table to give them a fighting chance.

"Small, fast, nasty," Dolly said, gripping a handful of arrows and searching everywhere at once. "They're like the cartoon Tasmanian devil, a chaotic whirlwind of teeth an' claws, but they're also psychotically cruel. A 'cap will go for the maim 'fore the kill. Only savin' grace is they have low HP, so so's long as they don't surprise ya or gang up on ya, they're as annoying as a fire ant. If they gang up, well, they're like fire ants."

"I got a new Class Feature unlocked, unsure how it works. Check your Statuses...now." Honoka closed her Status and prayed to God along the lines for a tactical nuclear strike or a Holy Hand Grenade. "We might actually live through this."

Honoka hyperventilated to psych herself, moments away from the group of screaming monsters entering the compound, when her nightmares became real.

"Aunt Hono-chan?"

Spinning towards the north east corner, Honoka's world slowed to a crawl. Miu and Jaya stood together holding hands, two bowls of buttered popcorn for a movie between them, wearing pjs of whatever popular cartoon was out right now. Maybe they hadn't noticed the monster bodies, maybe in the strange dim lighting of the dungeon they couldn't see blood covering Honoka, but neither of them were frightened. Neither knew how much danger they were all in.

From every wall surrounding the enclosed compound, leaping over the roofs of the square nālukettu structure, a solid wave of redcaps wailed and snarled as they clawed through the air. Blue skinned, naked like a ken doll, growing sickly patches of thick black fur in random places, with mouths like lampreys, serrated black claws, all wearing a blood red stocking on their heads. They were fast, so very fast, over a hundred of them within literal spitting distance of the girls while Honoka and her wives were fifty yards away (45.7 m).

Honoka tried to move, tried to think! There was no capacity in Honoka's heart to measure the anguish watching certain death approach those girls. She already saw the future, holding their limp and torn bodies in her arms, forever regretting she could not protect them. She would try, she was desperate to try, but there was nothing. Nothing! For all her power, she could not save these girls. Honoka reached out her hand and tried to shout warning, but it choked on inarticulate sorrow, scales digging into the dirt to valiantly fail.

Too late, the girls looked up, eyes widening and the beginnings of screams upon their lips. Teeth and claws were too close, they would be dead before the screams left their mouths.

Dear God, save them!

"Begone!"

Black fire exploded from one of the doorways, swirling around the two girls into a burning tornado high enough to stop Pharaoh's army. Dozens of the frenzied beasts found simply touching the flames burned them to charred nothing, scattered their assault as more leapt over the building and flung themselves directly into the dark conflagration, ashen skeletons spilling to the ground on the other side.

From out of that fire, marching forward as if her very dignity would defeat an army of beasts, Gwyneth raised a single gloved fist into the air, more of that black flame burning out of the eye slits of her golden mask. "Whoever it is that holds the leash to this filthy pestilence, the Baroness considers these people here under her aegis!"

Gone was the hesitant woman who ran away from Honoka in empty hallways. Gwyneth radiated the presence of a queen as she pulled that gloved fist towards herself, power thronging through the air like a gong. In a colossal spray and discharge of gore, the dead boars exploded when their bones were ripped out of their bodies and flew towards the imperious lich, forming humanoid-ish shapes in a ring around the fire. Once the army was in place, the deadly and impressive fire tornado dissipated, leaving two scared girls huddling in the center, unharmed.

However, the redcaps embodied mindless hunger, only seeing flesh and blood before them and trying to manufacture chaotic misery. Gwyneth's skeletal amalgamations met that ferocity with deliberate, unified strength and stood their ground, dismantling the animalistic with unyielding tenacity. Stepping inside this defensive ring, Gwyneth raised her hands again and shot out smaller, precise gout of black flame, shoring up her defense perfectly.

"Nothing shall harm these children!" Gwyneth cried out, a conviction Honoka had never heard in the lich's echoey voice. "I swear it!"

Honoka was torn, wanting desperately to help, but she had to think of the bigger picture. Gwyneth's impressive display of necromancy effectively drew half of the horde away. In fact, given enough time, the lich would have stopped the entire monster army single-handedly. However, the real situation still left hundreds of enemies running full tilt towards the three women in the center of the yard.

"I'm going to split them up!" Honoka yelled, shifting her massive body forward and holding out her hands, hoping this worked. The holsnaga didn't have any real words to describe what happened, it felt like going to a blood bank and donating plasma in the space of a moment instead of an hour (with no juice or cookie). Tired and woozy, in front of her was a half dome of opaque energy, redcaps slamming bodily against the effect before scrambling toward either side. Now with a large shield facing the western entrance and Gwyneth drawing all the monsters from the east, the only directions to defend were the north and south. Honoka bared her fists and took the south while Miaka faced north, Dolly firing into both directions from the center.

When Honoka split up the Classes among the three of them, she didn't get exotic and complex. Miaka had Eve's goblin Race and brawler Class, Dolly had Diane's succubus...assets...and Honoka took Padmava's, Banda's and Quinn's Classes. Honoka already felt it, the pain in her body on a cellular level that meant she allocated too much into herself. Thaumian energy threatened to tear her apart, but Honoka didn't care. If pain was the price for her family's safety, Honoka would pay it a hundred fold. Accessing Quinn's Class, Honoka put proof to her iron determination.

"Aaaah!!" Honoka roared, each of her four hands and forearms bursting apart in a spray of blood and sulfurous smoke, extending outward into long blades half praying mantis and half demonic scythes. Now properly armed, Honoka waded into the mass of tiny creatures and slaughtered them like a garbage disposal slaughters celery.

"I'm really jealous of Eve's Class!" Miaka shouted from her end. Already an acrobatic, close combat fighter, Miaka's glowing rods threshed through blue monsters, proving that innate skill combined with the right Class acted as an exponential factor in a fight. On Honoka's side, allocated naga tail herded the monsters and kept them from surrounding the women. Miaka accomplished the same effect moving so quickly between the monsters that not a single one advanced. When Eve used her Class, it a barroom brawl condensed onto one particularly savage fighter. When Miaka used the same Class, she was a dancer weaving to the rhythm of the fight. Every strike brought death, every move economical. Already the savages monsters crawled over the bodies of their brethren just to engage Miaka. And based on the wide and toothy grin spread across the gobyaon's beak, she loved every second.

It was Dolly, though, that made the biggest breakthrough. At first, arrows eliminated single targets one after another, plugging defensive holes and keeping them all from being overrun. Then - maybe thinking of something or hitting upon it by accident - one arrow exploded in a cloud ten feet wide (305 cm) and rained shrapnel on dozens of redcaps at once, beasts falling to the ground in a mist of blood.

"Ya can combine different Class Features!" Dolly then fired off twenty arching arrows over the barrier. With a staccato of bursting shafts, hundreds of the nasty creatures all died at once in a crimson fog thick enough to haze the entire courtyard in red.

Despite the odds, this was the fourth down home run they needed! However, before the girls celebrated, with a gasping breath the deadly archer went limp and fell heavily to the ground, quivers spilling the remainder of her arrows onto the dirt.

"Miaka!" Honoka shouted, dismissing the barrier and sweeping her tail around in a sharp loop, pushing the last of the creatures away from the group of three, maybe fifty of them left.

The combat savvy Miaka understood, breaking away and checking on Dolly gently with her talons. "She's breathing steadily, no heart problems! I think that cool arrow trick uses MP and Dolls has never used her mana pool before, probably just ran dry of magic!"

Speaking of MP, Honoka didn't take the time to check her Status, but she was probably running on fumes at this point. Gritting her teeth (which proved very painful with large folded fangs in her mouth), Honoka stared back at the monsters, about to finish this. Or, at least, she would have, when Honoka and every other woman in the yard were reminded Miaka spied something huge in the distance.

With a final flap of twin pairs of wings - throwing Miaka off her feet while Honoka remained upright purely from naga anatomy - something gargantuan fell into the courtyard with bone shattering force, a crater fifty yards wide shallowly breaking into the ground. The first impression was primitive, lost in the placid island of ignorance sitting in the midst of the black sea of infinity. A mix between a flying T-rex and a mutant blue beetle in only the most corporeal description, its jaws - large enough to swallow a passenger jet whole - unhinged and roared, the cacophony shaking the whole Floor with more physical force than discernible noise.

*KAAAKAKAKMMMM!!*

Bleeding out her ears, Honoka fought off the effects of pressure and ethereal dread. In fact, she marveled that she remained conscious, her high Health forcing her awake even if she lacked full lucidity. She couldn't move, only able to stare as the colossus sniffed the air and fixed a row of a dozen tiny eyes upon the women.

Which is when Honoka figured she must be hallucinating.

Concepts in size no longer held meaning. Padmava's house was actually a compound that could house hundreds of people comfortably with an open space in the center large enough to fit a football stadium inside. The giant beast made the house appear like a doll house in comparable scale. So when red finger shapes rapidly descended from the misty ceiling of the Dungeon - large enough to make this previously unfathomable creature now appear to be the action figure to this new threat - all concepts of reality were lost upon anyone in the courtyard. A flurry of long, large tentacles grappled over the insectual dinosaur, quickly wrapping enough bright red spongy limbs around the creature that it stopped attacking and instead struggled to break free. It thrashed, shaking the earth for a moment, yet it was only for a moment as the tentacles constricted and lifted, hoisting a thing the size and weight of a large building into the air, vanishing into the ceiling mists.

For the briefest moment, Honoka managed to glimpse through the mists acting as the Floor's sky in this jungle biome. What Honoka spied through that mist was an octopus hanging from those rocks above, only so large miles were the smallest increment to understand it's size. Other tentacles reached down into the courtyard and casually smashed the last of the redcaps, those limbs precise and fast enough that only smears were left after a few seconds, red flesh ascending back up and then disappearing as the mist thickened across the ceiling again.

Quiet. It took ten minutes for anyone to recover enough to move, yet the dungeon remained silent. Allocating everything back, Honoka fell to her knees and gasped for air, every part hurting blindingly before her brain started shutting everything down into unconsciousness. In her last act before it all slipped away, Honoka tried to see past the mist again. Nothing that happened in the last hour made sense, why shouldn't there be giant dungeon octopi as well?

She did find it odd, collapsing to the ground for what Honoka told herself would be a quick nap, that all the monsters attempting to kill them were colored blue, yet the one that saved them was red. The former architect didn't have any evidence to support this, but she reasoned that must be significant.