The corpse of the grumpling she had just domed was stuck so firmly that it came up with the axe when she tried to pull it away, its limbs dangling. With a strangled noise, she let the weapon fall, turned her focus to the unified mass of claws and fur still bearing down on her, climbing all over her, tearing and stabbing at her.
Two grumplings were trying to make off with her fallen torch to leave her in darkness. Expelling a frightened yell, she hit the first one with a clumsy front kick to the side of the head that sent it bouncing off the wall with a scattering of spongy fungus. She reached blindly and tore a biting creature from her body by its ankle to swing into the second thief with all the force she could muster, their skulls knocking together with a sharp smack, both compacting under the force like overripe pumpkins. She threw her living weapon to the ground, stomped the back of its neck, then rolled it aside with the broad side of her foot.
She laid about her in an indiscriminate, blind frenzy, hands and feet moving on jerky reflex. She crushed bones, shattered skulls. Everything was a loud, dark, breathless storm, seconds passing like hours.
Then, suddenly, the horde of creatures disengaged all at once, leaping off her and ducking away from her wild haymakers to go slinking off in the dark every which way, out of her tiny circle of light in a second flat. She was left standing there, wheezing for breath, with the torch guttering at her feet to cast her own crazy shadow jittering along the chamber wall.
Her clothes were torn so bad that they hung off her like rags, and her skin stung in countless places. She prodded at herself, tried to figure out if she was badly wounded, but she only found minor scratches and some small, superficial puncture wounds where she had been stabbed that made her fingertips come away red.
A rough half-dozen grumplings lay scattered about her; half of them stone dead, the other half still thrashing weakly. Horrible gurgles and moans and sucking noises issued from their throats.
Sam picked up her torch, the thing coming back to full life when it was removed from the moist dirt. Getting a closer look at the creatures on the ground, she found that behind their fur coverings, their bodies were grotesquely deformed. Mushrooms sprouted from them all over; arms, armpits, chests, faces—even mouths, in one case. These spread out in sprays of dirty greens and reds and browns and grays, similar to the ones that festooned the walls.
She wasn't sure what that meant. Was the nettlegeist causing all this fungal growth? Was it due to something else?
With neither the time nor the presence of mind to give it any thought, Sam dislodged her hatchet and trudged on, picking the tunnel that most of the creatures seemed to have fled down. Maybe she should have given the dying grumplings mercy by finishing them off, but she was already out of the chamber when she had the thought, and by that time it was too late to go back. She was glad for the excuse.
Even as she continued down the tunnel for some time, her heart continued to batter the inside of her chest. Shadows jumped out at her, the light off her torch constantly shifting and distorting over the fungal growth that streaked the walls.
Dark, terrible thoughts raced through her mind. Too weak. Too slow. Couldn't save anyone. Will would die. Will was already dead. Her heart was beating too fast. She couldn't get air. She leaned against a wall to catch her breath, crushing wet mushrooms under her elbow.
"Nug," she breathed through hard panting, "I don't know if… if you're still doing the thing, but you can stop now. It's too much. It's too… I can't…"
Her advance instantly turned into a mad scramble, breaths coming in shallow gasps, tears streaking her face. Faster. Faster. She needed to go faster. Even a dead sprint wasn't fast enough.
She skidded to a stop when a shambling shape came into view. A single grumpling, something off about it. The dark-furred creature was horrifically bloated with fungal growth, tottering on emaciated legs that supported a huge, rounded, misshapen belly. It carried no weapons that she could tell, but unlike the others that had been entirely naked, this one had a filthy hide thrown over it like a ragged poncho. The sloppy garment was studded with bits of sharpened flint that glinted shiny gray-black in the torchlight.
Sam barely had time to process the whole baffling, disgusting sight before the creature let out a shriek that sounded more like an expression of agony than fighting spirit. It arched back, arms thrown wide, and its stomach rapidly swelled until it was pushing on the flap of its garment.
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Then, all at once, it ruptured violently, a dull explosion that sent gore flying, spattering the walls and floor and ceiling all over. Stone shrapnel from the hide poncho went whistling past Sam's face, and suddenly she was blinking at a flare of pain in her right eye, vision gone black on that side, drawing a hiss of renewed pain from her when she tried to prod at it.
The exploded grumpling was well and truly dead, torn open from waist to crotch, and the only thing blocking her path now was its still-twitching corpse.
Halfway blinded, Sam kept moving. She couldn't afford to stop. Not for anything.
Only a few steps down the line, another wave of grumplings fell upon her in a coordinated assault. They came charging out of hidden tunnels at her sides that had been concealed behind fungal foliage, and several even dropped down on her from somewhere above.
This time, they lassoed her with thin ropes made from twined tendons, teams of them pulling on her from several directions at once to hold her in one place between them.
A pulsing fog billowed through the tunnel as she tried to fight back, further obscuring her already halved vision. The grumplings did not appear affected, even as the fog thickened and muffled her torch's light even further. Maybe they could navigate in the dark. Maybe the nettlegeist could choose to omit its minions from the skill effect. The why of it didn't really matter.
The grumplings jabbed at her with knives and hacked at her with little stone axes. They focused her efforts on her ankles, sides, head, backs of the knees. Anywhere and everywhere that might be a weak point. Their bodies pressed against her, smothering, each creature almost indistinguishable from the next as they stepped in and out in perfect sync, one grumpling never getting in another's way.
Another foreign thought echoed through her head, effortlessly cutting through the noise.
The fear chilling her veins heated, boiled, burned. Sam felt herself slip, falling into herself until she felt like she was a passenger in her own body. Swallowed by a single, all-consuming desire.
A need to tear these disgusting creatures into bloody pieces.
She was only vaguely cognizant of her body's actions, experienced as blurry snapshots of awareness. Smashing a grumpling against the wall. Stomping another into the ground until its brains spilled out. Throwing the hatchet at one running toward her and catching it between the eyes. A snapped neck. A shattered spine. A flattened rib cage. Picking one up by its oversized head and digging her thumbs into its eyes until they popped like grapes, then crushing its skull between her palms.
Through it all, she was walking forward. Forcing them back. Leaving broken bodies in her wake. They retreated occasionally to set up another ambush, but always came back. At the next intersection, a pair of those bloated ones came at her from opposite directions and threw themselves at her. She stood there and let them blow up, shrugging off the nicks she took from the shrapnel, and moved on.
For a while they stayed at range where they were only vague, shadowed figures and peppered her with blow gun fire, aiming for her face. The projectiles bounced off. She ignored them. The monsters realized that strategy wasn't going to work, and quickly abandoned it.
The fog undulated about her and solidified into ghostly shapes, trying to confuse and disorient her, but it made no difference as she was just walking without a plan anyway. She figured she had to be going in the right direction, going by the grumplings' increasingly desperate attempts to repel her.
They collapsed the ceiling on her head to try and bury her and cut off her advance, but she broke through the rubble and kept going. She encountered what she thought were just medium-sized rocks littering the ground until she stepped on one and it exploded in a grainy cloud of choking spores that made her torch flare brighter for a moment. Some sort of huge camouflaged puffballs.
She let none of it slow her, and finally made it out of the tunnel into a larger chamber. It was roughly circular and maybe thirty feet wall-to-wall, with a higher ceiling that extended a good five feet above her head. Old bones and moldering trash lay heaped in a huge pile at its center, illuminated by a hole in the ceiling that trickled a shaft of ambient dusk light down into the chamber, hitting off random pieces of dirty glass or tarnished scrap metal that poked out of the trash hoard.
A group of seven larger, burlier grumplings in rattling bone armor stood arrayed in front of the hoard, snarling and shrieking and slinging what Sam assumed to be insults in their own cursed language at her. They jabbed metal-tipped spears at her, warning her to stay away.
They were guarding a long, pudgy figure that lay on its side before the hoard, many legs working feebly, a fat tail swishing at the air. Sam could not see the thing all that clearly past its defenders, but it looked grotesquely pale and soft, like a huge, white worm or a floppy centipede. An old, withered grumpling knelt by the creature's side, hard at work extracting an arrow from its side with viscous, pus-like fluid bubbling past the shaft.
Sam's lip curled with disgust.
The nettlegeist willed its guards to part by frantically waving a slightly longer forelimb; chubby, clumsy and blunt-fingered like the arm of a baby. She got a good look at its face, then, which was no face at all, just a vague suggestion of a head on top of a fat neck, an eyeless, featureless shape only broken up by a thin mouth. "Human!" it cried in a butchered, oddly enunciated attempt at normal speech, body wiggling and contorting with the effort of producing words. "You leave! Make deal, you leave!"
"No," Sam replied.
"Take treasure! You leave, take treasure! No follow!"
"No," Sam repeated.
The chance for this to turn out peacefully had ended a good long while ago.