Figuring she might as well make use of the excellent shot that the nettlegeist had given her at its head, Sam reared back and hurled her hatchet, sent it spinning into the murk. Before the weapon had even left her hand, the aged grumpling healer had staggered up, arms thrown wide and scrambling into the path of the hatchet. The blade bit deep into the center of its chest with a thud, and the withered little creature tumbled away, choking on its own fluids.
That put a rather conclusive end to any negotiations the nettlegeist thought it was having. It only needed to give a long hiss as a command for its honor guard to rush forward, expelling brave war cries.
Sam dropped her torch and waited for them to reach her, four diving in to pressure her while the remaining three circled at a distance, angling for an opening. She caught the first spear thrust at her by the shaft, stopping the point an inch from her gut, and ripped it from the creature's hands. The grumpling didn't let go fast enough and was carried forward by the pull, stumbling face-first into the knee she had raised and waiting for it. It fell away, and she twirled the spear around in her fingers to get a proper fighting grip on it, then spiked it point-blank through the grumpling just now taking the place of the first one. It shattered the large animal skull that served as its breastplate and went clean through the torso, coming out the other end to impale the creature to the ground.
One of them released its weapon to leap at her from the side. She met the thing with a raised hand and caught it by its neck; left it dangling, flailing. Adjusting her grip, she brought the creature up to her mouth and effortlessly tore out a chunk of its throat, then tossed it carelessly aside. She spat out the chunk of sour-tasting esophagus at one of its advancing comrades.
They fell one by one, and even with steel instead of stone their weapons did not do much to hurt her. The last two tried to flee. She nailed one in the back of the head with a scooped-up rock as it made for the nearest tunnel, caving in its brainpan. The last one didn't make it more than two steps before she caught it by the ankle and it went flopping on its face. It screamed as she stepped on its spine, then screamed no more as she felt bone shatter like fragile glass.
Upon seeing that it no longer had any protection to hide behind, the nettlegeist forced its ponderous body upright with a frantic clicking of countless sharp limbs. Sam's mind struggled to figure out how to classify the creature. Snake? Worm? Centipede? Something even more primordial with its doughy, featureless body, like some vastly overgrown amoeba? A forest of mushrooms sprouted from its back in colorful ridges, releasing powdery waves of spores with every movement the monster made that mixed with the mist that now issued from around its feet and was quickly thickening throughout the chamber.
The fog soon concealed everything, leaving her blind to the creature's movements and everything beyond arm's reach. Its spores clung to her throat and burned the one eye she still kept open. She shut that eye too, and strained her hearing for the tap-tap-tap of many legs and whisper of its dragging underbelly as it circled her.
"Be careful," Sam murmured. "The nettlegeist might try to flee. You should surround the den to cut off its escape."
"Good."
That was just a precaution, though. She didn't think the nettlegeist was really going to run. If that was its plan, it would have done so by now, but it was still circling, circling. It was done running. It was setting up one last, desperate attack.
Sam saw no need to disappoint it. She dropped her arms by her sides and waited, daring it to do its worst. A few moments later she felt a strong impact out of nowhere that would have sent her stumbling if her legs hadn't already been wrapped up in a thick, slimy tail. The nettlegeist wrapped itself around her, going higher and higher up her body, its legs digging into her clothes and skin until she was trussed up all the way to her shoulders.
The nettlegeist's blank face slowly slid into view in front of her, its pale countenance partially blending in with the fog that surrounded it. It squeezed her tighter, choking her, and its toothless, tongueless mouth gaped into a wide, gaping hole as it spewed out a watery cloud of clinging spores directly in her face.
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Holding her breath through it, Sam shrugged one of her pinned arms higher, then higher still, extracting it by inches. Her task was made significantly easier by the slickness of its smooth, thin-skinned bulk reducing friction. When she finally dragged it loose, the nettlegeist snapped its mouth shut and tried to jerk its head back out of reach, but Sam caught it in her hand, digging her fingers into the spongy flesh and holding it in place.
The nettlegeist's myriad limbs scraped against her all over as it struggled for its life, and it let out a long, thin hiss that intensified into a panicked whine as she clamped down harder. Its head seemingly did not have a skull inside, its tissues providing only token resistance. When her fingers had nearly met in the middle, hand closed most of the way into a fist, the monster finally went slack. Insectile limbs jerked spasmodically as its elongated body released its cramping hold.
Sam let the disgusting monstrosity fall away, its upper body slowly unwinding as it sagged down her, and she stepped free of the part still clinging to her legs. She went over to the dead old grumpling and pinned a foot against its small stomach to jerk her hatchet back out, then took it back to the nettlegeist to behead it, just to be safe. The blade being as small as it was, it took a handful of hard chops before the head came completely off.
Standing up off her haunches, Sam kicked the formless head off into the dark. She gave a heavy sigh, feeling suddenly exhausted, and she let the blood-slick hatchet fall from her stiff fingers to clatter on the ground. Bodies littered the chamber around her, some still twitching occasionally.
It was over.
She'd done what needed to be done.
[Congratulations! You have reached Level 8!]
Yay. Go me.
* * *
Mongrel
At some point, the faint screams and other, more unspeakable noises issuing from the den ceased, overtaken by an oppressive silence. Then the troll announced Sam's success, and the ones who had been placed around the clearing to cut off the nettlegeist's retreat were able to pull back to the temporary camp they had set up.
Not long after, the kid came wandering out of one of the monster tunnels; clothes gone to tatters, caked up to her eyeballs in blood. She walked slowly, without any particular energy or purpose. Mongrel jogged over to meet her, offering an arm to steady herself on.
She declined. "I'm all right," she said with a tired smile, one of her eyes pinched shut. "Most of the blood isn't mine."
He brought her over to the camp and sat her down so he could be the judge of that. It turned out she was telling the truth. Despite looking an absolute state, she really wasn't very badly injured. Aside from a few scrapes and cuts and minor puncture wounds, she was still in decent shape.
The worst damage she had sustained was probably the eye, which had somehow been pierced by a tiny flint shard. Number One was able to extract the foreign object, but aside from that there wasn't much to be done until they could get her to a Physician in Talltop, meaning she'd probably be keeping up her Will Greene impression for the next little while.
Number One plucked out stone pieces from a few of the other wounds as well, then cleaned them with alcohol and bandaged the worst ones. Sam thanked the old chimp with a stroke on the head and a tug on his earlobe, but appeared too weary to say much.
He imagined it was probably more mental than physical exhaustion that was plaguing her. Popping one's cherry could affect people quite powerfully, and Sam was a girl of particularly sensitive moral constitution.
"How'd it go in there?" Mongrel asked, crouched next to her, when she didn't say anything for a while and just sat on a foldout stool staring at nothing.
"It went well," she said in a distant voice that was nothing like her usual chirpy tone. "The nettlegeist is dead. I think most of the grumplings too. Maybe all of them. I dunno."
"All right, kid." He patted her leg and gave her a sympathetic smile. "You did a good job."
"Thanks."
Mongrel stood away to give the girl some room. The mercenary woman, Price, approached him as soon as he finished talking with her. "How the fuck did she just do that?" she asked, grabbing Mongrel by his sleeve.
Mongrel glanced down at the offending hand, then back up at the hard-faced woman. "What do you want me to say? The kid's got guts, is all."
"Fuck off, man. A Level 6 Laborer doesn't pull the type of shit she just pulled with 'guts'."
"Level 8, actually," Sam corrected absently. "I just haven't had time to sleep yet."
"Fuck me," the mercenary muttered, rubbing her forehead. Realizing that Mongrel wasn't about to give her a satisfying explanation, she stalked off to fetch some firewood, muttering obscenities under her breath.
Oatmeal and Flowerboy were suitably awestruck, whispering amongst themselves about what might have happened inside that den. The troll was the only one who didn't seem to have an opinion. Once his genius mode ran out, he went back to picking his nose and reading his books.
It was pretty much night already, and the kid looked like she could use a bit of downtime, so Mongrel decided that they would camp out right there in the clearing for the night. He set up a rotating watch to keep an eye out just in case the grumplings weren't quite genocided out of existence, or some other unspeakable thing decided to spring on them out of the woods.