Babossa’s giant, black eyes narrowed as he rounded the final bend of the dirt path. The rough-cut pathway led up to a stone landing similar to the one at the other tunnel and then ended abruptly against it. He strode toward it vigorously with long, heavy strides and stepped onto the landing within seconds of laying eyes on it.
His nostrils flared in anger as he noticed that none of his servants were around. The tunnel entrance stood before him without the slightest hint of activity. No demidemons stood guard outside nor were any of them shepherding slaves back and forth from within the mountain. His rage had been steadily growing for the past three days, but as he looked around at the lack of activity, it reached a boiling point.
Thoughts of what he'd find in the tunnel had filled his mind since the moment he'd set out. His trip around the mountain had left him with little else to occupy his time. As a bolos demon, he had no need for sleep and he was too angry to eat, so he'd focused entirely on what could be happening within the seventh tunnel. A quick glance at the tunnel entrance told him that his gut feeling about the tunnel had been right and his anger boiled even hotter.
What have these worthless demi been doing? Do they think that they can just ignore my orders and somehow survive?
A worse thought had occurred to him and occasionally popped back into his head. He clenched his massive jaw and ground his flat teeth together as he once again considered that his demidemons had discovered his prize.
The demi must have figured out what I’m after. Those backstabbing little maggots probably found Gormum’s fortress and decided to search for the gallovine fruit without me. They mean to keep it for themselves. Those filthy, little demi; I’ll kill them all!
A pair of slaves wandered out of the tunnel entrance just as he reached it. The pair appeared lost and confused, wandering out of the tunnel as if by blind luck; bad luck. Both slaves walked stoop shouldered and with their eyes darting back and forth warily as if expecting something to attack them at any moment. They only took a few steps out of the tunnel’s mouth before they noticed Babossa and stopped dead in their tracks. At once, they both began shaking in fear and tried to shrink away as if hoping to avoid his notice.
If not so angry, Babossa would’ve laughed at their meek, pathetic fear. His huge, powerful body inspired fear in nearly everyone that laid eyes on it, and those that didn’t fear him on sight learned the error of their ways at the end of his fist. With tan, leathery skin stretched across thick slabs of muscle the likes of which no man could ever hope to possess, he was the very definition of monstrous. Wide, powerful shoulders flanked a neck so thick and stocky, it nearly dwarfed his head. Long, ivory horns protruded from the sides of his head, two on each side and curved forward in front of his nearly human face. The only parts of him that didn’t ooze with obvious power were the tufts of shaggy hair that covered his chest and shoulders, but they only made him seem even more unclean and menacing. He'd always been amused by the reactions that slaves had upon seeing him, but he was far too angry to care this time.
“Where are the demidemons?” he boomed at the obviously frightened slaves. “Tell me!”
The slaves shook violently in fear and one appeared to be having trouble breathing. The man appeared to be on the verge of passing out and the other slave stood shivering beside him, whimpering hysterically. Babossa scowled at them for a moment before he realized that what he was doing was useless.
Slaves can’t talk; pathetic little insects. Even if they knew what was going on, they couldn’t tell me. These slaves are completely-
“Useless!”
He reached out and grabbed the nearest slave, the man that was about to faint, and squeezed. He felt dozens of bones instantly crunch beneath the iron grip of his fingers, but he stopped squeezing before the man was completely crushed. The slave rasped and sobbed in pain as if that was all he could manage despite his grave injuries, but Babossa ignored his agony-filled groans. Turning around, he cocked his arm back and threw the man’s crushed, broken body off the mountainside. The slave soared a few hundred feet into the air, flailing uselessly, before he was caught by gravity and plummeted down out of sight.
Roaring, he turned back to the slave that remained frozen in place by the tunnel entrance. He loomed in close until his horns nearly grazed the man's face and the slave’s whimpering increased dramatically. A puddle formed around the slave’s feet and Babossa drew back from the slave, once again rising to his full height. Curling his lip in disgust, he raised his arm and the slave’s eyes widened in horror.
Without a second thought, he swatted the man aside with the back of his hand. The slave hardly had time to react or even utter a sound of pain before he crashed into a boulder beside the tunnel entrance. Stone and flesh mingled in a bloody tapestry of broken shapes under the force of impact. Babossa snorted out through his nose and returned his focus to the tunnel entrance.
Those traitorous demi will die much slower.
With a growl, Babossa practically dove into the tunnel. Dropping onto his hands and feet, he sped down the tunnel like a great beast in search of prey. The double-jointed nature of his bolos hips and knees allowed him to move as easily on all fours as he could on his two feet alone. Even down on his hands and feet, the tunnel was a tight fit for him, and he nearly filled the space completely. The occasional bit of jutting rock caught him in the arm or leg, but he hardly noticed and they were torn from the walls by brute force in the face of his relentless advance. A single thought was the center of all of his attention: the gallovine.
He’d only gone a short ways into the tunnel, before he noticed that someone was slowly wandering toward him. Believing that the approaching person was yet another slave wandering freely through the tunnel, his anger surged. His pace increased, and he rapidly closed the distance between them.
As he moved closer to the approaching wanderer, he noticed the dark, burgundy skin of a demidemon. The demi swayed as it walked and had its clawed hands covering most of its face. Babossa could make out rivulets of blood running down the demi’s arms from between its fingers.
The pathetic weakling is injured? The little thieves must be killing each other to claim the gallovine.
The demi slowed to a stop as he heard Babossa approaching, but Babossa kept the same rapid pace until he reached the demi. Stopping just before he crushed the wounded demi, he glared down at it with white-hot rage. The demi pathetically raised its head up to look at him and dropped one of its arms, uncovering half of its face.
“Who did this to you?” Babossa boomed at the demi, barely able to hold his rage in check.
Hesitantly, the demi lowered its other hand from its face. The entire left side of the demi’s face was riddled with deep gashes and angry, purple bruises. Its left eye was gone along with a chunk of its nose and upper cheek. Glimpses of ivory could be seen in several places where the flesh had been torn back to reveal the demi's cheekbone. The remainder of its nose was broken and crushed to the right.
“One of the slaves surprised me from behind with a rock,” the demi rasped, its voice thick with fear.
A slave attacked one of the demi and managed to injure it; his death was probably quite messy. The other demi should’ve killed this one too, though. Any demi weak enough to be maimed like this by a human is worthless and far too weak to be allowed to live.
“A slave attacked you from behind, and did that to your face? Pathetic. Where are the others? Why haven’t I heard from any of you for days?”
The demi’s swaying motion increased and it looked as if it was about to fall over. Babossa quickly reached out and seized it by the shoulder in an iron grip and forced it to remain on its feet. Bringing his face down to eye level with the demi, he glared into its remaining eye.
“What's going on here?”
To accentuate his point, Babossa squeezed the demi’s shoulder until he could feel its bones beginning to crack. The demidemon’s eye became wild with fear and it grunted in pain.
“They’re dead; all of them. I’m the
only one left besides the slaves and... her.”
“Who; who killed my minions?” Babossa’s rage was taking hold of him again and he could feel his control slipping away.
“A demon that was pretending to be one of the slaves,” the demi rasped. “We’ve been having trouble with her for a while. She’s quietly been killing us off for days now.”
“Fool. Didn’t you think that I’d want to know about something like this? Why didn’t any of you come and tell me?”
“At first demi began disappearing one by one and we didn’t know what was happening, but then she started killing small groups and we found her out. We’ve tried to attack her several times, but she’s just too powerful. There were only five of us left, so we tried one last time. We caught her completely off-guard and nearly had her, but that slave interfered and did this to me.”
“What did this demon look like?”
“I only saw her for a moment as she killed the others, but there was no mistaking what she was; a spire demon.”
“You let a spire demon walk around in my mountain!” Babossa bellowed, his anger bursting free of his control.
“Please, I didn’t-"
“Useless!”
Babossa squeezed his hand into a fist, obliterating the demi’s shoulder with ease. The demi screamed and fell to the ground, its arm dangling by a few scraps of torn flesh.
Ignoring the pathetic screams and cries of the demi, Babossa smeared the blood from his hand on the wall beside him and continued forward. His rage had grown into unbridled fury that blinded him to all else. A few steps into his resumed descent down the sloping tunnel, he felt the delicious crunch of the demi being crushed beneath his foot, but his fury took no notice.
A spire demon whore is trying to steal my gallovine! No, never, I won’t let it happen; it’s mine! I will claim Gormum’s power and become the most powerful demon The Nightlands has ever known!
He rushed past the cells where the prisoners were kept and didn’t slow at all. Babossa no longer cared about slaves or the demi; all that remained was beating that spire demon to the gallovine. Sweat ran down over his thick, leathery brow into his eyes, but he refused to slow down to wipe it away.
“No one steals from Babossa!” he bellowed into the tunnel with ear-shattering force. “Do you hear me? I will find the gallovine, and I will find you, as well!”
Despite the stinging sweat that ran into his eyes, Babossa could make out an odd section of tunnel in the distance ahead of him. The stone seemed to be made of light and shined brighter than any of the small glowstones that studded the tunnel walls around him. As he neared the section, he was forced to squint and eventually turn his head aside. The light was exceedingly painful to look at; demon eyes could see exceptionally well in the dark but were extremely sensitive to bright lights.
Babossa slowed as he approached the strange glowing section of rock. Black stone surrounded a wall of glowing light, and, for an instant, he thought that another lightwielder had somehow found their way into the tunnel.
He thought of the three skulls that swung from his belt. All three had come from foolish lightwielders that he’d killed only a few weeks earlier. After a moment of consideration, he decided that it was unlikely that another lightwielder would come alone to challenge him.
Those weaklings were almost as pathetic as the rest of the human trash around here.
Squinting as much as he could, Babossa briefly looked the glowing section over. The tunnel became much smaller at the point where the light began, large enough for only a man or demidemon to continue forward. The light that spilled from the opening in the rock seemed to be coming from a dense cluster of glowstones. The glowstones formed a narrow tunnel that led into a space beyond that he couldn’t quite make out, but he knew instantly what it meant.
Gormum’s fortress; finally it’s within reach!
The glowing passage of light between the glowstones was only wide enough for him to fit his arm through, but he guessed that it was no more than 15 feet long. Iron-tough skin coupled with tremendous strength would easily allow him to destroy such a pathetic obstacle and he knew it. He nearly laughed out loud at the challenge to his might, but then he realized that a spire demon would be able to slip through the opening almost as easily as a man.
That spire demon must already be inside trying to rob me of my prize!
Bracing himself on his feet and one hand, he immediately began pounding away at the glowing tunnel with his free hand. Thunderous blows rained down on the stone, one after another, shattering it into tiny fragments. After demolishing a few feet of the glowstone obstruction, he reached out with his huge hand and scooped the debris out of his way. The piercing light had become slightly less intense than before, and, squinting, he could see that only 12 feet remained between him and the ruins.
He took a single step forward and resumed his thunderous barrage of furious punches. Black rock and glowstone alike shattered on contact causing bits and fragments to fly from the obstruction in shimmering clouds. Vibrations from his assault shook the tunnel and dust rained down from above in response. The tunnel was quickly filled with thick, choking clouds.
Ten more feet.
The tunnel began to shake around him as if responding to his attack, but he ignored it. Cracks formed along the ceiling and small pieces of rock joined in the growing cloud of dust that rained down on him. Undaunted, he hammered away at the obstruction, no longer even bothering to scoop the debris aside.
Seven more feet.
The shaking grew worse, and, with an audible crack, a large chunk of rock nearly as big as Babossa himself broke away from the ceiling. It landed squarely on his right shoulder, and he staggered under its crushing weight, momentarily stunned. With his right arm still braced against the floor, he managed to hold up the rock’s immense weight while he continued to savagely pound away at the dwindling obstruction with his left hand.
Only four more feet!
Cracks split the surrounding rock into countless pieces and the entire passage quivered ominously; threatening to collapse at any moment. Babossa groaned as the weight on his shoulder continued to grow at a staggering rate. He felt as if the entire mountain was pressing down on him, but he refused to relent or be defeated.
Despite the painfully bright light, his eyes were wide and manic as he heaved upward with all of his might. In the brief moment that his shoulder was free of the crushing weight, he made his move. Propelled by the incredible strength of his legs, he surged forward and burst through the last few feet of rock and glowstones as the ceiling came down around him.
Babossa exploded into the room beyond the tunnel, tearing apart most of the wall along the way to the thunderous applause of several hundred tons of stone crashing down behind him. A dense cloud of dust filled the room as the tunnel continued to collapse. Countless slivers of shattered glowstone danced through the air amidst the dust creating a shimmering mist that rolled across the room in a wave.
Babossa slowly rose to his full height and smiled. The spacious room had obviously been built to accommodate large demons like him and was far more comfortable than the cramped tunnel had been. Turning his head, he quickly scanned the damage to the tunnel. A wall of solid rock had filled in the entrance completely and a distant rumbling suggested that even more rock was continuing to fall on top of the already collapsed tunnel. His smile broadened as he got his rage back under control.
Good, this way no one leaves here. That spire demon is trapped in here along with me and has no way to escape from me. I'll be sure to deal with her as soon as I've obtained the gallovine fruit. Once I’ve taken Gormum’s power as my own, I can simply make a new exit and walk right out, but first I need that power!