They came at me as a group, the first one lunging through the fog with a hiss that sounded disturbingly close to a wet, hungry growl, but I did not move.
The illusion washed over my senses as the creature attempted to conceal its approach, filling the tunnel with false movement and phantom shapes while the real attack came from somewhere entirely different.
I swung my sword toward the left without turning my head, catching the creature exactly where it emerged, and its claws struck the silver-alloyed blade hard enough to throw a shower of sparks across the mist.
The foglet recoiled from the impact, but I was already reaching into the space where I knew another creature had to be hiding, closing my gauntleted hand around what looked like nothing at all.
My fingers tightened around an invisible throat, for something that supposedly did not exist, the resistance beneath my hand was very real, I gave the creature one short, violent jerk before the sound of its neck breaking echoed through the sewer.
The fog around me thinned a margin as the dead monster flickered back into visibility, its body sagging inside my grip while its long limbs hung uselessly toward the filthy water. I pulled my arm backward and threw it down the tunnel with enough force that the corpse carved a path through the mist as it struck another foglet hidden inside, the resulting collision sent both creatures tumbling across the stone floor in a tangled heap of limbs and claws, the monsters in fog seemed to hesitate at the sight of my strength.
That created the opening I needed, I lowered my sword and slid it back into its scabbard, because the last thing I wanted was to set my meals on fire. I flexed my fingers inside the reffitted gauntlets, testing the articulation while the steel plates shifted smoothly against one another around my knuckles.
Tholin had done excellent work with them, even under the strain of my grip the joints remained responsive and the reinforced fingers moved almost as naturally as bare hands.
I curled my hand into a fist several times, then opened it again, feeling the limits of the armour before turning my attention back toward the surrounding fog.
There was enough sturdiness in the steel around my fingers and wrists to let me put serious force into a strike, but I was not interested in discovering exactly how much punishment the metal could absorb by abusing it with my impossible strength.
Crushing force was the obvious answer, as hardy as they were, these creatures were thin--fast and difficult to hit, yes-- but they were not invulnerable and as I had already proven with the first one, I could still kill these things with my bare hands.
Eventually the creatures seemed to gather their wits, the fog moved around me and somewhere to my right, a child began screaming. "Help me, someone please, I am trapped down here, and I can hear them coming for me."
The voice sounded frightened enough to fool a normal man, the breathless panic of a child attempting to hide while monsters searched the darkness around him. I did not even turn.
Another voice came from behind me almost immediately, this one deeper and more desperate, screaming as if being torn into. I stepped sideways instead, extending one arm into empty space just as a clawed hand materialized from the mist.
My gauntlet closed around the creature's wrist.
The foglet tried to pull away, but my grip tightened before it could disappear again, and the sudden resistance told me precisely where its shoulder had to be.
I yanked it forward, caught its throat with my other hand and slammed its body against the nearest brick pillar hard enough to shake dust from the mortar.Its skull struck first, then its spine, and I tightened my fingers around its neck until the creature stopped struggling.
The body sagged and I dropped it into the water.
"You're wasting your time with all these illusions, I know how you creatures think." I announced as another distortion rushed through the fog.
I moved before the creature finished materializing, my body crossed the distance so quickly that the water beneath my boots had not yet settled when I reached the point where I knew it would appear.
My left hand caught the foglet beneath the jaw and my right fist drove into the hollow cavity in its chest.
The impact folded its torso around my arm, and I felt several bones crack beneath the force before I seized its shoulder and twisted, tearing the joint apart with a wet pop.
It roared.
I drove my knee into its face and lifted it from the ground, then threw it hard enough to send it skidding across the slick stone where it collided with another creature emerging from the haze.
The second foglet barely had time to react before I was already upon it. I caught one arm, twisted beneath it and used the momentum of its own charge to wrench the limb across its chest, driving my forearm into the side of its head until the skull gave beneath the pressure.
The body collapsed into the shallow water, the first creature was already trying to recover. I stepped on its chest.
It tried to rake it's claws across my greave, but I simply stepped off, the claws missing before I stomped down, the creature's ribs collapsed beneath my boot.
It spasmed once, then went still. I looked around the tunnel, the mist was still thick enough to obscure the far walls, but unlike the first time I fought these things in Caed Dhu, it no longer felt confusing.
The first time I had fought foglets, their mist had been genuinely disorienting, they did not simply hide themselves inside ordinary fog and expect darkness to do the work for them.
They manipulated the environment around themselves, bending light, scattering moisture and creating layers of false movement that made distance, direction and even the apparent position of the creatures unreliable.
A man could hear claws approaching from his left while the foglet was already moving behind him. He could see a silhouette ahead while the actual body slipped through the mist several paces away. He could hear a familiar voice calling for help and follow it directly toward a creature that had never made the sound at all.
It was a remarkably effective hunting method, it was also a hunting method I knew more intimately then even any witcher in the world.
The first time I encountered foglets, the mist had overwhelmed me, and the only reason the only thing they butchered was a horse, is because I relied on my physical might as a vampire.
Afterward, however, I had consumed their blood, and through my Gift I had taken fragments of their memories, their instincts, their habits and the strange impressions that accompanied whatever passed for a hunting mind inside those emaciated bodies.
I remembered how they approached prey from different angles, how they coordinated movement without needing to physically see one another, how they used the mist itself as another set of limbs, extending their awareness through every distortion and every false image they created.
Most importantly, I remembered their patience. Foglets did not simply attack the first opening they saw. They waited, they watched and they pressured their prey until the prey became frightened enough to create the opening for them.
That understanding changed the fight completely, there were four of them remaining now and I could more or less pinpoint where all of them were, not because their footsteps were loud, but because the pattern of hunting they used had become familiar enough that I could distinguish intention from deception.
One was circling behind me, another was remaining low in the water ahead, a third had climbed onto the wall above my right shoulder, and the fourth was waiting farther down the corridor without making the slightest attempt to conceal its position.
I smiled beneath the visor, flexing my fingers inside Tholin's reinforced gauntlets as the fog curled lazily around my armour. "It is a good idea to rely on what you know, but all you are accomplishing is making this go on longer than it needs to."
The thought came almost humorously, why would they try anything new when the hunting pattern that had served them for generations was already ingrained into whatever passed for instinct inside their misshapen minds?
Predators might eventually abandon a familiar tactic when their prey proved more dangerous than expected, but monsters were governed by something stranger than simple caution, and the foglets seemed almost incapable of accepting that the thing stalking them had become the greater threat.
The creature above me dropped from the wall without warning, claws extending toward the back of my helmet as its body disappeared into the mist halfway through the descent. I caught it by the ankle before it reached my shoulders, my hand closing around the limb with enough force that the bones beneath my fingers creaked audibly through the surrounding fog.
The creature immediately attempted to vanish again, its outline dissolving into the white haze as whatever magic concealed it tried to pull its body away from my grasp.
It accomplished nothing.
I swung downward before it could understand what had happened, and the foglet reappeared halfway through the motion just in time for its body to strike the stone floor with enough force to crack the surface beneath its back.
Its limbs convulsed once against the wet stone before going slack, leaving me holding an awkwardly twisted leg for another second before I released it into the shallow stream flowing through the tunnel.
Another came from the water almost immediately, rising beneath the mist with its claws already reaching toward my abdomen. I stepped aside before the attack fully developed, allowing the creature's momentum to carry it past me while my arm caught its wrist and redirected its charge.
My fist drove directly into its elbow with enough force to reverse the joint, and the resulting crack disappeared beneath the creature's shriek as I twisted its arm behind its back.
The shoulder followed with a wet pop that carried clearly through the sewer, leaving the foglet hanging helplessly from my grip while its remaining arm clawed uselessly at the air.
I drove my forehead into its face through the visor, feeling its skull give beneath the impact before I seized its torso with both hands and hurled it headfirst into the nearest brick wall.
The wall shuddered from the collision, several pieces of mortar dropping into the water as the creature slid downward and disappeared beneath the surface without another sound. I released it and turned toward the final two, who had finally stopped moving inside the mist.
That amused me more than the fighting had, their hesitation was the first real indication that whatever instincts controlled them had finally recognised that their usual methods were no longer producing anything resembling a successful hunt.
"What are you waiting around for? I know you're not scared, you don't even understand the concept." Obviously neither answered.
Instead, the fog shifted several paces ahead as one of them moved cautiously backward, while the other remained farther away and began circling toward another angle.
I could almost appreciate the near intelligence behind the decision, because continuing to throw themselves at an opponent they had already failed to overwhelm would have been wasteful even by their standards.
Unfortunately for them, they had just given me something far more useful than an opening, they had given me a predictable pattern.
I lowered my shoulders slightly and planted one boot into the shallow water, allowing the muscles beneath my armour to settle into the position I needed.
Then I accelerated, there was no warning or dramatic movement for them to react to, and certainly no opportunity for the fog to disguise what happened once my body crossed the distance between us.
One moment the far end of the passage was empty except for drifting mist, and the next my gauntleted hand had already closed around the throat of the first foglet.
Its body began to vanish almost immediately, but I had already identified the position of its shoulders and hips from the movement preceding the attack.
I drove my other fist directly into its chest, collapsing its ribcage inward before twisting my arm and throwing the creature sideways into the second foglet. The impact caught the other monster before it could disappear, sending both bodies crashing against the stone wall in a tangled mass of limbs and claws.
I was already there when they fell. I seized the nearer creature by the head and drove it downward into the water hard enough to send a sheet of filthy spray across the tunnel, holding it beneath the surface until its struggling became little more than a series of weak spasms against my gauntlet.
The final foglet managed to stand. It did not, however, manage to understand why that had been allowed to happen.
I crossed the remaining distance before it could complete its next movement, caught it beneath the jaw and drove my knee into its abdomen hard enough to fold its body around the impact.
My hand shifted from its throat to the back of its skull, and I slammed its face into the brick beside us before wrenching its head sideways with a single violent movement.
The creature collapsed into the sewer water, joining the others in the darkness beneath my boots, silence returned almost immediately.
The fog continued to drift through the tunnel, but it was thinner now, and the voices had stopped, the scraping claws had vanished, and the only sounds remaining were the distant rush of filthy water and the soft settling of mist around my armour.
I looked down at the six bodies scattered around me, and took of my helmet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blood. Rot. MINE.The marsh-water tasted of old mud and slow death, but the wind brought a new sickness, a heavy, greasy reek that bit the back of our long throats.
Three of us; three pairs of yellow eyes splitting the dark. We dropped the half-chewed corpse-prey and let the swamp swallow it. This new stink was thick: it was a fat, oily challenge.
The word is nothing to us, the taste of the air is everything. It tasted like the fat, stupid cave-things that dare to dig in our dirt. Intruders, a feast, a giant carcass left out to spoil, begging for our claws to tear it apart before the worms could finish it.
We uncoiled, our long, starved limbs slid through the reeds. The mist came with us; thick, white, and breathing. We are the mist, in darkness we spilled over the riverbank and down into the black throat of the stone hole where the earth had cracked open.
No light, good. We do not need light, we see the heat-pulses of the earth, feel the damp stone shivering under our claws.
*Click. Click. Click.*
The reek grew teeth, it choked the narrow tunnel.
The first of us lunged. Disappointment, not a carcass. A strip of hairless skin wrapped tight around a jagged tooth of rock. It was soaked in a foul, mashed paste. Crushed roots. Sour blood. The mashed-up brains and marrow of a big, stupid cave-beast.
One of us snapped its jaws down, ripping the dead not food away. Another buried its long face into the stone, licking the dried gore until its gums bled. The third--me--whirled, long neck twitching, snapping at the shadows. The air hissed, the mist boiled around our humped backs.
More of smells, deeper, the foul trail bled down into the dark. We trotted after it, bellies scraping the wet filth.The stone paths grew choked with water, down the path came the soft, bloated patter of webbed feet.
Webbed food, many of them. Pale, slimy water-corpses creeping out from a broken archway. They gurgled, they bared their dull, flat teeth. They thought the dark belonged to them.
The first one leaped, claws out.I vanished into my own breath. The food's claws tore empty air where ribs had been a heartbeat before. I hardened out of the white smoke behind it. My long arms whipped down, my talons opened the soft, grey skin of its back from neck to rump. It hit the stones, leaking black blood.
The rest rushed us, snapping and splashing through the den. Blind, heavy meat, we danced through them like smoke. A clawed hand punched through the back of a hairless skull, a throat torn open, spraying cold, stagnant brine.
They tried to kill us, we did not let them. The oily stink had set our blood on fire, everything in these tunnels was an enemy, everything was food.
When the splashing stopped, we feasted, we cracked their soft ribs and lapped the cold, thin puddle-blood from the floor, it was not enough, not what the smell promised.
The reek called again from the deep dark, stronger and so we slinked towards it.
The path spat us out into a massive, hollow cavern. The air here was blinding. The smell of prey things was everywhere, but so was the musk of our own kind.
Three more of us emerged from the white fog, their long, grey hide slick with fresh prey. Their yellow eyes burned into ours.
We spoke no words, only the low, vibrating rattle in our chests.
We lunged; the cavern turned into a storm of rotted teeth and screaming mist. Claws scraped sparked against the stone. We tore at each other's long ears, gouging shoulders, establishing the order of the pack with teeth and blood, a violent, shrieking tangle until the instinct shifted.
Why kill each other? The fat, rotting prize was still ahead.
The fighting ceased as fast as it began. One of the old cavern-dwellers sniffed a fresh scent bound to a pillar, grunted, and slipped down the throat of the deepest tunnel. We followed, six of us now. A pack of smoke and claws moving deeper beneath the smell of prey.
Failure after failure, our prey eluded us, a strip of cloth on a cave wall. A smear of paste on a low arch. A pile of crushed marrow where the tunnel narrowed. We did not ask why the meat was waiting for us. We do not have the brains for "why?" The scent said come. Our instinct said claim.
We arrived at fissure, our query was nowhere to be seen, but above us lied more prey, the air was dead here. Hot and heavy, but with a wonderful, massive rot.
And around us a mountain of small, soft prey scattered in the corners, rats with crushed heads. A two legged corpse, green and bloated, wedged in a grate, bones, it was a perfect larder, a perfect den. The white fog we breathe filled the high chambers, settling thick and heavy, trapped by the ancient stone ceiling. It would never clear.
Six pairs of long, grey hands meant more meat could be cornered, more throats could be torn before the prey knew it was surrounded. There was no brotherhood in the dark, no love or loyalty, only the shared instinct of the pack. If a meal tried to turn back, there was always another wall of teeth already waiting in the mist.
The pale water-crawlers were the first to break, their numbers whittled down until the shallows ran black with stagnant brine. Then the skittering cave-rats went quiet, their nests emptied one by one. Soon after, the soft, furred things on the mud-banks stopped coming down to the water to drink.
Then the two-legged meat began coming down into the dark.
The first was a sour, stumbling creature that reeked of fermented grain, collapsing into the filth before a single claw touched its skin. The second was a mud-man who smelled of grease and sharp earth. The third was a soft, weeping one who had followed the hollow, mimicking baby-cries they blew through the drainage pipes. None of them ever went back up to the light.
The two-legged ones were easier than the water-crawlers. They were so soft, so agonizingly slow. The moment the white smoke touched them, their hearts went wild; a frantic, skittering pulse that made them stupid with panic. They ran blindly into the stone corners, having no rivers to dive into, no deep bogs to hide their pink skin.
Every throat the pack tore made the stone chambers feel more like home. Every rotting pile of ribs left to molder in the corners made the air sweeter. Every wet swallow of blood reinforced the raw instinct that had dragged them down into the earth.
Now, six mist brothers breathed together inside a nest built by coincidnce. They did not know the word why. They could not comprehend the word who. They only knew that the stink had promised them dominion.
Then, the air in the nest changed.
A smell echoed through the stone, many yet one, a hunter.
It was not just the soft allure of the two-legged meat, nor was it's stride the sloshing steps of webbed meat. It was a sound they had never licked from a bone, a rhythm that carried no scent of prey.
Six grey bodies froze instantly, the white smoke boiled hot and thick from our hollow chests, masking the ancient archways until the chamber disappeared. One of us lifted their elongated, hairless head, tilting its ears toward the sound. Another slid silently up the wet wall, its talons anchoring into the cracks of the vaulted ceiling. A third dissolved completely into the rising vapour. The rest fanned out, their long arms dragging against the stone floor as they shifted into the killing ring they had used a hundred times before.
Something was walking into their dark. Something dangerous, something that did not belong in the earth.
We waited, suspended in our own breath, then in the distance a heavy boot stepped into the white mist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthias Harlow
I staggered sideways, my fist slamming into the wet elven brickwork with a heavy, metallic crash that cracked the ancient mortar. My gauntleted hand clawed blindly at the wall, fingers crushing stone into powder as the world violently unraveled behind my eyes.
Cold stone, the iron sting of blood, an electric jitter of a warm heart stumbling through the mist, entirely blind to the teeth waiting in the blind spot.
My head snapped back, teeth grinding hard against each other. Before my own mind could form a single line of defense, a secondary, suffocating tide of alien consciousness breached the dam.
Darkness, the slow, rhythmic push of six chests exhaling the white void. The sweet, metallic stench of rotting marrow drifting up from the deep vents; the scent of border lines, of a yard claimed, of fat carcasses to be dragged into the dark.
My vision splintered into a kaleidoscope of chaos. I reeled forward, dragging myself against the rough bricks to keep from dropping into the sludge. "Hunt…" The words didn't sound human, they were flat, vibrating with a hollow, metallic resonance that didn't belong to my vocal cords.
Run. No, wait. Let the two-legged thing swing, the meat hears the ghost-voice. The meat is confused, drop from the wall. Now.
My fingers curled into claws, flexing involuntarily. The mist around me thickening. I felt the vapor before I saw it, an aggressive, damp pressure coiling around my shins and creeping up the crimson linen of my surcoat, no longer functioning as an external element but as a direct extension of my own will.
The fog is not empty. The fog is our skin.
I took am unneeded sharp, gasping breath. The mist reacted instantly, surging forward not in response to the sewer currents, but following the raw, unspoken command of a muscle I stolen. I raised my left hand. The white soup swirled violently around the metal, climbing my forearm like liquid grease and swallowing the polished steel plates until the entire limb simply ceased to exist in the atmosphere.
I lowered it. The armor materialized out of the white void.
'Go feed, gorge yourself.'
"Fuck! No!" The protest was a croak, but my mind didn't care. The influence was spreading. The visual displacement bled upward, erasing my shoulders, then my chest plate, until I was nothing but a pair of floating iron hands hovering in a blinding, milky vacuum. When the shell finally snapped back into focus, a terrifying, absolute recognition flared in the back of my brain.
Hunt.
The reflex was faster than logic. My body simply conformed to the mist, I disappeared. There was no transition, no physical shift, only the dizzying, sickening awareness that I was still standing exactly where I had been, yet my own down-turned eyes could no longer find the contours of my own chest. I thrust a hand outward, striking the wall.
My hand went through the wall, and I pulled it back, and the metal shimmered back into visibility.
"I need to get myself together." The response to that thought wasn't a voice in my head, but a wailing instinct: a visceral, heavy needle driven straight through the base of my neck.
Hunt.
I recoiled, my skull cracking against the brickwork. "Stop!"
HUNT.
The command thrummed through me. The surrounding fog vibrated, and suddenly, the dark tunnels weren't empty anymore, through my mist I could feel everything; every jagged crack in the masonry, every shift in the stagnant water level, the exact weight of the six drained carcasses cooling in the muck behind me. I closed my eyes, but I could still map everything.
Warm blood, one small heartbeat. Moving low. Circle the exit, squeeze the throat.
My eyes flew open, the memory of killing that boy jumping around my head from six different perspectives, the distinction between what I had killed and what I actually was began to liquefy, melting into an ugly, grey blur.
The ore-coated one enters, it's claws are too strong, it's movements too fast, it catches me by my throat and sque-
My gauntlets clenched until the metal hinges groaned. I remembered the execution, the dying. The two concepts were overlapping, fighting for the same space in my head.
Food.
The impulse was automatic, a sharp, acidic secretion at the back of my mouth.
Food.
The odor hit me then. It wasn't the copper scent of fresh blood or the heavy lard of living game, it was rot. Pure, advanced decomposition. My head slowly rotated toward the dark mouth of the deeper drainage corridor, drawn by a heavy, magnetic pull.
'There it was.'
Old flesh waterlogged in the black trenches. Bones covered in a thick, green layer of river slime. The absolute disgust I should have felt as a man was instantaneously crushed beneath a wave of profound, watering anticipation. The stench tasted sweet, not unlike a vintage wine or ripe fruit, but laced with the sweet undertone of a bloated carrion, rich and dense enough to pull every scavenger out of the wilderness.
Venom pooled beneath my tongue. I swallowed once. Twice. I loathed the frantic, hollow ache expanding in my gut, but the beast-mind simply didn't care why health should be a barrier to an appetite.
My boots began to move, my legs carried the weight of the metal forward. The mist parted before my surcoat in perfect, fluid waves as the tunnels widened and the temperature plunged. I marched past the dead drained foglets without a glance, tracking the stench until the air became thick enough to chew.
Then I stepped into the larder.
The floor was a mattress of splintered ribs and calcified skulls. Old human remains had been dragged into the damp corners, stacked alongside the pale, slimy corpses of drowners and large, bloated sewer rats that had been slowly harvested over months. A perfect, heavy sanctuary.
Something inside my chest relaxed, I dropped into a crouch, the iron greaves squelching deep into the grease-slick earth as I stared down at a half-decayed drowner leg protruding from a pile of offal. My hands moved before my thoughts could even register the command. I reached out, my steel-plated fingers digging into the cold, swollen skin. The flesh was soft, mottled green and black, strips of rotting muscle hanging loose around the gray bone.
There was no revulsion, only a deep, starving necessity.
I bit into it, the muscle parted with an oily, sickening ease. I chewed, and the taste hit the back of my throat, rich, heavy, and absolutely delicious. The reaction was primal, I tore another rancid chunk free, swallowing it whole before my human mind could erect a wall, my gauntlets burrowing deeper into the ribcage of the corpse as if I had been fasting for a century.
My vision swirled, cycling through a frantic yellow hue.
Good. Meat. Home.
I froze, the rotten tissue still wedged between my teeth. The word echoed through the cavernous hollow of my skull like a bell.
Home.
I looked around the chamber. The piles of feces. The green bones. The waterlogged garments of dead peasants. To the thing floating in my head, this squalor was safety.
Another strip of muscle slid down my throat. Then, a tiny ripple disturbed the black water trench right beneath my knees.
I stopped chewing, my breath catching in my throat as I looked down at the stagnant surface. The distortion in the reflection didn't match the heavy crimson linen or the foreign plate I wore. For one terrifying, fractured heartbeat, the water didn't show a knight.
It reflected a long, needle-ribbed silhouette, sickly grey skin stretched so thin the bone threatened to cut through from the inside, and a pair of bulbous, unblinking yellow eyes staring back at me with a vacant, monstrous hunger.
I forced my eyes shut, my jaw locked tight against the shuddering ache in my chest as I fought to bury the impulse where no light could ever find it.
I stayed on one knee for a long time, the cold sewage water soaking right through the boiled-hide lining of my greaves, listening to the frantic, ragged whistle of my own breath bouncing off the damp vault walls. The thrumming from my obsidian signet ring had turned into a steady, localized burn against my finger, a sharp, black wedge of suppression that kept hammering at the margins of my mind, helping me to systematically suppress the remaining grey-green threads of the beast consciousness.
When I finally opened my eyes, the reflection in the water was just me. Pale, red-eyed, and covered in the evidence of my own degradation, but entirely me.
Author's Note: Hey guys, that's it for Monsters of Maribor! I'm sorry this chapter took me so long to get to you guys, but like I said, I've been busy getting my Uni work done on time. Luckily, I handed in everything I needed to today, so I had some time to churn out this chapter. I hope you enjoyed it! I tried to make it as visceral as I could to hammer in the whole wrongness of him becoming more monstrous.
Honestly, if it wasn't for the ring, he would have gorged himself down there. Tell me what you guys thought! How was the fight? The memory meld? The corpse eating? Please let me know what you thought of the whole chapter in the comments!
Also, just in case the monster POV section was a bit hard to follow: I was basically inferring that the foglets were drawn into the city by a necrophage lure. I have this whole idea worked out as to exactly how a bunch of monsters managed to sneak into a fortified city unnoticed, and more importantly why they were put there.