Quota 0/391 - Only 3 days left
Victor was not exactly in an ideal situation: with a Coil-Head planted in front of him like a two-hundred-year-old tree and a Thumper potentially ready to pounce on him from behind, not having the strength to get back up was the final nail in his coffin.
He could not even turn his head to look behind him without risking a charge from the statue and probably getting obliterated. Victor had no idea how that thing would kill him, but his odds did not look good.
After all, the system had given the creature a danger level of 80%. For a monster that was completely harmless as long as you looked at it, having a higher danger rating than a Thumper or a spider was not very reassuring.
The only good thing in all this for Victor was that the Thumper seemed too focused on something in the next room to come make his situation worse.
He could hear the creature dragging its monstrous body over several meters before crashing into a wall, repeating the cycle over and over as if it were trying to dig a hole through the concrete walls with its oversized head.
Victor did not believe that strategy would work, considering even a Jester had only managed to make the walls of the New York manor tremble. If the apex predator of the place had failed to pull that off, it would take something even bigger to breach a wall like that.
'Something like a tank or a giant. Not sure the owner of this place would be okay with that,' he thought as he kept staring at the Coil-Head's feet in front of him.
He did not need to look the creature in the eyes, and he was not about to risk a crick in his neck for no reason. With that excuse in mind, staring at the little white feet of a horrifying creature no longer felt as strange as Victor might have thought.
After all, he was doing it to survive.
So he spent several minutes seriously contemplating white toes. Victor also noticed that the Coil-Head did not even need a pedicure because it had no toenails.
'You really do learn something every day...'
He was not sure that bit of information would ever be useful, but there was no harm in storing it away in some corner of his mind in case of a future crisis. For now, it was time for him to grab his things and get out of here.
He picked up the pink hairbrush and the small steel key before painfully pushing himself off the ground, making sure to keep his eyes on the creature in front of him. For an extra layer of safety, he ordered his faithful cubic companion to come stand in front of him like a shield.
"Want to try taking a bite out of it?"
It cost Victor nothing to ask, even if the answer was as expected as it was unexpected.
The Jester spun around as if asking its master for confirmation, its little white hand resting on its crank in a somewhat threatening way.
"You have my blessing, blue-eyes white cube! Go for it!"
It was the kind of inspiring speech he hoped he would not regret later. While he was casting his biggest ult yet, he sadly had to cancel it as fast as a hundred-meter sprint.
That meant he watched from the corner of his eye as the creature bounced up and down for several long seconds, only changing his mind after hearing the ominous message from the announcer inside his head.
Better start running, dear host!
This was no longer just a bad omen. It was a full-blown curse the system had fired straight at him.
"Take your hand off that crank."
The creature pulled its little hand away reluctantly without even bothering to wind itself all the way back down. Deep inside it, a small voice was whispering sweet nothings, begging it to keep turning the crank. Unfortunately for it, Victor's order seemed stronger than its inner instinct.
Once he had disarmed the allied grenade he had thrown at his own feet, Victor focused again on the creature in front of him. His cubic companion had scared him so badly that beads of sweat had started forming on his forehead and were now creeping dangerously close to the corners of his eyes.
That would not have been a problem if he had been able to move his arms. One quick swipe would have been enough to wipe his brow and, at the same time, deal with the only source of the problem, but the gravity was too strong for him to even lift his arm off the floor.
That left Victor with only one solution: ask his best white cubic ally of all time for help.
His companion had already helped pull him out of the gaping chasm behind him by tugging on his hand, so surely it could wipe his forehead too, right?
Victor, still meticulously inspecting the Coil-Head's white toenail-less feet, could not think of any other solution.
"Give me your hand!" he ordered his companion.
From the corner of his eye, Victor saw a second pair of white feet approach, and more importantly, a smooth white hand that almost gleamed in the ambient light. With a mental command, the Jester placed itself between Victor and the Coil-Head, then used its hand to try and gently wipe away the stream of sweat running down Victor's forehead. Well, as gently and usefully as a rough block of marble could be used as a sponge. If the result of the operation had not seemed very promising already, Victor was still wearing his orange suit and the helmet that came with it.
The only thing the Jester really wiped away was the thin layer of fog that had started building up on the visor. And, as if to underline the failure of the whole operation, a drop of sweat finished its descent and lodged itself in his right eye.
Victor blinked.
klik-klik—krk-klik—klik-KLAK
He had only closed his eyes for a few tenths of a second. During that brief lapse, Victor had the distinct impression of hearing a spring run a marathon. That was not terrifying on its own, unless the spring in question happened to be a two-meter-tall creature whose foot was only a few dozen centimeters from his head.
Under those conditions, Victor would be completely and entirely fucked.
'Well, fuck.'
Those were his only thoughts before a train slammed into him head-on and sent him flying to the other side of the room. Victor opened his eyes again while his body was still airborne. The upside was that the force of the impact had launched him well over the chasm, and the downside...
Victor hit the wall head-on, his bones giving off a dull crack that sounded deeply ominous. The pain could not compare to the horrible agony he had felt after the Coil-Head's marathon charge, but Victor could feel his thoughts slowly going numb. His body had already pumped out every last drop of adrenaline in the previous minutes, leaving Victor to bounce off the wall and crash onto the metal platform without being able to move a single muscle.
His whole body had gone numb to the point that he could no longer move most of his muscles. The only one he could still use with great effort was his neck.
But that was enough to survive.
He painfully turned his head toward the source of all his problems, a groan of pain slipping from his lips.
The Coil-Head had already crossed the chasm and now loomed over him, the modern-art statue breathing an aura of death down his neck.
'This is really... not... an ideal situation...'
Victor had thought he could use the Jester to get back on his feet and run, but now all he could do was remain curled up on the floor.
With death standing as close as a piece of chocolate during Easter, Victor could no longer afford to hesitate.
"Get me onto your back... and let's get out of here," he ordered in a tiny voice to the Jester, which had crossed the chasm behind the Coil-Head.
With a firm, controlled motion, like it had done with the missile, the Jester slid its single hand under Victor before flipping him onto its head like a straw doll.
Victor certainly was not very heavy, but right now he looked less like a human being with a spine and more like a broken kite caught in a gale.
Once the acrobatics were over, Victor shared the next part of the plan with his mount:
"Run."
As if he feared possible complications, Victor still added,
"Backward if you can. I need to keep looking at it."
The Jester placed its hand over Victor to keep him from falling and started walking in reverse. It did it with such unsettling ease that Victor found himself wondering whether the creature had some built-in geolocation system. Even when Victor thought they were about to back straight into a wall, the creature always managed to turn just enough to avoid the collision.
It was as if the creature had a rewind button. A button that let it move backward automatically.
In any case, Victor was not going to complain.
With an ally this versatile, once he was back on his feet he could really make a killing on his next expeditions, especially if he could ask the Jester to carry him back to the entrance whenever something went wrong.
Now that the ringing in his ears had died down, Victor could hear the sound of a Thumper smashing its head against something metallic.
The noise was coming from the large adjacent room Victor had crossed on the way in.
There, atop one of the cabinets fixed to the wall, Olivia was trying to hit the creature below with a shovel while it tried to knock the young girl off her pedestal.
Because Olivia could not manage to land a hit on the Thumper with her weapon, the situation had turned into a perfect stalemate.
Victor did not know any of that, because he could not see it.
His head was still turned toward the Coil-Head to stop the marathon runner from accelerating, and his backside was now being served to the Thumper on a silver platter.
Luckily, the creature seemed too obsessed with Olivia to notice Victor behind it. Less luckily, a new creature had joined the fray. That was not good news, especially when the creature in question was a Jester with its hand resting on the handle of its music box. It was only when his nightmare joined the fray that Victor saw from the corner of his eye the entirety of the situation.
"**Blyat...**"
It was the only Russian word he had learned over the last few days. He had no idea what it meant or whether it even fit the situation.
All Victor knew was that Olivia was going to need something a little bigger than a rocket launcher pulled out of a hat if they wanted to survive their catastrophic situation.