Fighting four-dimensional enemies

I had my costume and my buckler, but not my flight. I hurried over in Sveta's direction, crawling at first, then staggering, and crossed the boundary.

And in the shadows furthest from me, the watchdog woke. It lumbered forth, reaching out to grab the concrete of Cradle's area, a table in Rain's, and to the shattered dais at the center of the room.

Too many limbs, all smooth planes like marble, with cables running in the gaps, each glowing with an intense heat. A twenty foot tall titan made of reaching arms that could have been tentacles, they were so many-jointed.

It was nothing like the beast of lightning we'd seen on the video.

That wasn't a single watchdog administrating this room. It was one of four dogs.

Cradle's.

***

I had the impulse to fly and I couldn't, and feeling that lack while facing down something as big and intimidating as this many-handed thing was suffocating. I'd never been especially afraid of spiders, but this thing was like three spiders of varying sizes all overlapping one another, each limb ending in a hand. It was fluid enough in its arrangement that it could be as tall as a two story building, then sweep out to be barely any taller than I was, but with limbs reaching out to every surface across a twenty foot span.

***


The hand dipped low, striking the damaged section of floorboards. It carved out a furrow, turning a hole into a ditch, a gap in the room with only ruined wood below, like it was broken floorboards or rafters with foot-wide gaps between pieces of wood, all the way down to fucking infinity.

Which meant that when I shifted course to favor the smallest portion of the gap leaped the ditch, I was simultaneously going weak kneed, my mind wrestling with the idea that it might really be infinity, that what happened here could really be forever.

***

I had to back up and to the side, mindful of where I set my feet. There was a bottomless ditch behind me, a trench in front of me, the floorboards starting to fall away, with a loose precipitation of pine needles and leaves that had dried out a long time ago.

"-It's not three-dimensional," Sveta finished her statement.

Four dimensional?

The closer we got, the bigger it was, and the more its arms multiplied. More joints existed in more shades of color, and the color that radiated out from those joints was mild, less than a candle might shed, but so numerous collectively that they made something brighter. They were the source of the seemingly sourceless illumination that made it possible to see in the rest of the room. I could map it from room to room, including that cold golden light that was apparently meant for me.

***

The floor dipped precipitously again. My feet began sliding on dusty, pine-needle covered floorboards, and that horrible rollercoaster-drop feeling became an ongoing thing.

Too wide a gap to jump, no footholds.

I adjusted my grip on the spear, stabbing down at the joint below, driving the tip into the mess of faint green wires. It penetrated, doing some damage, and remained jammed in.

The arm dipped another foot, and the bottom end of the floorboard was pulled out of my hands. I backed away, not because of fear or immediate threat, but because I was one more shift of the floor's angle from sliding down into oblivion, and I wanted a chance to be able to think and react before I did anything there. With hands and feet, I could move back three or four feet, and I would summarily slide two feet back toward the edge.

I wasn't even breathing, and I had to force myself to start, because I could not afford for my muscles to be oxygen starved at a moment like this.

***

I looked up, and I saw what I could imagine another planet might look like, if it were separated from our world by only a few hundred miles. A tangle of reaching limbs, recesses, never repeating, not a funhouse mirror or kaleidoscope, but wholly unique when I looked at any portion. Its dimensions distorted the dark portion of the room in retrospect, making it seem like the distance to the gate was miles, and those miles were punctuated by hundreds of arms that were planted on ground that had ceased to be floorboards and was now a plain of what looked like hard, packed salt, granular against my scraped knees and palms.

I felt like my body was nonexistent between my ribcage and my knees, after having my stomach drop so much and so intensely across those frantic minutes. Standing was an exercise in convincing myself not to flop over like Torso had.

Blitz it, I thought. It's a tinker, supposedly. Let's hit it before it can hit us.

Moving forward was disorienting. Normal rules for perceiving this thing didn't seem to apply, as things moved at the wrong speeds in my peripheral vision when I moved past them.

I found the arm that looked like it was straining to bear the most weight and I punched at the purple-tinted cordage with my buckler's hard edge. Light danced with blinding brightness from the damage I'd done, so I hit it again, my eyes averted. Every muscle in my shoulder, arm, and forearm hurt, and the old bullet wound in my bicep was shot through with a feeling like I'd been stabbed. Because of course it was turned into a part of me.

Four hands came plunging down, one for me, three to provide support that this many-handed monster wasn't getting from the one I'd punched.

I backed out of the way of the one, and used my hood to shield my face from the cloud of granules and dust that exploded around the impact site.

***

- From Within 16.8-16.9