I Don't Want to Be the Hero Vol. 4 by M.E. Thorne

Author:M.E. Thorne [Thorne, M.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Lilith, who had been standing just outside our little circle, watched us with a wry smile. She seemed cheered by the scene, and I noticed afterward that she had a bit more pep in her step.

“Any idea what’s inside that tower,” I asked her quietly, as we walked back towards our magiboat, “what we’ll be facing?”

She shrugged. “Could be anything, really. As Krencha said, giant evil towers pulled from the bottom of the sea could contain just about anything. We are dealing with a mad scientist here.”

“Mad scientist?”

“What else do you call someone who runs crazy experiments, creates monsters, and violates the rules of reality?” She asked archly.

I had no good argument against that.

It was tempting to rush in, to sail right to the tower, and to confront its secrets, but thankfully Thalie and Daggerdare suggested caution, tempering Annowan and Krencha’s zeal.

We did a cursory search of the remaining outlying islands, but the most interesting thing we found was a long-abandoned stone dock. The design made me think it had been built by humans, maybe the ones who had tried to conceal Belial’s body, but we had no way of being sure.

“Makes you wonder where all this crap came from,” I said, gesturing towards another series of sunken ruins that had been raised off the coast.

“Those are Lythor ruins,” Lilith said, pointing to a series of structures that looked like waterlogged bowls stacked one atop another.

“Lythor?” I asked.

“Giant evil squids,” she answered blithely.

Thalie shuddered. “Allies to the Bitch Goddess?”

“Nope, just a bunch of assholes,” the empress laughed, “they got wiped out during the war after they accidentally summoned an avatar of destruction. Their entire civilization sank to the bottom of the sea.”

“And then a thousand years later, their homes were dredged up by Belial.” Looking out, I could see even stranger piles of wreckage mixed with the more common human, demonic, and dwarven ruins.

“The disaster that created Amalgam wasn’t some orderly process,” Lilith said as if reading my thoughts. “Things were jammed together, ripped apart, while others were lost to the void. I imagine most of these ruins represent the parts that were lost, tossed to the bottom of the sea or buried deep under the earth. Belial dragged them up from their graves.”

“To study them?” Thalie frowned, “That would make sense, right?”

“But to what end?” I tucked my rain cloak closer around me. “What’s she trying to do with all of this?”

“Mad scientist,” Lilith repeated, “I imagine she’s got some crazy goal like world domination, or creating a race of supermen to burrow to the center of the earth.”

“You don’t seem super concerned about this,” I said.

She laughed. “Cause I’m not the hero here. I’m not going to worry about foiling her schemes or defeating her plans. I’ll leave that up to you and Annie.”

“Geeze, thanks,” I uttered.

“Listen, I’m just here to kill the nut job,” she said with brutal simplicity. “That’s my main goal, I can’t let her threaten the people under my protection with her continued existence.

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