Chapter 36: Tunnels and Stairs
Thayla stepped up beside Victor, her spear leveled and pointing toward the creatures lurking in the darkness. “What are they?” she hissed.
“How would I know?” Victor held Lifedrinker sideways in front of himself, waiting and watching.
“Yellow eyes, short, or crouching. Yeksa? How could Yeksa survive this deep?” Thayla’s words were hurried, rambling, and Victor realized she was speaking in a stream of consciousness, panic tinging her voice. Thayla panicked? That didn’t make sense.
“Chill, deep breaths. Hang on,” Victor said, then he cast Globe of Insight, and the dark, stony riverbank was suddenly bathed in white-gold light as the ball of Energy formed in his palm. He concentrated on moving the globe and then lifted and “threw” it with a motion of his hand. It sailed forth and shed light on the scurrying owners of the eyes—dozens of huge, black-furred rats.
Thayla took a deep breath and said, “Thanks, the not knowing was freaking me out. I think I’m still shaky from almost getting digested earlier.”
“No worries,” Victor said, watching the rats scramble back toward the shadows, avoiding the pool of light cast by his orb. “They don’t like the light.”
“Let’s keep pushing forward; you can drive them ahead with your light.”
“Sure, if they stay scared—they’re as big as mastiffs, so I’m hoping they don’t all suddenly get a backbone.” Victor started walking, and when he got up to where his orb hovered, he put his hand up behind it and shoved it forward again. The rats continued to scurry ahead of the light. Victor noticed a reflection off to his right and realized some of the rats were in the water, rushing past them with the current. “Watch our backs!” he hissed, pointing to the rats in the water.
Thayla spun with her spear, shining her light back behind them, and then she said a word that didn’t translate and screamed, “They’re rushing up behind!”
“Steady, Thayla! They’re just fucking rats!” Victor roared and cast Inspiring Presence. Suddenly the golden light of his orb seemed to permeate the entire massive underground tunnel, and Victor saw all the black-furred, scrabbling shapes of the rats in front of them, in the water, and behind them. There were hundreds. “Thayla! We’re going to charge the ones in front of us! Come on! Stay with me!”
Victor glanced at her to make sure she registered his words and was happy to see a grin on her face and brightness in her eyes; she was also inspired. Victor rushed past his orb, nimbly leaping up and batting it forward so that it sped along the river, over the humping, wriggling mass of rats. Then he was in front of them, unleashing more inspiration-attuned Energy with Project Spirit. A visible wave of black-tinged, sickly yellow Energy rolled out in front of Victor onto the rats, and their narrowed yellow eyes suddenly grew wide and round. They squealed in a much different pitch and turned away from him, scrabbling back and jumping into the river.
Victor knew more rats were on their heels, so he kept pushing forward, shouting, “Keep moving!” He swung his axe in narrow cleaves, catching a few slower rats with the blade and dampening Lifedrinker’s edge. He saw Thayla jabbing her spear to the side and in front of them, and he couldn’t help exulting in the rush of battle with a high-pitched howl. To his surprise, Thayla picked up the howl and ululated in a perfect counterpoint.
As they broke through the crowd of rats and stretched out their legs, really moving, Gorz spoke up in Victor’s mind, “Victor! Another five hundred meters, and then you’ll want to take the passage on your left!”
“Come on, Thayla! Five hundred more meters before we turn!” They tore along the hard stone riverbank, skidding through the little depressions holding sand and silt, putting more distance between them and the pursuing rats. Victor knew he was in better shape than when he was on Earth—he had numbers on his status screen to prove it, but his empirical evidence was pretty strong too. This sprint, for instance—he knew he had to cover five hundred meters, but it was only a matter of thirty or so seconds before Gorz was screaming in his mind.
“Here, Victor! Turn here!”
“Here, Thayla,” Victor yelled, cutting in front of her and dashing toward a dark cleft in the stone tunnel wall. He found himself charging through a narrow smooth-walled passage, his glow stone shedding just enough light for his barreling, bobbing progress to throw crazy shadows up and down on the high walls. He could hear Thayla’s heavy breathing behind him and, further back, the clawing skittering progress of their pursuers.
Suddenly he burst out of the high-walled, narrow passage and into a round, stone chamber with a crazily steep set of stairs winding up the curved walls. “Your next passage is three hundred meters up this shaft,” Gorz said helpfully.
“Thayla, get up the steps a bit; I’ll be right behind you. Let’s make a stand here; you can stab around me, and I’ll hack any rat that comes up!” Victor said, slowing to pull her arm and propel her up the steps. “C’mon! Run up a ways, so they can’t pile on each other to flank us!”
“Right!” Thayla said, taking two steps at a time with her long strides. Victor was hot on her heels, and he could practically feel the rats scrabbling at his back as they climbed. When they’d mounted a good fifty or more steps, he panted, “Here! We gotta make a stand, or they’ll run us down!” Victor spun, arcing Lifedrinker in a downward, sideways cleave, anticipating the rats right behind him. He hadn’t been wrong; two rats met their end at that moment as the axe’s gleaming, silvery edge tore through their snouts in a wet, crunching gash.
As Victor recovered Lifedrinker’s momentum, Thayla jabbed her spear beside him, catching another rat on the point and flinging it down the steps into the bucking, thrashing river of giant, hissing, growling rodents that were scrabbling up the narrow steps after them. Victor lifted his axe and ended another rat, but a dozen more were clawing toward him as he lifted the blade. Wanting to give himself some space, he cast Project Spirit again, this time with rage-attuned Energy. The closest pile of rats went into an absolute mad frenzy as the wave of shimmering red Energy rolled over them. They began to bite at each other, screaming in their madness, turning the stairs into a slick, bloodsoaked self-serving abattoir.
Victor backed up a step and breathed heavily, enjoying the break as the rats ravaged each other. “They have weak wills,” Thayla said, behind him, also watching the mad rat melee.
“Fuck yes, they do,” Victor replied, still holding his axe sideways, ready to smite any rats that broke out of the frenzied, snapping, clawing ball of vermin. One rat did slip free and lunged at them, but Thayla stabbed it in the air, knocking it off the stairs to fall to the bloodsoaked stone at the bottom.
By the time the madness left the rats' eyes, dozens were dead, and they were so bloodsoaked and battle frenzied that it took them a while to redirect their aggression on Victor and Thayla. By the time they did, Victor was ready with a fresh Inspiring Presence. He and Thayla cut apart five, then ten, then twenty rats as they bounded up the steps and leaped at them. Blood and rat parts liberally soaked the steps beneath them, and as their footing grew gory and crowded with corpses, he and Thayla slowly backed up, higher and higher, leaving a trail of broken, twitching, screaming rats and corpses.
When Inspiring Presence wore off, Victor was ready with another projection of rage Energy, and the ensuing mad melee gave him and Thayla another breather. “I don’t see any more coming out of the tunnel. This is it, just what's on the stairs—we can do this!”
“Yeah,” Thayla said, breathing heavily beside him. “I can’t believe we’ve killed so many already.” It was true; the number of dead giant rodents was staggering. A huge mound of black, twitching fur rose at the base of the stair, and the steps were slick and cluttered with guts, blood, and corpses.
“Gimme a drink, please,” Victor said, holding out a hand. He had a hankering for some of her wine, and Thayla got the idea, grinning and pulling out a bottle. She drank half of it and gave him the other half, and Victor quaffed it with a grin, watching the rats maul each other a few feet down the stair. Just as he stowed the empty bottle in his ring, the rats seemed to recover their senses and redirect their frenzied rage on him. His Inspiring Presence wasn’t off cooldown yet, but he and Thayla were rested and ready, and the fight was on.
By the time the last of the growling, yellow-eyed beasts died with Lifedrinker in its head and Thayla’s spear in its breast, they were painted red and exhausted but exhilarated. Victor fell back onto an empty step, and Thayla collapsed on the step above. They both were panting and sweat-soaked, but it was a good kind of bone-deep weariness they felt, the kind that came with victory, and Victor couldn’t help looking back at Thayla and grinning. “We fucking did it! We killed a damn army of rats the size of pit bulls!”
Golden motes of Energy started to gather on the mounds of dead rats along the stair and piled at the base, and soon it was all flooding into Victor and Thayla.
***Congratulations! You’ve achieved level 22 Herald of Carnage. You have gained 10 will, 8 strength, and have 20 attribute points to allocate.***
“Shit, I forgot to spend my attribute points from the last fight!”
“You get free points? Mine all go into strength, agility, and vitality.”
“Yeah, my class gives me some ‘unbound’ points to spend each level.” He looked at his gore-covered arms and sighed. “So much for that bath we just had.”
“You’re much filthier than I am. It’s a benefit of having a longer weapon.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He looked at the scene of the slaughter beneath them, noticing the heavy reek of expended bowels and souring blood now that the adrenaline of combat was wearing off. “Let’s move up a ways, and then I want to rest for a minute and look at my attributes.”
“Agreed,” Thayla stood and started stalking up the steps, her spear still held ready. Victor tried not to focus on her ass, and he knew it was creepy even to realize he was doing it, so he pushed his gaze past her, up around the turn of the spiral, making sure there weren’t any ambushes in wait. He hadn’t really thought of Thayla that way—she was so damn tough and angry most of the time. It’s not like his current life had room for romance, anyway. He softly laughed to himself, imagining it.
“What?” Thayla glanced back at him over her shoulder.
“Nothing. Laughing at my own idiocy.” He thought of something else and tried to steer the conversation, “I’m not going to get a chance to get revenge on the jerks who robbed me and tried to kill me.”
“In my hometown, there’s a saying: ‘life’s roads aren’t made in straight lines.’ You never know if your path will bring you back to the mine, or it might lead you to those people in another place; not everyone is destined to die in this pit.”
“You’re sounding more optimistic; think we have a chance to make it through that dungeon?”
“Oh, don’t spoil the mood by making me be realistic.” Thayla chuckled.
“This is good; I can’t smell the corpses anymore.” Victor turned his back to the wall, then sat on a step, contemplating his attributes. Thayla sat just above him and also seemed to be staring into space. “Did you level, too?”
“I did. Fastest level I ever gained—I think those rats were tougher than the usual huge rats we run into in the delves.”
“They were tough for rats, but we showed them who was boss, right?”
“Sure, but I think your inspiration abilities had a lot to do with that.”
“Teamwork,” Victor muttered, trying to figure out what to do with his attribute points:
Strength:
66
Vitality:
90
Dexterity:
33
Agility:
33
Intelligence:
24
Will:
103
Points Available:
20
His class made sure his will and strength were going to keep going up, and his vitality was already solid. Did he want his strength to outpace his dexterity and agility so much? Gorz didn’t think it would be a problem until it was “two or three” times his other attributes. “My strength is twice as high as my dexterity and agility.”
“Strength is important, but so are speed and skill,” Thayla muttered, clearly preoccupied.
Victor knew his intelligence wasn’t as crucial for physical fighting, but it bugged him that it was so “low.” “Gorz, I don’t feel stupid, and my intelligence value is more than twice what I was born with. I’m not going to start feeling dumber or something if all my other stats keep growing, but my intelligence doesn’t, will I?”
“Not exactly, Victor, though you will eventually run into people with much higher intelligence than you, and their thoughts will be faster, they’ll have more raw Energy, and could prove to be very dangerous to you.”
“So, you’re saying there’s no easy choice. Why can’t anything ever be easy?”
“Oh, surely there will be times when things will seem easy, Victor. Look for the sunshine after the storm.”
“Hah, I love it! My talking necklace is giving me counseling.” Victor started to smile, but then his face sobered. Thinking of counseling made him think of Ms. Marshal and how she’d seen his potential and helped him graduate. Had he let her down? How many people knew he was even gone? His girlfriend, for sure. His Abuela. Did any of his “friends” care or notice? Did people think he’d just run away? God, what if his grandma and aunties were looking for him. What if they’d gone to the police and put up missing person flyers? They probably had.
“What’s wrong with you?” Thayla asked suddenly, and Victor realized she had moved up a step and was eating a piece of bread and staring at him.
“What?”
“Your face. You look like you just ate something sour.”
“My mind ran away from me. I’ve been so busy surviving that I haven’t spent much time thinking about what everyone in my life would do after I disappeared. My grandma, she, well, she didn’t have a lot going on; I think making me dinner and asking me about my day was about all that kept her going.”
“That’s hard.” Thayla shook her head, and Victor appreciated that she didn’t try to cheer him up. He sighed heavily and then allocated his attribute points. He put five into intelligence, five into dexterity, and ten into agility. He didn’t want to let his minor attributes stagnate, but right now, while he was fighting for his life, he figured agility was slightly more important.
He sat back and basked in the warmth of the Energy that flowed into his body as his allocations took effect. There wasn’t anything he could do about his family and what they thought of him. Marcy hadn’t been that serious, and he didn’t worry about her. His aunties probably were convinced he’d run away to his mom’s side of the family. Hopefully, they’d convince his Abuela not to worry. If he couldn’t find a way to travel home, maybe he’d find a way to send a message. This world was full of magic; surely, there was someone who could help. “Are there a lot of wizards in Gelica?”
“People with the actual Wizard class? Or do you mean just strong Energy users?”
“I don’t know. Both?”
“Well, that’s the answer; there are both. Hundreds of thousands of people live in Gelica.”
“Awesome. You think they’ll know a way to contact my world?”
“I don’t know. I know people can travel between worlds, especially System worlds. It’s just extremely costly to use the System Stones. I’m sure if people can travel between worlds, there must be a way to send messages. You gonna try to contact your grandma?”
“Yeah. I’d sure sleep better knowing she wasn’t worried about me. I think we should get going,” he said, gesturing to the stairs above. “You ready?”
“Mmhmm,” she said, and Victor looked at her again. She’d leaned back against the stone wall and was chewing her last bite of bread with her eyes closed. She had spatters of dark, dried blood on her red cheeks, but she looked relaxed and peaceful, and Victor wished they could rest longer.
“This isn’t a good spot to rest, I’m afraid,” he said, grunting as he stood up. “Let’s go a bit further.” “Gorz, is there any good spot for resting coming up?”
“If nothing’s changed, Victor, you’re going to be traversing a lot of constructed hallways and rooms soon. Ancient ruins. You should find a suitable space.”
“Alright, thanks.”
“Yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming.” Thayla opened her eyes and lithely stood. Victor started up the stairs, Lifedrinker held crossways in front of him. The axe’s wide, bearded blade gleamed in the light, and Victor realized he’d never seen blood linger on it. On her, he corrected himself.
“You’re a thirsty lady, aren’t you?” he asked the axe suddenly, on an impulse, and, he swore, Lifedrinker shuddered slightly in his grip.
“Are you talking to me?” Thayla said from behind him.
“Nah, Lifedrinker. You think it's true what Lam said? Do you think she can gain consciousness? Like, come alive?”
“Maybe. I don’t know; I’ve never heard of whatever she said it was made of. Some kind of silver?”
“Heartsilver, I think.”
“Add it to your list of things to check out when we get to Gelica.”
“That’s the spirit! When we get there!”
“The passage you want to exit through is coming up, Victor.”
“Right. Thanks again, Gorz.” Victor lifted Lifedrinker into a more ready position and kept climbing, focusing ahead now, ready for anything that might be lurking in the upcoming passage. His precautions proved unnecessary; the passage was a smooth stone tunnel that led away from the stairway, dust thick on its floor and no monsters in sight.
“How much further do we have to go?” Thayla asked, looking into the tunnel.
“You’re more than two-thirds of the way, Victor.”
“We’re about two-thirds of the way there. I think we’ll find a good spot to rest soon.”
“Okay,” Thayla nodded, adjusting the grip on her spear.
Victor started into the tunnel, carefully watching the dusty ground as his glow lamp illuminated it, searching for signs of previous occupancy. Nothing seemed to have disturbed the dust in a very long time, and soon, the two of them came to a wooden door that was rotted off its brass hinges but still propped, crookedly, in the doorway. Victor looked back at Thayla and motioned with his head toward her spear, mouthing, “Ready?” She nodded, and Victor grabbed the door between two of its old, warped boards and yanked. When it flopped open, he regripped Lifedrinker and peered into the room beyond.
It was a square, stone room about twenty paces across with dusty piles of broken, rotted furniture partially obscuring the space. Victor thought some of them looked like old bookcases or cabinets. He stepped forward, Thayla right behind him, and a warbling shriek was the only warning he had before a heavy creature with lumpy yellow skin smashed into him. It screamed as Thayla’s spear bit into its side, and Victor pivoted, pushing his axe between him and his assailant, using his lowered center of gravity and prodigious strength to shove it back.
The monster looked like a bulky, naked, boil-covered old woman. Her skin was yellow, her nose exceptionally long, and her eyes crazed and red. She waved her long, claw-tipped arms about in a frantic, warbling display of insanity. Her strange dance made her long, narrow sack-like breasts wave in pendulous loops, and the pus-filled boils that liberally coated her thick, wrinkled skin erupted and oozed with her gyrations. “Fucking hell!” Victor recoiled away from her, imagining the pus splashing onto his face.
Thayla hadn’t withdrawn her spear and drove forward, pushing the disgusting creature across the room. It wailed and shook, dark blood pouring out of the wound Thayla had inflicted but seemingly more concerned with its strange dance than getting away from her. Victor wasn’t an expert on monsters or their tactics. Still, he had a bad feeling about whatever she was doing, so he used Channel Spirit to ignite his arms and axe with rage-attuned Energy, and then he took two long steps forward and brought Lifedrinker down on the hag’s skull. He split the monster from forehead to breastbone, and the quivering body shook for a moment, then stilled. Lifedrinker pulsed in his hand, and Victor saw rivulets of green-yellow Energy flowing into her sunken edge.
Moments later, golden motes rose up from the hag’s horrible corpse, and Victor knew she was dead. Neither he nor Thayla leveled from the encounter, and the monster’s body was so offensive to their senses that they decided to quickly vacate the room. They had a choice of three doorways, but, with Gorz, the choice was easy, and Victor led the way through the broken doorway to the left, Lifedrinker at the ready.
“That thing was disgusting,” Thayla softly said as they advanced down yet another long, stone passage.
“Yeah. I fucking need a bath like never before. She was practically hugging me.” He shuddered at the thought but kept moving. Soon, Gorz directed him to turn down a side tunnel, and they continued that way for a while until they came to a large, empty hall with several small rooms lining one wall. Broken, rotten furniture littered the space, and most of the small rooms stood empty and open, but two had mostly intact doors. With Thayla at his back, spear ready, Victor opened each door, revealing mostly dust in the first and an ancient, partially collapsed table in the other.
“Let’s rest in one of these,” Thayla said.
“Yeah, I’m beat.” Victor went into the room with the old table, pleased that its long, polished top was still quite solid. “This one. We can barricade the door with this table.” Thayla helped him close and barricade the door, then they sat down on the dusty stone floor and shared some of their food. “How much more of this wine do you have?”
“Eleven bottles.”
“Nice. I filled the empties you gave me with water from the river. You think it’s safe?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know—bacteria, monster piss, rat shit?”
“Well, that’s disgusting, but we’ll live. No one with as much Energy as we have really gets sick from things like that.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Haven’t you noticed? You heal faster? You’re more resilient? The more Energy you have suffusing you, the more that will happen. Someone who made it to level ten or higher hardly ever gets sick. Well, unless they’re dealing with some nasty attuned-Energy attack.”
“Still, I prefer the wine.” Victor grinned and bit into one of the sausages Lam had sent with them.
“I notice you don’t drink or eat as much as I do. Have you improved your race?”
“Yeah. I won a big fight for a rich lady. She gave me a fruit that advanced my race a few levels.”
“Seriously? How many?”
“Three.”
“Wow—quite a prize.”
“Yeah, the asshole that held my contract was pissed. I think he saw it as a waste of money.”
“He’ll be surprised if you come knocking after clearing your way through a dungeon, hmm?” Thayla grinned, her eyes closed, and Victor saw her long, sharp canines. Was she imagining him taking revenge and savoring the image?
“I wouldn’t mind paying him a visit someday, I guess.” If he were being honest, Victor hadn’t hardly thought about Yund, but he definitely owed that big asshole a thing or two. He’d sold Victor out at the first opportunity. He might have been scared of the nobility, but he could have handled it a hundred different ways. How about a head’s up? Maybe Victor could have “escaped.” Who was he kidding? Yund wasn’t sticking his neck out for anyone, least of all one of his slaves. “Yeah, I’ve got a few people in Persi Gables that I need to pay a visit to one of these days.”
Thayla didn’t respond, and Victor realized she was sleeping. He sat back against the wall and watched the door, letting his mind drift. He thought about home, about the Wagon Wheel, and about the mine. He remembered his glimpses of Persi Gables when he’d been led around to different fighting venues and imagined walking those streets a free man with money in his pockets. His lips spread in a smile as he thought of meeting Vullu and taking the goat-man out for a meal. Then he frowned, thinking about the people in the cages at Yund’s and all the ones who died during every “pit night.”
Victor had ideals, but he wasn’t stupid, and when he thought of trying to stop the whole system that allowed the pit fighting and all the other things that went with it, like selling people to the mines, his mind spun at the complexity of the problem. Like Edeya had said, what was he going to do, take on the whole Ridonne Empire? “Maybe not, but I can help a few people and see what happens from there,” he whispered to himself. “Wouldn’t hurt to get a little payback in the process, either.”
When his eyes grew so heavy and he worried he’d fall asleep, he shook Thayla’s shoulder. Her eyes sprang open, and she looked panicked for a second, but when she saw Victor’s face leaning over, she sighed and nodded. “Your turn.”
Victor slept a few hours, and when Thayla woke him, he felt stiff but ready. His neck and back were sore, but he figured a bit of walking would sort him out. “Ready?” he asked Thayla after they’d picked up their belongings and stowed them away.
“Yeah, feeling a lot better. I was practically sleep-walking earlier.”
Victor nodded and moved to slide the table out of the way when he heard a sound like boards clattering onto the stone floor in the next room. He held his finger to his lips, and Thayla nodded. Victor moved to the side of the table they’d propped in front of the door and pressed his ear to the wood, holding his breath. He didn’t hear anything at first, but then the sound of something snuffling came to him. It reminded him of the sound a dog makes when sniffing around at the ground for a bit of food you dropped, but it was deeper and slower, like it was coming from a much bigger nose.
Victor turned to Thayla to whisper what he’d heard when a howling roar, loud enough to vibrate the wood of the door and table, broke out in the next room, and then the door rattled as something big hit it. Victor threw a shoulder against the table, trying to hold it in place, but the door rattled and shook, and the table kept bouncing into him like it was being hit by a charging linebacker. “Something fucking big is hitting this door!” As he hollered, a flash of red light erupted on the other side of the door, bleeding through the dark cracks in the wood, and then three long, knife-like claws speared through the planks, sliding through it like it was made of paper. Long chunks of wood fell away from the cleaving claws. A moment later, a big, round, orange eye with a vertical black pupil peered through the hole.
Another howl erupted from the monster, shaking the wood and making Victor’s ears ring, and he backed up, holding Lifedrinker. “This thing’s coming through. Get ready!”
“Stop telling me to get ready! What do you think I’m doing? Sleeping through this?” Thayla snarled, stepping up beside him with her spear leveled at the door.
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