We stepped closer to the drow mage, and his arms waved in the air, radiating pulses of darkness and pale light flickered from his palms. A small circle of dull-glowing light surrounded our feet, his eyes flickered white and black and he snapped his fingers, then the world around us blurred.
We were in motion, but not. Then we stopped on the other side of the chasm in the blink of an eye.
“The hell was that?!” Balmur whispered fiercely.
“A simple transport spell, called Locomotion,” Xaenth explained patiently. “Takes a group of people close together and moves them a short distance, merely up to three hundred feet from the origin of the casting.”
“I need to learn that,” Balmur said, his voice a bitter grumble.
“It is something that must be studied deeply, but you are welcome to attempt it someday.” The drow smiled as if at a child, then regarded the others we had left behind. “Tell me, though, if he was to be bait, why does Dirt wait in safety?”
“Think of how potent his virgin blood is,” Yohsuke answered, a look of longing crossing his features, his eyes closed and nose to the imaginary wind. “One whiff and the lesser vampires will come running.”
“Flapping,” Bokaj stated.
“Dude, hardly the time to correct the man’s English,” Muu said, then snorted derisively.
“No.” The ranger lifted his bow with an arrow nocked and pulled taut. “Flapping!”
I could hear it now, the sound of wings that grew steadily louder until it was almost deafening. Glaring above us, several hundred screeching bats separated from the ceiling and plummeted through the light, the shadows twisting and growing in the dim glow. The small creatures fluttered and flapped like a hurricane of fangs and flesh moving across the chasm toward the small group.
Gem exploded from the earth and swatted dozens of the creatures onto the ground beneath her stomping feet.
“We need to get in there before they’re any more aware of our presence than they might be, already,” Yohsuke’s voice cut through my worry. “Maebe and Fainnir have that. Let’s go.”
We pressed ourselves against the steel wall of the fortress and moved as swiftly as we could without attracting unwanted attention. Once we reached the doors, I groaned softly.
The door was covered in sigils, runes, and circles that glowed sickly green, deep purple, and shadowy in the light.
I pressed my awareness against it and knew that the door could withstand all of us, casting our strongest spells at it simultaneously and still come out unfazed.
“I cannot dispel this quickly.” Xaenth frowned as he poured over the door from a reasonable distance. “And, there appears to be a blowback trigger on it.”
I wanted to choke him the hell out for not volunteering earlier to help with the traps, but we had other, bigger concerns.
The bats used echolocation in all directions, screeching and calling into the nether. We had run out of time. Either we waited to see if something opened up, tried to find another door, or we went in like badasses.
“Cover me,” I shouted at the others and focused my mind on my claw and began to funnel flame-aspected mana into it at a slow and steady pace.
The others moved to stand close to my back but gave me enough room to work. I stayed closer to the door than I wanted to, but it was a necessary evil as I dug my burning diamondhard claw into the steel surrounding the door. It didn’t take at first, but I funneled more mana into it and persisted, working my way through the steel around it. It was thicker than I thought, and I almost summoned Falfyre to assist, but this way would work.
I began funneling mana into my other claws and dug in with a grunt of effort, the steel melting and clearing faster and faster, and I increased the mana I was using.
It took about two minutes of constant funneling, and by the time I was finished, the bats were falling faster. The bad news was that larger specimens had detached from the ceiling and began to fly over the chasm, toward us, and toward my wife and the kids.
My mana was about half full at that moment, so I decided to trust my friends and focus on getting us inside.
“Let me get a couple shots off, and we will see about getting all the way in there.” Bokaj took a deep breath, and before he fired, I cast one of the few buffs I had, Star Blade. It wasn’t purely for melee weapons, it was any weapon really, and at a measly 25 MP, I kicked myself for not having cast it earlier. It lasted for an hour, which seemed a little broken, but hey—I ain’t gonna complain.
Starry mana infused with Bokaj’s bow and his arrows streaked into the air like shooting stars, catching some of the larger bats in the wings, and they screeched horribly as they burst into flame.
Yeah, Celestial spells do some serious holy damage sometimes.
The larger bats began to fall into the gaping maw of the chasm below them, the void gobbling them up, but not their echoing cries of anguish. As two more echoing cries sounded, my claws penetrated the wall fully, and I made the hole wider with more ease than I’d had earlier.
“Go on.” Bokaj fired another arrow, then I stepped through our newly made hole with Balmur just in front of me.
The rest of the group filed in without touching the still slightly molten, but as I crossed the threshold Yohsuke gasped.
I turned to find him standing outside the door with a look of confusion on his face. “The hell are you waiting for?”
“An invitation, you asshat!” He snarled back, he tapped the empty air before him, and it seemed to be solid. “You know, for a nerd who knows as much lore as you do, you seem to know precious little about vampires. They have someone alive in there who lives in this place.”
“I invite you in,” I tried, and it didn’t work at all. “Go help Maebe and the boys stay alive, and I’ll get ahold of you when we find the person who can invite you in.”
“Okay.” He nodded and turned to sprint away. I heard him filling the others in mentally.
This is some bullshit. Muu grumbled loudly. We have a vampire and a werewolf, what’s next? Sasquatch?
Dude, you’re literally a humanoid dragon, James shot back. Get your scaly ass in gear, and let's get this over with!
Looking around, I saw the entryway down here was only that, an entryway. We came out next to a closet that held skeletal remains in it, some bones crushed to dust, others splintered, with few whole bones left and a coat that held nothing of interest. The rest of this lower portion was just a hall to the stairs. No other doors, nothing. I thought I saw a flicker of movement above us up the stairs and glanced back at the others who nodded that they were ready, Bokaj still looking outside for a moment.
I sprinted up the stairs in front of me two at a time and came to the second floor with my friends. The area looked to be some sort of nightmare dining room with a large crystal-covered chandelier glowing above a long table. The gray walls were splattered with crimson. Goblets of blood, plates of gore, and organs, with fine golden forks and knives laid out most perfectly for some kind of fancy dinner. The only thing ruining what could have been a perfectly fucked up civilized moment were the bodies that hung from meat hooks instead of sitting in chairs around the sides of the room. Some were human, some drow, and other creatures I didn’t readily recognize, but the majority of them looked to be goblins. The small corpses seeming to float.
“This is hardly pleasant.” Xaenth sniffed and held a kerchief to his nose with disdain in his gaze.
The worst part of all of it was that there was someone seated at the head of the table with a hooded figure behind them. She sat with her legs draped over the side of the chair as if lounging, with a goblet of crimson liquid held in her hand.
“Rude of you to break into someone’s home, uninvited as you are,” she observed before raising the glass to her lips.
Her drow features were elegant and beautiful, less Amazonian than the other female drow elves I had seen so far. Her figure was much more athletic in her simple pale dress. Her eyes glowed scarlet as she watched us all with mi
ld curiosity, the slight impression of blood left behind on her lips disappeared with a slow, lazy flick of her tongue. Dainty fangs peeked out from behind her lips as they quirked into a smile.
“I see you have brought a few friends and a dog?” Her eyebrows raised, and her voice dripped with sarcasm, “Well, I always did want another pet, though mother never did care for animals and beasts. That was why she always seemed to have such a soft spot for my cold-hearted, psychotic little sister. Oh well. She is dead now, and the latter sits on a throne built of lies.”
“What do you mean?” Bokaj asked, stepping forward slightly. As he did, the chandelier dimmed, and the darkness above deepened considerably.
“Meaning that she takes credit for things that had been orchestrated by someone else, but dead men can keep all sorts of wonderful secrets.” She smiled fully then. “I wonder if any of you would be willing to be turned here and now? Save me some time? My benefactor has an interest in you all as well, though why I do not know. All she wants is either your demise or your cooperation.”
“It was you.” Jaken frowned, then blinked at her. “You were the one who sent that invasion force to Djurn Forge, and who are you talking about? Is the figure behind you this benefactor?”
The woman said nothing, gave away nothing with her pleasantly blank face, but the figure laughed, creepily. “I take it that you haven’t liked my meddling? Good. You will all die here; my minion will see to that. And this world will be ours. And then we come for yours, and all the people you protect will fall.”
I ground my teeth as the figure stepped forward and faded before I could even cast a single spell, fuck. So, she is a minion then, and that must have been the general we thought was here. The others had to have heard me, but they stayed quiet while Jaken finished his thoughts.
“You did that, and then while you were overseeing it, she killed your mother and cast you out,” Jaken continued on. I watched as he began to deduce more and more, but the shadows above us deepened further still. There was something up there. “And that’s why she sent us here—to kill you and tie up the loose ends. But with a benefactor… why would you need to do all this? As a minion, your job is to create chaos, right?”
“Very clever, Holy One.” She purred as she slowly clapped her hands softly. “Though you do realize that, even if you were to make it out of this place alive, she will likely kill you all for making the connections that you have. Seeing as though she seems to want to ‘tie up loose ends,’ and such. My benefactor gave me this place, and with it, the ability to raise the dead and make them the undead. She was quite gracious, even gave me a taste of her power, though that she calls me minion irks me, and you will not do so either. No matter.”
Righteous Brand flew from Jaken’s fist, piercing her heart. The goblet falling from her hand as she had been swirling it. The paladin stood up straight with a grim expression on his face, but the body in the chair began to change.
“You honestly did not think I would be here to greet my beloved little sister’s pet assassins personally, did you?” Her disembodied voice sounded sarcastic and surprised. “Here I had been thinking you smart enough to have figured that out, my lady truly does give you all too much credit.”
The shadows deepened once more, and glowing eyes opened within them.
“No, I have my sights set on something much better,” she said happily. “Something made slightly less…well-defended by an attack that had been too fortuitously devastating to pass up. But do not worry, I’m certain you’ll find your current hosts’ much better company than I. You see, dinner is served.”
Her haughty laugh echoed throughout the room while seven hulking figures dropped from the darkness above the chandelier, their twisted bodies grotesque and oddly shaped. They looked to be large, wingless vampire bats, but their musculature was insane and would have likely made the hulk fit right in. Large, clawed hands balled into half fists then spread wide as they crouched as if to spring at us.
Time to get the fuck out of here, she’s going for the city! Balmur called to all of us and we began to back away.
Xaenth, who had been behind us, spoke out loud, “Well, this is an unfortunate turn of events.” His fists began to glow with a sickly light as he looked from the hulking vampires to us. “I thought she would at least wait to watch as I killed you for her.”
“Mother fucker!” I snarled aloud as the light left his hand but bounced off of Balmur’s dome spell.
Balmur burst from the shadows at the drow elf’s feet at the same time three arrows burst from Xaenth’s chest. One more bounced off of a barrier he erected before him, but Balmur stabbed Sorrow into the traitorous mage’s spine, the hand dropping to his side.
I bounded forward and kicked him at the vampires that had charged, and he hit one, the beast stopping to put the limp body to its mouth before savaging the throat and tearing it out to chew on.
“Let’s move!” Jaken shouted as an aura of red radiated from his body, his sword, and shield in his hands.
“What about Righteous Brand?” Muu called as he stabbed at one of the vampires with his holy spear.
“I’ll have another made; we need to leave!” He said as two of them crashed into his shield and I had to steady him with my hands on his back. “Zeke, fry them, and let’s get out of here.”
“Balmur, cover the door in shadows so the light won’t escape!” I called, and he shouted back.
“Done!”
I nodded and focused my mind, then cast Solar Flare into the back of the room just next to the wall. A miniature sun burst into existence there, and the light from it scorched the wall and everything in the immediate vicinity. I tried to pull some of the shadows up in front of us to assist in keeping us from getting the brunt of the attack, but it still hurt like crazy. I was down to a little less than half health, and the others, but for Muu and Jaken, had fared a little worse.
The hulking vampires screamed and roared, thrashing in the light, attempting to get to cover, one of them upended the table to try and get something between it and the offending spell. Its life ebbed as the table burned, and Bokaj’s silver-coin arrows pierced it, knocking it onto its back into the light of the spell, where it screamed once more and fell dead in a pile of ash and dust. One of the others had managed to get around us by jumping over the balcony, crushing the stairway a bit, but having fallen prone.
Muu stabbed it several times in quick, shallow strikes with the holy damage carrying it to its final death. The other hulking vampires had followed us to the stairway where Balmur and Bokaj did their best to harry them where they could, how they could. Jaken began attempting to heal the others, and I ensured that nothing was following us as we came through the hole in the wall.
“Don’t touch the door!” James reminded us as we came closer to it. The larger bat creatures continued to screech from outside, and now that they were away from the Solar Flare, the hulking vampires grew a little braver. One grabbed Jaken’s shield in his hands and began to twist, the metal groaning in protest. Gnashing teeth and fangs reached over it as the paladin’s sword began glowing a deep gold.
“In Her name, and by Her strength, I cast you from my sight!” Jaken roared as he brought the radiant weapon back, then stabbed it forward. “Smite!”
The vampire screamed pitiably and died in a flash of radiant energy like an explosion. The others kept their distance after that, the four who still lived, but they were badly hurt, around 40% health at best.
We gotta kill these things. James head-butted one who had come too close to him, trying to get a good grasp of him to bite. Any more of that smiting left Jaken?
Cooldown, and the mana cost isn’t pleasant. Jaken huffed as the vampire behind the one he had killed lumbered forward. Keeping these things funneled like this is cool and all, but they keep trying to go through my damned shield. Let’s get moving!
We took the lot of them back toward the door, Balmur guiding us as we fell back into the open. Once we reached the doorway, an idea
hit me.
Let’s see if we can get them to touch the door! I called to the others. They agreed, and we lured the creatures out, a little of the light from my still burning spell highlighting them from behind. Step aside and out of the way as soon as you can, give me at least fifty feet just in case it doesn’t work.
I’d had a bit of time since I’d worked through the wall and cast my heavier spell, and I was feeling better about casting this spell if needed. Once the vampires were dead, we could get a couple minutes to recover. My friends scrambled out of the doorway behind me, and a clawed hand wrapped around the back of my neck and froze, getting ready to dish out the worst beating I could, then the hand lifted and pulled me away from the door and the approaching vampires.
“Don’t worry little fella, I got you,” Muu whispered behind me, the adrenal dump I had experienced making me angrier at him than I truly was at that moment.
The vampires had made it to the door, and Jaken beat his sword against his bent and dented shield, another burst of red aura filtering from his body. They looked like they might jump the door, but the lead one stepped right onto it, and nothing happened. Shit!
I cast Phoenix Burst immediately, the small ball of burning radiant flame careening into the lead vampire and engulfing him as the ball spread over fifty feet and blasted purifying flames over them. Bokaj’s arrows rained into the doorway once the flames had died down, and I saw another beam of red zip into the door before detonating, and another gout of burning flame erupted.
The vampires inside were well beyond fried and ash, they had to be, but the absence of the light gave me pause. I needed to be sure. I poked my head inside the room doorway, taking in the sight of the singed, still burning floorboards and stairs. No more vampires.
“What the hell are we supposed to do now?” Jaken sat on the ground for a moment to rest and check on his shield. He must have decided it was beyond repair, the clawed rents in it, the dents, and the beginnings of a tear in the top being too much because he threw it over the ledge of the chasm. We waited in silence, but nothing came for a long time. Then a distant, echoing thud.
Into the Darkness: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure (Axe Druid Book 4) Page 57