The Dead Rogue

by Pavel Kornev

  Critical hit! Damage taken: 244 [380/624]

  Right knee damaged! Movement speed reduced!

  With one hit, the beast had managed to make me lose a third of my Health and almost bit off my leg below the knee!

  I grabbed my flamberge by the hilt with one hand and by the ricasso with the other and raised it above my head, planning to pin the spider to the floor, but I didn’t make it in time. The skull on the end of the elven priestess’ staff smashed into the chitinous side of the spider with such power that it both broke through the shell and threw the monster aside. The spider hit the opposite wall and fell on its back, jerking its legs spasmodically.

  “Run!” Isabella growled as she changed into her battle form. Her short armor covered her whole body apart from the head and her face showed its demonic features as her eyes lit up with predatory fire.

  I swore as I hopped along on one foot. My cracked knee really got in the way, as well as the spider’s filaments stretched out above the floor. I didn’t always manage to jump over them, the torn ends often whipped around my ankles and slowed me down, pulling me back.

  I heard a rustle in the darkness and saw compound eyes begin to light up.

  “Burn in hell!” the priestess shouted, as she sent a ball of wild fire at the underground monsters.

  The fireball exploded, throwing more spiders to and fro and burning away their webs, but there was no chance of destroying all of the monsters.

  “To the wall!” Isabella screamed, as she cast her next spell very low, just above the floor. The fireball flew through the whole chamber, until it hit a pillar and exploded in droplets of fire that completely burned away all of the threads.

  I immediately entered stealth mode, while the elven priestess sprinted towards the far door, jumped through it and shut its rusty iron bars behind her just before the spider that was chasing her.

  Her pursuer fiercely clicked its mandibles and then the staff that the priestess thrust through the bars threw it back, as if it were a billiards cue sending a ball into a pocket. The spider rolled away into a far corner and went quiet, while the other cave denizens quickly crawled away in every direction of the dungeon and hid from the priestess behind the stone pillars. They didn’t notice me because they couldn’t find me without their web of signal lines.

  Very, very slowly I moved along the wall towards the safety of the door. Sometimes, I had to stay still in one place for a long time and sometimes I had to move around the spiders or get out of their way. I was afraid of losing my balance and falling most of all, but by some miracle, I reached the iron bars of the door and whispered, “Open up.”

  Isabella let me in.

  “You utterly useless piece of carrion!” she declared, just as I expected.

  “Are you serious?” I chuckled, as I sat down on the floor. “Everything here is especially made to be against rogues! Bats that see through stealth! Kobolds that can smell and hear stealthy types! Spiders that catch stealthy characters in their webs!”

  The priestess glanced at me from head to toe and sneered.

  “The balance developer tried hard. Otherwise a noob rogue like you could have gone through the whole dungeon on his own.”

  I let out a string of curses.

  “Did you get hit hard?” Isabella asked.

  “I’ll be as good as new in an hour or two,” I replied, mentally weighing up my regeneration speed. “My knee will probably be all right before that.”

  The elf gave me an angry glance and cut me off.

  “We can’t lose that much time!”

  I sighed, rose to my feet with some difficulty and limped off down the corridor. Thankfully, the domain of the spiders didn’t go beyond the barred entranceway and there were no webs or scratches left by their spikes on the walls. The passage soon started to angle downwards and we came across empty and rusty torch sconces. I slowed down my pace and started to pay a lot more attention to what was under my feet.

  There was little hope of noticing a trap in advance with my level of perception, but I didn’t want to give this up to chance. I turned out to be right. A stone cube that was slightly crooked compared to its neighbors soon came before my eyes and as soon as I looked at it intently, the silhouette of a discovered trap appeared.

  “Be careful!” I warned the priestess. “Follow right after me!”

  There was no guarantee that I would make out all of the traps and there could never be only one, but following each other step by step allowed us to reduce the risk of activating the defensive mechanisms of the dungeon to a minimum.

  “All right,” Isabella replied curtly. She deliberately fell behind again and followed me at around ten to fifteen paces away.

  I couldn’t blame her for that, as I’d have happily let someone else walk on ahead of me. This way, I had to stand still for a moment after every step, expecting the creak of some rusty mechanism underfoot with every movement.

  Nothing happened though. We managed to make it to the descent of the next level without any adventures.

  The railings around the stairway leading down was made out of human bones, with the eye sockets of the skulls built into the walls burning with a blue fire. They didn’t provide much light, but were great at creating a depressing atmosphere.

  I started to feel uncomfortable, and you need to try hard to scare a dead man.

  There was no better place for traps, but I took my first step on one of the wide marble steps without hesitation. I didn’t even hold my breath.

  I didn’t breathe anyhow.

  First step, second step, third step and then the stairs ended unusually quickly and I found myself in the middle of a spacious dungeon with a high ceiling that was decorated by glowing crystals. The uneven walls were covered with cobwebs, but these were normal webs, without the huge lines and sticky ropes of the monsters of the level above.

  I stepped away from the staircase and stopped, waiting for Isabella. Suddenly, the wall moved! The cobwebs slid away and the skull of a skeleton that had been immured in the wall came before my eyes. It clacked its lower jaw and suddenly demanded, “Kill me!”

  That was exactly what Isabella did. She just cracked the skull with her staff and gray pieces poured down onto the floor. The skeleton shuddered and fell apart into separate bones. I picked up a femur and found that it had been chewed upon by powerful teeth.

  “Have you fallen asleep, Kitten?” the elven priestess asked me.

  I ignored her and wiped the dust off the neighboring skeleton. It turned out to have been chewed on just as much as the previous one.

  “Kitten?”

  “There’s a layer of ghouls or some other carrion eaters somewhere around here,” I told the priestess.

  Isabella rubbed at her chin thoughtfully.

  “So these aren’t just decorations?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” I chuckled as I pointed to a mound of bones piled in the corner. They were cracked into pieces and the marrow had been sucked out.

  “Well,” the priestess sighed, “now we know what awaits us ahead. How’s your knee?”

  My health hadn’t fully recovered yet, but my leg could already bend and the shards of my meniscus no longer crunched with every step. I could move normally.

  That’s what I told Isabella.

  “Onwards!” was what she commanded in reply.

  I looked around and moved towards the dark doorway that I could see far ahead. As I passed a stone pillar, the skeleton which was chained to it awakened and asked, “Kill me!”

  Isabella immediately fulfilled this request and crushed its time-worn yellow skull.

  “What a pest!” she said indignantly.

  I got distracted and nearly missed a stone slab which was askew. I took a closer look and saw that it was definitely a trap.

  “Walk around it!” I warned the priestess, while I carefully stepped up to the door and had a look at the next dungeon. It turned out to be a catacomb full of disturbed graves.

  The graves were built
into the walls and followed one after another in several rows and rose to the very ceiling. The narrow passages were littered with shards of bone, shreds of shrouds and pieces of stone slabs. It actually smelled of something far nastier than dead flesh here...

  I activated stealth mode, took a few strides and then stepped over a trap that I discovered. The scratches on the slabs of the disturbed graves were shocking because of their depth — it was as if someone had deliberately chiseled into the stone.

  I got distracted from looking at the floor for only a moment, but that was enough. Something crunched underfoot and I jumped forward, but I still didn’t manage to fully avoid the attack. A huge weight fell upon me, something hit me on my head and I got thrown to the floor.

  Damn! I somehow got up from the floor and discovered that my head had twisted to the side. This sort of wound would have definitely killed any living character, while I just couldn’t move my neck.

  “Are you all right?” Isabella asked as she stood still by the slab that had fallen from the ceiling.

  “Partially,” I gurgled and grabbed my head to turn my face forward, accompanied by the crunch of broken vertebrae. I let go and understood that my neck didn’t twist by itself anymore.

  Horrible.

  I took a step and I suddenly got strongly drawn to the side, as if the wound had also affected my vestibular system. I swayed as I walked a little further and was relieved to find that I could still keep my balance.

  “Useless piece of carrion,” I seemed to hear from the darkness, but it could have been an illusion. I’m not sure at all that Isabella said it out loud.

  However, there is no need to say certain things out loud as they are that obvious. A level 26 rogue, who was actually level 13 was not at all the best companion for walking around dungeons which were generated for characters at level 50!

  After taking a few more steps I decided that I had finally gotten used to my ramrod straight and immobile neck, but when I wanted to look under my feet, I bent over too much and almost fell forwards. I swayed, waved my hands and suddenly saw movement in the next passage out of the corner of my eye. I turned sharply, raising my arm to block and almost took the attack of a scavenger on my shoulder!

  The rat-faced creature with powerful front paws was no bigger than a child, but smashed into me like a cannonball and easily threw me to the wall.

  I backed into the unevenly laid stonework and pushed the scavenger with its open maw away from me. The long claws that it sank into me tore apart my already bedraggled cloak but powerfully slid off the steel links of my chainmail. The carrion eater that I threw off made an agile turn in the air, landed on its paws and immediately rushed back towards me. I met it with a flamberge attack, but the creature somehow managed to avoid the blade and slash at my face with its clawed forepaw.

  My cheek was sliced down to the bone and the game log flashed red — the hit caused double damage. I was enraged, so I used Sweeping Strike and the beast didn’t manage to avoid it this time as the blade caught it as it jumped and threw it back down to the floor. I slashed down at it with the flamberge and took its front paw clean off.

  “Step back!” Isabella shouted, but I didn’t listen to the priestess and slashed the creature’s ugly head in half with my next sword strike.

  Got it!

  Another creature immediately darted towards me from the dark passageway. Diving under my arm, the ratling thrust its clawed paw into the hole left in my chainmail by the kobold’s pick and the world went red.

  Claws of Darkness. Double damage!

  Damage taken: 148 [252/624]

  Stun: Save Failed! 00:29... 00:28... 00:27...

  Stunned? I froze as if I was a statue, unable to move hand or foot!

  A ball of lightning hit the scavenger on the back and tore it into pieces, but it made no difference. A squall of ratlike beings burst out of the darkness and they buried me underneath and tore me apart in an instant.

  An especially horrible death...

  3

  DARKNESS. HEWN STONE. Pieces of bone.

  I was resurrected inside one of the side niches and immediately put the skull that I had in my hand back in my inventory. I no longer had my chainmail hauberk. It was either left on my corpse or it had fallen to pieces, having lost the last of its durability. Thankfully, my other items were intact.

  I fell off the stone shelf onto the floor and someone whistled in surprise nearby.

  “Oh, Kitten, you are so full of surprises!” Isabella drawled. “How did you manage to return to the dungeon? Just don’t tell me that you have a portable altar! It’s useless down here. I checked!”

  I didn’t answer the uncomfortable question posed by the priestess and asked one of my own instead.

  “Was I gone for long?”

  “For around a quarter of an hour,” Isabella replied. She had been roughed up rather badly in her battle with the scavengers. “Try to hold out for a little longer next time, all right?”

  “I think I’ll try.”

  The dark elf snorted and turned her face away from me, as it was covered with cuts from the slicing of claws. There was a small glowing cloud above her head and a used Scroll of Regeneration lay at her feet.

  Isabella suddenly smirked and licked her smashed lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “If you are able to get resurrected right here, we can use you for scouting... A bit more actively.”

  “When I listen to you, it sounds like I didn’t do anything!” I replied indignantly.

  “You did,” Isabella admitted and then started to hurry. “Let’s go, we need to burn out the rat nest.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “They have had a taste of you, Kitten,” Isabella replied. She winced, adding, “They had a taste of me too. If we don’t exterminate them, they’ll come at us from behind.”

  I left the dead end together with the priestess and saw that the narrow passage was covered with scavenger bodies. With body parts and burnt guts, to be more exact.

  Isabella spat with annoyance and started to look for something among the bloody mess. She soon chose a scavenger that was not burnt as badly as the others, took one of the long pins out of her hair and stuck it in the scruff of the dead creature’s neck.

  The scavenger shuddered, got back up on all fours and started to crawl along the blood-stained floor of the dungeon, its paws moving slowly but surely.

  “So you’re a necromancer as well?” I asked with surprise.

  “I am the servant of the Mistress of the Crimson Moon, Goddess of Birth and Death,” Isabella replied and then ordered, “Get moving!”

  “Me again?”

  “Who else? I’m no tank, Kitten, you need to cover me!”

  I couldn’t argue with that so I followed the zombie scavenger. We passed the dungeon with the graves and started to see more immured and chained skeletons along the walls.

  “Kill me!” one of them asked in the usual way, but I passed it by. I heard a crunching sound behind me and the voice immediately fell silent.

  The dead ratling, as my companion decided to call them, kept crawling along, but it wasn’t particularly fast. I easily fell in step with its unhurried movements, following behind and looking around tensely, ready to enter stealth mode at the first sign of danger.

  Nothing happened, however. We managed to pass several empty halls unchallenged, but when we reached a fork in the passageways, there was a sudden thud and our guide was hacked to pieces by blades which came out of the wall.

  “Damn!” Isabella spat out.

  We didn’t really need the sluggish zombie anymore anyway. I noticed a hall behind one of the pillars which looked like the scavengers had dug their lair right into the body of the rock.

  “What’re you waiting for?” the priestess hurried me along.

  I got down on all fours and started to make my careful and unhurried way towards the hole. If it was even a little narrower, there would be quite a risk of getting stuck and there was no way to use a
flamberge normally here, unless I only used it for thrusting.

  The hole gradually narrowed and I would have begun to sweat with fear, but the dead do not sweat. There are many things the dead never do...

  Thankfully, the rathole was not too long and we soon came out onto a small stone platform on the wall of a spacious and dark cave. A side staircase led downwards with narrow and uneven steps, but Isabella didn’t want to descend.

  “Cover me!” she demanded, as she started to do some sort of sorcery. The energy which poured from the hands of the priestess hung in the air in glowing lines, which then came together to form the outline of some sort of complex figure and carried themselves somewhere under the vaulted stone ceiling of the cave. A ghostly cloud started to form there and gradually turn an intimidating shade of crimson . The brighter it glowed the louder could we hear squeaks, scratches and creaks.

  “Hold them back!” Isabella growled, her gray face filling with blood and darkening from extreme concentration. Fat droplets of sweat rolled down the cheeks and forehead of the priestess, as her cheeks drew in and her eyes sank deep and started to burn with a dark fire. The same fire burned in the eye sockets of the skull on the staff that she had slung on her back.

  I didn’t get distracted by Roger or the glow intensifying under the ceiling. I changed my grip on the flamberge and got ready to fight back against the attack. Thankfully, all I needed to do was to knock scavengers off the narrow stairway. Nevertheless, the first scavenger caught me unawares. It took a low jump from the stairs onto the platform and skillfully dodged under the blade of the flamberge, but then got caught by a kick from my boot and flew off downwards.

  I heard the echo of a muffled thud and another scavenger appeared. My flamberge took its clawed paw and the retreating creature fell off the platform without outside assistance. The next creature chose an absolutely ideal moment to jump and attacked me when I was only about to raise my sword. The scavenger had quite a good chance to push me off the platform, but I was saved by my Dodge skill. The creature missed and flew into the darkness, almost clawing at Isabella on the way.