by Hugo Damas
Okay, Zaniyah thought to herself.
The Hunter fashioned a torch out of the materials around her, using part of a branch, pieces of a bush, and then rocks to light a fire. She had something else to use for light, a magical item that had been provided by Eliza, but Zaniyah liked magic only a bit more than machinery, which wasn’t much at all. She preferred to have the torch, thinking the fire was real and more useful than a glowing stone.
When the Hunter was halfway down the stairs, one of the steps sunk down with her foot. Mechanisms engaged and she heard plating snapping into place, repeatedly and increasingly louder. Closer.
The Hunter saw the staircase was flattening around ten steps away, which was enough time for her to jump. She split her legs and caught herself between the walls, keeping herself steady as the steps flattened under her and all the way up to where the staircase began. Looking back, she heard stone scraping and dragging itself, and suddenly, there was no wind coming from the entrance. It had been blocked.
It seemed the place wasn’t as decrepit as Zaniyah had first thought it to be. There is probably a pit at the bottom of the staircase, her experience told her.
The Hunter tested the wall for attrition by turning her feet somewhat and, content, allowed her body to fall back. She swung it, and once her head brushed the now smooth ramp, she pulled her feet of the wall to let go.
Her body glided forward a few feet using the momentum. The Hunter kicked off one of the walls, lightly kicked off the opposite one, all to extend her lunge and also help her break her speed, and then split her legs to get a firm grip on the walls. Her feet slid some inches but otherwise helped her stop her momentum, even if she ended up almost upside-down.
The Hunter breathed out in effort. Even for her, what she was doing was physically taxing. She breathed in to gather her inside strength, and then pulled herself up, taking in the burn in her abdomen. Then she swung again.
It was arduous, and it took time, but that was sometimes the necessity of treasure hunting. The Hunter estimated that it took around half an hour to reach the exit, at which point she swung one final time, flying over a pit of metal spikes that had been placed to receive whoever slid down the ramp.
The Hunter narrowly grabbed at the ledge of the actual floor.
She pulled herself up and sat down, massaging her legs and feet, but mostly her abdomen. Zaniyah needed to relax the muscles before moving on. She was a bit annoyed because it turned out she could have simply slid down the ramp and then leapt over the spike trap. However, there was no way to be sure that the pit was that short in length, and also, there could have been more unexpected traps, and sliding down a ramp would give her no time to react.
After ten minutes of rest, she continued on. As she had expected, the deeper the Hunter went, the more challenging the temple became. Tar floors lighting on fire, walls firing arrows, ceiling and floor closing on each other. All things the Hunter was familiar with.
All the while, Zaniyah wondered whether she could find her way back out, but after dozens of past experiences, she had learned to not let that uncertainty be a detriment to her focus.
The Hunter needed all the concentration she could muster to deal with the hardships at hand.
There were also inscriptions and tombs. People were buried there, still holding their possessions. So to speak, they were long past decomposed in the ground where their ashes were buried, so they possessed nothing. Eventually, the Hunter would come by the tomb she needed to steal from.
That of Jakarayah.
He was the prophet that turned the worship of the Light into the worldwide phenomenon that it was. Zaniyah wondered if the whole thing was as corrupted back then as it was now. Whether he was just the first iteration of the Lady of Light, and all before her who led a whole slew of institutionalized practices and rules that mostly served their benefit.
Zaniyah didn’t wonder for long. That kind of thing was beyond someone as simple as she was. She wanted to make her people proud, that was all that drove her.
The tombs were just simple doors on the floor, with each grave having the name of the occupant inscribed onto it. The letters were in another language, even if they looked like the one she had come to know in the civilized world. To make sure she would recognize Jakariah’s, she had it memorized like one memorized a drawing.
The Hunter looked at the first tomb, finding out she had to dust it to be able to see the inscription. She did so cautiously, lest it be booby-trapped.
Nothing happened, and that wasn’t it. The Hunter held up the torch, which was now dwindling, and saw that she was in a room filled with many tombs. She had the strong sensation that her mark wouldn’t be one in a group but more one in a whole room. That said, there wasn’t really any rush, so she preferred to check every single one individually.
They were spread across the floor like flower-beds in a flat park. A few inches protruded from the ground but they otherwise fit into it pretty neatly.
The Hunter had relaxed after checking up on the third tomb, now convinced they weren’t going to ambush her. She was still moving carefully, one never knew if the ceiling didn’t have a trapdoor to drop acid or poisonous insects, or if the ground wouldn’t trigger some other kind of trap, but the tombs, at least, seemed to be safe. And the fourth tomb wasn’t it either.
The Hunter froze.
There had been a noise, she was sure of it, but the crackling of the fire was keeping the environment from being completely silent. Zaniyah blew on it immediately and, in the dark and quiet, stood still. Listening.
She heard a faint, far-away noise…of a crash.
Maybe one of the traps? Zaniyah considered the moving ceiling, thinking it might have collapsed, but another crash sounded out, very very far away. She couldn’t rationally explain it, but the sense she got was that it was by the entrance.
Zaniyah couldn’t reasonably explain why she suddenly felt a danger to her goal. To her life, even. Fear of the unknown gripped her as she could only assume what else was there, but as another crash came on, still in the faint distance, and yet, a tiny bit closer, she decided to throw most of her caution into the grave she was standing over.
There was a reason to rush now.
The crashing was erratic. There was violence to it. Something was busting through traps and entrances with all the subtlety and patience of a raging bull.
The Hunter ran around frantically, holding her magic stone up to the graves. The stone produced a yellow light and seemed to be fueled by contact with flesh, since it had been dark while in her pouch. She preferred not to think about how it actually worked.
The stampeding sounded closer and closer, and so The Hunter’s searching got faster and faster.
She changed rooms, finding more tombs. Exasperating, the Hunter threw all of her caution out the window -- so to speak, there were absolutely no windows -- and got to jumping from tomb to tomb. Thankfully her rushing did not activate any traps, which all but convinced her that the rooms really were safe, as far as that went.
The Hunter didn’t exactly notice how she started to sweat, but with her heart beating at a faster rate, and starting to run, she knew she was in trouble.
Frantically, Zaniyah decided to change rooms before getting through all the tombs. She was met with a chamber. It was wide and went far with tombs in rows after rows.
“Oh my…” Checking them all would take forever or, failing that, too long.
Zaniyah recognized the sound of crashing coming from the first room with tombs.
It must be the LBA. They want to interfere with everything we seek to accomplish, Zaniyah considered, angry. Her eyes, though, scanned the room she was on. Urgently.
There was a podium located front and center, elevated above the other tombs, and illuminated by a single ray of light. The light was very faint, likely coming from what was probably an inch-wide crack in the ceiling many feet above.
Still, that had to be it. With another entrance rupturing and falling, Zaniyah h
ad to be honest with herself and admit she wouldn’t reach it in time.
Alright. The Hunter pushed the light stone back into her small pouch, making it instantly go dark, and jumped aside twice. Okay.
The Hunter relaxed her heart and calmed her breathing.
Right by her, in the other room, tombs cracked and shattered under whatever was coming her way. Zaniyah was about to find out what that was.
The entrance to that gallery of cadavers burst inwards, announcing the arrival of the unstoppable thing that had been rampaging through the temple for the past ten minutes.
It was a beast.
The Hunter squeezed herself against the wall, hoping she was outside its peripheral view. She held her breath, too. A beast? What?!!
It didn’t make sense. Had they reached that far south? At the moment the beast landed and steadied itself, to take stock of the room, the Hunter noticed how she could hear no more. Why only one? She asked herself. What?
There was only one possible explanation for that situation. Only one answer came to Zaniyah’s mind with all the certainty of every instinct she had accumulated over the years.
There really was something about the amulet. Something the Beasts feared.
The beast sunk its claws on the floor and leaned in preparation to lunge. In reaction, Zaniyah’s nervous system flared. She imagined a world where the beast was successful at what it was trying to do right then and there. A world where the amulet, possibly a true threat to them, was destroyed right in front of her.
The feeling of failure produced a fear that consumed every other source of hesitation.
Without thinking, she leaped for the beast, hopefully staying outside of view, and then jumped to grab it.
Her hand grabbed on a crevice in the back of the neck just as the body lurched forward in its piston-like launch. Zaniyah was whipped and dragged across the air, and she couldn’t help but squeeze out a grunt of effort.
They crossed the entire room in one amazingly fast glide. The Hunter’s body was dragged like a cape, her fingers barely hanging on, and protesting with pain.
Her senses flared and doubled their effectiveness, and her instinct had taken control. She caught a glimpse of how far away the tomb was and got a sense of how close to it she would land.
The beast started a descent, and so did the Hunter, still hanging on. Her instincts flared again, and the Hunter released the beast, to get launched further by inertia. She front-flipped for added safety, and it was a good thing she did because her arms hit the beast’s head hard as she flipped over it.
The Hunter was on high alert.
Her body hit the ground tumbling uncontrollably. Zaniyah focused on her feet. She made them hit the floor as soon as possible to send her in a leap towards the tomb. She might not control her body’s movement, but she could manage its heading.
A monstrous howl came after her just as her body hit the lid of the tomb full-force and with little to no restraint, or focus. She was unsure how she had hit it, but it rebounded her back quite aggressively, into another chaotic tumble.
The Hunter felt a good amount of pain gnawing at her right shoulder.
Knowing she was tumbling back towards the beast, she frantically scrapped to kick against the ground and stop that, afraid it would attack and reach her.
It did.
The Hunter felt a stinging sharpness cutting across her back. With a frightful yell that she failed to contain, Zaniyah jumped again and ran for the tomb, only then noticing that her hitting it had pushed it with enough force to send the cover sliding off.
Another howl came forth, and she knew the beast was about to leap at her again. With her back flaring dangerously hot, she pushed the lid to hurry it up and reached to grab the first thing her treasure hunter eyes got drawn to. All to the noise of the ground crunching behind her.
The Hunter turned her head and then jumped back to avoid the beast’s leap. It glided much less so it could hit the tomb, heavy-handedly crushing the whole thing, as well as the small pedestal it had been standing on.
The Hunter landed on leveled ground and looked at what she had grabbed.
It was a pendant, but was it the amulet? Zaniyah’s brain didn’t have enough control of her mental faculties to compare the inscription to what she knew. It was mostly flooded with pain and fear.
Her instinct, however, was coming in loud and clear.
YOU HAVE IT! RUN! Zaniyah turned and ran for her life.
A normal person would never outrun a beast. The Beasts were only slow to jump from the point of view of someone who could split a second into different parts, perception-wise. Indeed, most really athletic people would also fail to do so. The Hunter could fail to do so, but right then, at that moment, she had to succeed.
The fate of the world might well depend on it.
With that pressure weighing heavily somewhere in the recesses of her survival instinct, she heard the wind cutting and knew where to dodge to. The Hunter hopped to the left, allowing the beast to crush the ground she would have been standing on otherwise.
She got the sense that the beast would next jump straight for the entrance to cut her off. It was its best bet. The Hunter measured distances and was pretty certain she would not make it in time.
However, the fact was that Zaniyah had not seen any other exits, and she would never be able to defeat the beast. She either made it to that exit or else…
The Hunter ran faster than she had ever run before.
Zaniyah leaped thrice and reached for the pieces of the broken entrance that were still standing, desperate to gain every little inch of terrain that she could. The beast was already soaring, so said the silence, and it would be soaring to either cut her off or downright crush her.
The Hunter’s hands awkwardly grasped around the shattered stone of the exit, since they were both holding on to items, and pulled, turning to get out from in front of it, but she was too late. A massive pain simultaneously slammed and pierced the side of her back.
The Hunter was thrown against the wall yelling, but she was so high on the adrenaline pumping through her body that the pain and wound were left forgotten. She bounced off, landed on her feet and glanced at the beast, seeing it half-past the entrance, with some of the stone ruptured around it.
Those stark, dark eyeballs fixed on her, and its left claw thrust with every intention to skewer her. The Hunter leaned out of the way by rolling back, and then dove forward and vaulted her body over the claw.
The Hunter hit the ground running but almost instantly tripped from pain stabbing at her side, finding out she had not completely dodged the swipe.
She skipped on her left leg every five steps, trying to find the optimal way to run with her injuries. She decided on using her left leg to jump and land. It still hurt her side considerably, but using the right leg was a pain so acute that it threatened to knock her out.
Zaniyah heard the beast giving chase. Crashing and crushing its way across the hall, trying to reach her.
I will make it! The Hunter thought to herself, wincing even inside her mind. I will make it!
Zaniyah followed the trail of destruction the beast had left in its wake, past the tomb rooms and back into the corridors filled with traps. Fortunately, the rooms were much smaller than Jakaraiah’s tomb, which meant much sharper turns, all close to each other. The corridors also didn’t have high ceilings, and that lack of height kept the beast from leaping far. Indeed, they were dented all over from the beast’s earlier rush.
The Hunter saw the broken traps, easily making out that none of them had posed any danger to the beast, if they had even provoked any pause. She reached the room with the walls of arrows and stopped with a wince. Her mind was back with enough control to remember she should consider that room for a moment.
Damn.
The Hunter had surpassed that trap by simply outrunning the arrows. How would she repeat the feat with her wounds? She then noticed she was holding the magical stone of glowing, in the hand tha
t wasn’t holding the amulet.
That was good.
Zaniyah also glanced down at the wound, finding a puncture large enough to shock her. Frowning, she looked back to see a trail of bloody spots.
Crap. It didn’t look like anything too important had been skewered, even though the bleeding was serious enough by itself. The Hunter would survive if she could escape and tend to the wounds. She would certainly die, and soon, if she could not. Immediately, she pulled the scarf out from the neck and tied it around her entire torso, covering both the side wound and part of whatever wound now plagued her back.
She tightened it in a grunt of pain.
More crushing of stone, and bellows, both approaching. Why did it bellow like that? It sounded so angry, so furious, even though it held no sort of face with which to express any emotion.
The Hunter looked forward a bit more carefully to find there was stone scattered across the floor. She raised an eyebrow.
The arrows are shot due to the pressurized floor, she remembered, truly putting her all into producing clear thoughts. It was pretty sensitive too.
Gingerly, she stepped into the trap, confident that she had the speed to back-off in case the first three arrows came out.
They didn’t. None did.
Out of ammo! Zaniyah realized, and immediately leaped forward, cursing at herself with words she didn’t know the meaning of. She could have just kept going!
The beast crashed into the room just as she was exiting it. Its wail boomed again with frustrated fury.
The mind of the Hunter was back at work. In her awkward mix of jumping and limping that constituted a run, she opened her hand to look at the amulet. It was a white thing, but it wasn’t glowing or anything. It was just made out of a kind of metal that had not gained an inch of rust in the centuries it had been down there next to a corpse.
Sure.
It had an inscription but it wasn’t in the language that was on the tombs, it was something she didn’t know. It matched the drawings she had memorized, however, and that was enough. The Hunter had her prize. She pushed it into the safety of her pouch.