She simply dashed back to where she’d left the supplies, dug a Mana potion from Preston’s pack, and turned to the massive stone door that could only lead to the main temple.
“So,” she said, cognizant of the time pressures before them, “let’s get this thing open.”
* * *
Alvin spat out his tea. “He actually said that?!”
Preston nodded, a smile crossing his face. “I shit you not, those were his exact words.” He pointed up at the cultist’s agape expression. “That was my reaction too.”
The two sat together on the floor of the prison room, exchanging conversation between the petrified-wood bars. Alvin sat comfortably on a cushion Preston had passed through the barrier while the healer sipped on tea kindly provided by the friendly cultist.
“What did you do?”
Preston turned up his palms. “What could I do? I ran the hells out of there and never looked back. Lesson learned: just because you see collars in the window doesn’t mean it’s a pet store.”
Alvin shook his head, his face rapidly approaching the color of a beet as he let out waves of wild laughter. “I can’t believe people—” He froze. “The tea cakes!” He shot to his feet, not waiting for a reply as he dashed from the small chamber.
Preston chuckled to himself as he watched the man leave. He rather liked Alvin, though he had to wonder how one such as he had wound up part of a cult. Maybe he had family connections?
He dismissed the thought as Alvin reappeared with a white apron wrapped around his cultist robes, clutching a metal tray with two fluffy oven mittens. The scent alone drove Preston to his feet.
Precisely twenty-four bite-sized pastries lined the sheet, each cut into pristine squares with a flourish of bright pink frosting for decoration. Smell aside, if the treats tasted as good as they looked, Preston might have to kidnap the cultist for his own culinary purposes. He never got a chance to find out.
Three robed figures rushed into the room from the other entrance, their gasps for breath a prelude to the panic in their voices. All three began speaking at once, wasting precious seconds on a jumbled mess of words before one finally took the lead. “Alvin! Have you seen Lord Melithor? We have a problem!”
“We certainly do,” a familiar snide voice sounded from behind the kind baker-cultist. The cult leader—presumably Lord Melithor—stepped into the tight room flanked by two others. “What’s this I hear about—oh, thank you Alvin.” He paused to snatch a tea cake from Alvin’s tray. The room fell terribly silent as he chewed.
The cultists trembled.
He swallowed, venom returning to his voice. “What’s this I hear about the nursery?”
“They’ve—um—they’ve burned it, your holiness. It’s gone.”
Alvin gasped. “Not the puppies!”
Melithor cursed. “Without the hellhounds, Garaxia will be without Her army. She won’t be pleased.” He addressed his frightened underlings, “How did they find the nursery? Which of you idiots forgot to enchant the key to break if they interfered with its casing?”
“It’s a wooden key!” a voice protested. “It would’ve snapped like a twig if they tried to break it free or caught fire if they tried to melt the ice!”
The leader rubbed his temples. “Caught fire? That’s your excuse? And what, pray tell, happens to ice when it melts?”
“It—um—it turns to water?”
“And how well does wood burn when it’s soaking gods-damned wet?” he yelled through his teeth.
The cultists cowered before him.
Melithor continued, “You’re all useless! Somehow I’ve managed to gather the least competent group of people to ever summon an archdemon!” He paused, every ounce of cruelty disappearing from his tone. “Not you, Alvin. You’re doing a wonderful job and we all appreciate you.”
Alvin beamed as a chorus of nods reaffirmed the praise, only to halt as Lord Melithor turned back to his other underlings.
“But the rest of you—useless! Please at least tell me you’ve completed preparations for the summoning ritual. We’re lucky the adventurers took the long way here.”
“Yes, your holiness,” a quivering voice answered. “We’re nearly—”
He cut off as a horrible demonic cry echoed in the distance.
Melithor cursed. “They’re at our gods-damned front door. Nearly isn’t gonna cut it. Finish the runes, prepare the altar, rein in the imps, whatever still needs to be done. I don’t wanna hear excuses, I want you to do your damned jobs.”
He reached into his robe, withdrawing a crooked knife of pure obsidian. “If you all fuck this up, I swear to Her Greatness those adventurers won’t need to do shit. I’ll kill you myself.” Six cultists trembled at the violence in his words until he tacked on an extra “Not you, Alvin.” The remaining five continued their trembling.
“Go!” he barked, shocking the gathered cultists into action. With a vile grin, Melithor turned to address Alvin with a sudden warmth in his voice. “Prepare the Priestess,” he ordered before heading off for one of the open tunnels. “It’s showtime.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Showtime
ALVIN DIDN’T SEEM to realize Preston had slipped free of his bindings even as he grabbed the Priestess and slung him over his shoulder with surprising Strength. Preston struggled, of course.
Having failed to escape the cage, freeing himself from Alvin was his next best bet at avoiding the sacrificial altar. Much as he disliked writhing and kicking and scratching at the kind cultist, he disliked the idea of dying to summon an archdemon even less. The Priestess was smart enough to realize that every second he could delay the ritual was another opportunity for his companions to arrive. So he struggled.
Unfortunately, his unimproved eight base Strength proved useless against Alvin’s ironclad grip. Hells, the cultist didn’t even react to Preston’s efforts. Whether he was too strong to notice or too polite to comment, Alvin practically skipped down the icy tunnel with the healer in tow.
Preston gave up three minutes in. “How—how are you so strong? I didn’t think Cultist gave any Strength.”
“It doesn’t,” Alvin chirped. “I was a Blacksmith’s Apprentice before Lord Melithor found me. Racked up a lot of Strength and not much else.”
Preston furrowed his brow as he tried and failed to imagine the short-statured baker working a forge. “So how does a trainee blacksmith end up here?”
Alvin’s shrug dug into Preston’s stomach. “I always hated it. Stuck in a hot smithy all day with a bunch of folks too distracted by the clanging of their hammers to hold a pleasant conversation. I practically jumped at the chance to leave when I found Lord Melithor’s pamphlet.”
“His… pamphlet? He was recruiting for his evil cult by handing out pamphlets?”
“How else would he have done it?” Alvin asked. “It’s foolproof, really. No man could gaze upon Garaxia’s beauty without becoming enthralled. Of course, the leaflets only had a crude sketch, but even that was enough to sway the hearts of many.”
Again with the ‘no man,’ Preston thought. He opened his mouth to ask about the word choice, or even why he’d yet to see a female cultist, but Alvin beat him to it.
“Oh, here we are!” He stopped short in the middle of a hallway. “I’ve known brothers of Her cult to stand here and gaze up at Her mural for hours.”
Two thoughts crossed Preston’s mind as he twisted his neck to look up at the painted wall. The first was that Garaxia was anything but beautiful. Her skin was the same deep blue of the demonic ice, and her face was warped both in rage and by the pair of tusks jutting past her upper lip. The mural depicted her wielding two brutally jagged swords, each stained red with the blood of whosever army she’d been cutting through.
The second thought to pop up in Preston’s mind was of understanding. Welp, he sighed to himself, that explains why the cult is all men.
Garaxia was topless.
As Preston reasoned, either the painter had taken a good number of artistic liberties
with the size of her chest, or the demoness herself employed some amount of illusion magic, because there was no way those had any place on a field of battle.
“Isn’t She magnificent?” Alvin muttered.
“Alvin, no,” Preston answered. “You could do so much better.”
The cultist sighed. “Look, I’m sure Ayla is absolutely lovely, but I couldn’t just abandon my friends.”
Preston snorted. “‘Lovely’ isn’t a word I would use to describe Ayla, but that’s not my point.” He shook his head, thinking better of diving into Alvin’s love life at that particular moment. He switched tactics. “Are you sure this is the kind of person you want to be? There are more options between Cultist and Blacksmith.”
“That’s the plan!” Alvin grinned. “Lord Melithor says once She’s summoned, Garaxia will grant a boon to all who contributed to Her great arrival. I’m going to ask for money to start a tea shop.”
Preston blinked. “A tea shop?”
“Yep!”
“There are easier ways to get funding. Why didn’t you just… get a loan?” The Priestess sighed. “Hells, if you let me go I’ll give you the gods-damned silver myself.”
“Really? Awww, that’s so nice of you! It’s not just about me, though. Larry needs to pay his brother’s bail, Riley needs to hunt down the basilisk that killed his father, and Andrew needs Her help to locate his missing son. I can’t abandon them.”
Preston instinctively moved to rub his temples at this headache of a situation, but Alvin’s restraining grasp held his arm in place. “You’re all gonna die. If my friends don’t kill you, some other party will, and that’s if you survive summoning an archdemon in the first place.”
Alvin shrugged. “We can’t all be adventurers, and we can’t all fight our way to what we want.” He looked up at the mural. “We take the opportunities that present themselves. Either they pan out or they don’t. At least at the end we can say that we tried.”
He turned, leaving the painting behind as he continued on down the frigid hallway.
As Preston’s mind raced to find ways to refute the cultist’s statement, he found his arguments increasingly hopeless. He could only hope the coming bloodshed wouldn’t prove as costly as he feared.
* * *
“All ready?” Urgency filled Wes’s voice as he addressed the others.
Eve watched her Mana pool tick up as the potion did its work. “Just about. A few seconds left on my cooldowns, but they’ll be up in time to fight.”
Alex simply nodded.
“Alright.” Eve positioned herself against the cold stone of the massive door. “I open it and Alex steps in first?”
“Is that the best strategy?” the warrior asked. “Pushing open this behemoth won’t exactly be subtle, and that’s if it’s even unlocked.”
The air glowed orange as Wes’s hand came alight. “I’ll burn it down if I have to. One way or another, we’re going through that door.”
“Right, right, subtlety isn’t your strong suit,” Eve teased. “Maybe there’s another secret passage we could—”
She trailed off as a chorus of masculine voices filled the cavern, somehow unmuffled through the thick door. They chanted in a language unknown to the Striker, but she didn’t need to understand the words to know they didn’t mean anything good.
Wes stopped forward. “Time’s up.”
Eve nodded, bracing herself against the cobblestone floor. With a burst of strength and the aid of her Surefooted to keep her from sliding, she shoved.
The gargantuan, foot-thick door swung open without resistance, slamming into the interior wall with a resounding thud. It was apparently not only unlocked but also enchanted for ease of opening. Whoops.
The chanting came to an abrupt halt as two dozen hooded faces turned to stare at the intruders.
“So much for subtlety.” Eve drew her mace.
The ritual chamber itself was octagonal in shape, roughly eighty feet across in all directions. The walls were lined with paintings and tapestries of a half-naked demon woman Eve could only assume was Garaxia, but she had neither the time nor attention to spare judging the tasteless depictions.
A stone table dominated the cavern’s center. It rested upon a wide platform, atop which the entire congregation of cultists stood in a circle. Eve had just a moment to note the demonic runes carved into the floor and the familiar Priestess tied down to the sacrificial altar before the first frost bolt flew her way.
Alex leapt forward, catching the projectile on her shield. Three more followed.
The room erupted with flame as Wes launched his own barrage in retaliation. It was met with screams of agony. A smile began to spread across the mage’s face as his spells did their work, only to falter and fail as an explosion of ice quenched the flames.
The already frigid air turned sharp as the chill spread, forming a layer of frost upon the ground. Twice Wes tried to continue his assault and twice his Fire Bolts flickered out before they reached their target.
The cultists didn’t let up. Each time Eve made a move to dash from behind the cover of Alex’s shield, a frost bolt flew by, sending her back to the Survivor’s protection.
“Hold fast!” Alex called. “They have to run out of Mana eventually!”
Eve bit her lip, counting the impacts as spell after spell struck the warrior’s shield. She waited.
It wasn’t a lapse in the onslaught that eventually prompted Eve to leap into action. It was the series of hideous inhuman cries.
She Charged!
A whirlwind of frost encircled the dais, obscuring the platform in its own contained blizzard. No wonder Wes’s spells had failed. A silhouette stood at the maelstrom’s center, his arms held to the sky as he channeled the protective spell. Eve could worry about him later—if he was busy channeling he wasn’t stabbing Preston.
Instead, she turned her focus towards the steady stream of figures emerging from the tempest. Eve gripped her mace.
Were it not for the familiar robes they still wore, Eve might’ve thought them summoned beasts. As it was, whatever metamorphosis they’d undergone had left little humanity behind.
Their skin took on the same deep-blue sheen as the demons, their hands grown to slender claws nearly as long as Eve’s entire arm. Pointed horns tore through the tops of their hoods, matched by the viscous maws of needle-sharp teeth that stretched across their faces.
Eve had her work cut out for her.
She picked a target and raced towards it, pulling back her mace for a deadly swing as Mana Rushed through her. She counted down as she approached, waiting for the strike she knew was coming.
Three.
Her heart raced, pumping warmth through her to counteract the frost in the air.
Two.
She held her breath.
One.
She leapt back as the transformed cultist took his swing, her feet sticking well to the frozen floor as Surefooted did its job.
Her opponent had no such skill.
The demonic hybrid skidded forward as it lost its balance, its shredded boots unable to find purchase on the slick ice. Eve’s mace was ready for it.
You have defeated Level 48 Cultist of Garaxia: +1830 exp!
Eve dismissed the notification, not even bothering to grin as she turned to face her next opponent. Even as Alex swung her spear and even Wes joined the fray wielding Burning Hand where Fire Bolt had failed, she moved with haste.
They had too many foes left to defeat before they could turn their attention towards the altar and the blizzard protecting it, and the Striker could only wonder what was going on within.
* * *
Preston strained against his bindings as he jerked his head back and forth between the only two figures that remained within the confines of the ice storm. Adrenaline more than anything fought off the cold as loose bits of snow and ice pelted his skin.
“Finish the ritual!” Melithor yelled over the howling wind as he maintained his spell. “I’ll hold them
back as long as I can!”
Alvin gulped, his eyes flicking from his master’s impressive figure to Preston’s pleading gaze to the jagged knife at Melithor’s waist.
“You don’t have to do this!” Preston shouted.
“But my friends need—”
“They’re dead, Alvin!” the Priestess shouted. “Or they will be soon. Your ritual won’t even bloody work with me as your sacrifice.”
“We should’ve gagged him,” Melithor sneered. “He’s just trying to save his own skin. Do it, Alvin, for the glory of Garaxia!”
Alvin gulped. With a shaking hand he reached out to claim the ritual knife.
“If you do this, there’s no going back. They’ll kill you. You can still surrender. You can still stand down. I won’t let them hurt you if I’m still alive to talk to them.”
A demonic screech pierced the snowstorm as yet another cultist fell to Eve’s mace and Wes’s flames.
Alvin jerked his head in the direction of the noise, his eyes glassing over as he stared at the whirling ice. “Larry…”
“You can’t save them, but it’s not too late to save yourself! You can still have your teashop.”
The knife fell to the floor. “I… I had to try.”
“And you did! But this won’t work. I’m telling you, another opportunity is presenting itself. You just have to take it.”
Melithor snapped. “Don’t listen to him! You’re destined for greatness, Alvin. Now claim it!”
Alvin ran.
The storm parted for him as he dashed through. Preston watched with bated breath as his silhouette separated itself from the chaos of battle, slipping away down a side passage. He smiled.
A string of expressive, if unoriginal, curses escaped the cult leader’s mouth as he took a step back. “Useless, cowardly, imbeciles all of them!” He lowered a hand, the whirlwind visibly weakening as he diverted a portion of his attention from its upkeep. “If you want something done right…” He reached for the fallen knife.
It wasn’t there.
This Quest is Broken! (This Trilogy is Broken (A Comedy Litrpg Adventure) Book 1) Page 32