Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller

by Jason Anspach

  I nodded.

  “You comfortable using it?”

  I said I was.

  He nodded. Then made our plan. We were going to move up, following this gallery we were in. If it was like the ones we could see on the other side, we’d have opportunities to climb up to higher levels via stairs and long sloping ramps. And there would be tombs to hide in set within the walls of the sides of the inverted pyramid that was the well. Maybe, if the enemy had managed to get down into these levels, then maybe a lot of the tombs’ nastier denizens had already been dealt with. Maybe.

  In essence, Sergeant Kurtz was proposing a creep right through their lines and up into the library tower itself. Tanner would stay on point and I would follow close behind. If needed, I’d activate the ring while the team hid, and it would be up to me to find a route through the orc patrols ahead.

  That made perfect sense if you just said it. Doing it sounded crazy. At least it did to me.

  It was clear, as we studied the orcs, that they were looking for something up there above us in the top levels of the tomb.

  “Mighta heard gunfire below,” suggested Brumm, and then spat dip.

  We started out.

  The first hour was solid. We made good time as we passed the gloomy remains of tombs set in the walls. Skulls and carved runes adorned these places like warnings not to enter them on penalty of death. Or sometimes we made our way through rooms full of ancient weapons and chests like dusty old soldiers standing at attention. Kennedy pointed out that there was probably treasure in those chests if it was anything like the game.

  “Probably traps too,” someone muttered. “I thought wizards were supposed to be smart.”

  “You mean high on I-N-T,” Kennedy responded. Intelligence. “Anyway if I’m the wizard… then Soprano’s the thief.”

  “I’m no thief,” Soprano protested from under his load of ammo for the two-forty. “Ain’t never been caught stealin’ nothin’.”

  “The thief,” explained Kennedy patiently, “detects traps and disarms them. Like you did with the trap door.”

  Soprano nodded at this, then agreed. “Then I’m the thief. Okay. Bene.”

  We bypassed our first swarm of orcs easily.

  You could smell them from a long way off because they reeked. Real ripe. We faded into the ruins of a smaller tomb whose door had been pried open at some point in the past in order that it could be thoroughly looted. The Rangers stacked inside the tight tomb, weapons ready to do murder.

  “If just one comes to investigate,” whispered Kurtz as they approached, “I’ll pull it inside and do it. Keep silent until I give the order to engage.”

  Kurtz had his garrote out. Brumm was ready to support with a folding seven-inch karambit knife that he was holding ready near the door to the tomb’s darkness. His other gloved hand was free, ready to control Kurtz’s would-be victim once the strangling began.

  But the orcs passed without incident. There had to be at least thirty of them in that troop. We waited, checked the route forward, and then continued on our route up through the levels.

  The next dodge happened midway up a set of titanic stairs. We were nearing the uppermost levels and the dome above. Now that we were getting close, the torches the orcs had left burning and our augmented vision showed me more of the fantastic dome above and the images that had been left to adorn its surface.

  Twelve grim figures were featured. They looked less like time-lost special operators and more like Ringwraiths straight from the Lord of the Rings movies. They wore shadowy armor and dark cloaks. Their faces were lightless voids that felt wrong to look at. The only thing you could see in them, those voids now that you got close, were burning red eyes that stared down into the vast well below. At first I thought the red eyes must’ve been a fantastically vibrant pigment of paint used long ago with some technique that gave the glaring eyes a menacing, dismissive contempt for the viewer. But as my enhanced vision zoomed in, I could see that they were no mere tricks of paint and lighting. They were fantastically huge gems. Set in the dome sculpted above. Bigger than anything I’d ever seen before. And probably worth an untold fortune.

  “Look at those,” Tanner said halfway up the dusty gray stairs we were climbing along the edge of the well. We were near a fabulous giant bowl that was set in the railing and must have once served as some immense brazier to light the way for funerary processions bringing more heroes down into the dark of the tomb to sleep forever.

  But somehow, even as I thought that, my mind told me that wasn’t right. That wasn’t what this place was.

  There were no heroes down here.

  This wasn’t that kind of place.

  This is where, some voice in my mind whispered, evil goes to wait for its next chance.

  Chance at what? I wondered.

  I was sure I didn’t want to know the answer.

  And then we heard the orcs coming toward the top of the stairs just above. Singing their marching songs. Yeah. I didn’t mention that part, but the orcs had a kind of cadence of grunting and shouting and some words they sang as they moved. It was low, and harsh, and ominous.

  The closest I can come to comparing it to something is that it was kind of like a demonic mumble rap. The orc troopers making the baseline thumps and thuds and other noises while one caller, their marching sergeant, did a kind of spoken-word poetry of violence, mayhem, and murder. Or at least that seemed to be the gist from the few words I could catch in Turkic and Arabic.

  But like I said this orc swarm was coming straight at us from the top of the stairs, and there was no place the main body of our team could get to for a fade before the enemy topped the stairs, looked down, and saw a bunch of Rangers with murder in their hearts.

  My mind saw an immediate firefight. Soprano and Rico were already down on the steps setting up the two-forty. Thor had his sniper rifle leveled on the big cold brazier. The other snipers were slinking into the shadows and getting ready to fire. Brumm was farther down with the SAW covering our backtrail.

  But it would be loud, and there were at least ten other mobs of orcs all across the levels below and above us. There was no getting around that, or what would happen once we revealed our presence, and stealth was no longer an option.

  We’d be surrounded and out of ammo in pretty short order. We would not reach our support position. The attack would fail.

  I slipped the ring on. I’d had it ready. I ran by Tanner and said, “Keep down!” as I picked up a clay funeral urn.

  I haven’t mentioned that either. But there are ancient and dusty urns of all shapes and sizes everywhere, on every level. There’s so many of them you don’t see them after a while. And where there aren’t urns there are grotesque candle holders that verge on the obscene. Scenes of rape and pillage. Twisting demons and snakes. Dragons. So I grabbed one medium-sized urn and ran to the top of the steps as fast as I could. Straight at the marching orcs who were about to spot us. One-handed, I chucked the urn off into the darkness to the left. Into a dark vaulted hall that intersected our own. I was almost on top of the lead orcs as I did it. I was face to face with a platoon of wild-eyed and snarling orcs who couldn’t see me. Or so I hoped. Fangs. Darkly glittering malevolent eyes. Weapons. Spears. Short swords. Axes. Armor made of leather. Spikes. Scars and strange white tattoos. Horrific bad breath.

  The urn crashed in the darkness of the hall off to our left. My left. Their right. And they stopped. Their war leader gave some shout. Instantly the orcs were spreading out, weapons ready to do instant violence.

  “I’m here,” whispered Autumn in my mind. She had come up to just below the level of the top stair. Almost invisible in her cloak and hidden behind a statue of a snarling minotaur with a giant battle axe at the top of the stairs. Golden coins and dead candles lay all around the base of the statue.

  “I’ll trick them now,” she whispered.

  I co
uld hear her voice, and the voices of others, other Shadow Elves sounding like the Lost Boys, far off to the left and down that dark and shadowy hall filled with silent tombs. A moment later arrows came whistling out of the darkness and whipped past orcish heads. The orcs snarled and roared at the attack, bellowing war cries and pounding their thick chests.

  Their war captain called out, “Eifrit!”

  Which in Arabic is a diminutive form of a genie. Efreeti.

  “It is their word for us,” Autumn whispered in my mind. “It means little demons.”

  I watched as now the orcs, convinced elves were attacking from their right, organized loosely and charged the dark hall, shouting battle cries and giving war whoops. Their trumpeters blaring out Uroo Uroo to sound the alarm and call to battle across the great necropolis that was this tomb.

  All around us other horns answered the urgent call. They were coming. The orc hordes were coming. But for the moment, the orcs who’d almost discovered us were off chasing rabbits. Shadow Elf rabbits. Which meant we had a moment to move forward and get ahead of what was about to happen.

  Just a moment…

  “It’s clear,” I told Tanner breathlessly, feeling my heart hammer in my chest as fear or adrenaline coursed through my body. “Have to move now.”

  Hand signals, and the team was up and moving. Hustling forward and interfacing with Kurtz for a bare-bones sitrep. Just a few more levels and we’d reach the dome. If we got lucky. And according to the Old Mother, the fortress was just above that dome.

  We were close.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  We were even closer when the shooting started.

  “Use your secondaries!” shouted Kurtz as we breached the final level beneath the sprawling dome. We’d just ascended a line of twisting stairs that took us up through the last levels of the well, areas that seemed to be set aside for storage and construction. Lots of skulls, mummies, tools, and dead candles. The place reeked of something unholy.

  And believe me, I’m usually a rational person of science. But some things are just wrong. And this whole place felt like one big that.

  Somewhere, far down below, in some system of hidden rooms, secret tunnels, or unfound halls we’d never gotten close to accessing, lay the final resting places of the Ilner. The operators. But that discovery would have to wait for another day. Right now, we were in a running firefight and trying to make our way out and up into the tower in order to make our hit time.

  The clock wasn’t burning. It had burnt. Kurtz was no longer reminding us of that. He was just a desperate man doing his best to get us where we needed to be. His Rangers needed Team Rogue to be where it needed to be when the attack went down. And we weren’t.

  That was unacceptable. This was as close to mission failure as one of Kurtz’s elements had ever been. The only positive was that at this point we were keeping the enemy tied up with us, which meant keeping at least some of them off the main gate.

  The snipers were engaging teams of orcs trying to push us from the rear as the firefight made its way through the upper catacombs. Incoming crow-feathered arrows streaked through the shadows and firelight to land among us, striking walls and gear. Sergeant Thor had been hit, but it wasn’t bad. Or so he said. Kurtz, Tanner, and Brumm were clearing the path forward. We’d hit dead ends twice and had barely gotten out of there as the enemy tried to close its forces about our necks like a noose you didn’t want to get caught in.

  It wasn’t the dark and deep that made you feel claustrophobia’s creep. It was the enemy. And for some reason that made you angry. Like all you wanted was a clear path to kill your way through and breathe some fresh air if there was any left in this ruined old world we ended up in.

  At the last dead end we almost became just that. Dead. Suddenly going hand-to-hand as a group of orcs dressed in gray rags, probably six of them, came with knives from out of a secret door we hadn’t spotted there in the nowhere-to-go space.

  That was a common thing in Kennedy’s games, according to the wizardly PFC. Secret doors. They were hidden and you could find them.

  Kurtz and company were down to last mags. We’d need those for the fight in the fortress to keep the perimeter clear for the snipers to work once the attack started. So suddenly the Rangers and I were hacking at the orcs who’d come out of the secret door with our newly acquired “weapons of renown” we’d taken off the floor of the crypt far below. The crypt full of the wights who’d once been Ice Kings in the long-ago Ages of Forgotten Ruin.

  Last of Autumn had told us the weapons were of Dragon Elf make. Shining and beautiful, broad, curved, leaf-shaped blades. They were light to handle, incredibly sharp, and hit with more force than they should have. That was the magic, apparently.

  We’d just eluded a team of orcs following us up the last set of stairs and had come down this dark hall only to find a sudden torchlit dead end. I noticed our weapons beginning to glow with a soft blue cold light. The Dragon Elf weapons.

  “Orcs!” shouted Last of Autumn in the little English she’d managed to pick up. Except it sounded like “Oaks!”

  “Here they come,” shouted Brumm. “We makin’ a last stand here, Sar’nt.” He was talking about the orcs to our rear, the ones who’d tracked us and followed us down this dead end.

  Rico and Soprano wanted to use the two-forty to clear our way back to the stairs. But Sergeant Kurtz was trying to save the last two drums we had for the defense of the tower above. With the death machine that was a two-forty working inside the inner courtyard of the castle, we could keep the tower clear and work over the defenders forward of our position. Burning ammo now meant the snipers had to do all the work while the tower was vulnerable to counterattack. And that could get real messy.

  It was a question of asset management. How best to employ combat assets given the current tactical situation.

  That was when a seam in the rune-covered wall, those strange Egyptian hieroglyphics that were everywhere, just opened up, and out slipped these orc ninjas, because that’s what I’ll call them.

  Orc ninjas.

  They wore flowing dirty grey rags, even over their faces. All that could be seen were their glowering eyes and fangs. They moved silently, barefooted, and came swinging at us all at once. It was clearly a suicide attack. One of them whispered loud enough that I could hear and translate.

  Effectively he said to his brother attackers, “My life for the Nether.” And they all whispered back a reply in orc that I didn’t understand.

  Kurtz got his MK18 up and blocked a slash from the leader just in time. Then he kicked the thing in its balls, and apparently orcs had them because it went down groaning like a giant with severe intestinal distress. Kurtz fell back two steps, pulled the Dragon Elf blade he’d commandeered from out of his carrier where he’d stuck it, and jammed it right through the chest of the next fierce orc that decided to attack him. It was like the orc just impaled itself on Kurtz’s new sword, it went in so smooth and effortlessly. The stunned orc gasped and died, and Kurtz pulled his blade back out just as easily.

  The rest of the orcs came at the rest of us. Tanner fired once and drilled one right in the head, then shifted and fired again, nailing another right between its beady little eyes.

  His shooting, like everyone else’s, was on point. A polish of Hunters’ Fellowship had been added to the skills honed in Chief Rapp’s gunfighter school, resulting in some weird Matrix-level shooting even the Rangers were frankly amazed at.

  “Hope it sticks,” Tanner remarked.

  “No luck. All skill. But don’t jinx it,” Brumm muttered.

  Now we were fighting. Including the Lost Boys with their bows. And I was in it whether I liked it or not. I’d decided not to shoot unless I had to so I could redistribute my mags to the real killers if needed. Have I mentioned I just came along on this ride to do languages? I think I’d carried my weight. So, I already had the inte
resting little elven dagger out and ready to contribute in order to spare ammo. Again, not thinking I’d actually need to use it. The blade wasn’t long. More on the order of a Roman gladius. And like I said, it felt light but when you swung it, it got heavier with increased momentum over the arc of the swing, or strike. Some kind of relativistic effect that counted as magic here in the Ruin.

  I was near the dead end when the whispering orcs came for us out of secret door with their wicked daggers. Without thinking, I slashed the first one that got close to me and took off the side of its scalp just like that, cutting into brain and bone and then thin air.

  That doesn’t happen with regular knives and blades. Those have a tendency to bounce or just stick in cuts that deep.

  But these were magic weapons.

  The six orcs were dealt with in seconds, Kurtz getting two, Tanner two, me one, and I think Soprano shot one with his rifle. A couple had Lost Boy arrows in them, too. It all happened pretty quickly. And violently.

  “These bad!” shouted Jabba as he cowered behind his ruck. This was his usual position when there was a fight going on. “Dark slayers. Not good. Not good.” The little goblin shouted in his pidgin Ranger English and Turkic when he didn’t have the right word. Jumping around and pointing as he did. “These from the Land of Nothing.”

  He said that last part in Arabic.

  “What’s he saying?” shouted Kurtz as more orcs came at us from the rear. The sergeant was looking to me for any kind of intel as to why the little gob was freaking out. But Land of Nothing had no context, sounded crazy, and didn’t contribute to the immediate threat. So I went with, “He says we’re in trouble.”

  “No shit, Talker.” Kurtz then shouted at Thor. “Clear us a way back to the stairs. We gotta backtrack our way out of here.”

  Two snipers had died on the way in. One from a… curse. The other from a fall. That left four. What happened next was amazing because as I turned away from the bloody remains of the orcs we’d just hacked to death, adrenaline surging through my body and making me feel like I was going to have a heart attack, fall into a pit I’d never get out of, or win some incredible prize, still hard to tell which, I could see dozens of orcs running down the dark, column-lined hall that had led us to the dead end.