by Logan Jacobs
“Let’s kill these guys and get out of h--” I started to say as I gestured at the coffins, but I didn’t get to finish my sentence..
A growling sound came from the coffins, and we all turned to face the source of the noise. The undead had all risen, and within moments they stood facing us with ancient swords in one hand and crude shields in the other.
They moved faster than I would have expected, and I brought my feather sword up just in time to fend off an overhead blow from the zombie to my left.
Mahini shoved Elissa behind us, and the tiny redhead whimpered as she cowered next to the urns.
The undead had us cornered, and they bashed their swords against their shields to taunt us. They reminded me of Skyrim draugrs, but we were outnumbered by one.
Nothing I couldn’t handle, though, even without Mahini’s help.
“Keep Elissa safe!” I commanded, and then I rushed into battle.
I caught the first zombie’s sword on mine, but he brought his shield down and slammed it into my shoulder. The vibrations went through my bones like a shockwave, and my grip on my sword faltered.
Suddenly, a sword pierced my rib cage from behind, and pain arced through me like a lightning bolt.
Doh.
Chime.
This time, I was going to kill these assholes before I did anything else.
“Stand back,” I instructed the two women, and then I made my way over to the closest coffin. “I’m going to open them one by one to let the zombies out. I’ll distract it. Mahini, you shoot it with your bow, and Elissa, wait until it’s down and then smash its head in with your rock.”
“Yes, Bash,” both of them replied in unison.
The desert goddess notched an arrow to her bow and held it pointed at the stone floor while she waited for my next move. Elissa stashed her torch into a crack in the wall, and then she gripped her large flat stone in both hands.
We were ready to kick ass.
I crossed the rest of the distance to the closest coffin, and I shoved the lid off slowly. The zombie that laid inside the sarcophagus peered up at me, and then a low rumbling growl came from its disintegrated throat.
I leapt back and held my feather sword at the ready. It didn’t take very long for the undead to rise from his coffin and stand before me, but no other zombies stirred from their slumbers, so it looked like my plan was working.
Then the zombie bashed his sword against his shield in the taunting gesture, and I heard the echo of undead from the other coffins.
Shit.
“Mahini, try to shoot as many of them as you can before they climb out of their coffins,” I directed the black-haired beauty in an urgent tone. “The other three are waking up.”
“Alright…” Mahini murmured, and then she fired her notched arrow into the undead who stood before me.
The arrow lodged into his shoulder, above the circular edge of his shield, and his eyes immediately leapt to Mahini. It was just the distraction I needed, though, and I lunged forward and stabbed the zombie in the gut below his sword arm.
No blood poured out, but a dry powder speckled the blade of my weapon when I withdrew it from the zombie’s decayed flesh.
The undead creature growled and turned his red eyes back to me, so I scurried backward to get out of reach of its ancient sword.
Another arrow zipped through the stagnant air and landed in the zombie’s eye socket, and the projectile buried itself so deep into the undead’s skull that the point came out the back of his head.
The zombie crumpled and fell to the ground, but it let out a gaspy moan as it hit the floor.
“Take this!” Elissa roared out a battle cry as she dashed forward and slammed her rock down onto its head, and she crushed the skull in one hit.
I turned to face the other three zombies, but they’d already moved to surround us.
Mahini jumped in front of Elissa and fired an arrow at one of the zombies, and I lunged forward and parried a blow with my sword.
Then all three zombies attacked me at once. I beat back the brutal onslaught of blades with my feather sword, but I cringed every time metal struck metal since I knew that would affect the durability of my weapon.
They started to overpower me, and I caught one of their ancient swords on my left gauntlet. The pain lanced up my arm, and I was just glad it wasn’t my sword arm. I backpedaled to gain some ground, and I almost bumped into Mahini as she notched another arrow to her bow.
The projectile flew high and missed the small undead horde, but then she tossed her bow over her shoulder and grabbed her sword.
Two against three were good enough odds for me, so I charged forward into battle with the desert goddess by my side. A moment later, the ring of swords hitting metal and the thunk of our blades as they struck the shields filled the air.
Mahini managed to get one of the zombies down at the same time I spun around and beheaded the undead who attacked me from behind. Then we both turned on the last undead to finish him off, but a large flat stone suddenly hurtled through the air over my head and crashed into the zombie’s chest. He was knocked to the ground, and I quickly took advantage of the situation to rush over and sever its head from its shoulders.
“How the hell did you manage to throw the rock that far?” I asked Elissa as I stood from the dusty remains of the zombie.
“It was hard, but I knew I needed to help my husband, and I just experienced this crazy burst of strength.” The beautiful redhead sauntered over with her chin raised high, and then she scooped up the big stone and dropped it onto the undead’s skull. The crushed remains scattered in every direction with a moist squelching sound, and both girls wrinkled their noses in disgust.
“Well, your husband thanks you and thinks you are amazing.” I grinned.
Elissa repeated the process to the other two Mahini and I had killed, and then she eyed the rock now covered in gore and viscera with disdain.
“I think I need a new rock,” she observed with a wry smile.
“That was incredible!” I laughed as I crossed the distance between us, and I swooped her up into my arms. “You’re such a fierce warrior, Lissy.”
“Oh, hush,” the redhead said as a blush crept up her freckled neck. “I just wanted to help.”
“You did more than help,” Mahini commented with obvious pride in her voice. “You held your own in a battle with the undead. You have definitely earned the title of warrior woman.”
I suddenly remembered the burial urns, so I put Elissa down and made my way over to the shelf, and within the ashes were two pieces of jewelry. There was a golden chained necklace with a green gemstone pendant in one, and an ornately carved unadorned silver ring in another.
I quickly pressed my pointer finger to first the necklace and then the ring to see if the items had any magical abilities, but no stat boxes popped into existence, so I supposed they were just normal pieces of jewelry.
“Mahini, Elissa, come look at this,” I whispered into the shadows where the women had gone to explore as I dug out the gemstone necklace and the silver ring.
The torch light flickered and splattered across the stone walls, and shadows danced in between the reflection of the flames. The two women cast long silhouettes of their forms onto the floor as they approached, and their eyes glowed in the light like the gemstones in my hand.
It would almost be romantic if we weren’t in a deep, dank burial sanctum full of the undead.
“What is it?” Elissa asked with obvious excitement as the torch light reflected off the gemstone in my hand. “Ooh, Bash, it’s so pretty!”
“That is quite a find,” Mahini observed as her piercing blue eyes scanned the jewelry in my hand.
“I like the necklace, so bright and beautiful,” Elissa cooed.
“Just like you.” I handed it over to her with a grin. Then I gifted the silver ring to Mahini, and she turned it over in her fingers with an appreciative eye.
I helped Elissa snap the chain of the necklace around the
back of her throat, and then I made a point to take the ring and slide it up Mahini’s ring finger. It was a perfect fit, just like the two women in my life.
“I wonder what the carvings mean?” the desert goddess mused as she brought the circlet closer to her piercing blue gaze.
“We will just have to find out, won’t we?” My grin grew even wider.
I loved to spoil my women and get them special gifts, and I was pleased I’d already found something they liked so early on in the catacombs.
I made a new save point, and then I fetched Elissa’s torch from the nook she’d stuck it into.
“Shall we continue?” I asked, and I gestured to the tunnel on the far left of the circular antechamber.
“Absolutely,” Elissa replied in a breathy voice as she repositioned the large gemstone necklace around her neck.
Mahini played with the silver ring and nodded absently, but then her brilliant blue eyes lifted to mine, and I saw the emotion hidden behind her stoic expression.
“It suits you,” I said as I lifted her hand and kissed the ring on her finger, but I didn’t let go of her as I dropped my arm back to my side and turned toward the next leg of our journey.
I’d chosen the tunnel on the far left for logical reasons. I wanted to be able to keep track of where we explored since it was likely we would encounter some confusing passageways or traps, so we started on the left, and I led the way down into the dark corridor.
There were some steps as the floor dropped down another level, and then it leveled out beneath our feet once more. There were chambers on both sides of the hallway, but I decided to only go into the ones on the left and then hit the ones on the right on the way back.
The first chamber I entered down the tunnel was empty, the caskets were already opened, and the previous contents were gone. I drew a mental map of the catacombs in my head as we explored, and I added this one to the cleared list before we continued onward.
The second room we encountered on the left-hand side of the tunnel had two sarcophaguses inside and one chest. The coffins contained skeletons, but they didn’t animate when I exposed them, so I assumed they were actually dead.
But I still had Elissa bash in their heads with her rock while Mahini and I chanted ‘Skullcrusher’ over and over again. Just in case.
The chest in the room was unlocked, but it only contained two pieces of gold. Still, I added it to my loot and continued to inspect the room.
Then I made a new save point by thinking about when and where I was, and then we pushed onward down the tunnel into the burial sanctum.
In the next chamber, a zombie stood in the middle of the room. He stood about as tall as I was, and he wore the tattered remains of what was once leather armor. His skin peeled away from his bones in random spots, and the stench of decay radiated off him. He growled and charged toward me as soon as I entered, and I had to scramble to bring my feather sword up in front of my face before his blade came down.
“Great One, watch out!” Mahini shot an arrow over my shoulder into the undead creature, and I shoved him back with my blade. Then I swirled my sword in a wide arch and brought it up under his shield. The metal cleaved through the decayed flesh of his gut, and crumbles of ash and rotted flesh fell to the floor.
The undead asshole kept coming, though, and he swung his sword at my face again.
I knocked it to the side easily, and I flicked his shield arm up before I thrust my blade deep into its chest cavity. That was enough to take it to the ground, and then I gestured for Elissa.
She had to find a new rock since her last one had become too covered in undead gore for her to want to touch it anymore, but it didn’t take her very long to find something suitable. Then my wife trotted over with a wide grin stretched across her face and her new stone in tow, and she dropped it onto the undead’s skull with a self-satisfied air.
“It doesn’t matter who starts the fight,” she quipped as she flicked back her fiery braid, “Skullcrusher will end it.”
“Way to go, Skullcrusher,” I complimented her with a wink.
“It seems to be the only way to put them down for good,” Mahini observed as she inspected the zombie’s corpse.
“I wish there was something other than a rock I could use,” Elissa mused. “They get heavy and gross.”
“You chucked that one rock over our heads,” Mahini reminded her. “You’re plenty strong enough, but a different weapon might suit you better. Something for bludgeoning.”
“Like a mace,” I suggested.
“Those are the ones with the pointy balls on the end of a stick?” Elissa scrunched up her nose like she was trying to remember some obscure fact.
“Those are the ones,” I laughed.
“So, we need to get Lissy a mace.” Mahini nodded her approval. “We might even find one while we’re down here, since previous adventurers may have perished and left their gear behind.”
“That’s a good point.” I frowned. “But that makes me think of the eight missing teens from Lake Balerno. Do you think they’re still alive?”
“If they were, they would have returned home by now,” the desert goddess pointed out. “They likely lost their lives for their follies.”
“How are you going to break the curse?” Elissa asked as we made our way back out into the tunnel.
I made a new save point as I thought over the best way to explain to the beautiful redhead what I expected would happen.
“There’s going to be something we have to kill,” I said carefully. “Once we do, the curse will be lifted.”
“What is it?” Mahini asked as her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “More of the undead?”
“Sort of.” I shrugged. I didn’t want to explain any more so as not to give away my lack of knowledge, but all I had to go on was my previous experiences with video games. Every game I’d played with dungeon levels and skeletons always had a big, bad undead boss you had to fight in the deepest bowels of the catacombs. If you won the battle, you would be rewarded beyond your dreams, but if you lost, then your soul was forfeit.
Except I couldn’t lose, thanks to my abilities as the God of Time.
We’d traveled about a mile since the room with the four undead and the jewelry. The mysteriously lit torches along the wall of the corridor helped a little, but the torch I held was much brighter. I held it up high to light the way for our little trio, and the two girls stayed close by my sides within the circle of the flame.
Suddenly, the torch light reflected off a silver thread about three inches above the floor.
A trip wire.
“Wait.” I held up my sword arm to signal the women to stop, and then I followed the line of the string until I found the source of it. A small pulley attached to a net of boulders. If we crossed over the tripwire, then the rocks would fall onto our heads and crush us. The fact that the wire was active and hadn’t already been set off told me two things. One was that no one had been down this tunnel in a very, very long time. Second, this wasn’t the direction I would find the source of the curse in. If no one had been this way, then the eight boys from Lake Balerno wouldn’t have been in this tunnel when they activated the blight on the water.
Still, there could be loot hidden in the rooms ahead, so it wasn’t a complete waste. Plus, I wanted to have one hundred percent completion of the entire sanctum when it was all said and done.
So, I lit the way while the two women stepped delicately over the silver wire, and then I followed carefully in their footsteps. Once we were safely across and out of distance of the boulders, I made a new save point, and then I grabbed a loose rock from the stone floor and chucked it toward the trap.
The wire snapped beneath the weight of the stone, and the boulders crashed down into the tunnel to partially block the path. Then I worked with the two girls to shove the debris out of the way enough for us to get back through.
Once we had our escape route, we continued on down the tunnel in search of loot, the undead, and the source of
an ancient curse.
The next chamber we went into was empty of everything except a workbench where a few ancient tools laid scattered across the surface, and I could only imagine the kind of horrible experiments that occurred there.
Then we came across the final room. The hallway itself turned and spiraled into the chamber where it widened out into a space about twenty feet long and half as narrow.
Against the far wall, a zombie stood in an alcove with its arms crossed over its chest and its eyes closed. Mahini shot an arrow into its skull before I could even give the order, and the undead creature’s eyes shot open to reveal the red orbs that glowed within its hollow sockets.
I shook out the muscles in my shoulders as I prepared to fight the undead man, and I repositioned my feather sword in my fist to a more secure grasp.
Then the zombie dude pulled a mace from a strap on its shoulder, and my jaw nearly hit the floor. It was perfect for Elissa, not too big, but definitely deadly. She could slam it into skulls with ease after the way she’d thrown that rock.
“Bash, watch out!” Mahini called out from behind me, and I could hear the fear in her voice.
The zombie swung the mace down toward the top of my head, and even though I lunged to the side, it still slammed into my shoulder with a sickening thud.
Chime.
I decided to leave the boulders alone for now and to deal with the zombie easily awoken in the far chamber, so I trotted down the tunnel with the torch in one hand and my sword in the other while the two girls hurried to keep pace with me.
“We can leave that room alone,” I said as I gestured to the room with the workbench. “There’s nothing in there.”
“Yes, Great One,” Mahini said as her eyes widened with awe. “Your knowledge of these tunnels is vaster than the catacombs themselves.”
“It would seem so, huh?” I chuckled.
As soon as we entered the room at the end of the hallway, I ran straight up to the closed eyed zombie and began to hack and slash at him with my feather sword.