By placing the levers next to an empty loot chest, I was implying that pulling the right lever would fill the chest with loot. Now, I knew that the Seekers weren’t here for that, but the underlying psychology would work.
This was the Heroes’ Temptation; when a person finds a loot chest underground, they want the treasure. Doesn’t matter what they were originally there for. If they see a lever, they want to pull it. People are stupid.
After creating the levers I had 225 essence points left. Since my full dungeon capacity meant I couldn’t create any new creatures, I had to settle for more pitfalls. I made two of them, both right next to the loot chest and hidden, but linked to the levers. When the greedy Seekers pulled the levers, they’d have an unpleasant surprise.
That was as much as I could do on short notice. Fake tunnels, an anti-seeker squad with health replenishing vampiric dust, and a whole load of ooze-sprouting fungi. I just had to hope it would be enough.
CHAPTER 26
Reginal’s bowels always felt loose right before a raid. He hadn’t been here on the last one, trusting Jagorga the bard to lead a team into the caverns. Jagorga hadn’t come back, and everyone knew what that meant.
But they were the Eternals, and they wouldn’t give up trying to claim back their home. The clue was in their name.
Now, he and a dozen of their best warriors assembled by the surface door, and they had a secret weapon. Tavia, the Wrotun trap maker, a girl who knew the tunnels better than even Reginal himself because she had seen the new passageways they had made. She knew where the traps were, except the ones that the damned core would have created.
It also meant he could abandon his barbaric practice of sending human slaves into traps. Reginal had never liked doing it, but it had been a necessity.
So he tried to ignore the pressing urge to make toilet for the fifth time that morning, and he addressed his people.
“I can feel it in my gut today, my friends,” he told his warriors.
“You always feel it in your gut, chief.”
“No, not that. I feel this is our time. Tavia will guide us to the heart of our home, through the deceiving tunnels they have made, past the traps they have sprung for us. We will take back what is ours. No mercy, for they would show us none. Spare nobody who raises a blade to you.”
“Er, chief,” said Tavia.
“Ah, yes. Our agreement. Men, women, proud Eternals warriors. You will spare any Wrotun who surrender. Any who willingly leaves our home will not taste our steel.”
One goblin warrior nudged the archer beside him. “He always gets like this before a raid. Speaks like he’s a general in the king's army, or something. Big words, and using that loud chief voice.”
A few of them laughed, and Reginal didn’t rebuke them. Let them have whatever good humor they can muster. They’ll need their spirits today.
He placed his hand on the ground. Energy coursed through him, and he felt a faint trembling of mana. Reginal was no mage, but he was the chief of the Eternals, and this was their rightful home, and the only spell he knew was that which would open the doors to his ancestral land.
Light spread out on the ground, thin lines of it that formed a rectangle. And there it was. The door.
No time for words now. No more rousing speeches. Only blood and battle awaited, and by the end, Reginal will have claimed back their home.
Deep underground, far west of the Eternals, First-Leaf Godwin led a procession of Wrotuns through the cavern and toward the tunnels. He could already smell the spring, even so far away. His body ached for it, and this ache tore at him. He gritted his teeth and forced the pain back.
“Remember,” he said, without turning back to look at his people. “The core is a trickster. Galatee has given the order to disarm his traps, but he is still dangerous. He will find a way to surprise us, mark my words. Stay strong. Remember, this is your home you are fighting for.”
He had only been able to muster ten men and women worthy of a blade. They were not fighting people, not anymore. Maybe they had been once, back when they had first taken this land, but now they were older than they had any right to be, and though the springs extended their life, it didn’t make them stronger.
It didn’t matter. Godwin was their only mage, and he was powerful enough. He already knew his staff and spells could destroy the core, and now it was only a case of finding their way to him and ridding the world of his gem foulness.
Yet, a small part of him was sad. Or perhaps not sad, but guilty. He knew that the core was a conscious being, and he knew that he had brought the core here, just so he could destroy it and convince his people there was no hope in staying.
He was a liar, yes. But a liar with his people’s interests at heart. That is what he needed to focus on.
“Here we are,” he said, as he approached the opening that led to the tunnels. He didn’t dare turn around, because he knew the rest of the Wrotun, those who couldn’t fight and instead had placed their faith in him, were watching. Their hope would only weigh him down now.
And so, Godwin stepped into the tunnels.
Reginal was the first to reach the bottom of the slope. He emerged into a much wider space than he had expected. Until recently, the surface door had led to only a series of tunnels, but now there was a room.
A room with decapitated goblin heads strewn around it. Reginal felt sick, but he couldn’t let his fear show in front of his people.
“The core has been busy,” he said.
“They generally are,” answered Tavia.
It was a strange room. Dominating it was a series of multi-colored floor tiles. Some blue, others red, yellow, green.
“He’s been decorating the place,” he said, forcing good humor.
“A trap,” answered Tavia. “Let me go first.”
The rest of the Eternals filed in now, but they all stayed by the wall nearest the slope opening, and they watched as the Wrotun girl walked cautiously forward.
She kneeled beside the first tile. This was colored crimson, with no markings.
“There will be a pattern,” she said. “And false tiles, I’m guessing. Ones that produced a pretty bad effect when you step on them.”
“Pretty bad? Please, Wrotun trapper, define pretty bad.”
“You know. A gruesome death.”
It was then that Reginal heard something.
It sounded like water dripping from the cavern ceiling. Soon, he realized that not only were the sounds too rhymical to be just dewdrops, but they were getting louder and louder.
Within seconds he realized that it was a drumbeat. The volume rose until it became a furious pounding.
A stench reached his nostrils. Spent mana. A spell had been cast!
Before he could react, an overwhelming sense of fear shook him. A feeling of hopelessness that rushed through his body, filling him, creeping into his soul where it rested as a darkness.
His men murmured. One of them gasped, and he heard them all talk now, and the fear in Reginal grew stronger.
He heard a kobold voice speak in his head.
You should leave. This is no place for you.
And he almost follow their advice. His terror was so strong that he wanted to drop his sword and run.
What was happening? He was a goblin chief. A warrior by blood and training. Reginal hadn’t become chief through running from battle, so why did every part of his mind scream at him to flee?
It was then that a figure stepped out of the shadows from the far side of the room. A kobold with a tambourine strapped around his chest.
“Don’t you like my song?” it said.
“A bard!” shouted one of Reginal’s men.
The chief understood it then. The bard had used his magic, playing a song of fear.
Luckily, the goblins had brought their own bard. He stepped forward now, a portly goblin with a lute in his hands.
“I know music of my own. We could have a duet.”
The twang of his lute met with the pounding of a tambou
rine, filling the deathly cavern with a ridiculous song, jarring lute notes and beating drums, the noises echoing off every wall.
A new energy filled Reginal. A sense of hope. Courage. Now, this was a bard song he liked.
It filled him with just enough bravery to raise his sword again. “Kill the little drummer!”
Tavia shot to her feet. “The tiles! Stop, you idiots.”
Reginal saw sense and was about to order his men to halt, when more kobolds stepped out from the shadows.
Warriors with iron swords. A much larger kobold with a warhammer, a hammer that Reginal recognized used to belong to one of his men. A ranger kobold with mice scurrying across his shoulders.
The kobolds crossed the room and stood in the center of the tiles now, a line of them, eight in number.
“Would you like to dance?” asked the kobold bard.
He pounded his drum again, producing a different beat this time. There was a series of snapping sounds, and the stench of mana filled the cavern again.
Bolts of purple light shot from the bard’s drum, flying at Reginal and his people.
A goblin beside him fell, purple light burning a hole in his throat. Another dropped to his knees, holding his belly and screaming in agony.
“Ah,” said the bard. “You seem to know the steps to this song.”
This was no good. Reginal and his people couldn’t cross the tiles without risking more traps, and it seemed the kobolds couldn’t trigger their own mechanisms.
But if they just stood there, the bard had free rein to play his foul music and hurt them. It would be a pathetic way to die.
Reginal wished he had brought his human slaves. Damn it, why had he trusted the trap maker to get them through this? She was no match for a core.
He raised his sword. “Slaughter them all. Tear out their guts and hang them around your necks.”
With his words, and with his own bard playing a lute song of courage, that was all they needed. His warriors rushed forward, weapons raised, screaming war cries, and the goblins and kobolds met in the center of the tiled floor.
One goblin slashed a kobold ranger’s throat, sending a spray of blood over the tiles. Another thrust his sword deep into a kobold warrior’s belly, and the sharp wheeze of pain he gave stirred Reginal’s confidence and awoke it fully.
The kobold dropped his tambourine. Well, not dropped, exactly. A goblin had chopped off his hand, so he was quite unable to keep hold of it.
But then darts fired from the walls. Dozens of them at a time, whizzing through the air and puncturing his men, sticking in throats, wrists, stomachs.
Yellow light appeared in the center of the room, wrapping around the injured kobolds. One by one, they got to their feet, even the ones who had been on the edge of death.
“What?” said Reginal. “How?”
“It’s the darts,” said Tavia. “Nothing for it now. Cross the tiles. If we stay here, we’ll die. Don’t worry about the kobolds, just press on.”
So they ran across the tiles now, triggering even more of the traps, summoning endless volleys of those foul magic darts. Reginal pushed through, his head ducked low, focusing on only reaching the end of the room…
…where he came to an iron door blocking their exit, stopping them from getting further into the dungeon. It had a great knocker set in the middle.
And then the door spoke to him!
It spoke not in the common tongue, but in an altogether rarer language.
The kobold language.
“Huh?” said a goblin, appearing beside him. “What did it say?”
“It’s a riddle,” said Reginal. “It won’t open without us answering it.”
“Answering it? I can’t even understand it!”
“And now we’re trapped,” said another goblin.
Reginal saw that he was right; they had cleared the tiles, but now the healed kobolds were behind them.
“We’re trapped! Trapped by trickery!”
“Would you like another song?” asked the kobold bard. “A little music while you die?”
The bard seemed so, so confident. And why not? Reginal and his men were trapped between a kobold-speaking riddle door and an army of healed kobolds.
Luckily, Reginal and his clever son would pass their nights in their tent by studying together. Studying history, stories, and languages.
Kobold was one of them, luckily enough.
He focused on the door now.
“Speak your riddle, you useless lump of iron.”
“We’re lost,” said a voice behind Godwin.
He hated to admit it, but they were right. They seemed to have wandered through the same tunnel countless times now. But how? Godwin had walked these tunnels just the day before, taking a familiar route to the springs.
The damn core must have changed them.
Well, without his traps, perhaps this tunneling trickery was all he had left. All it would do was delay the inevitable, but they’d find their way through eventually.
Now, he just needed to calm his people. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Galatee disarmed his traps, as I said. We just need to keep calm. Take note of the tunnels. Every inch of them. There will be a way through if we’re careful enough.”
And so they wandered through tunnels that had once been familiar but now seemed so foreign. Godwin led the way, forcing his pain deep down inside him.
Then he realized something. His pain, his yearning for the mana, could help him now. He had spent so long trying to rid himself of his addiction that he seemed to spend all his waking hours trying to ignore the stench of mana, ignore how it made desire grow inside him.
Now, he surrendered himself to it. He smelled the air.
Ah, there it was. That sickeningly sweet fume of the mana springs.
“This way,” he said.
And he led them through the tunnel again, this time following the deep stink of mana, taking turns where it seemed to grow stronger.
“This is the way,” he told them.
Soon, he saw a large opening at the end of a passageway. Feeling more confident by the second, he followed it.
They emerged into a room he’d never visited before. A large, oval-shaped room with a treasure chest sitting in the center of it.
CHAPTER 27
It was all going rather well. You can forgive a core for taking a little delight in watching his dungeon do its job, can’t you?
I had a bunch of Seekers trapped between an incomprehensible riddle door, and my anti seeker unit.
Godwin and his scant legion of Wrotun fighters were walking around in circles like stupid chickens (no offense to any poultry out there), where Maginhart and his newly-leveled miners had made quick work of carving new tunnels.
I started to get a weird feeling. A kind of glow inside me. Happiness, maybe? It was strange. Cores aren’t supposed to be all that happy. I guessed it was just the endearing idea that dozens of people would meet their end in my lair.
But as I watched the room nearer the surface door using my core senses, that feeling began to evaporate.
One of the goblins, the tallest and oldest of them who seemed to be the leader, began to speak to the door. He spoke to it using a scattering of kobold words. His pronunciation was a butchering of the language, as far as I could make out, but that didn’t matter.
The damn door swung open!
Hells, how was I unlucky enough to make an enemy of the only gods-damned goblin in all of Xynnar who could speak kobold?
He and his men streamed through the doors and into the tunnel beyond it now, fleeing from the tile and kobold trap.
One of the goblins fell right into the pitfall I had placed behind the door, and his screaming and subsequent thud soothed me a little. Then, the rest of the invaders leaped over it.
It’s okay, I told myself. Many of Tavia’s traps are still in the tunnels. That should slow them down.
I should have learned not to be so optimistic by now, shouldn’t I?
Be
cause that was when I spotted another person accompanying the goblins. A girl. A decidedly non-goblin girl.
One who made them all wait as she walked on ahead, spotting each and every trap, and disarming them in a frightful speed.
It was only minutes before the goblins reached the end of the tunnel, many of them unharmed, and that damned kobold-speaking leader spoke with the final riddle door, opening it.
I followed them using my core vision, watching them emerge into the loot room.
CHAPTER 28
“A treasure chest!” shouted a boy. He was a Fifth-Leaf of the Orcak tree. A sturdy orc. Not much use with a blade but strong, and one of the first to volunteer to accompany Godwin.
The First-Leaf held out his staff, and the boy ran into it and stopped.
“Wait, foolish boy.”
“But there’s treasure here. Nobody ever said there was treasure in the tunnels. It might help us, First-Leaf. And look! Levers. Who knows what great things will happen if we pull them?”
“You are an idiot, Fifth-Leaf Orcak. Nobody move. Let me think about this. Every instinct I have tells me we have to leave this place.”
“That would have been wise,” said a voice.
Figures emerged from a tunnel to the north. Goblins. Ten of them, led by one Godwin knew well; a goblin chief he had once dreamed about.
“Chief Reginal.”
“After all this time. All these years. Finally, we meet again, Godwin. You haven’t changed much since you slaughtered my people and stole my lands.”
“And you look so much older, Reginal.”
“We know why that is, don’t we? Why would the marks of time show on one of us, and not the other?”
This had all gone wrong. The Eternals were here? Now of all times?
This could not have gone any worse.
The Wrotun gathered closer together now. Godwin could feel the fear coming from them. His people weren’t fighters, and Godwin had not planned to lead them into one. This should have been so easy; kill the core, and then leave this place for good.
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