“Ahhh. So you are running away?” I asked.
“No. I’m on a quest to buy my way out of this marriage.”
“You can do that?” I asked.
“Sure. I just need ten thousand gold pieces. Then my grandfather will let me marry whoever I want.”
“Damn, that is cold,” I said with a long whistle. “How are you going to get ten thousand gold pieces?”
“There are rumors of a forgotten city deep in the Underdark around our stronghold. I got a bunch of equipment, an ancient map that I found in our loremaster’s library, and I planned on finding the treasure. Things were going fine until those gnolbolds ran into me. I had actually found the gates of the city, but the sons of dogs trashed my equipment and then took me, hostage.”
“I see.”
“So now I have to accept my fate and marry this beardless limp dick.” She shrugged.
“Do you still have the map?” I asked.
“Yes, but I can’t fight monsters, and the Blood Smiths won’t escort me on some treasure finding quest. I had to give them the slip the first time. They won’t give me another opportunity. I might get locked up in a cell as soon as I get home.”
“You said you saw the city gates?”
“Aye, but I didn’t get a good look inside the walls. It was an old dwarven kingdom from thousands of years before the Time of Heliotrope. I might be able to convince the loremaster to ask my grandfather to let me go, but chances are that they will just take my info, lock me in a cell until my wedding, and then go loot the city themselves. Thanks for all the gold, artifacts, magical loot, and relics, Gratia!” she huffed.
“Relics?”
“Of course.” She nodded with a grumpy frown.
“Do you know for sure there are relics there?”
“Aye. It is an old city. There must be ancient magical relics there. One of them will pay for me to be a free dwarf, with change to spare! But now I have to take you all back home and face my fate.”
“How far are we from where this gate is?”
“Ahhh. Half an hour of walking.”
“And your stronghold?”
“Half an hour, but in a slightly different direction. It will take about an hour to get from the gate to my stronghold.”
“How destroyed is all your equipment? Could you repair it while I search the city?”
“It will take days to search the city, even for a group of us. I had planned on staying there for a few weeks.”
“So you brought food?”
“Kind of. I had a Bag of Meals that I brought. If the gnolbolds didn’t take it, we should be able to eat out of it for a few days before it needs to replenish. I like where your conversation is going human, but why are you helping me?”
“I am looking for some relics. Fifteen actually.”
“The Fifteen Pieces of Heliotrope?” my three companions all asked at the same time.
“Yes. I think. You all have heard of them?”
“You aren’t going to be able to find the Pieces of Heliotrope.” The dwarf girl laughed.
“Why not?”
“No one knows where they are. They were lost before the Time of Heliotrope, and some say looking for them caused the destruction in the first place.”
“That sounds kind of dumb. Why would looking for relics cause the destruction of the world?”
“I don’t know. My stronghold’s loremaster has an interest in the Pieces of Heliotrope. You might be able to ask him for some information when we get there. I doubt he knows anything useful, but there might be some info in our library about it. That is where I found my map. Worse case, he could tell you where you should journey to ask for more information.”
“Good. Let’s take a quick detour to where you thought you found the gate, look around some, and then go back to your stronghold. I like the idea of a bunch of treasure, and if the Bag of Meals is there, maybe we can stay a bit longer.”
“Leo, there might not be any treasure,” Artus spoke up from behind us. I noticed that the fenia was walking fine now, and his health bar was almost full.
“True, but it is only an extra hour’s travel, and if there is some stuff to be found, we can split the profit four ways.”
“Leo, I don’t need any treasure or money. I just want to be by you. Even though you won’t mate with me, I still love you,” Allurie said.
“Split three ways. Even better!” I said with a laugh.
Chapter 22
“Good! They left my Bag of Meals! My cart is ruined, though,” Gratia sighed as she dug through the rest of the contents on top of her cart. It looked about the same size as the one I had pulled for Geern.
“Can you fix the wheel?” I asked as I squatted down by the shattered circle of wood. The walk hadn’t taken as long as expected, but I had gotten the sensation that we had traveled deeper into the Underdark.
“I have repaired many a broken wagon wheel. If you have some spare parts, I can help. Grrrr,” Artus said to Gratia.
“I can help, too!” Allurie said, “If Leo thinks it is a good job for me?”
“Yep. You said the gate was down here?” I asked the dwarf woman as I pointed behind me.
“Aye. About two hundred yards. You’ll see it on the right.”
“I’m going to go walk down there and take a look.”
“I’ll come with you,” Allurie said as she skipped to my side.
“No, that’s okay. Your job is to assist Gratia and Artus with anything they might need to fix the wheel.”
“Got it.” She nodded and then returned to the cart.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I said as I jogged down the tunnel. I held my short sword in my left hand, and the blade glowed lightly with my only magic ability. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough for me to avoid the sharper looking rocks on the floor of the tunnel. My feet were starting to feel a little raw from all the walking and running. Next clothing item I needed were some boots.
The tunnel continued past the two hundred yard mark, but I saw the break on the right where Gratia said it would be. It actually did look like an old fashioned castle portcullis, and I looked around where the metal parts joined into the stone of the wall to see if there was any method of opening the iron grid. The opening was only about ten feet high, and I saw a slot cavity at the top of the grate. I didn’t see any sort of lever on this side of the tunnel or any sort of keyhole that I might use to unlock it.
Maybe it wasn’t even locked? The doorway was in the middle of nowhere, deep underground. If Gratia had not found that map, she would have been searching down here for years and come up empty. We had gone through dozens of similar looking tunnels, and the woman had needed to consult the ancient piece of leather a few times to ensure that we weren’t lost.
I set my sword on the ground at my feet and squatted down as if I was doing a deadlift and hooked my fingers under the lowest horizontal grid part of the portcullis. I tightened my abs, push down hard with my bare feet, and then stood. The metal gate resisted a bit at first, but there was a snapping sound somewhere up above, and the grate moved with a dull screeching noise. The howl of the metal probably wasn’t all that loud, but the tunnels of the Underdark were empty of anything that might deaden the sound, and the scream echoed through the cavern around me like a megaphone.
“Well. If anything is alive in there, it knows I am here,” I grunted to myself as I hefted the gate as high as I could in the deadlift position.
A few years ago I had trained the deadlift really hard for four months under Calic's supervision. I had managed to pull six hundred and twenty pounds for a single rep. This gate felt like I was lifting four hundred pounds off the ground, and I realized I was going to need to get the bottom of the gate over my head so that I could walk under it. Or I was going to have to find a way to keep the portcullis locked open.
I set the gate back down with a sigh and then swung my arms around to get the blood flowing back into them. I felt pretty warmed up from the earlier fight, and
my jog here, but doing a clean and jerk with this kind of weight was going to be a feat. I inhaled a few deep breaths to steady my nerves, and then took my deadlift position again at the metal.
I grunted as I pushed as hard as I could down into my heels while I slammed my hips forward. The portcullis screamed with frustration as it lifted into the air, and I switched my hand position once the bars got up to my chest so that I was doing more of a push instead of a pull. Then the bars were over my head, and I was able to keep them aloft with the strength of my skeleton instead of my muscles.
I took in another few breaths of air, and leaned my head in past the wall to see if there was a lever or anything that controlled the action of the gate. The glow of my sword didn’t reach that far past the gate I was holding up, so I figured that I would need to drop it and move inside. When my friends got here, I could deadlift it up easily enough.
I stepped out from under the bar and used a little bit of my strength to help it fall without too much noise. Then I reached through the squares of the portcullis to retrieve my glowing short sword. As soon as I held the weapon in my hand, I realized that there was something wrong, or maybe not wrong, but odd.
The weapon shouldn’t have kept glowing when I had set it down. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about the Ember ability for many hours, but the weapon kept its light. As a test, I thought about making the weapon stop glowing. It complied with my thought, and I was suddenly plunged into darkness so deep that I let out a gasp. I thought about making the sword glow again, and it instantly cast its yellow light around me as a torch would have. I set the weapon down and then took my hand off of the weapon. It continued to glow by itself, and I wondered if there was a glitch somewhere in Ohlavar Quest’s magic settings. When I had set the book down earlier the magic had seemed to turn off instantly.
Or maybe I had unconsciously willed it to turn off?
I gestured over my UI and pulled up the description of Ember again. It did say causes item held in hand to gently glow. If the spell is maintained for eight hours item will glow permanently. Huh. I picked up the short blade again and thought about turning off the light. Darkness encased me immediately, and then I commanded the weapon to glow again.
When I set it down, the glow continued as it had before, but then I thought about turning off the ability. I wasn’t touching the weapon, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was immediately in darkness once again. I thought about making the sword glow again, even though I wasn’t touching it, but nothing happened. I spent another ten or fifteen seconds making a few more attempts, but it was apparent that I needed to be touching the object to make it start glowing, but I could turn off the magic from a distance.
I pulled a dagger out of my belt and used Ember to make it glow. Then I grabbed my short sword. It was weird that the ability descriptions weren’t precise, but maybe I shouldn’t complain that much. The ability to make it flare had probably saved me from all the gnolbolds earlier, and being able to cut off the glow of the magic remotely would probably be useful one day. Still, I should tell Zarra that the skill description needed to be cleaned up a bit. Gamers tended to lose their minds when things weren’t exact.
I heard the roll of wooden wheels on the other side of the grate, and I moved the few steps to try and peer through the iron bars. My friends moved into the light after half a minute, and Allurie waved at me.
“Leo, is everything okay? It sounded like a monster screech,” Artus asked with his growling voice.
“Yeah, it was just this gate. Gratia, do you have something that we can wedge this open with?”
“Aye. I do. Here.” She set down the handles of the cart and then pulled a metal tripod looking device out of the bed. It kind of looked like a car jack, and even had a winch handle on the outside.
“I’ll lift it up again if you can fit it under,” I said as I commanded my dagger to stop glowing and put my weapons back in their sheaths.
“Aye. You do the easy part, and I’ll do the hard part. Humans,” she said with a laugh.
“Very funny. Here we go.”
I took my deadlift position and heaved the gate up again. Gratia slid her jack under the gate, twisted the handle on it for ten seconds and then gave me the nod when it looked like it was matched up to the bottom of the bar.
I let go of the gate, and it didn’t protest the jack’s strength. There was now a two and a half foot gap for us to crawl through, or pass loot, and my friends scurried under the metal so that we could continue into what Gratia thought was the abandoned city.
“I couldn’t see much further into the darkness,” I said as I drew my short sword out again and commanded it to glow. The combined light of our emberbrands pushed our radius of sight out a few extra feet, but it still looked like another generic tunnel lay in front of us.
Of course, there was nothing really generic about the graphics of this game. The tunnel looked as I would have expected a real life cave tunnel to look. It was unique in its features and cut, but we had traveled through miles of tunnels so far today, and they were all starting to look the same.
“There is a bridge up ahead. Looks like dwarven make. I think we are in the right place.” Gratia’s voice sounded really excited.
“I hear water down below,” Allurie commented as we reached the stone bridge. The span looked as if it was carved out of the rocky ground with expert hands. The railings on the side rose three feet from the base, and I guessed that the height meant the builders had intended them for dwarfs, and not humans, or elves, or fenias.
The tunnel above us had opened up when we came to the bridge, and I guessed that the chamber we were in was incredibly vast. I couldn’t see a hint of the ceiling past our lights, and the bridge just seemed to continue onward into empty nothingness.
“Why do I get the feeling that this is a terrible idea? Grrrr,” Artus growled.
“At least you aren’t stuck in a cell waiting to be executed,” I said as I walked in front of my friends.
“True, and if we find treasure, I might not have to work ever again.”
“I kind of think you like working. I doubt you would ever retire,” I said over my shoulder to my friend as we walked across the bridge over nothingness.
“Grr. True! I’d just buy a nicer wagon.”
“Do any of you three hear anything, or see anything?” I asked.
“No,” Artus said.
“No,” Gratia said.
“I hear singing. It is sppooooooky sounding,” Allurie said with wide eyes. “Not like the gnolbold music. That made me want to dance. This makes me want to hide.”
“That’s not good. How far ahead?”
“I don’t know Leo. I think a quarter of a mile,” the silver haired elf pointed past me.
“The bridge ends up ahead. I see buildings,” Gratia commented.
I let out a slow breath of nervousness and then reminded myself that this was just a game. If I got killed, I would respawn in twenty-four hours. Where would I actually revive? Outside of the gate? Would my friends meet me there? Would they get killed by whatever monster was lurking down in this forgotten dwarven city? I was going to guess that Ohlavar’s AI would allow monsters to kill NPCs. If my friends died, they would be gone forever.
The bridge ended in a decorative archway made of beautiful stonework. There were carved dwarves, hammers, and casks of beer etched into the rock with amazing detail. Part of the arch had been ripped off at the top, and a good chunk of it was scattered on the ground. I did see a group of stone buildings about thirty feet away from us to the right, and I tiptoed around the broken pieces of stone to walk in that direction.
The buildings sat on a raised section of the city, but I didn’t see a set of stairs anywhere. The higher level was only six feet, so I was able to easily leap up to it. Once I was on top, I helped my three companions climb up after me.
“Do you know what kind of buildings these are?” I asked Gratia as I motioned for my companions to hold their emberbrands closer to their bo
dies.
“Looks like guard posts. They are small apartments. Let us go look,” the dwarf woman said as she took the lead.
We walked into the first building. There was no door on the opening to the small square dwelling, but it looked as if there may have once been something attached to the stone of the entryway.
“Nothing here,” she said after she poked her head inside.
“Same here,” I said as I looked into the archway of another. It was just a square room. Maybe there had once been guards living there, but I didn’t see any furniture or clothes.
“Looks like these used to light the city,” Artus pointed at a ten-foot tall pillar with a globe on top. It almost looked like a gaslamp, but the glass had long since given up its glow. The sight made me kind of miss my friends. Jax would have said something like “dude, that looks like a penis,” and then Garf would have argued with him about no one having a ten-foot long dick.
“Let’s do a quick search of them all. Meet at the far corner in thirty seconds. If you find anything, bring it,” I instructed my companions, and they nodded at me as we spread out through the cluster of square homes built near each other.
I poked my head into four more of the square stone buildings and didn’t find anything. Artus joined me at the end of the group of homes, and then Gratia shook her head when she stepped out of her last building.
“Where is Allurie?” I asked when I didn’t see the elf girl.
“Here, sorry. I found something,” she said as she handed me a scroll. “It was hiding under a stone tile in the last building I looked inside. So sneaky!”
“Great. Thank you,” I said as I sheathed my sword and opened the scroll.
I couldn’t understand the garbled text, but the orange subtitle of my UI popped up, and I read them to my friends.
“Rwunidar was the mightiest of the Ice Hammer Clan’s Blood Smiths. He was undefeatable in combat, kind to his people, and was adored by his fellows. He was also known to be a loremaster and a singer of great talent, and he would often serenade thousands of dwarves during their festivals. He was feared by his enemies, the Drunador, and they came to loathe his invulnerability in combat.”
Lion's Quest: Undefeated: A LitRPG Saga Page 33