by Noah Layton
I let go and landed hard on the rough ground. Some of it fell loose in the process, the rocks and pebbles slipping beneath my feet. The ground was littered with them in masses and piles.
The slabs with the girls stretched out upon suddenly appeared, descending steadily into the pit.
I hurried over to them just as they clunked to the ground heavily.
Dashing to the space between them, I felt an incomparable relief hit me. They were safe.
They were alive.
‘Santana,’ I said, pushing her hair from her face. Aside from the liquid that had been splashed upon her and the ragged state of her clothes, she appeared unharmed. ‘Are you all right? Are you awake?’
I tapped her lightly on the face. Her eyes fluttered open, and the moment she saw me a weak smile rose to her lips.
‘Jack…’
‘It’s me. I’m going to get you out of here.’
I turned sharply to Mariana. She was in a similar state in mind and appearance.
‘Backstab.’
The Dagger of Concealment landed in my hand once again. Not exactly designed for cutting binds, but it was the best thing I had on hand.
I sliced through the bindings on their wrists and ankles in no time, the sharpness of the blade helping to no end. The ropes twined and came loose, and I pulled them away with scrambling hands.
But they were both completely incapacitated. They couldn’t even stand.
How do I get you out of here?
Just as my mind began to search for a solution, I realized something chilling.
The chanting and the drumming above had stopped.
I knew that they were still up there. They had to be. There was no way that they had filtered out in their hundreds in the seconds that I had been down here.
All the same, there was silence from above.
I searched around in the darkness, wondering why the girls had been lowered down here in the first place when there were no signs of a threat anywhere.
I picked up the torch from the ground and raised it up, shedding light on the ground around the slabs.
There were bones everywhere. That was what I had been walking on.
I thought back to the room in the cave where the power well was hidden.
There was something down here.
Click.
I spun around to look into one of the darkened corners where the sound had emerged from.
A head pushed out of the dark and into the light. There had once been eyes on its green head, but they had been burnt out long ago by something. Its green skin was unmistakable.
A wood-elf.
This was even more feral than those I had previously been confronted with.
It crept forwards, hunched over, occasionally stumbling onto its hands in the process.
‘Get the fuck back,’ I said sternly, holding up my torch and producing my sword. ‘I’m done being pissed off today.’
The wood-elf carried on, suddenly baring its sharpened teeth.
‘Fuck this.’
I threw down the torch and stamped forwards. With a single swing I brought my sword back and slammed it down into the feral wood-elf’s head.
The blade concaved its skull and butchered the back of its brain, sending it to the ground quickly, but not before the spray of its blood landed on my face.
I pulled my sword back and looked around.
More were emerging.
I backed towards where the girls were still lying helpless. Defending them was the most important thing right now considering the state they were in.
‘Am I supposed to be afraid?’ I growled, looking around at them all. ‘I’ll bet every other helpless innocent that’s been sent down here has been too incapacitated to deal with you fuckers, huh? Well, not me.’
I went to wipe the blood from the dead wood-elf from my face, only serving to smear it.
I couldn’t imagine how insane I looked right now with my blood-stained skin, my flaming eyes and my battered clothes
‘Is this it?’ I said cockily. ‘Is this all that you’ve got?’
I waited for the wood-elves to get in proximity before cutting them down in the same brutal fashion. They hardly even put up a fight.
When they were all defeated, their death rattles withering away, I found that the ground above was no longer completely quiet.
There were murmurings of confusion, and the occasional shout.
I rushed over to the girls and looked up through the tunnel that they had been lowered through.
Three wood-elves – the tribe master and two of his guards – were staring down at me.
Shit.
They grunted loudly. The annoyance turned into disgruntled shouts, then into confused yells.
Chaos was breaking out among the crowds of wood-elves above.
But from the sounds, they weren’t coming this way.
They were moving further away in a mad scramble of thundering footsteps and shouts, moving in such numbers and force that dust fell from the ceiling.
Why are they running away?
Caught in the act, but there was nothing that I could do about it now.
I thought fast, wondering how the hell I was going to get out of here now that they were alerted to my presence.
I held my arms up, sword in one and power stone in the other.
Come join me.
Their faces did not become angry, though. Instead, I was confronted with fear and murmurs of confusion.
Then terror.
A rumble suddenly coursed through the ground beneath me. Pebbles and dust dislodged from the cave roof overhead, pattering down like hailstones.
It was so severe that I almost fell on my ass.
Earthquake.
Shit. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
I had to get the girls out, but there was no way unless they were on their feet and ready to move.
And then, the happy answer came to me. It was the only answer.
I pulled up my inventory and set eyes on one of the many items I had pulled from the land of the Gaalus Tribe.
Moonrise x2
I retrieved the two vials and pulled the cork stoppers from their tops, exposing the dust within.
Looking sharply between the girls, I shook my head and placed the vials over their faces, steadily tipping the dust along the glass edges until it reached the end.
‘I’m really sorry about this…’
The dust tipped out and landed above their upper lips.
I placed my hands over their mouths, forcing them to breathe through their noses and inhale the substance.
In unison, their eyes slammed open.
Mariana inhaled sharply through her mouth, grasping at her throat and coughing as she rolled to her side. Her legs went rigid as she grabbed the edge of the slab and coughed violently.
Santana sat up like she was on a hinge, groaning out loudly. Her pupils dilated and she gasped for air, squeezing the edges of her slab so tightly that knuckles turned white.
‘All right, we’re all okay,’ I said, tending to them both. ‘We need to get moving before the roof comes down on us. Can you both walk?’
With the boost of energy that had hit them both they could do more than walk.
Santana leaped off the slab and wrapped her arms around me. She was still wearing the dress that she had adorned for the dinner at the land of the sun-elves, albeit a lot more torn now.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I think so… Where are we?’
‘Damn good question.’
A hand clasped on my shoulder, and I spun to see Mariana’s wide eyes.
‘What’s happening…?’
‘We’re in some kind of pit beneath the land of the wood-elves, but we have to get out of here. There’s an earthquake and the wood-elves are running for it. Only we could pull off timing that well.’
Mariana’s eyes went even wider, and her mouth tipped open uncontrollably.
She glanced around
her feet.
‘This is the sacrificial chamber,’ she said quietly, looking over to the slaughtered wood-elves that I had cut down. ‘And those are…’
‘The assholes that almost killed you.’
‘Those are our escorts. Oh, gods…’
‘Your escorts?’
‘I know some of the wood-elf tongue. I overheard there plans when we were brought here. We were lowered down here to be sacrificed.’
‘To those things?’
‘No…’ The ground rumbled suddenly with much more ferocity than the first. Mariana looked to me with a look of irrefutable terror. ‘To him.’
I knew the name. Her brother had told me it.
From the cavern above, one of the wood-elves screeched out.
‘ZAGOR!!!’
He was real, and the girls were supposed to be his sacrifices.
An darkened orange light suddenly filled the cave too quickly.
I looked over to its source, a section of the cave where several of the feral wood-elves had crawled from.
But it wasn’t just a corner of the cave. Hidden in the darkness was a huge entrance to another sub-cavern, from where the orange light was glowing.
There was no time left for talking.
‘Come on!’
I hopped up onto Santana’s slab along with Mariana. Reaching for my sword, I took it firmly in my grip and slashed at the chains with all of the might that I could muster.
The pure tensile pressure that they were under made them break more easily than they should have, and with the first one broken it raised a little.
I turned to a second on the opposite side, holding the girls close to me with one arm and controlling my sword with the other.
Another strike.
Another.
Then-
BOOM.
The chain exploded, spinning outwards and away from us.
If it had come our way the strength and speed of its movement would probably have killed all three of us, but I didn’t have time to dwell on the matter.
The slab suddenly rose, accelerating upwards and back through the tunnel.
Our mismatched weight sent the whole platform off-balance. It slammed against the rough tunnel walls as we ascended to the upper section of the cavern.
Chancing a look below, the glowing red and orange embers stained with an unnatural blackness scattered over the space that we had just occupied.
The slab arrived in the cavern and we hurriedly leaped off.
Only a few wood-elves remained in the cavern; most were running to the exit in their hundreds, all sprinting up the steps to the narrow tunnel that Lara and I had entered through.
Lara would be fine – there was enough room for her to hide, and the wood-elves seemed more pre-occupied with getting out of here.
We should have been doing the same, but not all of the enemy tribe had departed.
The wood-elf tribe master stood before us, a guard at either side of him.
Our three enemies stared us down as we jumped down off the slab.
‘What… What-you-do?’
Just as Mariana could speak some wood-elf, so could the wood-elf tribe master speak some of our language.
It was sharp and spluttered, but I knew exactly what he had said.
The tribe master stared at me with an infernal mix of anger and terror.
‘Move aside,’ I growled, raising my sword. ‘Or we all die right here, right now.’
This wasn’t a courtesy. In any other scenario I would have cut down the bastard responsible for kidnapping my wife.
But fighting was the last thing I needed right now. The cavern was going to come down on our heads, and fighting would only stall our efforts to escape.
Deep down, though, I knew there was no convincing him. He had made his bed of dedicating himself to an ancient creature that lurked beneath the earth, and he was going down with his ship if it meant sending my wife and Mariana straight back down there.
The tribe master suddenly yelled out, roaring like a lion. His guards followed suit.
Weapons had been dropped at our feet when the rest of the wood-elves had took off for the bottle-necked exit.
Mariana and Santana both reached for rusted spears, snatching them up as I promptly readied my power stone.
‘Telekinea!’
The blast unfurled instantly from my open palm. It should have made short work, but the space was too wide and the wood-elves too fast.
The guard on the left was struck in the arm, spinning him out and sending him crashing to the floor, but the tribe master and the right-hand guard both ducked sharply, avoiding the force of the blast.
Shit.
The tribe master brought his spear back by his waist and plunged it towards my chest in an upwards motion.
I swung my sword swiftly, knocking the path of the spear to the side to the left, the sharpened tip missing my body by mere inches as he stumbled away.
Mariana dealt with the right-hand guard, their spears clashing in a parry before she delivered a brutal punch to his face, knocking him back.
The wood-elf that had been knocked down by the blast jumped up sharply and made for Santana.
‘Telekinea!’
This time it did the job.
The blast struck him square in the chest and threw him back against the rock ledge. His head struck it hard, leaving a spatter of blood on the surface as he slumped to the ground.
As the tribe master regained himself and made towards me, Santana darted behind me and moved to Mariana’s side.
They brandished their stolen spears wildly, moving in on the wood-elf that Mariana had just punched and stabbing at him before he had a chance to regain himself and muster an attack.
The wood-elf tribe master approached me and readied himself as I formulated a plan of attack.
He stopped some yards away, ready for me to try and use my power stone so that he could dodge again.
It was useless against him. I would have to take a melee approach.
The girls cut down the second wood-elf guard and were about to move in to help me take him down, but-
A sudden brutal, crunching rumble rolled through the cave, knocking us all off-balance.
Orange light glowed up from pit we had escaped.
Zagor was approaching.
‘Go!’ I shouted to the girls.
‘We’re not leaving you!’
‘If we stay down here we’re all dead. I’ll hold this asshole off.’
As I ordered them to run, I suddenly realized how Ralos must have felt.
‘GO!’
Mariana and Santana exchanged a look before taking off up the steps to the exit. I looked over the tribe master’s shoulder as he blocked my path, unable to see Lara.
Santana looked down to me one last time from the exit with wide eyes, then turned and ran.
‘Come on, you son of a bitch,’ I grunted at the tribe master. ‘Make your move.’
Rocks were beginning to fall from the ceiling all around us.
At first the tribe master had been fearful at the girls being saved from their sacrifice, but as destruction mounted, a psychotic grin began to grow on his face.
He raised his spear to his side in an outstretched arm.
Then he dropped his weapon to the ground.
What the fuck is he doing?
His smile grew wider as he raised his hand and shaped it into a form I knew all too well.
He had a power stone.
It landed in his hand in an instant.
I charged forward with a yell, raising my sword to strike him down, but with a lift of his hand and the utterance of a single, indiscernible word, the spell was cast right in my direction.
But nothing happened to me.
Instead, the master vanished.
I rushed forwards and hit nothing, spinning around in search of him.
Scanning in the nearby area, I saw that his minimal wrappings were hovering in the area, before being thrown to the
ground along with his headpiece.
It was an invisibility power stone
Shit.
I tried to listen to determine his location around me, but the rumbling in the cave was too harsh, and it was only getting worse.
Crunch.
A hard strike was delivered to my nose, disorienting me.
I staggered back and shook my head back into the moment.
With my sword raised before me, I tried to protect myself.
I could run, but my back would be turned to my enemy.
I would be defenceless, wide open to attack, just like Ralos had been.
Blood was starting to drip from my nose, which I promptly wiped away. I leaped up onto the ledge of the next level of the cave and kept my sword drawn.
Every second I spent here was another that Zagor would have to kill me.
He was getting closer.
I scanned the ground for signs of the dust shifting, but it was impossible to discern, especially with continuous shaking of the ground.
Instinctively I spun towards a sudden clunk nearby but instead found myself looking down at a foot-long boulder that had fallen from the ceiling just a few yards away.
The tribe master wasn’t the only threat down here.
‘YARRRR!!!’
The yell sounded just as an invisible foot struck me in the back.
My sword went flying from my hand and I collapsed forwards, thrown from the ledge and back down to the platform by the pit.
I rolled onto my back and groaned as I pushed up, the wind knocked out of me.
The tribe master was still invisible, but he had done away with the stealth approach. The arrogance of his upper hand had gotten the better of him.
A sudden kick was delivered to my stomach, sending a jolt of terrible pain through my torso.
‘… Backstab!’
I groaned out the word, but the blade landing in my hand immediately.
Another kick was delivered to my stomach at that very moment.
I raised my arm and stabbed at where I deemed his leg to be, but the master was too fast for that.
I hit nothing, and a second later the dagger was kicked from my hand by an invisible foot, flying away from me.
Mustering my strength, I pushed up and dragged myself away.
I collapsed onto my front, battered and bruised.
Blood was staining my hands and smearing on the ground.
But that’s not my blood.