by Noah Layton
Managing to focus my eyes, I saw it; the bowl of red liquid that had been splashed on the girls.
I snatched it up, hearing the master’s footsteps approach me.
Turning sharply, I jolted the bowl and struck the master square in the face with it
He yelled out as the liquid splashed him in the face and filled his eyes.
Now I’ve got you, motherfucker.
There was no hiding anymore.
With an animal grunt I pushed up from the ground and stood, staggering to the wood-elf leader.
He groaned and rubbed desperately at his eyes. Much of his body was still invisible, but with the liquid streaming down his face, I could see him.
ROOAARRRRR!!!
The demonic sound shook the entire cavern worse than ever.
Heat was beginning to emanate from the pit as the orange glow became blinding.
I rushed to the wood-elf and delivered a hard punch to his face. I grabbed him by the shoulders before he fell back, running a hand into his hair and dragging him roughly to the pit.
I had no weapons at hand, but it didn’t matter.
‘You want to meet your master?’ I panted, bloodied and battered. ‘Fine.’
I swung him back, then smashed his head hard against the slab hanging over the pit, the very same that had been used to lower my wife to her prospective death.
His body went limp the as his head concaved against the surface. Blood poured out and spilt to the ground.
With a final, ferocious grunt, I kicked his corpse down into the pit to meet the demi-god that awaited him below.
The rumbling of the cave suddenly softened. I steadied my breathing and paused, wide-eyed, before another horrendous roar broke out, worse than any that had sounded yet.
I turned and ran, leaving my weapons behind and sprinting up the steps to the exit.
I hadn’t even thought to grab the power stone from the master’s inventory.
I didn’t care; right now, surviving was the only thing that mattered.
Every second I waited for a rock to smash into my head as they rained down from the ceiling.
After several close calls I reached the platform where I had been hiding with Lara and sprinted along the corridor.
The escaping wood-elves had long made it out, but with their departure, so had all the torches extinguished.
I sprinted ahead, tripping over rocks and suffocating darkness until I saw the firelight of the exit.
I prayed silently that my wives and Mariana were safe.
A crack splintered through the ceiling, bringing down the cave behind me just five yards from the exit.
My feet pounded into the steps as I scrambled madly to the surface, running through the fire and looking out at the carnage around me.
I had killed the master and escaped the cave, but the citizens of the tribe still numbered in their hundreds.
Wood-elves were everywhere, but few if any were paying attention to me.
Most were cowering on their knees before the fire, while others were retreating, walking backwards from the fire, but all were looking my way.
Because that was where their true master resided.
They were chanting louder and louder, some kneeling forward to pray, others lowering their heads.
The sheer number made me reluctant to run, even if none were now seeking to attack me.
‘JACK!’
Through a large gap I saw Mariana and my wives, including Lara, ushering me to them with pleasing eyes.
I sprinted to them, and together we hurried across the land in a mad rush to escape.
Bizarrely, the wood-elves paid us no notice.
All they cared about was the emergence of their master.
We had taken his sacrifices, and now he was emerging.
There was nothing they could do to avoid his wrath but pray – or run.
The ground was shaking like an earthquake had hit us, but all I was conscious of was the slamming of our footsteps on the ground. Our group of five sprinted through the dried grass and mud.
All that I saw now was the perimeter fence, our shot at freedom lying in the forest where we could disappear-
BOOM.
A single rumble sent all of us off-balance, staggering before jumping back to our feet.
This wasn’t just a rumble, though – it was the beginning of something so powerful I could hardly comprehend it.
BOOM.
A ripple jolted through the ground, and things became silent too quickly.
‘RUN!’ Mariana screamed.
‘WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WE’RE DOING?’ Lara yelled, looking over her shoulder at Mariana.
I saw her eyeline move from Mariana sharply to something far above us.
‘Oh, FUCK!’
I turned and looked over my shoulder at the sight that had erupted behind us.
The land within a fifty-yard radius of the fire pit flew up into the air. It was like a volcano was erupting beneath the earth.
I turned, making sure that Mariana and my wives were ahead of me, and continued running.
It wasn’t just us; the wood-elves were all screaming with terror, running to the outskirts of their tribal land.
Clods of dirt began to smash down all around us like hailstones, and as I chanced another look over my shoulder I saw the land past the fifty-yard mark radius begin to fall away.
If we didn’t keep up we would be sucked into the earth.
The fence still stood tall, and cutting it down would take too long.
I cycled to the Telekinetic power stone and felt it land in my hand.
‘Telekinea!’
The energy burst exploded from my hand and struck the fence, splintering it.
I hurled the spell forward again and the fence gave.
‘MOVE, MOVE!’
The girls leaped through the gap, pushing past the remains of the defenses and into the forest.
I jumped through after them, watching them reach the tree line before turning once more to look back towards the land.
The land fell away, as if all the space beneath us was hollow. Wood-elves ran for their lives, and for a second the magnitude of what was happening hit me.
The entire tribal land of the wood-elves was being destroyed. Almost all of their people had fallen into the abyss below.
And as the ground caved in, something emerged from it.
A huge hand appeared, reaching into the sky before slamming into the falling earth. It didn’t need to grasp for leverage against anything; it was large enough to stagger up through the collapsing mud and rock beneath it.
Just as the dryad had shown me.
Its head emerged, a huge pair of horns set into its forehead that smouldered with fire that burned with brown and dark orange embers, before a gigantic pair of blackened orbs that acted as its eyes peered above the ground.
They were like a shark’s; dark and dead, suggesting not a single shred of empathy in its mind, but its actions said otherwise.
It clambered up from the ground, its gigantic body stretching thirty yards high. It was humanoid in shape, commanding a pair of strong arms and legs below a rocky torso.
I knew I had to run but I was staring at something that not even many people in Agraria had likely seen.
This was a demi-god.
This was Zagor.
He was just as Ralos had described.
Some of the wood-elves dropped to their knees, lowering their heads and praying, and in seconds they were sucked into the collapsing ground at the edges of the land. It was one of the most baffling things that I had ever seen, dying for the sake of showing worship to something that had resulted in the destruction of their tribe.
Other wood-elves set their loyalties aside, choosing wisely to turn and run. I and the group were no longer the focus of their evil affections.
That honour went to the simple act of staying alive.
‘Jack, we need to go, NOW!’
Zagor suddenly locked eyes
with me. I stared back at him and felt one of the strangest feelings I had ever felt hit me. It was a combination of terror and power, as if I was seeing something truly powerful for the first time.
He was huge, but the collapsing land was much bigger in scale than him. I expected him to be sucked into the earth along with his wood-elf minions, but just as the rock podium that he stood upon began to fall away, one final, powerful motion occurred.
A huge pair of wings stretched out from his back, unfolding massively like blankets that clouded out everything around them. With a sharp jump he burst into the sky, taking off and disappearing into the night with the powerful driving of his wings against the air.
The demi-god vanished over the treetops.
‘JACK!’
I pulled my eyes from the view of the land and ran for my life, the land collapsing at our heels as I sprinted after my wives.
We didn’t stop running until we reached the cave.
Elera led us through the forest, having mapped out the route perfectly in her head. I wanted to wrap my arms around Santana and embrace her tightly, but as we raced through the woods the sounds of wood-elves’ slamming footsteps and screams were everywhere.
I guessed that they couldn’t give a shit about us anymore; their god had just destroyed their land and killed most of their population in the process, and they were running for their lives as much as we were.
We reached the trench and hurried through, exchanging Potions of Haste in the process and downing them quickly before sprinting onwards.
I didn’t know how much time had passed when we reached the river, but it meant that we weren’t far from the cave. Elera led the girls down to it, ushering them in while I protected the rear of our group.
I struggled through the water madly, glancing around and seeing no sign of pursuers until-
‘RRAAARRGGG!!!’
Something hard struck me from above with blunt force.
I crashed forward into the water, submerged beneath the surface, surrounded by distorted, dulled noise and writhing bubbles.
I levelled myself, pressed my feet against the ground and propelled myself upwards, gasping for air and pushing my hair out of my face.
A wood-elf was right in front of me, scrambling up to his feet – his attack on me from above had done as much damage to himself as it had to me, but his feral morale was filled with rage.
Even now, there were still some who were trying to kill us. He probably blamed me for what had happened.
But I had had more than enough.
He lunged at me, finding my neck. At the same time I drew my arm back and punched him straight in the throat. I felt the crunch of his Adam’s apple against my knuckles, and he fell back, flailing his arms and crashing into the water as he tried to draw a breath.
I could have stabbed him, but I was too angry and too done with this fucking land to let another of these bastards go this easily.
I sank a hand into his hair and spun his body around, plunging him forward and into the water where I held him as he struggled.
I held him beneath the water as he flailed madly against me, scratching and kicking and shaking until the final twitch left him and his body began to calm.
I held him there until the struggles became jolts, and the jolts became shivers, and the shivers became nothing at all.
But below the surface, somehow, he was still grunting.
‘Jack…’
‘Wait,’ I called out to the voice from the cave. I could tell it was one of the girls, but now who – my mind was too focused on ending this wood-elf.
‘Jack…’
‘He’s still growling!’
‘Jack… That’s you…’
I panted harshly and turned to see Santana crouching in the mouth of the cave. Her face was still scuffed and spattered with mud, her dress torn and ragged, but her eyes were as bright and perfect as ever.
‘Let it go,’ she said peacefully, offering a hand out to me.
My arms were tensed so hard they were trembling. I struggled to relax them, finally unclamping my hands from the body of the wood-elf and letting him drift to the bottom of the river.
‘I thought… I thought you were…’
‘I know, but I am not, because you came to get me. Now come and rest. Gods know you deserve it.’
I watched the body being picked up by the current as it started to inch its way downstream.
Once it was out of sight and sure it wouldn’t wake up, I turned to Santana and took her hand, letting her guide me into the safety of the cave.
Chapter Fifteen
By the time I had entered the cave and let my guard down, I was out like a light. The exhaustion of the past few days set in, and at the sight of my wives and Mariana being safe, sleep took me fast.
When I awoke, I found Elera and Lara sleeping nearby, with Mariana close and doing the same. Santana was the only one of us who was awake; she was sitting by the fire, where the first hints of sunrise had begun to make their way through the winding passage to the cave entrance.
‘How are you?’ I asked, stretching my arms and moving to her side, where she snuggled up to me at the fire.
‘I am fine. I just… I thought that I would never see you again. I have never been so scared in my life.’
‘I know. I’m sorry that even happened to you.’
‘It is not your fault, husband.’
‘It is, though. We were on a foreign tribe’s land and I was off getting a freaking tour of the place by…’
‘Mariana,’ she said. ‘I know. She told me while we were being held captive. She was underground with you when the land was attacked, but she was taken too. It didn’t make a difference. One of us was going to be taken either way.’
‘So you had time to talk to her?’
‘She is a strong person. Perhaps too strong for you, Jack.’
‘Wo-o-ow…’ I laughed quietly. ‘Too strong for me?’
‘I mean that she would be better running a tribe that married to a tribe master.’
‘And you don’t think you’re strong?’
‘I do, but she and I come from different families. My father was more than willing to let me marry you. Her father is an experienced warrior and the head of a tribe.’
‘In case you didn’t know, Jeremiah is pretty terrifying. The guy knows how to swing an axe.’
‘Maybe… I just do not think that she is wife-material.’
‘You afraid that you’re going to be side-lined or something?’
‘No, I just… She has been raised in a different way to the rest of us. She has been raised to lead, and very few people are brought up like that. Of course, that might not matter, seeing as her brother is next in line to the position of tribe master over the sun-elves.’
I turned away from her, looking into the fire.
‘Not anymore,’ I replied. ‘He’s gone.’
‘… Gone?’
‘He was killed by the wood-elves after holding them off so that we could escape. Artrix is dying, too, which means…’
‘Mariana is next in line.’
‘Right.’
‘You haven’t told her about her brother yet?’
‘In between rescuing the pair of you from a gigantic monster, fighting off an army of wood-elves and blowing up a tribal land, the right moment hasn’t exactly come up. But the right moment for me to ask you something has.’ I turned to her, looking her in the eyes. ‘The wood-elves, they didn’t… Do anything to you, did they?’
Santana didn’t pretend to misunderstand what I was talking about. She knew exactly what I was saying.
‘No. I went untouched, and so did Mariana. From what I understood they wanted to sacrifice us to Zagor untouched.’
Internally I breathed a sigh of relief. Morals or not, if they had laid a finger on my wife I would have marched straight back what was left of the land and slaughtered every last one of them that was left.
‘I’m so sorry this happened,’ I said,
wrapping my arms around her. ‘The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to our land is build a twenty-foot stone wall around it so that nobody can ever get to us again.’
‘Does the building system allow you to do that?’ She laughed.
‘Maybe, maybe not, but I’ll do it with my bare hands if I have to. We’re going to build defenses so powerful that nobody can ever get to us.’
‘It wasn’t down to defense,’ Santana said. ‘It was straying so far from our land.’
‘True,’ I muttered. ‘I think from now on we need to focus on our own area instead of wandering into the wilds. But we have enough time to think about that when we get home. Let’s just focus on getting there first.’
Travelling at night had been the logical approach when we had first travelled to the land of the wood-elves, but now that we were leaving and most of the wood-elves were dead, we surmised that we could safely travel in daylight.
After packing up our belongings and setting off, we reached the cliff side where the land split in two. We trekked along the precipice for a few hundred yards before arriving at the remains of the bridge, and as I surveyed both sides, I thought back to Ralos’s grip on my hand.
The jolt of the spear hitting him ran through my arm again.
I barely knew the guy and had thought he was a grade-A asshole, but after finally sitting down to share a cigar with him and to actually talk, it turned out he wasn’t who I thought he was at all.
And if that wasn’t enough, his actions had spoken more than anything he had said.
‘The cliffs descend a few miles downriver,’ Mariana said. ‘We can cross to the other side of the river there and make it back before sundown.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I nodded.
We made the trek by the cliffside at a fast walk, staying close to the forest until we reached the crossing, where the current of the river had slowed. After reaching the other side with little difficulty, we all took another Potion of Haste each and set off through the forest, led by Mariana.
A little after midday we reached the walls of the sun-elf tribe, managing to avoid any remaining stray wood-elves in the forest from the direction of our approach.
I knew there had to be some that had escaped the destruction of their land.
A terrifyingly paradoxical feeling struck me as I laid my eyes on the walls. On the one hand I could return to safety, to the peaceful confines of a well-defended tribal land that was free from the threat of a vicious enemy tribe, and know that my women were safe.