It was the Aerie Roc above the trees, circling around and awaiting Echo’s orders. She looked up quickly without trying to draw too much attention to what she was doing, even as she was roughly led away with shoves to her back. While she didn’t actually see the massive bird, she was 99% sure that it was there, just out of sight.
Without waiting anymore, as she was being led out of the Bowery and any hope of ever surviving was fading with each of her steps, she threw her head back and yelled, “ATTACK!”, projecting thoughts of the Chamberlain as she did so. The entirety of the people in the Bowery froze at her shout, the Guards looking at her and the other Rebels, expecting some sort of surprise attack that they hadn’t accounted for. Echo couldn’t see the Chamberlain’s face because she was forcibly facing the other direction, but she could only assume that he had a similar expression of wariness and confusion.
“Guard – silence her permanently if she tries something like that ag—” The rest of the pompous fool’s words were cut off by a branch-shaking screech, and the hole that opened up to the sunlight above was abruptly covered.
“What is that?! King, drop the Sphere and both of you protect me!” she heard the Chamberlain scream from behind her. Echo whipped around and out of the grip of the Guard holding her, in time to see the giant bird descending towards the Chamberlain, talons poised to rip him apart. Suddenly, she felt another inaudible *pop* as the Negation Sphere was collapsed, and her heart sank. There’s no way it’ll survive against the King and Queen, especially with how powerful they are.
Her heart recovered from its disappointment as she looked at the King, who was fighting his reactions, shaking almost uncontrollably as he closed his eyes with a smile. The Queen was looking out blankly toward the middle of the Bowery at nothing in particular, but a hint of a smile and shaking in her own limbs indicated that she was also fighting the commands given by the Chamberlain.
Speaking of the no-longer smug Elf, he fell onto his back in his effort to get away, and suddenly a thick metal wall appeared above him, somehow floating in the middle of the air between him and the diving monster. From her viewpoint, something looked wrong about the wall, especially from the side closest to the prone Elf; it almost looked incomplete as if he had run out of energy creating the barrier, though insubstantial might be the better word. Remembering what she had heard about the Chamberlain and how he utilized Spirit energy to control the minds of those around him, she instantly knew what the wall was: An illusion.
The Roc appeared to be adjusting to avoid crashing into the wall, which would take it out of range of an attack; she didn’t want the horrible Elf to get a chance to utilize another attack, however, and the King and Queen losing their internal fight was a possibility at any time. Therefore, with every ounce of mental capacity she held, she ordered the bird to fly into the wall, despite its natural inclination to avoid crashing into a solid object.
There was a briefest of hesitation as the bird continued to reverse its course, but then it doubled down on its dive, aiming straight for the metal wall. “What!? Nooooooooooo!”
Without any sort of resistance, the Roc shot right through the illusionary wall, swooped down over the horrified form of the Chamberlain, and then swooped him up with one of its powerful talons. One of them had apparently pierced his entire body, because Echo heard him scream, just as a hundred different spells thrown out by the Guards impacted the Light Barrier in an effort to stop the Roc. Fitting that the spell protecting him from The Rebels would prove to hinder his own rescue.
Before the screaming Elf could use any other spells to save himself as the Roc’s path took it further into the middle of the room, she silently gave another order. “Finish him.”
Faster than she could reasonably follow, the bird’s beak bent down and struck at the distraught and now-crying Chamberlain, his screams abruptly cut off as his head was swiftly removed from his body. The Roc then let the body go, where it slammed into the Bowery floor with a wet-sounding *thud*, even as the bird tilted its head back in mid-flight and swallowed its prize.
Brand-new screaming shattered the sudden silence, as the King and Queen sat straight up on their thrones and started yelling so loud Echo thought her eardrums would burst. She couldn’t even hold her hands up to her ears to save them any further abuse because her hands were still tied tightly together with rope, but thankfully the screaming stopped after about 10 seconds. Echo watched as the Royal couple seemed to deflate and collapse upon their seats of authority, followed by every single Royal Guard. Each of the ones guarding the prisoners flopped to the floor unconscious, and the one nearest her nearly knocked her down in the process.
What just happened?
“Good thinking, Echo. Hold on, I’ll get you untied.” The next moment, Winter was at her back side and she felt an intense cold radiating over her bare skin, followed soon after by her restraints suddenly letting her go.
“Thanks.”
“Ha! I told them it was a good idea to bring you along! I guess I was right, again,” the normally surly Elite said with a giant smile, and she didn’t have any idea what was going on.
“Don’t listen to him, Echo; he enjoys messing with people’s perception of him whenever he can,” Churven said from behind her, and she jumped at his sudden presence – she didn’t even hear him approach. She whipped around, seeing that the Elder was there as well, cautiously stepping over the unconscious Guards on the floor nearby.
Herrlot interrupted the conversation. “There’s no time for this. You need to get going.”
“Get…going? But what is—?”
“They’ll be fine when they wake up, though they’ll be extremely confused and likely missing some chunks of their memory,” Churven said quickly, nodding at the Guards covering the floor. “The King and Queen, however, won’t be so lucky unless you get them to this dungeon of yours.”
Ah. That’s right.
“Oh, and good thinking on removing his head, because decapitation is the only way to effectively sever the tie between the caster and the victims of the mind manipulation spell.”
Echo paused in the middle of ordering the Roc to land. “Wait…so I could’ve messed that up? You could’ve told me.”
The Elder had the presence of mind to look a little embarrassed. “Well, we couldn’t really trust you with everything. We were convinced we had someone feeding information to the Chamberlain, but we weren’t sure who it was. Based on how adamant you were that we had actually taken you from safety, we weren’t exactly convinced that you hadn’t been compromised. You understand, don’t you?”
She did, but that still didn’t make it right. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s just get them loaded up and we can go.”
“I…I’m not going with you, Echo. Someone needs to organize everything here now that the King and Queen have been incapacitated.”
That sounded a lot like she was taking over the governance of the Elven people. Almost as if they had just successfully completed a coup….
The Elder held her hands up, as if to stop Echo from thinking the worst. “Now, I know what that sounds like, but it’s only until you come back with them. I was telling the truth when I said I don’t want to be in charge; running a small village was the most responsibility I would ever want.”
Echo just shook her head, not completely believing her, but having no other choice at the moment but to follow through on her commitments. Either way, if Herrlot was in charge, then at least there would be someone that knew about the danger and was willing to start passing out Energy Orbs.
The Roc landed moments later and Echo got plenty of help gently strapping the Royal family into the harnesses, and she took her place in her own position. With one last look at The Rebels – who had succeeded in their rebellion all because of a much-less powerful Ranger…and a gigantic bird monster from a dungeon in the wasteland, of course – she turned away and instructed the Roc to make its way up and out of the Royal Bowery.
As she flew off to the northeast, towards Sandra’s dungeon
, she couldn’t help thinking that the way things turned out had been the Elder’s plan from the start. Too many coincidences, I’d say. Regardless, Echo looked at the setting sun, hoping she would arrive before it became too dark; it was just her luck having to try to set down in the middle of a desolate wasteland, carrying the most precious cargo of the Elven people.
Chapter 26
Gerold hesitated before he joined in with the chaotic battle ahead of him. Not because he was afraid, but because he wasn’t sure where he might be best used to shore up the failing defenses of the Shieldmen and civilian fighters ahead of him. Doing a quick estimate, he determined that there were at most 40 Shieldmen and 100 civilians wielding battleaxes and wearing non-Shieldmen armor that appeared to have seen better days. Almost everyone in their strongholds knew how to fight and defend themselves, but they were much less effective at it than the more specialized Shieldmen, of course.
Sadly, as he glanced around, there were at least 200 civilians – residents of Stonebrink Hall that he recognized – lying in jumbled heaps, pushed to the side of the Whiskeyflow Tavern floor to make room for the rest of the defenders. Noticing a few others that he recognized for a different reason, he realized that they weren’t all civilians; some faces belonged to at least a half-dozen Shieldmen he knew, and since he couldn’t see all of them, there were no doubt more.
“This…this is bad. Maybe I should’ve just left instead,” he said out loud. No one seemed to hear him, fortunately, because there were too many screams and the sounds of a fierce battle overwhelming the senses.
As for what they were fighting against, Gerold immediately recognized two types of dungeon monsters that were known to come from dungeons relatively nearby. To see them working together, utilizing the same tunnel leading into the Tavern, was a very bad sign.
The first were classified as Werebeasts, a variation of the common Beast-type dungeons – a variation that made them even more dangerous, unfortunately. Basically, take all of the different beasts – wolves, bears, boars, large cats, and worse – and combine them with the basic shape of a Dwarf (or, from what he heard was more accurate, an Orc or a Human based on their proportions), add in some heightened intelligence, and you ended up with some dangerous combinations. Beasts normally didn’t scare Dwarves because rarely could they bite or scratch through their armor, unless they were extremely powerful; Werebeasts, however, were dangerous because they thought about where to attack instead of attacking whatever they could reach. Many a Shieldman had been injured or killed from a claw sliding perfectly through a joint in their armor, or from the Werebeasts working together using simple-yet-effective tactics to isolate and tear apart a single Shieldman.
The only thing the Shieldmen had going for them when facing off against any of the Werebeasts was the fact that none of them were as large as their Beast counterparts; there weren’t any 900-lb Werebears, for instance, nor were there any 15-foot-tall Dire Werewolves to menace them. At least, none that anyone had seen in the past. Most of them were between 6 and 8 feet tall, weighing anywhere between 200 and 400 lbs; still larger than any Dwarves – except for Gerold in his Deep Diver suit, of course. While wearing it, he was nearly on par in the height department, though he had an advantage in the weight category, as the suit was made of heavier metal than flesh and blood.
“Oh, no – not them!” he exclaimed in disappointment, seeing the other type of dungeon monster. Bugs. Creepy crawlies. Pests. Vermin. 6 and 8-legged nightmares. Insects of all different types flowed around the Werebeasts, filling in the spaces in between with their chitinous bodies, too many legs, and multiple eyes. Unlike the smaller bug-like constructs that Gerold had seen in Sandra’s dungeon, these ones weren’t tiny enough to squish with a well-placed boot; no, these were much, much larger, coming from a dungeon that they had classified as having Gigantic Bugs.
There were Giga-spiders, Giga-beetles, Giga-ants, Giga-centipedes, Giga-bees, and even Giga-mantises, which were lethal with their razor-sharp forelegs that could slice a person to pieces – when not protected by armor – in a matter of seconds. For the most part, Gigantic Bugs were usually more annoying than deadly, but when accompanying the Werebeasts, they were obviously proving to be more than a challenge as they overwhelmed with sheer numbers. When even the Giga-ants were a foot and a half long and were arriving in groups of 20 or more, that kind of thing could quickly become a problem, especially if one needed to defend against a more powerful threat like a Wereboar or a Werecat.
Individually, each of the monsters wouldn’t have been much of a problem; together, they were proving to be deadly. Gerold again evaluated where he would do the most good; he thought it would probably be prudent to protect the armed civilians the most, as they were the ones that were dying at a more prodigious rate than the Shieldmen. “And, well, I really don’t want to be near the other Shieldmen right now, because there’s now some bad blood between us.”
He hated thinking that way, but it was true. He wanted to help, but the way they had reacted and treated him when he arrived back home was still freshly impressed on his mind. He had to admit to himself that there was good reason for them to feel so strongly about him losing his armor, because of the scarcity of said armor nowadays, but to go so far as to lock him up felt unjustified. Still, he wouldn’t let them just die and would do what he could to save them – even if he didn’t want to.
“Your Highness, you need to retreat down the tunnels while we hold them off!” A sudden shout caught Gerold’s attention as he started to move towards the line of civilians doing their best to keep up with the onslaught. The monsters seemed to just keep coming with no end in sight, but if the former Shieldman had learned anything from Sandra, it was that there would be an end, eventually; there was a limited amount of the “mana” she had at her disposal, and these dungeons would be just the same. However, he also remembered that she had mentioned that the deaths of people in her Area of Influence gave her more of that mana, which meant that unless they put a stop to so many casualties, the monsters would keep coming without a stop.
“I will not!” came a different voice, one filled with strength and resolution. “We must contain and seal this breach, because I cannot permit the monsters to gain a foothold in my Kingdom!”
My Kingdom? “Is that…King Mynag?” he asked loudly in surprise, and this time he actually got someone’s attention. A Shieldman turned towards him from the line, and Gerold was surprised to recognize the description of the King in his armor. It was flecked with white, yellow, and red, which was an unusual combination of Holy, Air, and Fire elements that he knew the King possessed. While he wasn’t actually acquainted with the King, he remembered seeing it during the ceremony in which he was presented with his armor and became a Shieldman; it was only a brief glimpse of the King, of course, but he would remember the look of that armor anywhere.
“Parten! What is this?” King Mynag asked in a shout, before turning back around to the line and splitting a Werewolf in half with his battleaxe, ending its efforts to sneak up on the important personage. The attack had been so fast that Gerold knew it had been enhanced by the King’s elemental energy, which just went to show how powerful he was.
“What—” the First-shield questioned as he sliced an arc through a half-dozen beetles coming up to his knees, a visible trail of burning embers in the wake of his slice— “are you talking about—huh?! That’s the hunk of metal one of our patrollers found yesterday. It took three of us to drag it in here, but we figured we could melt it down.” Parten turned back to the battle, almost negligently slamming his shield into a Wereboar that was charging at him, knocking the powerful Werebeast back at least 15 feet, breaking its neck in the process. “What is it doing—Gerold! You honorless excuse for a Shieldman – how did you get out of your cell?”
“You were going to melt down my Deep Diver suit?” Gerold asked, horrified. He was suddenly glad that an attack had threatened Stonebrink Hall, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have ever seen his suit again.
“Answer my question—”
“Parten, leave off it! The bigger question is what that hunk of metal can do; I see that it can apparently move, so maybe it can fight?”
“Your Highness, you don’t understand—”
The King was apparently losing his temper, because he roared as he jumped into the air, landing in the middle of a veritable army of Giga-ants. His impact produced a fiery shockwave of light that burned through at least 40 of the bugs, as well as a few Giga-beetles, frying them to a crisp. “Enough! Can’t you see we’re going to need all the help we can get?”
First-shield Parten was quiet for a moment, before he said something to the King that Gerold couldn’t hear. King Mynag just shook his head, before grunting. “I know, but if I conserve too much energy, then we’ll be overrun before we know it. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to push it too far.”
Both of them, as well as the pair of Shieldmen around the two that Gerold intuitively knew were the King’s bodyguards, seemed to ignore him in his Deep Diver suit. With the King giving him at least a modicum of permission to fight, Gerold immediately strove for the civilian side of the line, filled with Dwarves who were doing their best to engage and kill the incoming monsters, but who weren’t nearly as effective as the Shieldmen. Even though there were nearly 3 times as many of them as compared to the number of Shieldmen in the room, they only had about a third of the line to defend – and they were defending it badly.
It wasn’t their fault, though – they were just outmatched.
“Make way! I’m coming to help!” he yelled as loudly as he could, his Deep Diver running forward with large stomps of its metal feet, heralding his arrival. Whether they heard his shout or the clank of his feet against the stone, the civilians turned at the sound and – with wide eyes and a few shouts of surprise – moved out of his way. They parted around his suit in a wave, letting just enough room open up for him to pass without hitting anyone, and then sealed up the pocket they had created as soon as he was through. In seconds, he was at the front of the line – and none too soon, it seemed.
The Crafter's Dominion: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 5) Page 26