Yeah, I sucked. Thank God my ruse actually worked, though.
“They’re here! The rotters just ran deeper in!” Rotters, eh? Everyone’s a critic.
Sticking to the darkness, I watched as dozens of people started to fill up our old campsite. They didn’t immediately chase after me, though. Four of them began to slowly work my direction, but they weren’t trying to be sneaky and only one was really watching his surroundings. The other three carefully checked every square inch of tile before moving forward. It seemed these four were the minesweepers. Good.
I took the opportunity to examine the milling group in the back of the room. Since they were bandits, I’d imagined a bunch of unwashed rejects from a post-apocalyptic movie, but in reality, they seemed pretty well off. Their clothes were well cared for, most had leather or light bronze armor, and they had weapons, a hell of a lot of weapons. I took this to mean that the bandit business was booming.
As I scanned the faces, I caught a glimpse of Scarface, now with a prominent bandage around his neck. To say he looked pissed was an understatement. He moved stiffly and underneath the bluster were definite signs of pain. My heart just bled for him. Really, couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
A little more hunting found Pretty Boy, standing with a small group of leader types. At their center was a tall, slender man with blond hair and an outfit that looked like it belonged in a formal ballroom. He also had the gall to be munching on an honest-to-goodness apple. An apple! It took every bit of willpower I had not to reach out with a bit of TK and snatch the first real food I had seen in weeks, but I managed. Food was good, but so was staying alive.
When the minesweepers got close, I ghosted further back into the shadows. I couldn’t get seen at this point, but I had to keep watching. Up until now, the minesweepers had been marking any tile they suspected to be a trap and moving around them, but to get into the hallway there was no way to avoid stepping on at least one pressure plate. Closer… closer… there! The group stopped at the last line of tiles and began to carefully pry them up.
Yes! I mentally shouted.
I watched with a nasty grin on my face as they quickly and efficiently disassembled the mechanisms, before I faded back further.
Once past the first bend, it grew dark, pitch black. I didn’t have a light, but, then again, I didn’t need one when I could cheat. One of the more interesting things I realized about telekinesis was how much feedback I got from my invisible hands. On top of that, when I wasn’t actively trying to manipulate something, I could control about fifteen different hands, just feeling around. Sprinting through the dungeon would still be a bad idea, but I moved at a brisk pace using my TK feelers to scout my path.
My lightest TK touch felt like a breeze.
Just ahead was a side path closed off by a cave-in, a deadfall that I had deliberately triggered to block off the path. We couldn’t have our visitors straying off the path, now could we? I scrambled up the rock pile and through the narrow opening at the top before closing it up behind me. After I was hidden I waited, my TK hands squeezed through cracks to give me a mental picture of the tunnel on the other side.
Soon enough, I felt a body moving through the hall. That was my cue to reach as far as I could in the opposite direction and use a TK hand to gently toss a handful of pebbles to the floor. I had to help these assholes keep going the right direction, after all.
A moment later, light started filtering through a peep hole at the top of my dirt wall. I watched in silence as the minesweepers moved past my position, armed with portable magic lights or torches. One woman turned briefly in my direction to give the cave-in a once over, but I knew there wasn’t much to see, just floor-to-ceiling rubble. As she dismissed the side passage and followed the others, she stumbled before catching herself and moving on with the tiniest of wobbles.
As soon as the minesweepers were past, I reached out once again. I had to hunt around a bit, but eventually I found my target and grabbed a thin line coiled against the wall of the tunnel. Bandits were starting to pass by and I had to wait for…
Just.
The.
Right.
Moment.
There. My TK hand darted forward and deftly dropped the loop at the end of the tripwire around a small, shin-high protrusion across the hall. It stayed there for only a moment before the next unlucky man in line caught his foot on the line and went face-first into the stone floor.
Now the trap was activated.
This trap had originally been a trio of weighted bronze blades, designed to bisect whoever activated it, as well as anyone ten feet ahead or behind. I liked the concept, but felt it was not ambitious enough. Some of the other devices in the dungeon used a really neat high test line for one thing or another. It was impossible to tell if it was animal sinew, or plant-based, or some sort of synthetic fiber, but the stuff acted like a flexible piano wire.
So now instead of one set of blades moving, two of them did, acting like scissors and covering more of the hall than one set alone. The heavy bronze blades sliced through flesh and bone like butter, even mashing up or cutting through the bandits’ armor.
I threw up.
There was no helping it. Even though I hadn’t seen the carnage with my eyes, I had just gotten a front-row seat to the sudden and violent dismemberment of nine human beings. It didn’t matter that they were the scum responsible for killing my sister’s clan, these were still humans and now the hallway was a charnel pit of spurting blood, open skulls, and exposed guts and—
I’d caused this.
The scent of death made its way through the rubble and I started dry heaving. Coppery iron mixed with open bowels is a more horrific stench than anything I could possibly describe.
With no reason to stay at my hiding place, I slid down the cave-in and began to shakily hobble up the hall. My unsteady hobble turned to a walk then a jog as I pushed myself along by sheer force of will. This was without a doubt the hardest run of my life, but I had a schedule to keep. Thankfully the lights along this path were intact, because my TK required concentration and right now, all of mine was devoted to putting one foot in front of the other through waves of gut-churning nausea.
My path took me through twists, turns, and three rooms before it doubled back to a crossroads of sorts. Six hallways joined into a single high-ceilinged room with a bubbling acid bath in the center. My hallway and the one leading toward the exit were pitch black, while the rest led off to various other parts of the maze. As I had hoped, the remaining bandits were gathered there, steering clear of the caustic liquid and the tiles that would cause it to spurt out in all directions. Nasty stuff, that acid. I had no clue what it was, but it could eat through just about anything I dropped in.
The group of cutthroats was looking mighty green around the gills. I had only experienced the horror through a wall; most of them had needed to walk through the dismembered bodies of their former comrades. They looked a lot better than I could have possibly imagined, though, which told me a lot about the kind of people I was dealing with. Anyone who could shake off something like that was the dictionary definition of callous. Then the pounding in my ears settled to manageable levels and I started to catch snatches of a really nasty chewing-out. “Rotting pieces of… throw the lot of you into the slave pits… what… misses a tripwire?!”
The speaker was their leader, Fancy Pants, and he was looking at the minesweepers like they were something nasty scraped off the bottom of his very posh shoes. The strange thing was, their expressions didn’t really match the dressing down. Well, one of them was cowering, but another two just seemed bored while the last was grinning like an idiot.
This seemed to be making Fancy Pants absolutely furious. He whipped back and faster than I could follow, delivered four lightning slaps. He wasn’t holding back, either, because the targets rocked back from the force. The cringer kept cringing. Happy Boy just collapsed into a giggling fit while his buddy started crying, but one of the bored ones seemed to snap
and hurled herself at Fancy Pants without warning. It was an uncoordinated attack, but surprise made up for sloppy form and one of her wildly windmilling arms connected with the side of his head.
The room went deathly still. Even the lunatic understood she had just majorly screwed up as her boss slowly straightened his head, looked her square in the eyes, and blurred.
Fancy Pants was suddenly on the other side of his attacker, a bloody knife in his hand. The woman swayed for a moment, then collapsed to the ground with blood gushing from a slashed throat. I blinked, not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, or if FP had really moved that fast. One moment he’d just been standing there, the next Poof! Bootleg tracheotomy. What was really weird, and probably weird that I’d noticed, was how somehow not a single drop of the arterial spray had landed on his immaculate suit.
“Do you wish to join her?” he asked the remaining minesweepers, his cultured voice a deadly calm. When none of them made any move to acknowledge him, the man shrugged, blurred again, and their throats erupted into crimson fountains.
What had happened with the rebellious minesweepers and had gotten them killed was actually pretty simple, and another of my ideas.
I’d banking on any minesweepers being at least somewhat competent, and trying to disarm a few traps, so I’d made sure the ones near the maze entrance were particularly inconveniently placed. There’d been nothing special about the mechanisms of those pressure plates; they were actually dead simple to disable, pun intended, but the parts would have been a little oily.
Maybe the minesweepers had thought the oil was lubrication to keep the things working. It’d actually been the juice of a little purple berry that grew nearby, the one that was a really nasty contact hallucinogen.
I had been hoping that as the juice took effect, they would stumble into another trap, or maybe set off this room’s acid bath, but an execution worked, too. Fancy Pants killing the minesweepers was actually really stupid, a fact that he seemed to realize too late, but had hidden well, putting a menacing look on his face. I’d been watching close, though, and I saw the flicker of his expression.
The bandits were definitely shaken. They had just watched four of their number go absolutely bonkers before getting one hell of a severance package. This was all after walking through a hallway coated in pieces of their buddies. Bandit morale had to be at rock bottom right about now.
It was time to dig that hole even deeper.
The bubbling acid was not bubbling on its own. In fact, it hadn’t begun bubbling until I’d thrown spare bits of metal into the mix. As it ate away at the metal, it released some noxious fumes and a whole lot of very flammable gasses. These gasses had been slowly collecting in the ceiling for quite a while.
My TK wasn’t quite strong enough to force down a pressure plate or even trigger most of the tripwires. If the traps were too sensitive, all sorts of things could set them off early, so they were designed with a bit of slack, not to mention the clunky parts and loose tolerances. But my power was plenty strong enough to levitate a match to the room’s vaulted ceiling. I backed around a corner, covered my ears, and dragged the distant match’s head against the rough stone.
The tunnel filled with light and a deafening roar as the far room became an inferno. It wasn’t really an explosion—there wasn’t enough gas collected for that—but it did its job. I poked my head back around the corner to see a scene of pure chaos. A few bandits were rolling around, trying to put out the flames, but most simply scattered. All discipline in the group had vanished and they ran in every direction. With luck they wouldn’t be paying much attention to where they stepped as they fled, either. As I watched, a flaming bandit stepped on one of the stone tiles that sent bubbling acid spewing in every direction.
Part of me was elated, feeling a deep sense of accomplishment. The other part of me, most of me, was still not okay with actually killing people, even bad people, so I was conflicted, not sure whether to cheer or throw up again.
I still had to admit that my plans had been working even better than I’d imagined, though. The whole trap would have been perfect in its execution if not for a shrouded figure that suddenly sprinted down the hall and ran right into me.
Engineering Ludus, Chapter Seven
We went down in a tangle and clatter. He probably didn’t realize who I was until I planted a fist squarely in his gut. That was the first and only decent hit I got in on him, because the guy was good. Killing for a living on Ludus involves a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, and my only training was waving my hands around in junior karate class back when I was ten years old.
He deflected my next punch, and then I oofed as his open-hand strike knocked the air out of my lungs. My orb-granted endurance helped here, apparently extending to let me function without air, at least for a little while. I rolled over to my hands and knees for a quick breath before something snaked around my neck and pulled tight. I’d just managed to get my hands up in time to keep the son of a bitch from choking me out, but super powers or not, I wasn’t going to last long.
Without my arms keeping me upright, I slammed face-first to the stone floor as the bandit threw his weight against me. The impact stunned me long enough to lose my grip and the choke hold tightened, cutting off my last bit of air. The world began to fade at the edges as I struggled, but in the hand-to-hand department I was completely outclassed.
I still hadn’t lost, though. With my face in the stone, I needed to think outside the box, and fast. Thoughts raced through my head as the seconds marched toward my death. I hunted desperately for any means of escape, reasoning that I couldn’t get to my sword or e-tool with the bandit pinning me, and the angle made it impossible to hit him. Besides, my hands were busy straining against the arm that was trying its best to crush my windpipe. As the world fuzzed, I spotted something lying in the tunnel, something I’d seen before. My oxygen-starved brain took a few seconds to put it all together and a plan clicked into place.
With desperate effort, I sent a burst of TK for the chunk of wood and bronze. Working on instinct, I maneuvered it just so. There would be no way to test it, even if my vision hadn’t just about gone black. I was trusting my gut on this one. With a silent prayer to anything that would listen, I gave my TK hand a tiny squeeze.
There was a cough and a sound like a hammer hitting rotten fruit. Instantly the pressure on my neck lifted and I took my first deep breath after what felt like years. Between my panting breaths I could hear a gurgle from the dead weight above me. After a few more gasps of delicious air, I mustered the strength to push him off and slowly rise.
A copper slug from his own pistol had torn a hole in Pretty Boy’s neck. After seeing the wound, I realized how lucky Gazra-tam had been that her rib had blocked the shot.
Blood was pouring out of his neck in spurts as it pooled around him. I wasn’t sure, but from the odd muscle twitches and lack of an exit wound, I guessed the bullet had lodged in a vertebra. “Being shot hurts, huh?” I hissed. This was the man who came an inch from killing Gazra-tam. I felt exactly zero sympathy as his gurgles quieted and the blood flow slowed.
My emotions were strange. Shouldn’t I feel, well, something the first time I killed someone so close, in a life-or-death struggle? I didn’t feel anything.
Once I was absolutely sure that Pretty Boy was dead, I figured it was time to get back to the business at hand. Before heading back up the tunnel I stopped to pick up the pistol.
The weapon was an odd design, something like a cross between an old flintlock and break-action shotgun, but made of bronze instead of steel. It didn’t take long to find the catch that let me open up the barrel and look inside. The chamber was strange. I had been expecting the device to be magical, and while I didn’t know the first thing about magic, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t look like this.
It didn’t take long to figure out what I was looking at. This was an air pistol! Not all air guns were like little BB rifles given to children, and I remembered reading somewhere that
early American explorers used pneumatic weapons to take down large game. It was odd that Pretty Boy’s pistol ran on air, but maybe there was a good reason to use compressed air over gunpowder on Ludus. It was true that I hadn’t seen any firearms yet, and the pistol I held in my hand was actually fairly mechanically refined.
I wasn’t a gun nut or anything, but like lots of other Americans, I had been shooting a few times. My passing familiarity with a pistol was infinitely better than my nonexistent swordsmanship, so I grabbed a pouch of ammo from Pretty Boy’s belt and slipped a pellet into the chamber. The pistol made a satisfying click as I snapped the action shut. Then weapon in hand, I started back toward the acid chamber.
Since there had just been the better part of forty bandits in the room, I took the approach slowly and carefully. It looked empty of people now, but there were at least a dozen bodies on the floor. I wasn’t going to take any chances, so I triple checked everything I could see, and slipped tendrils of TK into the places I couldn’t. Not all the bodies were dead, some were alive, but thankfully, there were no hidden assassins lurking in the shadows. For a second I felt paranoid, then remembered it was only paranoia if people weren’t actually out to get you.
The next part of the plan would be disturbing and difficult. I had actually argued with Gazra-tam about it, though not too hard. It made sense, after all, in a cold way. Even knowing this part was logical, it still took every bit of my resolve to draw my sword and drive it through the still-moving chest of the closest living body.
It—because I didn’t dare think of the body as anything but an “it”—gave a brief gasp and then went still. I repeated the action on six more unconscious forms. Every time it felt like it was my own heart under the blade. This was immoral, it was disgusting, and it was necessary. Damn me if it wasn’t, but we couldn’t leave enemies where they could sneak up behind us.
Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus Page 6