by M. Coulray
“You’re with them?” The man’s voice dripped with scorn. “They’re animals, barely sentient!” Every word he spoke was accented by a thrust from his blade. I was being pressed hard and forced into retreat.
I almost tripped over a dead body. I was lucky not to get stabbed, and sooner or later my luck would run out. The enhanced Agility from my armour was working overtime to keep my vitals out of the line of fire, but I didn’t have the mana to use Sense Vulnerability even if it did proc. Worse, I couldn’t land a hit on the son of a bitch. There was only one way this fight would end, but luckily, I wasn’t alone.
Unmat stepped forward and interposed his muscular form between the man and myself. When he tried to go around the one-armed lizardman, Votess lashed out with her tail and tried to trip him up. The rogue nimbly jumped over the sweep, but from midair, he was in no position to dodge the kick that Unmat sent him. He flew across the room and crumpled against the wall.
Immediately Unmat was on top of him. The lizardman stood on the rogue’s pelvis and seized his right arm. Without even a grunt of effort, he pulled until the man’s arm dislocated, and then the flesh tore free. Unmat threw the man’s severed arm aside. The rogue screamed in agony.
Mika and I were both staring in shock and horror. Unmat looked back at us, his expression and tail telling us nothing. “Do you wish to interrogate this thing? The Scaleless speak loudly and at great length when injured.”
Mika dashed over and used her magic to ease the wound. “You can’t do that! It’s, it’s torture!”
Even Votess looked troubled. “We do not torment our enemies,” she said.
Unmat snorted in derision. “Then the people have grown weak, not strong as I thought. Ask him what you will,” he said to me. Unmat started rifling through the wreckage of the room.
“What are you doing here?”
“We’re here to exterminate the lizards for good,” said the man, wincing in pain. Mika’s spell had healed him but there was still the residual effects of having a traumatic amputation.
“Why, though? What did they do to you?”
The man stared at me. “Are you an idiot? There’s no other orichalcum mines anywhere within two thousand miles! If the lizards won’t sell it to us, we’ll take it for ourselves! If we can get into their sanctum and bind their goddess, they’ll have no choice but to bend the knee to the Kingdom!”
I had a feeling this “kingdom” was long dead, but there was no reason for the flow of information to go both ways. “So you’re doing this to enslave them? To steal their resources?”
The man spat. “Do animals have the right to own anything? To hell with them. You, woman! You’re a priestess of Minolt, aren’t you? You know these things are corrupted!”
“They’ve never done anything to me,” said Mika quietly. “They’ve treated me well, and never shown me cruelty.”
The man’s eyes were beginning to roll wildly. “None of it matters! They have no loyalty, not even to each other! We only need one more crystal! Then we’ll bind her and kill her and you’ll—”
The man’s words were cut short by Votess, who thrust her spear in his throat. He gurgled and stared at us with hatred and terror as he died. I found myself unable to feel much of anything but contempt for him. The people he thought of as animals were my friends now, and I would never let anything happen to them.
“A traitor let them in,” said Unmat when I translated the dead rogue’s words. “It would have to be a priest or priestess. No-one else could lower the wards and allow them to translocate into the temple.”
“We killed an undead priestess upstairs. She wore this medallion,” I said. I fished the shattered shards of the medallion from my inventory.
Unmat’s eyes widened and his tailed slapped the floor. He reached for the medallion and when I handed it to him, he crushed it into wreckage in his hand. “Krozi. She was the traitor. It was her who was assigned to us today, or the day we were attacked. She could have opened the temple to invasion. You slew her?”
“Well, it was a group effort,” I said. “But yeah, she ain’t coming back.”
“Hmm.” Unmat said nothing more.
We continued searching the room until Unmat found what he was looking for. He held up a strangely curved blade with an awkward hilt. The weapon was made of a metal that I didn’t recognize, with a silvery-green dullness to it. He tossed my boneforged knife to the floor and moved through some forms with the blade.
I picked dup my discarded knife, slightly offended at its harsh treatment. I stared at the sword until my AR HUD gave me some information.
[Orichalcum Temple Sword]
ATK: 9 (base 9)
DEF: 0 (base 0)
Durability: 100/100
Quality: Superior
Special: Orichalcum blades never dull and cannot be damaged by normal means. This blade was forged for Lizardman hands and will have an Accuracy penalty if wielded by any other race.
Well, that explained why the humans wanted these orichalcum mines so badly. The stuff was amazing!
Votess watched Unmat leave the room, a troubled expression on her face. We all filed out and followed Unmat down the dormitory hall.
28
Unmat brought us to a halt outside a wide wooden door. The smell of death seemed to intensify here. He moved his hands through a series of motions, and I realized her was using the hunter’s cant, or something similar. Votess nodded and whispered to Mika and I.
“Inside there are at least three Scaleless. They smell of fear and confusion. We will take advantage.”
Unmat and Votess both kicked the door at once, and it flew from its lock and collapsed. Inside, four humans stared at us. One was on the floor, and the other three were menacing him. The three standing immediately turned to face us, and one began weaving his hands through the air.
“Magic!” I yelled, shouldering past Votess to close with the unarmored mage. When I got near enough, I realized that he wasn’t unarmored at all. My blade slid over his clothing. Barrier spell. Shit. Now I knew how my enemies felt.
“Idiot! We stand with you, against the reptiles!” The spell caster cursed me and shook his head. He seemed to think I was one of their forces. He tried to push me aside to get a clear line at my friends, and I let him, the better to get a clear shot at his flank.
The other two humans were engaged with Votess and Unmat, while Mika was pulling yellow energy to her hands in preparation for any healing that might be needed. The mage was already lining up his shot, whatever it was, and I pushed down my panic. I hadn’t been able to shield anyone with Mana Barrier, and whatever this guy was casting was going to rip right through them.
I lined up my blade with the mage’s neck, and put every ounce of power I had into my thrust. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to pierce his barrier effectively. My knife barely scratched him, but as he was unwounded, Excruciator’s painful magic took effect. He shrieked and dropped his hands, clawing at his neck and falling to his knees.
I love this knife. I kicked the mage in the face and he fell forward, but I hadn’t done much damage, if any. While he thrashed in agony, I took a moment to look for the fourth human, the one on the floor.
He knelt, still terrified, and I could see that he held something in a tight fist. I decided that as long as he wasn’t fighting against us, I’d leave him alone. Unmat and Votess were taking the other two warriors on, and any minor wounds that pierced their barrier spells, Mika healed rapidly. I watched her, impressed. Then she widened her eyes and pointed a glowing hand straight at me.
“Dispel!”
A yellow beam shot over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw it hit the mage, who had risen from the floor and was reaching for me with a fist full of lightning. The moment Mika’s spell hit him, the electricity disappeared, and a flickering blue glow writhed over his body. Mika’s weird habit of shouting out her spell names did me a favour; I hoped that flicker I’d seen was his shield dropping.
I thrust my knife forward,
letting my body do what felt right. The blade met with no resistance and slipped between the mage’s ribs. I could feel his heartbeat through the cold steel, and when I twisted the knife up and to the side, the warmth of his blood rushed over my hand. We held our gazes locked as I let him slip to the floor, and I didn’t look away until the light was entirely gone from his eyes.
Mika had saved my ass. I tilted my head at her in thanks, but she was already wading in to assist Unmat. Her holy blade carved through his opponent’s arm and continued into his belly. The man folded over without a sound, and Unmat crushed his throat with a taloned foot.
The final warrior began backing away. “We can talk! Just tell us what you want! If we can get in the sepulchre, we can—”
His words cut off when Unmat’s sword slashed through his neck. His head and body fell separately, hitting the ground and splashing his blood all over Unmat’s legs. The temple guardian didn’t seem to notice. He flicked his tail in satisfaction and turned to the last human, the one kneeling on the floor.
“Wait! I’m not with them!” His words fell on deaf ears, and Unmat’s advance didn’t slow. It took both Votess and I to stop him.
Unmat growled at us. “Should we kill this one?”
“I don’t know if he’s any part of this,” I said. “He says he’s not with them.”
“Then how is he here?”
I turned to the kneeling man, and put the question to him.
“My name is Gerlit, and I’m just a locksmith! I was hired to open a door, but I had no idea that this would be, that it would be… I didn’t know!” The man, Gerlit, suddenly turned his head and vomited. “This is awful!”
“What’s in your hand?” I pointed to Gerlit’s closed fist.
“This?” he opened his hand. In his palm, a red crystal glittered. “They said this was part of the key. I was examining it when suddenly it was like time stopped, forever! I couldn’t move, but my thoughts remained my own.” The man retched again.
“That’s two shards,” said Mika. “Three more and we can open the door.”
“Three more?” Gerlit sounded confused. “I haven’t seen the door, yet. There was another, a giant of a man, and he had three of these crystals. He was heading for the guardian chamber when…” Gerlit shuddered, unable to put his experience to words.
“We kill him,” said Unmat, raising his weapon.
“No!” Votess seized him by the arm. “We are only four. With him, we are five. You said yourself, five must open the door. If we kill him and he is the last, how will we open the door?”
I turned to Gerlit. The man was terrified, and his gaze didn’t remain on any one of us for more than a moment. “If we protect you, will you help us open the door?”
The man nodded, his gratefulness almost embarrassing. “Yes, yes! Please, just don’t let them kill me!” He shot a look at Votess.
“All right. If you need to tell the lizard folk anything, Mika can translate for you.” I didn’t want him knowing that Votess could understand him. The man was clearly out of his depth, but there was no sense showing our hand.
“There’s going to be a guardian chamber somewhere,” said Gerlit. “I know that their leader was going there with the crystals he carried, and I was supposed to come open the door, but then everything just… stopped.”
“The guardian chamber is ahead,” said Unmat when Mika translated. “If this giant Scaleless is there, we will kill it.” He shot a look at Gerlit, who quailed under his obviously aggressive gaze.
“This whole thing feels wrong to me,” said Mika. Votess didn’t say anything, but dipped her head a fraction of a degree, just enough to let me know she heard and agreed. Ahead, Unmat led the way. He spent just enough time in various rooms that we passed to confirm that nothing was alive in them. Once or twice we found lizard folk who we might have been able to save with Mika’s magic, but Unmat wouldn’t let us heal them.
“Save your power for the battle to come. These weaklings deserve death.”
I thought about bringing up the fact that he would be dead right now, were it not for Mika. I glanced at Votess, who shook her head. Both of us were out of our element, but at least she was the same species. Her opinion outranked mine.
Between us, Gerlit walked, hunched over and silent. I kept him ahead of me and behind Mika. I wasn’t sure what Mika thought was hinky, but I trusted her enough to keep an eye on the guy.
“Hold. This is the guardian chamber, but there is something wrong.” Unmat pulled Votess roughly into an alcove that sat beside a huge wooden door. The door itself was partly shattered. Wisps of smoke still trailed up from the wreckage, as if it had exploded. I noted that all the fragments of the door were outside the room, so whatever had blown it apart originated inside. Great.
“I can hear nothing inside. We enter as one,” said Unmat. Without waiting for us to reply, he charged through the wreckage of the door. Votess followed him and the rest of us tried to keep up.
Inside the room was a shambles. Dead lizard folk littered the floor, in a circle surrounding a huge humanoid. At least one of this guy’s parents had to be an ogre or something. He was that big, and that ugly. He was also dead.
Behind him was an oculus door, with five large handprints surrounding it. In the centre was a sixth handprint. The seams of the door glowed with faint red light. This, then, was the door that we needed to open to reach the end of our task.
“That’s him!” shouted Gerlit. He rushed ahead, only to be knocked on his butt by a flick of Unmat’s tail.
“Tell that one to stay back.” Unmat knelt beside the dead giant and tore open his clothing, cursing in anger when he couldn’t find what he was looking for.
“Lemme help,” said Mika. She knelt down beside Unmat and meticulously opened the corpse’s pockets and pouches. In the second one she opened, she found three red crystals, the mates to the two we already carried. She held them up and Unmat tried to snatch them from her.
“What the hell?” Mika pulled her hand back, passing the crystals back to Votess, who looked awkwardly at them. “The door needs five to open, so shouldn’t we each have one?”
Unmat growled. “Why should I let three Scaleless and one… degenerate into the most sacred place four temple?” He stared fully at Votess, making it clear what he thought of her.
“Because we fought and bled for the Goddess, as you did, and we will see this through to the end.” Votess was firm in her voice. “Do not be a fool.”
After a moment, Unmat nodded and held out his hand. Votess deposited a single shard into it, and then handed one to Mika and Gerlit as well.
The dead man had one other item of interest. A heavy maul was grasped in his hand, and when I looked at it, I saw that it was enchanted.
[Steel Maul, “Thunder of Blood”]
ATK: 14 (base 9, +5 from enchantment)
DEF: -1 (base -1)
Durability: 102/150
Quality: Normal Enchanted
Special: Minimum STR: 18. For each point below minimum, wielder receives a -3% Accuracy penalty.
Spend up to 25 Vitality to create a shockwave that hits all surrounding targets with (Vitality spent x 3) Lightning damage. Spent Vitality may not be regenerated via any means for one hour. If the spent Vitality would drop the wielder to zero, damage dealt is doubled.
That explained why the dead lizardmen were laid out in a circle. I wonder if the man died from his own attack, or if he bled out after winning the battle.
“This one fought well,” said Unmat. A note of respect tinged his voice. “I would have enjoyed battling it.”
“He would have fucked you up,” I said, hefting the maul. It was far too heavy for me to wield effectively. “This thing probably killed all of them in one hit.”
I offered the maul to everyone present, but they all declined. Mika said she lacked the strength, Unmat snorted in derision at the idea of wielding a Scaleless weapon, and Votess simply held up her spear. I didn’t even offer it to Gerlit, who was staring
at the weapon like it was about to bite him. Shrugging, I tossed the maul into my inventory, where its weight didn’t matter.
At Unmat’s silent nod, we all approached the oculus door. Before we did anything, Unmat spoke to Votess. “You will need to supply the blood to open the door,” he said. “I have only one hand.” He indicated the central depression. “Wound yourself and place your hand there, then we shall press the crystals to the surrounding.”
Votess slashed her palm and immediately pressed it to the central depression. She hissed in pain, and blood pooled into the handprint, defying gravity. The rest of us pressed the crystal we’d palmed against our respective handprints. Mika, Gerlit and I barely reached the fingers of the prints, and I hoped it would be enough.
Votess reached over and pressed her crystal to the last handprint while maintaining contact with the central reservoir. Immediately blood flowed out from the centre in thin but solid rivulets. It was warm when it reached my hand, and I turned to look at her.
Votess’ face was drawn, and the pain of whatever she was experiencing had her tail twitching and shaking. She showed no sign of backing down, and I swelled with pride at how strong she was. Mika was staring at her as well. Unmat wasn’t looking at anything but his hand.
It was Gerlit who had my attention. For a locksmith, he didn’t seem too worried about the strangeness of this magical mechanism. Instead, he seemed almost impatient. The main was nodding his head in tiny, mechanical motions, spaced out in one second intervals. What was he counting down?
The grinding of stone on stone alerted me that something was happening. Unmat withdrew his hand and the rest of us followed suit. The door was opening, slowly but sure. Each of the oculus panels was sliding and rotating out from the centre.
Votess collapsed on the floor, and I was at her side instantly. Mika’s glowing hands touched Votess, but there was no change. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, nothing like what I’d seen from her before.