“Cornalic, did you steal—” Wicum tried to ask again, but the half-orc interrupted.
“Look, Leo, I just want to apologize to you. I understand how hard it is in a new city, with no friends—”
“I have plenty of friends—”
“To watch your back, and go on adventures with you. So I would like to swear on the Light.” The green-skinned man kissed his fingers and raised his arms to the sky while he glanced upward. “That I shall be your man. Your friend. Nay, your brother in this harsh and cruel world. Leo, you’ve never had a friend like me, and I can guarantee you that you’ll be astounded by my—”
“I’m so fucking sick of this shit.” My broadsword was in my hand an instant later, and I stepped toward the half-orc.
“Whoa, Whoa, whoa!” The four of them all shouted.
“Leo, oh my. I am so sorry to have angered you this much. Please, please hear me out,” Cornalic said as he took a step back.
“Give me my gold, asshole.”
“Listen, Leo. I know you are angry—” the half-orc started, but Mirea interrupted him.
“Put your damn sword down, Leo. This isn’t how we handle things,” she growled, and I saw her take a few steps to flank me on the left.
I didn’t fucking care though. I wanted my gold back, and I wanted nothing more to do with this half-orc.
“If you use that sword on me, something terrible will happen!” the green-skinned man half shouted-half shrieked, and I paused my advance.
“What will happen?”
He had sounded really upset, and I wondered if he had some sort of crazy death magic enchantment that would go off after I attacked him.
“Well, I’m a bleeder, so I’m probably going to die if you attack me. Just saying, that would be tragic.”
The other three party members suddenly burst into laughter, and I looked around at them in confusion. Was this a joke that I didn’t get? Their laughter seemed to increase in volume, and even Cornalic was smiling.
Then I was smiling for some reason.
“Leo, put away your sword,” Wicum said. “Cornalic, give Leo back his money, and let’s explore this dungeon.”
“I don’t think I can trust this asshole. Is he even useful? I think he is just a crook,” I said. This whole situation was ridiculous, and I didn’t want to spend any more time with this asshole.
“Leo, you are going to need me in the party. I have a skill set that is beyond amazing. I really should be a key member of every party, and get a double share of the treasure, but alas, I love this group so much that I am willing to settle for an equal share.”
“What is your ‘skill’ that you bring to the party? Besides picking pockets,” I asked. My sword was still in my hand, but I knew I wasn’t going to use it. As long as he gave me my money back, I’d let him go.
“I am fantastic at opening any lock.” He snapped his fingers and made a bow. “I just undid Mirea’s bra, and she didn’t even notice it.”
“By the Shadow, you are an idiot,” the woman sighed, and then she made a small gasping noise. The four of us turned to look at her, and she bit her upper lip with confusion. “I… uhhh. Actually need a moment alone to fix some… garment issues,” the woman said as she kind of wiggled her armored shoulders. “I’m going to step in here a few feet,” she said as she moved to the interior part of the mausoleum. “Cornalic! Don’t ever do that again!” she shouted after she’d stepped out of our eyesight.
“How did you do that?” Bylem asked with awe.
“Amazing half-orc magic!” The man bowed low again and then turned to face me. “So you see, Leo. You need me, and I need you. We are like bread and cheese, wine and cheese, apples and cheese, nuts and cheese, crackers and—”
“You really like cheese, don’t you?” Bylem snorted.
“Absolutely! So you see, Leo, I shall use another metaphor: the mighty dung beetle needs the cow poop to roll around. With it, he fertilizes the land, and helps with the circle of life. Let me be your cow poop, you shall be my mighty dung beetle, and together we shall make the world a better place!”
“You spent all of his money, didn’t you?” Wicum asked.
“Yep. Every last coin I’m afraid. Wait, wait, wait!” he cried out as I stepped toward him. “I shall give you twice more than what I have accidently taken.”
“Accidently taken? You stole from me on purpose,” I growled.
“Well, yes and no. See, if I had known I’d eventually end up in a party with you, I would have never stolen from you in the first place, since I don’t steal from party members. So this was more of a case of me not being able to tell the future. So hate me if you will for that sin, but alas, we all suffer from it equally.” The man shook his head at me with another sad expression on his face.
“So it would have been fine to steal from me if I wasn’t going to be in your—”
“Leo, Leo, Leo,” the man sighed and shook his head. “It is never okay to steal from someone.”
“But you just—”
“Fine!” Mirea said as she stepped from outside of the mausoleum entrance. “This is settled. Cornalic, you owe Leo two hundred gold. We’ll enforce payment back to him during this exploration. If we don’t find the gems, or coins, or whatever wealth, he’ll get whatever first item you would have taken, and then gets his own pick. Agreed?”
“That sounds perfectly reasonable, and I’d also like to extend my sincerest apologies to you, my dearest friend,” Cornalic said as he turned from Mirea to me.
“Oh, go fu—”
“That’s enough. It is over. As soon as we enter the Iron Crypt, we all need to have each other’s backs. Leo, do you commit to doing that for Cornalic and us?” Wicum asked with a dark growl.
“Yes,” I sighed.
“Cornalic?” the warrior asked.
“Oh, of course!” the half-orc bowed to me again.
“Fine. Let’s get going. I’m point. Leo and Cornalic in the rear.”
The party window flashed on my screen, and I saw everyone’s name along with a small portrait of them. Cornalic’s was set up with a giant half-orc smile that took up most of his face, and I almost groaned out loud when I saw it. I couldn’t believe I was in a party with this guy, and I doubted that he’d do anything other than saving his own skin if it came down to the wire. The Astafar Unlimited game world had plenty of impressive players, and I had often been in a group with people I didn’t particularly care for, but they were all professionals, or at least, trying to become professional gamers, and I knew that they would perform their role. I didn’t trust Cornalic as far as I could throw him, and I figured the tall, muscular half-orc probably outweighed me by forty pounds.
So I couldn’t throw him very far.
Wicum held an emberbrand in his left hand and carried a long sword in his right. It was one of those hand-and-a-half bastard type blades, which could be used with two hands if needed. Mirea carried a heavy looking metal shield in her left hand, and a one handed broadsword that looked similar in proportions to my own blade in her right. Bylem had the palm of his left hand opened, and a globe of purplish light hung a few inches above the fur of his hand. It was significantly brighter than the emberbrand that Wicum carried, but I guessed that the warrior in the front wanted to have an extra source of light. Cornalic didn’t carry a light source or have any weapon out, so I pulled out one of my short swords with my left hand and used Ember to make it glow.
“That’s a neat trick,” Cornalic said to me as we had all passed into the decorative mausoleum. Every square inch of marble inside was polished to a mirror-like shine, and the light from our magic made the inside glow like the interior of a tanning bed.
“I’m just using Ember on my weapon,” I said as I stepped around a set of four stone coffins. They had massive lids on top of them, and I guessed it was to keep thieves from looting the bodies.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that before. You have amazing skill. I’m so glad we are the bestest of friends now.”
“I’m not your damn friend. We are just working together on this exploration. Once I get my gold back, I don’t plan on ever partying with you again.”
“Ahhh. That breaks my big half-orc heart, Leo. Please be gentle with me, I love quickly and get my emotions shattered often. I feel as if we will be best friends till the end of our days, and it pains me to think that you might not feel the same way.”
“Just stop talking to me,” I growled at him. Mirea and Wicum had reached the top of a broad set of stairs, and they began to move into the depths cautiously.
“Fair enough. I’ll let you cool down a bit. I can understand why you are mad. You have pride, as you should, and it is tough to be embarrassed.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” I kind of lied. I actually did feel like an idiot for letting this guy con me twice. “You’re just an asshole.”
“I have never heard that insult before, but I must say that I like it. You are ingenious, and it makes me think that we shall have a friendship that the greatest of bards will sing about long after our grandchildren have passed into the realm of magic.” The tone of Cornalic’s voice made me think he wasn’t at all worried about the dangers that were ahead.
I opened my mouth to reply to the half-orc, but then I closed my teeth together with a snap and swallowed my words. This guy was obviously feeding off of my resistance. I just needed to stop engaging him, do my job, and then get my share of the loot when it came time. Talking to him was making me angrier, and I’m sure he was just trying to get me to snap at him again.
I had thought that the stairs would wind down in a spiral shape, but they actually widened and continued downward for what felt like three hundred feet. They finally ended at an extended platform of gray marble. The walkway was a good fifty feet across, and stairs on each side led down twenty feet to another level of coffins and maze-like crypts. There were a few sporadic emberbrands at each turn of the halls below, and I could clearly see the grid pattern of the narrow hallways.
“This place is huge,” I commented to Bylem.
“Indeed. It is normally a safe place to visit also, if a bit creepy, but now that the tide has changed, and the Iron Crypt is opened, the city has deemed the area dangerous to citizens.”
“Do monsters get out of here and go into the city?” I asked. We had passed a set of guards at the gates of the cemetery, but they had seemed bored, and just waved us through without much hassle.
“Undead don’t really like the sunlight. Some might get out at night, but we are still a five-minute walk from the branching hallways of the dungeon, and there is a rope ladder leading down to that foyer. The only way something could really get out of there is if it was powerful, and followed a group of adventurers,” the fenia explained as we walked.
“So we need to make sure we aren’t running out of here and leading bad things into the city. Got it,” I said.
“Leo, my friend—”
“I’m not your friend,” I interrupted Cornalic’s words as he stepped next to me.
“We shall have no problems with you in our party,” he continued without pause. “And—”
“You don’t know me. You’ve never seen me in a party. You don’t know what you are talking about. Just don’t speak to me anymore, okay?” I said to the half-orc con-artist.
“Ahhhh. It wounds my heart to hear you say that, but if my silence makes you happy, I shall comply.” The half-orc finished speaking with a flourish of his right hand and another low bow.
Bylem gave me a short laugh and then shrugged his shoulders once Cornalic finished his bow, and then the cat-man gestured for us to catch up to Wicum and Mirea.
The five of us continued on the raised platform of the lower level of the crypt, and then came to another long set of descending stairs. We continued down the steps for a few minutes, and then reached another level of the crypt. This part looked ancient, and the marble surfaces looked caked with dirt.
“We’ve descended into part of the ancient city that Arnicoal was built upon,” Wicum whispered over his shoulder to us.
“Was it around before the Time of Heliotrope?” I asked.
“Aye, but it is possible that this place was built upon the ruins of another city, and that of another. Some of these places descend deep into the underdark, and their depths may contain unknown horrors.”
“And lots of treasure!” Cornalic said.
“I’ve seen some of those horrors before,” I whispered with a shiver as I remembered the overseer.
“Oh?” Mirea raised a well-shaped eyebrow as she looked back at me.
“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it over a beer sometime,” I chuckled.
“Ehhh. If you pull your weight through this, and we get out alive, I might let you buy me a beer,” the woman snickered.
“Shhh!” Wicum let out a hiss, and the rest of the party stopped moving.
“I hear it,” Bylem whispered.
“Dearest friends, I heard it about half a minute ago, but it is just the twist of the wind through the tunnels up ahead,” Cornalic said as he patted his mouth to sooth his yawn. “If I hear anything important, I’ll let you all know.”
“Alright,” Wicum said with a nod, and then he continued alongside Mirea. The placement of emberbrands was more sporadic on this lower level, and I was thankful for the three sources of light our party carried. The darkness here felt more oppressive than it had in the underdark beneath Cutno, and I guessed that it was the proximity to all the long dead corpses that were making me uneasy.
Then I remembered that this was just a game, and I was at the start of a dungeon dive with my first real party. Granted, these were all NPCs, but I was really looking forward to proving my worth to them and getting a good chunk of loot. Even though I disliked Cornalic, and wished that he wasn’t here, the situation was now in my favor. I was getting either 200 gold or two choices of treasure, I was confident that I’d be able to swing my requests with the loot division so that I acquired a piece of art or another item that I could probably use to get Baron Yinnia’s attention. Even if the baron didn’t want to trade right away, maybe I’d be able to open a dialogue with him and figure out what he was looking to acquire. Then I’d focus on finding something else for him during another dungeon exploration session.
“This is the spot,” Wicum whispered back a half second before a small mausoleum-like building came into our emberbrand light. It was maybe twenty feet high, thirty feet long, and the same across. It would have fit in well on the surface of the graveyard above us, but down here it just seemed out of place.
It also didn’t help that the surfaces of the building were covered with sculptures of screaming skeletons.
“There is a rope ladder leading down,” the armored man said as he pushed open the door of the building.
I stepped inside after the two humans and fenia. There was no crypt shelving, or coffins inside of this place, just more skeletons embossed on the walls and a ladder hanging from the ceiling. The ladder was made of nice looking rope on the sides and wood rungs, and it disappeared into a pitch- black hole in the center of the mausoleum. It looked as if part of the flooring had turned into a small sinkhole, and I could hear the faint sound of howling wind down below. I guessed it was the same noise that had alarmed my party members a half minute before, and I wondered how sharp the half-orc’s senses were. The green-skinned man did have pointed ears like an elf, and they were rather big on his head.
“Keep your lights away from the hole. We don’t want anything to know we are coming. Cornalic, can you check down below?” Mirea asked in a hushed whisper.
“Certainly my dear lady, and might I say, that I am deeply honored to be given this impor—”
“Just look down the damn hole and let us know if it is safe to climb down! You have the sharpest eyes in here,” she hissed at him.
The half-orc walked over to the hole and then crouched near the edge. He then leaned over the side of the tile and stuck his head down into the blackness of t
he hole. A few seconds later the man pulled his head up and leaned away from the hole.
“There is a tiny problem,” he said with a sigh.
“What is it?” Bylem asked as the rest of the party tensed.
“I just realized that I have forgotten to pay the innkeeper for my lodging tonight. She might have it in her mind to go up into my room and rifle through my belongings in search of payment. If she does that, she might see the unlocked chest that I have placed on the small table in my room. It is there to attract thieves, pickpockets, and the other such riff-raff that might feel they are owed other people’s belongings.”
“You’ve got to be kidd—” I began to say, but the green-skinned man continued.
“If she opens that chest, things will be quite unpleasant for her. I will most definitely have to spend the night in another inn, or with one of you tonight.”
“Cornalic, what in the Shadow are you talking about? Is it safe down below?” Mirea’s question dripped with venom.
“Oh yes, as far as I can see down there. However, it is very unsafe in my inn at the moment, and I’m afraid the situation will be bothering me for the rest of our journey.”
“Too bad, you aren’t leaving,” Wicum growled at the half-orc. Then the warrior grabbed the rope ladder and began to climb down.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of leaving you four. As far as I’m concerned, we are—”
Lion's Quest: Dual Wield: A LitRPG Saga Page 16