by Eric Ugland
He snapped in half.
GG! You’ve killed a Greater Alpine Centipede (lvl 8 Greater Insect).
You’ve earned 100 xp! What a mighty hero you are.
Unfortunately, killing one seemed to release some sort of pheromone or what-have-you into the air, because what was a singular surprise centipede soon became a horde of the hundred-legged assholes, all rushing toward me with pinchers clacking and screaming a shrill shriek that made me want to crawl down a hole just to get away from it.
Luckily the centipedes did make a minor error: they’d chosen to fuck with me on a day when I was feeling particularly ornery. I was just looking forward to killing anything. Which, in retrospect is enormously fucked up, but I blame the nature of Vuldranni for that. Killing was such a major aspect of life there. I suppose that’s just a truth whenever you’re somewhere in the middle of the food chain.
The first centipede to charge got a boot to the head, which I used as my plant foot, and kicked the second like I was going for the game-winning field goal. I would’ve gotten the three points. That fucker sailed high and straight.
By the time the third through eighth centipedes got to me, and number three was right about to bite me, I had my axe out.
I cut once to the left, once to the right. Outside of shearing off about two hundred legs, it didn’t seem to do much. The axe just didn’t have the bite to get through their chitinous armor. So I threw it, and grabbed a tree.
Not a huge tree, just something about four inches around, and maybe twenty feet long.
I used it like I was pounding in posts. Vertical hits, up and down. The centipedes were basic swarm attackers, unable to use much in the way of tactics. So I turned myself into a power-hammer, squishing arthropods in 4/4 time. Unable to help myself, I started to sing Stayin’ Alive under my breath. Just to keep my rhythm, you know.
We must have stumbled into a nest, because those things kept streaming out in massive numbers. They swarmed around me, going after the others in the party. The kobolds, perhaps as is their nature, took one look at the centipedes, and ran. One did throw his shovel before running, but he also ran. I didn’t blame them. They were workers for this party, not fighters.
“Stand and die, prinkies!” I shouted.
It was an order they seemed just as happy to follow as any other, gleefully getting in the way of the centipedes and accepting the fatal blows with showers of glitter. Interestingly, that seemed to bother the centipedes nearly as much as me killing them. The first few that bit into the prinkies got glitter all over their carapace, and were really confused. And, from a guess, blinded by all the glitter. The other centipedes started to avoid the prinkies, which then just sent the prinkies into a frenzy as they tried to complete their order, chasing down the centipedes and forcing their furry selves into the mandibles of the giant bugs. In another time, when I didn’t have multiple mandibles lodged in my thighs, I probably would have found it hilarious.
An arrow flew right by face and slammed into the eye of a centipede I’d lost track of, splashing its brain and eye juice all over my face. Another arrow zoomed by. Again and again, arrows drove the centipedes back.
Then hell took over, and flames came up everywhere. I jumped back, the heat overwhelming me. My skin felt like it was about to blacken and blister. I fell to the ground and started rolling, on instinct.
After two rolls, I stood up and got a warhammer out of my bag, ready to fight some more.
There really wasn’t much need, though.
Tarryn stood in front of me, one arm outstretched to the centipedes, the other reaching to the sky. Flames poured out of his outstretched arm, and when he brought his skyward arm down, the metaphorical arcane hammer came with it. A ball of purple energy slammed into the middle of the inferno with a heavy whump, knocking everyone off their feet.
I popped back up, looking around.
There was a single centipede still up, moving toward the prone form of Baltu.
I whipped my warhammer at it, and I maybe relished the whistle of the air as the warhammer zipped along, before it pulped the creature’s head.
“Interesting morning,” I said.
I walked over to the edge of the burning woods. Or, at least, what had been burning woods. The purple energy bomb had done a thorough job of putting out the fire, so now it was mostly smoldering. I used my infinite root beer flask to squelch anything that looked close to reigniting.
Past the blackened trees and whatnot I found a hole. Initially I thought it was another result of Tarryn’s energy bomb. But upon closer inspection, I noticed two things. One, we’d clearly stumbled on a nest of giant centipedes. Two, there was something at the bottom of the hole that looked suspiciously like a carved floor.
“Tarryn,” I called back, not taking my eyes off the carvings.
“Don’t suppose it can wait a minute while I throw up?” he asked.
“You overused your juice again?”
“Maybe.”
“Wretch, then come.”
“Yes, your grace,” he said, but I heard a smile in his voice.
There were still a few centipedes in the midst of their death throes, so I grabbed a spear from my knapsack and did a bit of stabbing while I climbed down into the hole.
“Baltu!” I shouted out of the hole. “Can we eat these things?”
“Can, yes,” Baltu replied. “Want to? Not so sure.”
“Oh well.”
Tarryn appeared at the top of the hole and looked down.
“What am I looking for, my lord?”
“This stuff,” I said. “Something is carved into the rock here.”
“Carvings?”
I started throwing corpses up and out of the pit, and Tarryn did his best avoiding the gross stuff. The blood and guts from the arthropods were pooling up and goo-ifying over the stuff I was trying to look at. As soon as the biggest corpses were out, I got on my knees and tried to scrape the carvings clear. Which, you know, went about as well as trying to get jam off of a toddler’s hands while he was playing with jam. It was disgusting, in so many new and fantastic ways I’d never dreamed of. And this was just my day-to-day life now.
“Might I suggest backing up, my lord,” Tarryn called out from above.
“You have a way to clean this up?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The manner of speaking was incineration. He just poured fire out of his hands, burning the shit out of everything in the pit until the rocks in the dirt around the hole were a bright glowing orange. Interestingly, the carved bits that made up the floor weren’t glowing.
“Interesting,” Baltu said, coming to stand next to me. He was leaning on a walking stick, and the wisps of his white fur blew gently in the hot air coming off the hole.
“It is,” Tarryn replied. “What material is so resistant to heat?”
“Some metals maybe?” I asked.
“It’s possible. But I believe we see native iron ore in there, and that’s close to melting. That spell is too much for most forges to handle, so I’m not sure what exactly that material might be.”
“Looks like sandstone,” Baltu said.
“Can’t be,” Tarryn replied. “There is no way that’s sandstone.
“Not saying it is. Just looks like it.”
It was a lighter tan color that seemed out of place in the valley. None of the rock that I’d seen around looked like it.
“Any chance you can cool it down?” I asked Tarryn.
“Of course, but do you really think—“
“You out of mana?”
“No, but—“
“Then let’s not waste more time standing around here with our dicks in our hands.”
“I wasn’t aware that was part of the plan,” Amber said. I’m not admitting I blushed, but, you know.
“I just want to find out what’s there. What it means.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Ragnar asked. “Who knows what it is?”
“I’m not sure
the wisdom of it, but I also don’t like having unknown things in our backyard. Or is this our front yard? I don’t want something mysterious in the valley. That’s just asking for the thing to be some horrible curse that’ll strike at the least convenient time.”
“When’s the convenient time for a curse?” Amber asked.
“April 25.”
“What?”
“It’s the perfect date. Not too hot, not too cold.”
“The what?”
“Never mind. Cool that hole off, I’m going in.”
Tarryn rolled his eyes with the practiced ease of a Tik Tok queen, but conjured up a cool breeze that cycled through the hole in the ground. The glowing rocks cracked as they cooled, and I jumped inside.
It was still an unsettling level of warm, but nothing like what it had been. I knelt down and touched the newly cleansed stone.
ALERT! You have discovered a MYSTERY of the holding. Uncover the mystery or suffer the consequences .
“Well fuck,” I said. Why didn’t it spell out the consequences? That was just a dick move. But it was certainly clear what it wanted me to do…
“Cursed?” Ragnar called down.
“You see the notification?”
“Yeah, I always check my notifications. Hint, hint.”
“Not the time.”
“Never the time with you.”
“Then you know we need to figure this out.”
Ragnar sighed, and shook his head before walking away from the hole.
I noticed Amber watching him go. Tarryn just stared at the stone.
“Catch me,” Tarryn said. Without wait for a response, he jumped.
I did catch him, but I seriously considered just letting him drop to the ground. It was weird how light and wiry the man was. His voluminous robes did a good job of hiding his body.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Magic takes a toll,” he said, his eyes locked on the carvings.
“Should I get the workers back to, uh, work?” Baltu asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Get Ragnar to watch over. Amber you stick by here and make sure we aren’t ambushed by anything and, uh, shit. Where’s Maja?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Turns out Maja has a thing with bugs. With all creepy-crawlies, really. She hated them intensely. So when the centipedes emerged from their den, she’d taken off sprinting. Amber eventually found her huddled in a bush about a mile and a half back down the road.
Baltu got the kobolds back to work, while I herded the remaining prinkies back into their horde. We had a ton of the little furry helpers. Probably a literal ton. My mana pool was pretty decent, at least according to Tarryn, and I was summoning every single little fucker I could. That meant there was a veritable army of them at the ready. All of whom were digging, with varying degrees of success. It meant we were going fast, but there were definitely moments where we got a bit off course. I went back to work as well, leaving Amber and Tarryn in the pit for the moment, while I helped push the group through a particularly rocky bit of terrain. But as soon as we were back to the soft earth, the prinkies led the charge, and I hopped back down into the hole.
“What’ve you figured out?” I asked.
Tarryn just shook his head.
Amber, who sat above us on the ledge of the hole, offered: “There’s not really any other life around here. And those centipedes aren’t exactly endemic to the area.”
“Further confirmation it’s something weird as fuck,” I said.
“I just so love it when you clarify what I’m struggling to say.”
I winked at her, and she actually smiled a bit, then looked away. Blushing.
Interesting.
I put my hand on the carved stone, and I used one of my abilities, Detect Metals and Minerals.
“It’s hollow on the other side of this,” I said.
Tarryn looked over at me, surprised.
“Just a little clever application of an ability,” I said. “And I can also tell you that this is a just the tip of something big.”
“How big? Tarryn asked.
“I can sense out to five hundred feet, and it goes past that in every dimension. Except, you know, up. Where we are.”
He whistled, low and long. “That is big.”
“Yeah, but what the hell is it?”
“I’ve been keeping from casting too much at it, just in case there’s something on the stone. Magic barrier or something.”
“Seems smart.”
“But I can’t make heads nor tails of this carving or anything.”
“Means it’s not something from the Mountain Kings, eh?”
“No, not likely.”
“Is there, I mean, can we hire some academic to come look at it? I mean, how are these things handled?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes.”
“You’d backfill this with dirt and rock and forget you saw it. Ruins are ruins for a reason.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a while. And I talk to myself a lot.”
“You wanted to know what people normally do with this stuff. That’s what people do.”
“Why?”
“Because something happened to whatever built this place, and it clearly wasn’t good because then either they’d be here or we’d know about them. But we don’t. We thought this was virgin territory, right—“
“Sure, but don’t you want to know what happened to them so it doesn’t happen to us?”
“Okay, that makes enough sense that maybe you are onto something.”
“So what do we do?” Amber asked from up on the edge of the pit.
I pulled a hammer out of the bag.
“Bust in,” I said.
Chapter Forty
Easier said than done.
I beat the shit out of that stone, and nothing.
Not a chip. Though the hammer withstood the punishment fine, so perhaps that didn’t exactly demonstrate much. It was as hard as steel apparently.
“Either of you have a diamond?” I asked.
Amber shook her head. Tarryn just glared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Tarryn said.
“I thought a diamond might scratch it.”
“I know why you asked, but I don’t know why you bothered asking.”
“I don’t know what Mancers keep on them. I’m sure it’s a lot of weird shit.”
“I’m more bothered you didn’t bother looking in that bottomless bag of yours.”
“Oh. Right.”
Tarryn was almost as big a prick as Nikolai when he thought of something I hadn’t.
I took the bag off my hip, and set it on the ground in front of me. Which was really just a stalling technique while I thought of the various things I’d stored inside.
The first thing that popped in my head was the Eternal Xiphos of Sharpness. It said it would cut anything, though there would be some damage to the blade. I wasn’t even sure the blade would withstand more than a single cut, and I didn’t think a single cut would give us an idea of what was inside.
But what was the point of having magic items if not to use them?
So I pulled out the sword.
“Might want to stand back,” I said.
Tarryn shrugged, but he moved to the edge of the wall.
I took a second to think about the cut I was about to make, and I decided the best idea would be to try and cut a circle. Ideally big enough for me, but I’d also settle for something big enough to get a good look inside.
With a bit of a flourish, and an audible scoff from Tarryn, I swung at the stone in a wide arc. The blade bit into the stone, and I spun around continuing the cut in a circle all around me.
There was a brief moment as I acted like the coyote before the stone fell into the hole, with me on top of it.
Chapter Forty-One
A tremendous amount of wind blew around me as I fell. Everywhere I looked, I saw colorful particles floating about in the
air. Something magical was happening. My stone disc hit the ground and broke into a thousand tiny pieces. Almost to dust, which was not at all what I was expecting considering how hard the stone had been just seconds before. Hitting the ground also had a rather unpleasant effect on me — my legs dislocated from either hip, and my lower leg bones punched right through my knees to say hello to the world.
I collapsed in overwhelming pain, and, you know, not having legs that worked. Which meant that even if I wasn’t in a tremendous amount of agony, I’d have fallen over. But as soon as it happened, my regeneration kicked in, things got pulled back into place, and my flesh knit together. Which was both disgusting and fantastically painful.
“You okay down there?” Tarryn yelled into the hole.
Far above, I could see his head silhouetted against the bright sky above.
“Alive,” I shouted back.
“You missed the light show,” he said.
“What kind of lights?”
“Colorful. Shot up into the sky, maybe five hundred feet or so. Really pretty, but I’m even more sure now that we should have buried this and forgotten it.”
“I’m sure it’s fine!” I lied. The damage was already done — it wasn’t like complaining about what we should have done was going to reduce the pickle we were in.
Slowly, I got to my feet and checked the function of my legs. Good as new.
I looked around. I was in a shaft, not quite vertical, but pretty damn close. There were carvings on two of the walls, kind of like pictograms. They were at an odd angle to look at from the floor. Speaking of the floor, it was made of large bricks of stone. And there were two things that looked like they might have held torches or lanterns at one point. Lastly, there was a door. Going down.
“Oh,” I said to no one in particular. “That way is up.”
I wasn’t in a mine shaft or a hole. Rather, it was a hallway, or a tunnel, just turned ninety degrees.
“Uh, Tarryn?” I called up.
No response.
A moment later, a head appeared in the hole above.
“Trying to find rope,” Tarryn said.