The Scarlet Cavern

by Michael Dalton

  The Scarlet Cavern

  The Makalang Book 1: An Alien Sci-Fi Harem Adventure

  Michael Dalton

  Copyright © 2020 Michael Dalton

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Afterword

  Cover illustration by Kenshjn Park

  www.deviantart.com/kenshjnpark

  Cover design by Hell Yes Design Studio

  https://www.hellyes.design

  Beta reading by R.B. O’Brien and the RoUS.

  Follow Michael on Amazon and at michaeldaltonbooks.com and Twitter at @MikeDaltonBooks.

  Ex-Marine and lonely single dad Will Hawthorne just wants to clear his head with a weekend in the woods with his live-action roleplaying group. But a careless misstep sends him tumbling through a cave into an alien world. There he finds a dying civilization of bizarre human-animal hybrids, filled with effete males and frustrated females who are soon pursuing him for their own ends. For Will has stumbled into this world’s most powerful legend – a legend of the one who will come to reverse its decline – the legend of the Makalang.

  The Scarlet Cavern is the first book in The Makalang series and contains explicit adult scenes and violence.

  Chapter 1

  Icame out of a gray fog of unconsciousness to find myself lying on my face.

  Under me was a layer of loose, sandy dirt. My head throbbed. Groaning in pain, I reached around to the back of my skull where the throbbing was the worst. I felt a sizable lump, but my hands came back clean. There was no blood. That was something.

  I looked up, realizing that I was on the floor of a cave. The area around me was dimly lit from an opening overhead. Gradually, the fog began to fade, and I remembered where I was and what had happened.

  I sat up slowly and spent a few moments assessing my injuries. My back ached, and it seemed like I had struck my shoulder and left arm on the rocks. A lot of me hurt, but nothing appeared to be broken.

  I stared upward out of the darkness. I’d fallen at least ten feet, bouncing off the sides of the cave on the way down. There was an old, gnarled tree root near the opening that was likely what I’d hit my head on.

  A light rain fell through the hole, and the smooth walls of the cave were getting wet as they caught the drops. Climbing out would be difficult in the best of circumstances, which these definitely were not.

  I checked my phone. Nothing. There was no signal down here.

  As my head cleared, I looked around for a way out. There was a boulder I could get my feet up onto, but from there, I could not reach any handholds. Every time I tried to climb out, I found myself sliding back down the slick rock. I tried jumping toward the tree root, but even after I took my backpack off, it stayed at least a foot out of reach.

  I had a decent amount of climbing experience, but I had no gear and my skills were fairly rusty. My ex-wife Jacqueline hated that hobby of mine, and I hadn’t done anything serious in at least ten years. But rusty or not, no amount of skill can compensate for a complete lack of purchase.

  I had no rope, but maybe there was some other way to haul myself out. I dug through my backpack for possibilities. I decided that the rainfly on my tent might be long enough to reach the opening. I tied a rock to one end and tossed it up. All it did was bounce back down.

  After several tries, the problem was clearly getting it to hook securely onto something. What could I use? After a moment or two, I had an idea.

  I spent a few minutes tying my tent stakes together into a makeshift grapple. That worked – the first throw easily caught on the tree root. But when I put some weight on it, the aluminum stakes just bent and came free.

  Two hours earlier, I’d dropped my kids off with Jacqueline.

  Now I was at the bottom of a hole with no way out, and no clue what to do.

  That seemed about right. It fit pretty well with the rest of my life at the moment.

  ◆◆◆

  “Bye, Daddy!”

  I hugged my six-year-old daughter Cassie and stood up as she turned and ran to the doorway, where her mother had already scooped up her brother Hunter. Jacqueline and I exchanged the same look we did every time I dropped my kids off, me pretending to be civil and her pretending I had any reason to be.

  “I’ll see you next week, guys.”

  Jacqueline gave me a polite smile and a quick wave.

  “Bye, Will.”

  Behind her, her husband Richard looked my direction, but I ignored him as I always did. We rarely ever spoke, not that there was much to say after he broke up our marriage. It still gnawed at me that their affair had gone on as long as it had.

  Part of that was on me. I had been willfully blind, trusting her excuses and explanations long after I should have gotten suspicious.

  I walked back to my car as they went inside. Jacqueline and I shared custody, and I’d had the kids for the past four days. She had them this weekend, so I was going out of town on a campout. Because when your life sucks, one way of dealing with it is coming up with a new one.

  I was heading off for three days up in the mountains with my live-action roleplaying group, hiking around the Cleveland National Forest. The rest of the group was already on their way to our campsite, but I told them I’d be late because I had to drop my kids off with Jacqueline after work.

  The idea was part role-playing, part camping and drinking in the woods. Since we would be on public land, we’d planned it as a low-key affair so as not to alarm people – just the seven of us, dressing up and rolling dice as we hiked up and down the mountain.

  The trip from Jacqueline’s house up into the Laguna Mountains above San Diego took about an hour and a half of driving through mesquite and scrub oak before the pine forest began around 4,000 feet. I finally turned off the state highway into the parking lot just after 5:00.

  I bought a Forest Service pass at the gate and found a parking place near the trailhead. There were a few people there, but I tried to ignore their looks as I got into costume.

  Our current campaign was a fantasy-steampunk pastiche, and I’d envisioned my character as a sort of samurai-artificer. Part of my outfit was a replica katana I bought as a divorce present for myself. It was a well-made Chinese knock-off rather than anything authentically Japanese, so it wasn’t period-correct by any means. The blade was simple carbon steel instead of traditional tamahagane, but it looked nice and honed to a very sharp edge. Since our LARPing was about role-playing rather than mock combat, it didn’t matter that I was carrying an arguably deadly weapon on my back.

  The rest of my costume consisted of a suit of armor I made in my garage. In-game, it w
as supposed to be “green dragon scale plate armor,” but it ended up looking more like a green stormtrooper suit, minus the helmet and gauntlets – only less neat and symmetrical because I’d made it by hand, piece by piece over six months, out of colored carbon fiber and epoxy resin. Although the end result was fairly rough – my attempts to create a scale-like surface hadn’t really worked – I was proud of the effort I’d put into it. It worked well enough as armor without being too heavy for hiking, and the green carbon fiber looked reptilian enough for my purposes.

  Once I was suited up, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and started out. Our campsite was about three miles up the trail, where the rest of the group was presumably waiting for me, patiently or not. I hadn’t been to this particular spot before, but I had a trail map and our game-master assured me it was well-marked and not hard to find.

  The trail was level for the first half-mile before I reached the spur leading up to our campsite. From there, it was a fairly steep series of switchbacks going further up the mountain. I leaned forward and just focused on the climb.

  ◆◆◆

  Once it dawned on me that my marriage was over and I could start dating women who weren’t determined to make me the most miserable person on Earth, I made a concerted effort to get myself back into dating form. And like lots of people dealing with a major emotional upheaval, I went completely overboard.

  I revamped my diet, started working out and running, and when I felt up to it, joined a local crossfit gym. I went on the long-distance hikes Jacqueline had never liked me doing. I started rock-climbing again. I even got back into the martial arts I enjoyed as a teen, when I earned a black belt in Shaolin karate and weapons my last year of high school.

  I definitely got myself back into physical shape. After a year, though, I was still putting off the emotional work. Getting my six-pack back was no help when I was still an emotional mess.

  I had dreams of dating and screwing all sorts of hot girls in their twenties, but I got nowhere trying to make it happen. This was largely because I could never figure out the right approach to online dating, and I was using the few women who connected with me as unpaid therapists. In a year, I managed four dates, none of them repeats, and no sex.

  So when a friend of mine mentioned his LARP group – I’d been into role-playing games as a kid too – the prospect of a fantasy world off in the wilderness seemed attractive. I’d been playing with them ever since. Maybe I’d figure out something up in the mountains, maybe not, but it was something to do besides stare at the walls of my apartment.

  ◆◆◆

  I got myself into a steady pace where my head was emptying all my work and love-life crap behind me, and I was feeling a bit overly proud of how fit I was now, when I heard a distant rumble across the valley.

  Shit. Our GM had warned us that the weather forecast predicted a chance of rain that night, but being the bold adventurers we were, we’d decided to tough it out. And as I looked out toward the ocean, there was definitely a squall rolling in. I stopped to dig a poncho out of my backpack and threw it over myself.

  I got another quarter mile up the trail before heavy drops of rain began to fall. It wasn’t a downpour, but the trail and forest around me rapidly grew wet. I slowed my pace to avoid slipping, but I had a good pair of hiking boots, so I kept going.

  A few minutes later, I encountered a split in the trail. I stopped to look at the map, but I was pretty sure where I was, and no branch was apparent. Which way was I supposed to go? Both trails were thin and led off beyond my sight. One angled uphill, the other slightly downhill. I looked for tracks from my friends, but the rain had obscured whatever might have been there.

  After thinking it over and not wanting to get any wetter, I chose the uphill trail, deciding that these were likely two branches of the same trail that came together further ahead.

  The trail took a sharp turn up the hill, and I was soon clambering up a half-buried pile of rocks. I was about to turn around when I got to the top and saw a clear trail leading down the ridge. I paused to enjoy the view inland and noticed some kind of cave about ten feet down the other side. There was an opening in the hillside about four feet across leading down into darkness.

  Caves were fairly rare up here, but not unheard of. This one didn’t look terribly interesting even if I’d had the time to check it out.

  I turned to continue down the trail, but the cave had distracted me enough that I misjudged my next step. What I assumed was solid ground was in fact a loose stone that gave way under my foot. A split-second later, I lost my balance with all the gear on my back, and I fell backwards onto the hillside. I reached out to my sides, trying to gain some purchase, but the muddy ground slipped away under my fingers.

  As I slid faster down the slope, I realized I was heading straight for the cave opening. I shot my arm out toward a dead branch on a tree I was passing and caught hold of it, only to have it snap off in my hand.

  I slipped rapidly down into the cave. Something hit my head, and everything went black.

  Chapter 2

  By the time I concluded that climbing out of the cave was impossible, it was starting to get dark. I’d been yelling for help every few minutes, but no one appeared to rescue me.

  A cardinal rule of wilderness survival is that if you get lost, you need to stay put so people can find you. The further you wander from where you were supposed to be, the more area they have to search.

  I knew that. But I was now wondering if there might be another way out of this cave. If I couldn’t get out the top, maybe there was an exit below. I promised myself I would just go and see.

  That was when I found another problem.

  One of my personal inside jokes – and when you’re a divorced single dad, most of your life is inside jokes no one else gets – was that there was always something I forgot to bring on a campout, no matter how much I planned and thought things out.

  And this time, in worrying about all my LARP gear and getting the kids to Jacqueline’s on time that afternoon, I’d somehow forgotten one of the most basic elements of camping – my fucking flashlight.

  What to do? As it happened, I did have another source of light. My GM had agreed to let me bring a green laser pointer as a stand-in for a magic wand my character owned. And unlike my flashlight, that was safely packed away with a spare lithium-ion battery.

  It wasn’t as good as a real flashlight, but the laser pointer succeeded in lighting up the cave just enough to see where I was going. There was a passage behind me that narrowed down a bit, then curved around to the left into the hillside. That wasn’t a great sign, but after packing all my stuff up again, I went to check things out.

  The cave floor further down was the same loose sand I had landed on. Clearly a lot of things were blowing and washing down here over time. But the passage continued and leveled off, though I had to climb over and around several large boulders.

  The green illumination of the laser gave everything an eerie cast at first, but gradually my eyes got used to it. I hadn’t come very far, but there was still no sign of an exit. This appeared to be some kind of cavity that had opened up in the granite of the mountain. A friend of mine was a geologist, and I knew that, geologically speaking, this range was very old. Maybe the endless shifting and faulting in the area had cracked things open at some point.

  Then I came around a bend and found myself in a larger cavity that sparkled with crystals. Veins of some kind of crystalline material were shot all through the walls of the cave, sending irritating laser reflections all around me. And despite the monochromatic green light from the laser, there was some strange effect that caused the crystals to glow with bright red fluorescence.

  Yet before I could assess what I’d discovered here, my heart sank. I looked ahead and saw a solid wall of rock blocking any further progress.

  Or did I? A wave of disorientation swam through my head. I blinked, and there was a passage continuing on in front of me.

  What had I jus
t seen? I rubbed my eyes, and it was still there. Maybe the apparent wall of rock I thought I’d seen was just a reflection from the dust I kicked up clambering through the cave, confused by the concussion I’d likely given myself falling down here.

  And when I stepped forward to see what was beyond, I let out a laugh of triumph. Up ahead was light. Wherever I was, I’d found a way out.

  I left the crystals behind and climbed quickly forward. The cave began to open up, and the light ahead was brighter than I expected. The clouds must have cleared already, and maybe this cave was catching the sunset.

  The air on this side was colder, no doubt because of the brief storm. Then I caught an odd scent on the breeze – something floral.

  The exit was low, a hole in the wall about five feet high and three across. Still wondering how bad that concussion might have been, I dropped down to my knees to avoid the top of the hole and crawled out into the sunlight.

  I blinked again. What I saw were not the ponderosa and lodgepole pine trees I’d left behind at the cave entrance an hour ago. They were . . . something else.

  They were trees, I suppose. But the bark was deep green instead of brown, and it glittered in the sunlight like the crystals in the cave behind me. Above me, the branches spread out in a not-unfamiliar pattern, but the leaves were long, blueish-green ovals. Large red flowers studded the branches, and little white insect-things flitted around them. They looked like butterflies, except for having six wings instead of two.

  That was about the moment I realized that the sun was not setting – it was up in the sky above me, higher than when the storm had swept in. I looked at my watch. It was 6:15. It should have been dark by now.

  Was I hallucinating? Was I actually back in the cave in a coma? Feeling a bit silly, I pinched myself, but of course nothing happened.

  The ground below me was moist and spongy, not the dusty, sandy soil of the Laguna Mountains. I looked back at the sky. Not only was the sun in the wrong place, something about it looked wrong. It looked smaller somehow. It was hard to tell for sure, not being able to look directly at it, but the afterimages it left on my retinas were at best two-thirds the normal diameter of the sun. It was about the same brightness, but smaller.