I focused on them but couldn’t get a lock just yet—we were too far out. The minions waded into the water, pushing the limits of the proximity barrier, and I couldn’t hear them, but their mouths opened in clear snarls. Almost close enough, the details looked fuzzy, but every second the boat brought me that much closer within range.
A stray strand of hair worked itself loose of my braid, whipping into my eyes, and I clawed it back out again. Blinking, I focused and found in that second of inattention, I’d closed the remaining distance. A feral grin tightened my face and I got cautiously up to my knees, getting a better vantage point. Two sets of hands locked around both of my arms, and I knew by feel who they belonged to: Bannen on my right, Chi on my left. They would make sure I didn’t fall out of the boat. I trusted them to hold onto me as my attention fully went to the minions ahead.
These weren’t the shielded minions I’d seen over the past few weeks, but true minions, ones completely warped by Toh’sellor. It had been months since I’d had to think along these lines, but I still knew what to look for. The core of Toh’sellor always embedded itself in the minions, the first sign of change from their true nature into something other—the twisted version of Toh’sellor’s reality. Once I found that first core, I looked for a second, then a third, finding the common elements between them. It seemed in the long months since we’d last fought, Toh’sellor’s modus operandi hadn’t changed any. It still built its minions in the same way. Good, that made things significantly easier on my end.
I spoke the spell I’d utilized dozens of times before, listing out to my magic what I wanted to disappear. I could feel my magic hum happily, rising to the task, as eager as a bloodhound to please. Destruction suited its nature very well, and having a job like this made it happy. No one else likely saw it the way I did, as my magic shot out, impacting every minion on the shoreline within reach of me at the same instant. To them, all they saw was two dozen wolves, predator cats, and some strange moss-like creature disappear into dust.
“Brace yourselves!” our pilot called out in warning, seconds before the boat’s prow rammed into the sand.
I might have toppled straight into the water if not for the hands firmly gripping my arms. As it was, I barely rocked forward before Bannen and Chi pulled me back. Only when the boat stopped moving did they let go of me, the motor falling to a hum as it idled. Agents leaped out on either side, the salty water spraying upwards as their boots impacted with the sea, then they raced onto shore, falling into defensive formations.
Following after as closely as I could, I kept my eyes further up along the beach, as I knew there were other minions out there—ones I hadn’t been able to destroy in that first sweep. Ah good, they were coming for me. That made life easier.
A hand landed on my shoulder and Maksohm said against my ear, “I need you to take out as many minions as you can. I don’t want Team Two up here without protection or reinforcements. If they get swarmed, it’ll come to a bad end.”
I nodded, agreeing, but I’d already intended to sweep the beach clear before heading in. I didn’t want my colleagues out here alone with these things. They could defeat them, I knew they could, but they’d also have their hands full with trying to contain Toh’sellor from up top and dealing with any new minions it might create. We had no real idea how long it would take for me to get in there from the main entrance. Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? Either way, too much time for Toh’sellor to work with, and the danger to the team was not inconsiderable. I’d give them the best odds I could to get through this alive.
The minions this time looked like a cross between dogs and fish, a strange combination that instinctively put my hackles up. They were fundamentally wrong in appearance and just the sight made my stomach turn. I quickly spoke the spell to put them out of their misery, as I couldn’t imagine such an existence.
I heard Maksohm bark out orders behind me, could hear Team Two moving off toward the knoll. My own team formed up around me, as a living barrier between any threat I hadn’t spotted yet. “Bannen, did I miss anything?”
“Coming in from behind and to your right,” he calmly reported.
Turning, I saw what he meant: another pack of wolf-moss minions. What a truly strange look for a minion. I’d never seen the like of it before and hoped not to again. Only six this time, so I dared hope that after I defeated this group, the beach would be clear.
Because of my preoccupation with the other group, these were closer, and I couldn’t get the spell out quickly enough. Chi shot three before I could get the full spell launched, and Bannen nearly had to go ahead and deal with one himself, it got that close. My heart thudded in my chest, adrenaline racing. I remembered this sensation of going into battle all too well.
So did my husband-familiar, going off that wicked smile on his face. Bannen always loved a good fight. At least one of us was happy?
Maksohm turned both directions, looking, then grunted in satisfaction. “Looks like we’re clear. Team Two, stay in contact. Teams One and Three, let’s move in. Remember, Team Three, stay behind us so Rena can deal with whatever traps are in the cave.”
“Yes, sir!” several voices assured him in unison.
I kept my eyes peeled as we jogged along the beach, heading southwest toward the cave entrance. I wish we’d been able to land directly in front of it, but the area over here had more rocks than sand, and getting the boats any closer would have punctured the hulls. Or so I had been informed. Part of the reason why I wished we’d gotten closer was to give our enemy less time to prepare for our arrival, of course, but the other reason was sand.
White sandy beaches sounded romantic, or at least in novels and poetry they did. But the reality was quite different when having to run across it. Sand shifted very easily under the slightest bit of pressure, and trying to keep up a good pace was challenging to say the least. I felt like I’d turn an ankle at any second if I moved faster than a slow jog. People ran across beaches for exercise? Really? Were they trying to get injured?
Maybe it was just me, though, because no one else seemed to struggle with it. Granted, I was not the most athletic person in the world, as for most of my life just breathing was nearly beyond me. Since acquiring Bannen, though, I’d been more or less forced to exercise more regularly, as my husband liked to be active. I thought I’d improved, at least well enough to keep up with my very physically fit colleagues.
Clearly I still had some distance to go with that, if this moment illustrated anything.
Sand abruptly gave way to rocky ground, to my relief, giving us a firmer footing. We slowed to a fast walk, everyone panning their surroundings for threats. I stayed near the front of the group, Bannen on one side, Chi on the other, carefully looking for anything that smacked of ambushes or traps.
“Rena?” Maksohm inquired behind me.
“I don’t see anything,” I answered, still looking. The snow on the ground gave clear evidence of several footprints overlapping, that even to my eyes signified activity. People came and went from this area regularly. We rounded a sloped patch of earth and the cave entrance abruptly came into view. I’d expected something tall enough for people to walk through, of course—the reports had told us that much. But it was significantly taller than that. Even Vee could walk through comfortably without anything threatening to make its acquaintance with her head.
Actually, it gave off a vibe of being a little manmade to me, as if a cave entrance naturally existed here and then someone had widened it. The edges were too clean, too precise, and the floor looked smooth. I didn’t even see a pebble out of place. It made sense, of course. If people were hauling large quantities of equipment and supplies back and forth through here, they’d naturally make it easier by leveling the floor. Would that make it easier for me to spot any traps? I hoped so.
Turning my head a little, I reported to Maksohm, “Still no signs of traps.”
“I find that conversely worrying,” Chi muttered to no one in part
icular.
“You’re not the only one,” Bannen grunted. He shifted, hands tightening around his swords, and I knew that fidget. He did not like this situation one bit.
Then again, we were basically walking into a fatal funnel with unknown numbers of enemies in front of us, and an out-of-control Toh’sellor waiting like a jackpot prize at the end.
Sarding deities, now I was distinctly unhappy about going in there. Were we absolutely sure I couldn’t just burrow through from the top? Well, no, if I did that, it exposed everyone to chaos energy and increased the odds of them being infected to a hundred percent. As much as I loathed to admit it, going in this way remained the safer option. Probably not saner, but safer.
Alright. Into the breach.
Rena seemed confident we didn’t have any traps to worry about, so we entered at a steady pace. No one rushed or bulled ahead. Rena needed time to fully sweep the area with her eyes, after all, and it was hard to do that at a run. Besides, if she did see something, she’d stop immediately, and no one wanted to risk bowling her over. So a quick walk it was, thirteen agents and eight familiars forming up in a defensive square pattern to either side of her and at her back.
I wished we could put her in the middle, but in this case, we needed her eyes to see every detail of the area ahead. I stayed planted at her right, Chi at her left, and we clung to her sides like shadows. Emily I kept a sharp eye on as well. She had experience against Toh’sellor’s shards but she’d never been on an operation of this scale before, and I could tell she was a little nervous. Or perhaps jumpy with battle nerves and adrenaline. At any rate, it was always good to keep the healers in the center of a defensive formation because they were the very last people you wanted injured.
Both teams cleared the tunnel entrance without issue. The dampness of the cave mixed into the air, speaking of mold, wet rocks, and something else that stank. I do mean reeked. I couldn’t pinpoint the smell but my nose kept twitching under the force of it. I nearly asked if anyone else identified the smell, but the mood felt too oppressive for pointless chatter. Everyone radiated tension, literally ready to leap on anything remotely dangerous. Several mage lights went up, mostly the healers carrying them, and they cast eerie shadows along the uneven walls. It didn’t help the atmosphere whatsoever. In fact, it got downright creepy after that.
I heard them before I saw them. High-pitched chittering, squawks, snarls that sounded like gasps of air, mixed in with the light thump of many small feet all rushing our direction.
“Vee,” Chi turned to his wife plaintively, like a small child asking for confirmation that the monster under the bed really wasn’t real. “Monkeys?”
I almost felt sorry for him in that moment. Bad enough we were in a fatal funnel, bad enough we were in a cave that spanned deities-knew-how-deep with who-knew-what faced us, but we got murderous monkeys on top of it all. This was really shaping up to be a bad day.
Vee put an arm around his shoulders, giving him a brief hug. “Sorry, love. But if it makes things better, you can shoot these monkeys.”
He brightened for a moment. “That does sound good.”
Then the first wave of the monkeys came around the bend and into sight and we all visibly flinched. “That’s…a lot of monkeys. What do you call that many monkeys?”
“Troop,” Maksohm answered succinctly. “Or tribe. Sometimes people use barrel.”
“Horde,” Chi snarled, whipping out five arrows at once. “I’m going with horde of monkeys because hordes are evil and monkeys are the epitome of evil.”
No one contradicted Chi. It had to be one of his worst nightmares, facing this many monkeys underground, and we had to defeat all of them just to get through. There was no other way around it, really. He might need therapy after this. Actually, we might all need therapy after this. I was just going to assume that, for sanity’s sake.
For now though, the general consensus seemed to be that shooting things made Chi feel better, so we’d let him shoot all the monkeys he wished.
He took out the first five of the wave with deadly accuracy, and it was hard to hear over the general din the monkeys made, but I could see the results readily enough. They looked odd, like zombie monkeys—their gaits off, their tails sometimes missing, or sometimes triple like a mythical fox. Toh’sellor’s influence, no doubt. They didn’t have that half-changed look we’d seen in Njorage; these looked fully malformed to me. Rena didn’t say one way or another, though.
With the tunnel being only so wide, we were limited to three of us fighting at once, leaving the agents behind us unable to do much at all. Some of the mages threw fire spells over our heads, Vee for one, but that was limited to a handful of people as well, leaving the rest to watch and fume. I could hear their frustration but didn’t dare give ground or encourage them to work past me. We flat didn’t have the room for it.
Maksohm realized this and pulled Chi back, pushing two other mages forward so they could sweep ahead with several fire spells. Chi wasn’t exactly happy, but the few monkeys that dodged around the fire balls and got through our defenses quickly found an arrow lodged in their bodies.
Rena spoke quickly, unleashing her spell as fast as her mouth could go, but, still, that took a minute. The rest of us fought them off as well if they got to us. The monkeys didn’t give much opposition, light and small as they were, in terms of brute force. But sards were they quick. It sometimes took two swings before I could connect properly, instead of a glancing blow, and that was patently ridiculous, as nothing should be that quick.
Five minutes into this, I could feel my body warming up, sweat dewing between my shoulder blades. I was not out of shape. I just possibly had been slacking a little on my speed drills the past few months, shenanigans aside. “Chi.”
“Yo.”
“Need to do more speed drills,” I huffed out.
“Tell me about it,” he snarled, reaching for another handful of arrows and unleashing them like lightning.
The last syllable fell from Rena’s lips and every monkey within line of sight dispersed into dust particles instantly. Usually I celebrated that, but it meant monkey ash went everywhere. Including places that I reserved for food and my wife.
“It’s in my mouth,” Vee complained, spitting, or at least I think that’s what she said. A little hard to understand with her tongue hanging out of her mouth.
We all gagged, spitting and taking a second to regroup. Maksohm, bless him, called upon a sea wind to come in from behind us and flush the air and cave floor clean.
“Do that sooner,” Vee demanded plaintively.
Rena gave us all an apologetic wince. “Sorry. There’s just such poor air circulation in here.”
“How about I start a wind spell when you start yours,” Emily offered, trying to be stoic about things, but still looking a little green around the gills. “That way we can avoid a repeat.”
“Do it,” three voices ordered her at once.
“Let’s switch,” Vee offered. “Every other time, avoid tiring you out. I’ll take next wave.”
“Maybe there won’t be a next wave?” Rena waved an illustrative hand toward the cave. “That was a lot of monkeys. Njorage didn’t report all that many were stolen, right? Just two hundred or so, and we already killed some up in Njorage—”
That same terrible sound of chittering, snarls, and many small bodies rushing toward us echoed from beyond the next bend.
“You’re an optimist,” Chi accused her as if she were really a murderer.
“Apparently so.” Rena winced again, giving him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Chi.”
“There’s no point dwelling on the past, what’s done is done, insert other random platitudes here.” He gave her a look as he bent to retrieve arrows before we got swarmed again. “How about you make it up to me by killing all of them?”
“That I can do.”
Even bracing myself, the second wave was just as bad as the first, or maybe worse because
of the gagging taste lingering on my tongue. I tried very hard not to focus on that as I waded into the fray once more. A sea wind blew up behind us as Emily worked her magic, Rena already speaking in that lightning quick way of hers. It still felt like a small eternity before that wave went down in the same puff of ash.
This time, the wind kept it from invading our personal space, although it still came closer to my face than I cared for. The demands of fighting something that small and quick lingered in my arms and shoulders. I could fight all day, given the right circumstances, but that meant pacing myself to some degree. I was loath to do it, because it meant leaving Rena’s immediate side, but I couldn’t exhaust myself this early on either. I tagged out with Blanks, falling to Rena’s back, letting him move up. He, on the other hand, looked happy to have a chance to flatten a few dozen minions on the next go-round.
I bent to help Chi retrieve some of his arrows, we all did, but we moved at a quick walk at the same time. We needed to cover as much ground in between the fighting as possible, otherwise this nightmare would never end. No one said it, but I think we all cautiously hoped that we’d cleared the monkeys out, at least. I hadn’t exactly gotten a headcount on the bloodthirsty little suckers but that had been at least a hundred. Hadn’t the report of the stolen monkeys offered about three hundred as an estimate? We’d fought a hundred and fifty or so in Njorage, so shouldn’t that account for all of them?
A blood-curdling roar echoed down the tunnel and we all froze abruptly in our tracks. “Is that…? That can’t be a bear, can it?”
“Of course they have a bear,” Maksohm sighed. I think he resigned himself to this whole mission being a complete disaster at that point.
“Maksohm.”
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