by Tom Larcombe
When the goblin came in with his first load of coal, Eddie broke some down and tucked it into the stove, then asked Dominic to light it. Once the coal was burning and the doors were closed there was only a tiny trickle of smoke into the room and Eddie was satisfied. Tamshir noticed though, and sniffed.
She came back into the room and with a cast of Stone Shape, sealed all the little gaps that had been letting smoke out into the room.
“Now it'll all go where you want it,” she said.
“I appreciate that you're trying to make your workers more comfortable, but can we get back to clearing the mine?” Charles asked.
~ ~ ~
Chapter Fifteen
Greenshaw stared at the report he'd just received.
What is this? he thought. I thought this guy was going to be a pain, but he's actually filing better reports than Harmon did, even going out of his way to detail problems. That doesn't fit at all with what his record showed.
Deep inside of Greenshaw he felt an irritation that he couldn't explain. Why would his subconscious be irritated by the man it had recommended doing his job close to perfectly.
He skimmed the report again. Cooper had been told to restart the construct testing as soon as possible, but his report mentioned that he had concerns about one of his squad. That the man had been the one with the most time in a construct and it had affected him strangely. He recommended that, at the very least, that man be kept out of the testing for a while so Cooper could observe him and see if the mental instability that seemed to be affecting him was something that would fade with time or if it was something they needed to be concerned about.
Not at all what I was expecting from Cooper. Hell, he even sent this report with a receipt verification request so he can prove it was sent. Covering his ass? That doesn't fit at all with the image I'd built of him from his records. In the past it seemed like he was more of a go for broke type that wouldn't bother with such things.
It's them, the voice deep inside of him said. I know it is, they're interfering somehow, ruining my plans, our plans.
What them is my subconscious talking about? Greenshaw wondered. And why would this be ruining our plans? Wasn't our plan to test this and figure out a way to make it work in the real world?
The voice deep within him took on a soothing tone, one that Greenshaw hadn't heard since the voice first introduced itself.
Don't worry, the them is the squad in the game. They're treating it as a game and not as real testing. So we'll just have to adjust their orders to make sure they do as they're supposed to, that's all. It's only a minor issue with our plans, the plans will continue and we'll make them work. Everything will be alright, everything is alright.
The voice continued to mutter soothing statements in the back of Greenshaw's mind and he soon forgot that he'd wondered about it at all, knowing that everything was alright, and everything would continue to be alright.
~ ~ ~
Eddie let Charles take the lead as they headed back into the mine. The first place Charles took them was to the hole in the floor that had supported some sort of basic elevator, before they'd dropped it into the shaft.
“Well, shoot,” Charles said. “Looks like we'll have to sweep the top floor again first.”
He was staring at several spikes that had been driven into the stone floor and the ropes that dangled off of them.
“I didn't actually expect that,” Charles continued, “but at least it kept them away from our backs when we were clearing this floor the first time.”
“Let's do that again,” Eddie said. “Not drop them, but...”
He reached down and start pulling the rope up. He coiled as he went and dropped the coil on the floor beside the hole when he was done. Charles had already started coiling a second one, and Karl had the third.
“If they try to come up here again, hopefully we'll hear them,” Eddie said.
“Once they finish with the ropes, I can make sure of that,” Stalker said. “I'll just set an audible trap around the hole. If something comes up out of it, they should trip it and we'll hear them. Well, unless we're in the middle of combat, then we might miss it.”
“Sounds good,” Eddie said. “Or at least it sounds better than not trying it.”
Stalker spent a couple of minute with a small hammer, spikes, some cord so thin Eddie could barely see it, and a few tiny bells.
“Those will be loud enough for us to hear?” Eddie asked.
Stalker nodded.
“They're a lot louder then their size would indicate,” he said with a grin. “You'll see, or I suppose hear, if the trap gets set off.”
Once he was done, the two groups set off at a much more rapid pace than they'd moved before. There wasn't any noise they could hear, so no active mining was going on, but that didn't mean there weren't orcs around here someplace.
They covered the entire floor in under half an hour, trotting everywhere and peering into corridors they remembered as dead ends. When they were finished, they hadn't found anything living on the first floor.
“So, maybe they put those up to try to repair the elevator?” Eddie guessed.
“Or to see if they had people still up here when the elevator collapsed, or orcs up here I suppose,” Ephram said.
“Anyhow, it looks like it's time for us to drop down a level,” Charles said.
“Use their own ropes? Tie some knots in them and it should be an easy climb,” Karl suggested.
Charles nodded.
“As long as we test the weight those spikes will hold up before we trust any weight on them. I'll be going down first and I don't fancy a fall. I heard how deep it was when the elevator dropped and I've no desire to fall like that myself.”
“It's a plan,” Eddie said. “But Lucky, I don't think you want to do this. Would you go back to the goblins and guard them?”
The cat chuffed once, then to all appearances it looked like she gave a sigh and started trotting back along the passageways towards the entrance.
When they got back to the ropes, Stalker spent a minute disarming his trap and recovering the materials he'd used to make it. Then Eddie set to work on the ropes. He actually did two of them, one with knots spaced for the larger party members and one spaced for the smaller.
Charles waited for Eddie to finish with both ropes and drop them back into the pit. Then he took the rope that was spaced for taller people and wrapped it around his hand. When he leaned back, away from the pit, the rope groaned a little from the strain, but both it and the spike held the tank's weight.
He dropped it back into the pit, then began to climb down. Charles' party healer, Alyxandria, normally referred to as just Alyx, waited for Charles to call out that he was down, then she followed.
Her balls of light circled around her in the air and followed into the pit as she climbed down.
“Go ahead Jern,” Eddie said. “Certainly wouldn't harm anything to have another tank down there if they were attacked.”
Aside from Jern, Tamshir and Stalker were also on the smaller side and once the dwarf was down, they followed. It only took a few minutes to get all of both parties down and Eddie was glad that Tiana had her lights out as well since the next level down seemed darker somehow.
The two groups started down the corridor they'd entered and it wasn't long before they heard the sounds of mining once again.
~ ~ ~
As they began to clear the second floor of the mine, things seemed mostly similar to the top floor. The only difference was that the overseers and the warriors were occasionally one to two levels higher than the ones on the top floor. The other difference was in the prisoners. They only found one group of goblins and humans, the rest were all orcs chained together and willing to fight when the overseer and warriors in charge of them were attacked.
The non-orcish group they rescued seemed much more subdued than the ones they'd found on the top floor.
Which makes sense, Eddie thought. You put the captives that are most like
ly to rebel the farthest away from your base that you can. Either that or you leave them locked up constantly, but you won't get any work out of them that way, now will you? If the most rebellious try to break for it, you just let them go, or hunt them down and kill them as a lesson to the others. Either way, they're no longer a problem and you can claim you killed them even if they get away and cow the remaining ones more.
Even just thinking of the logical way to manage slaves left a sour taste in Eddie's mouth. He really, really hoped that he could purge all of the orcs out of the mine, and rescue any slaves that they still had here.
Aside from the slight changes of higher levels and different composition of miners, the second level was still fairly easy to clear. Charles' group was mostly higher level than the warriors they were taking on and while Eddie's group was underleveled for the overseers, the six on one odds they had more than made up for the difference in levels.
They did take a few more wounds this time than the last, but with Alyx, Tiana, and Eddie all able to heal, none of the wounds lasted for more than a minute or two before being taken care of.
Soon enough they had the second level cleared. When they got back to the elevator shaft Charles stopped after grabbing the rope.
“We can call it for the day, or go down to the next level. What do you all think?”
It was unanimous to continue down to the next level. While a couple of the fights they'd had were interesting, nothing had been challenging for them. Charles had also noted that since they were fighting in a new area with different mobs the experience was much better than they'd been getting while fighting on the surface of the mountains.
The only abstainer was Karl.
“I'm for that, but not yet. Give me about five or ten minutes. I want to go down that rope and see how many levels there are first, then we can do down to the next one, okay?”
“Sure,” Charles said. “Actually that makes a lot of sense. Go for it.”
“Careful Karl,” Eddie said.
“That's why I wanted ten minutes. I'm doing this in stealth.”
“Can you stealth while climbing a rope?” Eddie asked.
“I'm about to find out,” Karl replied, hopping onto the rope and starting to shimmy down.
As he started moving he shimmered out of existence and all Eddie could see of him was something like heat waves in the area he figured Karl's body was in. Those rapidly slid down and out of his sight.
“I guess that's a yes then,” Eddie said.
The miners they'd recovered were still huddling at the edge of the hole, so Eddie helped them climb up the ropes, telling them in both common and goblin that there was a safe room they could find if they followed the chalk arrows once they got up top. He'd worry about who wanted to be where once they got back up there themselves.
It was less than five minutes later when Karl reappeared. Eddie had just finished helping the last of the miners up the rope.
“Well, that's a letdown,” Karl said.
“What?”
“There's only one more floor, then the hole goes from cut to natural, sort of. It's almost like a circular cave leading down, one with stairs chipped into the walls. That goes down for about thirty feet and leads into a natural cave network. I didn't go any farther because I heard a lot of noise down there. Sounds like lots of critters somewhere close once you get to the bottom.”
Charles, and most of his group, looked intrigued by that.
“Do you think there might be one down here?” Charles asked Ephram.
Ephram nodded.
“It would make sense. The miners would be like the foraging parties we find on the mountainsides, no?”
“It might be,” Charles said.
“Uh, anyone want to clue in the lowbies here?” Eddie asked.
“Oh, sorry. I think there might be an orc settlement down here. Remember how I said that's what the level ratings were really for? Well, if there are a lot of critters nearby, as Karl said, and there are orcs foraging, or in this case mining, on the mountains that normally means there's an orc settlement nearby.”
“So, is that going to be a problem for the next level?” Eddie asked.
“I doubt it, they never react when foraging parties disappear so if this is the same, they probably won't react to the miners disappearing.”
“Probably?” Eddie asked.
“It's the best I can give you. But I'll tell you what, you're welcome to join us when we attack the settlement if you like. It's good experience for us, so it ought to be great for your party,” Charles said.
“Yeah, but will we actually be useful?” Karl asked.
“Eddie's got evaluate, right? Doesn't Dominic have it also? They can use that and you guys can pull off all the lower level types. They normally try to swarm us, so if you can pull off even five or ten, yeah, it'd be useful,” Stalker said. “I'd bet you get a lot more than that though.”
“But that's for after we clear the third floor,” Charles said. “So, how about we do that first?”
“Okay, let's go.”
They climbed down the ropes again, coming out in a tunnel on the third floor down. Eddie glanced at the hole that led even deeper underground and did a little mental math.
“Hey, Tamshir. Want to put a cork in it?” Eddie asked, pointing towards the tunnel down.
“What?” she asked indignantly. “I'm not saying anything.”
“No, no,” Eddie said. “Look where I'm pointing. I think with your Area of Effect, you could block this tunnel going down for like two thirds of a foot with a single casting. It only looks about six feet in diameter. Cast it three times and there'd be a two foot thick stone cork keeping anyone or anything from coming up behind us.”
“Oh, sorry, I misunderstood,” she said.
Then she looked at Charles, who nodded.
“It sounds like a plan to me. Then one casting can probably open that up for us to get through later on, right?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, I can do that, both ways.”
“Go for it,” Charles said.
Everyone else backed away when Tamshir waved for them to do so, and Eddie saw why. Little bits of rock were flying all over the place while she was in the middle of her spell and he now understood why she kept chasing them away when she'd been making the room for the goblins.
After she'd plugged the tunnel down, they waited another twenty minutes for her to regain some mana, at least enough to use some of her useful spells if necessary, then they headed into the third level.
It was more of the same, once again with slightly higher level orcs, but this time there were no humans or goblins, all the actual miners were orcs. The biggest change was when they got to the final corridor, one that went out much farther than the rest. At the end of it, there was a larger group of orcs all guarding a single orc that had its back to them. He seemed to be wielding a tiny hammer and chipping away at the wall.
Is that a rock hammer instead of a pickax? Why would he be using that? Eddie wondered.
The orcs raised an alarm, and the one carrying the rock hammer dropped it and spun.
“Caster in play!” Eddie called out, noticing the fetishes and other decorations that normally denoted a goblin shaman. He figured they were close enough that this was probably an orcish shaman.
“Ephram, take the caster,” Charles called, bracing his shield for the rush of the orcs that were coming at him.
Eddie added his own fire, pulling out an Arcing arrow to try to drop the caster as quickly as possible. Ephram had evidently had the same idea because just as Eddie released an arrow from his bow, a bright flash came from the shaman. A second one came a moment later as Eddie's arrow found its mark. Even with the two arrows striking him, the shaman was still standing, but at least it looked like they'd interrupted whatever spell he'd started to cast.
As the orc warriors slammed into Jern and Charles, trying to get to the more lightly armored party members behind them, Eddie saw the orcish shaman
bark out a command, then he started chanting again. A hint of motion from the corner of his eye showed him that Ephram was firing again, so Eddie held his arrow. He also squeezed his eyes tightly shut, anticipating the flash.
“Arc,” Emphram called out, warning the rest of the party this time. Eddie saw the flash through his closed eyelids and reopened them, when he did, the shaman was still chanting and an orcish warrior partially in front of the shaman was still trembling with little blue arcs of electricity dancing over his body.
The shaman finished chanting and the floor in front of him bulged upwards. Some creature, larger than an orc and equipped with pincers, mandibles, and a carapace surged up out of the solid stone.
Eddie released his own arrow that he'd had drawn and ready. This time, the orc warrior wasn't quick enough to get in front of it and it sank to the fletching in the shaman's body. The shaman danced from the electrical charge racing through him, but once the electricity passed, he moved so he'd be out of the line of sight from the two archers. Eddie heard him chanting again, but was currently focused on the creature he'd summoned.
It had charged the front line, but Jern had dropped his shield to the stone of the floor and blocked it. Even with a successful block the dwarf was driven back a foot just from the sheer weight of the thing. Jern's hammer lashed out and a small chunk of something flew off the creature, not seeming to deter it in the least.
Dominic got off a spell and the tunnel was lit from the flames that raced past the party members, striking almost half the orcish warriors. At the same time Alyx and Tiana were chanting, gold flash after gold flash illuminating Charles as he took hit after hit trying to stop the orcs. Tamshir chanted a spell herself and a pair of stone hands came from the side of the tunnel, grasping orcs and closing their grip tightly on them.
Eddie, giving up on the shaman for the moment, started releasing broadheads one after the other. He targeted the orcs Dominic had burned. Only one of them had dropped from the spell and the others were pushing Charles backwards. Jern continue slamming his hammer into the creature in front of him as it tried to get its pincers latched onto his shield, but Jern was having none of that, using his hammer to strike the pincers and drive them off target before slamming another strike onto its body.
