The kobolds crossed the room and stood in the center of the tiles now, a line of them, eight in number.
“Would you like to dance?” asked the kobold bard.
He pounded his drum again, producing a different beat this time. There was a series of snapping sounds, and the stench of mana filled the cavern again.
Bolts of purple light shot from the bard’s drum, flying at Reginal and his people.
A goblin beside him fell, purple light burning a hole in his throat. Another dropped to his knees, holding his belly and screaming in agony.
“Ah,” said the bard. “You seem to know the steps to this song.”
This was no good. Reginal and his people couldn’t cross the tiles without risking more traps, and it seemed the kobolds couldn’t trigger their own mechanisms.
But if they just stood there, the bard had free rein to play his foul music and hurt them. It would be a pathetic way to die.
Reginal wished he had brought his human slaves. Damn it, why had he trusted the trap maker to get them through this? She was no match for a core.
He raised his sword. “Slaughter them all. Tear out their guts and hang them around your necks.”
With his words, and with his own bard playing a lute song of courage, that was all they needed. His warriors rushed forward, weapons raised, screaming war cries, and the goblins and kobolds met in the center of the tiled floor.
One goblin slashed a kobold ranger’s throat, sending a spray of blood over the tiles. Another thrust his sword deep into a kobold warrior’s belly, and the sharp wheeze of pain he gave stirred Reginal’s confidence and awoke it fully.
The kobold dropped his tambourine. Well, not dropped, exactly. A goblin had chopped off his hand, so he was quite unable to keep hold of it.
But then darts fired from the walls. Dozens of them at a time, whizzing through the air and puncturing his men, sticking in throats, wrists, stomachs.
Yellow light appeared in the center of the room, wrapping around the injured kobolds. One by one, they got to their feet, even the ones who had been on the edge of death.
“What?” said Reginal. “How?”
“It’s the darts,” said Tavia. “Nothing for it now. Cross the tiles. If we stay here, we’ll die. Don’t worry about the kobolds, just press on.”
So they ran across the tiles now, triggering even more of the traps, summoning endless volleys of those foul magic darts. Reginal pushed through, his head ducked low, focusing on only reaching the end of the room…
…where he came to an iron door blocking their exit, stopping them from getting further into the dungeon. It had a great knocker set in the middle.
And then the door spoke to him!
It spoke not in the common tongue, but in an altogether rarer language.
The kobold language.
“Huh?” said a goblin, appearing beside him. “What did it say?”
“It’s a riddle,” said Reginal. “It won’t open without us answering it.”
“Answering it? I can’t even understand it!”
“And now we’re trapped,” said another goblin.
Reginal saw that he was right; they had cleared the tiles, but now the healed kobolds were behind them.
“We’re trapped! Trapped by trickery!”
“Would you like another song?” asked the kobold bard. “A little music while you die?”
The bard seemed so, so confident. And why not? Reginal and his men were trapped between a kobold-speaking riddle door and an army of healed kobolds.
Luckily, Reginal and his clever son would pass their nights in their tent by studying together. Studying history, stories, and languages.
Kobold was one of them, luckily enough.
He focused on the door now.
“Speak your riddle, you useless lump of iron.”
“We’re lost,” said a voice behind Godwin.
He hated to admit it, but they were right. They seemed to have wandered through the same tunnel countless times now. But how? Godwin had walked these tunnels just the day before, taking a familiar route to the springs.
The damn core must have changed them.
Well, without his traps, perhaps this tunneling trickery was all he had left. All it would do was delay the inevitable, but they’d find their way through eventually.
Now, he just needed to calm his people. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Galatee disarmed his traps, as I said. We just need to keep calm. Take note of the tunnels. Every inch of them. There will be a way through if we’re careful enough.”
And so they wandered through tunnels that had once been familiar but now seemed so foreign. Godwin led the way, forcing his pain deep down inside him.
Then he realized something. His pain, his yearning for the mana, could help him now. He had spent so long trying to rid himself of his addiction that he seemed to spend all his waking hours trying to ignore the stench of mana, ignore how it made desire grow inside him.
Now, he surrendered himself to it. He smelled the air.
Ah, there it was. That sickeningly sweet fume of the mana springs.
“This way,” he said.
And he led them through the tunnel again, this time following the deep stink of mana, taking turns where it seemed to grow stronger.
“This is the way,” he told them.
Soon, he saw a large opening at the end of a passageway. Feeling more confident by the second, he followed it.
They emerged into a room he’d never visited before. A large, oval-shaped room with a treasure chest sitting in the center of it.
CHAPTER 27
It was all going rather well. You can forgive a core for taking a little delight in watching his dungeon do its job, can’t you?
I had a bunch of Seekers trapped between an incomprehensible riddle door, and my anti seeker unit.
Godwin and his scant legion of Wrotun fighters were walking around in circles like stupid chickens (no offense to any poultry out there), where Maginhart and his newly-leveled miners had made quick work of carving new tunnels.
I started to get a weird feeling. A kind of glow inside me. Happiness, maybe? It was strange. Cores aren’t supposed to be all that happy. I guessed it was just the endearing idea that dozens of people would meet their end in my lair.
But as I watched the room nearer the surface door using my core senses, that feeling began to evaporate.
One of the goblins, the tallest and oldest of them who seemed to be the leader, began to speak to the door. He spoke to it using a scattering of kobold words. His pronunciation was a butchering of the language, as far as I could make out, but that didn’t matter.
The damn door swung open!
Hells, how was I unlucky enough to make an enemy of the only gods-damned goblin in all of Xynnar who could speak kobold?
He and his men streamed through the doors and into the tunnel beyond it now, fleeing from the tile and kobold trap.
One of the goblins fell right into the pitfall I had placed behind the door, and his screaming and subsequent thud soothed me a little. Then, the rest of the invaders leaped over it.
It’s okay, I told myself. Many of Tavia’s traps are still in the tunnels. That should slow them down.
I should have learned not to be so optimistic by now, shouldn’t I?
Because that was when I spotted another person accompanying the goblins. A girl. A decidedly non-goblin girl.
One who made them all wait as she walked on ahead, spotting each and every trap, and disarming them in a frightful speed.
It was only minutes before the goblins reached the end of the tunnel, many of them unharmed, and that damned kobold-speaking leader spoke with the final riddle door, opening it.
I followed them using my core vision, watching them emerge into the loot room.
CHAPTER 28
“A treasure chest!” shouted a boy. He was a Fifth-Leaf of the Orcak tree. A sturdy orc. Not much use with a blade but strong, and one of the first to volunteer to accompa
ny Godwin.
The First-Leaf held out his staff, and the boy ran into it and stopped.
“Wait, foolish boy.”
“But there’s treasure here. Nobody ever said there was treasure in the tunnels. It might help us, First-Leaf. And look! Levers. Who knows what great things would happen if we pull them?”
“You are an idiot, Fifth-Leaf Orcak. Nobody move. Let me think about this. Every instinct I have tells me we have to leave this place.”
“That would have been wise,” said a voice.
Figures emerged from a tunnel to the north. Goblins. Ten of them, led by one Godwin knew well; a goblin chief he had once dreamed about.
“Chief Reginal.”
“After all this time. All these years. Finally, we meet again, Godwin. You haven’t changed much since you slaughtered my people and stole my lands.”
“And you look so much older, Reginal.”
“We know why that is, don’t we? Why would the marks of time show on one of us, and not the other?”
This had all gone wrong. The Eternals were here? Now of all times?
This could not have gone any worse.
The Wrotun gathered closer together now. Godwin could feel the fear coming from them. His people weren’t fighters, and Godwin had not planned to lead them into one. This should have been so easy; kill the core, and then leave this place for good.
Couldn’t a plan go as he wanted it to, just once?
Still, surely it couldn’t get worse?
It was then Godwin heard footsteps from the north tunnel, and a group of kobolds ran in. One of them, a kobold with only one hand, dragged a tambourine. Another had mice scurrying all over him.
Slurping sounds came from the east, from yet another tunnel.
How many tunnels had this stupid core created??
Soon, Godwin saw the source of the slurping sounds. Eighteen figures made from slime shuffled into the room. Their eyes, beneath their film of viscous fluid, were dead, their stares cold. Each figure seemed smaller than the last, until the final one to enter was only as tall as Goodwin’s knee.
Chief Reginal stepped forward now.
“Fitting that we meet today,” he said. “On the anniversary of the day you took this place from us.”
CHAPTER 29
It was all quite delightful, really. Like watching a theatre troupe perform. I was safe in my core room, watching them all through my core vision. I saw Godwin and his people enter the loot room, followed shortly after by the chief Seeker and his goblins.
At that point, I felt it was a good time to ask my fungi-creature to go say hello. The hivemind spawned their oozes, and the army of oozes, in their ever-decreasing sizes, dutifully oozed over to join the main party.
Then, just to cap it off, my one-handed bard and his anti-seeker team caught up, and the bard placed his tambourine on the ground and began to pound a gentle beat. It didn’t sound all that musical, given he had lost a hand, but it was still nice.
It was a little like someone had arranged a dungeon ball, so many guests were in the loot room. Only, instead of drinks and dancing, there would be death and destruction. Beautiful.
Reginal raised his sword and commanded his people to attack. My ooze and my kobolds answered, and so did the Wrotuns.
The battle became chaotic. If this had really been a play, I would have set the stage a little better. As it was, the scene before me became one of utter mayhem.
Goblins stabbing kobolds. Kobolds slashing the Wrotun. Young orcs screaming and thrusting at anything that moved. Drumbeats casting waves of mana spells, ooze monsters leaping onto their victims and biting and scratching, and covering them in fire and ice-imbued slime.
The sounds were horrifying, even for a core. Such screams of pain. Death rattles. Choking throats as swords pierced them.
And the blood! I used my core smell then, and the utter volume or iron-rich blood stench was enough to make me dizzy.
This was the thing about battle, you see. When you get down to it, when you really get to the heart of it, it isn’t beautiful. It is a picture of utter, utter chaos.
But still I watched it, and I saw goblins die. I heard the Wrotun scream. I saw piles of ooze on the floor.
I was just beginning to enjoy it when I realized something.
Where the hell was Godwin?
I focused on the warriors fighting in the loot room, and I tried to pick out the shriveled old gnome, but he and his staff were nowhere to be seen.
And that was when I heard a sound. A noise near my core room, down one of the tunnels. One that seemed to be getting closer and closer.
Rat-tap-tap.
“Hello, core,” said a voice.
I didn’t need to play the game now. You know, the game where I’d pretend to be psychic and guess who had joined me in a room.
“Godwin,” I said.
And there he was. An old gnome, one who seemed older than the dungeon itself. His robes were covered in blood. It was smeared over his wrinkled face, over his hands, all over his staff.
“Here he is,” said Godwin. “Our savior.”
His voice was etched with pain, but I couldn’t see any wounds on him. Sure, he was covered in blood, but it didn’t seem to be his own. He eyed me now with a gaze of pure fire, yet his stare kept darting between me and the mana spring set into the wall. I could see his saliva bubble on his lips as he looked at it.
“Do you know why you are here?” he said.
“Sure. The academy thought I could use a holiday.”
“Stupid, insolent gem. You were here to save our people.”
“And I thought I was doing a good job, having already stopped a party of Seekers. What the hell was all this about, Godwin? The Rushden boy. You know that Gary didn’t kill him.”
“Of course! It was me. Conjured from my staff, a spell of-”
“Yes, yes. You cast a spell to kill one of your own people, and then you blamed me. You took away one of my best monsters, and you convinced the Wrotuns to destroy me.”
“Well, yes. But you have quite robbed me of the speech I had planned.”
“You can still tell me why.”
“My people are addicted to the springs, core. But their gift of life comes with consequences. You can see it in me. Every year I live beyond my mortal allowance, my pain grows. Every step is a cascade of agony. This is no life. And we live here, underground. Here in the darkness, always scared that the Seekers will attack. We have never known happiness here. We should have left long ago, but the draw of the springs was too much, and I knew that my people would never leave willingly. Not unless there was no other choice.”
I tried to digest his words. I felt like understanding was coming to me, but it was slow. Godwin wanted to leave this place? What?
“I don’t understand my part in this.”
“I had to convince my people that they had no choice but to leave. That the Seekers would keep coming, and eventually they would destroy us. But to convince them there was no choice but to go, they had to believe there was no hope. I needed a tool to destroy their hopes, and you were the hammer I wielded. If we put everything we had into one last desperate way to beat the seekers, into one last form of defense, and the defense failed, they would know we could not stay. They would finally accept it.”
“Ah, so you thought you’d destroy me, leaving yourself defenseless. Your people would finally get it into their skulls that the Seekers wouldn’t stop coming. Quite clever, Godwin. Eight out of ten for the theory, two out of ten for execution.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I’m still here. And you led your people into a bloodbath in the loot room.”
“You mark my execution, core, yet I haven’t completed it yet.”
Godwin raised his staff, and the base of it glowed red with a fury I had never seen.
Memories flashed inside me now. Memories of death and reawakening. Flashes of fire and light.
It was a memory of my forging. Of the academy forger
s placing my consciousness into my gem. I had seen a light like this before.
Then another memory came; one of Godwin striking Jahn and I, chipping parts of us away.
This old gnome could destroy me.
In my early days as a core, I had remembered my first death. Those memories faded as I got used to my gem body, and I forgot what it was like to face mortality.
Here I was now, facing death for the second time.
My instincts fired. I madly thought of anything I could do, anything I could use my scant essence on.
No, there was nothing. Nothing I could create to stop him.
Godwin approached me, his burning staff raised high. I wouldn’t shout. I wouldn’t scream. I’d face my second death like a true core.
And then a shape leaped into the core room, smashing into Godwin. There was a great slurping sound, accompanied by the gnashing of teeth.
It was Gary!
There he was, my beautiful spider-troll freak, with all his leech legs wrapped around the gnome, their dagger teeth tearing into him and sucking his blood, draining him dry amidst a chorus of sucks and slurps.
The old gnome went limp. His staff fell from his hands and clattered on the floor, and the light at its base dimmed.
And still, Gary slurped. Again and again, his leech teeth drinking the gnome’s blood.
It took quite a long time, actually. I got rather bored.
Finally, Gary unlatched himself and stood up, his legs covered in blood.
“Nothing quite quenches your first like gnome blood,” he said. “Ah, Dark Lord. What a delight it is to see you. You look ravishing.”
CHAPTER 30
Two Days Later
For the second time in my second life, I found myself locked in a darkened cell. Coils of metal rope were latched around me. It wasn’t to stop me moving, since cores aren’t known for their great range of movement.
No, after the battle, Chief Reginal had fetched the rest of his people to the cavern. He had brought a goblin mage with him. Acton, he said his name was. A friendly old goblin, actually, but he had these annoying metal ropes that, when latched around me, drained my essence. Without any essence vines, and being removed from my dungeon, there was nothing I could do to replenish them.
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