by Zeke Biddle
That, at least, gets her moving, but I’m already dreading needing to miss a night of sex to go kill a bunch of sad, pathetic bears while they sleep.
Except for some shouts from the buildings closest to the cliffs, the village appears deserted. When we go to investigate the sounds, things get even more confusing.
“Are those kids?” I ask, pointing at the five short creatures banging on Dasandra’s door.
I can’t make out any details in the evening shadows, but they look like kids. They only come up to about my belly button.
Creeping up behind them, I see they are swinging hatchets at the closed door. Trying not to startle anyone into doing something stupid, I clear my throat to let them know they are not alone in the street.
A voice from the building shouts, “Hurrah! It’s Marcus and his harem!”
Alexandra, standing shoulder to shoulder with me, mumbles, “We’re not all in the harem.”
“Soon,” I whisper to comfort her.
She pulls both of her swords, and I’m not sure if it’s to greet the intruders or take exception to what I’d said. I have no idea how she manages to use the two-handed sword with just one hand, but I can’t help but think she’d be more efficient not using the other crappy sword at the same time.
Not that I’d ever say so out loud. I like my head where it is.
The “kids” turn towards me. Their skin is green, and their bottom fangs rise almost to their eyes. I’m pretty sure now they aren’t kids in costumes.
“Goblins?” I ask.
They all shake their hatchets at me, and I’m fairly certain they would attack if not for how Alexandra keeps lazily swishing her swords back and forth, as if trying to hypnotize them.
“Guess not,” I say, and try to come up with another creature.
Before I get the chance, an arrow pierces one of the creature’s thin leather chest armor. “Orcs. They are orcs,” Gillian says while notching another arrow and letting it fly to finish off the orc she’d shot earlier.
Alexandra chops off the head of another one.
It finally clicks that these are the same kind of creatures that appeared in the middle of the village the first night we returned, only there’s a lot more of them this time.
I shrug away the stray thought as I cast my fireball spell. Two orcs disappear.
That leaves us with just one.
I take a step toward him—or is it a her?—but before I can start asking where it came from and who sent it, Alexandra chops it in half with another wild haymaker of a swing of her sword.
“Damn it, Alexandra. I wanted to question it. There might be more wherever it came from, and maybe even a boss who gave them their commands. Think of the experience we could have gained.”
She pauses to do exactly that. “Shit,” she eventually says. “Sorry. Maybe someone in town saw something useful.”
Before we can start calling the villagers back out into the street, a tiny green head pops up over the cliff. His eyes go wide when he sees us and his dead friends, and then he drops back down out of sight.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I say. “Something can come up from down there. Unbelievable.”
“Great,” Alexandra says with a grunt. “Now we won’t even get the reward for saving this stupid town since one got away.”
Quest: Awaken the elf from her eternal slumber in the cave below and return the Staff of Light to her.
Do you accept this quest?
Knowing they can’t see the message, I give them the details and then ask, “We doing this? The orcs clearly came from down there, and if we’re going to keep this village safe, we can’t just leave town to go off on our daily adventures without clearing the caves first.”
“Ugh,” Alexandra says. “You keep saying that the bigger the monsters we kill, the sooner I can join the harem. Did you see how little those orcs are? All five of them probably gave us less of those experiences than one bear.”
“Experience points,” I say, gently correcting her.
“I vote no,” she says, completely ignoring me. “Each villager can use a rake or frying pan to fend off dozens of those orcs. They’ll be fine.”
“No,” Eulalia protests. “We have to do it. These are—”
“Yeah, yeah. We know.” Alexandra rolls her head back and groans. “They are your people. If you can handle them, what makes you think they can’t?”
Eulalia widens her stance, as if preparing to wrestle Alexandra to convince her to shut up.
As much fun as it might be to watch the two sexy women grappling with each other and rolling around on the ground, I come up with something I think will convince her to go explore the cave and keep my party from injuring each other.
“That was probably just a recon party, right? Where there’s five orcs, there’s bound to be more. Probably hundreds, if not thousands.”
“Yeah, but even so, the bears—”
I talk over her. “And if they are sending out recon groups, that means they are organized, and must have some skilled leaders. And since we’ve received an official quest, I’ll bet you one free night of oral sex there’s a boss of some sort down there. And if I’m right about the leveling thing, those will get us there faster.”
“Oh,” Alexandra says. “I didn’t think of that. And I bet there’s some loot down there, too.” She glares at one of her swords as if it said something to offend her. “Fine. I’m in.”
“Gillian?” I ask, but she’s nowhere to be found. “Gillian!”
She returns a few seconds later with a large pile of ropes and a shy smile. “I thought they might come in handy.”
I roll my eyes, amused at my thief. “We accept the quest to awaken the elf, whatever that means.”
I accept the Staff of Light when it suddenly appears and floats at chest height.
“Hmm. I guess we better get going,” I say.
“Should we sleep first?” Gillian asks, shaking the rope at me.
“No time, hon,” I say. “Who knows what kind of raiding party the orcs might have planned for tonight? Business before pleasure.”
I seriously hope I’m not going to regret wasting our harem skills fighting the bear earlier. Hopefully we’ll kill the monsters and get a chance to rest before we get into any real trouble.
I call for the villagers to help lower us down the cliff. They quickly form into four lines.
Gillian looks back at our tent and sighs, but trudges over to the edge of the cliff with the rest of us to start tying a harness for herself.
5
“I’ll teach you how to tie someone up really good some night soon,” Gillian whispers into my ear as we prepare to drop over the edge of the cliff. She laughs when I blush and gives me a kiss.
I’ve watched her work knots into the ropes. She’s way too good at it. No matter how intriguing the prospect might be, I doubt the experience would be relaxing at all.
We argue for several minutes about the order in which we should go over the edge before Eulalia points out, “Going alone is suicide. We have no idea what’s down there, which means we all need to go as one.”
None of us have an argument for that.
The villagers do a great job of holding us steady. About fifty feet down, we dangle over a never-ending abyss and stare into a large black hole in the side of the cliff.
“Fuck. That looks evil as hell,” I say.
“We need some light,” Alexandra says. “If only our wizard had some kind of spell to light dark places.”
She’s bugged me so relentlessly about my inability to learn spells she found useful. The fact of the matter is that I still haven’t even understood the basics of how I learned the ones I do know. Learning magic is definitely more difficult than swinging a sword.
“Soon,” I lamely promise.
She snorts a reply. “So what do we do now? Go back up, or head on in?”
“In. Definitely in,” I say.
“Can you shoot a fireball in there to light things up?”
Gillian asks.
“Probably not the best option. It’ll be too intense for us to really see much, and if it sets anything on fire, it might end this quest early if the smoke is too bad or we collapse a wooden beam that causes a cave-in. What do you say about me risking a lightning bolt?”
The spell is my newest, and it’s so weak it barely causes any damage.
“I don’t want to go in there completely in the dark about what to expect,” Alexandra says.
Gillian and Eulalia both agree, so I send one zap of lightning through the opening of the cave.
It zigzags back and forth down a long empty hallway then curves slowly to the right. There’s nothing to see except the walls of the tunnel.
“Well, that’s about as safe as we could hope for,” I say, trying to work up the courage to start swinging my way to the opening.
“And looks like there’s jack shit in there for us to kill,” Alexandra counters. “This whole thing will be a giant waste of time.”
“Come on, guys. Don’t leave me in here to save the elf princess by myself.”
When I stop frowning at Alexandra, I see Gillian already standing in the mouth of the cave, untied from her rope and waving at us.
“How did you—” I start to ask before just shaking my head in wonder.
“Fucking thieves,” Alexandra mumbles as she kicks her legs to start swinging her way into the cave.
Between yelling up to the villagers holding her rope to give her more slack and Gillian helping pull her in, she manages to negotiate the awkward transition into the opening. Eulalia goes next. A few minutes later, I’m standing by all three of them in the eerily silent, and creepily dark, cave.
I would kiss the ground but I don’t want Alexandra to make fun of me.
“This is just stupid,” Alexandra says. “It’s too fucking dark. We could fall right into a pit we can’t even see. We’re going to break our fool necks.”
I’m starting to agree with her, but Eulalia saves the day.
“The staff,” she says. “If we can just figure out how it works, maybe it will provide enough light.”
She unties the staff from my back and then hands it to me. It’s much denser than it looks. It would probably make a decent-enough weapon in the right hands, but that’s just my old warrior brain talking.
I’m a wizard, and need to start thinking like one. Searching for a button, or magic words written on the shaft, turns up nothing.
Channeling my inner Gandalf, I butt the end of it against the ground, and the orb at the top lights up enough to see about a dozen feet in front of us.
“There we go,” Gillian says. “Some light for you pussies and plenty of shadows for me.” True to her character class, she walks to the edge of the light and with one more step, disappears.
“Did you fall?” I ask somewhere between a shout of concern and a whisper to avoid being heard by any potential monsters.
“Maybe someone grabbed her,” Eulalia says with concern dripping from her voice as she hurries after her.
Gillian steps back into the light. “I’m here, sillies. Just hiding in the shadows. It’s what I do.”
She takes a step back and disappears again.
“Fucking thieves,” Alexandra repeats.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager it isn’t the last time Alexandra will use that mantra during our quest. Dark, shadowy caves are a thief’s dream.
Trying to regain control of my party, I say, “Okay. I think we should just head that way.”
I point deeper into the cave.
“Of course we’re going to head that way,” Alexandra says, taking her first step toward whatever might be awaiting us like the good, brave warrior she is. “There’s no other way to go. Come on. I want to get this over with. And if I can’t join the harem by the time we get back to the village, none of you are getting laid until we figure that out.”
Once we get far enough around the bend we can’t see the entrance anymore, the path opens up into an enormous domed space with a sarcophagus in the middle of it. If we stood on opposite sides of the room, we’d have to raise our voices to hear each other.
“I have a bad feeling we’re about to fight a battle on two fronts, and that’s a sure way to get crushed in the middle,” Alexandra calls out from where she’s inspecting the gold sarcophagus.
I hurry over to join her. “You should try to keep your voice lower. You don’t want to wake the dead.”
We both laugh nervously at my bad joke.
“What do you think is in there?” Alexandra asks.
“The dead,” Gillian says, popping up on the other side of it and scaring the shit out of us.
Alexandra shakes her sword at the other woman. “Don’t do that. You’ll give Marcus a heart attack.”
“How sweet of you to worry about me, Alexandra, but you jumped higher than I did.”
Gillian just smiles at us and, while maintaining eye contact with Alexandra, drags a dagger along the side of the sarcophagus.
“Where’d you get that dagger?” I ask.
“I borrowed it. It was just sitting over there in the corner.”
“Fucking thieves. You know you probably set off an alarm, right?” Alexandra asks, her eyes scanning the room for intruders.
Gillian smiles at the new weapon. “I like it. It called out to me, begging for a life of adventure. How was I supposed to just leave it there?”
I sense a faint orange glow on the blade. “It’s magic, right? What’s it do?”
Gillian turns the blade over and squints at it. “Magic? I didn’t know that.”
I take the dagger from her to try and investigate the item closer and decipher its arcane secrets. “Hmm. I can’t tell anything other than it’s enchanted. I’d be careful with that thing.”
Gillian’s smile turns into a frown. She makes the dagger disappear somewhere in her clothes, leaving me shaking my head at how close to magic a lot of thief skills are.
“I don’t think you should open that,” Eulalia whispers over my shoulder, startling me every bit as badly as Gillian had a few seconds ago.
When I recover, I ask, “Why not? Is it cursed?”
“I can’t positively or negatively sense curses. But disturbing the dead never ends well.”
“Oops,” Gillian says. The dagger is once again in her hand, and she’s slicing through the seal on the tomb.
“Fucking thieves.” I blink in surprise at hearing the words tumble out of my own mouth.
“It better not be a ghoul,” Alexandra says. “If we get any experiences stolen, I’m going to kill her.”
The blade makes quick work separating the top from the bottom. With two of us on each end, we pivot the lid to create an X with the bottom, rather than trying to remove it, so we aren’t stuck with some super heavy object in our hands while a monster lunges for us.
But it’s empty.
Gillian wipes sweat from her forehead. “Huh. That’s a letdown.”
“Better than dying,” Alexandra argues. “Come on. Let’s get…wait a second. What’s that?”
She reaches down and pulls on something that’s wedged between one of the sides and the cushion.
“Oh, isn’t she pretty?” she asks, brandishing a pitch-black sword with a thin red line along the cutting edge.
In my vision, it glows like Gillian’s dagger does, but red instead of orange.
“It’s magic, too,” I say.
“Maybe this quest won’t be so lame after all.”
Gillian makes her way around the sarcophagus and leans closer for a better view. “What does the magic do?”
Alexandra and I both shake our heads.
She says, “I don’t know, but even without the magic, it has to be better than this crappy two-handed sword I’ve been using. I can’t wait to go kill some things to test it out.”
Alexandra’s two-handed sword disappears into her pack.
“That little sword?” Gillian asks without bothering to hide the disbelief i
n her voice.
“It’s not that small. Besides, my two-handed one wasn’t really much more than a big stick. It’s heavy as hell, too. Probably not the best thing to try to wield with one hand. This new one’s sharp enough to split Marcus’ pubic hairs, and I can still use the other sword Eulalia gave me in my left hand.”
“Let’s not put that thing with my pubes to the test,” I say.
I reach inside the sarcophagus and start patting around. “Anything else in there?”
The others join in, but we come up empty.
“Okay. So now we have a mystery. Caves along the side of the Infinity Drop. An empty sarcophagus in an otherwise-empty chamber. Two magic weapons of undetermined, but probably different, magic. Someone either lives here or used to. Where are they? And what does any of this have to do with the orcs attacking the village?”
“I’ll bet one cheap-ass two-handed sword the witch is involved somehow,” Alexandra says.
“Well, that’s good news. I was expecting her. If she’s involved, then we’re back to being in a one-front battle, and have much less chance of getting crushed in the middle of anything.”
“I don’t know about that,” Eulalia says. “Look.”
A section of the wall on the opposite side of the room is sliding open, and orcs start pouring through.
6
“That little fucker that got away from us up above must have warned the others,” Alexandra says. She holds both swords in front of her and gives them a close inspection. “Let’s hope this new blade’s magic isn’t some curse that will get us killed.” She tests the balance of her new sword combo. “That’s much better.”
Eulalia turns to me. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off with a sword someday? Like a last line of defense if monsters get past your magic. Maybe a good dagger. We should find you one to test it out if this goes well.”
“And if it doesn’t go well, we’ll probably die,” Alexandra counters.
Gillian hops up onto the lid of the tomb and starts shooting arrows into the crowd. “Looks like about thirty of them. We should be…oh, what’s that?”
