“Stop,” I whispered loudly. As she had gotten more animated her voice had gotten louder. “We have to be quiet and we have to go now. You lead the way. If you want to save your friends we have to move.”
As we were talking Otto had dragged the other ork body into the tent. The Areva woman took it all in, and I had to give her credit because in that moment she changed. She went from a helpless victim to a warrior. She straightened her back and a new fire was alight in her eyes. She headed for the tent exit, but not before kicking the dead ork that Otto had just dragged in and spitting on his corpse. I kicked him once for good measure too; fuck it, he seemed like a dick anyway.
The Areva woman knew her way around the ork fort. She took us on a quick route at a crouch in between tents and buildings before coming to one of the completed buildings. It looked just like all of the others, just a small round wooden house, but this was the one she seemed adamant about. The doorway into the dwelling had an animal skin hanging in it. I pulled out my crossbow and went in quickly, throwing the animal skin aside. There was one ork wearing hide-type armor asleep in a chair against the back wall. I let a bolt loose from my crossbow and my training paid off because it hit right in his throat. He woke up choking on his own blood, and fell out of the chair into a pile while he fruitlessly tried to stem the flow.
He stopped moving quickly and my brain stopped looking for more enemies and instead began taking in the interior of the room, which was bare except for one feature. In the middle of the room there was a stone well with a ladder sticking out of it. There had just been this one ork in the room; I guessed he was the guard and had fallen asleep on duty, which made this well important.
“This is where they are at? This goes down to the dungeon?” I asked.
“Yes, they collapsed in all of the other entrances. This is the only way in or out now. It seems like they are trying to move out of the dungeon and seal it closed behind them. This way they can live on the surface and the dungeon remains protected,” said the Areva woman.
“Are you going down with us or are you staying here?” I asked a second before I realized that I couldn’t trust leaving her there alone.
“I’ll go down. You don’t know the way, and there are traps that I have seen them turn off and on. There is a full treasure room down there, magic stones, spirit stones, enchanted weapons, you name it and they have it. Some of the traps in that room can’t be turned off by anyone, period, so don’t rush into it. There is only one true path down, the rest are dead-end offshoots full of traps.”
Otto stepped forward and grabbed the dead ork by an ankle. “We can’t leave him here,” he said before hanging the ork over the side of the well and then climbing down with the corpse dangling below him. I was glad Otto didn’t just drop the corpse; it would have alerted anyone who was at the bottom. I had to begrudgingly admit that Otto was a pro.
“You next,” I told the Areva. She put one foot over the side of the well onto the first rung of the ladder and I reached my hand out to shake hers. “I’m Earl by the way. The other one is Otto. What’s your name?”
“I’m Talvi,” she says with a small smile that didn’t fit our grim surroundings and hectic situation. Once we all got to the bottom we found ourselves in a long cave. There were tiny glowing alcoves in the walls every twenty feet or so that put out just barely enough light to see by.
“That way,” said Talvi, pointing behind us, “is a dead end with a pitfall trap. We need to head this other way. Make three rights and a left. If you take any other turns you will hit traps and risk dying a terrible way. Sometimes they have a roaming guard down here, but I don’t know if they will bother it now that they’ve been working on topside security lately. The ork shaman sleeps down here with at least two dozen acolytes. I think he is a mage. The other orks in this contingent treat him like a god, though I have never seen him do magic myself. Their sleeping chambers are close to the treasure room area where my friends are being held.”
“Any way to sneak past them?” I asked as Otto remained stoically silent and on guard.
Talvi didn’t answer right away, like she was lost in thought. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so. They keep strange hours and practice an ork religion, they’re true believers. In fact, they are all insane zealots for the most part.”
“Do they have any way to alert the surface if we start fucking them up?” I asked.
“No, they don’t,” she said with a large smile. “They tried drilling a hole to run a string through so they could tie it to a bell, but the rock was too dense for them here and they were afraid of a cave-in. They just use runners to relay messages to the surface.”
“You hear that, Otto? We can’t let any slip by or the whole fort will come down on our heads.”
Otto nodded once and head off down the tunnel. We took the three rights and the left like Talvi told us; the whole time our crossbows were out ahead of us and we were ready to fire. Once we turned the corner on the last left the tunnel died off into shadow.
“It’s an illusion,” said Talvi, who walked towards the shadow in the tunnel and stuck her hand in it. Her arm entirely disappeared. “It works both ways to make people think this is another trapped dead-end. Those inside can’t see back this way either. It’s well-lit on the other side, it’s a tunnel like this. On the right is an opening, sort of like a miniature great hall, beds, tables, that kind of thing. That’s where the orks will be. To the left is solid stone, and straight ahead are the cells and the treasure room. The second you leave the shadow they will be able to see you if they have a guard on duty in the hall.”
I was impressed by how thorough the Areva woman’s descriptions were at first, but then I remembered she was more or less a soldier, and a scout. She was doing her job right now, and doing it well.
Otto and I prepared to step around her and go through, but at that very moment an ork walked out of the shadow wall. Otto was ahead of me so he was the one who got to deal with it. He simply grabbed the ork by the tunic he was wearing and then threw him into the rock wall near us. The collision was nasty and the ork instantly went to sleep. I wasn’t sure if the ork was dead or not, but I was content that he wasn’t getting back up anytime soon. I figured I should have stabbed him with my short sword, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My morality rears up at the strangest times.
I took the lead and moved into the shade wall with my sword point-first ahead of me. Running into an ork in the pitch black, magic-shade-wall-of-creepiness would have been terrible. I was only about two steps of complete darkness, when true to Talvi’s word we came out into a brightly lit hall.
This section was lit with the same embedded wall lights, only these ones seemed to be running on full power while the other ones were at maybe two-percent power. Fifty feet in front of me I could see the rock wall on the right was framed out with some large pieces of lumber, making a twenty-foot-wide opening, but I couldn’t see around that corner. Straight down the hall past the opening, maybe another fifty feet after it, the hall gradually opened up into a larger room with some tables and ropes strung up at odd angles. It was too far away for me to make out the fine details.
Otto and Talvi come through a second later. “Plan?” asked Otto.
There was no way around what had to happen. “Murder and mayhem. Talvi, you can leave if you want. You got us here safely and I remember the way back.”
“No. I’m staying. Just give me a crossbow. I’m not leaving my comrades.”
I wouldn’t say no to more help so I handed her my crossbow and the little container of bolts I brought with me. She snapped them to her waist. Next to me, Otto put his crossbow away and readied his club.
Then my mind went to my murder place and I wanted to yell my squad’s battle cry, but it felt wrong here on Ludus. I settled on a fast walk but my adrenaline got the best of me so I started jogging and then running.
I spun around the corner into the orks’ great hall; the place was lined with tables and food. To the right side o
f the room were some curtained-off areas that I guessed were the sleeping quarters. To the left was more food storage, and armor and weapon racks. At the back of the room was a large chair that could best be described as a throne, and sitting in it was the biggest fucking ork I had seen yet.
He had a massive red robe on over his giant frame with the hood worn up. A great white beard ran down his chest. In front of him was a cleared area where someone had put down a square of finely polished wood, and two ork brawlers were sparring on it.
I took this all in within the space of a second. There was nowhere else in the room for the bulk of the orks to be except behind the curtains to the right. I prioritized them as the biggest threat at that moment since Talvi told me there were two dozen or more down.
Then I lifted my hands and unleashed hell, truly unleashed. Up to that point on Ludus I had been conserving my power, using it in small bursts so I didn’t use up all my energy at once and I could continue working and training. Not this time—this time I burned up at least half of my energy in one giant sweeping blast. The curtains exploded into flame and debris, orks screamed, pieces of lumber and even rock flew in all directions. I ran one clean sweep across the entire right side of the room destroying almost everything there before I cut my power off.
No one moved, and whatever mechanism was being used to hold the curtains up must have lost too much durability because what little was left of them came crashing down. A few injured orks rolled out of the burning debris, but not many. The two ork brawlers who had been sparring at the front of the room for the shaman’s entertainment lost it when they realized I had probably just killed most of their friends and they rushed me with berserker screams.
Using so much of my power at once had physically exhausted me to the point that I was bent over with my hands on my knees, huffing. I was thankful when Talvi snapped off a crossbow bolt and it hit one of the attackers’ legs, making him fall and roll. The second ork was met by Otto’s club moving full speed with all of his strength behind it. I watched the enemy Otto hit turn into little more than meat chunks and pink mist.
Otto turned and started rushing towards the shaman with his club held high. The shaman shot out of his throne and lifted his hands, just like how I lift my hands. My heart felt like it had stopped and time seemed to slow down as I watched in horror as a roaring bar of flame came out of the shaman’s hands straight toward Otto. I tried to react as fast as I could, lifting my hands as fast as a western gunslinger, snapping off a burst of pure force, but it was too late. Otto was engulfed in sticky flames.
He flipped to the ground and began to scream as he rolled around, trying to extinguish himself. I prayed his armor had protected him. My burst of force intersected with the remainder of the shaman’s flame blast and blew it away from Otto.
“Help Otto, I’m going to kill this piece of shit,” I said to Talvi, with more anger then I realized I had in my whole body. I couldn’t explain it; the anger, it rattled my bones as I felt tears streak down my face. Otto was the last vestige of Earth that I had left. Even though he was a German bastard, he was my German bastard. At some point he had become…my friend. He was the last soldier under my command, or maybe I was under his, I didn’t really know. All I knew was that I had come to respect and trust the quiet man in the short time I had known him. He was here risking his life to help others, and now he was burning.
The shaman laughed when he saw my emotion, and he casually shook himself out of his large robe, exposing a giant and heavily muscled frame. He raised his hands toward Otto again.
“Fuck you!” I shouted and let off rapid bursts of pure heat his way. He was forced to retreat and blow bursts of heat back toward mine. Purple energy blasts collided with red flames, creating explosions and heating up the area. I never stopped running toward him, sending different probing blasts his way. I kept shifting how much force and heat I was using to try breaking his defenses but he just kept attacking, shooting my blasts out of the air or dodging them.
When I slowed my assault he would try to fry Otto, who was being pulled out of the room by Talvi. The ork was using my friends to try and exhaust me, and it was working. I had to change tactics. We were pretty evenly matched at a distance, so I decided to try to get up close.
It was hard for me to use my hands independently, but I risked it as I fired a dark-purple heat blast at the shaman and a light-purple force blast at the ceiling above him. The rock cracked and splintered and a few shards fell down. He sent a huge blast of flame at me as he jumped away, while I sent a force blast behind me, throwing me forward. Then I let off a smaller force blast in front of me to disperse his flame blast.
I was flying forwards so fast that I almost sped into my own force blast but it tore apart his flames right in front of me and I landed within a few feet of him. I rushed in and threw a kick at his face which he dodged. Then I pointed my right hand with my pointer finger out like a gun and shot a condensed blast of heat at him. The attack drilled right into his stomach, but it didn’t slow him down much. This made sense, he had to be somewhat heat-resistant so he wouldn’t be burned by his own flames. I probably was too to some extent for the same reason.
The shaman did a kip-up and threw a flame-covered fist at my face. I dodged and felt the heat fly by as my hair caught on fire. I didn’t have time to worry about it. I threw my fist at his face and let off a burst of force at the last second. The blast rocked his head back hard. I followed this up with a punch to his stomach and let a blast of force off the second my knuckles dug into his skin. The hit lifted him off the ground. He fell to his knees and spit up blood.
The ork slowly raised his head to look at me and then he started laughing, a deep and evil laugh. Fire started spreading from the tips of his fingers, up his arms, over his shoulders, down his body, and then his head was engulfed. He never stopped laughing. I knew it was time to get the fuck out of there.
I turned and ran as he kept laughing. I only slowed enough to pat the fire in my hair out and to grab one of Otto’s arms. Talvi had almost pulled him entirely out of the room and I helped haul him the rest of the way out. Behind us the room was heating up. I turned in time to see a huge wall of flame slowly heading towards us, unnaturally slow, like it was building. The ambient heat in the room was becoming unbearable. Next to us a limping ork carrying something small was trying to crawl away without being noticed. I didn’t have a free hand to kill him so I let him go since he wasn’t threatening us.
“Talvi, whatever that is,” I said, pointing backward with my thumb at the magical fire wall. “It’s going to kill us. Keep pulling Otto. I have to try to stop this.”
She nodded and kept going. It was good that Otto was barely on his feet and trying his best to limp his way out; this meant he was alive. I looked around, not sure what to do, but my eyes landed on the lumber supports that were reinforcing the opening to the great hall. Without hesitation I blasted them. Then I let off more blasts toward the ceiling of the great hall, hoping that I wasn’t going to bring the whole place down on my head. The flame wall was moving faster now, and it was headed straight towards us. I was almost out of energy, but I kept up the kinetic blasts, smashing the rock overhead, willing it to fall. Finally it came down. I hoped it was enough to hold the inevitable explosion.
“We have to get my friends!” yelled Talvi as the tunnel began to rumble louder. We set Otto down with his back to the cave wall and ran toward the treasure room. “Wait!” yelled Talvi. She stepped in front of me and reached through the solid rock of the wall, apparently pulling some hidden levers.
She yelled, “This was another illusion meant to hide the trap controls. I turned off the perimeter traps. Don’t go near the table there, it has traps on it that I can’t turn off.” I nodded in return.
We made it into the treasure room proper, the cave was still shaking. The area was a half circle with little open-faced rooms lining the outside of it, and in the middle of the room was a large rectangular table covered with rare treasures.
The table had a strange green glow to it that spread about twelve inches in all directions. To me the glow was screaming “fuck off,” and I got the distinct feeling that if I touched it, I would die. Each room around the circle had a series of ropes crossing in front of them in haphazard patterns. One of the little rooms had three dirty and bruised Areva women in it.
Talvi ran over to them and reached into an illusion alcove next to their cell. It looked like solid rock until she’d stuck her hand through and pulled a few things. The ropes around the cell went slack, falling to the floor, and the Areva women came out. They threw their arms around Talvi and me.
“We don’t have time!” I yelled, then I looked at the table once more. I couldn’t just leave it. “Talvi, take them around the side rooms and collect any treasure and weapons that you want or need to take out of here.”
I didn’t check to see if the Areva were following my instructions. I walked over to the table cautiously as the cave shook harder around me. I had to hurry. Then an idea struck me, my first non-stupid one I had had in a while. I raised my hands in two different directions, aiming at the two closest table legs to me, and then I blasted them off at exactly the same time. The table smacked the floor at an angle and some of the treasure rolled out of the deadly green glow; not all of it, but enough. “Winner winner chicken dinner!”
I started scooping up magic stones, a blessed steel fixed blade knife, and what looked like some sort of paper currency from Earth. Then the Areva women ran over and helped me pick up a few more items.
“Don’t get too close. That green shit will kill you!” I warned them. Then the cave shook harder and we knew we had to go. Talvi had reloaded my crossbow, and another of the women had grabbed a longbow from somewhere. The other two had melee weapons; one looked enchanted, or so I guessed from the slight glow about it.
Delvers LLC- Surviving Ludus Page 20
