“Oh, me? I’m just here to steal from the creepy wizard,” she said as Billy lifted her up and placed her on her feet. “But I broke in here the other day, locked the door behind me and everything, and then got chased around the room by that bastard!” She pointed at the dead monster. “Thanks for that, by the way!”
“Why didn’t it kill you?” Audelia asked skeptically.
“I’ve been hiding under the bodies since last night, waiting for an opportunity to sneak out, but never found one,” she explained. She looked out the broken doorway behind them. “Damn, it’s night again already. I can’t even begin to tell you how unpleasant it is to live under a pile of corpses for a day.”
“I’ve been through worse,” Audelia said, finally relaxing her stance a bit. She held the torchlight up to take a better look at the little rogue.
The girl had hair trimmed to just past chin-length, likely cut by herself, and eyes green as pure jade. Her locks were a vibrant red, and her complexion was strangely pallid, with light freckles on her cheeks. Her exposed shoulders and the tip of her nose were sunburned bright red, but she clearly had the sort of complexion that refused to tan. She wore a brown leather strapless top that pulled tight against her skin, pushing her pert breasts up, making them rather appealing. The top bore her entire midriff, cutting off just below the chest, displaying an attractively thin waistline. She was a bit shorter than Audelia, nearly two heads shorter than Billy, and she looked young, though not scandalously so. She was easily younger than Billy and Audelia, who were both in their mid-twenties, but probably not younger than twenty herself. She wore skintight brown leather pants that matched her top, and her arms and shoulders were unarmored, along with her chest above her breasts. On her feet were a pair of soft shoes—all the better for thieving. She was a pretty thing, but not nearly as busty as the battle maiden, though far more petite. Audelia’s body was sinful just to look at, while this girl was gorgeous, to be sure, but had an entirely different appeal.
“Well, you can go now,” Billy said after taking in the sight of her. “The door’s that way.”
“I’m fucking hungry,” she whined. “Got anything to eat?”
Audelia grimaced as Billy tossed her one of the last chunks of bread they had. It’d be hunting and gathering from here on out until they hit the next town.
“Thank you!” she said, taking a bite of the tough bread. “It’s stale and wormy, but it’s still the best thing I’ve ever tasted!”
“That’s because you’re tasting survival,” Audelia said. “Not food.”
“Well, we have to press on,” Billy said, trying to drop hints. “Please be safe.”
“I’m coming with you,” the girl said. “My name’s Kaya.”
Audelia eyed her with interest. “Aren’t your parents or your spouse waiting for you?”
“Lady, I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen years old. I don’t have anyone waiting for me,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
“Why?” asked Billy.
“Because you’re both my type, and I’m lonely,” she stuck out her tongue and winked cheekily.
“As good a reason as any. If you’re a thief, then you know how to be quiet. So be quiet, and let’s find the way up,” Audelia said. “By the way, I’m Audelia, and the outlander is Billy.”
Kaya eyed the two of them thoughtfully. “There are two ways up from here,” she said. “Climb the tower to the next ledge, which they’ll expect, or take the spider chute.”
“The what now?” Billy asked.
“Hold your torch up,” Kaya said to Audelia, pointing at the ceiling at the center of the room.
Audelia obliged, and both she and Billy were shocked to behold an open passage in the ceiling leading to a trapdoor of sorts, which obviously opened to the next floor.
“They drop bodies down from there sometimes,” she said. “Safer than walking them in through the door, I guess.”
“How do they get the bodies up there?” Billy asked.
“I’m not sure,” Kaya admitted. “Does it matter?”
The three of them fashioned a plan. They would use a combination of spider webbing and rope to allow Billy to climb the chute as quietly as possible. When Billy got to the trap door, he would set it on fire. They didn’t need to get through the door. They needed a distraction. At that point, Billy would lurk in the webbing below the trap door, causing as much ruckus and chaos as possible, while the women scaled the exterior wall, using the spider legs to stick to the wall easily. Then, they’d surprise whoever—or whatever—was in the room, killing them quickly, and pull Billy up through the trap door if he still needed their assistance by that time.
It was an insane plan, given that they had no idea what the room above looked like, what was in it, or if any part of the plan actually made sense in the context of those things, but it was far better to have a plan to scrap than walk into an ambush with nothing prepared.
The first phase of the plan went perfectly. The girls climbed the building with the spider legs while Billy set fire to the door and pounded against it, frantically creating noise and chaos in the room above him. Kaya and Audelia had a bit of a scare when they noticed that the stickiness of the spider legs was starting to fail. As Audelia made her way to the ledge, she spotted Kaya’s spider legs giving out, and the little rogue began to fall. Audelia desperately extended her arm, managing to catch Kaya by the wrist in the nick of time.
Meanwhile, Billy heard the confused voices of men debate what they should do about the noise coming from below, and they wondered aloud at what it could possibly be. It was several minutes before they noticed the smoke, and by then, the panic was setting in.
And then, the girls poured through the window above, seeing the room, getting a read on the surroundings. The door was the centermost point of a strange occult sigil, some manner of pentagram, that was carved into the flooring of this room. Along the edge of the room were seven statues of beasts—demons from one pit or another—and men wearing cloaks were standing by the trapdoor, near the center of the circle, discussing what to do.
Audelia flew into the room in a rage, hacking and slashing limb from bloody limb as head, arm, and hand hit the floor, blood spurting from every eerie man in the room. The creepy men were poorly armed, each wielding only ritual daggers in self-defense, and as hard as they tried, they were useless in a fight against the warrior woman.
But one of them, in the confusion of it all, almost got the drop on her. That is, until the silent footfalls of Kaya, undetected, ultimately landed her just behind the man as he readied his strike. With a flick, the rogue slit the throat of the man and tossed him to the floor where he bled out unceremoniously.
The room was cleared, but something was wrong. As blood pooled in the cracks of the carved sigil, the seven stone demons’ eyes glowed a variety of reds—a blood ritual.
“Get your friend up here!” Kaya said, kicking the trapdoor open. Audelia leaped down into the webbing, guiding Billy upward as Kaya frantically darted her eyes back and forth from her two companions and the seven monsters waking up around her.
“We should have just climbed to the top!” Kaya shouted. “Dammit!” She reached down, pulling Audelia up, who had thrown a rope to Billy. The three of them pulled themselves away from the trapdoor and eyed the seven monsters surrounding them.
“I’m going to need an update,” Billy said, seeing the fresh bodies and the stone creatures coming to life.
“Monsters bad, living good!” Kaya shouted, brandishing two bloody daggers in her diminutive hands.
Billy smiled in spite of himself as the first of the monsters poised itself to strike him. “Got it.”
Chapter 6
◆◆◆
The air was thick with sweat and incense. Wizardly rituals had been cast by the swarthy cultists that now lay dead at the barbarian’s feet—though they were dead not by his doing. His formidable companion Audelia was no doubt their slayer, with the agile cutthroat Kaya supporting h
er from the shadows. The three of them made a deadly triad, but three against seven was a fool’s game.
Billy squinted through the lenses of his glasses as the demons encircled him and his party. The three of them took up defensive positions, their backs facing one another, as the creatures all readied their assaults. It was going to be a bloodbath, one way or the other.
The first of the creatures charged him, followed by another. They glided toward him with a lumbering fury, obsidian claws outstretched, eyes glowing like crimson embers. Their toothy maws each held a frightening array of razor-sharp teeth, seemingly filed to a point so fine that even the lightest of bites would make mincemeat of any flesh or leather it found.
Billy buried his ax in the head of the first, and Audelia pivoted with angelic grace to decapitate the second. Their odds increased in a single moment.
Kaya, on the other hand, found herself underequipped for the circumstance and was reduced to dodging and deflecting strikes with her twin daggers. Her prowess was magnificently feline, and she managed to manipulate the enemy with such finesse that none of their missed blows found an opening against Kaya’s fearsome new companions.
With two vicious strikes, the barbarian eliminated another two demonic creatures, but he became alarmed at a sudden realization: the eyes of the defeated had not extinguished their red glow. There would be time to address that later, though: four down, three to go.
By this point, the battle felt far less like the hopeless gambit it had started as. Perhaps it was that very feeling, that bit of self-confidence that pervaded the barbarian's ego and infected him with the sin of carelessness. The three demons attacked at once, one for each of the adventurers, and Audelia and Kaya managed to dispatch theirs—Kaya with great effort, stabbing both daggers through the thing's eyes. However, Billy's opponent evaded his first ungainly strike, ducking beneath his blow and having its claws and teeth sink sharply into his abdomen.
There was something there beyond mere pain. The barbarian's eyes dilated as he slumped to the floor. Even as the last demon was slain, pulled off him by Audelia, Billy felt himself dripping away into an abyss. His consciousness seeped into a void, not unlike the one where he first encountered the being he believed brought him to this strange world—this world that was now killing him.
But that patron of his was not here. Nothing stood before him but an endless black abyss on all sides. It was emptiness, but it was also clarity. For the first time since being here, Billy remembered his death. The first one.
He'd imagined that this world was some sort of afterlife, though he hadn't had any confirmation of it. He imagined that the perfect body and the rippling muscles might be some reward for a life well-lived, but that wasn't the case. He didn't know what they were for, but it wasn't a reward. Maybe a pity prize at best, but Billy hadn't died a righteous hero. He had died of a bee sting: anaphylactic shock. He was off his mother's insurance for the first time in his life and unable to afford an epi-pen, so he thought he'd wait. He'd get a job sooner or later, one that would cover the cost, and that would be that. But he didn't. Not in time.
He was stung by a bee on a walk in the park, and he died surrounded by confused onlookers recording his demise on their smartphones. Maybe one of them called an ambulance, but it didn't arrive before he lost consciousness, and he never woke back up.
Billy looked into the void and shuddered. He died an empty death, and he was dying another. And his death would likely end up compromising, maybe dooming, the two women he'd taken up arms with so rashly. Better that he'd come alone, but he hadn’t. Better that he died alone, anonymous—a stranger in a strange land and nothing more.
“That is not what fate proscribes you, though,” a voice said, and suddenly Billy had the impression that he wasn't alone anymore.
“Why can't I see you this time?” he asked.
“Irrelevant. You can hear me. Now wake up. You will find your wounds to be not as bad as you’d imagined.”
“Wait!” Billy said. “How can I get stronger.”
“I am your patron deity. Keep making me offerings of flesh and blood, and you will grow stronger. And find those cores. They will empower you beyond what even I can do for you.”
“One more question,” Billy asked. “Why did you choose me?”
Billy felt a smile, or the impression of one, as he heard the next words spoken to him. “Perhaps one day I will tell you. But there is no time, now.”
With that, Billy's eyes shot open, and he found himself cradled like a babe in the arms of Audelia as she looked at him with a surprising amount of worry.
“Oh, thank Ko'ra!” She sobbed with relief. “What happened? Your wounds have suddenly closed!”
“Is he alright?” Kaya asked curiously. “Can we get out of here before they... do whatever it is that they're doing?”
The barbarian's eyes darted to see what she was talking about. The heads and body parts of the demons shook, even groping and snarling, as the dismembered corpses started to pull themselves back together slowly, floating through the air toward one another.
“Nothing is ever easy,” Billy grunted, lifting himself up with the help of his two partners. His fresh wounds still stung, but they no longer bled. It seems his patron was also his guardian angel, but something told Billy he shouldn’t depend on that too often.
“How can we kill these foul things?” Kaya asked frantically. Her eyes darted nervously back and forth between the monsters and her allies.
“I have an idea,” Audelia said, “But it's a bit strange.”
“Strange beats dead. What is it?” Billy asked. Time was running out before they'd have to repeat the battle once again.
“Throw the cultists' bodies out the window,” she said, lifting one of the dead bodies onto her shoulder and leading the way as the monsters writhed and reassembled themselves on the floor.
Kaya and Billy shared a confused look but followed suit, each lifting a cultist up, dragging or carrying it to the window, and hurling it over the balcony.
When all the cultists were tossed out, the last of them hitting the ground outside with a thud audible even from this high up, they turned their attention back onto the monsters. They were half-reassembled, but still. No longer alive, their eyes black and cold, not the malevolent crimson it was moments before.
“Sweet,” Billy said, finally taking a breath of relief. “How did you know?”
Audelia merely shrugged. “It was a deduction,” she said. “Clearly, our killing the cultists in this ritual circle was the trigger of some sort of dark magic. It stood to reason that removing the bodies, and by extension the souls and blood from which the spell drew its power, we might disable the spell altogether.”
“Nicely done!” Kaya said, slapping Audelia on her backside. The warrior woman glared at the girl, who returned a meek, apologetic smile. Then, to Billy’s surprise, Audelia grinned and returned a slap onto the nimble thief’s rump, hard enough to make her squeal.
“In any case,” Billy said with a sigh, “Time is of the essence. They know we're here, so we'd better keep moving.”
“To the next floor, then?” Kaya said, gesturing toward a winding staircase in the corner that seemed to lead, unblocked, to the next level of the tower.
“I'm skeptical of anything so easy,” Audelia said, “But we'd be making fools of ourselves if we opted to simply scale the side of the building again.”
Billy was already looking out the window. “The stonework is smoother here. It's hardly an option, to be honest, even for me. We have no choice.”
“Up the stairs, then?” Kaya asked, unwilling to be the first to make a move.
“Indeed,” Audelia sighed. “Oh, but I wish we could rest a while. I'm so sore.”
Billy nodded. He was exhausted as well. Scaling this tower had proven to be quite the ordeal, and so far, it felt fairly pointless. Surely, they'd seen and done enough to report back to Grint? All this for a bag of silver and the vague hope of a core? It hardly seemed worth
it.
“We don't have to press on,” he offered. “We could go back.”
But both Kaya and Audelia fervently gave looks of disapproval. “I'd rather die than turn back now,” Audelia said. “We've come too far.”
“I haven't stolen much of value yet,” Kaya said. “I'm sure there's treasure at the top.”
“And an angry fucking wizard,” Billy added. “Don't forget that.”
The little thief laughed. “All the same, though, I have no doubts. We're tough. By Ko’ra, we’ve got this.”
Billy sighed, but he also grinned. He wouldn't back down, then, if they were so hellbent on the task. They knew this world better than he did, anyway. If they thought it was a worthwhile pursuit and that they could survive, who was he to argue? And what's the worst that could happen? He might die? Been there, done that.
Enough time had passed, anyway. He'd caught his breath. Still, before they pressed on, he figured they should have a look around. “Let's check the room out now that we have a minute, though,” he suggested. “I'll watch the stairs. Kaya and Audelia, you two have a look and see if you find anything of value.”
“Right!” Kaya said, but Audelia was already beginning her search by the time Billy had finished giving his instructions. They flipped over tables, rugs, and altars, and they investigated crates and chests stowed away in the corner. They were mostly full of scrolls and books that meant little to any of them, being written in a strange and unfamiliar script. Still, Audelia threw the most esoteric looking of them and placed it in her satchel. Meanwhile, Kaya, ever the perceptive treasure hunter, found a hidden switch on a candleholder that opened a compartment beneath a solid stone platform. Inside there was a beautiful jeweled sword and a crystal wand.
“I'll take the sword,” Billy said. “It's better than my woodchopping ax.”
“I don't know how you've managed with that thing,” Audelia laughed, hand on hip.
“Give me that wand,” Kaya said greedily, and she took it before either Audelia or Billy could utter a protest, though as it turned out they didn’t much care either way.
Billy the Barbarian 1: The Heights of Dread: An Isekai Sword and Sorcery Harem Lit Adventure Fantasy! Page 5
