The next day…
The Mick and I shimmered into view next to a circle of menhirs with a popping energy nexus in their middle, a sight I hadn’t seen for most of a year now. We both crouched back-to-back and circled about one another, looking at everything in the area.
It was autumn, the harvest season was upon us, and the time for great moves of war, at least by the living mortals, was drawing to a close. It was a time to work the fields, bring in the food, and fill the storerooms with reserves to make it through the winter that was going to be returning.
The grass was long and waving, but the mushrooms that had been here were still gone, although there were a few visible down below in the river’s watershed, beyond where Kris and I had bothered to clear.
That was a good sign. It meant the olthoi had not re-established themselves.
A fully functional Bronze Drudge Statue was up on the pedestal there, totally repaired and ready for a fight. We were looking to see if anything had established itself up here now, and the fact it had no recent battlescars either meant it was scaring stuff off from the town below… or something had taken control of it.
The Freehold forces did not penetrate this far north. Arwic was right on the periphery of how close anything wanted to get to the Drudge Butcher of Cragstone, and the olthoi were a constant presence, testing and probing to the south of their lands. Our farming the Prismatic Fields really seemed to annoy the Paradox Hives, which had increased their numbers, testing our limits and those of the native wild tribes to the south in response.
Eastham had become an exciting place to be stationed, but nobody wanted to take up residence in Arwic and risk a day visit by Bonecruncher. Patrols did stop by regularly to visit the Olthoi Hunter there, however, reporting that she was acting more and more natural as time went on, especially as she was kept in the loop on the Olthoi Slayer research and other reports on olthoi movements and activities.
The fact that she occasionally blurted out impossibly timely knowledge about olthoi movements here and there, and that she could trigger a once-a-day olthoi rush to give troops a real feel for fighting olthoi in an open field were both considered valuable military assets.
The soldiers fixed up and painted her house, and brought her some new clothes, too. She couldn’t leave, and so they had resolved to make her as comfortable as possible.
The fact they were getting bunches of excellent free armor off her as they turned in olthoi trophies was also extremely convenient. Coordinated efforts to make whole suits for the elites of the army were being made toward that end, buttressed by the efforts of the smiths, because we wouldn’t and couldn’t rely completely on her for such an important resource.
The Mick and I stopped in to visit her. I brought her a whole box of soft cookies… and the Mick made her some sizzling, salt-braised, finely seasoned and applewood-smoked auroch steaks on the grill in the best Aluvian fashion. Her near-drooling was enough to break her complacency programming, and she dug in with us, although I had to cut her food for her because she kept glitching in hesitation as her NPC programming warred with unscripted actions and responses thereto.
From there, we could have run to Holtburg, but I decided to save time and just Portal there so as not to lose the daylight.
The River Esper basically pointed right to the Crater if you followed it on its course from the northwest. So, it was a reasonable place to begin, and naturally it was where my Lived-Line had started on this world.
The Mick straightened up warily, looking about. “Seeing an’ smelling nuthin’,” he said, although he didn’t put down Bunita just yet.
“The odds something isn’t in the area, especially in the cave, is slim to none. We wiped and cleared the olthoi ‘shrooms and pretty much all the Summon points. You can hear the birds. There’s a lot more life here, and some tribe would take advantage of it.”
He strode away and around the menhir. “Banderlings,” he reported after a moment. “Tracks fresh, maybe two days old.”
“The only Newbie Dungeon that should be functional is in Soushi. We broke Yaraq and this one should also be busted, but I couldn’t be 100% sure of that at the time. I can now. We need to go in and check on it.” I pointed up the hill, hidden by the brush. “The exit was over there.”
---
“Aye, lots o’ tracks here, an’ ye kin smell the cookfires an’ shite. Wild tribe, don’t clean up after themselves well.” He waved a hand in front of his nose, then brought down his Mask to clear out the stench, as did I. “Do we announce ourselves?” he asked brightly.
“Of course we do.”
He straightened his girdle while sheathing Bunita, swaggering up to the ramped entrance to the Dungeon, and stayed there for a minute, hearing just the faintest scraping of nails on stone from below.
Then he roared out a blistering challenge in banderling which made pebbles roll down into the place, before sitting back with his arms crossed and a smug look upon his face.
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There were immediate howls, hoots, yowls, gibbers, and growls from within, and it took only a couple breaths for the first fighters to come boiling out of the guardroom below to confront him.
They slowed down when they got a good look at him, but still clutched their spears and waved them in his general direction angrily. “Isparian! What an Isparian doing, daring to challenge the Bugspearing Tribe!” the bigger one bellowed at him, shaking that spear at him.
More banderlings were coming up behind him. I eyed the bronze fur and stout builds of this lot, and the fact they had olthoi chitin as part of their crude armor.
This was a tough tribe, with some advanced members closing in on 100, the level at which they headed for the Direlands to undertake magical training as great warriors of the people.
The Mick was, however, completely unimpressed. “I come with proper challenge, and you come bearing weapons?” he responded in curt, sharp banderling, and flowed into motion.
The spears of the first two banderlings were batted aside, and one broke from the sharp slap of his hand. Then his palms were planted in their furry chests, and they went sailing, up, over, and out of sight, while every banderling rushing to support them turned their heads to follow them as they yowled and kicked and vanished from view in the brush up the hill on the other side of the cave entrance.
They looked back, and he’d already stepped back into his neutral arms crossed position. “Is there anyone else who wants to approach a proper challenger with their weapons out?” He interwove his fingers, and flexed them palms out.
The banderlings all flinched back and twitched when his knuckles cracked like rocks breaking.
The lead, biggest banderling stepped up, head rising, waving an axe at him. “Challenge rules for tribe! Not for Isparians!” he growled menacingly. “You-”
Whud, crunch, aieeeee…
“Is there anyone else who wants to approach a proper challenger with their weapons out?” the Mick repeated in exactly the same cadence.
The next one to step up, waving a heavy iron-plated, olthoi-spike-tipped club, seemed a little more hesitant…
--------
The Rantha school of Banderling Diplomacy had taught the Lord Mick well. A dozen ejected, unconscious, tossed-around banderlings later, the largest female finally wandered up without a weapon in her hand, glowered down at the beaten and bashed males all around her, and growled, “What Isparian want?” at the Mick.
“Gor, a cat with a brain!” he returned with a wide grin as she glowered at him. “We be having a need to go through this cave you’re squatting in, t’ the very, very back of it, an’ make sure that the Portal there coming in hasn’t been used. If it has been used, an’ we believe that you’ve been killing an’ eating the Isparians who came through, I’m going to take me Sword in hand an’ butcher every single damn one o’ you.
“If it hasn’t been used, we’re going to wreck the thing even further an’ then leave you in peace, at least until we kill that damn drudge in the city down the river, an’ then come back here to take the town we built back from you.
“If there’s been no Isparians come through, we take nothing an’ do nothing.”
“This be our cave, our lair, our territory!” she spat at him. “Do you think we allow outsider to tramp all over our place?”
“Yer that tribe that used t’ run out o’ the caves near where Tibri dwelled,” the Mick said, and now his teeth were still showing, but his smile had vanished off into the mists somewhere. “Ye were bandits back then, but just an annoyance, knew when to keep your heads down. I recognize yer clan an’ markings.
“You’re here now. Doesn’t look t’ be as many o’ ye as there were back then. Ye be not coming back from the dead. Ye be not healing so good.” The banderlings he’d taken down definitely were not getting back to their feet easily.
The banderling matron was a foot taller than him, but she backed up quickly when he took a step forward. “I am the Black Mick, an’ I will kill yer entire tribe at the drop o’ a hat. You are only alive because the lass behind me be allowing ye time to live here until we kill Bonecrusher an’ push back to reclaim what were taken from us.
“You be weak. I be strong. Now get out o’ me way or I will slaughter every one o’ ye an’ do me task wading through the blood on me boots.”
Yes, the Rantha Diplomatic method for the wild tribes was completely intact.
The matron growled urgently, backing away, and the other banderlings around scampered quickly out of our way, young and grown alike.
“Let’s go, lass.” Neither of us bothered to put up a light, as we didn’t need one, and we were plenty happy to utterly ignore the banderlings who thought we might.
I did lean close to the matron as I passed her. “Have the wounded males lined up by the entry when we emerge, and I will heal them before we leave,” I said to her.
She growled something unintelligible, but just watched us go, and not a one of them dared to get close or stay in our way as we headed inside.
------
They’d spread themselves through much of the place, with some rooms assigned for young males, experienced males, children, storerooms, and the like. It was a basic Dungeon, after all, and it was plain from the Mick’s story they knew and enjoyed living in them.
There were other Dungeons in the area, too, which also could have accepted them. That they were here, said something about the location… or something was occupying those places, some of which were far more spacious than here.
The chamber at the far end of the Dungeon was almost untouched, even the writing on the wall still intact, and only a few claw marks were on the ground. It had obviously been prowled and assessed, but there was nothing here but their unease that something powerful had once been present here, and it was best not to stay.
“So this was the Beginner Dungeon,” the Mick mused, looking back and around in interest. “Not how I arrived. Were spit out right into the middle o’ a bean field, I was, over in Lythlethorpe. Lots o’ people came through these places after the elders worked out how t’ channel the new arrivals through them…”
I was crunching the remains of the Portal on the wall and rendering it completely inoperable at every level, not just a little broken and burned-out. “Fortunate to come into a settlement, then, after listening to your uncle.”
“Aye, the arrivals started aligning with the towns after these places were settled and performing, as if drawn t’ them. Random drops o’ noobs inta the forests didnae happen much after that.”