CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
MEETING AT LAST
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I could walk through walls. It didn’t fully hit me until I’d run through the caves for almost ten minutes.
I took the time to look back and take in the place. I’d need to know what it looked like to get back here if I wanted to have a chance of saving all those people. The prison was rounded, but I couldn’t see much of its exterior as the building was lodged into a cave. The entrance looked like the doors to some gothic cathedral, stone gargoyles lining steps that led out into wide, rocky cave tunnel. The wide double doors were almost ten feet tall, enough to accommodate even the demon knight. They were even more impressive from the outside, lit with hundreds of torches.
An underground fortress surrounded by stone, save for the entrances.
I ran as soon as I had a good memory of that round tower wall fixated in my brain. I didn’t have much of a choice. The entrance had been guarded, and the platoons of imps and their shaman leaders noticed me almost immediately. They’d been surprised to see a shadow leap out of their prison and run straight past them, but they’d certainly been able to see me. I wasn’t invisible in this form. Just intangible. It felt like I was a Photoshop layer with the opaque setting knocked down to fifty percent.
I could only assume that meant the demon knight had also seen me, but he’d decided I wasn’t worth chasing when his black staff’s ability had caught all the others.
‘Now they’re all going to be sacrificed in those lava basins while I’m lost underground!’ I thought miserably while I ran.
I had to get back to the surface. I had to get Theo. Call the cops. Fuck, could the cops even handle something like this? What about the army? Could they already know? With so many people kidnapped, I wanted to assume they had to, but with them being from all over the country… maybe not?
I sighed. I had to focus on practical matters. What was my agenda? First, I needed to get to the surface. To do that, I would need more light and more speed to outrun any of the creatures down here.
To address that, I dumped four of my new points into dexterity which my class was supposed to rely on heavily, and another four into intelligence if I needed to dole out more traps. I thought I’d need them more for the light than the enemies. Surprisingly, I still had more points remaining and another skill to distribute, but I decided to hold off on that for now. I did split the last four points between constitution and dexterity, though.
Luckily, I’d leveled up one more time between all the skeletons and the gorilla dogs, but I hadn’t noticed in the heat of battle.
To my surprise, the points in dexterity had a noticeable impact. Where before I might trip on the rocky tunnel floors, now I gracefully flowed over them. Not perfectly. I still tripped plenty inside the rocky cave with the low light, but there was a noticeable difference, and soon I was leaving the army of imps and demon jailers in my dust.
Phase was incredibly taxing on my batteries, and I had to drop it almost as soon as I was out of sight of the surprised imps, but I kept running. To my shock, a few arrows had snapped by my head when I escaped, fired from a new type of demon that I hadn’t seen before. Their skin blended with the dark caves, though, and I hadn’t gotten a good look at them.
The caves were occasionally lit by more of those burning torches. Unfortunately, where there was light, there were usually imps.
The caves forked almost incomprehensibly, and for the first few choices, blind panic made my decisions for me, usually choosing the darkest options. I made more tactical decisions when I was sure I was no longer being chased, but they were barely better than picking at random.
The whole cave system had a mixed feel of natural and artificial. The tunnels seemed like they’d been hollowed out, primarily due to the lack of stalagmites, but the vast caves they opened into felt more like what I’d typically expect to see underground.
Unfortunately, I had no memory of how I’d gotten down here. I didn’t think I could be all that far from home, but the places that some of my fellow prisoners had claimed they were from had me worried. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep after that imp had cast its spell on me. For all I knew, I really could’ve been dragged to Florida or Montana.
“If I were watching me in a movie right now, I’d probably be yelling at how stupid I was being,” I murmured aloud.
I came upon another massive cavern, this one as empty as the last two had been, and was forced to use a few of my traps to get a little light. I wished there was some sort of night vision spell, but no such luck. Strangely, despite the lack of light, my status and skill screens were perfectly visible if I wanted to look at them.
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Name: Rio Tande
Class: Rogue
Strength: 4
Dexterity: 12
Constitution: 8
Wisdom: 11
Intelligence: 20
Charisma: 14
I needed to slow down. I needed to move fast and get to Theo as quickly as possible before returning here. I needed more of these abilities, but mostly I needed a machine gun and a boatload of ammo. I needed to think calmly and rationally, but now that I finally felt somewhat safe, the conclusions I was coming to were pissing me off.
Theo knew.
The Imps had blue blood. Eerily similar to the blue speck I’d seen on the shower ceiling. That might’ve been a coincidence but added to the backyard burnings and the gun being gone…? Theo already knew about the imps.
I sighed. He’d just invited me to the Min’s place. Extremely out of character for his antisocial ass. Following the rabbit hole, assuming he’d met Seok or Narae doing something in the valley was a safe bet. Maybe he’d been planning to tell me, or maybe it was just a lucky break for him to make a friend while down in the ravine.
Maybe I’d never know, but it was blindingly clear that he knew about the Imps, at least. He probably already had a class of his own.
Well, that was for the best. At least he probably wouldn’t get kidnapped like I had been.
‘Though I’d have been fucking fine if my damn gun were where it was supposed to be!’ I thought, enraged.
On the other hand, If I had, I probably never would’ve known about the kidnappings. I might’ve never taken this seriously. Come to think of it, if Theo had just told me there were imps in the holler, I probably wouldn’t have believed him. The more serious he’d have been, the more sure I’d have been that he was setting up a joke.
Even he might not know just how serious this was though. I didn’t know why they were kidnapping people from all over the country, but now that I knew, I had to do something about it.
I took the darker paths. The good thing about my traps was that in the pitch black of some of these caverns, the blue light reflected off the shining ceiling with a certain majesty that beggared belief. I didn’t have time to enjoy it, but I decided to keep following the darker tunnels until I found a way out.
Two more tunnels, two more massive caverns, until I finally heard something unusual.
The low “Burrr” noises that the imps typically made weren’t there. Instead, high-pitched cries of battle echoed from down that particular passage. Was… someone fighting them?
My heart leaped. If Theo knew, he probably would’ve come down here for me. Could it be?
I hadn’t been able to recover much – ugh – mana since I’d been forced to keep using traps for light. Scrabbling around in the dark was preferable to dying in the lit passages in my mind, but I thought I had to risk it.
I crept into the wall torch's light, wondering how they kept these things lit. Was there an imp janitorial staff relighting the torches that burnt out?
I decided to chalk it up to more magic and continued creeping closer to the sound of fighting. The hall was empty, so I assumed all the imps had entered the next big chamber.
The cries must’ve been loud because the tunnel was surprisingly long. Sound echoed down here, and I made sure to be as quiet as a mouse as I reached the tunnel's edge.
I peered out cautiously, not sure what to expect.
There he was. Only it wasn’t the Theo I knew. Instead, he’d been replaced with some cosplaying knight reject. A wooden circlet adorned his head, and he was swinging around a glowing morning star. He was wearing a fucking breastplate. Occasionally he threw out strange silver ankh devices that were followed by a rapid-fire burst of blades that cut through imps like butter.
Despite all that, he wasn’t winning. He was overwhelmed. There must’ve been fifteen imps and at least two shamans circling him. I watched in mute fascination as he pulled out a gun – my damn gun! – and fired four shots at one of the spellcasters, all of them missing, before he held up his hand, and a crowd of roots sprung out of the earth to capture the imp. The thing’s fireball flew wide and killed one of its allies while the enraged shaman did its best to get free of the roots, but Theo had his hands full already as they began to swarm him.
To my horror, two goblins leaped up on him from behind and sliced at his back. The first dagger glanced off his armor with a spray of sparks, but the second one managed to draw blood and a scream. That was enough to snap me out of my shock.
What the hell was I doing sitting here watching!?
I leaped into the room and threw two traps as far as possible. The devices sprang to life and began firing bolts of ice that were much more effective against the little imps than they had been against the demonic Jailers and the Gorillas.
“Teddy!” I screamed.
The man blinked, momentarily distracted. A bolt of fire slammed into his arm for his lack of concentration, and he screamed as he fell to the ground.
“Rio!” He shouted. Despite his smoldering arm, he got back to his feet, kicking a stray imp off himself before backing a few steps away. He pulled out a red vial and downed it during the moment’s surprise my entrance had given him.
I wasn’t idle either. I was dangerously low on mana, but Theo had been busy. I dashed from one imp corpse to the next, collecting the small piles of gold and rapidly restoring the needed resource with Greed’s Reward. Each time I felt my mana return enough to generate one, I threw a trap, and soon the whole room was filled with the sound of frozen imps.
Tears were leaking down my eyes as I ran. I wasn’t going to die lost down here.
Theo was here. He’d found me.
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