After a short walk through right-angled turns, they came to a three-way intersection. Morgan looked down the corridors to the left and to the right. No sign of Trip, though he didn’t worry as the party interface showed he was still at full health.
He took an indecisive step forward towards the left-hand fork, when Trip appeared from the right passage. He arched his back and hissed towards the direction he’d come, then trotted down the left passage, looking back to see if Morgan was following. With a nervous glance down the other path, he followed Trip into the gloom.
The small shadow cat led the party unerringly down more winding corridors, choosing between paths with no doubt. Trip set a fast pace, causing Morgan to jog to catch up at points. After a few minutes of traversing the stone corridors they came to a dead end.
Morgan looked at Trip, eyebrow raised. Trip looked back, meowed, and then started pawing at the wall that blocked the end of the corridor. It wasn’t like earlier when they dropped into this place from the caves; an easy to spot patched hole, but a solid block wall.
“Trip, it’s a dead end. What do you want me to do?”
The cat meowed and continued to paw at the wall. The other beasts were wary of something now, something behind them all. Morgan listened as hard as he could, but apart from the scratching of Trip on the wall, and the occasional dripping of water, he couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
He turned to examine the wall. It was sturdily made, with square dark blocks of stone half a meter long. They were stuck together with thick lines of mortar. He looked to Trip once more.
“You want me to dig through the wall?”
Trip paused for moment to stare at him and blink, before letting out an insistent meow and starting to scratch the wall again.
“We really don’t have time for this.” Morgan announced, as he got to scraping the mortar away around one of the blocks with his now dull goblin blade. In the next couple of minutes, he made surprisingly good progress. The old dry mortar crumbled easily, and soon the block was loose. He gave it and experimental shove. It budged slightly, but there was more work to do.
He was so intent on his task that the first moan caught him by surprise. It came from the corridors, a ragged, wet and garbled sound. He spun to see the cats arrayed a couple of meters away from him in a protective line facing the dark corridor, tense with their backs arched and fur extended.
He turned to join the cats, readying his weapons. He took a step towards the line, before Trip looked back and growled at him. The black cat followed this up as he ran to the wall that Morgan had been digging at and let out a piteous meow. Morgan got the gist of it and retreated, kneeling back in his position at the loose stone.
The moans came stronger, more of them now. A discordant choir of rasping noise that echoed through the passage. He dug frantically at the mortar, cursing when his goblin sword got stuck under the stone, and switched to a thinner short sword. He tried the block again – more play, but still stuck. The sound of shuffling feet carried to him over the cacophony of groaning, and he looked back.
A figure rounded the corner with a limping gait, followed by another, and another, and another. Dressed in mouldy decrepit leather and rags of cloth, they peered at him with sightless milky eyes. Zombies.
[Identify – Cursed Flesh: Level 14]
[Race - Monster/Undead]
[HP - 1020/1020]
[SP - 560/560]
More came around the corner, a slow tide of shuffling rotted flesh. To his horror, his line of cats charged the approaching corpses. He gazed dumbstruck as Harriet’s fiery eye beam cut into the first zombie, shearing off its leg below the knee. Trip appeared on top of the toppling zombie, savaging its head. Ivycat cast a bubble shield on Scrap, who leapt, bounding off the falling zombie to fly in the face of another; claws whirling, rending at it’s eyes.
Trip vanished in a puff of darkness, and Tom charged into the fray with a mighty yowl. A rotting hand reached for the ginger cat but he easily dodged it, ramming the zombie in the leg with all his weight. It wobbled but did not fall. The arm reached again, and Tom spun and jumped, latching on to the arm and climbing it to the monsters' head before unleashing a flurry of claws.
Morgan watched his beasts assault the horde, thinking fast. The corridor wasn’t big enough for him to easily help without risking hurting his own cats. The cats were surprisingly holding their own, but he could already see over a dozen zombies in the approach, and there could be any number still around the corner. He had to get through this wall, fast. But first - he reached down the front of his shirt, grabbing the wrought dark Amulet.
Fumbling at the thing, he tried to activate it. “Cast!” he said, expectantly. Nothing. In his peripheral he saw Tom perilously close to having a bite taken out of him, but a hazy blue shield blocked the blow. His eyes flicked back to the amulet. “Activate! Go! Start!” he pushed at the gem, tried twisting it in its frame. Nothing. “Identify!”
[Identify – Amulet of Menincles]
[Aura of protection. All allies within 10 meters gain an arcane shield for 500 points of damage. Shield will reset 6 hours after depletion.]
[Use: Up to ten allies within 50 meters will enlarge by 50%, and their stats will be boosted by 25% for 5 minutes. Cool down: One use every 24 hours.]
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
He scanned the information again, gleaning nothing new. How did this work? No time.
“For Menincles sake.” he cursed, as he let the amulet fall back to his chest. And as soon as the name was spoken, a wisp of hazy green energy shot out from the gem in its centre, and his eyes opened wide. Scrap transformed mid leap, growing in a blink from a smallish cat to a size slightly bigger than Tom. His eyes sought out the ginger cat, and saw he was now more akin to a good-sized dog.
Morgan watched for a second as Tom bowled over one zombie and hamstrung another. Scrap raked repeatedly at a downed monster that was missing a foot until it stopped thrashing. He saw Trip take a glancing blow from a raking hand that threw him to the ground.
The wall, the block, he had to get back to it. In a flash of inspiration, he grabbed Elaine’s pickaxe from the pile of equipment he’d left in the corner.
Ignoring the sounds of battle behind him, he lined up the blow and struck. A chip flew from the block, and he struck again, and again. Soon, the block split into splinters and a good-sized chunk fell out of the wall. Peering into the gap, he saw a sliver of light and started scrabbling at the remains, clearing the stone splinters from the widening hole.
Scrap hit the wall next to him with a yowl, and he chanced a look around. Though they’d taken down a handful of monsters, the cats were being steadily pushed back by the overwhelming horde. They were just a couple of meters away now. Redoubling his effort, he used his sword to chip out the last of the mortar before leaning in and heaving himself against what remained of the block. With a grinding crunch, the last chunk of stone fell through to the other side. He threw the pickaxe and goblin sword through.
“I’m going in!” With a shout to the cats, he dived through the hole. Jagged edges painfully scraped his skin, but he made it through. He landed in a cobbled courtyard but didn’t take the time to look around. Springing to his feet, he called through the hole, “I’m through! Disengage!”
One by one the cats jumped through the wall, Tom coming through last, barely evading a grabbing hand. Morgan waited at the opening for the zombies to follow, swords in hand. He lopped off a searching rotten arm at the elbow, before looking around for something to barricade the gap.
The hole from which they had emerged was at the base of a three-storey tower, and a few meters away Morgan could see a thick looking door with a heavy wooden draw bar blocking it shut. Even if he’d have found the exit door, he’d have never been able to get through.
Rubble was strewn about the small courtyard; blocks having crumbled from the surrounding walls. A rusted portcullis featured in the opposite wall, leading out of the small fort. The remains of a wagon lay in the centre of the space, and he told the cats to guard the hole while he examined it.
The wood of the wagon was almost all rotted through, but the solid ironbound wheels were still largely in one piece. Each wheel came up to his waist in height, a solid mass of boards ringed with metal, and he figured that was enough to plug the gap. Attempting to push the wagon was out of the question, as the axles were rusted to the frame.
He looked back at the hole in the wall, to see the cats had slain a zombie that had tried to crawl through. Its mangled head stuck out from the wall and its body temporarily plugged the hole. With some effort and a sword, he managed to pry a wheel free and roll it over to the gap. A few gathered blocks later and the blockade was solid enough.
Now that the tide of zombies was cut off, he took a better look around at the small fort he’d found himself in. The courtyard was surrounded by walls five meters tall, in various states of disrepair. On one side, the tower loomed over the space, and opposite sat a squat gatehouse with the gates broken open, smashed in some previous encounter. However, the portcullis was down, blocking entry and more importantly for Morgan, his exit.
Panic rose once more within him. He didn’t know how long it had taken him to get out since Stacks message. Somewhere between half an hour and half a day, he had no way to be sure. What he was sure of, was that he wouldn’t, no, couldn’t make it back in time. Ever since the cave collapse in the matriarchs' chamber, it had been too late, he’d just been too busy, too stubborn to realise it.
Even if he found a way out, he had no idea how to get back through the wall. The gateway could be miles away in either direction; and combined with the journey from there back to Caslon, it was impossible to do in the four or five hours he had left.
With a sigh, he sat down on a block that formed part of his makeshift barricade and tried to relax. With the muted sounds of groaning and shuffling coming from behind him, he thought about his time here. He expected despair, anguish and tears, but instead he felt accepting, oddly grateful.
It had truly been a once in a lifetime opportunity. He’d seen grass and trees in abundance and walked through them bolstered with a purpose that he’d always lacked. He’d met good people, friends even. He’d tried foods he’d never have been able to get his hands on in reality, learned how to swing a sword and fight.
Sure, he’d died a few times, and he was sure it had been both painful and horrifying, even if those feelings were remarkably absent from his memories. Sure, he’d been here under duress, but it had been amazing, so much more than he’d ever experienced, had hoped to experience.
He looked down at his cats and his heart did hurt then. He’d had them – known them only for a couple of weeks, but it felt far longer. He’d watched them grow up from kittens into a band of warriors. What would happen to these cats once he was gone? Though, it wasn’t as though they were real anyway, right? Would they just cease to exist? A single tear fell down his cheek as he thought of Luna. He wouldn’t even be able to say goodbye to the angry little grey cat.
It didn’t matter of they were truly real or not, flesh and action made of code in someone else’s dream. They had been real to him. They had been his companions, his charges, his friends. They would always live on in his memories. But that just made it hurt more.
He absently stroked the beasts as he reminisced, wincing as the Ivycat clambered her way up his shoulder to lie on his head. Yeah, he’d miss this lot. Perhaps he’d get a cat when he woke up, though he wasn’t sure how his family's dog would react. That, and he’d probably be dead in a year, and it wouldn’t be fair to the cat to adopt it and then die shortly after. If he had the energy, maybe he could try to volunteer somewhere that looked after cats?
He leaned back against the wagon wheel and closed his eyes. He was tired. It’d been a long day. For a few minutes he dozed, reliving his recent adventures and circling closer to sleep when a message appeared in his vision. He sat bolt upright as he read it.
[James – Morgan, hi. I’m James Almiter. I’ve been in contact with Eleos and they have acceded to my request to buy out your contract. I caution you to be circumspect about revealing this information to anyone, as it’s not usual protocol. I will not force you to do anything, but I have your contract for six months and if you would have me renew it, make your way to the centre of the badlands to a place known as Ellness Cent. You will find me there. Be warned that if you do wish to meet me, the way is dangerous and full of trials. Take some time to become stronger before you attempt it. If not, enjoy your time and I wish you the best. Regards, James.]
Morgan’s exhausted mind span. Who was James Almiter? This stranger had bought out his contract? How and why? It was such a change in gear that he stalled for a minute while the news sank in. Six more months, regardless of whether he went to go find his mysterious benefactor or not.
He sat dazed, mechanically stroking the cats that surrounded him, ignoring the sounds of the zombies meters away. So, his story, for what it was worth - it wasn’t at an end. It was at another beginning.