Chapter 68

Vitus

I heard the sound of something running toward us with speed.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

I stood, readied my sword, and silently gestured for the others to prepare. Magic flared and gathered on weapons or in the hands of casters. Protective shields buzzed alive, casting the dim cavern in several shades of color. Metal whispered against metal as weapons were drawn.

We were forty men and women strong in total now. Nearly every new adventurer who entered the dungeon agreed to help us try to mount a force strong enough to push in and find a way to the spawning room.

Everyone agreed this was highly unusual. Dungeons were strange, and dark mana did unpredictable things, but this… this felt less random than a typical dungeon. It felt as though the dark mana here had a more calm, ruthless kind of intelligence behind it. Increasingly strong waves of attacks? Enemies who had the restraint to wait until they were large enough in number to push in against us?

And the stories were trickling back of the Eclipsed deeper in the dungeon. A group who survived said a crazed man was on a killing spree, and by all accounts, he was absolutely dripping with dark mana. They said his eyes glowed purple in the darkness, and he fought like a dreadbeast.

I hadn’t admitted it to my subordinates, but I was getting close to sending a runner back to Thrask. While I had never personally witnessed it, there were stories of dungeons that defied expectations—dangerous, perplexing dungeons. And if we failed here, nobody in Thrask would know until beasts were swimming up from the harbor and killing indiscriminately.

It might be necessary to send for a Silver to clean this up, possibly even a Gold, though it would take a great deal of good fortune to find one on such short notice. It would also cost a fortune to hire their help, and even Theon may balk at the price, preferring instead to let some civilians die and have his guards clean things up.

Damn it.

I knew what my mother would say. She’d tell me to stop thinking about what would happen if I failed. She’d tell me to not fail. Simple.

I stood a little straighter, bracing myself for whatever was coming.

The footsteps grew closer and closer until I realized it was our scout. She had been gone for hours, and I feared she was lost.

“Fiona,” I sighed with relief as I lowered my shield.

Magic cut off, and people relaxed around the cave, but nobody went back to their places. They were eager to hear what she had to report.

The young girl was sweating and panting, but she kept jogging until she was in front of me. She raised a hand, snapping off a quick salute. “Sir, the rats have built some kind of defensive structure out of mud. There’s a… hag rat of some sort at the center. She’s summoning more and more of them. And, well…”

“What is it?” I asked, pressing her, even though I knew she was exhausted and probably just trying to catch her breath.

“I saw some of the rats joining together to form large golems three or four times as large as a man. They looked fearsome, sir.” Fiona shook her head. “I don’t think we have enough strength here to break it.”

I saw the uncertainty pass through everybody like a sickness.

“Then we hold!” I said, raising my voice for everyone to hear. “They gather strength and build defenses? Well, so do we. We’ll keep recruiting those who enter, and we’ll stand fast here to claim the lives of any of those beasts who try to escape this tunnel. It stops here,” I punctuated my words by slamming my greatsword into the dirt.

Some of the uncertainty had passed, but my little speech hadn’t completely erased it.

That was alright. So long as they stood with us here, our numbers alone would inspire a degree of confidence. For now, we would hold and hope that somebody strong enough came along to help us end this once and for all.

Brynn

We stepped inside the secret tunnel that ran along the main passageway. It was pitch-black, but Thorn produced a glowing stone that showed a hand-dug tunnel. I could see finger marks along the walls. Three fingers, not four or five.

I slowly raised a hand, touching one of the marks as I turned to meet Lyria’s eye in the flickering light of the glowstone.

“You don’t think…” I whispered.

“Grommets?” Lyria asked.

I nodded.

“It would make sense, right?” I said. “That could be why there are little windows in here. Those weirdos have been watching us…”

“We can worry about that later,” Lyria said. “For now, let’s just be happy we can borrow their tunnel.”

I nodded, but I was thinking about how the grommets could have known where to find us. I guessed it wasn’t crazy to imagine they assumed we would head for the dungeon. But… I pulled out the rock Grimbo had given me as a “gift.” When I pushed my senses into it, I thought I felt a faint hint of mana, almost like the knotted mana within the slave tattoos on our new friends.

You sneaky little bastard…

I had a vivid mental image of his hairy face with the big teacup eyes and flat, white teeth lined up in a mischievous, hopeful smile. He was planning to follow me the whole time, wasn’t he?

I had to focus on the approaching party, though. The two Iron dots and the half-greenish yellow dot had reached the cave-in, which was near where we were hiding.

Our group had headed away from the cave-in a little bit to reach a place where the hidden tunnels ran close enough to the main passage. Without much effort, we had been able to knock the wall down and gain entrance.

We used cave moss to cover the entrance we dug out. It wasn’t a perfect camouflage job, but we picked a space in the darkness between torches. Without looking for it, I doubted anyone would notice.

We all crouched low because the cave was grommet-height. It was claustrophobic, and I could see several thin support beams the grommets had dug around, like frail dirt pillars. If someone bumped into one in the dark, I imagined part of the tunnel would collapse on them.

Genius little peeping toms…

“Can you tell us any more of this coming threat?” Thorn asked.

The others were watching me intently.

“I have… an ability,” I said carefully. “I can’t say much more, except that there may be a significant threat coming our way. And they’re close. Two or three Irons. One of them is… something different. Maybe a Forsaken? I’m not certain.”

“That…” Thorn said slowly, “is a good reason to hide.”

“Why do we wait?” Zahra asked. “If they pose such a danger, we should be moving now.”

Ramzi nodded in the darkness. “She speaks wisdom, yes?”

Sylara shook her head. She had been watching me during the brief exchange. “He knows something else…”

I sighed. “There is one more problem, yeah. I can’t explain how I know, but this is the only secret tunnel we can access from our passage. You guys collapsed the one you used to come this way.”

“And…” Thorn said slowly.

“And this one leads one way. Straight to the dungeon’s heart. There may be another big threat there. So for now, we’re better off waiting to find out if this group is dangerous. If they aren’t, we let them pass and head back to the entrance. If they’re more than we can handle, we’ll escape deeper into the tunnel and take our chances with the other threat.”

Zahra folded her arms, dark skin glittering in the shadows. She gave a long look to Ramzi, who nodded. Thorn scratched his beard and shrugged. “Sounds like a plan to us, right?”

Sylara’s face was steely as she nodded.

“Lyria?” I asked.

“Your plans have all worked so far,” Lyria said slowly. “Sort of.”

“Her confidence rings,” Ramzi said.

I grinned as I referenced my map. The three Irons would be at the cave-in within minutes. And the dungeon heart’s guardian was dead, but the purple dot was just sitting there, refusing to leave the room. There was a small hope we could wait him out if we had to flee deeper into the tunnels. But we’d have to leave eventually.

If we had to collapse the tunnels behind us to escape the three irons, we’d be stuck with no choice but to risk the purple dot.

Dammit.

I pulled out my Silver Scream quiver and infused an arrow with Bombroot.

Lyria’s eyebrows furrowed. “Isn’t that the explosive one?” she asked.

“I’m hoping we won’t need it,” I said.

If we were lucky, the two Irons and the half Forsaken were just… passing through. It wasn’t the craziest thought, right? Maybe they had another reason for moving in such a suspicious way through the dungeon.

Maybe we’d all simply sit here, watch them pass, and laugh about how worried we were.

Rake

“Fuck.” I stared at the collapsed section of the passage, considering our options.

Morrivan was kneeling with his face to the wall, rocking back and forth. What little hair he had was falling out, making the man look like he was rotting alive.

Cassian leaned with one shoulder on the wall and the tip of his large sword on the ground. He rested his hands on the pommel, watching me.

“What?” I snapped.

“I’m waiting for you to say we should dig through.”

“Don’t you have some kind of ability to deal with this?”

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Cassian gave a shrug. “Nothing in my toolbox for moving rocks.”

“What is in your toolbox, anyway?” I asked through my teeth. So far, I had hardly seen the boy do more than lazily lift his sword and swipe at the occasional beast. No powers. Other than an obvious degree of strength and speed, it was hardly even clear he was actually Iron.

“That’s the thing about tools,” he said. “There’s no reason to reveal them until they’re needed.”

Obnoxious boy. I very nearly stepped into his shadow at that moment. Let him see how smug he feels with a dagger in his spine and another peeling away his skin.

Not yet. It could wait. I wanted to find fucking Helmet. The bastard didn’t even know how lucky he had been to avoid us so far. This was the last godsdamn passage. I knew he was down here, somewhere.

But what was the story with the collapsed cave? Had he blown himself up in a fight?

Damn it. I had hardly given the possibility any thought until now. Of course, though… The idiot was likely to get himself killed before I reached him. His voidsteel helmet could have already died right along with him.

I searched the cave-in, unable to see any clear way through. They must have been on the other side when this happened.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Helping me dig a way through here is beneath you?” I asked over my shoulder. I didn’t even bother asking Morrivan. The man was already raving mad.

“I’m not about to clear a cave-in with my bare hands,” Cassian. “You could go back to the entrance and see if anybody will do it for money. Those Azure Guard types might do it for honor if you ask nicely enough.” He was smiling. The fucking kid was teasing me.

He was going to die slow. Very slow.

But not yet. All good things came to those who waited. I could kill them all, but there was an order to things. Helmet first. The others could come after. I simply had to be patient.

“Want through?” Morrivan croaked.

I jerked my head back and saw the man was standing, eyes crazed. He was raising his arms and gathering magic.

Oh, shit.

I jumped out of the way just before a giant green skull with snapping jaws formed in front of him. Trails of wind-blown magic swirled in its wake as it roared forward. It slammed into the cave-in with a boom, sending noxious air blasting backward over the three of us.

I turned my back, covering my face and squeezing my eyes shut.

I felt the ground shake for several seconds and heard the cackling laughter of Morrivan.

When I looked, the rocks were blown forward as if they had been blasted away by a bomb. Several of them still trailed green smoke.

Morrivan had already walked over the cave-in and was holding a severed monster arm in one hand. He began chewing, then looked frustrated.

“Not to your taste?” I asked, dusting off my clothes and following through where the blockage had been just moments ago.

See? Keeping crazy people alive was worth it from time to time.

“No mana left,” he complained, throwing it down to the ground.

“Another Forsaken?” I asked, alarm bells ringing.

Fuck. If there was another Forsaken down here, Helmet was definitely dead. And we needed to be careful. I was already less and less sure I could handle Morrivan on my own, and I couldn’t count on the pretty boy to help me put him down, either. If there was a fully awakened Forsaken down here…

Morrivan gave a twitch. “They ate the dark mana,” he said. “Scraps of corrupted mana…” he made a sickening suction sound as he nibbled on part of the arm. “Not much…”

What the hell did that mean?

“Let’s go,” I said, making my decision. If we ran into trouble, I had two meatsacks to slow whatever it was down. I’d slip into the shadows and let their deaths buy me the time I needed to escape.

I had only made it a few steps when I nodded a strange indentation in the ground.

I knelt down, touched the dirt with my finger, and then sniffed. “Somebody was here. Recently,” I said. I could smell it now, too. Their stench was all around.

“Great,” Cassian said lazily. “Maybe this bullshit is almost at an end.”

“Just shut up and follow me.”

Cassian

They were both problems.

Rake, despite his obvious character flaws, was a deadly bastard. As far as I could tell, he could actually teleport from one shadow to another, which was an incredibly powerful skill. On top of that, he had the ability to make his victims bleed shadows, which he could animate into temporary ranged summons. The combination had a cascade effect, quickly overwhelming his enemies with damage if he so much as made a single cut.

And those were only the abilities he had shown. Everybody with a properly developed sense of paranoia knew to hold back what they could. I doubted he was showing off his best abilities to clear out easy Wood beasts. Chances were, the sneaky bastard was hiding something even more deadly than what he had demonstrated.

Morrivan fought with much less subtlety. He was a pure glass cannon, but damn did he have a cannon. If he had a wider range of skills, he didn’t bother to show them. His favorite was the giant poison skull that exploded like a bomb and also sprayed poison in a large area. While he was terrifyingly strong, I suspected he could be put down quickly if I got close. Unless he was craftier than he let on. It was possible the crazed man was hiding defensive abilities or a wider range of skills that would make him more of a challenge to kill.

Rake noticed the place where somebody had slept, but he missed all the other signs, unless he was choosing not to point them out. I saw hastily covered footprints and areas where the dangling moss had been torn down, probably to create some kind of bedding.

People had camped here. Based on what I could see, it was more than just the pair Rake was after.

My eyes drifted upward. I noticed it, then. Somebody had set up a falling net trap. It was almost perfect camouflaged with moss, and Rake didn’t seem to see it.

I slowed my pace.

An ambush, then?

Rake kept walking, head slowly swiveling as he looked for signs of our targets.

Morrivan sniffed deeply. “I smell them,” he said in his low, raspy voice.

Rake grinned. “We know you’re nearby, little rats. Playing hide and find, are you?” It made no sound when he drew both of his daggers. He crept forward, eyes sweeping the tunnel. “When we were kids, nobody liked to play that game with me… I was too good at it.”

“Five of them,” Morrivan hissed. “Woods. One more… something else,” he added in a low voice.

“Iron?” Rake asked. He didn’t even seem concerned, only curious.

“No,” Morrivan said. His forehead crinkled in confusion. “Something else,” he repeated.

Rake turned away, speaking loudly. “I’ll make you all a deal. Since I’m pretty sure one of you is Helmet, I’ll let all the others go. Just give me Helmet and you can walk. But if you don’t, we’ll find you. One of us will wait at the entrance of the cave. And the rest of us will keep hunting you down. We can smell you. If you think—” Rake’s head tilted. He had spotted what I saw a few moments before.

There was a suspicious section of cave moss that had been pushed into the dirt within a dark section of the tunnel. It was hanging over the wall, but a closer look made it obvious. Something was hidden there behind the moss.

Rake clicked his tongue, smiling as he crept toward the entrance. A few more steps, and he would be directly beneath that net. But what good would a net do against someone like Rake?

“Found you,” Rake whispered menacingly. “If I have to come in there to get him myself, I’ll be very unhappy. Send Helmet out to me, and I’ll let the rest of you rats keep hiding. How about that?”

“Wait,” a voice called from behind the moss.

Rake waited, a slow smile forming on his scarred lips. Morrivan sat down cross-legged and began to rock back and forth.

I kept my distance.

“Is your name Rake?” the voice asked from behind the moss.

“Why don’t you come on out? We can have a proper introduction if you’re so curious.”

A man in a horned helmet emerged from the moss. He took several steps until he was in the center of the passage, putting the net between himself and Rake.

Something in the man’s presence made me certain we found him. This wasn’t an ordinary Wood.

This was fucking Seraphel. A divinity Eros hadn’t seen for over three hundred years.

Bumps of gooseflesh rose across my arms and the back of my neck. My father’s reverence for the situation had seemed overblown, but now that I was standing here in front of him myself… I had to admit I was impressed.

Seraphel’s presence was different. He stood tall with his shoulders back and his eyes intense as he stared back at Rake. He was broad and and more muscular than a mage, but less built than a warrior. The thing that stood out most was the subtle, unspoken sense that he was in control.

No Wood in his or her right mind should have any reason to think they weren’t screwed in his position. I hoped his confidence wasn’t all because of that net between himself and Rake. Even if Rake really hadn’t noticed it, there was simply no way it would bridge the massive gap between the two men. Rake wasn’t just any Iron, he was highly skilled for an Iron.

An asshole and loudmouth, yes. But there was no denying the man’s abilities. I thought he could have possibly caught even a Silver off guard if they were having a bad day. Rake was that deadly. His Shadow Blood attack was incredibly powerful, too. I had seen it in action enough to know. If his enemies didn’t immediately stop the bleeding from a single cut, their body would leak shadow blood that would turn around and create fresh wounds. Within seconds, the skill would create a cascade effect, overwhelming the target.

What kind of plan could Seraphel possibly have to make him think they stood a chance? If anybody hiding in that tunnel was Iron or stronger, I would be able to sense it from here. Unless they were so much stronger they could hide their aura, but that would likely mean a Gold, or…

No. It was nearly impossible for a Gold-level adventurer to travel around without people noticing. Veiled auras or not, people would have recognized them and word would spread.

So why the hell did he look calm?

Then again… how had Seraphel and his friends known to hide? It was almost as if they had predicted we would coming. Maybe he really had some kind of trick up his sleeve.

I watched the two men stand still as they faced off, maybe only twenty feet apart.

“Helmet…” Rake said. “I told you not to betray me.”

“I took you for dead,” Seraphel replied.

I studied the man with the helmet. My father said he would most likely call himself Brynn instead of Seraphel. Apparently, divine names were like titles in an ancient language given to the gods when they ascended. By whom, though? I had no idea.

All I knew was that according to my father, Seraphel was known as “Brynn” before he was a god.

“Brynn” wore a tattered and mostly torn up tunic. His pants looked a little newer, and his boots and cloak were pristine. Probably self-repairing, then.

He had on a simple, horned helmet made of iron. He held a bow that looked rather impressive. In fact, the bow looked very impressive. Was that an epic? Maybe even… no. I wasn’t sure I ever even heard of a Wood with a legendary item, let alone a legendary weapon.

He had some vials of various colored potions tucked in belt loops at his waist, and a simple mace hung from his belt. From what I could see of his face, his most striking feature was his eyes. They had a kind of unwavering intensity I found unsettling. It was the look of a man who wouldn’t be stopped.

I reached out with my senses. They were still somewhat imprecise. Had he maybe reached Iron and already learned to veil his power to some degree?

I pushed hard, confirming there was no shield over his power. No. He was definitely a Wood. He was very close to Iron, though. Very close.

“You thought I was dead?” Rake asked, tossing a knife in a casual loop and catching it without looking. “Nah. The thing about me is I don’t like to die when I’ve got scores to settle. And I’ve always got scores to settle.” He caught the knife again and pointed it toward Brynn. “Starting with you and that pretty bow. And if you think I forgot about that voidsteel helmet of yours, I haven’t. I bet that’s just an illusion you’ve got on it, right? Nearly got your head popped off too many times and you decided to disguise it? Smart. But you don’t fool me.”

“Wrong,” the man said. “I lost the helmet. Somebody else threatened to kill me, so I handed it over. And the bow just looks strong. It’s only a rare. You can have it if you want, but you’ll have to come get it yourself.”

If that wasn’t an obvious trap, I didn’t know what was. But this felt like the prey unknowingly trying to trap the predator. Except for that fucking confidence. There was something to this man. It made me want to let things play out, just a little bit. I wanted to see what he was capable of.

“Gladly,” Rake said. With a subtle movement I almost missed, Rake threw one of his daggers underhand toward Seraphel. The attack was blindingly fast and should have caught any Wood before they could react.

Instead of sinking into his chest, a glowing blue square appeared in front of Seraphel. It shattered like brittle glass as soon as the knife hit but blocked the attack.

Rake paused mid-stride, head tilting. “Hm. Not bad, Helmet. I’ve caught Irons with that one. You’re faster than you look, eh?”

“You can still walk away,” Seraphel said carefully.

How had he blocked that dagger? It was as if he knew it was coming. And the shield ability looked like something a Heart class might have. My father said Seraphel had used a Soul class in the past. Would he really change his class? But I supposed it wasn’t unheard of for a Soul class to get a shield. Wiped memories or not, I probably shouldn’t underestimate a man who went on to become one of the nine most powerful beings on Eros.

I inched closer to the fight. If I moved too suddenly, it might look suspicious. So I kept my approach slow and steady, hoping neither man noticed.

“Walk away?” Rake laughed. “You know, I’ve never been a fan of walking. I prefer doing this.”

Rake vanished and began to rise from the shadow behind Seraphel, both knives poised and ready to strike.