Carver cuts a branch out of the way with his shortsword, and almost fumbles it in his bloodsoaked hand, then he listens for the sounds of some of his boys doing the same. He recalls why they’re all out here in the woods instead of spending their first night in Riverta cozily sleeping in an inn. The look on all of his mens’ faces, save for Sunner, is the same. That beaten, tired look only bandits and soldiers going two full days without sleep can have. Sunner, meanwhile, looks like he’s just eaten shit, and to be fair, after how hard Carver had thrown him to the ground in that stable, he might’ve.
Less than an hour. Just one hour, and Sunner managed to, in that little pea-brain of his, decide that trying to grab a girl off the streets and drag her behind a random building for some ‘fun’, or whatever passes for it to his moronic mind. Carver, and the rest of his boys, were all doing the usual thing men like them do when rolling in to a new town, negotiating prices for their horses with one of the local farmers, and casing the town for how easy it would be to steal them back, along with whatever else they saw that they wanted. Sunner hadn’t followed this plan, so after only forty minutes at most, the few militia guardsmen in the village had raised an alarm after a girl had come screaming to the center of town about a rapist.
Obviously, Sunner hadn’t decided to run for it by himself, of course not, that would make too much sense! So of course Sunner had come running back to the group, marking them all in the village’s eyes as rapists and scum. To be fair, they were. But also to be fair, they were trying not to let the village know that yet. Carver snarls at Sunner as he hacks another tree branch out of the way. Skivs had said he remembers a hill a couple hours walk from the village being marked on the map, so the group is heading for it to make a rudimentary camp. They hadn’t been able to sell off the horses, but they hadn’t been able to take them either.
That’s why he was covered in blood. If the horses hadn’t been killed, the village guards might’ve been able to use them to chase down Carver’s boys. That was why he and his boys were cutting new trails through a forest, trudging up a small hill, supposedly aiming for a clearing at the top of it. What a fucking mess. Carver mutters to himself, before he finally spots bare undergrowth and moss-covered stone up the hill in the distance, instead of just trees.
“A couple hundred feet, boys! Keep moving!” Carver listens to the groans of response from his men as he shouts the command, and nods to himself in satisfaction. Sunner might’ve fucked up, badly enough that Carver’s going to make him the camp bitch for a bit, but at the very least they’re all still alive, even if Shotty’ll need a couple days to nurse that spear wound and Cuts will need something similar for his concussion, but they are all alive.
As he steps onto the mossy stone, clear of the trees and undergrowth at last, Carver looks up at the overcast sky, and then back at the last of his men stepping out of the forest. He checks over each of them once more, both to make sure they’re all here, and to make sure he knows what all of the injuries they acquired and supplies they managed to carry are. Pidger, uninjured, has all of the medical supplies. Shotty, spear wound, upper thigh, still has his pack full of hunting supplies. Cuts, concussion, not carrying anything. Shit. Replacing those shovels and picks will be difficult. Sunner, wounded pride, carrying nothing, though admittedly the group won’t need the disguise kits since everyone knows who they are now. Case is uninjured, and has his case spell supplies, which is good, since without him, they have no source of clean water. Skivs has all of his books and maps in his pack, and almost all of the spare melee weapons. Lucky has two of the packs full of travel rations, and Bruce has the other two. Mace has his mace, and also all of the group’s spare clothes. Barb has his barber’s kit, and the axes and saws for lumber. Jeet has the bows, and the arrows, and his brother Seka has the tents and torches. Carver himself has all of the wilderness survival gear and dungeoneering supplies, and that makes thirteen, and only two injuries between them.
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“Alright boys, spread out, groups of two, make sure we’re the only ones living here, and find a good place to put down the tents. Break!”
--
“Boss, better ‘ome see ‘is!” Bruce’s voice calls from further up the hill, and Carver starts his way up to the bare stone, avoiding the cracks and holes in ground below.
“What is it, Bruce? Better not be another one of your ‘pranks’.” Carver plants his left foot firmly on a rock outcrop, and jumps for Bruce’s extended arm, letting the burly man pull him up to his level rather than walking around the sheer stone drop. He sees it immediately, and almost falls backwards due to his surprise.
Caves this big can’t be natural, right? Surely this can’t just be luck… Carver stares in astonishment at the open mouth in the stone hill, and checks behind him to see how much light is left in the day. After confirming that while the sky is gray, it is decidedly still in the afternoon, he looks back into the cave. The darkness stretches further than the light reaches, tilting downwards in a very slight incline, and Carver swears he sees a large, open area at the end of what he can see.
“Cave! Everyone, on me, light up torches, we’re going in!” Carver shouts his order to all his men, and draws his shortsword. He nods to Bruce, who draws his spear and turns around to help Lucky up. “We’re not going in till everyone’s here, but I think this might be our biggest stroke of luck in a long, long time, boys!”
Carver waits for each of the men to get into the mouth of the cave alongside him, and they pass torches around to each other while wildly speculating about what they’ll find in the cave. Apparently, despite being concussed, Cuts somehow managed to organize a betting pool while Carver was distracted by removing his backpack in favor of proper combat kit. Cuts announces that the current bets, collects a last minute bet of ‘a family of bears’ from Skivs, and announces the betting pool is closed before Carver has a chance to place his own bet. It would’ve been for goblins, and he reminds Cuts of that as he takes point. Once Carver takes the front of the line of bandits, the chatter stops, and they advance into the dark with a mixture of trained expertise and highly unscientific ‘poke it with a long stick’ approach to suspicious looking piles of rocks or things that might be spiders.
Yet, the group manages to get down to the open area Carver had spotted from the surface without incident. That’s not exactly a good thing, not encountering anything at all in such a perfect cave, but the small cavern is definitely unnatural, now that they have a clear view of it all. Carver spins around, taking in the proportions of the open cavern and it’s proximity to the surface. 100 feet below the surface, sheer stone, circular cavern, another cavern straight ahead, uneven but otherwise flat floor…
“This place was made with magic, this can’t have formed naturally. If I had to guess, some wizard used it as a hideout a long time ago, and we’re probably the first to be here in a couple dozen years. We’re checking the next cavern, form up!” Carver announces his deduction to the gang, silencing the chatter about the betting pool and if this will serve as a hideout with his words.
The next cavern is almost identical to the first in terms of the sheer, uneven stone, except its actual shape is narrower and longer, sort of like a hallway but angled downwards very slightly, like a ramp descending into darkness. As Carver waves his torch at the walls to his side, he spots the first signs of this place being used by anyone ever, an iron torch-stone mounted on the stone walls. He waves his men to look at it, and Lucky points out a few more further down, in an apparently regular pattern from about 50ft in and lower.
At about a full mile of horizontal movement, and what Skivs calculates to be about 300ft of descent, the stone tunnel just… stops. Carver notes that the tunnel had started to level out before it stopped, and it isn’t stopped by ordinary stone, but by what rather much looks like a cave-in of rocks and dirt, which is what the walls of this tunnel should be based on its location.
“It’s caved in, but whatever is beyond it, and why it’s caved in, I don’t care. It’ll be safe for use to camp up in the upper cavern if we block off the entrance to this tunnel at the top. Turn around, let’s go.” Carver orders the men about, but looks over his shoulder at the cave-in for a moment before he starts walking. “Case, once we’ve gotten our feet off the ground here, I’m gonna have you poke at this to see if there’s not more to these tunnels. I have a feeling we’ll either find a way to make it rich from whatever’s down there, or find a reason to run like hell.”