Sunday, April 28th, 2069
Sprinting in mining boots that were practically falling apart wasn’t comfortable nor quiet. Each footfall from everyone in the group sounded like Mining Pick’s hitting stone, and my own steps carried a distinctive metallic noise on the left foot.
My brain told me it was my imagination, since my heartbeat sounded like a drum to my own ears as well. I’m sure it was only sounding a marching cadence because of the grunts and guttural cries that seemed to be right on our heels.
The worst part was that my body and mind were also fighting a war. With my Strength Stat I could push off the ground harder and likely outdistance the others, making it to the ridge and around the corner to the safe spot sooner. But with my Recovery Skill, and unlocked Stat I had the greatest chance of survival if they caught up to us.
My father was still the issue. In that I was literally shoving him with each of my own ‘sprinting’ steps to keep him in front of me. I considered shouting at him to move or stop fighting me but felt that could make him ‘dig his heels in’ both literally and figuratively.
The lighting changed and I knew we’d entered the animal pens chamber. I could even see the backs of Jarred and Willa running through the archway to the Fishery Chamber and Lake it contained. My dad also noticed the change and attempted once again to get behind me. Admittedly, with adrenaline coursing through my blood and the anxiety of the gorilla-like vicious-cannibalistic humanoids closing in from behind—I probably shoved him a little harder than I should have.
Why do I think that?
Well it looked like he jumped, flew over two edges of the depressed circular pens and landed just before the archway.
I saw him catch himself and start to turn to look back at me, so I shouted, “Husking move! I’ll toss you again if you don’t get on that husking ridge!”
Excessive. Probably, but I was already at war with my own desire to go faster and maintain my current ‘heroic’ spot in the back. Thankfully, Smegma flew up beside my father and while I didn’t hear what was said, I did see Gary’s legs unlock as he resumed his sprint.
My ‘shove’ had placed him ahead of Dave, and my father did wait at the ridge for him to go first, but thankfully he was right behind him.
The guttural cries and grunts grew both louder and gained more reverberations. I knew that meant they’d entered the larger animal pen’s cavern and clenched my fist on the handhold as my desire to move faster screamed at me loudly enough that it almost overrode Mental Fortitude.
I was only four feet from the start of the ridge, but couldn’t go any faster because of my father, Dave, Willa and Jarred. Each moved at what felt like glacial speed to me, as they desperately searched for handholds and failed numerous times before discovering one.
I couldn’t see this happening but I could hear the heavy breathing and scrabbling hands repeating itself over and over again. I managed two more small shuffles of my feet before I heard the grunts truly for the first time.
When the White Goblins had been on shore ‘conversing’ they had been quietly grunting in comparison to whatever this was. It sounded like a mix between a Warhog, Manticore and Frenzied Gorilla—with a dash of something neanderthal too. Like a guttural celebration of catching sight of prey. My eyes found the milky white orbs of the scarred Goblin I’d seen at the top of the stairs, and I watched, horrified as gobs of saliva dripped out of its mouth before splashing down its already slicked legs, or onto the lake stones beneath it.
For an instant, I thought time had frozen as I stared at the beast, its arms rippling with bulging, overexcited muscles. The comparison of its physique to that of apes grew more apt as those arms twitched spasmodically, seeming to want to beat its chest, but being just humanoid enough to stop the urge.
Then the moment shattered as the next White Goblin entered the room. The scarred one flexed its knees and then pushed off the stone, hard—sprinting at me with such ferocity that I flinched, even though he was twenty meters away. Thankfully the group had inched farther out onto the ridge and I was able to shuffle another two to four meters out, as the Goblin advanced. Surely, it would have to slow down to—
It leaped when it was ten meters away, and my foot slipped as my leg spasmodically attempted to jump up, forward, sideways or anyway that wasn’t in the path of the flying husking Freak.
I couldn’t breathe. My fingers cracked the rocks I was holding as my grip tightened. My heart even stopped hammering as my wide twitching eyes watched the ascension of at least three hundred pounds of Goblin. His leap was impressive, easily carrying him five feet above the stone, and propelling him forward with even more speed then he had when charging.
However, five feet of rise, with ten meters of distance, just wasn’t enough. My brain cataloged all this in the background, informing me of the discrepancy, but in something of a muted whisper that couldn’t drown out my screams of overwhelming terror.
It wasn’t until the milky-white eyes I was staring into fell below the height of my own and widened comically, that I managed both a gasping lungful of air, and to listen to that logical voice. The White Goblin continued to lose to gravity right until it hit the wall under the ridge, and below myself. It sounded both like what I expected a three hundred pound muscled Freak hitting a wall would sound like, and like nothing I’d ever heard at the same time.
Either the entire cavern shook or my section of the ridge shuddered, as a resounding thud hammered noisily through the air and stone I was desperately holding onto. The part I hadn’t been expecting was the frantic scrabbling, grunting, and shrieking that accompanied it. I could no longer see the beast and had to imagine he was attempting to find hand and footholds to climb up to me.
I moved further down the ridge, before I leaned back and peered over the edge. Sure enough, the creature was jumping up and down from the floor fifteen feet below the ridge, trying to get to us. Relief flooded my limbs, causing them to almost feel weak—when compared to the adrenaline induced hypertension from split seconds before.
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It didn’t last long, as I heard Dave shriek. My arms tensed again and I spun my head around to try to find my friend. I couldn’t see him, but knew he wouldn’t make that kind of sound without a reason. A reverberation through my hands accompanied by the sound of rock hitting rock clued me in to the projectiles.
I spun back around to shore and found a group of twenty White Goblins winding up to throw stone tipped spears. I also saw ten of them in various stages of retracting arms from a throw, or standing empty-handed. like they’d already thrown.
My eyes found the airborne weapons just a moment before one almost skewered me. I managed to heave on my right arm, and pull myself a foot in that direction, which was only enough for the spear to collide with my lower left back, and pierce right through. Thankfully, the wall was also stone, so it didn’t pin me in place like it might have with wood. But, when stone hit stone, it caused vibrations—and while I hadn’t felt pain when the spear entered my back, drove through my muscles, organs and out my front—I felt it now.
The shaft of the weapon vibrated violently, sending ripples of cascading agony screaming through my body to my brain. I managed to turn a shriek of pain that might have been similar to Dave’s into a roar of challenge, as my body attempted to seize up and I fought it. I would not fall off here. I knew what waited below!
I would not fall! I repeated that mantra as I clamped my teeth shut and clenched my jaw. More spears thudded against the wall, and two other screams from my group echoed over the cavern as I rhythmically planted one foot to the right, and shuffled.
My grip, only maintained by my increased Strength, had no feeling—each handhold was created by chipping away rock with my bare hands until my fingers dug in, rather than finding anything existing. I was numb, and so when my lead arm swung toward the wall and didn’t hit anything, I didn’t fully notice or comprehend what it meant. I started to shuffle and my foot found empty air. I was going to fall—my brain was certain of it. My body, while stronger than it had ever been before couldn’t recover from this—
My momentum changed and I was heaved around the corner by strong hands tugging at my arm that had just missed the non-existent wall, because I had unknowingly reached the end of the ridge. I swung for just a moment out above the water, and even heard a few splashes as multiple spears either missed me and sank into the deep, or the ones that bounced off the ridge and wall did.
Then I realized that it could also be the spear that was still protruding from my back…
My father swung me, allowing me to dip below the stone ledge before heaving me up like a kettlebell. My weight was not distributed like a kettlebell however, and so my dad was forced to release his grip on my arm, or risk overbalancing and tipping into the water. I became airborne for just a moment, unsure if I was out above the lake or above the stone ledge.
That question was answered as my injured back collided with hard stone, snapping the shaft of the spear off. Like the vibrations from the tip hitting stone, the agony redoubled, even as I was dimly aware of rolling twice before I dumped enough momentum. My body continued to scream its distress through nerve endings that were likely severed from a semi-sharpened rock-spear.
“Your Recovery is already working to heal your kidney. Dave needs you, now!” Smegma insistently whispered. “Do not close your eyes. Stand up.”
I heard him. Certainly. And I wanted to do as he said, but even the thought of moving sent renewed cold glass slivers screaming out from my wound. Was the spearhead still in there?
“It isn’t. Now stand up! Dave doesn’t have a Recovery Skill!” I managed to plant my hands beneath my shoulders. The urgency in Smegma’s voice moved me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible even milliseconds before.
Smegma continued to coax me, making sounds of encouragement, or berating my laziness anytime I even hinted at pausing or collapsing.
My mind fought my agony-riddled body, and might have lost. Luckily one of the two had a high ranked Skill assisting it. Sure, I crawled the last bit of the way to my friend, but husk anyone who says I didn’t make it there as fast as I humanly could.
My numb hands didn’t register the sensation of wetness that they rested in toward the end of my trek. My eyes were focused mechanically on the ground, but my next ponderous crawling ’step’ ending with a sickening splash, finally broke through my pain-fogged brain.. Glancing up I took in the strange gleam of greenish black liquid and traced it back to Dave’s leg.
A spear protruded from it. Dave was facedown and unmoving. How my friend had made it around the corner, I couldn’t say—but the need for Smegma coaxing ended with that sight. Dave was dying, and I was kneeling in his blood.
“Pull out the spear,” Smegma ordered, getting my father’s attention. “Use it to keep any Goblins from getting around that corner. Brodie,” I froze my hand already halfway to Dave’s leg. “That’s right. Heal him.”
My eyes cataloged a fountain of blood that followed the spear, a fountain I thought was only reserved for theatrics in movies. The sight made me twitch even as I jerked toward the sucking noise and leg wound that caused it. Shaking from fear and exhaustion, my hand hit Dave’s hamstring even as I began pumping my Mana into Minor Heal.
My hand glowed green, adding its own soft light to the abundance coming off the moss-covered snake I knew was there.
“Pull a cooked Mirror Fish out of your storage,” Smegma ordered, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking to me. He actually repeated himself before the connection sparked. As soon as I pulled out a steak, Smegma continued talking to someone else. “Thaw it with your hands. Then flip Dave over and feed it to him.
“In fact, pull out all the cooked Fish you have. It needs to thaw.” The Demon said calmly, seeming to change his mind. I managed to obey but felt my eyelids flutter, then closed. “No!” Smegma shouted. “Someone smack him!”
Something lightly hit my cheek, and I attempted to lean on it. “Not lightly, Willa! Hit him hard. Wake him the husk up!”
An electric crack sounded from inside my ear, from my jaw—from my scalp? The electricity permeated each pore of my skin individually and jolted me awake. Smegma’s black eyes stared into my own. “Do not fall asleep. Each drop of husking Mana you regain goes into Dave! Willa, keep smacking him if he even husking blinks.”
At some point Jarred flipped Dave over and fed him—already chewed Fish? Thankfully, at some point the need for Willa to keep smacking me let up, as my own wound passed some sort of threshold, allowing my body to feel exhausted but not catatonically so. I saw why the Fish was already chewed as Jarred spit a mouthful into a hand and then transferred it to Dave’s mouth.
He then massaged his Adam’s Apple like I had for my uncle in the cavern to get the potion down his throat. Dave’s throat moved and I managed a weak smile in celebration. He was alive—
My own stomach shuddered violently and then growled insistently. “You need to eat something too,” Smegma said. “That passive Skill might not use Mana, but it sure uses your body's existing biological systems, which need fuel. Grab some fish and let it thaw in your mouth.”
I picked up a cold Fish steak and broke off a semi-softened corner, before I heard a splash which drew my attention. At the corner stood my father with the bloodied spear from Dave’s leg. I could see him leaning back from a thrust—and tilted my head before Smegma’s face filled my vision.
“Eat, moron. Dave needs your continued healing. Your father will keep knocking the White Goblins into the lake!”
A voice echoed out from our corner of the ridge and shelf. The same corner we all hid around.
“I’m not sure how much longer I can keep knocking these bastards into the lake!” Brodie’s father shouted.
“You husking will do what must be done. We don’t let our Sect-mates die if we still draw breath.” Smegma growled.