Chapter 22 - Kiril

I was having trouble believing it, but it was indeed the crippled guy I slashed earlier, coming out of a big hole between the ground and the cave's wall, crawling with his human hands. My warning was more than clear: don't come back at me unless you want worse things to happen to you. He already saw what happened to his other friends. Did he bring more of them? Or was he now more confident because the webbed man would come help him?

The crippled man screeched quietly and waved his tired-and-scratched-from-the-rough-terrain arms, hastily signaling me to come closer.

I was confused, but I decided to do it anyway. If he tried to land a surprise hit, I would be able to take him out quickly and silently without a problem, so there was no real danger.

"What are you doing? Where are you going, idiot?" Guen asked when she saw me follow the odd, crippled creature.

I put my index finger on my lips, telling her to be quiet and with my other hand, I signaled her to follow me, just as the crippled fiend signaled me to follow it.

The crippled guy clumsily turned around and went back into the hole. I crouched and went in, following it, with Guen coming along, close behind me.

We ended up in some kind of long, fiend-made tunnel, barely big enough to fit a crouched person inside it. We followed the fiend to wherever it was taking us. It was not too close to where we were, which was not something I quite appreciated, as the exit/entrance was right there in front of us a few minutes ago.

Eventually, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Which was good, but I did not like the fact that the light was coming from beneath us.

Ignoring the commonly heard advice of "don't go towards the light," we did. There was a hole towards wherever the guy lead us and we would have to jump down from there.

The crippled [Spider Fiend] went ahead first. It would normally be able to jump down the hole without an issue, but in its current state, the best it could do was bring its torso out first, let itself go, do a somersault, and fall flat on its face.

Guen and I jumped down much more gracefully and, with the same amount of grace, we unsheathed our weapons when we saw where we were led to.

It was a [Spider Fiend] nest and there were at least twenty-four of them looking at us, with their fists and sharp spider legs at the ready, waiting to attack us if we made a single wrong move.

"You tricked us!" I hissed at the crippled fiend.

I couldn't believe I let him lead us to his lair, just like that. It was a terrible choice from my side and now they had to pay.

Guen was just as ready to fight as I was and the tension in the room was high.

Both sides were about to attack and initiate a bloodbath, but the crippled guy moved his hand fiercely and anxiously, signaling both sides to stop and calm down. He walked between the two sides and faced his fellow [Spider Fiends], turning his back to us.

From there, he started making some weird sounds and some unusual gestures with his arms, as if he was trying to explain something.

It could have been my imagination, but I thought I saw the [Spider Fiends] lower their guards slightly and loosen up a bit.

What was going on?

And then, after some more odd gestures and sounds, courtesy of the crippled guy, the rest of the fiends in the lair started all making a unique and unpleasant sound in unison.

Was this a battle cry?

No, wait.

They were... laughing?

Yes, they were actually laughing, hands on their bellies and all. The crippled guy told to the rest of the [Spider Fiends] the joke I made regarding [Spider FRiends] and they seemed to love it for some reason.

They also seemed to take it further than a joke and thought we were indeed friends. Given the current circumstances, I was more than happy to form an alliance, as deciding against it would mean a lot of spilled blood. None of it would be mine, but still, I did not have time for this - I needed to get to Jack.

I took a step forward and the [Spider Fiends] tensed up once again for a second, but relaxed again once they saw me hide my sword in its scabbard.

I tried telling them I didn't want to fight them and was only looking for a way to peacefully escape this dungeon, but they did not seem to understand my language. My hand gestures didn't really help either.

The only one that was able to understand me was the crippled guy. And Guen, who was laughing in the corner at my horrible attempt at communication.

So, I told the crippled fiend the situation we were in, how we wanted to get out but were blocked by the webbed man and he explained this to the rest of his friends.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

From there, the guy signaled us to follow him once again and went off to another tunnel on the other side of the lair.

I looked at Guen, she looked at me, we shrugged and we both followed the fiend.

This time, the tunnel was even smaller than before, so we had to actually lay down and crawl if we wanted to get inside. We did not have another choice, so we did.

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The tunnel path was long and we had to take all sorts of turns to end up where we wanted, which we were not able to do on the first try. No, at first we somehow got to the room where the [Spider Demon]'s corpse was and we had to get back. We probably should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Eventually, as we were going up on an incline, I started feeling a slight breeze on my face. This most likely meant that we were getting close to an exit, although it could easily be some sort of odd magic or a weird creature's doing. After all these things I had seen here, this was definitely not out of the question.

But no, after looking up, I could finally see it. A dark, cloudy sky and an almost full moon. The night's cold temperature was unwelcoming and yet I was appreciating both the change in temperature and the chilly but fresh air.

We had almost reached the tunnel's exit when a few spiders of the smaller kind—which were still enormous compared to regular spiders—decided to block our way and come at us from behind at the same time.

I was trying to unsheathe Illuminator, which was really hard to do given how short and narrow the tunnel was, but it turned out I didn't really need to. To my surprise, the crippled guy was protecting me and Guen. He was fighting the spiders, his own kin. Okay, maybe not exactly of the same kin. Maybe they were more like distant cousins.

Still, I did not expect the crippled fiend to fight against them, let alone mercilessly crush them with his bare hands as he was doing to each one of them. Spider after spider was pressured to explosion between the fiend's surprisingly muscular arms, splattering blue blood on every wall of the tunnel along with our bodies and clothes.

On the other side, behind me, Guen dealt with all of the incoming spiders without any issue - she was done in mere seconds. They were weak Level 0 monsters, after all.

We cleared them all and we continued on our way, having to crawl over the disgusting mixture of blue blood and squashed spider bodies. It felt really bad and it smelled even worse, to the point I was barely able to keep myself from throwing up, mostly because if I did, I would have to crawl over my puke too, which was not something I was particularly into.

"Fucking finally!" I yelled once I got out of that stinking hole. I threw my hands in the air, stretched myself, and took a deep breath of the fresh air, which felt like I cleansed lungs from years of accumulated dust.

"Woah!"

I lost my balance and almost fell down. And that was when I realized I was not on the same height I was when I entered the dungeon.

No.

When I entered the dungeon, I did so through a trapdoor on the ground that Jack revealed and opened for us all at the mountain's foothill.

But now, I somehow ended up on top the mountain itself.

I told Guen, who was behind me and had not come out of the tunnel yet, to be careful so that she doesn't fall down, to which she responded by calling me an idiot and saying that of course she knew we were on the side of the mountain.

Now that we had safely exited the dungeon, the crippled [Spider Fiend]'s job was over. He led us to the exit without the webbed man noticing us, and now he could turn back to his friends in his lair.

It was time to say goodbye. We did a cool handshake he taught me and then he turned around.

He was ready to get back to his friends, his body already halfway into the tunnel, when I called him.

"Hey! uh... crippled friend!" I said, not knowing how else I should call him. "Why don't you come with us all the way back to the City of Prosper? Maybe you can help us more until we get there. And maybe later we can help you with... these," I said and pointed at all his legs, of which he could use none.

The crippled guy thought about it for a bit and then gave me a thumbs up.

"Nice!" I said. "Well, if you are going to come with us, I guess you need a name. Do you have one?"

The fiend shook his head negatively.

"I'm fine calling him the crippled guy," Guen said.

"Yeah, but it may be a bit too long... How about Kiril?"

The fiend immediately nodded positively. It seemed that he liked the sound of it.

"Kiril it is, then!" I said.

"Yeah, not bad," Guen added. "Definitely better than 'Jinden'"

"You wish you had a name as cool as mine," I responded to her unwanted negative comment about my name.

"My name is great!" Guen said irritated.

"Yeah, of course it is," I said mockingly.

I then made a funny expression and said, "Guen are guee going gome? gagagaga."

She did not seem to appreciate my elaborate and sophisticated joke. She responded by landing a punch on my face, making me lose my balance once again and this time indeed falling off the side of the mountain.

Just before I started rolling down, I stretch my arm towards Guen to reach her own stretched arm.

She caught me. I smirked.

"You are going down with me!"

I snapped my hand back and pulled Guen, making her fall off the mountain along with me.

The fiend—now called Kiril—watched us fall down and wondered what he should do. He decided to follow us, slowly and carefully coming down the mountain. It was especially hard for him since he could only use his arms to move and that made him have an awkward center of mass on the way down.

We both fell, rolled, and tumbled down the mountain with increasing speed, with abundant small pebbles and rough edges scratching us on the way down. I tried to use Illuminator to stab the mountain and make the fall stop, but as I tried to do that, the sword fell out of my hands and waited for me on the ground, in the foothills.

Thankfully, the fall was not too big and we reached the ground shortly after, without taking too many hits. Guen actually was surprisingly fine. A few seconds after I pulled her, she managed to find her balance and was running down the mountain instead of just falling.

Kiril caught up to us while I popped half a healing potion just to be safe.

We finally were out of the dungeon! Not only that, but we fell off the right side of the mountain. If I had to climb this huge thing just to go back down the other way, I would probably lose my mind.

It was now time to go back to the City of Prosper and give Jack his medicine. The ormon fruit.

It was dark since it was in the middle of the night, but it was still easy to find the way towards the city. We could clearly see it in the horizon even in darkness like this. The City of Prosper was emitting a faint, golden light, almost as if it was a giant treasure in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it was, considering the beauty this city had and the many goods and services one could find there. And yet, they did not have ormon fruits.

We started walking towards the city, looking back every couple of minutes, to make sure that the webbed man had not heard us leaving and was not after us. There wasn't any sign of him thus far, for which I was very grateful.

Around half the distance was what we had covered when I saw something odd, far away, coming towards us with uncanny speed.

It kind of looked like a lion, with short, golden hair and a thick brownish mane. Almost everything about it said "lion," except for when it took off and started flying towards us.

"Get ready, it's coming."