Chapter 8: Candle Vs Bug.
Walking through the woods, pushing my trolley of beans, weapons, tools and tuna fish I went over the kind of power increases I’d received now that I was level 3. The main one was that I could use a twisted candle to alternate between two spells and my cantrips had gained a couple of small boosts. I couldn’t make a twisted candle until I got to civilisation though so it was tuna cans until I ran out of those, I looked down and counted the little metal cylinders, clanking around full of oil and fish. I had 6 of them.
I could now light or snuff a wick from a foot away, I could increase or decrease the brightness of a candle without decreasing its lifespan and my summoned wick would make a candle last 2 percent longer than it normally would. This applied to both normal burn-time and to the casting of spells, it also stacked per level so I now had 6 percent more lifespan in my tuna candles. Not a bad buff at all.
This would let me get a little more out of the Waxen Splash attack spell once I got better candles although the improvised candles would still only last for one casting of the spell so again, I had to get back to civilisation before that mattered to me.
The twisted candle ability was admittedly very cool though, now I just needed to make some of the specialised spell candles to use it with, and me I was one step closer to that goal because of a few new ingredients knocking around in my trolley. Pouches of reagents and herbs that the demon hunters had been carrying before I looted them, I knew how to work these into candles to change fragrance, burn quality and hopefully the type of spell I could cast from it.
Not that it was hugely helpful, I had the reagents but If I didn’t have wax then I couldn’t really craft any candles to mix them into. This meant I wouldn’t have any special candles like dragonfire or blood-chill so I was stuck with launching molten tuna-candles at assailants and then beheading them with one of the two longswords I’d awkwardly placed in my trolley or skewering them on my crude spear.
That strategy had worked out so far though. Only an hour or two after the cave incident I had been jumped by something my mental menus identified as a Grass-lurker. The creature looked like a giant Mantis with iron-tipped claws and shrewd, calculating eyes.
I had been quick enough to push my trolley hard into its path and lucky enough for it to tumble awkwardly instead of brute-forcing its way past the wheeled cart. In the ensuing tussle I received a vicious cut on my forearm from a parry gone wrong that could just as easily have severed an arm and delivered a series of cuts across the top of the trolley that severed its arm in turn. Not easily but it worked. After that I had lost the advantage, the creature flipped my trolley and I only just avoided getting bowled over and eviscerated, then I had to go on the defensive and learned that in a fight between man and Grass-Lurker you really didn’t want to be a steel-worker, you wanted to be a swordsman.
The creature got off another hit and I let out a shout of pain as it opened a red line along my thigh but I fought through the pain, jumped back with one of my candles held high, and doused the horrible bug in flaming oil. Chitin split open and greyish meat peeked through the cracks as green blood boiled and burnt.
The creature screeched and flailed around, claws wildly slicing at the air. I waited for an opening, dropped the empty candle and swung my longsword into its neck. Sounds pretty cool but I’m leaving out the fact that much like the hunter I missed my shot at a clean kill and actually swung into leg, abdomen, hind leg and thorax before I landed my killing blow. So what, I’ve already said I wasn’t a swordsman, just a fucking candle-man with a sword I guess.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
I considered honing my butchery skill against the mantis but I had learned from Merri that non class afilliated skills trained much, much slower than the affiliated ones and there was a missing girl to find so I just took the small sum of experience points that brought me up to 3/13 experience and continued onwards through the silent forest. Merri had been nice to talk to, but I really needed to talk to a regular human soon and the Delacroft estate sounded like the place for me to get some real fucking candles.
It only took another hour to find my target, a cave built into the side of a jumble of rocks, it was roughly where Merri had said it would be and was pretty clearly the actual target I was hunting for because I could see a rusted metal grille that had recently been wrenched open and from inside I heard the clash of steel on chitin or scale punctuated by the steady thunk, thunk, thunk of arrows punching into flesh.
I lit one of my trusty cans after tucking the last four into my coat and stormed down the stairs, a battle had clearly been raging when I had arrived, but when I stepped through the grille, the sound of combat suddenly stopped with a cut-off scream only a few steps in. After that I went down cold stone steps in silence, no sound of looting, no predator feasting on a corpse, just the silence and my own surprisingly calm breathing.
The descent into this cave was much nicer than the last one, I had carved stone steps instead of mossy, uneven stone beneath my feet and it smelled musty instead of like gore and decay. The only negative was the fist-sized alcoves that lined the tunnel with diminutive skulls full of needle-like teeth.
At the time I only had guesses but later on I would learn a lot more about those who built this place. It turned out these adventurers had been assaulting a tomb, the little skulls were the skulls of servants left here to guard the nobles of their race long into the afterlife. I saw the first manifestation of those servitors about 20 feet into the descent.
The guardian lay dead on the steps, its body shimmering as it slowly disintegrated into scraps of melting ethereal matter. It had been a squat, lizard-like being, about 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide, armed with a spear of bone and flint. My stomach turned as I saw it hadn’t died easy, beneath it was a woman, her ears were slightly pointed and she had a bloodless knife in one hand, a broken bow lay a few steps down and her neck and abdomen had suffered a multitude of spear wounds. I stepped over her, trying not to think about what I was going into, I assumed this had been Ruthax, the leader of the band Merri had told me about, I wished I could summon her to help me now but there was still another hour until she would be showing up.
“Hello? Who’s coming down here?”
The voice was creaky, tinged with a bit of panic. I took the last few steps and my light played out over a chamber with 3 exits plus the one I’d come in from.
“Thank you, Thank you so much, I couldn’t find the way out, one of those things broke my lantern and I’ve just been crawling around down here looking for the way out, I heard you fighting and I followed the sound but then it went quiet. If you hadn’t come down when you did I would have crawled right past these steps.” An old man rose from all fours and ran frantically into the light. I held out a hand and let my light illuminate a labyrinth of branching tunnels behind him. I barked a question at him. “Where is the young Lady Delacroft?” The man froze and I realized I wasn’t supposed to know about her being down here, he had intended to leave her and I could see his mind racing, probably figuring I must have been a member of the Delacroft household or a bounty hunter of some sort.
“Get up the stairs and go, you don’t need light if you take them slow, just tell me if she’s alive or dead first.”
The old man bowed his head, babbling out excuses as he pushed past me. “We got split up, I heard her creeping around in the tunnels though so I don’t think she’s dead. I heard a lot of us die but I swear I didn’t hear anything happen to Lady Delacroft...”
The old man paused at the stairs for a moment and then darted up them with a blurted “I’m so sorry for my cowardice but they ate my magic, I think elemental magic still works but I'm almost entirely focused on the arcane. I'm sorry”
I strode onwards, listening for any hint of the woman I was here to save as the tunnel branched off again and again, becoming a Daedalian maze that had taken a bunch of experienced fighters before I, an untrained moron had decided to test myself against it.