The cave was fairly ordinary, as far as homes for murderous fiends go.
Sandstone bordered the group at either side. They marched onwards single-file, with Kyle making up the front of the company. Pearce was close behind, making their passage significantly easier with his constant widening of the tunnels. Then came Capella, her stars shooting off into different branching routes, providing an ethereal lighting that would warn them of any oncoming dangers. They could also promptly explode in the faces of any Unbounded that did decide to show.
The middle of the line consisted of Aquila, whose Mark wasn’t really suited for the subterranean, and an angsty young man from the Gravity Sect called Lamont. He would assist Pearce in keeping the cavern stable if the place did come falling down, and Aquila . . . Aquila provided comic relief.
“You cosy back there?” She shot her beaked face over to Remus, who made up the very back of the party. Tiny balls of flames floated around him, illuminating their rear in case anything sneaked up on them.
If anything was, Violet, who was a dozen metres behind, would quickly dispatch them. Though that was besides the point.
All in all, they made for a pretty useful team. Remus felt assured, with a Warlord at their helm and a small team of capable Emblazed at hand, that everything would go okay, if not perfectly.
Through the bends and cracks of the cavern they ventured. Remus noticed that the further they went on, the more man-made their route appeared. It was a mixture of various natural coves and chiselled tunnels packed tightly together.
Their route was pretty self-explanatory, so Violet should have no trouble following close behind. Remus had her two Projections located inside a small, force-absorbent box in his cloak. That way, he wouldn’t accidentally command her over here prematurely.
Everything was going swimmingly, until Kyle came to an abrupt halt.
“What’s the matter?” Capella frowned, her eyes oddly luminous in their alteration. “I don’t see anything dangerous up ahead.”
Remus predicted the issue before Kyle confirmed it. “I just thought I should let you know,” he took a long drag of his cigarette, the smoke of which was no less annoying down here, “that this next section is a little contaminated by the Silver Cavities. You won't contract Rot or anything — the Supreme Fiend hasn’t been runnin’ amuck down here for a good while — but you’ll feel some pressure. Just try to breathe, alright, and everything will be sunshine and rainbows.”
Remus thought he overhead Lamont grumbling. Something like that’ll be a challenge, with you smoking out the place, though he couldn’t be sure.
As they entered, the front of the group affixed with cautious, tight lips, Remus felt his heartbeat spike. They all visibly flinched at the crossing, save for Kyle, whose Warlord status meant it would take a lot more to faze him. Remus expected the same tension at the invisible border, and braced himself over the crossing.
He felt . . . absolutely nothing whatsoever. He opened the eyes he’d held tight, though really couldn’t see what all the fuss about. A short walk didn’t leave him disturbed either.
The others all held varying degrees of grimaces.
That’s what three Durations of no sunlight, and living in the Silver Cavities gets you.
As the hour dragged by, Kyle guided them in-and-out of stretches of the Cavities. None of them were anymore intense than the first, so each time, Remus found himself mildly disappointed to find no bodily resistance. The others quickly grew accustomed to the density of the Infinity.
So another hour droned on.
Remus’ stomach was beginning to rumble, his feet ached, and the prospect of a drink had never been so appealing. Despite this, he insisted on only taking light sips from his waterskin. There was no sense in chugging it all at one, if he would then have to endure another eight hours with no water to grace his lips.
No one bothered to make light conversation, but Aquila did call out the question they were all wondering. “How much longer?”
Kyle had long since ashed his third cigarette, which seemed to complete the small pack he possessed. Now he had no vice to sate his anger with. Remus cringed. Aquila could not have chosen a worse time to ask that question.
“Sounds like someone amongst us is getting a little impatient.” Kyle spoke like he was gritting his teeth against a cigar that wasn’t there. He really was going to mess up his lungs one day. “I think you’ll be happy to know we’re over halfway there. We’ll come up a little further than the army camps, but nowhere near a battlefield, so don’t-”
A splurge of purple light stupefied them all. But no-one more than Remus. Had he accidently broken one of the orbs? That would have been a foolish mistake, and he’d made his fair share of those.
Kyle furrowed his eyebrows. “Now what on earth-”
Violet materialised ahead of them, face pale. “Run!”
They had all of one second’s warning, before the cry of some Unbounded approached.
“Now hold on a minute,” their escort held out a hand. “Who the hell-” Recognition sparked in his eyes. “You were the girl with Remus in the infirmary!” He shot Remus an ugly leer. “What, did you think you’d be lonely without your girlfriend to accompany us? Well too bad! Only winners of the tournament can come here, and that’s the end of it.”
Before Remus could retort, the place shook around them. Pearce extended all limbs like a starfish, grunting. “Something’s trying to get through!”
The vibrations riddling the passage barely faltered. In fact, cracks were beginning to spread through the cave roof. Voices rose in a panic, but none louder than Lamont’s painful screech, as he did everything in his power to stop their early burial.
Remus felt the shoulders of his shirt whoosh upwards, a new inverted gravity tugging him ever-so slightly.
Hands broke out of the earth before any of them could really process what was happening. They were pale white, a distinctly Unbounded shade, with their arms like unwinding threads. Thread-like in the fact they never ceased extending. Remus’s knee was grasped. Unfiltered Ambition made freeing himself easy, yet new hands reached where others failed.
The others faced more difficulty, save for Pearce and Lamont, who were presently the only force on their side between life and death. Kyle had summoned shields that now fully enveloped the pair in a messy clutter. Those Unbounded hands tried to tug the defences free, only to be completely swarmed by the other available fighters.
Erupting stars the size of a hand, streaks of blue flame, and lashing talons all left grey, monstrous blood exploding out of the Unbounded’s flailing limbs. Yet still, the cavern they resided in shook more than a crashing wave.
“I’ll pour your blood. I’ll drink on your Ichor-”
The voice like that of an imp ruined Remus’ day. What made it worse was how fluently the fiend spoke. If he had thought the Unbounded from the Cavities had spoken scarily well, this was another matter altogether.
It got to the point where the world became a frantic blur. It took all of Remus’ balance and composure to keep himself upright. The others had similar problems, though Kyle had now fully adopted his defensive gleam of metal across his entire body. He must have weighed tons, leaving imprints in the ground he stood on.
“Everybody shut up!” He roared over the raucous din, slinging spittle with every syllable. “Shut up!”
If he expected that to return everything back to blissful normality, Kyle was dead wrong.
Remus spotted hands scraping underneath the leader’s fortifications, circumventing the not-so impenetrable defences. They dug their way with startling speed to grab ahold of Pearce’s legs, shields be damned. The man shrieked, an entire assembly of hands covering every patch of his skin. Jagged rocks cut against the beastly flesh, drawing an ungodly amount of blood, but achieving little more.
He was being dragged away. With a speed like a spring rushing back. Remus met eyes with Violet, and the both of them rushed after him.
The others were on their tail, fleeing from the scene. Remus even spotted Aquila flying through the spacious expanse they were barreling into. They had to stop themselves on the brink of something impossibly unlucky.
A passage worming through the Silver Cavities, only deeper than ever before. Everyone but Remus, Violet, and the Warlord Kyle collapsed at the brink.
Remus felt the pressure this time, like the air was goo, and he had to push with every motion to get past. With bated breath, he saw a struggling Pearce be dragged around the corner, out of sight.
“How in the hell can you two move here? What, did you take a vacation in the Silver Cavities once?”
“Something like that.” Violet answered boldly, though Remus didn't dare speak.
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Flaming Gold was turning his Ichor an even brighter gold, and he pushed the flames to temperatures he’d never before risked within himself. They would have been stark white if outside, he knew. His Bank drank deep of the Infinity all around, and he used that as direct fuel.
Even with all that, the most he could do was jog after Pearce.
How many Unbounded are there? Or is it just one awfully powerful fiend? Neither reality was favourable. At any rate, saving Pearce, preventing an innocent soul from perishing earlier than needed, was the only thing he should be focusing on.
Violet had teleported ahead of the pair of them, and Remus couldn’t help but think how poorly this environment suited a Warlord from the Defence Clan. Kyle would struggle to live up to that title, closed-in and barely able to do more to protect his companions. All as they were slowly but surely split apart.
That was the Silver Cavities for you — a thriving deathtrap simply waiting to ensnare anybody unfortunate enough to get near. Or, if they were being truthful, foolish enough. Not even Warlords were completely safe down here.
“Kid,” Kyle called. “Can you fend for yourself? I can’t leave the rest of them to be butchered by the others, and,” it took everything he had to admit this next bit, “you look like someone who can defend himself.”
“Go on!” Remus yelped behind, grunting as the air only grew more dense.
He kept a flame in one hand, as he turned a sharp corner. When he saw what it illuminated, he wished he hadn’t.
Violet was watching helplessly as Pearce laid limply upon what looked like lichen. Only, it glowed strangely, and Remus half-expected it to bare teeth and eyes like some grotesque mutation of nature. The Earth Clansman was immersed in it, the Unbounded’s hands still grappling around from various holes in the earth around.
Remus took one look at Pearce’s Rot-infested body, took a step forward to pull him away, only to flinch. The man was already dead. His eyes were open, but unseeing, and his body utterly stiff. Then there was the Rot itself. If Remus got too close, he would share the same fate as his great grandfather.
That was to say, considering the circumstances, he would die alone hours before anyone could save them — if anyone would realise anything was wrong.
He grasped onto the chains at his waist, and whipped them out like a lasso. They encircled a swarm of the Unbounded’s arms, and without any hesitation, he pulled. Setting the chains on fire would potentially destroy the grappled limbs, wasting the opportunity. So Remus instead focused Infinity inwardly through Flaming Gold. Then, taking a step forward, he tugged with all of his god-given might.
It took him a second to realise he was screaming, though that was a fickle outcry compared to the Unbounded’s screeches. His muscles felt like they were on fire, that he would lose his hold with any coming second. He placated that thought by putting his body into overdrive, using every speck of Infinity he could consume as fuel.
It occurred to him he was draining the space of Infinity faster than he could make use of it. When that happened, Remus fed his Bank instead. Focusing on the growth of his Mould, the gentle intricacies he would need to pay full attention to, seemed to dissociate his mind from the moment.
Remus’ feet began moving forward, but all he saw were those winding, white tubes. The pain in his arms, shoulders, and back become secondary sensations. Blurred by adrenaline, Ambition, and the growth of his Bank.
Soon, it was as if the Unbounded wasn’t there at all, and Remus was engaged in an entirely different activity. His body was something else entirely, unrelated to his distracted mind and that winding network, that seemed far more substantial than flesh and bone.
His screams were reduced to one, long-winded note. Like he was scraping his fingernails over an endless chalkboard.
Remus could only imagine, in retrospect, what Violet and the others were thinking as they came rushing forward.
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Violet was still paralysed by shock when Remus hauled the main body of the Unbounded over with one last heave.
The wall of rock behind came tumbling down, and the group was forced to cough out dust.
“How are you all here?” Violet spluttered to the group, whose lifeless expressions were as rigid as hers. “I thought you couldn’t handle the Silver Cavities?”
“I could say the name to you,” Kyle came lumbering over, now fully clad in a fearsome set of heavy armour. The visor was open, and even as he spoke to Violet, his eyes wandered to Pearce’s corpse. Then to the Unbounded grappling with Remus. “I used the protective aura I was talking about earlier on the others, but stop talking!”
He launched onto the revealed Unbounded on the ground, who Violet had trouble describing. It was vaguely humanoid, like many powerful Unbounded, and she would guess it was upper Splintered Rank. It was nearly fully mummified by its dangling hands, and on the patches that weren’t fully concealed, laid enough faces to make up a small town. They all had expressions of witless agony, which Violet found pretty understandable, considering what happened next.
They all pounced on the hapless creature at once. Its skin erupted in bursts of stars, Kyle pounded on the creature with all the devastating force of a Warlord, talons created a criss-cross pattern across the being, and Violet summoned shards of Supreme Steel to stab into the fiend. Even Lamont pressed all his gravitational force into pushing the creature into the ground, eliciting multiple gruesome pops that sounded awfully like broken bones. Honestly, it may have been a little overkill. Remus was on the floor to the side, disoriented, though did launch himself up to contribute a few explosive fists.
As the fiend died in a fit of gore, something occurred to Violet. She had fought against this breed of Unbounded before, only that version had been substantially weaker. It may have been in the Chaos Clan manor. Yes, she remembered now, when it had opened up the eyes in its palms and-
Her blood ran cold. “Everyone,” she screamed, “duck!”
In one last wave of power, like the suicidal sting of a bee, the palms of the Unbounded opened up. Lasers shot out everywhere, unearthing rock; causing this chamber to tremble very much like the previous.
It was like they were all ants in the heart of a furnace. Destined to sizzle away for being foolish enough to stumble in here.
Violet acted as fast as she could. Magenta erupted out of her, and she whisked the group away. Her heart was racing as the darkness of a tunnel they’d entered previously shunned out the world. Amongst the outraged murmurs, Remus set his finger alight.
Kyle’s face had never been so red. “What-”
“I teleported us out of there.” She assured the group. Or the little she could make out of them, anyway. That was strange, why was it so dark? “The Unbounded’s dead. That was its last attempt to take us down with it. I can sense it dispersing not too far from here.”
Remus finally expanded his flame. It revealed Aquila laying on the floor, wincing as both of her wings were lacerated. Golden blood pooled across the rocky ground. Kyle was quick to kneel at her side, focusing his Mark's energy on her with deadly attention.
“Can you heal her?” Lamont enquired, his lone wolf demeanour perishing. He ripped the sleeve of his tunic, using it as makeshift bandages. Aquila simply laid on the floor, groaning quietly.
“I’m not a healer,” Kyle sounded genuinely panicked, which seemed to have a contagious effect over the entire group. “I’m suppose to prevent people from getting hurt, damn it!”
He cradled his head between both hands. “Gods, I’ve spent too long away from the battlefield. I’m too rusty. Too rusty for moronic escort missions like this anyway.”
Violet saw red. “How about you stop feeling sorry for yourself, and care for the patient who's literally bleeding out in front of you?”
He looked at her, teeth gritted, before the angry facade fell away. “You're right . . .”
For a minute, they all stood in awkward silence. Once Aquila regained some strength, was bandaged up, and strengthened by Remus’ willpower, the Warlord mustered up all the protective effects they could.
Only when they began to march towards their surfacing point, which wasn’t too far away now, did they realise something was wrong.
“Where’s Capella?” Kyle asked. When no-one answered, he asked again, louder this time. “Where is she?”
Remus, face grave and with hesitant slowness, increased the size of his flames. The entire passage was illuminated.
Including Capella’s lifeless body.
“No, no.” Kyle ran over, and put his head to her chest. When that obviously failed, he resorted to placing two fingers on her throat. He tried again, for the longest minute of Violet's life. “She’s not breathing. I don’t hear a heartbeat.”
Violet opened her mouth, but didn’t know what to say. She simply stared at Capella’s body, sensing another, the Unbounded’s, dissolving down to its final ashes in the other chamber.
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Koa settled into his tent, failing yet again to rest his racing heartbeat. For hours, it had been hammering in his chest, threatening to burst out if he didn’t settle the damn organ soon.
Ever since his close encounter with Nova, who had left after searching for thirty minutes, his body refused to calm down. He was going to take years off his lifespan at this rate.
What made it worse were the noises from outside. Any crack of a leaf could be a footstep. Any one of the countless critters could have been a clansman disguising the sounds of their approach. His mind thought of darker things, images distinctly monstrous, and he dared not recount them.
His intentions to walk straight out of the territory were sidelined, the exhaustion too great to ignore. One night of sleep, he had promised himself, and he would walk nonstop until he was free.
Which wasn’t working out very well, considering how Koa’s body refused to leave the realm of the conscious.
As sleep wouldn’t take him, Koa acted as his own guard. Listening out for danger and mulling everything over in his head. He couldn’t piece together what was happening here. Why were the Arachnid Clan carrying dead corpses off, like bugs caught in a web, and where to? Someplace where, as the clansman had put it, they would feed?
Koa was pretty sure it would become worldwide news if an entire clan had suddenly become cannibals, though he couldn’t be certain if much news was travelling out of this territory. What were the Insect Clan doing anyway? He was yet to see a single one of them, which was odd, as both clans had been known to cooperate. Kind of like the antithesis of the Earth and Sand Clans.
They were supposed to be on friendly terms, though Koa got the distinct feeling any strong friendship could be ruined when cannibalism came into the mix.
The image of Nova’s droning speech made Koa shiver, even under his covers. A desperate part of him wanted to beg for Maris’ protection. He threw away that idea because of the numerous issues with it, though one thing was becoming certain.
He would need at least the help of a God-Graced to keep the Unbounded from gutting him like a lamb to the slaughter. The only viable chance of getting that was by proving his worth to Juniper again.
He had deserted the sect after all. This was Koa’s own fault for sinking so deep in such dangerous waters, regardless of his intentions. To swim back to the surface, his only chance was by besting Ash.
Which, currently trapped in a deathtrap as he was, seemed to Koa like the least of his problems.
His eyes finally began to flutter when something snapped him wide awake. He felt movement, as if he was seated in the back of one of the Speed Clan’s carriages. Shadow passed through the material of his tent.
Slowly, his heart risking palpitations with how loud it was becoming, he moved over to the tent’s flap. He whisked it open.
Outside, he saw . . . spiders. Thousands of them, large and small, of varying breeds, all carrying along his tent.
Koa forced himself not to vomit, as a dark inclination dawned on him.
They were dragging him away. His first guess would be to wherever their masters’ went to ‘feast’.