Breathing in through the mouth was something uncouth, that was one of the few things Kali’ss etiquette tutor hammered into her head. Still, whatever instances that tutor had in mind for the young princesses future, she probably didn’t include infiltrating a troll den among them.
Kali didn’t dare take a single whiff of breath through her nose, lest she empties her stomach right there and then. The rancid bodily smell of three trolls making themselves home in this burrowed nest was almost tagine, and Kali could feel it on her tongue, taste their disgusting smell.
She had to control her breathing, keep it slow and steady, while also trying to divert her attention from the smell. It was like being punched in the gut, but through her senses, almost similar to how noises overwhelmed her hearing before.
It was terrible. They never spoke of how bad trolls smelled in the stories. Heroes just went in, killed the troll, saved the princess — who was somehow not turned into a nibble toy by the cannibalistic monsters — and then it was a happily ever after.
Kali was wholeheartedly certain that she wouldn’t want to get into any romantic entanglement with someone who’d just gotten out of a troll den. ‘Take a bath right fucking now.’ would be the realistic first thing to say to someone like that and not a passionate kiss, the smell would surely linger on the lips. Eww, disgusting!
The moonlight from outside cast long shadows over the tunnel going deeper underground than Kali’d expected. She knew the trolls were a lazy bunch, or at least she thought they were, and that would make it obvious that they would do the bare minimum for their nests. All it needed to do was give them some warmth and keep the rain off of them.
She found trolls hated water, not to the point where it would be effective against them in a fight, but it did visibly disgust them almost as much as they disgusted Kali. That being the reason they had nests at all even if a landslide covering them in their sleep wouldn’t do anything other than annoy them, rain protection.
With each step taking her further into the den, the moonlight grew dimmer and Kali had to rely more and more on her hearing to visualise her surroundings and the path ahead. Sounds were few down here, bugs and worms in the dirt being some of the few with the occasional wail of a root that was in the tunnel's way and so fell victim to the brutish monsters.
She could hear them deeper in, the three of loud snoring beasts. Where she slept silently and still as a painting, these monsters slept like animals. They growled in their sleep, turned about, lashed out at the walls in some nightmare-induced panic or just snored so loudly that it reverberate through the enclosed nest.
Kali had to hop from side to side dodging falling globs of dirt coming from the ceiling. The ground might be dense and stable, but the walls and ceilings were only fixed in place by visible punch marks. Troll architecture was something else for sure.
A soft breathe left her and along with it her heart calmed to a steady rhythm. The extra adrenaline and other hormones pumping through her veins could have come in handy, but right now she needed to keep her wits about her and take in her surroundings with care. There would be a time for instinct driven, heart-pumping combat.
The tunnel opened up to a larger space and from there, Kali could clearly make out the three side rooms opening up into this one central hall if it could be called that. The whole place reminded Kali of an ant nest more than any architecture she was familiar with as the place lacked both furniture and belongings aside from clubs, trunks, rocks, and half-rotting carcasses left laying all around the nest.
Kali focused, taking in the deep snores, the twitches, and the heartbeats coming from the three trolls.
Her brows furrowed, but after a few seconds, her head turned towards the room, opening up to the right. She pointed at it and with a touch of reluctance, offered her blade to thin air.
An invisible hand grasped onto it and pulled it out of her hold, the blade shimmering out of her vision after another second of floating about. That was it. Kali knew the plan down to the words used in each explanation Vorgnar gave them, she engraved them into her mind, she could make no mistakes here or she might finish herself and her two companions turning into troll chow.
She stalked up to the opening, a roughly circular entrance separating the hall from the room where the weakest looking troll was snoring sprawled out on its back. She noted Izuna taking her place on the other side of the opening but she ignored that for now, based on how well the berry’s toxin would work, she’d have to decide whether to resort to casting her spell before the trashing troll woke up the other two.
Her ears stood upright, constantly checking on the state of all the trolls she could hear. Everything outside became slightly foggy.
That was sub-optimal. She was supposed to be keeping tracks of the few closest nests and alert the others whether they were waking up. That was shot now, she might notice them if they made themselves obvious, but if they just woke up inside their nests, she wouldn’t be able to tell a thing.
Kali stiffened up, but she forced herself to relax as she heard blade sinking into rugged hide and piercing into flesh. There was no reaction yet, as it turned out trolls had very muted pain reception, but a moment later the troll started whining in a breathless voice.
It gasped and shivered, which Kali took as a signal to ready her spell just to be sure.
When the sphere of silence left the troll’s prone body, Kali could finally see (hear/visualise) how things were going. She flinched, the troll’s throat and upper torso were melting and regenerating at the same time, flesh sizzling as the potent toxin worked on turning into mush while the beast’s regeneration tried to stitch its flesh back together.
The reason it didn’t scratch or howl in pain was obvious, it lacked the vocal cords to do so as the epicenter of the melting flesh was around the base of its neck where she could still sense bone-deep slash marks.
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She tore her attention away for a moment, going over her constructed runes, getting an aneurysm right now would be all sorts of bad, and the troll wasn’t in any shape to either be a danger or alert others at the moment.
Or so she thought. The beast’s regeneration was going toe to toe with the toxin, it was impossible to tell which would win just yet, but somehow it still had the strength to pound the dirt ground under it.
Kali gulped as she had to buckle her knees as tremors shook the whole nest before quickly cutting off. Back in the room, the sphere blocking her perception of Vorgnar faded aways as he stood next to the prone beast with her blade impaling it through the skull.
For a moment she thought a sword through the skull would do even the troll in, but it proved her wrong as it aimlessly lashed out with its enormous arms a moment later, which Vorgnar dodged only by a hair’s breadth.
Kali shook herself out of her astonishment, noting that all her Runes were solid and she had made no errors. Her head snapped to the side as the troll in the opposite room clambered onto its feet. Then it made a step towards them, and then another.
“Vorgnar, they woke up. I’m casting the spell.” Kali spoke in a sort of whispered shout, not really knowing whether she should still worry about making too much noise.
The man nodded. He jumped over the flailing troll and tore Kali’s blade out of its head midway. He ended it with a roll which took him right in front of Kali, which she took as the perfect opportunity to cast her spell.
Runes glimmered in her mind, stabilising, and mana rushed into them. Then they collapsed and rushed into her head, where she threw the spell matrix out of her palm right at the troll, which was by now fighting off the last dregs of the flesh melting berry toxin. Troll regeneration winning out in the end.
A translucent Needle with an orange tint shimmered into being, and then it dashed off faster than the eye could see, burying itself into the troll's chest.
The beast stopped dead in its track, halfway between kneeling and standing up. Its arms clawed at its chest for a single second as it stumbled back before its whole torso exploded outwards in a roaring inferno.
Kali threw herself behind the dirt wall, as the edge of the flames licked all over the walls, scorching even the central hall's entrance a bit and burning skin and flesh on her right arm.
She gritted her teeth, scuttling further away as she channeled mana into her bracelet which slowly worked on stitching her charred black hand back together. In the meantime, the other two were engaging the new troll, but Kali noticed the third also slowly climbing to its feet in the furthest room.
“The third one is awake.”
Izuna nodded midway through a slash, her glaive raking through both of its ankles in a single swing and making the beast fall over with its tendons cut. It pounded the ground, shaking the nest much like the previous one and Kali noticed cracks forming on the ceiling.
“We need to get out!” She shouted, rushing back into the scorched room right after. They came for the core after all, if she got that, they could skedaddle and call today’s battle a victory.
“Hurry!” Vorgnar shouted and Kali was too busy shoveling ash aside to even check what the other two were up to and how they were holding up.
“I have it!” She shouted back, her fingers brushing against a fist size core brimming with potent magical energy amidst the piles of ashes.
“We need to lea-” the sound of something hard striking something fleshy with a wet crunch cut Vorgnar’s shout off.
Kali turned around, core grasped in her arm and her wide-eyed gaze catching Vorgnar’s form fly through the air. Shit.
She dashed out of the room, throwing only a glance at the still incapacitated troll whose right leg was now melting from the thigh down.
The other troll was the problem, it was bigger and its rugged brown hide appeared much like rock to her senses. The one saving grace of it all was that it wasn’t attacking, but licking at its fist, the fist it smashed into Vorgnar just a moment ago.
Kali tore her gaze away from the disgusting beast, feeling a roiling fury in her stomach at its ecstatic expression as it savoured the taste of blood with an utter disregard for the danger the three of them posed to it.
“Izuna,” Kali searched, finding the girl already at Vorgnar’s side and pouring a glittering red liquid down his throat. “We need to get out of here!”
“Y-yes,” the foxgirl muttered. She shook her head. “The, th- the thing, the core, you have it?”
“Yes,” Kali bit back a curse. Throwing the orb at the girl and grabbing onto Vorgnar. “Help.”
She might have had the muscle needed to lift Vorgnar’s weight, but he was slippery from all the blood coating him and barely holding onto consciousness by the looks of it.
“Ah, right?” Izuna blinked, her gaze having been transfixed on the core. “Let me.”
Kali bit her lips, but let the Fox-kin haul Vorgnar up. The man could be as much as ten times her weight, so moving his boneless body was nearly impossible. How useless.
Instead, she twirled around. She flicked a single Fireball back at the troll which just about finished up with licking all the blood off of its fist. The other wasn’t far from having its leg back either. They needed to get out of here as damned fast as possible.
The beady black eyes of the troll beheld the flaming ball rushing at its face with nothing but a contemptuous glance. Kali sort of assumed it would do something, but as the orb of flames died down a moment later the troll coughed, spat out some black soot and continued coughing. That was it.
Kali gulped, she turned out and ran. Izuna had already dragged the much larger man up to the nests entrance where she now stood, heaving and in the process of down a weird-looking potion down his throat.
“Izuna,” Kali said as she stopped next to her, all the urgency she felt seeping into her tone.
“I know, but I can’t carry him. He is too fucking heavy,” she cursed with a frown marring her face. “This should get him back on his feet even if he’s at the edge of death.”
“Okay,” said Kali, turning around and staring back into the tunnel. She could still hear the hacking and coughing, but it was getting lighter by the second. She could also hear the slumbering footsteps of the other troll. “How quickly does it work?”
Kali glanced up, the edge of the treeline calling to her cowardly nature. Tempting her to leave Vorgnar behind and just run.
“Any second now,” Izuna tapped her feet, showing only a touch more patience than the elf.
Kali looked around nervously. There was a worry nagging at the back of her mind that made her even more jumpy that she should have been. The dark landscape with only a tint of red to it wasn’t helping her nerves either with the ominous vibes it gave off.
The one saving grace of it all was that she could neither see nor hear any trolls from other nests walking about the ravine yet despite the pounding having shook the earth. Trolls might just be deep sleepers, she reasoned. There was nothing wrong with deep sleepers, they could sleep for eternity for all she cared.
The footsteps from inside the nest came pounding out. Kali gulped, trying to force the lump in her throat down when her head snapped to the side.
Something stepped into her spatial hearing range and as her eyes focused on it they flew wide. Right at the center of the ravine stood an enormous wolf with pure white fur and an icy glare.
It was large enough to swallow her in whole and to make trolls look human-sized next to it.
The wolf disappeared from her vision as a large back stood in her way.
“Vorgnar?” Kali blinked.
“We need to go!” The man twirled around, his chest still stitching itself back together and dripping blood but he seemed unconcerned or even unknowing of it. His eyes were bloodshot and almost rabid as he stared Kali down.
Kali nodded rapidly, relief flooding her and just as she was about the hop up to the top of the ravine dread grasped her spine as the earth trembled under her feet.
An ear-piercing howl rang out, echoing well into the depths of the forest and as Kali glanced behind her, she stared into those icy blue eyes. There was hatred and venom in them, along with cold intelligence.
“GO!” Vorgnar shouted, kicking himself up the wall and launching himself further up from a hand-hold and Izuna followed behind him a moment later.
Kali activated a Kinetic Hammer and aimed it at herself, sending her body flying just as the large troll exited the nest with a furious stomp.
Mid-air still, Kali could hear many other stomps just like that reverberate through the ground and when she glanced back at the center of the ravine, the Frost Wolf was gone like a mirage.
That thing is hunting us … hunting me.