Haeros Dungeon - Chapter 14 preview (Patreon)

We jogged, moving as quickly as possible, spreading out from the main pathway that we had traversed to see if we could find Brand or his body. I pulled a shard lamp from my side, raising it high so that I could sweep it back and forth across the dark hillside, noting that Yorrick was doing the same on his side.

Both Sophia and Kira were raising their voices behind me, shouting for Brand. I was uncertain if it was particularly useful for us to be doing that, especially when we knew these so-called hunters were real. Though how the story of doppelganger mutant creatures would play out once we told others, I did not know.

On Earth, stories of doppelgangers, of skinwalkers, of creatures that took over the face or body or another, were common. The early stories of vampires were just that – neighbors or individuals of the same sort that rose from the dead, who looked and spoke and seemed the same as before but were not.

Our atavistic fear for creatures that were so close to human but were not came from a past where something, somewhere, so near to human  was so dangerous to us that we had to react with disgust and fear.

Here, though, I had no idea if the ’Tionerths felt the same way, had the same stories. The group was harried, moving with desperate precision in their search for Brand, such that I could not get a proper read on their emotions, and could not tell if they sought him because he was a missing friend or because of a deeper terror.

As for myself… I was pushing down, compartmentalizing all the feelings, all the screaming horror of the doppelgangers. The part of me that could not help but wonder: what if I had turned away too long, if I had not noticed them taking Brand. How long he had been moving next to us, without us realizing it?

Who would be the next target?

Because I could not shake the feeling that it might have been me.

A rising groan came from my side of the hill. Not entirely by coincidence, since I had taken the side that Brand had disappeared from. When I swung my lantern in that direction, it caught him, stumbling towards us, eyes glassy, clothed in the same clothes as before, even his weapons the same. Blood dripped down one side of his face, a hand held against it.

Something clicked, and I remembered how the doppelganger had changed, how his clothes had faded away, blending into its body. I had not thought of it during the fight, how it had ignored the weapons it had carried to come at me with fist and knee.

Perhaps because none of that had been real.

“Brand!” Kira called out, only to be dragged to a stop by Sophia.

“Wait. He could be one of them.”

“What happened?” Brand slurred, and the closer he got, the easier it was to tell that he was a little – a lot – concussed. His movements were sluggish, delayed, the pupils in his eyes a little too large. I could not help but hope we could get some healing into him, because the damn kid got more banged up than any of us – and that included Yorrick, whose entire job was to get beaten up.

“We got ambushed,” I said, sliding forwards. I noted how Yorrick pulled in closer to us, keeping an eye out on his side, except for the occasional glance back. All our lessons with Marian back at the academy were paying off, such that he and Sophia were keeping track of the surroundings. Not so much Kira, whose emotions were running riot, but that was always the danger of letting people get too close. I knew we’d have to have words. Later. “You got hit first, I think.” I paused, glanced at Brand’s knives. “Do me a favour, trigger your skill.”

“My skill?”

“Your skill. You know the one, the defensive-offensive one.”

“I…”

“Go ahead. I’ll stay back till you do,” I said.

He did not seem to understand, but thankfully, he didn’t need to. He triggered his skill, letting lightning dance around him. Brand still hadn’t told us who he copied that skill from, but it was perhaps his most useful skill thus far and the one he had utilized the most. His second skill changed, semi-regularly; at one point he had been utilizing a redirect skill and on occasion even borrowed Kira’s skill.

I knew he hoped to add a third – no, wait, fourth – skill at some point in time. I always forgot about his third skill, a passive that let him handle multiple orbs connections at a time; that weighed him down, but gave him an overall physical boost that made up for his lack of raw talent and killer instinct. Where Yorrick’s time on the streets gave him a hardened edge and a second sense for trouble and my decades of training allowed me to cross the strength gap, Brand just had raw stats thanks to his numerous orb connections.

That being said, he could only hold so many copies of skills. Like me, he was stuck waiting for his soul to grow sufficiently in strength to handle any further connections. The fact that he was holding three already indicated how powerful he was, the headstart having his initial skill copied from his brother gave him.

Well, that and having existed for a decade and a half on this planet, instead of the single year and a half that I had. That kind of helped.

“Brand!” The cry of relief from Kira preceded her throwing herself onto his crackling body, the man just a little slow at turning off the skill. It fried her a bit, causing her to stumble and lurch, but she kept going, such that she wrapped her arms around him even as her hair lifted up in the air all around her. It was why Brand kept his own hair short, since otherwise the static electricity of his gift would keep him looking like Einstein constantly. “You idiot!”

I shook my head as he let out a low grunt, the woman clutching him so tight that it squeezed his ribs together. He eventually collapsed to the ground rather than try to hold her off him, even as Kira’s wisps floated and bobbed around the pair in agitation, drawing our lines of light in close.

“What happened?” Sophia asked, glancing back once to check on the pair as Kira kept muttering curses at the idiot boy.

I moved as well, taking station so that each of the three of us were parts of a triangle, looking out into the darkness. We had an elongated stop as Brand’s wound was wrapped and tended to by Kira, who had gotten hold of her emotions. The lantern still held in my off-hand was turned, sweeping back and forth with its pointed light to give us a little more distance.

It was that movement that caught a flash of red eyes, gone the moment I brought it back. It might have been a moment of imagination or…

“We need to get out of here,” I said, softly. “We need a place we can defend.”

“Our destination’s still multiple hills away,” Sophia said. “We lost ground, or else we would have been halfway…”

“Yeah.” Backtracking meant we were now closer to our starting point than before. While the flush of adrenaline from the fight had given us energy, it had passed while finding Brand, meaning that we were beginning to feel the effects of a long day. It was probably half the reason Brand got caught, as awareness and minds drifted towards the end of the day and we just wanted rest.

“We head back.” I made the call, not waiting for the others to decide. “We’ll stay behind their walls, put something between us and the hunters and give ourselves a wall to cover one side. Take turns resting.”

There were no objections, not even from Yorrick. Glancing back, I noticed the tension in his shoulders, the way he kept shifting his grip on his knife and the way he kneeled on the ground, resting his shield on the earth rather than carry it.

Exhaustion and a little wariness. Maybe it wasn’t just Earth that had stories of doppelgangers after all.

With one last check that Kira and Brand were good, the boy was hauled to his feet by the woman. She wrapped an around his waist, giving the still woozy kid support.

“Let’s move, people.”