An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 41 (Patreon)

“You said you’ve touched these before?” Morlo asked me. I was blinking, half-delirious. My thoughts felt very much like I’d just been punched in the head, and so it didn’t even occur to me to wonder when exactly Morlo had been told I’d done any such thing. 

“Here.” I answered, dumbly. “Or, in the other dungeon. That was one. The other was in the mines with Gruin.”

“He started convulsing,” Gruin added helpfully. Morlo didn’t seem to hear him, pacing, muttering. He seemed to have sunk into himself with thought, so intent upon his own considerations that I wondered if he’d have noticed an undead giant before it sprinted across the chamber and split him in half. 

We wouldn’t find out, because nothing disturbed the Thaumaturge. He certainly disturbed us though. When he finally looked up there was a haunting intensity to his eyes, and they were aimed right at me. 

“This changes things,” he told me.

“Why?!” I snapped, “Tell me, what’s going on!”

He ignored that question as he did so many others, and Vara and Devyne’s pitying looks were of little consolation. 

“We need to move,” Morlo told me abruptly, “we need to take you to—” he paused, choking back his words like a man who’d come too close to saying something he shouldn’t. That sent a chill down my spine, because I knew Morlo would happily talk about all the threats to my life we’d be heading for.

What exactly was it that he wasn’t willing to share? Was I to be executed outright?

A distraction came for all of us before I could get an answer to that question. Undead pouring into the chamber in such numbers that it made me wonder if they’d just been building their strength during the delay. 

It jerked all of us into action, Morlo most of all. 

“Flee!” he roared, “we can’t fight this many!”

I didn’t see it at first, but he was right. They just kept coming, a whole army of them crammed deep under the skin of the earth. 

And yet I couldn’t bring myself to move away, either. Not with that carving there. Not when it dragged me by the wits in a moment of distraction and started drawing me close all over again. Before I or anyone else noticed what was happening, my hand came down on the stone and the world melted away again. 

Strange, blurry images. Everything seemed to be made of mist. The voice was scared, jagged almost. 

“It’s everything we hoped for and more. Humanity distilled, war distilled. It will save us.”

“I know,” said another voice, more certain, more haunted. “And it will then doom us.”

When I came to, Gruin was carrying me and moving at a full sprint. His sprint wasn’t very fast, mind, really more like a swift jog by human standards. He could, however, keep it up for far longer than any jogging human I’d ever known. 

So it wasn’t much of a surprise when I realised my spell of unconsciousness had been long enough to displace me right through a tunnel.

What was more surprising, and upsetting, was hearing that noise. The one that’d chased me and Vara out of our first dungeon dive. The final one. I sort of spasmed when I realised what I was hearing, Gruin dropped me, and I scrambled as fast as I could to get back on my feet. Nobody said anything as I pulled into a sprint, almost overtaking the group and fucking right off ahead of them until I realised that this section of dungeon was unfamiliar to me, and that I didn’t know where I might head.

Once again, I was forced to not abandon my allies and risk my skin right alongside theirs. What was worse, my sword was gone. If a battle reached us I’d be stuck fighting it with my damned fists, and while heavy gauntlets added a lot of impact to one’s punches, believe me, they’re no substitute for an actual weapon.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Somehow we kept ahead of the sound even laden in heavy armour and fighting off the occasional undead ambush, and when we reached our little entrance into the dungeon Morlo wasted no time in helping us turn it into an exit.

In typical Morlo fashion, he did this by screaming and throwing a blast of force at the stonework. I saw it erupt outwards for one moment before the air was filled with debris, then we were all being hoisted high and thrown at the newly-widened hole. 

Had Morlo been less accurate, the cavity less broad, or our bodies less ballistically predictable, I suspect it would have led to a particularly juicy impact. Instead all of us cleared the dungeon by a great span.

Maybe a bit too great, for that matter, because we didn’t stop ten or even twenty paces from its mouth, and just kept going.

Vara and I panicked immediately, Devyne started screaming, while Gruin screamed something about lanks and our non-existent skill at projectile calculations. For him, it probably wasn’t so big a danger. Vara and myself had to take more direct measures to avoid becoming distributed across an area several times our own heights. 

She was able to make a big cushion of force that I suspected would’ve saved a warhorse. My skill in Thaumaturgy wasn’t quite there yet, and so the best I could do was slow myself as I flew. The dirt punched me in the face, chest, balls and everywhere else all at once. It punched me, but it didn’t quite do so hard enough to kill me. After rolling another fifty feet or so, coming to a miserable stop in a trench I’d dug with my own body and momentum, I just lay there and waited to either feel everything, or nothing.

I felt everything, a searing pain that ran right over me like I was being bathed in naptha. And a good sign. It’s when the pain doesn’t come that you know something’s seriously wrong with you.

Slowly, I recovered from the aches racking every inch of me and sat up. A dozen paces back I saw Vara had landed more gently, barely disturbing the dirt beneath her, though was still groaning in a heap. Devyne appeared to have enjoyed some shielding from Morlo as he fell, for he was the least injured. Gruin had landed farther from me, and harder. He’d actually sunk right into the dirt like a mortar shell, maybe half a yard deep. 

He, too, was fine, though. Maybe less hurt than I was. 

“That hurt!” he scowled, up on his feet before I was and marching his way towards Morlo quicker than Vara had even stopped mumbling in a daze. The Thaumaturge barely seemed to notice him, eyes still on the dungeon at our backs, face still dark and thoughtful.

“It’s staying,” the Thaumaturge whispered, “not emerging. Why?” He continued mumbling at that, and even Gruin seemed taken by his focus. 

Then it ended, and Morlo was in the present again. 

“We need to head off quickly, night is only a few hours away. They will emerge with it.” 

Nobody needed clarification, except for Vara who appeared to think she was back at Arvharest waiting to be stabbed to death by orcs. That wore off within another twenty minutes or so, fortunately, and we began making good time.

Not good enough.

The shamblers came by night, just as Morlo had feared, and like last time we took refuge on a hilltop to stave them off. Half of us were tired and worn from the dungeon, and if a stroke of luck had kept Cedwin from any treachery while we left him outside with the others, that didn’t do much to help us. 

What did help us, and help a great deal, was our positioning. Like the first time, that fateful night I’d been separated from Morlo by my own idiocy, we were propped up nice and comfortably on the top of a hill. This time, though, I didn’t lack the experience needed to see how relatively fine our position was.

There were more shamblers than last time, but pure numbers mattered little. In such an open space Morlo could unleash all the power he needed, and he was far from miserly about doing so. I saw bonfires half as big as the hill itself open up at its base and consume scores of the creatures at a time. The shamblers weren’t deterred by so insignificant a thing as being slaughtered, though, and came on with all the enthusiasm they always did. There were giant specimens among them, of course. A dozen or more, and outnumbered easily one hundred to one by their smaller brethren. 

They reached us after a minute, and the fight was hard. 

Hard enough that our little fellowship suffered its first casualty halfway into it. Chak died messily, but quickly. One of the giants caught his head with a swing hard enough to wrench the skull right from its spine and send him twitching to the ground, where he disappeared beneath shambler feet. 

It was Gruin who found vengeance for our fallen comrade, unfamiliar as he truly was to us. The Grynkori was never one to struggle with any excuse for killing, in any case, and he put this one to work as he fell upon the giant as a screaming bundle of limbs and strength. 

I almost felt bad for it, but then it’d killed an acquaintance of mine and I didn’t really have much love for undead in general. My own efforts at killing them were going rather nicely. Unlike Morlo, I wasn’t freed so much by the outdoors—the limits to my Thaumaturgy were still primarily my own power rather than any shackle of circumstance. 

That power had plenty to do here though. Shamblers sadly don’t produce warmth the way humans do, but Morlo’s own flames were spitting so much heat into the air that I almost felt overwhelmed at soaking it all up to hurl more into our attackers. Dessicated flesh, left dehydrated by so long without life, caught ablaze and kept Vara, Morlo and myself fed on sources for our power. 

By the dozen, they died to me and Vara. Combined with Morlo’s devastation we were thinning their numbers fast, and the remaining seven—now six—of our group were serving well to buy the Thaumaturges among us time enough to continue doing so. 

Il’vanja was a floating ribbon of death, as usual. Wherever her enemies’ weapons were, she wasn’t. Her weapon of choice was poorly suited for this sort of challenge, however. Where Gruin was able to confidently put a shambler down with only one blow, her dainty sword struggled. The mechanical damage required simply wasn’t something her weapon had been constructed to inflict.

But ingenuity served as a substitute for her lack of brute strength and metal-weight. She slit tendons and poked her blade between rusted mail links and armour plates, ruining all the joints needed to hold such unassailable forts of meat and bone together. Where Gruin vandalised, Il’vanja dismantled, and if she wasn’t nearly so effective as him, she certainly proved herself better than most of the humans present. 

Those humans; Dubin, Devyne and Vonti, fought as a trio now. Chak’s death had taught everyone the danger of their situation, and it was only seeing them from the corner of my eye, facing it with neither Thaumaturgy nor any level of preternatural strength, that I appreciated how little I had to fear by comparison.

I kept an eye on them, and on occasion hurled a fireball their way to fry some of the shamblers swarming their defence when it looked like they’d not manage to fend them off any longer. 

Then, almost before I knew it, the fight was won, and we were all alone on the hilltop.