Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Chapter 21: Just Breathe

I couldn’t be sure of what time I finally got out of bed, but it felt like morning.  The smell of meat frying on a pan was good motivation to get on my feet and try on my new armor.  Since I had made it, I didn’t have any problems slipping it on and fastening the sides.  I left off the helmet for now and put it in my belt, alongside my newly-forged weapons.

“About time you got out of bed!”  Donny poked his head in one of the empty windows, his helm open and showing off my cousins stupid grin.  “You ready to go?  I can’t wait to try this stuff out in a real fight!”  He disappeared before I could answer.  I guess at least he was happy with the new gear.

The meat Chu was cooking wasn’t the bacon I was hoping for, but thinly-sliced pieces of Angry Murder Goat were pretty tasty.  Well, if you are hungry, it’s close enough.

We made sure to pack up everything except for a few days worth of feed for the horses, and then double-checked our wards.  Donny and Chu arranged things with the captain, and made sure they knew not to approach the area we had claimed.  The threat of unknown traps would hopefully keep them from trying to eat the horses - or doing something equally stupid - for a day or two.  Okay, probably just a few hours, but the first layers of traps weren’t really that lethal.

Our first task was to clear enough rubble from the tunnel collapse to allow us room to get through.  It took longer than normal, mostly because we were all getting used to our new armor.  It made us a little stiffer than normal, but I insisted.  The only thing we didn’t have on was our helms.  They restricted airflow more than I would have liked, and we were all getting winded quickly.  The death cultivator was still alive deeper into these caves, so I knew the air was still breathable farther down.  Of course, that didn’t preclude the possibility of a section between us and his location that wasn’t safe, but we would burn those bridges when we got there.

Clearing a narrow path was easy, considering how much work had been done by the sailors when they attacked the rocks blocking the path.  To their credit, we did find signs of the dust being disturbed on the opposite side of the rubble, meaning there probably had been something watching them.  The trail died off rather quickly, as the dust gradually gave way to areas wet with moisture, mold and lichen.

We were finally getting deep enough to see small patches of the blue luminescent variety, but it wasn’t enough of a light source to allow us to see without using our other items.

“I don’t care how much it costs, when we get back to the surface, the first thing I’m doing is getting rid of all these green glow stones and picking out a different color.”  Valerie was walking next to me at the rear, letting Jamila get a turn taking point.  “These make us all look washed out and sickly.”

“Believe me, I understand.”  I had my glowstone fastened on the end of my spirit wood walking stick.  If I needed to shift it into a different form, it would just fall off onto the ground at my feet and allow me to still have some extra illumination.  “Green used to be one of my favorite colors.  Now, I’m getting pretty tired of it.”

“Shhhh!”  We both looked up to see Donny with a fist raised.  It was our universal symbol for freezing in place.  It also meant enemies were nearby.

I gestured for everyone to don their helmets.  Jamila was still out of sight farther down the tunnel, so we all readied weapons and started to spread out.  I didn’t see why Donny had stopped us, but I had no reason to doubt him.

Soon, I finally heard what he must have noticed.  There was a subtle grinding noise coming from somewhere.  The tunnels made it hard to figure out where it was coming from, beyond somewhere up ahead.

After a few minutes without anything happening, we started moving forward again.  The grinding sound was still intermittently audible, so we made sure to stay as silent as possible.  That was another shortcoming of the new armor.  It wasn’t exactly the greatest equipment for sneaking around.  We were forced to take agonizingly slow steps to keep ourselves from making a lot of noise.

Catching up to Jamila was now the priority.  Until we could identify what was making the grinding sounds, we needed to stick together.  I was even doubting our normal tactic of having a scout pushed forward so far.  We needed to at least keep one another within sight at all times.

We finally caught up to her when we rounded a gentle curve in the tunnel.  She was down on one knee, and leaning against the wall.  Chu rushed forward to help her, so we quickly followed behind.  As he got close to her, the grinding noise suddenly happened again, and a fine mist sprayed out from a thin crack in the walls.  He instantly started coughing, and was soon stumbling.

Jamila must have triggered some form of trap left by the former residents.  I had already released the spirit wood back into its ring, and started spinning out some threads of wood qi to drag them back, when a thin crack opened up in the ceiling above us.  The grinding sound was much louder, and the crack widened into an inch gap that stretched as far as I could see in either direction.  Not good.

“Run!  Our only chance is to get clear!”  I spun out two more threads of wood qi, then tied one on the left wrist of each person.  The armor tried to make them fizzle out and disperse, so I had to reinforce it with more energy.  Then, I forced out a bubble of air qi around my head to try and filter out as much of the mist as possible.  My own armor made it even more difficult, but I was able to push through.  It was going to drain my cores quickly, but I would manage.  And, I had found another problem with the new armor.  Maybe I wasn’t quite the Grandmaster smith I thought I was.

Donny scooped up both Jamila and Chu, while Valerie helped guide him.  I only took a breath when I had to, so I was still standing a few minutes later when all four of them were barely on their feet.  The wood qi was trying to heal them, but without concentrated focus it wasn’t doing much.  I used the tethers to start dragging them.  There was still no end in sight, so I just put my head down and started walking.  I felt it as each of my friends fell to the ground.  The smooth and damp surface made it easy to keep dragging them.

I don’t know how long I kept going like that.  Time seemed to stretch on for days, but I knew it couldn’t have been nearly that long.  I snapped out of it when I walked into a wall.  Looking around, I realized I was clear of the crack that spewed the gas from the walls.  My cores were almost completely empty, as were the batteries on my belt.  I must have drained those by reflex while my brain was on auto-pilot.  I looked up, expecting to see a dead end.  Instead, I was greeted by proper stonework.

It wasn’t a regular tunnel wall, but the wall of another outpost.  This one had much more damage, like it had seen heavy fighting.  I followed the curve of the wall to the opposite end of the much wider tunnel, and found a small gap where something had smashed in a section wide enough to squeeze through.

Since I was out of qi, I had to drag each of my friends through the gap individually.  I was completely exhausted, and I would need to set up some light sources before cultivating to maintain enough balance in my cores.  The dark and metal qi was even stronger here, and I was too tired to try and cultivate without the assistance a large amount of light would provide.

Once I had everyone inside, I took the time to search the area.  They were already starting to come back around, thankfully, but I wanted to make sure we were safe for the time being.

This outpost was much smaller than the last one, and most certainly was meant as more of a checkpoint or stronghold than a village.  There were only two one-story buildings placed in front of each gate.  The gate on the wall we had entered through wasn’t visible from the other side, but it was plainly marked once you were inside the compound.  It was a cleverly hinged section of stone bricks, which is probably why it still stood.  The other gate was a more traditional archway.  The metal portcullis had long ago rusted into near uselessness, and the wooden doors had mouldered into large piles of splinters.  It wouldn’t even stop a determined Angry Murder Goat from getting through, but at least we would hear it knocking down the portcullis.  I dropped a few trap plates in the gap we had crawled through before helping everyone limp into the nearest building.  It was completely empty inside, with no windows, and a short door on each end.  Probably a barracks, or possibly a storage area.

All of us were in pretty bad shape.  Any time someone tried to talk, it just ended in hard coughing.  Whatever that trap had contained, it had been both a sedative and a corrosive.  Maybe the armor had been a good choice, because any exposed skin was going to need some healing to heal the blistering.

I had just set up some of our brighter lights so I could start cultivating, when I heard a strange scraping sound coming from the other side of the main gate.  I had to walk outside to see what was going on, and I instantly dropped to my stomach as soon as I saw what was making the noise.

The scraping I had heard was the sounds of hundreds of bones as they shuffled along the cavern floor.  The bones of the feet of a very large group of skeletons that were currently shambling past us, without realizing we were here.  Behind them was a contingent of the desiccated remains of what I assumed was the former residents of the underground city.  They were all wearing rusted armor, and carried weapons that looked to be made entirely of black and red obsidian.  I lost count of them, but not because there were millions.  I lost count because I was shocked at what came next.  Several corpses that were more, well, squishy, moaned along behind the silent troops.  I even saw a few dirty uniforms from the captain’s crew, but not nearly enough to account for all of the people at the outpost.  This must be the missing crewmembers they hadn’t found yet.  There were also a few in the armor of the Imperial Army.  Not the Elemental Guard, but the regular conscripts that were forced into service for not paying taxes, or displeasing some lord or another.  But it wasn’t them that caught my attention.  No, it was much worse.

The smallest group brought up the rear.  It was made up of monsters, mostly the normal beasts you see in the high mountain passes.  But in the very back, bringing up the rear, were my hated enemies.  I now knew what had happened to Donut and Boot.