Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 36 (Patreon)

Chapter 36: Scraps

Jamila rushed back out of the chamber, not bothering to tell me what was going on.  I checked Roberts, and I was happy to see the infection had cleared out of his cores.  The lack of qi in his body must have made the infection even more hungry for the wood qi I had been using.  It also explained why the infection had attacked Donny so much faster.  Donny had more qi, giving the infection more fuel to absorb as it traveled through his system.  It meant the disease was more dangerous to those who were more powerful.  If I was a dark mana demon that wanted to take over the world, I would definitely want to take out the most powerful cultivators to make things easier on me.  I looked back down to Roberts, and he still had plenty of the black sludge in his meridians, but I had bought some time before he was turned.

“I have him stable, but he isn’t healed yet.”  I stood, brushing off my knees.  “Try to get him comfortable, and make sure he doesn’t try to cultivate.  It only feeds the infection.”  I checked the core that powered the shields on my armor and went to check on Jamila.  “I’ll be back to finish healing him when I figure out what is going on.”

The remaining sailors all gave me a somewhat unenthusiastic acknowledgement and piled more fuel on their fire.  I ducked into the tunnel and made my way deeper underground.  Right away, I could hear the sounds of battle.  A flickering light in the distance flared brightly, as if a fireball had exploded.  I started sprinting, and activated my armor’s shields.

As I ran, the tunnel expanded into a larger section that had been artificially expanded.  If it hadn’t been for the flames, I would have completely missed the crack in the wall to my right.  After squeezing through the gap, I almost ran into the back of the sailor who had led Jamila away.  He was gasping for breath, leaning against the rough stone and clutching a bleeding wound on his upper arm.  His clothing was smoking, and he smelled like burnt hair.  I didn’t have time to ask what was happening before he hurriedly told me what was going on.

“We ran right into them!”  He pointed with his good arm, just in time for another blast of fire to wash over the two of us.  I shielded him from the flames, letting my shields take the brunt of the attack.  “They must have been looking for us, and when we walked up they just attacked!”

“Stay here, I’ll see what I can do.”  I turned sideways to make my way through the tight spot in front of me, and popped free into another cavern that was very similar to the one the sailors were currently using as a base.  The biggest differences were the reduced number of buildings built into the walls, and the ceiling was much lower.  Oh, and the giant undead lizard the size of a freight wagon breathing fire at my friend.  That was definitely not the same.

“About time you showed up!”  Jamila was standing over the second sailor, who looked a little crispy.  She had tossed a handful of shield formation plates out, and the undead fire-breathing lizard was doing his best to wear them down.  “Mind giving me a hand?”

Behind the lizard, a group of undead skeletons were standing in three lines of five.  They seemed to be waiting for the lizard to get out of the way, or possibly they understood that moving in front of a fire-breathing monster was bad for their long-term un-health.

Normally, I would be able to tell what kind of beast I was dealing with, but rot and decay made it almost impossible to figure out if this was an adolescent mighty Lava Wyrm, or just a run-of-the-mill Fire Gecko.  There were a dozen more options between the two extremes, and I gave up trying to guess when the skeletons finally noticed me.

“Try using some spike plates to push that thing back, and get that sailor out of here!”  I shouted instructions to Jamila, and then focused my attention on the fifteen skeletons approaching me.  While they weren’t much of a risk while I was wearing my armor, they would certainly get in the way when I tried fighting the lizard.  I boosted a jump up to the second shelf of low houses, and used the few seconds it bought me to pull out my silver bow and a full quiver.  Charging it with earth qi made the arrows it would fire extra heavy, and I clipped the quiver to my belt.  Trying to put them down quickly, I started loosing arrows at the skeletons as quickly as I could line up shots.

My jumping around had distracted the fire lizard, and it shifted to look at me with its undead, milky eyes.  A single spike plate thrown by Jamila forced it back in surprise, and she took advantage of the space it provided and rushed past it into the crack with the sailor flung over her shoulder.  The lizard spun in anger, its thick tail knocking a skeleton that had gotten too close into flying bone shrapnel.

Seeing an opening, I loosed an arrow at the hip joint of the lizard.  The heavy arrow easily punched through the dead scales, and a loud crack of bone caused the beast to stumble and fall backward.  That brought its attention back to me, so Jamila had time to get clear.

While I was distracting the lizard, a pair of skeletons had managed to clamber up the steep ramp to the shelf I was standing on.  I took a half-step forward and loosed a single arrow that passed through the head of the first skeleton and clipped the jawbone of the second.  The dark qi holding the closest skeleton together escaped through the hole in its skull, and it collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.  The second skeleton didn’t fall apart, but the hit caused it to tip over the edge of the shelf and it dropped ten feet to the ground.  Its leg bones shattered, and it started trying to pull itself up the wall using its arms.  A quick count told me there were still ten skeletons moving around, so I lined up a shot to try for another two-for-one special.  Instead, I got interrupted.

Fire washed over me, causing my shields to shimmer into visible light.  It was only a brief moment of heat, but that was enough to suck the air out of my lungs and make my armor uncomfortably hot.  The arrow I had nocked burst into flames, and I threw it away before the bowstring was damaged.  I guess it was time to switch weapons.

I swapped my bow for an adamantine spear, and hucked it as hard as I could at the lizard’s face.  It tried another blast of fire to knock the spear off course, but it wasn’t enough to stop it from nailing the beast’s lower jaw to the ground.  The lizard tried to pull away, and managed to split its rotting mandible in half.  The fire streaming from its throat fanned out from the bottom of its mouth, carpeting the ground in a layer of flames.  Dry skin and bones caught fire, lighting up the cavern, forcing me to squint as my eyes watered from the bright flares when the skeletons lit up like candles.  The lizard was more… juicy, so it only smoldered, filling the cavern with a thick and noxious smoke.

Somehow, the skeletons kept coming for me despite being on fire.  I couldn’t help but admire their dedication.  Backing away, I started forming a qi construct similar to the one I had used on the rock trolls.  This time, I shaped a pillar with air qi and filled it with fire qi.  Instead of shaping blades as I set it spinning, I just left slits in the sides of the pillar and sent it toward the skeletons.  Blue flames spit out the sides, creating disks of destruction that sliced into the skeletons that tried to climb up the ramp, adding to the fire already eating away at their dry bones.

Having taken care of the skeletons, I refocused on the beast.  It had rolled around on the ground to put out its smoldering flesh, and then immediately made the same mistake of trying to breathe fire and coating the ground in flames from the split in its jaw.  Occasionally, the stupidity of your enemies is the thing you didn’t even know you needed in your life.

Considering the size of the undead beast, I decided to use another qi construct to finish it off.  Long ago I had dealt with a nest of Magma Newts, and a strong air qi attack had increased the temperature of their own fire attacks so much that it overwhelmed their high resistance to heat.  Becoming an undead had obviously reduced much of the fire resistance this beast had when alive, so a smaller version of the same attack would work.

Building a construct of air qi in the form of a nine-sided pagoda around the lizard only took a few heartbeats, and I filled its framework with more wind qi.  It was a ghostly-blue version of a building you might see anywhere in the south.  A simple roof was held up by thin pillars, and a few subconscious decorations made its basic form look very similar to one of my favorite meditation locations inside the gardens of the Imperial Palace.  It sat around the lizard like a cage, keeping the undead creature from escaping.  I left the base of each pillar holding up the construct unsealed, and the moment the lizard spit fire all over the floor the leaking qi interacted violently.

The almost smoky-red flames of the fire lizard ignited into a flare of yellow and blue.  Spots danced in my vision, and I blinked rapidly to adjust to the new level of light in the chamber.  By now, the skeletons were all destroyed.  The undead lizard was bouncing between the pillars of the pagoda, shaking the construct.  All it managed to do was increase the speed in which it was burnt to cinders.  I watched impassively as it went from undead to completely dead.

“Well, that took you long enough.”  Jamila stepped through the crack in the cave wall, hands on her hips and a sarcastic smile on her face.  “I can’t believe that thing gave you so much trouble.”

“It wasn’t giving me too many problems.  With the walls already cracking in this place, I didn’t want to risk a collapse.”  I pointed out the long-running crack that almost bisected the ceiling.  “That would be a very bad thing.”

“Sure, tell yourself whatever you want.  Either way, thank you for the assist.  At first, it was only the skeletons, but while I was getting you that fire beast showed up, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to save the two sailors.”  She motioned for me to follow her back through the narrow opening.  “Let me show you what we found.  Those things interrupted us before we could finish looking things over.”

I hopped down and collected my slightly-singed spear before joining her.  When we got to the wide tunnel, the two sailors were slumped against the far wall.  Both looked exhausted, and the one who had been injured was covered in a purple ointment that stank of herbs and vinegar.  I knew that it helped with his burns, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand next to him in a confined space.

“You finished them off?”  The uninjured sailor climbed to his feet.  The other man didn’t even wake up.  “We were getting a little worried.  Not many beasts spit fire.”  It was hard not to snort.  Fire-breathing creatures were so common that I had literally been unable to figure out which one I had been dealing with.  I suppose someone who spent most of his time on the ocean wouldn’t know that, though.  “You ready to see what happened?”

“Sure.  Jamila was about to show me what you had found.”  I stepped closer to the smelly sailor, and used a strand of wood qi to look him over.  “I can help your friend some before we go.”  I fixed the worst of the damage, and cleared up a nasty venereal disease I wasn’t too surprised to find.  Sailors tended to find the more exotic diseases, considering their profession.  I left the more minor issues to be corrected by his ointment.  If he was going to suffer from the stink, he might as well receive the benefits from it.  I also noted how poorly he had layered the qi elements through his body, causing a harsh imbalance toward wind and water qi.  It explained why he had been so sensitive to the fire qi.  “There we go.  That should help things along nicely.”

“Thank you.”  The uninjured sailor looked his friend over.  “How long do you think it will take for him to wake up?”  He nudged him with his foot, and the man slumped over onto the floor.

“Healing can take a lot out of someone.  It will probably take an hour or two, and he will be hungry and thirsty when he wakes up.”  I handed the man a set of rations from my belt.  “You should probably take him back to your camp while we go check whatever it is you found.”  He nodded in agreement, and I followed Jamila deeper into the tunnel.

“It’s over here.”  She pointed out the tell-tale signs of a large group traveling through the area.  We continued walking for almost half a mile before she stopped and pointed.  She led me to a small alcove carved into the side of the tunnel.  “I think this is where they must have tried to fight back against the undead.”

“And didn’t win.”  I winced as I looked over the scraps of bone and flesh that marked the remains of the people we had sailed with.  They had been torn apart, and it was clear the undead had chewed on their remains.  “There isn’t much left.”

“I think it’s impossible to tell how many died here.  It would take a long time to sort through all this and try to piece them together.”  Jamila nudged a pile of fabric, revealing a bare leg missing chunks out of it.  “If we even could piece anyone together.”

“Let’s just look for some sign of the captain, and try to use the clothing to guess how many are here.”  The two of us did our best to poke around, but our concerns were proven true.  The shreds of clothing were so similar to one another that it was impossible to know if they came from different people or not.  We could be digging through the remains of five people, or fifty.  What we didn’t find was anything that might point to the ship captain being among the dead.  I decided to call it quits after ten minutes.  “I don’t see the point in continuing.  We should head back, so I can heal the infected sailor the rest of the way, and we can get back to our friends.”

“What do you want to do about the survivors?”  Jamila dropped the piece of skull bone she was inspecting and brushed her hands together.  “I don’t think they will be willing to go deeper underground with us.”

“I’ll talk to their leader about it.  We can leave a trail for them to follow if they want to go our direction, but I bet they head for the surface.”  I looked at the markings left on the wide tunnel floor.  The group of undead that had walked through here had probably been even larger than the one I had wiped out in the higher tunnels.  “Since they are a smaller group, they might manage to make it past the bigger patrols of undead wandering around down here.”

The two of us walked back toward the sailors, and I did my best not to think about the dream I had involving the ship captain.  Dreaming of the new future I had helped to shape seemed impossible, but I was beginning to understand that ‘impossible’ didn’t mean much anymore.  The addition of dark and light qi in my cultivation had already caused me to change, and dreaming of the future might be another side effect.  It didn’t seem to be the same kind of dream walking I got from the gods.  Seeing Alya die made me unreasonably angry, considering we were little more than strangers in this timeline.  A romantic relationship with her was only hypothetical at this point, and I wasn’t expecting to be back in the Southern Kingdom for a long time.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter.  As long as I could kill the necromancer and stop the infection from spreading, that version of the future wouldn’t come to pass.  It was time to head deeper underground, and finish this task from the gods.  No more distractions.

“Hey Jim, where did all the sailors go?”  Jamila’s question caused me to pay attention to our surroundings.  We had made it back to their camp, and no one was home.  I cast out my senses, trying to sense any form of life nearby.  Jamila hopped up to the low buildings built onto the stone shelves and searched them while I inspected all the nearby exits.  “It looks like they just up and left.  There isn’t anything left to prove they were here at all.”

“I didn’t find anything either.  There are tracks at every exit, and we don’t have time to follow all of them to figure out where they went.”  I moved to go back toward the tunnel that led to the well.  “Let’s go.”

“What about the infected sailor?”  Jamila jumped down and joined me.  She was dragging her feet, slowing us down.  “Are you just going to let him die?”

“I didn’t let him do anything.”  I picked up the pace, lengthening my stride and forcing her to do the same.  “They made their choice, and we have a death cultivator and nox to take down.  No more distractions.  We need to finish this, before it’s too late.”  The image of Alya being run down like prey ran through my head, and I grit my teeth in determination.  “Too many lives depend on us to allow any more delays.”  I felt an invisible clock ticking away, and the pressure to bring down the necromancer seemed to grow with every moment.  Whether it came from the gods, or my own subconscious, it didn’t matter.  “We need to regroup with the others, and check on Donny.”

“Fine.”  Mentioning our friends made Jamila speed up the pace even more, forcing me to jog to keep up.  “Stop being so slow then, and let’s go.”  I snorted in amusement, and the two of us broke into a run, racing each other to see who could be the first to jump down a well.

My life was weird.