Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 43 (Patreon)

Chapter 43: Carpet

“Gah!  What in the stars-damned hell!”  Chu stumbled backward, spitting.  “I got some in my mouth!”

“Use fire!”  I didn’t bother trying to form anything specific.  I just blasted fire qi from both of my hands, washing the area around me in flames, my shield quickly changing back into a ring and the plate on the front dropped to the ground.  Feeling dozens of the spiders crawling around under my armor, I forced more fire to explode out of my meridians that were covered.  My skin instantly started burning as my clothing caught fire, so I switched to water qi before it got bad.  The stink of burned hair caused my eyes to water, but the lack of spiders crawling all over me was worth the discomfort.  “We need to get out of here!”

“Baaaah!”  Chu didn’t need my prompting.  He had seen what I had done with fire, and had copied me.  He just hadn’t swapped to water qi fast enough, and the hair on his head had caught fire.  He sprinted back toward the wagon, smoke trailing him as he pulled out a water skin to dump over his head.  “I hate spiders!”

“Me too!”  I took off after him, doing my best not to slip on the guts of the spiders I was stepping on.  More continued to fall in sheets around me, and I activated my armor’s shields to protect me from any that might land on my head.  “Get on top of the wagon!”  I wasn’t sure if Chu had heard me or not, but I was sure he would think to do the same thing.  In the blink of an eye, the floor of the tunnel had turned from rock to a moving carpet of spiders.  I continued to kill as many as I could while I ran, using my newly concentrated qi to increase the heat of my flames to the point it made even those spiders not directly touched by fire burst open.

“Jim!”  My head whipped around when I heard my name.  I looked back to see Valerie leading the horses single file, with Donny in the rear.  Leading the group was Jamila, who was the one who had shouted.  She was hunched over, lifting and dropping a plank of wood as they walked closer.  Dense clusters of spiders rained down on them, only to be shunted away a few feet above their heads.  To the front and sides, drifts of the arachnids were shoved to the side, as if there was an invisible snow shovel being pushed in front of them.  “I told you it would work!”

“Great!  Follow me!”  I had no idea what she was talking about, so I turned and ran for the wagon.  Its shields still held enough of a charge to keep the spiders from swarming over it, but they were drifting higher and higher.  Eventually, they would reach the edge of the protection, and swarm inside.  Chu was already on top of the wagon, completely naked and hairless, with reddened skin on the brink of blistering.  His armor was strewn about him, and he was slapping himself all over.  “Am I interrupting something?”

“Shut up, would you?  I can feel them crawling all over me!”  He continued to slap his back and arms, swatting at nothing.  “Maybe you could help, instead of just standing there and watching?”

“Chu, take a breath, and use some wood qi to heal yourself.  Nothing is there.”  I watched as he calmed down.  The redness went away, and even some stubble started growing back on his head and face.  The whole time I was still casting flames around, cutting down on the spiders trying to swarm us.  “Now, that’s better.  You might want to put some clothes on, before the others get here.”

“What?”  He looked up sharply, finally noticing everyone else coming up quickly.  “Ah!”  He ducked inside the wagon, scooping up his armor on the way.  He poked his head back up for a second.  “I’ll be out as soon as I get dressed.”

“Go ahead, I’ve got this.”  To give my meridians a break, I tossed a few poppers around.  Their small explosions sent bug guts flying.  “There are a lot of them, but they are only spiders.”

While I waited for the others to come closer, I got a closer look at one of them.  I snatched one off the ground as it walked past the edge of my armor’s shields and inspected it closely.

The first thing that I noticed was the faint smell of vinegar and decay.  It was smaller than the tip of my pinky finger, and its tiny fangs weren’t long or sharp enough to puncture my toughened skin.  It made them essentially harmless, as long as they didn’t get in our eyes, ears, mouths, or noses.  That didn’t mean the little thing didn’t give up.  It kept trying to bite me over and over, determined to inject me with whatever venom it carried.  The fine hairs that covered it were a mix of black and gray, making it easy for them to blend into the walls of the caves.  When I squished it between my thumb and middle finger, I flicked its remains away.  After smelling the rot on my fingers, I finally realized what we were dealing with.

“It’s an attack!  These things are all undead!”  I cleaned my fingers off with fire, then quickly healed the damage.  “We need to get out of here!”

“Hold on, we’ll be there soon!”  Donny’s shout was immediately followed by explosions as he tossed his own supply of poppers off to the sides.  The others were only a hundred feet away now, but their pace didn’t speed up any.  Whatever they were doing to protect themselves, it was making a clear path that the spiders couldn’t cross over.

“Okay, let’s kill some creepy crawlies!”  Chu jumped back on top of the wagon, and the roof immediately gave way, causing him to tumble back inside.  “Stars-damn it!”

“Quit goofing off and get out here.  I need to check you for the qi infection, since they got in your mouth.  Their fangs aren’t long enough to pierce our skin, but that’s a different story if you swallow one.”  I also didn’t mention that the roof collapsing meant that the shield formations were running out of energy.  “Hurry up!”

“Jim, Chu, come to us!”  Valerie was waving us over, and she pointed to the thing Jamila was using.  “We have a way to make it through this!”

“Alright, I’m here.”  Chu had jumped out of the wagon, and immediately joined me in blasting the undead spiders around us with fire.  “Check me, please.”

“Sure.”  I let him take over our defense, and ran a thorough scan over his body.  I healed the few scratches he had gotten in the fall, but I didn’t sense any infection.  “I think you’re good.”

“Thank the gods!  I was pretty sure I didn’t feel any bites inside my mouth, but you kind of freaked me out there.”  He paused his bursts of fire to swap out the core that powered his armor’s shields from an earth element to fire.  “There.  Now I should be good to go.  Even if they push through my shields, they will get cooked in the process.”

“Smart.”  I quickly did the same, and the two of us shuffled to intersect with the others’ path.  When we burned our way to them, I was the first to speak.  “Quick, everyone swap their armor cores to a fire element.”

“Why?  With this, we don’t need to worry.”  Jamila held up the piece of wood I had seen her with earlier.  “I knew I could do it.”

“What did you do?”  Chu moved closer to inspect what his fiance had made, blocking it from my view.

The narrow space free of spiders forced us to shuffle past one another, so I let Chu look it over first.  Instead, I looked down at our feet, where a repeating series of runes was perfectly carved into the floor.  It would take hours - maybe days - to do this, but they had managed it at a walking pace.  “I don’t believe it.  You successfully made a stamp, didn’t you?”

“Yep!”  Jamila pulled it out of Chu’s hands and passed it over, obviously proud of her accomplishment.  “I used some light qi to carve and reinforce the dragon jade Chu picked up from the Auction House, and fitted it into a piece of the fire wood those sailors didn’t burn up when we first entered the caves.  I guess the materials were rare enough to hold up to the demands of shaping a formation, huh?”

“I guess so.  I’m glad I was proven wrong, because this thing might have just saved us all.”  What I didn’t say was that I knew it shouldn’t be working.  Dragon jade was expensive, but not particularly rare.  The plank of wood she had used was even more common.  The two combined should have either fallen apart or exploded the third or fourth time she had used the stamp to make a formation.  It had to be that she used light qi to reinforce it while making the stamp.  There were still so many things that I didn’t know when it came to the new types of qi.  It drove home the point that there might be a whole bunch of preconceived notions of cultivation I had that were outright wrong now that two more elements could be included.

“Well, I think we have a city to visit.”  Donny tossed out a few fire whip traps that wiped out entire sections of the spider carpet that was growing thicker around us.  “How about we knock on the front gate?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”  I handed the stamp back to Jamila, and took position in front of Valerie in the middle of our ragged line.  “I have a feeling they are expecting us.”  I tossed a ball of flames at the battle wagon as we passed by, the concentrated impact of energy finally bringing the shields down and lighting it on fire.  Thousands of spiders were incinerated, but it barely put a dent in the tiny monsters swarming us.  “We wouldn’t want to disappoint our host.”