Tycoon May: Chapter 33 (Patreon)

Chapter 33

Grant stood coughing at the blocked entrance to the cave, mentally cursing his bad luck.  “I was this close!  And how did Steve get away in the first place?”  He retreated farther down the tunnel, doing his best to get a clean breath of air.  “Now what am I supposed to do?  If I try to dig myself out, the rockslide is going to keep shifting and burying me deeper.”

<Look on the bright side.  You won’t starve to death.  Not for a long time, anyway.  That Gracken probably tastes like snake.>

“I’d rather not find out.”  Grant looked around, trying to think his way through the problem.  He couldn’t come up with anything besides slowly digging his way out, or using his pickax to dig up and away from the side of the cave that was under the rockslide.  Either option meant he was going to be here for longer than the wagon train was willing to wait.  He coughed again, feeling defeated.  Another chunk of time taken hurt his chances of survival.  “I guess I better start digging.  It isn’t going to get any shorter by just standing here.”

He took another glance back at the collapse before walking deeper into the cave to start digging.  After taking only a few steps, Sarge stopped him.  <Grant, look back at the entrance.>  He shook his head, not seeing the point, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.  Grant did as he was asked, and saw through the slowly settling dust that it was even worse than he had initially feared.  The rocks piled in place were huge, keeping him from even having a chance to shift them enough to squeeze out somehow.  <No, don’t look at the rocks.  Look at the dust.>

Grant was about to say how stupid it would be, when he noticed a swirl near the floor of the cave where the dust was being pulled into the much narrower tunnel that he had ignored when he first got to the cave.  “What does that mean?  Do you think there’s another way out?”

<I think it’s worth exploring before you spend the next several days digging your way outside.>

That was a very good point.  Grant knelt down and tried to squeeze into the tunnel, but got stuck almost immediately.  “I don’t know, Sarge.  This feels dangerous.  I don’t want to get stuck.”

<Quit being a baby.  Take your armor off so you aren’t so bulky, and get moving.  You’re running out of time if you want to have a chance.>

“Fine.”  Grant tried again after stuffing his armor into his storage bag, weighing it down even more.  “But if I get stuck and die of suffocation, it’s your fault.”

This time, he was able to make it after sucking in his breath and using his arms and legs to push and pull himself through the entrance.  The tunnel opened up after a bit, allowing him to crawl on his hands and knees.  Everything was coated with dust, and it ground into his skin like sandpaper as he moved deeper.  Grant could feel his Regeneration trying to heal him, causing him to itch and hurt at the same time.  It was such a distraction that he almost didn’t notice when he crawled right past a hole in the top of the tunnel.

“Wait.”  Grant stopped and backed up.  “Is that what I think it is?”  Looking up, he thought he saw stars.  It was so out of place that he was convinced he was seeing things.

<Yep.  That’s definitely a way out.>  Sarge highlighted the tightest section of the narrow hole.  <You aren’t going to fit through here, so you can either try to widen it, or keep going to look for an easier way out.>

After gauging how hard it would be to dig in the already small space, Grant decided to keep looking.  He could still feel a slight breeze coming from farther ahead, so he pushed on, despite how irritating it was to keep crawling.

To distract himself, Grant started thinking about what it would be like if he had never picked up his Uchigatana.  While he wouldn’t be crawling on his hands and knees through a cave, there was a very good chance he would have been on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor of a barn stall.  He couldn’t help but let out a low chuckle at how things had come full circle.  He then stopped when he thought about everyone who had died over the last four or five months.

“Sarge, do you think it was a good thing I picked up the sword?”  Grant heard something scratch against the stone behind him.  He tried to look back, but it was so tight that he couldn’t turn around.  After nothing attacked him, he kept going.  This time, definitely a bit faster than before.

<Sometimes, I think the worst thing you could have ever done was pick me up.>  Grant snorted, thinking the same thing himself.  <But most of the time, you aren’t so bad.  Better you than some stuck-up member of a House who thinks they know better than everyone else.>

Another noise came from behind him, and he froze, holding his breath.  Grant half-expected something to bite him in his rear with the way things had been going, but he once again wasn’t attacked.

<It’s not even my butt on the line, and I’m starting to get nervous.>  Now, Grant hurried enough he was scraping off the skin on his hands and knees faster than regeneration could keep up.  The blood seemed to excite whatever was behind him, and it scrabbled faster to keep up with him.

A thin beam of light broke the darkness of the tunnel, and Grant scooted for it like his life depended on it.  He didn’t even bother looking to see if he would fit when he got there.  Grant shoved himself into the gap above, erupting from underground like a fish jumping out of a pond.

He flopped to the ground, gasping for breath as he rolled over to see if the thing in the tunnels was going to follow him.  A single Gracken head popped up, much smaller than either the three-headed or four-headed monsters he had seen before.  It turned to look at him before snorting in disappointment, ducking back out of sight in a blink.

“Where did that thing come from?”  Grant got to his feet, looking around to make sure he wasn’t going to get ambushed again.  He was on the side of a hill far enough away that he couldn’t see the rockslide.  “I didn’t see any little Gracken.”

<You also didn’t look deeper in the tunnel blocked off by the Gracken.  Either it just had baby monsters, or there was a nest deeper in.  You could have been the next meal for a whole little horde of baby Gracken.>

Grant shuddered, and pushed the thought aside.  “Well, I made it out okay.  Now it’s time to get back.”

He took a few minutes to get his armor back on, and started running back to the wagon train.  Steve, the House Saturday Vassal, was nowhere to be found when he passed by the rockslide.  If he reported back to his Wielder that Grant was dead, it would hopefully keep House Saturday off his back long enough for him to get out of District May.

By the time Grant made it back to the wagon train, they were already starting to pack up.  He slowed his run to a light jog as he came up to where Sam and Adria were talking with Evander and the scout he had helped rescue.

“Ah, there you are.”  Sam reached out a hand for Grant to shake.  “I’m glad you made it before we left.”

“We were beginning to wonder.”  Adria pointed a thumb at the scout.  “Now that you’re here, we have some things to discuss.  We know what they were after.”  She pulled out a couple of letters from the messenger bag Grant had given her.  “Those were definitely House Saturday Vassals, and they wanted you specifically.”

Evander gave Grant a thump on the shoulder.  “I think your monster-meat-eating habits are going to kill you.  Just not how we thought.”

Grant looked at them, obviously confused.  “What?”  Adria passed over the letters, and he quickly read over them.  They were written in some kind of code.  “Does anyone know what this means?”

“I do.”  Sam held out his hand, and Grant passed them over.  “It’s a kind of shorthand House Sunday uses.  Which means, these orders could have only come from one place.”

“Well, what do they say?”  Grant subconsciously rubbed at his shoulder where Evander had hit him.  “And what does eating meat have to do with it?”

“It says they want you found and ‘silenced’ immediately.  They don’t want the truth about other sources of food to get out, and you are the biggest threat to that.”  Sam tapped the letters on his open palm.  “And the orders came straight from Tycoon May’s mother.”

“All I know is, I’m out.”  The scout held up his hands in surrender.  “This is too big for my head.”

“It’s too late for that.”  Adria took the letters back and put them in the messenger bag before passing them over to the scout.  “You’re already a part of this.  We all are.”

Evander shrugged, placing his hands on his hips.  “Sounds to me like we’re going to have to fight a bunch of people over something absolutely ridiculous.  I like it.”

“Of course you would.”  Adria looked back at the scout.  “You are the least invested, so I want you to take those messages back to the city we just left and leave them on the bar at the first inn you find.  Start spreading rumors of House Thursday and House Sunday using House Saturday to suppress the information that monster meat is safe to eat.  The merchants and guards will hear it, and the rumor will spread faster than House Saturday can stop it.”  Her hands tightened into fists.  “We’ll do the same thing at every city we stop in, all the way to Forteresse Mere.”