LSRO: Chapter 304 - Electric Void (Patreon)

OMG - would you look at that.

4 chapters by Sunday night! BOO YA! I did it!

And now I'm back on track. Weeeeeeee

Dictation is working - so freaking relieved, because my damn hand isn't working haha.

Sorry about the cliffhanger...

NOT

~~

Chapter 40

Electric Void

Quinn had wanted to be wrong, desperately wanted to be wrong. Yet, when they came upon the next target,  creeping out of the passageway to ambush them from behind, she couldn’t deny the truth. They absolutely annihilated them in such a way that it was almost painful. It definitely wasn’t the most sportsmanlike way to defeat their opponents, but Quinn thought it was warranted considering they were yet again outnumbered two to one.

For infiltrators, intruders, who’d cleared everything out, who had rid the place of everybody there — these people just weren’t skilled enough. Milaro was beside himself. Their opponents knew nothing, they had nothing. She thought he might tear his hair out.

Eventually he sighed and pushed himself back up to standing. “But at least now we know how they had managed to clear everyone out.”

“How?” Quinn asked.

“Well,” he sighed, “they came in as a group. A group of 60 is pretty imposing when there are only scattered groups of three or four in the palace. It appears that Hal only had a perfunctory guard on the palace. As long as everything outside of it was taken care of, those people infiltrating the inner sanctum won’t have to worry about it.”

Quinn mulled it over. He was right. They’d made it in, despite the odds. They should probably be grateful that the intruders hadn’t chosen to massacre everyone in their path. She watched as they bound these prisoners, setting them into another room, carrying them away from the passages, where Milaro made sure they’d stay asleep for hours. Now she wanted to tear her hair out in frustration because even with these dozen down, there were still another dozen left that they had to face. She could only hope that they could get answers from these other 12 people. Because otherwise, this was all for nothing.

After tidying up behind the fourth group, they decided to enter the passageway again. But Eric stopped and frowned after a couple of minutes. He looked around back and forth, obviously checking the map that she’d sent him in the HUD.

“No,” he said, “we can’t get to them from here. These passageways don’t go down to the dungeons. They actually veer around to the kitchens.”

Quinn reinforced her senses and looked at Milaro for reassurance, but he just shrugged in his own frustration back at her. She reached out, feeling around, but also came back irritated. “There’s nothing more I can pick up out there. Only that this next group is a dozen and they somehow feel more solid to my extended senses.”

Malakai grunted, “Yeah, that probably means they’re stronger, right?”

Milaro groaned, “Very likely.”

“But that’s good, right?” Quinn asked. Because wasn’t it? Hadn’t they just been complaining that this was all too easy? It felt too good to be true? “I mean, it’s better that these are actually people who’ve been sent here to do a job than just to distract us from something we haven’t discovered yet, right?”

Milaro sort of shrugged. “Yes and no,” he said.

“What do you mean, yes and no?”

“I mean, it’s really nice having an easy go-through of it.”

Quinn rolled her eyes. “If we just need it to be easy, then we should ambush this group, too. After all, that’ll let us take out half of them before they have a chance to turn around, if we time our attacks this time using telepathy.” She wondered if she came off snarky. Probably. She wasn’t really fussed right then. The others blinked at her. So she decided to change the subject. “Anyway, how do we get there?”

Eric spent several more seconds studying his HUD before he spoke. “We’ll have to take this passage a bit further, up to where it breaks off to the kitchen and disappears and we’ll need to go through the hallways then,” He hesitated, narrowing his eyes as he followed the map. “I think the group is actually getting closer to Kajaro’s holding cell.”

Quinn, having been there to see Kajaro already recently, tried to orientate the map and the location she’d been at in her head but failed. It didn’t sound good to Quinn in any way for this stronger group to reach Kajaro’s holding cell.

Milaro stretched his arms above his head, cracked his knuckles and said, “I guess there’s no time like the present?”

Eric butted in before Milaro could say anything else. “We need to speak telepathically once we get closer to them, but for now we can just speak normally. They won’t hear us. There’s too much interference between us and where they are, even if they have enhanced hearing.”

Lynx piped up. “True! Regardless of their species, the proximity we have to them right now, they won’t be able to hear us.”

Quinn sighed with relief. She liked speaking telepathically, but then she couldn’t take facial cues properly and that always led to misunderstandings.

Moving ahead, they exited the passageways shortly, coming into the gorgeous hallways shaped by the igneous rock sculpting, opulently decorated with carpets that Quinn thought probably cost an arm and a leg. There were sconces along the walls, lit with low-yield flames that somehow still illuminated the corridor in a beautiful, shadowy way. Some of the rock glistened as if there was glitter or some sort of precious metal embedded inside it but she knew it was lava rock and thus likely just something that had happened over time, perhaps a residue of magic.

And now her brain was running away with her. She chuckled internally because it didn’t seem like the right time to be chuckling externally. The whole palace or castle reminded her of medieval dungeons that she’d seen in movies or even in documentaries. The paths wound around in ways that belied the size of the palace she’d seen from a distance, but then again, she knew magic could accomplish amazing things.

Just when she thought they’d come to the end of the corridor, another one popped up a winding chicane away from the previous one. If she’d been left alone without a map, she’d have been lost for years in here. She couldn’t follow the map even on her HUD, which made her wonder about the Library offering a course to brand-new Librarians that were shoved into it in the thick of things without any previous training. Maybe it would have behooved her to take the course cartography 101.

Quinn realized she was getting worked up for no reason and concentrated on where they were going instead.

While she’d been imagining what other courses, the Library could offer to assist her in interpreting her HUD, the surrounding conversation had moved on to mild speculation and discussions about why they were after Kajaro in the first place.

“Why do they want to silence him, do you think?” Erik asked.

Quinn raised an eyebrow. “Because he knows everything they’ve done and probably have planned, plus probably where they live, where they train, where they hide.”

Milaro continued the list without missing a beat, “And how they recruit, how they insinuate themselves into people’s lives in order to give themselves leverage to lure others to their cause.”

“My, my grandfather, that sounds like you have had first-hand experience at this,” Malakai teased, although Quinn noted there was a hint of trepidation in his voice.

Milaro did not chuckle in response. Instead, his voice grew extremely grave. “Well, I have been around for thousands of years and I’ve seen some crap in my time.”

Quinn took that to heart. He was old.

“Anyway,” the Elf King said, “I am quite certain it’s to stop him from spilling secrets. He’s bound to know so much.

“Why didn’t they kill him before?” Erik asked and then hit himself in the head. “It’s okay, don’t answer it.”

“No, let me clarify it for you,” Malakai said, “because your poor little brain hasn’t been able to absorb the knowledge.”

“Shut up, Malakai,” Erik said, a little snarkily.

Malakai ignored him. “You see, it’s because he had all these lives and could just pop back to life, probably take care of them himself because he would have known who was trying to kill him.”

“How did they get word,” Milaro started this time, “that he no longer has those lives?”

Which was one of the biggest problems Quinn had with the whole thing, because they hadn’t even known before yesterday afternoon.

“How did they manage,” she asked, “to get an entire contingent of people ready to move and out the door? Even if they somehow overheard it in the Library yesterday when Hal came to visit, or somehow defected from here, which didn’t they know Uncle Hal will track them down? Was it just in order to bring that news to the Sölem? I don’t understand how they moved this quickly.”

“Well,” Milaro said, “it’s probably because they had the essence of it figured out. Their team was probably already organized, and just waiting for Hal to break through and remove the lives. They likely didn’t count on him having not only guards but also having left a back-up plan in place.”

Quinn supposed that made a lot of sense. So Malakai changed the subject and turned to Eric. “Did this group just head straight here? Were the others decoys?”

“No,” Eric answered, “I don’t think so. I think they actually started at the other points of the castle, and unluckily, they didn’t hit his cell yet. So they basically did it by process of elimination. I’m not sure if they damaged those areas, as there aren’t other alarms going off or anything. I’ll leave that to Hal and Ikeshal.”

Quinn perked up, remembering the Satyr general who had helped them back in the battle where they captured Kajaro. “Is Ikeshal well again?”

“Mostly,” Eric answered, “he is back to about 80% of his duties. He’s gone to oversee the campaign tent with Hal.”

Quinn nodded slowly. “They should be back once they realize it’s a diversion, right?”

Eric shrugged. “Maybe? Depends on how deep that so-called diversion runs. I wouldn’t put it past his siblings to take advantage and for him to have to make it a lesson on why they shouldn’t have.”

While she knew that was likely the case, Quinn didn’t like it. She didn’t like Hal or any of her friends in danger. Especially not herself.

“Anyway,” Eric said, “I can tell where they went because of their magical signature. I followed it.”

“Wait,” Quinn said, “magical signature? We should probably pick that up in case we need to compare it to the magical signatures we got on the Esposian Isle.”

“Not a hard thing to do,” Eric said. “Just have to make sure we don’t forget.”

They all came to a stop at the top of a very long staircase. Quinn looked down into the almost gloomy lighting below them. She frowned. It didn’t remind her of the extremely sterile cell she’d seen Kajaro in, but that didn’t mean anything. They were quiet as they descended the stairs. Eric held his little finger up to his mouth in a motion of eternal silence. They pushed open the doors, luckily on oiled hinges, which made no sound at all, and proceeded through very carefully.

That was more like it. Everything around them had a smooth, white, sterile feeling, but it wasn’t bright. The light in the area managed to maintain a golden hue that softened it as it hit her vision. She took stock, seeing similar holding cells up ahead, just like the one that she’d originally seen Kajaro in. But Quinn frowned. It didn’t smell right. It didn’t feel right. Nobody spoke. Eric simply led the way. But there was nothing. No people. No speaking. No messages. Nothing scrawled on the walls. And yet, with each step she took, her sense of foreboding grew.

I don’t like this, she sent out to everybody. Aradie pushed in next to her neck, making herself smaller. We should be on alert.

Yes, Milaro agreed. This feels... wrong.

She looked at him. There were tiny beads of sweat on his brow. Another sign that Quinn knew not everything was all right. Only silence and emptiness greeted them. And that’s when the itching in the back of Quinn’s mind began. She couldn’t reach it. It wasn’t like she could scratch inside her brain. She had to put it down to being a gut feeling.

Definitely be on alert, she warned the others. There’s something not right up ahead.

They turned the corner, and this time, Quinn saw the door she’d entered through on her last visit, where they’d avoided this long corridor of sterility. They opened the door in front of them, the one that led through to Kajaro’s section, just in time for a severed arm to smash into the wall next to where Quinn entered from. She blinked as a trickle of blood hit her forehead and ran down the side of her face.

The room in front of her was filled with chaos. There were, as far as she could see, three spinoboli and two imps still standing, hovering... whatever. Around her, there was a massacre of medical professionals in their scrubs, as well as the intruders. Bits and pieces of bodies, entrails, blood, and viscera made the floor a shiny, slippery mess. 

And Kajaro stood at the end of the room in all his electric void glory.

~~

BWAH HAH HAH

Much love

KT