B3Ch71-Cheesing the Blackjaws (Patreon)

Harold sat against a log with both hands around a hot cup and watched the camp pack up around him.

It was a good morning for it. The cold still had a bite in the lower Blackjaws, but water was slowly running down the slope, and the snow on the south faces had gone gray and slumped. Late winter, finally losing its grip. He sipped his coffee slowly, just enjoying the view. He remembered these mountains, and it was fulfilling to see these peaks again. Around him, his guard was packing up.

They were good at it. Tents came down in a practiced rhythm and went onto the pack horses. The elite century moved through the gray light. Mors lay by the fire like he owned it.

The warhorse had folded himself down onto the frozen ground with his legs under him. The massive horse was radiating heat, and he'd claimed the best of the coals to soak in the fire. Every so often a knight passed too near Harold and Mors would lift his head, roll one enormous eye at the man, and shift his weight like he was thinking about standing. The knight would find a wider path quickly.

Then one of the younger knights led his own horse up from the picket line to load it, and he made the mistake of bringing it within fifty meters of the fire.

Mors went still. His head came up off the ground, and he fixed the other horse with a look Harold could feel from where he sat.

The horse stopped, and its ears went flat. It took one step back, then another, then decided it had urgent business at the far end of the valley, and it turned and dragged its handler off by the reins while the man swore and tried to haul him back. The two of them disappeared behind a tent, and Harold could still hear him yelling.

Mors put his head back down, satisfied.

"You're a menace," Harold told him.

The horse's ear swiveled toward him, and the massive horse nuzzled the top of his head.

Parker came across the camp with Jack Churchill a step behind him, and Mors's head came up again.

"They're fine, Mors." Harold didn't get up. "Not everyone's an enemy."

He felt the Nail stir under his sternum at that, disagreeing.

No, he told it. Not everyone needs murdering. And think it through for once. You kill everybody, there's nobody left to kill and terrorize. What are you going to do then?

He felt it turn the idea over, sullen about it. Then, grudgingly, it came around. It settled back down under his ribs to sulk.

"Still having those internal conversations, huh," Parker said. He'd stopped a few feet off with his arms crossed.

Harold sighed. "More and more every day."

Jack toed the edge of the fire as he adjusted his kit. "What's the plan today?"

Harold stood and stretched, and it felt good. Every part of him felt good — rested for once, warm. He'd been waiting on this morning for a long time.

"Today's the day we find out if all my planning since we got to Gravesend has paid off." He knocked back the last of the coffee. "We're going to speed-run every secret in the lower Blackjaws before we rejoin the army."

Parker's eyebrows rose in surprise.

"Couple of death zones to clear out," Harold went on, counting it off on his fingers. "A string of named monsters to put down. There's a ruin I want cleared and a stash nobody's found yet. I've got ingredients to pick that don't grow anywhere but up here, and there are a few groups of people living here I intend to recruit."

"That's a lot of shopping," Jack said, pleased.

"How long is all that going to take?" Parker said. He nodded at the knights loading the mules. "Those are the best men we've got. Half of them are tier three. And not one of them has mana like yours. We don't have your mana quality. So how do we kill them?"

"If we hurry?" Harold said. "About a week. These are places I know well. If my memory's right." He let that sink in, and because it was funny, added: "And it is."

Harold gave him a look. "You ever heard the gamer term 'cheese'?"

Parker stared at him.

"We're going to cheese these monsters," Harold said.

Parker sighed and shook his head. "All right. I'll get the boys ready. We can leave in ten."

He turned and walked off toward the mules, and Harold caught the tail of it as he went.

"Bet Jenkins and Elroy know what that means," Parker muttered.

They rode out into the thaw with the sun barely up over the peaks, and Harold pointed Mors's nose toward the first name on his list.

The big horse was glad of it. He wanted to run at everything, and the rough terrain didn’t bother him. Riding him was becoming easier and easier as he picked up a couple perks that allowed him to ride him better, and they came to an understanding somewhere in the first mile. Mors got to open up on the flat stretches. Harold got to keep his skull as the horse wove through the massive trees at Mach 10.

He dropped back level with Parker where the trail widened, and shouted the briefing over the drum of a hundred sets of hooves.

"First stop's a place I called the Silent Cave, last time!"

"The what?"

"Silent Cave!" Harold pitched his voice over the noise. "Big cave — bigger than you're picturing! And it doesn't allow any sound inside it! None! You can't talk in there, you can't shout, you can't so much as scrape a boot — the place just absorbs it!"

Parker leaned in off his own saddle. "Eats it how?"

"You go quiet the second you step in! Everybody does! Stay in there long enough, and you just explode!" Harold spread one hand off the reins, fingers flying apart. "Boom! No warning! Last time around, nobody ever figured out why! When it was discovered, it used to drive everyone mad trying to figure it out!"

"And you know how to figure it out," Parker said blankly, though he had to yell it.

"We are! Because Sarah figured it out!" His chest warmed at that. "Mostly Sarah! I came up with the fix, but she cracked it! The air in there's wrong — different from the air outside! And those figures carved all over the walls, they're imbued! Imbued to swallow sound!"

The trail bent around a shoulder of black rock and the wind cut sideways and Parker lost half of it. "The air's WHAT?"

"THE AIR!" Harold shouted. "It's not air! It's fumes! There's a dead lava monster down at the bottom of the cave, and it's been gassing in there for who knows how long, and there's nowhere for it to go! You breathe it the whole time you're in! Your lungs absorb it, and it builds up inside you so you never feel it happening!"

"Builds up to WHAT?"

"To the boom!" Harold grinned across at him. "Get enough of it in you, then the first time you push mana to empower yourself It combusts! The mana lights the fumes off inside your own body!" He clapped his hands once, and Mors's ears twitched at it. "That's the death zone. Drove a few lords mad trying to figure it out! Sarah only did after she found a different cave system that led down into the lava!"

Parker rode a moment in silence, working it through. "And your fix," he said. "Because I know you've got one, or we wouldn't be riding at it."

"Potions!" Harold thumped the saddlebag. "Brewed a whole batch of them before we left! You drink one, and it renders the fumes inert! You can pull all the mana you want and nothing happens!" He shrugged. "Then we walk down to the bottom, nice and calm, and we kill the monsters down there and take the dead lava monster's stash and strip it for components! It’s a lava king's carcass! Those monsters won't rise until year five!"

"So the whole trap," Parker said slowly, "is that everyone panics and reaches for their mana when they fight the monsters down there."

"Now you've got it."

"And we just don't care."

Harold nodded. "We’re gonna cheese it!"

Parker shook his head, but Harold saw the corner of his mouth move.

The lower Blackjaws didn't let anyone through for free, and the noise of a hundred armored riders traveled fast. A pack of Blackjaw goblins tried to ambush them as they entered a defile, and the century slammed through them without slowing. Their weapons came unslung, and they slaughtered them, Jack whooping somewhere on the left flank like a man at a festival.

An hour later, a pair of trolls came down off a ridge and charged into the column. Harold held the century back as Carter pointed at a couple of the tier-two knights and yelled at them to go forward, one knight to a troll. It was a good chance for them to gain a perk and raise their mana quantity, even if it wouldn't raise the quality. Fighting a troll solo was no easy task, but they should be up for it. The fights took a while too. Trolls were slabs of gristle and foul temper, and a tier-two mana blade bit shallow into these large blackjaw mountain trolls. The two knights waded in, working the joints and the backs of the knees, trying to bring the big things down — and the rest of the century made a spectator sport of it.

"Two silver says Toller drops his first!"

"Two silver says Bran doesn't get up!"

Because Bran had just ducked a sweep, caught his heel on the ice, and gone flat on his back in the snow, and the whole line roared at it.

"Get UP, you're embarrassing!"

"Put your back into it!" Carter bellowed, cheerful as a man at the races. "That thing is slower than you or dumber than you! It can’t be both!"

Bran came up spitting snow and went back in meaner for it. They rolled clear of the big clumsy sweeps and wore the trolls down a wound at a time. It wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t quick, and he was pretty sure the men had to dig deeper than they wanted. But both knights walked out of it — blown, splashed to the elbow, and whole — and better for having done it with no squad to back them up. Harold quickly cut the troll parts he needed off the carcasses, and they moved on.

And near midday a band of harpies came screaming down out of the sun off a cliff face, and there was a bad minute as the horses shied and men cursed before the archers cleared the sky and the survivors broke off north.

After that the trail climbed, and the black rock closed in on both sides, and the noise of the column started to change — hooves, and breath, and the jingle of kit, all of it getting quieter and thinning as they rode into the shadow of the peak.

Harold reined Mors in and looked up at it.

The cave mouth sat in the cliff face ahead of them, wide and dark and utterly still. Not one sound drifted out of it. Even the wind seemed to go around it as it howled around them this far up the cliff face.

He swung down out of the saddle and reached back for the saddlebag and the potions.

"All right," he said. "We're here."

He pulled the wax-stopped bottles out of the saddlebag two at a time and started handing them off to the men who'd be coming down with him — half the guard, the rest to hold the horses. Fifty knights, near enough. Each of them took a bottle, turned it over, and looked at it skeptically.

"Carter."

The centurion came over, chewing something. "My lord."

"You're staying up here."

Carter stopped chewing and spat it out as he considered.

"There's a manticore that hunts this range," Harold said. "Big one too. Smart. Try to kill it if it comes sniffing around." He nodded back at the picket line, at Mors standing head and shoulders over the rest with one ear cocked at the cave.

Carter looked at the black mouth of the cave, then at the horses, then back at Harold.

"Manticore," he said. "Lovely. So you lot go down a magic murder-hole after a dead king's jewelry, and I stand out here in the cold and get eaten by a housecat the size of a wagon." He was already reaching for his shield. "You lot go have fun. Bring me back something shiny."

"That's the spirit."

Carter grunted, and Harold watched him decide that guarding the horses against a named monster was a real job and not an insult, and settle the shield onto his arm.

Harold handed out the last of the bottles and drank his own. It went down like pond water strained through a boot. He capped the empty and pushed it into his belt, drew his axe off his back, and Jack fell in beside him at the mouth of the cave.

"You're leading," Harold told him.

Jack's grin came up as he swung his axe. “Finally.” He grunted.

Harold kept his voice low, and this close to the entrance it came out lower than low, like someone talking through a wall two rooms over. "The tier-twos take the front. You put them into the fights, and you let them work. Nothing down there should kill a man who's paying attention, and I want them earning perks against these. I'll be at the back. If it goes bad, I'll fix it."

"And you just watch," Jack asked skeptically.

"And I just watch." He rolled his shoulders. "Try not to have all the fun. Lead the way."

The sound died at his back like a door had shut behind him.

Harold had told them all what to expect. One boot on open air, rock, and wind. The next boot down inside, and the world went to felt.

He could hear his heart. He could hear the blood going through his neck, a soft rush that rose and fell with the knock. He could hear something in his ears.

He'd read once that they used to put men in rooms built to kill sound, and the men couldn't stand it. In less than an hour, they wanted out. This was like that jacked up to ten.

That was the Silent Cave. It made your body the loudest sound within you and made you fight.

Harold drifted to the back, let it wash through him, and didn't fight it. He set the axe across his forearm and watched Jack's shape go down ahead, and watched the tier-twos slot into the front the way they'd been told.

The passage bent and dropped and bent again.

They took it chamber by chamber.

Jack held them at each opening with a fist raised, and the column stacked and went still. Then his hand cut down, and they went through the gap hard and fast and fanned into the room with blades up, checking the corners, checking the ceiling now that Harold had signed the warning about it.

They talked through their hands. They had drilled the signs into the legion for situations like this, and it was strange and good to see it pay off.

The first two chambers were empty. A dead firewyrm's shed skin in one, brittle and enormous, that a young knight put his boot through and flinched at the sight of the crunch he couldn't hear. Old bones in the other. Nothing living.

But the air got warmer as they went down. By the third chamber Harold had opened his collar, and by the fourth he could feel the heat coming up the passage to meet them like breath off an oven.

The lava slime sat in the middle of the fourth chamber and glowed.

It was the size of a plow horse, a slumped mound of something between rock and syrup, dull red shot through with veins of orange that pulsed slow and bright when it moved. The air around it shimmered. Harold felt the sweat start on his back the moment he cleared the opening.

Jack put four knights on it.

They empowered— Harold saw the mana come up in them, saw their swords start to silently sing with mana— and they cut in hard, all four, good clean strokes into the body of the thing.

And did nothing.

The blades sank a hand's width into the slime and stopped like they'd hit a wall behind it, and the slime just ignored it, entirely unbothered. One knight worked his edge free and looked at it. Where it had gone in, the steel had come out dulled, faintly pitted, smoking. The stuff was eating his blade and hadn't so much as flinched.

Then the mound drew in on itself. A slight inhale.

A gout of the stuff came off the top of it, superheated, bright as a coal, straight at the four knights at knife-range. Three of them rolled to get clear, and the fourth just sidestepped from where he'd been standing. The shot kept going for the watchers behind. Two of them stepped into it and cut, mana blades flashing, and sliced the gob of molten slag out of the air in two wet halves that spattered smoking against the far wall and went dark.

Harold nodded to himself. Good hands. Every one of them.

Jack looked back at him and signed a question. He tapped two fingers against his own blade, then spread his hands: how do you kill it?

Harold signed back. He pointed at the slime, then made a fist inside his other cupped hand and squeezed it small and hard. A core. Then he tapped the fist, and drew a knife-line at it. Then he spread his fingers, passed his flat hand back and forth through the air, searching, shook his head, and turned the hand palm-up. Finding it's the problem.

With his aura, Harold could have walked up and put a finger on the core. For a soldier without real mana senses, it was near hopeless. You hacked at a thing that shrugged off every stroke and hunted a target you couldn't see, and you either got lucky or you got tired. Then you died.

Which was exactly why Harold folded his arms again and let them keep hunting. Every so often a warrior pushed hard enough against a wall that something gave.

So they hacked. Four of them, then six, cutting into a thing that did nothing but pit their edges and pulse its slow orange veins, and Harold watched their frustration build. The heat came off the thing in waves. He could hear his own heart the entire time, keeping time with the pulse of the slime's veins, which he decided not to think about too hard. Still, it was kinda funny watching the men try to peel sections off that slime.

Then the knight on the right went still.

Just for a breath. His head came up. Harold saw it happen, saw the instant he understood, and he stepped in and drove his point into a spot high on the slime's right shoulder, if a blob could be said to have a shoulder, a place no different to the eye than any other.

The slime collapsed. The fire went out of it like a snuffed lamp, and it slumped into a wide steaming puddle.

The knight stared at his own blade as it was ruined now. Harold made a mental note of the name, then Jack raised his fist and turned it, and they moved on.

The next chamber was the one Harold didn't like.

He'd known it was coming and he'd signed the warning twice on the way down, and it still put a wire of tension up his back as they stacked at the opening. Here the slimes didn't sit and wait. Here they clung to the ceiling in the dark and dropped on whatever walked under them. He looked up through the gap and tried to pick shapes out of the black overhead and couldn't quite, and hoped the tier-twos' eyes were better than his in the dark, and gave Jack the sign.

They breached.

Two slimes were already down on the floor, glowing, and the front rank went straight at them the way they'd just learned — and the ceiling came alive. Eight of the things dropped at once, a silent rain of superheated slag dropping into the middle of fifty men, and the room came apart into a melee with no sound. Except his pulse.

Jack was already swinging. Knights peeled off Harold's careful order and went to silently fight.

Harold looked at it all from the back, studying who had the senses to find the core and who didn't. He could see it in how they fought. Half of them hacked and hoped, brute work, wearing the slimes down toward a lucky point. But a handful — five, six — were finding cores. Stepping in, striking once, and dropping a slime.

One slime dropped off the ceiling for Harold.

It dropped at the back of the room where he stood apart, and a knight broke off his own fight and lunged to put himself between his lord and the thing. Harold waved him off. Back to your fight. He wanted to try something.

Harold had spent the time since the auction learning his new mana cultivation techniques and adapting them to his own. He reached inside himself and began.

He drew his mana up and threaded it. Strand over strand until it was braided together, and forced it down into his arms and legs first and then his frame. It was difficult, and he couldn't do it at all to begin with, but he was getting better. He sank those braided ropes into his muscular, skeletal frame. Into his cells. Where the guard was flushing their body with formless mana. His had structure and shape. Power.

Then he added the method he used inside a potion. In a potion, he had to keep the mana moving so it wouldn't sink into any of the ingredients and corrupt them. It was a delicate balance to make volatile compounds inside. It was part of why alchemy was so hard. The control needed was insane. But now he did that through the braids of mana he sunk into himself. Mana rotated through muscle, skeleton, and cell along a path he held open by will alone, and he could feel it affect him. He was already empowered with the braids to a frankly amazing degree. But the additional mana gave him more speed, and he knew if he needed to, he could empower different parts of his braid even more, and his mana rotated through him.

It was almost too much to hold. He could feel it wanting to slip, a dozen threads all pulling to unravel at once, and his whole attention narrowed down to stop them. His hands were shaking with it. Then he moved.

He crossed the room in a stride and a half — his empowered body doing exactly what the technique promised- and swept his open hand into the slime as it moved, straight through the molten body of it, and closed his fingers on the dense, hot core and tore it out.

The slime collapsed into a puddle around his boots.

Harold let the mana go. The whole system dropped at once, and he sagged half an inch, and in the same instant every nerve in his hand told him he was holding a rock straight out of a forge.

He juggled it as he silently yelled in pain. Tossed it hand to hand, fast, blowing on his palms between catches, hopping a little. One of the guards appeared at his elbow, a pair of heavy leather gloves held out straight-faced, and Harold snatched them, dragged them on, and got the core into a gloved hand, and only then looked up.

Half a dozen of his men were laughing like a mime.

Harold waved them off with the gloved hand, the core smoking in it. Yeah, yeah. Back to work.

He was a little proud of the grab. Screw them. Who knew what he could do with a core like this.

It kept getting hotter.

Below the ceiling chamber, the passage narrowed and steepened, and the heat rose. They all had to empower a little mana to stand it, and Harold felt the drain start to tell in the men.

Then the passage opened, and there it was.

The chamber was vast, the roof lost up in the dark, the floor a broad shelf of black rock, and coiled across the whole of it lay the Lava King.

It was a snake, if a snake could be as big around as a grain silo and long enough to fill a hall. It lay in loose coils with its great head down on the stone, and its hide was black and cracked like old lava, and in the cracks it glowed — white-hot, so bright in places that Harold had to look away from it. Great slabs of that heat glowed and dimmed across it, slow, as the dead thing vented and cooled and refused, even now, to get cold. And on its head, grown of the same stone as the rest of it and shot through with the same furnace light, was a crown. A ring of jagged points around its skull, white at the core.

It had been dead a long time. Harold smiled and stepped forward to take what he'd come for.

It was going to be tricky, which was why he'd brought the tools. He went into his bag and drew out the knives — the set Jessim had imbued for him before they left. The metal was imbued with heat resistance, but even that wouldn't last long against something like this.

He picked his spots on the vast dead body, and turned his attention inward again to build the technique a second time.

He wondered, threading the mana down into his arms, whether anyone else in this cycle could even try for this. Gravesend surely hadn't planned for the Lava King to be looted this early — who had the resources for it? He ran through the names of every power on the peninsula and came up empty. And even past that — who could use the parts once they had them? The hide, the heart, the blood. He'd need help with half of it himself, and he was the best human at it.

He was panting before he'd made the first stroke. This close, the heat was a physical weight, pressing the breath out of him. He had to hurry. He set the first knife to the hide and started.

The blades sweltered in his hands, fast, even through the gloves, the imbued metal soaking up heat. He'd have time for one piece. He'd already decided on the heart. Everything else was a bonus he wasn't going to get.

The hide fought him for every inch. It was near-impervious, cracked stone over something worse, and even with his mana quality behind the edge, it was slow, grinding work, the knife biting a fraction and then a fraction more. The blade started to glow. He watched it happen, and it dragged a memory up out of nowhere — the two Jedi in the old movie, the good one, cutting through the blast doors of the ship, the metal going orange around the lightsabers while the droids waited on the other side. Great movie. Though the Gungans were a weird flex. His knife glowed orange in his fist, and he kept sawing.

He got the hole open.

A blast of superheated air came out of the cut straight into his face. He turned his head and felt his skin get red and tight. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his people working the edges of the chamber — four of them hauling a great iron-banded chest up out of a fissure in the floor. He put his arm into the cut he'd made, up to the elbow in the body of the thing, and found the heart.

The heart was dense and heavy and hot enough that the glove was burning. He cut it free, the tissue giving where the hide had not — while off to his side two more of the guards bottled the King's blood into sealed vessels, thick stuff, slow as cooling glass, glowing faintly in the containers as it settled. While others were trying to cut sections off it, he saw Jack sawing at the base of the crown with single-minded focus. Of course. Damn magpie. 

Harold got both arms around the heart and pulled it clear, and backed off as fast as he dared. The moment he had room, he dropped it into the container, sealed the lid, and threw the clasps. His hands were shaking from the mana drain.

He looked up. Jack was watching him and waiting, holding the thing's crown in both hands.

Harold nodded.

Jack's fist came up and turned, and the guard closed their vessels and shouldered the chest and formed on the passage, and they started moving out.