Chapter 125: Chapter 125

Zoltan sneered down at me. Sometimes, he was so eerily reminiscent of what Hamsik could have been that I was forcefully reminded those two were related. “I knew it was you involved with this mess as soon as they told me it was some human mage messing about with Gravity.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“We don’t have time for chitchatting,” Khagnio hissed as the horde of Sight Flayers drew closer. “Kill now, talk later!”

The other Claws were hooping and cursing as they rushed back through the tunnel they had just opened high above us, yelling that they were going to recover the treasure long before any of us managed to even get close. Zoltan sent down one last sneer, before hurtling off after his companions.

“Get back here, Zoltan!” I shouted.

“Just die, maggot.” His voice was fading as he left. “Even if you survive this, the Eyelined Beast will…”

Ugnash was already rushing off to tackle the Sight Flayers, despite how many of them there were. Cerea was warning me to pay attention to the real issue present right in front of us.

“Knife, mageling,” Khagnio said urgently. “Forget about those assholes.”

“They’re not just assholes, they’re stupid assholes.”

Instead of pulling out the knife—I made sure to recover them after we took care of the Sight Flayers—I just focused on Gravity again, but this time with Field Manipulation and Siphon to create a wide circle of reduced gravitational force. Then I grabbed Cerea by the arm and jumped straight up.

“Woah,” she said as we reached the lip of the cave opening that Zoltan and the Claws had run off into.

“Get up here, you idiots!” I shouted at our other companions.

Khagnio looked up briefly with a scowl. Then he hissed at Ugnash, who almost looked disappointed that he hadn’t needed to use the red aura he had engaged. Seconds later, both of them had joined me and Cerea in the tunnel opening.

The Sight Flayers screeched and lashed the walls with their sparking tentacles beneath us, occasionally shooting those eye lasers too. All of that was absolutely ineffectual.

“Smart,” Cerea said with a grin.

“We can glaze mageling later,” Khagnio said. “Let’s go after those scaled bastards.”

Agreed. They were hunting after the treasures we were seeking, so we needed to stop them. Fast.

“Did they really come here just to sabotage us?” I asked.

“Officially speaking,” Cerea said. “Dungeons are outside Zairgon jurisdiction. No matter what we or anyone else does here, we won’t be held liable for it under Zairgon laws.”

“That’s insane. People can just come here and do whatever they want?” I paused as we were walking. “They could have summoned me here too then!”

The other three looked at me very oddly. I had, at some point, mentioned that I had been summoned to Zairgon to be ritually sacrificed, though that hadn’t exactly gone according to the cultists’ plan back then. Although, things had worked out eventually, even for the cultists.

“Nevertheless,” Ugnash said. “We will lodge a complaint with the Rat-Catcher’s Guild.”

Khagnio winced though he didn’t say anything.

“They can’t do much since it’s outside Zairgon jurisdiction, though, right?” I said.

“This is technically a guild operation. As are all dungeon delves and any other expeditions involving adventuring parties or the use of tokens, especially ones that are performed under proven sponsorships like the one we’re in through Master Kostis Daxsilszaz. As such, people under the purview of the Rat-Catchers are interfering in Adventurer’s Guild activities.”

“And they need to answer for it,” Cerea said with surprising ferocity. I normally didn’t see her get worked up about things.

We got moving. I had called Zoltan and his whole party stupid, but it turned out they were smarter than I had given them credit for. We had been going fast for about a few minutes when everything started shaking around us.

“What the…” I muttered.

Then the first cracks appeared.

“Back,” Khagnio said. “Back!”

We followed his fantastic advice in short order, quickly retreating the way we came. Not long after, the tunnel collapsed. I was forced to wave away the dust as a landslide of rocks blocked our path forward.

“Do you think they did that?” I asked. “I think those bastards did that.”

“Don’t worry. If they did, they’re still stupid.” Cerea had decided to stop a little ahead of reaching the lip of the cave. “Because we can still take the Sight Flayers out from above.”

She had a point there. We had stopped just behind her. Apparently, the monsters could sense us because they had calmed down after we had left but were now shrieking in a tentacle-powered tantrum again.

“Same trick as before?” I asked.

Khagnio nodded. “Knife please, mageling.”

“No, I’ve got this one.”

For one, we didn’t have so many daggers. For another, I wanted to be faster, even if I was the one about to receive the backlash.

The others didn’t argue once I explained my point. Instead, they gave me space to cast Field Manipulation, which dragged the furious monsters to the floor. With them so far beneath us, their flailing tentacles and eye-lasers proved a lot less dangerous too.

“This will only take a moment,” Ugnash said.

He jumped down and crushed the first two monsters with the weight I added onto him. Then he leaped back up as I shifted the circle of Field Manipulation under him from Infusion to Siphon, before slamming back down to take more of them out.

It didn’t take long until the floor of the tunnel was basically a flood of gore.

“Ugh, we have to go down into that mess?” Cerea asked.

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I didn’t voice the same complaint, but I definitely felt it too.

Ugnash was grinning. “It’s not too bad. You get used to it.”

“It’s not too bad,” Khagnio mimicked in a facsimile of Ugnash’s deep voice. He scoffed. “We don’t all like rolling in shit, you giant brute.”

Cerea and Ugnash both stared at the Scalekin.

“You’re from the undercity, Khagnio,” she said. “They literally eat entrails down there. Even we don’t do that.”

That was odd to find out, considering most people couldn’t exactly be picky about food in Zairgon. But I agreed. Entrails sounded no more appetizing than bugs.

“That’s bullshit, I tell you!” Khagnio said.

Turned out we didn’t need to wade through bloody, terrible-smelling muck. I went down to a clean spot, then just used more Field Manipulation and Siphon to send all the viscera floating in the air. We didn’t float up too because I was weighing down everybody’s clothes, as well as my own body.

The real issue, though, were the motes of black energy that took to the air.

“Where are they going?” I asked. “Zoltan mentioned something called an Eyelined Beast.”

Ugnash’s face had darkened. “I had a feeling that would be our target to get the treasure. I hadn’t realized they would awaken it this early, though.”

“Wait, if it’s being woken up now—hell, if it’s already up—then is all this killing just making it stronger? Can the motes travel that far?”

“They can,” Khagnio said with a growl. “That’s how they’re really screwing us over.”

We moved on faster. An urgency to find and stop the Zoltan and the Claws before they worsened things terribly gripped me hard. But it came with the sinking realization that they had likely already made things pretty terrible.

And then there was the fact that I only had a couple of hours left before my core decided to self-destruct. The cracks emanating from the centre of my chest had connected to the Threaded Reinforcement cracks I had imbued in my body. I felt like a walking collection of broken glass shards.

For the first time, I started cursing how long-winded and twisting the Eversight dungeon tunnels were. Even worse, the path split apart into two different directions not far ahead.

“Here’s where our map knowledge is going to come in handy,” Ugnash said. “To the right.”

“Right?” Cerea asked. “The main treasure chamber was to the left in all the maps we went through.”

Ugnash gave her a sly little look. “Which is why Khagnio and Ross’s friends are going to expect us to take that path. So we go through the path they don’t expect. This one on the right will also lead us to the secret tunnel they used.”

“But what if they guess that we’re going to guess they’d expect us to go left, so they’ll actually set up traps on the right,” I said.

Khagnio looked like he wanted to strangle me. “What if they guess that we’re going tosecond-guess our first guessto end up actually goingleft instead, huh mageling? What then?”

“You idiots!” Cerea started marching off to the right. “They’ve been here long enough to probably trap the whole damn dungeon. Let’s just go.”

The rest of us hurried after Cerea. Traps or no traps, it didn’t matter. We’d just be bulldozing our way through anyway. Follow current novels on novel[f]ire.net

It was weird, but the passages started turning a lot more artificial the deeper we went. Instead of tunnels carved through rough-hewn rock with weird eyes growing in them somehow, now they looked like walls made of real brick and plaster and all that. Ancient ones, by the vibes they gave, but definitely ones that were constructed and put in place by someone.

That didn’t stop the eyes, interestingly enough. They popped out of the artificial walls as well, some content to just watch and some emerging out of the walls directly to impede our motion. We took care of them easily enough.

“There’s the second split,” Ugnash said. “Up ahead is the secret tunnel. Well, secret.”

Right. Wasn’t much of a secret when we knew about it now.

“No traps yet,” Cerea said. She was looking in the direction opposite to the secret tunnel. “We should keep going right.”

We were about to do so, and while Ugnash and I followed Cerea in, Khagnio hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Khagnio squinted in the direction that we hadn’t gone. He hesitated once more, and I was going to repeat my question, but then he said, “It’s a trap.”

The Scalekin waved his hand. “Go. If you’re fast enough, you can evade it.”

We didn’t waste a second arguing. I didn’t even need to ask what kind of trap he meant. Threads of Gravity were already rushing out and ahead of me, scouring along the floor of the dungeon passage.

Cerea sensed my threads and my intention. “About twenty handspans ahead, Ross!”

I trusted her. Once again, I channelled Field Manipulation and Siphon, a circle of void-purple threads coming to life under the cracks on the ceiling. Cracks that widened a second later before a cavalcade of rocks slammed down ahead of us. But none reached the floor because Field Manipulation was pushing them right back up.

“Go, go, go!” Ugnash shouted.

“Good work, Ross,” Cerea said as we ducked our heads under the rocks held up by Field Manipulation’s repulsive force.

As we passed under the would-be mini avalanche, I heard the distant sound of fighting behind us. Loud curses accompanied by the clang of blades. Khagnio had engaged the enemy.

“We won’t be able to go back,” I warned.

Field Manipulation wouldn’t stay up forever. The landslide would lock us away from Khagnio for good. He’d be on his own, unless we made a significant effort to break through the barricade of broken rocks. But that would annihilate our chances of getting to the treasure before the Roaring Claws and Zoltan did.

Probably annihilate me too when my mana core burst apart.

“Watch out!” Cerea said all of a sudden.

I really wished it was more standard to give out warnings with directions attached. Watch out where? I thought we were coming onto a different sort of obstacle ahead of us, but instead, Cerea had her eyes going wide while staring behind me.

Turning just in time, I spotted the shadowy figures swooping under the floating debris hot on our tail.

I immediately let go of Field Manipulation. The rocks crushed down with a ton of force.

But missed the bastards entirely.

I cursed. The two Scalekin rushed at us, their Stealth dissipating entirely as they charged in to attack.

“You know what to do, yes, Young Lord?”

The only remaining member of the Roaring Claws was looking at Zoltan expectantly. Too expectantly. Almost demandingly.

Zoltan didn’t comment on it. Mother had taught him well on how to maintain his equanimity with others, at least when it came to people who weren’t his bastard half-brother. So, despite his distaste at the dirty Scalekin’s tone, his face remained neutral and unaffected.

“Of course, I do,” he said quietly.

“This is it,” the Claw said excitedly. “We can take care of two birds with one stone right here! Those fools don’t even know about the true depths of the dungeon.”

They were in the dungeon’s final chamber. The walls of the large room were filled with eyes, each and every single one now open and glaring at the centre. At where Zoltan stood next to the large flowering bud.

The monster within was emerging. Zoltan stood and watched as motes of black energy floated in from the rest of the dungeon, seeping into the bud’s interior. A crackling, squishing noise warbled out as their target slowly took life. A little premature, but it couldn’t be helped. The mongrels had proven more capable than Zoltan was willing to give them credit for.

He didn’t let the negativity consume him. Instead, he closed his eyes and focused on what was important here. On what he needed to accomplish.

This was the path to freedom. The path to reclaiming what was his by the right of his station. Zoltan was the scion of the eminent Scarseeker House in Zairgon. He was owed greatness. Wealth beyond what any gutter rat could aspire to, power beyond anything any of the living sewage would ever touch, respect beyond what any trash ever deserved.

“Young Lord…” the Claw said hesitantly as the bud started flowering.

Zoltan deserved to stand at the top. Zoltan would stand at the top. That was where he belonged, after all.

“Young Lord, it’s time!”

It hurt. It actually hurt, almost physically so, that Zoltan was forced to stoop to this level. It couldn’t be fathomed that someone of his station, someone of his incredible stature, would need to come down to some filthy dungeon and mingle with these base creatures and their baser politics and other filth.

Shouldn’t they remember that they were here to serve him? To elevate Zoltan Kalnislaw above the mire they trod in their scummy existences?

Zoltan opened his eyes with a growl. The creature was free from its bud. Rooted, yes, but nearly ready to unleash itself, moments away from roaring out and taking the dungeon by storm.

Scoffing, Zoltan yawned his mouth wide enough, before lunging forward to sink his fangs into the monster’s flesh, channelling his Aspect of Ensorcellment. There. The bastards might have expected to face a simple dungeon monster.

But they wouldn’t be prepared to face one that had been raised to the ferocious existence of a Scarthrall.