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Chapter 58: Competition
🕑 Added 2025-02-24 10:00:04 +0000 UTCThe Iron Knight is the name given to the Bearer of Ryn’s Blade. While not an Archmage herself, Ryn was the master blacksmith that forged the blades that were eventually turned into the weapons of the Bladed Knights. In life, she used an ensouled smithing hammer to enhance her craft, but for her last creation, she made a blade and transferred the soul stone to it. Her blade grants the wielder the power over metal. The sword itself is impossibly sharp, and can transform into other weapons. The knight who bears this blade also gains metal kinesis, enabling them to use their Will to empower their blows. Any metal armor the bearer wears becomes nearly indestructible and self repairing. The metal kinesis allows the wielder to intuitively reinforce their movements with their Will. The blade grants an aura effect, enhancing all metal objects in its area. Any armor and weapons wielded by allies in the effect are made magically sharp and durable. Furthermore, the blade greatly enhanced the power of any weapon created by Ryn herself, making the Iron Knight the linchpin of many of the Bladed Knights’ most powerful groupings.
-Bladed Knights by Kysin, the 195th High Librarian
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Kole was standing in a pitch-black cavern with his friends, beaming like a fool.
“I can see!” he said proudly.
“Welcome to the club,” Rakin said.
“That's great!” Zale said, much more excited for Kole than Rakin was.
“There’s a note,” Doug said, grabbing a piece of paper off a pedestal in front of them.
“‘There’s more than one ball,’” Doug said, reading off the card. “The team that grabs the shiniest ball wins. Watch out for the kobolds.’”
“Well, that’s different,” Rakin said. “We must be in a mountain. There is a lot of stone around us, but we aren’t too far below sea level.”
As he spoke, the dwarf was busy walking the perimeter of the circular cavern they found themselves in. It was a small chamber, roughly circular and twenty feet across, but it narrowed to a small tunnel.
“All clear, let's go,” Rakin said, gesturing them on.
“Good thing you learned Darkvision,” Zale said as they were making their way to the door. “Kobold’s go mad when they see anything reflective. If we had a light, they’d be all over me.”
Even with her armor enameled an intimidating black, polished smooth surface of it still caught the light spectacularly.
As if her words summoned it, a commotion broke out, echoing to them down the tunnel.
They picked up their pace, Zale traveling in a silencing aura while Kole subtly drew on his Fade ability to help them get the surprise on whatever lay at the end of the tunnel.
The tunnel ended suddenly, opening into a vast cavern. While Kole could now see in the dark, his sight was limited, and he couldn’t see anything beyond a bridge spanning a chasm twenty paces beyond the tunnel’s exit.
The only reason he knew the cavern to be so large, was because far away he saw a small globe of light, within it four of his classmates fought off a horde of kobolds as they fought their way across a similar bridge.
“That’s the Hooadin group,” Zale said in a whisper having ending her aura.
“Who?” Doug asked, to which Kole was thankful as it saved him from being the only person who didn’t seem to know half the classmates,
“Wookan’s Heirs,” Zale said, as if that clarified anything—which for Kole at least, it did not.
“The people with the ghosts!” Zale said, exacerbated, seeing that Kole and Doug were still lost.
“Oh!” they both said together, recalling the group from some on the previous hardball match replays.
The group drew upon the spirits of their ancestors to assist them in battle, sometimes directly summoning them. They had a barbarian that wielded a giant sword, and a rogue who specialized in archery. These two could lightly draw upon their ancestors to aid them, but they also had two Blessed by Wookan who summoned spirits directly. One conjured a spiritual hyena, while the other could harness the ancestors to aid allies and hinder foes.
As they watched, a dozen kobolds swarmed across the bridge at the other team.
“The bridge is trapped,” Rakin warned them.
“How do you know?” Kole asked.
“For one, it's kobolds, so everything is always trapped,” Rakin said, “And two, look at em runnin. They are avoidin the traps.”
Kole noticed what Rakin meant. Even in their rampage the kobolds were not running at the other team in a straight line. Instead, they ran in an odd dancing zig zag pattern, making large hops over invisible obstacles to reach their prey.
Due to the slow crossing, Wookan’s Heirs held the kobolds off, easily killing any small creatures that got near them.
“Let’s go while they keep them busy,” Zale said. “Lead on Rakin.”
“Aye,” Rakin agreed, and began to cross the bridge.
He moved slowly, giving instructions for everyone to follow directly in his footsteps, stopping every step to listen to the floor with his tremor sense as he tapped it with his foot. A few times he sprinkled sand across the ground and moved it, in some way using it to detect something Kole couldn’t see.
As they progressed slowly across the chasm, the other team fought on more slowly. In the distance a large ziggurat became visible at the far end. By the time they crossed the bridge, the other team wasn’t visible, but the sounds of their battle could still be heard. There were no guards in sight as they reached the wall, all that had been present had likely been drawn to the battle.
Each tier of the ziggurat stood ten feet tall and the structure had the hallmarks of dwarven construction from some age long past. Kole saw that there were five levels, but each wall was sheer, and completely free of handholds, the dwarven craftsmanship far outlasting the original inhabitants.
“I can make hand holds,” Rakin suggested. “We can climb the outside.”
“Save your Will,” Doug said, pulling out a length of rope.
With Zale’s help, Doug climbed the first tier, and they all climbed the rope after him. This repeated until they reached the third tier where a group of kobolds stood huddled, shielding their eyes from the light that would drive them into a frenzy.
Doug poked his antlered head up just briefly enough to see this before ducking back down and sharing his discovery.
“How many, and how far back?” Zale asked.
“Two,” Doug whispered, “Ten feet or so back along the wall of the next tier.”
“I’ll mist up and Kill them silenced,” Zale said.
Kole considered turning invisible and aiding her and was about to offer as much when she shook her head, reading his face.
“I got this,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
Kole nodded, and plan settled, Zale misted away.
Above, Zale appeared out of thin air, sword already coming down. She cleaved the leftmost kobold in two, slicing it from the shoulder on one side to the waist on the other, the blade continuing through the kobold huddled beside it.
Her silence aura stopped any noise from the brief skirmish, and she dispatched the second, unbisected kobold before returning to her friends to lower a rope for them to ascend.
Kole had never seen a kobold, outside of pictures. In his dark vision, there was no color, but he could easily imagine the dull scales covering their bodies to be a muddy brown. They were—or had been—short, smaller even than goblins, and looked like lizards crudely formed into the shapes of men.
Kole drew upon his Fade ability and went to the corner of the level to scout ahead. He sensed no eyes on him—outside the thousands possibly watching through the viewing illusion, though thankfully his magic wouldn’t be visible to them, nor would he have to attempt to avert their attention.
Up this high, the ziggurat was only fifty feet across, and Kole quickly made it to the other side. They were climbing the structure from the rear, and from this vantage point he could see that the monument stood on a spire, surrounded by a chasm spanned with one bridge on each side. Stairs lead from the ground to the top at the front and doorways to within were set aside the steps on each level.
Below, Kole saw the other team still lived, and making their way across the bridge which was not littered with the dead. Sections of the bridge were gone, having collapsed from the triggering of some kobold mechanism. There were no kobolds around, all that saw the light had gone into a frenzy at the sight of the shiny armor some of the party had. But Kole heard more within, frantically preparing for the invaders.
Kole ran back around to update his team.
“There’s a secret door here,” Rakin said, pointing to a section of the wall. “Gimme a minute.”
Kole kept Fade active and ran to the other side to keep watch just in case. Kole heard a click, and the sound of stone rolling on stone, and turned back to see a dwarven sized opening in the wall.
“I’ll go ahead,” Kole whispered, and slipped around Rakin, ducking uncomfortably in the hall that was just a few inches too short to walk upright in. As well as being too short, the tunnel was narrow, but as dwarfs partially made up for their lack of height with an abundance of width, Kole managed. The tunnel turned immediately upon entering, and Kole followed it until it came to a dead end.
He could hear something beyond the wall but ran back to collect his friends before trying to find a peep hole or crack, lest he accidentally open the secret door.
Once they were gathered inside, with Doug having to nearly crawl on all fours to fit his antlered head inside, Rakin quickly found the mechanism to open the door, and waited for them to ready themselves.
With a silent count on his hands, Rakin signaled the opening of the door, and at one the wall in front of them dropped into the floor, disappearing to reveal the hollow interior of the ziggurat. The clicking chattering of kobolds echoed off the walls, and Kole felt the reverberations of it within his chest.
The inside was a vast open chamber, with a long crystal stalactite hanging from the center, much like that in the Dahn. Each walkway lined the edges corresponding to each level of the structure, and kobolds swarmed all over them, fighting over weapons and getting ready to ambush the enemy fighting their way in through the front gate on the bottom floor.
Just before their doorway, four kobolds stood, turning around at the sound of their entrance. The kobolds let out a shrill roar and charged at them. Zale and Rakin charged to meet them screaming a battle cry of their own.
