philtucker
patreon
Throne Hunters Book 2, Chapter 23
🕑 Added 2024-06-28 13:00:22 +0000 UTCHarald awoke at Sixth Bell, and rolled out of bed. He felt refreshed and vigorous. He dressed in the pre-dawn gloom and cinched on his new studded leather armor, paid for out of the crew fund. It was well-oiled, supple, with a few strategically placed iron plates sewn over vulnerable areas. Not too heavy, not too bulky, and a vast improvement over his ruined set.
He buckled his new arming sword, took up his bulky kite shield, and grabbed the iron cap they’d all be wearing. A final check of his room, and then he descended to the entrance hall.
Everybody gathered there, eyes puffy with sleep, Vic frowning at the hour and cracking the occasional yawn. Kársek had risen early to brew strong coffee, and once Nessa descended with her pack, they set out into the gray morning.
They’d decided to walk so as to warm themselves up, and did so without any conversation. Flutic was coming to life, transitioning from the night city to the day, and the rumble of carriages and wagons slowly grew louder as the crowds thickened.
They reached the Dungeon Plaza just before Seventh Bell as planned, and Sam waved and pushed off the dead scale lantern post she’d been leaning against to jog over. She wore her new armor, all chainmail and leather, arming sword scabbarded at her hip but without the kite shield.
With her Artifact and Ability, she’d no need of a mundane one.
They murmured their greetings and got in line. Vic was still yawning, so against Nessa’s advice he purchased a second cup of coffee from a street vendor. Soon enough they stepped up to the guard who processed them without much interest, giving the usual disclaimers and warnings.
They approached the taxation desk, declared their scales and stats, and Harald was taken aback by how much Sam had brought: ten Zeniths, two of which went to each crew member for healing purposes.
Vic tossed his empty cup aside and led the way up to the platform. More perfunctory warnings, and then Nessa held aloft twelve Copper Crescents.
Was this becoming rote? Harald glanced around the deck and the guards, the huge revolving Dungeon Portal, the Humble Petitioner’s line. On some level it was. This marked his… sixth delve? He shook out his shoulders, activated his scale lantern, clipped it to his belt, then swung his kite shield around and drew his arming sword.
“Ready, Harald?” Kársek stood beside him, having acquired a sunflower yellow surcoat that he wore over his traveling gear.
“Ready. You?”
Kársek rolled his tousled head about his shoulders, causing his neck to pop, and nodded. “More so than last time.”
The portal ceased revolving. Nessa glanced back to make sure they were prepared, then led the way.
One by one they climbed the sky to enter the carnivorous portal, Harald going third, and even after so many entrances the way expanded to consume them gave him the shivers.
He emerged into a light and airy tunnel, the ceiling a good thirty feet up, the width just as broad. The walls were of porous white chalk, striated to intimate the passage of eons, while the roof was rough and stained and irregular.
Other huge tunnels intersected with it, large enough for carriages to be driven through, horses and all. White light radiated gently from these side tunnels and up ahead where the main tunnel curved out of sight.
The ground was gravelly and made of crushed white sand and pebbles. The air was dry and cool and tasted, predictably, of chalk.
Silence. An expectant hush.
The 12th Level.
His father’s old favorite.
“You see, Harry, the 12th is where you’re put to the test. It goes on forever, it’s said, those blasted white tunnels. The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets. It’s said there’s a Celestial Prismwing hidden at its very end, can you imagine? Just hovering there, glittering, precious as all of Flutic, awaiting the man bold enough to seize it.”
His father’s passion had ignited his own, so Harald had immediately set to learning all that he could about the 12th. It turned out to be a simple level: huge tunnels that wound ever on, always the same, sloping gradually down.
And the danger? Stone golems. At first small and slow, easy to destroy, but the deeper you went the larger and faster they got.
Everybody eventually met their match. Even Gold-ranked raiders would occasionally attempt the 12th to see how deep they could go.
But that wasn’t on their agenda for today.
The 12th might test their skill and staying power, but the foes were as mindless as any other on the first dozen levels.
Nessa waited till Sam came through, then led them forward. The goal was to find a well leading to the 13th, as the next portal entrance was only to the 16th. That made the 13th, 14th, and 15th Levels some of the least visited out of all of the common floors. Most raiders simply defaulted to the 16th instead of bothering with the 12th.
But Nessa insisted they tackle this from the top.
They jogged forward, boots crunching on the crushed chalk, not talking so as to not alert any of the closest golems, but even so when they reached the first intersection a golem slouched into view.
It was humanoid, perhaps four feet tall, but appeared to be all shoulders and arms, its huge fists almost as large as its chest. Formed from the same white rock as the walls, it somehow conveyed a sense of death. The chest was cadaverous, ribs prominent, and gaps opened up the length of its forearms between stone sinews. Its face was a deathshead, a skull without nose, its eyes deeply recessed beneath a prominent brow, its scalp bald and uneven. It stalked forward lethargically on all fours, knuckles pressed to the ground, the weight of its shoulders over its arms. Its small bandy legs almost an afterthought.
Harald froze.
The golem lifted its skull-like visage and focused on him, mouth widening in a silent snarl, stone warping like flesh, and Harald saw that each of its eyes was a single Crescent Copper scale.
There was one thing that Nessa and Vic had insisted on: if they ran into a golem, they had to put it down fast. Their roar would attract ever more of their number, so they had to be slain before they could sound their warning.
Vic raised The Point and extended its gleaming tip straight into the golem’s brow before even Nessa could react.
The golem collapsed into a small pile of rubble.
Nessa nodded appreciatively and led them into the golem’s tunnel. The trick to descending to the 13th without getting swamped by the foes was to pursue a spiraling path, always trying to stay as close as possible to your point of origin.
They slew three more small golems, Sam collecting the Copper Crescents that they left behind, when they at last found a well descending to the 13th.
“Perfect,” whispered Nessa. She’d said it wouldn’t take long to find one, and she’d been right. Wells were common when it came to reaching levels without Dungeon Portal access.
“All right,” she said. “We won’t have long before we attract attention below. Follow my lead, remember our training, and stay close. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as we stay focused. And remember.” At this point she glared at Harald. “Listen for my commands, and if you hear them? Obey.”
“Yes, Delve Captain,” said Harald, chagrined.
She raked their group one last time, as if taking a mental tally of their resources, then nodded, sat and swung her legs over the edge of the simple well, then dropped in and was gone.
Damn, thought Harald as he watched Vic go next. Nessa really was like a different woman down here. No, that wasn’t quite right. No different, but… simplified. As if flensed all the extraneous parts of her personality, leaving nothing but the iron core.
Harald was slated to go next. He sat on the broad lip of the well. The stone was cold. He swung his legs over.
“Luck!” whispered Sam.
He flashed a nervous grin and glanced down. The heart of the well was swirling black energies. He took a deep breath and fell.
The abyss welcomed him. He felt himself traduced, translated across space, and then standing in a new environment.
He didn’t fall to his feet, simply found himself already standing, shield raised on his left arm, arming sword held at the ready on his right.
The portal back home now burned at his back, dragged down here by his descent. There was no need to return to the 12th.
The 13th Level was a dismal and macabre place. The air was hazy, the sky a vague press of slowly roiling fog without depth, the details of anything farther than a dozen yards growing indistinct. They stood in a small square of badly laid stone tiles, many shattered or missing altogether to reveal dirt. From where they stood a labyrinth of walkways, squares, and short staircases extended away in all directions, most of them bound by short retaining walls at either knee or waist height. Great gaps yawned open on all sides, and from many of these rose dead trees with grasping branches, their bark wizened, their trunks tortured. Mist swirled thickly in the depths, hiding the ground floor on which the goblins supposedly scuttled.
Kársek appeared beside him a moment later, the dwarf’s eyes wide, his grip on his hammer white-knuckled.
The dwarf’s appearance jolted Harald into action. He stepped into position, behind and to Nessa’s left, Vic having already taken the rear.
Sam appeared a second later, eyes widening as she took in the dull brown environs, the broken masonry, the barren trees.
“Moving,” said Nessa, leading them across the plaza toward the first shallow set of steps.
Everything looked on the verge of collapse. The short wall that framed a burial plot to the left of the steps undulated as if drunken and about to fall in. The paving was uneven, the flagstones irregular and poorly fitted.
Movement.
Harald focused on a freestanding archway that rose in the next square over, searched the top of the short wall that edged their own square, seeking the source of that distraction, then saw a cunning little face peeking at him from behind a broken column.
It was dusty green, the nose impressively long and angular like the head of a pick-ax, the brow beetling, the mouth impossibly wide and pulled into a wicked sneer. The goblin was just as small as described, perhaps three feet tall, its eyes a jaundiced yellow, its manner sly and amused.
For a moment they made eye contact, and then it jerked its head back and was gone.
Harald felt his heart pounding. There had been real life in those yellow eyes, a fierce cunning, a savage cruelty. The crypt keepers, the gloom maws, the ashen walkers, all of them had been monstrous but bestial, or mindless. Even the scarecrows had been too alien to register as “alive”.
But that goblin had definitely been another living creature, wicked and mean-spirited, its grin sadistic, but alive.
And it was hunting them.
But they were still moving.
“Goblin hiding behind western column,” he called out, remembering his instructions. There were no real cardinal directions down here, but to keep things simple each member of the group had their own assigned direction: everything on Harald’s side became “west”, even if they rotated and were returning to the portal.
“Three goblins watching from the south,” said Vic.
“Keep a steady pace,” called Nessa, leading them up the steps. “Kársek, prepare for a South One on my mark.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said the dwarf gruffly. “Plenty of Earthblood here.”
“Incoming!” barked Sam, and a shock ran through their small group like a sharp wind over wheat. A second later Harald heard a thok as a javelin hit Sam’s shield. It took all his discipline to not turn and see what had happened.
Nessa had made that clear: you minded your own business unless someone called for help.
They made their way up the steps and stepped out onto the walkway. It was some four yards wide, swaybacked and rough, the retaining wall knocked out and gone in great patches. Beyond swirled the mist that hid the floor below, while the occasional tree rose into view as they prowled on to the next square.
Which weren’t even squares, necessarily, but broader expanses of jumbled paving stones, sometimes adorned with broken archways or columns, all of it stained brownish-yellow as if by endless years of exposure to some corrupting miasma.
“The three to my south are now six,” called Vic, tone sharp. “They’re pressing in.”
“Kársek, South One,” called Nessa. “Unit, turn and head south!”
Kársek gestured. Harald reversed direction so that they returned swiftly to their original plaza. A four-foot high dun-colored wall burst up from the broken tiles at the head of the steps, and he caught sight of a handful of goblins drawing back their javelins just before they were hidden from view.
Their crew hurried to the wall just as the goblins came scrambling over the top.
Vic had put away The Point, wanting to level his Rapier Regent Class, and now he led the controlled charge at the surprised goblins.
Three jumped down ahead of the wall before registering how much closer the raiders were, and cried out as they rushed to the sides, intent on leaping down into the mist. Vic cut down one as the other two hurled themselves into the void, then swept his blade across the top of the wall just as two more pulled themselves up.
Both had their faces split open as they screamed and fell away.
Vic swiped the Silver Starbursts that appeared in the air where they’d fallen.
“Well done,” said Nessa. “Resume heading north.”
Again they changed direction.
Harald fought the temptation to peer ahead, and instead studied the closest walkways and squares on the far side of the swirling gap that ran alongside their walkway.
Three javelins came flying out of the haze as distant goblins ran into view and hurled them, little more than shadows at this remove.
“Three incoming!” Harald barked, raising his shield.
Sam’s Shield of Valor sprang into existence just above and to the side, and then the first javelin hit his shield with surprising strength. The iron tip failed to punch through, however, and the javelin bounced off.
“Relax, everyone,” called Nessa. “Breathe easy. Let’s move quicker.”
They picked up the pace and reached the next square. This one was ringed by higher, more solid walls, its face crisscrossed with knee-high remnants, looking to have been built just to complicate passage across its face. A huge wizened tree grew in the northeast corner, bulging red fruit hanging from dead branches. Most the flagstones were gone, revealing clayish, hard-packed soil.
“Three east,” barked Sam.
“Two north,” said Nessa.
The thick wall at Harald’s side turned into a causeway that speared out into the haze, and down its length came running a pocket of four goblins, javelins already pulled back to throw.
“Four incoming!” he called, and then the javelins were flying, hurled with all the little monsters’ strength.
“Kársek, East Three!”
A detonation sounded, but Harald hunched behind his shield and took the javelins. Frustration was mounting within him. He wanted to break formation and charge the goblins who were even now retreating into the gloom. He wanted to close and cut them down. Moving like this felt ridiculous, as if all they were doing was inviting endless ranged attacks.
But he bit down on that impatience and followed Nessa’s commands as they quit the square and continued north. Nobody had been hurt yet, and Nessa admonished them time and time again to control their breathing, to calm down, to stay in formation.
They traversed another walkway, entered a brief maze of shoulder-high walls that forced them to work back and forth as they sought to keep going north, goblins racing and giggling along the wall tops just out of reach.
One clapped its hands to catch Harald’s attention as it emerged from the haze some ten yards away, then turned and pulled down its pants, baring its green buttocks which it set to slapping as it cackled with laughter.
Harald grinned. “Come do that over here!”
The goblin turned, made a rude gesture, and ran off into the gloom.
“Up ahead,” said Nessa. “Looks like we’ve found a target.”
Harald hazarded a glance. A decrepit building loomed up out of the cancerous fog. It was a pile of masonry, on the verge of collapse, massive and unlit from within. Most of the windows had been boarded up, but their walkway led to a broad archway before which stood a nervous group of goblins, javelins and curved blades held at the ready.
Within, no doubt, was one of their leaders and a loot chest.
“Get ready for some heat,” called Nessa. “Kársek, South One”
A wall rose up to block off the goblins’ approach, but many more clambered up from below, hiking their wiry bodies into view as they appeared on broken columns, rotten walls, or even up the length of trees.
Javelins started to fall. Harald grimaced and kept his kite shield up, which shuddered again and again as it took blows. One javelin sliced in from behind and hit his shoulder, sinking deep into the muscle that connected to his neck.
Harald felt no pain, but the weight of the embedded javelin and the sudden weakness in his sword arm were warning enough. He sheathed his blade, pulled the javelin free, then absorbed an Aurora Veil that hung about his neck.
He hefted the javelin, spotted a target, and took two steps forward to hurl.
The javelin flew from his hand, missing the goblin by a foot. It stared at him, eyes bulging, and hopped off its perch to fall into the mist.
“Charge north!” barked Nessa, and Harald barely had time to draw his blade as they broke into a run.
The huge building was right there, and the pack of goblins had grown to about a dozen. They chittered and screeched their fear and hate, weapons raised, then broke and ran into the archway as Harald and Vic activated their auras.
“Stay tight!” yelled Nessa as they plunged into the dark tunnel. It was just broad enough for them to run two abreast.
There were no lights up ahead. Goblins could see in the darkness.
But Harald knew what awaited them.
The goblin boss and his small army.
Finally, he thought. Time for a real fight.
Comments
Jake Swartz
Loved the chapter. Something I noticed though is that one of the paragraphs says Sam absorbed an Aura Dawn to heal but I believe it’s either a golden dawn or Aura Veil.
ShivaMcTimber
Is there a discord chat for PT's books?
Phil Tucker
Yep!
Dual.
Tftc!
gigabik
Oooo exciting!!
Taylor
This is one of the best chapters in a while. Solid fight with a good setup. Looking first to seeing the massacre. The Goldchops are about to become famous
R.M.
Triangular portal. So that means at least level 16?
ShivaMcTimber
Superb chapter, thank you! The shuddering kick off has me on the edge of my seat - wonderful tension. Harald is revealing a lot of his tricks here and, depending who survives, word will get around.
Lorenz
Wow……loved the goblin battles…..and beginning to really appreciate the mastiff. :-). WTF is about to come out of that portal!
Dungeonborn
No sense in continuing with shields.” Pretty sure that is without shields?
