Pocket Dungeon 3, page 13
“What do you see?” I asked Yasha. I was only privy to the vague, shapeless blobs of yellow-tinged light, and those weren’t exactly the most helpful.
“The hall appears the same as the last,” she said as she guided us quickly down the hall. “It curves up ahead into what appears to be a room. There is a large arched doorway made out of wood, with intricate carvings along the frame. The door is already open.”
“Sounds like we picked the right hallway, then,” I said.
I was intrigued by the idea of carvings on the doorway, and I wondered if they were some sort of indicator as to what was in the room, or if they were just a bit of decoration, but considering the fact that I couldn’t actually see anything, I’d just have to keep those questions to myself.
The air pressure seemed to change as Yasha pulled me through a slightly narrower threshold, and I managed to piece together the fact this was the arched doorway. My shoulder bumped against the door as it swung listlessly on its hinges, and I blinked a few times to try and adjust my eyes to what the room held, as even the already faint glow from the Pauldrons of Wisdom had dimmed to nearly nothing more than a whisper of color, like a handful of glow-in-the-dark stars mounted to a ceiling.
It was still so dark that it shouldn’t have been possible though, like all the light in the world had simply vanished and we were in some sort of blank, empty vacuum. It left a sinking feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach that slowly began curling up my spine.
Nothing should ever be this dark.
As a kid, I hadn’t even been afraid of the dark, but this entire lack of light made me feel like a scared little kid. A shiver rolled down my spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was like someone could be watching me from anywhere in the darkness and I would have no idea until it was too late.
What a cheerful thought, Wes. Really helpful to dwell on stuff like that right now.
I didn’t have much more time to convince myself that the boogeyman wasn’t going to get me, however, because my thoughts were split in two by a sharp, panicked scream in front of me.
It was hard to place exactly where the sound had come from in the darkness, and it seemed to echo around the room. Whether or not that really was the case, or if my mind was just playing tricks on me in the dark, I didn’t know, but one thing was for sure.
Someone was screaming.
Yasha’s grip on my hand tightened.
“Can you see anything?” I asked her in a low tone as I adopted a readied stance. I didn’t know who or what was screaming, but I wanted to be ready for anything.
Yasha shifted to press her back against mine so the two of us couldn’t be snuck up on, which was a really good idea, had I been able to see even my own hands in front of me. But I still felt comforted to know she was with me.
“No,” she matched my whisper, and her voice took on a slightly panicked edge. “I cannot. Even my superior eyesight is failing me in this pit of darkness.”
Okay, well, that was definitely bad.
Another scream ripped through the air once more, and this time, it sounded much closer than it had before, and I was pretty sure it was male. Maybe. I’d heard dudes completely lose their shit and screech like that before, at least.
My only guess was that it had to be the guy we were chasing. Which meant something was making him scream.
“There’s a monster in here,” I whispered with no lack of certainty.
I briefly considered activating my Ring of Invisibility, but then a cryptic thought sifted over my mind like a cold breeze.
“Whatever it is, it can probably smell us right now,” I breathed. “Most creatures who can function in this sort of darkness rely heavily on smell. Fuck…”
Yasha’s back went rigid against mine at the notion, and I could feel the tension pouring off her in waves. I imagined that as terrifying as this was for me, it was probably worse for her, considering her usually much stronger senses.
“What should we do?” she asked quietly.
“I think we need to help the other man,” I said. “Because I don’t just want to let him die, and we might have a better chance of fighting whatever this is with three people.”
“I agree,” Yasha said.
That was all the affirmation I needed to do something that very well might have been stupid.
“Hey!” I shouted, and the volume of my voice was strange and uncanny in the already surreal space. “Whoever you are, we’re by the door! What else is in here!”
I had no idea if he would answer, or if it was even him at all, despite my initial thoughts. But after a pause, a shaking, wavering voice broke through the darkness.
“I don’t fucking know!” he shouted back, and it was obvious whatever this thing was, it had terrified him. “I can’t see for shit. But something took a giant bite out of my leg.”
Shit.
“What do we do?” Yasha whispered to me. Before I could answer, however, I felt the air in front of me shift, like something had moved by me, and moved by fast. Like, way too fast.
I didn’t hesitate. I raised up the Giant Slayer’s Battle Axe and swung the blade with all my might until I felt it connect with something. The shockwave from the hit traveled up my arms, and for a second, I nearly dropped the weapon, but I held tight as whatever I’d just hit bellowed out a deep, bloodcurdling scream.
For a moment, something flashed nearly ten feet up in the air.
It was the monster’s health bar. It was suddenly the only thing I could see in the expansive darkness, and it felt blindingly bright.
Wraith: level twenty-one.
I had a feeling this was a beast of inordinate size, because my axe had done twenty percent damage with a single hit.
But just as soon as the health bar appeared, it vanished, and suddenly the air had gone still around me again.
“What was that!” Yasha shouted, and I felt her shift to grab her katana from its sheath on her hip.
“A wraith, apparently,” I said. “I felt the air move, like something was in front of me all of the sudden, and just swung.”
“You actually hit that thing?” the man shrieked. He sounded a little closer now, but I really couldn’t be too sure with how sound played with the darkness to make the entire room feel strange.
“And I am about to hit it again,” Yasha snarled from behind me. The fox-woman’s sword cut through the air, and I felt the muscles in her back work as she drove the blade into the darkness.
I turned my head at the last second to see the health bar pop up once again, this time with only five percent less health. Yeah, I was definitely getting a boost from the axe.
The wraith shrieked once more, and the sound drilled into my skull, but I wasn’t about to lower my weapon to cover my ears.
A slightly less high-pitched scream broke through the din, and I realized the wraith must have leaped from Yasha to the man we were following. It told me one of two things. Either this room was much smaller than I’d first anticipated, or this thing was much, much bigger.
I really hoped it was the first option.
“Hit it!” I shouted. “Hit it so the health bar pops up and we can find you!”
The man screamed again, and something that definitely sounded like gnashing teeth sprung up a few yards away. I grabbed Yasha’s hand with my free one to pull her along with me as we moved toward the sound, but it was impossible to trace exactly where it was coming from.
Finally, the health bar popped up a couple of feet to the left, and the man let out another pained wail. Whatever he’d done, he’d done enough damage to knock it down by one whole percent.
“Go to him,” I said to Yasha. “Make sure his leg’s alright. I’ll deal with this thing.”
“I will do that,” Yasha said. “But if he attacks me in any way, I will incapacitate him without mercy.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” I agreed.
Then the fox-woman’s hand slipped from my grip, and she disappeared further into the darkness.
For a few seconds, I was left with nothing but a pit of expanding worry in my gut as I waited for Yasha to say something.
“I have found him,” she shouted, and relief blossomed in my chest. Yasha was fine. She’d found our guy. And now all I needed to do was beat the shit out of this thing.
I shifted slowly as I waited for something around me to feel different. It was hard to pinpoint what exactly I was looking for, except that it would feel… wrong.
I hated the vague, nebulous criteria, but right now in the dark, it was all I had to go off of.
And soon enough, I felt something shift in the air once again. This time instead of a breeze moving past me too quickly, it felt as if something was breathing right onto my cheek.
Oh, fuck no.
I raised the Giant Slayer’s Battle Axe up in the air and used all my strength to turn and swing it down in the direction I’d felt the breathing.
It only took a second before I felt the blade connect and sink into rock-hard flesh. I bore down on the weapon even more to try and drive the axe even deeper into the monster to no avail.
The blade of the axe head felt lodged in the monster, but each time the wraith flailed and tried to escape my grip, the health bar over its head dropped lower and lower.
The wraith and I were trapped in a strange stalemate where I couldn’t free the axe, and each time it tried to struggle free, it only brought more damage onto itself.
The bar was sitting at fifty percent now, so while I had the monster trapped, I fumbled with the Talon Blade of a Mature Ruby Dragon on my belt and pulled it free.
I held the handle of the axe with one hand, and with the other, I brandished the Talon Blade and drove it down into the monster’s flesh over and over again.
A spray of thick, bile-scented blood sprayed up into my face, and there was something so much worse about not actually being able to see the blood as it drenched me. It sizzled against my armor and the bare skin of my face, but I didn’t dare release my weapons to wipe it away.
I powered through the burning sensation as it began to spread across my cheek and brought the Talon Blade down again.
The wraith flailed at an even more frantic pace as it tried to free itself, but I wasn’t about to let it go.
With a final stab of the Talon Blade into what I hoped was this fucking thing’s heart, it dropped to the ground with enough force to make my teeth clack in my jaw.
The wraith gave a final shrieking gasp before its health bar dropped entirely to zero.
The thing was fucking dead.
And to my surprise, that was all it took to bring light back into the room.
It happened slowly, and at first, I didn’t even realize a change was taking place as the all-consuming darkness slowly began to trickle away like water down into a drain. All of the inky blackness drifted and moved through the air toward the fallen body of the wraith.
As I was finally able to see again, I realized the wraith had been the darkness. The mass on the ground was nothing more than that– a mass of darkness with no discernible features. The only thing marking the beast as something that had once been alive at all was the spray of black blood across the wooden floor leading to my feet.
“You’re alright!” Yasha exclaimed and leaped up to her feet. She had been crouched next to the injured man, but she quickly made her way over to me as the Cloak of Protection flapped in the wind behind her.
“I’m alright,” I said. “A little gross, but generally alright.”
Then I heard a faint popping sound. When I looked down at the inky black body, I saw a chest about the size of a cooler resting atop it, ripe for the picking.
“Let’s get the chest and get out of here,” I said as I moved to grab the item. At the same time, however, I heard the sounds of shuffling and frantic grunting coming from somewhere across the room
I looked up and saw the man we’d just effectively rescued from near death trying to crawl toward the door to the equipment room embedded in the wall as fast as his injured body could take him.
Before I could react, Yasha pulled the Braided Sphinx Hair Whip from her belt, and with a flick of her wrist, she expertly caught the man’s uninjured ankle and yanked him back, hard.
“Fuck!” he shouted as he was unceremoniously dragged across the blood-soaked wooden floor until he was a good three yards away from the door.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” I asked him as I came to stand over him.
The blade of the Giant Slayer’s Battle Axe dripped bubbling black blood down onto the man’s clothing with little sizzling pops. He flinched back, like he was afraid I was about to use the axe on him.
“I–” he stammered out before falling silent. It was as if he suddenly realized he might be better off if he didn’t say anything at all, but that wasn’t going to work for me. We hadn’t just chased him down for shits and giggles. I didn’t take too kindly to the fact he’d tried to kill not only me, but two women I loved. And somebody had to answer for that.
But mostly, I just needed to know why. Did it have to do with Harper? Was this something else entirely? Was it a part of the black market Elaene told us about?
One thing was for sure, none of us were leaving here until I learned what I needed to know.
Yasha pulled the whip a little tighter, just in case the man decided now would be a good time to try and flee, though I couldn’t imagine why he would.
“We’ve got some questions,” I snapped at the cowering man. “And you’re going to answer them.”
Chapter 10
“I don’t know what you want from me,” the man began, and it was evident he was trying to posture. His chin jutted out, and his hands curled into fists, like he held any of the cards in this exchange. “But I’m not gonna fucking answer.”
Maybe I would have believed him if he, a) didn’t look so scared shitless, and b) wasn’t actively being held hostage by a badass fox-woman and her whip.
God, I really loved Yasha.
“I think you are,” I said. “Because for starters, we just saved your life and it’s incredibly rude not to answer the questions of the people that just saved your life. Were you raised in a barn?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but I didn’t give him a chance as I continued on.
“And besides that, what other choice do you have? How long do you have left on your timer? Because we’ve got plenty of time. We could easily tie you up here and leave you to rot in this dungeon, just like you tried to do to us before. How long do you think before another wraith shows up to take the first one’s place? Do you think you’d be able to survive until then with that leg injury?”
While I knew, and I was sure Yasha knew, I would never just leave this guy to die here in the dungeon, he certainly didn’t know that. After knowing what Iris had been through, I couldn’t imagine doing anything like that to another person, no matter how heinous they were.
Well, except maybe William Harper and Archibald Black, but that was a different situation. They were clearly men at the top, and they were responsible for inflicting harm and instructing others to do the same. This guy seemed like a lackey, and not a particularly competent one at that.
The man on the ground went pale, and he opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a fish gasping desperately for air.
Yasha cut her golden eyes over toward me, and her tail flicked to the side. Her lips pressed into a line, and one of her ears twitched. I realized after a moment that she was having a hard time keeping her amusement to herself.
She definitely knew I was bluffing, because, after all, in her own words, I was incredibly noble, and a noble person didn’t just leave somebody to die in a dungeon because they were a dick.
They just thought about doing it for a few seconds before ultimately deciding to be the bigger person.
“All you have to do is tell us what we want to know,” I said. “It’s that simple.”
The man’s eyes flicked frantically from one side to the other, as if he was debating the limited choices he had. It only took him a few seconds before he let out a long, low sigh and dropped down to lie flat on the ground, as if he couldn’t even hold himself upright.
“What do you want to know?” he finally asked, and he practically rolled over and showed his belly in surrender.
Well, at least he wasn’t entirely an idiot. He obviously knew what being trapped between a rock and a hard place looked like, and he wasn’t about to let it kill him. Which was good, because I really wasn’t in the mood to kill this guy, and I really wanted to get out of this dungeon as soon as possible.
The blood splatters on my face were beginning to itch, as I was apparently allergic to wraith blood. Who would have thought?
“You’ve been following us,” I said. It wasn’t a question, but the man still reacted as if it were.
“You knew about that?” he asked, and he slowly began to push himself back up to a seated position, like maybe he shouldn’t just lie flat on his back as we questioned him like he was already practicing for being a corpse.
“Well, you just confirmed it,” I said and felt a small tug of pride that I’d been able to effectively dupe this guy into admitting the truth.
It might have been more impressive if he wasn’t an idiot, though.
The man swore under his breath as he continued to inchworm his way up into a fully upright position on the floor of the dungeon. The giant bite taken out of his leg looked pretty bad, but I wasn’t leaving until I got my answers.
“Why were you following us?” Yasha asked. Her hands were still wrapped tightly around the Braided Sphinx Hair Whip, and she looked like she was ready to yank on it at any second to send the man sprawling back to the ground again.
His eyes cut from me to the fox-woman with clear and obvious apprehension.
“We’ve seen cars following us for a couple of months now,” I said. “Why? Did you work for William Harper?”
At the mention of Harper’s name, the man frowned.
“What?” he said. “Why would I have worked for Harper? He did his own thing. Plus, he’s dead now.”
