Chapter 9: Spelunking (Patreon)

William Oh once climbed down into the bowels of the Abyss. He went so deep that he accidentally crossed into the underworld itself, where the lord of death himself was waiting to claim another soul.

With his mighty war-axe, Will cleaved the god’s jaw off of his body and brought back his teeth as a trophy.

Naturally, you can’t kill the lord of Death, but if you hear strange sounds coming from the ground at night, that might very well be Lumesh himself moaning as he searches for his severed jaw.

-          Jason Salazar

Will sat against the cold stone, staring straight ahead at the blank cave wall, lit by the faint light of Loth’s glowbugs.

“Why did I do that?” He asked aloud. “Why did I do that?”

“You said it was because you didn’t want them to grow accustomed to your greatness and then suffer in its absence.” Loth replied, sitting beside him.

“Yeah, but why did I DO that!?” Will demanded. “I could’ve had four girls in my party. Four…girls. We could’ve had…adventures.”

“In my admittedly short experience, one cannot change their nature at the first crack of shell,” Loth looked up at him. “Do you perhaps not have much experience with multiple women fighting over you?”

“That would be the understatement of the century.” Will replied.

“Then it would follow that your tolerance for those situations would be limited. If it happens more, then you will be able to respond with consideration, rather than panic.”

“Yeah, like that’ll ever happen again.” Will muttered. Then he recalled how the girls made those weird sighing noises at his reflexively made-up bullshit to escape their attention.

He also recalled Jason’s over-achieving manner of handling his end of the bargain. It had been amusing when he’d heard the stories firsthand when Jason couldn’t recognize him due to the sunburns and weight loss, but now…

He’s gonna keep going an entire year, isn’t he? Dear gods, I don’t think I can handle any more unearned fame.

On the other hand, now that I’ve got some distance, being mobbed by girls wasn’t so bad…

Will didn’t really know how to deal with them, though. A girl older than him had left the orphanage six years prior, and the closest one in age to him was Marissa, and she was three years younger. Pretty much a complete brat.

There were a handful of girls in the village about his age, but they didn’t really…interact much.

“How do kobolds deal with women?” Will asked idly.

“Well, there are many courtship rituals among our people, so there’s no one way of doing it, but I’m quite partial to the method whereby the man grabs the woman by the horns –“ He tapped the rear-facing horns jutting out of the back of his skull, before miming the action. “Wrestles her upper body to the ground, and-“

“No, I don’t think that’ll work.” Will said, shaking his head. “You know what? Let’s move on. It feels like this conversation isn’t going to bear fruit.”

“As you wish,” Loth said with a nod. “Also, in what manner can a conversation bear fruit?”

“It means ‘nothing good will come of it’.”

“Ah. Idioms. Those are difficult.”

“mm.” Will said, pushing himself to his feet and surveying the stone walls. They’d split into seven groups and begun scouting out the caverns, looking for the kaith supply line. It was a branching web of tunnels that plunged into pitch blackness, causing them to split up rather quickly. Thankfully before Will ran out of his severely limited supply of smooth one-liners.

In theory, all the kaith warriors should be at the frontline, where higher level Climbers were dealing with them. The workers themselves were much more in line with what one could expect on the first floor of The Tower.

The barrel of soil topped with food scraps turned out to house dozens of insect species, which Loth manipulated with ease.

Every time they came to a branch in the cave system, Loth left an arrow pointing back the way they came, marked with the luminescent juices of glowbugs squished against the wall.

“How many different bugs do you have, anyway?” Will asked, stepping carefully as they walked down the tunnel.

“Oh, I’ve got feeders,” Loth said, pulling out one of the wiggling grubs he’d offered Will. “They’ll eat anything and store food scraps as more of themselves. Good field rations. They feed the others, too. I’ve got silkstriders, wood-worms, venomous Gnatters, Pics, ticks, These ones coagulate blood, these make it flow freely. These barbs house flesh-eating bacteria. Squash some bleeders and barbs on a blade, and a tiny nick becomes a wound requiring a healer to intervene. And fast.

“I’ve got binders: they glue things together. A fungus for feeding the ones that prefer plants. Stinkers, Seekers….Use them together to mark a target and track it down later.”

“Gillies, sweeteners, masks, firestarters, poppers, glowbugs, of course, and umm….I think that’s about it. Probably.”

“It’s like a microcosm of Death,” Will said, leaning over the innocuous barrel of soil, watching the tiny flashes of light as shiny chiton moved about just under the surface.

“Isn’t it fantastic!?” Loth asked, looking up at him with a sharp-toothed grin. “It was a challenge and a half to get them all living together, and half of my Class is dedicated to simply keeping them in balance and under control.”

“What’s the other half dedicated to?” Will asked.

“Traps.”

“I see. ACK!”

Will nearly tumbled into the afterlife as the bottom of the tunnel fell out from under him. What he assumed to be a small shadow between one ridge in the floor and the next, was actually a pitch-black drop into nothingness, only about three feet wide, but immeasurably deep.

Will plummeted down for a fraction of a second before his body caught up with what was happening, and his good hand whipped out, catching the far edge.

Will kicked off the stone and whipped himself back up into the ‘safety’ of the pitch-black tunnel through enemy territory they’d been spelunking.

“Well done,” Loth said, kneeling beside the hole in the floor. A handful of glowing worms climbed up to the edge of his barrel, and Loth scooped them up, placing them in a dish of polished silver.

He turned the dish upside down, and Will blinked when he realized that it focused their light into a beam. Despite the beam of pale blue light, they couldn’t see the bottom.

“Looks like this may be another path,” Loth mused.

“…We shouldn’t give something the opportunity to come up behind us,” Will said.

“Which direction would you like to go?” Loth asked, pointing down at the hole, then the continuation of the tunnel.

Will heaved a sigh. “Let’s go down, I’m better suited for climbing than the others, so I should do it.”

“Very well.”

Loth held up a finger, and placed the barrel down beside the hole. The kobold’s silk-striders marched out of the barrel and began crawling up to the far tunnel

“Aren’t those just spiders?” Will asked.

“A special breed of them. They’re a domesticated variety that has a hard time hunting for themselves, but they make several excellent varieties of silk on command.” Loth said.

Will watched as the spiders strung an invisible strand of silk from the top of the far tunnel before Loth reached into his pouch and retrieved a tiny bell, hanging it up.

It seemed as though it was hanging in midair, in the shadow of an overhang, nearly entirely out of sight.

Loth plucked the vertical strand of silk, which gave off a clear tinkling sound. He nodded in satisfaction. All told, it took the kobold maybe five seconds to set up an imperceptible alarm trap.

Loth squished a glow bug between his fingers, then drew symbols explaining to any follow-up crews that they’d gone down the hole and the tunnel in front of them was unexplored.

Hopefully those symbols would prevent anyone else mindlessly stumbling into the pit like Will had.

“Alright, here we go,” Will said, dropping down into the pit and beginning to climb down.

As Will got started, a line of glow-bugs began marching down the the wall alongside him, providing dim illumination as he went.

About three minutes into the downward climb, Will was beginning to accept that this was an actual path and they weren’t going to hit a dead-end and come back again.

Shortly afterward, something lunged out of the dark and grabbed his foot.

“SHIT!” Will shouted as a ring of predatory teeth latched around his ankle, poking through the tough leather of his boots.

It yanked his foot off the wall and tried to yank him back into a hole where it would begin the process of feasting.

“Damnit!” Will only had two contact points on the wall, which was less than ideal when being ragdolled around by…

Will caught a glance of it, and wished he hadn’t. It was a wormlike appendage with a ring of fanglike protrusions that convulsed in sync with each other, with the sole purpose of drawing his foot down it’s gullet.

Will hissed in pain as he set his body weight on his left elbow and slipped the tomahawk out of his belt.

An instant later his elbow slipped, and he was in freefall, held up only by the monstrous creature reeling him into its coffin-like lair.

Will whipped the tomahawk forward and buried it in the maggot-white neck just beyond where he knew his foot was.

The creature pulled harder.

Will went into a frenzy, slamming the blade into the creature’s neck over and over, a faint hum building up behind his eyes as he did so.

Finally, Will slammed the ax through the creature’s neck, severing its hold on him completely. Will’s weight ripped the last threads of muscle, caused the monster’s jaws to detach with a sickly pop.

Unfortunately, that put him into freefall again.

Will hit his head on something, sending stars shooting across his vision.

He dropped the tomahawk and flailed around for any purchase he could find.

The stone conformed to his grip, and he wrenched to a stop, nearly pulling his arm out of its socket as his weapon kept tumbling.

Desperate not to lose his Relic, Will swung forward and caught the tomahawk between his thighs, nearly unmanning himself in the process.

“Well,” Will muttered to himself, dangling by a single hand in complete darkness above an unknowable drop, potentially surrounded by an entire hive of those flesh eating creatures.

“This could’ve gone better.”

Through a monumental effort, Will crunched up and passed the head of his weapon into the crook of his elbow, then carefully guiding it into a belt loop.

“William, are you still alive?” Loth asked as he rappelled down on spidersilk rope.

“Technically.” Will muttered. Once his weapon was secured, he got to work setting his feet…except there was nothing to set them on.

“…I think I’m hanging from the ceiling of a thousand-foot drop…with one hand.” Will said.

“Allow me to confirm.” Loth said, setting his feet and tugging on the rope. The silk-striders above him chewed through the rope and rejoined their master, where they reset the silk rope at his current position.

The glow-bugs marched down in tandem with their master until the walls of the tunnel suddenly gave way, leaving the kobold suspended over nothing.

Without losing a beat, Loth put glowbugs in his silver dish and scanned the surrounding emptiness.

“There’s a ledge there.” He said, pointing.

Will craned his neck to see, and spotted a ledge about twenty feet out and twenty down, lit up by the pale blue light.

“Can you keep the light on it?” Will asked.

“Surely.”

Will bunched up his body and put his legs on the lip of the tunnel, praying that his Tomahawk didn’t slip out of the belt-loop. His right arm was twisted nearly one hundred and eighty degrees moments before he pushed off with every fiber of his being, leaping across the empty chasm toward the ledge below.

Will had all the wind crushed out of his lungs as he hit the ledge. For a brief, hair-raising instant, Will thought he would slip off and tumble into the emptiness beneath.

His hand found a good grip less than a heartbeat later, and he hauled himself up onto the ledge, groaning as he rubbed what would surely become an impressive bruise by tomorrow morning.

“Catch!” Loth called, moments before a rope sailed across the gap and landed in Will’s hand.

“Hold it to the wall for a moment.” Loth’s voice called from the empty blackness in the distance, punctuated by the single blue light in his hand.

Will did so.

Dozens of silk-striders crawled down the rope and began webbing it to the wall.

“You can let go now,” Loth said as the rope went tight.

A moment later Loth slid down the rope, landing on the ledge, unhooking a metal hook with a latch on a spring as he settled.

“You’re quite good at climbing, despite being a one-handed human.”

“Half of my class is dedicated to it,” Will said.

“What’s the other half dedicated to?” Loth asked, referencing their earlier conversation with a wry look.

“Magic.” Will said, releasing the Sting Ring from dimensional storage into his palm.

Loth’s scaly brows rose.

“Interesting.”

Now that they were out of sight of anyone who might be from Ashwood and likely to run into further trouble, Will figured this was a good time to equip it.

He’d gotten the opportunity to sacrifice it to his Phantom Hand when he’d first taken it into the storage, hiding it from inconvenient questions by the magistrate.

Will hadn’t done it because there was no need to just yet. He only had one ring, and his ring slot was empty. Once he started having multiple relics fighting over the same slot, then he could worry about which one he wanted to destroy.

Wait a minute.

Will realized that his Phantom Hand was ridiculously powerful.

There were several slots that could only have one Relic, like helmets, boots (in pairs), amulets, two-handed primary weapons, etc.

Typically if someone found two helmets that would have had a synergistic effect between them, they could never combine those effects, because their wearer only had one head.

Not so with the Phantom Hand.

As its dimensional storage grew, he would eventually be able to use it as something like a Universal Slot, which vastly outweighed the utility of the Ring slot he’d lost to get it.

Awesome…still would prefer having my hand back, though.

With his mouth, he pushed the Sting Ring onto the finger of his right hand, feeling the faint buzzing sensation signalling that it had activated and added its effects to his character sheet.

Sting Ring equipped.

+1 acid damage added to all attacks.

1 Charge: Acid Bolt.

Fire a shard of acid-impregnated stone at a target.

They took a break. Will bandaged up the scrapes and shallow punctures on his foot while Loth sat on the edge of the ledge, idly swinging his legs over the abyss with the ease of a boy sitting in a tree branch ten steps from home, munching on grubs and drinking from a flask of water.

“Want some?” Loth asked, holding out a handful of grubs like trial rations.

“Nah, I got my own,” Will muttered, prying the creature’s fangs out of the leather of his boot, forcing the hardened hide to relinquish his snack.

He sat beside Loth, turned the creature’s mouth around backwards and started chewing on the neck-meat. There was a couple pounds of it attached to the jaw, after all.

“How is it?” Loth asked.

Wordlessly, Will seized some with his teeth and ripped the piece in half, offering it to Loth.

The kobold took a ginger bite and nodded appreciatively before continuing on.

The two of them took an hour to recover from the climb, sitting side-by-side, feet dangling over Death, leaning against the stone wall.