Chapter Ninety-seven (Patreon)

The round tunnel was as straight as Dett had told him it would be. It intersected with a multitude of other passages, but never deviated from its path. More than once, workers scurried out of a tunnel in front of or behind Kaz, nearly frightening him out of his fur, but they always ignored him, moving past as if he didn’t exist.

Kaz hugged the wall, occasionally running across the wide passage when a new opening loomed on whichever side he was currently on. The further he went, the more intersections there were, and the wider the main tunnel got, until it was almost more of a very long cavern than anything else.

At one point, he paused to take a few deep breaths, pushing his core to produce more ki, so he would be ready to run or defend himself if a warrior appeared, and found himself staring up at the ceiling. In all but the oldest of passages, the ones carved out by whoever lived in the mountain before the kobolds, the ceiling was left unfinished, even if some subsequent resident had decided to widen the tunnel itself. Not here, however. The top of the tunnel was as round as the rest of it, with the same marks more reminiscent of scraping than digging. Had the hoyi climbed atop each other in order to complete the circle?

The mental image this idea conjured up was amusing enough to distract him from his tension, and he drew in one more breath as he readied himself to move forward again. He stilled, however, as several loud clicks echoed down the passage. So far as he could tell, there was no pattern to them, but they were picked up by other hoyi down other passages, in much the same way a kobold tribe would relay a howl.

Kaz glanced around. If this was a call to arms, that meant now would be a good idea for any kobolds intruding in the hive to hide or get out, but the only place to hide was a nearby side passage, which was significantly smaller than this one. If no insects used that particular path, ducking into it would be a good idea, but if one did, there was no way they would fail to notice him.

Deciding to hide in plain sight, since sight was the one thing the hoyi didn’t have, Kaz pressed his back against the wall, holding his knife tightly, as he had ever since he separated from Dett. Sure enough, the clicking of approaching insects grew louder and louder, until hoyi warriors swept by Kaz in a tidy, single-file row. Each insect remained precisely in the center of the tunnel, though a few split off down side tunnels apparently at random. Not a single one paid any attention to the kobold who was finding out just how long he could actually hold his breath.

The answer was, ‘a very long time’, and Kaz was astonished as he counted hundreds of insects, in what seemed like a never-ending line. There were workers mixed in with the warriors, their smaller bodies like puppies among adults, and these were more likely to divert into the little tunnel he had decided not to use as a refuge. Most importantly, however, they were all heading in the same direction as Kaz.

When the last glittering blue abdomen vanished into the dimly lit tunnel ahead, Kaz finally released his breath and tried to step away from the wall. Tried, because apparently he still had enough heat in him that he had melted a thin layer of the ice coating everything. The resultant water had refrozen, sticking him to the wall via his frozen fur.

With a resigned sigh, Kaz used a bit more ki and pulled harder, wincing at the pain of some significant portion of his fur being forcibly pulled from his skin. He didn’t really want to look, but he found himself compelled to do so, and winced at the amount of fur now embedded in the wall in a vaguely Kaz-shaped blob. Reaching back, he ran his hand over his back, and was relieved to feel some soft fuzz, though he was fairly certain there was a bald patch on his tail.

Li thought all of this was very funny. He sent her an image of a grumpy kobold face. She smugly returned a picture of smooth, perfect dragon scales, entirely unable to become stuck to anything. He replied with a picture of a helpless, flailing dragon, pinned to a wall of ice and unable to free herself because she couldn’t rip her scales away without significant injury.

As Kaz continued down the tunnel, he found the worst of his fear and tension had vanished, and he could tell Li felt better as well. She had been in the box for a long time, and hunger was gnawing at her. Neither of them had any idea if or when someone would give her food or water, and Kaz knew her small body didn’t have any reserves, which added yet another layer of urgency to his search.

Soon, the branching tunnels began to acquire their own generally rounded shape, and as Kaz continued on, he found that all of the passages became curved on top and sides, no matter how small they were. The intersections also became more regular, occurring every twenty to thirty feet. More workers began to appear, still hurrying past him as if he didn’t exist.

Then more clicking came. This was louder, insistent in a way the first hadn’t been. It echoed through the tunnels, instantly picked up and repeated by insects out of sight but not hearing. Reluctantly, Kaz pressed against the wall again, shivering as he felt ice and stone on skin that was never meant to be exposed.

The hoyi came in pairs this time, taking up far more of the tunnel’s width. Two by two, one protective warrior, and one worker, carrying an opalescent orb carefully in its jaws. Inside each orb, Kaz saw a swirl of black and white ki, reminiscent of Chi Yincang’s Duality cycle. The things weren’t cores, but Kaz’s mouth began to water at the sight nonetheless. Whatever they were, he could eat them and grow stronger.

When the two dozen or so hoyi had passed by, Kaz still stood, staring after them. He wanted those orbs. Wanted them with a ferocity that nearly made him forget why he was there, and that they were guarded by creatures who could slice a kobold in half with a single snap of their jaws. But he wasn’t just another kobold, was he? He had his knife, and he had ki to reinforce his flesh and bones. If he followed them, found out where they were going, surely he could-

His stomach growled, and he clutched it, feeling the painful twist of his guts. He felt like this, and he had eaten since Li had. How much longer could the little dragon brush off the overwhelming hunger? No, he needed to go on. After all, he was still heading in the direction the hoyi had come from, and far more than a dozen of them had gone that way earlier. There might still be more of the tasty white spheres ahead.

Three more times the demanding clicking rang out, and each time, Kaz clung to the wall until one or two dozen sets of hoyi passed by. Each worker held a ki-filled ball the size of Kaz’s two fists put together, and each time Kaz’s longing to follow them or try to take one grew. It was only by thinking of Li that he was able to distract himself from this urge and continue on his way.

The only good thing that came of these intervals was Kaz’s discovery that he could use a bit of the red ki he was separating from his cycle to warm his skin and melt the ice that continued trying to stick him to the wall. The blindingly ki-filled red crystals were larger and more common here, and Kaz had started simply splitting the red ki from his entire cycle and leaving it in his central meridian, rather than focusing on blocking it from his eyes alone.

The greater presence of red ki seemed to warm his chest, heart, and lungs, so he pushed a bit out to his skin, and the ice there melted as well. Unfortunately, he couldn’t just infuse his skin with red ki, just in case the hoyi really could sense heat. Raising his body temperature at the moment seemed like a very poor idea.

As the clicking rang out through the hive for the fifth time, Kaz realized that it sounded different. Rather than coming from ahead and behind him at once, in that strange way echoes did, it clearly originated from a particularly large passage ahead of him.

Again, Kaz stepped to the side, but this time, to his surprise, the warriors and workers didn’t appear together. Instead, the workers came from the side passage, while the warriors came from the direction Kaz had been moving. They joined up in perfect formation, each pair briefly tapping their antennae together before moving off down the tunnel. When the last warrior arrived, however, there was no worker there for it to escort, so it simply stood, waving its antennae, as if confused.

Kaz continued to hold his breath, watching the giant bug. It turned as if to go down the side tunnel, stopped, quietly clicked its mandibles together, then finally turned and returned the way it had come. It was the first time Kaz had ever seen one of the insects seem uncertain what it should do.

Once all the hoyi were gone, Kaz again detached himself from the wall, moving closer to the now-empty tunnel entrance ahead. He stared at it. It was just as round as the one he was currently in, and the workers had come from here, whereas the deadly warriors waited for him on his current path. Dett had just said to follow any round tunnel, and this one qualified as well as any other. In fact, it led slightly closer to Li, since the trail of ki linking them vanished through the ceiling above and to his right.

With a nervous twitch of his ears, listening for any indication that one of the monstrous insects might be approaching from either direction, Kaz deviated from his course. The new tunnel was smaller, with the ceiling only just out of reach, and he wasn’t sure that even a worker could pass by him without actually touching him, which was something he had thus far avoided. Even if the smaller hoyi were either less wary or less sensitive, they might well send up some kind of alarm if they came into contact with him.

This thought in mind, Kaz picked up his pace, though he didn’t stop watching and listening for the bugs, and he found himself growing more and more on edge as he went. It took him a while to figure out the cause of his unease, which was that this tunnel had no passages connecting to it whatsoever. A tunnel without turns was a tunnel that could easily become a trap, leaving him with the possibility of being caught between two hoyi approaching from opposite directions, without any way to escape.

When he finally saw a broader opening ahead, Kaz’s heart thumped in relief, right up until the faint, chittering, scratching sounds that pervaded the hive resolved into something far more distinct. Chitin on ice and stone, the soft clicking of mandibles, and a strange, hollow scraping sound, it all came from straight ahead of him.

Silently, he crept forward,  desperately wishing for Li’s help to conceal his presence from whatever lay beyond. Of course, if the dragon was with him, he never would have come to this place, at least not alone. If only Lianhua had been missing, he thought he would have felt brave enough to tell the other humans, and risk their wrath when they realized he had lied to Chi Yincang. If they refused to allow him to remain with the party, or even attacked him, he could have fought back or fled, if he’d only had Li with him.

In his mind, the dragon sent him warm assurance, trying once again to explain how she did what she did. It was some combination of spreading a layer of ki around herself, as well as manipulating the perception of what others were sensing, and Kaz could no more do it than he could turn into a dragon.

Bracing himself, Kaz remembered Dett’s last words. Don’t panic, no matter what you see. More information would have been helpful, and if he ever did see the other kobold again, he would tell him so. Pressing his back against the chill stone wall, Kaz peered out into the cavern beyond, and barely managed to push a whimper back down his throat.

The cavern was enormous, larger than any Kaz had seen since leaving the Deep, other than the mosui city itself. That one was broken up by the floor to ceiling buildings, making it difficult to grasp just how large it was, but this one held only a few wide pillars, formed by the meeting of stalactite and stalagmite. Pillars, a thousand and one hoyi, plus one set of stairs.