Demon Card Enforcer 1, Chapter 36 (Patreon)

Chapter Thirty-Six: The Light in the Darkness

“The Great Game, Rule #80: Creature cards may now have an (available) power cost. These have zero drawdown once on the field.”

Wolfe pulled his car into the parking lot of George’s Bistro across the street from the Venom Arena. He parked it so that two cars would shield the view of his vehicle from across the street—he doubted many people recognized it on sight, but he wasn’t risking exposure over something dumb. He was already conspicuous enough because of his giant backpack.

“You still want to come?” Wolfe asked Shel, knowing the likely answer, but feeling compelled to give her the chance to exit the situation.

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Alright, let’s do this. Remember, don’t pull cards unless you absolutely have to. It will instantly give us away, or at least make Jason pull his. If he has a mantle on, a strong enough one, the blast probably won’t kill him.”

“I know.”

Wolfe stepped from his car, avoiding dinging the red Nissan next to him with his door, and then shrugged the backpack on. It was almost four in the evening, and the very first fights would start in about an hour—which meant that was the latest that Jason Klaus would be in place.

Wolfe walked out of the parking lot and waited street side as a few cars passed.

“What’re you doing?” Shel asked. “The light is down there!”

Wolfe laughed. “Seriously? After everything we’ve done, you’re worried about jay walking? You’re accessory to at least a couple murders.”

Shel flushed and looked down. “I’m liable for at least five first-degree murders under the felony murder rule, according to Miriam, since I was part of the felony break-in when we hit Javier. If we’re ever caught, I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison.”

Wolfe stepped out into the street as a break in traffic presented itself, and Shel followed, nervously glancing around.

They reached the other side, and Wolfe continued the conversation. “I’m skeptical they’d send a young, innocent-looking girl like you to prison for life, but I get what you’re saying. So why worry about jay walking?”

“You’re carrying an illegal bomb in your backpack!” Shel whispered furiously. “What if a cop had happened to drive by right then, and stopped you and conducted a pat-down search? We’d both go to jail!”

Wolfe scratched his head, feeling like an idiot. “Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry, I’ll think about it a bit more going forward.”

Shel nodded.

The two of them walked around the back of the Venom Arena and across that parking lot, next to a rundown building of indeterminate use with patchy weeds around the base and across the dirt around it. Wolfe saw the open entrance, presumably to the sewers, next to the building.

He took a deep breath, hoping it wouldn’t be too bad. “Shall we?”

Shel nodded and Wolfe walked over and bent down, putting one foot on the top rung.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, giving him a slight start. He stepped back up and pulled it out. Miriam.

She had sent a text message.

Wolfe grimaced at the comment. I’m not even going to get a break after Jason. Still, it’s needful.

“Who is it?” Shel asked. “It’s beginning to worry me whenever you make that expression. It always turns into a ‘whole thing’ to quote you.”

“Yeah, it’s gonna be a whole thing indeed. Miriam said that she got the Big Man out on bail, and they’re headed to the mansion.”

“That doesn’t sound—”

Wolfe sighed loudly enough to cut her off. “And the Big Man said to capture Nico and bring him to the mansion after we kill Jason.”

“Wow, they aren’t giving you a break at all.”

Wolfe gave her a sardonic grin. “I was literally just thinking the same thing.”

Shel smiled at him, but it was forced—her eyes were flicking from side to side, and she was tapping her fingers together.

Wolfe put his foot on the rung again, half expecting something else, but when nothing happened, he descended into the darkness, being extremely careful due to the extra weight on his shoulders.

To his surprise, there was barely any odor at all down in the sewers. He could smell some earth, with an undertone of decay and old dust, but that was it. The sewer was a huge metal pipe, corroded in places and obviously stained in others—but it had a mesh-metal walkway along the sides. Wolfe wondered why the city had abandoned it.

He was in the middle of a large tunnel. It was faced toward the Venom Arena ahead of him, and away from it behind him.

Wolfe turned his flashlight on and pulled his piece of paper out. He began walking along the tunnel toward the Venom Arena, prepared to take the turns described on the paper.

After twenty minutes of walking, occasionally seeing rats and bug nests, but little else, Shel asked, “Shouldn’t we have found it already? I mean, it wouldn’t have taken close to this long to just walk to the underground portion of the Venom Arena.”

Wolfe had already come to that conclusion and was irritated—his backpack was heavy. He thrust the paper at her and growled out, “Well, you tell me what I did wrong then.”

Shel took the map and looked at the directions for a moment. “Well, on the third step, we didn’t take a left, we took a right.”

“There was no left! I assumed he just wrote the wrong direction down.”

Shel didn’t respond, just looking at the map for a bit. After a moment, she glanced up at him. “I found the problem.”

“Do tell,” Wolfe said, sarcastically.

“When we went down the hatch in the first place, I’m pretty sure you were supposed to start walking away from the Venom Arena. The next two turns, before the third step left, were both rights, followed by a long tunnel.”

“So?” Wolfe asked.

Shel half smiled at him in the glow cast by the flashlight. “So, two lefts faces us backwards—we needed to get to some other pipe headed that way.”

“Fucking joy.”

Shel looked back down at the paper. “I think if we head down the connecting pipe in the other direction at step four we’ll get back on track and cut about ten minutes off the total return trip.”

“Alright, you lead us,” Wolfe replied, adjusting the weight of the backpack on his shoulders.

Shel took the flashlight and headed back, carefully following the path back for about ten minutes. At the rough halfway mark, she cut a different direction than Wolfe had come from down an even larger pipe.

As they walked along the path, however, Wolfe noticed a slight green glow coming from the ground ahead of them.

“Stop!”

Shel stopped. Wolfe stepped up and took the flashlight from her, then shrugged off the backpack and pulled his Edge out.

“What is it?” Shel asked, briefly glancing at Wolfe’s pistol and then staring forward.

“I’m… not sure,” Wolfe replied. “But I’m not taking chances.”

Wolfe stalked forward. The metal tunnel was perfectly cut on one side by a stacked-rock entrance way, with a shimmer of toxic green across the entrance, and an old stone hallway covered in vines visible past it.

Wolfe stared at the entrance as Shel walked up behind him.

“Is… is that a dungeon entrance?” she asked, awed.

“I think it is,” Wolfe replied. “I can’t believe we just stumbled upon it, now of all times.”

“Yeah,” Shel said.

Wolfe continued. “I wonder if it’s from this season or if it’s an undiscovered one from an earlier season.”

“It could have gone undiscovered for a decade or two,” Shel said. “Or even longer. Some of these tunnels were built when Noimoire was first being built, and never put into use. There are a lot of abandoned M line tunnels as well, although I think homeless people started using those ones almost immediately.”

“Huh.”

The two stared at the entrance for a bit longer.

“Are we going to… go in?” Shel asked. “Get more cards?”

Wolfe shook his head. “No. Just remember how we got here, and write it down once we’re out. We’ll come back in a few days or weeks, after this is all over, to get cards and make levels. This is a huge find—and makes up for the one I lost to the city because of the Cobras. But we have more important things to do.”

Shel nodded, and the two turned from the dungeon entrance. Wolfe grabbed his backpack, grunting as he put it on, and then they headed the rest of the way down Shel’s shortcut. It cut back out into another abandoned sewer tunnel, not very different than the rest, that Shel claimed would take them to their destination.

When the next three directions were all able to be followed correctly, Wolfe was also convinced she had found the path, and a few minutes after that, they started to hear cheering, clapping, and the sound of an announcer calling out the play-by-play on a fight.

It was less than sixty seconds after that when Wolfe and Shel arrived at their destination—a grate in the side of the sewer wall, blocked up with thin, rusted iron bars.

Wolfe looked out on the underground fight ring. Two guys, both beefy white dudes dressed in nothing but workout shorts, were whaling on each other in the center of a ring, with an announcer at the side calling it out. “Looks like Raffio is getting hit in the head way too often! He’s gonna go down soon, I think, and if he doesn’t, I’m sure this isn’t doing his last few brain cells any good!”

Wolfe snorted. “Everyone thinks they’re a joker.”

Shel raised an eyebrow at him.

“Hey, I’m good at it,” Wolfe said.

He turned back. The space was obviously a converted underground gym, with a couple workout mats and smaller rings surrounding a larger one. High school gym stands had been set up around the place, and about a hundred people were there, mostly sitting in the stands—Cobra thugs as well as a bunch of guys in obvious fighting clothes. But there were a few others, as well—older people that didn’t appear at all to be part of the gang.

Who are they? Why are they here?

Wolfe put it from his mind, and took the pack of his back with a sigh of relief. He slowly and quietly unzipped it and took the C4 bomb out, placing it up against the vent. He knelt down and prepared to set the timer, giving him ample ability to get out.

“Wolfe, please… wait,” Shel said, putting her hand on his as he started to set it up.

Wolfe looked up into her green eyes. “What?”

“You can’t. You can’t do this, I mean. It’ll kill everyone. All those people. You have to find another way.”

Are you fucking kidding me? Now this?