Journey Through the Underdark - Eric EarthScorn Book 1 - Chapter 20 (Patreon)

“What are they?” Eric asked as he huddled behind a giant glowing crystal.

Sasha had called them ‘Green men,’ which hadn’t helped, but now that Eric could see them, it made sense. The little creatures looked like emaciated children with gigantic heads and clawed hands. Skinny and with bulging elbows and knees, they looked like they were starved. Despite the thinness of their limbs, each was a figure of corded muscle. Their clawed hands were as large as Eric’s head, the nails extending inches away from their fingers. The most disturbing feature, though, was their heads. Their faces were wider and flat with thin pointed ears which faced to each side of their bald heads. If it were just the shape of the ears, it wouldn’t be as upsetting, but there was more. Their eyes were giant pits of darkness that had thin ridges of translucent flesh that blinked across them. This unsettling sight was only matched by the full mouthes that seemed to split their heads in half as they unhinged their jaws to fit in whatever they could find.

The pair had come upon the creatures as Sasha had them sneaking through the crystal columns. The glowing gem’s fascinated Eric since they produced light but were empty of magic. The feline had warned Eric that the creatures had a village of sorts, but they were surprised to find the group of five scurrying in the dim cavern. The group was hunting black multi-limbed insects that spit lines of acid a fair distance from their settlement.

Sasha had sent through the mental link a view of the creatures silently hunting within the crystal growths. To Eric, it was eerie how the monsters moved like men but then would shift into a bestial scramble with their claws digging into the stone as they chased their spider-like prey. When one of the man-like monsters captured a large spider creature, he stuffed it into his mouth whole. He hinged his head back and slammed down his needle-like teeth, chomping through the black chitin. When the others tried to steal a piece of the prize, the group broke out into a fight, which left one of their number dead. The other four then began to dismantle and eat their former hunter.

The two snuck past as the rest consumed their meal, but it left an impression on Eric. In every regard, these things were nightmare inducing. Their collection of hovels blocked the tunnel the pair needed to travel through. Their domiciles were made of a loose arrangement of bones, rocks, and their waste used as mortar. These disgusting nests weren’t directly blocking their escape from the cavern, the mostly flat cleared area before the tunnels made slinking through impossible.

Sasha wanted the two of them to wait until the village was quiet, and then try and sneak through. At worse, she felt that they would only have to kill one or two of the monsters when they escaped. To Sasha’s mind, this was a simple process. She would sneak attack them from the dark while Eric gained practice defending himself from one, then she could sneak attack again and end the fight. A win/win in her thinking. While she had no interest in eating the nasty green things, she didn’t like them, so killing a few seemed perfect.

Eric, on the other hand, had no interest in fighting these things. They looked too much like humans for him to be comfortable killing them, and they were too monstrous to think they wouldn’t attack him on sight. Eric was eventually able to convince Sasha to accept his plan, mostly because she liked the idea of getting to nap while he worked.

Approaching as close as Eric thought he was able without being noticed, he used his stone movement spell to create a hole in the ground. Once it was deep enough that the young wizard was able to stand comfortably, he invited Sasha in and then closed up the hole except for a small gap for air. As soon as Eric was digging a straight line towards the tunnel, Sasha curled up and began to snore. Eric made a note that they would have to go for a hunt once they made it passed the green men. Sasha had been pushing herself, and it would be nice to provide what she liked. A cooked meal. Not to mention, the boy was getting hungry himself.

The first thing Eric did was to create a ridge of stone that he could use as a sightline. It was a straight line from the hole directly to the other tunnel. Hopefully, he would be able to meet up with the other tube directly. Still, at worse, it would help him get closer to where he wanted once he dug the three hundred feet or so that was needed.

Part of Sasha’s hesitance with Eric’s plan was that she didn’t understand all of the emotions being sent along with their connection. Which was fair, Eric didn’t understand all of his feelings himself. Some of it was that he didn’t want to fight anything if he could avoid it. Eric thought he could if he needed to, but avoiding danger seemed like a better plan. But if that had been the whole of it, he would have gone with the feline’s plan. Eric admitted to himself that in part, he wanted to play with his spells more now that he knew how EarthScorn performed his magic, or at least, how Eric assumed how he did it. Proving that he was right was in there. If it had just been that, he could have created an overpowered earth moving spell and tried to block off the tunnel after the pair had escaped.

If he was honest, Eric wanted to see if he could do what EarthScorn could, maybe, even do it better than EarthScorn could. The idea of beating EarthScorn at his own namesake built a fire in the boy. Eric knew that EarthScorn had spent more than a century working with stone shaping. He knew that he had little chance of beating him, but he still couldn’t help imagining being better than the older wizard.

Having learned his lesson from experimentation, Eric was planning to keep a Shield spell running around himself while working on the tunnel. It was likely unneeded, but the memory of the stone rushing in and trying to crush his hand was still vivid in his mind. His first efforts were careful, similar to when he built the hole and cover initially.

The first thing that Eric noticed was that the walls of his pit were extra solid and hard to move. Once he made it past the compressed stone, it suddenly became significantly more straightforward to make progress. Briefly, Eric was distracted, considering if there was some limit to how much his spell could compress stone and what other things the spell could do. Shaking his head, he ignored the ideas and turned away from possible experiments to continue making progress.

To Eric’s annoyance, the stone moved slowly compared to what the elder EarthScorn had been capable of. Which made sense, but Eric had hoped that he would best him easily. A childish dream, but still one he had wanted. If he pushed more mana into the spell, he could make the stone move quicker, but that only worked in the area of the spell. EarthScorn was able to move vast swaths of stone, and while it was council propaganda, there had to be some truth to it. More than one wagoneer had told the tale of the giant border wall that EarthScorn had created by himself. Even if Eric disregards the idea that he did it in one day, just doing it in weeks would still be a massive undertaking.

The stone border wall was the main reason that Eric hadn’t asked Sasha to direct them to the surface. Presumably, a border would be pretty porous to people escaping or entering a kingdom. With the wall, the border areas were routinely checked. The chances of being found on the surface near the border were too great to risk.

Snorting to himself, Eric shook his head at his thoughts. He had only thought of that reason later. In truth, he had grown comfortable in the dark with the chance of gaining new spells. While the surface was a return to a place where people had power over him.

At first, Eric had tried to create a single Earth Pushing spell weave. Directing it into the stone allowed him to make progress. With a few other castings, he was able to push the sides of where he was ‘digging’ away to reinforce the tunnel. This worked for a while, though the stone directly ahead quickly reached a point where it was too compressed to make progress. He would need to significantly increase the mana that he put into the weave to continue compressing it.

Eric finally admitted that it wasn’t working.

Next, he created a series of push weaves in a cone shape, powered from the line of mana inside the cone. This worked, but still suffered from the same problem. The only real advantage was that it meant he didn’t have to keep creating new spells to shift stone away that had been previously moved.

Staring at the ten-foot deep tunnel Eric had created with a massive amount of effort, the boy knew he would have to work smarter and not harder. While he recovered his mana, Eric sat and looked at his work, trying to figure out what he should change.

Eric resisted the urge to slap himself despite how clear part of his problem was. He was only pushing! The tip of the cone should pull stone back towards him while the edges of the funnel-shaped weave should push the rock into the wall. Reinforcing the walls was a good idea, but strengthening the area he was digging was not.

A test weave showed that the results were significantly better. After breaking through the compressed section in front, the cone-shaped magical pattern dug in quickly. Unfortunately, Eric still had the problem of creating a series of spells to move the stone further out in a circle, the cone being too small to work effectively.

Eric titled his head at the divet as he thought about it. He could move the lines which fed the magic. He didn’t need to make them so short that they only connected the pushing and pulling shapes. Yes, that was how the other spells worked, and it made it easy to keep it structured, but he had modified spells before, so why not this? Eric wondered if it was possible to use longer lines to feed the mana into the reinforcing shapes, and then move them as he needed. His stone shaping spell wasn’t that expensive to use, but setting it up and taking it down to create other spells to reinforce the walls and expand the tunnel required a lot of effort. More than half his mana had been used up just from creating multiple weaves. If he could just move the stone moving shapes around, it would significantly speed him up and cost a lot less mana.

Once Eric had recovered, his body filled with the odd sensation of mana, he tried out his new spell idea. The stone moving glyphs were created in their regular positions in the cone, but the lines connecting them looped in towards the center near the line connecting the spell to Eric. The moment he began feeding mana into the new glyph, he could feel a difference. As the mana flowed through the lines, they tried to straighten and move from the central spell structure. Holding the spell together in its original shape was an effort on par with holding a powered weave unfinished. As soon as the spell had moved into the wall and pulled stone outwards, Eric allowed the structure to bloom. The pushing glyphs expanded outward and drove the rock in front of it as it moved.

To Eric’s surprise, the movement of the stone was smooth, and his idea worked perfectly, the tunnel opening up before him in slow motion. The boy wizard could imagine how the stone’s movement could be made even faster by combining it with more mana. Doing so would make the stone seem to explode outward in a burst of rock. If he didn’t miss his guess, it would look an awful lot like the sand creatures attack.

While he hadn’t mastered the technique, he had definitely discovered what he needed to dig his tunnel. To Eric’s embarrassment, he hadn’t expected that recompressing the spell into its cone shape would be harder to do than keeping it firm from the start had been.

So Eric began to dig, his tunnel moving forward by a few feet every minute, in a series of stuttering stops and starts. It wasn’t the smooth flow of EarthScorn’s, but it was fast enough to be useful. With the modifications that Eric had floating around in his mind, he could probably reproduce the smooth shaping that EarthScorn had performed.

Grinning, the boy continued onward.