Book 2: Chapter 23

Book 2: Chapter 23

“Are you alright?” Murunel asked in a worried voice. Kay had basically sprinted out of the area of the standing stones, and he’d run for the rest of the day until he’d been forced to rest by the setting sun. Even after sleeping through the night, he was quiet, tense, and moving quickly.

“Have you ever just known something?” He asked as he jogged across the open plateau, “Call it an instinct or a sudden burst of knowledge or whatever.”

“Yes.”

Kay nodded decisively. “Whoever or whatever it was that fought those constructs, they’re bad news. And they’re basically behind everyone. I want to get back quickly and warn them.”

“That’s fine, but you need to slow down,” Murunel ordered him.

“What?”

“You’re going to wear yourself out at the pace you’re setting. If you run into something that wants to fight, you’re going to be tired and not fight as well. I can list more reasons, but you’re not going as fast now, so I think I don’t have to.”

Kay wore a grimace as he stopped to breathe for a moment. “You’re right. I really don’t like it, though.”

“Don’t worry so much.” She patted the glass of the ball like it was his shoulder. “Eleniah should be able to hold off an enemy long enough for a retreat at the least.”

“What if it’s something that can take her, though?”

“It isn’t,” She replied instantly. “You can tell from that fight scene we found.”

“How do you know?” Kay stretched his legs and started walking again. “We didn’t see any bodies to tell what was bleeding; there were just those broken constructs.”

“Exactly. Or no, not exactly, but yeah, that’s what tells us that they really aren’t that strong.”N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

He glanced down at her. “Okay, educated me.”

“You saw the amount of blood on the ground. It was a lot, so either something really big bled a lot, or lots of smaller somethings died in there.”

Kay started slowly nodding. “And there’s no way something big enough to survive bleeding that much would fit in that room.”

“Right, so I think that whatever we have inside the plateau, it’s a lot of smaller, weaker enemies. Because those weren’t strong constructs, and they killed a whole lot of enemies. More than half the floor was covered in blood.”

“Why do you say the constructs weren’t strong?”

“The materials they were made out of were pretty standard stuff. It looked like regular steel and some easier-to-find gemstones for most of it. That means they aren’t that strong because constructs’ power comes mostly from what they’re made of. Even if you have a really high tier person making the construct, the materials will still limit the power that can be put into them.”

“Alright.” He sighed in relief a little, “That’s reassuring. How do you know so much about constructs, though?”

Murunel blew out a poof of smoke and rolled her eyes. “’ So much’? That was bare-bones stuff. One of my favorite ancestors had a tier six golem-making class. I can go on about constructs for ages!”

“Oh, then can you tell me-”

A massive roar ripped through the air, making the ground tremble beneath Kay’s feet. It lashed through his ears a second time, then a third, too fast to be from the same throat.

Kay slowly looked over his shoulder in the direction the sound had come from. It came from slightly behind him and to the right.

“We have to go check that out, right?”

“Well, we can’t just ignore it. What if it’s a threat to everyone?”

“Good point. We don’t have to fight it, though, right?”

“Well, I’m not going to attack unless I have a damn good reason to. At the moment, you wouldn’t be much help in a fight.”

“Right. Be careful.”

Kay started jogging towards the unknown monster. “Why do things have to keep happening right as I’m about to ask questions?”

“Comedic timing?”

An involuntary snort-laugh escaped from Kay. “I keep getting interrupted because it’s funnier that way?”

“Maybe the gods want more comedy when they’re watching you.”

“You believe in gods?”

“I’m open to the possibility.”

“See, I’ve always thought of myself as agnostic.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, it’s-”

Another three-part roar vibrated the air, even louder as the distance between Kay and the source of the noise decreased.

“... Did you hear screaming in that tiny bit before the roars started overlapping?” Kay asked Murunel.

She nodded. “I think I did.”

“Dammit.” Kay swept his halberd off his back and started sprinting. “Theology will have to come later.”

He hit the edge of the plateau a minute later and slid to a stop. He started glancing around, looking for... well, something! Whatever the hell was happening! Some movement below him drew his eye.

An armored figure was running between the scraggly trees that dotted the area. “Here it comes again!” They spun in place and threw up a massive shield. A gigantic snakehead appeared as if out of nowhere and struck at the figure. They expertly shifted themselves, and the snake’s fangs slammed into the metal wall and slid off.

“BOHICA!” Someone else shouted. Kay glanced in that direction and saw a small group of people fleeing the monster, most of them riding on a small cart that was being drawn away by a desperate horse.

“Shut up, Cindy!” A thin woman in a robe stepped from behind one of the trees and threw her hand forward. A spear of fire formed at the tips of her fingers and shot at the snake, slamming into its scales.

“Parts! Where’s Chitel?”

“Here!” Another woman shouted from behind Kay, “Where should I go?”

“Claudia got thrown that way!”

“On it!”

“It sounds like they’ve got a whole party,” Murunel commented as Kay forced more and more blood down into a sphere.

“Sounds like,” He parroted her as he pulled as much blood as he could from where the hydra had coated the ground in red.

“Are you ready, blood dude!?” The commanding woman asked with a yell.

“Almost!”

“Well, get ready faster! It’s almost free!”

The hydra roared in anger and finally ripped one of its heads free. Chunks of dirt and plant matter flew everywhere as it tore itself loose one head at a time. It roared in the same manner as earlier, with four mouths this time, each roar starting as the previous one began to end, like some kind of monstrous call and response.

Kay took one step forward and braced himself as he threw forward his hands. A spiraling drill-beam of compressed blood blasted away from him, thicker than his previous attack but less than half as thick as the sideways pillar of fire the mage woman had launched. It drilled into the body of the hydra and began to tear chunks of flesh out of it as it ripped its way through the monster.

The hydra screamed as Kay’s attack gouged a hole bigger than he was into it, and it began to thrash around and crush trees and rocks as it began flailing its death throes.

Kay backed up quickly, remembering some old lesson about snakes still being able to kill you even if they were mostly dead.

Someone stepped up next to him, and he glanced over. A woman grinned at him. “Well, that was fun. Now then-”

“Cindy!”

Kay watched in slow motion as the hydra went from thrashing in fake death to lashing out with deadly intent. The closest headshot at the woman, one of the huge fangs aimed directly at her heart. He jumped forward, shifting his armor into a massive shield of blood that he put between the monster and himself as he hip-checked the woman out of the way. The fangs punched through, crumpling the solid blood like glass in a traffic accident, and one of them slammed into Kay’s shoulder.

Kay screamed in pain as he retaliated with a blood-blade formed around his arm in the hydra’s eye. The hydra jerked away as it roared, ripping the fang out of Kay. He slumped to one knee and tried to push himself back to his feet.

He managed to prop himself up by using his halberd as a makeshift cane when a wave of burning pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced drove him to the ground.

Liquid fire ripped through his body as he screamed and screamed and screamed. The pain became the only thing he knew as he felt it spread from his shoulder down his arm and across his chest.

An eternity of pain passed when suddenly a flash of blinding light made him flinch, the light powerful enough to notice past his pain.

He vaguely noticed his body being flipped over so his face wasn’t digging into the dirt and indecipherable voices shouted at each other, but it was all eaten away by the all-consuming pain.

“Push it out!” Someone screamed in his ear, loud enough for him to actually notice. “It’s in your blood! Push it out of you!”

Sluggishly, fighting the venom that was killing him with every step, he managed to take control of the blood inside of him and slowly push the venom out of his body.

Bit by bit, in tiny, tiny amounts, Kay managed to force the venom out even as that same venom ravaged his body and brought him closer and closer to death’s door.

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Murunel watched, cursing the man that had had her imprisoned in the fucking ball even harder than ever before as one of her newest friends died in front of her. At least these random people Kay had just saved had listened to her when she’d started screaming at Kay. Her voice had been too quiet for him to hear, but one of them had heard her and started shouting as loud as they could directly into his ears, even louder than his pain-filled shrieks of agony.

She watched as tiny drops of blackened, dead blood were forced out of Kay’s body along with a clear liquid that could only be seen for a moment as it flickered in the light.

The woman who’d been shouting slid to a stop next to Kay on her knees, a box in her hand. She ripped the box open and yanked a strange cylinder of metal out. She flipped open a lid on in and started scooping up bits of the dead blood and poison into the object.

“Cindy, what is that?” One of the onlooking people asked. It might have been the man in armor, but Murunel was watching Kay.

The woman, Cindy, held the device up to the light and watched as the stone on the front of it began to slowly fill with green light. When the light completely filled the stone, it flashed once.m Cindy twisted the cylinder, and Murunel watched as a needle suddenly shot out of the bottom of it, and she jammed it into Kay’s arm next to the puncture wound from the hydra’s fang.

Cindy sat back and stared down at Kay. “It’s that thing I spent all my money on before we left. It’s an enchanted antivenin maker. Put in a sample of the venom, and it makes an antivenin in moments.”

“So you saw this.”

She shrugged, “Not really, I just knew we’d need it.”

A flurry of movement as another woman ran up, her robes flapping around her. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” A pair of hands slammed into Kay’s chest and began to glow. “Dammit! I don’t have any healing spells for venoms!”

“Just keep him alive,” Cindy ordered her and tapped the device she’d stabbed Kay with. “Between this and his own magic pushing the venom out of his system, he’ll be fine. Just make sure he’s alive long enough for it to work.”

They sat there for almost an hour as Kay writhed in pain, screaming and moaning for most of it, and blood poured out of him. Slowly, his color began to recover, and he got quieter and quieter. The venom and dead blood began to flow out less and less, and soon enough, there was only clean, red blood spurting out of the hole in Kay’s shoulder.

“That looks like it’s the last of it,” The healer woman muttered. She stretched her hand out and covered Kay’s wound, where it sealed before Murunel’s eyes.

The healer sat back on her legs and deflated. “And I’m officially spent. Couldn’t heal a paper cut at this point.”

“Thank you,” Murunel whispered, still staring at Kay.

“You’re welcome, tiny dragon. He saved our lives too, so I’d have to be a lot worse of a person to just let him die in front of me.”

“What do we do now?” The armored man asked, looking at Cindy.

She kneeled down and gently touched Kay’s chest, her eyes closed. After a moment, she stood up and grinned at the man. “We put him on the cart and head roughly a day’s travel in that direction.” She pointed through the cliff, her finger aimed directly at the settlement where Eleniah, Darten, and the dwarves still were. “And then we’re there.”

“What?” The group of people started clustering closer, wide eyes and smiles on their faces. “Seriously?”

Cindy pointed down at Kay. “This guy that just saved our asses? He’s the one we’ve been looking for.”

They all looked down at Kay, covered in blood and gunk, still pale from his dance with death.

Murunel glanced between them, all of them with some kind of expectant expression on their faces as they stared at her friend. “Who the fuck are you people?”