Book 8: Chapter 28: Lay of the Land

Book 8: Chapter 28: Lay of the Land

Victor sat on a large stone block and, groaning and cursing, worked to dig the crossbow bolt out of his armpit. A dozen bloody, broken bolts and arrows already lay at his feet. He’d finally run out of enemies to kill—they’d kept coming in twos and threes out of the ruins, seeking to capitalize on his “weakness” after he’d killed the original crew of ambushers. Those latecomers had soon learned the folly of their ways. Victor chuckled at the thought, glancing around the clearing at the many corpses and pieces of corpses. A few had escaped sans a limb or two.

One thing bothered him; the System had yet to send him any Energy, and he’d been done fighting for nearly five minutes. Did that mean other attackers still lurked nearby? As the bolt finally slid free, following the widened channel he’d made with his knife, Victor grunted in relief, dropping the bloody shaft. He stood and shouted, “If anyone else is waiting for a fight, let’s get this shit done. If not, then get the hell out of here!” His Iron Berserk had worn off, but his voice still boomed from his giant-sized chest.

He heard some scrabbling, some sliding stones, and rapid footfalls, but nobody showed themselves, and the noises grew more and more distant. Had he just frightened off some would-be attackers? He looked around at the corpses. Some were large—giant-sized as he’d come to consider his usual form—others were more human in proportion. None had been close to his titan form. None had been much of a challenge for him, either, not once he’d gotten out of the formation trap.

He supposed it wasn’t quite a fair comparison; these people had been stripped of everything before being sent into the prison. None had much in the way of armor or magical items, and few had any weapons that were worth mentioning. He wondered about that—hadn’t they slain a few fully-geared iron rankers ahead of his arrival? He remembered the loudmouth saying something about giving his armor to someone named Ronkerz. Was there a hierarchy in the prison dungeon? Was there a caste system for divvying out loot gained from the monsters that spawned within? If so, these folks hadn’t been high on the pecking order.

Victor was approaching the “minotaur” to look at his gear when he noticed rainbow-hued Energy beginning to coalesce around the body. He grinned, looking around to see a similar glow around the other bodies in the clearing. “Here we go,” he said, eagerly twisting his hands on Lifedrinker’s haft. A few moments later, an enormous surge of Energy hit him. The influx instantly healed his puncture wound, mending deep tissues that were slower to regenerate than simple flesh. More than that, it filled him to bursting, knocking him senseless as his mind drifted into the ether.

Almost immediately, he felt a familiar presence. It was Golgothoz, the Master of the Axe, who’d put his mark on Victor’s chest. He came near, and Victor felt his approval, though the master said nothing. When Victor tried to speak, he found no voice in his throat. Soon, the weighty presence faded, and Victor’s vision returned to normal. Once again, he stood in the blasted ruins of the death-attuned dungeon, the glowering gray moon high overhead. A System message marred his vision, and he read it quickly.

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 66 Herald of the Mountain’s Wrath and gained 12 strength, 17 vitality, and 12 will.***

“Good,” he grunted, slowly turning, ensuring no one was sneaking up, ready to take advantage of his distraction. The ruins were quiet, though, so he turned back to the minotaur corpse. His spiked mace seemed to be rough black iron, and his shield wasn’t anything much better. Victor stooped and turned the corpse over, hoping that he’d find something worth looting on the inmate’s corpse; after all, he’d come into this dungeon hoping the denizens had managed to pry some treasures from the deeper, more powerful monsters. The man’s clothes were ragged, stinking leather.

Victor stood. “Shit,” he growled. Not only were the inmates devoid of decent gear, but he’d expected to gain more than one level. He’d killed close to twenty attackers, and though they hadn’t felt particularly strong, they were “iron rankers.” Surely, some of them were higher level than he was. If not, how had they managed to kill five strong individuals before him? Was it just due to the trap?

One thought tickled the back of his mind, and, examining it, he saw that he’d been ready to compare his gains from this battle against those awarded by the System in the challenge dungeon. The situations were too different, he decided. The System’s awarded Energy in the Vault of Valor had been a portion of that taken from high-ranking, living cultivators—enough to account for ten levels. Looking around at the broken bodies of his foes, he began to understand just how little the System typically granted for slaying someone.

Victor spat, rubbing his hands together irritably. He’d touched something damp on the minotaur’s fur, and when he looked at the smear, he saw that his hands were covered in ash and blood. He dug a water bottle from one of his containers, poured some over his palm, then rubbed them together before drying them on a self-cleaning towel—he had half a dozen in one of his rings.

He scanned the quiet ruins, wishing he’d marked the time when he’d arrived. He looked at his watch for the second time since the fighting ended and saw he’d wasted another twelve minutes. “Twelve minutes and what? Five minutes of fighting . . . Nah, longer than that with all those guys slinking in after the first group. So maybe twenty-something minutes so far? Gotta hold for forty more?”

“Who you talking to, mister?” a youthful voice asked behind him. Victor whirled to see a lean, impish young man sitting atop a nearby, broken wall, his bare feet kicking up and down as he stared. He had empty hands and wore nothing but brown sack-cloth pants and a rough-spun green shirt. Victor relaxed his stance and lowered Lifedrinker. The kid had a pleasant face, smudged with grime as it was. Under a mop of sandy-brown hair, he had wide green eyes, a sharp, narrow nose, and a pleasant smile.

“Myself,” he grunted.

“Oh! I do that, too. Not many friendly folks to talk to around here, but the Enclave’s better.”

“Enclave?” Victor frowned at the kid. “Aren’t you a little young to be in a prison like this?”

The young man smiled and shrugged. Even atop the wall, he had to look up to meet Victor’s gaze. “Well, it’s not a prison to me. I was born here.”

“Seriously?” Victor shifted Lifedrinker onto his shoulder, holding onto her haft with one hand. He supposed he should have gotten more details about the place from Dar or the council. How many iron rankers had they sent in there over the years? How big was it? If a man and woman managed to survive inside the “prison” for a while and one thing led to another, he supposed it wasn’t so far-fetched to think some kids might be born. In a dungeon, though? Who would want to raise a family in a death-attuned dungeon? “Are there many kids here?”

“I’m not a kid, sir! I’m not strong enough to fight the spawns, but I know how to get around ‘em. I’m allowed out of the Enclave, unlike the children. To answer your question, there are lots of ‘em.” He held up his hands and started turning his fingers down one by one as his face twisted in concentration. “Seventeen in the Enclave, and I don’t know how many in Rumble Town.”

“Rumble Town?”

He nodded eagerly. “Yeah, where Ronkerz rules.”

“There’s a town here? How big is this place?”

“Big!” the kid laughed. “It keeps growing, too. A gap opened in the southern range last year, and my own father found a new valley!”

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Victor scratched his head and turned in a slow circle, surveying the carnage he’d wrought. “You know these guys?”

Sending hundreds or thousands of criminals into the same free-for-all wasn’t justice—there was no way every prisoner was equal in terms of raw strength, so that meant the stronger ones were going to have more power inside. They would suffer less than the ones who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Did they all deserve a fate like that? Even if you could argue that they did, Victor would be damned if he’d hear anyone say the children born inside deserved that fate. Tyn looked like he was starved half to death, which was bad enough, but the kid clearly didn’t have much going for him, even if he could get enough to eat.

“You said there are a lot of kids in the Enclave?”

“Oh, sure! Like I said, I’m a man, but I’ve got a younger sister, and she’s got many classmates at the school.”

“There’s a school?”

“Yessir. Lady Breeze runs it.”

“Lady Breeze?”

“The most beautiful woman in the world, sir.” Tyn grinned while he stuffed another wad of dried meat into his mouth. “You should meet her, but be warned: I’m going to marry her!”

“Oh yeah?” Victor chuckled as he leaned back, watching the stone circle, waiting for the portal while listening for any signs of approaching inmates. Tyn grew quiet as he ate and drank, and Victor lost himself in half-baked plans to help the children in this weird pocket-world. He had no idea what he could do; he had the ability to rescue precisely one other person. He supposed he could argue their case with the council when he got out, but beyond that, he felt like his hands were tied.

His frustrated musings were interrupted by the flare of blue light and the weird wailing sounds of the portal, and then Arona appeared, stepping out of the swirling blue disc of Energy. She whirled, her polished-bone staff held out defensively, and when she saw Victor sitting on the stone watching her, she relaxed and stepped closer as the portal snapped shut with an audible pop. “You did it,” she said by way of greeting.

“Yeah. Almost killed myself with that old lady’s bomb, but it broke the formation.”

“Old lady . . . Kreshta Griss? She gave you a ‘bomb’?” She looked around at the blasted area around the dais. “You set it off inside the formation with you?” Her raspy voice was incredulous as she shook her head. Victor simply nodded with a half-smile. “Who’s this then?” She looked at Tyn with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m Tyn, milady!” He hopped up and bowed sloppily, dragging both hands through the dusty gravel near his feet.

Victor stood and gestured at the kid. “I guess the inmates are building towns and having families. Tyn’s going to show us to one of the towns and, hopefully, Rasso will be there. If not, maybe someone will know where to look.”

“Children . . .” Arona looked Tyn up and down, her slender fingers tapping the polished bone of her staff. “How interesting.” She turned in a slow circle, her brows creasing as she observed the strange world with its black sky and oddly close moon. “The death-attuned Energy is strange here—too thin. I wonder if perhaps the many cultivators are causing a shift in the ambient Energy. The dungeon was created with death-attuned Energy, but that was thousands of years ago, and they’ve sent many cultivators into it since.”

“How many?” Victor asked. “The kid doesn’t know.”

“They’ve been sending a few dozen a year into this place since it was opened. I always assumed that most criminals banished here would have short, violent lives dealing with the dungeon's denizens—it’s supposedly tier-nine. If they’re cooperating and having children, though . . .” Again, she trailed off, probably, like Victor, trying to imagine growing up inside a dungeon.

“They don’t all cooperate. I had to kill a dozen or so people who were lurking outside the trap. They mentioned a guy named Ronkerz, and Tyn says he runs a town called . . .” Victor looked at the boy. “What’s it called, again?”

“Rumble Town, sir.”

“Ronkerz Gatebreaker is a legendary figure in Sojourn,” Arona rasped, and Victor felt a small surge of cold Energy waft off her staff as she gripped it and looked around nervously. “He led an insurrection, trying to overthrow the council two thousand years ago. He breached the Spire and killed four council guardians—all steel seekers. The story goes that Ronkerz was only tier-eight!”

“Great,” Victor said, shifting Lifedrinker on his shoulder and turning to look out over the dead landscape. “And he’s had two thousand years to get stronger.”

“Closer to three hundred—remember the time dilation.” Arona pulled a handful of tiny bones from her robe and scattered them around her feet. “We should get moving. I’d rather not run into him.”

Victor nodded, distracted, thinking about Ronkerz. The story of an iron ranker killing some guards in their “test of steel” was acutely interesting to him, considering Dar’s expectations for him when he went to Ruhn to help his granddaughter. In all honesty, Victor felt a wave of relief hearing about Ronkerz’s exploits—if he could do it, then it was possible. Maybe Dar’s confidence in him wasn’t so unusual. When he saw Arona’s five bone guardians spring up from the stony soil, it brought him back to reality, and he gestured to the stone dais. “We gotta wait for Arcus.”

“Do we?” Arona rasped. “You know he can’t be trusted. Wouldn’t it be wiser to leave him to his own devices?”

Victor chuckled and poked one of the weird, blue-fire-eyed skeletons with Lifedrinker’s blunt axe head. It stumbled back in a clatter and hissed at him like an angry cat. “Arona, no offense, but I hardly know you. We’ve had a few good conversations, and I’ll hand it to you: you were honest when you spoke at the inquest. I appreciate that, but I think I’ll wait for Arcus so I can keep you both where I can see you.”