Chapter 41

Chapter 41: Chapter 41

I have come to a painful decision, more for my purse than for you all; I will upload a bigger Chapter instead of two small ones. Thank me with a lot of support; I know I am amazing :)

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The swamp, heavy with the blood of barbarians, was stickier than usual.

I drove my shoulder into a mud-caked iron shield and felt the Turtle Tribe warrior’s ribs go behind it — a good, hard crunch. The Swelled Bud didn’t let up, heat pumping through my muscles, scalding, relentless. No time to read the shifting lines of the 5th Cohort. No time to map the ground. I just stepped over the falling warrior, flipped my grip on the bastard sword, and drove the diamond pommel into the jaw of the next barbarian coming through the toxic green mist.

Bone shattered. Blood sprayed across the back of my glove.

The 7th was carrying out Erula’s orders to the letter, grinding down the Coalition’s left flank. Crimson cloaks everywhere I looked, wading through the deep, rotting mire, cutting down what was left of the enemy vanguard.

A massive barbarian came at my chest with a rusted halberd. I didn’t calculate anything — my body just moved, twisting clear so the blade hissed past my ribs, steel sweeping up in the same motion. The Mystic Runes of the Sky flared. Static tore through the wet air and locked his arms rigid half a second before my blade opened his throat.

I kicked his body off my steel and kept moving. Stopping wasn’t an option — not now.

Then the ground just stopped existing under my boots.

This wasn’t a retreat, wasn’t some enemy trick. The earth itself had failed. Days of Goliath Trebuchets pounding the swamp, mixed with whatever the dead Shamans’ magic had done to warp the ground, had hollowed the whole thing out from underneath.

The ground groaned — deep, deafening, vibrating right up through the soles of my boots. Then a crater the size of a courtyard opened and swallowed the battlefield whole.

I fell.

No root to grab, no time to throw myself clear. I went down into the black with everything else — tons of mud, petrified tree trunks, a dozen screaming Imperial and Coalition soldiers, all of us falling together.

The impact tore the breath clean out of me. I hit loose shale and rolled, no control over any of it, rocks catching on my armor and biting into the skin underneath. Down some incline I couldn’t see, for what felt like forever, mud and debris roaring past my ears like a landslide that wouldn’t quit — until I slammed into flat stone.

I lay there gasping, choking on dust thick enough to taste.

The dark pressed in, total, suffocating. I blinked, waited for my eyes to adjust. Nothing to adjust to. Just void. The air was damp and freezing, and it smelled of old stone and something rotting underneath.

I forced myself upright. Everything ached — a dull, heavy throb — but nothing was broken. The Swelled Bud’s evolution had left my frame with a bone density that shouldn’t exist; a normal man would’ve come apart in that fall. I ran a hand over my chest. Tunic intact. Down my thigh. The Veriti knife was still there, still in its sheath.

I swept my hand across the cold, wet stone, searching. Panic spiked for a second — where was it — before my knuckles found the heavy, leather-wrapped hilt of the bastard sword. I pulled it in close. Felt the faint hum of the static charge against my palm, and something in me settled.

I sat in the pitch black, listening.

Somewhere far above — through who knew how much rock and collapsed earth — the war went on, muffled almost to nothing. Closer, groans. Other soldiers, the ones who’d fallen with me. A wet cough. Rubble shifting. Then a crunch that turned my stomach, and the groans just stopped. Whatever had made it down here with me was bleeding out somewhere close, in the dark.

I got to my feet. The evolution burned me out, or so close I could tell. I was alone in the dark, and the only rule left was simple: one foot, then the other. I needed to find a way out.

I checked the belt. I unbuttoned the supply pouch at my back and searched it by feel. Three blocks of Imperial field rations — salted meat, hardtack. Enough to keep a Dormant Bud going for three days. The canteen hung heavy at my hip. I shook it. Half full.

Three days of food. A few pints of water. A sword.

I raised the sword and pushed a surge of the Ember into the metal, deliberate. The Mystic Runes hissed and threw off a weak, stuttering shower of blue sparks — enough, in those brief flashes, to show me a massive limestone cavern. The ceiling was gone, buried under the collapsed mud and petrified roots that had brought me down here. No climbing back out through that.

Forward was the only path — deeper, where the cavern sloped down into the dark.

I sheathed the sword. The sparks died and the void swallowed me again. Left hand out, fingertips trailing the freezing, damp wall, and I started walking.

Hours bled together into nothing. No way to track time down here. The ground fought me the whole way — stalagmites in the wrong places, patches of slick moss that nearly put me on my back more than once. I went slow. Quiet. Careful with every step. The deeper I went, the colder it got, the humid swamp air giving way to a chill that worked its way through what was left of my tunic.

Eventually the dead silence broke. Something low. Rhythmic.

Drip. Drip.

I stopped, turned my head. Water, moving somewhere close. I changed course, followed the faint sound as it bounced off stone, and the air thickened — minerals, wet algae, something heavier than before.

I came around a jagged bend, and a faint, ghostly light broke the gloom.

A lake. Underground, the water dead still, black glass stretching out into the cavern. Up in the crevices of the ceiling and along the shore, patches of pale fungi glowed — a weak, sickly green, barely enough to see ten paces by. After hours of nothing, it felt like the sun coming up.

I walked to the edge, knelt, dipped one finger into the black water and brought it to my lips. Freezing. Heavy with iron. But fresh.

I unhooked the canteen, held it under, listened to it fill. Water, solved. I stood, scanned the shoreline, and found what I wanted — a shallow alcove under a natural overhang. Defensible. A choke point narrow enough that anything coming for me would have to come from the front.

I settled into it. Dropped the belt, unstrapped the sword and laid it across my knees, sat down on the bare stone. Unwrapped one of the hardtack blocks and broke off a piece with my teeth. Tasted like ash and salt. But the Ember flared anyway, turning it straight into heat.

I stared out over the black water, chewing slowly.

The silence here was different from the silence in the tunnels. It felt heavy. Expectant.

A sharp clicking sound echoed from the high ceiling above the lake.

Clack-clack-clack.

I stopped chewing. Swallowed the hardtack wrong, throat tight, muscles already coiling. My hand found the hilt and I came up slow, onto my feet. The fungi’s pale green light threw long shadows across the ceiling above me — all of them moving.

Clack-clack. Sssshk.

Something heavy, dragging itself across wet stone.

I drew the sword. Steel came out of the scabbard with a hiss that sounded almost like a warning of its own. I pushed the Ember into the blade and the runes lit — blue sparks throwing light straight up onto the ceiling over my alcove.

Four massive, segmented legs ended in razor-sharp chitinous hooks.

It was clinging to the stalactites right above me. A spider the size of an Imperial draft horse, body thick with black bristling hair twitching blind in the damp air. Eight bulbous, milky eyes threw back the blue light off my blade. Two mandibles, dripping venom, clicked together like they already knew how this was going to go.

Before I could brace, the spider dropped.

It came down silent, that whole weight slamming into the stone right where I’d been sitting a second earlier. I threw myself sideways, hit the ground, rolled up onto my feet in one motion. The thing let out a high, horrible hiss and spun toward me faster than something that size had any right to move.

It lunged, driving two front legs at my chest like jagged spears.

I didn’t think. Just swung the sword up in one brutal arc, steel biting deep into the chitin of its left leg, and the runes let go — a crackling burst of static straight into whatever passed for its nervous system.

The spider shrieked and convulsed, its whole left side locking rigid from the shock. But it had too much momentum behind that lunge, and even paralyzed, its body slammed into me full weight.

I hit the wall of the alcove hard enough to empty my lungs. The creature came scrambling after me, dragging that dead leg uselessly, mandibles snapping wild at my face — venom dripping off them, foul and acidic, sizzling into the stone an inch from my ear.

I kicked up, drove my boot straight into the cluster of milky eyes.

It recoiled, hissing in agony, and I didn’t give it room to recover. Both hands on the hilt, the Swelled Bud’s heat channeled straight into my arms, and I lunged — drove the blade into the center of its thorax, buried it to the crossguard.

I twisted the blade and let loose every ounce of electricity the runes could hold.

Blue light lit up the whole cavern, blinding. The spider locked rigid, smoke pouring out of the wound, and then it just dropped — collapsed onto the stone floor, its remaining legs curling inward the way dead things do.

I ripped the blade free and backed off, chest heaving, gasping at air that didn’t want to come fast enough. The carcass twitched once, leaking something thick and dark into the glowing moss.

I stood in the pale green light, wiping a splash of venom off my tunic.

The silence came back, and it didn’t feel any better than before. If anything, the dark past the lake felt deeper now. Wider. Worse. I looked down at the dead thing at my feet, then tightened my grip on the sword.

Three days of food left.

I had a feeling I’d need every last bit of it before this was over.