Mutants Misplaced
Chapter 2
Dead People Sees Us
The wind howled among the treetops as it carried snow that covered the landscape. Tyroth had been searching for firewood for twenty minutes and had managed to collect a decent amount of branches, that he had left in a pile next to the door to the tomb.
He made sure to keep the entrance in view as it was getting increasingly difficult to see through all the snow, even with his dark vision. Luckily, his many trips to door had left tracks in the snow that he could follow, at least for a while.
Digging up a small log from the snow, he decided that he had enough for now, he was getting too cold to stay out in the storm much longer. Once again, his wings had proven that they sometimes were a hindrance, as their large surface area and shallow blood veins had exposed his blood to more of the cold air and snow, cooling him down faster than normal. He had countered this by folding them on his back, but it didn't give many extra minutes.
Once he had the log, he headed to the door and started carrying the wood inside, longing to be back by the warm fire, his friends and his beloved mate.
Meanwhile, Leo couldn't get over the feeling that something was amiss. It could be the fact that they were staying in a warrior's tomb, but there was something that he just couldn't place.
Then, he heard something off to the side, something moving. He sprang to his feet and drew his blades, prepared to fight, but the source of the sound was nothing but an ordinary rat that squeaked when it got frightened by Leo's movement.
Leo sighed in relief as the small rodent scurried away to crack in the wall and hid inside.
"What's going on, Fearless?"
Leo turned around and saw that Raph had woken up, most likely from Leo's actions. He laid on the floor with one arm around Mona who rested on his plastron, still sleeping.
"Just a rat, but I keep getting this feeling that something isn't right with this place."
A couple of heavy footsteps were heard, making Leo think that Tyroth was back, but they were not coming from the corridor.
Turning to the source of the steps, Leo was shocked to see the corpse stood in front of the throne that it used to sit in, its eyes shone with an eerie blue light and it held its sword with both hands.
"Aav dilon!" it yelled with a very hazy voice as it moved against Leo.
It swung its blade at Leo with surprising speed, for a dried old corpse, but Leo skillfully ducked under the sword and kicked the warrior in the stomach, sending him back into the throne with a large clang, waking the rest of the mutants.
"Guys, wake up! We got trouble!" Leo called to make sure they readied themselves quickly.
At first, they were a bit confused, but they didn't need long to realize that they were under attack. Getting up and drawing their weapons as fast as they could, they were still shocked to see that their attacker was a corpse.
"Damn it, Mikey! I've been telling you that your snoring could wake the dead!" said Raph.
"Hey! This ain't my fault... at least I think it ain't."
Getting back on its feet, the warrior raised its sword and shouted.
"Alok, dii kendov!"
With great force, the lids on the caskets by the throne were shoved aside and fell to the floor, as more undead warriors rose from them. Their armor seemed lighter as some had less of it while some had more leather than metal. They all had weapons in the same style as their leader, swords and axes, both one handed and two handed, some even had shields or bows.
To make matters worse, the caskets against the walls also opened, the lids falling to the floor as even more undead stepped out and surrounded the mutants.
"Iidah!" the leader shouted and the undead charged the mutants.
Walking through the corridor with his arms full of branches, Tyroth was puzzled to hear the sounds of battle. At first, he thought nothing of it, they could simply have decided to train rather than sleep, it would keep them warm at least.
But the more he listened, the more clear it became that it wasn't training that he heard, but an actual battle. But who could they be fighting? There were no tracks to the tomb aside from Tyroth's own and the hall had no other pathways or anything.
"No... it couldn't be." he said as he dropped the firewood and rushed to the end of the long corridor with his sword in hand.
He didn't slow down when he entered the hall, he simply threw a swift gaze over the hall and sure enough, the mutants were fighting the undead, not a sight you see every day, but after mutating, Tyroth had become used to strange things happening, especially since meeting the turtles, but this was stretching it a bit.
Tackling an axe-wielding corpse that fought with Mikey, Tyroth delivered a punch to another corpse, flooring them both, if only for a short while.
"You've got to be kidding me! I've been gone for, what, half an hour, and you've managed to wake the dead!"
"You were the one that said that there was nothing to be worried about!" Raph snapped back.
"So I was wrong, sue me!"
As the fight went on, it became clear that the undead were faster than expected, but still not fast enough to keep up with the agile mutants.
Leo sidestepped to avoid the swing of a large axe and sliced off the arms of his attacker, followed by a pair of cuts to the lower back as Leo passed.
Using his sais to hold the swords of two corpses, Raph could feel that they were quite strong. Pushing back their weapons, he ducked and rolled between them. Once he was behind them, he jabbed his sais into the back of their necks.
Mona and Mikey teamed up to take down a few of the undead, Mikey striking at their hands and knees to disarm and throw them of balance, while Mona finished them off by either jabbing them in the face with her folded fans or breaking their necks with power full kicks and elbow strikes.
Sephie and Donnie did the same, Donnie using his bo to disrupt their foes while Sephie moved in for the kill with her daggers.
Tyroth cut down several undead with his sword without any real difficulties, they were strong but the sharp blade still sliced through them with ease. As he did, a pair of arrows struck him in the chest. They didn't penetrate deep enough to cause any real damage, but they still hurt.
Cutting the head of the closest enemy, Tyroth spotted two corpses with bows that stood by the throne.
"Archers!" he shouted to alert his friends, shortly before he had to dodge two more arrows.
"You mean targets, right?" said Sephie with a cocky tone. Kicking away the corpse that attacked her and leaving it to Donnie, she placed her daggers in her belt and drew her collapsible bow.
Firing two arrows in quick succession, she hit them in their chests, stopping them from drawing more arrows. Knowing fully well that you can't stop a walking corpse with an arrow or two in the chest, she fired two more at their heads.
The two undead archers fell like dominoes and Sephie didn't stop there, she continued to fire upon the rest, thinning their ranks even more. This caused the leader of the undead to become what could best be described as enraged.
Tyroth wasn't about to let the leader do any more damage and rushed him, hoping to take him down.
"Fus Ro Dah!" the leader shouted with such force that Tyroth was thrown into one of the pillars, together with anything between the pillar and the undead leader, which included Mikey and Raph.
"Ugh... what the shell was that?" Mikey asked groggy.
"Don't know, but it wasn't fun." said Raph "That guy's going down!"
The leader walked towards the three shaken mutants, intent on killing them, but Leo intercepted him. Katanas meeting longsword, Leo stood firmly as he protected his loved ones.
"How about we finish what we started?" Leo said to the undead warrior.
"Sahlag reimokur!"
"That's just rude." said Tyroth as he got back on his feet, if a bit wobbly, and pulled out the broken arrows out of his chest.
Leo easily deflected the leader's attacks and delivered a few strikes of his own while he searched for a good opening. Taking a step backwards, the warrior seemed to inhale.
Having an idea of what was to come, Leo move quickly, stabbing his foe in the stomach. Once the corpse staggered, Leo continued by cutting of the right arm and left knee with fast motions. As the undead leader fell to his knee, the blue-masked turtle decapitated him with a scissor like movement with his swords.
When the corpse showed no signs of moving again, Leo looked back to his friends and family and saw that they had managed to deal with the last of the undead without any injuries, aside from some bruises for Raph and Mikey.
"That was... interesting, but damn creepy." said Donnie.
"No kidding, I knew that there was some reason that I didn't like it here, but I didn't expect this." said Mona.
"Tyroth, what did you mean by 'that's just rude'?" asked Leo, curious to his comment. "Did you understand what he said?"
"I did, yeah, strangely enough he spoke in the tongue of dragons, albeit with an accent."
"So, what did he say?" asked Sephie.
"He said that Leo was a, and I quote, 'pathetic vermin'."
"Yeah, that's rude." said Mikey. "But what about when we flew into that pillar?"
"That was a bit strange, it were simple three words, 'force', 'balance' and 'push', but they all had magic within them, I felt it, so it must have been some form of spell."
"Great, undead warriors with magic, can it get any better?" said Raph.
"Well, at least we ain't that cold any more." said Sephie.
Returning to the fire pit, after calming down and collecting the firewood Tyroth had left in the corridor, they went to sleep. The fight had added to their exhaustion, so it didn't take long for them to fall asleep, despite the remains lying around.
Sephie and Donnie took it upon themselves to keep the fire going, and keeping guard just in case, at least for a few hours.
Hours passed and the mutants were somewhat rested. They weren't sure what time it was, it had been in the middle of the night when they got transported to this world, whatever it might be, and it was evening when they arrived. Hoping that it was still dark enough outside to move around undetected, they prepared to move out.
As Donnie tried to push the door open, he found that he couldn't even budge it. Stepping aside to let Tyroth try, not even he could move the door, he even tried to tackle it a couple of times, but all he got was a sore spot.
"Okay, that's not moving." he said.
"And now I see why." said Donnie as he held his torch closer. "Look, between the door and the frame, ice. The blizzard must have covered the entrance with snow, and now it's frozen in place."
"Now what?" said Mona.
"Can't Tyroth use his fire and melt the ice?" asked Mikey.
"I could try, but it's not gonna be easy to melt enough through the door to open it, we could be talking of several more meters of ice after that."
"The water have to go somewhere as well, if it only seeps through the gaps it will take very long time before we can even open the door, and it might as well refreeze while we wait." said Donnie. "But, there must be some other form of exit here, a vent or the like, the air didn't feel old or stale when we got here and the chamber never got filled with smoke from the fire."
"Then we'll search the chamber for this 'vent' and hope that we can get out through it." said Leo.
Said and done, they returned to the hall and started looking for the air intake. After a few minutes, Sephie found a hole up in one of the corners.
"I think I found something." she said as she used her gecko ability of climbing, and climbed up to examine it.
"How does it look, love?" asked Tyroth.
"Not good, I'm afraid. It's far too narrow, I doubt that even we girls would get through it. Maybe if we were completely drenched in oil, but that's a very big if. On the bright side, it seems like the storm has stopped."
"Do you think this place have hidden rooms, like in all the movies and games?" said Mikey, looking around.
"That's unlikely, but we might as well search for that too, it's not like we have much else to do right now." said Leo.
Spreading out again, the mutants examined the walls carefully, searching every nook and cranny, looking for suspicious cracks and hidden levers or buttons.
"Guys! Over here!" Mona called. "Listen to this."
Mona tapped the wall with one of the undead's sword, broken in half from the fight, and the wall sounded hollow. Donnie checked the wall more closely and found a well hidden outline.
"Great find, Mona. It's a hidden door, just like Mikey said there would be."
"It seems even he can good ideas sometimes." said Raph.
"Hey!"
"Quit it, you two. We still need a way to open it." said Leo.
"Leave that to me." said Tyroth, cracking his knuckles. Approaching the door, the dragon mutant channeled his mana into his right fist.
Punching the door, the energized fist shattered the inch thick stone into many pieces that fell into another corridor, hidden behind the door.
"Are you in a bad mood?" asked Mikey.
"After what's happened recently, I am a bit grumpy. What of it?"
"Oh, nothing."
"Come on, this might be our way out." said Leo.
So our heroes have found a way out of the tomb, but what awaits them at the end of that corridor? And where are they?
Honestly, if you haven't figured that out yet, I'm worried for you.