"What is it?" Cassie asked from the ground, her dread more than evident in her tone.
"I don't know. Something shiny."
"Shiny?" Jin snorted. "Like gold? Think there's a treasure chest down here, Long John?"
Jacqui rolled her eyes. "What you gonna do, Jin, steal it?"
"Hah! She said that 'cause you're a thief," Cassie said, explaining the joke to add her own layer of sass. Jacqui stood up and grabbed Cassie's good arm, hauling her to her feet. She hissed out her discomfort and readjusted her sling when she was upright, pushing her elbow back further for more comfort.
"Yeah, yeah," he huffed. "Let's go see what it is."
"Yeah. Gather around me," Takeda said, not in the mood to joke around after his fight with Cassie. "I'm not about to be surprised by any more spiders. I'll take point. Cass, since you're injured you bring up the rear." The playful mood died quickly, and Takeda knew he had killed it. Cassie's defeatist attitude had him up in arms, ready to forge ahead if only to prove her wrong later. He would find Kenshi and Master Hasashi alive just to spite her. Jax, too.
Jin crowded in behind him, crouching low with him to scuttle and shuffle under the webs. Jacqui moved to his right shoulder and Cassie grunted as she crouched too. She reached behind her back with her good arm and pulled a pistol from the holster, checking the clip.
"Good thing my other gun's empty," she said. "Not like I could use it anyway."
" . . . That's not at all a good thing," Jin said, shooting her an incredulous look.
She paused, eyes flicking over his head as she thought through what she said. " . . . You know what I mean."
"Well, reload it when we get the chance," he said, throwing his arm out.
"Is everyone ready?" Takeda grumbled.
"Ready," he heard, three times behind him.
He slid a whip from its wheel and fed a bit through his hand, letting it drag between his legs in case they were surprised. He held the glowstick with the other and moved forward, dodging the webbing's tendrils as they hung low, ready to grab them at any time. He leaned left and right, and could feel the others matching him step for step. Cassie was struggling with her injury, he knew. She couldn't use her arm for balance. When he looked back to check on her, he saw her leaning heavily on Jacqui, gripping her shoulder to steady herself.
He emerged and straightened up, holding the glowstick straight out ahead of him. He glanced up and all around, and their diamond formation flared out to his sides. His eyes were naturally drawn to the skylight, and as they drew closer Jin chuckled.
"Well? Is there gold in dem dere hills?" He laughed at his own joke, striding confidently towards the light. When he caught the glint he looked closer, and a second later his smirk collapsed. "Oh, shit . . . " He pushed past Takeda and ran over to it. "Lao."
Takeda peered over Jin's shoulder and recognized it, too. A perfectly circular shape, with the bump on the top for Lao's head. The blue tint of the skylight was reflecting of the pristine, sharp blade, giving it a glow all of its own. It was embedded a full few inches into a body, lying discarded on the rocky inlet, surrounded by webs. It looked recently dead. The clothes were still perfectly in tact, not torn to shreds like the other skeletons in the caves. The details on the armor were still recognizable, so they hand't been left to weather for very long. The only visible part of its skin1, the skull, was picked clean, but its hands and feet were still skinned.
Jin didn't seem to care. He ignored the body and tried to grab the hat to pull it out, but it was so deep in the man's chest that he pulled the body up off the ground. Jin lowered him back down and planted his foot on the man's chest and tugged, ripping the hat out of the body so fast that it seemed to flail on its way back to the ground.
Jin startled and jumped back. On impulse, his hand flew to his belt and he pulled his chakram free, hurling it towards the body. It squelched into the indent made by Lao's hat, but the body was still. Just dead weight.
"Kung Lao!" Jin yelled, whirling around and throwing his gaze across the entire opening, as though Lao would appear from a crack in the rocks. Takeda ducked from the sound, throwing his arms up in case any spiders decided to kamikaze them from the ceiling. "Lao, where are you?!" Jin yelled. "Can you hear me? Answer me!"
"Master Hasashi?" Takeda tried, hesitantly at first. He glanced back and met eyes with Cassie and Jacqui, just as wide-eyed and startled as he was. He shrugged. "Dad? Dad! Kenshi!"
The echo of his cry died, and the four of them listened in silence. Takeda wasn't sure what he expected. An actual answer? Cries of excitement and relief at being found? The remnants of yells, tacked on the end of an echo? Either way, the silence they received in return was just as deafening as Jin's yell. He felt his spirit sink.
"At least we know they're definitely down here!" Jin said excitedly. "These are the signs of battle that were missing from the graveyard! There's a body, there's a weapon, this is the perfect place for a fight because of how open it is . . ." he said, counting them off on his fingers. "I'm telling you guys, they gotta be down here - at least, Lao is! Come on!" he said, and he took off at a jog towards the blackness of the unknown areas ahead.
Takeda lunged forward and barely managed to snatch his arm. Jin pulled against him, then turned back. "What?"
"You can't run off like that!" he said. "What if more spiders come? You could get injured like Cassie!"
"Then come with me," he said haughtily, glaring at Takeda like it was the most obvious solution. He turned to walk again but Takeda halted him again.
"That's not what I mean-"
"Let go," he said, lowering his tone. "I'm going after Lao."
"Just wait, Jin!" Cassie huffed. "You weren't this fired up two seconds ago."
"Or," Takeda thought bitterly, "when I found out we needed Sento to get into the mausoleum. Or when I found Master Hasashi's kunai." If his memory was correct, Jin argued against searching for Sento based on the fact that if Kenshi didn't have it, he was probably dead.
"Two seconds ago I didn't think anybody was even alive!"
"So now that it's Lao, you're all excited, huh?" Jacqui prompted, and Takeda knew she had latched on to the same thoughts that he had. He was ready and willing to argue against anybody if it didn't include those that he cared about.
"Well . . . yeah," he admitted simply.
Takeda scoffed, rolling his eyes. "You're so full of shit, Jin," he growled. "You're only acting like you don't care to avoid being called out." All of Jin's unchecked arrogance was showing through, acting like he was above their argument and above any injury they could try to inflict on him.
"Called out for what?" Still playing innocent. "Caring about my cousin? And about a fellow Shaolin?"
"For being a hypocrite!" Jacqui said.
Jin brushed his ponytail over his shoulder, a motion that was outside of his normal idiosyncrasies, and Takeda knew he was uncomfortable with their confrontation. "Okay . . . This is the first real clue we got since we came here. It's just a bonus for me that it's connected to Lao. Will you lay off me if I say it like that?"
It was insincere, and they both knew it. Jacqui shook her head and sighed, glancing over to Takeda, and he shrugged. "I don't have the energy to do this right now," she sent to him. He knew how she felt. He was tired from fighting all the spiders, he was covered in drying gore and dirty cave water, and blanketing all of that he was nervous about everyone that could be trapped in the caves. The constant reminders of how lopsided their odds were becoming mixed with the tension of being on edge exhausted him and he could tell it was taking its toll on her.
Jacqui waved dismissively. "Do what you want, Jin."
"Great," he said. "So . . . I'm gonna go this way," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "If anybody wants to come with me, they can."
He stalked off, walking into the awaiting arms of the darkness of the caves and Jacqui barked out a laugh. "He knows we're gonna follow him. He doesn't have a light, first of all. He's the time-keeper, and we're too nice to let him rot in these caves."
"I can still hear you!"
"Good! You're an idiot!" Cassie yelled, wincing at the tugging on her shoulder. "Guess he's calling all the fucking shots now." They all followed to the place where Jin disappeared, the glowstick throwing its dim orange light over each new inch of the cave. Before long they made it to another round archway that led deeper into the cavern, where Jin had stopped to investigate something. On either side of the door was one of the yellow lights that Takeda had seen when he was peering into the area. He hadn't been able to tell what they were then, but the closer they got, the more clear the details became.
It looked like a boulder hanging from the ceiling, but a misshapen one. It looked like it had little protrusions - no, he realized, the closer they drew. Familiar orange boils. All in a glob, stuck to themselves instead of being incubated by a person. The familiar twist of webs dangled it from the ceiling, and as the glowstick cast its light over the clump he could see the same little brown specks floating in the juice in there. Some were bigger than the others, stretched and distended as the little spider inside grew. Some of them pulsed threateningly, like it was ready to burst at any time.
"Those are egg sacs," Jin pointed out. "Normally, spiders lay the eggs on a web 'bed' of sorts. Then, they wrap them in webs to protect them. There probably aren't any predators down here to protect them from except for people, but the spiders will hunt them. So I'm guessing for convenience they hang them from the ceiling."
"Is it weird I want to, like . . . smash them?" Cassie asked.
All three of them turned and stared at her, their mild disgust apparent on their faces. Cassie smiled sheepishly out of the corner of her mouth, the corner without the stitching. "You know, like, how you have the urge to squeeze a zit?"
Takeda could picture it in his head, no matter how much he didn't want to. He could picture Cassie cutting the webs, and he could hear them tearing in his head. He could hear the wet thump as the clump fell to the ground, and he could hear the crushed boils burst. Orange puss thrown out, a weak crunch of tiny spiders being crushed.
He snapped himself out of the thought, praying he didn't accidentally project it out to them. He quickly looked at each of them and it didn't look as though he did.
" . . . "
"I don't . . . have the energy to unpack that, either," Jacqui said, half to Cassie and half to Takeda, shaking her head.
"Hey, whatever," she said lightly. "I'm just saying." She shrugged, then cried out, gently massaging around her wound. "Fuck," she muttered. "I can still feel the little barb in there stabbing me."
"As soon as we can get topside, we'll remove it," Jacqui assured her. "For now, we should keep moving. With these eggs around, I have a suspicion they're gonna be guarded."
Takeda felt it, too. An overarching feeling that things were calm for too long. That something was undoubtedly going to come along at the worst possible moment and destroy any false sense of security they could have lulled themselves into. Jacqui grabbed the glowstick and forged ahead, ducking under the archway. Right away, the path opened again to the left, but the tunnel was overcrowded with webs, stretching from floor to ceiling and completely blocking any way past it. The cavern also continued straight on.
"I got this," Jin said. He adjusted his grip on Raiden's staff and tapped his own on the ground, and the little pearl glowed red. He tapped it again, and a small column of fire spilled out of the dragon's mouth. The webs caught and seared away, and a slight aroma of smoke clung to the remaining webs that were out of reach. Jacqui held the glowstick up in the air, trying to illuminate any part of the tunnel beyond, but it was too narrow.
"Time check."
"It's . . . " he trailed off, dragging the stopwatch from somewhere in his clothes. "Oh, shit! It's nine hours, thirty five minutes. We missed our three hour window by a half hour."
"Yeah, we gotta find a place to rest," Cassie said. She crossed her good arm over her bad, and Takeda knew that was her roundabout way of saying that she was in pain, and wanted to stop. "We gotta get this shit out of my arm."
"Which way?" Jin asked. "We don't know what we could find. If we go even deeper, we may not get the chance to rest."
"Left," Cassie said, with some form of confidence. "I say left."
"Why?" Jin questioned.
"I don't know. It's a fifty/fifty shot, so why not?" she said. "Come on," she whined. "Let's find a place, fast."
"What if it spirals deeper?" Jacqui said. "We may meet more spiders. That'd be bad news since we're down a member of the team."
"Technically, that could happen either way," Takeda mumbled. "Both ways could be clear, or neither of them. Just so you know that it's not one or the other."
"Thanks for that awesome reminder, Mister Logic," Cassie said, rolling her eyes.
"Which way do you want to go, Takeda?" Jacqui asked.
"I don't really care," he said, and he meant it. The reminder that they were due for a break had some effect on him. His limbs felt fine a moment ago, but now they felt heavy. His feet were suddenly sore in his sandals, he had a small headache that he was pretty sure was from the glowstick light, he felt shaky from the adrenaline rush of fighting the spiders, and his mind felt like it was growing slower. He also just wanted to stop.
" . . . Rock, Paper, Scissors?" Cassie said, holding out her good fist.
"You said that earlier," Jin chuckled. "I'm alarmed by how often you use it to make decisions." He held out his fist as well. "I'm for going straight, you're for going to the left."
"Best of three?"
"No, one round."
"Throw on shoot, or a beat after shoot?"
"Geez, Cass, I don't even think Mortal Kombat has this many regulations," he joked. "On shoot."
"Okay. Go easy on me, Jin. I'm wounded," she smirked.
"Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shoot!" they mirrored.
Jin threw Paper and Cassie threw Rock. He covered her hand with his. "Straight it is."
They made their way onwards, and almost immediately hit a wall. The cavern rolled to the right, and as Jacqui spilled the light of the glowstick over the walls, they found little black bulges protruding outwards.
"Old eggs?" Jacqui asked, tilting her head towards Jin to direct the question back towards him. He shrugged.
"Probably."
They walk a ways through the tunnel, and all of a sudden, Jacqui's toe caught on the ground. She tumbled forward and caught herself. "Hey! It's going up!" she yelled, excited. "Maybe this is a way out!"
"Ugh! Thank god!" Cassie moaned. Jacqui moved to stand upright, but her foot slid on the loose rocks and dirt. It turned upwards so sharply, she put the glowstick in her mouth and clamped it gently between her teeth, then had to dig her hands into the dirt to crawl up on all fours. The others followed her lead, hot on her heels. She lowered her head, focusing on her handholds and footholds until they finally reached the top. When the ground leveled out, she grabbed the glowstick from her mouth and held it up, raising her head.
She gasped, scrambling back and throwing herself back into the other three. Jin and Takeda, both bringing up the rear, were knocked off-balance, and Takeda's feet slid on the soft, loose dirt. He rolled back once, and when he was upright he threw out his arm, loosing a whip from its wheel. It lodged into the roof of the low ceiling, and he grabbed it with his hand, holding on as all three of them crashed into him one by one. Their weight ripped at his shoulder and he cried out as he felt the strain, but managed to hold on.
"What the hell?" Jin grumbled.
"Sorry, sorry. There's another body up there. Two. They scared me," she admitted.
Jin crawled over her, stomping wherever he pleased despite Jacqui and Cassie's sounds of anger and pain, then took the glowstick from her and crawled up himself. He crested the hill and beckoned them all up.
"Come on," he said. "They're dead."
"I know they're dead," Jacqui said, "but they're creepy, and I wasn't expecting them."
The three of them untangled and Takeda helped Cassie crawl her way to the top behind Jacqui. When he got to the top, Takeda saw two bodies that looked similar to the one they saw earlier. Their skin was blanched completely white, and looked paper thin, with cracks and abrasions all over them. The first was curled up like the other, with its hands clasped around its head and curled up, while the other was lying flat, nearly on top of the other. It had atrophied so much, the ribs and hips were clearly visible, and its arms were crossed loosely across its chest. Both had boils, some burst and some in tact, but long since abandoned by their inhabitants, who crawled out of their mouths and eyes.
Jacqui shuddered, then turned to the right and walked to the right. The rocks opened up, and through them Takeda could make out an extremely high, sky-lit ceiling. They emerged onto a ledge that overlooked a sort of antechamber in the cave. Down below them, a round area that appeared to be cut off from the rest.
"We could rest there," Cassie suggested.
"No. Look at the eggs," Jin said, pointing down into the area. "The spiders could be protective of them."
Cassie leaned over the edge, and her face fell into a frown as she spotted five or six clusters of eggsacs in the area. "Well, shit. Now what?"
"We could always go back and explore the left," Takeda suggested. "Why not? Not like we have anywhere else to go."
"And what if that's a dead end?" Cassie said. "Then where do we go? I don't know about you, but I didn't see any other caves to explore down this path."
"There were probably some, and we missed them. Either way, we know of one place we have yet to go, so since it's the last place we know of, why not go?"
Cassie finally rolled her eyes. "I guess."
She sat on her backside and rolled onto her right side, using her uninjured arm to steady her path, then she slid back down the incline. The three of them followed, and they traveled back to where Jin had burned the webs away from the opening.
"Who wants to take point on this one?" Jacqui asked. "I did it last time. It's someone else's turn."
Jin grabbed the glowstick. "I got it."
He held Raiden's long staff out in front of him like a spear, and the four of them ducked under the webbing, even crawling on their bellies at times. Takeda could also feel the ground inclining, and after what seemed like forever a white light reached his sights at the end of the tunnel.
He shielded his eyes, blinking rapidly, but couldn't keep his eyes on it for long. About three quarters of the way up, the air cleared. Fresh, clean air pulled into his lungs rather than warm, panted, recycled cave air, and it felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He knew they were going up - he wasn't sure where they would end up, but he didn't care. At least they'd be out of the caves for the moment.
They arose, ducking under a final curtain of webs, and in front of him Jin sighed, looking around.
"Thank the gods," he muttered. "Natural light."
Takeda looked around, and saw the rocks and webs receding on either side of him. He saw a strangely familiar wrought-iron fence that enclosed the area they were in. He saw shrubbery, dead branches, berries, stone skeletons and graves, and even those were a stark comfort to him.
They had emerged in another section of the graveyard.