Chapter 27:
Easy Victories
The next morning Izuku dawned his chain mail and his newly minted mage plate armor over it. He completed his outfit by draping a cloak around himself to reduce the heat of the sun on metal. Once it started to warm up he'd try out the true frozen armor spell that he'd practiced well into the night.
He was yawning in punishment for the extra self-study, but as they would be riding horses well into the afternoon he figured he could get away with a nap along the way. He was well accustomed to sleeping while riding animals at this point.
He went over the new supplies in his pack that his mistress had sent him off to buy, especially the antidote potions, scroll of town portal scrolls, and other potions. Finding it all secure he donned his sack and exited his room. Isendra's door was open and he entered to find her and Myr undressing the bed.
"We should be gone for a week, but possibly more, so you have plenty of time to deep clean all of my things. I apologize for the state of it all, I have been shut in this whole time." Isendra said to the young girl, who now wore clothes far more form fitting than those of Elzix' widow.
"Yes ma'am." Myr meeped.
Isendra noticed him and smiled, before donning her own pack and joining him in the hallway, leaving Myr behind to fold and collect the linen.
They exited Elzix' inn and walked briskly through the still dark streets of Lut Gholein. They had opted to start before even the earliest shops opened just to not be bothered by people or stared at. Or worse, get another tag along.
They arrive at the stables near the front gate to the city to find Cassia and Strom, awake and as pack-laden as Izuku and Isendra, waiting for them.
"Good morning Strom. Good morning Cassia." Izuku greeted.
"Good morning young Midoriya." They both greeted him with smiles.
Cassia's smile didn't survive when she turned her gaze to Isendra, but Izuku thought it didn't turn into outright animosity either. He hoped it wasn't just his imagination.
"The contract did not stipulate if you would be providing horses or camels for us." Cassia said.
"And as such, I think we can all rent our own without much difficulty." Strom interjected, giving Cassia a look.
Izuku made it a point of having Isendra at the back, with him in front of her, Strom in front of him and Cassia at the front. There was no discussion on the matter, they all just organized in that marching order as they exited the city. Perhaps they all wished for this to be as painless of a trip as possible? Both consciously and unconsciously.
It wasn't until the sun rose, washing away their tiredness, that Cassia broke that peace.
"I just realized I have no idea where we are going. Perhaps Isendra should be leading us, as she holds the map?" She suggested.
They completely reversed their marching order and proceeded southwest.
"Our first target is the Halls of the Dead. An old burial ground beneath the remains of an ancient Vizjerei city." Isendra announced.
"What is our goal here?" Asked Strom.
"An object called the Horadric Cube. Cain says it is an object of alchemical and transmutational purposes, which is vague enough to tell us nothing but specific enough to tell us exactly how dangerous it could be." Isendra explained. "It should be in the third sub level of the halls of the dead."
"It's always three, isn't it?" Said Cassia. "Three levels of subterranean horrors."
Meh. It wasn't always, but Izuku agreed that it was most commonly three. He retrieved his notebook and added.
The noon sun came and went, as they burned through two wineskins and frozen armors apiece, refreshing the former with the melting from the latter. When evening finally came and it's cool breeze drove the heat away.
"This is it." Isendra declared.
They had arrived upon what couldn't even be described as ruins. Stone walls, like abandoned shepherds walls of the Scottish highlands, littered the dunes. A few rose slightly higher than the rest, and all were made of what must have once been perfectly smooth blocks.
"So, do we know exactly where the entrance is?" Strom asked. "Or what it looks like.
"A pile of blocks with a single obelisk on the left side of the entrance." Isendra read off from the scroll Cane had gifted her.
They found it readily enough. It was the tallest thing left standing and had a stairway leading into the dark depths of the earth. It was hard to miss.
"That the entrance is unbarred seems sign enough to me that dark forces have already made it home." Said Cassia.
"Then let us go clear it out." Said Isendra.
They descended the stairs as one. What proceeded could only be described as mass matricide, assuming that was the correct word for killing mummies, which Izuku was fairly sure it was. Hundreds of the bandaged undead, laid to waste in mere minutes as their quartet charged through.
Izuku didn't want to complain, but this was by far the easiest spelunking expedition he'd ever been on. Maybe it was because there were four equally formidable warriors and/or sorcerers plunging as one, or perhaps it was because the hallways were just wide enough for them to march through a single unit, shoulder to shoulder. Or shoulder to hip, in Izuku's case.
The only hiccup in their march was the occasional Frankenstein-esque monster similar in appearance to Radamant, but lacking in all his sentience, strength, remorse and aptitude. These ones did nothing, absolutely nothing, but put back together the bundles of dust and bone Izuku and his companions had just shattered only to send them off and be shattered again. Izuku had to give it to them, they could take far more fireballs than the one and done zombies. But it wasn't significantly more in his opinion and so these foes served as little more than road bumps.
Besides that? The only thing that mildly slowed them down was waiting for the plumes of green, noxious gas that the mummies released upon their destruction to dissipate. Most of the time they didn't even have to do that as they annihilated them with ice and lightning before getting close enough to have to wait.
This chore continued down two more flights of stairs and two more levels of burial grounds, which were so reminiscent of the ones beneath Lut Gholein that he would have made the connection even if he hadn't known they were both Vizjerei in origin.
They reached what could only be the final chamber doors. The grandness of the doors was a giveaway.
Strom kicked it down with a single stomp of his boot to reveal a large, square room with four aflame pillars and an absolute horde of undead. The horde consisted entirely of skeletons, zombies and more of those Radamant wannabes. They all slowly turned to look at the intruders and Izuku noted an odd one out in the crowd.
One of those cat people, a lady one decked in armor and completely blue. Like,it was covered in blue paint.
It screeched and the clusterfuck began.
Izuku, without needing telling, charged forth and baseball rolled to the side as his three companions clashed head-on with the army of bones and wrappings. He was small and lithe enough to pass partly unnoticed, entirely unmolested by the slow, shambling undead and so it was on him to take out the problematic enemies. The ones that could raise the ones that Strom, Isendra and Cassia fell.
One, two, three fireballs later and the first quasi-Radamant was down for the count and Izuku was on the run again.
He peeked onto the fight to see that Strom had gotten separated from the others and was clashing with the blue cat woman. If you could call him repeatedly stomping her helmeted head into the floor clashing.
Four, five six fireballs and the second quasi-Radamant fell making the endless horde, finite.
Somehow, he had still remained unnoticed by the mindless hordes of undead, so he took off his pack, took a drink of his watered-down mana potion, and unleashed an ice nova into the fray. It still took a decent amount of concentration to keep the spell from effecting the three he wanted to spare, but he managed just fine.
The remaining undead were shattered by boots, lightning bolts and spears within moments after that. He didn't see the cat woman get killed, but felt safe in assuming they finished her.
"Anybody injured?" Izuku asked.
"Meh. A few scratches, might bruise a bit later." Cassia said.
Strom lightly kicked one of the downed enemies.
"I'm surprised none of these mummies released any…"
All at once every downed mummy exploded in a plume of green miasma and they all choked on it.
"You son of a bitch!" Cassia cursed Strom between coughs.
"I have antidotes in my pack! It's already open, let me just grab..." Izuku tried to say before he too was cut off by his coughing.
"Maybe we should all get out of the room full of poison gas?!" Isendra suggested.
They all got out of the room full of poison gas. Several antidote potions later, as most of them threw up the first one as their bodies tried to get rid of the foreign ailment, and they were all right as rain. If still a little green in the face.
The miasma inside the final chamber dissipated as they caught their breath and they all stumbled back in wearily.
They found the Horadric cube readily enough. It was in the exact center of the chamber and was a cube. Go figure. A beautifully ornate, metal cube with a metal ring latch on one face.
Isendra lifted it, pulled on the ring to open it, and revealed its innards.
"A box of holding?" Izuku said.
They all looked at him.
"You know, the boxes that are bigger on the inside than they should be?" He said.
They all looked back inside and tilted their heads.
"Was it the box itself we wanted or the contents it was supposed to contain? Don't tell me there were items in here and now we have to go find them?"
"No, Cane said we needed the box to put the other two items into." Isendra said. "Not that it should contain anything."
They had their prize, and so they left. The walk back up through the halls of the dead was quiet as exhaustion finally took its hold on them. It had only been an hour long endeavor, but after an entire day trip through the heat and the steady exertion of said battle without breaks, they were beat. And when they reached the surface they saw that the moon was now rising and the cold chill of night made them shiver.
"Fire and camp here?" Strom asked. "At least here we know all the enemies are dead. Or double dead."
They all readily agreed and hunted down a nice alcove between two ancient walls to make camp. Strom and Izuku went back into the hall of the dead to hunt down a few spears or other polearms from their fallen enemies and brought them back up to serve as firewood.
"What about the loot within the hall of the dead?" Cassia asked.
"We can do that in the morning." Said Strom. "For now, let us eat and rest."
After a meal of rations, a full night sleep, and a morning meal of rations they combed through the halls of the dead. They collected the many fine jewels, gold coins, and other offerings to the dead within. Izuku got the impression that the place may have already been pillaged once or twice and the would-be thieves had been added to the ranks guarding the halls.
When they finished and re-emerged the sun was just beginning to rise.
"Where to now, mistress." Izuku asked.
"The Far oasis." Isendra told them. "The shaft of the staff is hidden with a deliberately buried and "lost" temple."
And so, their journey continued. Far oasis was aptly named. It took another day and night of travel to reach it. Nowhere near as long as it took to reach… that place that no longer exists and never did according to Lut Gholein records.
But when they arrived, it was to find more ruins, and a lot of oasis. Pongs with throngs of ferns and palm trees about them littered the desertscape. Many of them were shaded by large, rock outcroppings and all were near more abandoned buildings. These ones were unlike the ones around the halls of the dead in that, while still little more than walls, they always came in groups of at least three and were brick and mortar, not giant sandstone. Some even still had the remains of wooden roofs and tattered tarps.
"Be at the ready. Swarms of flesh eating itchies have always been a problem near freshwater." Cassie warned.
"Is that why this place was abandoned?" Izuku asked.
"No." They all said at once.
"That would be the sand maggots and scarab demons." Isendra said.
Scarab demons he was familiar with. Sand maggots were a new monstrosity, and he was imagining the giant worms of dune wriggling beneath his feet as they passed into the ruined oasis city.
The swarms of flesh eating itchies turned to be anticlimactic, they were merely swarms of green mosquitoes. Definitely not something he wanted to be eaten alive by, but for two elemental sorcerers were easily dealt with. The swarms were burned away by fire and made the whole oasis smell like a bug zapper on a summer evening.
It was the sand maggots that threw Izuku through a loop. It came crawling out of one of the more preserved hovels and its size was such that it couldn't have possibly fit inside of the building were it not for its soft, squishy body. Sharp, vicious chitin made up its pincers and legs
It did not like fire. In fact, it was so vulnerable to such that a mere fire bolt from Isendra boiled the great deal of liquid inside of its body where it struck and it exploded from the impact. It was a little more visceral than what Izuku was prepared for.
"That isn't a maggot. That is clearly a termite. Who looks at these and calls them maggots?" Izuku complained.
Strom looked between Izuku and the giant termite, before shrugging.
"Well, they don't actually eat wood. They eat rotting meat. Hence, maggots." He said.
"Do they develop into fly's like maggots?" Izuku asked.
"No." Said Isendra, now smirking at his discomfort.
"Do they organize into colonies like termites?" He went on.
"Yes." Said Cassia.
"Then they're termites!" Izuku exclaimed.
They weren't even disagreeing with him. They just seemed bemused at how much he cared about the incorrect classification. He vented his frustration by writing in his journal that he needed to ask Cane about what organization was in charge about taxonomic classifications. This was assuming that there was such an organization.
"Why is it that every single stroke of good luck which we encounter is perfectly balanced by an exactly equal stroke of bad luck?" Cassia observed.
"How do you figure?" Strom asked.
"Well, we find the buried temple already excavated, saving us the hours – potentially days – of work trying to find it and similar length of time excavating it." Cassia pointed out.
"Which is counterbalanced by the fact that the reason it's excavated is because it's become home to a giant termite mound." Izuku finished her sentiment.
And indeed, they found the place indicated by Cane's map and instead of solid, compacted earth there was a hole. A slimy, noxious goo encrusted hole that looked more like the unspeakable parts of said termite's anatomy than a temple entrance. But it was in the right location, and foundation stones of some kind were strewn about the mounds of excavated dirt surrounding the entrance.
"You used fire on that other one, does that mean that the rule about creatures in these deserts being resistant to fire doesn't apply to these sand maggots?" Izuku asked.
"Oh yes. You and I will be taking point, apprentice." Isendra said.
In the end they did not, in fact, take point, but were instead shelled in by Cassia and Strom who made up their front and rear guard. The logic being that Izuku and Isendra can cast spells through them and both could keep any enemies at bay while they cast said spells. This logic proved partially true, as Cassia's extended reach with her trident made her the perfect person to take the lead as they delved into the tunnels.
She often spotted the oncoming "maggots'' before Izuku and Isendra even heard them, and with the narrow tunnels that they could barely fit through single-file, she was the most capable of keeping them at bay long enough for the sorcerers to reduce them to exploding piles of goo. The flaw in this plan was self evident, as Cassia became repeatedly covered in said exploding piles of goo, making her resorting to downing antidote potions like they were wine. This formation broke entirely the first time they became lost, and it was only the first of many. There was no rhyme or reason to the tunnels, as they were what amounted to an ant colony but of giant termites. They occasionally found a room or hallways of the original temple fairly intact and incorporated into said colony, but they provided little guide outside of place markers so they knew they'd been there before.
By the end, Cassia and Strom relented, allowing Izuku and Isendra to take the front and create a magical flamethrower spell between them that just continuously scorched the fifty meters of tunnels in front of them. Now they both saw and heard every maggot before they got close enough to spit that green, acidic bile. Which Izuku was pretty sure was something termites did to weaken wood, not something maggots did. They'd yet to fall victims to inset vomit, they wouldn't start now.
This also made navigating far easier. They knew they'd reached a place they'd been before by virtue of the fact everything was a black, charred warzone. Then it was a matter of backtracking or re-tracking to an offshoot tunnel they hadn't been down yet. By implementing this tactic they must have cauterized the entire nest before they found it. The queen's chamber.
He didn't know what else to call the bloated, tick-shaped creature ten times the size of the other "maggots" other than a queen. He was fairly certain termites had queens, not maggots, and the room full of eggs and caretakers all about her were further proof. It was all very flammable, and once they lit it on fire they just stood back and watched it all burn.
The queen screamed and chittered in pain as she slowly died, but it didn't hold the same horror to Izuku as with horribly mutated people. Or any, really.
They waited for the flames and thick smoke to fade away before proceeding, doing their best to cover their mouths so as to not inhale too much of the burned insect flesh. It smelled oddly similar to burnt hair and rubber.
The queen's chamber, despite all of the biological matter covering the ground and walls, was clearly a Horadric tomb of some kind. At the back they found a sealed coffin, which Strom kicked open like he had the Horadric door the day before.
Inside was a staff that looked to be made of a single, long, fossilized rattlesnake with spines of similarly long rattle snakes wrapped around it in a triple helix formation. At the top of the staff, where the three spines and the rattle of the snake's tail met, was a large orb of amber held in place equidistant from each as if by magic.
"That is the staff of kings. It is what we are here for. Cane's writings say we need to put it into the cube along with another object called the amulet of the viper." Isendra told them.
Izuku picked up the staff, which was almost as long as Isendra was tall, and looked at his mistress. "Can we store it in the cube?" He asked.
Deciding she, too, wanted to find out, she dug the cube out of her back and opened it. She inserted the staff into the box and it fell into it like a lamb into Merry Poppins bag.
"Oh. I've always heard about such an enchantment, but I've never seen it before." Said Strom. "That should make carrying it out of here easier."
And indeed, she merely closed the box and put it back into her pack.
They made ready to leave but Izuku stopped them all as soon as they re-entered the tunnel. A shiver, a lack of something that should be there. It was a familiar feeling.
"What is it?" Asked Isendra.
"I just felt it again." Izuku told them, looking to Strom and Cassia. "The masked magic."
"Masked magic?" Isendra asked.
But both Strom and Cassia understood his meaning.
"When we confronted Radamant, Izuku felt a strange lack of magic. Like a spell that was cast and then covered up. His description matched what an adept at sensing magic describes the work of a Vizjerei assassin covering up a spell they cast." Said Cassia.
The look of fear on Isendra's face told Izuku that she understood the exact seriousness of the situation.
"So somebody was just standing there, a meter behind us at most, as we laid waste to this entire room." Said Izuku.
"Or worse, they had been following close behind us the entire time." Said Strom. "Likely waiting for one or most of us to be downed so they could finish us off, or get the person they're actually targeting. They got no such chance today and must be confident enough to take all four of us."
Isendra visibly shivered at the explanation, but continued on
After that they began their long journey back up to the surface on full alert, ready for a sneak attack at any moment. The trip should have been more difficult with all of the tunnels being scorched black, but their feet remembered the way and they reached the surface in record time.
Night had long since descended so they once again set camp. They and all of their things smelled disgusting, so they bathed in one of the oases as a group and washed all of their things. Each remained on high alert as they did so, and even as they dried everything.
They took watch in shifts of two that night. Cassia and Strom first, Izuku and Isendra second. Then the strangest thing happened.
"Nothing to report Strom, you can go back to sleep." Izkuku said when the man woke up early.
He yawned as he approached.
"I dunno. I feel pretty awake." He said. "Are you sure it hasn't been six hours yet?" He asked.
Izuku and Isendra shared a glance. They hadn't bothered to set up the hourglass like the first watch usually did, as the sun usually did the job of waking the first shift up. They checked the firewood and how much they had used. It did seem like they'd burned through six hours or so of log, but they would be well into the morning if they did that.
"Well, it wouldn't be the first time I woke up after three hours feeling ready to attack the day. If either of you feel like getting some extra shut-eye I can keep watch now." Strom offered.
Neither of them did, so they opted for a three man watch. This time they did setup the hourglass just to measure the time. Two hours later they knew something was wrong, because then Cassia woke up refreshed and joined them.
"How is it not morning yet?" She asked. "I never wake up this refreshed with less than eight hours."
She was right. It had been night for well over two shifts now. If they were right, that would make it.
"Fourteen whole hours of darkness." Izuku summarized. "It has been night for fourteen hours."
They all looked up at the sky in search of the sun. It was cloudless and the stars were all out and bright, but no moon or sun lit the sky.
"Either we were in there for half a year, or the sun is out." Said Isendra.
"What makes you say either of those?" Asked Cassia.
"Because those stars are only visible near the summer solstice, they are blocked from our view by the sun's glare for the rest of the year." She concluded.
This story was Cowritten/Beta'd by NonsensicalRants You can hire NonsensicalRants to write your stories, all you have to do is provide him with a rough outline and contact him on his patron.
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