The Elder Lands

Chapter 37: A Familiar Embrace

After resting and checking on their equipment and Blessings, Clifton and Lilian helped Thorley dress his wound. It was wide, but thankfully, it hadn’t gone too deep.

“Apologies,” Lilian addressed Lucan eventually. “I couldn’t do more. My magic is weakened by the Elder Root.” She glanced upwards.

“It was plenty.” Lucan gave her a reassuring smile. He’d once read something about the Elder Roots interfering with magic. Apparently, only ritualists were unaffected by it.

Cordell got to take a brief glance at his Blessing before Lucan bade them move again. Torches were lit and weapons readied. They crept through the darkened length of the passage slowly and, thankfully, safely. It seemed the Wyrms had alerted each other to their presence and attacked them with all they had.

Once the soft glow of the moss bathed them again, Lucan relaxed. They’d still have to be alert of course, but at least they could see any would-be assailants.

The passage branched again and Lucan had to pick a direction randomly. Cordell marked it and they proceeded. Fortunately, the branching passage didn’t get any narrower, keeping all the characteristics of the previous one.

It only took them a short while to come upon another patch of darkness. It seemed that the Kewmer Wyrms were common in this part of the Labyrinth.

Lucan glanced at Clifton who nodded an affirmation, then he instructed everyone to be ready. He heard Lilian preparing her spell early this time, while the men readied themselves.

Thankfully, this encounter passed by easier than the last one. They’d gotten the measure of the beasts, and Lucan was happy to cut a swath through them. He killed the three that pounced on him this time and assisted Thorley with a fourth and a fifth.

After the last of the beasts had been put down, Lucan ordered a retreat once more. When they were a safe distance away, he allowed them to summon up their Blessings, with the same watch arrangement as last time. He did note that Heath and Ryder weren’t getting the same chances the rest of them were. So, as he summoned his Blessing, he decided that he’d bring one of them up front when they began moving again.

You have slain a lv1 Kewmer Wyrm and absorbed part of its Vital Essence.

You have slain a lv1 Kewmer Wyrm and absorbed part of its Vital Essence.

You have slain a lv1 Kewmer Wyrm and absorbed part of its Vital Essence.

You have slain a lv1 Kewmer Wyrm and absorbed part of its Vital Essence.

You have slain a lv1 Kewmer Wyrm and absorbed part of its Vital Essence.

You have leveled up.

Race: Human

Level: 5

Vital Orbs: 5

Mind and Body

Physique: Iron I 0/15

Spirit: Basic 0/1

Skills (0) 0/100

(Passive) Swordsmanship lv21: Journeyman

(Hybrid) 7-Point Star Dance lv4: Novice (0/1)

(Active) Wraith Strike lv2: Novice (0/1)

Lucan had some breadth now. He didn’t have to put all his Orbs into Physique, so he put two into Wraith Strike. The limitation of two uses a day was too stringent, and he wanted to use it more freely when needed. With the addition of his two Vital Orbs, Wraith Strike reached its fourth level which added two more uses to his daily capacity.

After everyone was done, Lucan had Clifton and Heath trade positions before moving again.

It later seemed that this part of the Labyrinth was a locale for the Kewmer Wyrms; as another, thankfully painless, encounter with the Wyrms was what ended their day.

After so much walking and exploring along with combat, Lucan saw it fit for them to set up their modest camp in a relatively straight part of the passage. Considering it was likely evening by now on the surface, nobody seemed averse to his command. Some cheap baubles were set on the ground in both directions to produce noise should an enemy possessed of enough stealth to attempt to slink into their camp. Along with that, two of them would keep watch at all times.

“Cordell and Thorley will stand first watch,” Lucan said as they spread their beddings on the ground. “Then it will be Heath and Ryder, then I and Clifton.”

And so those who weren’t on first watch slept fitfully. Lucan tried to sleep as deeply as possible, and fortunately, there were no incidents to wake him up before his watch, the latter also going peacefully.

As they packed up their belongings on the next day, he decided that they ought to be more aggressive in their branching. Though he wanted to be cautious, repeated encounters with Kewmer Wyrms could only be so useful. The beasts were too weak to bring sufficient benefit for their purposes in a reasonable amount of time. They’d established a cohesion to their party that he could now confidently rely on against stronger opponents, or at least he hoped so.

The more they trod the passages of the Labyrinth, the more Lucan began to experience something he’d known to expect. Though the Labyrinth was lit with the moss quite adequately, there was a certain kind of darkness that pervaded his own mind the longer he stayed below ground. A capacity for this kind of environment that he didn’t know he had was being tested to its very limits. Lucan persevered, though he knew for certain that the others must be suffering from similar pains. They would all have to adapt to it if they wanted to fulfill their purposes on this venture instead of resurfacing early.

Not too long after their departure, Lucan’s strategy for the day led to results. As they traversed a bend in the passage, they heard echoes of a subtle noise. It was difficult to parse, but Lucan believed it to be of beasts either scuffling or digging into something.

After Lucan gave his men a nod, their party marched forward cautiously. On and on they crept, through the passages that grew darker and emptier every moment in Lucan’s mind. Perhaps that was why he felt good when they perceived movement ahead.

Their party came to a stop when they heard shuffling noises, followed by scratching noises. The noises were subtle and mixed, difficult to parse or understand, and then their eyes joined their ears in observation. He could see them, their brown, hairy heads being their most prominent feature. Like men, they walked on two feet, but they were larger. Like men, they had creamy skin–no–hair, fine hair that covered their bodies, inspiring an image of a naked man. They had two arms like a man did. But they did not walk like one. Their loping gait had a patient, coiling quality to it.

Heath was the first to step forward. “Good m–”

Lucan and Cordell pulled him back at the same time.

“Those are no men,” Lucan explained. “They’re Ashkievs.” He’d read about them, and had even been warned about them once, long in the past. Alone, the beasts didn’t look different from a man lost to the wild for a season. And by the time you realized that they were in truth much different from a man, it was too late. Many a victim had fallen to even the tamest of Ashkiev Breaks. A cautious farmer would not approach a Labyrinth beast, but they would approach a man lost to the woods, or even a suspected interloper. But no matter how well they armed themselves for the latter, it would never be enough for what they eventually faced.

An Ashkiev was dangerous.

“Prepare yourselves,” Lucan commanded. “Shields up, there could be projectiles.”

The beasts perked up, what little of their faces not covered by hair darkened by the shadows that it cast. As though they’d understood him, they extended their unthreatening hands forward.

Lucan raised his shield with ill-concealed panic and yelled, “Brace!”

He felt something impact his shield, its thin steel plating taking the brunt of the damage. Still, a sound of creaking and splintering wood came from its wooden parts as more and more impacts peppered it. Braced against his body, the shield was stable, but he still felt every hit as though it was an offending fist dampened by a pillow. There was a definite weight behind every projectile. Lucan risked a glance beside him. Heath was holding out well, his shield braced and covering him. The young man-at-arms winced and Lucan saw him glance down at his leg where a glancing hit punished his shin.

It took moments that felt like an eternity for the projectiles to stop. Lucan shifted his eyes away from Heath and lowered his shield, seeing the sharpened bones that were scattered on the ground. A pair were stuck to his shield, but he shook them off. His eyes eventually settled on the beasts, their hands extended forward with their flesh wide open, as though cut by a surgeon’s blade. The open cuts where the bones came resealed themselves and the beasts advanced.

Their approach was slow but steady and measured. The same loping gait from before guided them forward, their muscular forms ready to pounce.

A chant echoed from behind Lucan, then shards of ice whizzed from above them to meet the incoming mass of man-like beasts. The shards pierced skin and drew purplish blood out of the beasts, yet they didn’t slow their advance.

“Their flesh is full of compressed bone,” Lucan shouted behind him without looking. He heard a whispered complaint in response, then a different chant began and he caught something from the corner of his eye, a globule of water forming above them, its size increasing by the moment. Yet he couldn’t give it much attention as the Ashkievs were upon them.

Thankfully, the beasts were wider than an ordinary man, which forced them to approach their line of four with three of their own and two more following in their wake.

Lucan ended up facing one of them on his own while his three companions handled the other two. “They can summon bone at a moment’s notice. Be vigilant,” he said.

He kept his shield even as Heath discarded his to properly handle his unwieldy greatsword.

The Ashkiev opposite Lucan covered the last yard of distance between them in a much faster step than the norm, forcing Lucan onto the back foot. A fist raced towards him even as he raised his shield to meet it. The impact echoed in his shoulder, but instead of the fist being deflected, he felt it hooked to his shield. Lowering it, he observed three curved bones extended from the beast’s forearm, their sharp tips digging into the steel plate on his shield.

Lucan pushed his shield to the left while his right hand brought his sword for a heavy cut to the Ashkiev’s joint at the elbow. The shift in his shield forced the beast slightly off balance and allowed him to deliver the strike. Again, the beast’s skin easily parted but Lucan’s blade didn’t make it farther than that, several bent bones barring its way. Feeling as though he was grinding against stone, Lucan retracted his sword before the beast’s free arm descended on him with another strike.

He stepped back and wrestled his shield free from the bony hooks. Too late for his shield to intercept, Lucan parried the incoming claw strike with his sword. The claw was deceptively bare, yet once his sword came close, five sharp bones came out where nails would be but longer than any claws he’d seen before. The beast tried to catch his sword with its impromptu claws, but Lucan was vigilant to it, sliding his sword free with a slicing motion and grinding metal against bone. Already, the beast was readying another strike with its recently freed hand.

Frustrated with being on the back foot, Lucan glanced at Heath who was on his left. The man-at-arms had been struggling against his opponent, but a timely intervention from Cordell gifted him the advantage. Seeing that his plan could work without him being impaled by a flanking attack, Lucan angled his shield to the right and shifted himself to stand sideways instead of squared off against the beast.

Meanwhile, the Ashkiev had wound back its originally offending arm and was in the process of trying to skewer him with the bones that now covered its fist in the form of a humongous, twisted spearhead.

With the beast committed to its attack, Lucan succeeded in receiving it on his angled shield as he intended. The bone spear sheared off a layer of steel from his shield while Lucan stepped into the beast’s guard. So close, the beast couldn’t leverage its arms for a timely attack, though Lucan saw bone beginning to protrude from the skin on its side to threaten him. He didn’t wait, however, quickly bringing his prepared sword into a weighty thrust through the Ashkiev’s ribs. The stacked bones in its chest would’ve weathered his assault had he not used Wraith Strike. Instead, his blade, carried by its momentum and his Skill, broke through a bone and slid between the rest, promptly reaching its destination and piercing the heart.

The beast, as though having had its strings cut, collapsed.

Lucan was frustrated by the limited space he had to move, particularly because he couldn’t use the Star properly. So instead of waiting for another beast to come to him from further back, he stepped forward, free of the formation he’d created but assured by Heath’s advantage over his opponent. Lucan immediately noted that instead of two enemies in the rear, he only met one, the other having stepped in place of a fallen comrade that had been facing Ryder.

Before he could clash with their enemies’ reserve of one, a large globe of ice smashed into the beast’s head, driving it to the ground. Lucan didn’t know if it was disoriented or dying, but he wasn’t about to pass the opportunity. He turned on the Ashkiev facing Heath and hamstrung its two legs smoothly. The bones packed in the beast’s legs kept it up, but it still lost most of its maneuverability. It tried to backhand him with a forearm lined with menacingly sharp bones, but he used his Star and moved to the back of the Ashkiev facing Ryder and Cordell. He gave it the same treatment as its peer and only watched briefly as his men-at-arms began to dismantle it.

Then he noted that the one smashed down with Lilian’s globe was rising again. The ice globe, cracked and parts of it splintered, was reforming itself under the mage’s chants. Water was forming on it and freezing visibly.

Again, as he stepped forward to face the rising enemy, the globe impacted its head with a heavy thump, driving it back down. The globe then rose and descended onto the beast’s skull a third and final time before it could recover. The impact made the beast lay down for good, though it also shattered the ice globe. Regardless, Lucan stepped in to ascertain its death, working his blade between the packed bones in its torso until he found a proper gap to slide it through and reach its heart.

Behind him, his men were finishing Heath’s opponent, the last remaining Ashkiev.

As it fell, their narrow battlefield grew quiet except for gasping breaths. Lucan observed the aftermath. Ryder’s stiletto had been a fortunate weapon against the Ashkievs, easily sliding between crowded bones. The quick man-at-arms had made short work of the first beast with assistance from Cordell, the latter having taken it upon himself to keep the two younger men-at-arms on his flanks alive instead of committing to any single fight.

Lucan himself marveled at how much of a difference Wraith Strike had made between him and his men. There was a reason entire lineages sometimes depended on passed-down Skills. Even Kingdoms were somewhat reliant on the Skills passed down among their vassals when it came to their way of war. The mounted men of Bitis, for instance, had most of the Elder Lands’ non-magical ranged Skills passed down from generation to generation. The difficulty of earning a bestowal had made it difficult to spread the most potent Active Skills around, eventually making them a carefully guarded resource.

He was brought out of his thoughts by the perplexed voice of Ryder.

“I’m certain, yes,” Ryder said, addressing Cordell. “The first one I fought was wounded. It wasn’t even walking right.”

Clifton’s voice came from behind to add to their conversation. “The noise, it didn’t make sense either, though I could barely hear it. There’s–”

Before his man-at-arms could finish, Lucan heard the subtle noise of something scratching through the earth. He was standing sideways to keep an eye on the passage further ahead. But the noise was so quiet and came so swiftly that he only had a blink before it grew more aggressive, more…near. A yell from someone coincided with the wall behind him exploding into pieces and peppering him with earth and stone. And then, familiar black arms wrapped around him from both sides and pulled him in.