ALL NOVEL Ch. 8 Low Tables are the Devil
The temple was deeper than it appeared on the outside. From the outside, it looked like a wide squat building that was maybe four or five stories tall. Most of the temple was underground, suitable to the need of the warren dwelling monsters that had taken residence. Stalking forward with his glowstick outstretched, Santi paused frequently, listening hard for any sound of movement. The glowstick was a giveaway that he would have preferred not to rely on. The kobolds would see him before he could see them, he just had to hope his experience could overcome the patrols that worked their way through the lower levels.
There should be six warrior kobolds here, patrolling in pairs. He had yet to run into any of them and was getting close to where the last shaman had been found the first time. He wanted to eliminate any type of magic assistance he could before the fighting started. The last thing he wanted was having to fight warriors buffed by a shaman. If he could kill the shaman, he had a good chance of working through the warriors.
The final shaman had been found in the heart of the underground temple. An ossuary, the bones of hundreds of dead kobolds had been placed around the room. It had been a brutal fight as the shaman used every piece of its power to kill them. Fighting a shaman in a room filled with deceased ancestors wasn’t the smartest choice, but Santi liked his odds better than running into enhanced warriors in the dark.
Feeling more like a thief than a mage, he continued downward. There was little to see, the weak light offered by the glowstick hardly penetrating the oppressive dark of the temple. He kept to a wall, his shoulder scant millimeters from brushing it, the light held off to the side near the center of the hall. If someone had a ranged weapon, he hoped they’d fire toward the light. The hallway opened up into a four way intersection, the first he had seen so far. If he remembered correctly, he needed to take the left branch to find the ossuary.
Swallowing his nerves, Santi went down the left hall. This central corridor was patrolled frequently, he could see the scuff of footprints in the thick dust on the ground. If he was unlucky, he was about to run into a pair of kobold warriors in the dark. His luck had been fantastic so far and it continued to hold out. The doorway to the ossuary appeared, the wall ending suddenly in a doorway. Faint light spilled out, just enough for a single torch if it had been put in the far corner of the room.
Santi peeked around the corner, hoping to find the shaman asleep like the first one had been. He cursed mentally when he saw the shaman wide awake, working with his back to the door. The torch mounted in the corner was weak, the dancing flame more yellow than red and its offering was pale. The ossuary was more shadow than light, twisting in diabolical designs, filled with the bones of slain kobolds. Backing away as quietly as possible, Santi lowered his bag again. He was on the clock now. A patrol could pass by at any moment.
Creeping back up to the side of the doorframe, ax cradled in both hands, he looked around. The shaman remained in the middle of the room, in front of a low stone table. It held something in its paws, working with intense scrutiny. Speed once more was called for.
Santi rolled around the corner and burst into a sprint. He only had to cover a few feet and his axe was already winding up for a powerful chop. The shaman was fast, stopping instantly, it spun and threw what it had in its hands at Santi. Santi only had a split second to see carved bones flying at him, but he was already ducking. While he had been a mage, he had honed his battle instincts for years. The shaman was dangerous to him, but at the end of the day it was only a low level monster.
He aborted his downward chop, instead lashing out in a horizontal swing like a baseball bat. The tip of the axe head caught the dodging kobold in the knee, splitting skin and bone and causing the shaman to cry out in agony. Santi slammed into the shin high table the kobold had been working at, biting back a scream of pain at his now bruised legs. The kobold had no need to hold back its cries, barking and howling in equal amounts as it scurried backward and away from Santi.
The ossuary wasn’t a large room and there were few places to flee to. With the obvious pain it was in, it lacked the ability to conjure any magic to protect itself. Santi didn’t let it linger in pain, hobbling forward and bringing down the splitting maul with finality. The shaman’s cries ended, blood rushing out to mix with the dust to create a muddy slurry under the shaman.
The fight had taken less than fifteen seconds. Santi was left limping as he went out of the room to grab his pack and then hurried back into the ossuary. With a stronger glowstick, he was better able to take in the long rectangular room. The ceiling was only six feet high and was covered in bones. Santi vaguely remembered this in his nightmares. Bleached kobold bones were placed around every inch of the room. Skulls formed elaborate candle stands, ran over with melted wax, now long abandoned. Rib cages had been fused together to make shelving that held only dust and memories.
The room reeked of poverty, of famine, of irrelevance. When they had came here the first time, this room had been packed with things stolen and looted from the dead of earth. It helped soothe something in Santi’s heart to see the desolation of the room, to know he had helped prevent part of the sack of earth with his action. He didn’t have long to think on it though. The fight and howling had echoed down the long corridors and he didn’t want to be caught flatfooted as the patrolling warriors found him.
He set his pack to the side and started to search through it. It was stuffed with all the things one would need to survive an ill-advised rift assault. Santi had thought long and hard about some of the things he had stuffed into the canvas sack. The water and electrolyte mix had only been the tip of the iceberg. A small box of nails came out of the bag along with some heavy duty fishing wire. He didn’t have too much time, he could vaguely hear the sound of distant barks in the distance.
He went back to the door and dug out a pair of nails. He hammered one into each side of the crumbling stone doorway with the backside of the maul, the hard iron digging through the broken stone with ease. Once he had them secured, he wrapped the fishing wire around the heads of a nail a few times and then strung it back around the other nail. As far as tripwires went, it was shit. The best he could hope for was one of them to stumble as it came racing into the room. He had other tricks in his bag, but no time to use them.
Santi glared at the limp form of the fallen shaman. If only it hadn’t been so noisy dying, then he wouldn’t be in such a hurry. For the thousandth time Santi reminisced on the good days, when he was a mage and didn’t have to dirty his hands. Soon, soon he would get his class and start working towards not having to work physically. Nothing wrong with standing off to the side and cutting monsters to pieces with a Razor Wind.
Throwing his fading glowstick back into his pack, he stood off to the side of the doorway. The minutes stretched on, inevitable death creeping by as the howls came closer. Santi could only hope it was a single pair and not all six. If all six came, well his story was going to end a lot faster this time than last time. He wondered briefly how his friends and family were doing. He didn’t have a functioning watch, but it had to be close to an hour outside by now. How many people had died already? It was a sobering thought, threatening his threadbare sanity.
He had come back to his younger body, but the trauma of an apocalypse came with him. Now, he was waiting in the dark with an axe for some monster to come storming through the door to avenge its fellow slain monster. It pressed on him, standing in the dark all alone. He urged the kobolds to come closer before his spiraling thoughts led him deeper into despair. He was going to be adding points to Willpower immediately, if for no other reason than he had to keep functioning.
Finally, his salvation arrived as the scurrying feet of the kobold warriors announced their presence. They couldn’t be more than a dozen paces down the hall. Their wet snuffling breaths rang loudly as he panted. Santi flexed his hands and prepared himself. He would have to be fast, the only edge a thin fishing wire wrapped around two badly driven nails. His pulse was racing, sweat sliding into his eyes, regardless of the cool temperature of the temple. One of the kobold warriors barreled through the doorway.