Chapter 13: Chapter Thirteen: The Really Bad, Horrible, No Good Catacombs, Second Try

As Leo descended the stairs, he observed one of the horrible mutated rats on the ground. The light from the lantern that Lily carried illuminated the freakish thing. It was the size of a small dog, and its fur was still bloody and covered in rime. As Leo stared at it, the option to trigger analyze appeared. Leo pushed his essence out, molding it to form the Mind magic that told him about the rat.

Averian Demon-rat
Level 2	Entropy	Health: 4	Stamina: 4	Essence: N/A
Physical Attacks: Bite: Damage 1-3, Thel’s Rot, A Touch of Frost. Magical Attacks: N/A			Defenses: Cold: 10 Entropic: 4
Special Abilities: Thel’s Rot: Any target that takes actual damage must make a +2 Toughness check or suffer Thel’s Rot. A Touch of Frost: Any target hit must make a +6 Toughness check or suffer -20% to accuracy and dodge for 1 minute.
Riddle: What happens when you take a cold-based preservation spell and mix a little corruption from the Blood Abyss in? These fuckers. These fuckers are what happens.   The Averian Demon-rat is a magical beast that resulted from mole rats being exposed to all sorts of nasty magic. They’re one-third mole rat, one-third ice spell, one-third demon, and ugly all day. Somewhere, there’s a queen bitch rat, and you really don’t want to meet her, but even these comparatively minor creatures can ruin any newbie adventurer’s day. Pro-tip: Avoid letting them draw blood. A good life tip in general, really, but especially noteworthy in this case.

 

            “The creatures can bite to inflict bleed,” Leo said to the rest of his party. “They can also inflict Thel’s Rot to make the bleed worse.”

            “Does everything here inflict bleed?” Lily asked. “It sure seems that way.”

            “Well, this creature does say it’s the result of corrupting a ‘cold-based preservation spell with the magic of the Blood Abyss.’ Does the Blood Abyss actually cause blood-affecting curses? Because that would explain it.”

            Lily nodded, smacking her cheeks twice. “Of course! The magical leakage from the Demon Scar must be causing the corruption here! And that explains the unusual pattern—the emanations from outside the town are affecting the outer magics more quickly and have been for longer, which is why the outer edge is more dangerous!”

            “Why do you sound excited?” Hugh asked. “You just discovered the magic of your town is becoming evil. I feel like this isn’t a celebrating matter.”

            Lily flushed slightly. “I just get excited by discovery, sorry.”

            “Fun,” Hugh said. “I get excited by loot. To each their own.”

            Leo held his sword out in front of him, wishing that he had a shield to go with it. He walked out of the first room and past the two doors that led into the rooms he had explored before. He glanced into each as he went past. In the combined light of the lantern and his sword, Leo recognized an office and a storage space. Both were still covered in frost, but they were far less scary with light, a weapon, and armor.

            Leo entered the room at the end of the hall, another obvious storage room, again with a door at the end. He heard skittering again and prepared, motioning Hugh to the side and Lily behind him. His team took their places.

            The measly three Averian demon-rats that charged were easy to handle—light and gear made slaying them nearly child’s play. Leo found that sword work came easily to him—perhaps it was this body’s donated skills. And while he still wasn’t strong, exactly, the two leveling stats he had placed in Strength let him hit a touch harder.

            A few experience points—and no damage—later, Leo wiped the blood off his sword and then took a gander at the room.

            Numerous odds and ends lay among the wreckage of quite a few barrels, but it was all broken and rotted. There was nothing that Leo could use. Gingerly picking his way out of the mess, Leo headed into the next room.

            That room was huge, a frosted rectangle filled with broken trash, a single exit at the far side. The cold reached new lows as they entered. Leo and even Hugh began shivering as they stared at a massive, disgusting rat, much larger than the ones they had been fighting, among the broken barrels and shattered sundries of the room. The rat was about five hundred pounds—and grossly pregnant.

Leo swept his sword back and forth as he heard skittering, and seven other rats emerged from the detritus all around him.

            “I’m going to try to get Mama,” Leo said. “Hugh, keep Lily alive. Based on the damage of the rats and the armor you and I possess, they should only be able to hurt us with a critical. Or a hit to a location the armor doesn’t cover in my case. But Lily is vulnerable.”

            “Got it,” Hugh said.

            The dragon moved to position himself in front of Lily as Leo stalked forward, sword at the ready in his newly strengthened arms.

            Leo screamed and charged the momma rat. The rats flinched back for a second and he closed the twenty feet in a few fast steps. After their initial hesitation, the rats charged him, but Leo saw the move—the space between enemies that would give him his shot. He jinked to the side, letting his sword dip very low to the right of him as he rushed past the momma rat, and brought it up hard, the angle perfect, and slashed her neck half-open. Leo kept going past a few feet. Momma rat’s body kept half of him free of enemies as he whirled, slamming one leaping rat with a left-handed backfist then slashing another across its body as his sword followed his arc and came down.

            The notification box informed him that he had inflicted a critical attack on the “Averian Demon-Rat Queen” but said that it was immune to bleed effects.

            That means it isn’t dead. Shit. Leo turned just as the mother rat bit his side. His armor reduced the attack greatly, but Leo grunted at the slight prick in his side and noted that he now had a bleeding effect. Damn.

            The Queen’s blood had frozen on her neck, a gross lump of crimson ice that prevented her from bleeding to death.

            And the unexpected attack had cost him. Leo yelped as one rat bit his lower calf, noting further bleeding.

            Hugh took two great lunging strides and bit a rat in half. Leo stomped the rat behind him and slashed the mother across her face. She screamed at him and stepped back, pawing at the wound as crimson blood crusted across her eyes.

            But Leo was off-balance. As he tried to step back, another creature bit his leg. Leo went down, cursing. He kicked the rat in its head as he landed.

            Other rats bit him. Fortunately, two came for his side, biting at his magical armor ineffectually, but a third bit his face. Leo screamed and grabbed it with his left hand, hurling it away and standing. Another rat bit his leg, and his vision went a bit blurry.

            Then healing warmth poured into him, and the bleeding stopped.

            Lily screamed. A rat hung from her thigh.

            Leo stabbed downward at a rat on his leg, impaling it, and then kicked the rat on Lily’s thigh as hard as he could. The rat crunched and squealed as it dropped, its back broken, but Lily was also flung to the side with a yelp and landed, rolling.

            A single rat made for her, but Hugh slashed it open with his claw, nearly severing it.

            Leo stabbed the rat that had originally bitten his leg. He peered around frantically for another enemy, thrusting his sword around erratically, but he couldn’t find another foe.

            “We got them,” Hugh said. “Calm down, Leo.”

            Leo’s heart rate dropped back down, and his panic faded. The regeneration Lily had used continued its work. Leo’s flesh stitched together, and his strength returned.

            Lily used the power on herself as well, then stood and dusted herself off. “That hurt, Leo.”

You are reading story Elf Empire at novel35.com

“Sorry. It got the rat.”

Lily sighed. “I suppose it did. However, I would point out that even with the increase to my capacity from leveling, I only have four essence left. So between that and the mushrooms in an emergency, we’ve got three heals to get to the vault. Try another day?”

            Leo gave it serious, if brief, consideration. “No. We have no idea what kinds of empires and other entities have sent parties to explore this location. Let’s keep moving. If we lose the vault, we’ll likely never get another chance.”

            Hugh flexed his foreclaw. “This quest has been pretty disappointing so far. I would hate to lose any other opportunities for treasure.”

            “Isn’t the r-real treasure the friends you m-made along the way?” Leo quipped, his teeth chattering slightly in the cold as the adrenaline faded.

            Hugh snorted and opened his mouth. Then he closed it, and his brow furrowed.

            I think he’s giving it actual thought. Probably since that’s not a quip by this world’s standards. It’s probably closer to blasphemy or deep philosophy.

             “Figure it out later, b-buddy,” Leo said. “This place is cold enough that I want to get moving.”

            Leo glanced over to ask Lily to follow him, but she was examining markings in the frost on the floor in the center of the room. She shuddered as she traced them carefully with her fingers.

            “Lily?” Leo asked, squatting next to her. “What’s going on?”

            “I see what’s happened, although I have no idea how or why it’s happening. The leakage from the Demon Chasm is entering the magic crystals that power the ritual. The crystals are growing. The excess magical energy is both empowering the ritual and creating leakage that’s making corrupted magical monsters.”

            As she talked, Lily pointed to a tiny aquamarine crystal set in the ground, and then to another sky-blue one next to it. As Leo stared at them, he saw a faint spiderweb of crimson cracks running through the interior of the gems.

            As to the size they were supposed to be, he wasn’t sure—but each was a touch larger than the comparable gem in his sword’s hilt.

            “D-Does that mean the effect will grow over time?” Leo asked.

            “I can’t know for sure, but I think it will.”

            “That could be a r-real problem for rebuilding your empire then, right?”

            “Maybe, but it also opens up possibilities. The one thing the kingdom always lacked was a true dungeon, where—”

            “Actually, let’s talk about it later,” Leo said, standing and holding his hand out to her. “We need to get out of the cold and to the vault.”

            “Leo’s too nice and you’re a compulsive scholar,” Hugh grumbled. “One of you is going to get us killed with whatever your particular variety of head-in-the-clouds is.”

            Lily sighed, took Leo’s hand and stood. “Fine. You’re not the first one to accuse me of that, but I just get excited to know, dragon.”

            Leo ignored the byplay between his two companions and crossed the frosty floor, reaching the far side of the room and passing through the door there.

            And into stairs that headed down farther into the darkness, the light from his sword showing him the upper portion of the stairwell.

            The stairwell’s architecture was different than the castle’s had been. It was not crafted of marble. Rather, it was hewn from gray stone that was old and worn and naturally carved.

            Hugh came up behind him. “You going down, buddy?”

            Leo started to walk carefully down the stairwell—each step was still encrusted in frost from the corrupted ritual in the other room.

            As he descended, he called out, “Lily, why does this stairway look so different from the other architecture around here? Is this just a catacomb-specific design choice?”

            “No. This is actually the top of a ruin from an older civilization. The Vethlyr Imperium, populated by the Ancient Ones. This location has been occupied for tens of thousands of years, by numerous peoples.”

            “What happened to the Ancient Ones?” Leo asked, fearing that the answer would be a horrible massacre by the elves.

            “They were destroyed, sort of, prior to the rise of the elves,” Lily answered, as if she could read his thoughts. “The Ancient Ones were a magically powerful lizard species, and they preferred very warm climates. During the last great cataclysm of the world, the rise of the dark god Cyl, roughly ten thousand years ago, this location became nearly unsustainable to them. The world was already cooling, and a major ocean current switched direction. Instead of warm ocean water coming north to this region, cold water came south.”

This seems like a lot of specific climate knowledge for a medieval society. Did they learn from gods or magic or did some crazy scholar legit figure this stuff out?

Lily continued. “The jungles that had once occupied the shores of the Inner Sea were replaced by temperate forests, and most of their local empire fell apart. The Ancient Ones moved their capital to the continent on the other side of the Split Sea and the jungles there. They left a powerful heat ritual here to make their old capital as warm and humid as they preferred in order to keep it as an outpost. When the Susel Plague hit, however, and the Ancient Ones were reduced to lizardfolk, the city was cut off from the rest of their empire and fell. The remaining citizens fled to a natural swamp at the far southern end of the Inner Sea. But there has long been the undercity beneath Calasti.”

“Wow. That’s a long time, and a lot of history,” Leo said as he stepped out of the stairs into a long hallway in the same architectural style.

Lily and Hugh stepped out behind him.

Lily continued. “People have been settling cities and going about their lives for over a hundred thousand years on Toth, but the cataclysms have knocked people back to near-extinction more than once.”

“What causes the cataclysms?” Leo asked as they walked down the hall.

“All kinds of things. Invasions from more magically powerful dimensions, the rise and fall of gods, arcane plagues… Every few thousand to ten thousand years, it seems, we have another one. And that’s just the worldwide or near-worldwide ones. Continents have their own problems as well, usually more frequently.”

This world feels crazier every time I hear about it.

“Why make the royal vault down in the ruins of the Ancient Ones?”

            “We actually call it ‘the undercity.’ To answer your question, the old king found it when he was just a talented tribal chieftain. It had an extremely powerful magical enchantment, of artifact level, on it. The vault now protects the contents against all who are not of the royal line. I think even if Chao had managed to get to it, he wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

            “Really?” Hugh asked. “I’m impressed.”

            “Normally, I figure you’d argue a claim like this,” Leo said.

            “Eh, Princess Pride knows her stuff when it comes to magic. If she thinks my sire couldn’t have broken in, she’s probably right.”

            “‘Princess Pride’?” Lily asked, raising her eyebrow—at Leo, not Hugh. “Is that term derogatory?”

            Leo coughed. “So, on a different subject, I just had a terrible thought. Are there lots of powerful magical rituals down here?”

            “Yes. The undercity was truly massive. The Ancient Ones built a multilayered city deep beneath the ground as their capital and filled it with untold magic. Our elven explorers had searched most of it, but not all, and thieves’ guilds and smugglers used the place for their nefarious purposes all the time.”

            Leo held his sword forward in his hands, trying to listen as hard as he could. “Well, that could be a problem. Isn’t this just a huge potentially corrupted monster lair, then? Since the leakage from the Demon Scar would affect the rituals here as well?”

             “Oh,” Lily said.

            “‘Oh’ indeed. And what if the vault’s magic has become corrupted? Will we have to fight a great beast of some sort?”

            “That… That might be possible.” Lily shuddered.

            “This deal just keeps getting better and better,” Hugh muttered, his tail swishing behind him.

            As if to perfectly capstone Leo’s comments, the scritch of claws on stone, subtly different now that they had left the frost-covered marble behind, came from down the hallway.

 

You can find story with these keywords: Elf Empire, Read Elf Empire, Elf Empire novel, Elf Empire book, Elf Empire story, Elf Empire full, Elf Empire Latest Chapter