Chapter 43: Ch. 043 – (Then) Collapse

Despite all his confidence, in that terrible moment Jonathan froze. Lighting the troll on that fire would have been easy at this range, but instead he found himself awestruck as it loomed out of the shadows, prepared to feast on his bones. Jonathan just couldn’t get over the fact that despite being twice his height and five times his weight, the thing had managed to sneak up on them without anyone firing a shot. It was incomprehensible and terrifying. As the troll’s mouth yawned ever wider Jonathan became utterly fixated on how its teeth were bigger than his hands. He just couldn’t look away from the daggers of rotten ivory. He finally understood why everyone else had been so nervous. Perhaps he’d bitten off more than he could chew, he decided.

That was when Erkom took the shot. It had been only seconds since the boots of its first victim had been swallowed, but in that time the dwarf had calmly and smoothly swung his brand around, aimed it, and pulled the trigger. The normal brand he’d seen most of his life shot a thumb sized projectile right through whatever you aimed it at, but this wide bore version that Erkom had right now was bigger, heavier, and longer. It was loud enough to deafen Jonathan in one ear as Ekrom’s shot blasted out, punching a hole right through the creature’s left eye before exiting the back of its head. The hole it left behind was as big as a corn cob. 

For a moment the troll staggered, and Jonathan thought that the dwarf’s weapon had managed to drop it in a single well aimed shot. Then, before his eyes, the wound started closing, and a few seconds later there was a milky eye growing in the socket again. For the moment that eye was still useless, but Jonathan realized that in less than a minute it would be like it had never even been shot. That realization is what finally stirred him to action. For the first time in this fight, instead of waiting for the avalanche made of flesh to devour him, he reached out to feel the fire around him. His original plan had been to cook the creature from the inside out, but now that he knew how big the troll was, that would take much too long. Instead, he felt the brand and the powder flask on the corpse in the troll’s stomach, and he channeled fire into them, igniting both. 

The second shot ripped out the side of the troll before ricocheting off the wall, but the powder flask exploded with such force that the shockwave was visible as its rubbery flesh rippled outward and a blast of flame left the hole made by the second shot. It wasn’t the reaction Jonathan had expected, but it would work. The troll was burning from the inside out like a fire in a coal mine. When it screamed in pain moments later, smoke belched out from its mouth in huge black waves that made it hard to see anything at all in the confined space for a moment. Then suddenly the troll was lurching forward again - leering through the smokescreen at its prey. Even that terrible blow, which would have been more than enough to kill any five men wasn’t enough to deter it from taking another step towards them apparently. 

Jonathan had only two options left at that point, and being eaten alive didn’t sound particularly appealing. Instead he started pulling heat from the coal fire directly. The result was that the tiny cookfire exploded into an inferno, spraying fire across the room, and splashing across the slick skin of the monster. The green skin crisped up like bacon and raised blisters in the wake at even the briefest touch. The troll barely seemed to notice being shot twice, or having an explosion set off inside of it - but the wall of fire that had suddenly appeared made it scramble back so quickly that it tripped over its own comically large feet in its bid to get away. 

“That’s it lad,” Erkom yelled, suddenly finding his voice. “Fry the bastard! Burn him to naught but char and ash!”

Jonathan didn’t need any encouragement. Every ounce of his will was already bent to that task. His forehead was drenched in sweat and it wasn’t from the heat of the flames he was producing. Even as the troll turned and fled he kept increasing the intensity of the flames, until their roar was almost as loud as the inhuman bellows of pain that the troll was making. Jonathan was giving it everything he had, but he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. The cookfire was exhausted, and the bag of coal they’d brought with them was evaporating into fly ash at an incredible rate. After that all that he could pull from easily would be the powder carried by the two surviving dwarves, and he didn’t think that they would like that very much. 

The thing scrambled backwards, panicking to escape Jonathan’s flaming grasp. Then suddenly in its bid to escape it tripped over the barricade, crashing onto its back into the tunnel. It reached up to the timbers and tunnel supports, to try to rise to its feet again, but that was a crucial error. The ancient wood gave way under its strong grip and suddenly the earth around them started to rumble and shake. Jonathan barely had time to wonder what was happening before the troll’s blundering triggered a full blown cave in. 

For a moment it sounded like the entire earth was giving way and they’d be crushed to a fine paste. Jonathan was sure they were going to die - but he was at peace with the idea as long as they took that monster with them. The flames ceased as suddenly as they appeared, but the smell of smoke and charred flesh was instantly replaced by dust that made it impossible to see anything and for a couple of minutes there was only the sounds of choking and coughing while the survivors struggled to breathe.  

It felt like an eternity as the world ended around them, but probably only a few minutes later the rocks stopped falling and everything was silent. As the dust cleared, Jonathan was shocked to find that he had been neither killed nor maimed by the catastrophe. After checking himself in disbelief to make sure he was still breathing and that he could still feel all his fingers and toes, he turned to the two dwarves that were with him. Erkom looked fine, in a dust covered, comical way, and the remaining prison guard was perfectly safe in the small passage he’d been exploring. 

“Is everyone okay?” Jonathan asked, looking around. 

“That there is what ye call a best case scenario Jon,” the dwarf said after a coughing fit. “Even all those fancy fireworks ye used didn’t kill it, but buried alive - well, it ain’t going to eat anyone ever again, now is it?” 

Jonathan was crestfallen, but tried not to show it. His big moment of showing what he was really capable of - of channeling an inferno to fight monsters… and he got upstaged by a cave-in. It wasn’t so different from how he’d been overshadowed by his earth blooded older brother for pretty much his entire life. 

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Then Erkom put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “But ye did good kid. Best shot at slaying a troll I ever seen. Maybe ye can see now - even yer best shot ain’t necessarily good enough against an eating machine like that.” Jonathan only nodded in agreement to those words and he rubbed his eyes hard to get the dust out of them. Suddenly they were starting to water pretty bad and the last thing he wanted was for his friend to think he was getting weepy all of the sudden. 

The dwarves conferred in the stone tongue for a few minutes while Erkom reloaded his weapon and Jonathan got himself together, and then the dwarf turned towards him and said, “The bad news is we ain’t got a map no more, but the good news is that if the troll managed to get from that side of the wall to this one that fast, there should be a way to get out of here that doesn’t involve suffocating while we wait for a rescue.”

“I think I can make it,” Jonathan agreed grimly. If he couldn’t things wouldn’t end well for him, but he wasn’t too worried. He agreed with Erkom’s assessment. If something that big could get through then the path ahead should be about as difficult as tracking a cattle stampede. 

Squeezing through the crack in the wall that wasn’t much bigger than him would be the hard part. Erkom went first, and wiggled through the narrow parts without any trouble, while Jonathan watched. Then it was his turn. The entrance was certainly wide enough to accommodate him, but at the narrowest part of the passage the thing shrunk down to half his height and slightly narrower than his shoulders, so he had to lay down on his side and extend his arms so the dwarves could pull him through while he breathed out as hard as he could. Even with all that it still took a couple tugs and a little force before Jonathan popped out the other side, panting and out of breath. 

The tunnel they were in now had suffered a little damage of its own, but the ancient shoring had held, and the passage looked clear. Before the dwarves had abandoned it they’d harvested the glow stones and the cart rails, so while there was nothing to trip over, the only light came from the stones that Erkom and the guard that accompanied them carried, making the walk a terrifying experience. They started walking immediately, following the clear tracks of the troll in the dust.

“I can’t believe a mindless beast like that thought to trick us like that,” Jonathan vented. “It made all the noise in the world so we’d look over here then it snuck up on us from the other side.” 

“Ye best believe it Jon.” Erkom’s voice was likely as loud as ever, but Jonathan could only barely hear it through the ringing in his ears after the shots and the cave in. “Trolls are pure, malicious evil. They’re all at least a few years old and have more practice than you can imagine at trickin’ unwary dwarves to their ends. There’s loads of stories of them lying in wait or clearing out whole settlements of the unwary if the village is small enough.” As Erkom talked, they walked towards where they expected the exit to be, and Jonathan pondered those words. In the fairy stories trolls were just creatures that turned to stone in sunlight and hid under bridges during the day. Apparently, dwarves read their children a different set of stories though. 

“Whole towns?” Jonathan asked. “That seems a bit extreme, even for a creature like that.” 

“Ye don’t say,” the dwarf practically sneered, “And who made ye the expert on trolls, eh? Ye just have to trust me on this mighty hunter - they are cleverer than they have any right to be. Why do ye think dwarves live so deep? After the elves unleashed the gobblers on us we had to keep going further and further down until they were out of reach of any but the luckiest or the toughest buggers out there. This troll fell down a chasm or drifted in from an underground river. There’s no way there’s enough food this close to the deep to sustain a monster of that size for long. He would need—”

Erkom stopped so suddenly that Jonathan bumped into him from behind. The dwarf let off a string of curses, only a few of which Jonathan knew. He didn’t think he’d bumped into the dwarf hard enough to justify all that. “What’s wrong?” he asked. 

The dwarf shone his light at the ground, “You know those tracks we’ve been following? This is where they end.” Jonathan looked down and was horrified to see that Erkom was right. They turned left here down a side tunnel that would probably intersect pretty close to where they were before… but the tunnel was completely collapsed. “Looks like when that big bastard buried himself alive the cave in resonated and brought this section down too. We might end up bein permanent residents here after all…”

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