Chapter 11: Chapter 11: Competing Loyalties

Jace and Xavier walked tentatively into the cavern.  Neither had much in the way of a Stealth skill.  The priest had spell options to keep them hidden, but his mana was still too low to cast anything helpful.  Jace understood how valuable his shaman-enhanced Mana Generation was but also realized how hampered he was by his low Intelligence.  The only spells he knew were bonus spells from his class, so having a ton of Mana with nothing to cast wasn’t helpful either.  He also noticed that he wasn’t regenerating as fast as he had been.  During the fight, he felt he was getting a burst of mana every few seconds.  Now, after dumping all his magic into the healing ring, it took much longer to regenerate.  Just one more question for Gracie.

They were faced with a choice almost immediately when the tunnel branched.  The path to the left had high ceilings, while the right one was much smaller, and Jace worried he might have to duck.  “The ogre’s quarters are in that direction,” Xavier wisely reasoned, pointing toward the large passageway.  Jace agreed with him.  He wanted nothing to do with those giants, assuming there might be more, and doubted they would keep Caitlin secured with them.  They moved to the right.

They met no one else in the first minute or two but saw signs of domestication.  The tunnel floor was smooth, and care had been taken to secure torches and shelves in some of the rooms.  Initially, they found only storage areas, open and mostly empty.  But after a few minutes, they came upon closed doors.  They tried the knobs and found empty rooms with unmade beds and scattered equipment.

“It’s lunchtime,” Jace said, searching for an explanation for the vacant rooms.

“Or they are all gathered for the sacrifice,” Xavier countered.

The shaman looked hard at his companion.  At times he seemed eager to see the girl killed for whatever dark purpose the goblins had in mind.  Though, if there were ogres present, they would likely find something other than a goblin at the top of this food chain.  The rooms they found so far had beds the right size for goblins.  Xavier complained about the smell of the creatures, and Jace was glad he had his Environment turned down.

They met their first occupant of the cavern when a goblin gnawing on a meat bone wandered in front of them from a side passage.  It squeaked in alarm, and Jace ended its life with a massive strike.  They tossed the body into one of the empty rooms but could do nothing about the blood stain on the ground.  Looking down the passage the goblin had been walking, Jace strained his ears but had to ask the priest if he heard anything.

“You don’t?” Xavier replied.  “It sounds like they are having a party down there.”

“That must be the mess hall,” Jace guessed.  No reason to think the girl would be there.  She would be fed meals in her room.  They stood at a 4-way intersection.  Their path had 8-foot ceilings, and that height continued if they went straight ahead.  The cross path the goblin had been traveling was shorter, barely six feet high, and wouldn’t be comfortable for most humans.  More goblin quarters probably lay in that direction.  The girl was likely kept straight ahead.

Jace also felt this was a key intersection, possibly joining the goblin quarters with those belonging to some taller creatures and then also leading to the food.  This was likely near the middle of the complex.  He had lost contact with his armor totem long ago and noticed that he had finally regenerated enough mana to cast another one of his 80-point totems.  Finding a small cutout in the stone wall, Jace dropped his Damage Sink Totem in the crevice.  It blended nicely into the rock.

The two continued carefully, finding several more doors.  Xavier listened at each but didn’t hear anything, and they continued.  Jace began to worry that he had wasted the totem as they walked over 100 feet, and he lost connection with it, but the tunnel angled down into the mountain and soon looped back, so they were walking beneath the section they had just traversed.  The trail back to the main intersection was almost 200 feet, but Jace could sense his totem only a few dozen feet above his head and was happy to find that his range could go up walls and through stone instead of just on a flat path.

The cavern was improving in appearance now.  Lanterns instead of torches hung at regular intervals.  Animal skin rugs sat before each of the doors.  Some of the open rooms had bookshelves and fireplaces.  Jace worried they were going in the wrong direction because this was looking more like a residence and less like a dungeon.  He expected to find two orcs or goblin warriors standing guard before the room holding the girl, but they hadn’t seen any security so far.

Xavier was still checking each door they came to, listening closely for any sound that might identify the occupants.  When they were reaching the edge of Jace’s totem, the priest paused at one particularly nice door for a long time.  A deer rug lay before it, and the door had a mail slot and a peephole.  There was even a cord hanging next to it that looked like it would ring a bell inside to announce visitors.

After almost a minute, the priest pulled his ear away from the door.  “She is in here.  I think I hear singing or humming.  Definitely not a goblin.”

“Singing?” Jace asked, thinking it odd for a prisoner waiting to be sacrificed.  It was also pretty quick for Stockholm syndrome to be kicking in.  Xavier ignored the question and pulled an item from his cloak.  It was a metal circle with fine silver lines crisscrossing through the center, creating an intricate pattern that looked oddly familiar to Jace.  Xavier set it on the floor of the cavern.  “Isn’t that the same symbol we saw in Caitlin’s bedroom?” the shaman asked.

The priest flinched visibly at the observation and tried to shrug it off.  “No, it is very different.”

The longer Jace looked at it, he could see slight differences, but the basic pattern was the same.  He filed this piece of knowledge away with the rest of the puzzles from this quest.  “Your mana is back now?”

Xavier shook his head.  “This item generates its own mana and can be used once daily.”  It still needed to be activated, and both men stepped back as the priest triggered it.  Light sped around the circumference of the five-inch disc for a few seconds before it levitated a foot off the symbol and expanded in diameter to almost two feet.  When it reached its final size, it flashed up and down in a blur of movement, creating a glowing cylinder five feet high.  In a final burst of light, it was gone, and standing over the disc was a dwarf-like creature.  He was dressed in glowing white plate armor with a neatly trimmed beard and a massive, luminescent hammer resting on his shoulder.

Xavier motioned for the ally to move, and he retrieved the disc from under his feet.  Jace looked at the priest questioningly.  “In case she has guards inside the room,” Xavier answered the unasked question.

There were no guards in the room.  Jace was sure of that.  He was also pretty positive he knew precisely what was happening here and did not look forward to what was coming next.  They didn’t bother to ring the bell and just opened the door.  Jace took one look at the girl inside and figured it out.

A young woman – Jace assumed it was Caitlin – sat on a wooden chair in front of a vanity, combing her black hair.  She wore a long red gown with splashes of black and white streaked across it in a random pattern.  True to Xavier’s observation, she was humming to herself, but she stopped suddenly when the door opened and stood to greet her guests.  When she was standing, Jace could see that she was very pregnant.

"Who are you?" she cried. “Did Yellrick send you?  I thought the brethren were off gathering gorse root?”  Then she saw the glowing white dwarf and understood.  Her face grew dark, and she repeated her first question.  “Who are you?”

“Your father sent us,” Xavier said.  “He mourns your loss.”

“I will not go back with you,” she scowled.

“I have no intention of letting you leave this room,” the priest smiled wickedly, “alive.”

Caitlin attacked first, waving her arms in a spell, and a terrifying black image flashed toward the intruders.  The dwarf stepped forward and smashed his hammer into the ground sending a burst of light into the room that dissolved the hex spell before reaching its targets.  The dwarf also extended one of its hands toward Xavier and Jace saw more white energy transfer between the two.  If he had to guess, Jace was sure it was mana.

As Caitlin prepared another hex, the priest was faster and enacted one of his hold spells, and the young woman froze in place.  He smiled at the result and then turned to his summoned ally.  “Kill he-“

“No!” Jace interrupted.  He wouldn’t let this happen.  Was this a trial?  Here was an Ordered priest ready to kill a Chaotic, pregnant young woman.  If Jace was also Ordered, was he supposed to sit by and let this happen?  Should he join in?  Never.  He didn’t care if this changed his alignment to chaotic; he would not let Xavier go through with this.

The priest felt confident in the duration of his hold spell and turned to look at Jace.  “Do you know what she is?  Do you know what she is here to do?”

“She is a witch,” Jace answered, ready to explain everything he had guessed.  “That wasn’t a silence spell back in her room.  It was a summoning spell, just like you summoned this dwarf, only she summoned the goblins to lead her back safely into this fortress.”

“Temple,” Xavier corrected.  “This is a temple to the god Torheinton, an evil deity who revels in the chaotic whims of man.”

“Whatever,” Jace dismissed the clarification.  “You knew all this from the start.  You knew what she was.  You knew she was hiding her pregnancy from the town with a spell.  And I imagine the child’s father is lying unconscious just outside this cavern?”  Faylon’s attachment to the girl made sense now.

The priest didn’t respond, but the look on his face let Jace know he was right.  “You had that sphere of invulnerability around you when the chief through that rock.  You could have stepped in front of the attack that took out Faylon.  You let him almost die.”

“I saved his life.  If I had allowed him to come down here, I would have been forced to kill him too.  I knew this temple was here but could not find it on my own.  I needed him to find it and you to get me inside.  I don’t need either of you anymore.  Do you not see what will happen if we do not stop her?”

“She is here for a sacrifice,” Jace reasoned, barely restraining his anger at the priest and wondering how long the hold spell would last.  “She is probably going to sacrifice her child.  She hopes it will give her extra power.”

“It will give her power,” Xavier said.  “So much so that I will no longer be able to stop her.  This had to be done now.”

“And the child?”

The priest spat on the ground.  “She doesn’t want it; why should I?”

“The half-elf outside does.”

“He could have prevented this if he wanted.  He knew what she was.  He liked the element of danger.  Young people,” the priest cursed in a language Jace didn’t know, and his profanity filter didn’t choose to translate it for him.  “They play with fire and never expect to get burned.”

Xavier turned to his ethereal dwarf ally and pointed at Jace.  “Kill him.”

[Xavier has left your party.]

“Oh really,” Jace muttered at the unnecessary prompt.

The glowing dwarf strode up to the shaman with smooth, easy steps.  He had no level or Hit Points over his head, so Jace had no idea what to expect.  The priest was Level 10, so he assumed this creature would be too.  The dwarf attacked first, and Jace again tried to parry the attack with his sword.  This time he was successful, and the attack rebounded away from him.  He attacked through the 20-slot, but his weapon only passed through the glowing figure, and he got no options to enact any of his critical abilities.

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The dwarf counter-attacked, and his hammer slipped through Jace’s defenses this time.  He noticed it only did 13 points of damage after his Damage Reduction absorbed 12, but he had less than 100 health and couldn’t take too many more strikes from that weapon.  Jace made another worthless attack that passed through the magical fighter.  The head of the blunt weapon was solid enough and looked to be made of marble.

As he traded blows with the dwarf for another round, taking another hit of 13, he looked over the short fighter to see Xavier rooting through Caitlin’s dresser to find a weapon.  The hammer he had wielded before must have been a magical construct, and he was low on mana still.  When he found a ceremonial dagger, Jace looked on in horror as this supposed holy man walked up to the defenseless woman and stabbed her in the chest.

The stun spell ended, and she cried out in pain.  They wrestled over the weapon, and Jace knew she didn’t have much time.  During the exchange across the room, Jace had taken yet another hit and was now around 50 health.  He still hadn’t touched this magical construct.  All he could do was occasionally block the stone hammer.

Jace paused.  He could suck mana from stone.  This fighter was built from mana and had already demonstrated the ability to transfer mana to someone else.  On the dwarf’s next attack, Jace stood his ground, let the marble head of the weapon hit him in the chest, and then dropped his sword and made a desperate grab at the block of stone.

[Grapple check.]

Jace said a silent prayer to whatever god was supposed to be choosing him.

[Success.]

“Thank you,” he finished his prayer and then conducted a tug of war with the hammer.

The dwarf had a puzzled look on its face, having never engaged with this technique before, but as Jace focused on the hammer and tried to suck mana from it, the creature was familiar with that type of encounter.  Jace might be a target for its attacks, but he was also Ordered, so once the mana started to flow, it didn’t stop.

Jace looked sideways at his Mana Pool and saw he was absorbing far more than his regular 20 per round.  He was worried he might cap out too soon and would have to cast a totem to send the excess mana somewhere else, but he realized that would only get rid of 80 points and instead dumped as much as he could into his ring and felt the surge of health run through him.  Now he had more than enough room to absorb the rest of this creature’s life mana, and he pulled with all his might.

The dwarf was growing weaker and dimmer by the moment, and within only a few more rounds, he faded into nothing.  Jace dropped the hammer on the ground, and it bounced around with a clatter before it disappeared too.  Jace bent over to pick up his sword and rushed to the struggling pair by the bed.

They were locked in their own grappling match, and while Jace would have guessed that the stocky priest should have been able to overpower her, she still had mana at her disposal, and he didn’t.  They fought over the knife, with neither gaining much of an advantage.  Her gown had torn during the fight, and her pregnant belly was prominently visible.  Watching Xavier try to leverage the knife toward the woman’s stomach and Caitlin desperately fighting him off drove Jace into a rage.

He stepped close enough to the pair for his 20-slotted dial to appear, but it jumped between both humans before Jace angled himself, so he was primarily behind the priest.  Knowing the strike would do massive damage, he attacked anyway, hitting the priest in the clavicle.  Jace strategically ignored the stun option and did a 3x strike into Xavier.  The priest dropped to the ground, his health going from 120 to 42.  Caitlin screamed at the vicious hit right in front of her face.  Her gore setting was probably high, and she was now likely covered in blood.  Jace tossed his sword aside, disgusted by what he had to do.  He picked up the limp body of the priest and threw him into the corner of the room.  Xavier’s health had already dropped to 21, and he stood over the man watching as it dropped to 11 and then six before leaning over and channeling 15 mana through the ring and into the priest.  His math was correct, and the man’s health rose to nine and stabilized.

Jace turned back to Caitlin.  In her eyes, he was also probably covered with blood.  Fear spread across her face as she gathered the torn remains of her gown around her.  “Who are you?  What do you want?  I thought you were with him.”

“I did not come here to kill you,” Jace replied.

“Then what?  You came here to kill him?”

Jace looked back at the priest and wondered again if NPCs could see Level and Hit Points.  “He is not dead.”

“He will be when Yellrick gets here.”

“Is that your master?” Jace asked.  “The man you sold your soul to.”

“I did not sell my soul!”  Anger was quickly replacing fear on her face.

“Not yet,” Jace agreed.  “And there is time to prevent that.  Come with me.”

“No!  This is my choice.  He will kill you if you try to take me.”

“Others have tried,” Jace said confidently.

“He won’t try,” she smirked, looking around briefly on her bed sheets and finding the dropped dagger.  “But he better get here fast if he wants a chance.”  She leaped off the bed at Jace, and a black image flew through the air before her, washing over the shaman a second before the woman got to him.  Like up on the ledge outside when the ogre chief had cast his healing spell, Jace saw images in his mind.  He saw his stone totem, somewhere on the level above, just out of reach.  He saw pictures of birds flying through the air.  There were animals stuck in the mud, a naked image of Caitlin lying on the bed, a person shocked at a surprise birthday party, and his daughter riding a tricycle.  As before, each picture had a number with it, but Jace couldn’t decipher the puzzle fast enough, and his mind settled on a mouse stuck in a trap.

The experience only lasted as long as Caitlin took to chase behind her disabling spell, and then Jace was back in the room, stumbling backward in a daze.  The only image now filling his mind was a furious pregnant woman wielding a dagger at him.  She plunged it into his chest, and the shaman felt an odd sensation flow through him.  A prompt told him he had a bleeding condition.  He didn’t know what that meant, but Caitlin didn’t allow him to find out.  She kept stabbing, backing him up against a wooden dresser, and taking out all her aggression on him.

Each attack wasn’t doing much above his Damage Reduction, but the bleeding condition kept stacking upon itself, and he felt his health drain away.  Even though he had dropped his sword, he didn’t feel helpless.  He thought he could punch back or try to grapple the woman, but he just stood there, letting her play out her hatred.

“Do you really want to do this?” he asked her between attacks, his calm voice driving her into more of a rage.

“Shut up!  Just shut up and die!”

Jace wondered if he could access his totem from this room.  Maybe if he touched the ceiling, but he was backed against a wooden dresser, so he had no chance.  “What about Faylon?” Jace tried.

“Don’t say his name!”  She punctuated the sentence with another stab in his chest.

If Jace was going to do something, he better do it quickly.  His health was once again below fifty.  But if this game was trying to tempt him into punching a pregnant woman, it had another thing coming.

“When you sacrifice your child on Yellrick’s altar, you will see Faylon’s face.”

That did it.  Caitlin faltered.  She swung and missed, the knife grazing Jace’s chest, her arm quivering in anguish.  “No,” she murmured.  “Shut up.  Just let me be.”  Her hand went limp, and the knife fell from her fingers.  “Don’t tell me . . .”

“You will be killing him too.”

“I said shut up!”  She exploded in fury at Jace again, pounding on his bloody chest with her bare fists.  If the attacks were meant to do damage, they didn’t make it above his Damage Reduction, but they didn’t need to.  His multiple bleeding conditions were still draining his health, which now dipped below 20.  Jace had enough mana to heal himself, but he felt he should continue to stand and do nothing.

Caitlin finally dropped to her knees as sobs overcame her.  She slumped before Jace, her face pointed to the floor and her body heaving in distress.  “What have I done?” she managed between convulsions.

Jace let out a sigh and then stopped his downward spiral toward death by channeling enough mana into his ring to stop the bleeding and get him above 20 Hit Points.  Jace fell to his knee and took the crying girl into his arms.  She hesitated at first, but his strong hands helped support her, and she gave in to her tears more completely.  It looked like an orc cradling a child to Jace's eyes, but he hoped Caitlin interpreted the embrace differently.  How the game allowed the other NPCs to see him as a man, Jace couldn’t understand, but he trusted Gandhi was taking care of it.

Her sobs slowed, and she pushed against him gently.  Jace let up his embrace and let her lean back and look him in the face.  “Did Faylon come with you?  I would have thought he would have tried to be part of any rescue mission.  Or did he . . .” her voice trailed off as she turned to look at the unconscious priest.

“Faylon is alive.  I can bring you to him.”

Caitlin sucked in her tears and shook her head.  “What do I say to him?  What can I say to him?  I almost . . .”

“But you didn’t.  Just tell him you love him.  That will be enough.”

Jace helped her to her feet and went to pick up his sword.  The door to the room opened, and a demon walked in.

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