Chapter 40: Chapter 40: Well Timed Events

The group eventually stumbled into a wide, tall room where it looked like there was a whole camping grounds being set up, though with more weapons than a wyrm hunting regimen. The elf shouted for ‘Captain’ while Justice and I hung back, skulking in the last flickering shadows of the tunnel behind them. There had to be thirty or fourty armed people, mostly Humans, arranging things and directing others to go set up elsewhere. There were a dozen Kobolds scurrying there and back, wearing Sumaran garb, heads down and unarmed. I wondered if they were indentured, or just impoverished. They might not even know what was happening, but I am sure they felt helpless to stop anything even if they did. 

“Who are these three?” A weedy looking dwarf shuffled out from beside a lit brazier. No one spoke quietly, like there was no concern that anyone would catch them down here. 

“Eyehollow meat.”

“Hey!” 

The dwarf grunted, ignoring the offended Human, “Fucker’s late. He won’t get his cut for this lot. You three, go down that tunnel, walk straight past three right turns then take the fourth one. Then take your next left. It will be a tiny stinking tunnel, but at the end is your station. Three others are already there, because they were on time. Eyehollow will show too, if he fuckin knows what’s good for him.”

“What about being paid?”

“If you lot were stupid enough not to take your pay out of Eyehollow in advance, its not my job to remedy it.” 

The trio made various upset noises but Captain snapped his finger, a Dwarven guild habit. They shut up. “You any of you three have the levitation scroll?”

“No,” the ostensible leader of the meat said, affronted at their mistreatment still. 

“Can any of you cast from a scroll?”

There was a pause and one of the smaller humans hesitatingly said, “I-I can.”

Captain scowled and tugged on his long brown beard before turning back and into the racks of weapons. He came back out and gave the reader a scroll and some object I couldn’t see from here. “Take that. When it lights up, that’s your one minute warning to cast the spell. You can read simplified Arcane, right? You three are in luck, you are going up next to the noble stands. Lots of robbing to be done. Now go.”

“I’m going back on my route, Cap’n.” The elf had already turned away, and was heading our way, deftly relighting his torch on the brazier as he passed. I shoved Justice back and we both retreated. 

“We can’t possibly kill too many of these people without being caught or killed. We just need to get up and prevent all the Draken delegation from being killed, so the ruse can be-” Justice whispered urgently. 

“My thoughts exactly. Those three. Go go.”

“We are playing an incredibly dangerous game here, Scaleen.”

*I already mentioned that all the Kobolds in Sumar City get killed if this assault starts a civil war, yes?*

“That’s fair. I am just not accustomed to trying to save nobles.”

*An unfortunate side effect.*

We turned down a passage vaguely in the direction of the dead meat trio’s directed path, and began weaving our way to catch up. Justice caught me by the tail at one point and pulled me aside as a different patrol walked an intersecting path. 

Fortune favored us, as the three marks were slow and loud. We caught up to them just as they turned right, just a few dozen feet away from us.

I motioned to Justice that we needed to take them down quietly, and she nodded. 

I drew Katarachin’s Victory. 

They reached the left turn. It was a crawl tunnel set about three feet above the ground. The smell of manure and garden runoff was strong, enough to make the skin where my feather crown used to be twitch. One of the trio gagged, and they argued amongst themselves who would go first. 

As soon as the first one crawled part way into the tunnel, I dropped my pretense of stealth and sprinted forward. I caught my meat about the neck. My blade was already in their neck as my momentum slung us to the ground. I hopped free and darted around Justice, who was choking her victim from behind, even as they fought back. 

“What was-”, the meat tried to crawl back out of the tunnel and I was under them, my blade thrust under their rib cage. I twisted, wanting to make sure that their lungs were too full of not-air for them to make any more noise. 

A snap told me that Justice had finished her part, and we stood back to survey our work. Justice looked a little sick and was breathing a little more ragged than I expected. 

“You okay?”

“First time I killed someone. By hand I mean. I mean, I blew up dozens, like a week ago. But it was from a distance, you know? And the guy in your apartment, it wasn’t, you know, like literally by my hand.”

I walked over and grabbed her hand. It was shaking. “I understand. Before this week, I’ve never seen so much violence at once.”

She gave a short laugh, “You could have fooled me.” 

“Different biological reactions. Kobolds don’t sleep and run hot when stressed. It’s why I’ve been eating two meals for one of yours.” I didn’t explain that I was currently in Kobold terror state because I was nearly conflagurated to death saving her from being mage-napped. 

“Oh. I thought it might have been your gender shift.”

“That doesn’t help, no. As soon as we stop fighting for our life, I’m going to need to hibernate for two days.” My body would shut down sometime this evening, regardless of where we were, according to the Kobold biology I’ve read, but I didn’t need to worry her.

“Ha, me too. This all so cannot end fast enough.” 

“No. I literally will sleep that long as a stress induced coma.”

You are reading story The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame at novel35.com

“Oh. Let’s hide these bodies.” 

“How long until that happens?” I didn’t answer immediately, and Katarachin noticed my pause. “It is soon then. Maybe we can figure out how to mitigate it.”

*I can’t stretch time, but if we find a few hours, then sure.*

We took the three bodies down the hallway about thirty feet, shoving them into a nook that looked like it was a cutout that never got finished.

I made sure to grab the scroll and grabbed three things that might have been the signal. A small geode on a necklace, a large blank metal coin, and a small hand mirror engraved with a small passage that I was pretty sure was associated with a minor god of self-determination.

My guess was the geode, but since I didn’t see what they passed off to the trio, I might as well not gamble. Justice took the scroll. 

Then we climbed into the same hole and made our way forward. 

There was a dim light ahead, like a single candle, so I wasn’t surprised when the tunnel ended. It was a small chamber, maybe ten feet in diameter, and it was open up past where I could see. There was brackish water that covered the floor, making it impossible to see how deep it was. At least one part of it was about foot deep, because three armed and armored humans stood together to the side of the entrance. 

“Who the fuck are you two?”

“Who are you?” I barked back at the Human standing just out of sight of where the crawlspace began to widen. I’d decided that bluffing that I was a tough would be my best approach. I dropped my formal, very flat accent for one associated with Kobold lowlifes.

“I’m the one asking questions here. Who are you two?” I didn’t feel bad having drawn my weapon as soon as I hopped down from the tunnel, because they had a mace they were casually holding before them.

“We were sent here by Eyehollow.”

“Fucking hell, musta been digging deep to get a kiddy sorcerer.” Justice made an afronted noise. “You one of the ones with the scroll right?” Their leader held a proper kite shield and a mace. The other two were a scout armed with a royal kitchen’s worth of knives and a fighter with a sheathed longsword and a buckler at their feet. 

“Who’s to say? Are you one of the ones who couldn’t manage the casting?”

“Do not make me shove your tail down your throat, Kobold.”

“Yeah, yeah we got the scroll.” 

“Good. You’ll have to sidle along the edge. Its deep as shit in the middle.”

“Smells like it too,” Justice said, trying to dampen her nervousness. She looked like she was trying to hide the fact that we were imposters, but then, I knew her pretty well. Perhaps it wasn’t so obvious. Maybe she just looked nervous because we were about to perform collective treason. 

I desperately wanted to ask what made them so reckless as to take this job. Were they paying off debts? Trying to support their family? These three didn’t seem like actual zealous insurrectionists, wanting to bring about a different heir to the empire. 

But it was better I didn’t ask, because then they might ask us the same. 

So we all waited, awkwardly, for some time. This might be a massively dumb plan in retrospect. 

Aside from trying to ambush and murder pockets of these insurecctionists before the coronation, less than an hour away, and likely finding only a tenth of their numbers, I didn’t have a better plan. We were lucky enough to join a group that would come out near the nobles. Perhaps we could give a warning to some of the royal guard. As long as not all of the royal guard were in on the assault. 

We could kill these three now and try to ascend early, but Justice had already explained that casting the scroll would alert someone, when we’d discarded the scroll from the mindgator group. 

Justice and I stood on one side of the well’s drain, the tip of my tail submerged in the muck of the shaft. The other three stood on the other side. I looked up, wondering just how far underground we were. As the light above ever so slowly grew, I could tell that we were at least ninety feet beneath the ground, probably a little more. Occasionally noise, like distant voices came down. Once a pair of coins came down and plopped into the center of the well. Justice and I eyed the trio while they eyed us.

I motioned, “All yours.”

The tallest of them, welding a cut down halberd sneered, “Generous, given that you are too short to reach them without drowning.”

“I can’t swim.” I said equibbly, and the group laughed. 

Not long after, the flat blank coin began to glow between my fingers where I’d been fiddling with it. The same was true for a coin that was being flipped by the scout in the trio. 

“Okay, well I guess its time,” they said. I looked up at Justice and she nodded back pulling out the scroll.

“Wait, hold your damn horses, I’m fuckin coming.” A gruff voice came from the tunnel we’d come out of, startling all five of us. 

I whispered, “Prep the spell. Cast on my signal.”

Justice began softly chanting Arcanist, and the shuffling and clanking from the tunnel came faster. “You fucks, one second!” From the hole, a Human in heavy leather and metal plates came out sprawling in the muck, as the ground began to glow in the shape of a disk just barely smaller than the well’s diameter. He looked like jerked meat and was missing one eye, the socket healed over and left empty.

“Eyehollow, we thought you weren’t making it.”

“I, fuck-” he said as he pulled himself out of the muck, “-was waiting for a trio I’d sent along ahead. Thought they got lost.” He stepped onto the disk with the rest of us and set his one good eye on Justice and I. “Who the fuck are you two?”

“Now!” 

You can find story with these keywords: The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame, Read The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame, The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame novel, The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame book, The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame story, The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame full, The Halcyon Call or: How I Learned to Befriend Isekai and Play the Metagame Latest Chapter