Chapter 161: 9.4 – Secrets of Tarin-Tiran

Robin needed a distraction. No, he was the distraction. He just needed an idea that wouldn’t get him skewered or put him in the line of whatever ability it was Gis regularly used to usurp the will of other beings.

The rest of his party would attack soon. Robin needed Gis and his mooks to be looking the other way when that happened. If they could do some serious damage, take one or two of Gis’s team member out right away it would go a long way to making this encounter a survivable one.

They might even win it.

Though as Gis seemed to have gone through some kind of power-up, that might be a fool’s hope.

Well, there were entrances to and from Silinir’s territory all through Tarin-Tiran. You could never be too far from one, once you descended beneath the surface level of the city. Might as well use that.

Robin concentrated. Something phantasmal, but still fitting with the crystalline, wild-magic flavour of the area would be idea. Phantasmal horde of crystal rats, perhaps?

His fingers flashed through the gestures of [Lesser Phantasm] and a chittering arose, sounding as if it were drifting down the tunnel closest to opposite both himself and the entrance by which the rest of the party would attack.

‘Ugh,’ the woman in mage’s robes complained. ‘Sounds like more of those rats. Haven’t we squashed enough of them yet?’

Robin used [Visual Phantasm] to add flickers of light flashing in the shadows down that tunnel. Enough to imply the presence of the glowing crystals embedded in the rats’ skulls, at least.

The hobgoblins began sniffing suspiciously, throwing glances at Gis, as if expecting the priest to say something.

He did.

‘You,’ he pointed at the leftmost scout, ‘go and deal with this. It’s just a few rats.’

The hobgoblin looked like he would like to argue, but he clearly knew better than to do so. he headed toward the tunnel. The rest of Gis’s party looked like they were about to return to their search,

That wouldn’t do. The whole group needed to be distracted. Time to amp up the threat.

Robin added the sound of a minotaur’s roaring, with a deep, crystalline reverberation beneath it. The sound was fresh enough in his mind, after all, and that would make Gis and his minions pay attention. Especially if Robin backed up the sound with a bit of terror of his own making.

The bard uttered [Whispers from Beyond], weaving it into the gaps in the illusory sound he had conjured and targeting the mage. It was a slightly tougher target, but safer than Gis. Besides, something told Robin that the two meatheads in Gis’s service might have some kind of fear resistance. Just an instinct, but he might as well follow it.

The mage staggered, face blanching white as whey, and the sooty red light that had been building around her frame to enhance her strength flickered and died.

The melee specialists had drawn their weapons and were already advancing toward the tunnel, grins of anticipation on their faces. Gis stood behind them and to one side, impatience radiating off his thing frame. The scouts were crouched athwart either side of the tunnel entrance, clearly taking up positions to flank or hamstring targets as the opportunity presented itself.

Everyone was focused on the tunnel, and that is the moment that Vance charged in, making a beeline straight for the staggered mage. The librarian had clearly been paying attention, and the glory of a warrior of legend flared around him like a corona. Purple-white missiles of pure force flared around him, also lancing forward to strike the already staggered mage.

The sword of paper flew, aimed straight for the mage’s neck, only to be brought to a halt at the last second.

‘Freeze!’ Gis shouted, stopping Vance in his tracks.

The immobility only lasted a few seconds, but that was long enough to arrest Vance’s momentum and for the mage to stagger away.

Robin trusted Vance to handle himself and immediately launched an attack on the priest while he was distracted. This time he did gamble on [Whispers from Beyond]. Anything else he had would do a bit of damage or distract, but if he could get that spell to land it would take Gis out of the battle for several crucial seconds.

It didn’t work. Gis’s will was too strong.

‘Bort! Cliv!’ Gis’s voice was the lash of a whip. ‘Pay attention! There is a threat at our heels!’

The meatheads turned from the tunnel, and, after sharing a glance, one took up a defensive position between the tunnel and Robin’s party, while the other moved—impossibly quickly—to engage Vance.

It was not a good matchup. Vance was all about skill, but his opponent was a mountain of a man who used brute force for both offence and defence. Given time Vance could wear his opponent down, use the gap in skill to maximise on small mistakes, but Vance wasn’t going to have that time.

The mage was recovering. Gis had shaken off Robin’s spell with no obvious effects. The party was outnumbered, physically, and definitely couldn’t match the magic most probably at Gis’s command right now.

Even as Robin watched the priest incanted a spell and roiling chains of mist began to spiral out from him. Shades, half-seen figures, wailed at the ends of the chains, bound in some kind of spectral service to the priest, clutched and grasped at any who came near to Gis, and the effect spread out a few dozen feet from him.

Robin quickly and quietly fell back, trying to avoid getting caught in the effect. he didn’t know what it did, but it would likely reveal his presence, and that wasn’t something he was prepared to risk.

Vance was falling back before his opponent’s advance. The mage was powering back up, the red nimbus around her deflecting most of Drev’s bolts of force. Daggers flew through the air as Jhess took shots of opportunity, guided by Savra’s insight, but soon Robin’s friends would go from holding their own to being driven back by the force of Gis’s.

Once more Robin called on [Whispers from Beyond] but this time he chose a new target: the hobgoblin scout cowering near the tunnel. They needed a distraction to cover their retreat.

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This time the spell took. The hobgoblin screamed in horror as the impossible sounds sank into his ear and began twisting his brain around themselves. The scout took off running, slamming wildly into the the wall before ricocheting off and sprinting away down the closet tunnel.

‘What—idiots!’ Gis shouted.

The party fell back, following their plan.

Well, most of them did. Robin wasn’t in position, driven too far to one side by Gis’s spectral defences.

‘After them!’ Gis snapped. ‘No! You too. Leave the idiot,’ the priest snapped at the hobgoblin as he made to chase after his feeling companion.

Reluctantly, the hob turned to follow Gis’s orders.

Robin filed that away in case it was a potential weak point. For now, he focused on staying still and silent and not getting caught. If he was going to be stuck on the other side of Gis from his party, he wasn’t going to take any chances, though he would take any opportunity to stab the old bastard in the back that presented itself.

He followed behind, trailing Gis’s group as they chased after Robin’s party. The bard used [Visual Phantasm] whenever he could, trying to keep Gis and his minions from getting a solid line of sight on Robin’s party mates.

‘They’ve got that illusionist with them,’ Gis growled at one point, loud enough for Robin to catch. ‘Has to be him. Lord Urkhan…’

The priest moved out of range. Robin cursed but followed. Ahead of them all, his party took potshots and dodged that turned out to be traps.

Gis and his party were terrifyingly efficient at circumventing most of the challenges Ruprecht had cooked up along the way. They didn’t see all of them, but there was enough defensive magic at hand to blunt the worst of the damage, and Gis’s dark gifts from Urkhan were enough to force the body to heal, even though the pain of the priest’s care was clearly excruciating.

Robin didn’t imagine a bone being commanded to heal would do so in any way that was pleasant, and the screams of pain from Bort or Cliv or whoever it was seemed to agree.

They still moved with terrifying speed and efficiency. Robin catalogued each and every power he witnessed, every trick they pulled. No one had yet spotted him, and he was gathering valuable information, even though his mind reading spell was long since expired.

It continued this way for several minutes. Robin grew increasingly worried. Gis had grown in power, notably and visibly. His companions were nowhere near as powerful, but each of them were worrying in their own way. And though there was clearly fractiousness between several of them, Gis’s iron-handed rule always quashed dissent before it could impact their overall effectiveness.

Much.

But there was little sign that Robin’s party was going to escape pursuit. Gis was too much of a dynamo, his healing energies and irresistible commands to continue driving his compatriots on even when they might otherwise have stopped.

Then something stopped them.

Well, not so much stopped as catapulted them in an entirely new and unexpected direct: straight down. The entire floor of the tunnel suddenly vanished, falling into darkness and taking Gis and company with it.

Robin barely managed to stop himself from rushing over the edge, he had been following so quickly on their heels, worry for his party gnawing at his gut.

Rocks crashed and rumbled, tumbling down into the darkness. Briefly, Gis’s magic lit up the shadows with a crimson flare, but that vanished quickly.

Then there was silence.

‘Hey, bard!’ Jhess broke that selfsame silence a moment later, calling from across the pit. ‘You all right over there?’

‘Fine, yeah,’ Robin called back. ‘What happened?’

I dropped them down a shaft that intersects with Silinir’s territory. I couldn’t expand too close to it, lest I risk alerting the other dungeon, so I have no idea how lethal or not it might be, but it should at least distract them for a good while.

‘And they can’t climb or fly back up?’ Jhess asked, fingering the edge of her dagger.

No. I collapsed a deadfall and sealed the tunnel on top of them.

‘Old one-eye isn’t going to like that.’ Robin smiled. ‘Well done, Ruprecht!’

Still, they had no confirmation that the priest was dead. That was a sobering thought. And it meant they had very little time to waste. If Robin knew anything about Gis, it was that the old priest was as persistent as he was mean.

‘We need to move,’ he said. ‘We can’t count on our enemies being down for the count, and with what I learned from their minds, we can’t afford to let them get ahead of us.’

‘Why?’ Savra looked at him sharply. ‘What did you see?’

‘Nothing good,’ Robin said, striding off into the darkness. ‘It’s like this…’

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