TS6 - Chapter 23

The scrape and clank of metal on stone announced the intruders minutes before they actually appeared.  When Kat had earned her improved hearing, she’d thought over a lot of the perk’s implications, but one that had never occurred to her was how boring it could be when she was stuck in a stake out.

Kat could hear everything, but that didn’t mean she could do anything to change it.

She could hear Kaleek and Dorrik breathing in their own alcoves.  She could hear Kaleek fidgeting, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.  She could hear water dripping through cracks in the crumbling masonry as the dribble of liquid slowly filled a stagnant pool.

More than that, she could hear each hesitant step their pursuers were taking.  The group had stopped talking now that they were ‘close,’ but that didn't do much to hide them from Kat’s senses.  Each step, each held breath, all of them were as clear as if they were taking place a single pace in front of her.

Another scrape, this time what sounded like leather and a buckle against rock as one of their pursuers pressed their body up against the stone brickwork of a tunnel wall.  A quiet step, the sole of a boot gently sinking into wet mud combined with the creak leather bending.

Kat raised a hand, extending two fingers before pointing toward the entrance to the tunnel where she could hear the other warriors poking around.  A swell of Psi energy wrapped itself around her, and a second later she could feel Dorrik’s presence making contact.

“Is Kaleek connected?”  She asked, closing her eyes and ducking even deeper into the crumbling alcove she’d claimed as her ambush spot.

“Here and ready to rip someone in half,” his thoughts floated effortlessly back to her over the mental connection.  “What am I looking at?  Will I at least get a good workout out of this?”

Once again, Kat let her focus slip away, concentrating on the squelch of boots in mud and the raspy breathing of their opponents as they drew closer.

“Six,” she replied.  “I have no idea how strong they are.  They stopped talking about five minutes ago.  I think they’re using some sort of telepathy to avoid giving themselves away, but they don’t seem to realize that we were already onto them before they drew close.”

“Six is fine,” Kaleek thought confidently.  “I can tie down three while the two of you handle the other three.  Then you can come back and help me with my partners.  If they’re still standing.”

“Oh!” He blurted out.  “Don’t be too quick about coming back to help me.  If I look like I’m having fun you should let me have my fun.  No need to spoil things if you finish your guys off quickly or something.”

Kat smiled.  In the distance, the first of their pursuers stepped into their tunnel.  Even with her low light vision she couldn’t see the warrior yet, but it was impossible for her to miss the sound of boots slipping across mud as the alien stepped into the open.

“They’re here,” Kat interrupted.  “Game faces everyone.”

“Our modified mana signature is undisturbed,” Dorrik said evenly.  “As far as the others are concerned, we’re walking slowly about two rooms away.  Enough for them to be cautious but more much more concerned with sneaking up on us than preparing for combat.”

Pebbles crunched as another boot entered the room, followed a second later by a deep raspy breath.

“One of them is sniffing,” Kat said quickly, “If they are a race that hunts by scent we could be in trouble, be ready to-”

A sneeze cut her off.

There was the sound of indrawn breath and then nothing.  She could almost imagine the furious mental diatribe as the rest of their opponents chastised the person responsible for the noise.

  One soundless second bled into the other as their pursuers remained silent.  Finally, after almost ten seconds, all of their opponents exhaled at the same time and began moving.

“Get ready,” Kat said soundlessly.  “They’re coming.  I’ll let you know the moment I hear footsteps moving past us.  Attacking from just behind them should cause the most chaos.  We should be able to take down one or two of them before they even know that we’re there.”

“Cooome on,” Kaleek whined.  “Walk faster.  Speed up. Speed up. Speed up.”

Kat tracked the shuffling steps, trying to locate each and every one of the aliens by the sounds they made.

The aliens approached, stopping for a second a couple paces from Kat’s hiding space.  For a moment, she was concerned that they’d spotted her, but then realization dawned.

All six of the aliens were pausing in the center of the corridor.  She wasn’t sure whether or not they were surveying their surroundings or silently discussing their pursuit, but the silence began to drag on longer and longer.

“Where are they Kat,” Kaleek.  “I’m practically packed into a ball right here.  I swear it's going to take a week to get all the kinks out of my neck and tail.”

Then, the moment was over and the aliens started walking again.

“Go,” Kat said, jumping out of her hiding spot even as she pumped her mana into Improved Laser.

She burst into the open, trying to process the scene with her eyes as a fist sized ball of air in front of her swelled with magical potential.

The three alien anglerfish stood in a loose circle, two creatures that looked like bats with four legs and a third that looked like a giant gecko stood in the center of the corridor.  Across the passage, Kaleek dropped from the alcover he had found in the ruins’ loose brickwork.

One of the bat creatures’ heads whipped toward him, but before it could sound the alarm, Kat’s spell activated.

An explosion of light and fire followed by a sharp ‘bang’ enveloped the alien.  

The blast knocked the rest of their pursuers back and the silence was broken by screams of pain and shouts of alarm as Kat broke into a sprint, darting from shadow to shadow.

Crescents of purple light arced through the air, slashing into one of the angler fish in an eruption of scales and verdant blood.  One of the fish aliens staggered toward Kat, blinging its grapefruit sized eyes blindly as it tried to eliminate the after images from her attack.

She unleashed a second Improved Laser, emptying a bit over five percent of her mana reserves in a pulse of energy that engulfed its shoulder in light and fire.

It spun as the flash faded, its left arm flopping limply as a charred crater appeared in its upper chest.  The creature’s mouth gaped open, revealing three rows of needle-like teeth as it gasped in pain. 

The alien entered the outer edges of Kat’s gravity domain as she ran toward it.  She didn’t slow, reaching out toward her enemy with her mind, sending it flying up into the air.

Kat zipped past the alien flipping the direction of its gravity to send it plummeting back toward the muddy rock bricks that made up the floor.  One of the bat creatures swung a battle ax blindly, sparkles of red power trailing the weapon as it hit nothing but air.

Then Kat was upon it, her hands moving with blinding speed as she slashed and stabbed.  Crippling Blow and Penetrate activated at the same time, directing her knife inerrantly toward the alien’s connective tissue and veins.

One second and fifteen cuts.  Orange blood spattered the two of the two of them as her target threw itself backward.

It raised an arm to try and block only for Penetrate to send her knife stabbing directly through the alien’s bones.  It shrieked in pain, a high pitched sound that barely registered with Kat’s enhanced hearing, and its arm pulsed with red light, trapping her knife.

Rather than wrestle the warrior for her weapon, Kat took a half step backward and kicked it in the chest, spinning its personal gravity to triple the momentum of her strike and send the alien flying back into one of its companions.

Just before the two of them hit, Kat dropped her control over the aliens’ gravity.  They slammed into each other like a car crash, tumbling to the ground in a jigsaw of orange blood and flailing limbs.

Before they could stand up, Kat cast Overpressure, turning the bloody trickle from the alien’s wounds into faucets.

Kat’s hand flashed downward, drawing the knife that she usually used for her Pseudopod, and pounced on the two of them.

The bat creature reached up to yank her primary knife from its forearm.  It died with her blade in its hand and the hilt of the weapon’s replacement sticking out of the bottom of its chin.

An invisible baseball bat hit Kat in the chest, sending her flying backward.  The fish alien she’d knocked over staggered to its feet, a pace long rod glowing dimly in its right hand.  

Kat felt another pulse of mana from her enemy, and on reflex she cast Daze, sending a flare of bright light directly into its face.

Another battering ram of invisible force whistled past her head, the alien’s aim thrown off by her counter attack.

She darted inside its guard, wrapping her fingers around its wrist and eliminating its gravity.  The alien’s eyes widened as she spun, putting her shoulder into the spellcaster’s armpit and throwing it into the air.

It flew upward as she cast Pseudopod.  A blink later, she jumped up after it, a tentacle of water snaking upward and grabbing her target by the ankle.  She doubled the upward pull of gravity on the two of them, accelerating both of them toward the battered brick arches of the ruined ceiling.

A jerk on her victim’s ankle pulled it to the side, positioning the flailing alien directly under her just as the two of them hit the ceiling.

Kat’s knee led the way, planted in the center of the fish person’s chest as their combined weight shattered the spellcaster’s bones, planting her leg deep into the scalding hot flesh of their unarmored torso.

It gasped for breath, blood dribbling from its mouth as Kat twisted her hip slightly, driving her knee deeper into the dying creature’s flesh.  She pulled her hand back, extending and holding her fingers rigid as he prepared to spear it through the alien’s throat only for its eyes to go blank and its finger to fall slack, letting the rod it was holding clatter uselessly against the ceiling.

A glance below revealed that Dorrik and Kaleek had made almost as much progress as her.  The first bat thing she’d injured with her opening salvo was lying on the ground in two steaming pieces, bisected by Kaleek’s greatsword within seconds of Kat leaving a smoking crater in the center of its chest.

Nearby, a fish person was bleeding out, its right arm missing.  Kaleek practically ignored it as he focused on fighting the gecko alien.  The amphibian was dancing back and forth, peppering him with ineffectual attacks from what looked like some sort of half length spear.  Whenever Kaleek would swing his sword, it would force the alien back only for his enemy to smoothly rejoin combat with a series of quick thrusts and slashes of its strange weapon, none of which managed to penetrate the desoph’s heavier armor.

Dorrik had also killed two aliens.  One was the other warrior that Kat had shot with Improved Laser.  The other was missing both its arms and its head.  Even as Kat watched, Dorrik burned with purple light, one sword beating a mace aside to open up a clean slash for his other weapon that spilled final fish person’s entrails onto the tunnel’s floor.

Kat kicked off the ceiling, gravity aiding her Leap toward the gecko as the alien retreated from Kaleek’s onslaught.

“Stop!” she yelled, arcing through the air toward the two of them.  “It’s the last one left!  If you can make it drop its weapons, we can question-”

Kat didn’t even finish her sentence as the gecko practically threw its half spear at Kaleek, both of its hands raised in surrender.

“Come on!”  Dorrik shouted back.  “I was just starting to have a little fun there.  Are you sure we can’t fight a bit more?  I’m not sure he needs both of his hands in order to surrender.  He can answer your questions just fine without them.”

“I would like to keep both hands please!”  The amphibian squeaked hurriedly.  “You have questions, I will answer.  I worked hard to get here and would like to keep this avatar please and thank you.”

“Okay,” Kaleek bargained.  “I get that two hands is a lot.  Maybe I can just cut off one?  You can heal him up right afterward.  I bet he’d barely notice.”

“I would notice!” The alien shrieked.  “I would notice a lot actually!”

Kat landed next to the two of them, reverting gravity to normal as she fixed the grinning desoph with a stern glare.

“Kaleek.  You’re driving the poor thing insane.”

“Exactly,” he replied mentally.  “I swear that I’m not acting like a bloodthirsty lunatic solely because I’m bored and want a proper fight.  Ask him whatever you want.  He’ll answer in a second.  He knows that his hands depend upon it.”

“Solely,” Kat remarked, rolling her eyes at Kaleek before she turned her attention back to the evidently male gecko.  He was wearing leather armor with bands of darkened and enchanted metal embedded into it around the torso.  The skin of his face and hands glistened, wet with some sort of mucus that he seemed to be excreting rapidly as he shivered in panic.

“Hello,” Kat said, trying to make her voice as calm and amiable as possible despite the blood from two different species of enemy staining her face and pants.  “My friend seems to want to remove one of your hands as a trophy.  That seems a bit grisly to me, but I also need someone to answer-”

“Ask whatever you want,” the gecko said urgently.  “If I know an answer, you’ll here it but please keep that madman away from me.  He was laughing his snout off the entire time while he ripped Rakleth apart.”

Kat sighed, glancing quickly in Kaleek’s direction.  The desoph was grinning happily, unrepentant.

“He’s nice when you get to know him,” she replied, trying to keep her words from falling flat.  From the panic on the alien’s face it was readily apparent that he wasn’t comforted in the slightest.

“Questions please,” the gecko said, eager to demonstrate his cooperation.  “Anything you want.  You ask and I answer.”

“You were hired to kill the three of us, correct?”  Kat asked, motioning toward herself, Kaleek and Dorrik.

“Not your entire team,” the alien replied hurriedly.  “Just you, the human.  If the rest of the team died there was a slight bonus available, but you were the mission target.”

“Delightful,” Kat said dryly.

“For what it’s worth I’m sorry,” the alien responded, bobbing its head up and down rapidly.  “None of this was personal.  We were trying to gear Rakleth up so that we could challenge the floor guardian.  He knew the three Tyraaks, and they offered our team enough marks that we would be able to field a fully upgraded kit for Rakleth and buy new weapons for the rest of us.  Of course, that hardly matters now.”

The gecko trailed off, twisting its head slightly to look at the two dead quadrapedal bats.

“I am sorry that we needed to kill your friends,” Kat responded without any real remorse.  “We noticed you pursuing our team and assumed that you had ill intentions.  Given that you outnumbered us two to one, an ambush seemed like our best bet to turn the tables.”

“Turn the tables?”  The gecko asked shrilly.  “How many silver dungeons have the three of you done?  What tables were there to turn.  We might have outnumbered your team two to one but I swear by the architects that it seemed that the reverse was true.  Each of you was stronger and faster than our teams and with a stronger power set to boot.  It didn’t help that you took out all of our casters before we even knew that your team was lying in wait, but I don’t think that it would have changed the outcome much.  I don’t like to admit it, but you had all of us sorely outclassed.  Pursuing you was a foolish endeavor, one driven by greed and stupidity rather than rational thought and analysis.”

“Well I’m glad we’ve cleared the air on that front,” Kat said, trying to give the gecko a reassuring smile.  She doubted that it did anything given that the alien was staring over her shoulder directly at Kaleek as the desoph loomed behind her.

“Moving on,” she continued.  “Tell me who hired your groups.  I haven’t really seen a lot of assassins in the tower.  Your presence here doesn’t seem to be very normal.”

“Certainly the first time I’ve been involved in a job like this,” the alien responded.  “Rakleth handled our contracts, mostly resource gathering or transportation between adventurer halls.  I know some details, but well.  Rakleth is in two pieces right now.  It will be hard to get a proper answer out of him at the moment.”

Dorrik strode up to the three of them, both of his swords still dripping with alien blood as he towered over the alien.

“Please,” Dorrik remarked.  “You might not know all of your former party leader’s details, but I would suggest that you tell us what you know.”

The gecko responded with a shrill, high pitched giggle, swaying back slightly as his eyes darted from Dorrik’s swords to where Kaleek was glowering at him behind Kat’s back.

“A stallesp,” he blurted out.  “I don’t know his name or where he’s based out of, but I know the contract came from a stallesp.  Rakleth didn’t meet him.  The leader of the Tyraaks knew the stallesp and handled all of the specifics.  Apparently there were a couple teams that were out and looking for you but they were the first to spot you.”

“So there are other teams out looking for us?”  Kat asked, crossing her arms in front of her chest.  “Do you have any idea where?  How many?  Anything like that.”

“Sorry,” the gecko responded.  “All I know is that they’re out there and that they’re looking for you, but if I were you I’d be worried.  The price on your head is twelve thousand marks.  That’s enough to drag a lot of people who have been stuck on the floor for years out into the open.”

“There’s a lot of those,” he continued.  “Folks that leveled up a little too quickly and got comfy in the real world.  Now they’re stuck here in these ruins going nowhere fast and the prospect of enough money to finally buy enough gear to make a push into the next level is enough to drive people a little crazy.”

“Twelve thousand marks,” Kaleek remarked.  “That’s like two months of grinding for us.  For an ordinary team that’s afraid of high tier dungeons?  If they push and hunt elites two to three days a week, that might take years.”

“Years if they do not spend any of their money,” Dorrik replied gravely.  “They will need healing draughts.  Fortifying concoctions and consumable weapons.  That is for the diligent.  Many lose sight of the climb and start spending their money on food, drink and gambling.  If you are not in a military, there often is not any need to push to level twenty four.  When every new dungeon means risking every skill and spell that they have spent years to earn? Many are not up to the challenge.”

“Please,” the gecko said, raising both of his hands.  “I’ve told you everything I know.  You’ve killed the rest of my party.  Even if I wanted to take on the floor guardian, there’s no point now.  One mark or twelve thousand doesn’t make much of a difference at this point.  I wouldn’t have a team that I could trust.  More money is nice, but I’m not dumb enough to try and sell you out or anything like that.  I’d prefer to live a safe life fighting basic monsters and maybe crafting a little.  I don’t need the kind of worries that twelve thousand marks would bring.  If you let me go, I’ll turn around right now and you’ll never hear from me again.”

Kat turned back to look at Kaleek and Dorrik.  One after another, her two companions nodded.  Finally she locked eyes with the alien.

“Go.”

The word was simple, but it was like Kat had released the string of a bow.  The warrior turned and ran, his boots slipping as he scrambled across the mud covered stone.  Within a second, he was out of sight, the sound of his hurried footsteps and his abandoned spear the only momentos he left the rest of their party with.

 She sighed.  A stallesp and a twelve thousand mark bounty.  That was a lot to think about as they resumed their trek.

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