Author Note; yes... sorry this is late. And I'm a bit behind but still working. 

I've been sick all week. So it couldn't be helped. (Not Covid and not monkey pox). 

Thank you for your support and reading. :)

 

 

 

Chapter 186

 

 

 

The two of us together…

Mallory’s Strength and roaming in the dark far beneath the world in long forgotten dungeon tunnels…

Somehow we stay together while I ride Mallory’s back as she climbs down for us, down the endlessly long and dark abyss shaft. There’s still no end in sight for it. And no matter how far we go it still stays endlessly long, but part of that is because the climb down is very slow.

Is this what a mile deep?

While we’re going down I can smell the rich wonderful scent of her curly dark long hair spilling over her back and into my face. And her scent is nice too. I’m not sure why but vampires don’t seem to get body odor in a bad way. Instead it’s like a normal clean smelling womanly smell, probably also cultivated by the predator genes inside of her.

I feel grateful she’s here. It’s amazing she can put up with this and she’s compensating for both of our needs with room to spare without getting tired or cranky as long as I remember to watch the timing on feeding her.

Still you can only go slow climbing down a vertical shaft like this. Even if you can have a bad ass strong vampire carrying you down a sheer drop you can’t go fast even if she has unreal strength. It takes a long time to secure footing and to not slip. With dark vision you can look for footholds and see them but its very detailed work that even puts her night vision at its limits; this is partly because night vision is for seeing predators not for climbing down vertical shafts in pitch black darkness.

As the hours go by I have to learn to be patient while she’s climbing, just praying she won’t too tired or drop me. And I don’t have the endurance or strength she does so even hanging onto her body she has to do most of the work for me as well. This is scary when I remember that even really good mountain climbers who have spent their entire lives climbing can end up having fatal accidents.

She’s still just going at her own slow pace while supporting both of us and her own weight like it’s nothing in a giant completely vertical cavern. In some places its slower than slow going because Mallory has to search carefully for places to put her hands. She doesn’t automatically see where the next handhold is even though she’s trying to plan her moves ahead. She’s knows she has to be careful how she moves when there aren’t handholds while looking for others and at the same time doing everything she can not to risk our lives because this whole operation is deadly squared and if we she were a normal human we would have died a dozen times over already. Sometimes that means her inventiveness at escaping a trap fall situation requires being creative about using crevasses in ways I hadn’t thought of to help us move. And in other places there’s hand holds but the rock facing is so sheer it’s like trying to grip a surface so slick that her feet slip often. Then there were even a few times where she lost her work and a lot of time after having to go back up a hundred feet or a hundred yards two or three times to switch over to another crevasse and go down it instead.

“Careful Master…don’t let go of me,” she said.

“This can’t go on forever can it?” I asked.

“You can rely on me. Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to the prince…,” she said.

That gets scary.

If she loses her grip we will absolutely for sure die, even with all my abilities. I don’t have any kind of safe fall or fly ability yet. And that’s a big problem. A safe fall ability would have been really useful here or even a limited glide spell. Although we can’t see if there are air predators in the open air of the gigantic deadly vertical shaft either. And if a spider can get bigger than a house in this mana rich under earth area than perhaps other insects can too.

And I can’t use my telekinesis to boost or buoy us up because of the mana leaching shackles. Even if I didn’t have the shackles on my telekinesis isn’t that powerful yet.

We keep working down.

And this thing is so big that the wind can literally shake and push at us with tons of force, just from its normal motions of air flow going up and down this strange tube. The air flow here is constant going by us like it’s nothing.

Every now and then Mallory stops to rest. She’s taking it rather well but even for a vampire this is a pretty good workout.

In some spots she had to smash with her fist using one hand to hold us up against the wall in order to create new hand hold positions. And crumbling and cracking a rock face is so beyond dangerous that it’s almost like trying to hold dynamite and light it at the same time. For starters as she strikes at the rock face if she uses too much force she can cause other parts of the rock to crumble that she didn’t intend to destroy; like the part where her other hand is holding onto.

We almost fell when that nearly happened one time. That’s why she tries to have hand holds for both her feet and at least one hand at any given time.

This is crazy.

“Are you OK, loverrrrr?” Mallory hissed.

“Lover?” I said surprised by it.

But I like it!

“I mean…master? That’s OK right?” she said carefully.

“You’re sweet.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You aren’t getting tired?” I asked as she kept going down.

“Hmm, nah, not yet. I hope I won’t. Vampires don’t get tired as easily as humans though. We naturally become obsessed with finishing our tasks at hand and that helps us not get bored,” she snickered sarcastically with a hum hum noise at the end.

How can she be so positive in the face of so many unknowns?

“Yeah I’m good. Thanks,” I said nervously.

“You sound nervousssss,” Mallory paused to say. Yep, her fangs are out again.

“I want to get rid of these shackles. And I feel so helpless,” I admitted.

She grunted. “Don’t worry. I won’t let you get stolen from me. We’ll fuck some more in an hour to reward my hard work. You don’t have a choice in the matter.”

Umm….she totally misread that.

The day keeps up like this…

Climb down for an hour or three or four, stop and relax when we find ledges, fuck Mallory’s brains out while she tries to keep us from falling off the ledge, and repeat while she eats our cum while trying to keep her high enough to not want my blood, and that’s not easy.

But it’s starting to feel like I’m her prisoner more than a lover.

She’s demanding and forceful. She doesn’t respect me as much now. She still has a tendency to try to bite me even after I thought I’d tamed her. But did I tame her or did she tame me?

I’m not sure I can control her and she’s very demanding. Even in sex she’s demanding.

Should I ditch her? That’s assuming I can fix our connection problem.

How did she get me stuck inside her?

My tool is literally suck inside her...yeah...it feels great however. But I’m pretty sure its not supposed to be stuck!

Is it some vampire slave ritual of some kind? Or something else?

She tried to make small talk to me but I felt sleepy and moody.

I want my life back. I don’t want to be imprisoned under Mallory or shitty dwarves. Somehow I’m already plotting revenge and escape.

But it didn’t work out that way.

“Shhh! Quiet!” Mallory said at one point.

“Huh?”

“We’re being hunted. I can feel somethingsssss coming yessss,” Mallory said while hugging the wall. I heard her grind her teeth just barely audible and I can see the long vampire fangs out. She doesn’t like to show them but sometimes they get away from her when her instincts of self preservation are active.

Are you kidding me?! We haven’t even gotten off the massive cliff face yet. I thought we already had gotten past that giant spider.

Suddenly Mallory’s arm shot out and there was a squeal that I swear sounded like a really huge pig or something similar. Then we heard a whoosh and something was falling it while is squealed.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said.

“Can you describe it?” I asked.

“Itssss something in the air,” she hissed.

What?

Then it happened again but this time from the other side. It was so forceful I might have been knocked off Mallory if I weren’t stuck inside her. I felt like I was jarred so violently I was dizzy for a bit. Mallory reached out to steady me.

In a way this is more dangerous than that huge spider because it has an aerial advantage that we can’f fight.

At the same time she’s also reacting to protect us. Her hand and arm whipped and slashed something that probably was intended to kill me instead. This one too falls down the nearly endless dark abyss that we’re climbing down.

“Was it a spider?” I asked.

A spider bigger than a man might shriek like a big pig right?

“No it’s not a spider. There’s no sign of them or the big giant mother spider. But she could climb this if she wanted too so I want to get us as far away as we can,” she said.

“Good plan,” I said.

“These…were …I don’t know…giant bat wings, but the body wasn’t like a bat’s. It was like some kind of shark like mouth with long needle like teeth over a foot long each in a grotesque predator jaw. And round fish like eyes. But the tail was like two crawdad tails hanging from the same body.

“What the hell kind of creature is that?” I nearly gasped.

“Quiet. There are more of them. They are hanging from the abyss’s wall just like we are. I suspect they have some kind of echolocation to fight and hunt,” she said.

Somehow we kept surviving while she climbed down steadily.

“How far do you think we’ve gone?” I asked after another hour or two.

“At least a mile? Even I have no idea,” she admitted.

How could a cavern be so big that it’s like a huge mile stretched out as if it were a planet sized version of a bee’s nest hole in a tree?

As we keep climbing down there are other creatures that live here too. Things like daddy long legs spiders that are bigger than both Mallory and I but are weak to being struck. Well I don’t know if they are weak to me striking them so much as weak to a vampire super strength hitting them.

We also ran into something that resembled plants but weren’t plants as much as they were mushrooms of some kind growing in here in the dark that glowed. As we get closer and closer to the bottom the more of them there are and the more of them that glow.

None of that seemed so bad until we ran into the cockroaches. Plus their being able to scurry about the sides of the vertical abyss shaft are amazing to see. They are unbelievably strong in survival skills.

The cockroaches are about three feet long. No joke.

“Shit! What’s that?!” I cried out.

“Quiet! Your voice carries easily here,” she warned.

“Sorry…”

She kept pushing them back but there were several of them.

Then Mallory’s fist caught it and swept it away as it fell off the wall leading to the abyss.

“Sorry, I missed that one,” she said.

“Yeah, you think?!” I said.

“I’m not perfect either. That one’s skin blended in with the wall so well. It’s not my fault,” she said defensively.

“Oh shit there’s another one,” I said. I still can’t see that far but I’d figured this out because the circling time window wouldn’t have been long enough for the first one to come back this soon.

Her hand struck that one knocking it over the edge too.

“Gotcha!” she said triumphantly.

“Why the fuck are they so big?” I said.

“That’s a good question,” she said.

As we climb down we see more of them.

It’s a discovery that they are eating the glowy mushrooms that grow all over the place here as we passed a certain point going down. We’d entered a new type of ecosystem it seems. Before it had been barren, and now it was like the strangest of things man could comprehend or not comprehend.

Still the shaft is almost vertical now but it’s slightly less vertical than before. Does that mean we’re going to reach a bottom soon?

Another two hundred yards and hours of work from Mallory later, we found there’s a glowy mushroom forest growing here. We have another new problem too in that the mushrooms and a type of glowy lichen that grows on the rocks here make it more slippery too and this makes us have to go more carefully. This slowed down our descent considerably. In some cases we stopped entirely and use broken rock to scrape away enough of the growth so that we don’t have a suicidal fall to our death.

“Look out!” I said.

Something just flew at us.

Mallory’s hand swiping at it, forced it back.

Then we realized what it was.

“Umm…those cockroaches have wings. And their teeth are huge. That thing was trying to bite us,” she said.

Crap.

Around us, there are hundreds of the giant flying cockroaches. This is like their mushroom farm or something and we’re surrounded by them.

Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!

Cockroaches are the most disgusting thing on the planet!

This totally gives me the willies. And if Mallory has to like bat them away with her fist, who knows what kinds of bacteria and eco whatever, slime shit are all climbing all over her hand from them microscopically. We keep avoiding the cockroaches as much as possible and also the mushrooms they feed off for obvious reasons.

If the cockroaches feed continuously from the mush room beds, then does that mean the mushrooms are basically giant bacteria growth vats? Would we get sick trying to eat the mushrooms? Mallory wouldn’t need normal food but somehow I’ve got to try to have access to some kinds of nutrients too actually.

Somehow Mallory continues to try resist my control while I avoid her tendency to occasionally bite at me. I’m in one piece and she recovers control after each swipe of her huge vampire sharp teeth. It’s one of her wild moments of acting out that I’m still having trouble trying to manage.

Still I get nervous about my situation.

Then suddenly we stopped.

“What? What is it?” I whispered.

“I think we found signs of life just now,” she said.

I followed her line of sight. She points to a rock formation not far from us on another ledge. The angle of the cave facing has changed here too. Not only is there a ledge, but also while the abyss shaft had been nearly completely vertical before now it’s not quite as steep but still greater than a 70 degree angle. There is still significant risk of falling or dying.

It takes time before we can work our way towards it. A good twenty minutes later we’d ended up climbing over to the little pocket ledge.

“See? That’s what I saw,” Mallory said.

We look over at the skeleton in the ledge. It’s in some type of leather armor with the corpse dessicated and with cockroach bite marks all over the bones, which have been stripped clean of flesh. There are also spears, a short sword, and other tools on this fellow marking him as a soldier of some kind. The eye sockets seem larger than dwarves too. Plus the mouth looks all buck toothed.

Whoever this fellow was, he was probably ugly as sin. But well, all bodies look ugly actually.

But what in the heck was he?

“It doesn’t look dwarven,” I said.

“Yeah the skull shape is wrong. But it’s not a goblinoid either. I’m not sure what he is,” she confirmed.

Whew…that made me breathe a sigh of relief.

“Thank goodness,” I said.

“What can you tell from him?” Mallory asked me.

“Well, he’s been dead awhile,” I said.

“True, but there has to be more to it than that,” she said.

We look over him again.

Think. What can we figure out?

There’s no jewelry on him anywhere. He’s wearing a type of caving boots to protect from both muck, water, for combat, and for roving over rocky terrain with mountaineering style cleats to dig into inclined surfaces.

Then we noticed something else.

The helmet he was wearing was damaged in several places indicating a head wound of some kind before he’d died, though we aren’t an expert about it. There aren’t any other areas that genuinely help us know what happened, and because his flesh was stripped away by the cockroaches we have no idea if there were other wounds.

“Ah!” I said in surprise.

“You discovered something else?” Mallory asked.

“Rather that lack of something else. Look there’s no food bag on him. No backpack or rations stored anywhere,” I said.

“How do we know that wasn’t stolen by others?” she asked while looking him over.

“That’s a possibility too actually. But if there were then one species warring on another would probably not like the same foods,” I said.

“True. Let’s go with that theory then. Either he didn’t have food supplies or they were taken by others. Either way it’s a possibility that there’s some kind of demi-human settlement nearby. Isn’t that what you were going to suggest?” she asked.

“That’s right I was,” I said.

“Demi-human…what could live underground but not be a dwarf, or goblinoid?” she wondered aloud.

“Hey there’s an almost imperceptible trail. It’s been disguised in the rock facing,” I pointed.

“That’s how he got here then huh?” she said.

“Either way, a body might mean a settlement or something close by. Maybe we have a chance,” I said.

“Yeah but we still can’t walk in there with me naked,” she said without being bothered by it. She was just bothered by others seeing it.

We’re both thinking the same thing.

What kind of demi-human settlement are we going to find by following that trail.

But for us to be able to reach there, it means we need to do something about my shackles don’t we? If we walk into some strange settlement down here with no way of defending ourselves what would happen?

As we peak over the next rise in terrain it’s confirmed.

A good half a mile ahead of us on the same steep wall of the abyss there’s a huge ledge probably bigger than the one from the giant spider. And we can see that far because there is a ton of glowy lights and structures on the ledge that resemble some form of tower like buildings and fortifications.

Who lives there? What are they?

Why so deep underground?