Chapter 11: Metal Bars

A temporary stalemate had formed. 

We were eyeing the blocked exit and our host’s guards were waiting to see what we would do. Would we surrender without a fight and let them throw us in the dungeons for as long as they saw fit, would we try to fight or attempt to make a bolt for it?

Roxi was throwing death stares every which way with clenched fists as her gaze darted back and forth like a corned tiger. Going by that and the anxious looks she was throwing my way, I could tell what she was thinking. 

Suicide by guards. 

Attack so hard they would have to kill us in the process, instead of capturing us or wounding us into submission. Things were pretty desperate when the best outcome you think of was getting yourself killed and starting over at a village that was a two days march away.

Die and meet the creepy ‘friend’ in the death dream? Have to pass through the Basiphusis grove again?

An emphatic fuck no!

Can we beat all these guards? Probably not, but we didn’t need to beat all fourteen guards, just the two guarding the door with the officer that escorted us and somehow keep the rest from following us, Then if we could escape the fort we could find somewhere to hide in the town until we could find a way out.

Grabbing Roxi’s sleeve, I tugged it to grab her attention. “Chains,” I mouthed to her soundlessly. 

Her eyes widened with surprise before her expression flashed with recognition and finally then settled on determined.

Ok time to dance.

Stepping backwards towards the doorway, I activated [Daze Wave] and watched as a wave of purple energy roared forward, catching guards in its wake and like a bomb in a confined space, threw them into the walls and shelves. 

Ok, that is more powerful than I thought it would be.

Spinning around I launched another at the door guards who were already moving to stop us.

Roxi, quick to follow my lead, was already cursing every guard she could see downed or not, binding them with chains of darkness. “What are you waiting for? Time to go, Aisling!” she yelled as she ran into the hallway.

“One sec!” I yelled in reply as I threw a [Flash] into the air and then dropping a decoy before following her, invisible to even the guards I hadn’t blinded.

Now you’d probably think we could just leave a bunch of bruised, blinded and chained guards just sprawled out on the ground as we made our escape.?

Maybe you’d be right, but I wasn’t going to waste our miraculous escape on ‘maybe right’. Turning back to face the room we’d escaped, I dropped my explosive [Shimmer Barricade] across the entrance.

Turning full circle as I searched for my bearing, I spotted the way we came in and started running forward. Barely five paces into my escape a green-sleeved arm shot out of a doorway to my left, grabbed me by the pack and pulled me inside. 

Diving after me Roxi cursed my abductor and pulled her jagged athame on him.

My abductor turned captive was an unassuming human male dressed in officer’s greens, and whose features were altogether too average and utterly nondistinctive. “Hey, hey, hey! Stop! No stabbing! Please! I’m trying to help you,” the officer hissed struggling to balance keeping quiet with making himself heard.

Pressing her athame up against his throat Roxi hissed back at him with all the menace she could muster, “Speak. Quickly.”

“You’ll never make it if you go out the front entrance. Do you really think you’re going to make it through two gates, as well as a town and a military camp swarming with soldiers? Try running with a few crossbow bolts in your legs. I know another way out, a better way and you'll be outside the town and far on your way before they manage to search the entire fort and not find you,” he somehow bragged confidently at dagger point.

“We’re already gambling with our lives here, why not one more wager? I say we follow him,” I opined, gesturing for Roxi to lower the athame.

Sheathing her dagger with a shrug, Roxi gave me a crooked grin, “Your plan, you’re doing pretty well so far.”

“Right, everyone happy? Shall we go now?” the officer asked with a level of sass far below his paygrade. Taking our silence for agreement, the officer entered the corridor at a brisk walk, “Come on! Keep up!”

Following along, our guide led us on a twisting route deeper into the fort, that seemed to avoid any other soldiers, guards, servants or other officers. Occasionally we heard shouting or the heavy footfalls and clatter of armor of guards close by, but we never ran into them. It was almost uncanny, his ability to avoid anyone else.

The deeper into the fort we went, the further down we went also, past storerooms, cellars, ice houses and dungeons until we entered a particularly derelict pantry.

“They stopped using this one a couple decades ago after rats kept getting in despite all their best efforts,” the officer explained, before he started dragging a tall cabinet away from the wall. “They might have succeeded if they had managed to find and wall off this tunnel. Too bad they had forgotten about it,” he chuckled waving us into the pitch black.

Following as soon as we were inside he began tugging on a handle mounted onto the back of the cabinet to drag it back into place. The pantry had been dark, but the tunnel was darker and as our entrance slowly sealed shut, that little sliver of dim light shrunk until it finally vanished.

If this was a movie some character would probably make some comment about having to face the dark and then pull out a light source. I was already popping open my ability creator to modify my flash spell into a torch, when our guide clapped his hands together loudy.

“Right, we have a long dark path ahead of us before we come out the other side,” said the officer as he pulled out a milky looking crystal and rubbed his palm across a rune scratched into one of its polished faces.

Pure white light poured out of the crystal, stealing my vision as if I had stared into the noon sun. So that’s what it’s like to be on the receiving end.

“Sorry, sorry. Should have warned you,” came a voice ahead of me as I blinked trying to clear my eyesight.

I could make out Roxi’s silhouette as she towered over our new friend, “Excuse me, but who the hell are you and why are you helping us?”

“Right… About that…” he began, scratching his head with one hand, ”Question time can wait till we’re outside. Trust me, I’ve gotten you this far and well, let me get you the rest of the way. Then hopefully I won't have to answer the ‘can we trust you’ question ten times.”

* * *

Our journey to the center of the earth had a predictably downhill incline as we probably passed under the town. The further we travelled the damper the tunnel got, the stone walls that met above us in a round arch were slick with a film of water and slime. We could hear the sound of running water through the walls, my guess was the sewers, they’d probably laid this tunnel at the same time.

It was lacking the smell of saltwater, but I couldn’t help but think back to a more familiar tunnel where this all started. Hopefully this one had a much lower risk of collapsing.

The tunnel seemed to have a presence that abhorred smalltalk and with our discussion tabled till we were outside, the only sound that marked our passage was the splashes of our footfalls on the wet ground. Eventually the splashes grew louder as the passage’s incline evened out, allowing for more water to pool along the tunnel’s floor.

“We’re nearing our destination now, the tunnel should have taken us to the west of the town near the road to the Capitol. Our exit is in the river bank, far beyond the army’s camp. Even if there wasn’t a treeline blocking sight of this part of the river from the fort, the river bank would hide our exit,” the officer explained, pocketing his crystal as a faintly lit opening seemed to grow up ahead, “Good thing too, since it should be a clear sky once we’re outside and the full moon is only a few days off full.”

Instead of relieved, I was starting to feel anxious the closer we got to the exit. My gut seemed to twist in upon itself as I imagined what could be waiting for us on the other side. Our guide had seemingly saved us and I wanted to trust him, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t imagining guards waiting for us just outside.

The opening was now close enough now for me to make out the vertical lines of metal bars barricading our exit. Were they set in the stone? Was it a gate? Would it be locked? Would we be able to open it? Would we have to break through them? Would we have to turn back?

By the time we reached the gate, yes it was a gate, I had gotten myself so tangled up with anxiety and trapped in my own thoughts, that I had to have Roxi guide me to a safe halt. “Aisling, wake up! We’re here! Shifty over there is just picking the locks,” she whispered, as she bent down close enough for me to, even in this dark, count the hairs of her eyelashes. I couldn’t stop staring at the way her lips parted slightly as she waited for a reply.

“Umm ahh—,” I stammered, my brain short circuiting as it realised an actual response was required, before I was mercifully interrupted.

The gate’s lock popped open with a heavy click. “Are you two coming or are you planning for a lovely future together in the ground once they catch and bury you? We have a bit further to go before we can safely stop and talk,” ‘Shifty’ said. I wasn’t sure if it was amusement, frustration or both I could hear in his tone.

We emerged from the tunnel into the underside of a stone bridge much like the one we had crossed on our way to the town. Our exit was disguised as just another drain or culvert in a well designed sewage system, well at least for the technology level. It was even placed next to two other such openings. 

I guess emptying sewage into the river downstream was better than dealing with it in the streets or paying for it to be carted out each night.

Outside it wasn’t much brighter than it had been inside the tunnel.  It was definitely night and the light we had to see by was the stars above us and the still rising moon that was just peeking up over the distant horizon. How much time had passed while we were escaping? It had still been maybe an hour off sunset when we’d entered the fort. 

Swiping open my UI, I check the clock. 8:30pm? When did the sun set? Its summer so the days would be longer, but there were mountains to our west for it to disappear behind. Had we lost several hours escaping?

Escaping, we hadn’t escaped yet.

The river was too wide and deep to try and wade across, so instead we had to risk climbing the river bank, crossing the bridge and hope no one was out this late to see us. The river bank was muddy as we made our way up, and Roxi was once again there to catch me when I slipped. It was like her job or something now, to catch me. We made it across the bridge, and if they did see us, they didn’t make it obvious. Noone started shouting and no alarm bells rang out.

Once we were safely across we left the road, climbing over a fieldstone wall into a farmer’s orchard and then when we were deep enough to not be seen, we continued on mirroring the road’s path westward.

Traveling through orchards and crops was a lot slower than on a road, but the pace Shifty was setting was faster than comfortable and there was no sign of us stopping soon.

I was having trouble judging how long we’d been walking or how far we’d walked, but looking through the treetops I could see that the moon was now almost directly overhead. Is this what the game had become for me? Short periods of action followed by lots of walking? If true, my pained virtual legs and feet weren’t happy with it.

Neither was my head happy for that matter, I didn’t get much sleep last night thanks to our dinner date with the lizards and today we’d marched almost without break. My brain was screaming at me, ‘It’s nighttime! For the love of all the Gods please sleep!’ 

Sleep deprivation combined with exhaustion equals killer headache.

There was a thicket of trees ahead. Had we reached the end of the farms?

I could already feel my sense of the world around me narrowing down to what was directly in front of me and the time between my yawns was growing shorter and shorter. 

I think the medical term here is ‘I'm dead on my feet’. 

Feet? Feet, oh yeah I’m dragging my feet…

Pack is too heavy. Everything is heavy,

Why are my eyelids so…

“Roxi? What are you doing?”

Why is her hand behind my back? How did I end up on the ground?

“Oh. This grass is soft.”

“I’m just… I’m just going to rest my eyes a—”