Warsinger - Chapter Nine

The tunnels beyond the makeshift hospital were completely dark. They’d been bombed into oblivion, with craters in the floor and a groaning roof that rained sand down on our heads as the four of us – Suri, Karalti, me, and the unseen presence of Lahvan - crept out into the open.

“Ugh, that burned sugary smell,” I muttered. “They blew the place with nitroglycerin?”

“Yeah. No open flames down here. It's volatile as shit.”

The corridor junction had been bombed out so thoroughly that it was lop-sided. I knew we were getting close to our goal, because the corpse reek was now so overpowering that it drowned out all other scents. The dead bodies prisoners and guards were scattered everywhere in the straight stretch of hallway before the crossroads. Karalti sniffed curiously at the nearest body, then sneezed. “Blurgh. Gross.”

“Not into carrion?” I stopped to survey, sucking on one of my teeth as I flicked from point to point.

“Nope. That’s all Cutthroat.”

The devs of Archemi had been kind enough not to be completely realistic when it came to decomposing corpses. As overwhelming as it was, the stench was only about fifty percent as bad as the real thing. By day three and at these temperatures, a real body would have been as red and green as a Christmas sweater and leaking black goo all over the place. These corpses were relatively normal looking people who happened to be dead. There was limited bloating or liver mortis, just old blood, pale skin, and splotchy black patches like stains on old leather.

“So what was this about fifty gun-toting automatons?” I asked quietly.

“Mechanical Turks,” Suri hissed back. “They’re Artifacts the Wardens used to guard the female prisoners. When we broke out, they pulled all of them back here and set them up like a firing squad to shoot anyone tryin’ to get down that hallway. The Turks are controlled by an Overseer, this little floating sphere thing. If you take it out, the Turks go down, but we can’t fuckin’ reach it.”

“The Overseer’s behind the line?”

“Yeah. Three or four rows of ‘em, endless ammo. They’re firing Phantasmal rounds.”

“Phantasmal?” I queried the wiki without thinking. “Hang on.”

Phantasmal (Effect; Level 10 Enchantment)

Phantasmal weapons and projectiles pass through non-magical armor and barriers (walls, floors, etc). They damage corporeal living creatures and incorporeal undead, but do not damage constructs or structures. Phantasmal rounds cannot penetrate Aurum, Bluesteel or magically-warded surfaces, such as walls protected by a Protection Geas or Field of Silence spell.

Karalti hunkered in close. “I can detect them?”

“Save the mana: you’ll need it when we escape from here. The bodies signal the Turks’ position.”  At the corner junction, the bodies were thrown to one side like a slumped pile of ragdolls where they'd been blasted by flanking fire in the killzone. These guys had been shot from the right. The pileup and the side lean were pretty intense, so the fire had been from close range. 

“Got any Darkness tricks that might help?” Suri asked, squatting down behind me. “Something to wipe their L.O.S, maybe?”

“Yeah. Hang back.” 

I dropped to a slow crouch, weaving between the buzzing corpses. There was no other sound from any of the fetid, darkened passages, other than the distant rumble of sandworms and the soft hiss of sand as it streamed from the cracks in the ceiling. When I reached the corner, I pulled a small mirror from my Junk pile in my Inventory and used it to try and carefully peer around the edge of the hallway. But before I could see anything beyond a flash of steel, the Mechanical Turks opened up. A deafening barrage filled the crossroads, rupturing the opposite wall and sending chunks of stone raining down on the pile of bodies below. My response was hard-wired: get down and start counting bursts. On my belly, hands clamped over my ears, I counted a volley every five seconds, on. Even for a high-level player character, the blazing mana-infused musket balls were a lethal deterrent. The Mechanical Turks were firing in rows, loading, setting, firing in perfect unity. And Suri was right - they never seemed to run out of ammo.

After a short eternity, the firing squad stopped, and the corridor fell into a ringing silence. "Lahvan! Now!"

The Shade tensed against my will, briefly, before his resistance melted. Gasps went up from behind us as he peeled out of the darkness and flowed down the hall. He rounded the corner, but didn't trigger the Turks. I closed my eyes to concentrate on him, and found I could sense some of what he did. The shadow passed through the four-deep ranks of machines, his form splitting and gliding over the enchanted metal. A clockwork metal sphere hung over the last two rows of Turks, twisted and turning in mid-air like some kind of nosy Lament Configuration. The clockwork machine was engraved with a pattern of blazing blue eyes, all of them restlessly scanning the hall in all directions. Lahvan escaped notice until he burst up out of the squad like an oil slick - at which point, the [Overseer] went from blue to red, and the first row of Mechanical Turks fired.

"Get that Overseer!" I snarled.

Lahvan wasn't strong enough to take it out, but obediently charged in anyway. The Golem generated a translucent, prismatic shield around itself as the Shade engulfed it, and soon the two were wrestling - shadow twining around the shield as the golem repeatedly shocked Lahvan with bolts of brilliant electricity. As it did, the Turks all turned around as one unit, aimed their muskets at them both, and opened fire. The rounds passed through Lahvan and struck the orb, punching through its magical shield and impacting the sphere. It burned out in a sputtering shower of sparks, deactivating just as the shadow let out a sigh and collapsed, his HP spent. The Turks froze in position, some of them in the middle of loading balls into the ends of their muskets.

"Hahahahah, yeah! Eat it!" When I turned back, Karalti looked pleased, but Suri looked… hestitant.

"Hector…" Suri said. "Was that what I thought it was?"

"Uhh. A shadow?" I rubbed my head through the Raven Helmet. 

“Did you summon that?” She asked. “Summon as in ‘Necromancy’?”

“Yeah. I kinda did.”

“And you just sent him to his death?”

“Technically, it was already dead. The guy I pulled it from was also a dick.” I jerked my head down the hallway. "That gunfire’s probably attracting some curious baby sandworms right now, so maybe we can go before we're crushed to death? Pretty please?"

"Sure." Suri sounded dubious. "Let's go."

Suri and I both took muskets and several Phantasmal rounds with us. We followed a row of dim torches past open empty cells, until we reached the Warden's Quarters. Suri and I took positions by the door. She indicated for the mages to stand back, and mimicked a spell by wiggling her fingers. They nodded and took position.

Suri gently slid a large key into the lock. She tested it, wiggling it back and forth, then began to count down with her fingers. Five, four, three, two... one.

Suri turned the key, pushed the handle down, and opened the door just enough to kick it in. 

"Get down on the floor! Get down on the floor!" She shouted at the top of her lungs, sighting down the musket barrel as we all piled in after her into a filthy, disorganized mess of a room. Tables groaned under messy stacks of books, some open, some even just thrown on the ground. Empty dishes, tankards, cast off sacks and waxed wrappers lay everywhere, massed up in loose piles around piles of artificing scrap and crafting materials of all kinds. There were rows of urine-filled jars, some with lids, some not. The smell in this close, stuffy little suite of rooms was almost as bad as the corpse-filled corridor.

And like the corridor, it was silent. The kind of dead, leaden silence of an abandoned house.

"You're fuckin' kidding me." Suri's face flushed with heat as she dropped the barrel and began frantically searching the room, as brutal and thorough as a prison guard pulling apart a jail cell. We spread out, searching under the tables, in the closet, in all the other human-sized spaces. All we found was rotting food, soiled bedding, and a weird device that looked like a small Tesla coil with three pylons. The pylons were set at equidistance inside of a frazzled magic circle in one of the only clear spaces in the suite of rooms, and the burned plastic-and-wet earth smell of mana hung thickly on the air.

“Guess we know what Path one of both of them were.” I held my breath, trying to choke out the gym locker smell. “Yeesh. They clearly forgot to build a bathroom here.”

Suri paced around the edge of the circle like a caged lion. “They were in here for a couple weeks, building this piece of shit, and then blew the corridors knowing it’d attract the sandworms. Those motherfuckers.”

“Can we work out where they went?” I gestured to the device, then to the shelves and tables. 

"How the fuck would I know?" Suri snapped back. She whirled around and stalked to the bookshelves, then pulled one of them over like it weighed nothing. She began frantically tapping the exposed walls to search for hollow panels or secret doors. "I don’t even know if I could pick them out on the street. Half the time, it was so dark in the Dregs that I could barely bloody see them. The rest of the time, they were jamming pokers into me and I was screaming my fucking lungs out-"

"Hey, hey. It’s okay," I said, trying to soothe her. “We'll find them, one way or the other. If anyone can do it, it's us.”

"Those motherfuckers!" Suri put a boot to one of the chairs and kicked it full-force across the room. It smashed the far wall and shattered, sending wood shrapnel skittering across the circle. "Those absolute CUNTS!"

Karalti and I hung back, collecting notes and journals as Suri stopped looking for them and began to trash everything within reach.

Glass, books, and finally, the table underneath. She slammed both fists onto it as she sagged into a chair, put her face against her forearms, and began to shake. That was when I went to her and lay a hand on her shoulder.

"We'll find them, somehow." I said. "But you need to pull yourself up for long enough to get home. We got people to get to safety."

"I know. I know." Suri's voice was raw with barely controlled fury. "But we aren't gonna find them, Hector. You know it, I know it. They're fuckin' gone. And they… those little piss-ants sent the guards to my cell to just start up like business as usual, you know. They had months to think about what they're fuckin' doin' down here, and they... they were gonna just..."

"We'll find them. But you need to get on your two feet and we have to bail out of here." I clapped her back, hard enough for her to feel it through her blackened metal shell. 

“Suri,” Karalti looked up over, an open book resting in one hands. “I don’t know if it’s any help, but I’ve got some names here. It looks like one of them was writing a lot.”

“Hit me,” Suri closed her eyes, straining to regain control.

“Jacob is the guy that did the writing,” Karalti said, scanning the page. “And the other guy was Nicolas.”

“Jacob and Nicolas…?” Why were those names so familiar?

“Get everything you can.” Suri climbed to her feet, and the three of us began shoveling papers into our packs. That lasted maybe ten seconds before the ground began to shake. The ground jolted from side to side; the torches guttered, swaying as the tunnel roof groaned overhead.

The sandworms were here.