Aeres Academy - Chapter 11 preview

In the end, I decided on prudence. Now, if patience had come along and she was cuter; I might have chosen her too. Both of those virtuous sisters were of the same mind in this case, and I re-routed myself down the side corridor, arms bent a little as I readied myself for an ambush. To my mild surprise, I was not attacked the moment I exited the small, tight side corridor but rather, came into a broken and shattered cavern. 

Knocker bodies, lying where they had been struck down, their chests cut open to retrieve the monster shards lay scattered and beaten. The entire place looked like a scene from a Dexter outtake, with blood splatters - a weird greenish-blue in the underground light - everywhere.

"Guess I'm late..." I muttered to myself, verified the ground was clear and then, spotting the deep treks going right to one of three entrances, chose to take the leftmost - and trackless - exit. Not that there might not have been another who took it, the lack of bloody footprints was no indicator of anything but someone not wanting to wade through blood.

So, good sense, I guess?

Down that path and then another branching pathway. Going left, I found myself having to bend low and creep forward with my knees beginning to protest the crouched movement after a few hundred meters. I was grateful when the ceiling rose and allowed me to stand. Unfortunately, it also ended, and it took me looking all about before I realized I had to climb.

In this case, I wedged as I climbed rather than go hand-over-hand. It was a little more difficult to do so, but it meant that I could look the way I was going. A good thing too, because I had time enough to spot the knocker that popped its head over the ledge that was my destination before it disappeared and returned with a big rock.

Big for a five foot, wiry monster at least. Knockers were humanoid as mentioned, five feet tall in general, built like a wiry grade five student; but with a quarter of their looks and ten times the hair. They were furred, but in a light down that kept them warm in the underground but not too hot. Flat, upturned nose like a pig, beady eyes with disturbing, too large pupils that took up its entire iris. Clawed three fingers and an opposable thumb and big, padded foot of a predator.

When the knocker tossed the rock, I managed to bat the rock aside with my arm, leaving my wrist and palm pulsing with agony. Wedge, slide upwards, wedge, slide, wedge, slide. Shuffling upwards, pushing with leg and back, I ascended as quickly as I could before the bastard returned. 

Outside of my vision, it kept chittering and screaming, sounding more like an ape than a sapient creature. To speed things up, I added my hands to the help, moving sometimes with only two points of contact – foot and back or hand and back. The next stone caught me as I was shifting upward, tossed without the damn creature showing its face. It caught me on a shoulder, bounced off and left a deep bruise behind. 

Rather than be a target, I shifted position to the other wall, so that the next time they looked, I was not where he expected. That saved me from a pair of rocks, the thud, thud of clattering rocks alerting them that something was wrong. 

Too late.

Three of them poked their way around the ledge this time. I had risen enough that I could grab at the leg that I spotted. Yanked and pulled on it, disrupting the knocker’s balance. Not off the ledge, but sideways into their friends. 

Did knockers have friends? Family and a society? I had no idea. Still don’t. Some delvers choose to learn such things, chose to be researchers and grow their understanding of the underworld. Others focused on the one thing that mattered. 

How to kill our enemies.

Once the three were trying to sort their feet out, I got one hand on the edge of the passage, elbow pointed to the side. I pushed, levering myself to the top of the cliff and tucked the lower part of my body inward. Tucked myself at the same time as I twisted, swung legs upwards to kick at where the knockers were.

Considering I had no real view of the creatures who had fallen back a little as they sorted themselves out, the fact that I impacted at all was fortuitous. That made my lighter opponent fall over, from surprise just as much as injury. 

After that, I was up in their midst. Crouched low, wading in, striking with elbows and knees at body parts and torsos that presented themselves. 

Close quarters fighting was more about feel and sense of body structure than sight. You moved and hit by instinct, trusted in your ability to take incoming punishment and angled feet and body so that incoming attacks whiffed by. 

More often than not, you could not see all the viable targets, but as humanoid bodies were built roughly the same, joints and tendons and organs were all in the appropriate places for finding. You just had to get creative, when elbows bent more than they should, when collarbones were tougher than expected, when liver shots mattered little. 

There is something intrinsically wrong in the human mind about fighting the knockers, goblins, gremlins, kobolds, bogarts and every other smaller humanoid creature that emerged from the dungeon. Though their names were different, I could not help but utilize Earth ones for the most similar. It helped, a little, with the dissonance of beating what was basically a child. 

Because they really were not. 

Still, for the majority, that dissonance forced them to hold back. With their swords, their knives, their magic. It took time and training to push pass the mental obstacle of hurting these creatures. Even with all my training – even envisioning the fight, over and over again in the sanctuary of mind in the middle of the night, I held back. 

Just a little.

Good thing, there was one tried and true method of getting over such things. 

A mouth – not razor sharp, thank the gods – clamped down on my left arm. I felt it bite down, the knocker’s stronger than human jaw clamping on hard enough that it left bruises. A crooking of the elbow, a drop of the body and a slide to the right smashed head and teeth against wall. Once to loosen the grip, a second time to concuss. 

Good start, but not enough. I felt a pang of regret, of hesitation as shadowed tiny bodies reminded me of my own grandchildren. 

Frozen, I never saw the bone shard – their equivalent of a knife – that punched through my inadequate armour in the side, burrowing into the space between short ribs and nicking one of them on the way in. Instinctively, I followed the line of the arm back as I chopped with the side of my hand, crushing a throat and leaving the knocker gagging. 

The last knocker got a teep that caught it in the head rather than solar plexus, sent it reeling backwards to crack its head against the wall to fall boneless to the ground. 

Noise from down the corridor showed moving bodies. I bent low, grabbed the idiot that bit me and tossed him. I’d never taken part in dwarf tosses before, and the knocker was substantially heavier than expected; so I didn’t get as much airtime as I wanted.

It still meant he bowled over the first few as he slid and bounced along the ground. After which, I threw myself into the group, ignoring the stabbing pain in my side and the one in my hip – how did that happen? – and got to work. 

My breathing rasped a little, coming in fast and exhaling hard and loud with each blow. The smell of the knockers, ripe and a little horsey, filled the air, mixing with their exhalations that clogged the air with bad dental hygiene and rotting flesh. A shank nearly opened my mouth up, the last few knuckles clobbered my mouth. I tasted blood and salt, something a little more bitter as my cheek throbbed.

Each moment, I ducked, rolled, weaved and otherwise boxed my way through the crowd. Each punch hammered thin ribs, ruptured internal organs and snapped heads on too thin necks back. I was no a hulking monster of a man, but at around six fee three or so – hard to say when they didn’t use the same measurement systems here – I towered over these creatures. Bigger, faster, better trained, but they had the numbers.

In the end, though, size mattered. Enough so that I started walking over dead and dying bodies, knockers that were just a little too broken to fight back. By the time I managed to clear my way into the next cavern – battling through a short apartment hallway length or so – most of the creatures were down.

A good thing for me, because if they had tried to rush me all in the cavern, I would have had a problem. As it was, with only four left and a lot more space to work my special brand of fisty magic, the end result was never in doubt.