The Cursed Extra-Chapter 145: [3.18] The Loudest Team in the Dungeon
"Victory means nothing if the ceiling falls on your head five minutes later."
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The goblin’s death rattle echoed off stone walls as Rhys pulled his spear free. The iron point came away with a wet sucking sound that turned his stomach. He’d heard it a hundred times before on the village palisade, but it never got easier. Black blood dripped from the weapon in thick globules, pooling on the tunnel floor between chunks of rubble and scattered goblin weapons.
The metallic tang of blood mixed with the musty scent of underground air. He’d breathed cleaner air during the mass burnings after the plague summer, and that was saying something.
His team stood among the carnage. Chests heaving. Sweat mixing with dust until their faces looked like miners who’d been underground for a week. The eerie glow of the tunnel’s phosphorescent moss painted everything in shades of sickly green and pale blue. His teammates looked like corpses that hadn’t figured out they were dead yet.
Rhys wiped his spear point on a dead goblin’s leather jerkin. His father had taught him that lesson young. A dirty weapon was a dead man’s weapon.
Jorik leaned against his warhammer’s handle like it was the only thing keeping him upright. Which it probably was, given how hard the big idiot had been swinging. The massive weapon’s head sat buried in a crater he’d smashed into the floor during the fight. Fissures radiated outward from where metal had met rock like a spider’s web frozen in gray limestone.
Rhys noted with professional displeasure that the damage extended a good three feet in every direction.
That kind of force in an enclosed space was asking for trouble.
"See?" Jorik wiped gore from his knuckles with the back of his hand. His teeth showed white in the phosphorescent glow when he grinned, and there was blood on them too. "Nothing we can’t handle."
His voice carried a confidence that Rhys didn’t share. Couldn’t share. Because he’d grown up knowing that confidence was just another word for the thing that got people killed.
Petra kicked at a dead goblin’s crude axe, sending it skittering across stone with a harsh metallic scrape. Scorch marks from her fire magic blackened the tunnel walls in jagged patterns. The charred stone still released wisps of acrid smoke that curled toward the ceiling.
The air still shimmered with residual heat in places. Rhys felt sweat prickle fresh across his forehead every time he walked through one of those warm patches.
"Could’ve gone smoother, but we’re alive. They’re not."
The goblins nearest her had been reduced to charred husks. Their bodies curled into fetal positions by the heat that had cooked them from the inside out. The smell was something you never got used to. Burnt hair and roasted meat and something else. Something wrong. It lodged in your sinuses and stayed there for days.
Finn crouched beside the largest goblin corpse. His slender fingers moved with care as he examined its crude armor. His scholarly demeanor seemed out of place amid the bloodshed. Like someone had dropped a librarian into a slaughterhouse and he’d decided to catalogue the cuts of meat instead of running for the exit.
"These weren’t scouts." Finn turned a piece of leather over in his hands. "Look at the leather. Reinforced stitching here, and here. Battle-worn in a way that speaks to dozens of engagements." He traced symbols etched into the material. They looked like claw marks and circles. Maybe some kind of tribal identification. "This was a hunting party. Experienced. Organized."
Rhys said nothing. His jaw tightened as he took in the scene with the same assessment he’d give a battlefield back home. His father’s spear felt heavy in his hands. Heavier than it should have after just one fight.
The tunnel walls bore deep gouges from Jorik’s hammer. Places where the stone had cracked and crumbled under impacts that would have pulverized bone. Chunks of ancient rock now littered the floor, some as big as his fist.
Petra’s flames had left the ancient stone cracked and weakened in different ways. Hairline fractures spread upward toward the ceiling like roots growing in reverse. Heat expansion and rapid cooling. He’d seen what that did to the stone walls of the village forge when some fool apprentice quenched too fast.
The phosphorescent moss that should have provided steady light now flickered erratically. The glow pulsed and dimmed in uneven patterns, casting unstable shadows that made every corner seem alive with movement. Rhys found his eyes jumping to track motion that wasn’t there. His spear half-rose before his brain caught up with his reflexes.
He approached one of the larger cracks in the wall. Ran his fingers along the damaged stone. Felt the texture change where the rock had been stressed beyond its tolerance. Fragments came away under his touch.
Not crumbling exactly, but close. Too fragile. Too old.
His instincts from countless nights on village watch prickled at the back of his neck. That familiar warning sensation that had saved his life more times than he could count.
"We were too loud." Rhys kept his voice low, though part of him wondered if it mattered now. The horse had already bolted, as his mother used to say. The sound of their battle had already traveled through these tunnels. Bounced off walls. Carried into depths they couldn’t see. Announced their presence to anything with ears to hear.
His green eyes scanned the darkness beyond their immediate vicinity. "Something heard us."
He could feel it. The weight of unseen attention pressing down on them. The subtle shift in the air that came before danger revealed itself. The same feeling he got when wolves circled the sheep pens at night.
"Better loud and alive than quiet and dead." Petra shrugged, still riding the high of victory. She gestured at the goblin corpses. "Besides, what’s going to come after us that we can’t handle? More goblins?"
She laughed. The sound bounced harsh off the tunnel walls.
Rhys shook his head slowly. His borderland instincts were screaming warnings he couldn’t quite articulate. Couldn’t put into words that would mean anything to people who’d grown up in cities or comfortable towns.
The tunnel felt wrong. Not just dangerous, but fragile. Like a rotten beam holding up a roof, ready to snap under the slightest pressure. Like the old mine shaft near his village that everyone knew to avoid. The one that had swallowed three children whole when it finally gave way.
"This place is old. Older than the maps suggest." He pressed his palm flat against the nearest wall. The stone almost vibrated under his touch. "We can’t fight like that again."
"You worry too much, Blackwood." Jorik hefted his hammer, testing its weight like he was already looking forward to using it again. The muscles in his arms bunched as he gave the weapon an experimental swing that whistled through the stale air. "We’ve got fire, steel, and stone magic. What more do we need?"
Rhys didn’t answer.
He was too busy listening to the low rumble that had just started somewhere deep beneath their feet.
