“Clear the seal,” Valen said again, when Kaelen didn’t move fast enough for his liking.
“Or would you rather explain to the Order why a scout’s cowardice will cost the expedition this expedition?”
No pressure, no problem.
Kaelen forced Corin’s limbs forward, nerves thrumming with panic seems like borrowed to drown out his own icy assessment.
The obsidian door’s seam pulsed once beneath his palm (warm, impossibly) and groaned open, revealing a chamber swallowed in torchlight twenty feet beyond, the ceiling too high to see the dust motes in its vast hollows of rot.
[Ding!
Structural Seal Disengaged.]
[Warning: Threat Signature – Awakening.]
Awakening.
Lovely.
Of all the words I want to hear right after letting the door open to whatever’s on the other side–
A vaulted burial hall, the floor of which curved away behind Kaelen’s torchlight (farther than a human could see with a fire in his chest), and arched overhead, its walls lined with sarcophagi, their cracked lids and rusted chain fastenings dangling from the ceiling by their fraying iron loops.
And on the dais at the far end, a shape Kaelen’s nerves refused to acknowledge as a man, three times the height of a man, its skull a mass of rusted iron chains from shoulder to shin, a cleaver the length of a boat balanced atop its lap.
“Guardian construct,” one of Valen’s knights breathed, already backing away from the threshold despite the solid plates over his pectorals and shoulders.
“This wasn’t on the survey records.”
“Nothing worth finding ever is,” Valen murmured, drawing his sword – same idle ease that’s served him since he climbed off his horse half a lifetime ago — “Formation.
That’s what we’re here for.”
The skeleton’s empty eye sockets erupted with a dull un-natural red the exact moment the last guide crossed the threshold.
[Ding!
Guardian Awakened.]
It moved, faster than a man that size should be capable of.
The cleaver swept up in an arc and came down on the chamber floor with an explosion of force that blew the cracks right out of the stone walls, sending a violent shockwave rolling through Valen’s forward squad, all of their collective weight thrown backward like leaves on the wind.
Two of the knights crashed into the far wall, a third did not rise from crouching position.
“Regroup,” Valen barked, already too late.
The formation was shattered, lost to years of training to move as one.
Kaelen dove sideways, dragging Talia with him by her collar as the broken planks the size of a wagon wheel swept past her ankles.
“Thanks , really thanks.” She gasped out, already tensing her knees as the massive guardian’s skull turned toward the disorganized guides, as if choosing prey at random.
[Vessel Structural Decay: 51%.]
[Warning: Interface Access Still Compromised – No New Skills Available.]
Ah yes.
Our good and proper welcome to the dungeon.
Nothing but upgrades, nothing but useful new toys.
That is, all the upgrades I don’t have the skills to use yet, and all the skills that require upgrades before I can be bothered.
Kaelen cataloged the skills: Void Slip, Shadow Fade, an adequately thick fist to shatter bone, forty scattered scarabs hidden in the crevice behind us.
“Correct,” Nix said from the depths of Kaelen’s bones, as indifferent to being right as a blade is to biting its owner’s hand.
“Improvise accordingly.”
In the next motion, with the same careless arrogance that had cost the knight already sprawled against the chamber wall, Valen’s mages miscalculated the reach of the blade sweeping back toward them and failed to anticipate it.
Selene had taken up position too close to the bulk of her squad, trusting in the ward glyphs to buy her time.
She was too slow casting her own defensive sigils, a half a second behind the rising arc of the cleaver, and instead of a clean strike to her person, the blade’s shockwave drove her into the pillar at her back.
Her circlet flew loose of her braids and rolled away.
An elite mage, felled.
Kaelen allowed a measure of satisfaction to pass through him.
Oh what a laugh, being untouchable your entire life .
.
.
I forgot how much it sucks coming down to touch something.
Valen himself was better prepared and knocked back the follow up blow, the flat of the cleaver striking his blade in a way that was more than sufficient to flatten an unprepared soldier, but not enough to send him down just the same.
Kaelen observed as any competent hunter would the spiderweb of cracks that spiderwebbed from the center of Valen’s golden runic breastplate, a hair’s breadth away from the man’s ribs where another fragment of falling ceiling might have been, had he been any more unprepared.
There was no doubt to what it meant.
The way Valen’s men moved, eyes locked forward, teeth bared even as the blood ran down his thighs.
[Ding!
Structural Vulnerability Detected.]
[Target: SiR VaLen.
Holy Aura Integrity – Localized Breach, Chest Plating.]
[Assessment: Aura Defense in Affected Zone Temporarily Reduced in Estimation of 60-70% Reduction.]
Kaelen’s muscles went rigid, every nerve save the one in his skull going numb.
The opening.
The opportunity.
All it took was arrogance (inestimable) and bad timing to put the man squarely in the crosshairs of fate and Kaelen’s cold calculation.
The vulnerability.
A weakness for his opponents, a strength for him.
“Just confirm before acting,” a voice in his skull warned, edged for once with something akin to concern.
A partial weakness is never a guarantee of success.
A misjudgment means immediate incineration for at least at this distance,.
I will not judge.
I cannot.
Not since the day he first let me look his body up and down.
A fraction, nothing more.
The cleaver rose a second time this cycle, but instead of the knights, the guided force, as if the construct cared to choose between them, turned into the slow-moving, expendable things and swung toward their smaller numbers.
Talia gasped, and Kaelen shoved her backwards, away from the arc of the blade.
[WARNING: Catastrophic Vessel Damage.]
[Left Arm – Severed.
VessEl Structural IntegriTY: 51% 71%.]
Pain came delayed, and dulled, and Kaelen stared down at the neat pool of black matter pooling on the threshold a foot from his knees and felt something in his mind reach out and grab the numbness in his chest.
It was neither agony nor relief.
It was simply reassessment.
71% and counting, if this body was anything to go by.
Talia screamed (the distance between them, impossibly long, and the ringing in Kaelen’s ears, no less so) and Kaelen forced his remaining hand against the floor, forced his legs to push him up and look across the battlefield and assess the glint of broken gold on the breastplate across the threshold that meant life (or a very long death, perhaps) and he had only the one shot.
One arm, a fraction of his skills, and the opportunity of a fraction of a split second, and the distance between his eyes and the man on the far side of the threshold was thirty feet, but he would not have it any other way.