NOVEL NEXT Ch. 23: The Lair
Cass regretted her decision almost immediately. But she was unwilling to let herself fall into indecision by second or triple-guessing the choice. The only absolutely wrong option was to still be standing there when the Herald came back.
She kept Stealthing forward, her senses sharp. She almost wished they weren’t. The further in she went, the worse it smelled. Rot and iron hung heavy in the air, overwhelming her stat-heightened senses.
The only consolation was there were no monsters yet. Nothing so far wanted her dead.
Lots of the dead though. Bones and chitin lined the walls. Dried flesh clung to some; others were picked clean. A chill ran down her spine. Her stomach twisted.
Every step was laden with regret.
But she didn’t turn around. She had to see this through.
More and more of the bones had meat on them. More and more of the flesh was not yet petrified by time.
To her right was the skeleton of a large rodent. It lay a top of a pile of similar bones. Strips of flesh and furry skin hung from its arms and clung to its ribs. Still soft and fleshy and putrid. Something slunk through the bone pile, climbing up and through an empty eye socket.
A centipede.
And just the first of many.
Another crawled out from behind the skeleton. Another chewed on the decaying flesh. More slunk along the walls. Still more coiled around the remains of a cockroach, already half devoured.
They ranged in size from barely bigger than Cass’s hand to barely smaller than Cass.
This wasn’t the Ancient Centipede’s Lair, but its nest and nursing ground.
Panic flared, her steps falling faster and faster down the cavern. This was a mistake. This had been a horrible mistake.
She Identified one. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe these were harmless bugs. Maybe…
Young Cressarian Centipede
Lvl 2
[Very few of this species survive to adulthood. Competition between siblings is fierce, with over half killed by a sibling for resources before leaving the nest. Those that survive will have the strongest venom and the cruelest disposition.]
Maybe they were vicious bugs that would murder an outsider as easily as their own family.
Still, that suggested they were unlikely to team up and swarm her. Hopefully, their venom was something she could handle. Hopefully, it wasn’t something she was going to need to handle.
The cavern just kept going. The rancid smell of death hung heavier with every step, the centipedes to either side, bigger.
Regret snapped at her heels like hunting hounds, but she couldn’t turn around. Why had she come this way? Why hadn’t she taken the other path? Why had she thought she could handle this? Why? Why? Why?
But she couldn’t get herself to turn around either. Maybe it was simply the certainty of all the centipedes between her current location and the exit. Maybe it was the possibility that there was a reward waiting for her at the end of this path. Maybe she was too stubborn to give in, even to her own fears.
All she knew was each step was fast and frantic, a desperate plea to find the end of this tunnel.
Ahead, the cavern changed. Natural stone was replaced abruptly with polished steps, intentionally carved and placed. They led up between a pair of Greek columns, all of it in the blackest and smoothest of stone. Like polished marble.
She climbed them, paranoia mounting with each step. This was her first concrete evidence that sentient beings lived in this world. Someone had at some point built this temple here. How long ago was that? And why put it at the back of a natural cavern?
Atmospheric Sense promised that there was no other entrance at the back. If there was another way in, it was sealed so tight not even a draft slipped through.
The temple was a single room, too small for the enormous Ancient Centipede to fit in. The walls were polished, black brick. The floor looked to be tiled in the same material. In the center of the room, on a black podium, sat an orb.
Her eyes agreed with Atmospheric Sense, there was no other way into this room, just the entrance she still stood in.
She ran her hand around the walls anyway. She’d take any chance she didn’t have to sneak past half a mile of decaying monsters and baby centipedes. The walls were sturdy. Neither Mana Sense, Atmospheric Sense, nor touch found any indication the walls were anything but.
She sighed. She was stalling. Oh, she definitely wanted to get out of here as soon as possible. There was the worry the Herald would come back and kill her. But a glance at the orb in the center of the room was all Cass needed to know that the treasure was not good news.
It was a black orb. The room wasn’t meaningfully illuminated, the nearest lighting coming from some luminous moss just outside the temple. That left the room deeply shadowed. One would have expected that. They also would have expected the back of the temple to be the darkest. Instead, the shadows pooled around the orb.
And it looked worse to her Mana Sense. It glowed an angry crimson and vibrated like a hornet’s nest. The thing oozed an aura of malevolence. It was thick enough that even Cass wasn’t willing to chalk it up to nerves.
She almost walked away from it.
She Identified it instead.
Orb of Shadows
[The treasure entrusted to the Herald of the Deep.
Last retrieved: 638 years, 7 months, 14 days ago.
Last manifested as: Dagger of Ruin]
Cass raised an eyebrow at that. The first two lines were more or less what she expected. The second two she didn’t know what to make of. Over 600 years since the last time this object was retrieved? Wasn’t this a quest item? Maybe most people didn’t bother with sub-quests?
She reached out to pick up the orb, but hesitated, her hand hovering but a hair's breadth above the glassy surface. Did she actually want this thing? It looked evil. Its title sounded evil. The object it last manifested sounded very evil.
But was she really just going to walk out of here with nothing? That was a sunk-cost fallacy, and she knew it. She hadn’t lost anything coming here, she was unlikely to lose anything walking out now.
But it rankled to leave empty-handed.
Would she really gamble again on this object?
Again, it was safer to just leave. But again, what would she do next? Wander along as she had been? How long could she keep that up before she ran into something she couldn’t handle with what she had?
Risk and reward, foolish or not, she took it.
Herald of the Deep’s Treasure Stolen
[Leave the territory of the Deep or Defeat the Herald of the Deep to Manifest Treasure
Tutorial Sub-quest: Defeat the Lords’ Heralds Checkpoint (1/3) Completed
Reward: Chance to Manifest Treasure, 1 Choice of 3 options.
Skill, Dex based, Empowered by Focus
Trait, Minor, Resistance
Bonus, Range]
Cass barely had time to process the message or look over the offered rewards when a second window popped up.
Notifying Herald
Good Luck