Chapter 40: Pain, Sound, and Silence

The sound of their footsteps against the stone paved streets is drowned out by the shouts and machinery.

“I thought we were gonna be able to shower! You promised a shower pendejo!” Izzy shouts as she jogs behind Cy, holding her guitar to keep it from bouncing as they run.

“I don't exactly have an itinerary for you guys! Improvise!” Cy yells, ducking under some advanced piece of equipment held in an evacuating dephi's arms.

“What?! That's literally been your whole deal the entire time I've known you! How long have you been gone that you don't have future knowledge of when we take bathroom breaks! The book never said we'd immediately get roped into fighting monsters in a mindshaft?!” She yells back.

“It—” Cy gets yanked by Mato as the group takes a hard right, heading towards the western shaft, following the lead of that dephi runner that burst into the adventurer's guild. Alarms sound a short distance away, rhythmic, pulsing, and loud.

Their footsteps slap against the sloped ramp heading up the mountain, Demarcus nearly twisting an ankle on the rails for minecarts on the side of the path. Up ahead they can see a mass of people spaced out around something, a few breaking off or being let through to continue evacuating.

They near the cluster of bodies, and Cy opens his mouth to shout something to make the crowd let them through but a far louder voice punches its way through the din and resounds off the mountainside.

“Adventurers! Make a hole!” An armored dwarven [Mining Captain] yells, amplified by an [Announce Order] skill, and the crowd parts.

Izzy turns slightly red at all the eyes staring at them as they pass through an opened column in the crowd, and she tries to stay focused, spitefully muttering litanies against Cy.

Demarcus has no compunctions about staring, and stares directly back, agog at the alien beings around him. Pale 4 armed humanoids with white, grey, or blonde manes, and odd proportions give him an uneasy feeling like he took a wrong turn at the uncanny valley. Short and stout people in intricate armors and suits, stained and personalized and making room for their beards. He clumsily collides with someone in front of him he did not see from his eye height. They go bowling forward and his arms reel as he tries to keep his balance.

Demarcus staggers forward and catches himself, trying to see who he hit through the constrained vision of his barbute helmet.

He kneels to help up the sprawled dwarf.

“I am so sorry!”

“Pull me back! Ya stone-skulled, lead-footed—”

Demarcus lifts the fallen armored dwarf with a sudden “hup”, and they scramble to grab some sort of jackhammer off the ground. They step back behind Demarcus and he stumbles forwards again as the dwarf kicks him in the ass.

“You’re the adventurer, you take the front!”

Demarcus looks around to take in the situation the others got a grip on a second or two before him. He stands now in front of a semicircle of dwarven and dephi [Miners] holding various mining implements. The ground before them is littered with the corpses of dead and dying insects, 6 legged with black chitin, ant-like except that their antennae slope backwards towards their thorax, their 2 forward legs are heavy and reinforced like the tips of a pickaxe, and their mouths when open are gaping maws of spinning rows of jagged edges that twist as the front of their eyeless face seems to rotate.

Oh, and they're 3 feet long.

Hemolymph stains in the nose as the group sees the killing field covered in dozens of dead coal crawlers, more and more reaching the lines of [Miners] and getting crushed, hammered, or split apart. When one survives a hit from some kind of precise laser and manages to stab through the unarmored boot of a dwarf, they're pulled back and replaced by a dephi wielding hammers in his lower arms. She— and it is a she as the dephi has mammaries, though only 2 on the upper pectorals, which Demarcus isn't sure about the correlation there.— grabs the two descending forelegs of the crawler with her upper arms, holding the bug in place as she hammers its head in with her lowers.

More and more of the bugs seem to skitter forth from the wide entrance to the mineshaft that the crowd encircles. 1-3 at a time they spew forth and are usually intercepted by the crowd. When one breaks off and begins climbing up the steep rocky mountainside next to the entrance, a yell sounds out over the sirens, machinery, and clamoring crowd.

“That one! Don't let it get away or it'll infest another shaft!”

A bolt suddenly pierces through it, shattering against the mountainside and spraying shrapnel into its underbelly. The bug lets out a high shriek, almost imperceptible to human ears, as Mato reloads and fires again, killing it.

Somewhere beneath the din, a sound begins to build as a [Punk] finds the pitch of the sirens and uses them as her bass. A [Song of Spite] picks up and the angry, scared, and besieged crowd feels their blood boil and their eyes focus. Pains become distant with the buzz of adrenaline, and only serve to fuel their purpose.

“Tone it down! You're pulling them out of formation!”

The crowd shifts back from where they began inching forwards as the playing falters, when it returns a moment later it sounds less like barfight music and more resolved.

Demarcus wades forward, and two of the approaching bugs turn towards him. He still isn't certain how his skills work, especially his passives, and he's been hesitant to tell anyone that— but in a life or death fight they seem to just click. He feels a strange dissonance between [Lessened Weight] and [Dense Mass] as his footfalls impact the ground with such force, yet he moves them with the same ease as normal. When he punts the first bug with a foot to the face it goes flying back between the boards of the open mineshaft like a field goal. Cy’s shout of “goal!” Is barely audible, and misheard by most as ‘go’.

The second bug brings a foreleg down on his sabatoned foot and he feels the metal dent, pinching his foot painfully— before he removes half of its spinning circular jaws with a crowbar to the face. He steps over and onto it with his undamaged foot, pinning it against the ground and releasing his other foot, which he uses to stomp the rest of its head into mulch.

A burst of 7 of them skitter from the camouflaged dark of the mineshaft and a shout of surprise comes from the edges of the Frontline. With a cracking sound, thin and rectangular sections of the rocky ground suddenly slam upward into walls of stone around the edges of the semicircle closest to the mountain. Cy lowers his staff and yells towards Izzy.

“[Wall of Sound]! Funnel them to Demarcus!”

A beat or two passes for Izzy to finish the musical phrase before she kicks it up, cranking the reverb and causing her guitar to feel omnipresent. The air solidifies and violently vibrates with the sound at the edges of the stone walls leaving a 10 foot gap to either side of Demarcus. The frontline behind the new walls begins to shift nervously, some peering through the vibrating air to see the bugs beyond turning towards Demarcus.

“Half stay behind the walls, they may be temporary! Back lines move to the opening to support!”

Demarcus hears thundering boots behind him as the [Miners] regroup behind him. He takes 2 steps forward and swings a [Power Strike] down onto the first bug, splattering its head between the ground and his crowbar. Two scatter past him at either side as he raises his weapon, dragging the bug's carcass with it for a foot before it flops back down to the ground, hydraulic limbs still twitching.

His eyes dart between the two on either side, and decides to let them pass, holding the center. In a brief second of hindsight he realizes he should've attacked the first bug from the side, and tried to hit it into one of the other ones.

He applies this immediately to the next bug to step up, it's mouth opening and beginning to whir as he sidesteps, baseball swings, and sends it splattering against a [Wall of Sound], missing the bug sprinting past him. The vibrations of the wall seems to scrape the carapace a bit.

Demarcus spits sweat from his lips, focusing deeply on the bugs nearest to him. The next is still a second or two from reaching him, so he turns to the one that's passing him.

He takes a deep lean to his right, one he expected might take him to a knee, but finds his core strength enough for the task. He grabs the passing crawler by the backleg and yanks, intending to throw it back but instead tearing the leg straight off.

The bug screams, and is quickly silenced by a pickaxe through its thorax as a dwarf yells “[Emboldened Swings]!”

The voices around him break through his focus and reach his ears, and Demarcus finally notices all the skills being yelled from the crowd.

“[Hammer Blow]!”

“[Rock Breaker]!”

“[Double Time]!”

“[Second Wind]!”

“[Mud Pit]!”

That last voice was Cys, casting some spell. But Demarcus doesn't see it.

He looks up and forward, and quickly interposes his crowbar between him and a leaping crawler. The hooked head of the crowbar enters the whirring mouth of the bug with a horrible screech of shearing metal as sparks start to fly from it.

Bug still wrapped around the head of his weapon, Demarcus takes a shoulder swing slamming the crawler down and onto another. The crowbar breaks through the first, a bit scratched but no worse for wear, but only cracks the exoskeleton of the one below. A second swing finishes it.

Demarcus looks up from the break off group he’d been focusing on to see the state of the battlefield; a huge swath of the ground just outside the mineshaft entrance has turned to deep mud. Bugs crawl through from the mountain hole and immediately sink almost the whole of their legs into the mud. They kick and squirm, their mouths whirring and seeming to suck up the mud, but only causing more mud to fill the empty pocket. Thick roots, more like tree limbs in and of themselves twist and dig through the mud, entangling and restraining the dozens of bugs fighting through the mud.

The few crawlers going up instead of out fare better, but not by much. Bolt after bolt stabs into them, sniped by Mato standing atop some tall piece of machinery to see over the walls. The few that get past him, there being too many for him to reload fast enough to kill all, get crushed by a dephi behind the wheel of a huge excavator like machine, dexterously piloting the drill arm to pinpoint accuracy. Demarcus wonders how that guy would do at an arcade claw game.

Cy yells from somewhere to Demarcus’ right, in the crowd behind the stone walls.

“D, they're restrained! Finished em off!”

D nods to no one, and sprints towards the mud pit. His boots crunch and buckle over the uneven ground littered with bug corpses. Demarcus takes 2 steps into the mud, sinking past his toes, and begins taking swings at the restrained crawlers.

The mud, the roots, and the awkward angles make it nearly impossible for him to get in solid hits. He takes a spear-like foreleg to the chest plate from a flailing bug, the armor dents, and he tries to roll with the hit. The mud sticking to his boots and the lip of rock behind his feet makes his stomach drop with that sudden feeling of losing balance. He falls back, catching himself with a hand, and feels his frustrations build.

The [Song of Spite] burns in Demarcus’ ears and blood, and his next hit splits the back of the bug wide open. The swing after that bisects it.

Demarcus wades deeper into the mud and blood, focusing his swings on the bugs' center of mass, one by one popping them open with a disgusting crunch. His lips are twisted tight to prevent any of it from getting in his mouth.

Eventually, tired and even dirtier, with the last of the insects stuck in the drying mud pit finished off, Demarcus leans against a stone wall, breathing heavily as he watches the occasional bug skitter forth from the mineshaft. They're quickly intercepted by the group of [Miners] that have moved up past Cy’s crumbling stone walls.

Isabella helps clean the important bits of Demarcus off from the dirt and bug goo as Mato keeps an eye on the cliff face for any more breakaway bugs. Cy stands back, and the dwarven [Mining Captain] walks up to him.

“Damn good work! Are you the captain?”

Cy leans against his sooty wooden staff and casually points a finger towards Mato.

“Talk to the old guy.”

Mato turns around and awkwardly shakes the dwarf's hand. The [Mining Captain] tugs on his exposed beard in stress. A slight accent, not quite familiar to any from earth, one that puts a little more emphasis on the hard sounds in the words makes its way into the dwarf’s voice.

“Fine shooting there. But we're not out of the pits yet.”

“Go on.” Mato says, occasionally flicking his gaze away from the man to the mineshaft or his party.

“Well, we need a scouting party to enter the shaft and confirm there's nothing left. The sooner the better. Can't return to work without it and, left unattended, these bugs’ll infest the whole damn mountain.”

“And ya want us to do it?”

“Not you necessarily, but the adventurer’s guild is usually the one contracted with this. We've got a local group that tends to handle it but, seeing as you're already here…”

Mato looks up and projects his voice to address the rest of his party standing nearby.

“Y'all feelin’ up fer it?

Izzy and Mato look to Demarcus first.

“I can keep going. Think my armors damaged a bit though.”

“You can get that repaired in town. I think the guild covers some of that.” The [Mining Captain] helpfully chimes in with.

Mato's eyes slide to Izzy.

“I mean, I'm feeling up for a shower, but if this is just a quick confirmation that there's no more bugs…” a put-upon sigh. “We could help out.”

The group looks over at Cy, picking something off of his robes. He looks up.

“Hey, I'm just along for the ride.”

“Great! They came outta the red shaft. Just follow the red paint.”

The group checks themselves over, and once ready, approach the shaft entrance.

Some magical equivalent to industrial lights used to hang from the ceiling, but as they get a closer look they can see that the mineshaft must have been torn to pieces by the bugs’ escape and the evacuation. Metal equipment torn to shreds, support beams with chunks taken out of them, and 90% of the lights either torn from their mountings and gone dark or damaged and flickering.

Cy taps his staff against the ground and a warm light bathes the entrance as a deep orange flame flares to life in the gnarled wood crook at the tip of his staff.

“Whoa, ey, half-baked, you sure fire is the best idea in a coal mine?” Izzy asks.

“Relax, it's a [Light] spell, not a real flame.” Cy replies.

They step into the eerily empty shaft, most of their steps echoing off the walls. The stone is dark, and interspersed with metal supports along the main shaft, with wood on the branching paths. Painted lines lead to each shaft with rails for carts along the ground. Equipment mid-use is thrown aside in various places, many torn to bits by the legs of the bugs and their grinding jaws. A splatter of crimson shows this wasn't a bloodless evacuation.

“So,” Demarcus starts, “what'd ya mean when you said you were ‘just along for the ride’?”

“Hm? Oh. I mean that I'm not gonna dictate what you guys do, and I'm not gonna fight your battles for you.” Cy replies.

“Fight our battles?” Demarcus asks with a playfully condescending quirk of an eyebrow.

“Yep. I'll keep you alive and in one piece but the rest is up to you. Ya won't level otherwise.”

“For the briefest of moments I thought you'd given up on being a control freak. How naive of me.” Izzy remarks.

Mato traces the lines on the walls, examining pockmarks and uneven chunks from the crawlers’ movement. He subtly directs them down the red shaft.

“Well, what do we wind up doing after this? What's on the docket now that we're ‘adventurers’?” Izzy asks.

“And where are all the bugs?” Mato mutters to himself.

Cy just shrugs. “Don't know. Probably a shower. Like I said, it's up to you guys, I'm just a safety net.”

“Hm.” Izzy says, in thought.

It's been a while since she's had to make any actual decisions about her future. After dying and choosing the Game of Gods, it's been one survival situation after another, and she had been swept along by the group. Izzy feels a pang of resentment she can't quite identify for the bit of anxiety bubbling in the face of the loss of Cy’s certainty and direction.

Shower. For certain. Then, a whole new world, and music.

Mato stares at striations in a hole in the wall, [Basic Tracking] firing off to point out a hastily dug burrow. The group continues on, and he wants to stop them, but sees more signs of holes further along at the edge of the fire light.

“So, should we be keeping our guard up or do we not find anything in here?” Demarcus says, grabbing his crowbar with 2 hands as he looks around the mineshaft, thoroughly uncomfortable with caves after the doppelgangers in the tutorial.

“It's a good idea to be prepared anyways.” Mato interjects.

He gets on his tiptoes at the edge of another burrow, seeing the way it slopes downward.

“Yeah, Mato's got the right of it. Could be there's still some in here. I dunno.” Cy says with a shrug that shifts the light.

“You don't know?” Izzy asks, incredulously.

“Well, didn't you say you have to keep things vague? His book probably didn't write down the specifics.” Demarcus argues, trying to prove that he understands and has been listening.

Mato kneels and examines a bit of the cracked flooring, removing a bit of rock to find another burrow, and a dead crawler wedged within it, piercing wounds cover it from other crawlers’ forelegs, showing how it was trampled in a stampede.

“Yeah, the book wouldn't specify that sort of thing. Probably.” Cy agrees with Demarcus, shifting his lit staff to better see the holes around their feet.

“Probably? It's your book! What'd you just not read the passages for this little spelunking trip?” Izzy needles.

“Hey, gang?” Mato says.

“Uh, no. No I didn't.” Cy admits, cringing at his words.

“What? Why the hell not?” Izzy asks, stepping over a fallen wooden beam.

“Yeah, actually, why not? Is there something specific going on we should be aware of or is it just you being higher level? What's up?” Demarcus asks.

“Guys—”

“No it's not anything specific. I just— I should probably just tell— no, not that.” Cy nervously trips over his words.

“Oh God what it is it this time? What's wrong now?!” Izzy bites.

“Iz. D. Cy. Get—”

“I don't have the book! Alright?!” Cy admits. “We don't need—”

“Stop!”

In a rare moment of pugnacity, Mato raises his voice in the stern authoritative tones only a father, grandfather, and park ranger can manage.

The group stops dead in their tracks, whipping back around to look at Mato, Cy and Demarcus stanced to fight.

They see the green clad ranger crouched, looking above and past them. Izzy turns her head back and tries to find what he's focused on.

She sees only the mineshaft. Filled with holes and scratchmarks, damaged equipment and fallen support beams—

Mato beckons with his fingers towards him.

“Back this way. Carefully.”

The group steps back as one, putting pressure on a bit of rock hollowed by a burrow, which snaps beneath them.

A crunch, a scream as sharp rock scrapes along the back of a leg, and 3 sets of arms and legs scrambling for their balance.

A collapsing floor, an unsupported stone ceiling, and an old man diving forwards to try and save the children and instead falling with them.

A hole in the floor, a cave-in, and a 20 foot drop.

Pain, sound, and silence.