Chapter 29: The Tools of The Hunt

Elias pushed off the wall and kept running, he could feel that he was coming closer to the spot of cold where he could seed his Lumina.

The tunnel twisted, veering to the right, and Elias’s hand brushing the walls, noticed that it was damp. Looking closer, he saw water dripping from cracks overhead, pooling in shallow depressions all over the floor.

’Damn, this could be dangerous. I can no longer see the floor well enough to avoid traps.’

Elias had noted that one of the reasons he had moved fast enough to avoid that last trap was that his eyes had caught a slight depression in the ground, and even though he had not fully noted it, his Supernatural Detail Obsession had picked it up.

He was barely noting this troubling development when he heard another click. It was a metallic snap under his left foot.

Elais dove forward, rolling as a section of ceiling collapsed behind him in a thunder of stone. A massive slab, perfectly cut, dropped straight down where he had stood moments ago. The ground shook, and Elias collapsed to the ground, but he quickly scrambled up and kept moving.

A resounding boom shook the air, showering splinters of stone that whizzed past Elias like bullets as the giants behind him slammed into the slab of stone that had just missed crushing him.

’I am not just being hunted by these creatures, but this damned tunnel itself is trying to kill me.’

Every few dozen yards, another trap triggered, pressure plates under the floor, hidden counterweights releasing spiked logs from the walls, narrow sections where the ceiling suddenly lowered like a guillotine.

Inside his head, Elias could hear buzzing; it seemed as if it was coming from his Status screen, and it was being updated, but he was not concentrating on that distraction for the moment.

Elias dodged, rolled, leapt, crawled, his body moving faster than his mind could track. He was still getting hurt, but they were not injuries that could hold him back. Elias’s instincts on the wounds he could accept were sharp, and his mind felt as if it was on fire.

Regeneration closed cuts almost as soon as they opened. Broken bones ground back into place with sickening pops. The stump of his arm was now a throbbing knob of new flesh, fingers beginning to bud like pale flowers.

He was healing, while he was also being hunted by a tunnel that seemed to have remembered every grave he had dug. Elias would swear that these traps seemed to follow a pattern that seemed to be linked to his actions before he entered this Fragment, but for now, his mind was filled with nothing but the thought of survival.

The traps were dangerous, but they slowed down his pursuers but it did nothing to stop their constant roar, thousands of voices screaming his name, screaming their own deaths, screaming for vengeance.

Elias.

Elias.

Elias.

He burst into a wider cavern, the first real change in the tunnel’s shape. The ceiling soared twenty feet high, walls rough and wet as the stalactites above dripped an unknown whitish fluid to the ground. The floor was uneven, littered with broken stone, and in the center of the cavern stood a single statue of Asulon, larger than the others, fifteen feet tall, untouched by cracks.

Something about this statue almost made Elias halt his movement; it was the most perfect statue of Asulon that he had ever seen, and after four years of working in the tunnels, he had mastered nearly every curve and crease in this statue. If he were not looking at the stone, he would believe that this was the Ascendant.

After he had halted, chest heaving, Elias checked the spot of cold in his head; this seemed to be a stable structure. Could it be the place to seed his Lumina?

However, the result he was sensing from it was confusing; it seemed to be the right spot, yet it was not. Elias knew that in order to fully confirm his answer, he needed to fully concentrate on the map in his head, but doing so would leave him vulnerable.

Behind him, the tunnel mouth he had just exited was filled with shadows. The first of the bleeding statues stepped into the cavern, black ichor dripping from its cracked chest, smiling that terrible, jagged smile. Its appearance was rough; barely any stone was left on its body, and its left leg was bent as if it had been broken in multiple places, but the sense of power from this creature was palpable.

Elias’s hand went to his backpack; he had tools, he had the blood fragment from Commander Yseult, and he had one thing the statues did not…He had been the hunter first.

He grinned, a wolf’s grin in the dark that matched the smile on the face of the bleeding giant. The hunt had truly begun.

He tore open the backpack with his teeth and one hand. Inside it were chisels, hammers, measuring wire, a small flask of lamp oil, a spark rod, the nozzle he used for paste, a sealed jar of quicklime residue, a thin metallic cable he used for precise proportioning, and most importantly, a small silver cube… the Alchemistry Crystal.

Elias had long been planning in his head how to use the tools in his backpack; all were solidly made and masterworks in their own right. They had been made by him, and he knew every inch of them.

He snatched the wire first, with shaking fingers, he tied one end to the base of the unawakened statue in the center, stretched it taut across the cavern entrance at ankle height, and secured the other end to a jagged outcrop on the opposite wall. As he worked, his fingers steadied as he suppressed the jitters in his spine.

Then he grabbed the flask of lamp oil and the spark rod, and, crossing the wire, he began to pour the oil onto the ground. When he poured a third of it, he stopped and went back over the wire.

The first statue stepped fully into the cavern, black ichor dripping, stone grinding, smile widening when it saw its prey. Elias smiled back.

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