Chapter 114: Forge On

Jay vomited onto the blood-slick cavern floor, just barely getting her visor up in time to not puke inside her own helmet. Douglas’ innards had covered her, the smell of blood and bowels only enhancing the nauseating horror of what had just happened. Dys and Syd gagged as well, the experience too overwhelming for Jadis’ Refracted Mind to keep her emotional response separate between her bodies.

“Shit,” Kerr said, pulling herself out of the water.

“Gods,” Aila echoed the archer as she too emerged from the cave stream.

Jadis didn’t want to think about what had just happened. It was too awful, even for her naturally cool control. Without looking at the severed legs laying near her, Jay stumbled to her feet and moved away from the gory scene, wiping her mouth as best she could. Her other two selves also got out of the water, helping the others out as well, already trying to put distance between themselves and where the spider demon had come from.

“Where’s Busch?” Thea coughed out in a panic as she was pulled from the water.

Fuck.

Jadis had forgotten all about the incapacitated guard in all the confusion. Her Jay self had been carrying him, she was pretty sure, but she must have let him go when everyone had been swept into the water on top of her.

Looking into the dark waters for any sign of the man, Dys and Syd dove back in, quickly swimming to the bottom of the deep section of water to try and find him. After a minute of searching, they came back up with Busch between them and brought him back to the stone ledge. As soon as they set him down, Eir was there, checking the man’s vitals by whatever magical means healers had.

“His soul has p-passed,” Eir shivered out softly a few seconds later. “He’s gone.”

“Fuck!”

All three of Jadis shouted, slamming fists or weapons into whatever stone surface was nearby. That was another man dead thanks to her actions. Busch had drowned because she’d stupidly let him go. Douglas had died because she’d ripped his fucking legs off by hanging off him like a giant fucking moron. Ealdread and Garver and Falk were dead because she’d led them all into a literal demon infested cave and he had sacrificed himself to protect her from her stupid decision.

Jadis cursed again, impotent rage clouding her vision. She’d never felt so terrible in her life.

“Hey, cry about it later big stuff,” Kerr broke through Jadis’ haze. “We can’t stay here.”

“Fuck you, I’m not crying,” Jay snarled, blinking back hot tears that had not yet fallen.

“Of course you aren’t,” she agreed, walking past Jay to pick up the giant spider leg that had been ripped off by Aila’s spell. “I mean, what kind of mercenary would, I don’t know, have feelings and shit when people they know are dying around them. That’s just crazy talk.”

Kerr checked the torn end of the spider leg, sniffing it, then actually licked the end. She quickly spat the taste out with a grimace but nodded her head once as if she’d just confirmed a fact.

“That spider thing wasn’t possessed. That was just a natural beast taking an opportunity for a meal.”

“How could you possibly—” Dys began to ask but was cut off by Kerr tossing the leg in her direction. A relatively impressive feat, considering the size of the leg.

“No corruption. I’ve killed enough of those bastards to know what demon corruption smells like and whatever that spider puta is, it doesn’t smell like demon. So, stop arguing, listen to your elder, and lets fucking go.”

Kerr was right. There was no point in wallowing in her failures. They had to get going before the giant cave spider came back for seconds or something else came along. Like the demons Ealdread and his guards had given their lives to delay. A delay she was wasting by focusing on regret.

Tossing the spider leg aside along with her self-recriminations, at least for the moment, Jadis focused on moving. They were all still very much in danger and they still needed to find a way out of the hell hole of a cave system.

As a group they left the grisly scene, leaving behind Busch and what was left of Douglas since there was nothing else to be done with the bodies. Kerr quickly took the lead and forged ahead, directing the group further upstream to where the cave widened out further, turning into less of a tunnel waterway and more of an actual large cavern, though nowhere near as large as the one they’d seen before. Syd stayed right next to Kerr, not letting the therion woman get too far ahead or out of reach, just in case more giant spiders or other dangers waited in ambush. Jay kept close to Aila for the same reason, while Dys did the same for Eir and Thea. Eir still had no clothes or boots, though, and after a few minutes of walking Dys simply picked the elf up in one arm, carrying the shivering woman close to her body.

Jadis couldn’t imagine being pressed up against her steel armor was all that warming for the elf, but it had to be better than walking barefoot on the stone floor.

The cave opened up further as they went, though with all the stalagmites and stalactites getting in the way, it was hard to maneuver through the dimly lit cavern. As they hurried through the dark, Kerr volunteered a few more thoughts about where they were.

“I can hear other cave critters moving around in here. Them and that connard un-possessed monster tells me this cave hasn’t been invaded by demons.”

“That’s a good point,” Aila agreed, picking her way around one of the many rock formations. “If demons had gotten in here, then they’d have killed or corrupted all the natural wildlife they could by now.”

“Doesn’t mean they aren’t coming behind us,” Dys grumbled in response.

“But it’s also been a while. You’d think they’d have caught up by now if they had figured out that we swam up the tunnel,” Syd countered her own pessimism.

“Or there’s another way around we don’t know about and we’re walking right into them,” Aila said, throwing the frankly awful possibility out in the open like a dead fish no one wanted to touch.

The mood from there was somber. The seven, or five, of them traversed the cavern with as much speed and silence as they could manage. More tunnels, the natural kind, presented themselves as options for travel, and Kerr picked one as being the best of bad options since it had a slight upward slope. On more than one occasion they were forced to backtrack as they ran into dead ends, but overall they kept moving forward, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and any pursuers.

While the caves and tunnels weren’t exactly easy for her to move in, and there were plenty of smaller tunnels and crevices that she would have no chance of crawling into that split off from the paths they took, Jadis noticed that for the most part the passages were plenty large enough for someone of her size to fit. She wondered if the giant cave spiders had much to do with the unusual dimensions of the cave tunnels. From what she knew of spelunking, it was an activity that usually involved a lot of crawling and squeezing into tight spaces. That hadn’t been the experience she’d had so far, not to the degree she expected, anyway.

Thoughts of the giant spiders strayed towards thoughts of how badly she’d fucked up the situation with Douglas, so Jadis forced her thoughts towards a different matter. What were the giant spiders eating when they weren’t opportunistically feeding on unsuspecting mercenaries? Kerr had mentioned she’d heard some small creatures hiding in the dark recesses of the cavern, but little beasts didn’t seem like the ideal prey for such large monsters. And she doubted the spiders were going to the surface to hunt, otherwise the demonically overrun tunnels would have been discovered before now in all likelihood. With how Aila and the others didn’t even seem to have a name for the giant spiders, she presumed they were a new discovery. Weigrun was, Jadis reminded herself, an apparently relatively little-explored subcontinent, more wilderness than tamed lands. It made Jadis wonder just how much more of the wide world was still unknown. The thought was a good distraction, as was the discovery of the likely natural prey of the giant spider.

Rounding one corner in a particularly wide tunnel, Kerr had come to a sudden stop, head tilted to one side like a dog that had heard a distant whistle.

“What?” Syd asked, immediately jumping to high alert.

Kerr held up a hand for silence, then crept towards the left wall, a handaxe at the ready. She stood near a lumpy rock formation for a moment, then suddenly struck it with her axe, pulling at an edge of the formation.

To Jadis’ surprise, the lump of rock fell off the wall with a light clatter, then began to squirm around on the ground, revealing the many-legged underbelly of some insectile creature.

“The flying fuck is that?” Syd asked as the rest of the group closed in on the beast.

“Rock Crawler,” Kerr explained while putting her axe back in her belt. “You see them in caves back on the main continent. Taste like shit but they’re edible.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Aila said, kneeling down to get a better look at the squirming creature. “They dwell in deep caves and eat the glow moss, primarily. Technically magic beasts, but certainly one of the weakest and least dangerous. I think some part of them is used as an alchemical ingredient, but it’s not unique in nature so no one hunts these beasts specifically.”

The underside of the thing reminded Jadis of a sea roach, one of the giant isopods from back on Earth, with far too many legs. It was much larger than a giant isopod, though, reaching four feet from stem to stern and nearly as wide. Once the cave crawler managed to flip back onto its feet, it slowly began scuttling away from them and back up the wall, its rocky shell blending in perfectly with the cavern stone.

“Well, good to know we have options if our rations run out,” Jay murmured, watching the crawler as it progressed up the wall.

Much to Jadis’ surprise, when it got to a certain point roughly a few feet overhead, several more of what she had thought were just features in the cave walls started moving as well, getting out of the way of the first crawler as it plowed over and past them. Even more startling was the much, much larger cave crawler that started moving closer to the ceiling; the huge insect had to be seven feet long at least.

“I guess the Weigrun breed is a little bigger than the ones found on the central continent,” Aila commented with some trepidation coloring her voice as she watched the bug bigger than her disappear into shadowy crevices overhead.

“Seems like everything comes bigger in Weigrun,” Kerr said with a muted grunt, head turning meaningfully towards the three giants.

“Right…” Jay did a half shrug. “Anyway, if we’re done examining the local wildlife, let’s get moving again. I’d personally like to get out of this pit before we make any more zoological discoveries that we may not like so much.”

The group moved on, continuing their search for a way out of the cave system.

In the lightless, unchanging tunnels, Jadis lost all track of time. She had no idea how much sleep she’d gotten back in the stream alcove, much less how much time had passed while wandering the demon tunnels before then. The only metric she was able to go by was bodily functions and general levels of exhaustion. And, while Jadis still felt like she could keep going, the others eventually got to a point where it seemed they weren’t going to be able to continue.

With no exit in sight, they settled on finding another spot to rest in, though this time around they took some extra precautions. Rather than blocking themselves into an alcove with no exit, Kerr found them a section of the cavern that looped back around to the main one, giving them a way to escape if they were attacked from one end. Jadis also took a couple of their blankets and hung them across the entrances, blocking off sightlines to give them at least a modicum of cover.

With little energy left in them, the much-reduced group collapsed inside their pitiful campsite to get some rest.

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