Chapter 506: Kadi’s Time To Shine
Thor stared at the young woman for three agonizing seconds.
Her jaw moved slowly and an audible wet swallow echoed from her throat as she visualized three pounds of glistening, peppered venison tenderloin.
"Well..." Thor grumbled, abruptly uncrossing her arms and scratching the back of her neck with an exaggerated thoughtful scowl. "When you frame it with such strategic foresight... a tactician must know when to conserve fuel. Sitting in a dark cave is an insult to the open sky, but starving a warrior’s stomach is an insult to the cosmos! Silas! I have reconsidered! We take the cave!"
Silas stared at the Princess, an amused impressed smirk tugging at his lips.
The royal woman caught his glance and offered him a tiny conspiratorial wink beneath the rim of her fur hood.
’Clever girl,’ Silas thought. ’She handled that better than the others would have...’
SH-SH-SHK!
A sharp scuttling sound scraped across the loose scree twenty paces up the eastern slope.
From behind a jagged basalt tooth, a mutated six-legged crawler with its pale blind face split into a wet ring of needle-like teeth lunged down the rock face, drawn by the sound of voices.
FZZZZZZT!
Kadi didn’t even turn her shoulders.
The Sand Mage simply flicked her right wrist toward the slope.
From the leather pouches at her hip, a dense pressurized stream of golden mineral sand erupted like high-velocity buckshot.
The sand whipped through the freezing air with the deafening shriek of a drill.
’When doing long range like this... the sand with me is the best.’ She thought.
KRA-CH-CH-CH-CH-PONG!
The abrasive torrent struck the leaping aberration dead in the chest and the hyper-concentrated grit acted like an industrial water-jet cutter, grinding through the creature’s chitin, muscle, and spinal column in less than half a second.
SPLAT!
The pulverized remnants of the beast splashed across the dark rock, dead before the pieces hit the snow.
Kadi closed her fist, drawing the red-stained sand back toward her waist, letting it settle into the pouches with a soft metallic rustle.
Her dark braids swayed as she exhaled a long shaky breath with her knuckles white against her reins.
"I agree with the rest," Kadi murmured, her voice tight with lingering strain.
Her dark eyes were tired with dark circles bruising the skin beneath them.
"We’ve been on high alert since dawn, my Lord. Even an hour to catch our breath and reset our wards will keep our reflexes from slipping..."
From behind them, Aeliana sat stiffly in her saddle.
The high-elf secretary adjusted the silver wire-rimmed spectacles resting on her nose, clearing her throat with an official administrative air.
"Lord Silas," Aeliana began, pulling a small book from her satchel to review their projected march routes, "if we adhere strictly to the logistical projections I drafted, pausing for a forty-five-minute interval will depress our average velocity by sixteen percent... We are currently two hours ahead of the base schedule so if we push through the boundary now, we could theoretically reach the descent threshold before the midnight—"
GURRRRRR-GL-GL-GL-GL!
A loud unladylike rumble tore from Aeliana’s stomach.
The sound was so clear that it echoed off the narrow canyon walls like a distant landslide.
Aeliana froze.
Her sentence died instantly on her tongue and then slowly, a brilliant wave of pure crimson flooded across the high-elf’s pale cheeks, burning all the way up to the slender delicate tips of her long pointed ears.
She clamped both hands over her lower abdomen, shrinking into the collar of her white shirt as her eyes darted desperately down at the wolf’s mane.
"I... that was..." Aeliana stammered, her voice dropping into a humiliated, microscopic squeak. "...an involuntary sound... Lord Silas..."
𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮
A muffled snicker broke out from the line.
"Sounds like your stomach wants some roast pork, ears," Morwenna teased, leaning back in her saddle with a wide toothy grin.
"I can easily sustain the march for another twelve hours without caloric intake!" Morwenna declared, turning her gray eyes toward Silas with sharp arrogant pride. "A True woman doesn’t whine about a growling belly... My Tidebringer and I can carve a clean corridor straight through this mist right now, Captain. Nobody protects your blind spots better than me."
"Oh, please," Eluned scoffed melodiously from Silas’s other side, rolling her emerald eyes with dramatic disdain. "A pirate’s crude iron is hardly a substitute for the living primordial power of the World Tree. One word from me, and the deep roots will form a highway that shields our Lord from every foul creature in this trench... If anyone is securing his safety, barnacle, it is his divine wife."
"Wife?!" Morwenna bristled, her jaw tightening as she gripped Tidebringer’s hilt. "Just because you have sex doesn’t mean you’re his wife, you overgrown shrub! Don’t flatter yourself! I was cutting down leviathans while you were still fertilizing moss!"
"Enough," Silas commanded, raising a single hand to cut through the rising storm of divine and nautical bickering.
Both women clicked their tongues, turning their faces in opposite directions with identical childish scowls.
Silas looked past them with his blue eyes settling on the dark undulating wall of white mist gathering at the end of the gorge.
He had been caught in that vapor once before.
"Haah..."
He remembered the sickening weightless horror of it... the way the Corpse-Leeches manifested from empty air, the way the sound died and the absence of physical logic.
If they were swallowed by that fog at its peak, it wouldn’t just be low-tier leeches dropping from the sky.
’I have a terrible feeling about that mist,’ Silas thought, his fingers tightening against Valkyrie’s reins. ’Pushing forward out of stubborn pride is how entire strike teams end up buried under the permafrost.’
"We rest," Silas decreed firmly, leaving zero room for debate. "We find an elevated cavern, dig in, seal the threshold, and wait for this surge to clear. Tasmin, scout the eastern wall and find us an opening that won’t collapse under a strike."
"Already spotted one, my Lord," Tasmin replied, pointing her dagger toward an elevated basalt shelf forty feet above the gorge floor. "Two hundred yards up. A dry fissure mouth with a deep narrow access point and defensible choke, it’s quite perfect for a squad hold."
"Lead the way."
The ascent to the elevated cavern shelf was brutal.
The Blessed Wolves had to dig their iron-shod claws into the icy shale, scrambling up the steep scree slope in a tight disciplined zig-zag pattern while the white fog continued its relentless climb up the canyon floor behind them.
When they crested the shelf, the cavern opening loomed before them.
It was a jagged irregular tear in the solid basalt face, roughly twelve feet wide and fifteen feet high.
The interior was completely pitch-black, exhaling a faint unnatural smell that carried the distinct foul odor of rot.
"Dismount," Silas commanded softly.
THUD! THUD!
The eight riders slid from their saddles into the ankle-deep snow.
Silas closed his eyes, extending the spiritual perception anchored within his Mythic Gold Core.
The invisible golden pulse radiated into the lightless cavern mouth, bouncing off the uneven stone walls and mapping the subterranean space.
’A large main chamber, roughly sixty paces deep with a natural granite ceiling and it’s structurally sound.’
Then, his sensory pulse struck living flesh.
’There are four signatures that are deep in the rear hollow and they’re of Tier 2 energy...’
"We have residents," Silas murmured, his hand dropping toward his weapon belt. "Four hostiles nested near the back wall. Looks like—"
"Allow me, Lord Silas."
Kadi stepped forward.
The Sand Mage’s voice was remarkably steady, though the fine shaking of her hands betrayed the nervous adrenaline coursing through her veins.
She pulled the heavy wool cloak from her shoulders, letting it drape across the pommel of her mount, revealing her dark leather armor and the brass-inlaid rings ringing both of her forearms.
She looked directly into Silas’s blue eyes, a fierce hunger for validation burning in her dark irises.
"You brought me on this strike to pull my weight," Kadi said, her chin lifting with quiet determination. "I didn’t swing a pickaxe in the mines yesterday, and I spent the morning watching the Saintess and the commanders clear the road... Let me clear the den so I will secure the cavern for our squad, my Lord."
Silas studied her face for a quiet second.
"Go," Silas granted with a slow, respectful nod. "Take the room, Kadi. We have your back."
A fierce, grateful spark ignited in Kadi’s eyes. "Thank you, my Lord."
She turned, stepping boldly across the frozen threshold into the pitch-black maw of the cavern.
The moment her leather boots crossed the boundary, the dark interior awakened.
SKREEEEEEEEE-CH-CH-CH!
An ear-splitting metallic screech tore through the cavern, echoing off the stone walls like shattering glass!
From the ceiling of the rear chamber, four shapes detached, crashing onto the granite floor with concussive sounds.
THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!
They were Basalt Crawlers... they were monstrous arachnid-like horrors roughly the size of warhorses.
Their bodies were encased in thick, jagged plates of petrified black rock that functioned as natural armor and their eight jointed legs terminated in diamond-hard, spear-like points capable of punching through solid steel as their bloated underbellies pulsed with a sickly glowing yellow acid.
"CREEEEEE!" a hiss rattled through the air as the four beasts charged forward in synchronized scuttling.
CLIK-CLIK-CLIK-CLIK-CLIK!
The lead crawler closed the distance in an instant, lunging through the darkness with its two front spear-limbs cocked, thrusting straight toward Kadi’s throat with the speed of an armor-piercing ballista.
FZZZZZZT!
Kadi didn’t retreat an inch as her eyes burned with amber mana.
"Flow," Kadi whispered.
SHSHSH-BOOM!
She didn’t summon sand from her pouches this time, Kadi reached out to the very bedrock beneath her feet!
Her earth mana surged into the stone floor as the solid granite beneath the charging crawler instantly lost its molecular cohesion, grinding down into billions of microscopic sand particles.
’Finally we’re not out in the snow...’
The solid floor transformed into a violent churning quicksand vortex in the span of a single second.
WHOOSH!
The lead crawler’s front legs plunged into the liquid stone.
Its terrifying momentum violently betrayed it as the beast pitched forward, its armored head slamming face-first into the churning sand with an earth-shaking crack.
Before the monster could thrash its limbs, Kadi clapped her hands together.
CLAP!
"Solidify."
The churning vortex of sand instantly crystallized back into solid unbreakable granite.
KRA-CRUNCH!
The crawler’s legs, torso, and lower jaw were permanently fused into the stone floor, trapped in a stone vice that crushed its internal organs under millions of pounds of geological pressure.
The beast shrieked, vomiting a geyser of yellow acid that sizzled uselessly against the cave ceiling!
"First one down," Kadi muttered, her braids whipping as she pivoted on her heel.
The second and third crawlers vaulted over their trapped kin, their massive rock-plated bodies lunging through the air from the left and right flanks with their mandibles wide and dripping with slime.
WHOOSH.
Kadi dropped low, sliding across the dusty floor on her knees.
As she slid between the two airborne monstrosities, she thrust both arms straight upward toward the cavern ceiling.
CRRR-RUMBLE!
"Twin Spire!"
From the solid rock of the ceiling above, two stalactites that were as thick as tree trunks and sharp as needles shattered loose under her magical command, driven downward by the full force of gravity and pressurized earth mana.
THUD-CRUNCH-SPLAT!
The two falling stone pillars impaled both mid-air crawlers simultaneously.
The massive stone spikes drove clean through their armored thoraxes, pinning both writhing shrieking monstrosities dead-center to the cavern floor.
Black ichor and shattered plates of basalt exploded across the walls in a violent sickening display of total dominance.
SKREEEEEEE!
The fourth and largest crawler... a scarred brute nearly twice the size of the others skidded to a halt, its twelve red eyes widening in pure shock.
Realizing it was outmatched, the beast curled its legs, attempting to launch itself backward into the deep shadows of the rear tunnels...
"You don’t leave," Kadi snarled as she extended her right arm with her fingers clawing at the empty air.
From the pulverizing impact zones behind her, clouds of fine pulverized stone dust were hanging suspended in the draft.
Kadi seized that dust and her mana superheated the microscopic particles, converting the cloud into a swirling vortex of molten glass-sand.
VUUUUUUM!
The glowing superheated sand formed an eight-foot serrated crescent blade that hovered above her shoulder, spinning with the deafening high-pitched scream of a turbine engine.
"Sand Sever!"
Kadi brought her arm down in a violent chopping motion.
SHING-BOOOOOOM!
The molten glass crescent tore through the cavern.
It crossed twenty yards in seconds, cleaving cleanly through the fleeing crawler’s armored waist, through its legs, and burying itself four feet deep into the solid granite wall behind it.
THUD-SPLAT!
The two severed halves of the alpha crawler collapsed into the dust, twitching twice before curling into stillness as the cavern fell into ringing silence.