Book 5 Chapter 30: (Almost) Buried Alive

    The whistles came from a particularly dark corner of the cavern. Everybody instinctively swung that way. Arthur beamed his flashlight in the same direction, squinting hard to see through the dark.

    Horatio gathered up all of the light around him and cast it out in that direction, too.

    What at first looked like the pitch-black curve of the hollow eruption was actually the mouth of another tunnel.

    It probably leads past where the ice reached, Arthur thought, his stomach sinking. He made a snap decision.

    “It looks like we have a fight on our hands. Anybody who doesn’t want to do that, get back up and reconvene with Sams and Joy. Everyone who does, gather up around me.”

    Because one thing was for sure: He was here to harvest shards, and even cards if he could get his hands on any. He wasn’t running anywhere.

    “Cressida,” Arthur said, “see if it’s possible to block up that tunnel using one of your shields, or at least delay them a little.”

    She nodded and jogged off to the tunnel mouth.

    Behind him, purples lifted into the air with their riders. He wasn’t surprised to hear them leave. He suspected many could take care of themselves, or at the very least, they had self-defense cards. That’s how they had survived so far in Blood Moon.

    But he was also a brand-new captain to them, and the trust wasn’t there yet. They had likely just harvested more shards than they had seen in several eruptions combined. Many of them wanted to cut and run with their wealth while they could.

    The real surprise was that Griff and Squish decided to stay, though Griff looked decidedly pale. His jaw was set in a grimace of determination.

    Catching Arthur’s gaze, he nodded once in acknowledgment. “Squish and I can help out for a while. But if it gets too hairy, we’re getting out of here.”

    “I understand,” Arthur said.

    Steve and his dragon hadn’t immediately leapt up into the air, either, though the little Common danced around nervously, and Steve looked uncertain.

    “What do you want me to do, sir?” he asked Arthur directly.

    Arthur thought for a moment. “Get on your dragon and continue harvesting. There are a lot of corpses stuck high up on the wall and on the ceiling. There’s no reason you should waste the chance to harvest. Steve,” he added, “if things get bad, use Bolt’s ability and flash out.”

    As a Common, he was naturally at the bottom of the pecking order and needed all the shards he could get. Steve nodded, and with a faint look of guilt mingled with relief, he mounted his dragon.

    Arthur turned to the tunnel. The whistling was getting louder.

    I wonder if there’s going to be any Rares in there, he thought, thinking of Cressida’s quest notification, and he had to hide a grin.

    “Wait,” Griff said suddenly. “There’s too many people. Squish can’t take everybody, and I don’t think that your Rare can hold two passengers right now.”

    Arthur hesitated. He hated giving away any of his secrets, but Griff had a point.

    “I have an extra-dimensional space large enough to store a person. If we need to evacuate, you take Horatio, so that way you can see on your way up. Cressida,” he called, and jogged to the mouth of the tunnel. “How is it looking?”

    Behind him, Brixaby followed, though he remained a step or two back, still collecting shards from the dead scourglings as he went.

    Cressida was standing in front of the tunnel with her hands on her hips, assessing it. “I’ll be able to put up a shield large enough to cover most of this,” she said as Arthur approached, “but I won’t be able to keep it up for long, especially if there are a lot of them. Too many hits will drain my mana.”

    And judging by the whistling down the tunnel, it certainly sounded like there was a lot of scourglings.

    Brixaby grinned a fearsome dragon grin. “Arthur, I believe that some of them are carrying Rare shards. I can smell them.”

    “Well, that would fit with Cressida’s quest,” he said.

    He touched her on the shoulder to get her attention. “If this turns bad, then I’ll need to take you out using my Personal Space.”

    She nodded, but then looked back to the tunnel, distracted.

    He needed to make sure she completely understood. “Cressida, when the time comes, you need to give me permission, or it’s not going to work. So if you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed, I want you drop the shield sooner rather than later.”

    I just want you to be safe, he wanted to say but couldn’t quite figure out how without coming off as too corny.

    “Yes, Joy will not forgive me if any harm comes to her rider,” Brixaby said.

    He supposed he could have just said it like that.

    Arthur turned on the flashlight and swept the beam down the tunnel. He could not see any of the oncoming scourglings yet, though the opening of the tunnel sloped forward, showing even more frozen bodies attached to the ceiling and the walls. Many of them were arranged blocks—though, unfortunately, not enough to stop up the tunnel, only enough to narrow it.

    He would have walked in to get a closer look and see how far the tunnel went, but the ice was thicker in patches, as if the cold had collected here. He only took a couple of steps before he started to slip and had to back up.

    Why didn’t he have ice clamps in his Personal Space? Once he got back to the hive, he was going to find a way to locate some.

    The whistles were getting very close now, and Arthur figured they’d see the first of the scourglings any moment.

    Cressida gestured for him to stand behind her. Then she cast not only her kinetic shield, but also several of her animal summons.

    As she had said, she couldn’t make her shield large enough to cover the entire mouth of the tunnel. There was a gap wide enough for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder on each side, so she used her summons to fill in the caps: Wicker, her bear made of flame guarded one side. Her hedgehog toddled to the opening on the other and crouched down, his spines on full display.

    Above, water cranes circled at the low ceiling. Arthur imagined that they would dive down on anything that got past.

    Arthur looked on with slight amusement. “What, you’re not bringing out those kittens?”

    She shook her head. “I might if a higher-level scourgling shows up, but the lower-ranked, littler ones don’t have the brains to be taken in by them.”

    Even blinded, suffering, and stuck like pincushions with razor shards of metal, they still blundered forward with jaws open.

    When they got too close, Griff stepped up with his spear spinning in a golden blur. Anything the spear touched fell into pieces.

    With all of that, the scourglings did not have much of a chance.

    The oncoming wave ended, but many scourglings were left injured, and the hideous whistling was getting on Arthur’s nerves.

    “Kill them all,” Arthur directed and stepped forward to do just that.

    “Excellent,” Brixaby said with satisfaction. “I have been looking forward to testing this out.” Then he grabbed something from his Personal Space.

    Arthur did a double take. “Is that a sword?”

    It was a rough piece of metal shaped like an elongated knife, and looked distinctly odd being held in the dragon’s hands. Swords were generally meant for humans, and while Brixaby could approximate the grip, it wasn’t exact.

    “Yes, I am a weaponsmith, and this has runes enchanted with sharpness on it,” he said, and brought down his sword in an easy chop that cut through a blinded scourgling like butter.

    Then he reached down with his other claw and gestured for the shard harvest.

    “Could you . . . make one for me?” Arthur asked.

    “Perhaps,” Brixaby replied diffidently. “When I get the appropriate metal. And you are never to use it when riding on my back. This is quite sharp.”

    Arthur sighed and mentally added whatever type of metal Brixaby wanted to his shopping list. He waded forward to help dispatch the last of the scourglings and start the harvest.

    Soon, Arthur realized he had become nose blind to the smell in here. Because the new smell of freshly dead scourglings was somehow even worse.

    As Cressida had promised, about one in every twenty scourglings yielded a Rare shard. And quite a few yielded Uncommons. That was quite unusual, because they were all Common scourglings.

    “I think they’ve been consuming each other,” Brixaby said when Arthur commented on it. “Then they would be combining the shards.”

    “Makes sense,” Horatio said. “That would be why they came at us with teeth and claws and not additional card power. Maybe give it a few more weeks and they would have gathered enough to make cards.”

    Griff shuddered. “I’ve changed my mind: I’d rather not explore very old eruptions.”

    Arthur had no complaints. Frankly, it was the best of all worlds: an enemy that could be easily killed but gave a great reward.

    They moved forward, wading through what was left of the scourglings. There were even more in the tunnel, either pulped by Brixaby’s Stunning Shout or the effect of being blasted back by Cressida’s kinetic shield. Some bodies were so utterly destroyed it was hard to tell where they began and others ended. Those usually were too damaged to harvest a shard.

    Several dozen yards beyond, the tunnel ended in a freshly collapsed wall of rock and dirt. Arthur looked warily at it, knowing there had to be another wave of scourglings trying to dig their way through to get them right now.

    So far, Arthur had found two Rares, and he knew that Brixaby had gotten at least that. Cressida ended up with three. It was a good day’s work.

    Even Griff ended up with one Rare shard. He looked like he was ready to cry when Arthur told him to keep it. To someone from Blood Moon Hive, those shards literally meant an extension on their life. It was a good day’s work.

    Later, looking back, Arthur would curse himself for letting greed lead him too far into the tunnel.

    Brixaby’s Stunning Shout had bounced around and completely decimated the scourglings in the back of the tunnel near the cave-in, so Arthur was hard put to try to find a chunk big enough to harvest. He drifted closer toward the wall, concentrating too much on what was harvestable and not enough on what was happening around him.

    So when he felt the eruption cone start to shake again, he was taken completely by surprise. The hollow part of the eruption cone was rock, but here in the tunnel, it had moved to soft dirt again. Dirt that started to fall apart before Arthur’s eyes.

    He straightened, horrified, then turned to yell at the others, “Get out—get out of the tunnel!”

    Only then did he realize he was the one farthest in. Everyone else had drifted to the mouth of the tunnel.

    Rocks and dirt started to rain down in earnest. A big stone smacked him on the shoulder, bringing him to his knees. Distantly, he heard Cressida cry out his name. A second later, the air was full of choking soil.

    Arthur shut his eyes and activated his Phase In, Phase Out card. Instantly, the weight of the soil lifted.

    There was a crashing sound from above him. The tunnel completely collapsed, and everything went dark as he was cut off from light.

    He was somewhere within tons of rock and soil, completely blinded, and his card would only let him phase in between it all for thirty seconds.

    He shot to his feet, picked a direction he thought led out, and ran.

    If he went the wrong way, he could go farther into the tunnel or sideways straight into dirt and rock.

    It was just dark with nothing to see, nothing to hear, and no tactile sensation from all around.

    At the ten-second countdown, he knew he must have headed in the wrong direction. There was only blackness all around him. Within a few moments he was going to phase back into the middle of rock and soil.

    Arthur put on a final, desperate burst of speed. His only hope was that somehow, he could escape the boundary of the eruption cone and come out the other side. It was a vague hope, a dim hope. The eruption site was huge.

    Then, with two seconds left, his eyes registered light, and he stumbled into an open space. He let his Phase In, Phase Out drop and gasped in air.

    Then, immediately, he wished he hadn’t.

    He hadn’t stepped into daylight, or even moonlight. He was surrounded by a blue bioluminescent glow. He was in a cavern, and clinging to the walls on the front and the sides were clusters of wet, baggy ovoids.

    Scourgling eggs.