Blood Shaper

The Shatterplate War Chapter 18

The twelve-foot tall giant, half purple down one side of its body and half orange down the other, roared in pain as it stepped on the caltrops made of blood that Kay had scattered around its feet earlier. As it danced around and roared in pain, Kay dashed for the exit.

You could, hypothetically, defeat the giant to clear the room. At least Kay assumed so. He wasn’t going to even attempt to do that, though. With its strange coloration and foppish-looking clothing, at first glance, it might seem like it wasn’t that strong. Kay had learned that it was the opposite of that, and the giant was strong as fuck, when he’d accidentally made too much noise, and the giant had punched through several feet of stone wall to try and hit him. It had been an immediate reaction, too; it hadn’t even wound up for the strike. One moment its hand was at its side on the other side of a wall; the next, its fist was inches from Kay’s body.

After that, Kay had relied even more heavily on his less than stellar stealth skills and had snuck around the part maze, part climbing area, part children’s play place that was that room of the Dungeon. Thankfully, the giant wasn’t very smart, and Kay managed to trick or misdirect it several times in order to escape or just move around it while beneath its notice. Which is why when Kay used some Blood Manipulation to hurl a hunk of rock past the giant’s head into the room behind it, he wasn’t surprised to see it whip around and stomp into that room, bellowing in rage.

What did surprise him was the sudden ringing bell noise that echoed through the room and the glowing colors that lit up around him as he dashed over a line in the floor between himself and the exit door. He cursed as he heard the giant roar again and start stampeding towards him. He must have missed something, or maybe alerting the giant to its escaping quarry was just the last trick of this room.

Kay had needed to steal keys from rooms the giant seemed to live in, find hidden passages that led him to other areas, quietly solve puzzles and riddles that block his way to the next thing he needed to find, all to make it to one little spinning wheel that needed to be turned in order to lift the portcullis over the exit door. And apparently, he needed to have found something else to disable the alarm that told the giant where he was.

The giant roared again, and somehow in the wordless scream of rage that it let out, Kay heard a note of personal injury. The minor attacks on the giant, the tricks, the noises that led it stomping off in the wrong direction, all of those it could accept. But trying to escape? The giant seemed to take that personally.

Kay heard a crunching noise, and he glanced back to see the giant rip a four-foot chunk out of the wall and chuck it at Kay. Kay yelped as he watched the massive piece of architecture fly at him, and he dove to the side. Kay’s goal changed from “run to the door before the giant can catch up” to “run from the giant that is trying to kill me with flying pieces of masonry”.

Kay sidestepped and rolled, dodged, dashed, and leaped in an effort to not get squashed, and the sixty feet between where he had been and the exit felt like miles.

Three feet from the exit, miraculously still alive and only lightly injured from flying shrapnel, Kay tripped. It could have been on a piece of broken rubble, over his own feet, or maybe for the first time in every room so far, a brick was unevenly placed. Whatever it was, Kay hit the ground face first.

In his mind’s eye, Kay could see the stone coming right at him to crush the life out of his body. If it hit, that was the end of his story. He would never make it back to Avalon. He would never see his friends again. Of course, that was only if he let it hit him.

Kay pulsed blood out of his hand, ripping his skin open as it exploded against the ground and sent him spinning towards the incoming projectile. With no time to draw blood from his canteen, he blew open his other hand as he sent a bolt of blood at the flying rock. It was feet from hitting him as Kay’s attack punched through it and broke it into multiple pieces that scattered in different directions. Some of those pieces still hit Kay, but with less mass and force behind them, they only bruised him.

Kay whipped his arms back and used ropes of blood that he hooked around the edge of the open doorway to yank himself backward through the exit. As he flew through the air, he flipped two birds at the giant with his bloody hands. He doubted the giant actually knew what that gesture meant, but it still screamed in rage as Kay flew through the exit and out of the room.

The door out of the giant’s room had been the only one that didn’t have some kind of, well, door. Some had curtains hanging in the opening, others had wooden doors with knobs you chose a symbol with, there were the ones that looked like they were bricked up that pulled aside when you tapped a symbol, and there was a fourth kind that had acted a bit like airlocks from submarine movies, where you turned a handle to a symbol, locked it in place, then spun the mechanism to open the door. This was the first that was completely open, and in the opening was impenetrable darkness. There was no symbol to pick in any way, shape, or form. Kay hoped it was the exit but planned to end up in another room.

He passed into the darkness, and an instant later, was in another lit room. A tiny part of him recognized that this room was different. The rest of him was grunting in pain as he tumbled ass over head across the stone floor, bouncing a little each time he landed. He stopped when he slammed into a wall opposite from where he entered. Moaning with pain, he tried to get up.

“Boss!”

“Mayor!”

“Mayor!”

Three people ran over and flipped him onto his back. He peeled open his eyes and found Lauren, Jadet, and Yven staring down at him with three worried expressions.

“Hey! You three are okay,” He tiredly cheered in a quiet voice.

“Are you okay?” Lauren cried as they all hovered above him. “Oh gods, your hands!”

“I’m fine.” Kay waved off her concern as he pushed himself up b his elbows. “Don’t worry about it.” He pulled some blood from his canteen and sent it into his hands at the same time he activated the healing properties from his Bloody Healer Skills.

“Hold still!” She snapped at him instead of calming down as she pulled out a small vial. She forced him to spread out his hands and poured half of the vial on each of his palms.

“That tingles.”

“It’s not the best healing potion, so there might be some itching after the tingling.”

The skin on Kay’s hands started to slowly close over as he helped the potion’s effects along by pumping some extra mana into his own healing Skill. After his hands looked mostly normal, he gently set them in his lap and looked up at his three party members. “So, based on how we’re paying attention to me instead of worrying about what’s around us, I’m guessing we made it out?”

“We did,” Yven acknowledged with a small smile, “We don’t really know where we are, though.”

Kay pushed past Lauren, who was still watching him with a worried expression, and stood up to get a better look around. He stumbled a little, and Lauren grabbed at his arm to keep him from falling over. They were in a long hallway with decorative braziers hanging from the ceiling containing glowing stones of some kind. The hallway was made of stone bricks, like the rest of the rooms of the Dungeon that they’d passed through, but that was the only similarity. The Dungeon rooms had been made of white stone bricks, perfectly flush with each other and immaculate. In direct contrast, the hallway was made of bricks that were dark gray stone, and each of them was slightly rough around the edges. The construction was still amazing to look at, and in Kay’s opinion, quite well done, but it wasn’t unnaturally perfect like the Dungeon.

“Well, there’s no mana pressure, so we aren’t in the Dungeon anymore,” Kay remarked as he looked around. He glanced down at his hands and flexed them a few times. “That does itch now.”

“It should go away shortly,” Lauren told him.

Looking around some more, Kay saw that he’d tumbled out of a large open archway that was almost ten feet tall at its apex. Behind it was more of the white stonework of the Dungeon. He stuck just his hand through and felt a slight amount of Dungeon pressure.

“So, that’s the Dungeon we just came out of, right?” He pointed into the arch.

“Right.”

“Then what’s that?” Kay turned and pointed at the giant pair of double doors that stood over thirty feet tall. The giant doors were made of planks of dark wood, bound together with thick strips of metal. Giant rings hung taller than most people could reach as handles, and there was a small gap between the doors. Small compared to the doors themselves, that is. There was enough space for two large people to walk side by side.

Above the doors were a series of words in an unrecognizable language. Kay stared at them for a few moments until they shifted into English. “The Tumultuous Halls.” He read out loud.

“Mayor?”

Kay turned around to see Yven beckoning at him from further down the opposite direction.

“There’s some kind of writing here.”

He stepped over and looked at it what Yven was talking about. A large sheet of copper-colored metal hung on the wall, and there was more unknown writing carved into it. Underneath the writing was a simple map. As soon as he could understand it, Kay started reading to everyone. “The Tumultuous Hall lies ahead, woe to those who enter unprepared. It is a powerful Dungeon that will sap your strength and destroy you should you not be ready to face it. For those not ready to test themselves against it, the great Dungeon has created two children for the weak to prepare themselves against. First, the Caustic Depths will strengthen the fighting abilities of those who survive. Opposite the Depths lies the entrance to the Many Trial Rooms. Face the rooms and test your wit and the strength of your minds.”

They all shared a look, then glanced over at the archway they’d come through. Directly opposite was a pile of rubble that might have been another similar-looking archway, now filled with broken stone.

“Is this three Dungeons or one?” Jadet.

Lauren shook her head, “It doesn’t matter. We need to see if there’s a way out of this building or whatever we’re in and if we’re in a safe location to bring our people to.”

“Good point.” Kay started heading away from the massive doors of The Tumultuous Halls, “This is probably the way out, right?”

The hallway stretched out for a few more hundred feet before stopping at a wall of broken masonry and rubble from the ceiling caving in. There was just enough of a gap to see what looked like natural sunlight filtering through from above. It only took a few minutes for the four of them to work together to widen the gap enough for Kay to slip through. The ceiling of the underground hallway had obviously collapsed at one point, leaving a gaping hole in the ground. Vines grew down into the hole, and the dirt that had fallen in from above had grass sprouting on it haphazardly.

Using a ladder made out of his everyday blood Kay and his party climbed out of the hole to look around. They had previously been slightly north of the mountain that was right next to Avalon and a lot farther west. Now they were almost twice the distance they had been north of the mountain to its south and considerably closer to it.

Kay turned around and pointed, “So everyone else is that way. I think we’re far enough away to call this safe from the pterosaurs.”

“I agree.” Yven started climbing back down into the subterranean hall. “Let’s go get everyone and get home.”

“Stop rushing!” Lauren insisted loudly.

The three others turned back to look at her.

“We need to compare notes and gather as much information about those Many Rooms as we can!” She lectured them, “If we go back and just drag everyone inside without preparing, we’ll get some of our people killed!”

The three men shared sheepish looks before Kay stepped forward with one of his notebooks out. “You’re right. We should start by describing everything we went through so we can compare notes. I’ll go first.”

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