Stumbling Up: A Loser's Guide to Progression - Chapter 49: Not Your Average Sewer Rat

"Richaaard! Tandy? Leeee-oooo!!!!"

We'd been wandering under the southern restaurant district for an hour. Back and forth, calling. I'd triggered [Molten Promise] on my hammer, turning it into an oversized torch. No crack or crevasse was left in the dark. We'd looked at our party [Map], and they'd crisscrossed the area so much it was hard to tell where they'd disappeared.

The empty spot in my mind that they inhabited was a raw, sharp wound. It was as though they'd been excised from my psyche with an obsidian knife, and all I could feel was their absence.

The red-hot panic started to turn into resignation. [Self Critic] had me doubting it was even possible for me to find them. The city was so much bigger than Woodsten. I was out of my depth. They were gone.

I knew I needed to keep searching. Keep looking.

But I felt helpless.

"They didn't die," I said, primarily for my own benefit. If I spoke it, it had to be true.

"No, we would have gotten a death notice. They're still in [Your Mom's Party], just not here." Meredeath backed me up with the confidence of someone who believed in the [System's] rules. I knew better.

We sat back against the sides of the tunnel. [Guardian's Promise] sat next to me, illuminating the tunnel like a certain glow worm.

Even if I was going to allow myself to believe Meredeath, I had no idea what to do next.

The delivery tunnels were a fairly straightforward web that followed the roads of the city. We'd searched everywhere they were supposed to explore. Not only had we not found them, but the place was empty. No rats. No deliveries. Nothing suspicious.

"Let's go back to the sewer juncture. If Tad is right and that's where the rats are congregating, then that's where they should have ended up," Meredeath suggested.

Her words were calm, logical, and they made sense. And that, irrationally, pissed me off.

"We already checked. They're not there!" We couldn't find them, and she didn't seem that upset by it. Worse, she'd been right. Splitting the party had been a bad idea, but I'd been so excited to get some time alone with her.

Meredeath stood, patting the dust off her legs.

No part of me wanted to imagine being [Adventurers] without Tandy and Leo. I tried triggering [Heartbeat] again, but all I got was heartburn. It was all my fault.

"COLE! Snap out of it! Look at me." Meredeath snapped her fingers. I refused to look. "I don't know what's got you stuck, but sitting here in an empty tunnel isn't going to save our friends’ lives. Now get off your ass and start doing something useful."

"But it's my fault." The truth I'd been clutching came out in a whisper.

"Has your [Self Critic] leveled or something? Even if I agreed that it was somehow your fault, which I don't, how are you fixing it?"

I looked up at her. She had a hand extended to help me up. I took a deep breath, trying to will the tension from my body. I took her hand, and she pulled me to my feet. [Guardian's Promise] flared when I grabbed it, as though it sensed my resolve.

Without another word, Meredeath headed back to the main junction for the district. The leather of her black corset armor reflected the glow of my hammer.

"You should take your own advice," I called after her, as I willed my feet to move. Her back stiffened. She didn't turn to look at me, so I continued, "Whatever it is in your previous life. It's not your fault either."

Meredeath kept walking, ignoring my comment.

I knew why. It wasn't easy advice to follow.

Fifteen minutes of silence, and we were back where our investigation had started.

The sewer junction sat in the middle of a wide roundabout. Tunnels exited the chamber like spokes on a wagon wheel. The delivery tunnels in this section of the city all sloped down to here. This sewer was larger than the other junctions we'd seen. Not only were there grates for runoff, but also a waist-high giant drain was positioned in the center. Presumably, so restaurants could bring their frying grease and dump it.

The whole place reeked of old oil. It was a sewer rat's paradise.

I leaned over the drain, holding [Guardian's Promise] above it. The pit continued well beyond the light of my hammer.

"I don't understand how they made these tunnels. This wouldn’t be easy to build, even in my world. And you're a lot more," Meredeath caught herself. I knew what she was going to say, though she'd slipped before. Our world is a lot more 'primitive.'

"They likely used magic. Back when Eddie's Mill was built, we had true [Geomancers] that were responsible for most of the underlying build of these old cities. That's why the new districts are always crappier. A lot of skill and spells were lost in the cataclysm that ended the last age." I wasn't about to admit that I, too, was impressed by the city's design.

Meredeath peered into the darkness. Light wasn't a limiting resource for her eyes anymore.

"Do you see anything?" I asked.

She leaned further still, squinting into the abyss.

"Best lean back," came a low, gruff voice. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Clutching [Guardian's Promise], I turned to face the newcomer.

"No harm intended," he said, stepping into the light, palms up. Meredeath's eyes were glowing as she crouched, ready to jump into action.

The guy was short and stocky. He wore flexible scaly armor with joints made of chainmail and a midnight black double-bladed axe. Bushy eyebrows and a pair of brown eyes peeked over a thick green bandana. A long tangle of rope coiled around his arm as he stepped into the center of the roundabout.

I hoped he was a fellow [Adventurer], because if he was the person causing issues in Eddie's Mill, we were about to become his next victims.

He stepped past Meredeath, looking down into the drain himself. With a grunt, he threw the coiled rope into the hole. He held a grappling hook in his hand as he watched the rest fall.

"You, with the glowing hammer. Find an anchor for me, will you?" His nonchalance disarmed me as much as anything. This was a man at work. I cast about, looking for anything that could be considered an 'anchor.'

"It's over here," Meredeath answered him. The man's eyebrows raised as he walked around the drain. Sure enough, she'd found a steel anchor poking out of the concrete.

He latched his rope to the steel rung and walked back to the drain, looking into it.

"Are you going down there?" I asked the obvious. I could imagine what Richard would say.

"Yes, people to rescue and all that." He hopped onto the rim of the drain and, without another word, jumped into the abyss.

Meredeath and I ran up to the rim and watched as he rappelled down. The drain was just wide enough for him to kick off and drop in three to five-foot increments. The walls were slick with grease and threatening to cause him to slip at any moment.

Ten feet, then fifteen. He kicked off and disappeared. A faint shimmer flickered in the drain as a cool breeze blew up from the hole. The air smelled of grease, but felt heavy, like a storm was brewing.

"Can you see him?" I asked, grabbing Meredeath's arm. Was this some trick of the light? I held [Guardian's Promise] over the hole, squinting to see the guy.

"No, he's just gone."

The rope suddenly went slack, bouncing flat against the wall. I had the sinking feeling I knew where the rest of our party was.

"Do you think it's a portal?" Meredeath asked.

I looked down again, as far as my eyes could tell, the drain was a bottomless pit. Except it wasn’t. It felt like the pit was watching me back.

"I have no idea, but he must have hit the bottom right?" I pulled at the loose rope.

"Either that or dropped to his death," Meredeath countered. We stared at the brown twisted rope a bit longer.

My mind raced, evaluating all the possibilities. "That guy seemed too knowledgeable to just jump to his death. He had to be an [Adventurer], right?"

Meredeath tugged at the rope, testing the grappling hook.

"It seems sturdy enough." She looked at me, her eyes pensive. I wasn't thrilled about going into a grease trap, but if Tandy and Leo were down there, what choice did we have?

"I've never heard an [Adventurer] story about climbing into a sewer," I muttered, unhappy with the task before us.

Meredeath looked at me as though evaluating if I was serious. She started chuckling, one of those insane little uncontrollable laughs. Before I knew it, she was bent over, grabbing her stomach.

"You obviously haven't played Dungeons and Dragons," she wheezed, wiping tears from her face. Dungeons and Dragons? What kind of world did Meredeath come from?

"Who would play with dungeons or dragons, much less together?"

Meredeath lost control again.

I had the sneaking suspicion we were going to find more than rats down here.

I just hoped it wasn’t dragons or dungeons.

Turned out the joke was on me.