A Soldier's Life - 353 - Shit Storm (edited 3-2-25 +250 words, needs a new title maybe)

Chapter 353: Shit Storm

The tower was in an area that could only be described as the slums, where dilapidated shacks housed the poorest of the poor. We had been ignored and avoided as we moved through the foul-smelling streets. The tower gates were closed and barred from the inside. Using my air shields, we quickly scaled the old sect tower outside of Godok under the cover of night. With the air shields only lasting twelve heartbeats, we had to be very coordinated in our climb.

As we climbed, Gilda supposedly monitored whether we had set off any magical alarms. We gained access high in the tower through an open window. The small bedroom through the window smelled rank and was a mess of dirty clothes and bedding. I tied a length of the silk dungeon cordage to the bed and tucked the remainder under the bed. If we had to escape quickly, repelling down the wall was our fastest means.

According to Gilda, everyone was expected to attend a ceremony in the tower's lower levels. Although the clouds currently obscured Neptune’s Tear, it was a full moon tonight, and the Sect of the Venomous Serpent performed their initiation rites under such a sign. I was getting a weird vibe of seeing this movie before.

Deep in the tower's bowels, you could hear the forest drakes’ muted grumbling, roaring, and hissing. However, Gilda whispered to me, “Those are not all drakes. Some of those sounds are the drake’s next meal.”

Everything had gone surprisingly smoothly so far, so I had the feeling something would go tragically wrong soon. How was I so easily talked into this? Who decides to infiltrate what amounted to a cult tower on a whim? I looked over at Konstantin and grimaced as his eyes were eager.

We moved relatively silently to the stairs and encountered our first sect member climbing toward us. She was carrying two large buckets and didn’t even look up as Gilda sprinted forward and pierced her throat with a stiletto. The young woman never made a sound as the buckets clattered and spilled down the steps. Bodily waste covered the steps and landing. Konstantin opened a locked room with his spell form, and Gilda dragged her victim inside. I grabbed the repugnant buckets and followed.

I immediately questioned her brutality with hissing words. “Jupiter’s cock Gilda! It is just a young woman, and she is not a werehyena!”

Gilda, in her old portly woman’s body, knelt over the body and pressed the blade of her dagger to the dead woman’s cheek. A light stream of smoke came from the wound, and the smell of burning flesh filled the room. Gilda said flatly, “She is not fully turned. About a month more and the infection would be complete. Probably why she is not with the others being initiated”

The youthful woman couldn’t have been twenty, her blond hair now matted with her own blood. I knew that curing lycanthropy was extremely costly, but it still felt like we should have tried to do more than just kill her. Konstantin looked at me expectantly, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I pulled out the collector and handed it to him. This woman was not my enemy and hadn’t tried to kill me. I stepped into the corridor to keep watch.

The collector was returned to me when the pair exited, and we continued lower. We didn’t see another sect member as we reached the arboretum on the first floor. A few fruiting trees dominated the open space, but there were no signs of any sect members. “Where?” Konstantin whispered to Gilda.

Gilda had some emotion on her face as she had assumed we would find the sect members here. The only sounds were of the beasts below. “They must be with the forest drakes. Maybe they are part of the ritual initiation,” she guessed. “There should not be more than twenty from my observations.”

We descended lower, and the smell of musty mold and urine rose from the stairwell. Gilda, with her more acute senses, led us down a corridor and up a short flight of stairs. A small balcony overlooked a large pit. “That is a lot more than twenty,” I whispered.

We stayed back in the shadows as dozens of men and women feasted on a lavish spread of food and drink. Some were immodestly dressed, some were in robes, and others wore armor. The pit walls had numerous cast-iron grates with dark green drakes whining and roaring inside. The drakes were slightly larger than horses, but I knew they were fast with a deadly bite.

“Forty-nine,” Konstantin said.

“I counted fifty-two. Did you get the three in the cage?” I said softly. Three skeletal men looked on behind one of the grates, longing at the feast before them.

“No. Fifty-two then, but most likely, they are food for the drakes,” Konstantin admitted. “We just need to get one of them alone, and you can do your thing.”

“My thing?” I feigned ignorance.

“Yes, where you kidnap someone against their will. Though a dead body will be just as good,” he replied casually. “Those stairs seem to lead to a privy area. We can circle around and catch one going in or out.” I noted a few members were pissing on the wall of the pit, but some headed toward the stairs between two of the iron grates.

It was easy to tell this pit was for training drakes and maybe some bloodsport as well. The acrid smell of decay was heavy in the air, and I guessed the sands below had seen their fair share of blood. We started to find our way around the pit's perimeter, moving where Konstantin wanted us. The hallways had several doors to storerooms. Gilda halted in front of us and kneeled, sniffing the air.

She held up two fingers, and Konstantin whispered to me, “She smells the shit pit.” I didn’t know how a shit pit would smell any differently from everything we were smelling down here. We didn’t have to wait long as a stumbling sect member in drab brown robes stumbled up the stairs from the pit. He had wild hair growing in odd patches, an elongated face, and a slight hunch to his spine—all characteristics of werehyenas.

As he entered the tunnel Gilda had indicated was the shit pit, Konstantin rushed up behind him from our concealment. Konstantin was going for a silent kill, breaking the man’s neck, but the neck didn’t give as he strained. Instead, the intoxicated man grabbed Konstantin’s arms and pulled Konstantin over his back. Konstantin flew and crashed into the wall, and I quickly got in range and moved the man, who had been swelling in size, into my dimensional space. I didn’t want him to raise an alarm. He had decent aether resistance but still failed to resist me. My aether annoyingly bottomed out as my dimensional space slammed shut with my prisoner. My minor aether restoration potions would have been welcome about now.

Gilda and I knelt beside Konstantin. When he slammed against the wall, he created a fairly loud noise that could be heard even over the party below. “You okay?” I asked the slightly confused Konstantin.

“Not yet,” he said, orienting himself and standing. I handed him a lesser healing potion I had brewed and checked behind us. Gilda suddenly raced into the shadows of the latrine pit tunnel, and a short commotion ensued. I heard something pop on Konstantin—either a dislocated joint or bone setting. He let out a relieved sigh.

I watched the stairs as Konstantin gathered himself. When Gilda returned, she announced, “Two dead.” She didn’t have a drop of blood on her, and her eyes had some amusement to them.

“I got the big one. Can we go now?” I pressed. The following person approaching the restroom would find the mess in the privy, and I didn’t want to face fifty werehyenas. As Konstantin had fittingly shown, they were formidable beasts. “We don’t have time for the collector,” I hissed at their reluctance. Konstantin finally gave a curt nod, and we started to backtrack. We didn’t get halfway to the stairs before an alarm sounded. A dull gong was struck repeatedly, causing the air to thrum.

I drew magebane as we quickened our pace. I knew Konstantin was accustomed to pulling stupid stunts like this all the time, but if I died tonight, I would haunt him forever. Two humanoid hyenas were descending the stairs toward us. With unspoken words, Konstantin took the one on the left, and I pressed forward to confront the one on the right.

I parried a clumsy mace strike into the wall and then deeply sliced the inner thigh. As he fell toward me, I used his momentum to toss him over me and down the stairs. A spray of femoral blood got on my face, and I spat the cursed blood out. Konstantin had dispatched his own hybrid quietly. My hyena-man was howling in pain and for help.

“They are coming,” Gilda said, sounding displeased.

“It had the high ground,” I defended, not getting a quiet kill and drawing attention to our position. “We should exit through the main gates instead of going to the fourth floor.” No one objected, and we quickly arrived in the atrium. The massive sect doors had a massive worn bar across them. I assumed it was to secure the tower while they partied below. Konstantin sheathed his blade and attempted to lift it, grunting and straining. It barely budged. I joined him, and together we inched it above the bracket. It must have weighed over five hundred pounds.

As the bar clattered to the ground, Gilda warned us, “The drakes are coming.” I could barely make out the sound of claws clattering against stone, echoing from the stairwells. I grabbed the ring to pull the heavy door open, and Konstantin joined me. It slowly inched open, but not quick enough.

The first drake head appeared on the stairs, and it didn’t hesitate to rush us, crushing trees and destroying furniture. “Work on the door. I will keep them distracted.”

I had recovered enough aether to bring out the black spear. I spun it to draw the drake's attention and led it away from the door to my right. The drake obliged and changed its trajectory toward my challenge. The stone floor shook under my feet, its toothy maw open in anticipation of a meal. I tested my aether and had just enough for one air shield. I set the shield and stepped back in a defensive stance, letting the forest drake crash into it. It smashed the shield but slowed and was stunned enough that a quick lunge into the skull killed it.

The leaf tip was lodged in the bone skull, and I was trying to retrieve the black spear when I felt myself overcome with complete calm. My muscles relaxed, and I just wanted to sit down. I realized what was happening and pushed aether through my mind fortress spell form. My head cleared instantly, and my calmness washed away as my adrenaline surged again.

Sect members were behind two drakes that had climbed the stairs but were being held back by leashes. One of the sect members was a mind mage. I quickly picked him out by his surprised expression. “How is the door coming?” I asked without looking. More and more sect members were pouring out of the stairs, forming a line behind the forest drakes.

“Gilda’s through and pushing from the outside!” Konstantin barked at me as he strained to pull the door wider. The was going to get nasty, and my only solace was they did not have any ranged weapons. I focused on the mind mage, and when he smirked, I instinctively turned to face Konstantin, who had suddenly rushed toward me. That mind mage had to be incredibly powerful to influence him with a spell from such a distance. I didn’t have a counter for the spell, but I knew an injury with sufficient pain should help Konstantin break the spell.

At least Konstantin’s attack was tempered and not suicidal. I used the spear to keep Konstantin at bay, thinking this was quite a shit storm. At least Konstantin was not fighting at his best. His movements were telegraphed, and he wasn’t trying to pull any of his typical tricks. A roar across the atrium and the pair of forest drakes had been released and were thundering toward us—okay, more of a shit storm.

I took a handful of pellets from the belt as I retreated from Konstantin and tossed them high in the air across the center of the atrium. I closed my eyes as bright flashes and clouds of smoke erupted from a dozen pellets. The drakes raced through the cloud, unaware of the consequences. The flash pellets had served their purpose and blinded Konstantin. Now that he had trouble seeing, defending himself from my quick attacks was impossible, I knocked him hard twice on the head with my spear shaft, ringing his helmet and dazing him. He paused his attack and looked bewildered. “You done being a puppet?!” I yelled at him. Konstantin’s mind was catching up, and he nodded sluggishly.

The mage didn’t have a line of sight on him, so he shouldn’t be able to reestablish his control. Konstantin was slow coming out of the influence. “Drakes,” I barked a warning at him. He was in no position to defend himself between his temporary blindness and coming out of the influence of the mind magic.

The blinded drakes hadn’t slowed down but were blinking wildly and snapping their necks as their nostrils flared. I hip-checked Konstantin out of the way of one drake and used the spear to cut a line down its rib cage as it passed. The drake crashed into the door, knocking crashed into the wall. “Get out!” I hissed at Konstantin as I faced the other drake. My aether shield flashed, and I cursed under my breath. An aetheric missile had splashed on me and wasted my amulet’s charge.

I pushed the dazed Konstantin to the exit Gilda had widened slightly as the drakes flailed about. The cool night air was welcome. I was slightly surprised to see that Gilda had waited for us. “Help him. His mind is muddled.” Gilda immediately took Konstantin’s arm and guided him into the slums. I backed up quickly, watching the door. When Gilda and Konstantin disappeared into an alley, I turned and ran in a different direction. If the sect members saw anyone, it would be me, and I would lead them away from Gilda and Konstantin.

I settled into a jog and then a fast walk as I moved into the more affluent parts of the city and made a zig-zagging path toward my destination, constantly checking behind me. I made sure my obfuscation sphere was in contact with my skin in case I was being tracked. When I entered the Adventurer’s Hall, I raced up to our rooms, relieved to see Konstantin and Gilda had arrived before me.

“How is he?” I asked.

Konstantin answered for himself, his voice dry and confounded. “My head is still echoing with the mage’s command, Eryk. It feels like my head wants to split in two.”

I didn’t know many mages in the guild. I hadn’t really tried to befriend anyone. “Do you know any mind mages?” I asked Gilda. She shook her head disappointedly. Gilda didn’t really talk to anyone. “Damn it. I only know one mage. Maybe she can help.” I stood and went to get the halfling illusionist Lesna.

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