This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 138

Chapter 138 - You’ve Seen One Ancient Ruined City, You’ve Seen Them All

Eve made it through ten synchronized jumps of the misthoppers, ten sudden lurches forward followed by slow slides to a halt, before she decided she’d rather walk. After twelve, Art made a similar decision, opting instead to join Preston on Reginald’s back.

Wes, whose stomach was apparently far stronger than Eve had ever given him credit for, stayed aboard the sled, sitting back and chatting with their rodent companion. From her spot alternating walking and jogging to keep pace with the lurching sled, Eve could hear most of what went on between them.

“So why the eyepatch?” Wes so bluntly asked. “What happened in the year since we saw you?”

“What are ye talking about?” Drathis replied. “It’s always been like this.”

“No it hasn’t,” Wes said. “When we were here last year, you very definitely had full use of both your eyes.”

“No I didn’t.”

Wes turned to Eve. “He’s fucking with me, right? He has to be fucking with me.”

Eve shrugged. “Well it’s that or whatever poked his eye out managed to convince him it hadn’t.”

Wes blinked. “What?”

“Yeah I’m going to go with the former,” Eve laughed. “You are very fuckable with…” She scowled. “Wait, that’s not right. Very fuckwithable?”

“Fuckwith-prone?” Wes offered.

“No, that’s not it either,” Eve said. “You’re not prone to being fucked with, you’re easy to fuck with.”

“Fuckwith accessible?” He tried.

From his spot atop Reginald’s back, Preston snorted. “Yeah, you’re an equal opportunity fuck.”

Eve shook her head. “My money’s still on fuckwithable. It flows off the tongue better.”

“Great, so we’ve gone from ‘equal opportunity fuck’ to how easy it is on the tongue.”

Preston blushed.

Eve laughed. “Your words, not mine.”

Wes glared at her through his mask. “You’re the one who started with ‘fuckable.’”

“Okay, maybe partially my words.”

“Have ye considered,” Drathis chimed in, “‘tease-able’?”

“Great, now we’ve gone from fucking to teasing,” Wes muttered.

“That’s probably more accurate,” Eve replied, “but fuckwithable is so much more fun to say.”

Slowly, letting himself linger on every syllable, Drathis fully experienced the act of saying the word. “Fuckwithable. Aye, that is fun.”

All at once, the others followed suit until the conversation had completely devolved into everyone just saying “fuckwithable” over and over again at different speeds, tones, and with slight variations in emphasis. Even Reginald gave it a try, though the series of grunts and growls the word translated to in draconic didn’t carry quite the same satisfaction as in common.

The party traveled for three days on—or, predominately, next to—Drathis’s frog-drawn sled. The rat had brought with him more than enough water for those that needed it, while Art made the search for food trivially easy. Tracking down and freezing in place low-level prey animals was practically the purpose of trellac telepathy, and Art was all too happy to help his friends hunt for their meals.

On their second day out from Drathis’s cave, they even found a herd of those mist-deer-things that Eve had so hoped to come across. It took a great deal of Art’s focus to force all nineteen of the beasts to ignore their most primal instinct to dissociate into the fog at the first sign of danger, but once he managed it they were no match for Eve’s speed.

The deer-things—called mistlers according to Appraise—had pale brown fur to best blend in with the color of the poison fog. Other than their color, the main visual aspect that distinguished the things from mundane deer was their antlers.

They had three of them.

From the heads of males and females both sprouted three branching antlers that seemed to twist about each other chaotically before rejoining in a single, sharp point at the tip. Beautiful as they were, Eve couldn’t help but shudder at the mental image of the kind of carnage such a weapon would wreak on whatever it pierced.

Fortunately, the prey animals weren’t exactly wired for fighting back.

Other than the one they butchered for food then and there, the party piled the carcasses up on Drathis’s sled. In exchange for the antlers, leftover meat, bones, and whatever other parts of the mistlers the rat could find a use for, he promised to skin them all and give Eve however many pelts she needed to get her armor made.

It wasn’t what she would’ve called a fair deal, but considering the alternative was skinning them all herself and then carting the hides around for their entire delve through the Burendian ruins, Eve happily took it. After all, they weren’t exactly short on gold. Come to think of it, the party really was due a trip into some city or other in joint vacation and opportunity to spend all the coin they’d accrued over a year’s adventuring.

Truthfully, the only disappointment in their hunt of the mist-deer-things was that mistler tasted indistinguishable from any other bit of venison. For how hard to find and kill the damn things were, Eve had really hoped for something interesting.

On the third day, Drathis dropped them off right where the dry dirt of the Dead Fields gave way to a decrepit cobblestone road, cracked with age yet somehow still as perfectly flat and paved with identical stones as any bit of Burendian engineering. “Here ye are,” he announced as the party unloaded their gear. He nodded towards the road. “If I have to tell ye which way it is, good luck making it back.”

Eve smiled. “I think we can figure it out. Thanks, Drathis.”

“Thanks for the ride,” Wes said as he hopped off the sled.

Thank you, Mr. Drathis! Art added. It was nice meeting you!

“Aye,” Drathis grunted. “Your pelts will be waiting for ye at the cave. Good luck in there. You’ll need it.”

Preston frowned. “How do you know we’ll need it? For all we know that place could be empty.”

Eve glared at him. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.”

“What?”

Wes managed to say it in perfect sync with Drathis, matching the rat’s grunting tone and dismissive cadence flawlessly.

“Class knowledge.”

Preston snorted. “Should’ve seen that one coming, huh?” He shook his head, letting out a chuckle. “Thanks for everything, Drathis. Good luck out there.”

Drathis nodded, winked—or blinked—with his one eye, and tugged the reins southward. With one final wave of his claws for the adventuring party, he raised his whip, flogged the fog frogs, and lurched off into the mist.

“Alright.” Wes clapped his hands together. “Big scary ancient ruined city number three. Let’s do this.”

Eve frowned at the cobblestone road before them. “It’s weird to see a road on the surface, right? Everything Burendian we’ve seen so far has been underground.”

Preston turned up his palms. “It looks Burendian. I suppose it’s possible Drathis took us to the wrong ruined city—he did say the map was wrong—but it seems more likely that the Burendians had a city on the surface too. It’s the capital, after all. They had to have had some presence on the surface.”

“Makes sense,” Eve said. “Still, I’m not making any assumptions until I see a dungeon notification. Imagine if we went to all the effort of exploring the wrong big scary ancient ruined city.”

Club in hand, Eve took the lead down ruined cobblestones. She kept her eyes and ears flowing with Mana, enhancing her senses at the cost of a few points each second. Even with Art’s telepathy on lookout, the fight with Planty had taught Eve her lesson. Not all threats had minds to read.

But five minutes into their walk, they found the first structure, or at least what was left of it. Eve could track the lines in the stone where Burendian enchantments had once run over the simple cottage, though their Mana had long dried up. The roof had collapsed some eternity ago, leaving little more than four walls surrounding a pile of rubble for the adventurers to search. They didn’t bother.

The buildings—Eve figured them to be the houses of farms long lost to the poison mist—grew more and more common as they walked. The two they found that were still standing both housed colonies of fist-sized fungal creatures that Wes was all too happy to burn away before they had any chance of leaving the building to attack the party. Having watched the way they skittered about the walls and floor of the ruined farmhouses, Eve desperately hoped there wouldn’t be any of them in the city proper.

Two hours down the road, the long-dead farms and collapsed buildings gave way to an open square. The rubbled remains of inns and shops lined the wide open, paved space, while four roads in total stretched out in the cardinal directions. None of it was of interest to Eve.

The nest was.

Right at the center of the courtyard, stretching easily fifty feet across, stood a circular nest carefully crafted of torn bits of metal and stone. For the time being, Eve ignored the four dark passageways leading into the ground beneath it, electing instead to Jet up and over the mess of stone and steel. With a flap of his ghostly wings, Reginald carted the others in too.

Three eggs stood together in the center of the nest, white and mottled brown and as tall as Eve herself. When she placed a hand on one, no warmth of life passed through. “Whatever laid these hasn’t been here for some time.”

The eggs are dead, Art sent. But Reginald says he knows this smell.

Eve’s and Preston’s eyes met.

“You don’t think…” Eve said.

“What else do we know that’s this big, lays eggs, and hasn’t been around for some time?”

“Guys…” Wes interrupted, stooping down to pick something up from rubble-nest. He raised his hand to display a tuft of golden fur and a white feather. “Look familiar?”

“Well shit,” Eve cursed. “I guess we know how that griffin got so high level. It’s probably been feasting like a king on all sorts of Managorged animals.”

Preston nodded. “That only leaves one question, then.”

“Exactly,” Wes chimed. “How do griffins lay eggs if they have the back half of a mammal? Shouldn’t they give live birth?”

Eve and Preston both turned to look askance at him.

“That,” Preston said, “was not the question.”

“If we killed the mama griffin,” Eve asked, “where’s the father?”

Wes groaned. “I liked my question more. My question, I actually want to know the answer to. Your question is begging a griffin to swoop down and eat us right now.”

Eve laughed. “Sounds like it’s time to waltz right into the dark underground passage, then.”

“First things first,” Preston said, walking up to stop Wes from discarding the pieces of evidence he’d gathered. With a grin, the Paragon swiped the griffin-feather and stuck it through his hat, stashing the old red phoenix feather carefully in his pack. “Okay, now we can waltz right into the dark underground passage.”

Rolling her eyes at Preston’s need to accessorize in a place like this, Eve leapt back over the lip of the nest and landed gracefully beside one of the four dark openings. With Reginald’s help, the others joined her a minute later.

Thankfully enough, each opening stood tall and wide enough to accommodate two carriages abreast, leaving more than enough space for Reginald’s ever-growing form to squeeze through. Even more fortunate, Eve could just make out characteristic white glow of Burendian enchantments from somewhere beyond the thick fog that permeated even the underground passage.

As if poised to confirm the party had, in fact, managed to find the correct ancient ruined city, the notification popped into Eve’s vision the moment she set foot beneath the shadow of the ceiling.

You have entered the dungeon: Crown of Burendia! Fight well.

Next