[Shrubley, the Monster Adventurer] Chapter 38 – A Lily for a Shrub

The Countess gasped. She could see, but only just barely, and it broke her heart to watch the shrub tumble into the darkness. He didn’t even scream. There was no fear in his heart, no terror. He had been brave. Is brave! her thoughts corrected her.

If anybody could survive that fall, it would be Shrubley. Even Cal’s bones would turn to powder and the slime would be a puddle. And of course, the koblin would be just as dead as the Countess.

But the shrub? He might be able to survive. He was light, bushy, and had a ton of springy leaves and branches. There was a chance, and that was the best he was going to get.

“Come on,” she said to the others. They needed to keep moving. There was nothing they could do for poor Shrubley.

“Shrubley,” Slyrox whispered hoarsely, choking back a sob.

A cynical, hard part of her mind told her that he was the weakest member. If they had to lose somebody, it was better than a rising star like Slyrox. Travelers were quite rare on Almora, and a monster Traveler was unheard of.

Furthermore, the Countess had seen Slyrox modify the training dummies’ weaponry to increase the effectiveness and restore their durability, using something the creature called kludging.

Though simplistic, it had been a feat of ingenuity that should not have been possible with the insufficient materials at hand. Slyrox had even been able to get the squeaking out of a dummy’s wheels until she realized Sose liked the noise and then put it right back.

No doubt, the koblin was an artisan in the making. A strange one for sure, but an artisan nonetheless.

The Countess stretched back and picked up Slyrox by her backpack to carry her over the gap. She did the same with Cal. “Put the slime in your backpack, Slyrox,” she told the girl as they headed on with the koblin in the lead.

“There should be a bridge up here on the left. Keep your hand out over the gorge and you should feel it.”

Slyrox’s stubby mittened hand just barely grazed the rough wooden timber of the bridge’s anchoring support. “Slyrox has–” She sniffed hard to steady her voice. “–found something.”

The walkway widened the slightest bit here, giving the Countess enough room to get around the koblin and test the wooden planks of the bridge herself. After the break that had sent Shrubley tumbling into the depths below, she didn’t want to lose anybody else.

Putting her weight on one plank wrapped in knotted rope that was slung from one end of the gorge to the other, the Countess winced as she heard the wood creak.

But it held.

It was unfortunate there wasn’t enough time for the koblin to attempt that odd kludging to fortify the rope.

“Careful now,” she told them. “Put both hands on the rope and stay to one side or the other. The wood should hold better where it is most supported.”

One by one, they edged out onto the rope bridge. The hot sticky wind of this dreadful mirror world swept through the canyon and caused the bridge to sway wildly.

Slyrox screamed in terror, but Cal said a few soothing words to her and she went on. Apparently, the koblin was afraid of heights. The fact that she likely couldn’t see anything,especially with those dark smoked lenses in her mask, didn’t help things much.

In the dark, your imagination can run wild.

A faint hissing sound in the distance had them hurrying up despite the unsettling way the bridge swayed and creaked with their passage. When they finally made it to the other side, the Countess extended a fingernail. It elongated into a thin-bladed talon.

“What are you doing, mistress?” Cal asked when he heard the sound of her slicing through the rope.

“I’m cutting the rope,” she told him. “The serpentii can’t follow us if they can’t use this bridge.”

“But Shrubley could!” Slyrox cried. “You cannot leave him. We could go after him!”

The Countess hated playing the bad guy in times like this. Normally she loved it, but the loss of Shrubley tore at her cold dead heart.

It’s always the good ones that leave us too soon, she thought bitterly.

Sose poked his head out, looking tiredly from Slyrox to the Countess. He had nothing but sympathy for his mistress.

“Even if the bridge were cut from the other side and we could somehow use it like a ladder to climb down, the gorge is so deep that we wouldn’t even be a fraction of the distance down. We can’t get to him. I don’t even know what’s down there and I’ve been up and down here as a bat.”

“You could turn into–” Slyrox began.

“I can’t!” the Countess screamed with rage and shame. “I can barely hold on as it is. All of my powers are out of commission. I’m only staying upright by sheer willpower but that too will fade. If I stop, that’s it. I’m not going to get back up. When that happens, I want us to be as far away from the serpentii as possible.”

She knelt down and put a hand on Slyrox’s shoulder. “I miss him too,” she said with surprising tenderness. “But if the serpentii get us, his death will be in vain. Don’t you think Shrubley would want us to go on, to save ourselves?”

“He has to be okay,” Slyrox whispered fiercely. “He is just like Havior. He is not dead.”

The Countess nodded. There was no use in correcting her. “Come away from the bridge. There should be a tunnel up here a little ways.”

The slime sniffled. A bubble of dangling snot sucked up into Smudge’s pink jelly, and then floated around.

Cal had been quiet the entire time, but finally he spoke up. “I’ll do it. You should… save your strength, Countess.”

The Countess looked at him, then nodded. “Hurry. I can hear them coming. If we can manage to break their pursuit, they’ll lose the trail, and we can hole up somewhere to lick our wounds.”

Her dark oppa shut his eyes, curled up in fast slumber to accelerate his health, stamina and mana recovery. Most soul aeder needed sleep to do just that, but that meant while he was asleep, he was vulnerable.

His little beating heart imparted just a trace fragment of strength to the Countess.

Cal summoned his newly granted Elemental essence to create slicing winds that frayed the thick ropes until they snapped. There was a hollow whistling sound as the bridge fell into the gorge and then clattered against the opposite side.

Everybody winced and shivered at the sound. It sounded like breaking wood as it echoed throughout the gorge. All thoughts were bent on poor Shrubley, their de facto leader, who had wanted nothing more than to be an S-Grade Adventurer.

He only wanted to be a Hero, Cal thought to himself as they dragged themselves through the roughly hewn tunnel in the gorge’s side. The faint hissing sounds of the serpentii became a distant memory. He was my first friend. My best friend… and now he’s gone. It’s not fair.

Cal couldn’t help but spiral down into doom and gloom. They never would have gone to the manor if Cal didn’t try to become an adventurer too. If he had just stayed with the Rattle Rousers. He would have been miserable, but at least Shrubley’s dream would still be alive.

He would still be alive.

Shrubley had been kind enough to be his mentor, to pick a contract that was supposed to be easier. Things were finally looking up, and then Cal’s bad luck popped up again like an ugly wart.

The Countess had told them that life wasn’t fair, that there was no justice, but just this once… Cal wished she was wrong. He needed her to be wrong.

If I had just done what Shrubley had done and picked a different contract, any contract, then we’d be sipping some warm milk back at the guildhall by now, I bet. We’d still have met Smudge… maybe not Slyrox, and that would be a shame, but we would never have gotten mixed up in… in this!

They were in over their heads. And Shrubley had paid the price for it.

With the dark, foul mood Cal was mired in, he couldn’t dwell on what would have happened to Slyrox if they had not been there. She might have been thrown into the mirror realm alone, and the koblin would have been all the Countess had.

Eventually, the serpentii would have come for them all, anyway.

What bothered Cal the most was knowing that, if he had been given the choice, the wretched shrub would have willingly fallen into that pit! He thought it would be heroic to sacrifice himself for his friends.

Cal hated this place, with its foul damp air and horrible creatures that had chased them out of the only home he had truly cared about. Sure, he spent every day working his bones to… well, the bone, but he had been happy.

Training and growing stronger with his friends, his family, was more important than anything, and now the serpentii had taken that away from him.

“They will pay,” he muttered to himself. The green necromantic fires in his eye sockets flared with cold anger the likes of which he had never felt before.

Cal had always been afraid, nervous, anxious, or all three. But anger? He hardly knew the word.

Now he understood why people feared skeletons. The anger soaked into his bones and settled there, granting him renewed strength and stamina that he hadn’t felt before.

“Just a bit farther now,” the Countess said. Cal realized he could see her faintly and up ahead the tunnel curved and became lit by the pale watery light of this mirror world.

I’ll destroy this place if it’s the last thing I do, he promised himself. It was because of that half-light that Shrubley was so ill. Cal had seen the shrub use sunlight to empower and restore himself with surprising speed.

Robbed of that, he withered and wilted day after day. And yet he never complained, never whined, never quit.

He trained three times as hard as any of them and still made less progress. It wasn’t fair. Nobody blamed him, though. You only had to look at the shrub to know he was very sick. Only a true monster would have blamed Shrubley for that.

They walked out of the cave and into the sickly warmth of the mirror world. From up on the hill, they could see the forest that surrounded the village of Taamra, but the village itself was nowhere to be seen.

“We can camp down in the woods,” the Countess said, using the rough side of the cavern mouth to keep herself upright. “Only a little farther to go.”