Ditch digging. The task that the oh-so esteemed Duke of Treffel had seen fit to lay upon the shoulders of his world’s kartorim protector... was ditch digging. Rocks became rubble as Voy hefted a massive, improvised hammer and tore into the sheer sidewall of the stone quarry. Really, Voy’s role was more tunnel digging than ditch, but his sentiment on it remained the same. Toxic gas had poured out during the regular workforce’s last shift when they’d hit an underground cavity full of it. It could be weeks before enough of it had dissipated for the crews to resume their work.
The subterranean gas was heavier than air and displaced oxygen here at the bottom of the pit, snuffing out the engines of the drilling rigs and sending the workers scurrying for re-breathers. Voy’s carapace covered him fully now, his helm filtered out the noxious elements from the air around him and his body squeezed every ounce of oxygen out of the air already in his lungs as he worked alone.
Heavy steel swung down and crashed against stone, crushing more of the bedrock into gravel. Voy kicked against the ground behind him, pushing some of the accumulated pebbles out into the wider quarry. In his mind, he kicked himself just as much. Maybe Avaron wanted him here, and maybe what he was doing did technically help the people of Treffel… but it was not the life he’d burned away his childhood for. He’d at least hoped there was a moegon sighting that needed his attention, they were the only thing that really necessitated his involvement, but when he’d asked the duke mentioned only that a few had been seen surfacing in the fissures hundreds of miles away, nothing he needed to worry himself with.
And that was that, no carbon dragon to slay or sightings of possible Pantheon forces to scout, just rock breaking alone by the blue light of his helm’s eye lenses. This work matters he told himself. He was needed here he thought as he raised up his hammer again. Even if they hate me he brought his hammer down and shattered more stone. It is my duty to them, to help the common people he repeated words he’d told himself a hundred times in a desperate attempt to squeeze the purpose out of his days. He swung the hammer again, colliding thunderously with the stone wall before him. The ground shook and trembled beneath and around him.
I should dial it back a bit. Setting down the hammer Voy cleared a place on the ground and sat down to catch his breath. Fiery needles tumbled through his blood as his body retaliated against the use of his strength, his tissues breaking down faster than they could heal with every motion. Leaning back against the tunnel’s sidewall, Voy let his arms fall limply to let the surge of pain fade away. It never did, not completely, but there was a threshold where he could ignore it enough that it may as well have.
The earth rumbled again, shaking loose pebbles from the ceiling. Another mining crew must have started back with their operation nearby. Voy inhaled deeply, even filtered the air tasted vile. It might not harm him outright, but the horrid mixture of rotted eggs and soap would stick in his nose for weeks. All the more reason for him to stay, he reasoned. If planets could want, then Treffel wanted to be left alone. The idea of the ground fighting back as you dug into it was absurd, but Voy could think of no better way to describe the pockets of lethal atmosphere that spewed out when the quarries were dug.
Normal humans were not meant to survive here. He inhaled another draw from the cave. It may not be glamorous, but even this helped them. Families wouldn’t go hungry waiting for the gas to clear enough for the miners to earn their wage. That was heroic. That was good enough, surely. He needed to stay, to keep helping them and waiting for Avaron’s arrival. Hembrandt would have to deal with his expedition on his own, fabricated orders from Avaron or not.
A few more moments and most of the burning in this limbs would subside, and Voy could get back to it. The moment of solitude was nice. The fact that people avoided him in the city didn’t make it any less crowded, but here in this little cave too toxic for anyone but him and remote enough to be silent he was truly alone. The last of the sunlight from the open top quarry outside faded, and his tunnel went dark but for the light of his eyes.
Outside the world took offense to the pseudo-kartorim’s respite and as he began to relish his calm the wailing of disaster alarms sang the song of immediate danger. Clenching his hands into fists, Voy steeled himself and hooped to his feet, the needles in his hands not yet as faded as he would have liked. Raising the hammer from the ground Voy jogged to the tunnel’s mouth. Tremor’s like before ripped through the stone, but unlike before they did not pass after a moment but grew more intense, more violent.
Voy broke into a ran as the ground convulsed around him. Behind him the tunnel he had only just dug collapsed, the wave of rubble chasing behind him as he raced for the quarry pit. Icy adrenaline poured into his veins, cooling the burn of exhaustion and lending new strength to his limbs as time slowed around him. His run became a sprint, his steps cracked the stone as he charged free of the falling stone. When it had nearly caught up to him, Voy leapt free of the cave he’d carved, jumping right off the top of the scaffold stairs that had led up to it and plummeting eighty feet down to the quarry pit’s basin.
He landed in a squat, the transferred momentum from his fall creating a web of fractures in the stone beneath him. Dust billowed out from the closed tunnel Voy had fled, and several others that had likewise been collapsed by the tremors. Straightening his posture, Voy raised the shoddily welded hammer he’d been given to use as a tool for digging. No longer was he under the delusion that the tremors were the result of overzealous labor, or crews returning to dig. The gas was still here, he was a fool to have dismissed the quaking as such before.
The source of the rumbling hadn’t shown itself yet, but it was close enough now that he could hear it. Like the clamor of a dozen supersized piston driven picks with none of the accompanying engine clatter. Rising from below the pits bottom – rapidly. Mere seconds before the ground beneath him erupted Voy leapt back, dodging the attack from below.
Heat shimmers poured up from the bursting stone, small fires popped and flashed as the toxic atmosphere combusted on what little oxygen had been let in and the heat that accompanied it. Lit by the flash-flames, a stout, snake-like creature with four powerful legs splayed out at its sides heaved itself remarkably fast from the sinkhole of its own making.
It landed with a booming, meaty thump as the momentum of its ascent lifted it into the air before gravity yanked it back down to the ground. Its body was covered it segmented, black plates that glowed orange irregularly from where they had absorbed heat along the creature’s journey through the volcanic underbelly of the world. It sniffed at the air, flicking out its tongue in conjunction with its breaths. It turned its neck-less, whale like body all at once to face Voy, having found him by smell before it could see him.
With no warning, no forecasting or prediction a moegon had burrowed its way nearly to the city and burst up here, hunting on the surface. It opened its black maw to reveal rows of glowing orange metallic teeth and roared, firing a jet of superheated gas directly at Voy. The torrent of near-plasma washed away stone rubble as it melted the rocks and splattered the orange goo they became onto the wall of the quarry, Voy dodged aside just before the area he was standing became an ad-hoc crucible.
Regret for wishing his job had been a moegon hunt hit Voy as he skid on the stone out of the moegon’s line of fire. This was bad. Foolishly he’d trusted that the duke’s forecast of moegon activity was accurate and left his vibrosword safely at home. Unlike other kartorim, he did not have the luxury of the flared pavis and energy lance to draw upon from his armor. No, all he had at his disposal were his already tired limbs and the shoddy hammer the quarry workers welded together for him hours earlier.
The moegon finished its devastating exhale and turned to face Voy again, stomping its massive clawed front feet into the ground before charging at him, its eyes wide with animal fury. Voy leapt to his left to dodge again, but underestimated the beast’s speed. As he cleared its head, the moegon swiped out with its right foreleg and clipped Voy’s hip, not catching him but hitting hard enough to send him tumbling into the quarry wall.
He collided back-first with the stone, cracking the stone behind him. His carapace remained unbroken, but the man beneath recoiled from the unexpected impact. Wheeling off its charge, the moegon turned and set itself on a new course for the pseudo-kartorim half pressed into the wall. Its mouth glowed violently orange as it mustered a new stream of scorching wind in its belly.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Being tossed aside did not sit well with Voy. Surprise turned to anger. He ripped his arms up from the stone and slammed his elbows back against it, prying himself free to stand before the charging monster. Just as the moegon was nearly upon him, Voy yelled a wordless battle cry and swung his hammer in an arc from below and drove its head directly into the beast’s bottom jaw. The blow turned the moegon just as it released another stream of near-plasma, drawing a line of melt glass along the quarry wall where its breath touched. Several iron teeth fell from its head, clattering to the ground like tools from an upturned toolbox.
The momentum from the moegon’s charge carried it forward into a hapless tackle, slamming Voy back against the quarry wall beneath the dazed creature’s bulk. His hammer was torn free, landing beneath the moegon’s belly as it collapsed to the ground. Pinned to the wall by the unconscious moegon, Voy struggled to free himself. His arms burned from the exertion of tunnelling and the blow he had dealt to the moegon’s smile.
His arms were pinned beneath the moegon’s shoulder, only his head and neck were peaked out above it. Through his faceplate he could smell the sulfurous odor of its body and feel the nauseating heat it radiated from its coal-like hide. It shifted lazily and Voy redoubled his efforts to free himself, desperate to not be at its mercy when it came to.
White hot needles stabbed into every inch of his body, his blood felt coarse as it forced its way through his veins. His heart beat in too small a cage to house it. His lungs squealed and groaned as they resisted the expansion of of breath. In its flawed and self destructive state, Voy’s body was more his foe than the moegon could ever be. Every tissue fought to resist him, every cell dead set on rectifying the travesty of his continued existence.
The moegon shifted again, this time lifting barely off of Voy. Seizing the moment as his vision narrowed to a pinhole from the pain, Voy lifted his legs and planted his feet against the creature’s hide. He would not die here. Not today, not like this. Gritting his teeth, he growled in defiance of his body and the monster, growled through the tang of blood on his tongue, and kicked both legs into the volcano-borne abomination. Its scales split and fractured, Voy’s kick launched the creature dozens of feet back. The moegon slipped over onto its side as it skid away, its mind not yet conscious enough to keep balance against the unwelcome inertia.
Voy fell away from the wall and onto one knee, wheezing beneath his face plate as he steadied himself. Before him the moegon copied his state, listing to its right while its front left leg hung limp. Molten blood poured from its fractured shoulder and mangled jaw. Unsteady breaths made it wince as cooler air passed over its broken teeth.
Shaking his head Voy rose to his feet, his body protesting all the way, and retrieved his hammer from the ground. A large chunk was missing from its head, and the handle was bent from the previous strike, but it was better than nothing. It felt a hundred times heavier than before in his tormented arms as the strains of his condition drained away his ability to use his superhuman strength. He allowed its head to fall to the ground, choosing to lean on the hammer as a sort of cane. What I wouldn’t do… for an energy lance...right now… he fought to stay conscious.
Tendrils of hot gas snaked their way up from the battered moegon’s face, the torpor in its eyes being over-ridden by bestial rage. Snarling, it stamped its injured leg with a bassy, bony pop-thunk. It wriggled its claws in animal satisfaction as it shifted its weight back onto the leg. The coils of steam and smoke that once poured from its maw were sucked back into its gullet as it inhaled sharply, preparing yet another column of fire in its chest.
Voy no longer had it in him to dodge. The summons adrenaline placed upon his overtaxed muscle went unheeded as each fiber and cell fought against even the act of standing. Perhaps this was it after all. At least the beast might be exhausted enough from this fight that it wouldn’t go on to hurt anyone else. Voy tried to find solace in that meager silver lining.
Suddenly, from atop the edge of the quarry pit a bolt of blue energy screamed down and struck the moegon’s open mouth, breaking the tenuous hold it had on on the air it ingested and releasing it all at once in an uncontrolled fireball around the creature’s head. It screeched in protest, swiping at the flames with it’s claws.
Voy turned his head to the shot’s source to see a woman sliding down the quarry wall, slowing her descent by digging her hand into the stone itself. She was encased in kartorim carapace, but the color pattern he did not recognize right away. It was the same blue as those of House Caldion, but the trim was a warm bronze color. Her eye lenses glowed an intense shade of green, and her focus was trained on the moegon below. An energy lance was extended from her right forearm, and charged a follow up shot as she slid.
The flame around the moegon’s head dissipated and it turned its attention to a new target. In began to inhale again, this time lowering its head and raising its damaged leg to shield its mouth until it was ready to return fire. More bolts of plasma rained down on it, but its black hide absorbed them effortlessly and left only a faint orange glow where they struck. Whoever she was, she didn’t know how moegons worked. Proper kartorim or not, that meant she was in danger. New determination beat in Voy’s chest. It would have left to die of its wounds underground after finishing him off, but with her arrival he had a reason to push harder. He couldn’t allow someone else to suffer the consequences of his failure.
His limbs trembled, but ultimately gave in to his will. Nerves screamed in painful retaliation as he hefted his hammer. Ignoring the pain Voy forced a gravely growl through grinding teeth and broke into an agonizing sprint toward the moegon. The carbon dragon did not turn to face him. Plasma still rained down on it as the other kartorim reached the ground and deployed the shield in her left arm. She stopped firing and retracted her energy lance to draw a bronze vibrosword from her back, and begin a charge of her own. Predatory satisfaction swam in the moegon’s eyes as she did so, fast as she was she would not reach it before it finished readying its breath attack.
But Voy would. When he was but ten feet away from it, he leapt into the air lifted the hammer above his head and lined up a devastating aerial strike aimed for the moegon’s armored head. In this final moment, the beast took note of him and frantically moved to defend itself and sat into its rear legs to swipe at Voy with it’s good arm. He felt his perception of time slow again as adrenaline once again found purchase. His torso was exposed and he could not defend himself with his arms raised, but there wasn’t time to stop him from landing his blow upon the beast. He could accept a Pyrrhic victory.
Claws sped toward him and again just before the moment of his death a projectile saved him. This time it was the woman’s bronze vibrosword, thrown with such speed at the moegon’s clawed foot that the force it delivered when impaling it knocked it backward and kept Voy out of the moegon’s reach. That was twice now, if he made it out of this he owed her big time.
With his course clear Voy put every ounce of his remaining strength into bring his hammer down on the monster, pouring every bit of his focus into the strike as if his will alone would make the hammer fall heavier upon his foe. Stony chitin buckled and shattered. Natural armor was pulverized and cast aside as the hammer continued on, making pulp and paste of the soft tissues beneath.
A sonic boom ripped out from the dead moegon’s head as the hammer forced the creature’s corpse into the ground. When steel met stone, the hammer finally gave out and shattered along with the moegon’s shell in a shower of molten flesh and charred iron. Voy tumbled over the moegon and rolled haphazardly onto the quarry floor past it. He came to rest on his back, chest heaving from effort.
The sky above was all he could see now, too exhausted even to turn his head. Starless and purple from the city’s light pollution it made for a poor view. As Voy descended from his adrenaline high he realized he quite missed the stars. They were always visible on Anitora.
The sound of flesh sliding wetly off metal came from nearby. The blue kartorim had retrieved her sword from the moegon’s foot. If she meant him any harm, there would never be a better time than now. He resigned himself to whatever her intent was, the last of his desperation born strength entirely spent. Graceful and slightly metallic steps approached him from the direction of the moegon’s remains.
“Either the duke treats you waaay worse than I thought, or he was lying when he said we could find you at home,” the woman stepped into view from above, appearing upside down to him from his perspective. Her helm retracted, collapsing and compressing until it was contained in the metallic patches on her neck. Smiling down on him, Voy recognized his savior as the woman from the House Caldion delegation. She did look a lot like Illati but up close he could see subtle differences.
Chief among them, a smile. “Need a hand?” She offered an open hand for him to stand up. Her long hair fell out past her shoulders, and didn’t seem any worse for wear. Even with her helm retracted her eyes seemed no less green, no longer machine-like lights but glowing emeralds all the same.
“You alive?” she asked with one eyebrow raised. Voy snapped out of his daze.
“You… are not Illati…?” Voy half asked, half observed. Talking hurt more than he guessed it would, his lungs not nearly done protesting his behavior. She laughed slightly, the same giggle from the throne hall.
“And you,” she crouched down, her eyes locked to his, “are not Avaron.” That stung, certainly more than she’d meant for it to. “Now I’m fine if you want to run down the list of everyone we aren’t, but I’d rather save us both the time and just say who we are. Work for you?” She stood back up and stepped around Voy’s side and offered her hand again. This time Voy accepted it. She pulled and helped him to his feet. “Name’s Elara, of Allodoa and House Caldion.”
She stood nearly a foot taller than him, which made sense even if it was jarring. Voy grimaced as he retracted his own helm. Its collapse was a slower, clunkier, and altogether less elegant process. If Elara had any impression of it, she didn’t let it show.
“And I,” Voy coughed, “am Voy.” Elara looked at him expectantly. “Oh, no house allegiance. I’m my own guy, a one man band and so forth.” She laughed again. Voy swore he hurt a bit less each time she did.
“One man band huh?” she teased, and gestured to the moegon “Is this a concert then?” Voy’s cheeks flushed red.
“Never said I was good at it,” For the first time in years, be it from the combination of post battle hormones or something about the woman in front of him, a genuine smile graced Voy’s battered features. He shook away the feeling, it could wait. “I imagine you’re here to take me to the admiral fella?”
“That’s the idea, and as it stands he expected me back with you about...” she looked down at her wrist despite not wearing a watch or timepiece and frowned, “awhile ago. Shall we?” Without a moment in hesitation, Elara ran and leapt up to the wall, digging her hands and feet in and climbing her way up and out effortlessly.
Voy sighed. Limping slowly, he made his way to the scaffold stairs that led out of the quarry. When he reached the top at last, Elara stood waiting at the top, bouncing on her toes impatiently.
“You moving slow for kicks or did that thing mess you up worse than I thought?” Voy winced and transitioned out of the limp walk to a more normal gait as his body mended itself.
“Believe me, not for ‘kicks’. Also not from the moegon, he only hit me once.” He walked slow, balancing a sudden need to not look weak against the pain of moving normally. “I’ll heal as we walk. I apologize.” Understanding softened her face.
“Alright. Don’t hurt yourself. We can take all the time you need.”
