The Homeseeker: An Elemental Adventurer LitRPG

Chapter 38 - Lacking of Flesh

The group got to their feet after having had long enough to appreciate the fact they wouldn't be trapped inside the Chaos Chamber until the end of time.

"I ran too fast and abandoned my arrows. I left about half," Yelsa noted, looking over her quiver.

"And we left behind some perfectly good daggers," Rep added, thinking back on the skeleton.

"How did King Docrun ever make it out of there?" Zalan suddenly asked. "He didn't have any power and he was supposed to be super secret. How would he be able to deactivate it by himself? Did he always go in there with a ladder or something?"

"He always carried his scepter," Gorb said, his eyes growing wide at the realization.

It took Zalan a second to catch up to his thought process. If the king always had a long stick with him, he could raise it up and deactivate the Artifact without needing the assistance of something to get him to stand taller. And he could keep the solution to the room a secret, further protecting his treasure hoard. Fran shook her head in disbelief.

"It should have been so obvious!" she said.

"I don't know how that could have been obvious," Zalan replied.

"I am surprised to hear you say that," Fran stated. "You were a born leader in the Chaos Chamber. You kept supplying ideas when I think the rest of us had resigned ourselves to the chaos."

"I wasted a lot of our energy in there," Zalan frowned. "We threw a lot more of our power around than we needed to."

"No, we threw around the exact amount of energy necessary," Gorb replied, nodding to Zalan with new deference. "Were it not for your idea to fatigue the wall, we would not have found that it was part of the trap. Were it not for your suggestion to search the corpses, we would not have found that our plans were folly as soon as we did. And you and Yelsa were the one to tell us to attack the Artifact outright."

"I mean, Rep was really the one to get us out of there with his idea at the end. And any one of you probably would have thought of all of my ideas given enough time," Zalan replied. Rep smiled, appreciating how useful he had been in the dire situation.

"How much time? We may have been too exhausted to try," Fran said.

Zalan didn't know why he felt so strange about taking the compliment. He didn't feel like a leader in any way, but he saw the way his companions looked at him differently. Not that they thought he should take charge, but that he was worthy of more respect than they offered him before. All of them except for Rep, who seemed to always be giving everyone he met respect that they hadn't yet earned.

Zalan figured that the reason he felt strange about the respect was because of how fleeting it was. By this time tomorrow, he would be home and none of these people would matter. Did they even matter now, if they were the equivalent of a lucid dream? Zalan had a hard time pinpointing whether this dream world had any bearing on him. Would he remember anything when he woke up? Was this place real at all?

He noticed they were still looking at him, expectantly.

"Let's keep moving," Zalan said, leading the way across the stone bridge.

The bridge stood high above the castle, giving them a good view of the area below. The moat was running very shallow, whether by lack of care from any inhabitants or a natural decrease due to the current season, Zalan couldn't tell. The flowers could be seen for miles around, waving happily in the breeze and adding splashes of color to the otherwise green sea of grass below. The air was fresh, feeling like Zalan had emerged from a paper bag and could breathe easily after escaping the Chaos Chamber. He looked up, taking in the view of the tall tower the dragon just flew within.