Children of The Underground

Chapter 15: Children of The Underground

Drazhek tried to stay awake for as long as he could. The more that he stared into the darkness of the tunnel, the heavier his eyelids grew. They closed, for just a moment. Drafts whistled through the caverns. Somewhere, there was the sound of dripping water

He fell into a doze, as thin and light as a soap bubble. In this half-sleep, the world around him turned vicious and frightening. The drafts became the harsh, muddled murmurs of evil spirits. The rhythmic dripping, its echoes loudened by the acoustics of the room, turned into the footsteps of a silent predator, ready to rip out throats while the group slept.

At last, Drazhek couldn't stand it no longer, and awoke with a jerk.  When he reopened his eyes, he saw a figure looming just outside of the fire's glow. It almost looked human. But as Drazhek sat up, bracing his blunderbuss against a shoulder, it stepped into the light, and then, Drazhek saw his visitor for what it really was.

It looked like a young woman, dressed in some kind of quilted armor. On her back was a longbow. On one hip was a sheathed shortsword, on the other a quiver of arrows. The girl's face was as pallid as a corpse, with a tinge of pale blue. Her eyes were pale disks, that glowed like cold starlight. A mop of fine white hair draped across her shoulders, like woven moonlight.

It was a ghost. It had to be. No human being could possibly look like that and still be alive.

Suddenly, they made eye contact. the figure made eye contact with him. And then it melted back into the shadows. 

Drazhek sprung to his feet. He was completely awake, although more than a little uncertain of what he just saw.

He breathed heavily, trying to look in all directions at once. While it was possible that the woman he saw was a figment of his imagination, he wouldn't leave it up to chance. Not after all the shit he saw on his way down here, and then some. Ghosts? Sure, there could be ghosts. After all, didn't he see the dead rise up to attack the living on top of that hill? And even if that woman disappeared, that didn't mean there wasn't something out there, some hostile force watching them from inside the darkness, biding its time to attack.

But whatever he saw sure looked more like someone that something. Drazhek didn't like the implications. If there was another person nearby, another thinking being, then perhaps it could be reasoned with. But if that person was hostile, then it meant another foe, all the more cruel and clever to be bested.

A hand curled around his shoulder. Drazhek yelped, and turned around just in time to see Misha, who held her sword in her other hand.

"What is it?" She asked. "Did you see something?" Drazhek replied with terse, clipped words.

"Woman, completely white, had a bow and arrow. Looked like a ghost." Drazhek turned back towards the darkness, half-expecting to see a pair of silver eyes peeking back at him. But there was nothing.

Misha nodded, but looked back at the others. If there was something here, then the best course of action would be to wake the others. Wandering around by themselves in a hostile, unfamiliar environment would be tantamount to suicide.

"For the time being, Smartass, we need to lay low. Let's keep watch and see if any of those bastards show——"

And there they were again. But this time, instead of a single ghostly figure, there were five. There was the woman from before, the one with the braided hair, but the duo could make out a few others: a middle aged man, two younger men who looked like twins, and a young woman with short, bob-cut hair. All of them had the pallid skin, silver hair, and glowing eyes.

All of them had their swords drawn, and looked ready to kill.

Drazhek didn't hesitate. He brought his gun to eye level and opened fire. The blunderbuss roared and kicked against his shoulder. The woman with the short hair raised her hand, and curled its fingers into some bizarre gesture. A patch of air around him distorted, refracting the light into a shimmering haze, like the heat from a mirage.

The adrenaline pumping through his blood made time slow down and his vision narrow. But surely that didn't explain why the round shot pellets slowed down, becoming visible black spheres of lead over a centimeter in diameter, buzzing towards the woman like a cloud of flies. The cloud's spread, also widened, far more than ballistically possible at this range. But even then, they moved fast, and the woman had no time to react as the balls savaged her face and neck, carving gashes into the unprotected flesh.

The woman covered her face and dropped to her knees, howling an all too human scream of pain. From between her fingers, Drazhek could see not blood, but a dark blue ichor seeping out, drawing tracks like ink stains down the back of her white hands.

"WE HAVE CONTACT!" Yelled Misha. She in turn shot her blunderbuss from the hip at the middle-aged warrior. He had also set up that same magic shield, but Misha's volley was aimed at the man's chest. There was a loud crack, like the sound of splintering wood, and the man was knocked back a couple of meters, flat on his back. He doubled over, moaning in pain, but there wasn't any blood. By the sound of it, though, the man must have broken a couple of ribs from the blast.

The twins grabbed both of the wounded, one apiece, and then they disappeared, fading out of existence like a bad dream. Lena and Boris were awake by now, and  had their weapons drawn. They ran up to Drazhek and Misha, then set down teardrop- shaped oblongs the size of a palm. The oblongs quickly fanned apart and a shield-shaped object of translucent blue light, about two-by two meters sprouted from the ground. In between the shields was a space about half a meter wide, like a gap between two front teeth. The group crouched behind the light shields, Lena and Drazhek on the left, Boris and Misha on the right, weapons at the ready.

"Is that a gods-damned phasing field?" Drazhek gasped. He was terrified, but still awestruck by the technology.

"You mean a 'pavise'?" Boris asked. "Yeah, it is. Now can someone tell me what the hell is going on?"

Before either of them could reply, a volley of arrows flew at them, ten maybe twelve in a single swarm. Behind the pavise, Drazhek could see the arrows vanishing as they were absorbed into the field of light. The shield wasn't absorbing them, so much as making them immaterial.

"People!" Misha shouted back. "Well, they look like people, but I don't think they really are!" 

Boris and Lena began thundering away from their weapons, ducking back behind the pavises to reload. Although it was dark, Lena took even, careful shots, that elicited yelps of pain and surprise out of the murk. Boris, on the other hand was firing shells from his cannon, running a careful sweep into the darkness.  Some time during the fray, Vera crawled up to Drazhek and Lena.

"Well, looks like we found them! The Children of The Underground! Too bad they're trying to kill us."

A ghostly figure, the woman with the braid,  popped into existence in the gap between the pavises. Her hands crackled with bright, blue lightning. She was looking at Misha. Misha turned towards the woman, and had just enough time to draw her sword, when the woman with the braid smashed her hand against Misha's solar plexus. Misha gasped, then tensed up, shaking and gibbering from the electric current coursing through her body before falling to the ground with a thud.

Something snapped inside Drazhek. He dropped his gun, and instead grabbed the ax from his rucksack, somehow in arm's length.

"Kurvo, raskolyun tobi bashkun! I'll split your dome, you worthless  bitch!" He roared, and swung that ax down like the great god Perun himself, the blade flashing down like a lightning bolt.

He didn't get the woman's head, but instead the blade sliced into her shoulder. An indigo gout of liquid spurted from the wound in  a high pressure jet.

Drazhek had time for vicious pleasure at the woman's savaged shoulder, when she wheeled towards him, moaning in pain yet somehow still quickly, and slammed an electrified palm between his belly and his chest.

There was a muscle spasm, and a sharp pain throughout his body. Then, Dragomir Sventoslavich fell unconscious.

END OF PART I