Runeblade

B3? Chapter 262: Escape, pt. 3

Feeling the chill of the air on his still damp skin, Kaius tugged his pants over his hips and muscled the buttons on his fly closed.

Despite his struggles with the non-compliant clothes, he still stared over the bunks in front of him to keep his eyes trained on the door—the constant restless gnawing he felt in his chest urging him to move faster.

Even with Ianmus and Kenva now fully dressed and keeping watch, every second would matter if someone discovered them. He wanted to be able to react immediately.

Eventually though, the trousers won the war—the final button was too troublesome to close without looking. Grunting in frustration, he forced it through and bent down to grab the tunic and jacket he had found.

Those, at least, fit a bit better—sturdy canvas and wool sliding over his broad chest comfortably, even if the sleeves were a little too short.

Kaius supposed he should feel grateful he found anything that fit him at all. He was not exactly a commonly sized man, standing a full stride taller than the average, with shoulders that may as well have been thrice as broad. Even a couple of months of thin gruel and torturous confinement wasn’t enough to put a dent in the muscle he had built over the last year.

Some of that he expected was due to the influences of his Beastblooded racial trait, and his bond skill, but he’d always been big.

Kenva and Ianmus had faired better. Ianmus fit his clothes just fine, though his wrists and ankles jutted out awkwardly far, and the ranger had the opposite problem—extra fabric bunching at the ankles of the boots they’d managed to find in a usable size.

Lucky bastard, both he and Ianmus had been relegated to simple black socks.

Only time would tell if it would actually help to obscure their status as escaped prisoners.

The weight of the unknown sat heavy, bubbling anxieties threatening to turn his focused haste into panicked speed. He forced the feelings down, focusing on his immediate tasks.

Whatever came next, they’d manage.

Fully dressed, apart from the socks he had left sitting on the nearby bunk, Kaius reached for the dark grey woolen blanket that he’d used as a towel.

Drying his hair, Kaius looked back at the spigots they’d used to get clean. Even if the water was frigid, it was a monumental step up from the weekly hose down of literal ice water they had gotten in the cells. Their fallen jailor might have wanted to rid them of the worst of the muck of their captivity, but he hadn’t made the experience pleasant.

With the soap they’d found, he felt downright reborn.

Judging by the way the rigidity that had suffused Ianmus and Kenva had faded somewhat, he assume his companions felt similarly. Though, he did notice that Ianmus was still doing his best to avoid Kenva’s eyes—angled away from her under an obvious pretence to get better coverage of the door.

Kaius smiled, shaking his head slightly. He understood, even if he didn’t feel the same compunctions with nakedness. Even though they had all been focused on moving as quickly as they could, it was impossible not to notice with how little privacy the room afforded.

His brother, on the other hand, somehow managed to look even more fearsome with his dense fur plastered close to his skin. Waiting patiently towards the front of the room, every curve of his musculature was highlighted in a dull red sheen—making him look more like an artist's rendition of primal strength than a truly living creature.

The simple statement of his brother’s primal might eased his nerves. Even if they did end up in a fight without their gear, Porkchop would be almost at his full strength. He doubted any two-bit crook would be able to go toe to toe with a rampaging greater meles.

Unfortunately, such wasn’t the case for him. He was limited to the small selection of spells he had already inscribed, and a simple camping knife. He’d taken a few minutes to inscribe a handful more while his team had cleaned themselves—Hateful Nails one and all—but it still didn’t feel like enough.

At least with the knife he should be able to use Mystic’sRend, his skill never did say it needed a sword.

Grumbling inwardly at his circumstances, Kaius walked over to the small table that sat next to the armoires where he had scavenged their clothes and snatched up one of the blades he had left sitting there.

He flicked it into the air, wincing as it’s balance made it tumble uncontrollably. He snatched it out of the air—mental stats improving his perception to the point that such a feat was easy—and slammed it into its sheath.

Buckling its sheath at his waist, he knew that the naked discomfort he felt without his sword was a simple reality he had to get used to. At least he had a blade, even if it was a poor one.

Scooping up the remainders of the motley collection of uniformly bad quality knives, Kaius made his way to his team.

“Here,” he said, passing off a blade to both of them.

“Can I have another?” Kenva asked, eying the remaining knife left. “I’m Skilled in two blades, and these are just long enough for me to use with my abilities.”

He nodded and passed it over, relieved that another member of their party would be atleast partially battle-ready. Though, he did know that the woman was primarily a ranger, so he doubted that short-blades were anything more than a backup weapon in more normal circumstances.

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“How much further is the vault?” Porkchop asked, his attention never wavering from the door.

Kaius grunted. The compound was massive—or, at least, what he had seen of these two underground levels suggested it was. Currently they sat at the almost complete opposite end of the floor from both the vault, and the stairs to the next level.

Thankfully, despite each layer being made up of a mire of twisting and intersecting corridors and rooms, one group of guards who had taken him semi-regularly to questioning had a tendency towards. They had never daudled when they’d hauled his limp body to the torture chambers on the floor above, and he’d memorised their route.

“We won’t be moving the fastest, just in case we run into any stragglers, but maybe ten or fifteen minutes. And that’s quick, whoever designed this place seemingly hated sightlines—no corridor I've seen runs for more than sixty strides without splitting, turning, or passing through some room.” he replied.

As much as he wished they could simply sprint straight for the vault, doing so would be folly. He knew that they would run into trouble—could feel it in his bones. He doubted that a hive of scum like this would leap to the defense of their fellows, he’d eat his socks if there weren’t at least a couple of personnel dragging their feet in the hopes that the danger would have mostly passed by the time they got up top.

“Well, I think if we do happen to run into any guard, we should capture them if we can—the knowing hunter waits by the game trail, and all,” Kenva grunted, crossing her arms and leaning into the stone wall to her left. “We’re dangerously low on information, even with you resisting their toxin, we still have no idea on what is happening above, who is in charge, or even where the hell we are.”

“Knowledge aids, always,” Ianmus agreed, nodding. “I doubt we’ll get the opportunity to make another attempt if we fail, so seizing every opportunity that comes our way will be of utmost importance.”

Running his hands through his hair, Ianmus frowned in concentration. “More than that, I want to know more about the vault. What, exactly, do we risk if I make a mistake? Just how precise will this work be?”

That was…a hard question to answer—while he’d all but memorised the formation used on the door, it was still a monstrous work made by a master, and he only knew enough about Vhaxanish to intuit the generalities of most of its function—and how to break them safely.

One didn’t need to be a master joiner to know how to knock the pins out of a door, after all.

“We’ll capture someone if we can, but only if we can do so without risk—getting into that vault is priority number one. Getting our gear back will have the single greatest impact on our chances of escape.” Kaius said, accepting that more information would be helpful.

As for the vault…he turned to Ianmus. “We’ve talked about it somewhat, but to be detailed—the vault is sealed by a nightmarish Vhaxanish formation, and it’s riddled with redundancies and contingencies. If we just tried to hammer it in, we’d get nowhere, set off an alarm, and trigger half a dozen traps, only two of which I've been able to identify. One of which is a curse.”

Ianmus winced—everyone knew exactly how horrific curse magic was to deal with. The effects might be small, but they were almost impossible to remove without treatment or growing strong enough that the power of your soul overwhelmed them.

“Thankfully, I am reasonably proficient in the language that was used to inscribe it—though only in a mortal sense, I lost my Skill with it when one of my general skills evolved to align with glyph binding,” Kaius continued. “It’s one of the most complex scripts to use, but also one of the easiest to break, if you know where to look. There are eight key sections I will need you to destroy simultaneously, the largest no bigger than the tip of my finger. If the timing is off, or you miss even one, every last ditch measure embedded in that enchantment will trigger at once—and we’ll all be in for a horrible time.”

Ianmus paused, staring at him gravely for a few moments as he processed the importance of his task—getting their gear back, and all the other things in the vault besides, would fall on his shoulders alone.

The mage’s eyes hardened, and he gave Kaius a nod. “Well, I suppose I best not miss.”

Kaius grinned, Ianmus’s determination fueling his own.

“Let’s move people, we’ve got ground to cover.”

….

As they continued moving through the twisted warren of granite, drowning in the red light of the alarm, Kaius noticed that the dim sounds coming from far above were growing more chaotic, and the rattling shudders that wracked the compound were growing even more intense.

The more it went on, the more he doubted that it was a rescue squad from Deadacre—even Rieker wouldn’t be able to leverage so much strength, and he doubted they’d have been able to rouse an army in their defence.

Putting the matter out of mind, Kaius led the way forward—his offhand relaxed and ready to cast a Hateful Nail.

They’d pushed through a couple more corridors since moving on from their temporary respite. Despite his best efforts to take a cursory look through the armoires of every room they had passed, they hadn’t found anything better than the knives and simple clothes they’d already appropriated.

He’d given up after they’d left the first section of sleeping quarters—it was wasting too much of their time. Kaius had hoped that Kenva would be able to speed the process up, but apparently her ocular skill didn’t allow her to peer through obstacles without limit, she could only see living things.

What they did, however, stumble across was a mess hall, large enough to seat at least fifty. It had been mostly empty—at this point Kaius was almost certain that it was the middle of the night—but there had been a dozen plates of half eaten meals strewn across long tables that stretched across the room.

Sucking down someone's half eaten dinner wasn’t exactly dignifying, but in the current circumstances it may as well have been succour brought by the gods themselves.

Invigorated by the nourishment, they’d continued with far more energy and focus than before.

Kaius stared down their current stretch of hallway, almost identical to the ones they had passed before—a mix of open and closed door, and plain red-drenched granite. They were getting close—almost halfway, by his reckoning.

Halfway through his step, he saw Kenva come to a dead stop.

“Kaius!People rushing to get ready, fifth door on our left. Kenva is pretty sure they are just in a hurry to get above.” Porkchop suddenly shouted, urgency flooding across their bond.

He snapped to the door in question, one of the last before the hall made yet another bend. Now that their presence had been made aware to him, he could hear a faint murmur of movement coming from the room, almost entirely drowned out by the soft rumbles from above.

Freezing, his mind raced. They could hide and let them pass—all it would take is ducking into one of the open rooms next to them.

Yet, he couldn’t get Ianmus and Kenva’s words out of his head. They were low on information, and he doubted they would get another opportunity like this.

Jaw clenching, he made his decision.

It was time to act, and maybe find out something helpful.