Runeblade

Chapter 47 : A City, Lost

The final goblin came at him with a feral squeal, swinging its rusted machete at him in a sloppy overhand blow. Kaius parried, A Father's Gift knocking the short depths-born's blade away with a clang. The goblin was left open. He followed through.

The point of Kaius's sword punched right through its face with a spray of green blood.

**Ding! level 15 Goblin Outcast slain**

He sneered in disgust as the creature went limp, sliding free from his sword with a wet schlick. It was the last one. The fight had been easy. Coming up to his chest, he had an immense reach advantage on the goblins, even before his longsword was factored in. Though thanks to the tyranny of stats, they were still stronger than him.

Everything he had fought for months had been stronger than him. It didn't matter all that much when the only way they had tried to leverage it was clumsy swings and wild swarm tactics. The goblins were about as good with their jagged machetes as he had expected after seeing their ramshackle weapons. Terrible. It had been all too easy to punish amateur swings with fatal repostes.

Kaius turned to check on his friend, finding Porkchop licking one paw clean of blood. A pile of crushed corpses arrayed around him.

"Gross." He said, squirming at the sight of his friend happily enjoying goblin blood.

"What? It's almost as good as jerky after all the undead."

Kaius shook his head. "Definitely still gross."

Porkchop huffed and went back to cleaning himself.

Shaking his head, Kaius moved towards the cook fire that was at the mining caverns centre. The goblins had been roasting some sort of beast over it. A massive rodent, judging by the head and tail. Frankly, it smelled delicious, especially after months of unsalted jerky and hastily cooked kills.

He'd had a growing suspicion that the Depths tried to make water and food readily available. Whatever the purpose of the arcane structure, its challenges weren't meant to include death by starvation or dehydration. Even so, he would have to be an idiot to eat the meat without checking it first. He used Identify.

Roast Rous:

Depths-wrought Item

A Rous that has been inexpertly roasted over an open fire. Partially scorched. At least it's salted.

**Ding! Identify has reached level 3!**

Salt.

He was already moving. Snatching one of the legs of the roasted beast, he twisted it free with an uncomfortable crack. The fire hissed as stray juice sizzled on the hot coals below. SInking his teeth into the leg, the meat scorched his mouth. He ignored the pain, moaning as salted meat practically melted in his mouth.

Kaius laughed into his food as Porkchop bolted over at seeing his reaction. His friend ripped his own leg free from the carcass. Savaging it on the cavern floor.

"It's not gonna run away."

"Why." The bone crunched between Porkchop's jaws. "Is." A chuck of meat came free with a snarl. "This." He snapped it down. "So. GOOD."

"Salt. Best thing ever discovered."

"Why haven't you been doing this! Your jerky sucks!"

"I would if I could, buddy." Kaius laughed. "We don't have any. The jerky is pretty shitty, it's supposed to have salt."

As he ate, Kaius walked around the rough room that had been carved into the stone. The goblins had set up a number of tents. Crude things of leather and cloth, barely remaining standing as their rickety frames of sticks threatened to collapse at a moment's notice. One of them did, when he accidentally brushed against it. He did find a barrel of water in one corner of the room. He refilled their water skins before they drank deeply from its reserves.

They moved on, returning to the dark shafts that criss crossed this biome.

Almost immediately they ran into more traps. The worst was a pitfall. A jagged pit carved into the floor of the passage, falling deep enough that he couldn't see its bottom with his Low Light Vision. Ironically, the trap itself was incredibly poorly hidden. A blatant hole in the floor covered up with splintering slabs of wood. The problem came in crossing the pit. It was too wide to jump. While the planks looked sturdy enough that he could edge his way over them if he was slow, Porkchop would have smashed right through them.

It had taken carefully stacking the planks until they were four thick, and some very careful steps, to get his friend across. Even then, every creak of wood had sent Kaius's heart leaping into his throat.

Once they left the pitfall behind, it wasn't long before they noticed something…different. The tunnel ahead opened into what could only be called a corridor. So unlike the haphazard excavation of the goblins, this tunnel was smooth. Clean. Perfectly spaced metal supports holding up the room with geometric perfection.

Every third section between the supports was carved in massive intricate reliefs that stretched from floor to ceiling. The ones he could see depicted stout figures in impressively thick armour, fighting off hordes of strange beasts for which he had no name.

"This is dwarven." Kaius said, running his hands along the perfectly smooth walls. They weren't manufactured, it'd been cut directly into the stone with a jeweller's precision.

"You sure? It's the Depths, not like it has to reflect your stories."

"I know. But this matches up with everything I have ever heard of them. Plus, look at the art, those are definitely dwarves. Wherever this leads, I bet it's going to take us to at least one Champion." He said with conviction.

They moved in cautiously. Well lit by yellow-white glowing crystals embedded in the ceiling, the path was as straight as an arrow and up ever so slightly to their left.

Looking both ways down the path, Kaius saw that the upwards route seemed to open up far, far in the distance. He activated Eagle Eye. There was something there. He couldn't quite tell what it was, not even with the added acuity of this skill. But there was something. An open space, and large. Though with the distance and angle he could tell little more than that.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 3!**

They moved. Kaius was careful to keep an eye out for traps, but there didn't seem to be any. Every so often another butchered entrance was hacked into the perfect stone of the passage, showing where the goblins had added their inferior work.

Reaching the end, Kaius's jaw dropped. Shock rooted him to the spot. He'd known the cavern was going to be large, maybe even as large as the original blue grove. He hadn't expected this.

The passage breached the wall of a truly immense cavern. They were half way up, exiting onto a thin platform of carved stone. Off to the side, a narrow staircase was embedded in the cavern wall, offering passage to the floor far below.

"Impossible…" Kaius said. Porkchop was silent, simply standing and staring.

It put the blue grove to shame, large enough to fit the sizable corpse of trees a dozen times over. At least. A city dominated the centre of the open cavern. Stacked like a wedding cake, every layer of the city rose higher than the one before it, growing more and more opulent and intricately carved as they went.

It seemed to be made from one seamless piece, the entire place apparently carved whole cloth from the bedrock. Fields surrounded its fortress-like walls. A massive suspended crystal illuminating endless regimented fields of mushrooms and other, more exotic, fungus.

Kaius's eyes flicked to the walls of the cavern. They were as glassy smooth as every other piece of dwarven construction. They'd carved it. Carved the whole place out of the bedrock, city and all. It was insanity.

Porkchop broke the silence first.

"Kaius. I know it will hurt, but you need to use your skill to scout the city for us. If that place is swarming with goblins we need to leave. We'll be overwhelmed the moment they spot us."

He tore his eyes away from the vista in front of him, giving Porkchop a nod.

Moving to the edge of the ledge he lay down on his stomach, facing the city. It was a sheer drop to the cavern floor. One he had no chance of surviving if he fell. With the vertigo he got from Eagle Eye, he didn't want to risk it.

Focusing on the city, he amped up his skill, wincing as everything in sight was thrown into sharp relief. Not enough. It was more detailed, but he could still barely make anything out. He pushed the skill to full power, groaning as ice-picks of pain hammered their way into the back of his orbits.

Pushing through the pain, he swept his eyes over the city.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 4!**

Immediately he could see the flaws in the city. It was dirty. War-torn. Everything was smudged in a layer of grime. The desiccated bodies of slain armoured dwarves filled the streets, and the stone that wasn't cracked was worn away.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 5!**

His eyes burned. Forcing him to blink so that he could continue to scout. The mental load was worse. His mind felt like an overstretched waterskin, every second forcing it closer and closer to bursting.

From what he was seeing, it was worth it. Porkchop was right, the place was absolutely crawling with feral goblins. Though thanks to his skill he could tell that they were distributed in a decidedly unnatural way.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 6!**

While he had no way to see into the many buildings, from the squat green figures he could see wandering the streets and lounging on roofs, they seemed to be bunched together. Groups of thirty or so were milling about, going about their day, but there would be streets between them and the next. If they were careful, they should be able to deal with them section by section. Hopefully without causing enough of a ruckus to bring a whole horde down on their heads.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 7!**

Another notification dinged in his mind. With each one his eyes strained just a little less, his migraine slowly reducing. Barely. He still felt like he was getting smashed over the head with a hammer. Sweeping his eyes across the city, he looked for signs of Champions. At the end of the day that was what they were here for.

He found the first likely candidate quickly. The bastard wasn't even in the city, but in the fungal fields outside. Standing out like a sore thumb, a mounted warrior prowled amongst the spread out common goblins who wandered the rows of crops. Garbed in cruelly spiked leather armour, the goblin sat astride a massive wolf-like creature. It was a Champion, no two ways about it.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 8!**

The second one was near a massive set of stairs that lead up to the second tier of the city. Lording over some sort of mustering grounds, it stood head and shoulders above the rest of its kind. Of course, being head and shoulders above a goblin probably meant it was only as tall as he was, but the creature's bare chest was laden with muscle.

Halfway up the city there was some sort of open air temple. A square of free standing pillars surrounding a wide altar at the centre of a massive pavilion. A goblin stood tall on the raised stone, waving a staff through the air as it led its fellows through some sort of ceremony.

**Ding! Eagle Eye has reached level 9!**

He found nothing else until he reached the top of the pyramidal tiered city. A flat paved courtyard dominated the highest level, surrounded by a low wall with a statue depicting a stout warrior at its centre. Something massive stomped across its surface, dragging a club as big as he was behind it. Kaius blanched. Hulking and hideous, it was a fearsome sight to behold.

There was no way that was a Champion.

No, the massive circle of glowing runes carved into the courtyard's surface gave away its true identity.

They'd finally found a Guardian.