Chapter 389: The Fruit of Our Hard Work
"Ugh, my head." Sonia frowns, trying to force her eyes open. "Why does my head hurt this much? Did I hit something before bed?" She mutters to herself as the world slowly sharpens around her.
The first thing she sees is a ceiling.
My room? No, that’s not my ceiling. That looks more like... a ceiling from a plane. Wait. Plane?
The next second, memory floods back all at once. The flight home. The crash. Being attacked. Sonia sits up abruptly, and sharp pain lances through her abdomen and head at once.
"Whoa! Not so fast, Ms. Hart." A man’s voice comes from beside her.
Her head snaps toward it and her jaw drops.
"Linus Monfort!" She shouts.
"Shh!" Linus lunges forward and claps a hand over her mouth, then goes completely still.
Sonia is too stunned to react. She can only stare at him, wide-eyed, her mouth held firmly shut beneath his palm.
After a few tense moments, satisfied, he exhales in relief and finally looks at her properly.
"Okay." He whispers. "I’m going to let go, but keep your voice down." His tone leaves no room for argument. Neither does his face.
Sonia nods, still confused. He slowly releases her and takes a step back.
"What’s going on? How did I end up here? The last thing I remember..." She stops, another memory slamming into her.
She’d been searching for Elder Loujt, then something attacked her. She still can’t remember what, exactly, she never got a good look at it, too focused on running.
Yes. She’d run, without once looking back. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she could use magic. Sonia looks down, ashamed of herself.
I should have stayed and fought. She sighs, embarrassed, then lifts her head and finds Linus watching her from a careful distance, seated in a chair. A rather nice-looking chair.
She realizes the room around her looks nothing like a crashed plane. Everything is intact. She scans it slowly. Linus follows her line of sight, watching her take it all in.
He sighs. "Yes. Thanks to this room, I survived the crash without much injury."
Sonia looks at him again. Aside from clear exhaustion, he doesn’t look like someone who just walked away from a plane crash at all.
"How did I end up here?" She asks.
"After the crash, I woke up in here." Linus begins, then briefly walks her through it before adding, "I must have passed out from a concussion. You’re the one who woke me, banging on the door."
"Door?" Sonia frowns, then sighs as it comes back to her. "Right. I was running blind. I saw light. It must have been this cabin. I couldn’t find a way in, so I just started pounding on it."
"That tracks. And for what it’s worth, I owe you for that banging."
Sonia tilts her head slightly.
"You woke me up with it, and it forced me to get up and fight the door open. If you hadn’t, I’d probably still be unconscious, no closer to figuring out how to get it open." He gestures around the suite. "Now we’ve got a proper shelter, and we can go out when we actually need to."
Sonia looks around. She has no idea what the room looked like before, but she can tell it must have been extravagant. Now it’s clearly been converted into something more functional, some cleaning, some rearranging.
She turns back to him. "You told me to keep my voice down. What’s out there? Animals? What?"
Linus tenses, faintly. "I don’t know. It’s too dark to explore properly. I wanted to wait until you woke up first." He pauses. "But one thing I do know. Whatever’s out there, it isn’t friendly."
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Captain Daniels crouches behind a rock, trying to will himself invisible. In his head, the same phrase loops endlessly. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.
Screams carry through the dark. He squeezes his eyes shut, keeps muttering.
"HELP!" A man’s voice tears through the air. Daniels claps both hands over his ears. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.
Somewhere out there, his rescuers and more survivors are being slaughtered, and he’s too afraid to move a single muscle.
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Elder Loujt stays perfectly still where he is. Only his eyes move, scanning the darkness below, searching for any sign of movement.
He’s perched on a tree branch, several meters above the ground.
The last three days have been nothing but a waking nightmare. He isn’t even certain it’s actually been three days, there’s been no daylight at all since the crash, which confirms one of his worst fears.
They’re inside a dungeon. A night dungeon.
The number of survivors with him has been cut in half already. Because of the zombies.
Yes. Zombies. Even Elder Loujt could barely believe it with his own eyes. He’d always assumed such things only existed in movies and stories. And yet there he was, trying to rest, when a man beside him suddenly coughed up blood, and moments later, several of the creatures descended on the group.
They’ve been playing a desperate game of hide and seek ever since.
He’s grateful, at least, to have discovered the creatures can’t climb, and their necks seem locked in place, unable to look upward. That alone has kept him alive this long.
But they can smell blood from a considerable distance, and most of the survivors are bleeding in one way or another, which makes them very easy to track.
Beyond the zombies themselves, Elder Loujt hasn’t encountered any other creatures native to this place.
Does that mean the zombies themselves are the dungeon’s native creatures? He shakes his head slowly. He’s never heard of a zombie-type dungeon before. Not once, in all his years.
This would be the first.
He sighs again. I really hope Her Highness is safe.
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"YEAH!"
"Woohoo!"
Shouts and applause erupt across the dungeon site as the Hunters emerge alongside the Baroness.
They’ve cleared the dungeon in three days. Nothing short of a miracle, according to some of the DCEU Sentinels watching.
The Baroness can’t help herself, smugness radiates off her as she walks past the officers, chin lifted even higher with every step.
Hawk rolls his eyes behind her. He catches Ethan’s gaze, and Ethan presses his lips into a thin, tight line before shaking his head lightly.
The other three trail behind, each one carrying a survivor, some carrying two, the Baroness carrying none.
"Your Ladyship!" Chief Chambers approaches in hurry. He’s been ordered by Director General Weston and Commissioner Coleman to guaranteed the Baroness’ safety. A very tall order for someone who can’t enter the dungeon with her.
When Chief Chambers heard the order, he tried to protest, but those two people refused to listened and just left.
Once Chief Chambers finds out the Baroness is safe, he immediately goes to look for his nephew.
He sees Hawk, carrying an eight year old boy on his back.
"Lewis!" Calls Chief Chambers.
The boy lifts his head and smiles at him. "Uncle David." He says weakly.
"Oh, God!" Chief Chambers almost fall. Strength drains from his knees.
"Oh, Lewis! Thank God you’re safe!" Chief Chambers repeats it again, taking his nephew from Hawk’s back.
He bows toward Hawk in gratitude. "Thank you for saving him. Thank you."
He looks down at Lewis. "Let’s go find you a doctor, okay?"
Lewis stares up at him, pitiful and exhausted. "I want Mom. Is she here?"
"Yes, of course she is." Chambers nods gently, already carrying the boy away from the gate, heading toward the medical tents. Their voices fade further and further into the distance.
The Baroness watches their backs, a faint arrogance settling over her expression, as though she’d been the one who personally carried the boy to safety.
She turns to face Hawk and the rest of the Hunters. "As you can see, gentlemen, we have done excellent work here. You also performed very well in there. Well done."
She draws in a long, elegant breath before continuing. "This is the fruit of our hard work, gentlemen. Now, take the survivors to the medical tents, and then you may go home and rest. We’ve all earned it."
Hawk just stares at the Baroness, unblinking.
Ethan reacts first. "Yes, Your Ladyship. Thank you. We’ll head to the medical tent now." He turns to his teammates. "Come on, guys. Let’s get these people the attention they need."
Medical personnel are already moving toward them.
As the Hunters carry the survivors over, the Baroness lingers, slowly scanning the crowd, basking openly in the praise and admiration surrounding her.
It never once crosses her mind that she did nothing inside that dungeon beyond issuing orders. She’d stayed hidden the entire time, while the Hunters, Hawk especially, did every bit of the actual work.
She is so far in her head that it was her who did the saving.
He’d taken a few nasty wounds for it, too.