134. Things in the Water
Chapter 134: Things in the Water
The dragging sound grew louder. A wet, sloshing pull, like something heavy being dredged through mud.
I pushed Neralia behind me, my back against the slimy tunnel wall. The greenish glow from the lichen seemed to dim, as if the very light was afraid.
It rounded the curve ahead.
At first, I thought it was a man. A tall, shambling figure. But the proportions were wrong. The limbs were too long, too thin, draped in tattered, sodden rags that might have been a uniform once. Its skin was the colour of a drowned corpse, grey and bloated, stretched tight over sharp bones. Its face was a sunken ruin, eyes milky white and vacant. Water streamed from its clothes, pooling around its bare, skeletal feet.
It carried no weapon. Its hands ended in long, black nails that clicked against the stone as it shuffled forward.
“Gods,” Neralia breathed from behind me, her voice a thread of pure horror. “A draugr.”
“A what?” I kept my eyes locked on the thing. It hadn’t seen us yet. It was just… moving. Dragging one foot after another with a terrible, patient purpose.
“A waterlogged dead,” she whispered, her scholar’s mind fighting through the fear. “Not undead in the necromantic sense. They’re… echoes. Crystallized battle rage and despair, given semi-physical form by the wild mana saturation. They haunt places of mass death near water. This tunnel… the fort’s cisterns must be flooded.”
The draugr’s head turned slowly. Those milk-white eyes fixed on the space where we stood.
It let out a sound. Not a roar. A low, bubbling groan, as if its lungs were full of swamp water. Then it moved.
It was not fast. But it was relentless. It came down the tunnel with a lurching, ground-eating stride, arms reaching.
I met it. I didn’t wait for it to reach us. I stepped forward and swung my sword in a tight, horizontal arc aimed at its neck.
The blade bit deep into the spongy, grey flesh. No blood. A gush of foul, brackish water poured from the wound. The thing didn’t flinch. It swiped at me with a clawed hand.
I ducked back, wrenching my sword free. The cut began to close, the water slowing to a trickle, then stopping. The skin knitted back together, leaving a pale seam.
Shit. Regeneration.
“Its form is sustained by ambient mana and water!” Neralia called out, her voice gaining strength. “You must disrupt it! Destroy the core of the manifestation!”
“How?” I yelled, parrying another clumsy but powerful swipe. The impact shuddered up my arm.
“Severe trauma! Or… or purge the animating energy!”
The draugr lunged, both arms outstretched. I sidestepped and drove my sword straight through its chest. The tip punched out its back with a wet crunch. More water gushed. It grabbed the blade with both hands, ignoring the edge cutting into its palms, and pulled itself forward along the steel, its ruined face inches from mine. The smell was horrific.
I let go of the sword and dropped, sweeping its legs. It fell like a felled tree, heavy and wet. I scrambled back as it began to push itself up, my sword still lodged in its torso.
“Neralia! Can you use magic? Anything? A fire rune, something?” I shouted, remembering her explanation. Elemental magic needed circles, but maybe…
She was pressed against the wall, her dagger in hand. “I have elemental affinity for fire but I told you, my training is theoretical! I can sense mana structures, not shape them! I don’t have the focus or the innate talent to draw a stable circle under pressure, let alone power it!”
Theoretical. Right. No magic.
The draugr wrenched my sword from its own chest and tossed it aside with a clatter. It got to its feet, the hole in its torso already sealing. It was learning. Or remembering. It picked up a piece of fallen stone, a chunk of mortar the size of a loaf of bread.
It threw it.
I dodged, but the stone clipped my already sore shoulder. Pain exploded, white hot. I stumbled.
The draugr charged.
A flash of blue light streaked past my head. It struck the draugr in the face with a sizzle. The creature recoiled, hissing, smoke rising from where Neralia’s enchanted dagger had thrown its spark. It was a bee sting, but it was a distraction. An enchantment was pre-made magic, not something she was casting.
I used the moment. I didn’t go for my sword. I focused inward, to the pool of Ki. I didn’t have enough for a blast. But I didn’t need to destroy it. I needed to *disrupt* it. To be a foreign element in its magical matrix.
As the draugr turned its milky gaze toward Neralia, I lunged. Not with a weapon. With my hand. I pushed past its reaching arms and slammed my palm, flat and hard, against its waterlogged chest, right over where its heart should have been.
I didn’t try to unleash energy. I did the opposite. I pushed my Ki into it, not as a weapon, but as a *command*. A single, focused thought of denial, shaped by the control I’d been grinding for in the dark. My energy was life force, warm and alive. Its form was sustained by stagnant, death-soaked mana. They were opposites.
‘STOP.’
My Ki, an alien signature in this world of runes and circles, flooded into the nexus of its form.
The draugr froze. A full-body shudder wracked it. The water weeping from its seams boiled away into steam. The milky white eyes flickered with a crackle of blue-gold energy. It opened its mouth, and a sound came out that wasn’t a groan. It was a sigh. A long, relieved exhalation of air that had been trapped for sixty years.
Then it collapsed. Not into a corpse, but into a pile of sodden rags, grey sludge, and a large, slowly dissolving puddle of brackish water. The sense of cold, patient malice vanished.
I stood over the remains, breathing hard, my palm tingling. That had taken more out of me than a sword fight. It was precision work.
I retrieved my sword, wiping the slime off on a dry part of the tunnel wall. “Theoretical knowledge has its uses,” I said, looking at Neralia.
She was pale, her dagger held in a white-knuckled grip. “You… you purged it. With your energy. You didn’t destroy the body, you unraveled the spellform holding it together.” She looked at me with something like awe, and deeper fear. “That is not mana. It doesn’t interact with spellforms like mana does. It… it overwrites them. It’s like pouring a solvent into a delicate alchemical mixture.”
“It caused it to stop,” I said simply. “That’s all that matters.”
A low, bubbling groan echoed from the tunnel ahead. Then another. And another.
We turned. In the green gloom, more shapes were shambling into view. Three. Then five. Their wet footsteps sloshed in unison. They had heard. Or felt the disruption in the ambient mana.
Neralia’s breath hitched. “The cisterns… they must be full of them.”
I looked at the oncoming draugr, then back the way we came. The tunnel was a maze. We could run, get lost, maybe lose them. Or we could fight, and be overwhelmed when my Ki ran out.
“We need a bottleneck,” I said, my mind clicking into tactical mode. “A place where only one or two can come at us at a time.”
Neralia pointed a trembling finger down a side passage we had passed. It was narrower than the main tunnel, and darker. “There. That conduit is smaller. They would have to come single file.”
“Let’s go.”
We ran for the side passage, our footsteps echoing. The draugr’s groans rose in volume, a chorus of the drowned. We squeezed into the narrower conduit. It was tight, the ceiling brushing my hair. The lichen glow was fainter here.
We hadn’t gone fifty feet when the conduit opened into a larger, circular chamber. In the center was a deep, dark well, the source of the dripping water. And around it, standing motionless in the shallow water covering the floor, were two more draugr. They turned as one as we burst in.
We were trapped. The narrow conduit behind us, now filling with the sounds of pursuit. Two more in front.
I pushed Neralia toward a relatively dry ledge against the wall. “Stay there. Throw your spark when you can. Aim for the eyes.”
I planted myself between her and the room, my sword ready, my Ki a low, tired flame in my gut. The two by the well started forward. The first of the pursuing draugr squeezed into the chamber behind me.
I was surrounded.
The first draugr from the well reached me. I sidestepped its lunge and brought my sword down on its arm. The bone crunched, water spurted, but it grabbed my wrist with its other hand, its grip like a freezing vise. The one behind me closed in, its nails scraping against my leather armor.
Neralia’s dagger sparked, hitting the second well-draugr in the shoulder, causing it to stagger back a step. It wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t get a clean strike. I was being pressed. The cold was sapping my strength. The one holding my wrist pulled, trying to drag me off balance. The other behind me raised a clawed hand for a killing blow.
I made a choice. I stopped fighting the pull. I let the draugr yank me forward, using its own strength. As I stumbled toward it, I dropped my sword, twisted in its grip, and slammed my free palm into its chest.
‘STOP.’
The same internal command. The same flood of Ki. It was faster this time. The creature dissolved into slurry and rags.
But the effort cost me. My vision swam. My Ki pool was dangerously low. I turned, unarmed, to face the draugr behind me and the second one from the well, which was now recovering.
I was out of energy. I was out of space.
The timer in my vision glowed, steady and uncaring.
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