Chapter 13: It’s Raining
Two hours passed, and it was still dark in the cave. Dark with a graveyard of a stink coming from all around him. Water dripped from somewhere over the ceiling. That was the only sound. A tap and then another tap. The rhythm of it scarcely changed.
Valens picked himself up off the ground when he felt his mana source. He was ready, now, as ready as anyone caught in some twisted world could be. Questions were a dime a dozen here, and asking them one by one to Nomad proved, well, not particularly fruitful.
Nomad knew some things, and had little clue about the others, or rather, his kind cared not what the human populace was up to in their so-called peaceful lands. The Undead were mostly busy with dealing with demons caged in the bowels of the earth, and only heed to the calls they thought of as profitable.
It was a sick cycle, Valens came to realize, as the Undead had no other way to breed but to rely on corpses lent to this Eternal War. Used to be humans themselves, once, but after they had their hearts forged into stones they came alive as strange creatures fixated on a single mission.
So then, he presumed, it was only right for Nomad to not have a deep understanding of human society. If what he’d told him was true, though, humans were fighting somewhere in this cave system. Real humans who were a part of this guild called Duality.
Valens couldn’t wait to meet with some of them.
They moved onward silent as cats, Valens picking each of his steps with care, his mind ever-focused on the Resonance as he kept an eye across the stretch. He was brutally hungry, and parched as a man thrown out into the edge of a desert, hoping to chance his way into an oasis to quench some of his thirst.
He could conjure some water from the humidity in the air, of course, and there was some of it pooled over the holes across the ground, but by no means did he have any trust in it. The rot was heavy in here, and chances were, it blended into the water like an insidious poison.
Head kept low, mind blurry with all the strangeness that coated over him, he followed Nomad through the cave. The path was windy ahead, but thanks to Nomad’s bulk he could barely feel it.
By the time they came across another corner the ceiling started shaking, bits of gravel raining down in trickles from above them. Through his sound vision Valens tried to get a picture of what was happening, but the thick layer of stone and soil blurred the frequencies into a tangled mess.
“Back off,” Nomad said, holding his sword at the ready. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Bits and pieces sprinkled about as another part of the ceiling started moving. It soon spread to the greater half of the rock, the outer layer trembling continuously as whatever force was drilling into it grew stronger.