Chapter 10: Lingering Melancholy.
"I can’t push it open... Damien, order your undead to help". Chad’s screams were muffled by the incoming stampede, but Damien didn’t need to hear him to understand what needed to be done.
The priest and the other two undead positioned themselves around the stone slab and, with great effort, began forcing it aside. Muscles bulged and stone groaned, but the entrance was still opening far too slowly.
Chad, Yuri, Damien and the headless undead remained behind to buy time.
The footsteps finally arrived, they came from every direction. One after another, antlered figures emerged from the snow-choked ruins.
Their broad frames towered over the frozen landscape, each gripping a crude club lined with rusted iron spikes. Hundreds of pale eyes stared at the humans without blinking.
They didn’t charge, they simply surrounded them. The circle grew tighter with every passing second.
The Eidolons parted and a path opened through the crowd. An Eidolon stepped forward.
A strip of red cloth concealed most of its face, leaving only its eyes visible beneath the fabric. Its antlers were larger than the others, thick and scarred from countless battles. On one hand, it carried a spiked club almost as tall as a man.
Its gaze swept across the four humans. Then it lingered on the undead priest that was devoting itself to opening a stone slab.
For the first time, genuine fury appeared in its eyes, the leader of the Eidolons raised its clawed hand and furiously brought it down.
The army behind it roared and charged forward aggressively, their large frames pushing against each other in a race to reach the humans.
"Shit". Yuri cursed.
Damien glanced over at her with a questioning look, he never pegged her as the type to curse in the open, but in this case, who wouldn’t, in fact. Damien had several curses he was prepared to spit out before dying.
"Guys". Seris suddenly shrieked. "It’s open".
Yuri was the fastest, she used her dormant ability as a speed boost to bolt into the narrow opening, well it wasn’t exactly narrow, but two Eidolons side by side definitely couldn’t squeeze their way in, but it was no problem for humans.
By the time everyone made it through, the Eidolon forces were already upon them, Damien had no choice but to leave the headless undead behind to delay their entry, to which it did faithfully.
The tunnel wasn’t as dark as Damien expected, they could more or less see what was in front of them, except the further they went the wider the tunnel became, until Yuri’s voice cut through the uneasy silence.
"There’s something here."
Damien didn’t like the way Yuri said that. Whatever she had discovered, he doubted it was anything good for them.
Just as he was about to move forward and join Chad, a sinister whisper echoed inside his head.
It was familiar and not in a comforting way. It was the Emissary.
[Your undead has fallen]
Damien’s steps halted.
He immediately turned toward the entrance they had come through. It wasn’t very far away. Even from here, faint roars drifted through the tunnel.
Headless was dead.
Headless was the name Damien had given the undead Eidolon. They hadn’t known each other for long, but Damien still felt a strange sense of loss. Headless had fought bravely, carried his own severed head without complaint, and most importantly, had faithfully followed every order.
The undead priest seemed to sense his mood. It stepped forward and lightly tapped Damien on the shoulder as if offering comfort.
Unfortunately, all that came from its chest were the same low, guttural growls.
Damien stared at it for a moment before sighing.
"They got Headless, priesty".
"Did you just call the undead... Priesty?"
Seris stared at him with wide eyes. Her back straightened instinctively, and her feet subtly shifted apart as if she were deciding which direction to run.
The undead priest responded with a low growl.
Seris pointed at it with a trembling finger.
"You named it?"
Damien frowned.
"Of course I named him"."
Seris looked even more horrified than before.
...
The tunnel wasn’t what they expected. There was no path leading deeper, no hidden route to freedom. Instead, it ended in a dead end.
Though calling it a dead end didn’t feel entirely accurate. Rather than a simple wall blocking their path, the tunnel opened into a large, carefully carved chamber. Whether it had once been a storage room, barracks, or something else entirely, Damien couldn’t tell.
Several smaller rooms branched off from the main chamber. Some contained dusty beds, and on more than one of them, skeletons still lay undisturbed, as if they had simply gone to sleep and never woken up.
Weapons of all kinds lined the shelves along the walls, surprisingly, they were exceptionally well preserved.
Yuri unsheathed a black katana and gave it a testing swing.
"These weapons aren’t ordinary. This place has clearly been abandoned for centuries, maybe even longer, and yet they’ve maintained their sharpness. The metal isn’t rusted, chipped, or even dented."
Chad lifted a heavy copper-colored spear from a nearby rack.
"We shouldn’t sit around waiting for death. There’s got to be another way out somewhere. We just need to find it."
"I admire the enthusiasm, Chad." Damien clapped lightly, doing his best to ignore the lingering melancholy of losing Headless. "These skeletons probably wanted to live just as much as we do, and yet they all died here. Trust me, if there was a way out, they would have found it."
Chad fell silent because Damien had a point, nobody wanted to die, and nobody wanted to die in a hole.
When given a choice, people always preferred to decide how they met their end. Hiding underground, waiting for death to arrive while the world carried on above them, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good death.