There were no Viamontians Kris chose to succor. If anything, they were even more Red than the ones outside, close and loyal followers of Varicci who Kris and Briggs sent off forever without emotion, giving them the coup de grace and releasing them from eternal servitude and off to their promised fates.
With Red souls, that fate was not something they were going to look forward to, but hey, life choices, people. Buck up and take responsibility for becoming a lemure in your afterlife and everything.
I waited on that side of the pit, which sat right where the hallways came together, with no gaps around it… which was ridiculous, you had to jump the corners of the pit to go into the other passages. I supposed it kept the Eaters from spreading, except Summons didn’t wander, regardless.
Well, I put arches in the corners because it was architectural stupidity and it offended me. Briggs headed off to clear out the shades who for some reason had infiltrated this place, while Kris went off to feed Quaver to the Eaters who were left alive in the other wing of this Level.
I busied myself making a set of stairs directly from here to the former Portal Room directly above, bypassing the tedium of those long tunnels extending out and back, and having to come through all those hallways just to get back to the middle here.
I mean, really. There’s defensive Dungeon designs, and then there’s boring slogging around. Unfortunately most of the Dungeon was organized on a downhill slant, so I couldn’t go straight up through all of them, but ah well.
The two of them were back in about fifteen minutes each, Kris flicking off vivisizing Eater gore, and Briggs a little scuffed up from some weapon action that wasn’t from Viamontian knights. Neither was injured at all, any injuries taken on Health and Fast Healed away by now.
Still, they looked over the edge of the pit, and made incredulous faces. “That’s a hundred feet down,” Kris pointed out in some disbelief. “I mean… there’s no way back up except to run through the whole Dungeon now. This is the height of stupid!”
“It’s not like they were sending down supplies or relieving the men on duty,” I pointed out to her, also shaking my head. “Which begs the question of when the System actually grabbed the man so he didn’t need to eat or piss or anything, I guess.”
Kris stated simply, “I expect they murdered him as soon as they brought him here, and he just fought to the end because it was all he had left. The System grabbed them all, used it as an excuse to set up that recurring Augmentation Gem Quest he was the end of, and he got to die over and over to people coming through harvesting Gems, just fighting over and over to the death mindlessly like a good Summons should.”
“The Mick did say he was pretty impressive back in the day,” Briggs noted proudly, for Sir Bellas had taught both their preincarnations.
“That Broken Right Hand technique of his.” I lifted an eyebrow at her words. “Sir Bellas studied a lot of magic, and could even Cast powerful War and Life Magic. Golds back on Ispar, the Mick said he got up to Platinum here.”
“For a knight, that’s incredibly strange and versatile,” I agreed. “Textbook Eldritch Knight.”
“The Broken Right Hand was his way of messing with people who relied too much on Item Magic. It completely ignored Armor Buffs from Item Magic!”
I had to blink. “That’s… a pretty impressive technique,” I had to admit. “Did he pass it on to anyone?”
Kris shook her head. “No one else could figure out how he did it, it might have been a unique talent.”
“All spells and techniques were unique talents at some point. If the two of you don’t mind, I’d like to observe him if he has the technique active. You can draw out his fight for some time, can’t you?”
The two of them glanced at one another, slightly amused. “I think we can do that, although I doubt he’s going to be so merciful in return,” Briggs nodded.
“Briggs first. Get that Source working on him. He won’t recognize you or your fighting Style, but I think Kris can get him to recognize just who he might be facing…”
Kris just lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t look anything like Eleonora,” she said softly. “But fighting like her? I could do that. I am better than she ever was, however, although she was quite good. A full Ten Melee equivalent at nineteen years old.”
And likely improved a bit once she made it to Dereth, before she was killed, I thought, saying nothing.
“Should only be Viamontian knights below, and they should all be former personal favorites of Varicci assigned to dispose of Sir Bellas. You probably will even know their names and faces, Kris,” I reminded her.
Her pale violet eyes were cold as polished gems. “We’ll be Merciful just long enough for you to tell me their names, so I know they are dead,” she hissed slowly. Quaver sparked, and then its blue-black length of metal and glittering Blackfire Stones snapped into full Lightningphasing as the Elemental Stone on his pommel was swapped out.
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Endure crackled loudly as the same thing happened. “Ladies first,” Briggs grunted, and Kris hopped over the edge with perfect faith in her Sandals to catch her below.
Briggs followed, and I followed Briggs on my Disk, the Fiuns coming down after me in a vertical stack at a slow and stately pace.
There were three Viamontians posted in the pit below, one in the corridor leading out. Two were already down, crashed against the walls, and the other two were being manhandled with savage skill and fury as I reached the floor. Ignoring the fights that would be over in another second, I went over to the downed Tribune in his brassy full plate armor and peered down at him.
“Sir Vambril di Dulce.”
“Famous for how many unBlooded daughters he raped as part of Varicci’s coterie,” Kriss hissed, pulling Quaver out from under the bronzed helm of the Viamontian Lord it was sticking through. No blood came out, Mercy making sure the wound wasn’t fatal, but the Summons still went limp and collapsed.
Zeks heaved the unconscious Summons in my direction as I went to the other Tribune. “Sir Francois du Lotila.”
Endure crashed down right in front of me, still Lightningphased, but no Mercy on it this time. “His favorite past time was riding down peasants on farms,” Briggs stated flatly.
He’d been a thick Purple, so that fit. Must have started early, if Briggs knew of it.
Lord Willem du Corcosi was a cousin of the royal line, twice removed, and gleaming Ruby. Sir Chauncel di Renari was a member of a clan of famous Viamontian armorers, who’d stolen much of their design work from some of Kris’s father’s early work, and also as Red as they came.
Both of them were couped without hesitation, and we were off to the last four of them.
The next chamber was large and incongruously white and splendid, although suspiciously bereft of furniture at all. There was a Tribune guarding the forward ways to right and left, and two Lords holding court, such as it were, in an audience chamber in the middle of the room, the entrance to it on the far side from us.
Briggs and Kris knew all of them. All of them were Ruby, too.
There was one final hallway leading north, a rather fierce heated updraft coming from it which was keeping the entire chamber warm, vented out the way we’d come in and sent up that pit to the higher level.
Both of them stopped right at the entry and looked down at the same time. Naturally, so did I.
The whitely tiled and trimmed floor there, a work of art by devoted craftsmen, again so incongruous to the Dungeon itself, looked like any other section of it.
“Three strikes from that four-leaf greatmace of his, the Fist of Bellenesse,” Kris said softly, kneeling down and touching the floor, one place with her finger, the other with Quaver’s point, while Briggs shifted and tapped his armored toe nearby at the third.
“Broke the ley line reinforcement of the stone with that Broken Right Hand technique of his. It didn’t restore perfectly underneath,” Briggs told me softly. “Blood in the cracks there, too,” he added.
They were seeing it in their tremblesense, the scars of one last valiant fight from probably the greatest warrior of the Viamontian people at the time.
“He died right here, and so did they,” Kris stated with grim satisfaction, looking up at the audience chamber with the stairs leading up to it behind and above us. “This is where the System took them all. Those two Corcosi scions up there in their little courtroom probably pronounced sentence down at him with their confident sneers, and all six of their lessers probably fell upon him at the same time to kill him.”
“And the knights failed, and the two had to come down to finish the job. It cost them their lives, too,” Briggs agreed proudly. “By the time Varicci sent people down to check to see that the job was complete, they were probably already in the System, and he and everyone else likely forgot what was supposed to happen and accepted it as the prison-in-exile it seemed to be.”
Their eyes turned to the dark tunnel, flames from the heart of the mountain venting out the floor, impossible for a normal person to endure for too long, it was simply too hot.
But if you were in the System, it obviously did not matter.
“Ready to give some mercy to the old teacher, Fuzzy?” Kris asked softly.
“Darren was a horrible student, but that was on me. Sir Bellas was a great man,” Briggs agreed quietly. “I’d like nothing better, my Hag.”
Kris’ cackle was low and slow, and she started down the tunnel. “Leave the Fiuns and just watch, Ryin. We’ll make this a show for you, see what you can see of it.”
I did just that. Nothing was going to respawn here and threaten them, and hey, knowledge is power.
---
There was a superheated grate in the middle of the flow letting up a furnace of heat, for who knew what reason. The air temperature was near to that of boiling water, which meant Sir Bellas had some definite fire resistance unless he died of heat exhaustion regularly and respawned.
Down the ramp, across the grate, up the ramp… and there was a whole square room with a cross of more furnace grates over a lava pool below. A massive figure in battered but functional steel armor was brooding against the side wall.
“SIR BELLAS OF THE BELLENESSE! The Great Mother of the Bellenesse calls you home!” boomed out Briggs’ Warlord voice, easily surpassing the roar of the flames from below.
The armored figure, easily a full head taller than Kris, shook his head as if waking from a trance. Since he might have been holding that position over fifteen years, that was hardly surprising.
“Another challenger come to kill me in Varicci’s name?!” was the only bellowed reply, as the man snatched up a weighty two-handed mace and raced forward to attack Briggs without delay.
“That’s a Hollow Mace,” I identified it quickly. Such Weapons were common on Dereth, but I’d never heard of one from Ispar before. The Fist of Bellenesse was a famous Weapon in his hands, so there had to be a story there.
Briggs met him right over the flames, completely unworried about it, and they crashed together with all the impact of two very big men in heavy armor, and Mace rang out against Hammer.
I knew the duel was only going to go one way, but I wanted to discern more of the magic around this Artifice-ignoring technique, a limited form of anti-magic focused tightly around Sir Bellas’s Weapon as he and Briggs began to spar.
A duel with massive heavy Weapons by two strong armored men who don’t worry about exhaustion is a wee bit different from all the fancy moves and subtleties of a sword duel. There was a lot of of crashing steel, shoving, very precise angles of attack, pressure and meeting of elbows and fists as the two jockeyed for position, matched strength, and kept at it.
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