Underkeeper

The kobolds’ breach wasn’t hard to find once they went looking for it. Barely fifty yards away, around another bend, they found it—a messy hole where the masonry had collapsed, leading into a low tunnel.

Fiora raised a force barrier over it immediately to forestall any potential surprises. Then she called back to Ed, who arrived a moment later followed by the other four Underkeepers. Jori was now hiding just out of sight around a corner, which suited Bernt just fine.

“Alright, listen up. Fiora and myself in the front. We’ll be maintaining a one-way force barrier. Kustov and Bernt on offense in the middle, and Sen watching the rear with Uriah. Go!”

Without further preamble, Ed moved, nudging Fiora into the tunnel. It was a simple arrangement, and good tactics. Kustov was a geomancer, and between the two of them, they could crush or burn just about any threat so long as the others ensured that they couldn’t be interrupted. As long as they did their jobs, anyway.

Bernt hadn’t actually killed people with a spell before, but this seemed like a bad time to bring it up. He’d burnt out nests of rat men, and this was the same sort of thing, right? This was what pyromancers were for, and he needed to get used to it sooner or later.

Thankfully, they emerged into a larger, more permanent tunnel after just a minute of scrambling through the low and narrow hole. As they looked around, finding their bearings, angry chittering echoed from the left. Without interrupting the shield spell he was channeling, Ed flung a sphere of conjured light in that direction, revealing an amethyst flash of scales. The source of the noise scrambled away, yipping in a strange language.

“That’s contact!” called Ed as he advanced toward the sound, picking up the pace. “Let’s go, we don’t want to get mobbed too badly.”

The others followed, rushing down the tunnel. Fiora’s force shield scraped the ground and the walls, triggering two traps in quick succession. Steel bolts shot across empty space, sinking into the walls ahead of them, before a spray of liquid fire erupted toward their faces. The liquid struck the shield and slid down to the ground, but its searing heat still radiated, forcing them to stop.

“Bernt!” Fiora’s shouted.

Right, this was his problem. He fumbled for his wand, pulled it out, and raised a hasty heat barrier in front of them before extending his will out through the focus. Controlling fire was simple. Easy, even. It was literally the first thing a pyromancer had to learn. It just felt hard, because everyone was counting on him to get it right now.

Getting ahold of himself, he gathered the flames up, contained the heat, whirled it all into a cyclone, and blasted the whole mess out toward the enemy. Even if the kobolds were taking cover, the burning air would sear their lungs for a moment and buy them some time. It wasn’t his finest work, but it would get the job done.

***

Lilya had known for days now that they were going to die. When the kobolds dragged her family down into their cave, she had seen the bones piled haphazardly in one corner. They were too big for chickens or goats, and too small for beef.

They’d crammed her into a tiny cage with her husband and daughter, and just left them there. The first day she simply stared at the bones, thinking about how their own bones would be lying there soon, for someone else to stare at. Her daughter’s bones.

She wanted to scream, to cry—anything. But she couldn’t. She just felt numb. When she looked over at her husband, she saw a mirror of her own shocked, somehow dead expression staring back at her. Ria, their daughter, huddled behind the two of them, and sat staring at nothing. Still, they both did their best to block her view of what was happening.

Now she stared in horror at the new sight before them. The kobold leader, some kind of sorcerer who dressed himself in lots of golden jewelry and gems, was running his claws through the long, fluffy beard of the robed gnome dangling upside down from the ceiling. They’d driven a metal hook through his heel, hanging him by it like a slaughtered pig for butchering.

They cackled as their victim hyperventilated.

“Oh. Oh my heavens. This… this is unbecoming indeed,” he wheezed. “Even for such low-minded creatures as yourselves… to let your jealousy… drive you to such… barbarism.”

The kobold sorcerer hissed menacingly, and where his claws touched, the gnome’s beard caught fire, the flames licking along his face and up his robes. The little man screamed in pain and terror while another prisoner, a human who’d been chained to the wall, yanked against his restraints, screaming at them.

“You cloaca-licking, dickless little lizard fucks! You better start prayin’ to whatever big-daddy lizard you follow around. Do you have any idea how badly you done fucked up?”

Lilya would have considered that kind of language unsettling in other circumstances. Ria tugged at her skirt and looked at her fearfully.

“Will the adventurers come soon?”

She looked around the room as despair welled up inside her once again. The Adventurers’ Guild rescued people sometimes, but they didn’t just go looking for trouble willy-nilly. There had been no rumors of any kobolds in the area before they were caught. Worse, she hadn’t seen anything worth looting, except maybe what that sorcerer was wearing.

The Adventurers’ Guild didn’t pay wages and adventurers only received payment if whoever issued a quest decided to offer a reward. In practice, that meant adventurers tended to go where there was something to loot. Lilya couldn’t share the angry man’s apparent confidence that anyone would be coming.

A few of the kobolds broke off from torturing the gnome to beat the man into silence. It took a solid minute, but eventually he slumped back against the wall and they turned back to the gnome. Lilya steeled herself as one drew a knife, as if to begin taking pieces off.

Just then, the side door burst open, followed by a thundering boom and a searing wind that heated the whole room in seconds.

The kobold sorcerer yipped at the others, and two drew their weapons and ran into the tunnel. Less than ten seconds later, they came hurtling back as if thrown. One tumbled to the ground, but the other smacked into the far wall with a sickening crunch.

Gray-robed figures poured into the room, the first one a wiry gray-haired woman who pounded the end of a short staff on the ground. A shockwave blasted from her, knocking over kobolds in a cone that spread out with a loud clap. Almost at the same time, a dwarf bent down right behind her and slammed his bare fist into the stone floor. Spikes of black obsidian erupted out of the ground in a line, impaling two of the falling kobolds and injuring the feet of a few others as they stumbled.

The kobolds that hadn’t been hit threw their spears and charged at the group, only for the projectiles to bounce off an invisible wall a moment before the kobolds themselves did. Yelps of surprise and hisses of pain filled the room as several of them fell, injuring themselves further on the glass jutting from the floor.

The kobold sorcerer raised both hands and glared at the invaders as an otherworldly light began to glow around them. He bared his teeth in a snarl.

Then, suddenly, he was gone. Lilya blinked, staring at the mid sized boulder that suddenly lay where the kobold sorcerer had just stood. Red blood trickled out from underneath.

It was only when she felt little arms clutching her leg that Lilya realized Ria had moved and was watching. She jerked her hand down to cover the girl’s eyes, but she wasn’t looking at the crushed kobold—she was gazing at the newcomers with wide eyes.

The gray-haired woman moved aside as a young man cloaked in a whirling cylinder of blinding light stepped to the front. A split second later, that light blasted out in a nova of incandescent flame that bathed the entire room in fire.

For a moment, Lilya was sure they would all burn as the searing heat stung her face. But the flames didn’t reach them. They billowed into another invisible wall, part of a dome that covered the entire corner containing the prisoners.

As the fire dissipated, she watched as even more spells ripped through the remaining, now on fire, kobolds.

They were mages. All of them.

Only as silence claimed the room did she hear the low, wheezing chuckle coming from the chained man.

“I told you scaly shits.” He whisper-laughed. “I warned you true. You… you’re gonna get it now.”

Finally, the meaning of the mages’ gray robes sank in. This wasn’t the Adventurers’ Guild.

Didn’t they usually do city maintenance?

***

Bernt didn’t know what Kustov used as a focus, but there was absolutely no way punching the ground was a necessary part of that fancy earth-spike spell. He was just being theatrical. It was also a vivid reminder of just what his colleagues were capable of.

The fight had now moved on to the mop-up phase. Ed, Sen and Uriah picked off any survivors who wanted to keep fighting. As they did, perhaps five or six others picked themselves up and escaped out the far door into another tunnel, hissing and whimpering to each other. Bernt was still too frazzled from the strain of his fire nova spell to do anything about that, and the others weren’t paying attention.

When Bernt saw the prisoners in the corner, the gorge rose in his throat. While Yarrod couldn’t have been in their custody for more than fifteen minutes, he looked much worse. The tiny man was stripped naked, had been suspended upside down from a hook, and looked horribly burned. Three other people were crammed into a single cage, and Dayle was chained to the wall with his fingers tied together awkwardly.

Spellcasting didn’t necessarily require incantations, rituals, specific motions, or the use of a focus, but all of those things helped. Casting spells without any kind of support for guiding mana was horrendously difficult and usually had unpredictable results. It looked like the kobolds had wanted to be double sure, though, judging by the lumps on Dayle’s head.

Ed and Fiora were already moving across the room, one lifting Yarrod with a levitation cantrip as the other pulled the hook out his leg. Once he was lying down, Ed pulled a standard-issue minor healing potion—far less potent than the one that Fiora had used on him—from his belt and poured it down gnome’s throat.

Bernt doubted he would be back to normal anytime soon.

While Fiora broke open the cage, Bernt tried to get the chains off of Dayle. He was terrible at force spells in general, but he could do a basic unlocking charm that most self-respecting locks in civilized places were enchanted against. Fortunately, that didn’t include kobolds.

“Well, look at you, all pyromancing and shit,” Dayle rasped good-naturedly as Bernt unwound the ropes that trapped the man’s fingers. Dayle’s eyes wandered to Yarrod, his expression turning hollow. “It was about time. I thought they were going to rip old Yarrod to shreds right in front of me. Poor little guy. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, either. Didn’t deserve that.”

Handing Dayle another minor healing potion, Ed hunkered down in front of him, trying to get a look at his eyes.

“You alright? Everything still on?” he asked.

Dayle downed the potion and handed back the empty vial. “I didn’t tell ‘em anything, chief. Not that they asked, or that I’d know anything some damn lizard would want to know anyhow. They were just keeping us out of the way here. Maybe they were saving us for a snack or something. I don’t know, but I don’t want to be here anymore. If they’re feeling brave enough to wander around inside the walls, then there’s at least a thousand more of them in the immediate area, and I don’t really feel in shape to fight.”

Ed nodded and helped him up. “I reckon you’re right. Let’s go.” He looked up at Bernt. “Bernt, you mind getting those people out of the cage?”

After that, things happened fast. He got the others—apparently a mother, father, and their daughter, maybe ten years old—up and moving. They’d been heading to market from their farm when the kobolds ambushed them on the road, probably to steal their supplies. As the father picked the girl up and carried her out of the room, doing his best to block her view of the bodies, the mother quickly stripped the valuables off the sorcerer’s corpse. Bernt considered stopping her—that jewelry had to be worth quite a bit—but Ed gave him a little shake of his head and he left her alone.

This place felt like it should be miles and miles away from civilization, but less than five minutes later they were ducking back into the rough tunnel that led underneath the city wall. When they moved to get everyone up and out of the sewer, Kustov stayed behind to seal the tunnel.

It was just a delaying tactic, Kustov had explained, but the kobolds wouldn’t be reopening that particular tunnel any time soon. If they were here for a reason, they’d be tunneling in at a hundred other points, and if they weren’t, then maybe they’d just move on to avoid a war.

Even Bernt, who didn’t know much of anything about kobolds, found that unlikely. The Underkeepers just weren’t that lucky. Besides, who would go around abducting and torturing people if they were hoping to never be discovered?

Bernt didn’t really know what they were supposed to do next, but apparently Ed did. He marched the entire group through the streets and past the headquarters of the City Guard, straight up toward the castle.