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The bugs just wouldn’t stop coming. There shouldn’t even have been that many in this chamber. Something was wrong.
Adso spun away from one Olthoi’s stabbing, spearlike claw and ducked under a stream of sizzling acid from another. Patches of burned and slashed leather dotted his entire body, marking near-misses and narrow hits. Ignoring the acid that splashed onto his already wounded shoulder, he brought the full strength of his body to bear as he stepped into a lunging attack against the nearest Olthoi, the one that had just spit acid at him. He found the weak point where two plates of chitinous armor met just under the creature’s head. He drove the point of his dirk into the gap and punched the thick blade in all the way to the hilt, then twisted his wrist and slammed his free hand against the pommel of his dirk like a hammer hitting a chisel.
With a shriek and a reverberating crack, the Olthoi’s head split open from the bottom. Viscera and gore spilled onto Adso’s outstretched forearm, and he pulled himself back into a defensive pose as the Olthoi fell heavily to the stone floor. He narrowly escaped another stabbing attack from the other Olthoi as he rolled back. He drew a throwing knife with his left hand while he brandished the gore-encrusted dirk with his right. Breathing hard and beginning to tire, Adso watched the Olthoi’s attack patterns as he came into melee range with the beast. He hunched down in a defensive squat and parried the Olthoi’s attacks low and away, forcing the creature to stoop over him, waiting for the telltale mandible movements that would alert him to an impending acid attack.
When the moment came, he reacted instantly and decisively. As the Olthoi drew its head back to spew acid at him, Adso’s left hand shot out and jabbed the throwing knife right into the spot between the Olthoi’s mandibles. The Olthoi reared up in agony, giving Adso just enough time and space to roll mostly out of the way before acid started pouring messily from the ruin of the Olthoi’s maw. Adso stood back, watching in disgusted fascination as the Olthoi staggered back and forth, literally choking to death on its own acid. A few splashes had gotten onto his armor, again, as acid sprayed uncontrollably from the creature’s suddenly ruptured mandibles.
So intent was Adso on the spectacle that he was almost surprised by the next wave of Olthoi charging up the tunnel. They came surging towards him out of the darkness, but stopped short of coming into melee range with him. He could see others fanning out into the corridors beyond, probably to surround him in the tunnels and cut off any chance of escape. He could feel the ground shaking, felt dust and rock shaking loose from the tunnel’s ceiling and walls as something truly huge emerged from the shadowed chamber at the far end of this tunnel.
“This can’t be right,” Adso thought as the Olthoi Queen shuffled forward with all her soldier-children gathered around her. “There hasn’t been a Queen in these tunnels since…” His thought went unfinished as he caught a glimpse of a grisly trophy impaled on one of the Queen’s claws: a human head, with long blonde hair hanging from it, now caked with blood and dirt.
“It’s not possible,” Adso muttered to the Olthoi Queen and her assembled host. “You died years ago, before I even came here…” The Queen hissed, as if in response, and Adso began to back up the tunnel, retracing his steps to the surface. The Olthoi horde followed him, step for step, accompanied by triumphant-sounding hisses and screeches from their Queen. Finally, Adso turned and ran as fast as he could, and the horde took off after him in shrieking, chittering pursuit.
Adso found his exit tunnel blocked by rapidly advancing bugs, too many to avoid or quickly kill. He fled down another tunnel, in search of an alternate route, only to find it similarly blocked with a mass of charging insects, and so he ran again. At some point he gave up on trying to keep a sense of direction in the maze-like warren of tunnels and ran down whichever path seemed least dangerous or most likely to lead upward, towards fresh air and freedom. He was caught several times by Olthoi ambushes. Though he managed to narrowly escape a fatal strike each time and killed several more Olthoi, he was stabbed and burned repeatedly, and the ordeal was taking its toll on his health and his equipment. He gulped potions when he could and just tried to keep one step ahead of the ravening bugs.
Finally, after an eternity of running and fighting, with the breath wheezing out of him, his muscles burning with fatigue and his potions all gone, he saw a patch of light at the end of a long, upward-leading tunnel. Ignoring the pain that wracked his body, Adso ran. He was almost to the edge of the tunnel when a black spike lanced out of the darkness and impaled his calf. He stumbled and rolled to the ground, muscles torn. Behind him he could see three Olthoi and the darkened side in which they’d been hiding. He’d failed to notice that deeper patch of blackness on his way to the exit, blinded by fatigue and desperate hope of an escape. He’d fallen right into their trap.
“How’d you outsmart me anyway?” he asked softly, as the Olthoi crept slowly up on him. As if in answer to his question, there was a glow of purple light from behind. Adso turned his head to look, and he saw that a Virindi had appeared in the tunnel up ahead, in the exit to the surface world that had attracted his attention. He tried to crawl that way with just his arms and one good leg, determined at least to die in the fresh air, and not in these dank tunnels.
It wasn’t just any Virindi, though… As Adso crawled closer, he could make out its masked face. Not the kind of mask that he was used to seeing on Virindi, and something in its posture indicated curiosity or interest, more than was usual from these aloof beings. The Virindi floated closer, and he could hear a voice, impatient and eager, echoing in his mind. “Tell me, human… How true does this realm feel to you? Did we correctly map the details? Master will be displeased if our work is imperfect…”
Before Adso could shake off his confusion and try to respond, there was an explosion of pain from his midsection. He looked behind him and saw that he’d been impaled to the ground by an Olthoi claw through his abdomen. He could feel the blood pooling hot beneath him, felt the agony from his stomach… Above him loomed an Olthoi, its other claw already slick with blood from Adso’s leg. The bloody claw reared up in the air, ready to end his life… then lanced downward, right at his head…
* * * * * * * *
Adso woke up with a shout. It took him a moment to realize that he was lying in a bedroll by a campfire, not on a blood-slicked patch of tunnel with Olthoi and a strangely curious Virindi around him. He looked around, scared and confused, and saw Master and Sabithra also sitting up in their bedrolls, both of them wide-eyed and disoriented.
“I dreamed that the Olthoi Queen was not dead,” Adso gasped.
“I dreamed that the Hopeslayer ruled Dereth! The seas and rivers were red with blood…” Sabithra whispered.
The two of them looked at each other, then looked at their Master, who was still silent, staring into the distance.
“Master?” Adso whispered. “Master, did you dream of something?”
“I dreamed I was still on Ispar,” their Master muttered, his voice hollow with terror.