PreCursive

  By the time Venix, Kazuma, and I reached where Azarus had been shouting from, he had ducked into a nearby doorway. As the two samurai raced ahead of me, I skidded to a halt just before I followed after them. Something on the side of the door had caught my eye. Something that gave me a moments pause, and caused my heart to leap in my chest.

  There were words written on a pque to the right of it, clearly visible and legible after all these years.

  In English.

  ‘Cpt. Jensen Harlow, Sec.’

  Harlow.

  The name of the man who had sold out his fellow Netherim to Lucretia and all her conspirators.

  The man who had become the creature known now as Akhoroth.

  The portal before me yawned open wide, a deep darkness obscuring all within. It felt like I stood on the precipice of some gigantic, monstrous mouth, complete with jagged metal teeth from the destroyed sliding door halfway hanging out of its recess. I swear I felt a breath of hot, muggy air escape the confines of the room ahead, like the breath of some hungry arcane beast.

  This had to be Akhoroth’s ir. It was too te to call out to Venix and Kazuma, much less Azarus. The three of them had been swallowed by the abyss before me and were beyond my sight. Though, I could still hear them on the other side, if only faintly.

  “Nate!” I heard Azarus shout, his voice muffled and warbling as if it were coming from the other side of some deep, dark pool of water. “In here!”

  I cursed myself as a fool for not telling my companions about Akhoroth’s once Human name, and plunged into the darkness. I shivered at the feeling as I did. It felt like I was passing through some kind of thin mucosal membrane, as if I were the veritable tadpole emerging from its egg.

  Oddly, though, the room on the other side almost seemed…normal.

  Well, normal for the living quarters, at least. It was still a wrecked, crumbling ruin of a small bedroom, complete with shattered instruments and exposed wiring. Perhaps it was a little bit rger than the others we had found down here, owing to Harlow’s once high position in the Netherim hierarchy. But it was hard to tell. However, it did have one major difference from all the other rooms down here.

  On the far wall of the room was a rge, jagged rent into the corroded steel, something beyond the norm for the curse-ravaged bunker. It looked to me like two enormous cwed hands had pierced into the shell of the room and tore it open, to expose the air of the hollow mountain on the other side. The gash covered the entirety of the far wall, and my three companions stood on the edge of the gash, staring out beyond the edge of it.

  Because there was something on the other side.

  This room must have been sitting snug on the wall of the mountain. If I understood this complex right, it hung in the middle of Gorenzan, suspended by thick steel girders driven into the rocky walls, with further support from immensely long cables that snaked miles into the air. I’d caught glimpses of both of them, during my brief flight outside of the bunker after escaping my trial.

  However, the four of us weren’t seeing a solid stone wall on the other side of the gash.

  Instead, there was a hole.

  It was just as rge as the rent in the steel, and strangely, looked to have been carefully carved by the same cws. The hole in the mountain wall extended beyond sight, with only yawning darkness on the other side. Strangely, though, this wasn’t the same supernatural darkness I had seen from the other side of the door. It just looked like the absence of light.

  Azarus was the first to break the silence the four of us had fallen into. “That’s damned odd,” He muttered, drawing our attention. To my surprise, I noticed that my Dwarven friend wasn’t actually looking at the hole.

  Instead, he seemed to be inspecting the edges of it.

  “What is it?” Venix asked quietly, voicing what the rest of us were thinking.

  The smith looked up briefly with a furrowed brow. “This,” He said, gesturing towards the edges of the opening. “I’ve never seen anythin’ like it. It’s like…it’s like someone welded the stone and steel together, to create some kinda seal. I…didn’t even know somethin’ like that was possible.”

  My eyebrows shot up, and I joined him closer to the edge to see. Sure enough, Azarus was right. The rock of the mountain looked to have been welded or fused together somehow, all up and around the point where the two of them met.

  How had this been done? And more importantly…

  Why?

  It had to have been Akhoroth, but that made no sense. Wasn’t the former security Chief of the Netherim a sve to the will of the Wyrm in the core?

  “What’s this?” I suddenly heard Kazuma ask behind me. For a moment, I thought the samurai was just talking about the odd hole the same as we were before I heard a cttering sound.

  I turned around just in time to watch as the Kawamaran man picked something up off of the ground. Something with a shape that was familiar to me. Something that caused my entire body to tense, and my eyes to shoot open wide in sudden panic.

  The device in Kazuma’s hands almost looked like a gun.

  And he was holding it by the trigger.

  “DON’T-” I tried to shout.

  Too te.

  The trigger depressed with a faint click I heard even from where I was, and from the barrel of the odd device, a fiery beam of red light no thicker than a pencil nced outward in a continuous stream aimed right at my head.

  Luckily, I was expecting something to happen, even if it hadn’t involved a fucking ser.

  I ducked, and heard Kazuma yelp at the same time I did so. From below I watched with fear widened eyes and a pounding heart as the beam struck the steel of the wall I’d been standing by and melted it. The stream cut out only seconds ter as I heard Kazuma drop the apparent ser gun. In the sudden silence of the room, the apparent weapon cttered onto the floor of the bunker with the sound of pstic on steel.

  “Ah…” I heard Azarus say, though I didn’t look at him. Instead, my eyes were still trained on the melted section of steel above my head, no rger than a quarter. It hadn’t penetrated all the way through the wall, but I don’t doubt it could have. “Yeah, that could have done it.”

  That broke me out of my trance, and I shot my Dwarven friend a foul look in response. He wasn’t paying any attention to me, though. Instead, he had wandered over to gaze at the melted steel with fascination in his molten gold eyes.

  It was Kazuma who helped me to my feet. “Hart, are you okay?!”

  I took a deep breath, and nodded at him. “Yeah, I’m…fine. But more importantly…”

  The realization of what Kazuma had stumbled on rolled over me in an instant, causing adrenaline to course through my veins once more. This time, it wasn’t fear that crept over me.

  It was greed.

  Ignoring the low whispers of Azarus and Venix behind me as they examined the melt, I approached the dropped weapon. Now that I had a better look at the thing, it…didn’t really look like a gun at all, honestly. To me, it almost resembled the shape of a cordless electric drill. It was bulky, ste grey, and instead of a drill bit attached to the ‘barrel’ of the thing, there was a clear lens embedded in it.

  I stared down at the extraordinary find in my hands and felt my lips stretch apart in glee. I couldn’t help but raise the weapon and point it at a nearby wall and pull the trigger, this time away from anyone in the path of the barrel.

  Unfortunately, no bzing beam of red death escaped the ancient firearm this time. Only the same click of the trigger. I copied the sound, clucking my own tongue in disappointment.

  Damn. Kazuma must have used up the st of the charge this thing had, with that careless shot.

  Still…

  Now this was what I was talking about. This might just help my own stalled research project immensely.

  But not now. For now, this was just a paperweight.

  Later, though…

  I was knocked out of my daydreams by the sound of Azarus clearing his throat. I looked up to see my three companions staring at me curiously. “Ya done starin’ at that thing like ya want ta kiss it?” He asked, a tad sarcastically. “What even is it, anyway?”

  I cleared my throat embarrassedly, and tucked the find of the century into the pack at the small of my back. I think I was only able to fit it in there with how depleted my stocks of potions and supplies were.

  Silver linings, I guess.

  “An old weapon with no power left,” I said smoothly. “Forget it. More importantly, I thought you said you found Renauld? I sure as Hell don’t see him in here.”

  Azarus eyed me with suspicion for a moment, but dropped it. Instead, he raised his right hand and showed me what was clutched between two fingers.

  A small tuft of bck fur.

  “Found this on the edge of the door out there,” He said. “He’s gotta be this way.”

  “And if he’s not in here,” Venix continued slowly.

  “Then he must be down there,” Kazuma finished pointedly, staring down the tunnel in front of us. We all followed his gaze.

  The tunnel that Akhoroth must have dug himself, for some odd reason, stretched out before us.

  Venix broke the silence and seemed to flex his still-lit antennae. The lights at the ends of them bobbed in the air. “Well. Come, then. We must traverse the depths for the Healer.”

  We exchanged nods, and as a group, stepped into the mysterious tunnel, lights guiding the way and weapons drawn.

  ………………………………

  Akhoroth must have carved the tunnel rge enough for his entire bulk to fit down it, because it was pretty spacious in here. And I have to say, as far as mysterious old tunnels beneath the earth go…

  This was one of the least ominous I’d ever been in.

  What a thought that was.

  But it was true. Despite the source of it and what and who it must lead to, this wasn’t a terribly intimidating tunnel. The hike through it’s entirely straight length was downright rexing in comparison to the tense environs of the bunker. The almost malicious presence that filled those halls was strangely…absent in here. Even in Traver’s clinic, there was the sense of being watched by something.

  Actually, not altogether all that different from the feeling I’d gotten back out in Goryuen proper now that I thought about it. But at a certain point, we must have gotten close enough to the Maw’s actual ir.

  Because we started to hear voices.

  Two of them, to be precise.

  In the stony acoustics of the tunnel, they carried quite far. Not enough to discern the words, but enough that I could make out each speaker.

  One was quite clearly Renauld. After spending so much time with the Gnoll, I was very familiar with his half-upbeat, half-sarcastic way of speaking.

  The other, though…

  That was the sibint, tortured hissing of the Maw that I’d heard all the way back in the hall of the dead.

  The first time we all heard it, we stopped in our tracks and gnced at each other. Partly to make sure that we were all hearing the same thing. The words weren’t discernable, but the fact they existed was.

  Renauld…he didn’t sound like was in distress, to me. Hard to tell, though.

  We picked up the pace, and that seemed to signal the both of them on the far end of the tunnel. It was coming up soon, I could see.

  Ready for anything, the four of us burst through the opening into a rge cavern that looked to have been carved from the rock my immense cws. On the far wall, I could see a pile of long-decayed instruments and objects like those we’d seen in the halls of the living quarters. They were all lying in a near bed of half-decayed cloth. Clothes and bnkets and curtains, I couldn’t tell what each scrap was. Only that they were woven together into what looked like a nest.

  However, that wasn’t the most important thing in the room.

  In the center of the cavern was a small, circur steel table, with what seemed to be an equally small LED mp of some kind sitting upon the surface. Its cool, flickering light seemed to indicate it was old and barely functioning as it cast odd shadows in the cavern, but yet it still worked after who knows how many years. And sitting at it were Renauld in a corroded steel folding chair…

  And the Maw, the immensity of the monster coiled beneath it akin to the winding of a snake.

  The two of them…I…

  I think they’d been having a fairly serious talk, from the frown on Renauld’s face. However, the Gnoll man perked up from his almost dour state as we burst into the cavern, which drew the attention of Akhoroth. I almost shivered at the tortured squeals of his steel ptes grinding against each other as he turned to face us.

  What the Hell was going on here?