PreCursive
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Chapter 262 - Challenge the Mount
🕑 Added 2024-11-27 18:00:12 +0000 UTCIf it was even possible, I think the rain was coming down even harder today than it had been yesterday.
That struck me as a bad sign.
From the moment Tarus had crested the horizon behind nearly black clouds, we’d been marching along the ridgelines once more. Only this time, we could barely see in front of our faces from the curtains of water falling from the sky. The wind screamed and howled all around us as it buffeted our balancing forms, making our footing even more treacherous than it had been yesterday. The elevation was increasing as we navigated the winding ridgelines, moving ever closer to Mt. Goryuen, the shape of it barely visible in the distance.
At the same time, the path changed as well. The ridgelines were getting closer together, to the extent that I think I would have been able to jump from one to the other with a single, wing-assisted jump. The result was that the space between the mountains, and thus the valleys visible below us, were becoming steeper as well. As such, the rivers of rainwater flowing through rushed ever faster, racing towards the central inland sea.
We stopped, briefly, to watch as one particularly fierce example raged below us. In those rushing grey depths, I could see dozens and dozens of boulders being tossed to and fro as if they were nothing more than cotton balls caught in the wind. They dashed against the walls of the valley, sending shockwaves up to meet us and threatening our precarious footing. Some shattered, some didn’t, but I was sure plenty already had. Those waters had to be filled with countless shards of stone rushing at hundreds of thousands of stony daggers, hidden just beneath the surface. These rivers had to be a veritable blender.
I caught Azarus’s eye, standing up there, and wordlessly jerked my head towards the central peak that dominated the skyline, even through the storm.
Just as wordlessly, he decisively shook his head.
I see.
All of this…it made me wonder just how dangerous the inland sea would be.
Would those same rocky knives shred us, if we had to dive for the bunker? We would just have to wait and see, I suppose.
Because of all of this, our progress was slower, far more careful than it had been even yesterday. It had to be. We couldn’t risk anything less, honestly.
We’d already had one close call, about halfway through the day. Renauld’s relatively lower Dexterity than the rest of the party finally caught up with him. The party was navigating one precarious ridgeline when we came upon a break in the path, as if a great blow had reached out to shatter the mountain before us. We couldn’t go back, because this had been the only path forward, and Venix insisted this was the right way. As a result, we had to jump the gap.
Renauld was stubborn. He claimed he could make the jump with no problem, and since he hadn’t slipped so far on our trek, we had no reason to disbelieve him.
That was a mistake.
When he jumped, the Gnoll only barely reached the edge of the gap. But he landed on the very edge of it, and lost his balance. I was watching him at the time, and as our Healer windmilled his arms frantically, eyes widening in panic as he slowly tipped backward, I caught him.
Barely.
And only by the sleeve of his robe. If it hadn’t been for Bella flashing to my side and helping haul Renauld up, I think my friend might have slipped right out of his clothes and tumbled down the mountainside. The rushing waters weren’t even that far below us, now, with as inland as we’d gotten. They’d been rising higher for a while now, and he would have been dead if he’d fallen in. Luckily, the two of us managed to haul him back up onto the ridge everyone else was waiting on. The Healer thanked us profusely, and after a short rest to catch our breath, we got back underway.
But not before I shot Kazuma, Renauld’s nominal protector, a pointed look. He looked away in shame, catching my meaning. The next time we came upon a break in the path, he offered to ferry Renauld across, and after his close call, the Gnoll didn’t protest.
It was about halfway through the day that the situation changed.
The Wyrmkin found us.
The serpentine, white-haired hounds appeared as if out of nowhere, expertly camouflaged by the storm. If was as if the proto-Revenants were embraced by the storm, lovingly hidden in it’s embrace as they stalked us across rain drenched plateaus and ridgelines. I think it was only thanks to the enhanced acuity I’d inherited from my mutated, nearly elven ears, that I heard the crunch of their claws, as they climbed the nearly sheer cliff-face behind us.
They were trying to ambush our back lines, which I was a part of.
I whirled to look behind, just in time to watch as a pack of Wyrmkin slunk over the ridge. Seeing me notice them, they abandoned their attempts at stealth and charged our position. I shouted as loud as I possibly could to be heard over the wind and the rain, and thankfully, my companions heard me.
After how many times we’d encountered the Wyrmkin out in the jungle, we were used to their tricks by now, and they were dispatched, albeit with a bit of trouble. It wasn’t even because of the monsters themselves. It was our footing that was more precarious.
Once the last of the Devout Wyrmkin were defeated, I breathed a sigh of relief and turned back around, only to be surprised once again. I had barely noticed in the midst of battle, but Venix hadn’t been with us. Briefly, I’d thought it odd, but just assumed more of the Wyrmkin were attacking from the other side.
Turns out, I was right. Only it wasn’t a Devout he was fighting.
It was something else.
I only caught a glimpse of the thing before Venix’s blades decapitated its horse-sized head, but what I saw was different. The Wyrmkin that my Antium friend was dueling was almost centipede-like. It was longer, with more legs than the usual four that these creatures had. It wound out nearly ten feet in length, and its jaw was longer if only to hold nearly forearm-length bladed fangs.
Still, its azure scales were no match for Venix’s blade, and he took its head clean off its disgusting shoulders.
Bella was the first to break the silence, as the apparent Wyrmkin puffed into greasy black miasma, nearly immediately washed away by the rain. “The hells was that?”
I didn’t blame the woman for the disgusted note in her voice. I’d felt a shiver run down my own sine from revolting the thing was.
Venix sheathed his four blades and turned to face us with a frown on his chitinous features. “A Profane Wyrmkin. The evolved, Prime version of Tatsugan’s spawn. The lesser Devout’s to the rear were only a distraction for the greater to pounce to the front. Be wary. They stalk these ridges in droves, each of them leading packs of their own.”
Shit. I hadn’t heard that thing approaching us at all. And here I had been all proud of myself for catching the Devouts in their stalking. Turns out, I had been meant to.
Now that we knew what was waiting for us out here, we were all warier in our trek. Good thing, too, because that was far from the last time we encountered groups of Profanes and Devouts on the way to the mountain. On three more separate occasions, the Wyrmkin tried to ambush us in one way or another. Either by repeating the tactic of creeping just under the ridgeline, by outright charging at us across them, or, in one particularly memorable battle, they jumped down at us from a mountaintop that was at a higher elevation than our own.
Still, we dealt with them all the same.
They were fine gristle for the mill that was our advancement, in the end.
Until finally, finally we reached the destination we had been driving towards all this time.
Mt. Gorenzan.
……………………………..
We stood upon the edge of the great bowl and stared out at the sea that churned beneath us.
It was…gigantic. Titanic in scale.
I couldn’t even see the far edge of what could only be the largest caldera I had ever seen, much less been to. It had to be nearly fifty miles in diameter at the very least, with a depth nearly as impressive. Mt. Umetsuji had absolutely nothing on the depression that Mt. Gorenzan rose from.
And rose it did.
Mt. Gorenzan was, I think, the single largest mountain on either Earth or Vereden. It had to be. The largest mountain from my birthhome had nothing on Gorenzan. This was a true gigalith, a remnant from an age where Vereden had been nothing but furious molten rock and toxic gasses. Even with the depth of the caldera that it rose from, maybe only two-thirds of the mount itself was visible before it pierced the cloud cover. There were huge swaths of the upper reaches obscured from view by the angry black clouds of the eternal storm that raged at the direction of Tatsugan, and even then. Even then, the base of the mountain that was visible was titanic in the extreme. Quiet estimations from an awed Azarus were that the base of the mountain, obscured by the floodwaters as they were, had to be fifty miles wide at the least.
That was a scale I don’t think a human mind was truly capable of comprehending.
I sure couldn’t.
Stretching out in a nearly unbroken line for miles around us was the rim of an absolutely massive caldera, filled with the floodwaters we’d seen raging in countless valleys for days now. Maybe some twenty miles away from us, just barely visible, we could see where the rim of the ridgeline had broken.
A great, jagged slash in the caldera wall was letting in countless tons of grey water that fell into the sea hundreds of feet below us. It looked almost as if an unbelievably massive sword had carved down into the face of it to scar the surface, and the blood that rushed forth was the storm. If I looked around the caldera walls, I believe I could see that this was the normal life cycle for the inland sea. There were similar-looking gashes in the walls that looked to have been completely closed off by the detritus of the range.
Countless ones, in fact. Honestly, the ridges were more dam than they were wall, after I don’t know how many centuries of fracture, then cementation, then fracture again.
There was at least one bit of good news.
The gash was, in a way, healing. All of the silt and stone and boulders I had observed in those rushing mountain valleys were good for something, at the very least. It was gradually clogging up the break in the wall that water flowed in through, slowing the rise of the sea. Currently, the sea had yet to reach the halfway point of the mountain, far below us in the yawning chasm of the caldera.
Of the Immortal Returning Wyrm, I saw nothing. No roosts, no scales, no strands of hair of the beast that had slain Venix’s master were visible on the mount. It might just be that it didn’t live this far down on Gorenzan, that we could see it. Its lair might be above the roiling black clouds of the storm it had conjured.
Maybe.
I couldn’t help an ominous feeling all the same
For all of Azarus’s doomsaying, we might just have beaten the storm to the bunker door in truth.
I felt a smile cross my lips as I exchanged happy glances with the rest of my companions. We’d done it.
At least…
I thought so.
Our smiles didn’t last long.
Maybe fifteen or so miles away from us on a distant plateau that overlooked the caldera, I saw it.
A bright, red glare that pierced through the gloom of the storm. Its malevolent glow was cast by what looked to be a mystical flare of some kind, illuminating a full half of the caldera in crimson light.
Visible on that plateau was the Order of Solstice’s Flame. The entirety of their forces were gathered in neat lines and rows, almost military-like in their discipline. Across the gap I could see their armor gleam in the light of the flare they had lit, and at the front of their ranks, I could see a single, solitary figure. Because of the distance, I couldn’t make out any features on them, but I didn’t need to, to know who they were.
The gigantic slab of metal he called a sword, thrust into the stone, told me the identity.
“The challenge…” I heard Venix breathe, standing not far from me. I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, but I didn’t get a chance.
A roar answered me instead.
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