Chapter 83: Chapter 83: The First Level of the Mine
"And then what happened?" Aive, completely enthralled, eagerly pressed Sera for the rest of the story.
"Then? Then I chopped them all into frozen mincemeat, of course! Girlie!" Sera roared with laughter. "I’m still standing here, and I’ve made it all the way to the south!"
"But I didn’t win the bet. When dawn broke, I took them to see the mammoth’s carcass, but that bunch of bastards insisted I’d just found a dead mammoth and killed the Ghouls around it to pass off the feat as my own. Ptuh!"
Frustrated, Sera snatched the waterskin from her hip, took a long swig of ale, then lifted her hide jacket to show her companions a large, old scar on her waist.
"See? This is where a Ghoul got me. Their claws are laced with a paralyzing venom. If we really do run into them, you have to be extra careful!"
"Aive shouldn’t be affected, right?" Victoria asked, looking at the Half-Elf. "I’ve heard that the very first Ghoul was once an Elf. After his fall, his vile master abandoned him during a war with a Gnoll Lord. With nowhere else to turn, he prayed to the Elf Gods for help and was mercifully saved. Ever since then, the venom on a Ghoul’s claws has had no effect on Elves."
"Then I’ll probably only be paralyzed half the time," Aive said with a self-deprecating laugh. "After all, I’m not a ’whole’ Elf!"
An Elf was an Elf, and a Half-Elf was a Half-Elf. Even many of the common races couldn’t tell the difference between the two, let alone a Ghoul.
"Are we going in now?" Silvia glanced worriedly at the darkening sky. "Will they get stronger at night?"
"Don’t you get stronger at night, too?" You floated beside Silvia. ’Though she thought Ron was the kindest in the group, and Aive was the easiest to talk to, she still preferred to be with Silvia—her body temperature was lower.’
"But I’m a Caster..." Silvia sighed and drew a pair of daggers from her belt. "Fine, fine. This is my first ’adventure.’ I don’t want to look like a coward."
"Don’t worry. If you can’t handle the fight, just get behind me and Victoria." Aive smiled, hoisting her tower shield and leading the way toward the mine entrance on the hillside.
"The boards sealing this place have been torn off. It was probably the Ghouls," Aive said, using her scabbard as a crowbar to widen the entrance enough for her heavy tower shield to pass through. "Come on in, there are no Ghouls nearby!"
Ron cast Light Magic, illuminating a dim mine shaft that was, just as Aive had said, completely empty. The tracks on the ground were long since abandoned and decayed—the railroad ties were rotten and fragmented, the iron rails rusted and warped. A minecart lay overturned to one side, covered in the marks of teeth and claws.
You’s form became ethereal as she floated ahead into the mine’s depths. She returned a moment later. "There are no Ghouls in the nearby offshoots. The creatures must be hiding deeper inside."
"However, it looks like spiders and centipedes have made this upper level their nest. There are a lot of them, so we’d better be careful."
The spiders and centipedes You mentioned weren’t your average small critters. They were giant spiders and giant centipedes—massive, venomous beasts several times larger than a man. The giant spiders were particularly insidious, skilled at using webs to hunt their prey.
Not wanting to alert any other potential monsters, Ron and his group could only advance cautiously, dispatching any beasts they encountered as quickly and quietly as possible. Even so, the scent of the living seemed to have alerted the local predators, and a steady stream of various beasts and monsters began to converge on their position.
"I feel like we’re tomb raiders..." Ron said as he loosed a Flaming Arrow, igniting the hairs on a giant spider’s body. "And these things are the Guardian Beasts protecting the master of the tomb."
"An interesting comparison," Silvia replied in a low voice. "If I ever have a castle worthy of a Vampire, I’ll raise a batch of these little darlings myself."
She leaned close to the head of a giant centipede at her feet, as if intending to taste the insect’s blood, but for whatever reason, the Vampire Descendant ultimately couldn’t bring herself to take a bite.
"Then Delaford and I would come hunt in your castle every day!" Sera laughed. "It’d be great if we had these things back home in the snowfields! We wouldn’t have to risk our lives hunting ferocious beasts anymore!"
In truth, for any ordinary person, creatures like giant spiders and giant centipedes were still dangerous and deadly. It was just that compared to what Sera used to hunt, they paled in comparison.
"You’d get sick of them if that were the case," Ron muttered. ’He was reminded of the huge cockroaches he’d seen in the south during his past life. Their northern relatives never got that big!’
"Whoa! Look what I found?" Delaford’s head popped out from around a corner up ahead, followed by You. "A guardroom!"
When Ron and the others went over, they saw it was just as Delaford had described: a guardroom built at an intersection of the mine shafts. However, there were no living people or Undead Creatures inside. Only shattered bone fragments were scattered across the rotted chairs, beds, and floor.
"There were at least three people here," Ron said, gathering the bones on the floor. "Looks like the Ghouls got them..."
"How do you know that?" Aive asked, pointing to the fragments Ron had swept together. "I don’t even see a skull."
"Here, look at these," Ron said, picking up a few bone fragments. "Don’t they look a little similar?"
"They’re neck bones. Of course they look the same," Aive said after a quick glance.
"Then what about this one?" Ron picked up another. "Is it the same shape as the others?"
"No," Aive said, shaking her head. "But it’s probably still from the neck or spine, right?"
Aive may not have studied systematic anatomy, but as a veteran Adventurer, she could still answer a simple question like that.
"This is the first cervical vertebra, also known as the atlas. It sits at the top of the spinal column and connects to the skull. It’s shaped like a ring and has no vertebral body," Ron said, picking up two more. "A person has seven cervical vertebrae, but only one of them is the atlas."
"And we’ve found three atlases here. Doesn’t that mean there were three people?"
"Then why did they die in here? Didn’t they say some ancient empress sealed this mine?"
"Don’t put so much faith in so-called ’orders’ and ’empresses’," Silvia said with a contemptuous smile. "Most likely, the people outside received the order but never bothered to inform anyone inside."
"Trapped in the darkness as monsters bred and beasts roamed free, with no way to the heavens and no path out of the earth, they could only wait here until the very end."
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