Return of the Runebound Professor

There were a few ways Noah could see things playing out in the pitch black, his sword struggling desperately to keep itself in flight. Not a single one of them was going to turn out well. If they couldn’t see what they were fighting, then they couldn’t defend against it.

And, even if Moxie hadn’t been together with him, Noah’s gourd was at his hip. If he died here, it wasn’t going to be any different from anyone else dying. He’d just come back right next to the monster and get killed once again.

Looks like I’ll just have to change the circumstances.

Noah called on Combustion. He couldn’t see anything, but he didn’t need to. He extended his will, trying to alight literally anything within the area around them.

“Hold your breath!” Noah hissed to Moxie. If she heard, she didn’t waste any extra air answering him. There was no time to confirm – even if Noah’s eyes couldn’t pick anything out, his Master Rune could.

There was a loud woosh as a spark ignited on some of the residual smoke from his pipe that was still touching his skin. The flame raced down the trail, illuminating the smoke like an outline for an instant as it went in every direction it could.

One of those directions happened to connect with a rotted vine hanging from one of the walls. It caught. There was a loud whomp as the fire roared like a starving beast. If Noah hadn’t known better, he would have thought he’d just set a field of dry grass aflame.

Within instants, half of the room was aflame. Sickly black smoke poured into the air all around them as the fire intensified, and whatever magic had been holding Noah’s flying sword snapped.

Instead of taking off, they dropped. Noah kicked the blade away from himself and set off a blast of wind, cushioning their fall and pushing them over to a hill in the sea of writhing, decayed muck.

He landed with a grunt, stumbling on the slick surface beneath his boots. Noah used Natural Disaster to push the smoke away from them, gritting his teeth as he squinted through the flickering light in search of the creature.

“You can probably breathe for now,” Noah said, amending his earlier suggestion. “As long as I keep the smoke away from us, at least. I’ll have to stop if I swap the Rune I’m using, though.”

Moxie released him and took a step back. “What in the Damned Plains are we up against? I’ve never seen anything like this. Also, look at the ceiling.”

Noah turned his eyes upward. A heavy bed of rotted vines covered it. There must have been at least three or four layers of thick plant growth, each one as thick as Noah’s chest.

“That might not be so easy to get through,” Noah muttered. “How did it happen so silently? And where the hell is the creepy smiling thing?”

He and Moxie both scanned the room again. Noah could feel his heart hammering in his chest so loudly that it almost competed with the roar of the fire around them. There was no sign of the monster he’d gotten a glimpse of before the lights had gone out.

Some of the light in the room vanished as a large portion of the flames were suddenly snuffed out near the far wall. Noah and Moxie spun toward it, nearly slipping in the process. In the time it took them to turn, another section of flame vanished behind them.

“It’s either really fast, or it’s got a lot of range to it’s magic,” Moxie warned. “What happened to your sword?”

“Dead,” Noah replied tersely, his fingers flexing as he searched for a target to fight. Anything would be better than just scanning the darkness, waiting for his opponent to make the next move. It was like the jaguar fight all over again, but this time he didn’t have Tremorsense. “I think it got decayed by the sludge. Can you destroy or move the vines on the ceiling?”

“No. They don’t even count as vines anymore. They’ve been changed.”

“Lovely,” Noah muttered. Another batch of fire vanished. Even as more smoke poured into the room from all the burning dead plants, the flames lighting it were going out one by one. That said, Noah did have a huge amount of smoke to work with.

I don’ t know what it’ll do to anyone that breathes it in, but at this point, I’m not going to use myself as a test subject. I’d rather avoid slinging it around too long. Best to just get the hell out of here and seal it in.

“New idea,” Noah said. The light illuminating his face faded once more as more fire went out, but he ignored it. He called on Sunder, reaching for the reassuring, cold energy of the Master Rune.

A shudder ran through his soul, and Noah froze. Sunder felt… different. He couldn’t place exactly how, but the Rune seemed to be reacting to whatever was going on around them. The back of Noah’s spine tingled.

The black sludge surrounding them was the exact same material that had been dripping from the spear-wielding man when he’d attacked Renewal at the Waters of Life.

There’s no way he tracked me down, though. If this was actually him, I’d already be dead. So what is this stuff?

Noah gave Sunder a sharp tug, and energy finally flowed into his veins. They turned a dark grey as the power coursed through him. Noah flexed his fingers, then looked up to the ceiling.

“Moxie, can you launch us at the ceiling with a big ass vine? I’ll cut through it.”

Moxie wrapped her arms around Noah’s waist. He felt small vines secure them together. A rumble ran through the ground. For whatever reason, the flames had stopped snuffing out – but Noah wasn’t going to complain.

The hill erupted. A massive vine the width of a car roared out of the ground in a blur beneath Noah and Moxie. Noah lurched at their rapid ascent, but Moxie’s hold on him was strong enough that they both remained on top of it. Their rotted surroundings flashed past Noah as they rapidly approached the ceiling.

As soon as they grew near it, the vine slammed to a halt. If it hadn’t been for smaller vines holding Noah and Moxie down by their feet, the momentum would have launched the two of them straight into the blackened vines above them.

Instead, they stopped just beneath it. Noah’s hand shot up and, as soon as he touched the wet plant growth, he released Sunder’s magic.

A flash of black thrust upward, carving through the vines in a split instant. Sludge poured from the scarred plants. Moxie’s vines rose up around them, forming a protective umbrella before it touched them.

All around the area that Noah had sliced, the severed vines pulled back. Dirt started to rain down along with the sludge as they revealed the bottom of the ground – or was it the top of the cave? Noah couldn’t be bothered to care. To him, it was freedom.

He grabbed the smoke filling the cave with Natural Disaster, forming it into a spike and thrusting it upward into the hole he’d just formed in the plants. The spike tore through the air, slamming into the dirt and ripping through it easily. Noah yanked the spike back and daylight poured in through the hole they’d just formed.

Moxie didn’t need to be told to move. The vine shuddered to life beneath them, shooting up and launching the two through the hole and back into the daylight. The bindings holding the two together slipped away and Noah staggered off the vine, breathing heavily and turning back to the hole – which was currently plugged by the top of Moxie’s vine.

“Move it.”

“Are you sure?” Moxie asked, wiping her brow and drawing in deep, greedy breaths of fresh air. “All the smoke–”

“I know. It’s fine. Root Fiend.”

Moxie’s eyes flashed in understanding. She nodded and pulled the vine down a little. Noah used Natural Disaster to grab the smoke once more, then sent it pouring down to the bottom of the cave and left only a thin stream leading up to him outside.

Then he combusted it.

The spark raced down the tendril, burning it away as it shot down for the base of the cavern. Moxie’s vine slammed back up, sealing the hole shut. A second passed. Then another. Noah opened his mouth.

A massive tremor rocked the earth beneath them. Noah staggered, nearly losing his balance. There had definitely been an explosion beneath them, but it looked like it hadn’t managed to penetrate the thick layer of dead plants covering everything. Moxie’s vine fell back, re-opening the hole.

The explosion must have been big enough to cut it off or kill it.

Noah pressed his hand to the ground and called on Natural Disaster again. Small moves were far from his specialty with this particular Rune, but he didn’t need this to be small – just fast.

His teeth ground as he tried to channel the Rune properly. After a few moments, a large section of dirt and stone pushed out of the ground and slid over to the hole, covering it.

Several seconds of silence passed. Noah straightened, wiping the sweat from his brow and bracing his hands against his knees. “Well, shit. Did you get any energy from killing a monster?”

Moxie shook her head. “Nothing. It’s still alive.”

They looked at each other.

“You want to go back down there?”

“Do you?” Moxie raised an eyebrow.

It’s got something to do with Sunder – or does Sunder have something to do with it? Either way, the monster managed to survive an explosion that would have killed a huge Root Fiend a dozen times over. I’m not so sure this is a fight we want to pick now that we’ve managed to escape.

But, more importantly, not all was as it should have been on the surface. Noah’s brow furrowed as he spun in a circle. There was something very important missing.

“Where’s Lee? I thought she was up here.”

Moxie cursed. “You’re kidding. She didn’t fall in with us, did she?”

“No, she didn’t. She was still watching, and we definitely would have heard her if she dropped down,” Noah said. His eyes caught on an indent on the ground that wasn’t too far from where they’d been standing before Moxie had gotten yanked into the underground cavern. It looked like the claw of a large creature had cut through the ground. “What is that?”

Moxie looked down at it. Her lips pursed and she looked up, scanning the ground for something. She spotted it and jogged a few steps, stopping beside a similar impression. “Some sort of claw marks.”

There’s no way some big ass creature strolled up here in broad daylight and managed to snag Lee while she wasn’t paying attention. We weren’t below the ground that long. She wouldn’t have gone down that easily.

A thought struck Noah. He looked up – and saw a huge black bird hurtling down toward them. Two huge, clawed feet poked out beneath it, and its neck hung at an odd angle. Atop the bird was Lee, riding it straight into the ground like a crazed train conductor.

“Holy shit,” Noah muttered. Moxie followed his gaze. The bird wasn’t slowing at all, though. Noah and Moxie jumped to the side as one. As Noah dodged, he also drew on Natural Disaster and sent a wave of wind out.

Lee leapt off the bird’s back – right into the cushion Noah had formed. It wasn’t exactly soft due to the nature of Natural Disaster, but the churning energy slowed Lee’s fall by enough to let her land safely.

The bird, on the other hand, crashed into the ground and splattered everywhere, spraying black goop in a wide circle around its landing zone – the same goop that had been dripping from all the plants in the cavern beneath them.

“Oh! You’re back,” Lee said. “Did you manage to fish up a good monster? This bird grabbed me right after you fell in. It stopped fighting all of a sudden a few seconds ago, though.”

Right after I blew up the cavern.

“Goddamn it,” Noah muttered. “This is definitely going on my paper. Something’s going on.”

“You think Dawnforge is under attack by some weird shit?” Moxie asked.

“No,” Noah replied grimly. “I think I am.”

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