12 miles below the froze.., p.19
12 Miles Below: The Frozen Realm: (A Progression Fantasy Epic), page 19
I was itching with the need to examine the door, to see how it worked, but that had been tampered down greatly since coming down here. Constant life-or-death struggles did that to a person, go figure.
Instead, I settled for appeasing some other bits of curiosity that wouldn’t cost us time. “Can you tell me anything about the lower levels? Stories or things that happen down there?”
The tunnel entrance ahead was lit with green, and a tiny arrow glinted slightly off the bottom left side, hiding behind a tall rock. He climbed over a particularly large rock, then grabbed my collar and lifted me up. “When I was in… a better state of mind, there were some sights I remember well. We traveled down to a meadow once, on the second level—an escort mission to keep a few of our traders safe until they could arrive at the next undersider hold. One moment we’re walking through metal and steel alleyways. And then the next, this vast plane, almost like the surface wastes. Except all green and breathable. Grass grew everywhere, with occasional trees scattered around.”
“Grass?” Odd plant. Completely worthless for food, so it only existed in books and videos. No one in their right mind would waste space and soil to grow grass. “The undersiders had an entire field of it?” What weird folks. But I suppose if they were living in a massive plain, space wasn’t a luxury.
“Aye. I’d only seen pictures of grass on records when I was a boy. I enjoyed the ocean and forest pictures too. However, meadows always seemed something… more to me. I thought it was how the gods had wanted the surface to look. How it was supposed to have been. A massive plain of green, stretching in every direction, where you could walk the ground on bare feet even. Instead, something went wrong in their plans, and now it’s all ice and snow.”
Plains, forests, oceans, deserts, beaches—all of that was right mystical stuff that you couldn’t really believe existed. I’d read about these in old stories at first and just assumed they were fantasy tropes for a long time. It threw me for a loop once I’d seen real video footage.
Father shook his head. “I didn’t have many other chances at leisure, there was training to do. Winterscar’s last owner had disowned his sons and offered the armor up in challenge to anyone in the House. You remember your grandmother? She made a bid for the armor through me.”
Yes, I remembered her. A sociopath who saw everyone as tools to be used for her own purposes. A highly clever political creature that one had been. She’d thrown away Father, her own son, the moment Mother died and he fell into the bottles. She took charge of me, thinking I could be molded into her next proxy pawn, playing the long game. She’d tried with Kidra but cut her losses within the month. My sister was outright immune to the crazy old bat. So Grandmother decided a newborn would be a cleaner slate, even if it did take years before I could speak.
I was glad she bit the ice early enough. Though I was worried some of her lessons might have sunk deeper inside than I’d thought. She certainly knew how to groom someone into a weapon, from how Father had ended up.
To me, Father had always been someone you avoided whenever he arrived back home until he passed out and it was safe again. Or else you’d end up with bruises. Less of a person and more a force of nature, like a storm that blew into the house each night.
Kidra and I had gotten used to him in our own ways. She still remembered who he had been before the bottle, and I’d simply never known him as anyone other. I hadn’t thought much about what his own life must have been like, growing up with a parent like that. Grandmother clearly hadn’t missed where his potential was, and it sounded like she’d cut out anything that didn’t maximize her goals.
“You asked what I remember the most about the underground. That would be it,” Father said, ever walking forward. “There were battles and people I had met and befriended as well—if they still consider me their friend after I…” he paused for a moment. “After I stopped serving as a relic knight.”
“Did you go back there every now and then, to the meadow? While you were still active.”
“No. We only went there once. The hold refused to let us inside.”
“That sounds like undersiders all right.” I mean, I understood. Scavengers had a reputation as thieves, and I supposed we somewhat deserved it. We did pick the bones of the dead on the surface.
“They didn’t want anything our traders could offer, even if it was useful,” Father said, smolder in his voice. “Ugly scrapping thing, their city. Black castle towers, rock walls and all. It looked like a blight on the land.”
There was a heaviness in his voice as he talked. “Seeing that town, how it sat so strangely in the middle of that meadow… I could almost understand how the machines might view us.” He shook his head, pushing the thought away.
“I’ve seen hundreds of different biomes, Keith, some teeming with far more life, but I never traveled into something as simple and… and as beautiful as that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE GOAT
It was about half an hour into the trek that one of those large sealed doors did something Father hadn’t ever seen before. We were traveling through another open pocket when the random door ahead suddenly turned bright gold instead of the usual lighting that doors had.
And then it flashed, on and off, as if trying to catch our attention. Father drew out his rifle, considered for a moment, and then decided to just ignore the doorway and continue our path, gun still at the ready. The blinking increased frantically, but soon we were too far into the chamber and other rocks obscured our sight.
They didn’t stop winking. Each room we reached had one door glow bright gold and begin winking. The pattern and frequency sometimes changed, and each and every time, Father stubbornly ignored the call.
“I’ll not take chances,” he said when I asked about the blinks. Apparently, he’d never seen that happen before. “The fewer encounters with the machines, the better our chance of survival is. There’s no need to add more unknowns. We’re not here to explore.”
I, of course, wanted to see what was behind those doors all the more. Was it a good idea? No. Absolutely not. I’d rather take a shower under the sun. Father had sound reasoning.
Still, that part of me that wanted to touch everything was trying to convince me about pulling something. A friendly reminder to myself: Everything happening right now was the direct result of the last time I pulled something.
More time into the climb, the air started to feel drier and colder. Discomfort built up in my ears, and I’d have to move my jaw to clear out the air in my ear. We were making our way closer to the surface now.
Artificial sunlight seemed to be more and more sparse, as if power was beginning to be disconnected the farther up we went. Our headlights soon became one of the few sources of light guiding our path up, mine still strapped on the right side of my chest, just under my neck.
Moss stopped growing, and the rustle in the bushes also became a distant memory. It was getting colder now. I even started to notice the occasional clump of frostbloom appearing wherever the cavern light still worked.
Frostbloom was notoriously weak to the competition of other plants from what we’d found in the bunkers. If they were starting to appear here… we might be running too close to the surface.
And that would be my dead end so long as I didn’t have a spare rebreather.
I wasn’t sure what the plan was once we got closer to the surface. Maybe he’d go ahead and make contact first, then have the rescue team return with a spare rebreather for me. That’s how I’d go about it, were I in his shoes. The issue was that I’d have to be left alone for a few hours, and those screamers were clearly designed to hunt down solo targets. Machines could have looked like anything, yet they seemed to have been built from the ground up to terrify first.
Still, if it had to be done, it had to be done. Screamers didn’t have specialized eyesight like he’d mentioned before. I might be able to find a crevice and hide inside, out of sight.
It was in one of these murky, more empty chambers that Father raised his hand to signal enemy contact.
“They’re not usually in the main chambers like this,” he muttered to himself, then shook his head and slowly backpedaled.
“Machines?”
He nodded gravely. “Up ahead, on the ceilings. Don’t make too much noise.”
“They didn’t spot us?”
“No, these are dormant in their nests. They wait for prey to walk under them. We’ll just search for another way up and sidestep them completely.”
Plan in motion, we turned and backtracked. As much as I was sure the machines would love our company, I was good for one lifetime.
I got to see a goat, eventually. The large animal was chomping down on shrubs with a few others of its flock. They looked way bigger than I’d expected, filled with hair and creepy eyes.
They watched us warily, preferring to turn and go down another tunnel rather than stay and risk the pair of strangers. Watching how they effortlessly hopped around on the rocky shelves, finding any small perch, I could see why they’d done well down here. Plenty of plant life to eat, too big for the swarms of pipe bats, and no issues with mobility.
Supposedly there must have been predators down here too that hunted them. Though, like Father had said, they clearly stayed out of our sight.
But besides the goats, we’d found no other way around after two hours of walking. It looked like the nest of machines had picked this part of the cave system specifically since it was the only path within several miles—a cross point of sorts. Everything else had been either a blue tunnel, the wrong direction, a cave-in, or red and dark.
Machines aren’t stupid, clearly.
And so we found ourselves back where we’d started from. If I were more superstitious, I’d say someone had jinxed me.
“Keith, you need to listen to me very carefully now,” Father said.
He pointed to the ceiling, where white spike-like shapes bloomed over everywhere. No matter where his helmet headlights pointed, there would almost always be another white flower-like spine. “Those are all machines. Three different kinds make up these nests. They have next to invisible lines of string layered around the chamber. You won’t be able to see them, but the relic armor can. I’ll tell you how to navigate, and you need to make sure you replicate all of my motions exactly.”
There are so many of them. Maybe two or three dozen shapes. Ratshit, I could see why he called it a nest.
“Do we have a plan if there’s a mess up?” I asked.
“No,” he answered curtly. “This breed fights with far more coordination than previous ones you’ve seen. It takes a full team to hold off even a smaller nest like this. Alone, we can’t even reliably run. Their only weakness is that they sleep until something triggers their trap, and they’re greedy.”
“Greedy?”
“They don’t like to share their targets. They get especially sloppy when victory seems assured.”
I nodded, understanding the gravity of it. “Like fighting two lost humans.”
“Exactly. But there’s very few ways to make use of that in our situation. The best and only plan forward is to not wake them in the first place. We’ll take our time and move through this room as slowly as we need to. There’s no time limit.”
No time limit except for the drugs inside his body. We still had to get him to the surface before a day went by.
“What about explosives?” I asked, glancing down at his utility belt. There was one unspent grenade he’d wisely saved during that first fight. He knew they’d avoid any explosion after they learned from the first one, so he hadn’t bothered wasting it.
“The ones that can be killed by an explosive stay far up on the ceilings. The ones that come down… well, they’ll survive an explosive like this one. It’ll be a waste. No, assuming we make it past this room, the grenade needs to be saved for later.”
The room was large, filled with different nooks and crannies, some wide enough to easily walk and others too thin that even my slimmed-down environmental suit would get caught. I wasn’t worried about rips in the weave anymore; I had bigger issues with this suit than that.
There was a stark and absolutely clear difference between this cave compared to the others. The entire place was littered with steel spikes as long as my arm, bedded into the rock, all at different angles. It reminded me of a ring of swords—the traditional dueling grounds of surface clans. A massive, empty circle of dirt, with a ring of cheaply printed metal swords embedded everywhere at the edge.
Occult weapons could cut through armor and permanently cripple a knight. Anything less powerful than an occult weapon would bend and break with the sheer force behind a swing in armor. So duels were fought with simple and cheap metal swords. Part of the skill was to reach the edge of the arena and pull out another sword when the one in use broke.
But the ring of swords was far more organized and densely packed. This landscape was simply chaos incarnate. The metal spikes were everywhere, with no rhyme or rhythm, but they were sporadic enough I could traverse through them.
They had no relation to the trip wires, as I quickly found out. I suppose that would have been too obvious.
Plants and moss still grew haphazardly around in the dim light, but there wasn’t a single rustle of shrubs or any frantic rats running out.
The chamber was as silent as a grave save for the water leaking through on its way down. I had a feeling machines hunted more than just humans.
As planned, we moved methodically through.
Occasionally, Father would crawl forward, and I’d have to repeat the same, each time praying under my breath nothing would trigger.
Sometimes we’d have to turn back and retrace our steps as Father got sight of what was around the corner. I got a feeling he was picking the easiest possible route, even if it came at a cost of time.
A few tracts of land were clear of traps, so that gave us a moment to collect ourselves and bypass it quickly.
Things were progressing well enough until we heard the panicked sound of a goat, far behind us.
Father froze, then swore under his breath. I turned to look at the source of the noise to see a lost youngling. Red stained its wool, and it staggered around, hooves clopping on the solid rock with feeble purchase. It looked exhausted, as if it’d been chased up here.
“It’s going to trigger the room,” Father hissed, drawing his rifle up. It would be a hard target at this range and an even harder shot without another hand to stabilize the weapon.
The goat continued to move, baying and approaching where we’d started. Had it followed us here? Or more probably, whatever was chasing it knew better than to come into this room.
Father took a deep breath and held the rifle, aiming down the sights as best he could with one hand. No shot came. I could tell he was second-guessing himself, and he couldn’t afford to miss the shot here.
He lowered the rifle a moment later and scanned around, then ran over to a large rock. There he took a kneeling stance, using the rock to stabilize the rifle, replacing his useless left hand. Like this, he had a much better chance of hitting the target.
He’d have to pull off an expert shot at this distance. I raced through my mind for possible ideas or ways to even the odds. “Maybe we can hit somewhere in front of the goat, to spook it away?” That would be a lot easier to hit.
Father shook his head. “Can’t take that chance. It could run the wrong way and trigger a trap at the side of the cave.”
“Can we make a run for it?”
“No. If they wake up, they’ll chase us down. Winterscar is a powerful armor compared to the other suits of armor, but even it can’t outrun this foe.”
He breathed in, held it, and aimed down sights.
The crack of the rifle resounded in the chamber, a three-burst shot that flashed through my vision.
The bullets hit the rock just behind the goat, making a loud crack echo back. It was too far away for me to see how far he’d missed by, but I had a hunch it was a really close thing. Father swore and aimed again, taking another shot immediately after.
The goat, on the other hand, didn’t know it was being attacked, but it knew dangerous sounds were not to be trusted. So the stupid thing bolted straight forward just as the next round of bullets fatally caught its flank.
Flashes of light illuminated the ghostly wiring leading right up the ceiling as the goat tripped on them, baying and screaming in panic, not quite understanding just how doomed it truly was now.
Dozens of violet robotic eyes flared to life and peered down with glee.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THINGS OF METAL AND PRIDE
Father instantly bailed on the idea of subtlety. He tossed the rifle out of his hands, trusting the strap would hold, and spun around. Hand now free, he reached out and yanked me off my feet, sprinting through the obstacle course with no regard for any trap. Lights shone as he tripped countless wires.
I had a miserable full view of what happened to that sorry goat in the meanwhile.
Four white, disk-like bodies landed farther away from the dying animal. They struck the ground, dropping from the ceiling on six long legs, each limb ending in thin, pointed spikes. Their body was like that of an armored crab. But they had the agility and dexterity of a spider with those long legs.
But the real danger to the goat was what stayed on the ceiling.
A pale blue light shot from the cavern roof at the doomed goat before it could collapse, illuminating the rock in a blue hue. This glow surrounded the goat, lifting it off its feet with a lurch into the air. There, the animal floated, slowly rotating on itself, hooves flailing around with panic. I could even see the clumps of blood floating around in ball-like orbs, merging together, spinning around aimlessly.
