He had come long and far, but this, surely, must be what he had come down here for.Before Deebus stood a mass of solid, dark stone. Something about the structure seemed to have an incredible weight, an almost tangible sensation of drawing the world downwards around it. The whole thing was monolithic, no seams between the perfectly smooth, almost perfectly square blocks that made it up. There was but a single small, straight passage into the dark inside, marked by two cubic pillars in front.
As he crept closer, Deebus saw movement near the entrance. Coming even closer, he was surprised. There was an anteater, all the way down here in the dark, but he had not seen any animals yet in this journey, not to mention that this surface animal was nothing like the cave animals that kobolds knew. There was something more wrong about this anteater, though. It did not look healthy, covered in sores, and missing patches of hair: in fact, it looked rotten. Next to it he saw what looked like the bones of a koala. Sitting upright like a live one, but a real skeleton would have slumped. He revealed himself to them, wanting to see if they would fear like normal animals. They stared at him with eyeless sockets instead, crawling towards him, snapping their jaws, so he ducked back into hiding.
Dead yet moving. There must be some powerful magic at work here indeed, but how to kill what is already dead? To the other side of the wall he had access to, Deebus noticed a lone monitor lizard, also rotten. He would try this isolated target first. Carefully, he crept behind it, making sure to position himself between one of the giant mushrooms and the other corpses, and fired an arrow. It pierced through a gob of rotten leg flesh, but otherwise the creature didn't seem to notice. Creeping closer, he began bashing it with his spear, piercing the skull many times but only after 8 such blows did the lizard collapse. Sheer blunt force, it must be. This gave him an idea.
He looked around the blood-red fungus tree. The others seemed not to have heard the loud, bone crunching blows. Not caring for the putrid smell, Deebus reached his arms under the heavy lizard carcass, hefting it over his head. With a mighty heave, he hurled it at the other corpses. It slammed into the rotten anteater with another grisly crunch, and the anteater collapsed as well. Quickly, he baited the koala skeleton away from the other two bodies, before coming around behind and smashing it with another thrown corpse. Now, with the outside cleared, he ventured inside, carrying the lighter koala skeleton if he should see another rotted creature.
Sure enough, after a few twisting turns, he saw another one.
He crept deeper in, through a long, twisting, mazelike passage, smashing another rotted koala as he went. At the end he came to a flight of stairs, which opened into a much more open chamber below. Upon looking around he recoiled, as here were some enormous corpses, larger than horses, of some long-bodies, lengthy creatures with huge manes, the ones that still had hair at least.
Deebus hurled the koala at one of them, but despite snapping bones, smashing rotten flesh and staggering it, it did not collapse. Worse, trying to heft another nearby body to throw, they found him and charged him. Barely making it back up the stairs, Deebus threw the remaining two corpses from his pile, destroying the first two to come up, but still one of the giant beasts hauled its way up the stairs. Ducking around the corner, Deebus smashed its legs as it came by and beat it until at last it went limp. With careful sneaking and piling of bodies, he soon had the rest of those rotted beasts collapsed.
Seeing a dead anteater in the next room over, he hurled a piece of monitor lizard at it, knocking its head off. This only seemed to attract its attention though, and as he crept up to finish it, it charged him. Deebus caught its strike with his shield, but fell over. Every time he tried to stand up to land a blow at it, he had to block or roll away. Managing to scramble back up the stairs, Deebus found himself cornered, his shield the only protection with no room to dodge. After a long time, almost to the point of exhaustion, Deebus finally managed to deflect a blow such that the corpse fell over, not he, and he bashed it to death.
The others went down fairly easily after that. Deebus found the smaller ones would topple with only a few blows, while the larger ones were dispatched with thrown bodies. Then, after destroying almost all of them on that level, he saw It.
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Topic: The journey of Deebus, a kobold story. (Read 193003 times)