Monster Hunting 401: A LitRPG Fantasy Adventure by Andrew Karevik (book suggestions .TXT) 📗

Eldest is stupid. Because that threat only exists for as long as she’s alive,” I said. “And if she kills one kid, we’ll sure as hell make sure to stop her from taking any more down. She knows that.”

“Don’t think others haven’t tried,” Eckshaw grumbled. “But…peace is preferred. The Eldest has stated that you are to kill its foe before you return to the village. Or else.”

“Lead the way then,” I said, gesturing widely for him to take point. I wasn’t about to argue with this man. Not when there were lives on the line. The Eldest was afraid, I knew. It couldn’t track our movements now, so all it could do was rely on Eckshaw as its mouthpiece. Although…how did it find me, I wonder?

The man stared at us for a moment. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but decided against it, opting to instead turn around and march forward into the darkness, green flame raised high.

Trig just looked at me and mouthed the words. “I hope you have a plan.”

I shrugged helplessly at him and motioned for him to stay close to me. The enemy couldn’t learn my plan if I didn’t even know what it was. I just hoped that whatever fiend we were about to face would prove to be identical to the Eldest. The more we could learn killing that thing, the easier we could take her down.

Our wagon was about the only thing making noise as we wandered through the dark. The creaking, the pots bubbling and the automated potion collection system whirring accompanied our steps and provided a pleasant distraction from the oppressive darkness all around us.

I had thought returning to this place would be of little difficulty. That having escaped it once before, I would feel more confident and comfortable in the shadows. But those thoughts proved to be little more than fantasy, for walking through the woods, I felt nothing but anxiousness at every corner. Being under the sun one moment and back in the pitch black realm the next seemed to discourage me more than anything. How I yearned to turn around and just escape this hellhole. But there was too much at stake to really entertain that idea. Instead, I just focused on all the good we were doing here.

“Woah!” Trig said, breaking his hour long silence. I snapped to attention to see that finally, the landscape had changed from the perpetual maze of giant trees and chest-high bushes. There was a single slope in front of us. A decline leading downwards. The first change in elevation we had seen here.

“Here it is,” Eckshaw said as he raised his green torch high. “Below you will find the pit where the wretched beast lives. It exists for no other purpose than to feed, but just as the Eldest, it is too bloated and sluggardly to wander the woods searching for meals. Instead, it marks its prey and lures them here. One by one, they march into its open jaws. A vile and disgusting creature.”

Though he used strong words in his speech, I could hear little emotion from him. Eckshaw spoke almost as if he were reading from a script.

“Well? You ready?” Trig asked as he leaned over the edge of the slope, looking down. The darkness seemed just as thick as anywhere else, impenetrable and foreboding.

“No,” I replied, walking next to him and raising my bow. “But don’t let that stop us.”

Chapter 23

Eventually the ground beneath our feet vanished. The grass and dirt instead became covered with bones of all types. Femurs, ribs, skulls and spinal columns littered the floor to the point of becoming its own terrain. So deep were the bones that when I shuffled my boot into the pile, looking for the actual ground, I could only find more skeletal remains.

“It’s a veritable graveyard here,” Trig whimpered, his voice pained and afraid. I did not wish to tell him what I observed about these bones that made them especially disconcerting. To the regular eye, they just looked like bones, but to one with medical training, it was easy to see that the marrow had been torn out and sucked dry. The beast that had created these bones had stripped every inch of food and nutrition from them, leaving nothing left.

“How many people do you think this is?” he asked. “Thousands? It has to be thousands, right?”

“Easy, Trig, focus,” I said, raising my torch, ignoring what was crunching beneath my feet as I walked. “If we aren’t careful, it’ll be our bones added to this collection soon enough.”

“How can you be calm here?” he hissed. “I’ve never seen this many people, alive or dead!”

Indeed he was correct about this. The sheer amount of skeletons in the area was so big that it was plausible that a small city had been devoured here. But was this creature we were hunting the cause of so many dead? A small, foolishly hopeful part of me wondered if maybe it actually subsisted on bones for survival and scavenged for these body parts. Once we reached the walls made out of skulls and only skulls, I began to doubt that was the case at all.

“Luuurrrrrrrr,” breathed a deep, human-like voice in the distance. The sound echoed all around us, bouncing around off of the various walls made out of bone and skull.

We both dropped down out of instinct, adopting stealth stances, but of course, such a thing was in vain. The two large torches mounted on my backpack gave me away instantly, as did the torch in Trig’s hand. No matter, at least being lower to the ground would make us harder to target.

I motioned for Trig to standby and quickly moved towards the source of the sound. More walls of skulls and other bones appeared before me, slowly rising up higher and higher as I continued. These walls seemed to serve a purpose, for eventually, they were on both sides of me, creating a maze