Chapter 20

  The hunting party broke camp before dawn. They walked most of the way to the reported location of the den, stopping on a low rise that gave a decent picture of the surrounding countryside. Before they arrived, Seventh had already pinpointed the location of the den. The presence of mutts in the area disrupted her {far sight}, but she used {God’s eye view} of the region to spot a cave opening in the ground where most of the distortion concentrated.

  Dalex didn’t tell the others Seventh’s discovery. The amateur mutt hunters finding the den before the pros would probably cause some suspicion. He didn’t need the hunters anymore to find this particular den, but he wanted to maintain a relationship with these people. They still had far more information about mutts than he did.

  And, while Dalex let the hunters locate the den on their own, he did not slack in planning their defense. If the mutts suddenly attacked, Seventh would warn him, and he had prepared a host of options. One such option hovered a few dozen yards off the ground, an {attack golem} summoned from the {voidstalker} hidden by {invisibility}.

  Metsa, the archer and mother elf, knelt down at the top of the hill and said, “Sentiremong means I smell your fur.”

  She bent her head toward the earth and was motionless. The other hunters watched their surroundings, vigilant for any mutts roaming outside the den.

  After almost half a minute, Metsa raised her head and pointed in the direction of the den. “The scent is strongest over there. We are close. Perhaps a furlong.”

  Dalex looked at Seventh and she said, “Around two hundred yards.”

  “I see something,” Staja, Metsa’s son, said. “A dark spot. Perhaps a cave?”

  “Your eyes are better than mine,” Dava said. He turned to Dalex. “Well? You said you would kill the mutts before we got close.”

  Metsa and Staja had reached the same conclusion as Seventh. Dalex cracked his knuckles and walked to the front of the group, facing the den. He pointed at the den. “Is there anyone over there that might be in danger? Anyone we might want to evacuate? I don’t know this area.”

  Dava shook his head. “It is wilderness for two hundred miles north of the river.”

  Dalex turned to Seventh next. “Do you see any problems with our plan?”

  Seventh waited a moment, possibly running some numbers in her head, and then said, “No. The damage should be contained to the den itself.”

  “That makes this easy, then.” Dalex raised his right hand to the sky and said, “Terrameue brings the tears of God!”

  Nothing happened for several seconds. Dalex kept his hand raised and waited patiently. Hitasa gave him one of her tilting looks of confused expectation. Among the hunters ballooned a general atmosphere of skepticism. Perhaps Dalex had pulled some trick at the lodge. Perhaps he was a fraud.

  And then God’s tear arrived.

  A pointy-tipped narrow object the length of a compact car zipped out of the sky and slammed into the ground just behind the dark spot marking the cave entrance. Two hundred yards away, the impact created a slight puff of dust and a hollow thump. A second later, the earth heaved beneath the strike of the tear. It swelled into a dome of churning dirt an acre in diameter and then collapsed in a splash of dust and debris, leaving behind a massive hole the size of a city block.

  The ground shook. Dalex and Seventh kept their footing, but the rest of the group wobbled back and forth as tremors rippled out from the explosion. A deep rumbling seeped out of the ground beneath them. It took several seconds for the earth to calm. When it did, Dalex finally heard the birds in a nearby copse of trees chirping angrily at the disturbance.

  “By my ancestor’s antlers, what was that?” Oyuun, the deer-eared damekin asked, her voice breathless.

  “A deep penetrating explosive fired from a loitering high-altitude [drone],” Seventh said.

  “Ahh-tatatatata,” Dalex tried to talk over the [android] and then corrected, “A tear of God.”

  Metsa gave him a flat look. “Where is the dragon?” The older elf’s tone brooked no nonsense. The others of her hunting group started scanning the sky, looking for something.

  Dalex’s mouth fell open. “Come on you guys, have a little faith. There’s no dragon.” Unless you counted the [drone gunship] flying circles around them ten miles in the sky, which Dalex did not. No, not a [drone gunship]. What had he called it? A {golem albatross}? There were too many {golems}. He kept forgetting their names, and not all of them were winners.

  Dava’s voice shook as he spoke. “I have never seen such devastation except at the claws of a dragon.”

  Reminding himself to tone the theatrics down next time, Dalex started down the hill toward the devastation. “Come on everybody, let’s see if it actually worked before we start invoking the names of your overlords.”

  The crowd at the top of the hill watched him for several seconds without moving. Even Seventh stayed put, likely busy scanning the area for signs of mutts or enemy {far realmer} technology. Apparently, it took quite a bit of her attention to navigate the distortion. Finally, Hitasa came trotting down the hill, and that broke the dam of uncertainty in the others. They followed after him several yards back.

  Hitasa caught up to him. “You say that as if the dragons aren’t your overlords too.”

  Dalex couldn’t help a scoff. “The more I hear about your dragons, the less respect I have for them. A dragon should be noble and dangerous, not autocratic and genocidal. No, I would not say they have any right to lord over me.”

  “You don’t actually think this proves you can defy them,” she said, pointing toward the massive crater.

  He would have thought it went a long way to doing just that, but he only said, “I’m hunting mutts today. I’ll worry about dragons when I actually meet one.”

  They reached the edge of the crater and stopped. The center of the depression sank a good forty yards. Dalex couldn’t distinguish any dead mutt bodies in the mess of loose soil and pulverized gray rock. Before he waded into the mess, he cast {detect precious metals} and made sure his {wards} were at full power.

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  Once that was done, he said, “{Companion skills},” and a system window for the {attack golem} appeared.

  He set the {golem} to follow him and walked down into the crater. While he knew the mutts were vulnerable to his weapons, he also knew his armor could be damaged by their teeth. And his new friends were even less resistant. He wasn’t taking any chances. The {golem} would wipe out the first mutt it saw with extreme prejudice.

  Halfway across the crater, Dalex stopped when he saw a mangled animal leg. It was big enough and the right color to be a mutt’s. He knelt down and dug around the leg with his hands until most of the appendage was visible. Hitasa helped him from the opposite side. The others gathered around to watch. When it was exposed enough, Dalex grabbed it just above the paw and pulled until most of a haunch came free.

  “Seems like I got at least one,” Dalex said, tossing the leg back onto the ground. He remembered how his first mutt encounter had involved the beast regenerating a pretty serious muzzle wound. “Or can they heal this much damage?”

  “No,” Dava said. “The mutt attached to that leg is dead for sure."

  They wandered around the crater for another fifteen minutes and came across the remnants of two more dead mutts. Unfortunately, while Dalex was digging the third corpse out, he happened upon another cave entrance. It was partially buried after the {God’s tear}, but he immediately realized the den had likely extended deeper under the earth than he had anticipated. These things dug like prairie dogs.

  Dalex called the others over and they went to work moving some of the debris blocking the entrance. The hole was wide enough for ten people to walk abreast, or for a single mutt to scamper easily up and down the tunnel.

  No mutts came out of the cave to greet their noisy guests, but everyone knew that wasn’t enough proof that the mutts were all dead. Dava had expected five of them in the worst-case scenario, and the hunters could only account for three corpses.

  “We have to go in,” Dava said.

  Dalex agreed, but some of the mutts might still be out on the town. He gestured to Seventh. “Stay up here and make sure nothing comes in after us.” He faced the others. “Do you have everything you need for spelunking?”

  The hunters shared an amused look among their group and then Dava nodded. “This is how we typically deal with mutt dens. We try to smoke them out if we can, but we always have to go inside to finish the job. Leveling the entire den before we even get close isn’t usually an option.”

  “I’m glad you’re prepared.” Dalex turned around and faced the yawning black maw of the tunnel. “I’ll lead, then. Watch our backs, Seventh.”

  “Do not die,” she said, and while she left the, I would need to requisition another human, unsaid, he still heard it in her tone.

  Under his breath, Dalex said, “I’ll try not to inconvenience you.”

  He cast {illuminate}, creating a hovering orb of light from the {astral mortar}, and strode into the cave. Two of the other hunters invoked spells that created a light source and they all followed him inside with Hitasa. Behind them hovered the unseen and unheard {attack golem}.

  ***

  After several minutes of carefully walking down a straight path washed in the glow of yellow and white light, they came to a branch.

  “I think we should stick together and explore the branches once at a time,” Dalex said.

  Dava agreed and asked Oyuun as his second in command to drop a spell marker.

  She intoned, “Wayfinder marks my path,” and they continued down the right-hand branch of the tunnel.

  After another ten minutes they reached cavernous chamber. Dalex stopped at the end of the tunnel, waiting until everyone caught up before he crossed the threshold into the chamber. He didn’t see any mutts. He didn’t hear any sounds that didn’t belong to the cave or his companions. His wards didn’t tell him that anything threatening lurked just ahead.

  He peeked into the chamber, looked left and right, and then walked a few yards, watching his surroundings carefully. The chamber was big enough that his {illuminate} spell didn’t reach the far wall. He took one more step and heard Hitasa gasp behind him.

  “Dalex, stop!”

  He pulled his foot back. When nothing attacked him, he took a closer look at where he had been about to step and realized he had almost walked off a cliff. A trick of the light made the floor look like it kept going, but it only extended about ten yards from the tunnel before it dropped away into unseen depths below him. The edge of the cliff extended to his left and right, ending on both sides with the cave wall. Dalex stood at the center of a spit of land like a closed off beach, but instead of the ocean, the beach ended at a yawning pit.

  “Thanks for the warning,” he said, then kicked a rock off the ledge. He didn’t hear it hit the ground, and so he turned around.

  “Well, I don’t see any–”

  His voice caught. Six sets of big yellow eyes stared at him from high over where the tunnel exited into the chamber. A second cliff stood out some fifty feet above him. A few of the eyes were in pairs of two. Some were in trios of three. One was a group of four. All of them connected to the shadowy figures of enormous, misshapen hounds.

  Dalex pointed up the cliff wall for the benefit of the others. “There’s–”

  Three of the mutts leapt down on him.

  “{Skull An–},” he began to call before they slammed into him as a group and carried him over the side of the cliff. As he slipped over its edge, he looked back into the mouth of the tunnel. In the glimmer of his companions’ magical illumination, Dalex saw Hitasa’s eyes go blank, and then he was gone, down into a chasm deeper than he could possibly guess.

  He fell among a whirlwind of clawing paws and snapping teeth. One latched onto his right arm with its mouth, trying to pull the limb out of its socket. The others battered him with claws as sharp as scythes. They growled and roared as they tried to rip him apart.

  “{Volcanic touch}!” Dalex shouted, voice strained. The gauntlet around his right arm flooded with {astral mortar} to form a cannon at the end of his hand. It fired and the head of the mutt chewing on his arm exploded in a flash of hot blue plasma.

  With his dominant hand free, Dalex dismissed the cannon and called for {Skull Anchor}. The axe appeared in his hand, and he rolled over in the air, chopping down. The blade bit into the neck of one of the mutts falling with him, not quite severing its head from its body. It screeched in pain just as the third mutt, surprisingly nimble in free fall, swam in to take a bite out of Dalex.

  He readied his axe to split the final mutt’s skull, but they all slammed into the bottom of the cave at the same time. The bodies of the three mutts exploded into bloody chunks on contact with the ground. Dalex’s head hit a rock, and, even though his armored helmet pulverized it to powder, it knocked him out.

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