Chương 22: the Shadow Wolves

I follow the tracks of the wolves, wondering if the two groups that we fought were part of a larger pack. El and I identify signs in the ground, and I point out to her how to follow them backwards to figure out where the pack had come from, where they'd been before. We do see that the second group we fought was connected to the first. And we follow the trail back even further to a cave. A cave that I've never seen before. There isn't a cave in Loring Park.

I've been here before, I've been all through here every year for Pride, and I've never seen this cave before. And there's no way that the cave would just go unnoticed. It's a massive cave coming up out of the ground, a cave that goes down below the ground. I look at El.

"Do you want to go in there?" I ask.

"You won't be able to see that well."

"I can carry a torch," she says, looking around for something that will serve.

"I can fight with the axe in one hand and the torch in the other."

"There's no telling how many more shadow wolves will be down there," I say.

"We'll be careful," she says. She grabs a stick off the ground and wraps one of the wolf furs around it. It'll stink, but it should burn at least a little bit. She wraps it nice and tight, and soon we have a torch wrapped in fabric. System strikes again. I light the torch with a casting of Flame Ball, and we sneak our way into the cave. Sneaking with a lit torch is much harder to do, and I don't expect we're going to be able to stay hidden for any length of time. I expect that we're going to fight any second now.

I just hope that the cave doesn't open up that much before we do. Right now, El can stand in front and I can shoot over her shoulder at our enemies as they are forced to come to us one at a time. The tracks suggest that a lot of shadow wolves came this way, and they seem to have been moving fast, running to get out of the cave. I wonder what that means. It feels like something important, but I can't put my finger on it just yet. We follow the cave downward.

It doesn't take long before the grey skies give way to absolute darkness, cut only by the light from El's torch. She adjusts her grip on her axe as she walks, her eyes as often raised up to look at the darkness as cast down and looking at the tracks. My tracking skill goes up again, but I doubt hers has done the same. There are some other passages branching off from the main cave as we go, but they are too small for us to make our way through them.

The wolves might be able to get through, but they'd be reduced to crawling if they did, and that would give us plenty of time to wipe them out before they were able to attack us back. Eventually, we do come to a larger chamber. We stand shoulder to shoulder and look out, expecting to see a swarm of shadow wolves. But the chamber is all but empty. The only thing inside the room is a platform shrouded in shadows. No, not shrouded in shadows.

It's got one giant shadow that sits there, separate from the rest of the cave. A slash of darkness that remains dark even in my vision.

"What the hell is that?" El asks, her voice a bare whisper.

"I don't know," I say.

"Looks like a shadow."

"But a shadow of what?" That's a good point. Nothing seems to be casting the shadow, though.

"It's just a shadow," I say.

"It's dark even to my vision."

"I wish I had dark vision," she says. As we make our way around the chamber, trying to keep the greatest amount of distance between us and the shadow standing in the middle of the room, I watch the shadow. It's outside the range of the torch flame, so I know El can't see what's happening. But I can. I can see as the shadow stretches just a little bit, and a Shadow Wolf steps out of it. No, not steps out. It spawns. I'm reminded of that old arcade game Gauntlet.

The monsters would spawn forever unless you destroyed the generator. This is like one of those. I wonder if I can destroy it with a Flame Ball. I summon and throw the ball of flame, but instead of disintegrating the shadow, it just hits the wolf and gets its attention. It snarls and charges at us. El drops her torch and swings with both hands, chopping down into the wolf as I dart to the side and stab it. The wolf makes a noise of complaint and swipes at me, but doesn't hit anything.

El swings again, taking off the wolf's head and dropping it in front of us. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it I keep waiting for the message that we've defeated the Shadow Wolf, the message that we get a measly 200 experience a piece. But the message doesn't come. Instead, another shadow wolf steps out of the shadow, sees us, and starts charging for us. This is bad.

We take this one out about as easily as the first one, though this one does get a nip at me for 9 damage before we take it out. And we don't take it out as quickly as before, so there's another one that wades into the combat before we take out the first. I don't know if the monsters are spawning faster because we're here or not, but we can't just fight an endless stream of them. Can we? I mean, do we have the stamina for it?

I use Bleeding Strike to kill the first shadow wolf, shoving my bracer down the throat of the second, stabbing it again and again as El slashes at it.

"Maybe we should go?" I asks as El stoops to pick up her torch, and I watch as a fourth shadow wolf steps out of the shadows.

"They're going to keep coming."

"Yeah," she says.

"But one at a time. We can fight for hours and never be in any real danger." There's something to be said for that. I draw my bow and step off to the side, shooting a Sniper Shot at the wolf as it steps out of the shadow. I can do that every fifty five seconds, and it will kill the shadow wolf that I hit. But they're spawning every twenty seconds or so, which means we have to fight two out of every three of the wolves. They claw and bite, and El slashes with her axe, slamming it home over and over again.

She takes hits somewhat regularly, though. It's in the style that she uses when she's fighting. It's very brazen, taking damage to deal damage more often than not. She isn't defending herself basically at all, but rather going all out and recklessly attacking the enemy, swinging away at them and not caring if they get a slash in edgewise. I keep an eye on her health total. It's going down somewhat steadily, but still slowly. She has over four hundred to start with, so I'm not going to worry about her for a while.

But I can foresee this being a problem after not too long. Another problem is that my stamina isn't going to last forever. I have 210 to start with, but it takes ten every time I do a Sniper Shot, and twenty five if I want to do Bleeding Strike. Even if I avoid using Bleeding Strike, it's only a matter of time before I run out. Sooner or later, we're going to have to run away from the shadow wolves. But that might not be for a good long while.

I keep shooting and throwing knives at the wolves as they come out of the shadows. I lose track of how many we kill. The bodies pile up quickly, but so do the nicks and cuts on El's arms and legs. Her health drops from 400 to 200 after about ten minutes and god knows how many wolves. By the time it drops to 100, and I decide she could use a heal, I've run out of throwing knives and am rapidly running out of arrows.

I step up and cast Healing Touch, spending 50 MP in a single charge and watching as the streams of bleeding cuts and bite marks stop bleeding nearly as much as they were, her health shooting back up past 250. I can probably do it again in another minute, but my MP isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later, we're going to run out of resources. I pull an arrow out of one of the bodies and use Sniper Shot again at the wolf that's just coming out of the portal.

It staggers for a few seconds and then dies, right around the time that El finishes off the other wolf that's still fighting. I look over at her.

"Ready to go yet?" I ask.

"Not yet," she insists.

"One more wave."

"I'm out of arrows," I say, putting my bow away.

"And there isn't time for me to recover too many of them before another wolf comes." Sure enough, the shadows are already flexing and moving. More to the point, the torch at El's feet is starting to sputter a bit. It sputters, and the size of the flame reduces by about half, leaving her almost entirely in darkness. I draw my sword and summon a ball of flame in my free hand so that El can still see, and I start moving back towards the way we came in.

With both of us using swords, we're not going to be able to take them out nearly as quickly. She'll still do the same damage, of course, but I'll be down from 66 to about 56. Ten points of damage in each strike doesn't sound like much, but I can't swing as fast as I can shoot, and the wolves have 400 points of health each. And we're now going to deal with three of them per minute, rather than two, because I can't keep doing Sniper Shot; I'm out of arrows.

There are more back in the park, but that doesn't do me any good. We get back to the main passage out of there, and back up as we fight another shadow wolf, letting it chase us out of the cave. Only there is no out of the cave. The passage ends abruptly, just leading to a wall. And it's not like we made a wrong turn or something like that; there aren't any turns away from main tunnel, that used to be the cave. We kill the Shadow Wolf that was chasing us, and I turn to look at El.

"What do we do?" She looks up at the corner, then looks at me.

"Put out the flame," she says. She puts one hand on my arm. I let the flame ball disappear, and I cast Healing Touch on her again just to be safe.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"Look at the time," she says. I check the clock. 22: 34: 55. So it's about nine in the morning. Fucking hell, how long were we fighting?

"I don't get it," I say.

"I think this is what happens to the shadow wolves during the day," she says.

"They're trapped in here. And so are we."

"And they'll just keep spawning all day long until they fill up the caves, then they'll get out when the sun goes down again?" She nods. Which is weird, because she can't see.

"We have some time before they find us, but once they do, I think we're going to spend most of the rest of the day fighting."