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324. Ragged Puppet
🕑 Added 2025-03-06 15:00:03 +0000 UTCThe puppet plunged a blade toward Ike’s heart. Ike swept the Hungry Sword from his prone position. There was no strength in the blow—there couldn’t be, from the angle he was at—but it didn’t matter. The Hungry Sword struck the puppet’s blade and devoured it.
Ike raised his brows. He’d expected the two to clash, the Hungry Sword to maybe take a bite of the blade, but instead, the blade had just disintegrated. A second later, rust flakes rained down on his face, and he realized the blade was on the verge of destruction to begin with.
As if unaware of the blade’s destruction, the puppet kept swinging. Ike activated Storm Clad. Its fists impacted Ike’s chest and bounced off his icy armor. He lifted his foot and kicked the thing back. The puppet flew away, as light as paper. Lighter than any other puppet he’d kicked, as though it, too, were on the brink of disintegrating whether Ike attacked or not.
The puppet struck the wall, and its body shattered. Pieces rained down, tangling in the tattered robes it wore. Ike stood, dusting himself off. He walked over.
“Phew, that thing scared the shit out of me. What was that?” Wisp asked, peering at it over his shoulder.
“Just a random puppet,” Ike said.
“But if that’s the case, why did none of us detect it?”
Ike stood for a moment, silent, then shook his head. “It must have simply been too weak. So weak that we didn’t register it as anything but a bug and subconsciously ignored it.”
Wisp frowned, unsatisfied, but didn’t say anything else. Ike wasn’t satisfied with his own answer, either, but with no more proof of anything, he didn’t want to engage in speculation. Not now.
He knelt and examined the puppet a bit closer. It wore a hooded robe, one that had long-since torn away at the edges so it came down to a point around the puppet’s hips. Underneath, it wore armor. Only the rusted vestiges remained, a few scraps of metal and steel hinges, some leather ties, but it remained identifiable as armor. Ike tilted his head, confused. A puppet, wearing armor? Why bother? It wasn’t as if an injury slowed them down, nor did they seem to feel pain.
Maybe it retained its consciousness, and simply wanted to wear armor. If that was the case, then it should have a unique face. He thought back to what he’d seen during the fight. The hood had fallen over the puppet’s face, shadowing its features. He might have seen it while he was lying on the floor, but he wasn’t looking. He’d been too busy fighting for his life. Ike poked at the hood, trying to find the face, but found nothing. Its whole body had become fine powder.
“Ike, come on. Let’s not stay in here too long,” Wisp called.
Ike glanced over. She nodded. Mag huddled against the wall, hunched up in a way that Ike could almost see his puffed up feathers.
He sighed and stood. Mag hadn’t wanted to go here to begin with. He didn’t want to torture the poor bird by dragging things out. “Alright. Let’s keep moving.”
The three of them walked on. The passage had looked short from a distance, when the sun shone clearly through it and cast a single ray of light across the plains, but once they were within it, the gap seemed to extend forever, with nothing but the corpses of puppets and sheer rock to either side of them.
The further they walked into the gap, the deeper the shadows became. Before long, the walls stood in complete darkness, almost impenetrable to Ike’s eyes. Every now and again, Ike thought he saw motion, but every time he turned, it was nothing but the fading light playing off a puppet’s arm or body. He rubbed his arms. “This is almost worse than the ants.”
“Yeah. This place gives me the heebie-jeebies too,” Wisp agreed.
Mag said nothing. He just stared at them with big round eyes.
Ike sped up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here as fast as we can. No need to stick around.”
The other two sped up as well. They raced toward the distant exit. As dark as the shadows were here, the exit looked like a beaming spot of light, a beacon beckoning them out of the darkness and back into the daylight. They ran on, but it still remained distant, far out of their reach. Ike stared. Was it possible that there was no exit? Or maybe they ran on a loop. Maybe the floor was enchanted, so that the could never escape.
The darker it got, the wider the passage seemed to become, as well. It was wide to begin with, but as the darkness encroached, Ike could have sworn that the walls receded apace. Their footsteps echoed in the cavernous passage, deep in the heart of a mountain, the only sounds that interrupted the silence, and the throbbing beat of that strange, sourceless pressure.
He had expected fewer puppets in the mountain’s center, but to the contrary, more puppets piled up underfoot. He climbed hills of puppets, skated down drifts of them. If not for Brightbriar having conquered several regions, and therefore having access to a near-infinite supply of puppets, he would have wondered if Brightbriar had any puppets left. But even so, whatever he accomplished here, he paid a serious price for. What was he willing to go this far to obtain?
Is this the entry battle for this region? As soon as he thought it, Ike dismissed it. There was no opposing force. No skeletal remains of human opponents. Nor did the puppets bear signs of fighting one another, not that he would have understood why they would have done such a thing. It was as though droves of them had descended upon this mountain pass to fight one singular foe, and droves of them had died, here, cut short at the hands of one monstrous foe.
On Ike’s shoulder, Shawn sat up. His hands clenched Ike’s shirt, and fear sounded in his voice. “Where the hell are we?”
“In a mountain,” Ike said.
“I know, but what did you do to it?” Shawn asked, looking around him.
“As if Ike could do this,” Wisp muttered under her breath, but even for her, she struggled to make it sound like a joke. The strangeness of this place affected them all.
Ike’s eyes widened. Images flashed through his mind. The black-robed mages in the foxes’ resort. The strange ritual they tried to enact on Shawn. Mont’s extreme distaste, mirrored in Shawn’s tension now. “Shawn, that pressure—is it a mountain?”
“It is.” Shawn’s whole body was tense on his shoulder. Ike couldn’t see him, but he knew Shawn would be pale if he could.
If Shawn’s awake, then we must be close to the mana vein. To the mountain’s very soul and source of power. Ike sped up, activating Storm Clad to surge with his whole speed. It couldn’t be. He refused to believe it. But—wasn’t it possible? And if it was true, then those black-robed mages, and Shawn…
He shook his head and ran on. There was no point in speculation. He’d know it when he found it.
“Ike! Wait up! Ah, dammit…” Wisp sighed. Transforming into her spider form, she scuttled after him. Behind her, Mag took to the wing, though he held back a bit.
And further back, behind all of them, a ragged form moved.
