Chapter 18 - The Night's Knell III

Claire descended upon the first raven to enter as soon as it was out of sight of the others. She stabbed an antler into its side, skewering it, before swinging the weapon again with enough force to send its mangled corpse flying into a nearby wall. A similar fate awaited both the second and third, but not the fourth. Having deduced that she made quick work of its comrades, the fourth bird acted with more caution. It moved slowly as it squawked out what almost seemed to be a report to those that couldn’t see into the bunker. Its diligence allowed it to evade her first strike. It killed its boosters, twisted its body, and pushed its wings against the air to alter its momentum and slip past her blade. The technique would have been sure to disorient an airborne foe, but airborne Claire was not. Unaffected, she removed the creature’s head with a second swipe of her blade and sent its lifeless corpse spiraling into the ground.

The halfbreed’s ears perked up as she made the kill. A series of loud thumps grabbed her attention and led her eyes away from the vertical entrance to its more horizontal counterpart. No sooner than she inspected it did it give in to the pressure. A black-feathered bird cannonballed into the barrier and broke through. Though it crashed right into her side, it didn’t do any damage and she was able to dispatch it with a quick swing. But that was where the good news ended. While the two entrances weren’t on opposite sides of the den, they still were far enough apart to make it impossible for Claire to keep an eye on both at once. She was going to have to split her focus.

Birds streamed in from both avenues, and with much more vigour than before. But even so, all seemed fine. Or at least it did at first. The ravens that came from the steeper entrance weren’t much of a threat. They had to turn at least once upon entry. She had more than enough time to eliminate them, even with most of her attention on the other tunnel. The only issue Claire encountered didn’t manifest itself until she finished dealing with several waves of enemies. And it came in the form of her equipment. Her frog antlers were durable, but they had never been treated or forged. At the end of the day, they were just ordinary bones belonging to creatures no more powerful than the altered ravens. They could only take so much punishment before they were beyond the point of use.

The first to break was the blade in her left hand. Its upper half snapped off when she used it to stop a head on charge. She had succeeded in avoiding damage, but she had lost one of the weapons she was using to fend off the swarm. And more importantly, the raven had survived. When the next pair entered the burrow, Claire found herself facing three.

She recognized that allowing her foes to maintain an even greater numerical advantage would only swing the battle in their favour. The burrow couldn’t fit too many birds at once, but the more there were, the more she would need to focus on defense. If the size of each wave grew, she would lose the ability to catch her breath. Her stamina would drain and she would eventually be overwhelmed. The threat of fatigue seemed imminent. It loomed directly overhead, but the halfbreed wasn’t the least bit concerned. She was confident that she would be able to quickly dispose of the third raven and revert the status quo before the situation spiraled out of hand.

The rogue pulled a dagger out from the wall and used it to dispatch one newcomer while swiping at the other two birds with her remaining sword. She caught both, but only one died. Her seated position prevented her from putting her back into her strikes; drawing out the full extent of her power simply wasn’t possible without the use of her legs.

Righting itself in midair, the two-time survivor charged at her. Its thrusters sped it up much more quickly than she expected and forced her to use both hands, one to guard against the attack, and the other to perform an execution. The sequence cost her the opportunity to catch the next pair as it entered. They were given enough time to readjust, reposition, and launch their respective attacks. Again, she was forced to focus on defense while another two ravens joined in on the assault.

Claire clicked her tongue in annoyance. The situation had only gone from bad to worse. All because she was a malformed halfbreed. She would have been able to avoid the problem in its entirety by flattening the third raven with her tail had she been more like her mother. And she would have been able to escape the encounter had she the ability to traverse the forest at top speed like her father. But she had failed to inherit either of her parents’ body plans, even though most other halfbreeds took after one or the other.

In spite of her frustrations, Claire was not in any immediate danger. She was warding off all four of her foes with surprising ease. She had been nicked a few times, but none of the injuries were particularly noteworthy. The attacks that had landed on her scales had outright failed to inflict any sort of damage. She was only cut where her skin was exposed, though that wasn’t saying much, as most of her body remained uncovered by her natural armour.

The rogue prepared herself for the worst. She thought that she was going to be overrun in a matter of moments, but apparently, four was the effective limit on the number of ravens that could simultaneously challenge her. Squeezing a fifth or sixth bird into the tightly packed space benefited her more than it did her enemies. They would start crashing into each other whenever she repelled their attacks and threw them off course. Some accidentally finished off their own allies, while others wound up in a crumpled, easily executable mess. The number of corpses left strewn about didn’t help either, and some birds even began popping into the room just to retrieve them and open up more space for their peers to fight. The black feathered avians quickly learned that four was the limit and refused to join the fray unless there was enough space to move around. If possible, they even tagged out when they found themselves too wounded or exhausted to continue, all to keep her on her toes. But the longer they fought, the less likely their victory seemed. Because unlike the birds, who spent every day in the presence of their predators, Claire lacked combat experience.

She grew more accustomed to the hunt as it dragged on. Her swings gradually became smoother and more refined, and her strikes more vicious and deadly. She was finally starting to understand the visual cues associated with her foes’ attacks and the timings required to counter them. She went from almost exclusively defending to eliminating a raven every few exchanges by the time her second antler broke. Much to her own amazement, the weapon’s loss barely affected her. If anything, she found it easier to parry the bird-shaped projectiles with one of her hands empty, an undesired truth that left her more annoyed than pleased.

The rogue wasn’t the only one to realize that the battle was starting to swing back in her favour. A distinctive deep squawk signalled all of the birds to engage in a sudden retreat. Even those that had been in the midst of attacking her turned tail and flew back up the tunnels. For a moment, Claire thought herself victorious. A very, very brief moment.

The illusion was shattered when she heard a familiar splat from just outside the burrow. Moving to the burrow’s main entrance and looking up, she was blasted by a sudden torrent of liquid. When it finally stopped, she opened her eyes to find herself staring at an upside down frog with its mouth gaping and tongue retracted.

Raising both arms, she braced herself for impact. But it never came. The frog was already dead. It was just a corpse, one being hauled around by a group of birds.

Looking up at the branches, she saw that there were more of them. A lot more of them. Dead, bloated frogs literally dotted the sky. The corvids were hoisting the amphibious buckets to the forest’s floor and dumping their contents into the burrow. The swamp water pooled on the ceiling. Rapidly. The muddy water touched the top of her hair, dirtying and dying it a shade of brown. Still, she didn’t panic, at least not until the third anuran was dropped.

The liquid the third frog spewed wasn’t swamp water. It was much clearer, like that of a spring or river. And more importantly, it pooled not above, but below.

Claire wouldn’t have been worried if all the water was sourced from the marsh. It certainly would have been a rather uncomfortable experience, but not a dangerous one. The burrow’s more vertical exit was nearly built into the ceiling; the swamp water was sure to drain before it could even cover her eyes. But the same couldn’t be said for the supposed spring water. It could actually rise enough to drown her.

All signs seemed to point to checkmate. If the birds’ plans were to be trusted, her only two options were to wait and drown or step out into the open and allow the rocket-powered ravens to peck her to death. Naturally, the halfbreed desired neither result, so she set her mind to thinking a way out of the predicament.

The first option she considered was to dig. Technically, there wasn’t anything stopping her from creating a third entrance and sneaking away while the ravens remained unaware. It seemed like a decent idea and she was very tempted to put it to the test, but ultimately refrained. It was too reckless. She didn’t have a clue as to how long it would take her to dig out an escape route, nor how much time she had remaining.

Her second proposal was to make an escape through the canopy. The ravens were much faster than her, but they weren’t as agile and had a hard time navigating tight spaces. Still, option number two was also soon dismissed. The halfbreed wasn’t confident that she could get up into a tree or guarantee an escape even if she did. There were too many birds hanging around; one was sure to catch her unawares.

Last was the thought of standing her ground. Handling herself in a four versus one filled her with confidence. She felt she would be able to hold her own so long as she managed to locate a point of defense that was less easily flooded. The proposition sounded good on paper, but it was impractical. She knew very little about the area and its landmarks. Stumbling upon the burrow had been nothing but dumb luck and it wasn’t happening again.

None of the ideas she came up with seemed particularly viable. They all had their obvious flaws, but nothing else was coming to mind. She knew that the rising pressure would only make it harder to think of anything notable, so she defaulted to the plan with the fewest glaring faults: digging. After grabbing all her stuff, she crawled over to a random corner, lifted her bone mace, and got to work.

Down was the first direction she dug. Fighting the ravens had taught her that she wouldn’t be able to leverage her strength if she didn’t have enough space to stand up, so she wasn’t discouraged to find the task much more grueling than expected. She was able to plunge the tough femur deep into the ground, but while the mace was significantly wider than her arm, it lacked the wedge-shaped blade that a shovel was supposed to have. She was only able to remove a tiny bit of soil at once, and the muddy consistency that the topmost layer had didn’t help. All the blood, oil, and water had made it more than difficult to handle.

It took a significant amount of time to dig a hole large enough for her to stand upright. She was enthused, at first, but all her ardour drained the moment she realized that digging did not, in fact, suddenly get easier just because she was no longer seated. If anything, it was only becoming harder. The water that the ravens poured into the pit permeated through the soil and turned most of it to sludge. The rogue was so frustrated by the development that she decided to punch the wall of her newly constructed pit. The right cross tore right through the mud, displacing a volume far greater than what she managed to remove through the use of her dysfunctional shovel.

For a moment, she stood frozen in place. She stared at the hole for a good few seconds before wordlessly reattaching the bone mace to her bandolier and getting to work with her bare hands instead. That, of course, wasn’t to say that she continued to punch it. Not even Claire was that silly. She started sticking her hands into the mud and either scooping or tearing large portions out from in front of her.

Log Entry 627

You have acquired the Digging skill.

Shut up Box. I hate myself enough already.

The combination of a better toolset and a brand new skill helped to drastically speed up the rogue’s advance. But after another few minutes of digging, she realized that she wasn’t going to be fast enough. The cave was already a quarter full, and she had only managed to make five or so meters worth of progress. The biggest problem was a lack of raw force. Tearing through the tree’s roots took a lot of effort. Worse yet, there were often large stones in her path. Removing them was difficult and required far too much time. Time she didn’t have. Based on how quickly the water was rising, she suspected that she would only be able to excavate another ten odd meters before she had to start digging straight up, and that simply wouldn’t do. Fifteen measly meters was likely to be well within the ravens’ detection range.

Continuing to dig didn’t seem like it would do her any good, but she had already invested far too much time and energy to quit. Fortunately, she happened to have a solution in mind. Without a moment's hesitation, Claire dumped all her ability points into strength and brought its value to 95. The change that came with tripling the stat was drastic. She suddenly found herself capable of tearing right through even the thickest roots without much effort. Likewise, the rocks that she had struggled to painstakingly remove were a problem no longer. One hand was all she needed to casually rip them out of the dirt and toss them over her shoulder.

Three skill levels later, she broke through the ground roughly a hundred meters away from the burrow. There was a large, thick bush right above her. She wasn’t able to catch any glimpses of the ravens right off the bat, but her ears were telling her that there were only a few overhead. Waiting for them to pass, she widened the hole and slowly crawled out of the ground and into the undergrowth.

Her cheeks slackened. A goofy grin appeared on her face as she pushed the bushes’ branches aside and looked towards the thorny tree. They were still working on drowning her. Not a single raven was actively patrolling the area; the only ones standing guard were situated around the burrow’s known exits, and those that were airborne were focused entirely on transport.

She had escaped. And the oversized pigeons didn’t suspect a thing.