Chapter 2

“There you are, scum.” King Barstol whispered.

They’d found their pursuers within fifteen minutes, two giant men dressed in red. Or no, at this point, pursuers wasn’t the right word. They’d completely passed by one another now.

At this point, they were the king’s competition.

“This is annoying…” The first of the men muttered, a solid brick of a human being, with bulging muscles the size of the king's head. “He didn’t say this would be underground.”

“Where it is doesn’t matter, Bruno. What does is that we get it before that treacherous king.”

“What even is it, Himil?”

“That… we don’t know. Our king simply said to find it.”

“So they don’t know either…” King Bristol muttered to himself.

“Find it, Sneed? How do we find something when we don’t know what it looks like?”

“We’ll find out.” The second man, Sneed, was practically a twig, with a nasally voice that matched his frame perfectly.

For some reason, seeing other people down here gave the king a bit of reassurance. Dark tunnels and a mysterious castle were mysterious, they didn’t have answers.

Generic thugs for a rival king, he could deal with those.

“Come on, Bruno.” The king and Oliver watched as the two men chose a door at random and walked inside. Neither made a sound until they were for sure gone.

“So it's a race they want?” The king grinned. They’d never been nearly this close to the two men before, and now that he’d gotten a good like the king felt almost excited. Beasts were dumb and predictable. Men made for much more interesting opponents.

Except for maybe Bruno, he thought, that man sounded dumb as a brick.

“What’s the plan, your majesty?" Oliver slowly peaked out from his hiding spot and stretched. “Do we want to tail them, pass them, or cut them off?”

“Pass.” King Barstol slowly rose. “They clearly don’t know the castle that well, we can get by without much trouble.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because the door they just took leads to the secondary royal banquet hall.”

“So a dead end.” Oliver smiled.

“And a massive one at that. If I was a monster, I’d choose a big open space over these cramped halls any day of the week.” The king spun around and glanced at the remaining two doors. One had its door blown completely off, which now sat on the floor with a rather thin layer of dust on top. The other still stood, completely sturdy.

“This one.”

“The closed one?” Oliver hesitated. “Not to disagree with your judgement, Your Majesty, but what if there's a reason that one's still closed. Look at how they barricaded it.”

The King knelt down. Sure enough, extra steel bars had been hastily welded onto the wooden frame, in such a way that clearly it’d been locked from this side.

“Interesting… But no matter! We go anyway.”

“But why?”

“Because,” King Barstol unsheathed his sword and slashed through the door. It fell down with a single strike. “This way leads to the king’s private chambers. We want to get down there as fast as possible, right? There's a shortcut.”

“Come on, you’ll see.”

The air changed the second they stepped through the door. Gone were the bones and the faint scent of blood from earlier. This place felt damp and abandoned, moreso like the kind of atmosphere one would expect from an abandoned castle.

“What do you think the treasure is, Oliver?” This time, it was the king who broke the silence.

“M-Me?” Oliver looked a bit surprised. “Hmm. Not sure really. Some kinda artifact maybe? Marcus had more money than he knew what to do with, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had something hidden down here that's worth more than a small country.”

“But one that couldn’t save him.”

“Maybe, maybe he chose not to use it, maybe that's how Marcus sank the castle.” Oliver shrugged. “What do you think the treasure is then?”

“No idea, but it’s something that Marcus clearly valued enough to try to save, even after his death. That letter must have been one of the last things he had ever written.”

“Well, one way to find out. I—”

“We're here.” King Barstol gently pushed open the door to the king’s master bedroom.”

Unlike the rest of the castle, the bedroom looked nearly untouched. There were no corpses or bloodstains in here, instead, the deep blue bedsheets were nearly perfectly made, surrounded by smooth wooden bookshelves on either side.

King Barstol kicked aside a spare book and marched over to the velvet tapestry facing the bed. “It has been a while, my old friend.”

“Does the tapestry mean something, Your Majesty?” Oliver asked.

“It was an old gift of mine, more than two decades ago.” The king gently brushed his fingers along the fabric. “A dragon, to represent the great fires of Marcus, and a raiju, to represent my great strikes of thunder. We fought together in the past, you know, back when things were somehow less chaotic.”

“Name a country, we’ve most likely fought either for or against them.” Oliver sighed.

“But those days must eventually come to an end.” The king gripped onto the tapestry, and ripped it right off the shackles.

Behind, a great metal door stuck out from the wall, smoother than butter and clearly twice either of the men’s weight.

“So that’s what you met earlier…”

“It should descend right down to the entrance hall. We designed this after a break in a few years ago, Marcus and I. Our castle back home used to have something similar, until a… better system was put into place. But Marcus decided to keep his. I wish it would’ve served him better.”

“But, Your Majesty, how are we even going to get that thing open?”

“With magic, what else?” The king grabbed his sword, and gently pressed the blade’s tip against the cool steel. It clicked once, then twice, then slowly opened with a crawl. “Come on. We don’t have time to waste.”

* * *

It barely took more than five minutes to arrive in the main hall.

The stench of blood came back in waves the second Oliver opened the door, hidden within the lowest past of the ceiling. “What the hell happened here?”

Like above, corpses lined the once smooth marble floor, with what was once a long wooden table cut into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle. What differed from upstairs was the sheer quantity.

Maybe it was simply the size of the room, or maybe because the monsters had broken through here, but the bones of men and monsters alike piled so high that King Barstol could nearly touch them while hanging from the ceiling. It didn’t paint a pretty picture about what had transpired a month ago.

King Barstol dropped to the ground with a thud, followed close behind by Oliver. “Carefull, the stench of monsters is strong in this place.”

“So, surely the treasure must be as well, right?” Oliver sounded hopeful.

King Barstol agreed, though he was far from the kind of person to ever admit that out loud. “Maybe. But stay on guard. Some of these monster corpses are too fresh for my liking?"

“I see…” Oliver bent down, where a bit of monster meat still hung off one of the bones. “These look smashed. Do you think whatever did this is still down here?”

“I can’t tell you if whatever did this is alive or dead, but if it was able to kill all these…” King Barstol kicked a few bones aside. “Then there's most likely not much that could hurt it down here.”

“Fun.” Oliver scowled. “Let’s hope we don’t run into it.”

Unfortunately, that hope didn’t last long.

They found the beast guarding the stairs leading downstairs—the only stairs that lead below the first floor in the entire castle.

It was a ginormous beast, with eyeballs that covered its skin like scales, all spinning like tops. A great tongue slithered like a snake from its mouth.

“What the hell is that…” Oliver’s eyebrow rose. “I’ve never seen a monster such as that.”

“You wouldn’t have. Monsters of that sort aren’t natural.” King Barstol scowled.

“Natural?”

“Those nightmarish creatures, with eyes or ears or whatever that cover their skin, those are the kind of beasts that only man's magic could create.”

“So it's leftover from the battle…” Oliver grinned. “Well, the least we can do is clean house a bit.”

King Barstol grinned. “For once, we can agree, Oliver.”

The king pointed his sword toward the beast, and let his magic fly.

But this time his bolt didn’t do much. The monster roared, a roar of annoyance more than anger, then twisted back toward the two men, faster than a creature of its size should’ve had the capability to move.

A rustling came from behind the two men.

King Barstol smiled. “Perfect.”

“What are you standing around for?” Oliver leaped forward, arrows shooting from his bow like a legion of crossbows. “Same plan as the last one?”

“What else?”

They both charged as the monster roared. Oliver with his arrows, and King Barstol with his sword of lightning. Neither were close to enough.

The beast swung its eye covered hands like tree trunks. Dust and rubble filled the air as the two men continued their attacks. But, no matter what they did, the beast shrugged every hit off like a paper cut.

King Barstol’s lightning barely scratched the beast, while Oliver’s arrows, the few that actually pierced through its outer eyeballs, barely stuck an inch into its hide, and fell off at the slightest movement.

But King Barstol continued to grin.

“What’s the plan?” Oliver shouted, landing right next to the king.

“Just wait.” King Barstol leaped into the air as the beast did another attack, barely missing by a few inches. “We're being watched.”

“We are?” Oliver turned to look, only for King Barstol to roughly grab his head.

“Don’t look, they’re planning to sneak past us in the commotion!”

“Planning? What are you thinking, Your Majesty?"

“That they’re going to fail, and that we can simply take their place!”

Another thirty minutes of fighting passed before the two men dressed in red made a move. The nasally one, Sneed, made the first move when he stepped out from the preceding room. His strides were long and quiet.

If they hadn’t seen the two men before, King Bartsol wouldn’t have had a clue as to his presence.

But they did. King Barstol didn’t bother to think about hypotheticals.

“Wait for it…” Bruno slowly walked in, notably less stealthily than Sneed. King Bastol would’ve been able to notice his presence pretty easily, even with the fight going on.

But still, the king wasn’t one for hypotheticals.

“Wait for it…”

The two men made it closer by the second to the stairs.

“Wait for it… Now!” The king screamed with the force of a cannonball.

Oliver acted first. He sent a volley of arrows raining down at the two men. They jumped out with the force of trained soldiers and faced Oliver.

But those arrows were never meant to hit.

They existed to attract the attention of the beast.

“Go, now, Your Majesty! Get the treasure!”

“But—”

“Ill be fine!” Oliver shouted. “This is your chance.”

“And that it is.” King Barstol sighed and gave a slight nod to Oliver. Neither of the men knew if they’d see each other again. “Thank you, Oliver. I won’t let this be forgotten.”

With those parting words, he ran down the stairs.