Chapter 27 #2
I waved at everyone before stepping into the mine’s entrance. Davina was at my right, Seiji just ahead.
“Please stay close,” he advised as he entered the inky depths of the mine. “I do have an energy shield I can erect at a moment’s notice. It hopefully will work against this monster.”
Aye, hopefully was the key word there. Still, I’d stick close. To guard him, if nothing else.
“In movies it’s always damp and dripping when you go this far underground,” Seiji observed.
“And has a ritual sacrifice at the end,” I agreed.
Davina muttered, “We’re in too dry a land for that. I thought we’d see lots of bones?”
Brandon had passed along what he’d heard this morning, about the tragic accident that had shut the mine down. Likely where her thought came from. “Anyone they couldn’t rescue likely is still trapped behind stone.”
“Ah. Good point.”
“Or they’ve been eaten.” Seiji cast a glance over his shoulder at me. “I know part of your argument for why this isn’t a living beast is there not being any scat. No bones of victims. But it’s very possible we haven’t gone down deep enough to find its lair.”
Deeper? “Should we write on the walls at some point? ‘The ground shakes…drums…drums in the deep. We can’t get out. They are coming.’”
Seiji cracked up and turned, bumping knuckles with me. “Lord of the Rings, nice.”
I loved that he knew the quote. He was a nerd like myself, then? Oh, that was brill, we’d have lots of fun conversations. Made him even more fun to date.
Davina was muttering again. “I’m two thoughts away from pissing myself and these two are over here cracking jokes. Did you decide to share the brain cell this morning?”
“Now, now, Davi, you know we’d only write on the walls after we killed the beastie.”
She rolled her eyes expressively, her head rolling with them. “Obviously.”
I cackled again, pleased my teasing hit the mark.
Also, it was a sign of how much a professional Seiji was that he could crack jokes with me while on a hunt. He’d clearly done this before and had nerves of steel. Oh, he made for a fine hunting partner, he did.
We kept going deeper. We weren’t too deep just yet, only about halfway to the point we’d stopped at before.
The tunnels were still relatively wide at this juncture, big enough for them to have rolling carts in, although I had to stoop a bit to keep my head from hitting anything protruding.
We’d stopped where we had before because the tunnels got very short, and narrow, and frankly too small to fight in.
I was more than a little worried about battling anything down here. It was why I had my dirks. I didn’t think I’d have enough room to wield a claymore.
Couldn’t say I was too chuffed.
We kept walking.
There was this feeling when you were underground, as if you felt the weight of the earth above your head.
You could feel how deep you’d gone, the pressure coming against you from all sides.
It was enough to make a claustrophobic person scream and run back to the surface.
I wasn’t the least bit claustrophobic but still felt uneasy.
Those old-time miners had nerves of steel.
They must have had to work here day after day.
Still no dampness, not really, but the air grew heavier, staler, and I started wishing for some sort of wind or breeze, but of course nothing could penetrate down this deep.
We hit the cave-in that had blocked our path before, which meant it was now time to make a decision. There were tunnels to the left or right and both looked identical.
“Flip a coin?” Davina suggested, also looking between the two.
“No,” Seiji murmured, staring hard toward the left. “It’s that way.”
A heavy pause, and then I asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to. “Leannan, you seeing something?”
“Oh, I see lots of things.” Seiji sank to his haunches and stared intently at something, some patch of stone. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Deliver us,” Davina sighed in a prayer. “All right, Seiji, go on.”
“So it’s not a demon.”
I let out a breath of pure relief. That anxious knot in the pit of my stomach eased up a notch. “So we can kill it.”
“Affirmative. But I know why there’s no scat or bones. It’s not flesh.”
“What the hell is it, then?”
“An energy beast.” Seiji stood, but he turned sideways. I knew precisely what he was doing. He kept an eye on the tunnel while he talked to us. “Rare, to say the least. They are pure energy and normally created from a great force, something involving sacrifice.”
The pieces fell into place. “Like an explosion killing dozens of miners?”
“That would do it.” Seiji glanced down the tunnel, and in the harsh light of my LED flashlight, his expression was grim. “I suspected it could be, just because of what we’d learned of the mine’s history. I can’t say I’m pleased, though.”
Davina came a step closer, peering around him. “How tough is it to kill?”
“Very. If I was alone, I wouldn’t continue. They can teleport through space and walls, since they have no physical form.”
“That does make it a wee bit challenging.” I eyed him, knowing he had something up his sleeve. He always did. “Okay, so what’s the trick?”
Seiji shook his head a little. “You Scots are a different breed. I tell you there’s a monster that’s hard to kill or track and you’re taking it as a fun challenge.”
“Oh, hunting a beastie like this is wicked fun.” I meant every word. I prodded again, “What’s the trick?”
“The trick is twofold. First, give me your weapons. I need to tweak them.”
I handed over both sets of dirks first, as did Davina. She mostly fought with dirks or a bow, really, and she had both on her. She didn’t like using a short sword in narrow spaces like this, and I didn’t blame her.
I had no idea what Seiji was about but somehow wasn’t surprised when he took out a Sharpie from a pocket and started writing on my blades. It was quick, the same kanji on both. Three characters, all simple in design, and then he handed my blades back. I studied them but I knew very little Japanese.
“What’s it say?”
“Koudansetsu, or properly, hikari de tachikiru,” he translated while writing on Davina’s blades. “In essence sever with light. It’s not active just yet. There’s a second step.”
He wrote on her bow, too, with Davina’s blessing. Then he took two fingers and swiped them down the length of the bow, then the blades, and returned to me only to repeat it. Now, the second he put his fingers to metal, I could see as he applied his own chaotic energy to the blade.
“I’m calibrating this so the energy signature is one beat off from the energy beast’s.
” Seiji explained even as he took the second dirk and coated it with energy, both sides.
“If it’s the same frequency, it doesn’t work.
So one notch higher or lower is enough to disrupt an energy beast’s form. Disrupt it enough, it dissipates.”
“Dissipates like dies?”
“No. It dissipates like… Hm, can’t think of an analogy.” Seiji paused, frowning at the blades like they held the answer. “It’ll disperse, in essence. Once it disperses, I can truly use my power and cleanse it completely.”
“Oh, like Eli does when she exorcises a ghost?”
“Yes, quite like that.” He extended his hand and I put my claymore into it, pleased he was doing mine, too.
Now I understood why he wouldn’t attack it alone. It had to be hard, trying to fight it down to the point where it went into a sort of stasis, only to turn around and have to hit it again with a powerful attack. Sounded exhausting.
The word exhausting reminded me of Mack overdoing it on our first case together. Suspicions arose and I gave voice to them. “If you’re forced to fight it, then cleanse it, does it affect you?”
Seiji finally looked up at me, eyes peeking up through his thick, messy hair.
His wiry frame was guarded, somehow, a wariness to his posture that I hated with every fiber of my being.
It spoke of disappointment, of not having the support he needed, of being forced to shoulder it all alone.
There was something there, in his dark eyes, a question of his own he chose not to voice.
“Yes. It affects me direly.”
“Will I need to carry you out?”
“Hopefully it won’t be that bad.”
He didn’t say no. Fuck me, Brandon had said something about even a chaos magician needing an anchor, but I hadn’t realized he meant it literally.
So the reason why Seiji wouldn’t attack this thing alone was because he was likely to collapse afterward?
! Oh, now that wasn’t a nice thought, not at all.
Something firmed up in me, a fixed determination. Like hell he was going hunting without me. From now on, I was going with him.
His expression shifted—into something like confusion? Like my reaction surprised him. “Oh, I can tell you didn’t like my answer.”
“Fuck no, I don’t,” I shot back. “You crazy man, do not go into a fight you’re likely to collapse from!”
Davina fake coughed to cover her laugh. “Like you’re one to talk.”
“Hush, you.”
Davina cackled like the little gremlin she was. Fuck me, cousins were worse than sisters some days. Always reminding you of the mistakes you’d made. Or the stupid shit you’d somehow survived.
Seiji lifted to smack a kiss against my cheek. It was the first time he’d touched his lips to me, and it was a nice little zing. Put a happy smile on my face. “I’ve got you two this time. I’ll be fine. All right, let’s get this done.”
I still wasn’t happy about this idea of him being in danger and not a soul around to help him.
We’d revisit the topic later, see if we didn’t.
Hopefully in bed, after a nice shag. We hadn’t gone anywhere near that level yet—no time or energy, and I wanted to properly romance him a bit first. But after this, oh, I’d spend time getting to know this man. Every inch of him.
I had post-celebration ideas, you could say.