Immortal Swordslinger 1 by Dante King

Author:Dante King [King, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

“So, this is the Ember Cavern.” Vesma peered around as we walked down the tunnel, her features illuminated by the red glow of the wall. The light that gave others a hellish appearance somehow accentuated the prettiness of Vesma’s heart-shaped face and brought out the rich red of her lips. With her usual cynicism replaced with an expression of curiosity, she looked better than I’d ever seen her.

Not that I would risk telling her that. It didn’t seem like the sort of compliment she would appreciate.

“I forgot that you guys hadn’t been in here before,” I said.

“Just you and Hamon.” She raised an eyebrow. “Some special male alone time.”

“Ugh,” I said. “If you didn’t want to think about him that way, what makes you think I would?”

“All that tension between you two; sometimes, that means something special, right Kegohr?” she asked as he nudged him with her elbow.

Kegohr didn’t respond but kept staring down the tunnel, his two-handed mace clutched tightly in front of him.

“Are you all right, Kegohr?” I asked. I’d never seen him like this before. Normally, he was the one keeping up the conversation, even when training left us breathless or unable to string together a coherent thought. But now, he strode along silently, looking grim even by the standards of the place.

“Oh, gods!” Vesma slapped a hand against her forehead. “I should have thought of this.”

“Thought of what?”

“Kegohr’s been into a Vigorous zone before. Several times, back home.”

“Did he get hurt there?”

“No, but…”

“But I haven’t been back,” Kegohr rumbled. “Not since my parents died.”

I didn’t know what to say. Assholes like Hamon were usually the ones to mention Kegohr’s parents, and then as a source of mockery. I hadn’t thought about how little Kegohr talked about them, or how it was all in the past tense.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You know what a tainted guild is?” Kegohr asked.

“No.”

“Imagine if everyone in a guild was an evil fucker, from the highest master to the lowliest initiate. People who would do anything, however cruel and wretched, to increase their power. That’s a tainted guild.

“I came back from the Vigorous zone one day. I’d been hunting for cores. It had left me full of power, feeling like I could take on the world. I was through my front door before I even realized that anything was wrong.

“My da was there, lying on the floor, dead. There’s this thing the tainted guilds do, where they find an Augmenter’s channels and they dig them out. Suck the power dry so they can empower themselves. To do it, they keep the victim alive, so the power still flows. Keep them alive as long as they can while the butchery goes on, and they eat what they’ve taken. Imagine what a body looks like after that. Imagine finding your dad that way.

“They were still there, eight of them, with their black knives and the fire glowing in their eyes. They had my mum, still alive, but cut, battered, bleeding, bent over the table.

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