ELARION : The Echo Breaker

CHAPTER 14: Black Breath

The world above was preparing for war, but true death crawled beneath the ground.

Sector 4's drainage system was the large intestine of the Aurellian city. This slimy ancient brick corridor flowed with a river of black sewage carrying piles of garbage, rat carcasses, and concrete residue from the collapsed tower.

Ganda walked in front, dragging his feet in knee-deep water. His right hand gripped the slippery wall to maintain balance. The trembling in his hand was getting worse. Without Arok's medicine, his nerves began to scream for a pause.

Behind him, Niko trudged along, constantly pulling Elara's wrist. The architect girl walked like a living corpse. Her gaze was empty straight ahead, her mind still left on the surface with the little kid's ash-soiled shoe. She didn't care about the sewage soaking her boots.

"Ganda," Niko whispered, his voice echoing softly. "The map says this tunnel leads to the Northern Waste Reservoir. We are moving away from the border."

"Quiet," Ganda hissed. "The safest exit is in Sector 7 through the old ventilation shafts."

Ganda stopped abruptly. His nose caught something. Amidst the smell of feces and iron rust, there was another scent. Sweet. Like ripe fruit forgotten on the branch, rotting and bursting under the scorching sun. The smell of fermenting meat.

"Do you smell that?" Ganda asked.

"Smell what?" Niko covered his nose. "There's only the smell of shit down here, Boss."

"No," Ganda pointed forward. "The smell of rotten honey."

They reached a circular room, a former junction of large pipes. Right in the center of that room, Niko immediately turned around and vomited.

On the dry concrete floor lay a pile of corpses. Five homeless people. They were not killed by swords or sharp weapons. Their bodies had bloomed.

Their skin had split, and from within grew fine-haired black fungi. Their blood vessels had blackened and bulged out like tree roots seeking water. Their mouths were wide open in silent screams, but the oral cavities were crammed with white cottony spores.

"By the god of coin..." Niko whispered, backing up against the wall. "What kind of disease is this?"

Ganda approached cautiously. He looked at the walls around the corpses. There was a symbol painted roughly using black blood. A spiral symbol broken in the middle. The emblem of the Ruzkai Clan.

Ganda frowned. His past knowledge spun information about the nation from the West. The Ruzkai were a nation of wild warriors. Their elite troops fought for pure glory. They worshipped rage and physical endurance, fighting with bare chests, trading wound for wound, and welcoming death on the battlefield as a ticket to immortality.

Poisoning crippled vagrants in a dark sewer severely contradicted their philosophy of war. The Ruzkai did not kill weak people holding no weapons. This plague must have robbed them of their sanity and honor.

Slap... slap...

The sound of wet bare feet slapping cold metal echoed from the ceiling pipes above.

Ganda looked up quickly. "Above!"

A figure jumped down from the shadows. He landed on all fours and crouched low like a frog. His spine curved sharply at a painful angle.

His body was emaciated, wrapped only in a rotten burlap robe. There was no thick leather armor or the proud war paint of the Ruzkai tribe. Hanging at his waist were small bones, severed human fingers, and rat ribs that clattered softly like death's wind chimes.

His face was covered by a wooden mask carved to resemble a crow's skull. Through the mask's eye slits, a pair of yellow eyes could be seen, dilated wildly from hallucinogens.

"That's a crow mask," Niko's voice trembled violently as he pulled Elara to hide behind him. "A Sower. I thought poison shamans like them were just stories to scare little kids."

The Sower held two small rusty hatchets, their blades smeared with thick green herbal liquid. He didn't wait for a signal or challenge to an honorable duel. He lunged like a wild beast.

He jumped in a zigzag, bouncing off the sewer walls to the pipes, then sliding to the floor. His movements were chaotic and lacked any basic martial arts pattern, forcing Ganda to retreat to read the direction of the attack.

The Sower stopped for a moment, tilting his head to sniff the air.

"Your iron is cold..." his voice sounded wet from behind the mask, as if his mouth was full of phlegm. "...but the meat inside is warm. Fungi always like warm places."

He lunged again. His right hatchet slashed at the neck while the left aimed for the thigh. Ganda executed an evasive spin. He shifted his right foot in a half-circle, then pivoted his body away.

Sssss...

The tip of the Sower's hatchet grazed Ganda's thigh. His trouser fabric hissed and burned instantly from the acid liquid.

Ganda winced slightly. He tried to guard his left side, but the Sower had already jumped to the right. This enemy didn't fight with stances; he relied purely on destructive instinct.

The Sower landed, then folded his body backward unnaturally to avoid Ganda's counter-slash. His spine bent until it nearly snapped.

"He has no spine!" Niko screamed in horror, seeing the anatomically defying body movement.

Ganda took a step back. His eyes couldn't follow the speed of those wild movements. So, Ganda closed his eyes for a second.

He ignored the visual distractions and centered his focus on the sounds in the room.

Amidst the echoes of splashing water and the hiss of the enemy's breath, Ganda heard it.

Click... scrape...

A sound from the Sower's left knee joint. There was the noise of thick fluid rubbing inside the kneecap. The sound of a severe pus infection.

This Ruzkai was deathly ill. Every time he landed, bearing weight on his left leg, a micro-pause occurred as his nerves held back the pain. He was actually limping.

The Sower saw Ganda standing still and thought his prey had given up. His breathing quickened with glee. He lunged for the killing blow. He feigned swinging a hatchet at the head, then his body dropped drastically to bite Ganda's leg.

Ganda did not retreat. He had already locked onto his enemy's sound pattern.

When he heard the scraping sound of fluid in the enemy's left knee ring out sharply, Ganda knew the Sower would plant his weight there to launch himself. That was his weakest foundation.

The Sower jumped high, mouth open behind the mask, preparing to bite.

Ganda stepped half a pace forward, cutting off the pouncing distance. He rotated his shoulder and didn't use the sword blade. The distance between them was too tight. Ganda reversed the handle of his Dao, then slammed the solid iron block at the base of the pommel straight forward.

CRACK!

The brutal iron strike lodged right in the center of the wooden crow mask. The momentum of the Sower's own jump worsened the damage. The wooden mask shattered into pieces, and the nasal bone behind it was crushed instantly.

The Sower staggered backward, dizzied.

Ganda gave him no time to breathe. He swung his right leg and kicked the Sower's left knee right at the hinge point that sounded the wettest earlier.

SNAP.

The shinbone, porous from disease, folded and snapped. The Sower fell to his knees, hitting the sewage water. His wild attack ended as a paralyzed lump of crippled flesh.

Ganda advanced quickly and pressed the blade of his Dao against the Sower's neck. His right hand was still trembling, but the tip of his sword pressed against the enemy's jugular vein with absolute stability.

"You are a nation of knights who seek death on the battlefield with heads held high," Ganda hissed coldly, his breathing heavy but rhythmic. "Since when did the Ruzkai become cowards who poison sewer water and kill helpless cripples?"

The Sower coughed violently. Black blood squirted from behind the shards of his wooden mask.

He stared at Ganda, then let out a wet laugh, producing a sound like churning mud.

"Honor..." he whispered hoarsely. "Ask the graves of my fallen brothers what honor means. Honor cannot heal rotting soil."

He pointed to the broken spiral symbol on the wall with a trembling hand. Then he began to hum softly, chanting his clan's death song.

"When the grass turns to ash, and the horses stop running. The wind will carry the last seed of dead flesh, to plant a garden of life inside iron lungs..."

The Sower looked at Ganda and smiled widely until his black gums were clearly visible. "The prophecy has begun."

Ganda stepped back quickly. His instinct screamed danger. The black veins on the Sower's neck began to move wildly, swelling like over-pressurized balloons.

"Fall back!" Ganda shouted, turning to look at Niko.

PUFF!

The Sower's body burst open. Not an explosion of fire, but a pop of methane gas and biological decay. A cloud of black spores sprayed out, filling the room with a dense fog of toxic dust.

"Run!" Ganda ordered firmly. "Cover your nose and mouth!"

Niko immediately clamped a hand over his own mouth, then pulled Elara's body with all his might. They ran through the ventilation tunnel, leaving behind the corpse of the Ruzkai Sower that was now spreading death on the floor.

At the end of a tunnel, far enough away and safe, Ganda stopped walking.

He raised his Dao near the lantern light. At the tip of the blade that had touched the Ruzkai's skin and blood, the iron was starting to blister and rust green from instant corrosion.

"Ganda," Niko called out, his face deathly pale and his breath ragged. "Ruzkai in the sewers... if there's one, there must be a whole pack of them."

Ganda sheathed his damaged sword slowly. His eyes stared sharply into the darkness of the tunnel behind them.

The Empire was focusing its troops on the Eastern border, thinking the threat was out there. But this city was being eaten slowly from beneath its own foundation, and none of the rulers realized it.

"They are building a nest," Ganda whispered coldly. "We need to get out. Now."