Round 2: Soulforged Vs Relt Peltfelter

[Relt PeltFelter]

The gentle sound of water trickling was the only noise which filled the ancient and ill-regarded Naiterwally Catacombs.

The tunnels were so old as to appear mere caves. Almost perfectly round, with low ceilings and a number of tight, hairpin turns, they had only ever been partially mapped by explorers. Whoever had lived in them had left no major traces of their lifestyles; there were no fire pits or shards of pottery, and indeed no actual chambers, just regular tunnels going downward.

Obscure legend held that the tunnels were dug by evil spirits fighting their way out from the lower world. The great sages of Althanas held now that they were fashioned as a sort of shelter by the earliest inhabitants of Corone, though the nature and identity of these first people is lost to time. These sages point to the fact that the tunnels were dug low on the flood plain as indicators of their antiquity, as it is thought that in times past that region was higher above sea level. Certainly there are signs that the tunnels once extended far deeper, and that the movement of the earth must have closed off some passages.

The local people of Naiterwally Village claimed the Catacombs were intended as graves for a race of monsters which lost the very first war with mankind, the war which decided who would rule the world (the world at that time consisting, to those concerned, of their village and the surrounding six or seven miles). They said that to disturb the dead of their own race is bad enough, but to disturb the dead of an angry species that lost to their ancestors is far worse. They made signs to guard against evil emanations, and avoided the windy moor where the tunnel openings gaped to the sky like leprous wounds. The villagers encouraged people to stay away from the Catacombs, in their quiet and polite local villager way. But the organizers of the Serenti Invitational are not local people, and that is why they insisted on using the Naiterwallies to host a fight in the second round.

There was a small shantytown surrounding the holes, built and maintained by archaeologists from some university somewhere. They were not happy about the tunnels being used for combat, but had agreed that the expanse of Tunnel A-3 was of limited historical value, shallow and unbranching, ensuring that the two combatants released into it would eventually collide in spectacular combat. Surely, the archaeologists said, these tunnels had been empty for a long time. The shift in altitude had brought them low in the water table, and in the wet season they were totally flooded. For the moment, however, the tunnels were totally safe.

It's a shame that archaeologists get things wrong so often.

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Relt Peltfelter, native daughter of San Francisco in the year 2025 and erstwhile Chinese food delivery girl, had not been enjoying the Serenti thus far.

She had passed into round two simply by virtue of her opponent's ability to suddenly and powerfully fail to be in the arena, and therefore having been subjected to a battle royale of flailing ungulate and screeching goblin. There were still bits of hippo stuck to her hair. Evidently the next fight would be in a big weird tunnel or whatever, which made her think first of Dig-Dug, and second of The Descent. Relt's experiences in caves up to this point had not been rosy, but fuck it, she had been punchblocked in the first round by some guy just disappearing, and she'd be damned if she didn't get to punch somebody this time.

The tournament representatives had handed her something as she entered the cave; it looked like an iron banana, but Relt was assured that it was a magical tracking device, allowing her exploits in the caves to be transmitted to the surface for the pleasure of the crowd. The girl just shrugged and jammed the thing into her bag, walking down the long-empty entry to Tunnel A-3

The tunnel wasn't actually very impressive. It looked as though someone had given Mother Earth a colonoscopy with a Roto-Rooter; just a long tunnel spiraling downward. Occasionally the wall would show a vaguely person-sized alcove, or a bas relief so water-worn as to be nearly abstract, but the only life down here seemed to be a bunch of fat, blind hopping critters and some optimistic scorpions. The ceiling was just over five feet high; Relt was able to walk upright and only occasionally viciously bang her head on a budding stalactite, but a taller person might find their progress a lot more hunched.

Relt stopped after walking downward for about twenty minutes. The tunnel was totally empty thus far, and pitch black; the organizers had given her a torch, but she preferred to use the bright digital glare of her cell phone's flashlight mode. She wondered if her opponent was lurking down here somewhere, or if he was still on the surface, being handed an iron banana and gently shoved down after her. She took a fighting stance and held out her switchblade, still coated in hippo blood, hoping that she looked cool for the spectators, who still regarded her with a sort of quiet, awed horror after the culminating events of the previous round, which are not to be mentioned under any circumstances.

- - -

Relt had missed a very important fact as she descended the tunnel. Tunnel A-3 goes down only one hundred feet. It takes only about ten minutes to reach the bottom, where a cave-in has evidently closed off further depths. Relt should not have been able to walk continuously downward for twenty minutes. She passed what had been the bottom of the tunnel halfway through her journey, at which point her magical transmitter's signal to the surface cut out.

More importantly, after passing this point, Relt failed to notice a change in the walls' texture. While they appear to have been chiseled by the same method as the higher reaches, which had been cut down from the surface, the digging of the lower tunnel was clearly done more recently. What's more, they had clearly been dug from the opposite direction; upwards, from below.