Chapter 104: The Tomb of the First
Star Lance led the assault on the palace gates, throwing a spear through a Templar’s neck before she could swing her black blade at the Assassins. The woman gurgled and fell as four more Templars went down, taken down by Trueshot and Feather Duster.
Things looked good as the Assassins began to push the doors open. Mentor Overcast from Cloudsdale was the first in, firing her rifle through the tiny hole as she strafed to the side. Plenty of Templars went down, but some managed to retreat behind a few support pillars, keeping the second floor of the palace up. Most of the place looked unstable, seeing as it was an old heritage site, but so far it still had yet to collapse on them.
Star Lance ran through the doors and chucked a spear at a rifleman on the second floor. It pierced his chest and sent him tumbling down, with Lance grabbing the man’s rifle as it fell. With his new weapon, the Assassin lieutenant finished off the remaining Templars with the other Assassins before dropping the empty gun on the ground.
“All Assassins,” he spoke into his radio. “We’ve captured the palace. Now, it’s only a matter of time before the Templars learn our plans. The rest of you hold the city. We’ll search for the tomb in here.”
“Got it, Star Lance,” Feather Duster acknowledged in his earpiece. “Trueshot and I have the outside covered. We’ll keep the Templars from entering the palace.”
With the orders given, Star Lance pulled out the map from his coat and gave it a good look. The entrance to the first level underground wasn’t clear, but it had to be somewhere in this huge hall before the throne room.
“Search this place,” he barked. “There should be an entrance here somewhere.”
He used his eagle vision to look around, scanning the ground for any kind of trap door or hatch. The Saddle Arabian Assassins should have the advantage, since they’ve probably been to this palace countless times before. Mentor Shamal was close to the middle, surveying a clump of busts of King Sombra and a woman. It seemed the Mentor was onto something.
“Mentor Shamal… did you find something?” Star Lance asked behind the bearded man.
“No, not yet,” he mumbled, but kept his eyes on the floor. “Though, I’ve never searched the floor here. I didn’t think there’d be anything.”
“Star Lance,” Rose Petal said as she walked over to join them. “The busts, their faces are all pointed in the same direction.”
Star Lance frowned. He hadn't noticed that. It might’ve been that the people looking after this place had moved them, but he saw no harm in checking it out. He stepped up to the closest one, one of the woman, and traced his finger along an invisible line. It looked like they were all facing the back wall, just under the balcony of the second floor, where a brazier stood over a shortened pillar.
“Have you checked that spot, Mentor Shamal?” the lieutenant asked, thinking they were on to something.
“I’ve looked at it, yes, but I’ve never found a secret passage there or anything.”
“There must be one. We just need to look harder.”
Star Lance looked high and low around the brazier, hoping to find a secret switch or button that would open a secret door or something, although he did guess that it wouldn’t be that easy.
Think, Lance. How would they open this tomb back in the day? Secret button? Secret code word? Secret rites? Or could it also have been permanently sealed?
They didn’t have time to figure it out. Surely the Templars must know the artifacts were hidden here as well. Star Lance turned around and yelled for one of the Assassins; a woman with long orange hair jogged over. She had slings of C4 over her shoulders, along with a few rifles in the backpack behind her.
“I need you to blow a hole right here,” Star Lance pointed to the brazier.
“What?” Mentor Shamal wore a face of astonishment. “Star Lance, you can’t blow up a heritage site!”
“It’s important, Mentor. You know that. The Templars could come knocking any second now. We need to find these artifacts and get them to Steel- Mentor Steel Shine as fast as we can. We need to do this.”
Shamal still didn’t seem to want to do it, but eventually he conceded and turned away. “Do what must be done.”
Star Lance nodded to the Assassin with the explosives. She quickly placed a cube of C4 at the base of the brazier’s pillar before asking the others to step back.
The blast shook the old palace, but it still managed to remain standing, much to Mentor Shamal’s relief. The brazier had collapsed down into a hole before the sound of the large bronze dish could be heard bouncing down in the darkness.
Stairs.
Star Lance rushed forward and brought out a flashlight, pointing it down into the gloomy hole. They had guessed right. There was an entrance right here.
“Lieutenant!” one of the Assassins called by the door. “Templars! Incoming! Lots of them!”
“Hold them back!” Star Lance replied loudly and turned back to the hole. “We’re going down.”
The Assassins moved down the old staircase, covering their noses as they adjusted to the stale air. The cavern hadn’t been touched for a thousand years. The stairs were winding, but eventually the Assassins found themselves at the bottom, standing before an old, dark, circular room, shaped like a donut.
A few openings spanned every few meters around the exterior wall, while there was a big wide pillar in the center of their donut with more stairs leading down into the depths.
“Go! Search the place! We need to find that tomb, fast!”
One of the Assassins arrived at one of the entrances, but out of the ceiling, a large circular saw cut down so fast that Star Lance almost didn’t see it as it returned back up into its hidden slot. The Assassin slowly split in half from shoulder to shoulder, both halves falling flat to the ground. He didn’t even have time to scream.
“Careful!” Mentor Shamal hissed. “Traps! I should’ve seen this! Most ancient tombs in Saddle Arabia have traps to keep grave robbers out!”
The Assassins moved about carefully, but as fast as they could. They had a limited time here, and they couldn’t risk letting the Templars get down here.
Star Lance approached one of the openings, carefully looking at all its edges from a good distance. There seemed to be a small thin hole along the left and right sides for something to fit inside. The Master Assassin didn’t know what it held, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He picked up a random stone lying on the ground and tossed it through the doorway. As soon as it passed the opening, long but sharp spikes emerged from the sides, narrowly missing the rock as it landed on the other side, only for a plate under the rock to start sinking, sending larger spikes out from the ground in the expanse in front of the little rock.
He narrowed his eyes, allowing his advanced eagle sense to take over. Now that the traps had been sprung once, he could combine that information with his natural intuition to find a safe way across. It seemed the other Assassins were also getting the idea, throwing stones across the test the traps before moving in.
Star Lance advanced on the first trap as he flicked a hidden spear out into his hand. He found one of the small openings for the spikes to emerge from and jammed his weapon into it before sticking a foot past the trap line. The trap sprung immediately, but the one spike caught on the spear and screeched to a halt. The rest of the mechanism followed as each spike stopped at the same length as the one Star Lance had jammed.
“That turned out nicely…” he chuckled and left the spear in as he walked over to the next trap.
The second spike trap was incredibly easy for the lieutenant to cross. He simply avoided the pressure plate and was on his way into the expansive room ahead. The room was empty, except for a single stone coffin lying in the middle.
Star Lance approached it, warily watching out for more traps as he crossed the smooth ground. Thankfully for him, nothing happened. He unsheathed a hidden blade and slotted it under the coffin slab and lifted before stuffing his fingers under it when it was high enough. Lance gathered the strength in his fingers and pushed the lid off; the impact echoed across the whole cavern.
A single skeleton lay inside the rocky sarcophagus, its bony hands still wrapped around the rusty hilt of a ceremonial scimitar that had been entombed with it. Upon closer inspection, there was nothing spectacular about the sword inside; this was just a random coffin. Not the one he was looking for.
Star Lance muttered a curse and sprinted back out into the main cave, looking for the others. Rose emerged from one of the other tunnels, clutching one arm.
“Nothing there, Star Lance.” She explained her ordeal with spike traps, only to find a single coffin with nothing of interest inside it. “Got nicked on the way in, but I’m fine.”
The sound of something large hitting the palace above them sent tremors across the cavern, raining dust and small debris over them.
“They’re attacking the palace!” Mentor Shamal returned with a few other Assassins. “Preposterous! They have no sense of preservation!”
“Mentor Shamal,” Star Lance got straight to the point. They had even less time now. “Did you find any artifacts?”
“Nothing of interest yet,” he shook his head.
“Then there’s only one place left to check,” Star Lance said and looked down the staircase in the middle.
The group proceeded down slowly, flashlights dancing across the space to check for any more dangers. Once at the bottom, the Assassins found themselves staring down a hallway so long that their light couldn’t see the end of it.
“Well, great. More walking,” one Assassin groaned. “As long as there are no traps ahead...”
Star Lance led the group, but proceeded carefully. The walls on the sides had small candle holders modeled into them, but years of disuse and the lack of oxygen had already extinguished the fires long ago. After almost five minutes, the Assassins finally saw something up ahead in the darkness.
A door.
When they got closer, Star Lance put a hand to the door, noticing its rocky texture. He handed his flashlight to Rose and pushed at the door, but it didn’t budge, not even slightly.
“Is there a way to open these?” he turned to the Saddle Arabian Mentor.
“C4 should do the trick,” the orange haired Assassin from before smiled, raising her plastique explosives.
“Just watch where you put them,” Shamal warned, looking up to the stone ceiling. “You don’t want to bring it all down on us.”
“I’ll be careful, Mentor Shamal.” She got down on her knees and pasted the explosives to the lining of the door.
When she was done, she stepped back quite a distance with everyone else following her. She smiled and held up her detonator.
“Do it.”
Star Lance flinched as the explosion sounded across the enclosed space, the blast constantly ringing in his ears longer than he wanted. When they looked back past the smoke, the door still stood, though there was a small hole through it, allowing them to see the other side. To their dismay, there was a second door ahead.
“We’ve got to climb through,” Star Lance said, the first to try it.
He stuck a hand and leg through before trying to squeeze his shoulder down. It fitted just nicely, allowing him to scrunch up his body to get his head through. After that, the rest of himself was easy to get in as the Assassin lieutenant finally arrived on the other side.
“It’s fine!” he called through the hole. “Come on!”
The second Assassin to squeeze through was the girl with the explosives. She quickly got to work on the second door as the others made their way through the hole. This time, she placed a little more explosives on the door to create a bigger hole for an easier way through. So far so good, seeing as the ceiling had yet to collapse over them.
For a third door, the female Assassin was the first to go through, setting up her explosives before Star Lance and the others joined her.
The third explosion was as deafening as the first two, but they were somehow still unburied. Star Lance wondered if the tombs were protected by some kind of magical force.
Before the smoke had cleared, rays of light had already penetrated the space they were in. The small group of Assassins cheered aloud, their victory echoing in the cavern around them.
Just ahead of them, Star Lance could see it. There was no fourth door, but a vast circular room with a few statues lining the walls, each one of the woman he had seen earlier, but holding a different weapon each. Something sat in a chair near the back of the room, holding two glowing things in its hands, which illuminated most of the room. Star Lance recognized the armor the statues had, realizing whose tomb this was.
“This is it,” he breathed, turning around to face the other Assassins. “This is the tomb of Emerald Edge, the First Assassin.”
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The ancients went to a lot of trouble to make sure Emerald Edge's tomb wouldn't be discovered. Even Mirror Match warns them away from it. Are the Assassins sure they should be doing this?
Ah, that’s how you know this palace was Sombra’s.
One assumes that something is miss Edge. And the glowing things are the staff and shield. Cool.
Awsome! This reminds me of when you open the library in Revaluations.
Another 10/10. Now, it begins.
They kinda deserve what's coming.