Jack Templar and the Monster Hunter Academy: The Templar Chronicles: Book 2 (23 page)

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “But I don’t think I ever will be.”

“Hmmm…” she said, studying me. “The bravado is gone. That’s a hopeful sign. I just hope the courage remains.” She took my hand and held it up in the air, spinning me toward the crowd. “The Trial of the Cave begins now. Cheer on your champion!”

The crowd exploded into the loudest cheer yet. Will and T-Rex, filled with tension, screamed their heads off right in front of me. Only Eva remained silent, looking past me into the dark shadows of the cave.

Aquinas walked me forward in through the gates. The cheering hunters stayed behind except for Will, Eva and T-Rex, who followed us into the darkness of the mountain.

I pulled out my sword and the space around us was suddenly awash in light. Xavier’s luminescent paint worked better than I could have ever imagined. It was as if my sword had been transformed into a giant lantern.

It caught Aquinas off-guard, but only for a second. “I see young Xavier shared some of his treasures with you,” she said. “Just beware. The place you go has been a world of great darkness for thousands of years. The creatures that live there may not thank you for bringing light into their domain.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

Eva spoke up, her bearing serious. “I found an old book once that described the ring being in a great room across a river, protected from any who would try to possess it,” Eva said.

“Yes, yes,” Aquinas mumbled. “A great room. But where? And protected how? These are the real questions. If the book is even accurate, that is.”

We came to a stop at the wide set of metal doors, crisscrossed by heavy chains and padlocks. Aquinas produced a set of old keys from her pocket and set to work unlocking each of them. Finally, the chains lay in a heap in the ground and Aquinas’s hand hovered over the last lock.

“Are you ready?” she asked. “Once you enter, the gate cannot be opened unless you have the Templar Ring. Do you understand me? No matter what, the gate will not be opened.”

I looked to Will, T-Rex and Eva. They watched me with a mixture of nervous excitement and fear. “No goodbyes, all right?” I said. “I’ll be back in no time.”

“You bet, Jack. Go get ‘em,” Will said.

“Just be careful,” T-Rex croaked, his voice trembling.

I looked at Eva, who stood with her arms across her chest. I nodded toward Will and T-Rex. “You’ve got these two, right? You know…if anything happens.”

Eva nodded. It was clear she wasn’t going to say anything, so I gave her a smile and turned back to Aquinas. As I did, I heard Eva say softly, “Do your duty.”

I smiled, but didn’t look back. “Come what may,” I replied. I nodded toward the gate. “All right, let’s see what’s behind door number one.”

“Good luck, Jack,” Aquinas said. “Remember what I told you when you first came here. You must find what you stand for. Not what you stand against, but what you stand
for
. Do you understand?”

I nodded, even though I truthfully wasn’t sure that I did.

“When you discover what it is, you keep it in here,” she said, putting her hand on my chest. “It’s only for you. For your power. A hunter with a strong enough
why
can endure any
how
. Remember that.”

“Thank you, Master Aquinas,” I said. “Just be ready to open the door back up when I get back.”

She smiled. “May you be pure of heart and ready for the task. Only a true Templar will pass the test.”

Jacques de Molay had said those same words the day he hid the Templar Ring. I prayed that the challenge of those words would not prove too great a task.

I nodded in acknowledgement to Aquinas, took a deep breath and readied myself as Aquinas inserted the key into the final lock, turned it and unlocked the gate.

Chapter Thirteen

A
great grinding noise filled the air as a series of gears and levers moved inside the door, unraveling a complicated locking mechanism that groaned from centuries of disuse. Some final bolt pulled out of place and the door bulged outward with a whoosh of air like a bottle that had been sealed under pressure.

I stood in front of the door, my glowing sword in hand, praying that Will’s hypothesis had been right and that nothing alive remained in the cave.

Only seconds later, that idea was blown away by a great, angry howl coming from deep within the darkness.

“Hurry,” Aquinas said. “You must get as far from the door as you can before the creatures find you. If you are to have a chance, you must hurry!”

Without giving myself time to think, I ran forward into the cave. Behind me, the gate slammed shut and the locks slid back into place. My heart sank at the sound. I was on my own. 

I held my glowing sword over my head, running through a narrow opening roughly cut through the black granite mountain. Xavier’s paint gave me enough light to see, but not more than ten or fifteen feet in any direction. After that, it was pitch-black. The passageway was covered in veils of spider webs that clung to me as I ran past. Suddenly, the floor crumbled underneath my feet and I was falling. In a flash, I wondered if this were already the end. Could it really be that I was going to fall to my death only feet away from the door? Weirdly enough, I mostly felt embarrassment at the idea that I’d been so careless.

Fortunately, a moment later my backside hit a rocky slope. My relief was short-lived as I started to slide down the steep surface. I dug my feet in, but succeeded in only kicking more rocks loose. I reached out with my hands, trying to grab onto anything solid. Nothing. I looked down below, the panic rising up in me. At first I thought it was just the light playing tricks on me, but, sitting up a little as I slid, I could see what was ahead of me: a drop-off into a black void.

I scrambled even harder, desperate now to cling to anything that could slow me down. But now I was surrounded by an avalanche of loose rocks and dirt. There was no stopping. It was starting to look like I had celebrated too early. I really was about to plunge to my death.

But I wasn’t about to give up that easily. I flipped over so that I was still sliding feet first, but now on my stomach instead of on my back. Dragging my hands out on either side of me for balance, I raised myself up on my knees, as if I were surfing. With a quick look behind me, I saw the avalanche of rocks beneath me pouring off the cliff. I was going to get one chance at this.

I gripped my sword with both hands and held it over my head, blade pointed to the ground. With a loud cry I plunged my sword as hard as I could into the ground, just as I felt my feet slide over the cliff.

By luck, it hit something soft and sunk in. I held on tight. With a violent jerk, my body stopped, my legs dangling over the edge of the chasm. One of my hands slid off the sword and I spun around, my whole body hanging in midair.

With a cry, I swung my legs around and reached back for the sword. I missed. I felt my grip weakening; any minute now, I was going to be an eternal addition to the darkness below. I reached again and missed again. Worse, I felt the sword move. Whatever I had dug the blade into was loosening. I watched in horror as the blade slid out an inch. Then another.

Summoning all my strength, I reached for the sword with my free hand.

Got it.

I pulled myself up just as the sword slipped out of the ground, reaching safety only seconds before the earth around the blade crumbled away.

I sagged on the side of the cliff, panting from the exertion.

The avalanche of rocks and debris continued to smash its way down the chasm, sending resounding echoes throughout the cave.

“So much for the element of surprise,” I mumbled.

As if in answer, a rustling, screeching sound erupted below me. Carefully, I leaned over the edge and held my sword in front of me. At first I thought it was a cloud of dust rising up from the chasm, but as the sound grew louder and my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I realized I was wrong. It wasn’t a dust cloud. It was a swarm of thousands of bats!

I scrambled to my feet and worked my way back up the cliff. Seconds later the bats tore up from below in a wild, screeching mass. They were so thick that it looked like a waterfall in reverse as they flew up higher and higher into the cave. A few of them separated from the main group and buzzed around my head. I waved my arms to shoo them away, but it was no use. The few turned into dozens, and soon I was surrounded by a buzzing cloud of the little creatures. After my battle with the shriekers a few days before, these bats seemed more of a nuisance than a real threat. That is, until they started biting.

I felt the first little bite on my leg. Then another on my arm.  On my elbow. Then the entire swarm dive-bombed me, clinging to my body. They clawed at the joints in my armor. Tried to wriggle their ways into my helmet. I felt one trying to climb up my pant leg. Every time I swatted a bunch of them away with the back of my hand, twice the amount flew in to replace them.

I was in real trouble.

I stumbled forward, my hands in front of my helmet to keep the little devils away from my face and eyes. It was like I was the first food these bats had seen in years and they weren’t about to let it walk away. I racked my brain for a way out of this mess. Desperate, I reached into my backpack and pulled out one of Xavier’s grenades. Holding my forearm across my face, I threw the flash grenade at the ground next to my feet.

BOOM!

It exploded with a blinding white light and enough of a concussive blast to spray me with dirt and shards of rock. Most importantly, the bats shrieked and lifted off into the air, flying back into the gloom of the cave. I felt a little bite on my calf and reached up my own pant leg to pull out the one that had crawled up there. I held it, a pinched finger holding each webbed wing, and studied it. Its little face was dominated with massive black eyes, an adaptation from living in the dark. It screamed at me and bared a row of sharp teeth, freakishly oversized for the creature’s tiny head. 

“Sorry, you’ll have to find something else to eat today,” I said, and tossed it up into the air. With a scream, it flapped its wings and flew off to join the swirling column of its still-hungry friends.

I spotted a path worn into the side of the sloped rock face a few yards below where I stood. Quickly, I crawled to it and headed deeper into the cave, leaving the screeching bats behind me.

The light from the glowing paint on my sword was only half as bright as when I had started. The tumble down the rock slope had scraped it completely off in several places and the rest of it was dull from small scratches. I was having a tough time picking my way over the rough cave floor with the limited light so I stopped and dug through my backpack for the spray bottle Xavier had given me.

I wiped off what dirt I could from the blade and then reapplied the glowing paint from the spray can. Soon, the glow returned in full force, but it was the spray that missed the blade that surprised me. Little particles of glowing paint drifted in the still air, making a tiny glowing cloud of light. I sliced my sword through the middle of it and it swirled around in cool little light tornados. Under different circumstances, I would have hung out and played with the spray, but the sound of rocks rattling in the chasm beneath me reminded me that I wasn’t alone and that I had to keep moving. I put the spray bottle back in my backpack and restarted my hike. As I had absolutely no idea where I was going, forward seemed like the best direction.

For the next two hours I kept to the rough path carved into the cave floor. Sometimes it looked like a well-worn track beat down by years of heavy use, but occasionally it would turn into no more than a narrow path within a field of giant boulders. I wondered what type of feet had worn away the stone over the years to create the trail. I had a bad feeling that they weren’t necessarily human. Still, the only other option to following the trail was to strike off down one of the many side tunnels that branched off into the darkness. While some of them had rough trails of their own, I decided to stay on the clearest path possible.

I remembered Eva’s voice telling me that the ring was in a large room somewhere below. I reasoned that it made sense that the most well used path would lead me there. Or lead me right into whatever traps had been set over the years to protect the ring from discovery. Still, I reminded myself that finding the ring was only half of the battle. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if I were to find the ring, only to get hopelessly lost in the cave system. I shuddered at the thought of wandering aimlessly around the cave for days or weeks on end.

Even worse, I imagined what it must be like for my father as a prisoner in Ren Lucre’s dungeons, not only in the dark, but chained to the wall, living without hope. And that was one thing I still had. Hope. But with every step deeper into the cave, I felt the oppressive darkness press in on me, trying to stifle the idea that I had any chance of success.

In fact, the longer I walked without running into another creature, the more time my mind had to second-guess what I was doing. The underground system was enormous. If the room wasn’t on the main trail, it would take months to explore even just a small fraction of the system. And a ring could be hidden anywhere. I could have passed right by it over an hour earlier and I would never know. Just as my hopes were bottoming out, I heard a sound up ahead.

I gently crouched down to the ground and slid my sword into its scabbard to hide my light. I strained my ears to pick up the sound again. Without the noise of my walking, the sound came to me clearly. A soft, constant roar. There was a river ahead of me.

My heart leapt. Eva had said I had to cross a river to get to the ring. I was about to pull my sword back out when I heard another noise.

This time it came from just behind me.

First, I heard a rock tumble across the ground as if it had been kicked.

Then the soft wheeze of a creature breathing. Something big.

I froze in place, my hand already on the handle of my sword.

The breathing turned heavier—from a wheeze into a series of small grunts. Then I realized that the creature was sniffing the air.