Moving towards Adam, Maynard sighed. The man was very, very dead. He had been on his last legs before Maynard had charged in, but now there was an extra hole where his throat should have been, and he had the same glassy eyed look that Callum wore. To Maynard, it seemed like the only people who were left intact were himself, and Philippe – but with Philippe the problem seemed to be other than physical.
The Mediterranean man sat firmly in the light of the guard room, shaking and still holding the withered stick out despite the danger passing. He seemed to be trying to look everywhere at once, twitching to face every single sound in the night, but slowly his tremors were gradually coming to a stop. His breaths became more measured, yet he was still obviously on edge when Maynard reached him.
“Dude, I need your help with Tommy. He’s been badly injured and I need you to look after him while I look for medical supplies. Do you think you can do that?”
Philippe nodded slowly before saying, “How… how’s Adam?”
“Dead. That… thing, it got to him before I could save him. I can’t help but feel that if I had been able to attract it’s attention like I did at the beginning of the fight I might have saved him, but I was too late.”
A heavy air was left over the pair of them after Maynard finished speaking. They both knew that if they had been better, if they had been more cohesive a group they might not be two and a half men down. It weighed on their minds as they lifted Tommy out of the rain and into the hut, even as Maynard hunted for supplies.
As he searched through the camp Maynard visited Harry and the other miners, but left them behind when he realised that they were safe for the moment. The three men had locked themselves up in their room, barricading the door with the table that Maynard had been playing on minutes before, and while it might not truly help against the shadow beasts, the lamplight was still flickering strong. Rapping his knuckles on the door, he called out, “Harry? you guys alright?” The heavy rain continued to soak through Maynard’s clothes as he waited outside for a response, knocking again when he received silence. After the third knock, he saw Harry’s head pop into sight and the window opened a crack.
“Mayn, is that you?”
“I don’t think a monster would take time to knock on the door politely, you know?”
“You might be right about that…” Harry replied, trailing off slightly as he processed his actions, “Did you find out what happened?”
For a moment Maynard was silent as he tried to order his thoughts, but as he realised that organising things was not helping, he simply said, “It’s over, and there are three bodies near the entrance. That… may be a bit difficult to explain.”
“Did you kill them?” asked Fred as he leaned close to the window and peered out at Maynard.
“No, but that’s where this gets difficult to explain. A shadow beast did. A shadow beast that my companion and I killed, at which point it kind of just faded away like smoke.” Maynard scratched the back of his head as he looked on at the men he had been playing cards with no more than five minutes earlier.
“You saw the beast?” Harry said, aghast.
“Yeah, I did, and now I need to find any first aid supplies that you guys might have. One of my companions is severely injured and we need anything we can get to bandage his wounds and treat them.”
At the mention of injuries Oliver chimed in and said, “There should be some medical supplies in the gatehouse. I know there’s laudanum, chloroform and some cleaned bandages there. You might not initially notice it there though, as it is in an unmarked box near the back of the room. The chemicals are all labeled, so once you find them you’re in the right box.”
“Thank you Oliver,” Maynard replied before turning back towards the place where he had left Philippe and Tommy. “I’m not sure what to suggest here, but I’ll try and get someone from Illham to come and clean things up here either today or tomorrow.”
Waving back at the miners, Maynard dwelled on the idea of where he would get the support needed for healing Tommy. The fresh bandages and archaic pain killers would help but he needed more to make sure Tommy would live. Unfortunately, in Silent City there was only one place that acted as a major respawn point for all of the Illham and Durley maps: the Illham College infirmary.
He returned to the gatehouse empty-handed, having glanced in all of the buildings that had not been drowned in the rain that only seemed to be getting heavier. Wet and downtrodden, he walked into the small room and saw Philippe fussing over Tommy’s unconscious body. The man turned to the door as Maynard entered, flinching slightly as the shadows in the room elongated. For a moment, they just looked at each other before Maynard shrugged in defeat and said, “If we are going to heal Tommy, we probably need to get to Illham College. I just have no idea how we’re supposed to be getting there.”
“What about the carriage?” Philippe replied as Maynard made his way to the back of the room and began opening the crates that lined the wall.
“Carriage?”
“Yeah, the one that’s supposed to be arriving soon. Professor Lockley…” Philippe stopped and his face paled. He took a raspy, deep breath before continuing, “Lockley said it would be here in two hours, but that was almost two hours ago.”
“I’ll clear up the bodies outside, so we can get to Illham as fast as possible. The less the coach driver sees, the quicker we can move,” Maynard said as he pulled bandages out of the fourth box he opened. Handing the bandages to Philippe he moved back into the rain.
“Are you sure you should be outside? You’re soaked.”
“I’m not going to get any wetter, am I?” He replied with a chuckle, “And you need to be in here to look after Tommy. Trust me, I’ll be fine.”
They separated once more and Maynard moved to clear out the corpses left in the wake of the shadow beast’s rampage, but when he arrived at the scene the only thing he saw was the corpse of the professor. In the place of Adam, Callum, and even the beast itself were three small boxes. Two were black, and one was red. With a sigh, Maynard moved the boxes into his inventory and watched as the list gained a faint tint of red.
Assuming that his inventory was now full to the brim, Maynard moved towards the professor and prepared to shift the body. Immediately he noticed an issue; there was no professor above the elbows. As such, he was forced to grab the legs of the corpse and drag it through the slick mud into the shade of a nearby alleyway. He placed the severed arms on the body, and then moved a few empty boxes to obscure what was left of Lockley’s corpse from the casual observer.
The entire process took less than five minutes, but he was left with barely any breathing time before an old man steering a horse and carriage pulled into the area. The horse whinnied, shying away from the area that the shadow beast had roamed through, forcing the driver to stop his carriage early.
“You the chap I’m supposed to be picking up?”
“It’s me and two others, but one of us was injured in the mine. You able to take us to Illham college as fast as possible? We need to get him to a doctor.”
The old man nodded, giving Maynard a toothy grin lit ominously in the heavy rain. “Can do. Just get him in and we can make our way.”
Maynard nodded back, and for the first time since he had entered the realm he began to relax.
