It felt like we had been riding on Mugi’s back for about twenty minutes.
The tunnel still went on. In distance we had gone maybe six kilometers. No, we had gone at least seven. But there was still no sign of an exit. In a word, Mugi was amazing. Here we were, draped in darkness going down a rough and unpredictable tunnel. But still, he carried two people on his back. I don’t care if he’s the strongest Mugi of his race, it must have been tiring. But still, our Mugi hadn’t slowed one iota. With just his sensitive nose he cut through the darkness.
“Doesn’t this feel like a maze?” I asked Yuri, pulling myself up and close to her ear. “We could be running around in circles through the same place over and over for eternity, never finding the way out, and—”
“Stop breathing on my neck,” said Yuri interrupting me. What a cold response. I pulled myself down from her shoulder, frustrated. Wha-what got into her? I bit down on the base of Yuri’s neck.
“Ouch!”
Yuri twisted her body. I started to tickle her.
She struggled back. She giggled and tried to bat me off.
The problem was I was bored. How long were we going to keep riding on Mugi’s back? It would be one thing if I could see some gorgeous landscape or have at least something to look at. But we were still stuck in pitch-black darkness. I couldn’t even see myself, much less anything around me. Now that we had hit the thirty-minute mark, it wasn’t unusual for a full-grown woman to get impatient.
So I was getting a little screwy, and I had to release some energy.
Naturally I wasn’t going to mess with Mugi, the one carrying two people on his back all this way.
Even as his caretaker, there were certain lines I wouldn’t cross.
I bet he thought that was true.
Mugi suddenly stopped.
He let out a low growl.
“Not good…”
I panicked.
“Kei, this is your fault!” Yuri quickly attacked. “You and your little games.”
“C’mon, Yuri, you were enjoying it,” I replied. I can’t stand getting blamed for things that aren’t my fault. She’d been playing along a second ago.
“Grrr…”
Mugi’s growl grew stronger.
“Listen, this obviously isn’t the time to get into it,” said Yuri. Her voice was shaking. “This is the real deal.”
“We better apologize,” I said. “If Mugi were to dump us here, we’d be dead.”
“I don’t want to die!”
We agreed to apologize.
“Sorry, Mugi,” we said in unison.
But, right then.
Mugi was ignoring us.
“Gurrrrr,” Mugi growled again.
“Gyaaon!”
He suddenly roared. As he growled out, he jumped back about one meter.
Bright beams broke the darkness, lighting up wherever they struck, sending us to the wall.
Laser guns.
The bright lights exposed our position.
Accustomed to the darkness, the light made my head pound.
This was a big mistake. Mugi wasn’t mad at us. Sensing something out of the ordinary, he’d stopped moving to warn us.
Flashlights tore through the darkness. Not prepared for the bright lights after so long in the dark really threw a curveball to my optic nerves. Ouch! But I wasn’t going to let it get to me. Covering our heads with our arms we rolled off Mugi’s back.
We rolled up the wall and pressed our backs against the rock. I had already pulled out my heatgun.
“Uuwan!”
The now unburdened Mugi jumped straight to the heart of the enemy.
The light beams were suddenly darkened.
It became pitch black, again. The afterimages from the lights had been burned into my eyes. The streaks from the afterimages were crossed with pulses from a laser gun. In the darkness it was easy to hide, but also just as easy to be exposed by a light beam. That was painfully clear. But now we also knew where the enemy was. Taking aim, I squeezed the trigger of my heatgun.
The blast lit up the enemy and the wall together.
The rising flame momentarily lit up the tunnel.
I could see the enemy. The red flames reflected off their armor. It was them. I also caught a vision of a gaping hole in the tunnel wall. A short cut. They had cut us off and then waited for our arrival.
Mugi had kicked over a number of soldiers. Yuri sent the Bloody Card into the air. The number of armored warriors was surprisingly low. Not all the warriors from the open area came. Maybe ten had pursued us. Or could this be a completely different troop of soldiers?
The flame burned out.
I fired twice more, and then three more times.
Mugi maneuvered himself between the light beams and my heat rays. Yuri kept the Bloody Card flying. She was going for the arms of the armored warriors carrying the laser guns. We knew it would be hard to kill them with the Bloody Card, but if it could eliminate some of the laser guns, that would be a big help. That alone would put us on the offensive. The battle only took a few minutes.
We wiped the floors with them. They didn’t stand a chance.
The fight was over before it began. We got lucky that they had too few fighters in a narrow tunnel. The odds had rolled our way.
They were unable to return our attacks, and the battle had ended with the dense boom of an explosion.
The tunnel fell silent.
After checking on each other, we prepared to advance down the tunnel again.
Yuri took a flashlight from one of the fallen soldiers. Sometimes her sticky fingers come in handy. The light was off when Yuri picked it up, so we didn’t know if it actually worked, but pressing the power switch sent a bright beam of light, piercing through the darkness.
Within the ring of light we could see the fallen armored warriors, their bodies strewn about, unmoving.
There were six bodies altogether.
The other soldiers must have retreated. They had also destroyed the shortcut through the side of the wall. A giant pile of rock and sand blocked the hole up. That was the explosion we’d heard. It wasn’t pretty, but it had served its purpose.
Yuri and I went to take a closer look at the fallen soldiers. They were all dead. Two by the heatgun and four by Mugi. Among those, three had lost arms to the Bloody Card.
“Grrrr…”
Mugi came to us. He was growling strangely. Yuri pointed the light at him.
Wow!
Maybe it was from the brightness of the light, as Mugi turned his head away as the light shone his way. One of the fallen soldiers was being carried in Mugi’s mouth. (To put it correctly, he was pulling the soldier from the nape of his neck, well, the fine details don’t really matter. Basically he was hanging from his mouth.)
“Ugg…”
Mugi opened his mouth. The soldier flopped to the ground. “Nh… unh… nh…,” he moaned, looking straight up.
This could only mean—
He was still alive. This armored soldier wasn’t dead.
Nice work, Mugi! You just discovered a very valuable clue!