Keeper's Justice
Copyright© 2025 by Charly Young
Chapter 35: Quinn
Quinn slid into the cave silently, moving like fog through the narrow entrance. He was fully merged with the Other. His senses expanded beyond normal human limits: he could hear the mutter of the Orcs a little ways down the drift, could smell the mineral composition of the water seeping through limestone, he could feel the subtle air currents that spoke of passages and chambers deeper in the complex.
His enhanced vision turned the darkness into shades of grey and silver. Every stalactite, every mineral formation, every crack in the stone was visible to him as clearly as if it were daylight.
He’d left Wraith and Rainbow at the cave entrance with strict instructions to wait for him to bring out the captives. Wraith had protested, of course—her hand on her knives, furious with the need to find her sister.
But one look at his face had thankfully silenced her.
The cave system was extensive, carved by water over millennia, each chamber and passage a unique sculpture of dissolved limestone. But Quinn knew every inch of it. He’d been here before, many times years ago—naked and alone in the dark, fighting trolls and orcs in brutal training sessions that had nearly killed him more times than he could count. Endless deaths and maimings while the troll women taught him combat, taught him to move in darkness, taught him to be a weapon.
He had hated them for it then.
He was grateful for it now.
Three orcs were on guard just off the main entrance, positioned where the natural tunnel widened into a small chamber. They should have been alert, disciplined, ready.
Instead, they stood like automatons, their eyes glazed and unfocused, their weapons held loosely. One was swaying slightly, as if drunk or drugged.
Quinn paused, studying them from the shadows. Something was wrong here. Orcs were brutal, yes, and not particularly bright, but they were superb warriors with sharp instincts for danger. These three moved like puppets with half their strings cut.
Drugged? Mind-wiped?
It didn’t matter—a puzzle for another time.
Quinn struck.
The first orc never saw him coming. Quinn materialized from the shadows behind it, the Dragon Whip already summoned and singing through the air. The lightning flash, thin as spider silk and sharp as monomolecular wire, took the orc’s head before the creature could even register his presence.
The body was still falling when Quinn was already moving to the second guard.
This one had slightly more awareness—its head started to turn, its mouth opening to raise an alarm. Quinn’s hand lashed out in a knife-edge strike, his enhanced strength and speed turning his palm into a blade that crushed the orc’s windpipe. The creature clutched at its throat, choking; Quinn ended it with clinical efficiency—a thrust of his stiffened fingers that punched through ribs and found the heart.
The third orc finally registered the threat. It drew its weapon—a brutal cleaver-axe that looked like it had been forged from scrap metal and bad intentions—and actually managed to swing.
Quinn flowed around the blow like water, his merged state making his movements impossibly fast and fluid. The Dragon Whip lashed out twice in rapid succession—once to disarm, the whip wrapping around the orc’s wrist and neatly severing the hand that held the weapon; then to kill, slicing into its thick neck and out. The head fell with a thunk to the dusty floor of the cave.
Three guards down in less than two seconds.
Quinn stood among the bodies, breathing slowly and evenly, listening. No alarm had been raised. No being had heard.
He moved deeper into the cave, his bare feet silent on the cool limestone.
The passage forked ahead. Quinn paused, extending his senses down both corridors. The left fork led deeper into the complex, and from that direction came the smell he’d noticed earlier—the rot smell of blood magic, the ozone tang of summoning spells. Dark magic was being worked somewhere in these depths.
But from the right fork came something else: the faint murmuring of children’s voices, soft and frightened. The scent of young humans, unwashed and scared.
Children first. Dark magic after.
Quinn took the right fork, moving quickly but carefully. The passage descended, narrowed, twisted. The air grew colder and damper. The walls closed in until Quinn had to turn sideways to squeeze through some sections.
Then the passage opened into a larger space, and Quinn found himself in pitch darkness. He closed his eyes. The troll women had blinded him and sent him into these same caves to fight rock trolls. He didn’t need eyes to perceive the environment.
He froze, all senses alert.
A slight noise ahead. The scrape of claws on stone. The rasp of breathing—the rank smell of trolls.
Two of them.
He silently moved closer.
They were crouched at a natural chokepoint where the passage narrowed to barely three feet wide. Quinn’s enhanced vision slowly adjusted, revealing them in vague shades of heat rather than light—warm bodies against cool stone, hearts beating, breath steaming in the cold air.
Two of them, smaller than mountain trolls but still dangerous. Cave trolls, adapted to living in total darkness, with senses to match.
They were more alert than the orcs had been, their small red eyes scanning the blackness, their clubs held ready. But something was wrong with them too—their movements were jerky, uncoordinated. They kept shaking their heads as if trying to clear away confusion.
Mind-wiped, Quinn thought grimly. Someone or something has been tampering with their heads.
The trolls’ heads moved around frantically, trying to locate the intruder they could sense but not see. Their nostrils flared, testing the air. One grunted something to the other in their crude language—a question, maybe, or a warning.
Quinn was already moving.
He scaled the cave wall silently, his enhanced strength and the muscle memory from countless training sessions letting him find handholds in the limestone that no normal human could have used. His fingers found tiny cracks, his toes pressed against mineral formations barely larger than pebbles, and he climbed horizontally across the ceiling until he was directly above the trolls.
Then he hung there, patient and still as stone, waiting.
One troll shifted position, turning slightly away from its companion to peer down the passage. In that moment, Quinn dropped.
He landed on the first troll’s back with perfect precision, his hand already thrusting forward in a strike that had been drilled into him through years of combat training. Not with a weapon—with his bare hand, reinforced by speed and merged strength, punching the vulnerable joint between head and spine where the spinal column met the skull.
The troll died instantly, its nervous system severed before it could even register pain.
The second troll grunted and swung its club in a wide, desperate arc—but Quinn was in motion, the Dragon Whip singing out to wrap around the creature’s thick neck. One sharp pull, one twist, and the troll’s head fell with a soft thump, and its body collapsed a moment later.
Quinn stood among the corpses, his face serene, cold, emptied of everything except purpose.
Five guards down. How many more?
He moved on.
The passage opened into a series of connected chambers, and in each one, Quinn found more guards. More orcs, a pair of goblins, even a hobgoblin that should have been too cunning to ambush but went down as easily as the rest.
Eight more kills in quick succession.
And all of them moved wrong. Drugged. Mind-wiped. Controlled.
Quinn’s unease grew with each body. This wasn’t normal slaver security. This was something else. Something that had taken brutal, cunning warriors and turned them into mindless automatons.
The daemon was storing spare bodies just in case.
Quinn’s jaw tightened. He needed to kill them all.
The final chamber opened before him, and Quinn froze at its entrance. He could hear them now—children’s voices, soft and frightened, trying to be brave but failing. The sound of quiet crying. The rustle of fabric as they huddled together for warmth.
There was dim light there from the phosphorescent lichen on the wall.
He ghosted to the entrance and peered in.
No guards. In the dim light he could make out a gaggle of children—he counted fourteen quickly—huddled together probably trying to keep warm. A cage of bioluminescent fungi and lichens provided some meager light, creating more shadows than illumination. The children looked terrified but physically unharmed. No obvious injuries, no signs of torture or abuse.
Small mercies.
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