Chapter 145

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After Grud got his hands on the Blood Priest's comb, he ordered everyone to vacate the room so he could have an easier time isolating the different smells with his enhanced sense of smell.

After he got a good sense of the Blood Priest's scent, Grud started sniffing around the room, and he did not like the thought of it. He would have much preferred sniffing the scent of beautiful women, but here he was, smelling the scent of an old man.

Grud's sniffing brought him to three main spots, the bed, the dresser where he got the comb, and an attached room that was filled with herbs and a big copper cauldron. But as strong as those smells were, they were not the freshest scent he had come across in the room. The freshest scent seems to be coming from a tapestry hanging on the wall.

Grud pulled the tapestry aside, only to find a wall like any other in this mine, cracks and all. But as Grud sniffed some more, he noticed that the tapestry and wall shared the freshest scent. So, Grud literally put his nose to the wall and started sniffing. This eventually brought him down on all fours as he was sniffing a stone that looked big enough for a slim person to fit through.

When he tried to see if the rock could be pried pr pushed away, he found that it was solidly in place, but that did not deter Gurd, as he was confident in his nose, and his nose was pointing him to this stone.

So Grud resorted to the tried and true knock test. With a knuckle, he started knocking on different parts of the wall. When he got to the stone at the very bottom, it sounded hollow.

Grud smiled as he empowered his fist with mana and punched the hollow-sounding stone, shattering it, only to reveal that it was barely held up by wood.

When Grud looked in the hole, there was only darkness, but with his enhanced vision, which allowed him to see in low light, He could tell that the crawl space was around a meter deep before expanding to a wider area. Seeing the size of the hole, he knew that there was no way he was fitting in, so he called his men to go in and see where the hidden passage led.

But even among Grud's men, none of them could fit through the hole, so Grud had to send his men to bring the skinniest among his men who were in the other tunnels.

Sometime later, twenty men with slimmer builds came back. From their looks, they were of Newland heritage.

The first man to enter had to shed his armor to fit in the hole and could only afford to bring a shortsword and a lit torch. But when the man entered the hole up to the mid-thigh, Grud heard a sound he was familiar with, the sound of meat being stabbed. 

A second after that stabbing sound, the man in the crawl space went limp as Grud pulled the man out by his leg, only to find he had been stabbed tight through his neck, severing the spine.

This brought a round of cursing and swearing from Grud and his men. When things calmed down, Grud posted two men to guard the hole and gestured the rest of his men out of the room. When they were out of the room, he gathered his men in a huddle and spoke softly.

"Going in there is not an option. We would just be feeding bodies for that bastard to kill. What we need to do is smoke the hole and hope that the cave beyond does not have too big a ventilation." Grud said.

"But Chieften, if that is the case, would smoking him even work?" one of the men in the huddle asked.

"I should assume so. If he had anywhere else to go, he would not have needed to kill the first man instead of running away through some hidden exit. So he is most likely trapped like a rat, we can only hope the cave he is in is an enclosed space." Grud replied.

When there were no more forthcoming questions, Grud broke the huddle by giving his men instructions, and soon, there was a fire built in the crawl space that Grud's men were fanning.

Ten minutes into smoking the hole, Grud heard the first coughs from the other side of the crawl space, which told everyone that they were onto something. A minute later, there were the sounds of feet shuffling, followed by water being splashed from the other end of the hole, but that made things worse. The moment the water touched the hot embers, it kicked up a thick plume of smoke that Grud's men furiously fanned back into the hole. This caused the coughing from the other side to worsen.

A few minutes of coughing later, a voice came from the other end of the crawl space, "I surrender! Stop the smoke! I will come out."

Grud's men looked to him for confirmation. But Grud answered by shaking his head and tossing a piece of wood on what embers survived the douse of water. Without any words, his men got the message that he wanted the Blood Priest to be smoked to death. So they stoked the fire and fanned the flames to make sure the Blood Priest would die choking on smoke.

In the span of ten minutes, the choking transitioned to wheezing, and eventually silence. But just to be safe, they smoked the place for another ten minutes before they sent a man in to retrieve the body.

After putting out the flames and giving the surrounding rock some time to cool off, another skinny man was sent in with some rope, and soon, a soot-covered body was dragged out.

To identify the body, the women were once again called in, and they washed the face of the body. And indeed, it was the Blood Priest. "Cut his head off and put it on a stick outside the mine." Grud told his men before turning to the exit. There were still the sounds of fighting from the other tunnels, and Grud thought this conflict had drawn out long enough.

***

An hour later, the only people left were Grud's men and the women who the Blood Ascendants captured. But even with all the enemies dead, there was still much to do, namely clearing the bodies of the dead and sorting loot.

And there was much loot to be had, a few tribes' worth of loot, in fact. But besides a few interesting bits and baubles that Grud took for himself, the rest went to his men, and they saved some valuables to pass on to the families of those who had fallen in battle.

After all that was settled, the only situation left unresolved was the women that they rescued. So Grud gave them a few choices; they could strike out on their own if they wanted, but Grud highly discouraged that course of action. They could find friends or family from other tribes to take them in, and Grud would provide an escort. Or they could follow Grud and join his tribe.

When Grud laid out the choices, one particularly bruised woman with dead eyes stood up and walked out into the cold, soon followed by two others. Grud wanted to prevent them from ending their lives and tried to stop them. However, after seeing the look in their soulless eyes staring back at him, Grud felt conflicted but eventually let them go. He had seen what they had been through, and as much as he did not want to see them die, he could not bring himself to take what little control of their lives they had left. So he let them go out into the land of white snow, and said a small prayer to the spirits and ancestors to let their end be painless when they go into their final rest.

As for the remaining women, a quarter of them had family in other tribes, while the rest of them opted to join Grud's tribe. But before they did anything closely related to traveling, Grud and his men needed to get patched up and get some rest.

Weeks later, Grud returned to his chiefdom with his men and new women in tow. And there waiting for his was his wives who greeted him with hugs and kisses.

As his women surrounded him, he was tempted to find a way to stack them all on his shoulders and run back home to ravage them, but with time came maturity, patience, and self-control. 

So Grud held back urges and directed his wives, who were the defacto matriarchs of the chiefdom, to take care of the rescued women and get them settled, because as strong and powerful as Grud was, some things needed a gentler touch.

But before his wives and the other women of the tribe whisked the rescued women away, Grud pulled Reta aside, dug inside his coat where it was warm, and took out a few damp cloths. When he unwrapped one of them, inside was a red moss that they took from where the Blood Priest was hiding.

It only took a whiff of the red moss to recognize that it was the same scent he smelled on the breath of all the Blood Ascendants, and it did not take a genius to put two and two together to guess that the red moss was what turned the Blood Ascendants into raving lunatics.

Grud passed the wrapped-up red moss and asked Reta to find a dark place to plant the red moss and warned her about its effects.

After Reta left to do Grud's bidding, he went around his chiefdom to check in on his grown-up children and his daughter-in-law, whose husband was killed by the Blood Ascendants. He would be the one to tell her that vengeance has been delivered.

When the news was delivered, his daughter-in-law broke down crying, and his granddaughter joined her. The only thing Grud could do was hug both of them until they calmed down. After reassuring them that they were family and always welcome in their home, he went back home to greet his younger children who were still living with him.

After Grud got cleaned up and lay down on the soft bed he had been away from for months, he realized the months of trudging in the snow and not sleeping well had taken an unconscious toll on him, and his eyes grew heavy.

Grud did not fight it and closed his eyes.

***

Grud slowly returned to the waking world covered in warmth and feeling a wet suction on his whole dickshaft while his hard, bloated, and backed-up blue balls were being kneaded just the way he liked it. 

Grud wanted to open his eyes, but was unable to due to the soft and heavy fleshy objects resting on his face. He knew what was obstructing his vision but was in no hurry to remove them.

Just then, Grud heard Nita speak, "Ah, I can feel him trying to open his eyes. Dear husband, we see you have worked hard. So just rest your face in my breast, and let us take care of the rest."