I Will Be the Greatest Knight
Chapter 198: The Basement

Chapter 198: The Basement

What the following day held was something beyond the apprentices’ imaginations once it was presented to them.

While they all slept, Sir Gunnar had been tearing apart bedding in strips once again. When they all met in the same barrack the next morning, he offered every person a couple of strips of fabric.

He then showed them how to use them by holding up his own and fashioning one of them around his face so that it covered his mouth and nose. He took it off.

Everyone was given two just in case.

"From my understanding, there is a lot of poisonous smoke in the basement," the knight explained. "We will be bringing down supplies to seal the entrances. I feel that this is a required step to get the goblin situation under control. They somehow infiltrated the Duke’s Tower through a tunnel system... Er, at least that’s what I’ve been told. We will be going in blind, which is why I need all of you to have your partners’ backs."

There wasn’t more to it than that. After a brief breakfast, they reconvened in the practice yard.

Just as with the day before, the moment the sun was high in the sky, the goblins disappeared into various corners. It was hard to tell where they came from or where they went.

It made it all that much more frightening to go into a basement blindly, wondering if the awful creatures were filling the space.

Based on the sheer number of them, they would fill the basement practically wall to wall.

Since Gunnar was the one subjecting all of them to that, he lit a torch and decided to head down first, followed by the other two knights and their partners close to their backs.

Everyone followed slowly with their faces covered in cloths that were meant to block the poisonous fumes if it came to that. They hoped that it would work.

The first thing Gunnar saw was the hell that the place had turned into.

The basement was normally a dirt floor, but items were strewn all over the place, not leaving a bit of uncovered ground.

Not only that, but walls had crumbled down and dark caves went off in every direction. Gunnar counted four, but he suspected there were more in the further reaches that he didn’t dare go further into.

As he approached what was left of the armory and the space that Sir Phillip was most concerned about, Gunnar’s steps got slower as the visibility got worse. It was as if the air was thick there.

The clanking that Phillip was so concerned about before wasn’t lost on Gunnar. The uncertainty of it struck his heart.

Rather than being there to solve all of his questions, Gunnar remembered their true reason.

"Boards," he ordered.

Since the majority of the useful boards in the Duke’s Tower were in the basement, the apprentices had to push rocks out of the way to retrieve the requested items and hand them off to knights.

As best as they could, they sealed up the door.

However, when there were about two feet left of space towards the top, a certain clicking of communicating goblins filled the space, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

A giant gust of the toxic fumes burst forth through the gap in the boards and the ceiling. Everyone within the vicinity began coughing and trying to catch their breath.

With the smoke came more goblins. Their communicative clicks became screams. As they got into the smoke, they became frenzied as they tried to fight the humans who were invading their new looting grounds.

Irene was near Felix, whose eyes widened at the most horrific sound he had ever heard. Already haunted by the noise of goblins, it had only gotten worse in the wake of everything that had happened.

"Felix!" Irene pleaded. "He’s saying to go!"

The apprentice still grasped his sword.

"It isn’t worth sacrificing yourself," Irene continued. "You’re better for the duchy alive than you are dead."

Felix squeezed his eyes shut, but he felt Irene push against his chest to try and get him out of the basement. He relented, not realizing she wasn’t coming along right away.

Gunnar was bludgeoned as he directed the apprentices to get out of the basement. When he was on his knees on the floor, Irene momentarily forgot who her true partner was as Leif disappeared up the stairs.

The knight who chose her was grounded, and she immediately turned around to strike the monster with her sword. She sliced down its chest shallowly, but the monster still shrieked in horror.

In a more decisive show of her weapon, she stabbed the goblin clean through its chest, throwing it backwards on the ground.

As she attempted to right herself and retrieve her sword, she was pulled by her arms and forced to her feet by Sir Gunnar. With her blade barely in her hands, she sprinted out of the basement, following the others.

"Keep going!" Gunnar shouted. "There are many. We are no match as we are now."

As we are now... the words echoed through Irene’s thoughts.

What were they now?

Rather than a proper knighthood, they felt like a mismatched group forced to fight for their lives.

While Gunnar tried to inject intelligence and reasoning into each situation, there was still practically no rhyme or reason for what they had been doing. Every decision was made on the fly. They were all exhausted and simply fighting for themselves until more help could come to them.

They sprinted across a practice yard once well-used but now growing with weeds and other grasses that were invasive to the space. There had been too many monsters that entire summer to bother practicing. The apprentices were sharpening their skills with firsthand experience. Nothing was more valuable than that.

They finally made it back to the barracks and onto the second floor, where all of them seemed to collapse as they caught their breath.

However, once Irene was standing still, she couldn’t stop coughing for a few moments.

Ever since she was poisoned, she noticed that facing the poison was a bit worse for her than it was for the others who had never been poisoned. Perhaps it stuck around in her body more than she realized.