The Decaying

Chapter One – Spike’s Gemstone Hunting Trip

Spike walked with a mining helmet and a wooden basket to his favorite gemstone-rich cave. Before going into the cave, he turned on his helmet’s light. Its light crystal shot out an array of white light like a flashlight. He completely ignored checking walls for any gems. Because He and yearly miners cleaned out everything near the entrance, he unexpectedly saw many creatures near the cave opening that usually inhabited deeper underground caverns.

Spike thought that they moved to this location to get food easier. Their eyes shined when he put his light on them while they cuddled up with each other. There were bats, lizards, insects, and other life forms that he had not seen before. He just walked past them in deeper of the cave without them bothering him all. After a couple of minutes later, Spike finally reached his secret spot that it was blessed with lots of tasty gemstones.

When he shined his light in front of him, the walls, ground, and ceiling sparkled like a starry night. There were garnets, rubies, topazes, and other exotic gems everywhere in this area. Spike drooled to the ground from his excitement as his eyes grew super wide like a foal was in a candy shop. He greedily started to fill his basket with gems that were bent into the ground. His powerful claws had no issue with getting gemstones from their rocky prisons. He did not notice a skeleton was in the farthest corner in this area that closely watched him.

After a few moments of watching him, it hatched a clever plan in its nonexistent mind to get Spike to fall into its trap. It found the most enormous and shiny gemstone that it would find. Then it cast an influential want spell on the gem to increase the effectiveness of its bait. Now, it was a waiting game for the skeleton’s newest victim to take the bait.

Spike put the last gem to fill his basket to its full capacity. In the corner of his eye, he saw the hugest and shinest gemstone that his eyes ever laid on was at one of the corners of the cave. The wanting feeling quickly consumed him to collect the motherload of a gem. He slowly walked toward it with his drool pouring out from his mouth. Meanwhile, the skeleton took one of its sharp ribs from his chest with the pure black liquid all over it, which would use this body part to wound and infect the little dragon with a nasty disease. It just needed to wait for the perfect time to strike.

After a couple of moments later, Spike entered its attack range while reaching the crystal with one of his hands. The skeleton slashed both of his legs open and cast a knockout spell on him with a single swift movement. He passed out from its magic and fell in front of it with a nasty thud. Lucky, his mining helmet saved him from having a concussion. Spike’s body did not land into the pool of the black liquid. This direction of his fall was one of the steps in the skeleton's master plan. It reassembled its body and put its rib back like a jigsaw puzzle.

Then it returned all of the rotting texture liquid into its chest container before sealing up the canister. There were a lot of aminals’ bones were revealed when the fluid was removed. They were remainings of their owners that unfortunately fell in this substance. The living skeleton stepped on some of them as it made the way to Spike. They were crushed and made a cracking sound under its hooves. The skeleton was not bothered by the new noise that it made.

The cracking echoes lingered in the cavern as it moved Spike on his back with its magic. Then it closely inspected his legs’ wounds and gave a silent approval to them. There were nasty slashes below his knees that the virus quickly turned his blood into a mess of black rotting substance.

The only thing for the skeleton to do is the final step of its master plan. It easily teleported itself, Spike, and his stuff to the entrance of the cave. Then it materialized an emergency flare gun from existence and fired it into the sky before returning to its ambush spot. The flare glowed up a blight red and attracted more victims for its owner to infect them with the virus.