“Run!” Tailyn yelled as he took off. Nobody objected, and the group circled back around to the edge of the quarry.
“It worked,” Valia exclaimed. “Nice job, Tailyn!”
The guards were gone, having all rushed off to figure out what had happened on the road. They might have even been going to restore the protection, but that didn’t matter. In that moment, they were gone. The green lixes looked around in confusion — their overseer had also gone missing.
Tailyn picked up a stone and threw it through the dome. It passed through the shield without a problem, telling him the protection just held back the poisoned air.
“Shall we?” the boy asked with barely concealed excitement. “We need to get into that building. That’s where they took the mage, so that’s where the main black lix must be. The entrance to the tomb has to be there, too!”
“Let’s do it,” Valanil said, checking her quick access slots. “Everyone ready? Go!”
Leaping the wall wasn’t a problem. Even with how tall it was, it was still much lower than where the group had been lying. The protective field let them through without a delay or triggering an alarm system. Tailyn summersaulted as he landed, noticed out of the corner of his eye that Valia was in her usual spot on the lix’s back, and dashed off as fast as he could in the direction of the two-story building. None of the green lixes reacted in the least. As the group sprinted by, they just looked around and waited for their overseer — it didn’t occur to any of them that they could take off.
“There’s the door!” The lix got to the building first. Valia leaped off his back, leaving him to get to work. For some reason, the door was locked.
“I’ll be right back!” Tailyn knew he was taking a risk, but he couldn’t just leave the black stone there. The lixes were presumably going to get the protection back up and running, and he didn’t want them coming back to sacrifice more people.
“Stop!” Valanil yelled after him. “The guards are coming back! Lix, hurry!”
The boy hit the brakes and slid across the ground as he looked back in the direction of the road. Three spherical octopuses were hurrying back as fast as they could — somebody had informed them that the group of humans and Ka-Do-Gir had shown up. And that somebody had dispatched a formidable army.
“Done!” Ka-Do-Gir twisted his pick in the lock one more time, something clicked, and the door flew open. “Get inside!”
The blow that landed a moment after the door slammed shut shook the whole building. The guards had run straight into the wall in their attempt to get at the intruders, and the door cracked. While the group could tell the guards weren’t going to be able to get through immediately, it wasn’t going to take more than another ten of those hits.
“There’s a way down — let’s go!” Valanil yelled when she saw a flight of stairs. A noise broke out on the second floor as the guards tried to get in through the windows. The lix went first to scout out the path ahead and meet any opponents head-on, with Valia and Valanil following him. Tailyn brought up the rear. Suddenly, the door shattered, and tentacles battled with each other to get through. As something told Tailyn his fire was going to be useless, he decided to go with a different card to buy them some time.
Ka-Li.
You used Cold Ring-II 10 times.
Charges remaining: 140 of 150.
Suddenly, everything fell silent. The guards’ tentacles were covered with frost and stopped moving, almost as if they’d been turned to icicles. Struck by an idea, Tailyn brought Matilda slamming down on the nearest one. His ears rang — it was more like hitting metal than living flesh. And while the blow didn’t get him anywhere, he felt better knowing he had a weapon he could use against the guards. He just needed to figure out how to get at them through the cold.
Tailyn slid down the stairs and found himself next to the group. The lix was working on another lock. The enormous metal door looked much more like an ancient tomb than the squalid two-story building, which presumably meant the lix had built the latter so they had somewhere to live while they were digging.
“Let me try,” Tailyn said when he saw Ka-Do-Gir’s middle limbs begin twitching nervously. He obviously wasn’t having much luck with the lock. Stepping aside, the lix let Tailyn come over to the door, and the digital panel the ancients loved so much told the boy it was looking for a code. Of course, no one in the group knew what it was.
But Tailyn didn’t care about the code. Halas hadn’t had it when he’d shown up, and he’d been able to get inside, presumably not after the kind of antics the mages in the mountain had been trying to pull. That meant there had to be another way. The boy just needed to find it.
A fairly large panel stretched over the buttons, and Tailyn placed a palm on it. Nothing happened. Taking off his glove, he tried again. That time, it worked exactly the way he’d been expecting it to.
Verifying access…
Mission for Isr Kale’s tomb detected.
Access granted.
A noise broke out from up above as the guards were freed from their frozen state and dashed after the fugitives. Shadows appeared in the stairway. But right then, the door slid silently off to the side.
“Follow me!” Tailyn barked as he ran into the tomb.
Sirius entered the 1st level of General Isr Kale’s tomb.
All group members receive +1 level.
***
Crystal +1 (4).
The door slid shut again, cutting the group off from the guards pursuing them. Tailyn looked around and froze. His mouth gaped — he’d never seen anything like the buildings in front of him. He would never have imagined they were even possible.
“Sweet mother,” Valia whispered as she gasped in shock. She knew where they were.
“No, little girl, your sweet mother won’t be helping you here.” Even Valanil was impressed, though she did her best to disguise her surprise with an instructive tone of voice. “This is an example of the true greatness of the ancients. What they were able to do without any magic whatsoever.”
Chapter 15
THERE HAD BEEN a time when the City of the Dead impressed Tailyn with its scale, beauty, and richness. The perfect stone constructions had been beyond anything a modern architect could have come up with, and the boy had decided nothing else could come close. The world wasn’t capable of it. But oh, how wrong he’d been.
Isr Kale’s tomb was a multi-level tower made of metal and glass, at the center of which was an enormous black core plunging down from the fifth story. Up against the ceiling, it supported the giant oak. And down there inside the tomb, the earth around the tree turned out to be transparent, showing off the crystal that actually was there tearing the oak apart from the inside. But it wasn’t the usual blue skill booster. It looked three or four times as big, in fact. And regardless of how transparent everything was, the group’s perception was powerless to tell what it was, just spitting out exclamation points when they looked at it.
Tailyn was stunned by how exact the tomb’s angles were. Everything was unusual, strange, nothing like what he was used to, though at the same startlingly perfect — the rivets, the seams, the joints, the straight lines, and the crystal-clear glass everywhere. The entire inner wall was made of glass, and it was so tough even Ka-Do-Gir couldn’t so much as scratch it. The boy pressed himself against the transparent wall. From where he was standing, he had a great view of the opposite side of the tower, not to mention what was happening down below at the base of the pillar.
Lixes were all over the place. The creatures were taking down the walls, stripping them of everything they could get their dirty little paws on. Suddenly, it hit the boy — the magnificent structure had once been even more beautiful, only the coin-starved monsters were systematically looting it. Everything bigger was broken down into its smaller components. Then, it was all whisked into a portal set up by the pillar. Ka-Do-Gir suddenly growled, following that up with a question he asked to nobody in particular.
“What’s that bastard doin
g here?”
There was no answer forthcoming, but that pulled Tailyn away from his examination of the other walls, forcing him to focus on the scene below.
And there was plenty to see.
First and foremost, his gaze was captured by the shimmering portal. It was being held open by two shamans, both of whom were presumably brown lixes — that was what color their skin was. And it was into that film that the marauders were hauling their loot, tossing it in as though the portal was just one-way. The younger workers were buzzing around an older lix the group had already seen out managing the excavations outside, while there was also an old, wrinkled lix leaning on a staff. Always dissatisfied by something, the latter handed out blows left and right using both his staff and his middle limbs. But the surprising thing was that the proud lixes didn’t even dare talk back to him. Instead, they just started running faster and hauling more when they found themselves on the receiving end of his administrations.
But even with all that, it was neither the shaman with his lixes nor the marauders that shocked the boy. That honor belonged to a pool at the base of the column. The murky red water — or whatever the liquid was — continually seethed, the bubbles popping and spraying the prisoners hanging above the pool. When the liquid hit them, they writhed and gave off some kind of blue glow. Tailyn recognized one of them — it was the mage the caravan had carried in. And the reason he recognized the poor guy was that he was the only one of the three prisoners with skin remaining. The others were mere chunks of meat that twitched in agony when the red liquid hit them.
But the mage didn’t last long. About a minute after Tailyn began watching him, the blue light around him blinked a few times before completely disappearing. The rope holding him up snapped, and the poor guy’s body dropped into the pool, splashing the other victims as well as two lixes carrying loot over to the portal. As the new wave of red liquid hit them, the other two prisoners just twitched even harder, and the blue light they were giving off became even more intense. But it was different for the lixes. While they only took a few drops each, that was enough for their bodies to crash to the ground, two ugly piles of black goo no longer reminiscent of the powerful and fearsome creatures they once were. And that infuriated the old shaman still more. His blows began raining down with new intensity.
A pair of green lixes showed up equipped with shovels to clear the remains of their comrades off the floor and into the pool. That left just two bodies hanging over the liquid, and the lixes continued hauling off loot as though nothing had happened.
“You know him?” Valanil asked when she had her fill of watching the goings-on. The glass didn’t let her use her perception, so the shaman remained just as nameless as his prisoners.
“Vu-Rga, one of Halas’ closest advisors,” Ka-Do-Gir replied, practically spitting out the shaman’s name. “The last time I saw him, he was at level 112, the most powerful brown mage, probably the most powerful lix mage, period. He’s eighty-three years old. That’s up there for a lix — in human terms, it’s 166. The bastard has caused so many problems that he was driven out of all the tribes, though nobody’s been able to kill him no matter how many times they’ve tried. He’s too strong… Only Halas was able to bring him to heel. Of course, that just made the old dog even crazier and more malicious, to the point that they say he’ll kill you for looking at him wrong… When Halas decided to take out his frustration on the green lixes after what happened in the City of the Dead, Vu-Rga personally killed every third member of the tribe. He didn’t even have pity on Li-Do-Gu, the most beautiful of the greens. My female.”
That new information turned out to be so helpful that the group finally saw a message pop up when they looked at the wrinkled creature.
Vu-Rga (brown lix). Shaman. Age 83. Level 112.
“The only thing I don’t understand is where the tomb itself is,” Valia said. “There should be a sarcophagus with a body inside, but all I see is that awful pool. What is it there for? Are they draining mana?”
The girl’s guess didn’t sound so far off to the herbalist. The blue glow around the mages could potentially have been there to suck mana out of them, particularly if the mages hanging above the acid were able to regenerate it quickly. Valanil pressed herself against the glass once again to get a better look. The blue glow was washing into the pool, and she could see next to it a strange apparatus looking something like an alembic from an alchemical lab. The red acid flowed through the tubes, blue drops fell into a receptacle, and the drops were filtered a few times before reaching flasks. One of the shamans was busy making sure they were completely full, replacing them and starting the process over when they were. And the rich color of the liquid in the flasks spoke volumes to the herbalist. Each one restored at least a thousand mana. Yes, that kind of production line was far more efficient than working with plants and pebbles in a workshop. At least, it was so long as they didn’t run out of working material — the poor guy the lixes had just dragged in presumably hadn’t been the best mage.
“The tomb is probably farther down,” Valanil replied. “We’ll have to get through all five levels to reach it. Lix, what do you know about that shaman’s weaknesses?”
“There aren’t any. He has all kinds of powerful cards, though nobody knows where he got them. Most are for summoning. All the lixes know about Vu-Rga’s monsters.”
“This is getting better and better,” the herbalist practically groaned. “Tailyn, my boy, tell me you have enough wisdom to recharge this card.”
The woman handed the boy her most valuable find in the previous ten years, her bukamonster card. While it still had four charges left, she had no desire to jump into battle without having everything fully charged. Nobody knew what would happen to her…or to Tailyn.
“Sure,” Tailyn replied, happy he could be useful to the group, too. The combat status had disappeared the moment the group found themselves in the tomb. And since nobody had yet realized they had unexpected guests, there had been no new status change, and Tailyn was able to charge the card and return it to Valanil. He did the same with Valia’s jungle call card.
“Well, there’s no way back now. Lix, you’re first; Tailyn, you follow him. Valia and I will bring up the rear. Let’s see what these bastards can do.”
Status change. Current status: combat.
You cannot modify your current deck.
Opponents remaining: 38.
It was a surprise to see how few creatures there were down below. The first floor had just three lixes working away at some kind of panel, none of them paying any attention to the newcomers as they tried to work loose and carry off half the wall. And their levels were laughable — from three to five. A few swings later, and Ka-Do-Gir had turned them into loot, though even that came up with just three suits of lesser armor that Tailyn got. Each was worth twenty-two gold, barely enough to justify taking up an inventory slot, though the boy was going to keep them around as long as he had the slot available. Ten years spent living with nothing had taught the boy to never turn down extra gold.
Finally, the lix in charge noticed Tailyn’s group. A few quick gestures later, and a group of ten fighters and two shamans headed up to meet them, Vu-Rga looking to join but just stumbling out of breath against his staff after a few steps. Still, he was able to rap a slow shaman on the back and yell something after him. The latter bowed low, nodded, and ran off to catch up to the rest.
“They’re going to take some work — they aren’t marauders,” Ka-Do-Gir said calmly. The upcoming battle didn’t have him ruffled in the least. To the contrary, he couldn’t wait. Lixes were born to fight, and he was in his element.
“Let’s head over! While they’re on their way up, we’ll bathe them in fire,” the boy said, pointing at an open area on the opposite side of their floor. For whatever reason, the tomb builders had made it such that you had to do a complete circle to drop down a level. The stairs were just a few dozen meters away from the door, though they were separated by an impenetrable wall. T
he only way to get over to the other side was to go around.
“They might be ready for that.” Valanil didn’t share the boy’s enthusiasm. The fighters didn’t really bother her, though the powerful shaman’s students looked to be formidable foes. And her perception still wasn’t telling her what level the approaching group was at.
“Let’s meet them here,” Valia said suddenly as she peeked around the corner. “If Tailyn shoots fire from here, it’ll bounce off the wall and into the next hallway. And they won’t be able to do anything about it — in the City of the Dead, the lixes fired icicles, so I assume they’ll be doing the same here. Only they won’t be able to from the other side of the wall.”
“Did you not hear me, you idiot?” the herbalist shot back as annoyance overwhelmed her. “They might be ready for fire! Is kissing all your head is good for, or can you think with it, too?”
It looked like Valia had been shocked. The girl had ignored the woman’s behavior, writing it off to the stress, but she couldn’t let her talk like that. Commoners needed to remember their place. Calling her an idiot, really?
“Nobody gave you the right to talk to me like that,” she said firmly the way her father had taught her. Valia knew the effect that voice had on people. “You’re not my trainer, not my mentor, not even my nanny. You’re just a regular country herbalist here helping Tailyn!”
Forest of Desire (The Alchemist Book #2): LitRPG Series Page 21
