Chương 109: Sapphire Peaks

I greatly regretted my commentary about how easy it was to travel. From Dawnhold to the Emerald Nest was one thing, but travelling onwards to the Sapphire Peaks was another thing entirely. Even with the document from Lord Reid, they still insisted on checking we had appropriate equipment, and Cluma had to confirm our levels, because obviously they didn't believe me when I claimed to be rank three, despite the fact I was pulling all the equipment they demanded to see out of my [Item Box].

Thankfully, they had no trouble believing it when it came from Cluma. I felt discriminated against... Couldn't I trade my [Unbound Soul] trait back for [Abnormal Soul]? Eventually, we were able to convince the person in charge of portal transport that we had a valid reason for travel and knew what we were doing, and weren't just messing around. He directed us to another portal, where I stood waiting for them to install a walkway, but there didn't seem to be one around.

And then I noticed the floor clamps were missing and suddenly had a bad premonition.

"We're supposed to fly through, aren't we?" I asked.

"Yes? Sorry, did no-one mention?"

"It's fine. Never mind." The inside of the portals weren't that long. Neither of us would have a problem jumping, given our stats and high jump enchanted rings. I just hoped there wasn't a wall on the other side or something. I took a run up and dived through, a laughing Cluma following behind me. At least she found it amusing. I still had no desire at all to research what happened when someone fell out of a portal mid journey. Fortunately, I landed on the other side safe and sound, with barely a stumble.

Cluma landed behind me a few moments later, while I took a look around. The warehouse we were in looked very much like the one we'd just left, with a wooden interior and large array of portals. The main difference was that the platforms used to shuffle monster corpses around now contained things that looked kinda like rhinos with extra horns. Actually, triceratops might be closer, given that they also had an armour plate behind their heads.

The face didn't look right for a dinosaur, but then we only had bones and fossils to go on back at home, so maybe our artists' impressions were wrong. Did they have a dinosaur dungeon here? That would be cool.

"What? Who are you? Aren't you children?" Ah, and the other difference; the place was staffed by fairies.

"Hi. We're here to find a couple of people," I explained, pulling out Lord Reid's letter from [Item Box]. Given the trouble we'd just had on the other side, I might as well jump straight in with the big guns.

"We have a letter of passage." She read it, then shrugged.

"Have a safe trip then." Okay... That wasn't painful at all. I hurried out of the place before she could change her mind. As was usual, the warehouse was built next to a dungeon, with stores and a delvers' guild branch nearby. [Mana Sight] told me that this dungeon had fifty floors, the same as the Emerald Caverns and the Emerald Nest. Maybe all the original settlements were the same? Unlike the others I'd visited, I didn't see an actual city anywhere.

In the Emerald Caverns, there had been living space a short walk away from the dungeon, while in the Emerald Nest the dungeon was in the middle of the city. Here, I couldn't see anything. There was a forest to the west of us, and a sparkling lake to the east, with nothing but grass to the north or south. I could see giant peaks jutting into the air in every direction, but the ground where we were seemed completely flat. I didn't see any species around other than fairies. For that matter, only female fairies.

Did they not have males? Mum's sex talk had only properly covered humans and beastkin, with a very small dose of elf and dwarf, so when it came to the other races I was still clueless. In any case, we were attracting attention just by standing around, so it was time to get going. 4/2 Autumn, 337 7: 12: 70. 1 1. 44, -12. 10, 1. 19 Invoking [Clock] informed me that we needed to go a little west and very slightly north to match the coordinates of my notification.

We were pretty high up too; back home was all point ones and twos, but here we were ten times higher. The distance wasn't too bad; probably a few kilometres, although it was hard to be certain with the granularity of [Clock]. Given the extra time we spent in the Emerald Nest, we should probably find somewhere to sleep first and travel there in the morning.

I'd done enough research beforehand to know that this place had a Synklisi style inn for delvers, but I wasn't exactly a delver right now, and I wasn't certain they'd let us stay. If not, we'd have to ask around for alternatives. Thanks to [Mana Sight], I had no need to guess which building was the one we were looking for, the rooms of beds being obvious to me even without anyone lying on them, so the two of us headed in.

The place had no reception, but did have a tavern area on the ground floor, so we wandered into there instead. Looking around, the place was very sparsely populated, but while the employees were all fairies, the few tables that were occupied contained either demons or harpies. Harpies were a given, but [Soul Perception] was enough to see that although they were folded away under clothing, all the demons here had wings, too.

I hadn't asked about the Sapphire Peaks dungeon, since it wasn't what we were here for, but I would hazard a guess that, just like the outside, the terrain inside favoured fliers. Given how inaccessible everything else apparently was, I was impressed by how normal the buildings were, with their front doors comfortably at ground level. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Having never seen a harpy before, I stopped for a moment to look around.

They had scaled legs that they mostly left bare, ending in long, curved talons that looked like they would be difficult to walk on. Between the waist and neck they looked mostly human, with a normal pair of arms, but they each had a pair of wide, feathered wings sprouting from their backs. Their heads were human-ish, but they had more feathers instead of hair, running down the back of their necks and connecting to their wings, and they had short, wide beaks in the place of a nose and mouth.

"Can I help you?" asked a fairy waitress, walking up to us.

"I hope so," I replied.

"Do you have a couple of beds spare?"

"We do, but are you delvers? You can't have come here without knowing anything about our dungeon, but you have no equipment." Right, no equipment at all was weird whatever we were here for, but because of [Item Box] neither of us had so much as a backpack. Cluma had a small pouch around her neck that she wouldn't let me store and insisted I didn't touch, but aside from that, there was nothing. Even my pockets were empty.

"I'm a spatial mage and have [Item Box], so we're better equipped than we look," I replied, "but we aren't here for the dungeon. We're here looking for someone."

"Okay, if you aren't here on delver business, we'll need to charge you a higher price, but you can still stay. It'll be one and a half silver a night. How long do you want a room for?"

"I'm not sure. It depends how long we need to spend searching, but certainly no more than a week."

"That's fine; it's not as if we're expecting an influx of people anytime soon, so just let us know when you're leaving. Give me a minute, and I'll arrange you a room. Was there anything else?" I was about to answer no, when I realised it wasn't me she was looking at when she'd asked that question. Cluma seemed to be staring at her rather hard.

"Oh, sorry. Umm... If it's not a rude question, I thought fairies had wings, but so far I haven't seen any. You don't look much different from elves." The waitress laughed.

"No, it's not rude. You've not seen any of us around before then? I assumed you'd come from Synklisi to be looking for someone here. But no, our wings are pure mana, so they're only visible when we use them." I wasn't entirely sure of the correctness of that statement, given that I could see her wings clearly through [Soul Perception]. Actually, I could see them now through [Mana Sight]; miniscule streams of mana running through the air.

I couldn't see Rose's at all with [Mana Perception] when she didn't have them out, and given the tiny quantity of mana involved, that wasn't a surprise. The quantity of mana increased as I watched, and her wings lit up visually in yellow behind her, the light tracing out delicately curved shapes. Cluma's eyes opened wide at the display.

"Beautiful," she muttered, reaching out a hand. The waitress took a step backwards to evade as her wings blinked back out.

"Asking isn't rude, but touching without permission is," she said, smiling.

"A fairy's wings are rather intimate."

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" exclaimed Cluma, blushing.

"I didn't know."

"And now you do. It's a dull day in which we don't get to learn something new," she added with a wink. I was glad to see she wasn't insulted or annoyed.

"Let me go and find that room for you." The waitress disappeared through a staff-only door for a minute before returning and leading us up some stairs.

"This one," she said, pushing open one of the doors for us. Any sort of hotel without locks on the doors still freaked me out a bit. Even with the Law, there was a bar of demons right beneath us. What if they got drunk and barged into the wrong room at night? Cluma had no such qualms, rushing in to look around.

"Thanks," I said to our guide.

"Umm... I don't suppose you've heard of any recently born babies that... have been acting strangely? Two of them, quite likely twins."

"No, I can't say that I have," she answered.

"You're in the wrong place if you're looking for twins, though. Fairy twins are completely impossible, and I've never heard of harpy twins either." Hmm... Maybe not twins then, or else the message glitched and displayed twice. And why were fairy twins impossible?

"Well, thanks anyway." She nodded and walked away, leaving the two of us alone. Thankfully, we had two beds in here, and as with all delver accommodation, there was a large emphasis on the bathroom. It was the perfect place to stay while we conducted our search.

"Can we go back downstairs for food?" asked Cluma as she finished exploring.

"I know you've brought plenty, but..."

"But it's not the food you're interested in, right?"

"I've never seen harpies or demons before!" she agreed, nodding quickly. Well, why not? I'd never seen a harpy before either, and while I could watch them with my various esoteric senses from here, that still wasn't quite the same. Besides, I'd bet the local food would be interesting.... Then I remembered the sight of Rose eating, and had second thoughts. There weren't any fairies down there as customers, were there? I did a quick scan with [Mana Sight] and didn't see any, so it looked safe.

I left a chunk of toe in our room, in case I needed to get back in a hurry after we started our search, then the two of us returned downstairs, where the same waitress came over.

"Did you forget something? Anything else I can do to help?" she asked politely.

"Some food," I answered.

"And preferably a table where little miss curious here can see the whole room." She led us to a table with a grin, where I browsed a menu full of monsters I'd never heard of. Hah, monster cores too; they were obviously used to catering to demons. At least vegetarian options were in plentiful supply here, not that I'd seen farmland nearby. Did they gather them from the forest, rather than farming? I went for a fruit dish, while Cluma ordered her usual big pile of meat.

She'd already stuffed herself earlier in the day. How was she possibly hungry again? Was she taking advantage of the fact I was paying? Not that her main focus was on eating this time. Watching her in action was fascinating, walking up to other tables while our food was being prepared, introducing herself, and within minutes she was petting a harpy wing, poking at a demon horn, and even convinced one of the demons to take his top off and show off his own wings.

There was no way I could talk to strangers like that, not on Earth and not here either. Half of the customers had delver gear, and as usual, I found the different styles of armour around each dungeon fascinating. In place of our black dire wolf leather, these delvers were wearing something that was mostly a light brown, with grey splotches. It was heavily textured, almost giving the appearance of scales. It wasn't the skin of the corpse I'd seen in the warehouse, but it looked like something from a related monster.

Then our food arrived, and Cluma hugged her new friends goodbye. And then the waitress asked where her hug was and got one too. Probably the only reason she hadn't had one earlier, whether she wanted it or not, was because Cluma was embarrassed over the wing incident. Hang on, we'd been travelling all day now, and I hadn't had a single hug. Where were mine?