Chương 23: AF Chapter 22 – Exploring a Ghost Town

Across the road was another stone building, this one... odd. It had broad stone steps and columns, with what I called a Grecian roof and motif... except the whole thing hadn't extended back more than fifteen feet. Hadn't been, because it had fallen into a rather gaping hole, opened up in the hillside directly underneath it and collapsing the whole shattered building down within, all the stones cracked and broken as what looked to be a big chunk of the hill had fallen in on itself into a concealed room below.

A concealed room with no visible way in or out, but with furnishings nonetheless... and what looked like a pool of water gone all scummy over in the shadowed far side, where the wall was breaking open on the hillside without, with cracks of light falling through. In not too much longer a time, the supporting wall there was going to come down, or someone would dig it out, and there'd be a way in that didn't involve rappelling or levitating or jumping down forty feet or so.

I looked back at the dungeon area, back at this pit that had been made out of a room. Another dimensional chamber, forced back into real space, directly under the heavy anchor to its entry. Unlike the nest, its ceiling hadn't taken the weight well, and it had collapsed under the load. Everything I was seeing pointed to a massive magical collapse, which was concerning.

By my standards, this place was absolutely awash in magic, given it could actually support an ecosystem with mana pools, a place that didn't need a Matrix to anchor the mana and hold it in. Exactly how mana-flush was this place, if it could routinely afford dimensional chambers like this? Then I realized how stupid I was being. I hadn't tracked the countryside yet, but if Summon spots were common, that answered my own question.

The amount of magic needed to gridmap a large area with powerful Summons like that was ungodly, and the expense must have been... well, it wasn't a small number. Especially if people were killing off multiple Summons repeatedly over huge areas. Someone had had access to a lot of people, power, and funding to do what I'd seen, and I hadn't even seen anything yet. Let's not forget setting up an interplanetary or interdimensional Portaling network to another world for the purpose of bringing in outsiders for... what?

The primary reason would be slave labor or military conscripts. They were really the only two options that made any sense whatsoever. You didn't bring in rival colonists or something, your own people would revolt. You brought in outsiders to fight for you or as labor, that was it. Making up a randomly-generated portal network to do that... someone had more power and time than good sense, unless there was no remaining population of your own, and you HAD to go grabbing people.

I didn't go directly down the hill, instead heading back for the unnaturally clear road, none of the rubble or scree or anything obstructing it, and followed it down and around to the lower part of the town.

There was another crater there, again with the twisted and warped matter of reality being bent around, spitting infectious energies marking red, blue, and green crystals of unsteady make and type drilled into the ground, but of much smaller size and quantity than the pale blue of the larger crater just up the road behind me. I waved my hand, and could feel the echoes of rippling spatial magic worrying at the veil again, drawing on the ground conduits from the menhirs to do... something.

V-Darts got to work on everything there, starting on smoothing out the after-effects almost instantly as they did so, fixing what something had done wrong as I walked into the rest of the abandoned downtown area. A tumbled cottage on the right, roof caved in and door completely torn off. There was some sort of sign out front, but it was splintered and illegible now. Up ahead on the left was a massive pedestal of green stone. It looked like something a statue should be sitting on top of.

Oddly enough, there was a hacked and blasted statue of greenish coppery metal there, smashed and rent and leaning against the pedestal. A statue that had all the hallmarks of being a Construct of some kind, and Animated at one point. I eyed the markings on it, the fact it still radiated magic, and the fact that all the wounds were exterior plating and not to what had to be the gearworks or endoskeleton inside, which raised my caution.

I noted the type of injuries to it, and trusted to the fact almost all of them were the same type to prepare Acid as the complement to my Shards this time. With a Silver Vulnerability to Acid prepped to arrive first. If I had to hit the thing twice, I wanted it dead. I approached it warily down the road, and heard the creak before I saw the motion as its head turned on me, and the hand bearing a crude dagger of forged greened bronze lifted.

"Cruath Qualoi!" Pure Life Magic, nothing on my end. I felt a moment of resistance, rapidly overcome by the surge of Snowcasting I could add to all spells, even Isparian ones. There was a gurgling, fluid shimmer of light around the thing as it lurched to life, starting in my direction with great speed, given it was twice my height. So, I fell back on my Disk and just backpedaled rapidly, sighing at my lack of proper Lightfoot.

The Waveskating Step would allow me to skate backwards at a healthy clip without turning around. Another thing I needed to get into place. So would Footsteps of the Mage. Alas, not enough time to get everything I needed. Maybe we could montage the next thirty days and I could really get myself set up sweetly. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. No?

Well, time to instead take advantage of the fact Constructs took a long time to build up speed, and I was at the edge of its threat range. The Acid-shifted Shards, backed with a Silver "Zojak Quafeth!" for a LOT of additional impact, hammered into the brazen skin of the thing like eight acidic hammers, blowing and fusing holes right through it before the reverberating force-sparks of the Banefire to Constructs blew through its insides, going after all the key stuff happily, Holiness powering it all.

When the spray blew out the back of the thing, I knew it had been damaged previously. The next step it took sent it tumbling to the ground, its arms, legs, and head breaking off the shattering torso and going tumbling. I just waited, expecting something else to be roused by the thing, and then realized the statue probably attacked everything in its line of sight, including any animals or investigators, which meant nothing was going to stay in line of sight of the thing without being chased and possibly killed.

Indeed, some of the damage to the buildings looked like it had been inflicted by sweeping blows of that bronze sword-sized dagger... With a chink, all the parts of the drudge Construct fell completely apart, shattering and reshattering down to basically particle sizes, before swirling up... and pouring back into the green pseudo-stone of the pedestal. Ah. I reversed course, keeping an eye on the broken and shattered buildings, stealing up to lay a hand on the pedestal. Yes, it had a link to the ley line grid.

Yes, it was pulling on it now, the magic trying to reassemble the destroyed Construct, but not able to surge and rematerialize it like a Summons. I imagined if I rose up into the air and looked at the top of the plinth, I'd see little flows of bronze coming up out of the stone and slowly taking the form of a drudge's foot as it slowly rebuilt the thing with its restricted mana flow.

Well, I didn't know how long it would take to rebuild the thing, and now that I recalled its position, its extended back foot had been touching the plinth. It also meant something had come through the place and beat it down. Acid and hacked gashes in it... my guess was the olthoi. The fliers alone could simply rain down acid until it was too damaged to move, and then anything on the ground chop into it. Good enough, time to see if anything was left in the town...

Remains of a corral, probably livestock brought into the town for chopping up and feeding folks. There was a feed barn nearby, in remarkably good shape compared to the rest of the buildings in town, probably because there was little magic involved with it. On the other side of the barn, next to a building that seemed to be the personal domicile of a local archmage (basically someone who could Cast at Gold), was another of those ley-linked devices, all burned out and fused.

This one seemed to have had a lot of brewing/heating/mixing contraptions about it, all of them now half-melted and damaged by the elements, but it looked like something to do with chemistry or alchemy. Some sort of magical communal alchemy lab that boosted skill checks? I was a bit incredulous as I looked at the open sky and lack of sterility and uncontrolled conditions, wondering just what you could have made alchemically here... but then, I didn't know the local magic, so it was kind of moot.

Like the more general magical exchange up the hillside, this building was torn apart, the upper floor in particular blasted away entirely at one corner, as if a bomb blast centered there had gone off. The magical reinforcements to the house had kept it intact, but those had ebbed over time, and the remnants were barely more than normal wood now...

and seem to have been blasted by acid flung every which way and loose, boring holes in what remained and precipitating more collapses into the basement beneath, now half-filled with water and growing mold and fungi, with scattered Air Gold coins I could drag out of the mud and under rubble, and that was about it. The fungi I shot and cleared away, turning to the other buildings standing close together.

The closest one was the most intact, but when the hanging door was pushed open, it was plain the entire floor had been blasted out by something, leaving the interior a mess and a ruin. I had no idea what had been done, but there were only a few Air Gold coins scattered around, some minor tools so rusted as to be useless, and I didn't really need scissors or needles and pins at this time.

Next door had probably been a smithy, but the front of the building was completely blown out, and the first floor had collapsed into the basement as well, bringing with it a massive smelter of some sort that had likely tapped into the ley line, and now looked to have melted itself into uselessness. There were scraps of iron and coal down there, the remnants of smithing tools, nails, and basic ironwork turning to rust, and more of the Air Gold coins around.

The last shop had its floor and wall blown out as well, who knew what was stored there that had done the job, and whatever the ley-linked device there was supposed to do seemed to have been violently disassembled and fallen apart, chunks missing as if fired in all directions into the stone. I did pull up a wide variety of degrading arrowheads from the rubble with the scattered coins, but nothing useful or of value. There were mushrooms growing in the basements of all three buildings, and they all went up in vivus.

And... that was it for the important buildings. I could go investigate some of the houses nearby, but I had the impression the only thing I might find was the remains of animals using them as dens, or mounds of fungi from olthoi spreading their harvests. Which was reason enough to investigate them. I sighed, marked how many hours I was going to devote to this before I got started on my rep counts at the henge, squared up my shoulders, and got to work. There were only a few hundred homes in the vicinity.

I should be able to go through them in a couple of days. Well, it was something that could wait. I went into the backside of the smithy, to a section of floor that was still stable, and took a seat against the wall. Protected from overhead observation, I began my two hours a day of needed sleep/True Meditation, letting me swap out Wizard spells, and work on other things. I should be able to puzzle out Web once again with a few hours and get it back into my spellbook, along with my Phantom Servant.

More important than trundling through some abandoned homes.