Chương 324: AF Chapter 323 – Checking Things out on the Beach

No banderlings were posted on the high northern hill, which wasn't all that surprising. After all, wasn't there a half-mile ring of them about the place, who'd be bellowing alarms as soon as an enemy was sighted? Who needed sentries when you had hundreds of them all around your home? Which didn't mean I was going to drop the Invisibility and Scentless, nopers. The Deathstone pit was right where the Mick had indicated.

I looked over at what had been a carenzi race course, now torn all apart and most of the wood likely hauled off to be burned. There were old and weathered craters where planar implosions had closed the row of Portals that had once existed there, the gambling halls they'd once been set up to go to now abandoned rubble.

I thought about gambling halls having the power to put something as strategically important as a Portal in place from the Direlands directly into the civilian areas for newbies in Osteth, closed my eyes, and shook my head. No-no, my bad, making a set of Portals available for virindi raids into all three major heartlands of the Isparians was a good idea, sure, sure. It wasn't sheer unmitigated insanity at all, nopers...

There was also a tent standing near the Deathstone Pit, ragged, empty, but somehow still standing despite the years of weathering and being abandoned. The Mick walked up to it, glanced inside, and then just shrugged and stepped back out. Virindi-empowered, holding up despite the years, and the superstitious banderlings likely kept it around as a sign of the virindi who had rebelled against the Quiddity, just like their boss.

We walked up to the Deathstone, and the quiet, unnerving wails caressing ear and spirit as the dead here let us know their disquiet. Hundreds of them. This had been a popular Deathstone, despite its location… or perhaps because of its location. Not the same size as the one in Candeth Keep before it was Burned away, which definitely had been popular, but still greater in number than the residents of the small town had numbered.

Bunita slid out silently, and orange-rainbow motes of Lost Light stole out to set blue crystals on vivic fire in swirls and spirals. Every single blue crystal was set to mistfire, and the intermingled skulls of Isparians, tumeroks, gearknights, and Empyreans alike began to Burn and crumple. It didn't take him more than a couple minutes to set it all alight, but we respectfully waited and listened as the faint cries faded gently, gratefully away.

It didn't take that long before there was only the silence of the morning wind and a pit thick with mistfire staining the stone white, paleness that would fade shortly with the first touch of the sun's rays and Natural Renewal. A roar rang out in the town below, and we both tensed. The Mick looked at me, but I just shook my head. I hadn't gone sensing for anything, and hadn't Cast anything, either. Answering calls began to ring back and forth, and I straightened up.

"Rise and shine call." I began to walk towards the slope, just enough of an angle to see the town below. Ayan Baquar was shaped like a C, the open area facing us to the north, with a line of stucco buildings along the east and south, and several too-durable tents to the west. The buildings had held a couple of families each, making it a true small town, with wealth in excess of its size, even with some remarkably skilled crafters who had once lived here, drawn by the wealth flowing through the place.

It was a flow that had never truly stopped, even when drawn off by Candeth Keep's establishment to the south-east. Banderlings began to stumble out of those buildings, stretching out on verandas and balconies with great gaping yawns, their colorful armors oddly bright in the rather plain Gharun'dim style buildings. The call was centered on the famous tavern of the Smoking Axe, home of the biggest drinking competition in all of Dereth.

It was the place where the famous Ulgrim had held court as enforced Mayor of the town, elected after passing out dead drunk. Now striding out of the tavern was a great dark banderling, a head taller than almost any of the others around, hulking and muscular… and with eyes burning like red-hot rubies, trailing hot red-purple energies as he strode out to rouse his people.

"Never had quite the ear for banderling," the Mick admitted quietly, watching the ruling banderling get his vassals into motion towards the beach.

"But that definitely be Harraag. Killed him enough, never forget that face." He waved to the east, where other banderlings in different colors of armor were spilling out of the Factionhouse Dungeon in a long stream.

"Note all the ones in town be having the same colors as those standing guard about the town, an' the ones below are more like the random spawns out in the wild areas. Powerful ones get t' stay closer ta the boss."

"Nothing new about that." The lower banderlings broke into runs to catch up to their elders, splitting around the base and straight up to the town as they followed the elders down towards the shore.

"Remarkably mundane for all the pure muscle showing here."

"Everybody's gotta eat, if'n they ain't got one o' your Rings," he agreed.

"We gonna stick around t' watch them go fishing?" I shook my hand slowly, pointing south.

"There's a mine of metal over there of what they called Shade Ore."

"I remember it. Raided it scores o' times for samples…" His face went long as he sighed again.

"Never found out what it was for." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"And unsurprisingly, somehow we have no samples of it, and nobody knows what the Whispering Blades did with the metal." Which was damn hilarious, because Prince Borelean back then had been the head of the Order! The Mick reached up to massage the bridge of his nose.

"Mindfuckery shite again." He looked that direction, then glanced west.

"Moarsman temple was out there near the Festival Stone. Swing by and see the status of it?"

"If the banderlings left it intact, I overestimated them, even if they aren't the brightest," I agreed shortly.

"Let's get to the mine before the Salute to Aru."

"Easy enough," he agreed, watching as the stream of banderlings hurrying to the shoreline began to thin out.

"Note the absence o' kits. Either in the Dungeon, or they ain't having any here."

"I don't feel like checking, they can have the place." No nose off my skin.

"Aye, bander reek in tight quarters be one o' those things ye don't want t' remember," he nodded.

"Shall we?" Invisible, scentless, and silent as we ghosted along an inch above the ground, we headed down the hill, cutting behind the last of the banderlings and heading south of them along the shoreline. I could just see the fires on the columns leading to the Darktide Festival Stone out there. The moarsman temple, a twin to one that had been thrown up by Mayoi both long ago and more recently, wouldn't be too much farther away.

"Well, I thought they were goin' down t' the shore," the Mick mumbled defensively. Banderlings were coming and going from the depths of the mine we wanted samples from. The force that had split off had come this way, instead of staying down by the beach. It was pretty obvious, now that we were here, that there was a permanent work force living here, with additional miners coming in to haul out their prizes.

"That actually makes it easy." I pointed down the trail they were using.

"All the samples we want will have fallen along the trail from those crude sacks they are using. I can just Sift up what we want."

"Nah." The Mick flexed his fingers.

"Can ye make one of the sacks Invisible with me?" I had to quirk a smile, having a good idea as to what was coming.

"Of course, Lord Mick."

The selected Aggressor Banderling was proficient in Bludgeoning and Fire Magic, wearing bright red armor. It came up out of the mine with a shreth-hide sack bulging with ore, hefting several hundred pounds of the stuff with patient strength. Then an Isparian in black armor popped out of nowhere and slugged him in the jaw. With a wail and a roar of surprise that attracted a lot of eyes, the Aggressor was literally sent flying. Maybe one of the Tukora lugian spawns had smacked it further, it was hard to tell.

The red-armored banderling actually cleared the heads of a couple of the guards by the mine entrance there, hit the ground, bounced, and tumbled over several times before stopping. Shaking his head, he got to his feet unsteadily.

"Isparian!" he roared, pointing, and the startled guards immediately raced in that direction. They found nothing. There was no scent, no trail… and no sign of the heavy bag of ore the Aggressor went looking around for, despite a dozen banderlings joining the search. The swelling bruise over the cheek and eye of the Aggressor was proof enough of the mighty blow the others had witnessed, but there was no sign of the Isparian he had seen.

"Ah, just like the old days…

'cept the Ocean Palms push things a wee bit further than back then," the Mick informed me happily. I just shook my head, the sack of 'Shade Ore' already reduced to Itemized size and stowed away.

"Any particular places you want to check out, or do we head back to Candeth now?" The moarsman temple had been leveled to rubble, as expected, lots of big banderling claw marks on the brittle coral.

"I want a Lived-Line running all 'round these shores, if'n ye don't mind the mileage," he replied drolly.

"Ahead o' us a couple miles be the home o' a scholar o', eh, dubious authenticity. His cellar were full o' some inordinately tough Rats an' Nefanes fer some damn reason." At my look, he explained.

"Why, it made perfect sense. Ye had to run all the way to the bottom o' the place, pick up a magic key he dropped from the floor, come back ta the top o' the place, get into his chest, retrieve his notes as t' his most recent papers, an' return them to 'im in Fort Teth's bar. Or ta the fellow he plagiarized in the Smokey Axe in Ayan there."

"And… that was worth your time?"

"Aye, sure. Combine it with a trip ta that shattered moars temple back there, a run through the Shade Ore mine, an' ye were making a fair bit o' Karma fer maybe an hour o' work all told, just running through most of it an' only having t' butcher a handful o' shite at the end of the runs.

"Fightin' them things in that cellar were a true pain in the arse, however. They were damn tough, and spawned fast…"

"And would be worth a lot of Karma."

"Thought might have crossed my mind a wee bit," he admitted.

"You noticed we were on a trail leading that way, right?"

"Odd, that."

"So the odds the banderlings are using the place for the same reason are pretty high."

"Surely the lead-brained things wouldnae be so intelligent as t' deny us our fun?" he moaned theatrically.

"They can obviously Level, and it's a good place to do so. Any other Dungeons in the area they can exploit?"

"Aye, but north. There's a Hall o' Metos an' a Black Spawn Den there." I made a 'keep talking' gesture.

"Fast spawn golums o' various sorts, an' tons o' fast spawn tuskers. Ostensibly, the latter were 'breeding grounds' for the virindi's favorite muscle. There are three Halls and three BSD's spread out about the Direlands.

"They be wonderful places t' power-Level fer the 100 to 150's," he recalled with some nostalgia.

"Fast-spawn golums, huh?" They and Elementals were about the only things which actually dropped useful things anymore, which implications he promptly caught.

"And some Revenants an' Dark Revenants. Dropping mnemosynes, which ye could turn in fer more Karma…" He took another long breath.

"Those were memory storage things, like magical pyramids o' preserving orders an' conversations the Undead use in place o' notes an' missives. We were rewarded for delivering them t' a collection site…" I just shook my head.

"Well, they certainly knew how to keep you and your fellows busy and distracted by bling," I had to say, and he held up his hand, his skating stride turning into a long sliding pause I mimicked automatically. There was indeed a cottage in startlingly good condition ahead of us, except it was now ten feet above the surrounding ground, the dirt ruptured upwards in a broad area underneath, like its own stony motte.

Rough stones were piled up to form a crude path up to the cabin, and outside the front of it, about a score of the lower-tier banderlings, led by a quartet of the tougher, higher-Level ones, were sitting around, eating some fresh fish they'd obviously caught out of the ocean nearby.

"Well, that answers that," the Mick murmured, and turned south.

"No Dungeons that I be remembering until we can see the Caul, but that may well have changed, too."

"Well, let's go see!"