Chương 509: AF Chapter 508 – The Heart of the System Part III

Briggs and Princess Kristie came to a halt at the junction of four corridors. I glanced at the Visual File, as I'm sure they did, and looked further into the thaumaspectrum. There'd been several more security points along the way, bypassed with tactile cappillokinesis or sometimes an adamantine point to the operating mechanism, or simply by being sneaky. Not a single damn room along the way. This was the approximate middle of the hill we'd entered, about four hundred paces in.

Briggs and Kris looked down, then up in tandem, so cute to see, then looked back at me. I was looking up at the unmarked ceiling.

"It all goes down, but there's a down coming from up above," I informed them.

"There is a lift here. Very closely engineered, no lifting mechanism that we can see… or activation mechanism," Kris stated suspiciously. I frowned.

"There's such a thing as automatic returns to a base, but that's for a busy hotel. Place like this, any lift should be parked at the spot it was last used…" There was no motion in any of the adjoining chambers, and both of them sniffed loudly.

"There's a scent, but it's been scrubbed. Can't recognize anything about it," Briggs murmured.

"Second possibility is that this is an invitation in case they have noticed intruders, but they still can't make us out."

"Sensory systems?" I asked.

"Looks like just a pressure detector from here, but we've no idea if there's something in the very middle," Kris nodded at the center ceiling.

"There could be a notification system or external remote, of course."

"You're saying this system goes down?" I asked, looking down.

"Definitely open space below us," Briggs confirmed.

"Well, then, we need a look at the control mechanisms or formations so we can spoof them. I'm not trying Blinking here without some real problems manifesting." And I stepped right into the room, looking all around studying the magic. Whistling cheerfully, Kris followed me, and Briggs just grunted and grinned before following us. None of us were actually touching the floor, however. Briggs was looking down as Kris was looking up, painting what they saw and matching it up to what I was seeing.

Definitely nodes on the top that were not vital to conductivity. Likewise, the bottom had nodes devoted to movement and positioning that used power instead of passing it on through. I dug out two jewels not sacrificed for goldweight. The Elemental Fields generated a ton of the things, convenient sources of alternate crystalline components for happy Artificers. I put one over the central lifting node of the room, then gestured to Briggs for a lift, lifting a foot.

He deftly scooped up my foot and lifted me effortlessly over his head. The fifteen-foot ceiling was suddenly in my face, and I placed the red garnet there, alchemical adhesives keeping it in pace.

"Out," I directed them, and Briggs didn't even bother to let me down, just pacing over to the passage we'd come down before lowering me down.

"Kris, flick the one on the floor." A nigh-invisible cord unwound from inside her sleeve, a thin whip woven from her own hair… and thus able to convey her Vajra. With casual precision, she just flicked her hand, and thirty feet of cord lashed out, uncoiling and slapping the black garnet I'd set on the floor there. The jewel cracked and then blew apart at the supersonic snap, and then mana began to dribble out of it… mana the purple-black of Void Magic.

It stained the whiteness of the crystalline floor, sinking into the stratified crystals and the very fine, very sensitive conduits of mana there. Very suddenly, blackness was racing through the floor and around the walls along hundreds of separate pathways. There was a shudder and flaring flashes as the walls around us began to strobe strongly.

The ceiling of the room turned deep blue as countering lines of energy gathered and pulsed through it, stopping the spread of the black mana with harsh surges of power, stalemating the energy. Countering threads of gold mana licked out, and began to eat into the spread of the black aggressively, driving it slowly back. There was a whoosh, and suddenly the room in front of us was diving down into the mountain with a silent rush of wind extending past us.

I nodded slightly as I studied the formations along the revealed shaft, especially those coming from on high and what was being transmitted through my emplaced red garnet.

"Was actually expecting them to be located higher?" Kris mused, looking down.

"Unless they aren't recalling it up to them?"

"The command pulse came from above, not below. They probably sent it down low for decontamination with more devoted systems. Since there was very little energy involved, I expect they'll actually be done with it shortly." I stepped forward, turning around over the open space and leaving my toes anchored just above the edge of the shaft, and crossed my arms to wait patiently.

"I think a free ride up the hole is in the works, don't you?" This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. Solemnly, two master lightfooters who also happened to have Cloudstepping Sandals joined me, their toes above the edge of the lip, and we waited.

Approximately twenty minutes later, there was a pulse from above down the sides of the shaft, which I took note of. The burst of lights gathered about two hundred paces below us, and the said light began to ascend quickly in our direction.

"Shaft above looks like about a hundred and fifty meters. One open door. I don't see a gap at the top of the shaft for it to go higher," Kris informed us.

"On three. One, two, three." We all stepped backward, and the top of the lift was right there to receive us and take us up fifteen feet smoothly before pulsing and coming to a halt.

"Ascent command. Stop command…" I murmured, and there was another pulse down the shaft.

"Lift command," I stated in satisfaction, just as the room began to rise again. We all shifted to face the direction of the doorway above, a still rectangle of soft white light in the streaming threads of the liftshaft.

"We jumping or stopping?" Briggs asked calmly. I stepped behind Kris.

"At your command," I said calmly, grabbing her by her long hair, which promptly slithered around my hand in interlocking braids. She reached out and grabbed Briggs' girdle, and I felt their ki mesh as her fingers trailed along the shaft, Trembling Domain reaching out thirty feet ahead of us and up to see if there was anything waiting up there. Crown's foot lowered gently to the roof of the liftroom below us as the doorway of light came closer.

"Clear!" she muttered, and surged forward, yanking both of us with her at the same moment. Perfectly timed, we surged through the door and were completely through as the lift rose up behind us, stopping against the ceiling there emblazoned with a whole lot of Runework I had memorized while we were ascending. Focusing formation, incredibly sophisticated. Briggs pivoted left, Kris ahead, I was right.

"Clear."

"Clear."

"Clear," we all said together. The hallways were in shades of brown and gray, with either great reproductions of wooden paneling on the walls and floors that extended out in front of us, or fantastically old real stuff. There were potted plants set into wall creches at regular intervals, and the air didn't feel as still and clinical as on the lower floors.

"Humanoid scents, I think, quasi-human, like Empyreans, but further out," Briggs said in a deep whisper.

"Five… six of them."

"I'm hearing at least two hums of magibots." Kris pointed ahead.

"Lower register, probably a stronger power source."

"Larger room and doors down my way."

"Corridors branching off mine," Briggs said, all of us contributing to the Visual File.

"Straight up the middle would seem to be the best play. I'm going to guess living quarters to the right, storerooms and public areas my way, and work areas up the middle."

"Gonna feel bad if we get hit from both sides," Kris grinned, but I just turned around and let her tow me as she and Briggs took point. I could look at the manafield in any direction, I wasn't subject to my visual field of view, and I was writing it all into the Visual File… and I could look out their eyes as we moved. Double doors ahead of us, and the floor actually had a self-repairing lush carpet without a speck of dust or wear on it.

The plants in the creches were all lightly magical, flowering and capable of changing their leaves and blossoms as desired, possibly responding to ambient mana, possibly preprogrammed. All of them were quite lovely, with fine scents that were filtered by our Vajras… and they definitely had some psychoactive aspects to them.

We were all Scentless at the moment, so these plants weren't going to have anything physical to react to us, and certainly seemed responsive to magical or psychic indicators, neither of which they were going to pick up in the Auras of two Forsaken. Indeed, I watched the blooms go all white on Briggs' side as his Sun flowed over and past them, burning away any ambient mana, while they went gray and neutral on Kris's as the mana went still and immovable. My own Aura was naturally buried inside theirs.

We passed this subtle alarm system without incident. Kris touched the double doors, flicked up her soulclaws, and raked them into the seam between the doors. A connection was broken, and she and Briggs pushed them open almost without breaking stride. Ahead of us were what looked to be glass doors going into some manner of office, only another door there with a name plate on it, and nobody visible at the desk there. The hallways extended out to left and right, and doorways were visible leading off them.

"All scents pass through here. One ahead, two left, three to the right," Briggs reported.

"Left. It's likely the supervisor is in the middle, and sees the most activity." Kris didn't say anything, just moving left quickly, relying on her Trembling Domain to alert her to any surprises. The conduits in the walls here were less fine control and more thicker power, which might say something about the purposes here.

Through her Tremblesense, we could get a clear read of the solid contents of any room before we even reached it, which soon clearly identified a person setting at some kind of magical control desk within the second room, with a lot of crystal veins extended up to it.

"That looks useful," Briggs murmured.

"And I don't think they are facing the door." Which door was locked, but the combination of Sound Bubbles, Vajra, and Null Strikes had it open in just seconds. The office was spacious, mostly facing a wall that was absolutely covered with real-time scrying screens showing real-time images all over the island of Dereth. Just a glance showed Freehold, Mayoi, Hebian-to, and Baishi, along with a half-dozen areas with Isparians and other races engaged in fighting, drilling, or social activities.

The man sitting in a hovering seat there was at least as tall as an Empyrean, with robes emphasizing wide shoulders with a narrow waist. His white hair was long in back, high and tight in the middle, and he seemed quite fixated on the screens in front of him. No screens showed any interior views. Obviously anything like that was left to others, who after thirty thousand years wouldn't be too hasty about investigating minor things going wrong and were relying on automagic systems to repair themselves.

I saw the burning wreckage of Nuhmudira's ship floating out there in the Inner Sea, but no sign of the Wagons. Perfect. Briggs and Kris probably couldn't be seen in these scrying sensors, but could be inferred they were present by looking around them. However, Astral Wards disrupted any scrying sensors they were in the range of. So, putting one on the Mick meant that any attempt to view the Wagons and find out they weren't being dragged by two invisible people wasn't going to work here…

and also inferred that I might still be aboard them, as my Astral Ward had made us all invisible earlier. They didn't know we were inside.