Chương 514: BECMI Chapter 513 – A-mazing Greetings

The grandiose doors… opened into a hallway only ten feet by ten feet, the room at the entry narrowing rapidly until only thirty feet from the entry it had become that small, clearly a nasty way to greet an opposing army… or visiting delegation. Cirru and I just looked at it.

"So inviting!" she remarked.

"Good thing they put it AFTER a suitable grand entry hall!" she mocked them and the small entry area. The dank smell of something cold and reptilian lingered in the air, too.

"Such a friendly place," I agreed, considering the opening.

"A labyrinth would be appropriate, with monsters springing out from behind walls and many fiendish traps!"

"Oh, good, here I thought they all ran away," Cirru deadpanned with confidence. I swirled up a handful of spells, including Find Traps at VI and Find the Path, while also reaching out to touch the stone. My smile was enough for Cirru to roll her eyes.

"Don't tell me – they didn't magically reinforce the stone!" she protested in mock annoyance.

"It's magically created, they likely couldn't without further refinement." The stone flowed under my fingertips like slow water, and I could only chortle.

"Cirru, dear, I don't think we're going to be walking through their labyrinth."

"Pity that." I began to walk forward, the magic indicating the way out of the maze leading in two directions: one going right at the fork ahead, the other going straight towards a wall. Find Traps sharpened my senses as I led the way, and I paused at the intersection, sniffing once as I considered the floor.

"Do you smell that?" I asked the others, who both sniffed as well. Cirru wrinkled her nose, as did Duum.

"Some kind of… poisonous seasoning sauce?" she asked, familiar with all kinds of cuisine.

"Lightfoot across the pit, please." She nodded and just skated over it behind me weightlessly, whereas I wasn't even touching the ground. I went straight ahead towards the wall, reaching out ahead of me and willing the stone away, which melted out of my path. For only twenty feet, before another chamber opened up, out of which a wave of cold air spread to greet us, and grinding sounds started up within. We entered what seemed to be a large meat locker of some kind, complete with hooks to hang food upon…

and some grinding thing of blades and an open chute on one end, a funnel on the other, meant to grind up that meat as it was gained. I considered what they might be growing or raising off Permanently Created monsters having offspring, and shook my head, the chill meaning nothing to me. There didn't seem to be any exit to this place, so I Shaped a way out ahead and to the right. Thirty feet later, another stretch of dark, drab corridors extended before us.

Both arrows showed going left now instead of ahead or right, so I turned and strolled along that way, looking for more traps and magic. I kept straight instead of taking the next right, down to the next left, which I did take. Shape arrow said go straight, maze arrow said go left. Something was wrong with the stone of the walls to the left, so I ignored it and Shaped the wall away in front of me. Forty feet later, the passage opened up, and we were back in the existing hallway.

Both Paths said follow it left and around. Above and Beyond the Weave of the World said stepping that way was going to drop a very powerful Fireball right on top of us. My Heat Sink Hexar Shield slid out of my Masspack and hovered over my head, and through the trap we strolled. The ceiling pulsed, invisible Runes flared to life, and a dot of fire fell down upon us before exploding in a… puff of flames that was instantly sucked into the Heat Sink without doing anything.

I reached up with Dread and scored those Runes three times just to disarm the trap permanently, then kept walking. There was another set of double doors in front of us, twenty by twenty feet, clearly leading somewhere…

The combination lock spun into proper alignment, the equivalent of 14-9-13-11-4, and Cirru pushed the heavy doors open.

"Well, that got big quick." The room beyond opened up rather quickly. The hall was ridiculously high, at least a couple hundred feet, shadowy illumination from outside coming through windows without glass, magic on the openings stopping any winds or rain.

Shadows extended across the room and the interior walls dividing it, murals displaying rituals of magic, tearing down gods and empires, roasting the populations of other species, obliterating armies, great scenes of torment, and other such excesses of behavior dividing up the chamber and concealing most of what lay beyond them, including one wall basically only twenty yards away directly in front of us. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Just a greeting chamber, not a place of importance, and Dread was reading Evil freaking everywhere… but a very specific kind in front of us, and it was powerful enough to do so right through the unenhanced stone. There were a lot of nasty creatures in this place, what looked like one behind every wall in the place, all of them waiting for someone to pop out so they could mob us.

I so noted their positions in the shadows and behind barriers to Cirru, and didn't bother to set us up for their joint attack as we glided forward and to the right at speed. It wasn't like they couldn't notice the massive door creaking open and the shaft of light from outside pouring in. With them all spotted, I didn't have much incentive or reason to hold back. Now, we'd been visiting alternate realms all day, and I was down some Valences…

but nothing truly important, and I still had the fixed Perpetual Spell, no other Kickers allowed, which I could use. Passives still applied, however, as did my Shardcaster benefits. Twinned Admixtured Shards from Valence flipped up in four sets of two dozen, seething with a lot of passive Boosts and Dread's Kickers, and I let fly without either of us slowing our pace.

Seeking let the Shards bend around obstructions and hit the things ducking into cover instantly at the sign of Casting, so said cover didn't save them. Fire and cold, searing Light flared, two to the left, one to the right, and one ahead and left through the opening there. Cirru followed the one ahead, but swerved right. An armored Revenant of some unhuman race; a rising Nightcrawler getting ready to pounce; a thing of shadows and fear coalesced to inflict death…

and ahead, the towering presence of another Nightwalker making ready to act, and none of them given the chance to do so. Disrupting Energized Shards with Holy Metas plowed into them and made them explosively dead much, much too quickly for the undead to do anything. Cirru found herself facing a robed skeletal spellcaster watching the massive form of the Nightcrawler exploded in radiant Holy energies of blinding intensity, the Light of it shaking its soul as something it had not seen in who knew how long…

and then Cirru was around the corner and on top of it with speed and her fists crackling with lightning. It flew backwards into the wall at the first impact, bounced off hard right into her next advancing punch, which battered it down and back and then it was in her hands and thrown to the ground, yelling as she tore its arms off its shoulders with one hand, and with the other clamped its shriveled, bony jaw shut.

Lightning sparked around her hand, not harming the lich, but the tremble of Thunder upon her claws was rattling his skull audibly.

"I suggest you wait for my mistress to address you before you try anything," Cirru purred softly to the creature in elegant Necrus, earning a startled pause from it.

"You may even get out of this without incident." Without any effort, she slammed it back against the base of the throne… in the wrong direction. Its spine broke sharply trying to bend that far and failed, while she just waited until I came to the foot of the steps there.

With double crashes, the mistflaming corpses of the nightwing and druj floating near the ceiling hit the ground after my second volley, exploded into vivic dust, and stained the dark floor a glaring white as sparkling white mist spread in all directions, matching that drifting out from behind cover where the revenant and a crouching nightwalker had been waiting and were now Burning merrily away.

The scream from the last target behind the wall ahead of me echoed around the chamber as I strolled through the opening after Cirru, looking left into the eyes of the lich and meeting its paralytic gaze without effort with my own crimson eyes. I didn't know what it was, but it was now dead by the way its Aura winked out.

Duum hopped off my shoulders, landed on Load, which assembled itself just inches above the floor, and floated off into the shadows, where certain other Detects said some sort of precious metals and other stuff was hidden in the shadows… although why these undead would be left treasure was beyond me. Perhaps their masters just forgot they had it?

"Greetings, I am the Lady Edge," I addressed the lich in haughty Necrus, watching the crimson lights of its eyes look me up and down.

"I see you've met Cirruluxul, the Lightning Claw. How might I address you? And please, no spellcasting. It will be quite painful to you." Cirru unclamped her hand, and the lich audibly cracked his jaw to reset it, wiggling it around a minute before answering.

"I was once known as Rogmentor, a great archmage of the Joventi. Now, I am just a nameless thing slaving for the Carnifex who hold my Phylactery," it began in a hollow, dry, and unhappy vaguely male voice.

"Welcome to Carnifex Castle, greatest and final stronghold of the race destined to rule over all of existence," he recited with rather graphically flat enthusiasm.

"I regret not being able to welcome you as I was properly instructed, but it seems I will have to make do with words, not wyrds, Lady Edge," he continued dryly.

"Tell me, dhampir, what brings you to this loveliest of creations out in the Everfalling Realm?"

"We look to be exploring the rest of the Castle with some speed, seeing if any of your masters are still around," I admitted to the alien lich.

"While the sight of my masters humiliating you with their overwhelming power and subjecting you to the greatest of humiliations and tortures warms my thoughts, I am afraid you will find little of their much-lauded hospitality here today, Lady Edge. Do go wandering about and attempting to find them. I expect you might find some tributes to their magnificence which may be of interest to you, but a proper meeting will not be happening," he apologized with clinical detachment.

"Meaning, they left, and they left you all alone to guard an empty shell, instead of taking you with them, because you simply don't matter that much, Master Rogmentor," I paraphrased, tapping my finger on Dread.

"I am aware that without your Phylactery, you cannot even kill yourself, and if I kill you here, you will merely reappear at the side of whoever bears the cage of your soul, warning him that someone has indeed breached their prison." Unwhite vivic flame accented with black Undead Banefire and silver-gold Holy flames surged up from the Dreadskull placed atop Dread, making it look both angelic and demonic at the same time. The angry red lights of his eyes fixated on it with both fear and hunger.