Chương 40: Chapter 39 - Into the Mountain

"Deep under the gilded halls of Kaz-Varr lie miles of exploratory shafts carved with a reckless disregard for tectonic stability, a hollow monument to a thousand years of unsustainable industry. These ancient veins have become a subterranean geography of their own, a dark mirror to the world above where the forgotten remnants of history settle like dust in a tomb." - Subterranean Surveys of the Western Range, 2nd Edition.

MASON The fissure exhaled a breath of stale air, the opening maybe five feet wide and six feet tall. We slipped inside and the howl of the pass was cut off, giving way to an almost eerie silence, the low ceiling forcing me to walk bent over. The glow from the entrance faded quickly, darkness swallowing the tunnel ahead. A sphere of blue illumination bloomed in my palm as I shaped the raw mana into a sustainable light source. Old scars spread across the walls, pickaxe strikes softened by time and moisture.

Rotting timber supports looked ready to collapse at a whisper, rusted iron pitons jutting out of the rock like broken teeth.

"This wasn't Ironhand work," Doran said, voice echoing in the cramped space. He ran a gauntleted hand along the deep gouges in the wall.

"They were chasing a vein without stabilizing the overburden. It's hasty and reckless... greed mining. What a disgrace." Liarra pointed to a series of diagonal scratches in the floor.

"The Drift marks the safe paths. If you want to live, stay close - one mark for an open passage, two for a collapse, three..." She paused, glancing back at us.

"Three we run the other way." The crate beside us hummed softly, a quiet vibration that Fin seemed to find comforting. He walked beside it, one hand resting on the wood like guiding a pet.

"The Drift?" I asked, ignoring the anxious energy that was a constant reminder I was back underground.

"Smugglers, anarchists, criminals, outcasts," Liarra said, searching for more markings in the dark as we hit a fork in the tunnel.

"People the clans and the kingdoms forgot. They carved a life from the stone that the dwarves threw away." Her voice carried a fondness that contrasted with her stoic image.

"You speak of them with respect."

"Do I?" she replied, not looking back.

"They live by a code I understand. They keep their word, they pay their debts, and they don't ask you about your past. That's more than I can say for the High Council." Doran opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it. We walked in silence, the crunch of our boots on the stone and the hum of the crate drowned out my thoughts. The tunnel widened, opening into a large conjunction where the remains of an old rail system rusted into the floor.

We took a path to the left, Liarra stepping carefully over abandoned equipment and mine carts crumbling with rust. After we'd walked another few miles, she stopped.

"We're still a long way from The Drift, but you never know where they may be scouting. If there's no direct threat, keep your weapons sheathed - if we look like invaders, we die."

"Understood," I said, checking the crate to make sure the runes were holding. We pressed deeper into the dark, the sounds of skittering creatures in the unseen spaces putting everyone's nerves on edge. After several hours, the tunnel ended abruptly. I risked pushing a bit more mana into the orb of light, the radius expanding to reveal old rail tracks that twisted into the void. A few feet from where we stood, the path disappeared into a chasm, a black throat in the mountain that swallowed the light.

It was twenty feet wide, the path continuing on the other side. The bridge that had spanned the gap was gone, reduced to a few timbers that clung to the rock.

"Dead end," Doran said, kicking a loose stone over the edge. I waited to hear the impact but it never came.

"We should go back, find another spur," I said.

"There's no way to cross this."

"There's no other spur to find," Liarra replied, peering into the dark.

"If you want to avoid the Stone-Sworn patrols on the upper levels, we have to clear this gap." I looked at the gap. It was too far to jump, and we had the crate. Could I contact Grimwald through the Chest of Transference? Maybe he could send through a rope, something that would allow us to make a bridge. Someone would still need to get to the other side to anchor it... I scanned the area, eyes landing on a rusted beam running through the floor, part of the old rail system.

"I could blow this beam out of the floor, if we're lucky it could act as a bridge." Fin made a strangled noise.

"Ex-explosives?! Are you mad? We're in the middle of a tectonic fault, we'd be buried alive!"

"Have a better idea?" I asked, frustrated. I could slip into the Athenaeum and hope to research a soluti-"The metal... we reshape it," Fin said, cutting off my thoughts. He looked down at the beam, pulling a pair of complex multi-lens goggles from his inventory. The lenses whirred as he put them on, cycling through various colors.

"We need raw mana, lots of it." Nobody spoke up. Revealing my mana pool would be risky, it was an anomaly I couldn't easily explain and I'd already earned plenty of suspicion.

"I have mana," I said finally.

"What do you intend to do with it?" Using raw mana to heat that beam enough to shape it would be a ridiculous undertaking, even for me. Beyond that, the damn thing was embedded in the floor.

"I can sing the rock," Fin said, the idea sounding ridiculous. He looked around as if what he meant was obvious.

"Aetheric Harmonics." It wasn't that I hadn't heard of it, it was a common part of crafting amongst the dwarves and gnomes, but I'd mostly dismissed as a focusing technique at best, religious hokum at worst.

"You think that'll actually work?" I asked, the disbelief apparently a bit too evident.

"I-it's physics!" Fin snapped, professional pride offended.

"Everything has a frequency. If you know how, you can match it... make it pliable." He looked around for validation, but apparently didn't find it.

"I can do it, but I don't have the mana reserves to shape that much rock, I'd burn out in seconds." It sounded absurd, but I'd learned that this unassuming gnome was far more than he appeared. I hesitated. Letting another mage draw directly from your core bypassed the System, removed every failsafe. Fin could permanently corrupt my mana channels if he was unskilled... or worse, malicious. And then there was the exposure. He would know the size of my mana pool the moment he connected to it...

I'd be handing him my biggest secret. Fin appeared focused, his usual nervous mannerisms absent, eyes cool behind the goggles. Maybe he was a very skilled liar, but if he was looking for a chance to harm me, he wouldn't survive long afterward.

"Listen to me carefully, Fin," I said, voice edged with warning.

"I'll be your conduit, but you draw only what you need. If I feel you probing, trying to map my channels or anchor a siphon, I'll cut the connection and the feedback will turn your brain into ash." Fin swallowed hard, his larynx bobbing.

"Un-understood." I placed my hand on his small, bony shoulder and took a deep breath, centering my mind with [Unbreakable Will].

"Do it." Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Fin closed his eyes and began to hum, the pull starting almost immediately. It was a suction against my palm, like a drain had opened and my life force was being pulled directly through it. Fin gasped, his back arching, eyes open wide behind his goggles.

"Fera's gears..." he wheezed, voice strained.

"It-it's endless." I saw panic flare in his eyes, the sudden rush of my mana reserves slamming into a vessel that was too small to hold it, spilling out around the edges.

"Focus!" I barked, clamping down harder on his shoulder.

"Don't let it pool or we're both fucked." I ignored the rising fear, concentrating my unbreakable will to force him to comply. Fin gritted his teeth, resuming the hum, channeling the mana into the stone. The sound grew louder, rising in pitch until it screamed in harmony with the ringing in the cavern, bouncing off the walls and echoing down the tunnel. Below us, the ground pulled apart, stone grinding as the metal inside it glowed a dull red from the vibrational friction.

The mana continued to flow, the ticker in my peripheral vision dropping alarmingly fast. Fin shaped it, amplifying the frequency more and more until slowly, impossibly, the massive beam was pushed out of the ground and began to reshape itself. It was cherry red now, creeping along the ground like molten steel, stretching like taffy under the onslaught of mana. I felt the strain as a building pressure in my head. Liarra watched us, body language shifting as she did the math.

"Hold it..." Fin gritted out, blood trickling from his nose, capillaries bursting in his eyes, the veins standing out on his forehead.

"Almost... there...." Seemingly all at once, the now fully liquid metal shot forward, webbing itself across the gap. More metal was pulled into it, the resonance of the frequency grabbing the head of a nearby pickaxe and the crumbling wheels of a cart, adding it to the growing mass. The metal met the other side of the gap, sparks flying as it fused itself into the rock on the other side. I severed the connection, mental gate slamming shut with a snap that I felt as a physical force.

Fin collapsed and Doran caught him. Steam was rising from his skin, raw mana leaking out into the air in smoky tendrils. The fatigue hit me next, my knees feeling suddenly weak and unsteady. I popped the cork on a stamina potion, drinking it quickly and watching the blinking red return to a softer greenish yellow. I offered the same to Fin, color returning to his face as he drank it down. Fin looked up at me, goggles askew, fear and awe.

"Wh-what are you? That... your mana pool... im-imposs-""Just rest," I said, cutting him off. Fin shook his head, wiping the blood from his nose. He wanted to say more, but wisely chose not to press it. Doran tested the metal with his boot and it held solid, looking at Fin with a new, begrudging respect. Liarra was less impressed, her expression unreadable.

"Let's move, before the mountain decides to punish your hubris." I'd revealed far more than I would have liked, but we'd made it. A problem for tomorrow. The uneasy partnership we'd been enjoying seemed to harden into outright suspicion as we ventured further into the mountain. The old veins were a labyrinth and our guide was clearly rethinking her decision to participate in this venture.

We walked for days without seeing scouts or even monsters, the darkness broken only by the steady flow of my mana-sphere and the quiet hum of the crate. In the evenings we'd make camp, fires burning low to provide some small warmth, but not much sleep was had by anyone. Irritations flared as the fatigue sapped our ability to remain calm. Fin and Doran took to bickering like children, Liarra's icy silence somehow even worse.

I tried to play peacemaker but mostly failed, my position in the group growing ever more tenuous. Fear swelled as we descended deeper, the surrealness of these depths pushing out other concerns. I could feel the presence of other beings in the caves, but they chose not to attack a well-armed party, a small mercy at least. Time was marked only by the ache in my legs and the shrinking pile of rations, my own food supplies long since depleted.

The years I'd spent in Peristonia came back to me down in this darkness, triggering strange flares of panic. The flickering of firelight like the torches of my guards, Doran's heavy metal boots a reminder of tapping in the dark. If anyone noticed, they made no comment. At least I was not alone.

I thought of Fenris often, his dreams of one day exploring these depths was an ever-present reminder that I was living for both of us now, but the dire circumstances and lost time I couldn't afford were a constant drain on my mood. Doran grew quieter with every mile, the evidence of his people's negligence was everywhere. Collapsed shafts, hasty supports, skeletons where workers had been left to die... at some point he'd stopped even trying to defend it, brooding anger replacing denial.

As a noble, he'd never had cause to do this sort of work, never knew what it actually cost to keep the forges burning in Kaz-Varr. On the third night, we made camp in a dry alcove. I ate the tasteless rations in silence, the camaraderie that had once sparked around the cooking fire was long gone. Now all we had was a dour determination to survive - a feeling I knew all too well. Liarra took the first watch of the night as she often did, the fatigue effecting her less than the others.

"We're entering deep-stalker territory," she warned that night before we bedded down.

"Starting tomorrow, we tie ourselves together, do not even think about undoing that rope." I was too tired to object or ask questions, nodding with the others. As I did most nights, I slipped into the Athenaeum and went to the archives, continuing an investigation that I'd taken on as a distraction from my darkening thoughts. I'd come to rely on [Tactical Analysis] like breathing, the information it provided was both a comfort and an anchor, but it was also limited.

As an Iron-Rank skill, I was desperate to evolve it, but unlike every other of the hundreds of skills I'd ever acquired, the Athenaeum had no information on it. Not a single morsel, almost as if it didn't exist. I'd been researching it for years in construct time, but so far the best I could come up with were hints that it wasn't a skill at all. It behaved differently to all my other skills, it's System description strange and incomplete.

I pulled a heavy leather-bound manual from a high shelf: Administrator Tools: Vol. 4 - Diagnostic Overlays. The text was impenetrably dense, written in High Exaltian technical jargon I could barely translate. I read through it, cross-referencing the information with my own skill description to confirm my suspicions - the similarities were undeniable. [Tactical Analysis] was a degraded echo of a much more powerful exaltian admin tool called [Omniscience Protocol].

According to the manual, it was designed for debugging and allowed System administrators to identify glitches and rogue variables. < Query: Evolutionary path for [Tactical Analysis]. Filter for System-compatible variants. > The Archivist remained maddeningly silent as it always did when I asked about [Tactical Analysis]. The constellations flickered but formed no platforms or new paths. < Error. Skill designation [Tactical Analysis] unrecognized in Database. User-side anomaly detected.

> I closed the book, frustrated to be meeting a dead end in a void of supposedly infinite knowledge. If there were no answers in this library, where else could even hope to look? There was one thing I'd yet to try. I returned to the waking world. It was quiet, just the steady drip of condensation and the steady breathing of the others. I held my hand up in the faint light of the glowing embers, studying the ring's markings.

If the skill was a diagnostic tool, and the ring was an administrator's key, surely they spoke the same language. I activated [Tactical Analysis] and focused the skill on the ring itself. The familiar blue overlay stuttered before fracturing and dissolving. A cascade of gold geometric symbols resolved in the air... not Exaltian, at least not any version of it that I'd seen. Was this the System's actual source code? A [Tactical Analysis] message appeared above the ring.

< TARGET: [Anchor Point - Alpha] > < STATUS: Active > < DATA STREAM: Unidirectional (Output Only) > < ERROR: Input Port Offline.

"Codex Nexus" Protocol requires bi-directional handshake. > Input port offline... bi-directional handshake. The ring was broadcasting, but it wasn't receiving. Could I force it to receive data as well? But how? I poured more mana into the skill, trying to brute force a connection, pushing my consciousness against the ring's input functionality. The gold symbols lit up brighter and began to spin.

"Whatever you're doing, stop," a voice said from the shadows, quiet but insistent.

"You're leaking mana all over, you're going to attract trouble." The skill cut off and I snapped my hand shut. Liarra stood peering at me from the fire's edge, her arms crossed. She was looking at my fist where the ring was now hidden. Had those symbols been in my head?

"That's an expensive ring," she observed, not even pretending to hide her distrust.

"Distinctive crest, too. Griffon rampant on a field of ash?" At least she hadn't seen the symbols.

"Found it in a ruin," I lied, turning the ring so the sigil faced my palm.

"Figured the diamond could be worth something." She walked closer and crouched beside the dying fire.

"The Petracca crest, powerful family once. And tragic." She looked up, the firelight catching the green of her eyes.

"They burned in their beds, all save a son who disappeared without a trace." I waited for the accusation, but it didn't come.

"Bad luck to wear a dead man's jewelry." I suppressed a sigh of relief.

"What makes you think my luck is bad?" I said, deadpan. I glanced around as if taking in a beautiful mountain sunset.

"What could be luckier than this?" She wasn't amused.

"I could sell that for you, worth a fortune to the right collector. Of course, worth a death sentence to the wrong one..."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"You do that." She stood up, stretching.

"We reach the junction in the morning and it's going to get a lot more dangerous, you're going to need the rest." She walked back to her post, leaving me alone with the dark and a mind full of spinning gold symbols.