Chương 1295: 1325 - Task Force Nikolaos II

The weather started to turn as Valeria plummeted toward the surface of Antaas. A cold wind had started to blow in from the west, and with it came heavy cloud cover and the distant rumble of thunder that she felt even in the heart of her Ulta suit. Such a feeling would've normally brought her great comfort, but that was due to a lifetime around Leon. Usually, when she felt thunder echoing in her chest, she knew that her husband was close.

Now, however, it brought a distinct sense of foreboding that didn't abate even as the desolate city rose up to greet her. The city, she could tell even amidst its decay, would have been a sight to see in its time. Here, the remains of great towers that had once risen like trees in a forest now rested on the ground in great heaps of rubble, their bases, crowded in times past by smaller buildings like mushrooms and small ferns that blanket the forest floor, little more than foliage-covered mounds.

Now, her sapphire eyes beheld a city long reclaimed by the jungle; enormous trees with canopies stretching far skyward and sinking their roots past even the deepest tower foundation, leafy green ferns forming a thick blanket upon the dirt-covered stones, and the distinct tracks of animals passing through the wide boulevards and living in dark hollows that had once been stately rooms.

The city had largely been made of stone, but here and there, glinting through the leaves and tens of millennia of accumulated dirt, she saw glass or metal. The biggest sources of visible metal, however, were the sleek hulls of the twenty-eight arks that she'd sent to secure this plane. Though they'd sunk into the soft earth, a couple things were reasonably clear: they hadn't crashed, nor had they been shot down. All of the arks looked reasonably intact, as if they'd landed, toppled over, and then started sinking.

Of their crews, there was no sign. They could still be inside the arks somewhere, but Valeria doubted it. Power was still on within the arks since the enchantments preventing her from seeing inside with her magic senses were active, but if there were any living beings in the arks, they'd failed to respond to any attempt at communication, nor had anyone exited the half-buried arks since her arrival beyond the terminus line. Even the wisps within hadn't responded to any magical pings.

A bright flash of lightning illuminated the city just as she landed in a grand central square in the middle of the city, a few marble statues poking out of the dirt here and there, but little grandeur remaining in the space aside from the magnificent thick-trunked trees that sheltered this square from the elements. Several seconds later, the subsequent clap of thunder shook her suit, something she felt as if it were her own body with her head pressed against the cloud glass plate that served as a headrest.

Around her, three transport arks touched down, along with ten more Ulta suits. Including the suit pilots, she had a hundred Tempest Knights with her, but no others. She understood that coming down here was a risk, and so she took only those who volunteered. Of course, her entire contingent of Tempest Knights volunteered, forcing her to pare them down to a single company of knights.

"Secure the area," she ordered as the transport arks took off again and accelerated skyward. Her knights fanned outward, their armor gleaming, their weapons in hand, all ready for a confrontation with whatever had brought down their detachment. However, nothing happened. No terrible monsters leaped out from the lengthening shadows, no savage barbarians appeared from hovels dug into the ruins, no sign at all of the missing crew or of any potential enemy presented itself.

None, at least, save for the pervasive feeling of being watched, of eyes upon her that she couldn't find. Just off the square rose the squat remnants of some great palace. The walls were thick, and a small rise around the structure indicated it had once been surrounded by a strong outer wall. That curtain wall was long gone, however, and in the gardens and courtyards within, many colorful plants grew chaotically, without any sign of containment or direction.

"This place stinks," Perella whispered into her comm slate, keeping Valeria up-to-date, the knightess walking on foot.

"Like rotting corpses." Valeria glanced at one particular flower species growing in the palace gardens, which had seemingly breached the broken curtain walls and spread throughout the city. It was a disgusting thing, blood red petals each the size of her hand, and a bulbous pistil the size of her head. Black spots covered the petals, while thick leaves along the stem covered sharp, curved thorns.

It bore a clear resemblance to a particular flower that Elise had ordered grown in the Royal fields—blood roses, whose petals could be crushed and turned into a powerful clotting agent, useful for stopping wounds from bleeding. Helen used them for other purposes, but of those, Valeria knew little. Useful though the roses were, they also stank like rotten blood.

"Probably the flowers," Valeria replied.

"Keep an eye out for—" She was interrupted when a particularly strong gust of wind blew in, bringing with it a dense curtain of mist that enshrouded the city. This mist didn't block her magic senses, but it was opaque enough that she could hardly see fifty feet in front of her. Worse, her knights outside of suits started to cough.

"Something's—" Perella began, but her report was cut off by a loud hack that came from the bottom of her lungs. Valeria pulsed her magic—mist was water, and she was a water mage even if she primarily used it in the form of ice. Backed by her eleventh-tier power and no small amount of origin power, the mist was thrown back, and she once again saw her knights, many of whom had fallen over. Five had even stopped moving.

"Get inside!" she ordered, pointing toward the remains of the grand palace. Her knights started moving while those in Ulta suits stopped to grab those five that had seemingly fallen unconscious. As they moved, the mist pressed against the barrier that was her magic, but couldn't penetrate back into the square.

However, the clouds above had continued to rapidly darken, and the edge of the distant storm was now upon them; rain started falling so thickly that the streets of the city, choked with plant life and accumulated dirt, rapidly turned into muddy rivers. Valeria extended her cover, keeping the rain off her people as they shot toward the palace ruins. The palace had been truly grand in its time; that much was easy to see as Valeria's people poured in.

It must've had a thousand rooms at least, and though most of it had collapsed, several halls remained intact enough to provide cover, and even allow them to ascend to higher floors using grand marble stairways that were large enough for the Ulta suits to fly through. The décor was passingly familiar to her; marble floors and support columns shaped like tree trunks.

The walls were trapezoidal, while the ceiling was curved; both were unadorned, as any decoration upon them would've come from magical projections that had long ago run out of magic power. She guessed based on the tree-trunk-like columns that the décor would've been projections of the outdoors, as she knew that the Thunderbird Clan didn't do too well with being cooped up inside for long periods of time.

She knew that Leon grew particularly antsy when he was unable to go for a flight or even just walk around the gardens for an hour or two at least once a day. As they moved upward to get away from any rain that might accumulate within the palace—though it seemed most of the water was flowing away even as the mist rushed into the square as Valeria moved—one of the knights halted, terror visible in his demeanor despite her body-concealing armor. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

Read this novel on Royal Road. She then gave a blood-curdling shriek and began swinging at the air, her sword gleaming with light. Motes of that light shot out from the blade with every swing, punching fist-sized holes in the palace walls. It looked like she was attacking nothing at all, but she did so with terrible fervor.

"Nava!" Perella shouted as she clamped down hard on the other woman's arm. She was about to say something more when Nava slammed the pommel of her sword into Perella's midsection, sending her sliding away on the floor, slick with the rain they'd tracked inside. Nava didn't get a chance for another attack as several more knights leaped onto her, bringing her down. The stricken knightess struggled for a moment, then went still, as unconscious as the five others who'd been laid low by the mist.

"Darkness magic," another knightess growled.

"Nava was hallucinating!"

"No," another said, her voice quivering with fear. She stood apart from the other knights, pointing with her spear down a dark hallway at something only she could see.

"She saw… what I'm seeing now…"

"Speak, then, Cilia!" Perella grumbled as she rose to her feet, her armor having ensured that Nava's blow was little more than embarrassing for them both.

"What do you see?" Valeria narrowed the scope of her magic senses momentarily down that hallway but sensed nothing at all.

"My… mother," Cilia whispered.

"She's been dead for two hundred years…"

"Then it's a hallucination!" another knightess called out.

"No," Cilia breathed. She sounded on the verge of tears.

"I can feel it… It's calling to my blood…" Valeria's eyes narrowed as she realized what Cilia meant: both she and Nava were Ancestral Harts. Allos, another Hart, had also been acting strangely even beyond Antaas' terminus line…

"She's… telling me to run," Cilia said.

"To live …"

"Those with bloodlines," Valeria hissed, "do any of you sense anything else?" Two others did, with one of them seeing shadows in the corners of her vision. These two, Valeria noted, were also Harts, but both were in Ulta suits, which might've explained the more muted reactions to whatever was causing these visions. None of her other bloodline-bearing knights sensed anything, however, and every Tribe was represented amongst this company.

Though Valeria was no great enchantress, she was still fairly skilled—skilled enough to have studied the ancient runes alongside Leon and to absorb many of Nestor's lessons. She used that knowledge to project her magic outside of her suit and conjure a rune out of ice, one that was relatively simple, meaning 'shield'. She concentrated on 'shielding' her people from whatever was affecting them, pouring her will and origin power into the rune, which sputtered a bit, but began to steadily glow after several seconds.

Cilia visibly relaxed, and Nava awoke screaming. Some consoling words were said by Perella, and Nava calmed down, though the words she had to say did little to raise the mood among them.

"I saw scales the color of kelp, and eyes like burning topazes," she said after getting ahold of herself.

"It hissed like lightning and spoke like thunder, promising me everything below the earth…" Nava shivered but was able to rise to her feet with some help from Perella.

"What do you make of this, my Queen?" Perella asked Valeria.

"Something's trying to strike at us in any way it can," Valeria said coldly.

"If it's beneath the earth, then we'll break the earth and kill it. If it hides in the jungle, then we'll burn the jungle. If it's anywhere else, we'll—" A sharp metallic clicking sound interrupted her as it echoed down the hall. All of the knights pointed their weapons in the direction the sound had come from, the black hallway providing no hint as to the sound's source.

Valeria took the lead, carefully but with deliberate speed advancing down the hall, external lights on her and the others' Ulta suits providing enough light for their physical eyes just in case something unexpectedly blocked their magic senses.

This intact chunk of the palace wasn't particularly large, so they found the source of the clicking sound quickly: a set of magnificently wrought bronze doors set into a recess in the trapezoidal hall, just tall enough to allow Ulta suits to enter if they crouched slightly, and open just a crack. Reliefs had been embossed onto the front of the doors, showing an image of a Thunderbird wreathed in lightning striking down a pit of sea snakes.

A horn rose from the forehead of each snake, and the water around them raged. Perella and several other knights pushed the doors open as more knights rushed in. The doors creaked open on ancient hinges, moving only due to the high average tier of her knights, but what lay beyond surprised her so thoroughly that she hesitated to follow her knights in. A room, richly appointed, looking like it was immune to the decay all around the city, greeted them. The floor was dark marble and mostly covered by a large white rug.

White fire burned upon fifty candles scattered throughout the room, while the room's hearth was aglow with more white fire. Several chairs and a sofa were by the hearth, made of dark wood and cushioned in blue, while the opposite side of the room was given over entirely to bookshelves, whose books looked perfectly intact. Three sets of large windows allowed them to see the storm outside, the torrential rain and roiling mist both.

However, these were details that Valeria barely noted, as sitting by the central window on a stool was a veiled woman clad entirely in black. Her back was straight, and what little skin Valeria could see—just a glimpse here and there of the bottom part of her face beneath her black veil, and her hands—was ghostly white. The clicking sound had come from the delicate silver needles in her hand, with which she wove golden thread into an impossibly long black shawl fresh off a nearby loom.

Her aura, however, was entirely absent; she might as well have been mortal from how little Valeria could sense from her, but that only made her more guarded, not less. With every flash of lightning outside, the gold in the shawl glinted, but the woman didn't move; she simply kept knitting, heedless of the knights that poured into the room and surrounded her.

"Identify yourself!" Perella demanded, her aura flickering in anticipation of a fight, her sword flashing with the crimson lightning of the Blood-Thunder Jaguar. The veiled woman paused, her head turning slightly to regard Perella coldly, her eyes little more than hard glints of light shining through the shawl.

"Who are you to demand such from me?" she asked, her voice steady, cold, and utterly devoid of emotion.

"A guest in one's home should be respectful of her host, should she not?" She spoke in perfect Nexus common, her accent as neutral as it could be.

"I am Perella, knightess of Queen Valeria, wife of King Leon of the Thunderbird Clan!" Perella bowed slightly to Valeria, who'd entered the room by this point but had yet to exit her Ulta suit. Her words must have meant something to the veiled woman as she paused her knitting and seemed to unnervingly lock eyes with Valeria—a notable thing as that meant staring at the suit's chest rather than its head.

"Be welcome here," the veiled woman said as another flash of lightning illuminated the interior of the room, followed immediately by a city-shaking peal of thunder.

"We are kin, you and I, though by marriage." Her hands began their work again, turning the gold thread into bold figures set into the black shawl. Perella hesitated to respond, her eyes flickering back to Valeria. After a moment, Valeria finally lowered her suit and opened the canopy, revealing herself to the veiled woman, who did not do likewise.

"I am Valeria," she said.

"What is your name, if I might ask?" With a wave at the handful of her knights in the room, she had them back away from the veiled woman, though they remained in the room and vigilant.

"I am Phaya," the veiled woman responded, "wife to Eurydoros, who had the honor of being the Lord of Antaas, descendant of the Thunderbird, and great-grandson of Storm King Loren." Valeria's mind blanked for a long moment, unsure how to respond to this revelation. Phaya, however, simply returned to her work, acting as if Valeria and her knights weren't even present. Finally, Valeria whispered, "If we are kin, then… can you tell me what happened here? And why you are still here? And how this room is so…

untouched by the cataclysm outside?" Phaya's hands again paused.

"What makes you think I am here, or that this room is untouched?" Valeria frowned deeply, her eyes scanning the room again. She saw nothing that screamed 'fake', nor did she sense any magic that might have indicated some kind of illusion or mental trick. Her 'shield' rune was still up, too, and the enchantments that Leon had woven into her armor ought to have kept her particularly safe from such tricks.

"What… do you mean?" Valeria asked.

"Is this not real, what I'm seeing now?"

"It is very real," Phaya said.

"But you do not see. And in a moment, you will never see again…" Her ominous words earned her renewed attention from Valeria's knights, but Valeria herself froze as another sound reached her ears—and seemingly only her ears: a hiss breaching the storm, a hiss that curdled her blood and sent her heart racing in her chest. A moment later, she saw something moving outside, some dark shape hurtling toward the window.

Its body was enormous and scaled, and set into its serpentine skull were slitted eyes that glowed yellow in the gloom of the misty storm…