Chương 64: Chapter 140 - And Deeper

It was clear, when they came back down the next day, that Scrappy had been hard at work. Five of the rooms near the front had been reset. Thankfully, the strange golem was nowhere to be found, and it hadn't made it to the back rooms. The two greater labyrinthine horror corpses were missing, which was creepy, but the door was still open. Mirian cautiously checked the antimagic room, but they weren't lurking in the corners. Which was good; they'd left the soldiers behind this time.

The next room to conquer was a stone floor inscribed with strange shapes. Mirian found the tiles could be levitated off the floor easily. When one of the tiles came back down, a faint glow traced its way along the grooves. After a half-hour of moving them around, they discovered the trick was to rotate them around so that they created a complete pattern. The tile that let out a glow could transfer that light to the next tile if the grooves were aligned.

Once they were all lined up, the light flowing through the channels like water through a canal, the next door opened. The room after that was similar; the floor tiles had the carved grooves, but they didn't match up, and only some of the tiles could be lifted. A half-hour later of trial and error, the frustration was growing.

"None of the rotations seem to matter. There's no way to get the tiles with grooves to share a border, because every other tile is immobile. And it's not a remote connection. So what is it?" Cediri complained.

"We can keep going with trial and error," Aelius confirmed.

"Eventually, we'll cover all the possibilities. It's how we opened the Vault in the first place."

"These are heavy, and we only have so much mana to lift them," complained Aelius's mage. Mirian still couldn't remember his name. She was busy doodling in her notebook. I thought the theme of geometry and dimensions stopped at the horror room, because the next room was a trial of artifice, but maybe it didn't. There's a new magic component added to these rooms testing magical endurance, but it's still a geometry problem.

If the last problem was a two dimensional maze, perhaps its iterating again like in those first rooms. Line, square, cube, tesseract. This is the three dimensional room.

"There's a way to make the tiles touch each other," she said. And with that, she used lift object and tilted one of the tiles on its side so the grooves matched the glowing one on the floor. At last, the light continued, flashing through the grooves. Beatrice grinned.

"Mirian, you're a genius!"

"Well, I wouldn't say that. I did have a good math teacher though."

"Is it really that simple?" Grimald asked. It wasn't entirely simple. They had to build a rather precarious looking structure out of the tiles. Once the last tile was in place, linking a lopsided block pyramid they'd made to the grooves in the ceiling, the light passed through the entire structure, and the next door slid apart.

"More tiles? Really?" Cediri moaned.

"There's a pattern to the rooms, though. This one is going to need the light to follow a four-dimensional path."

"But we can't see in four dimensions!"

"We can deduce the path the light is taking by inference. Professor Jei taught me how to do that with a coordinate system." Cediri gaped at her, then shut his mouth.

"Alright. Just tell us what to move and where," he said. The puzzle was straightforward, but there still was a trial and error component to see if grooves were matching in the unseen spatial dimension around them. Thankfully, this room had fewer tiles. Even then, it took two hours. The resulting structure was nonsensical, with tiles scattered all over the rooms at various right angles from each other. But the door opened. Waiting for them was a golem. It wasn't Scrappy, but it had a similar look to it.

There was an orb in its center glowing a harsh red. Rings of brass and steel orbited it. Unlike Scrappy, it had one arm, and that arm ended in a nasty looking rod. Arcs of electricity danced down the rod. There were two doors beyond it.

"I don't see a way around it," said Aelius.

"Look at the floor," Cediri said. Grooves in the tiles.

"Are you kidding me!?" Beatrice exclaimed.

"Right, so we do a tile puzzle, but this time there's a golem trying to bash our heads in? If it's anything like Scrappy, it chews through magical defenses. And I don't think holding onto a shield when it hits it with an electric cudgel is going to be a pleasant experience." Mirian pulled out her greater lightning wand.

"I think I might be able to make this easier on us," she said. She stepped into the room. As soon as she did, the red energy-eye fixated on her and the golem began making a low keening noise. Its arm came up, and the rod in its hand crackled. Mirian coated the spell heavily with soul energy from the repository, then unleashed. The golem let out a scream. It flailed around, then, as the electricity roared out, thunder echoing through the tight halls, it backed up, then collapsed into a smoldering wreck.

Mirian grinned.

"See? Not so—" There was a clunk as the ceiling opened up and another golem fell down. As soon as it did, its red eye brightened, looking at Mirian. The pieces of the destroyed golem levitated around it, swirling around, clicking into place all over the new golem's body.

"I think you just gave it more armor," Cediri commented as the golem came at Mirian, club raised. Mirian used the Water form and started circling the golem, dodging to the side whenever it struck with the club. No matter how she moved, though, the eye stayed focused on her.

"Beatrice! Come inside the room. I want to test someth—shit!" The golem lunged forward, and she only just avoided it.

"Are you sure? I think—""Just do it! If it turns on you, I'll zap it again." WHAM! The golem's club sent sparks racing across the ground as Mirian leap backwards. It seemed totally unconcerned with Beatrice.

"The symbols in here are important," Mirian said.

"The eye's on me. I don't think it'll bother—" She kicked off to the side this time as the golem lunged forward.

"—bother you." She pulled out her levitation wand. At least it wasn't in an antimagic field. She could use the wand to rapidly accelerate herself in a direction, which would be easier.

"Alright, let's go. This is just another rotate-the-tile," Beatrice said.

"Heavies stay out just so we have more room to move. Actually, Aelius can your group watch our backs?"

"Got it," Aelius said. Cediri entered. He and Beatrice got to work moving tiles around while Mirian zipped about. At least the golem was predictable. She started to notice that it prepared its club in a different way for each different attack, which made it easier to know which way to dodge. Now that they knew how the puzzle worked, this one went much faster. As soon as the glow of the floor tiles covered the room, the golem stopped moving. The ceiling above it opened, and the golem levitated back out of the room.

The ceiling closed. In the next room, there were two golems. Mirian grit her teeth and had to take a moment.

"Alright. Alright. Shit. Fuck. It's going to be like that, yeah? Alright. Beatrice and Cediri, you rotate to guard duty to replenish your auric mana. Aelius, your arcanists are on tile-lifting."

"How's your mana?" Beatrice asked.

"Fine. And I have an elixir if I really need it. Ready?" The two golems' central eyes each lit up as they saw her enter. Mirian started with her levitation wand for the extra distance and safety, then once she'd gotten the golems into a predictable attack pattern, she started dodging with the Spear Cuts Through Water form. By the end of it, she was sweating, but the next door was open. She didn't dare look.

"How many golems?" Beatrice peered through the door.

"Just one, but it's way bigger and this time it has a hammer. Ah, uh, the tiles on the ground look funny. They're covered in… it sort of looks like labyrinthine horror carapace." Mirian took a deep breath.

"Alright. I'm going in."

"You don't need a break?"

"I need to see the end of this Vault." She walked into the room. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. When the golem's hammer came down, the carapace around the tile shattered. When Mirian tried to cut away the carapace herself with Eclipse, it rapidly regenerated. Only a strike from the golem's hammer kept it clear. She quickly figured out the puzzle required her to lure the golem over to each covered tile and get it to hit her, dodging at the last second.

Once the tiles were clear, Beatrice and Cediri could come in and rotate them again. The next room, there was a small golem with two bladed arms next to the giant golem with the hammer. As soon as Mirian walked in the room, it camouflaged itself. Detect heat worked well enough to give her a good idea of where the tiny-stabby golem was, then it was a matter of keeping her eye on both golems. That wasn't easy. Tiny-stabby-camouflaged golem liked to circle around behind her if it could.

Using lift object to keep the smaller golem in place turned out to be a bad idea; the larger golem suddenly accelerated to twice its usual speed, and only a desperate leap back prevented her from getting pasted onto the tiles. Then it was the next room, where it was the three-dimensional puzzle and one golem. Then, Mirian really did have to take a breather. She drank a mana elixir, looking out the door.

"Oh thank the Gods," she said. They were finally done with the golem rooms. Beyond the door, the room opened up into—well, maybe 'room' wasn't the right word. It seemed too big to be called that. The door opened up into a primeval forest. Some hundred meters above, they could see the faint glow of the ceiling. They could just make out walls on either side of them through the trunks and brush, some fifty meters distant. The forest seemed to extend outward in a corridor.

How long that corridor was, they couldn't tell. Aelius furrowed his brow.

"I've never heard of an econode inside a Vault," he said.

"Is it an econode?" Beatrice asked. Cautiously, the group stepped out into the underground forest.

"There's two other doors the way we came," Aelius said.

"Alternate routes?" Cediri wondered.

"Maybe. The antimagic obstacle course could lead here too. Which means—we have to be near the end."

"If it's not at the end of this room, we have to head back," Aelius said.

"We're already pushing the limits of our endurance, and our mana."

"Fine," Mirian said.

"Heavies, two to each side, mages, aegis ready. Columns of two by—" She paused when she saw Aelius's face.

"Sorry, force of habit. Would you prefer an alternate formation?"

"One heavy front, two on the wings. I can smell an ambush." Ambushes were why Mirian had started with the two column formation, but they were small enough and well organized enough they could react quickly to anything.

"Alright." They moved out, boots crunching on the pine needles scattered over the soil. She was using detect life, but the only souls she could see were those of the group. Strange. The souls of the trees are so faint I can hardly… Mirian's eyes went wide.

"Nothing here is alive," she said.

"What?"

"None of these trees have souls." Aelius said, "How can you possible k—""She knows," Beatrice snapped.

"That's enough. What does that… but what does that mean?" Mirian dismissed the celestial spell and switched to night vision. That's when she saw the first heat source. Behind a veil of brush, a mass of vines and part of a sapling was twisting in on itself.

"Left of us. Something's forming." Beatrice cast her own detection spell while the heavies hefted their war hammers. As it emerged from the brush, Mirian felt her heart pounding. The creature—except it wasn't alive, which didn't make sense to her—was almost feline in its form, but its sides were covered in blinking eyes and twisting spines, almost like wings. Its face had no eyes, instead, there were three mouths, each circular like a lamprey.

Those mouths could extend or retract, and the way they moved in and out reminded Mirian of a snake tasting the air. She'd only seen anything like it in one place before: the Mausoleum of the Ominian, in her dreams.

"God's blood," whispered Aelius.

"What is that thing?"

"I've never seen anything like it. Where did it come from?"

"The plants turned into it," Mirian said.

"What? That doesn't make any sense." The things approached them, hissing. Cediri cast an aegis on Grimald. It stalked forward, then leapt. As it did, it left a trail of smoke, and then suddenly disappeared as it reached the apex of its jump.

"FUCK!" screamed Gromaer. Mirian turned, snapping an aegis into place just in time. With an inky burst, the creature had suddenly appeared on the other side of them. Its mouths bit down towards Gromaer, several teeth breaking off as they hit the kinetic barrier of the aegis. The weird spiny eye-wings came down next, clawing at him as he swung his hammer out. The hammer crunched against one of the wings, and Mirian's aegis stopped the other.

Before it could do anything else, she sent a greater lightning spell straight through it. The creature split apart, becoming less like a beast and more like a tangle of thorny black vines. As it sizzled, the pieces melded into the forest floor and became a stout bush.

"What in the five hells," said Aelius.

"Did it just teleport!?" Beatrice said, voice high pitched.

"Mirian, where did you say it came from?" Cediri asked.

"Because if I heard you right—" Oh shit, Mirian thought.

"This isn't a forest. Fall back! Fall back now!" Behind them, she could already see the forest twisting and churning. Then, the same movement to their left, and right—it was everywhere. The beasts that emerged all could have been taken from the reliefs of the Mausoleum, except instead of being frozen in black stone, they were very real. No two were the same, but they all had too many eyes, spines, and teeth, with mouths opening up in unlikely places along their bodies.

They weren't like the labyrinthine horrors, though. Something about them felt more bestial, more real, even though her soul sight told her they were something else entirely. Behind them, she saw briars marching along to cut them off.

"We're surrounded!" Gromaer said at the same time Aelius said, "Send fire to the rear!" The arcanists all started casting at once. Suddenly, there were creatures everywhere, appearing in patches of inky smoke, growing out of the ground, running out from behind the trees. Mirian started rapidly casting aegis spells on each of the heavies. Once she was sustaining those, she started casting disintegrating flame ray, thinking that chemically charring the attacking creatures might stop them from morphing.

If the—she needed a word, and 'abomination' came to mind—abominations could turn from plant to animal, then turned back into a plant when they died, was anything preventing them from turning right back to an animal a moment later? She turned her beam of fire not just on the attacking abominations, but the plant life as well. Cediri cut apart the briars trying to block their retreat, while Beatrice was unleashing fire spells in quick succession.

Aelius and his two arcanists were using a force spell that could both block and cut, using it to deflect the incoming attacks before slicing apart the creatures.

"Ten more feet!" Gromaer called, smashing his hammer into an abomination that looked like wings coiled into a snake. One of the larger trees started to transform, bark and branches morphing into flailing tentacles covered in eyes and thick claws. They hurried back through the door. Thankfully, the abominations didn't follow. Slowly, they retreated, fading back into the forest, then becoming it. Mirian's brow furrowed. It seemed to her the forest before them was more dense than before.

"What in the bloody hellfire was that!?" Cediri exclaimed.

"That was teleportation," Aelius said.

"That shouldn't be possible." Mirian's mind was racing. There was a challenge here, and she got the sense none of them fully understood it. But each room had its own logic, but lessons from one room moved to new ones. But how did the lessons about golems smashing tiles relate to this? The four-dimensional puzzle connects, at least, she reasoned.

"It didn't teleport. There was a delay between when that first abomination moved and when it reappeared. It must have been moving through the fourth spatial dimension."

"How can you possibly know that?" Aelius asked.

"It's a guess, but it's based on the puzzle rooms. They connect to this. They must." Beatrice said, "Or maybe they don't. The first rooms are purely intellectual. The later rooms move more towards combat. Perhaps this last room is purely a trial."

"We should head back," Aelius said.

"We're not prepared for that."

"Agreed," Cediri said.

"We're so close!" Mirian said.

"We can't turn back now."

"I'd like to live," Gromaer said. Mirian looked at Beatrice. She'd told her Academy group the truth of things, but not the Ennecus group.

"Cediri, there's only like twenty days left." Cediri looked at Grimald, who nodded.

"Ah, shit," he said.

"I was trying not to think about that." Aelius cocked his head.

"What are you talking about?" Mirian closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh.

"Can someone else explain it? I can't tell you how sick I am of explaining it."

"The, uh, the world is going to end. Probably on the 6th of Duala," Beatrice said.

"Wow, that's really weird to say out loud." Aelius looked at them, then at his group, then back at them.

"... what?" he said intelligently. Cediri chimed in.

"Apparently, the catastrophic leyline eruptions have already begun, and they just intensify until—well the moon falls—it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? It's like those myths where they talk about a flicker carrying off the moon or something, and then that's how moon flickers come to be, only… Beatrice, can you take over?" Beatrice did her best to explain. At the end, she added, "I know Mirian because she's my sister's roommate," she finally said.

"She was a student. A novice. Now she's almost an archmage. I… I don't know what else explains it except the time stuff."

"So we're all going to die?" Gromaer said.

"But I… I have a daughter. She's down in Cairnmouth, I have to see her. I have to see her before—" And that was why Mirian didn't like explaining it. She was so tired of people having existential crises in front of her. Tired of seeing the despair crush them, and all she could offer was an empty promise. That someday, in some distant future… Rostal would say it was like promising a starving man a feast on the other side of a mountain.

"I'm down here because the stuff at the end of the Vault might be the key to saving everyone," Mirian finished. Aelius said, "But how… how do you stop the leylines… how do the leylines connect to… why would they…?" He looked around, as if any of them actually had answers. Then, as silence descended on the room, his shoulders slumped. For a time, they all sat, staring at the floor or looking to each other. At last, Aelius said, "Then I guess the only way forward is through. Rest up. Then we come up with a plan."

Mirian let them sit on the floor, where quiet conversation took over. She could hear half-finished ideas going around about how to best push through. She heard the sorcerer talking about fire spells, while Beatrice talked about using a wedge of force shields. Grimald insisted they smash the creatures, because even if it didn't keep them dead, it at least slowed them down. As they talked, an impatience swirled around Mirian. She sat down to meditate, but for the first time in a long time, she simply couldn't.

She could close her eyes and see her soul, but she couldn't focus on it, didn't want to focus on it. They were so close. They were missing something, she knew, but she thought maybe they could brute force this puzzle. After all, they had three heavies and six casters. There wasn't even really a point of planning, because they didn't know anything except how to smash through the abomination-forest.

She could tell they'd descended into the kind of ridiculous speculation academics sometimes fell into when they couldn't admit to themselves they didn't have enough information. After an hour of rest, Mirian rose to her feet, spellbook in one hand, wand of greater lightning in the other.

"Alright, time's up. Let's do this." Mirian charged in.