Chương 213: Chapter 287 - The Seventh Level

Two centiscerators coiled through the fourth dimension, attempting to cut Mirian off. She put a barrier of overlapping force blades up in their path to delay them while she prepared a black line spell to smash the enervator that was linked to them. The spell cut through the air in a flash of darkness.

As soon as the creature's black crystal had shattered and she felt it stop trying to siphon soul energy, she cast two shatter stone spells on the giant centipede-like abominations and then pushed her blade barrier into one while turning an incendiary beam on the second, searing a hole through it. Then she turned to assist her father, who was struggling against a second envervator while flying around the room to avoid a third centiscerator.

Mirian's spells flew with speed and power, their intensity enough that it left perturbations in the ambient mana. The last two labyrinthine creatures fell just as quickly. She looked down at her detector. With her aura, she could already sense how heavy the mana was down here, which made absorbing it into herself easier. What she was more interested in was the source of what she had deemed "antimagic particles," which were periodically streaming through this level of the Labyrinth.

"Forward again. How's your aura?"

"Acceptable," her father said. She could hear the strain in his voice. It was challenging enough down here that Mirian had begun to leave Meu on the surface, no longer riding on her shoulder. The next room contained a creature they had no name for. It sat in front of the door. At first, it looked to be ten different creatures. There was a disk full of spinning teeth in front of the door itself and nine different worm-like creatures with miniature mouths at their tips, each covered in spines.

However, as she felt out the fourth dimension, she could see it was all connected through there. It had no aura, but there were points within the structure of the horror that swirled with arcane energy, and she could feel the rich ambient mana moving like a wind into its primary maw. Mirian sent two whirling walls of force blades circling in both directions around the room, then shot off a pair of incendiary beams forward. Two of the tentacles glowed as the beast routed arcane energy through itself.

The whirling force blades disappeared, while the fiery beam seemed to hit a mirror of itself and also vanished.

"Counter-magic," her father said quickly. Mirian had yet to see a labyrinthine horror use magic like that. She thought quickly as the tendrils turned and arcane energy ran through each of them. She snapped up a brief prismatic shield that would block what she assumed was an attack of each energy type, then used Masikatt's web to attack the places within the creature that stored arcane energy. Without a true soul, the usual siphon spells wouldn't work, but that also left it vulnerable.

"Supplement defenses," Mirian instructed Gaius. Beams of energy shot from the tendrils: fire, light, force, and presumably a magnetic pulse. The spells all shattered against the prismatic shield, except for one. She found herself flung up and then backwards, the backplate of Equinox sending out sparks as she skidded across the ceiling of the hall they'd just come through. Antigravity force, she thought.

Both Luspire's shield and her father's black shield were poorly protected against that because no one used it as an attack spell. Even the energy transmutation built into her battlerobes was largely ineffective against it. However, it would take more than a blow like that to slow her down. Mirian levitated back into position and maintained her curses around the horror, taking command of the arcane energy within it. Something was fighting her for it—but the origin of the counter-spell wasn't the beast.

She rapidly cast detect arcane flow to map the four-dimensional threads that were battling her. They were coming from the Labyrinth walls. Many things suddenly made sense. The labyrinthine horrors and abominations could exist without true souls and organs because they were puppets. Mirian poured soul energy out, shaping it with runes to create a thin barrier around the creature. Pinpricks of violet and orange light burst all around the creature, forming a mist of light in the room.

The horror in front of them suddenly collapsed, the tentacles all flopping to the ground. All around, the threads of arcane energy in the room thickened, piercing through her soul barrier to reestablish a link with the creature, but in that time, Mirian had seized the arcane energy within the beast. Now she detonated it. The creature didn't scream. It didn't bleed much either; it was too much sinew and rubbery flesh for that. But the chunks of it were scattered across the room.

The arcane threads of the Labyrinth withdrew. It was "dead."

"I guess I get to name it," Mirian said, examining the corpse.

"I've never much liked vague names. Ninemaw."

"Remarkably straightforward," Gaius said. When she told her father her theory, he stroked his chin thoughtfully.

"That also explains why there's never been an econode discovered containing labyrinthine creatures, and the Labyrinth reclaiming the flesh of its creations when no one is looking. Interesting. If it takes that much soul energy to cut off a creature, though, you'll be drained within a few rooms." Mirian agreed.

"That's also how the labyrinthine horrors learn, isn't it? Not from watching each other die, but from the Labyrinth watching the intruders fight. I wonder—where does its intelligence come from? Though I suppose the Elder Gods created Luamin and designed much of the life on Enteria. Eintocarst probably found it easy to give the Labyrinth some strange form of a mind. I wonder, though…" The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. She expanded her aura to gently touch the walls.

Labyrinth, we're here to help Enteria. To fix the leylines. She waited. No response.

"Hmm. I suppose that would be too easy," she said. There was only one path forward. They continued. Mirian adjusted her soul currents slightly, allowing more of the ambient mana to flow. It took a bit of concentration to integrate it into her aura, but as her father's aura was depleting, they'd be relying more and more on her. A wall of carapace-crushers charged them in the next room. Mirian sent out shattering spells, then cut them to shreds.

They reached a junction of three passage ways, and that was when the swarm hit them. Greater labyrinthine horrors led the charge, with a tide of lesser horrors crawling about the ceiling. Wordlessly, Mirian and her father fought, sending out waves of fire and blades through their ranks. As the tide continued, interspersed causters vomited the force-corrosive acid at them, while voidlings blinked about through the fourth dimension, trying to cut off Mirian's air.

"The swarm isn't relenting," her father said worriedly.

"Shall we retreat?"

"No," Mirian said, handing him the divination device.

"Keep us on the path and focus on defense." Mirian's leyline repulsors crackled with remnant energy as she drew on them, and the excess energy vented through Equinox's back. As they advanced, the tunnels and rooms became a storm of energy. Mirian switched from the Dusk Waves form to her own Burning Tempest form. Lightning cascaded through the halls, each bolt both forking and chaining repeatedly. The tide of horrors were paralyzed and roasted in waves.

Her father switched to maintaining defensive barriers just so the roar of electricity and heat of the bolts didn't overwhelm them. When the pile of corpses became too thick, Mirian tried out the trick the ninemaw had used, using the antigravity glyphs she usually used in levitation in combination with targeting and directional glyphs. The sinew and cartilage became a moving wall that she shoved forward. When carapace-crushers tried to charge through it, they were shattered.

When centiscerators tried to slide through the fourth dimension around them, she broke them into fragments and burned the pieces. As they continued their advance, she and Gaius became an island of peace inside a storm of force, fire, lightning, ash, and flesh. At last the wave broke. The swarm slowed to a trickle. Then, there was merciful silence.

"I'm at my limit," Gaius warned. Mirian nodded. His aura was bare. She was well below her halfway point. They came at last to a place where the passages lay straight in a line moving from east to west.

"The particles are… emerging from the walls," Gaius said, looking at the device. Mirian closed her eyes and began cycling through her list of divinations to get a better sense of what the glyph and rune composition was like here.

"I see. These sequences are similar to the ones that generate an entropic antimagic barrier, but instead of creating a blocking field, it's ejecting the particles. Most of the flow is going west."

"Towards the buildup of leyline energy."

"Precisely. Then the entropic fields are like gates. One here must have opened, trying to nullify some of the buildup out west. That would also let more energy move eastward. But even with the Elder Gates open, the system isn't able to restore equilibrium." She reached back and let her hands brush against the leyline repulsors that were sitting in Equinox.

"But with a bit of help, and a map of these sorts of tunnels, perhaps the crisis can be further delayed." Gaius raised a weathered eyebrow.

"Don't you already have enough time? Didn't you tell me the limit now is contingent on the temporal needles returning to the Ominian?"

"That's the limit for each loop. I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about the final cycle, and beyond it. What I can do if something goes wrong. If something goes wrong in Zhighua. If something goes wrong in Akana. If something goes wrong in both. I will leave nothing to chance."

They battled back to the surface and rested two days to recover their auras and hunt more myrvites for soul energy, then returned. A week later, they at last found a Vault, nearly three kilometers from the entrance to the seventh level. Gaius was relieved when they found it.

"That was worse than dealing with the Third Army when we crossed the Nihayabranan," he said as Mirian opened the final door of the Vault. Mirian reached for the chest.

"Oh, I do love this part," Gaius said as the stone lid split apart, revealing the contents.

"No relicarium. Damn, I could have used some extra," Mirian said.

"No leyline repulsors either. It would be nice to give one to Ceiba Yan. Let's see… those pieces absorb magnetic fields and heat respectively. That one's the nasty acid. What's this one do?" she said, reaching for a strange-looking artifact that looked like a tangle of glowing threads. As she grasped it, it began to squirm and writhe. Belatedly, Mirian realized her father's ring, the one that controlled Meu, was glowing. As she peered at it, tiny glyphs and runes were scribing themselves into the dark band.

"Oh!" her father said.

"You know, that's funny. That's the same way that ring gained the ability to resize itself. I reached into a chest while wearing it to pick up an artifact, and it did something similar." Mirian furrowed her brow.

"So… what? Can this ring resize itself twice as well now?"

"No, the Elder artifacts looked different. It must be some other sort of enchantment." She closed her eyes, focusing. Then she opened them in surprise.

"I can feel Meu!" Gaius looked around.

"That damn cat didn't follow us, did he?" Then realization hit him.

"Oh. Oh! He's on the surface? How many miles down are we? Wait, everyone's using that newfangled measurement now, aren't they? Kilometers." Mirian laughed.

"Dad, people have been using that for over a hundred years. I don't know how far down we are. At least two kilometers, maybe a bit more." She focused again, flipping through pages in her spellbook.

"Then it's extending the range of the spell. That, or somehow reducing the exponential cost of maintaining a spell at longer distances. I barely feel the soul energy drain, but I can't track the path it's taking."

"Fascinating. I wonder how far…?" She stood there, contemplating the possibilities. Then she said, "I'm going to dip into my relicarium stash for this. This solves a problem I was having with one of my contingency plans, and I'll still have enough relicarium left over for my final contingency. Hmm. Once we've tested its maximum distance, I may want a second one."

"I can't say I've seen very many of these in the Vaults. I'm curious. How does this help?"

"The leyline regulator isn't a spell engine. It's a network of spells, like this ring. If the distance extension of this enhancement is long enough, that could give me another ally who can do spellwork at Mayat Shadr. Someone who I know has Enteria's best interest at heart." Gaius looked at her.

"You're enjoying being cryptic right now, aren't you?" Mirian grinned.

"Immensely." She jerked her head back towards the entrance of the Vault.

"Come on, let's head back to the surface. I have an unbelievable number of tests I want to run now." She scooped up the rest of the elder artifacts from the chest just in case she wanted any of them for something, then took one last look around. Her eyes still lingered on the ninth statue. Still not sure what that's about, she thought. It was sort of nice, though. The world wouldn't be running out of mysteries. There were always more secrets to uncover.