“My scanners are showing no life signs,” Justavi said.
Sings Too Loud and Tagge echoed him.
“Ragay, Abygale please guard the door. Keisho and Justavi please scout. I shall check the control orb.” Gossamare swam down to the center of the chamber.
The rest of the fairly large space was built like a coral reef.
Control stations were set inside little, cozy crevices across all three dimensions.
“A lot of potential ambush spots,” Justavi growled. “Keisho, let’s go together.”
“Agreed.”
They lit up the dark water with their swirling orbs of deep blue water.
Ragay decided to take the left side of the large, open doorway on account of him already being there.
Abygale got the right side by default.
“Shouldn’t we just close the door?” she said.
“Gossamare’s the leader.”
“So? We can make suggestions.”
“I wouldn’t. She’s only one of us that came from a place like this. She knows it better.”
Abygale shrugged.
“Yeah, you’re right. She probably doesn’t want us to get trapped in case there’s a malfunction or something that might make the doors shut. You think we should put a wall up?”
“I think we should save our energy until we know we need it. Just keep your senses down the tunnel. We should be able to catch threats quickly enough to put up that wall before they reach us.”
He kept his eyes down the dimly lit tunnel, trying not to react to every little jet of water from outlets or every swirl from the suction of the intakes.
His ears listened to Gossamare work the control orb while softly narrating every action she made for the benefit of her looming babywatchers. One small and one enormous.
All the while, Justavi and Keisho called out as they continued to scout the rest of the chamber for hidden threats.
Time stretched uncomfortably.
He exchanged a glance with Abygale.
The urge to talk rose, if only to distract themselves from the oppressive blanket wrapping around them that had nothing to do with the pressure of the deep ocean.
They could handle that fine.
It was something else.
Something their strong bodies couldn’t push back against.
The Heart of Sinaya dangling in front of him pulsed comfort, fortifying his inner will.
He hadn’t noticed it, but he had been close to sending out hard water spears down the long, dark tunnel at nothing.
Did Abygale feel the same?
He was about to ask her when Gossamare called out.
“This doesn’t make sense. There should be a log of every action taken in this chamber, but there’s nothing. It’s all been erased or not even logged. It approximates to the last communication Malali sent out almost six months ago. I didn’t know such an action was even possible.”
“You just didn’t have the clearance from where you come from?” Tagge said.
“Or it is done differently here compared to your home, Gossamare. It is several oceans and many land masses away,” Sings Too Loud said. “Don’t feel inadequate.”
“Psst… what does that mean?” Abygale whispered.
The hand around Ragay’s stomach squeezed and jiggled a little.
“The answer to what occurred here lies out there.” He gestured down the dark tunnel.
Keisho’s voice erupted from somewhere in the chamber.
“Gossamare! You must come here! We found someone!”
…
A child.
Like Gossamare, with translucent skin and flesh, but in a muted pink rather than her lighter blue. And also dirty, very dirty.
Bits flaked and floated around them.
Ragay regretted not having a suit.
“Ask him what happened here,” Justavi growled.
“Please keep back, everyone. You are scaring him. He has probably never laid eyes on one of your kind in the scales.” Gossamare held the boy’s hand.
His leg and arm fins opened and closed uncontrollably.
Ragay knew that to be a sign of distress for fins operated more on instinct than conscious thought.
For them to flap in such a manner suggested the child had seen traumatic things and was caught between the instinct to flee or hide.
“Should we close the doors, Gossamare?”
She glanced at him.
“Is this tunnel the only way to and from this place?”
“There are smaller access tunnels for maintenance and two others for emergencies. However, Sings Too Loud, Justavi and Keisho are too large or broad to fit in them.”
“I have suddenly decided that I don’t like our situation,” Tagge said.
“Ask the boy or we make our way to the nearest waterlock,” Justavi growled.
Gossamare tried, but the boy merely stared out into open water as if he was the only one in the chamber.
“Did you scan him?” Abygale said.
“Yes, he is physically as he should be. Aside from the lack of cleanliness and the malnourishment. However, the oceansuit’s instruments cannot scan the mind,” Sings Too Loud whistled softly.
“Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t be standing so close to him and unguarded, Gossamare,” Tagge, the babywatcher, said. “You know, cause…” she made stabbing and throat slashing motions.
“I can protect myself from a child. In any case, I shall place him in a construct bubble for his own safety while we—”
A high-pitched noise pulsed through the cold brine.
Sings Too Loud with his sensitive sense of sound doubled over. He punched the floor, cracking the smooth coral-like surface.
Ragay’s ears rang as he snapped his eyes back down the dark tunnel.
“Wall it up, Ragay!” Abygale snapped. “Double layer! I got front!”
Hard water burst into two perfect walls to seal the gaping doorway from their swirling orbs.
The noise stopped as suddenly as it had erupted.
Though he wasn’t sure that the walls had anything to do with it.
The boy floated in the water, eyes shut, hands over his ear holes.
Gossamare spoke urgently, but gently.
“You know what that was? Please, tell me. We can help you. We can help your parents. We came with Miss Karagatan. We have a portion of her power, see?” She held up her hooked staff and constructed a hard water copy of some kind of deep ocean animal that Ragay wasn’t familiar with.
It was round and fin-y.
He supposed for deep ocean people like Gossamare and the boy it must’ve been as cute as a tree rabbit was to him many, many years ago.
Unfortunately, it did nothing, but make the boy curl up into an even tighter ball.
“Guys. We’ve dived right into the middle of a desert here.” Tagge laughed bitterly. “Think on it. No blood. No bodies. One boy, who looks like he’s half-starved.”
“There was a lot of empty emergency rations in the creche we found him in,” Keisho said. “He’s small, so whoever put him there was able to fill it with a lot of rations. Enough for a months.” He lowered his voice. “Though not for six. It looked like he ran out a couple of weeks ago.”
“Don’t tell them about the waste,” Justavi said. “Had a portable unit, but it ran out of power a while back.”
“I knew I scented something,” Abygale muttered.
“That doesn’t matter!” Tagge snapped. “What matters is where did all the bodies go? If they were here and okay, they would’ve fucking gone up to us already. If they’re dead, then that just goes back to my first question. So, that leaves only two possibilities. One, something took them, which might sound okay, but then I have to ask is that thing still here? And, two, they’re still here, which opens up the question of why haven’t they made themselves known to us?”
“What are you saying, Tagge?” Sings Too Loud rose with a groan.
“That this might not be an investigate and rescue Quest anymore.”
Gossamare took charge.
“Sings, please watch the boy.” She glanced at Ragay and Abygale. “Continue guarding the door. I shall try to access the cameras. They might illuminate what tragedy has befallen these people and perhaps I can plot a safe path to an exit. Certainly, whatever danger lurks will prove wanting when faced with Miss Karagatan’s might.”
…
Ragay angled his body so he could glance quickly to the huge projection coming from the viewing orb while still keeping most of his attention down the tunnel.
Gossamare manipulated the controls, rapidly shifting through the live images from all over Malali.
The orb showed several dozen different cameras at a time in smaller squares.
He was impressed with how she went through them so quickly.
“Shit! Do you see that, Ragay?” Abygale snapped.
Down the tunnel, where the dim light from the evenly spaced crystals diffused into the blackest night, came flashes in pale red.
“I see it,” he said softly. “There’s a pattern…” his eyelids began to droop.
His and Abygale’s hard water walls began to waver and dissolve, mixing with the cold brine.
“Goss…”
It was so hard to keep his eyes open.
Harder still to pull them from the flashes.
“Oh?” Gossamare’s voice seemed to come from so far away despite the fact that it came from the gem in his ear. “No! Don’t look at the lights!”
Too late.
Ragay’s vision went dark.
The last thing he could focus on were the doors groaning.
…
He woke to cold coral nudging his cheek.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” Tagge said.
“How long?”
“One day—”
His eyes widened.
“Just kidding! A little under a minute. Pretty weak though. Abygale awoke in under thirty seconds and you’re, like, twice her size.”
He touched the coral-like surface of the inner door to ground himself in the present.
“I feel like I woke up in the middle of a nightmare.”
His body and mind felt sluggish, muddled.
“Nope. You woke up into a nightmare.” She helped him stand. “See?”
Gossamare had shifted the viewing orb’s projection.
Now a larger live image was fixed, showing what lay on the other side of the regular door and the emergency blast door.
People.
Most were like the boy with translucent skin in varying shades of red.
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Where they differed were the wriggling shapes sticking out of them like sucker fish.
“From the many, there is one.”
Ragay spun with his hooked staff ready to strike at the reverberating voice.
Tagge shivered.
“Not the first time they said that. Creepy Skill or magic to make it so we can hear it as if they were just standing right behind us.”
“Join. Us. Now.”
“Miss Karagatan—”
“First thing Gossamare tried. No answer.”
“Their mouths aren’t even moving.”
Tagge shrugged.
“Whatever you’re thinking of saying, someone’s already said it.”
“You said I was just out for a minute?”
“It was a very panicked minute.”
The voice continued with its mechanical cadence. Pausing for a breath Ragay didn’t hear in between each sentence.
“Well, at least we figured out what happened here. Not that we did much investigating.” Tagge patted him on the arm. “Now all we need is for Gossamare to plan us a way out without ending up like them.”
The wriggling shapes seemed to be biting into the skin, but not the muscles judging by the lack of crimson leaking into the people’s bloodstream.
“It has to be a monster. A bad one.”
Tagge’s grin was sharp.
“I bet Justavi that it’s another Empyreal Guard thing.”
“Why would they do this to an entire city?”
“Same reason they sent a tsunami at a whole bunch of cities. They just like genociding our kind. Typical drylanders.”
“You’re landborn.”
“That’s totally different. Don’t be bigoted, Ragay. It’s unbefitting someone in Sinaya’s service.”
“Everyone listen closely, please!” Gossamare enlarged an image.
Ragay figured it was about twenty or meters farther back from where the locals stood staring at the blast doors.
“What are we supposed to be seeing?” Justavi said.
“Watch the jets from the outlets. See how it swirls away as if striking an object.”
Awww crap!
Ragay saw it.
“Curse the great river maws!” Justavi snapped.
“What is it, Ragay?” Tagge whispered. “I don’t see anything.”
“I do not know their method, but they or it is somehow concealing the infested’s physical presences on the cameras,” Gossamare said. “Thus, I cannot be certain that any exit current I plot is, in fact, clear of them.”
A tremor rippled through the water.
Justavi burst toward the source with powerful sweeps of his tail.
“They’re in the other tunnels!” he snapped.
Abygale’s arm and leg fins shot open.
“I’ve got one!”
The water displaced by her abrupt departure jostled Ragay.
“Ragay! Take the last one! Do what you can to keep them from entering!” Gossamare helpfully pointed.
He swam past the pale little boy curled up in Sings Too Loud’s protective bubble.
The ripples of his swift passage would’ve shaken the boy badly had it not been for said bubble.
He spied the circular hatch on the ceiling partially obscured by a control station pod.
The hatch’s handle was more like a ship’s wheel and it was turning from the other side.
He hit the ceiling hard, grasped the wheel and began turning against the tide with all the strength in his body gifted him by Sinaya to swim in the depths.
“They’re trying to get in, Gossamare! Do something!”
The wheel continued to turn against him.
His hooked staff floated next to him.
Not so helpful.
He cursed himself.
He had reacted rather than acted.
A wiser man would’ve used Sinaya’s Heart, for it was infinitely more powerful than his mere muscles.
Now it was too late.
He couldn’t take a hand off the star-shaped wheel without risking it opening.
It was taking both hands and his entire body just to slow the turning.
“I see nothing on the viewing orb,” Gossamare said. “But, I am trying to lock it down!”
“Please hurry!”
“From the many, there is one.”
“Shut up!”
“Join. Us. Now.”
He grit his teeth.
“Sorry, no one is in here right now.”
Suiteonem Prime, Frost Road, April 2058
Cal openly thought about killing every adventurer in the dense forests between Lakeshore and the mountains to the north.
They generally ranged somewhere in between Level 30 and 40 with a few outliers lower and higher.
The risk was great for them, but the opportunities were even greater owing to the untouched potential of all the encounter challenges and spawn zones that had been left mostly alone up until about a decade ago.
Across the entire frozen valley thousands of adventurers received the most terrifying warning their danger senses and other similar abilities had ever given them.
The wise fled north toward the imperial fortress immediately.
Those that didn’t took their own fates in their hands.
It was all down to their luck now whether they would avoid the undead horde as it marched up the Frost Road and through the surrounding forests in their millions.
He stretched his thoughts to the handful of mining towns on his side of the mountain.
The attacks had commenced and ended just as quickly.
The revenant strength and level advantage were just too much for the Imperials to put up legitimate resistance.
It was why the initial siege on the fortress would be conducted by his weakest undead.
Hope had to be given to the empire… at first.
Hope would give them confidence.
Confidence would turn into arrogance.
And arrogance always led to a fall.
It would also keep Suiteonem entertained.
The man enjoyed a struggle that ebbed and flowed. Where both sides won and lost in equal parts. Where their combined suffering dragged them to their knees. Such conflicts insured the height of the anger that he craved and fed on.
The irrational rage a Calamity always created was so filling for the fake god.
Such an evil fruit to harvest.
Cal watched the adventurer’s flight. Watched the monsters clashing with the undead horde as the latter crossed into their territories.
Much of this leading wave of the horde were mindless, given the initial order to march north to the imperial fortress by revenants that stayed well-behind and well-hidden.
Half-frozen zombies shambled. Frozen skeletons clacked.
Basic ones.
An ice-skinned monster the size of a small hill swept a tree-sized limb, freezing and shattering dozens of undead in one blow as they swarmed toward it with the standard mindless urge to kill the living.
It could destroy hundreds in minutes if left alone.
He reached out and crushed it with a telekinetic grip.
Collect, he thought, giving the location to a warband of Blues put together for the purpose.
Some of the monster’s inner organs were infused with magic, making them valuable.
It was also a good opportunity for the warband to gain levels as they had to fight through the level-appropriate monsters he left alive in the area.
He repeated the interaction thousands of times across the frozen valley.
…
The Frost Road was narrow as reckoned by the Imperials. It cut in a mostly straight line from the fortress in the Pass of the Dead down to Lakeside. Unlike the other roads that branched off to the mines and Lakeshore it had been created out of smooth stone enchanted to handle the environment with minimal cracking. It had even been enchanted with the ability to self-heal over time.
The cost had been astronomical, but the empire knew that one of the best defenses against the monsters was speed.
The road gave their convoys to and from Lakeside that.
Four waystations sat over the road every hundred kilometers.
Though small, these stations were fortified like the crucial bastions they were.
Tall, stout walls and the most powerful weapons they could hold. From cannons to magical gems the size of cannons.
The first four fell without so much as an angry word to the undead that shambled and clacked through the open gates or simply walked around the stations.
The imperial soldiers manning them had simply fallen asleep on their watch or stayed that way in their warm beds.
More prisoners of war to ransom back at a later date.
The undead horde moved slowly, but the thing was that they never stopped moving.
It took them a week to reach the last waystation on their road.
Cal let the soldiers see the approaching horror.
Imperial doctrine demanded they hold to the last in order to buy time.
They all fled.
He hadn’t even had to nudge them.
Undead stretching across the horizon and stirring up enough snow to darken the morning sky was enough.
…
The Imperial Shield.
A massive city-sized fortress atop a high point in the Pass of the Dead with a long, gentle slope made by human hands down into the frozen valley.
Multiple layers of walls— some seeming to be nearly as tall as the surrounding mountains— were interlinked to provide a devious puzzle for any prospective siege to solve.
Long-range artillery began to thump, sending smoke billowing, quickly obscuring the entire fortress and the surrounding mountains under a dark cloud.
Approximately twenty kilometers was their maximum effective range.
Cal watched the soldiers rushing about like ants after their nest had been kicked open.
There were not nearly enough of them to fill the fortress even with the recent reinforcements, among which was Zinna.
He gazed down across the empire to see the trains filled with soldiers and conscripts steaming south.
Not nearly enough thanks to his many killings across the nobility and upper echelons of their leadership.
“Assault the first wall. Take it, if possible, but let them have it back if they try a little.”
Suiteonem Prime, Grail Beach, Suiteonem V, 20137
A small, boxy vehicle hit Sixty-eight as she burst out of the alley.
Or perhaps she hit it?
It was difficult to tell with how fast she was running.
Regardless, she jumped on impact, cracking the glass and getting a brief look at the shocked operator’s quivery jowls before she slid off the other side and dashed into another alley.
Local authorities chased her and the others on strange, two-wheeled vehicles that blared sirens at them and tried to disorient them with flashing rainbow lights.
But that was all they could do.
She ran almost as fast their vehicles, which were being constrained by the twists and turns of the streets.
The lochos had been forced to split up, but she caught glimpses of them or heard the noises they made as they, too, ran.
From what she could tell they were all in each other’s general vicinity and still headed in the same direction.
Sixty-eight recognized a hunt.
She had participated in a few on her parents’ land back home where the hunters used small, tough dogs to harass and chase prey, tiring them and forcing them into the kill zone.
Sadly, she didn’t have the time to warn the others on account of the running.
One of the magistrate-whatevers skidded around the corner on his two-wheeled vehicle.
She couldn’t see his face through his helmet, but she did see his eyes widen as she leapt up and planted a boot right on his helmet to help her leap up to the roof.
It was better up there where the vehicles couldn’t follow.
She spied Seven way up ahead running and leaping like a warcat in the treetops.
Fifteen and Thirty-two were falling behind him, clearly not as fast or agile.
Eighty wasn’t in sight, but she heard a loud crash down in an alley below and a loud roar.
A bright red flare shot high above, marking their location.
She thought that she could probably shoot it out of the sky with how much her eyes and aim had improved with the training to use the divine energy inside her, but decided against pulling her rifle from her bag of holding.
She’d have to stop to take the shot.
An ugly, squat building loomed up ahead.
Large enough to take up what looked to be about two of the locals’ blocks.
A drab gray with tiny windows and a lot of debris and junk hanging or laying on the tiny balconies.
It took her a moment to see that those were actual belongings, mostly clothing out to dry, probably.
So, a building with small houses judging by the spacing between windows and balconies.
She thought of her brief stay in the tiny rental home.
Not all worlds were equal when it came to what their people decided were acceptable dwellings.
They ran out of roof.
A broad street lay like a gray river between them and the ugly building, which was a lot larger up close.
Down on both ends of the street were the noise of sirens and the flashing of lights.
The building was surrounded by an iron-barred fence four times the height of an average human.
It seemed to her that the fence was more to keep people in rather than out.
Ivy Oaks was written on a large sign above the front gates.
She didn’t get it.
There was no ivy, no creeping vines.
Nor were there any oaks in sight.
The building and everything around it were as drab as the streets.
Seven glanced back and gave the signal to go over the fence.
The lochos climbed, barely slowing thanks to the divine blood in their veins.
Eighty barreled out of an alley, bringing up the rear.
Seven gestured at the nearest door into the building.
Even that was covered in iron bars.
Was this some kind of prison?
Well, misgivings aside, Sixty-eight didn’t have any better ideas so she followed.
Seven ripped the bars and the door half off its hinges with a surge of divine strength.
She caught a hint of the red-gold haze emanating from him like steam on a freezing winter night.
It was night.
The hour of the witch’s curse.
But Grail Beach was in a warmer climate.
He waved them through, pulling the door shut and beckoning for Thirty-two to seal it up with his goop.
“Let’s find a place to hide and take a breath,” Seven said.
“Why?”Fifteen scowled. “Are you tired? I’m not tired. No one’s even breathing hard. Well, except for Thirty-two, but that’s an emotional response not a physical one. He’s okay to keep running.”
“We can’t just keep running. We have to lose our pursuers or we’ll never have an opportunity to actually do what we’re here for.”
Oh, right… the test.
Sixty-eight almost forgot about the syarumen.
Their boots echoed against the gray.
There were lights outside the doors that must’ve led into the homes, but half were off or broken making Sixty-eight feel like she was walking into a foreboding cavern.
The large pipes high on the walls near the ceiling rumbled and groaned like the throat clearing of a large monster. They cast shadows that danced in the flickering of the weak lights. Clawed fingers that seemed to reach down for her and long tails that lashed in anger.
They walked deeper into the darkness for many minutes without signs of pursuit.
“What are we looking for here, Seven?” Fifteen complained like a girl.
Sixty-eight snorted smugly.
She didn’t complain like that.
Seven kept his eyes forward, scanning the empty hallway.
“An empty home or maintenance supply room or something like that.”
“Should I send out some scouts?” Thirty-two said.
“If we can’t find a place but hold on to them for now.”
The hallway widened as they approached what appeared to be an intersection of multiple hallways.
It was hard to tell since the intersection’s lights weren’t on.
Sixty-eight caught movement on the pipes but dismissed it as the same shadows cast by the low-quality lights that had been keeping her on edge the entire time.
A single step.
A cacophony of hooting.
And Sixty-eight went flying down a different hallway while on fire.
