Chương 245: AF Chapter 244 – The Hill and the Hole

We were both in a good mood as Princess Kristie hustled across the sky, Cloudstepping out of reach of the olthoi on the ground. Any lacerators or other flying types that zipped after us I popped with no-cost Darts until they dropped out of the sky, Holy Banefire Kickers doing their things as the wedges of fire-force smashed into and through them patiently and accurately while Kris just ran away from them.

There was a net thrown over the bundle of Elemental rocks on one Disk, thoughtfully woven of chorozite-laced strands in order to contain magical things like virindi, and which proved adequate at tamping down the Elemental reactions of the rocks. There were only a dozen of them, kept separated by the mesh, as we were sure they'd build into a chain reaction and start generating Elementals if allowed to cluster, something we'd seen happen to the nearby olthoi hive's little mounds after an hour or two of stacking.

Over a dozen spontaneous materializations of multiple Elementals had exploded out of the mounds of rocks the olthoi had stacked up, all up and down the mountainside, and the place had erupted into fast combat as the olthoi had to put down well over two hundred Elementals that had come out of nowhere. Then they had to redistribute the rocks that were in the way off to the sides and further apart, too.

I had remarked that the olthoi probably wanted nothing more than for someone to take all those rocks off their hands, and an amused Kris had agreed. We were painting the landscape below into The Map. It was free of Elemental stones burning away, but it was chock full of a lot of stands of mushroom the size of trees. Faintly luminous spores drifted in the air, kept at bay by Kris's Vajra and me with my Mask warding my face.

Paths and layers of matted olthoi fungi-ecology cut across the valleys and hills, replacing the grass and brush which would normally grow there, and even the moss and algae along the rivers and streams was a hue that glowed at night and seemed to turn the water a greenish hue that generally flowed east towards the ocean. Here and there great sloped holes gaped in the landscape, and Summons stood around waiting to be triggered, universally olthoi or their nominal predators, the grievvers.

Nests of the spidery beasts were visible here and there, draped in silk between stands of mushrooms. There were also buried tunnels which the grievvers could pop out of with frightening speed, levering webbed caps back into place after snatching a young olthoi drone or grub that wandered where it shouldn't have, sweeping them up and making them vanish with commendable speed.

I also spotted thrungus who had moved in among some of the mushroom stands, the stands' color changing to more reds and yellows after they did so. It didn't seem to alarm the olthoi, so I wondered if the mucor ecology was actually compatible with the olthoi, and the fungi-folk had no trouble adapting to the differences… I did hope that mucor didn't have magical effects on olthoi, or we could be in for a bad time.

Our entry path had taken us over the Paradox Hive, generating all sorts of territorial response from the landscape spawns and a few real olthoi. The trail we'd taken off to the north was apparent to a discerning eye, as it was largely free of any and all Summons, courtesy of the vivus from the kills I'd made as Kris lightfooted on through the place. The Paradox Olthoi Queen was the last of the prodigal mutations undertaken by the renegade virindi named Aerbax.

Originally captured from the infamous hive called the Black Death Catacombs, she had been pressured by other olthoi suspicious of the changes to her and her brood to move down to the south, by the mountains bordering the lands nominally held by Isparians and the wild tribes of banderlings, monugas, and mites. She was now in the foothills of the Lost Wish mountain range, her Hive one of three Dungeons there forced back into reality by the Fall, which seemed to have affected even olthoi dimension-digging.

One of those Dungeons ostensibly led to an underground colony of olthoi-fighting survivalists with specialized weapons, a truly unfortunate location for them when the Paradox Queen arrived with her brood. Atop the hill nearby had been an outpost of Royal Guards sent here to watch and perhaps trim back the size of the Paradox Queen's brood, even sponsoring attempts to go in and kill her… which never lasted, tied to the System as she was, and nobody knowing how to sever the link.

For some reason, the olthoi never came up high enough to threaten the tent, although subtle Wards encouraging them to turn away were certainly possible and not spoken about. The fact the place was important enough to serve as a Recall anchor for a custom Item Magic spell certainly indicated that something important was going on below the surface, but it all appeared to have been broken at the Fall.

Kris glided down onto the location of the tent, visible simply by dint of being a stretch of stone not covered by a carpet of brown-gray alien moss. There were shattered boxes and poles strewn around, somehow surviving fifteen years of the Elements, although there was no sign of anything living now… or we would have seen it the first time through. Her Tremblesense worked better than a Detect, since it had could go right into the dirt and earth, seeing everything instead of a specific target.

She had to concentrate to filter out the unwanted stuff, but hopefully there shouldn't be anything too deep, given we were on top of a stone hill. Of course, the Paradox Hive squatting down there at the bottom of said hill was definitely a looming threat, and the number of Summons and real olthoi on the landscape was not small. Happily, if you could quench your scent, you stood a good chance of escaping their attention in the night and the dark, although we did have to be quiet.

The area to walk around wasn't very big, and she just paced along the perimeter, then proceeded directly into the center. I waited while she sorted through random impressions, not really expecting anything, but then her brow furrowed and her head turned around. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Seriously?" I asked, glancing at the area she was looking at. My Detects had nothing but more moss and fungi.

"Seriously." She sent me the visualization, and I had to lift an eyebrow, too. One foot on stone, I could easily Shape the rock of the area to cut through the fungi mat, push it slowly up and aside, and then open up like a flower, revealing what was buried under dirt, debris, and a carpet of otherworldly lichen. There was just one, sitting among the fragments of maybe a dozen others.

It was greenish-yellow in hue, the flask still capped, and the one bit of lichen that fell down onto the stone around it withered and died almost instantly. An Olthoibane Infusion...

"Huh." I studied the structure of the crystal, and then reinforced it with another layer of stone around it, lest fragility break it apart where time had not. I reached out and broke it off the Shaped extrusion, which I sent back down into the ground, even roughly closing the lichen above it.

"Only one enough?" Kris asked, eyeing it in fascination.

"Yes. I can do a Divination to reverse engineer the construction process and find the formula as an alchemical derivation. Pretty sure a lot of concentrated olthoi acid is required."

"And that… Radiant Infusion he talked about."

"I don't think we're ready to be traipsing around the Dark Isle yet, if his stories are correct."

"No, no, I agree with you on that," Kris agreed. She turned around, paced off southwest and looked over the edge of the hillside leading down there, where the two secondary Dungeons close to the Paradox Hive gaped open, ready to admit the recalcitrant to their doom.

"Lot of olthoi around those," she said, as I stepped up next to her.

"Paradox olthoi. Mmm," I agreed.

"Might be wise not to run in all Swords blazing and making a bit of a target of ourselves, right?"

"And just how confident are you that something able to drill through dimensions can't shut down Teleporting as an extension of the Portals the adventurers here used to use?"

"I am not certain at all of it. How about I send down a Wizard Eye at V+2 or something, and we see how much we can see that way?" She didn't need to think it over that much.

"They can pop it like an egg if they sense it, but hopefully it's small enough to fly under the radar, and it should have all the range we need, right?"

"Hoping. I can use any basic Detects through it that I need to, also. If we find something underground, I'll have an automatic location, and should be able to D-Door right down to it without any problem."

"And if there is a problem… then perhaps we can just drop down and you Shape us a slide right to the desired location or something." Kris's thumb moved over the Prismatic Stone currently set in Quaver's pommel.

"Do you really think there's going to be any Isparian survivors down there after so long?"

"I honestly don't know. Supposedly they survived underground near the olthoi for almost a full generation before they were discovered. However, that was with Asheron's Protection and the deathstones, later on, and before the Paradox Hive. They could try going back to their former methods, but who knows if that actually worked?"

"Or they could have been just NPC's, as Lord Mick couldn't find any mention of this colony of survivors they supposedly came from," Kris murmured.

"If they are just standing about a room down there after all this time, I think I'm going to hit something, just on general purpose."

"Pretty sure the olthoi can kill something tied to the System here if they have the time and inclination, especially the Paradox Olthoi." I sat back against the Disk behind me as I began to bring up the up-Valenced Wizard Eye VII, Heaven's Eye, which coalesced as a spot of flickering black light, a tiny glint of silver glowing on the surface of the eyeball-sized divination sensor.

I flipped up the relay on my internal Visual File, shared it through the Mark with Kris, and we both watched it as it zipped over the edge and plummeted straight down at breakneck speed towards the nearer of the two Dungeons below. It was night, and even if the olthoi were somewhat sensitive to magic, I'd wound the magic tight, and they noticed nothing as the Heaven's Eye shot past them and into the Dungeon they were standing around.

The Visual File painted the 3D map of the Dungeon into place as I zipped down along the ceiling, noting that the olthoi goo and film typical of their Dungeons we'd been in with them was present here, but didn't seem particularly well-maintained. Detect Vermin did spot three olthoi in the main chamber below, but there didn't seem to be an egg chamber there, and I avoided the Summons that were sitting there twiddling their pincers as I zipped towards the back wall, looking for… huh, that.

There'd been a passage leading out here, with spikes inset into the walls to hinder the olthoi and force them into single-file, made from their own pedipalps and capable of punching into them if they tried to go too fast or with too much force. I could see the spikes on the ground, left there when a bunch of olthoi had simply lined up and carved out the passageway there, widening it by mined force and making the obstructions to them basically worthless.

"I don't imagine the natives made that work easy," Kris murmured, as the view moved fairly quickly along the acid-seared, pincer-chopped tunnel cleft through the stone.

"But they obviously got through."

"Aye, I imagine the olthoi would recycle their own dead, so no carcasses…" I murmured, following the winding track of the tunnel through over fifty yards of stone, where it abruptly widened out into a larger chamber.