Chương 139: BECMI Chapter 138 – Killer Legacies

"A boring machine, like the new steam-operated ones some are using in their mines, only far greater and more powerful, like an iron golem compared to a marionette." I glanced at the stream flowing quickly down and out of the mouth of the thing, and the lichens, fungi, and other cave life that crowded right up to the edge of it, but did not go in.

"Duum, what do you smell?" My Familiar was naturally quite at home here, and liked to fly around Invisibly, especially in the larger caverns, scouting things out. The beastials riding giant beetles, and another tribe on firedrakes, had been sussed out by him ahead of time, such details of pets lost in the greater information flow of the Commune. There were also tribesmen with smaller members who had learned to ride giant bats, and another group working with giant spiders.

We all assumed such tribes learned their ways from a greater tribe we hadn't run into, doubtless occupying some of the main caverns. No wolves down here, of course, but some of them had taken steps to get friendly with giant weasels if they lived closer to the surface. Their main problem was that they treated their pets brutally, and often used them as an alternate food source if times were lean.

Also, the things could rebel and use them as a food source, so they had to feed the big predatory monsters, generally with the members of other tribes, or a lot of mushrooms. They could grow mushrooms by heaping up shit and the leavings of their kills, but real agriculture? Not a chance. Their own hunger kept their numbers in check as they killed everyone and everything around them for food, and the food often killed them right back.

Oozes, slimes, puddings, and jellies in particular could be incredibly dangerous if under-dwellers didn't have access to fire. The things were always hungry, always hunting, and could eat an entire tribe without stopping, while weapons often did nothing but create bunches more of the things ready to eat them! Having wokans or shamans who could create fire on demand, and dried shrooms, lichen, fat, and hide that could become torches for burning away all the oozes was a forced necessity down here.

An Everburning Torch was a prize a whole village and tribe would gather around.

"No tracks going up or down it, and that includes slime trails," Rusafiel declared, the elven hunter our best tracker by a good margin, taking an eerie delight in sussing out the secrets of the underground, especially given how much I had to say about things. I had a LOT of experience wandering around dangerous areas underground and killing things, after all. I flicked my Ultravision up through the levels, and watched a dim glow rise up in bands well beyond the norm.

It wasn't some hard, lethal radiation, but it was reacting with the ambient magic to erode and repel living matter from the surface. No fungi could gain a foothold here, and the slimes touching it would have slipped and slid off and likely felt very ill upon touching it. It wouldn't stop us, of course, if we chose to investigate it.

"No beastials went up it?" I asked again, looking into the darkness with everyone.

"None," he affirmed.

"You can see the path coming up to here, but none enter it," the tracker stated with authority.

"They are survivors," Ukker murmured, looking up the tunnel like everyone else, dour suspicion in his gaze.

"At some point, someone went up there, and nothing ever came back down. Too, nothing is coming out of this place, then returning there, or the beastials would have followed them."

"My thoughts are some very efficient guardians, or undead bound to a site." I tapped the edge of the thing carefully.

"This was likely made by technology on a par with that of the Palace of the Gods down south." The Barhund's poetic name was much more impressive than wiener-dog, after all. Many of the raiders were enjoying the fruits of that technology, specifically nightvision goggles down here, and laser pistols were a much more convenient tool to use than bows and arrows, if you had to do a lot of violent killing quickly.

"There should still be idle traces. Bat guano, spider webs, wear and tailings built up from the water flow," Rusafiel shook his golden hair, braided tight so beastial claws couldn't grab it in a fight..

"Ah. So it is also being maintained …" I murmured, which raised eyebrows all around at the implication.

"I'll set up a darkpoint here to recover in, and go on up alone. I need full escape options if there's a threat, and I don't want to be slowed down by anything. Duum will come with me on Disk, and I'll be keeping in contact with the Marks so you can follow me. Belle, be ready to pull everyone out if there's real trouble." Meaning throw down a Teleportation Circle back to the Weirwood Court and get the duck out of Fodge.

The Princess nodded shortly, curious but not feeling ready to deal with the dangers of unknown high technology. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

An hour later, I was gliding up the pipe at good speed, not touching the sides. Duum was crouched on my Disk, wings in tight, ears forward, squeaking softly and listening to the echoes as they washed into the distance and didn't find anything. The stone stayed perfectly straight and smooth, whatever they'd treated it with holding up fantastically and defying the environment with aplomb.

That was probably followed up with regular laser-scourings and brush-downs, I considered, actions that could also be used to sweep whole armies out of the tunnel if required, chivying them to kibbles and sweeping them back down and out the entrance… or rendering them down for other purposes, as desired. I was Detecting for technology as well as magic, ranging a good three hundred yards up ahead in the narrow confines of the tunnel.

If there were traps, I wanted to know they were there, be it science or magic powering them up. -Mistress, there is a hum, - Duum /related to me, letting me hear a deep, faint vibration in the air. -Touch your ear to the wall, - I /replied, the two of us touching so there'd be no broadcast telepathy to be sensed by anything. He obligingly did so. -Yes, it is clearer and louder. Not unlike the Palace and the way it hums, but with stone instead of steel, - he /judged softly. -Back off on the sonics, then.

- He obligingly quit the ultrasonic screeching, which only tickled the upper edge of my hearing. Machines weren't quite so restricted as my ears were, and the combination of seismographs and simple microphones would likely catch 99% of the stuff coming through here, especially since they didn't seem to have to worry about the slimes or oozes wandering through here. No native magic at all. That was an impressive achievement in a magical world. A starship from alien worlds, not so much. But here?

There were a LOT of dead areas around a Commune couldn't pierce. That could be by magical warding, magical disruption, the presence of Aberrants, the influence of Immortals… or by technology disrupting the natural order about it. But by and large, a technological culture that could make a viable robohorse had to be very advanced, should have been widespread… and instead, it wasn't even a myth or a legend, unless all of those myths had been reworked from science to magic.

Like an Immortal hand had gone in and wiped out not just the physical evidence, but the very memories of them, only leaving behind some tantalizing pseudo-magical clues like the robohorse as to the true history of the world. I was really liking Immortals less and less as I contemplated what they'd been doing to the world…

It was a great metal vault of cold gray-green metal, a form of durasteel that could defy all natural forces and never rot or rust, chip or flake with time. Only positive force would be able to pierce it. It completely filled the end of the tunnel here, the space slightly widened so it could crack open and admit whatever device was used to regularly sweep the tunnel clean.

The blinking lights and sensory nodes here and there, and what most definitely looked like some form of laser armaments placed about it, were fine reasons why it looked like nothing had tested the defenses of the vault door from this side. From the center of the door, the stream of water gushed forth in its constant flow and trickle, not pure, yet somehow not corroding the metal around it at all, and not even seeming to have cut a channel in the stone, impossible as that was.

I was not, of course, obligated to go through the vault door. I touched Duum as my Disk peeled up back into my sleeve and thence to the Portable Hole in my boot, and we melted into the stone with the Stonegliding power of Earth Elemental Forms. It was like moving into heavy water, creating only ripples, no vibrations for sensors to pick up.

Touching me, Duum radiated no heat at all, and neither did I, so those sensors had seen nothing, and we had stopped outside the effective range of the motion detectors that Duum could hear quite clearly. When you don't want to go through the door, go around it.

I could feel the sheathed tunnel of metal beyond, and the humming veins of power that was electricity moving through cables, while other, more sophisticated flows burned through wires and circuits of much finer and smaller design, little humming nodes of power outlining the area shaped with technology and treated with some form of radiation that repelled lower life forms so wonderfully. There might be dust on the other side of the walls I was slowly gliding past on Duum, but there was no mold…

I was a hundred yards past and forty yards to the side before the stone opened up and we were able to come forth. Our Elemental Forms sloughed off as we emerged from the stone like we were coming out of a particularly heavy cloud, hissing a Vampire's Veil even as we emerged, followed by Invisibility. The smell hit us first, something that said this place was lived in, there was a lot of organic life, and there was light. Cold, sterile, yet somehow warm light.

Duum hovered there, wings out, me on his back, looking at what sprawled before us. The black area here had indeed been large, and this was one of the major caverns, ten miles long and up to five miles wide.

It wasn't the Sternvult, where I was born, but it was still impressive, with a lake in the middle of it, a river coming from above in a waterfall at the far end, its own faint network of clouds and winds moving things around, possibly with the help of ancient ventilation systems still working after all this time. Trees. Growing in the light of artificial sunlamps, fixed to the ceiling and somehow lasting all this time, a feat of engineering I didn't really believe. The…

betathauma radiation seemed to be clinging to those lights, too, making me very, very energetically believe that something quasi-magical had come in and empowered all of this technology behind me.

That included the ten-foot wall, the automated turrets, the humanoid robots standing in untiring sentry duty atop said walls with very obvious energy weapons at the ready, true warbots twenty feet high with artillery-grade weapons also ready behind them, and a sprawling metal complex behind them which probably held a repair facility, as well as whatever cleaned the tunnel behind us.

I painted all this into Visual File, passage through stone perfectly good for a Lived-Line which operated on solid surfaces for Teleporting precision. Some rock in the way was no impediment without other interference...