Chapter 757: What We're Walking Into

The expedition members, along with Allayeth and Marcus, were in a briefing room aboard an airship owned by the Adventure Society. This included Jason’s team, Rick’s team and Korinne Pescos’ team as the silver-rank combat contingent, along with a team from the Magic Society. The team of researchers had been, to everyone’s surprise, swiftly approved by Clive. It turned out the society officials didn’t want to go on the incredibly dangerous mission, so they sent the competent researchers they kept in the basement doing work they could claim credit for.

The gold-rankers included team Moon’s Edge, an all-female team trained by Allayeth. Rufus’ parents, Gabriel and Arabelle, had reformed their old team with Emir, minus former teammate Callum Morse. As they didn’t trust Callum’s current mentality for this mission, he had been swapped out for Emir’s wife Constance. She had known them all for years and had trained with Callum leading up to gold-rank, so she at least had some familiarity with the group.

The remaining gold-rank participants were Amos Pensinata and Carlos Quilido. Amos joined because his nephew was on one of the silver-rank teams while Carlos was the closest they had to an expert on the elemental messengers.

There was no bronze or diamond-rank element to the expedition. Bronze-rankers were too weak and diamond-rank too strong for the massive fluctuations in the ambient magic. Sometimes it grew so saturated that it created anomalies that could kill a bronze-ranker outright. Other times it dropped to almost nothing, like on Earth when Jason first returned home. Gold-rankers without a ready supply of gold spirit coins would be swiftly debilitated, rendered comatose, or even die.

A diamond-ranker would have it worse. Even if a sufficient supply of diamond spirit coins could be mustered up, which they couldn’t, it was uncertain if they would even be enough. Allayeth argued that she could duck into Jason’s soul space if necessary, but had eventually been convinced otherwise. If dimensional forces somehow blocked Jason’s soul portal at a point of absolute low magic, she could be crippled and killed as the magic-parched world sucked the life right out of her.

The briefing began with making sure that all the expedition members weren’t missing any critical details. The basics had already been disseminated, but it was easy to miss something or other.

“To summarise,” Marcus said, standing at the front. “You’ll be entering through the hole we have secured, determining if the device does what the messengers claim, and then activating it if it does. The key threat is the unstable elemental magic pervading the underground area. This is the same magic slowly building up that will eventually destroy this region if we don’t stop it. Mr Standish, if you would?”

Clive got up and moved to the front, Marcus shifting aside.

“Let me reiterate,” Marcus said, “that Mr Standish is in command of all magical investigation in this expedition. I don’t care if you’re gold-rank, I don’t care if you’re Magic Society; when it comes to investigating the magic, his word is first and last.”

“Thank you, Representative Xenoria,” Clive said. “The nature of the magic we will encounter remains unknown in the specific, but we do know some of its general trends. It is elemental in nature and appears to have a transformative effect on the body and mind. Our best information is that being an essence user offers considerable but not total protection. Strength of will also seems to play a considerable part. The messengers attempted to send some of their servants, but the messengers kill anyone whose will they don’t break and those people did not do well.”

“How reliable is this information?” Constance asked.

“Not as much as we’d like,” Clive said. “A lot more comes from the messengers than what we could detect from the surface. Fortunately, within the last day, we’ve had access to a somewhat more reliable source. Jason?”

Jason got up and joined Clive.

“I know there have been a lot of questions about the messengers I’ve taken prisoner personally. What I’ve been doing with them and why. What information have I gotten from them? Some of that I’ve passed on already, mostly big-picture stuff with nothing specifically actionable. The initial group of messengers I captured weren’t part of the messenger’s original underground foray where they caused this problem in the first place. I couldn’t use them to confirm or deny the information Jes Fin Kaal has been giving the Adventure Society. The messenger I captured most recently is another story. She’s lower rank, but she was there in person.”

“How can we trust any of the information they gave you?” asked the leader of team Moon’s Edge, Miriam Vance.

“That's a fair question,” Jason said. “I’ve taken the messengers away and you have no idea where I put them or what I’m doing with them. But there are people in this room that have. Lady Allayeth has seen them. I had her speak with them just today so that someone you trust could allay your fears as much as possible.”

“Anyone is free to speak with Lady Allayeth after the briefing,” Marcus said. “In the meantime, Mr Asano, please continue.”

“The latest messenger I captured was sent to us, in part, because she had little value to them. There are a lot of reasons for that I don't need to go into, but suffice it to say she was as close as the messengers get to a low-level drudge. She was part of an expendable group the messengers use for tasks like watching over the world-taker worm nests where there’s a good chance of being killed by adventurers.”

“I thought they were all meant to be superior beings,” Gabriel said.

“They’re indoctrinated to believe that they’re superior to us, but ultimately that’s just a method of control. They’re slaves and are used as such by the astral kings. They have an internal hierarchy, where the lowest messengers are told they’re still above everyone else.”

“You make them sound like victims,” Miriam said.

“They are,” Jason said. “Incredibly dangerous victims. Put them down if you get the chance; do not attempt to take them alive on the basis of compassion. Now, to get us back on track, these expendable messengers made up most of the group sent underground in the messengers' initial attempt to suborn the natural array. Only a fraction of them escaped when things went wrong.”

“And this messenger was one of them?” Miriam asked.

“Yes. She has first-hand accounts of what’s down there.”

“We have detailed information that will be handed out with your packets at the end of this meeting,” Marcus said. “For now, a quick summary please, Mr Asano.”

“There is an underground city,” Jason said. “A magical variant of smoulders have been living peacefully with the natural array for an unknown period. During the monster surge, one of the earliest-arriving group of messengers somehow found this city and burrowed down to it, looking to claim the array. To complicate things, a group of Builder cultists followed them, looking to claim an astral space also located down there.”

“Is the astral space related to the natural array?” Emir asked.

“We don’t know,” Clive told him. “This whole operation is built on incomplete and unreliable information, and I think we all know how that usually plays out.”

“Mr Standish,” Allayeth said. “Are you attempting to convince the members of this expedition to pull out?”

“No,” Clive said. “But if just explaining the situation makes it sound like I am, that should tell us all something.”

“The decision has been made, Mr Standish,” Marcus said. “I won't force anyone down that hole, but you have had ample chance to back out.”

Clive looked at Jason who shrugged. Clive sighed before continuing.

“Each of you will be provided with elemental resistance items, which we believe will help stave off the corrupting effects of the magic down there. You’ll also receive potions designed to purge your bodies of the elemental affinities magic they’ll absorb in the process of natural mana recovery.”

“How confident are we that will work?” Arabelle asked.

“Jason?” Clive said.

“Obviously,” Jason said, “we can’t trust Jes Fin Kaal and her messengers. While she has, so far as we can tell, mostly played things straight, she has also kept things from us. According to the messenger I just captured, certain messengers were significantly more resistant to the influence of the natural array's elemental energy. Those messengers were the ones who themselves possess elemental powers of the affiliated types, mostly fire, earth and metal.”

“If the messengers have people that can go down there,” Gabriel asked, “what do they need us for? As it was explained to me, they want us to go down there because they can’t.”

“They don’t have the numbers,” Jason said. “Elemental powers are fairly rare amongst messengers. Their local forces have between ten and twenty messengers that fit the bill, none of which are gold-rank. They don’t have the power to go down there and face what’s waiting for them.”

“Which is what?” Miriam asked. “Since it’s waiting for us as well, what are we dealing with?”

Clive stepped back as Jason took centre stage at the front of the briefing room.

“The best information we have,” Jason said, “is that we’re walking into a three-sided war already in motion. There’s an underground city down there and the native smoulders were, as of several months ago, largely unaffected by the unstable natural array. They’ve been modified by the array’s power for centuries. They may be immune to the power building up or just resistant, changing slower than the messengers. For all we know, it could be making them stronger and they’ll resist us trying to shut the array down. Hopefully not, as they’re our best bet for any kind of alliance down there.”

“Assuming that the escalating elemental energy hasn’t turned them into mindless monsters, the way it did the messengers,” Clive added.

“Yes,” Jason agreed. “Which brings us to the second faction, the element-infused messengers. We don’t know how many of them are still down there, but their numbers should be limited. A lot of them dug their way up and were killed on the surface. Fortunately, almost all should be silver-rank.”

He took a slow, weary breath.

“The third faction is the Builder cult. A lot of cultists couldn’t get back to the fortress cities before they dimension-shifted out, and we can safely assume that this lot were left behind. They were trapped with a lot of resources and significantly greater numbers than the messengers, and they holed up in the astral space, sealing it off. Hopefully, they'll stay there and we won't see them, but I don't think we'll be that lucky.”

“We also don’t know if the astral space has shielded them from the natural array’s magic,” Clive said.

“That’s right,” Jason agreed. “They may be bunkered down and unaffected, or they might be an army of elemental monsters by now.”

“So, to sum up,” Farrah said. “We’re going underground into a situation we don’t understand, filled with unstable magic we don’t understand, so we can fight enemies we don’t understand in order to do something we don’t understand but will probably give our worst enemies exactly what they want. We possibly understand what that is, but it’s a guess. Also, to pre-empt questions, I am trying to get everyone to not do this. I’ve got my own stuff going on, and if my friends weren’t going on this extremely ill-advised mission, I could get back to that.”

Marcus hung his head, letting out a groan that sounded like a passenger jet spinning up its engines.

“I’m going to stop things here before someone actually convinces you all to pull out,” he said. “We expect to arrive at the tunnel in around an hour, so I want you all to take that time and review the supplemental material you’ll be given as you leave this room. Please direct any questions to myself or Lady Allayeth.”

***

Marcus looked over the side of the airship at the fortress town below. Built over the top of the hole blasted out by the elemental messengers, it was a spiderweb of reinforced bridges with buildings on them, with a ring of larger buildings around the perimeter.

“This was built in a few weeks?” he growled. “People in Yaresh are living in tents and bunkers while this many construction resources were diverted here?”

“Politics,” Allayeth said. “The aristocratic faction is strongly allied with the upper echelons of the Magic Society in Yaresh. This was intended to be a way for both of them to take greater control in the messenger conflict. We pushed back as much as we could, but if the Duke went to war with the aristocratic faction, the city administration would have collapsed in the infighting and made things worse.”

“I was given a surprising amount of leeway to cause trouble,” Marcus said. “Normally a local government wouldn’t let this much power to swing to the Adventure Society, but now I’m seeing why.”

“The aristocratic faction isn’t broken, but they’re on the back foot now. You’ll find a lot of these buildings are empty shells after resources were diverted back to the city. Now things are only getting started there and we have this half-finished mess.”

“Have you been into the chasm?”

“Some way down, until the ambient magic became unstable.”

“Does it stay anywhere near as wide as the aperture as it continues down?”

“Yes, although it’s not uniform. Some sections are akin to an oversized mine shaft while others are more twisty and cavernous. There are even sections that are honeycombed with smaller tunnels instead of one massive one.”

“How did they do this? Displacing that much earth when digging up from below would be hard even with magic. By all accounts, the elemental messengers are fairly mindless, so I don’t imagine they have any engineers.”

“It looks like they used mixed methods, from what I saw. There was evidence of dimensional displacement, stone-shaping, magma tunnels. Clive Standish suspects that their elemental powers allow them to create or annihilate matter that is substantively elemental in nature by tapping into different dimensional layers.”

“Don’t you start. I tried listening to that man explain layers of reality, and I’m not doing it again. Although Asano did give me a slice of rainbow layer cake in an attempt to explain it with visual aids. Delicious, but ultimately futile.”

“You never studied any magical theory?”

“I did meet a scholar who told me I was an expert in applied kinetics, whatever that is.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“I didn’t get a chance before I beat him to death with a fruit cart.”

“How exactly did you wind up as a Continental Council executive?”

“They like to have different people for different situations. I usually get sent places where they need someone to cut through the politics. Not literally, obviously. Unless we want to. We get quite broad discretionary power and I find an axe through someone’s head on the first day helps set a tone.”

Previous     Next