Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

It was night time, and they didn’t have great visual acuity or range of vision, relying more on scent and hearing. We avoided the flying olthoi as we zipped up to the top of the hill, reclaimed the Disks waiting under covers waiting patiently there with their loads of Elemental gems and the like, and simply took off and up for the higher mountains they couldn’t pass over because the geomagnetic repulsion that enabled the bugs to fly didn’t work at those altitudes.

No such problem with Cloudstepping Sandals and Flight spells, however, or the Disks being towed after us as long as they were towed. If the Disks lost the link, they’d wink out and everything on them fall to the ground instantly.

I noticed Kris turning suddenly east as she studied the ground below us, a long valley running along the south side of the Lost Wish mountains. “Don’t tell me you found something else to hunt...”

Her reply was to point at my hand. “Harlune used to have a base in the Mite Maze, right?”

I thumbed Rose on my hand. I’d been applying goldweight to it intermittently, as well as some crafting time, using Fabricate to purify and restore the damaged energy channels inside, and rebuild them to a different pattern and standard. “You are correct.” I turned my head. “And it’s only a couple miles that way…”

“The odds are it was overrun with olthoi at some point, but Lord Mick indicated it was full of Wasp and Mite Summons, who likely aren’t going to go easy on any olthoi who came wandering in. If there’s any clue on where he went, it might be in there, right?”

“I’m game.” The Olthoi Hunter, if still in Arwic, could wait as we followed up on the clues for the hidden quest. “The Stone Collector said Harlune hated olthoi, and the town criers said he was seen in the Olthoi North. If there’s a clue to where he might be, the Maze might have it, I agree.”

“And call me jaded, but I’m not too worried about a bunch of Gold Phyntos Wasps and Mites.”

-------

Six arcs of lightning crashed past and by Kris as she waited there, completely ignoring voltage that would have chopped down a paramount without any effort on her part.

I stepped around the side and loosed three teardrop-shaped Darts, which flashed out and hit with bone-crunching blunt force trauma, smashing the thoraxes of three of the wasps flat and knocking them out of the air.

The other three zipped forward towards Kris, who impaled the first on Quaver, Shield-slammed the second, and flicker-cut the third eagle-sized insect with bright yellow and jet black markings in two.

Visual Files gave us a map-as-you-go, her Tremblesense alerted us to adjoining passages or physical problems, and I could discern all the magical points and forces at work here. Between us, the Dungeon didn’t have many surprises.

We didn’t Seal anything here. This was a good Dungeon for learning to fight in cramped spaces, use the environment, and deal with an enemy in melee that newbs were usually able to poke down from afar. We merely cut down the Wasp Summons as we moved through the place with speed and alacrity, mapping as we went.

It had three ‘levels’, a main level with basically two ‘upper floor’ sections that weren’t connected, and an extensive ‘basement’, which was the home of the mites.

It appeared that the olthoi had indeed made several stabs to get into the place, judging by the fried and punctured shells we found all over the place, occasionally blasted with lightning by hovering Wasps just on instinct if they were in sight, breaking down under the repeated treatment to little more than scattered purplish dust.

The Golden Phyntos Wasps ruled the main floor, found everywhere and racing to reinforce one another if they dropped within sight or sound, a fact which could rapidly get a whole swarm of them barreling in, geomagnetic wings all aflutter, stabbing with a lethal stinger or letting loose volleys of lightning spells up to Gold Scarab in strength.

Happily, they had fixed respawn points, which meant that you could make your way through the Dungeon without too much problem if you were quiet and knew the layout. That was discernible by the fact we could smell the presence of mites moving in and out of the place, but there were no bodies of them anywhere to be found, meaning they knew how to avoid the wasps when needed.

The Mick had said that Harlune’s area was at the rearward upper floor. Given that we were who we were, we did the responsible thing and ventured throughout the entire complex, charting where all the spawn points were, mapping the thing out for later teams to use.

That included heading down the first ramp into the basement to see what the mites were up to.

It rapidly became obvious there were living mites among the Summons down here, as shattered olthoi carapaces littered the area, along with the bones of dillos, reedsharks, shreth, rabbits, rats, and grouse. Since Summons didn’t hunt and didn’t really need to eat, that was a quite smelly clue there were living things in here taking advantage of the Summons to guard themselves, and probably actively helping in and directing the defense.

Fox-headed anthro Summons yelped and squealed in laughing barks that were extremely annoying in all the ways and came at us, flailing paws in crude punches, clawing motions, nipping bites… and kicks that could actually result in them doing backflips in the middle of combat.

Not a one that did such a thing got another blow off at Kris, imagine that.

They came streaming in to attack us with laughing barks and territorialism overriding any sense of self-preservation, which I had heard was one of the few things that kept their population under control. The other wild tribes had a severe dislike of mites and tended to war with them constantly, especially the banderlings. Even the Hea thought of them as barely more than pests who were constantly raiding, stealing, attacking, and would kill anything if they could get away with it.

We chewed through the fox-headed things with speed and alacrity, me popping them off in trios and Kris mowing through the rest. They were not a species that had any positive contributions to any society, not even having developed tool use, barely a step above apes and far more aggressive.

Mites fell, Summons and living alike, the smell truly impressive as they hadn’t even bothered to keep their lair clean normally, probably because dragging kills down was a necessity, but taking the trash out past the wasps would be real work, and the smell would probably pull wasps right to them.

The bigger male consorts and the females who led the tribe were at the end of the basement, supposedly where the fire-using mage Brannith had met his end. If a copy of his Staff had been spawned after the Fall, that was a Fire Cleaving Weapon we could plumb for more information, as it was at a lower level of power than the Bloodscorch Replica we’d taken apart to learn its secrets as best we could.

Thus, killing everything, including Summoned Mite Matrons attacking alongside the real ones, was completely on the plate, and we did it without qualms.

And down here, we vivisized them, too. Didn’t need this place turning into a breeding pit for mites, which undoubtedly it had been for a very long time. With no Summons for free security they didn’t have to feed, this place would be much less friendly to them when the next inevitable olthoi incursion happened.

---

“Yow!” I blinked at the locked double doors, holding traces of some very energetic attacks upon them from both pincers and claws, all self-repairing because of a devoted ley line link here the rest of the place didn’t actually have. It also meant the walls couldn’t be dug through here, and had kept the Dungeon’s maze intact when I couldn’t actually affect the walls and floors at all.

There was a reedshark sitting there… a big one, the size of an auroch!

It yipped and sprang at us.

It only managed to jam itself onto Quaver and Kris’s ready Archer Stand Thrust Stance, braced and solid and punching right into its brain on the pounce. She braced with heavyfoot and held it back, her legs flexing as she absorbed half a ton of mass slamming into her as the thing jammed itself hilt-deep on her Sword even as it died.

“Must be Alfrega,” I muttered, eyeing as Kris levered it sideways in the tight hallway. “A bit bigger than Lord Mick described.” Harlune had named his pet reedshark after the infamous Mad Queen of Aluvia who had inspired the rebels who first wielded the Rose of Celdon.

“And, I presume, much more capable of taking on olthoi,” Kris noted. “A Summons, want me to vivic it?”

“No. It’s probably kept this area mite-free, among other things, and I doubt anyone else has used the place for shelter because of her.

We hopped past the corpse, which would discorporate very quickly. A backed-up Summons spot could pop up a new version of her in less than two minutes. We quickly moved past her and into the living area that the reclusive Harlune had used for years before finally being lured out by Ben Ten to help lead the magical side of the Celestial Hand Faction.

Even then he’d had some followers/acolytes maintain the place in his absence, the enchantments he’d made on the place making it basically self-sufficient if you weren’t inclined towards sunlight and open spaces much.

Those enchantments seemed to have largely faded, and hadn’t been put back into place. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen any sign of adventurer or animal remains, so the Dungeon coming into the real world hadn’t been an automatic killing experience.

---

“Anything important?” Kris asked, walking up behind me as I surveyed the withered remnant of a full-grown apple tree, clearly once fully nurtured and growing down here underground.

“You might not have seen it in Holtburg, but they had similar things there in the entry Dungeon. Trees growing underground. I’m looking at the support matrices that generated the magical effects. They are much denser and stronger than others I’ve seen in use tapping ley lines, save perhaps at Ithaenc Cathedral.”

“Harlune was supposed to be the finest master of Item Magic on the island, even better than Asheron, as well as a master of Life Magic. Makes sense he could build something that would support life down here, and there’d be a master’s touch to his work,” Kris nodded.

“Find anything yourself?” I asked her, not turning away from my examination of the Formations used here, painting them into my Visual File for later replication. There were details of flourishing and depths of complexity, in addition to the clarity and quality of the work, that other, similar things that I’d seen used, including those I’d inherited from Mira and learned from the Item Magic masters down south, didn’t really hold a candle to.

They also had a similarity to the complexities of the work inside Rose on my finger. Not surprising, if they were the work of the same person…

“He had a rock collection.” The way she said it made me turn, and she held up a chunk of ore with crystals sticking out of it of a certain hue.

“Amarinthine Rose Quartz in its natural state.” I accepted it from her with anticipation. “Well well well. The Stone Collector was right, was he not?”

“You can trace that back to the mine it came from,” Kris grinned expectantly.

“I most certainly can.”

“Think we’ll find our reclusive archmage there?”

I lifted my left hand up, where Rose glittered for her perusal. “No. There’s four upgrades to this.”

She lifted an eyebrow, opened her mouth to say something, and thought better of it. “Right. Chain Quest, gotta jump through hoops.”

“Yes. But at least we know the next stop.”