Aelin was many things. He was an expert hunter, in the words of the system itself. He was also a fine archer, even if not as good an archer as he was a hunter. Although, if the Madman was to be trusted, he was possibly a better archer than he was a hunter, depending on which skill was more complicated.

Of course, he wasn’t exactly in the mood to trust the Madman, seeing as, of all the many things Aelin was, at that moment, he was mostly furious at said Madman for kidnapping them.

They were standing atop a giant building, clearly created by people, even if it was larger than any such structure he had ever seen. The thing was already so inhumanly large that he could almost not conceive of people creating it, seeing as they had already carefully paced at least two hundred metres out in each direction. Or at least as carefully as someone who earned the title of ‘Madman’ could be convinced into doing.

The reason for their attempted care was that even here, deep beneath the log of the fallen heartwood tree, the leaves covering the structure reached waist height for him. As such, they had to carefully slide their feet along the ground if they wanted to avoid the prospect of suddenly being buried, and possibly waking the ‘depth-beasts’ the Madman so casually spoke of. He was expecting to find the end at any moment, considering the sheer size they had already found, even if the others did not seem as impressed with the size.

Aelin glanced upwards at the disconcerting mushrooms hanging from the roof and lighting their search. The mushrooms themselves were accepted, if only for the light they provided, but the fact that Veiled-Elves commonly lived among similar shrooms was not.

At least the trickle of a waterfall pouring from a crack in the log above was purely useful.

“Aelin! Emma! I have managed to find my edge; without even falling in!” The Madman called in a voice far too loud for it to be safe.

Aelin glanced between where the Madman stood in one corner, and where Emma stood in another, roughly estimating that should all sides be equal, he had thirty metres left before he would reach an edge.

Aelin hurried his gate, and soon slowed once more to feel for the edge. Once he found it, he walked along it just as Emma had done opposite him and found the corner next to hers and across from the Madman’s, where he then placed the glowing shrooms the Madman had taken from the log above them with his magic.

The spirits had clearly damned him, or else he would have never been forced to accompany a magical madman.

They then moved to where they found the centre to be, and then beyond that, to meet with the Madman, slow as he was. Which was fair, given his starved state, even if it was once more infuriating that he refused to tell them the reason for his starvation. He would have guessed sheer incompetence at hunting, but even the Madman, as soft and sheltered from reality as he was, would be slightly too competent for that to be it, given his magic. And, even if it was the reason, he also had nowhere near enough pride to purposefully avoid telling them that. He would probably make more fun of himself with them, than either would at his expense, were that the case.

“So, what did you discover?” The Madman asked, glancing between the two of them.

“There was no chain at the corner,” Aelin said.

“wouldn’t we already know that? We can, after all, clearly see the chains from both our corners,” Emma asked the Madman.

“No. It could have snapped, and then been hidden by the leaves,” Aelin explained.

“Exactly!” the Madman said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Aelin with a grin, “Now, I propose only five possibilities regarding the location of the entrance which we are searching for, based on what we found concerning the anchoring,” he gestured to beneath their feet with an enthusiastic and maddening smile; as if they wished to be there, “of this. The anchoring positions, which, to be clear, indicates that the building currently finds itself on its side.”

“If we assume that whatever may have once occupied and built this structure finds the same inherent appeal in symmetry as we do, we can assume it is in some form of central position. Presumably either along the bottom, in which case we will simply search along the side opposing the anchoring corners, or…” The Madman trailed off, smiling with glee at something, a smile which Aelin did not trust, before he ran to the middle of the square they made, and leapt to hit the centre “In the centre of the side itself!”

He then sank like a rock in actual water, into the supposed ‘sea’ of leaves.

Aelin clenched his fists hard enough for them to hurt as he breathed deeply. “Do you think he knows that he is essentially holding himself, and our freedom, hostage?” Aelin started relatively calmly, before he began to growl, “That by jumping into a possibly dangerous situation, he forces us to follow him, to make it more likely that he, and our way out, survives?”

“He understands that we will be more likely to follow him. To be clear, he thinks the only reason is that we want to leave, and he is the only way we can do that, so he thinks we will follow him to get out faster that way.” Emma shook her head softly. “He doesn’t, however, realize, or at least he doesn’t let himself realize, that something dangerous may be inside of there. Even I don’t know what happened in that cabin, but since whatever did happen, he hasn’t let himself imagine or plan for things going wrong since.”

She then jumped in after him.

Aelin glared after the two. Whatever may have happened, it could not be allowed to keep affecting Oliver. When he fixed it, he would consider his debt paid, as even a slightly more realistic view on life would without a doubt save Oliver more times than he could, even if he kept attempting to do so for years.

Aelin plunged deep into the leaves, his system-increased strength allowing him to jump higher and with more force behind him as he landed. After a moment, his descent slowed, and he began to dig with his outstretched feet to slowly reach the ground of whatever this was. It took minutes of silent work, but eventually, he reached a point where things changed. Not in the way he expected, though. Instead, he was ripped from his focus when he found his feet to be waving through nothing but air. Of course, it did not remain that way for long, seeing as the leaves under his feet were what largely kept him from falling, and so when they abandoned him, so did the privilege that not falling apparently was.

His head soon passed through the border where leaves were not allowed and he saw that he still had six metres left to fall, a distance which was an acceptable fall with his current stats.

When he rose from his roll, he immediately heard the sound of arguing.

“And why was it, again, that you couldn’t have helped us with the drop, or at least told us? You know, so that you could be sure no one got hurt?” Emma grouched.

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“Well, as it happens, the reason the leaves disappeared after a certain point was the sigildry script which you may be able to observe immediately before the leaves reinstate their presence. Now, I expected that I would not understand whichever language it was written in, and rightly so, given that no alphabet on earth places particular importance on their letters being writable without lifting your pencil. However, the clues I may ascertain from the script could be invaluable.”

“And why could you not do that after catching us, like how you caught yourself?”

“Firstly, I would like to resolve the misunderstanding that I am capable of holding myself aloft, seeing as I can at most soften my landing slightly, a solution less effective than simply rolling.” He held up a finger, still not turning away from the symbols on the wall “Secondly, I was curious, and you are fine,” he said, shrugging happily.

Emma sighed, and rolled her eyes before she looked at what he studied so curiously. Aelin himself followed her gaze and saw what seemed to be a line of half-empty, loosely connected dots circling the corridor. “What have you found until now?”

The Madman began to explain excitedly “As far as I can immediately tell, there are two significant discoveries at the surface of this script. I noticed as soon as I laid my eyes upon it that it seemingly confirms my hypothesis surrounding whether phonetic or logographic languages are preferable. Given how few recurring symbols there are, I assume that it is logographic-”

“What does ‘logographic’ mean?” Aelin cut in, as even he was drawn in by whatever magic could do something as strange as block leaves.

The Madman glanced over his shoulder with a beaming smile, as though he was overjoyed at the interruption, before he explained. “A logographic alphabet means that each character symbolises a concept, rather than a sound. Now, the reason that is preferable, is that to activate a script, it is necessary to fill each character, to ‘teach’ the mana inserted what to do without your direct interference after that point. It is, however, costly to fill each symbol, or rather, it becomes costly when enough symbols are gathered.”

Aelin already understood the point, so he cut in so that he could continue to the wordy explanation “So you save resources by using fewer characters in a logographic alphabet.”

“Exactly! Now, the second discovery concerns the subject of flow-break, a phenomenon where you, when manipulating your mana to perform particularly dexterous turns in an enclosed area, lose control over a portion. The uncontrolled portion then breaks away into the atmospheric mana, or, theoretically, when involved in more delicate scripts, it could break the material it runs through. Although I would like to reiterate that the last portion is utterly theoretical.”

“That’s what the circles are for! You run along the circle, again and again, and then you softly curve into the middle at different points, drawing a line, before merging with the circle again! Then you keep doing that at different points, with different curves, until you get unique symbols!” Emma exclaimed.

“Precisely my thought! They then continue to the next circle by curving externally, rotating once more except counterclockwise, rather than clockwise, repeat Infinitum. Now I am almost finished with what I can gleam quickly, I simply wish to deduce whether they also artistically depicted what the characters symbolise inside of the circle, by attempting to find a leaf-circle.”

Aelin listened to the two discuss for some time, as the Madman came with suggestions and ideas which were swiftly discussed and thrown aside, the subjects of their arguments becoming ever more tedious. He instead chose to examine their surroundings and look for a path out so that He and Emma could force the Madman to walk along the path he found.

Along one wall were regular sources of stark, white light, illuminating both the shaft they came from and the four corridors going in all directions, even if two only two corridors had the lights in the actual ceiling. He then saw the ladder rungs going along the entirety of the floor in two of the corridors, and the rails in the ceiling of those same corridors and remembered that the ‘shaft’ they came from was once a corridor, and that the building was on its side.

Eventually, he heard the conversation falter slowly as they ran out of symbols to discuss on whether or not they represented any given concept.

“So, are you finished? Ready to leave before some great beast attacks us due to your chatter?” Aelin asked.

“As I remember, any situation where a great beast has threatened us was your doing, and a situation which I then promptly rescued you from,” The Madman said smugly, before melting away into a happy smile. “Granted, you prevented at least half a dozen such situations of my doing, but I still hold firm that I am technically correct.”

He then began to walk down the ‘upwards shaft’ corridor, and before Aelin could firmly grasp his shoulder to steer him back to the entrance, soon-to-be exit, he spoke. “Besides, we cannot leave even if we wished to do so, meaning~… Onwards! to adventure!” He pointed down the hallway, and ran forwards, careless of traps or dangers.

At least, he attempted to do so, until both he and Emma grabbed a shoulder each, being able to easily catch him with their stats, and simultaneously asked what he meant.

“Well, even if you were to throw me a sufficient distance upwards, I am almost assured that I could not find anything to grasp onto in a pond of leaves and flat walls.”

“So not only are we in an unknown environment, but we are also unable to retreat!” Aelin growled.

“Well, yes, but the system does not exactly have a stellar record on the subject of predicting fatalities, seeing as it has already done so twice with me, and yet here I stand,” the Madman said flippantly. “Besides, we’ll be fine, and it is far more interesting to contemplate why they are named Relic Crypts, of all things, than it is to think on such unimportant matters. Now, onwards! To adventure!”

After the madman unsuccessfully tried to run forwards again, they began to walk down the corridor once more, with Emma in the front with her sword, and him behind with a bow, while the Madman was securely contained in the middle. The ladder rungs made it annoying to walk; however, they were placed far enough apart that they could easily find room for their steps, even in a battle. They were, in fact, chosen for that exact reason, as the Madman had pointed out that they were likely to be more skilled and more powerful than their enemies, but severely outnumbered, which would make the difficult terrain play into their hands.

The flat grey walls were, at least, easy to examine for traps, given that they were well-lit and had no seems, as if the entire building was a single carved-out boulder. Which happened to be his current theory.

Eventually, they found a hole in the ground before them, or, he supposed, an entrance to and from the shaft. Of course, the door that had once filled the entrance had been ripped from it, if the cracked and broken stone around the entrance, and the large sliding metal door at the bottom, or ‘opposing wall’, of the room was to be believed. At the moment, however, two things about the bottom of the room were more interesting. Firstly, the hole continued into another room below the one they looked upon, which presumably also had a large metal door somewhere inside of it if the matching damages were to be trusted. And secondly, the many skeletons, rubble, broken pieces of furniture and other objects at the bottom of their current room.

“So should we try another path or can you magic us down there?” Emma asked.

The Madman looked consideringly at one of the cracks running from the broken doorway. “Well, I cannot magic us down there, seeing as I have yet to find a way to fasten myself to flat surfaces. However, I think sticking my knife into that crack should allow it to support a rope.” He smiled, before doing as planned.

Emma then looked at the short snippet of rope left after the knife, untied it, and retied it so that someone could act as safety when the first person went down. Emma then took hold of the safety line, and Aelin took the rope. Aelin knew he was the best choice, seeing as he was far more experienced at climbing than the other two. But that, to him, only meant that he truly knew how horrible the equipment they were using was. Which was why he was switching between a bone-creakingly tight grip, and one too loose to hold anything right up until he slid over the edge.

When he could finally release after twenty metres of tense climbing and land on the left side of the further hole, he did so immediately to escape the improvised climbing equipment. After he let go, the very moment his bare feet touched the ground in fact, he heard the soft, dull grind of stone against bone. It was a sound he was intimately familiar with, as he had felt it run through his hands many times, as he ground a person’s head against the cliffs of his home world. And when he turned, the scene of a nightmare, of a story meant to scare children from straying in under The Veil revealed itself before him. Skeletons that had been dead since before their world even began, according to the Madman, began to shake, shuffle, and move to stand. The dead clutched in their hands the rubble and wood they had wielded in life, as they stood before him, at least fifteen of them, with only the hole separating him from the ones on the other side.