With his experiments complete, he had something else he wanted to work on. Instead of letting the creature hit him, and uselessly carrying around the ridiculously heavy great axe, Felix prepared himself to fight back. The creature swiped forwards and Felix simply pivoted a leg back and out of the way, completely dodging it, then swung down with the axe as hard as he could on the creature's neck. The dodge was elegant as it was already second nature for him to fall into specific steps from the Dragon Dance.

The axe strike was slow, clumsy and frankly embarrassing. He was far too slow to catch the Devoured on the neck as it struck and instead hit it somewhere on it's back. He also wasn't able to put much force into the strike because he wasn't quite ready to be swinging the axe in an actual battle. Lastly, he was imprecise. Instead of the axe striking down and cutting into the creature, Felix wasn't holding the axe perfectly straight so the blade was deflected by it's scales. It pulled him to the side and almost caused him to trip over the beast with it's momentum.

From that point onwards, Felix slowly adjusted to swinging the axe. He still missed hitting anything vital as he was having trouble holding the axe straight, but he slowly worked on holding and keeping the blade facing the creature. With each and every strike, though his strikes were still slow, the blade became straighter. Once he managed to keep the blade from slipping and sliding around, once he could hold it perfectly straight, he began increasing the speed and power behind the strikes.

At first, the blade sank a few millimeters into it's scales, then a few centimeters. Finally, Felix struck the creature and cleaved through a scale into it's flesh below. It only just scratched the flesh, but it was far better than what he had started with. Unfortunately, all his practice was starting to severely tax him. With his Energy core, he wasn't really close to running out, in fact he had only used a fifth of his total pool. Rather, the cost on his health was much higher than he was anticipating. Felix was, though he hadn't been hit by the creature a single time since ending his experiments, sitting at around 30% of his total health.

Luckily the Energy flowing through his body was helping to offset the cost, but it was still ridiculous. He hadn't even noticed his health dipping so low. He felt the pain in his arms, then chest, then legs and finally his core, but he had mentally ignored it and pushed through, unconsciously dulling the pain. Unfortunately, he didn't have nearly enough health to finish the creature off with the axe so he instead flooding his boots with mana launching himself backwards. Before he landed, three massive blinding white arcs of electricity finished the creature off.

Ding You have slain a [D] Devoured (Lvl 149)

How the hell is anyone supposed to use this stupid thing?

There are people stronger than you are.

Yeah I guess. Maybe it'll get easier when I get stronger. Honestly, other than the health cost, I could definitely get used to this. In another life, I think I could have been a hulking barbarian with a great axe. It's kind of fun.

Felix sat down and meditated for a couple hours to restore his health while practicing spell formations. Once he was completely restored, he started looking around the manor for a vault but found it had already been sealed. He found the portal but it was frozen in time and touching it revealed someone had already been here, they had just ignored the monster in the backyard. Slightly disgruntled, Felix flew into the air and continued south east, around the inner circle.

I wonder how many of these key fragments people have found.

Already want to leave?

No… Kind of. I feel like I got everything I wanted out of it already. Don't get me wrong there's probably a ton more interesting treasures and all that but…

Don't you also want to figure out what is going on? Why there's a city of super crazy monsters below?

Yeah I do. I think that's what's holding me back. It feels weird to be up here galivanting through vaults when I know what's beneath us. It feels like this, these vaults, just don't matter.

You could go back down there.

I can't gain levels here so I don't know that I can ever get strong enough to beat the majority of those things. Even Nova would have trouble with them.

It is a limited event. You might as well get as much loot as you can out of it.

You're right.

As Felix flew over the estates below him, he started to notice a pattern among the people he saw vault hunting. Not all of them, not even a majority of them, but a large quantity nonetheless, seemed to be using magical devices. Felix spotted hand cannons, guns that fired spells, grenades, vehicles and even some interesting sets of armor. Taking a quick peak at his map, he was currently between the areas that were allocated for Snowvale and Trelas. It made sense given all the magically engineered devices, but it was still a little bit of a shock just how many people used them. He knew Martin made and used them to fight, but he didn't realize so much of his city did as well.

Looking through the estates, Felix suddenly spotted a vehicle racing through the streets faster than anything else on the ground. He immediately knew who it was so when they stopped, he decided to see if they had found any key fragments or journals yet. Felix dropped down in front of the vehicle as it's occupants climbed out.

"Oi, this is our va- Oh, hey Felix."

"Hey Jack. Any chance you guys have found any key fragments yet?"

Martin and Jack shot each-other a glance then Jack responded, "Nope, not yet. You?"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Nope. Only been in two vaults though. More importantly, have you guys found any Journals? Diaries? First hand accounts? Honestly books in general."

"Uh. We've found some… I guess. Not many though. Why?"

"Just interested in figuring out what happened here. Also I like books."

"Martin's been taking all of them."

On cue, Martin walked up and joined the conversation, "Hey Felix. You're looking for books?"

"Yes please. I'll give them right back, I promise. Just want to see if there's anything interesting in them."

"Alright… Uhm… There are kind of a lot of them."

"How many?"

"Like… a few hundred… maybe a thousand?"

Holy hell. I guess it's not just my inventory that's massive.

"Oof. Okay, I know this is a tall ask, but do you mind if I store them in my inventory? I have a skill to scan books so I don't want to keep them, but it goes faster in my inventory."

"Uh…"

"How about I give you something as collateral? Felix removed the Kryptos Repository from his wrist and handed it to Martin."

"I'm soul bound to it so you can't just run off with it."

Martin squinted at the bracelet for a few moments then his eyes shot open, "Did you find this here?"

"Yeah in one of the vaults. You can identify items?"

"Yeah, part of my profession. I trust you though, you can just take the books for now. Want to walk with us through the estate while they scan? Then you can hand me back the books before we head into the vault and part ways?"

"Sure."

"Jack, any problems with that?"

"Nope. As long as the vault and loot is ours I don't really care about the books."

Martin began removing books from his inventory and handing them to Felix, who stowed them into his own inventory. After a couple hundred books, Martin pulled a bag off of his hip and dumped out a pile of books, that never grew larger than a half dozen, into Felix's arms.

Ah, that makes more sense.

"Thanks." Felix nodded.

"No problem."

The two of them joined Jack and two others Felix didn't recognize as they walked up to the front door of what was probably, if Felix had to guess, the smallest house on this level. The house looked like a normal home on any suburban street back on earth. It was big enough that it had maybe two or three bedrooms but otherwise looked so normal it honestly seemed out of place amongst all the mansions and manors around it.

The outside was mostly rough cut stone bricks that gave it a rustic look with a vibrant almost orange wood paneling above that. The windows had black metal frames and the roof was made of simple clay tiles. Even the front door was just a normal, albeit thick and heavy, door unlike the double French doors and steel banded wood of the previous estates Felix had explored.

Jack was the first one through the doorway followed by the two Felix didn't know then Martin and finally Felix. Walking into the house, Felix instinctively pulled his robe over his mouth and nose. Every surface of the place was covered in a thick layer of dust. Just walking into the house, they had launched enough dust into the air to make it hard to see.

"What the hell…" Felix heard a muffled voice say from in front of him.

The front entrance was small with a small closet off to the side and stairs just a couple meters in front of them. To the left and right were sitting rooms and a hall respectively. Matching the outside of the house, inside, the floors were treated hard wood and the walls appeared to be painted sheetrock or some equivalent material.

Jack and the two right behind him split off to the left while Felix and Martin split right. Walking down the hall, there were two doors on either side. On the right, peeking in, there was a simple office with a desk a chair and a small bookshelf. Martin and Felix walked in and looked around but other than some books on the shelves, even the drawers of the desk were empty. Felix stowed the books on the shelf in his inventory and they walked across the hall and opened the other door.

Behind this door, was a staircase that descended downwards into the dark. The light from outside was more than enough for the ground floor to be illuminated, but this appeared to be a basement. Martin immediately pulled out a flashlight, likely his own creation and started walking down the stairs but Felix hesitated.

How…

Following Martin down, they stepped into a large open space that simply looked like a large unfinished basement. In one corner, there was a raised platform made of a somewhat rubber like material covering a large area, a couple dozen meters across. In another corner, was a workshop area with tables and tools strewn about.

Most of the tools looked like surgical equipment with scalpels, tweezers and clamps all made of metal and in a huge array of sizes. On the other end of the basement, was a massive pile of ash. The stone or concrete walls were completely blackened and covering the ground everywhere was thin black powder. There weren't even pieces of charcoal or chunks left over, whatever had been burned here, had been completely incinerated.

Felix walked over to the side of the basement that had clearly been burned, a side that took up at least three quarters of the total space, and just looked at it.

What in the hell happened here? There's a basement… which shouldn't be possible. Now this?

Doesn't seem that weird to me. Maybe the basement was spatially expanded or maybe there's enough earth on top of the stone layer for a basement to exist.

No… Something is wrong here.

What do you mean?

Not the basement, that's fine. I guess the charring is fine too. Something feels wrong.

Walking a few steps forwards, onto charred ground but still a few meters from the ash, Felix realized what the gut feeling was. There was something in the ash that was screwing with the ambient mana and anima.

"What's wrong? You find something over there?" Felix heard Martin call out to him.

Felix didn't answer though. Instead, he closed his eyes and focused in on the ambient mana. He was much more adept at feeling out mana than he was with the anima so he started with that. The mana was being pulled, but not from the ambient to a specific point. Instead it was being pulled into the ground and walls all around him but in a pattern. He couldn't tell what it was or why but it wasn't normal.

After a few moments of trying to figure it out, he switched over to focusing on the ambient anima and carefully walked forwards. He tried to reach out but couldn't quite sense the entire basement. Luckily it only took a few steps for him to latch onto what appeared to be a string. It was fluttering around like a kite string without a kite.

Focusing in on the string, he followed it deep into the pile of ash. To follow it further, he needed to clear out the ash so he used a very light wind spell to push it aside. He was hoping to avoid filling the air with ash but only somewhat succeeded. Following the string of anima, he found it sank into the wall right in the middle of the charred area, unfortunately, the wall looked completely solid from his inspection. Felix marked the wall with a tiny piece of mana then switched his attention back to the ambient mana.

The pattern was like a random series of lines all around the room that didn't seem to converge at all, if he weren't confined to a basement, he would guess they were ley lines. That thought gave him an idea though so he took a small drop of heavily affinized mana and dropped it into one of the lines making up the pattern. He immediately felt it race off to the side following the line for a few meters then divert down somewhere else that wasn't part of the pattern.

What in the hell…

Though it was kind of extreme, Felix had an idea of what to do. He assured Martin that he wasn't trying to kill him then walked up to the top of the stairs and sealed the door with a thick layer of solid mana. He made sure there were no vents or other openings then sat down as close to the middle of the basement as he could. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .