Tristan watched until the spriggon stopped moving. Once he was sure enough physical trauma could kill them, Tristan looked back at the church. He wondered why the three spriggons had been in the lecture hall. Tristan weighed his need to keep moving against figuring out what was going on. He had the time and even if it revealed nothing, he wouldn’t consider it a waste.
The lecture hall was larger than the ones in the Caldera. Understandable, as this city had twenty times the population of the Caldera. Instead of wooden pews, mats sat on the floor. Tristan had to assume it was not economical to carry that much lumber down here. Thinking back, only the rooms of the very wealthy had full sets of wooden furniture.
He looked for anything that could have drawn the spriggon’s attention. Aside from the mats, the room was quite bare. Glow stones were recessed into the ceiling, but they had run out of power quite some time ago, the lectern sat at the far end of the room, and behind it was some sort of abstract painting. Tristan was sure that the painting was comprehensible to the people who attended these lectures.
He did not think he would find anything until he got to the lectern. What he found was interesting, his metal sense picked up an artifact. Not one that he could use, but it was made of metal, so at least he could identify it. Walking around the lectern he found a fungus riddled book, a hat that was similarly infected, and a cord with beads on it.
This beaded cord had a metal wire, and glass beads. Tristan was not sure what the items uses would be apart from its artifact ability. It was a sound artifact that transferred the speaker’s intent with the words he spoke. A liar would have his intent to deceive transferred, and a guider like Daphan would have his apathy and greed communicated. This would cripple any guider that was not genuine, however, it would also be a massive boon to one who was.
Despite his inability to use the artifact he still shoved it into his bag with all his collection of other odds and ends. After another inspection of the room, Tristan found nothing that would have drawn the spriggons there. Maybe the people had been there when they died and simply been parasitized where they fell.
He had no proof and did not care anymore. Tristan had gotten something out of the search and that was enough for him. He was eager to find out which forces allowed for the intent to be transferred. Could he make a false intent, or maybe cover up his killing intent, which he had yet to find a way to control?
Stepping back outside, relatively speaking, Tristan surveyed his surroundings. The elementals had gone back to their weird gesticulations around the pedestal. Feeling the beads in his bag, he wondered what kind of mind games had been played with these people to make them so dedicated to a god that had not saved them. Looking away Tristan found that nothing else had changed in the surroundings, which was not much of a surprise, though he had half expected a few more spriggon to come to aid their fallen siblings.
“So where to next?” Tristan asked.
Vulcan sent over an image of himself rubbing an imaginary beard like he was deep in thought, “So you have two options. First, leave before you stumble upon the other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-six spriggons that could be down here. That would be the smart thing to do, as even if you could burn them, you would fill the underground with smoke and asphyxiate. Option two sneak around until you find the government office, and empty out the treasury. I advise the first.”
Tristan contemplated the two options before him and made his choice. He could play it safe and be guaranteed survival or he could break into a secure location and loot it. Unfortunately for Vulcan, he had not been with Tristan at the time he developed his love of breaking into secure locations and taking things. The Plains Caldera vaults and Forest Caldera Temple were the two times he was most proud of.
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He smiled, “Let's go find that vault and break in.”
Vulcan groaned slightly as Tristan marched off in a random direction. He was not sure what a government building would look like in an underground city. Tristan imagined it would look something like the church. The two buildings people spent the most money on were government buildings and religious ones. Tristan understood the latter - please your god or you will get smote - the former, not so much. It was a waste of taxpayer money, it should be built like a fortress to protect the leadership, not a mansion to indulge them.
Tristan was not familiar with the layout of the city, but if the vault contained potentially dangerous, high tier artifacts, the people would be foolish to place it next to the cliff. An attacking enemy would only need to get to that equipment to power up their soldiers and wipe out the population. Tristan would place it on the far wall, in a location where any invader would need to dig through eighty feet of stone to get to it.
So he jogged for the far wall with only Vulcan lighting his way. He started coming across fewer and fewer elementals and even found a few mutilated spriggon corpses. Tristan was nearing the center of the city and that would be near the epicenter of what had happened. He was not sure what he was looking for, but took an “I’ll know it when I see it” approach.
He ran for a few more minutes covering the better part of two miles before he found what he assumed to be the center of the underground city. Tristan was not entirely sure what he was looking at, a cylinder of massive proportions walled off a substantial portion of the city. The ceiling was only twenty feet high, but the architecture of the cylinder made Tristan sure it went up through multiple floors.
The bricks that it was made from were set into arches that were filled in with murals that depicted warriors slaying mythical beasts. They did not stop at the stone ceiling, almost as if this structure was placed here in a completed state by a giant after the city was built. Tristan walked around it but stopped before he could make a full rotation.
He had missed it because they were so still, but now that he noticed one, more and more became visible. There were dozens of sleeping spriggons. They were curled up behind rubble, under tables, and in generally difficult-to-see locations. It truly did seem that they grew right where their victims died. None of the hiding spots were good, but a desperate man would try anything.
Looking back at the giant cylinder, Tristan posed an idea to Vulcan, “How many spriggons do you think are in there?”
“In the colosseum?” Vulcan scoffed, “Probably most of the rest. It would be a great place to gather and kill a city with biological warfare.”
“What’s a colosseum?” Tristan asked, he was unfamiliar with the term. There was no building in the Caldera that was even a fraction of this size. At least if the mines were discounted, he had heard that the Lord of the Underworld tried to convert the mine into a sort of human hive.
Vulcan sent over an image from an overhead angle. A round building with an open roof design. Seating took up the interior, holding an immense amount of people. An open area in the center was set aside for live combat. Tristan glanced at the murals, they made more sense now that he knew it was a venue for bloodshed.
Bloodsport was not something any culture should revel in. Tristan would have disagreed a few years ago, but after being forced into a position to slaughter his neighbors he would not enjoy this. It was a sport for weak men to feel like they participated in the lives of the strong. Every group of people had an army, they should join that if they could not contain their desires.
Tristan continued walking around the colosseum’s wall until he found what he was looking for. A door. It stood wide open, like it had been thrown open from the inside. From the two spriggons immediately within, Tristan assumed that to be an accurate assumption. What ever airborne contaminant had been used must have been extremely effective to kill people this fast.
Tristan had already come up with several ways for anyone at tier two to resist the spores he had come across. A light kern could boost the potency of their immune system, a fire kern could simply raise their body temperature, water kerns had a similar method, though they would need boiling water instead. Air kerns would simply not breath, their blood already carried air essence. This perfect death rate was absurd unless this was a completely unprepared populace.
“You’re not going in are you?” Vulcan asked.
“Sure I am, don’t you want to know what happened?” Tristan asked.
“Not really,” Vulcan sighed in resignation.