Zalia quickly went to the other exit from the room, dropping the bar across it. The fact that even the bar mechanism was intact gave her more hope for the state in which most of the keeps internal decorations lay. She looked a little closer around the room, trying to find something that would give her a hint to its purpose but it just looked like a normal bedroom. There were some knick knacks she couldn't discern the use of but overall underwhelming.
She gently raised the door bar and pulled the door open, the hinges making a slight creak in the silence. Past the door was a spiralling staircase down into darkness, the dim, sourceless ambient light of the caverns of Cormaine not reaching this far. For some reason, the fact that even the accursed light of Cormaine did not reach into the depths of the keep was a little unnerving. Steeling herself, Zalia began the descent into the stairwell anyways. She was able to see in the darkness perfectly fine so the lack of light wasn't any kind of impairment for her.
The stairwell came to an end and another door lay in front of her. She tried listening closely with her ear to the door, trying to discern if there were any sounds of shuffling on the other side. She couldn't hear anything but that didn't necessarily mean the room beyond the door was empty. It could simply mean the occupants were asleep.
Congratulations! Survivalist and associated skills have reached Iron 18.
The notification sound made Zalia jump, again. She wasn't used to her abilities randomly levelling all the time, the situation she was in giving good experience to Healing presence and Survivalist constantly.
She pushed open the door gently, peeking around to see into the next room. Through the door was a corridor off of which she could see several doorways and an open, squared stairwell leading further down. Thinking logically, she was probably in some kind of housing or bedchamber section of the keep, somewhere visiting nobles and their retinue could stay. The room up above had held someone when whatever had brought this city here had done so and that meant there might be others in these rooms as well. Assuming her reasoning about what the next rooms might be was sound, which it wasn't always.
Zalia and Boreal slipped out of the door into the corridor beyond, moving quietly down the hall until they reached the next stairwell. Looking down, she couldn't see any undead on the floor below so decided to check out the rooms in the hallway. Each door had a keyhole on it, something she may be able to utilise if she managed to find a key. Maybe she could even break the locks with some ritual or ice manipulation. Thinking about it, she didn't know if the undead even remembered how to use doors at all, if there were any inside.
The first few rooms she carefully opened held nothing inside being nothing like small bedrooms like she had thought. They were significantly less well appointed than the one upstairs but still nice. One of the rooms closest to the stairs back up had an undead sitting at a small writing desk, head laying on the desk where an inkwell had spilt across a piece of parchment. It was like the Bathar had fallen asleep and never woken up again.
“What the hell happened here?” Zalia thought.
It was as if the entire city had fallen in an instant, no alarm or reaction quick enough to save the people asleep, walking the streets or otherwise.
She eyed the undead warily, though the furry, desiccated corpse didn't so much as twitch, she still didn't like the look of it. The Bathar had probably been Bronze rank in life, a fact she could tell by her Aura identification detecting the undead as the same. Fighting the Bathar here could be disastrous, she wouldn't be able to keep the Bronze ranked one silent as she had the Iron back upstairs. Instead, she left the room and closed the door, using heat manipulation to super heat the handle. After a minute of working at it, she managed to start melting the metal inside until she could no longer turn the handle.
She wasn't too happy with the temporary solution, knowing that the undead could probably break through the door with ease. Leaving behind such a high ranked creature was risky here where it wasn't outside. Out there she had many avenues of escape, in here she only knew of one and she was leaving a Bronze rank along its path.
She continued on anyway, finding each of the other rooms empty. She then made her way down the next stairwell. There were two floors she could go to, one was a door that when she opened led further into the keep somewhere, most likely the keep proper. The other was the ground floor from what she could tell. Looking around the corner she could see the entrance to the keep, two armoured undead still stood slumped against the wall to either side. She could also go the right rather than straight ahead, the corridor leading deeper into the ground floor of the keep.
She decided on the right path on the ground floor. She was looking for a treasury or armoury of some sort, hoping to find some armour that might fit her. She didn’t think she would find anything that fit well whatsoever but armour was armour. The path led her down to a T-intersection, the left path with a large arch doorway on the wall. Two more guards slumped asleep against the wall here too, guarding whatever may lay further inside. She had a feeling that in there would be the armoury. She just had to find a way to get past the Bronze ranked guards.
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Congratulations! Healing presence has reached Iron 20.
Congratulations! Healing presence has reached Bronze 1.
Healing presence will not gain further levels until all classes reach Bronze 1.
Zalia froze.
Passive 1 - Healing presence - passive - aura
Tin - Your very presence grants life to all around you. You, nearby allies and any flora and fauna you so choose within your aura are affected by a heal over time effect. The heal over time effect heals for low health every second.
Iron - Healing presence now heals the most grave injuries first and you may focus it onto a single target, increasing that targets healing while reducing the healing other targets receive
Bronze - Healing Presence now attunes to the specific needs of each individual target within your aura. It adjusts its healing output based on the severity of injuries or ailments, offering targeted healing to each person or creature accordingly. You may still change this manually if wished. Additionally, once every twenty four hours, when you or an ally would die you are instead cocooned in a protective barrier as made by Protection of the Wilds and made invulnerable to most things for six seconds.
She breathed out silently as she read over the new effect. She now had another way to survive death, the Protection of the Wilds barrier was a counter-execute heal meaning it healed based on missing health. She wasn't quite sure how that number worked but being within an inch of death would mean it would be at its most potent. Protection of the Wilds also let her enhance the shield with any herb replicable by Herbal magic. Her abilities were becoming more and more synergistic, pulling effects from each other in a long chain that made all the abilities more powerful. When Protection of the Wilds eventually reached Bronze, the effect gained then could boost Healing presence’s new effect significantly depending on what it was.
Having the second chance ability also gave her a little bit of breathing room right at this moment as she stared down not one but two Bronze rank enemies, yet more still behind her. Feeling more confident, she thought about how she could get past those two guards. A loud distraction was off the table, waking and drawing the attention of every undead in the keep was not an option she was willing to consider.
In the end, she decided to just try and walk past them. None of the other sleeping undead had reacted when she had walked past or moved near them, only hearing the alarm call of another Bathar or being stabbed in the neck had done so thus far. Using a Masking Ritual that used Dodge-vine to protect her further from senses, Zalia crept towards the guards.
Her plan worked and the two slumped and unconscious undead didn't react as she moved past them into what she had correctly guessed was the armoury. Inside were various racks of armour and weapons but what interested her most was the bodies inside. Unlike the undead around her, one of these bodies was actually fully dead with a greatsword impaled straight through their head. It was unmistakable as a Bathar, though smaller than usual for its race. What interested Zalia was the armour it was wearing.
It had heavy leather armour, thick and sturdy. There were no metal plates on this set like her old one had but it looked just as if not more tough. This set had a helm where her old one hadn’t, the headpiece having two ribbed horns curving from each side of the head out, down then forwards.
There was other armour around the place but this set was small enough it might actually fit her. Creeping forwards, she got close enough that her Aura identification was actually able to pick something up
Duskwraith Armour (Heirloom) - Iron rank.
Tempted to let out a whistle, she held back on making any sound and got to work taking the armour off the corpse. It was morbid work but would be worth it for another heirloom. Indis had her own set of heirloom armour, well, robes, and Zalia was more than happy to have her own. Duskwraith didn't really fit her style, whatever that meant, but if it gave her some kind of stealth ability she wouldn't say no. Besides, if it was anything like her bow then it had the opportunity to change and grow as she used it.
Eventually, she managed to carefully extract the armour from the body and placed it down in pieces on the floor. Remembering how she had bonded to her bow, Zalia began by examining the entire set, trying to remember the features and thinking about where it had come from. She vaguely remembered bonding the bow after learning some of its history.
After a little bit, she began putting it on piece by piece and found it shrinking and molding to her shape. When she put on the final piece, the helmet, a message popped up.
Congratulations! You have equipped ‘Duskwraith Armour’ in a ritualistic manner. The item is now bonded to you.
Duskwraith Armour (Heirloom) - Bonded Iron rank.
Tin - wearing the armour applies Shadows Veil to you.
Iron - Shadows Veil gains a new effect called Partial Intangibility.
Shadows Veil - Shadow Veil suppresses the wearer's aura and magical signature, making it challenging for magical beings or entities with heightened senses to detect their presence.
Partial Intangibility - Shadow Veil grants the wearer partial intangibility, allowing them to phase through thin barriers or objects, such as walls, fences, or closed doors, as long as the barriers are not too thick or magically protected.
It did indeed give her better stealth abilities but not how she was expecting. Hiding her aura like Hidey did would mean some people wouldn't be able to detect what rank she was. That could come in handy later, as well as providing a measure of stealth to a different type of vision. The Partial Intangibility ability she was much more excited for. It would let her pass through various obstacles, maybe even non magical weapons would pass through her. She would have to thoroughly test that before letting herself get stabbed though, it hadn’t seemed to have protected the last wearer who now lay dead with a greatsword through their skull. Inspecting the weapon, she could see that it was magical in some way though. She would have liked to take it but having no storage or use for the weapon, decided to leave it behind.
Standing up, she began to search the rest of the room.