Zalia’s mind was too full of thoughts as she flew back to the island she called home once more. The god’s plight, Delphi’s inability to explain what the collective knew, the new type of demon she had killed. Boreal was flying silently beside her, thankfully much more peaceful than her usual chaotic flight pattern.
“Do you think we should trust Delphi with this one?” Zalia asked Boreal mentally.
“Zalia trust instincts,” Boreal replied.
Zalia was inclined to agree.
“What if something bad happens to the collective because we leave though?” she said.
“Choices are made,” Boreal answered.
Boreal’s handle on language wasn’t excellent but the way she expressed emotion and images with her words lent the usually short sentences a deeper meaning. In this case, Zalia caught on to her intended one. Everyone must make choices as they see fit, there is no point taking responsibility for the decisions of others.
“Maybe we can take advantage of this situation,” Zalia mused.
“Advantage?” Boreal asked.
“I feel like since I’ve arrived in Endaria and now here, everything I have done has felt reactive in one way or another. Maybe we can take advantage of this and actually take the upper hand for once,” Zalia explained.
“Still reactive,” Boreal said.
“Well, I guess that is true. Still, we could set some kind of trap or… I don't know,” Zalia replied, trailing off.
She had many, many ways of setting traps and preparing for a fight before it happened but that usually took into account knowing what the enemy was. Maybe… maybe Delphi would tell them that much.
Keeping the question in mind, Zalia fell back into silence as they flew.
Once they arrived back at the cave, they walked into the icy central section with purpose. Delphi was nowhere to be seen but Zalia was alright with that for now. Instead, she decided to do something she hadn’t done for a while and stepped right up to the pool and jumped in.
With her addition of the sight that allowed her to see vibration, the visual experience of moving in water was an extremely disorienting one. It took her a good while to adjust to the freedom with which energy moved through the water in comparison to stone, though its similarity to open air helped.
She pushed forwards once her mind had caught up to the unexpected input, moving towards the collectives home. As the small passage widened up to the dimly lit underwater space filled with the floating jellyfish homes and waving plants, she sent her thoughts out.
“Collective,” she called.
“Zalia,” the reply came.
Unlike talking with Delphi, the experience was more like the many voiced one she had spoken with when meeting the collective for the first time.
“I have questions,” she said.
“Ask, though we make no promise to answer them,” the collective said.
“Alright. From what I understand, you are not able to tell me how, when or why there is a danger. You tell me to trust that if I stay, everything will be fine yet I don’t know what your perception of fine is. If you can’t tell me when this danger will be, are you at least able to tell me what it will be?” Zalia asked.
“No, the effect telling you anything will have on the future is uncertain,” they answered.
“Yet me knowing you have seen the future and have seen something bad coming will have had an effect on the future in its own right, has it not?” Zalia retorted.
“That would be right, assuming this very conversation is not something we have already experienced,” they replied.
“So you will tell me nothing?” Zalia asked.
“We cannot,” they said.
Zalia stopped there, turned around and left. There was no point continuing that conversation.
“Fucking seers,” she thought to herself.
She really didn’t know what to do. She knew that everything would be fine if she just trusted their judgement, or rather, experience of the future. Well, everything would be fine by their measure of the word. The issue lay in that she didn’t know exactly what that meant for them.
She came up out of the water, not even bothering to breathe in as she simmered in anger. Pacing around the room, she considered her options. Boreal for her part sat quietly waiting.
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“We can only prepare as much as we know how to,” Zalia said to Boreal, finally taking in a breath.
“Delphi friend,” Boreal reminded her.
“I know they’re our friend. I won’t leave them to die alone,” Zalia said with a sigh.
“Prepare?” Boreal suggested.
“That’s all we can do, isn’t it? They won’t leave and they won’t tell us more. Let’s get to it then,” Zalia replied, pushing her anger aside and steeling herself.
As much of a bitter taste it left in her mouth, she wouldn’t abandon the collective, especially since she was most likely the one to bring attention to their hiding place. She doubted it was anything they did since they had lived there for countless, well, counted, cycles. So, her only option was to set one hell of a trap for whatever came their way. She doubted it would be one of the aura monsters or the collective wouldn’t deem their circumstances as alright.
Unless of course they had some way of negating the aura themselves. That would just leave a probably Gold rank monster to kill. Easy.
The first thing Zalia did was begin setting up more of her ritual arrays. She left the cave and moved into the forest. With a little worry, she decided to carefully test how much effect the use of the arrays would have on the shades above. They were pretty mindless and more reactive if anything so they would be a good test for how much the creatures of Cormaine could actually sense her powers.
The first array she set up was the one she used to block the pervasive aura. She had to work extra hard to keep the plants alive as a war between her aura and the aura of Cormaine was waged within each plant. Eventually, with a little extra work, she managed to set up the array and the plants were immediately a significantly smaller strain on her healing. In fact, they barely needed it at all, almost able to maintain themselves on their own.
There was no reaction from the shades to the array forming, thankfully. That sort of eliminated one of the theories she had for why the demon had come here. Unfortunately, there were still a few more and all of them pointed to her as the reason. Maybe she hadn’t been stealthy enough when exploring the nearby islands, or flying between them for that matter.
Well, whatever the reason, she could at least set up some of her rituals without worry.
Within the protective dome of the plants, setting up further arrays was quite easy. The plants, now protected, grew as they normally would and before long she had set up the two further arrays that protected from both normal senses and spiritual based senses. The three together would provide a little safe haven for her outside of the cave.
Next, she worked on the entrance to the cave. Previously she had set up some trip wires within the actual caves themselves but wanted to do a little more than that if she could. Using her trapper skill, she summoned and set up bear traps, extending spikes and further tripwires. Using her own skills, she started digging up pits in the ground and filled them with stone spikes at the bottom. Each of those pits she covered with a mesh of vine she gathered and dried from the Dodge-vine. Those vines were intertwined with Bitterbalm to prevent any of the protective element from the Dodge-vine interfering with the trap.
Once the Trapper passive magic was done with it, the result was a perfectly hidden trap that she could walk across. She knew if something other than her tried though, they would find themselves on a short fall towards a sharp fate.
She was also able to use Preparation to turn the vine into a more rope-like material. She used this to set up traps hanging from the trees. The unsuspecting vines hung from branches but would whip out and grab something if it walked too close, pulling it up.
All of this, of course, was only possible because of the Trapper passive she had and its ability to magically hide and enhance all traps that she made. As well as its ability to create traps from nothing, of course. Those ones were a little less permanent though.
With the forest and immediate area in front of the cave entrance thoroughly trapped and now very dangerous to walk through, she focused back on defences. She had worked almost ten hours straight now to get as much as she had done but wasn’t about to stop now. She would need to be as ready as possible. Thankfully, due to the amount she was using them, both Preparation and Harvester gained a level, reaching Iron eighteen.
She wanted something a little sturdier in front of the cave entrance to serve as a barrier. She could of course summon a variety of walls into being when she wanted through a few different methods. Her manipulation of stone and earth could, her rituals could and Nature’s wrath now could as well.
However, she was certain there must be a way to create a barrier without having to be consciously focusing or actively doing so. Her ritual arrays were the perfect solution to it but she was having trouble coming up with something that would both create a barrier and still allow her through.
Her first idea was to make it a spiritual barrier but that would only keep out things such as the shades, or so she thought. She didn’t think the demons were quite the same thing in that regard.
In the end, she decided she would just have to make something that could be activated quickly but wasn’t necessarily active at all times. To do this, she had to create a ritual using Snow-leaf and Zephyr that created a small biome that allowed the Zephyr to live in. Inside the larger entrance chamber, she was able to fit in the extra plants on top of the three needed to provide protection from the corrupting aura, spiritual and normal senses.
With Zephyr now able to grow properly in a space where the air was a bit thinner and much colder, she was able to form the array for a ritual using Dodge-vine and an altered Zephyr. The altered Zephyr was changed by Bitterbalm to have the earth element rather than the air element. All in all, the ritual created a protective earth wall that would cover up the entrance should she ever place the initial ritual overtop.
Finally, after another three hours working on that particularly complex and very new ritual array, she decided to get some rest. She was dead tired from the past thirteen hours of preparing, the fight against the demon before that, flying not once but… many times between islands, playing the hunting game with Boreal, so on, so forth. It had been one long day.
She stepped carefully through the forest of plants that now inhabited the caves, walking through the passage she had widened, around and down to the icy cave much further in. Stepping around the plants there, she found Delphi sitting next to the pool.
“Hey,” she greeted.
“Hello Zalia,” Delphi said.
They stood awkwardly in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry for going off at you,” Zalia said.
“No need to apologise. I am sorry for my part in the collective not being able to tell you what is to come. I wish I could,” Delphi replied, sadness in their tone.
“I only need to know one thing. Whatever else happens, will Boreal be safe?” Zalia asked.
“I can not say,” Delphi said after a short pause.
“Know this. If she comes to harm and you could have prevented that outcome, I don’t care how strong your collective is, I’ll find a way to pay you back for it,” Zalia said matter-of-factly.
“I wouldn’t expect anything else,” Delphi replied.
“Good,” Zalia said.