26 - Gobbolds
“I bet there’s an achievement for losing consciousness,” Maya muttered as she sat in the dark. She had been only out for ten minutes, according to her computer’s clock. When it came to fights, battles, or anything really; it seemed she always found a way to lose consciousness.
The darkness of the hole she sat within didn’t entirely bother her. Maya didn’t know if it was the mental changes that had occurred when she added the attribute points or if she just was naturally unafraid of dark places. She tried remembering back to what she had felt like when first entering the Hangy. All she could remember was that it wasn’t the dark that people feared, but what lay in the dark.
As she couldn’t see the rainbow sky overhead, Maya assumed the ground had been covered back up. That would mean the gobbolds had some kind of earth bending powers. That meant they were on their home turf inside the ground.
That in itself worried Maya. The main reason they had unearthed the mana cores back where the dimensional scar was located, was for the simple reason that the ground was weird. Mana, in a normal Integrated Multiverse, was everywhere. It existed at a near even state across every universe. There were the occasional hotspots and low spots, but it was a fact that mana existed everywhere. Yet in the RSH, the ground seemed to either be absorbing mana or was a shield against mana, as the mana cores that had been buried within it were having a very difficult time recharging.
Which ultimately begged the question, why was there even a burrowing rogue AI? Rogue AIs were all about mana absorption and collection, their entire being was about finding more mana to grow. Why would there be a rogue AI that lived underground, when there was so little ambient mana within it?
“Maybe there’s a giant reservoir of liquid mana under our feet, mana gold, RSH tea.” Maya chuckled as she summoned a mana powered light from her inventory. She cast the illumination around and discovered an exit in one side of the hole she was in. “Ugh, I did not want to go crawling around in the holes.”
She continued to sit there for a while longer. These gobbolds didn’t seem to want to kill them, otherwise the hole she fell into would have been deeper. It was deep enough to knock the wind out of her and if not for her armor and high physical attributes, she would have suffered some minor injuries. As it was, she felt a little bruised and was more angry about the fact that she had fallen into a hole.
Yet, did that justify her killing them in turn? Maya frowned at the thought and began summoning components. She picked up the railgun barrel and thought about the destructive power it held. If she tried, she could probably dig her way out, but that exit was there for a reason.
Maya sighed and begin stripping the railgun down into pieces. She wasn’t going to kill gobbolds, if she could. The stain of twenty men and women was on her hands, even if they had willingly allowed her to take their lives. She still had to live with that.
It took nearly half an hour, but Maya produced a non-lethal weapon from the railgun. The capacitors discharged a large amount of mana when the marsani slugs were fired, but that could be turned into a short ranged mana stunner. Not unlike the first weapon she had ever built under Richfield’s tutelage.
Maya wrapped the large emergency battery in a pair of duracloth shipsuits, creating a makeshift backpack, and then attached the sensor box along with finding the scout rat that had joined her down in the hole.
She shut off her light and activated the sensor box, it began feeding information directly into her HUD. The world turned from a pitch black nothing to a wireframe world that displayed everything the sensor box could ‘see’. She fiddled with the controls for a few more minutes before adjusting it enough that it created a grayscale world before her.
Maya pulled on the mana battery backpack, hefted the mana stunner and walked into the exit.
***
The first signs that the gobbolds actually lived underground and she wasn’t just imagining it, was a pile of tools and clutter that lay at the end of a tunnel. Maya paused at the site, noting what looked like pickaxes, shovels, and buckets among the tools that lay abandoned in a pile.
“Digging more tunnels or mining?” Maya wondered. She reached the end of the tunnel she detoured into and picked up one of the pickaxes. It was fairly light and seemed to have been shaped from a single piece of metal. The sensor readings said it was a marsani alloy. Maya hefted it, feeling the balance and craftsmanship of the tool. Then she buried it into the tunnel wall.
There was a loud clang and Maya flinched as she could feel the reverberations of the strike through her gauntlets. She looked at the wall and saw that it was rock.
Maya frowned again, she didn’t know much about the RSH but this wasn’t a real world in the regular sense of the word. It was the ‘body’ of the System itself, yet as she took the time to run her hands across the tunnel walls, she felt and the sensor confirmed that they were hard as rock. She tapped the roof with the pickaxe and saw that it was rock also.
Did the ground become stone the further one went down? Maya didn’t know, but she remembered the dimensional bomb hole that had been left behind, it extended nearly fifty feet into the ground and the bottom of that hole had been the same soft dirt that existed on the surface.
Unless the gobbolds had some way of turning the dirt into hardened stone, which when Maya thought about it was most likely. One didn’t live underground and not have underground surviving tricks.
Maya inventoried the pickaxe and as she was turning to leave, the sensor box gave her a ping. She looked at the notice and it highlighted a small object half buried in the floor of the tunnel. Maya crouched down and wiped away rock dust and debris, underneath lay a gleaming crystal. Although the sensor box turned her world into grayscale, Maya immediately knew that the crystal was giving off its own internal light.
“What the heck?” she wondered.
She shut down the sensor box and its feed, reverting back to her own pair of eyes. The crystal in her hand, about the size of her thumbnail, gave off a slight glow in the dark of the tunnel. Maya turned to look down the tunnel again and then noticed the small pricks of light coming out of the wall. She moved forward and touched the tunnel wall, some of the rock crumbling under her gauntlets. She swiped her hand across the wall and uncovered scores of tiny crystal shards embedded into the wall.
She switched on the sensor box and watched as her HUD began pinging with alerts. Maya used the pickaxe to pry another crystal loose and peered at it. It glowed faintly.
“Mana stone,” Maya said as she realized what it was. She had only ever seen the industrial version of the stone before; they were dull translucent crystals. This was different, this was an actual stone made of condensed mana. It was something rare and mostly useless to the rest of the integrated multiverse.
She buried the head of the pickaxe into the wall and pulled away a large section. It fell away and as the dust settled, Maya saw more and more gleaming pinpricks of mana stones.
“Well, it seems we got some little miners here,” Maya said. She looked down at the stone and then back at the wall. “No killing.” She decided. “Trade.”
She received a ping from the scout rat, it flashed her a distorted image of figures rushing by.
“I guess playing miner got their attention,” Maya dropped the pickaxe and inventoried the stones. She hefted the stunner and walked toward the rushing figures.
A bright light flashed and flickered as a figure rushed toward her. If she had been relying solely upon her own eyes, the light would have disorientated or blinded her, but Maya was using the sensor box as her eyes. It filtered the flashing light, reducing it to a minor annoyance.
Maya activated the stunner and the tunnel filled with an even brighter light. The figure that was rushing toward her stopped dead in their tracks. It was a burly person, not one of the shorter specimens that had been spying upon Zono. Either, this gobbold was hitting the ‘roids or they came in a variety of different shapes and sizes.
The gobbold squealed in pain and dropped to the floor twenty feet from her. Maya scanned the area again and didn’t find anything else rushing in her direction. She approached and used her boot to turn over the figure. Ugly was a rude but accurate description of the SIL.
Splitfang - Level 8
Splitfang had an elongated head, a pair of elf ears, and a pug like face, smashed inward and full of folded skin. They wore a robe of stitched together cloth, a leather belt with a dagger on it and carried a shield and a sword in a pair of thin wiry hands. They had no tail and no snout.
Dread flashed and Maya jerked back with a curse. The spot she had occupied thudded with a pickaxe like weapon. She stared for a moment as another figure walked out of the tunnel wall itself, carrying another pickaxe in their hands.
Blackedge - Level 11
Where Splitfang had been wearing a robe, Blackedge wore a full suit of plate armor backed with chainmail. It gleamed a dull black in the sensor vision and Maya grimaced as she saw a pistol on a holster at their hip.
Blackedge flashed forward, fast and strong, definitely a combat orientated SIL. But Maya was no slouch, perhaps two months ago it would have been a challenging fight, but she was more than five times their level. Maya snapped forward and kicked the SIL in their exposed abdomen as they pulled back in a great swing of the pickaxe.
The breath exploded out of Blackedge and they bounced away from her, crashing against the far tunnel wall and collapsing to the ground. Maya could see an imprint of her foot in the metal of their armor. She walked up and zapped them with the stunner as a precaution.
A bit of duracloth later, Maya continued down the tunnel, leaving behind a pair of tied up gobbolds.
Three low leveled gobbolds attacked her at once, but she was ready for them. With a simple activation of the stunner, all three collapsed into a heap before they even got within striking distance of her. They were the type of gobbolds that Zono had shown her, short, rat tail, round head, and a snout full of teeth.
Redeye - Level 6
Shortblade - Level 8
Silvertooth - Level 10
Maya continued down the tunnel, noting several spots where the tunnels branched off. The sensor and her computer were already generating a map as she moved, but Maya noted that the tunnel she was traveling upon showed a lot of wear and tear. It was a main thoroughfare, so she decided to keep following it.
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The tunnel angled downward and after a few more minutes of silent traveling, Maya tensed as the tunnel changed from rock walls to smooth metal bulkheads. She touched the wall and saw that it was regular marsani. Ahead she saw light fixtures flickering, spread out in a manner that provided illumination but just barely enough to traverse the corridor.
“Did they build this?” Maya asked as she continued forward.
There was a familiar depression in the bulkhead and Maya paused to tear open the controls for the door before her. She overrode the lock and saw that the door was already powered. It creaked open, sliding on rusty rails and Maya peered into the room. It was empty, but her sensors noted several skeleton piles in the corners, definitely not the gobbolds, from the age of the bones and the fact these skeletons had horns.
Was it a ship? Maya wondered. She looked around and saw the corridor slightly curve away from her, not allowing her to see that far down it. It would make sense that there were more stuff buried in the ground than she knew.
The system was over a billion years old, she had no idea how much stuff fell into the plane from all the dimensional instabilities that hit the Integrated Multiverse, but perhaps they had been standing over tons of buried stuff.
Maya shrugged and continued down the corridor. It was eerily silent, the only sound being her boots on the deck. The corridor widen and she entered a multilevel chamber. She could see a second level of rails nearly twenty feet above her, overlooking where she stood. Maya paused by the door and scanned the room.
She didn’t see anything, but a moment later a figure entered the opposite side of the room. They were short and moved slowly and stiffly. Maya felt a slight wave of dizziness as her language module updated.
Coracora Standard Downloaded
Whitestar - Level 22
“Ho, warrior,” the figure said.
“Did you just call me a hoe?” Maya demanded.
“What? No. It was a greeting,” the figure turned out to be an elderly woman. She pulled back the hood that covered her face and she was similar to the images Zono had provided.
“What’s the meaning of all of this?” Maya demanded, eyes flickering to the upper railings that currently held no one. She wasn’t letting her guard down, creating another window to watch the area and sending the scout rat to warn of anything that might be coming from behind her.
“You are not alone, oh, warrior. You were lost, but now you are found,” the woman intoned. Maya realize, from the way the elderly woman spoke, it wasn’t directed at her, but some kind of chant or prayer or something. “The Mother greets you and you shall find comfort beneath her gaze.”
Silence fell after the words had been spoken. “Okay,” Maya said. “Are you the Mother?”
“No. I am merely an old woman, Whitestar.”
“I am Maya Sullivan of House Sullivan. I extend my greetings to you, Elder, and I hope that our interactions will not lead to violence, bloodshed, and/or all ya’ll’s death.”
“Powerful words, Maya Sullivan,” the old woman said. “But you are alone. This world is not kind to those that are alone. But for those who embrace the Mother’s comfort will find salvation and purpose.”
“I’m sure,” Maya said.”I’m not going to debate religion with you, ma’am. I’m going to ask you kindly to show me the way out and when we are on equal terms, outside, we can discuss what it is you want and what I can offer you.”
“You speak like a merchant,” the old woman said. “Yet you fight like a warrior.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet, ma’am.” Maya said.
Maya turned her head and raised her stunner as she saw a piece of the smooth bulkhead to her right slide away, so perfectly was the door fitted that Maya hadn’t even registered a seam in it. The door opened to a dark hole and from it Maya saw lights flashing and yelling.
A moment later one of the burly fighting gobbolds came staggering out, blood covered half of his body and they had a wild look in their eyes.
“What is the matter, child?” the elderly woman spoke.
“He cannot be stopped!” the gobbold cried, their voice rising to a screech.
Another moment later, Bell came charging out of the doorway lit up like a Christmas tree. He had mana powered lights all over his body and carried his three pistols and a pickaxe in his four hands. He skidded to a stop when he saw Maya and raised his pistols at the cowering gobbold and elderly woman.
“Ease up there, buddy,” Maya said. “We were in the middle of a discussion here.”
“These things attacked me,” Bell said.
“You kill any?”
Bell was silent for a moment. “No. But I badly injured a few of them.”
“Restraint?” Maya smiled.
Bell snorted. “I am not a killer of low leveled fools,” he said.
“Alright,” Maya said, her voice confident. “Ma’am, cowering gobbold, we come in peace, although you have not shown us the hospitality we usually see as visitors, we shall not hold it against you. Times are tough and the rainbow sky hellscape does not stand on ceremony.” Maya looked at the elderly woman who continued to watch her. The cowering bloody gobbold was still cowering on the ground, clutching the wound on its shoulder. Maya summoned a low grade healing potion and tossed it at the gobbold.
“For your injuries. If my companion, Belmoro, has injured others, then we offer to heal them with the potions we have.” Maya said as Bell grumbled. He had managed to start making potions, but the alchemical goods he had purchased were mostly geared toward performance enhancement, rather than healing. “All we ask in return is to be treated as equals and returned to the surface.”
The old woman looked confused. “Potions?” she asked.
“You don’t have potions?” Maya asked in return.
“I do not know what you speak of, child. Only the Mother heals those she deems worthy, all others must face the Choice and decide if they wish to live or contribute to the Family.”
“I’m not liking this,” Bell said to her over the comm. “I think they’re cannibals. One of the warriors I fought was carrying some strange meat on them, there are no meat producing animals anywhere.”
“Gross,” Maya replied. To the old woman she replied. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
Maya stepped toward the cowering gobbold, whose eyes widen in more terror as she approached and then attempted to flee.
“Stop,” the old woman snapped and the gobbold seemed to freeze in place, a frantic look in their eyes.
Maya didn’t know if the old woman exerted some kind of magical control over the gobbold or if they were instead just utterly terrified of her. Maya crouched before the figure and then picked up the healing potion that had been left on the ground. She also summoned a medical kit.
“I’m going to clean the wound and then apply the potion,” Maya said. The gobbold looked confused and Maya realize they didn’t understand her. She could understand them with the language module but it seemed this gobbold didn’t have a translator installed in their head. She looked to the old woman and wondered how she had obtained one.
The old woman spoke to the gobbold and they looked even more frightened than before. Maya shrugged and used an antiseptic that Nan had made to clean the wound. Although alien biology was vastly different from species to species, there was a sort of omni-antiseptic that was used by a vast majority of species. It wasn’t magical, like the healing potion, but it did the job very well.
The gobbold cried out in pain and tried squirming away, but Maya held them down tightly and after she cleaned up the bloody wound, she injected the potion. The gobbold cried out in terror once more and then… sighed as the wounds began to heal.
“There. Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” Maya inventoried her supplies and walked back to where Bell stood in a aura of lights. “Take it easy on them, next time, Bell.”
“They came at me screaming and trying to kill me,” Bell said. “I only defended myself.”
“What manner of power is this?” the old woman asked as the gobbold rose to their feet, looking stunned.
“You don’t use potions?” Maya asked. She looked to Bell who only shrugged.
“There are many talents that the Mother has, but healing powers are rare,” the woman said. “Many of the Children die from wounds that we have no idea how to cure.”
“Well, you’re in luck. We happen to have a trained [Alchemist] back at our base of operations,” Maya said.
“[Alchemy] is a useless occupational path,” the old woman said. “All who have gained it have not been able to level in it beyond low-grade. Many have tried, but they all fail.”
“You don’t have access to biological plant material,” Bell said. “Alchemy is not only the mixture of raw mineral components, but it requires plant based material as well, if you wish to gain higher levels.”
The old woman let out a hissing laugh. “Plants? The Mother would tell us of the world she came from, full of living leafy things. I cannot grasp what that would look like,” she said.
Maya took a step forward and turned to the healed gobbold. “Bring the others that Bell injured and those that I tied up, bring them here and I will heal them,” she said. The old woman took a moment to translate, but the gobbold perked up and rushed off. Maya noted that a small audience had begun to form, five figures had appeared on the upper deck of the chamber. She could make out whispers passing between them and the sensor box transformed the air vibrations into words.
“They heal,” one said.
“They will make our tribe strong,” another spoke.
“The blue one looks tasty. I cannot see what flesh lays under that black armor,” a third spoke.
“First of all,” Maya said, adjusting her stance. If she needed to, she would be able to hose down those on the upper levels with the stunner. “What are you eating?”
“The weak,” the old woman said without hesitation.
“Cannibals?” Maya asked.
“What are you getting at?”
“I want to know if you’re cannibals out of necessity or if ya’ll just like eating other SIL. I need to know this so that I can determine what is going to happen next,” Maya said.
The old woman watched her for a long while. In the upper deck, there gathered more of the gobbolds, but they had stopped talking. They were on edge, enough that even Bell began to feel it. The big man shifted and scanned the chamber, his fingers drumming on the pistol grips.
“We are Abandoned,” the old woman finally said. “The Mother provided for our sustenance, but our last leader was a selfish creature and caused our tribe to be cast out of the Motherland.”
A low wailing moan filled the chamber. “We are Abandoned,” the gathered gobbolds cried.
“But you, Maya Sullivan and Belmoro, you can bring us salvation,” the old woman continued. “You are Chosen, you come from the World Beyond, the heaven that the Mother arrived from. You, Chosen, will be our salvation.”
“How so?” Maya asked.
“We shall take you to the Mother. Those that come to this place from the World Beyond are lost, they cannot survive here as we can,” the woman sounded excited. “If you accompany us to the Mother, she will embrace us once more and you shall live forever.”
“Say that again?” Maya asked.
“The Mother shall Ascend you, make her apart of what she is, and all those that are borne from her flesh will carry your genes,” the old woman cried, tears running down her cheeks.
“You mean she’s gonna kill and consume us?” Maya asked.
“To Ascend by the Mother is a great honor. To have your DNA and genes shaped by the Mother, to be used to strengthen her Children is the greatest of honor,” the old woman said.
“Hard pass,” Maya stated.
The old woman looked shocked. “But we shall die if we are not allowed to return to the Mother,” she said.
“Not my problem,” Maya said. “I’m not going to allow someone to eat me and then use my DNA to make more creepy cannibal babies.”
An angry hiss filled the room.
Maya looked around. “Why are you dying?” she asked.
The old woman folded her arms and gave her a stern frown. She didn’t speak for a long moment, but finally sighed. “We lack the sustenance from Mother,” she said. “We have had to rely upon the stones and the biomass that can be scavenged. This world does not like the flesh that comes from the World Beyond and it rots fast, but we can find scraps to live off of. Then there are the weak that we must cull if the tribe is to survive.”
“What does the Mother provide that you eat?” Maya asked.
“Her flesh,” the gobbold spoke. “She is vast and great, a Tier 3 entity, she feeds off of mana and creates the flesh that feeds her Children.”
Maya shuddered. “How far from here is your Mother?” Maya asked.
The woman frowned, but eventually spoke. “We have traveled for many weeks, the Blood Harvesters chased us from the Motherland for the sins of our leader. We have traveled for nearly five weeks from the Motherland.”
“How many of you are left now?” Maya asked.
“Fifty three,” the old woman said.
“I don’t like this,” Bell said via the comm. “They’re too free with their answers. I think they intend to kill us still.”
“They can try,” Maya replied.
“You got the care package I left behind,” maya said. “Otherwise you would not know the language I’m speaking.”
“We received the tablet and the batteries,” the woman said.
“And the food?”
“What food?”
Maya frowned and figured whomever had found it had light fingers. Maya summoned a human ration bar and handed it to the old woman. She looked at it in confusion and then sniffed it.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Food.”
“It does not look like flesh,” she said.
“It’s not flesh. It’s food. Not very tasty, but with all the vitamins and nutrients that you need to survive.”
“Impossible,” the woman said, but she looked at the ration bar and after an eternity, took a bite of it. Her eyes widen and then she shoved the entire bar into her mouth. “Food…”
“I’m not entirely sure if you can digest it,” Maya said. “Different species have different needs.”
“We can eat anything,” the old woman said, showing her many teeth. “The Mother blessed us so that we would find sustenance in the flesh of every being that was brought here and even the stones offer us energy.”
Maya summoned a mana stone. “These?” she asked. ‘You eat these?”
“They are hard to digest, but yes. We can eat them and gain energy from it.”
“That’s impossible,” Bell said out loud. “No one can just eat mana stones and gain energy from it. Beings that live off of mana need to absorb it, not eat it.”
“The Mother has blessed us,” the woman said again. “But we cannot live solely off of the stones, they only provide a third of what we need.”
Maya sighed and looked at the growing gallery above them. The gobbold she sent off hadn’t returned and she didn’t know if they even would.
“You got something I want and I got something you want,” Maya said looking at the old woman. “Let’s make a deal.”