With the temple fully secured against troll incursions, I set Senica to work disposing of the vegetation. We ignored the stuff out near the edges that lacked metallic thorns in favor of the rooms near the core. A constant, moderate heat was enough to incinerate the vines, though I did end up having to create a chimney in the room we picked to hold the bonfire. Bits of thorns remained behind, mixed in with the ashes, the sorting of which was another perfect task for my sister to take on.

She didn’t see it that way, of course. I wasn’t sure what exactly Senica thought she’d be doing on this trip, but we weren’t on vacation. The only reason I’d agreed to bringing her along was to get some work out of her in exchange for her getting to experience a new environment, new monsters, and new spells.

While she worked on that, I cleared out the very lowest room in the temple and got to work digging. Using transmutation to excavate wasn’t like using a shovel. I made progress by compressing dirt into stone and using it to line the walls of the tunnel a few feet at a time. It was a slow process made even worse by the fact that scrying didn’t really work in solid ground. The best I could do was use a spell called earth sense or one of its variations to try to get a feel for the ground composition in a small radius around me.

Querit had developed a stronger version of it that I was using today, but it was by no means failproof. I got a bit more range and it did a better job of separating out what I was sensing, but it didn’t let me scan for miles in every direction. It was entirely possible for me to miss any underground facilities, especially since I was going off Keeper’s speculations based on old books she’d read and my own knowledge of city planning.

The temple was ideally placed to line up with the city’s buried infrastructure, which probably wasn’t a coincidence. It had been an important building back when people still lived here. Even so, it was well over a thousand feet wide and I doubted any maintenance rooms I might find buried down here would be even a fraction of that size. I also didn’t know for sure how far I’d have to dig and what, if anything, I could expect to find living underground.

Last time it had been sand worms ranging from man-sized to miles-long. But Galdrisa wasn’t located in a desert, so that was unlikely to be a problem here. We also weren’t in a mountainous area, so their cousin species, the rock worm, also probably wasn’t an issue. Was there some sort of… dirt worm? Root worm? It wouldn’t surprise me to find something like that.

After going down about five hundred feet, I took the time to expand the tunnel into a small cave complete with lighting and air recycling enchantments. The walls were reinforced with a steel net, just in case some sort of burrowing monster did find the place and tried to get in. Anything small enough to dig through the net probably wouldn’t be much of a threat given that the lack of ambient mana had called off pretty much anything that had the magical capabilities to compensate for a tiny body.

There were exceptions, of course, but it was a decent safety measure for a temporary camp that only took ten minutes to slap together. That combined with some basic security wards and my own ability to sense mana would be enough to keep us safe.

‘How are things coming along up there?’ I telepathically sent to Senica.

‘Hot. Smokey. Stinky. Why do these things smell so bad when you torch them?’ she complained back.

‘Probably something in the sap. Have you recovered much biometal?’

‘I haven’t even started sifting it out of the ash yet. Are you in a hurry to get your hands on a sample?’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘Just checking in and letting you know I’ve hollowed out a spot underground for us to use as a base camp. When you’re done, bring the thorns with you, please.’

‘It’s going to be a few hours, at least. If this magnetic spell thing doesn’t work, it’ll be even longer,’ she sent. After a pause, she added, ‘But wouldn’t that just mean they’re not metal and we don’t need to collect them?’

‘No. Not all metals are magnetic, and I have no ideas what kind of properties a biologically growing metal might have. I’m not even sure if it can go into my phantom space, though it probably can since it’s ‘dead’ now that it’s been cut off from the core.’

‘Right. I’ll be down when I’m done. The barriers are holding, by the way. And you were right about them not giving up. The pounding has been non-stop. I’m kind of starting to worry that one of them will get smart enough to break through the stone wall instead.’

‘Keep an eye on it and retreat if necessary,’ I suggested. ‘The hole I bored is too small for a troll to fit through and I can seal it up easily enough.’

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

With that said, I went back to digging and Senica went back to setting things on fire. For a girl who professed a deep and abiding love for burning monsters, I would have thought she’d enjoy cleaning all the vines out of the temple. There really was no pleasing some people.

* * *

Eight hours later, we were lounging on a pair of plush chairs I’d pulled out of my phantom space and snacking on cold leftovers from dinner. Senica had reeked of smoke when she’d finished clearing out the sublevels of the temple, but a few cleaning spells went a long way toward taking care of that problem.

I, on the other hand, just smelled like dirt. Considering that everything else here smelled the exact same, it was hard to notice. I was sure that once we left, I’d be working some magic of my own followed immediately by a shower. Hopefully that would be happening in the next day or two, but it would mostly come down to luck. I might find a chunk of mysteel within minutes of resuming my digging, or it might take weeks.

Either way, I was only going to be here for three days before returning Senica home and going back to Ammun’s tower to install the rest of those mysteel generators. I also needed to check on the three I’d already placed to ensure that they were operating properly and free of damage.

It seemed that giving Senica downtime was doing her no favors. Based on the scowl on her face as she picked at her food, I suspected she’d started thinking about whatever it was that had upset her back home.

“So,” I said, dragging the word out a bit. “You want to talk about it?”

Startled, she looked up at me. “Talk about what?”

“About whatever’s got you looking like you’re going to light someone’s hair on fire.”

I had my assumptions, but I’d learned the hard way that it was better to let her just tell me what was on her mind. That way, she had the choice of whether or not to share and I didn’t end up being the one she was mad at for bringing up the topic. Senica was not a person who appreciated being figured out.

“It’s Juby,” she said. “Obviously. Thanks for not asking earlier, by the way.”

“I assumed. He was supposed to go with us, but since nobody was worried, I figured he wasn’t in any danger or hurt.”

“He’s going to get hurt if he doesn’t knock it off,” she muttered darkly.

“Knock what off?”

Senica let out a growl of frustration. “He’s just… He’s so damn pushy lately. It’s like he doesn’t care what I want at all. It’s always him nagging me that I should be focusing on learning enchantments or inscriptions to maintain the town’s magic. I need to give up fire magic and conjurations in general. No more traveling. No more monster hunting. Just stay at home and learn to keep the house in good shape for him.”

I frowned. That was not exactly an uncommon attitude, but I hadn’t expected it from Juby. Prior to my reincarnation, there’d been a clear division of labor in the villages. Men went out to work in the fields. Women stayed home and tended the garden attached to the family hut. Children were sent to communal schools for a few years until they were old enough to take on their gender-assigned roles.

With the knowledge of mana core ignition becoming widespread again, those roles were starting to fall apart. It was simple for a mage to maintain an invocation that boosted their strength all day, which went a long way toward balancing the difference in muscle size between the average men and women. Beyond that, as the communities became more and more magically developed, less people were needed in the fields to begin with. Everyone was discovering new professions now.

So hearing that Juby subscribed to more traditionalist views on gender roles in relationships was a bit of a surprise. He’d grown up as an orphan and knew as well as anyone that everyone had to do their best regardless of whether or not they squatted down to pee. I wondered if this was a new attitude he’d picked up from one of the locals, though I doubted it. Most of the people who’d chosen to relocate to my valley and then to New Alkerist held progressive views, so I wasn’t sure who would have given him these ideas.

“Maybe he’s jealous,” I mused aloud. “Does he feel threatened by your prowess?”

“Not as much as he is by yours,” she said wryly.

I waved the joke away. Everyone who was threatened by power was afraid of me. That was nothing new, and I’d known Juby for the better part of a decade now. “It’s different when you’re romantically involved with the other person.”

“How would you know?” she asked. “I seem to recall your one marriage ended in murder. Wait… It wasn’t because…?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that. That was more because of greed, lies, and betrayal. She thought she was cleverer than she actually was, that I wouldn’t notice her snooping for secrets and selling them to my enemies.”

I cut myself off before I could go any further down that line of thought. It had been a spectacularly violent end to what had started as one of the best times of my previous life, but now it was just an old wound that had scarred over. There was no point in picking at it anymore. I’d done enough of that at the time.

“But we’re not talking about me. We’re discussing Juby,” I finished.

“There’s not much more to say,” she said. “He’s been really pushy lately and what he wants me to do isn’t what I want to do. I’m starting to think it’s time to break it off with him. I’m going to be a master mage, then an archmage. I’m not giving up on that. Whatever his hangups are over that, they’re his problems. Either he gets over them or I’ll get over him.”

I nodded approvingly. “Magic never lets you down,” I said. “Much better than people.”

“Present company excluded?”

“Did you finish collecting all the biometal?”

“Most of it,” she said.

“Then sure. Present company excluded.”

“Whatever. You’re a jerk.” She rolled her eyes when she said it, but I could hear fondness in her voice.

“That’s what brothers are for.”

“I don’t need you anymore. I’ve got Nailu now, and I’m going to teach him to be the sweetest little boy. None of this snark I get from you.”

I considered our little brother’s behaviors. He was fully mobile and more or less talking now. Some of his comments, though…

“Good luck with that,” I said.

Senica just sighed.