Amalia breathed out heavily, combat tired her out much more than her allies. Both because she was at a lower level, but also because she was more focused on smithing than fighting. As Marcus checked the newly killed foes, Amalia spent time looking into the windows only she could see.

“His progression is so much slower than mine. I got over seven times his experience and even got two levels from this one ambush”, Amalia thought to herself as she looked at the mounds of rock and flesh.

“We’re lucky they weren’t that strong. Their quantity was the only issue”, Marcus informed off-handily as he passed his hand over his ally’s shoulder to heal her.

“They did batter my gear a bit. Man, what’s all the fuss about?”

“Guard dogs, or migrated monsters. The golems at least were made by people.”

“What a bunch of lunatics”, Amalia spat.

“For many more reasons than abducting the righteous. Come, let’s continue”, Marcus waved.

The pair moved deeper into the mountain, welcoming protection against the weather outside that bit at their heels. Amalia scanned the area longer than Marcus, though it was more due to being inexperienced in spotting hidden foes or knowing the usual suspect spots.

Marcus held up his hand to halt Amalia at his back, “People up ahead”, he whispered.

Amalia stopped and hunched over a bit, “Where?”

“There’s some form of room around the corner”, Marcus pointed as he placed his back against the wall.

Amalia tried her best to detect what Marcus was alluding to, but neither sight nor sound reached her. She trusted the Devout at her side, though, so similarly hugged the wall.

Marcus picked out two vials from his robes and downed them, “I’ll lead the charge, get to their rear and draw the attention. You come in when they’re all focused on me and flank them toward me.”

“Got it”, Amalia replied quickly.

Marcus took a few seconds to prepare before running from their hiding place. Sliding across the rocky, yet a bit iced, floor, Marcus warped into his centre with a blast of wind away from Amalia.

The Guardian waited just as long, the sound of thumping and slashing decorating the halls with Marcus’s flourish of combat. Darting from the wall, Amalia was treated to the sight of a destroyed door with a corpse impaled with a shard of rock atop it, lifeless eyes staring blankly at Amalia.

Dazzles of grey aura and grey rock puncturing into sprouts of red filled the enclosed space as Marcus ducked, twisted, and jumped around a culmination of foes. His movements were quick and deliberate. Amalia had only heard talk about his time with the guards and only seen a minuscule amount of his battle prowess. Seeing such a display instilled a bit of fear in Amalia.

Snapping out of it, at least partially, Amalia charged and leapt over the corpse into the room. With the ruckus her metallic armour made, several of the humanoids turned to face the new challenger with sword and mace.

Raising her shield, Amalia blocked a resonating hammer strike, and parried a sword with her own. With the weight of her gear, she was slower, though, and took a strike to the side before she was able to reposition her shield or sword.

Taking a backstep, she blocked another strike and mentally commanded her Last Bastion skill, her shield vibrating as her body took on a blue glow. Swiping wide, she hit the opposition with heightened fierceness, returning half the damage she had blocked. The man fell to the floor quickly.

Parrying with a twisted underarm, Amalia was wide open to another attack at her shoulder as she hit the floor with her knee.

Blood dashed over her upper body as shards of rock penetrated her adversaries, however, as Marcus provided covering fire from his side of the room.

As one of Amalia’s opponents was distracted from the other element in the room, Amalia made a rising slash at them, followed by a diving pierce into their chest as they were brought to the floor.

Turning her shield arm into a ninety-degree angle, she blocked another bash that was riposted by another shard of rock from Marcus.

With the final body hitting the floor, Marcus jogged to Amalia to heal her.

“We’re not done yet!” Amalia shouted as she raised her shield behind her, a wolf’s maw thumping into the metal.

“Necro-manes, don’t let them bite you”, Marcus instructed as he danced around Amalia to swipe the demonic wolf from her shield.

Amalia stabbed the floor with her shield as she quickly drank her own potions, retrieving it in time to position herself to block another bite.

Marcus waved his off-hand around as he chanted twice, “Chain Guard”, forming numerous golden chains to wrap around and pin the two foes to the floor. Kicking off the floor, he dove onto the bodies and he stabbed at them furiously with a dagger from his belt.

The pair breathed heavily, put at ease as Amalia spoke, “That’s it.”

Marcus cleaned himself off as he checked his body for wounds, glancing over Amalia.

“I’m clean”, she informed as she knew she had not been bit.

Marcus sighed in relief, though his gaze was stuck on the necro-manes for a bit longer than usual. He turned to look at Amalia, then the wolves, then his own hand. He shook his head as his thoughts were but his own, before moving back into the room to inspect it.

“What’s on his mind?” Amalia couldn’t help but wonder.

There was plenty to do, from harvesting the monsters to gathering up the gear of the fallen. Marcus’s first point of call was the room itself. It was only slightly furnished, with a large table with several chairs, and lonesome cabinets on the walls. Looking at it, the interior felt out of place, as if it had just been dropped in this hallway.

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“Do you have any direction from here?” Marcus asked as he flipped over parchment and books on the table.

Amalia looked to the side as she answered, “It seems we’re here. Something in this room?”

“Check the walls”, Marcus ordered without moving his head.

Amalia nodded, though it was hard to say if the Devout even saw it. Starting with the wall that used to house the door, Amalia stroked them and started to knock every so often. Continuing around the room, Amalia found what seemed to be five hollow or false-wall sections.

Picking up several pieces of parchment, Marcus investigated the first wall. “It seems this is a sort of meeting area. A lot of notes about far-off places, one I know Logan had been to before. A spell ring harvesting prison.”

“Bit remote, isn’t it?”

“That’s the idea. If my guess is right, this is the checkpoint for teleportations. But…” Marcus trailed off as he landed a solid punch into the wall, shattering the stone and crumbling a part of it, “here we go.”

Pulling on a handle, a doorway opened up in the wall, revealing a short corridor leading to an oval room. Before entering, Marcus pushed one of the cabinets along the frame of the door to stop it from closing in on them too easily.

The room was a good ten or so feet wide, the centre housing several chalk and paintings of symbols and sigils that let off a slight pressure. Marcus crouched down to look at them closer, but it seemed his thoughts were more conjecture than anything.

“Seems you were right”, Amalia piped up.

Marcus hummed in reply before standing back up, “This one is still active. Let's check the others.”

The pair investigated the four other hidden rooms, all very similar to one another. Two of them were different, of darker tones and seemingly lacking any form of resonance. “This would be the harvesting prison, Logan disabled that one”, Marcus mentioned at one of the dead circles, “This would probably be from his most recent quest”, he continued at the second, having been connected to the mansion Logan had cleared out and destroyed.

“Any idea bout the other three? I only understand train station.”

“You… what?” Marcus asked, bemused at the expression and the idea.

“I don’t understand any of this magic circle business.”

“Right. Anyway. It’s hard to tell. I am not a diviner, nor do I have the skills Logan does”, Marcus replied earnestly as he rubbed his chin, “Try Identification on the active ones.”

Amalia concentrated on the active circles but sadly didn’t get much in the way of valuable information. “Here we’ve got the salad.”

Marcus rubbed his forehead at the next foreign expression, “I hope you don’t speak like that in town.”

“I try not to. Feathery and fluffy medieval talk, best I can.”

Opening a book, Marcus continued, “A lot of these are coded. I can understand some of the parchments, but no finite details.”

“Just the big picture.”

“If the circles came here, then whoever escaped could have used another and at that point who knows where they went.”

Amalia took a few seconds to think about it all. She was an outside observer to most of this, but she wasn’t wholly detached. One part she knew completely was that her quest markers hardly lied.

“This one”, Amalia announced as she pointed at one parchment amongst many.

Marcus picked it out and glanced over it quickly, “Damn cyphers. Your quest golem thing tell you about this?”

“Yeah. I guess this tells us the location of the two we’re looking for?”

“A unique split track to follow. If the location is hidden from scrying, at least written notes about where they are can tell us where to go. It’s better than just going through the 3 separate circles, I have no clue if we can even go back or what’s going to await us on the other end.”

“Can you decipher it?”

“If no one interrupts us, yeah. I can pick out consistencies and variations. Mind the doors will you?”

Amalia looked down the three corridors with lit circles, “Let’s hope no one wants to warp here.”

Grabbing a chair, Marcus sat down and began writing on the back of a piece of parchment as he began decoding the disguised texts.

“If it’s a substitution cypher, I could help?” Amalia offered.

“I would have prayed for it to be, but no. This might take a few hours, maybe even into the next morning.”

Amalia glanced over the parchment, but her eyes started to blur black, red, and blue with the alien format of the writing. “Right. Got it. Guard duty for me”, Amalia accepted as she rubbed her eyes.

“Group up the bodies. I left some alive so that they could tell us what we wanted to know, but we’d also need some of the magi to use the circles”, Marcus requested.

Amalia did just that. Some had died in the confrontation, but Marcus was true to his word, all the casters he could identify were all alive. It would be risky to take them at their word for where to go, or if they were even told where Jirango and Xican had been taken. This was just a checkpoint, after all, they might not have needed to be told.

----------------------------------------

Several hours passed as Marcus wrote and scribbled up parchment, the cypher proving to be quite an intricate one. If f meant a, it would have been done in a matter of minutes.

With the temperature dipping lower, Amalia made sure to reaffix the door to the room and even broke apart some furniture for a fire. Thankfully the smoke escaped through cracks and heated the room nicely.

As night encroached, the pair decided it would be best to sleep before attempting to pass into any of the circles. Since the two that were disabled were from “suppliers” the other three had a good chance of all being the storage units or even closer to buyers. One of them had a good chance to be a larger base.

That was a dreadful thought though.

If Logan hadn’t taken out the main headquarters already, any larger or stronger complex would have been a death trap for Marcus and Amalia. They didn’t need to clear it out if that turned out to be true. They just needed to find the captives and teleport away. Another reason to rest, Marcus needed his rings to be recharged.

At their best guess, the morning sun had risen outside, at least that’s what the amount of light bleeding into the cave led them to believe.

Amalia looked over her gear, the cracks worrying her slightly but she had spares. “How’s your equipment?”

Marcus yawned and rubbed his eyes, “Fine. I have extras.”

Amalia couldn’t help but feel something was on her ally’s mind, and anxiety made it seem more about her than anything else.

“You worried about Logan?” Amalia asked.

Marcus looked at the parchment and his notes as he replied, “Yeah. But. This parchment points us towards where Jirango and Xican are. This’ll be enough to set him free.”

“Does it say what kind of place they are in?”

“Not particularly. It notes some other effects being moved with the two, plus some other prisoners”, Marcus answered as he moved to an entrance to a teleportation circle, “This one will take us to something called the ‘Holdings Centre’, probably a sizeable guard in place.”

“I suppose we can be glad nobody teleported to this checkpoint.”

“They most likely have certain times to come through here, or in emergency. But. It is strange. If this links with the AV Club, why has the same place been used to apprehend and store Jirango and Xican for Quayvan? Quayvan orchestrated the AV Club’s massacre…”

“Something to do with that Thermometer man?”

“Thermodan. But that is most likely. Is it a pseudonym by Quayvan?” Marcus replied as he cracked his neck.

“Maybe he is removing all ties to him from the AV Club?”

“Spell ring harvesting, AV Club bases, suppliers and holding cells. A big operation that combines several groups together.”

Amalia looked back, “One of those circles go to a Magi Tower you think?”

“Thermodan was part of the MT, the association could be lying that they excommunicated him after the under market raids. It is plausible.”

“What’s our plan of action?” Amalia asked.

“Your quest update?”

Amalia ummed and ahhed, “It shows the circle you mentioned. It should update when we use it.”

“Alright. Let’s wake up some of these magi.”

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