> As a result, The Great Defiler survived – Mo’Kratha fell and his great rival Orcus was ruined by it. Tarantis was damned through it and Akalaraltis rose from shadow through it. However, our ancestors cared not, for this was a problem of the other races and they were mighty now having raised up their great Tyrant, the Creator of Lives. It was only when Neron, Emperor of the Eternal City, rose in the chaos after the end of the Heroic Age that those ancient ancestors who pulled the strings realised their folly. But by then it was far, far too late – for Neron and those around him, who even then men called debauched and depraved, lacking as they were in so many ways and destroying and perverting all they touched, became the template for our own damnation.

Excerpt from ‘On the Origins of Darkness’

  By Menoc of Tyre

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~ SANA & ARAI – DIGGING HOLES FOR THEMSELVES ~

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Some 50 hours and 500 metres of shifted rock later, their downward progress was finally stopped by contact with a cavern roof. The effect of the disruption had followed them all the way down here as well – if anything it had gotten stronger the deeper they went, and peering into the cavern, she finally knew why. Perhaps the only surprise at this point was that it had taken them this long to find a proper cavern. The Ur’Inan had been quite adamant that the escarpment was riddled with caverns and cave systems yet the only fissure they had found was currently being used to dump rock into. Peering into it very warily for a second time, she sighed and withdrew her tiny sliver of soul sense.

“That bad?” Arai asked from just above her.

“It’s a settlement,” she said, not bothering to hide the resignation in her voice.

There was a pause while Arai took in the cavern below with her own soul sense. It was a fairly large settlement – several thousand pig demons, at least with fewer slaves than she had expected in all honesty.

“So much for them not being in the depths,” Arai grumbled looking up.

“The settlement looks Undren,” she mused taking in the crude constructions, mostly in Undren style below.

“Not many slaves either,” Arai added.

She continued surveying the layout, with some distaste, until she found the banners, of which there were five, all in the most heavily defended points. The nearest one was on a totem over what was some kind of depraved sacrificial altar that she avoided looking at too closely.

“They always seem to deploy them in batches of five?” Arai muttered, shuddering as she looked away from the mess around and below the banner.

“It’s likely some function of their wider effects,” she guessed. They had worked just fine up above with no discernible different as far as she had noticed until all five were destroyed – otherwise she could only assume it was for redundancy.

“So, what? We close this up and try further across?” she suggested.

“How many days do you want to dig for your hundred metres of stone,” Arai grumbled.

“Point,” she conceded.

That was the biggest frustration here. Mining laterally along the escarpment was close to impossible: whatever had altered the way distance worked in the landscape above was several times worse down here, and even more unpredictable. Vertical was fine, inland and to the edge of the escarpment was fine, but any way across this land was so variable it made her want to cry.

They had two abortive tunnels above them, one which had gone for 10 metres when first dug, but when they went back along it, it was only two metres, and it stayed only two when they returned to it. The change had happened when they exited to clear the rock – precisely the moment they were not looking at the tunnel. They had tried a second one, but soul sense showed nothing when it occurred and this time the 10 metre tunnel was four metres long and then five metres when they looked at it again.

“It will be a pain to get them all down here as well,” she said, considering the cavern again.

“Given we have gone through three isolate talismans apiece, we should probably go back up and check on them,” she suggested.

“You do that,” Arai nodded, “I’ll go up a bit and see if the spatial nameless-accursed oddness extends this far down of the escarpment at least.”

Two serpents swirled out of her sister and her Nascent Soul also shifted back out of her body. They started to move rubble back up to the fissure as she began her own climb back up. Using the different qi beast souls for these kinds of tasks had turned out to be good training for them at least. The more they got used for such autonomous tasks, the better both their control over them had become. Unfortunately, excepting the serpents, they were a long way from becoming combat useful without a lot of oversight. Still, even small advances were nice in the circumstances.

It took her only a few minutes to scale back up. Their path down was a series of stepped tunnels which she could ascend quite easily at this point just by jumping. It would be more problematic for the others to descend, but until they had a route that didn’t lead to insanity and death below, that was kind of moot.

Hauling herself up over the edge of the hole, she surveyed the assembled mix of Ur’Inan, Ghoblan and Undren critically. They were, it was fair to say, not in the best shape. The Isolate Arrays helped a bit, but the creeping oppression of the enclosed space and the stifling environment was not doing them any favours. She had considered a water array, but Rusula had an art for that, as, it turned out, did Pezvak, so she had let it be. In any case, adding a water array to this place would probably have just made it even more hellish.

“Progress?” Rusula asked, looking nervous.

“That depends what you define as progress. We found a cavern,” she said with a grimace.

“I take it the contents-”

“It’s an Undren settlement that the Defilers have thoroughly taken over.”

“There are no known settlements of our folk here,” the Undren female chittered. “Nearest is Szreck Gate, several miles away inland.”

“Well it was in the style of the Undren buildings we saw in caverns on the way under the ocean,” she explained.

“Built with slaves?” Ragash asked. “Seems odd. Not think Defilers been here for that long.”

“It didn’t look recently built though,” she said, thinking back to how the buildings had been pretty worn and the rocks well-pitted and covered with cave algae in many places.

“Perhaps it is old place, ruined in previous war. I am not ‘history-scribe-speaker’,” the Undren female shrugged.

The Undren turned and spoke to the other few Undrenfolk who had basically kept to themselves up until now. After a while, the Ghoblan also got involved with one of them, even drawing on the floor with a rock for a moment. She was surprised at exactly how good at communication they were, although it made some sense that all three had some grasp of the others’ languages – the Ghoblan and the Undren had been trading in that vast city in the swamp the Ur’Inan held.

“They are having an argument about how many old ruins are down here and who settled what when,” Rusula said as she crouched there. “The gist of it is that the Undren were pushed out of here a long time ago by an Ur’Inan tribe who were basically wiped five storm cycles ago. After that this seems to have been an area of the escarpment nobody really paid much attention to because it’s too close to Gloomy Crags and the serpent holes in the massif outside.”

“It’s not a small cavern either,” she added. “Maybe 700 metres across and 150 high, crammed with buildings that go more than two-thirds of the way up the walls with workings cut into the floor in multiple places,”

“Old outposts made many years ago may even exist from before. Enemy of All scoured much, but even with 6000 years’ minings and clearings, they miss as much as they find,” the Undren who had spoken initially said with a shrug. “In end, better to cut passage around.”

“Yeah, that’s just it,” she sighed. “The spatial… whatever it is, is even worse going horizontally down here.”

“Yes, very annoying, require big skill to cut rock and have rock actually understand it be cut,” the Undren nodded. “It why Undren cut out all rock then rebuild afterwards.”

“We also this do,” one of the Ghoblan volunteered haltingly. “Much more-efficient than make out room, turn-around and get hit-in-face by rock-wall two time in one!”

“Why?” she asked, curious.

“Enemy of All make stupid thing, rip out world roots, cause big mess, land lose idea of being just land,” the Undren shrugged again, seeming quite prosaic about the whole thing. “Simply put, is fault of stupid tribes of Enemy of All. Excellent at break things, excellent at take things, excellent at kill things, no good at putting things back. This accepted thing, everyone know.”

The Ghoblan, Undren and even some of the Ur’Inan all nodded at that.

“Uhuh,” she nodded, not quite believing that for some reason.

“Anyway, this not important,” the Undren said, looking at the ceiling. “Important thing is that Defilers digging up above. They get troll-kind probably to do digging.”

“…”

“I see,” she said, controlling her voice so she didn’t let her frustration creep out. “When did they start digging?”

“Hard to say.” The Undren shrugged, “Tremors only noticeable now.”

“When you say now?” she asked Rusula and Pezvak.

“Few hours ago. At first it wasn’t clear, maybe only thirty minutes ago,” the Great Hunter said.

She was going to remonstrate that they hadn’t sent anyone down, because that would have been useful to know. But on reflection, she had to admit that their condition wasn’t the best and the tunnel down would be a bit of a nuisance to get back up, especially with the banners working from above and below.

Unable to dig sideways in a reasonable fashion, and unable potentially to-

She cut off her thought as another searching sense swept past the array, really testing it, scouring the rock all around at a minute level.

“How long has that been going on?” she asked when it passed.

“One every few hours,” Pezvak said with a sigh, “It doesn’t seem to find us, but…”

Considering the array in the room, which was currently half depleted despite having had a focus and a gathering array added beside it, she could only sigh as well.

“What kind of strength is in the cavern?” Pezvak asked.

“The strongest things I could see were stronger than me, but probably barely 6th Advancement as you call it, based on what we faced above. However, there are also banners down there,” she explained.

“I guess that is why they dig down,” Ragash said with a grim look. “They know that either way we run into wall, stuck between rock and hard place, literally.”

She was just thinking that it was hard to disagree with that assessment when Arai scrambled up to join her.

“So either you got remarkably lucky or…” Pezvak said.

“There are two layers parallel to us. The cavern system we are on top of has another cavern ahead of it. I got nowhere trying to mine laterally,” Arai added with a soft sigh.

“And we have them coming from above, digging down somehow.”

“Great, so we can only go through that cavern,” Arai sighed.

“We need to get rid of the banners at the very least,” she agreed. Turning to the room at large, she asked: “Do you have any idea how close the ones digging up above are?”

There was some discussion between the different Undren and the Ghoblan before Ragash finally answered for them: “They seem to be of the opinion that they are maybe a few metres down and having to hit the rock very hard. Probably they are in one of the fissures.”

“So we have a while,” Arai concluded.

“Probably, yes, so long as the ward here hold,” Pezvak agreed.

She considered his condition. He was not yet fully recovered from the fight above, and had wasted a lot of arrows from what she could gather. He and Rusula were the only ones with enough qi to use the talismans to shield the others up here as well.

“We will clear the cavern below then,” Arai said after a moment’s silence.

The rest of those in the room stirred uneasily, but nobody, not even Pezvak, spoke against it. Leaving them to it, they both descended again to the layer of the cavern. Looking back up, Arai shook her head. “I think Pezvak and Rusula actually wanted to come fight, as did some of the others.”

“Yeah. However, they would change their minds if they saw how many are actually in here,” she grimaced, looking at the cavern carefully again.

“The strongest pig demons are in the big complex to our right at the rear of the side cavern over there, with most of the female slaves…” Arai hissed with distaste.

“So how do we do this?” she said, sweeping the room again.

“We are going to have to use the leaf to destroy their banners, so splitting up is kinda pointless,” Arai mused.

“So… prioritise the banners. Which of us will do the chopping?” she asked.

“Your spear is in a bit worse condition than my sword, so do you want to take the leaf?” Arai said, handing it to her. “The ‘Principle’, or whatever is in them, just reflects my Sundering Intent entirely anyway, so I may as well focus on defending you while you ruin them.”

Taking the leaf, she tore open the last part of the roof with her Maelstrom Intent, and they both plummeted down, landing in the courtyard that had the nearest shrine.

She summoned the two-headed serpent, with her Nascent Soul sat on one of its heads holding a spear, and they set to rampaging through the courtyard while she went straight for the caved stone statue and the banner it held. It was a horrible, obese, three-headed pig demon. It held six arms, two of which held its huge, erect phallic organ, two held the banner pole that was mounted on the head of the organ and the other two were outstretched as if supplicating skyward. She cut through the banner pole and stabbed the leaf into the statue first. It also held some kind of strange array that this close up gave her a truly creepy and inauspicious feeling, like something was drooling over her from just behind her.

She punched the leaf knife through the forehead of the horrible thing and tore it sideways before swirling around it and hacking it apart in a dozen strikes, destroying the array formation spread throughout it before slashing the banner itself to pieces.

She recalled her Nascent Soul and its companion serpent because the drain from the banners on them was actually more than she was comfortable with, despite still using one of their anti-qi-disruption talismans, and jumped onto the nearest roof. Rushing towards the second statue two blocks away as fast as they could, drums and horns started to thunder around the cavern.

It took mere moments to repeat the same pattern of destruction as they arrived at it, while Arai slaughtered indiscriminately. The second statue was in a plaza surrounded by several large ritual platforms that were lined with freshly flayed skins, she couldn’t help but notice.

They got the third statue destroyed before an enraged bellow came from the side cavern and a palanquin burst out of it. They arrived at the fourth one as the bloated, obese pig demon she had spotted earlier being carried on it pushed aside the two orc females and took stock of the situation, pointing at something and yelling in their horrid guttural language. The six trolls carrying the platform roared as one and charged towards the fifth statue with its banner.

Directing her soul sense at it, she was surprised to see that the palanquin now had a field around it much like the banners. However, this one also dispersed and disrupted soul sense as well as qi. It stopped her seeing the strength of anyone within a few metres around it. Had she not spied on it surreptitiously before, it would have led to her not realising the palanquin, or something else there, could do that. It would also have made her deal with this much differently in all likelihood.

As it was, from having fought them, she knew the creatures the Ur’Inan called Trolls and the Undren called Troll-kind were decently powerful five-star Nascent Soul monsters but with some kind of mental shackle. They were little better than puppets that became enraged and then just instinctually blood-lusted brutes when freed from their captors' control. There was a bellow and she saw another pig demon riding a troll charging across the rooftops from the far end of the hall. Two more, also Nascent Soul, had come out of doorways cut into a pillar.

Returning her focus to the Defiler on the palanquin, she guessed it was probably close to the peak of Severing Origins – maybe it was very early Dao Seeking, but nothing she had seen earlier suggested it had a ‘Principle’, so she was–

With a howl, both the Ur’Inan females arrived before her and she realised her miscalculation – she had ignored the ‘slaves’, none of whom had seemed especially powerful. The first one arrived in front of her in a blur, almost catching her off guard as their ‘strength’ returned like a lamp that had been lit. A mist orb swirled out, courtesy of her sister, disrupting one and making it bleed a bit as she skipped back, cursing under her breath.

It stabbed at her with a blade of black glass, which she parried with the leaf and her eyes widened in shock – the blade of black glass and the leaf repelled each other, sending her staggering–

She ducked at the other one shot through the mists, cutting for her with its own arm length black glass blade. The edge as it hissed through the air gave her a faint sense of foreboding and she dodged back again, using the Maelstrom Shifting Steps to evade as best she could even as the other one came for her.

Blocking that strike, barely, because both of these two were comparable to Vaklash at the very least, she drew one of the spare spear blades and used it to–

-Fates go get violated by these evil demons! she screamed in her head as the black glass blade bent the spear blade that had blocked it and made her arm grow cold.

Greenish black fire flickered through it, and through the Ur’Inan’s eyes. The soul attack sank into her, submerging her in a film of lingering malevolence. Her arms grew cold even as the symbol shifted, meeting the incoming force.

The third figure she barely even saw as it leapt off the palanquin. It was a third Ur’Inan, with paler skin, covered in purple and white tattoos showing Ur’Inan being debauched and defiled by the pig demon. It approached her, intending to help her stab this other one, taking the opportunity to–

Arai cut at it, but missed somehow as it waved away her sword and sent her flying into a building before arriving beside her. Clumsily she misread the helper’s attack and–

And the symbol howled in her mind, forcing clarity where before there had been confusion. Her mantra shifted, forcing out the hypnotic force that had come from the pig demon on the palanquin, she now understood. The figure danced back and she felt her qi grow chaotic as the talisman it held in its hands was crushed to fragments.

-Where was the pig demon previously on the palanquin? she realised belatedly…

Grimacing, she put down a five symbol Yang Earth array and the entire neighbourhood they were in collapsed into rubble. The three Ur’Inan that were attacking her strained against the movement, slowly draining it – but the opening was enough. She threw herself for the statue in the middle of the ruin, bisecting the banner and carving the leaf deep into its head-

She didn’t even have time to curse as the trolls and the palanquin arrived, now with this other pig demon on it. They charged straight into the Yang Earth array, which melted away like it was never there. The qi she had put down was disrupted and distorted bizarrely and the whole imprint just collapsed into nothing.

Slicing down with the leaf, she finished ruining the statue even as the three Ur’Inan scattered around her, around both of them. The sense of disruption to her qi became even more profound as all three made some strange signs. Even her Nascent Soul was affected slightly, the ripple of the deviation flowing backwards through her qi before finally being stopped imperiously by the symbol and her mantra before it could properly penetrate her dantian.

The obese, disgusting demon stood by the last statue, holding an idol in its hand.

It placed a clawed hand on the statue, and she watched as red lines flowed off the big statue and reordered themselves on the small one. It turned to them and pointed at them with an obscene gesture and stood, holding the statue in its left clawed hand, laughing and saying something they couldn’t understand.

The Nascent Soul pig demon on the palanquin had backed off now it had disrupted the array, leaving the three of them to the Ur’Inan, who were certainly being controlled somehow. Tossing the leaf to Arai, she unslung her spear. The pig demon on the palanquin laughed and waved its arms and pig demons started retreating?

“That’s probably not good,” Arai agreed with a grimace, pointing at the obese pig demon, who was now doing something with the idol.

She nodded grimly, hoping that she could execute what she was going to attempt as successfully as she had before. It was… odd to execute, but she had managed it against the trolls before. It was annoying in many ways that none of the qi outside her body would respond, but this wasn’t primarily a qi-based attack, so all that did was make the activation more involved according to the teachings in her Sea of Knowledge.

The six trolls put the palanquin down and she saw now that each one had a smaller pig demon on them that was giggling and pointing at her. The rest of the demons had all started massing in a broad ring around the ruined buildings and even the three Ur’Inan had fallen back while maintaining whatever it was they were doing to reinforce the qi disruption. Many of those demons still had slaves with them happily abusing them as they hooted and laughed disgustingly.

-Well… that won’t continue for long, she thought grimly as she spun the spear again and visualised the required mnemonic to make the Maelstrom Intent flow. It rolled around her body, gathering a bizarre momentum as her Nascent Soul mirrored the actions she was taking. The serpents swirled around it in the water, hissing expectantly. This strike had a remarkable synergy with them as well. It was why she had tried to attempt it when fighting the troll kind and the horde above.

The lead troll roared as its charge gathered momentum, surging into the disruptive field and leaping at her with the intention of crushing her into the ground.

She shook the spear in her hands, listening to it ring in her hands. The mnemonic shimmered in her mind and she swept the spear’s thrust out, letting her Martial Intent execute the form’s flow out through it.

{Cry of Nammu}

The tone of the spear shimmering in her hands melded with the Maelstrom Intent as her Nascent Soul spoke the mnemonic. A ripple of pure Maelstrom Intent, infused with the strength of her Nascent Soul, swirled out around her as the spear strike surged forward. The momentum that swelled up within in her sent her Intent sweeping out like a rip current beneath calm waters. It passed over the charging trolls, over the three Ur’Inan, the surrounding pig demons, the distant demon with the idol and then the whole cavern.

The movement of the world became sluggish as ghostly waters swirled through the cavern – the material manifestation of her Martial Intent. With it came the serpents in her Qi Sea, now no longer small things, but imbued, somehow, with a dread devouring strength born of a primordial maelstrom. The whole ambience of the cavern was sublimated into it as the waters resonated faintly as she spun it and planted the butt of the spear into the middle of the mirage of the waters.

The world moved again. The waters rippled and a strange undulating tone spread out with it. For the briefest moment there was something else there, in the cavern. A shadow within the sound as the serpents all raised their heads and echoed it, their bodies shivering in harmony as it melded with them before everything faded away and the cavern returned to normal.

With a disturbingly gentle sigh, every pig demon below Soul Foundation in the cavern collapsed like a stringless puppet. All the Soul Foundation ones spat blood, their bodies twisting and foundations shattered. The Nascent Soul pig demons staggered and fell back.

Taking a deep breath, she spun the spear and repeated the motion, performing the second move of the form.

{Enki Stirs}

The disruption of the Maelstrom Intent coalesced within the cavern and swirled back towards her. No longer was the water gentle and pure. Now it surged with a vast momentum, swirling back into her and rolling around her for a second time. The lead troll, which had stumbled and then briefly gone out of control of its stunned manipulator, tried to lash at her. She struck forward with the spear and a wave of surging Maelstrom Intent swept out from her spear strike.

The trolls were cast back and as one went totally berserk as the Nascent Soul pig demons controlling them had their foundations ruined and their consciousness extinguished. Only the one on the Palanquin and the one holding the idol managed to resist the shockwave.

Both stared at her as if she were some kind of ghost crawled out of hell specifically to claim them, which, if she understood even a fraction of the symbolism behind these moves, she might well be. The devouring waters flowed back into her a second time.

{Ninhursag Descends}

Her Sea of Knowledge groaned under the strain as she executed the third part of the form. The whole cavern shook as a vast momentum swept her up and she leapt for the Nascent Soul pig demon on the palanquin. The trolls collapsed like broken puppets as she passed them by, their own consciousnesses dispersed in the wake of the momentum from the strike. The spear pierced through the barrier on the palanquin even as the three Ur’Inan who had been leaping for her were crushed to the cavern floor. The buildings turned to dust and the vitality of the place shifted.

The pig demon holding the idol screamed in rage and tried to use some art with it.

All momentum of her attack wavered as the pig demon did something with the idol. All the turbulent energy in the cavern and the dispersed soul strength of the demons was shaken from her control. Sadly it was too late, the second attack had had a formidable soul-based component to it, but this third one was as esoteric as it came. She was pretty sure that she was barely getting a hundredth of what it was capable of and even so…

Her spear punched through the pig demon on the palanquin, shattering its core directly and turning it into a misty collection of demon bits. In the aftermath of the strike, the forces that were still swirling around her ripped the palanquin itself to pieces, finally dispersing its bizarre bubble even as she charged on towards the fat demon with the idol.

It howled something and a truly vile wave of disruption met her own, only to be dispersed. This was no longer a battle of qi, or even soul strength, but a battle regarding the quality of Intent. The creature’s ‘Defiling Intent’ was powerful, but every aspect of this form held some comprehension of ‘Purification’. Nammu was about purification of ‘Intent’, Enki about purification of ‘Deed’ and Ninhursag? That held some connection to the purity and vitality of the world itself, the very antithesis of everything these vile things stood for.

The demon screamed and she threw the leaf at the statue. The demon did something with the idol even as her spear caught up to it and impaled its bulk. She fancied it was actually sweating for a second, then it blurred bizarrely and danced onto a nearby roof, laughing horribly as it did so.

Arai had grabbed the leaf and ruined the statue in the intervening moment.

The qi-disrupting, defiling effect didn’t dissipate.

The still laughing demon kept laughing, its disgusting bulk wobbling, then it somehow pulled itself up and wasn’t a fat obese thing anymore, but a tall, chiselled, muscular monstrosity tattooed with scenes of a thousand different evil things. From its mouth it exhaled a cloud of misty, reddish-purple fog that swirled across the cavern in an instant, sweeping over both of them.

Her symbol shifted and dispersed the poisonous mix of some very unpleasant interpretations of what Yin Earth was capable of. Shaking her head, she stabbed forward – yet before she even got there, her sister was beside it, cutting down with her sword. It shot backwards again, tapping her blade away with its hand.

{Dreaming of Abzu}

She struck at it with all her remaining strength – yet it somehow spun away from her blow, barely getting struck, spitting some of its vile words at her again.

Arai suddenly vanished and appeared right beside it again; the point of the leaf stabbed through its back even as its form blurred a second time, barely escaping their combined strike.

It snarled, seeming slightly incredulous, as if this whole series of events was somehow outside of its understanding of how the world worked. Arai came at it again, swinging her sword with one hand in a simple, yet deceptive arc. The demon danced back again and collapsed into two as her Sundering Intent overcame whatever trick it had been employing. Its lower half became misty, but before it could re-join them, she had arrived above it and impaled its core with her spear, sending surging pulse of Martial Intent and one of the two-headed serpents into its body, which collapsed into bones and rotted flesh, even as its disbelieving piggy face stared up at them.

The qi-disrupting, defiling effect was still there.

“Where did the idol go?” her sister said, casting around.

She looked around as well, but there was no sign of it.

“Maybe it was destroyed when this piece of shit died?” she suggested hopefully, not really believing it.

She grimaced slightly as her Sea of Knowledge settled from its rather overburdened state. While it did so she looked around the cavern, just as Arai was doing, for another banner or statue they might have missed. Nothing stood out, however, except for the side cavern which had several areas where her soul sense couldn’t seem to reach, much like the palanquins in fact…

“Great,” Arai remarked with a dark look in that direction, having also noticed those.

Taking out the crude talisman she had made with an isolate array on it, she grimaced and reinforced it a bit.

“I guess we can only look for it in there. As it is, Rusula and the rest will never make it through this cavern,” she remarked, looking upwards again.

Without further preamble, they both rushed for the side cavern. Despite seeing it from a distance, she was still unprepared for the horror within. The whole place was carved like some perverse temple. The alignments within it made her skin crawl and the carvings were… abominable, depicting every kind of ruinous death and depraved devilment and defilement.

Side chambers were bloodstained altars to debauchery and death. Female slaves, mainly Ur’Inan, were chained against walls. All of them were mindless, soulless in fact, or close to it, like the pitiable three whom she had incapacitated and her sister then properly killed in the aftermath. Staring at them with her soul sense as they looked for more of the disrupting symbols, she could see the broken fragments of their psyches, sunk into an eternal hell of torment that made her want to retch.

The biggest place of absence was the chamber beyond the main hall of the annex. The centre of the room held a bloodstained altar, disturbingly about the size and shape of a bed. Behind it, was a statue of the three-headed pig demon thing. The rest of the room held a series of lesser pillar statues, each one currently bearing a mindless slave. More pressingly, the altar itself held a palanquin upon which was sat a wizened old pig demon, its eyes shut in meditation. Before it was the idol they had seen before – or one very similar to it.

The barrier from the palanquin extended out to cover the statue behind it. Stabbing it speculatively, she found it was like poking a solid wall with a stick. Arai scowled and stabbed it with the leaf knife. The leaf easily passed through it and Arai tried to flip the idol out of the field but it didn’t budge in the slightest from its current spot.

“That would be too easy wouldn’t it,” she remarked distastefully, trying not to look at the slaves on the pillars, or the scenes around the altar, or the scenes carved on the wall for that matter.

Scowling herself, Arai stabbed the idol with the leaf, splitting it completely in two. The upper half fell off, but again refused to budge thereafter. A moment later red blood flowed from both halves. The interior faces of the cut idol, which were disturbingly flesh-like and pulsing faintly, grew tendrils and pulled themselves together.

Looking around, she tried to see if there were any other arrays. It took a moment to find them, even though the pig demons had not bothered to hide them, for the evil alignments of the place had fused with them in truly unpleasant ways. Each pillar had one, as did the altar, but they all led to the idol. Even the one in the statue on the wall behind the altar.

“The idol is definitely the core,” her sister muttered distastefully, cutting it again.

In the end, it took twenty more attempts before the idol finally gave up and collapsed into a puddle of fleshy waste. The dispersing effect that was all around them dissipated and she breathed a sigh of relief.

The red lines in it abruptly flowed back and into the desiccated pig demon and the creature opened its eyes to look at them before she had really registered what was happening. The space around her locked up and her entire body refused to move. Her Nascent Soul within her body was somehow prevented from leaving and all the qi within her just paused in its circulation somehow. Arai was frozen in the process of moving to stab it.

The barrier around the vile thing dissipated and it slid off the palanquin and grasped her around the throat with a hot, clammy hand.

“So brave… child. Allow me to reward you…”

The words were not audibly spoken but rather slid into her mind somehow, carrying with the feeling that something had just slimed over her soul and was looking for a place to bury her.

She struck out with the symbol and her mantra, using the connection of its own Intent to bridge between them. The serpents swirled with the symbol, striking out of her dantian at it. It flinched and snarled. Its hand, which had claws she realised, dug into the flesh of her neck. Wicked pulses of a truly abnormal qi, something between Yin Earth and Death Qi, tried to invade her body, only for her Myriad Elements Qi to finally stir and subsume it.

“Ah… I see…. You have lingered on, or just awoken,” the creature’s voice purred in her head.

It looked around then with a single claw tore open the front of her robe leaving a bloody red line from her neck to her navel.

“Beautiful. It has been a long time since I savoured a human – not since the days after the ruin.”

-Nope, no, no way, she gritted her teeth, mentally.

Whatever it was doing to restrict her was – she focused her soul sense on it and realised something was off. Its qi was weak, barely stronger than her own, but its physical body was far in excess of what it should be.

It ran clawed fingers over her breasts, leaving red lines in her flesh that sent malignant qi into her body even as she focused as much of her soul strength as she could into the imprint of the array – a five symbol-

“No, no, no… we can’t have you doing something like that,” it compressed its grip on her throat and her qi became more disordered.

She focused even more forcefully on the array – a five-symbol variant of the transformation array – and triggered it on the hand that was holding her neck. Its hand twisted abnormally and its qi became hers. Snarling, it waved a hand and severed the arm. She hung in the air, still frozen in place, and could only watch as a second arm blurred out of its body them merged into first, repairing the damage. A bizarre, twisted symbol appeared in its small eyes as red lines stood out like veins across its wizened body.

Its eyes traced her body in a truly disgusting manner. She felt that even if she bathed in acid she would not feel clean again from the way it took in her body.

“Dangerous, dangerous,” it laughed–

She never even saw it move.

Its clawed hand cut open her flesh like parchment and buried itself up to its wrist in her stomach.

“You have a mana sea, a physique cultivator, yet your body is weak…” it purred.

She tried to muster her focus and trigger another array, but this time it sent a crippling soul attack of its own, forcing her to focus on that rather than attacking it.

“Ahhh… I see! You fought with Martial Perception out there, not mana – not a mage…

“Not a…” its qi swirled around in her abdomen looking for… something?

Three of its claws somehow managed to breach into her dantian, which was terrifying in its own right. To destroy someone’s dantian was perfectly doable, but to pierce it without destroying it required…

-Principle…

-Nameless-! It’s a… an… ah-!

Something slid through her mind, the symbol stopped it and she realised in a strange, dissociated way what was happening.

-Shouldn’t my… my…

She was sure she had something that should stop it but something was messing with her memory, she was certain of that now. Messing with her…

The swirling, unrefined mists swept out of the wound, making the pig demon hiss in shock and sink all five claws through her dantian, and daintily found her Golden Core, like a pearl between its clawed fingers. Her Nascent Soul, still frozen in it, trembled and fought against it even as it slowly tried to pull out her core, only to be rebuffed in the first instance by the remarkable interconnectivity between the different parts of her foundation.

Its solution was quite obvious, but also very much the wrong one. A red symbol flickered within her dantian as it scratched something bizarre on her Golden Core – or tried to.

The pain was excruciating, her Sea of Knowledge shuddered under the force of its accompanying soul attack as it tried to lever apart her core from her soul without ever touching the symbol itself. In the process, her whole dantian started to shake and judder. The qi in her body turned chaotic and started to flow backwards something… disrupted – defiled – the very idea of her qi cycle for a brief section.

That turned out to be its ultimate undoing as liquid Myriad Elements Qi in her dantian, her Golden Core and her five pure meridians flowed out, over its claws. It screamed in shock and staggered back as its arm melted so fast she might have almost imagined it.

The wound in her dantian spewed out Five Elements mists while thirteen different colours of lightning sizzled out through it, even as the damage to her Golden Core stabilized.

-Yeah, not the way I wanted to find out how robust my cultivation foundation is! She screamed in her own head.

It struck out at her with a fearful soul attack and stood in front of her again, its claw aiming for her heart for some reason. This time she was ready for it though and punched out with the strongest Yang Lightning array she could. The goal here wasn’t its physical body, but whatever rotten thing these demons had that passed for a soul. Its body charred even as it howled, unable to dodge or evade this time.

The control that was holding them vanished and Arai vanished with it – appearing at its back even as she sprawled across the floor. She struggled with the momentum it had somehow imparted in her even as the lightning flayed her sister’s skin and made her bones visible through her body for brief moments. The leaf tore open its flesh, ruining its heart…

“NO-!” she screamed in shock as she saw that the creature’s heart was perfectly normal…

It had no core!

Arai cut onwards, through its dantian, to no avail and then the thing blurred and its front and back blurred through each other, grasping at her sister. The wound from the leaf was already healing even as Arai screamed and exerted her Sundering Intent to a degree she had previously never experienced before – even when they were fighting the serpents in the swamp.

She staggered up and-

Horror entered her mind.

Whispering, dark words dragged her into a nightmare world – she was chained up in a dark place, watching Arai die again and again before her.

Demons tore them apart, danced through her memories.

Dragged them out and defiled them again and again–

She screamed and desperately tried to push it out of her mind, clawing for her Mantra, the Symbol... the pagoda… anything that might act as an anchor as something endlessly dark swirled into her body from the ruined form of the pig demon, trying to take over her fleshly form. Her Maelstrom Intent was pushed harder and harder as whatever it was doing tried to force it out of her body, all the while assiduously avoiding her Symbol and any Intent that came from it and – equally bizarrely – her Mantra.

Just when she thought there was nothing more she could push at it, something finally gave and its momentum foundered just for a fraction.

Something inside it went snap – the most mysterious of the various Mantra Mnemonics, ‘Day’, shifted faintly and her rage and pain flowed outwards with it. Her Maelstrom Intent and the Symbol both struck like tribulation bolts from Heaven, transforming its momentum into their own. Like a hand flipping over the game board, the demon’s Sea of Knowledge was thrown back, out of her body. In the same instant, she saw the body that was still attacking her sister, exploded in a stinking wave of fleshy gunk and bones.

She was spared the worst of it by the convenient presence of one of the columns, but Arai who had been standing right next to it just screamed in fury and emitted a tyrannical wave of Sundering Intent.

Staggering up, she saw the horrible skull nearby and kicked it, only for her blow to be repelled.

Arai stumbled over with the leaf and stabbed it through the brain. A black mist hissed out of it for a moment and then the bones collapsed to dust. From inside the skull, she could see the faint pieces of a bizarre, unnatural looking core, split cleanly in half.

“Well, that explains where their cores were,” she groaned, realising she hurt all over.

“Yeah, next time we go for the head,” Arai grimaced. “I am never going to feel clean again.”

“What about the other four areas we can’t send soul sense into…?” she asked.

They made their way back to the main area of the complex and picked another one at random. It was another room, identical to the last, with an altar and a wizened pig demon with its eyes close sat upon a palanquin. However, unlike the last room, the slaves here had been… flayed.

She stared in horror for a few seconds before realising that the skins themselves were all arrayed around the demon, on the bed. Red lines that carried a most revolting and inauspicious aura pulsed across the whole surface.

Arai took a step into the room and they were both assailed by a strange, spine-tingling whispering. The room was already ill-lit by sickly greenish-red flames – now however, they dimmed yet further. She grabbed Arai and pulled her back.

The demon on the altar had stirred faintly and a strange, oppressive sense began to permeate the room. As they watched, the skins on the altar flowed together and formed a robe on the figure. One after another all the faces on it opened their eyes and stared at them.

“Join us…” twelve voices whispered in haunting unison. The symbol shivered and concealed their minds faintly.

“Join. Us,” the voices murmured again. The symbol wavered but held firm.

“Yeah… I think not,” she said after a long look.

“Agreed,” Arai said, backing away.

They didn’t bother to check the other three and instead hurried back out into the cavern.

“What now,” Arai said, looking both directions.

She looked in both directions, then up. Above them, Pezvak was kneeling by the hole looking concerned. A moment later he dropped down and looked around at the slaughter.

“Big handiwork,” he grimaced.

“What is the problem?” Arai asked.

“They are digging very fast up above. The Undren guess they will break through to our room in an hour or two,” the Great Hunter informed them grimly. “They were slow at first, then something changed and they started digging very fast…”

He trailed off and turned as she noticed at the same time as Arai. Two trolls with Nascent Soul controllers and several hundred branded slaves, mainly Undrenfolk, were trotting out of the entrance that almost certainly led towards the escarpment and the outside. Behind them were quite a few Golden Core pig demons.

Looking up, she saw Rusula peering down.

“I hope you have some rope,” she said with a grimace.

Pezvak nodded and drew an arrow from his pack that was actually a grappling hook. Aiming it at the ceiling, he shot it back through the opening. Rusula vanished from view for a moment before one of the other Ur’Inan slid down the rope.

The Nascent Soul Defilers pointed at them and she felt a wave of soul sense sweep out. Sending her own out, she blocked it as best she could, as did Arai. One after another, the survivors descended as the next wave moved into the cavern with much more caution than she had been expecting.

“I think that plan really is the only one,” Arai said after a moment.

“Yep,” she said grimly. It wasn’t optimal, but probably moon mushrooms or something similar were the only way they were getting out of here.

Rusula and Ragash both arrived beside them, both looking drained. Remembering something, she slung her pack around her shoulder and pulled out the spellbook. Both of them had memorised it entirely at this point, so beyond using it as a casting tool, it wasn’t actually that useful.

“Here, take this,” she said passing it to Rusula. “You should have the qi…uh, mana, to use it.”

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“You… had… something like this?” Ragash’s eyes went slightly wide, as did Rusula’s for that matter.

“Take this as well,” Arai tossed her one of the larger pieces of serpent core.

Rusula nodded and flipped open the book, pushing some of her mana into it. The runes on the surface glimmered faintly in the gloom.

“Ragash, Rusula – get the rest of them heading towards the sealed door at the back,” Pezvak said stringing an arrow and shooting it at a distant Defiler who died with a stunned shriek.

Picking up a rock, she imprinted an array on it and hurled it with all her considerable strength towards the advancing horde. The cloud of corrosive mist swirled around, shredding demons and slaves alike as they all fell back. She planted two more large water mist arrays and then they all ran after the others. She had made it half the distance when the force behind charged. They ran over the arrays without triggering them, because she hadn’t set them up like that, and kept on advancing. Only when a third of the force was ahead of them did she finally set her first one off, watching it turn the middle of the advancing tide into a red haze.

Arriving at the wall at the back of the cavern, which was a large sealed door, the force behind them was cast into disorder. Arai tried to cut a small hole through it and she was very relieved to see that it wasn’t lined with Arborundum. The survivors scrambled through, fleeing into the darkness beyond. She detonated the lightning array a moment later, turning the Blade Mist cloud into a crackling field of death that only the two trolls, their riders and a few frontrunners escaped relatively unscathed.

Pezvak shot the riders off of the trolls before finally scrambling through himself. They followed after, dragging the stone behind them, which she then fused completely, shutting them into the ruined tunnel.

Without waiting, she took up the front while Arai fell to the rear with Pezvak, and they set off into the darkness. Nothing much troubled them as they ran through the familiar carved tunnels. She could only assume that proximity to the pig demons stronghold kept many things from coming here. Soon they had dropped a level and she found most tunnels were flooded. Eventually, they found one of the octagonal shafts, which she scouted very carefully in case it held a slime monster.

Fortunately, it did not, but they still bypassed it quickly, because behind them she could now hear the rumble of drums and the sound of horns.

“How big is the range on those fate-thrashed banners,” Arai muttered as they kept on running.

She nodded, wondering that herself but having no answers to give.

As they made their way onwards, down one of the broad tunnels with a channel in the centre, she finally encountered a slime – a weak Nascent Soul one no less. Surprisingly, she destroyed it easily with just a soul attack, from well beyond its line of sight. A moment later its body was shredded as Arai’s own Martial Intent arrived, rolling in the wake of hers like a sundering wave.

She lost track of time as they walked deeper until finally, blessedly, the sense of her qi being grasped by unclean hands abruptly disappeared. She stopped and let the others run on past, watching as they all gasped, before stepping back down the tunnel a few paces to find that sure enough, the creepy feeling started to return ever so slightly.

Leaving it again, shuddering, she drank in the sweet, icy Yin Water and Wood qi of her surroundings.

“Those banners have an immense radius,” Arai hissed. “We have come almost 17 miles from the entrance.”

She nodded and reached down, scooping up a handful of water from the channel, staring at it with her soul sense. Within it, she could see none of the tell-tale mushroom spores she was hoping to see…

Looking at the other survivors, she did a finally tally there were less than she remembered although they didn’t seem to have lost anyone since they got to the cavern? Not counting the three from the Cloud Arrow’s tribe there were six Ur’Inan, four Undren and three Ghoblan.

“What happened to the others?” she asked remembering that there had been one more Ur’Inan and four more Undren.

“Undren die in head, from strength from above, same with Tuzak,” Ragash said softly.

“We throw bodies in chasm on way down,” the Undren said helpfully.

“We should probably unseal them now we are clear of that mess,” she said, swapping back to Imperial Common.

“Probably, yes,” her sister agreed. “At least they will be able to defend themselves a bit.”

Arai turned to the group behind them, appraising them as they sat around the tunnel. “With some effort, we can unseal your cultivations…”

That made most of them perk up at least.

The actual unsealing didn’t take as long as she had expected in all honesty. The arrays themselves that made them up were straightforward to unpick and the symbol in conjunction with their intent-infused qi easily broke them apart in a matter of moments. The seals on the Ur’Inan were a touch more complex than the Undren – but it was not at the point where it posed any lingering difficulties that she could see. As best she could guess, it was done by Nascent Soul pig demons, presumably using some tool.

When it was done, they all sat around, replenishing their qi from a few cores of spiders and the slimes they had killed on the way, as she took a moment to properly look at their surroundings.

A sweep of her soul sense told her that they were in a long series of running tunnels that followed to either side of the channel they were in. About half a mile ahead of them was a large hall that had a spider nest off to one side, while in another direction she caught a few slimes. Those she casually dispersed, as they were no stronger than Golden Core.

Once all those they had unsealed had recovered enough mana to not be totally useless, they set off again. Mapping their progress with her scrip, which was finally able to see some use again, she found that they were slowly going deeper. The layout of these tunnels was much clearer, now that she had the range to her senses to see whole branches.

“You notice that almost nothing here is lined with the qi-repelling stone?” Arai said as they stood in another hall, letting the Undren butcher a Nascent Soul spider mother her sister had killed.

“The stones of denial are usually found deeper,” the Undren female said, looking up.

Finally, after clearing that hall and two others, they found what they were after: an octagonal shaft into the depths that was flooded with dark water, and within the depths were some golden glimmers that were certainly Dead Sages Lantern's.

“Right,” she said, turning to look at them. “We will fortify that far hall and heavily trap the entrances.”

“Why here?” the Undren frowned.

“Because what we need is in that hole over there, hopefully,” she supplied, planting down the first activated lightning trap.

“We will never be able to swim out through that,” one of the other Ur’Inan muttered, a male who it also turned out knew some La’taan.

“This just keeps going deeper,” she said, continuing to rapidly layer down arrays, moving back through the hall.

“These are shafts down to old mines,” Ragash nodded. “Later they turn them into other things, but they just go deep, and occasionally intersect with other things.”

She didn’t comment more, and just focused on putting as many replenishable defensive arrays around as were convenient before following the group into the side hall.

“We will leave most of our stuff here. I trust you not to run off with it,” she joked, passing her bag with the cores in it to Rusula, who eyed her dubiously.

“With the degree of traps that come, nothing under 5th circle is going to walk in there easily, and anything over it will receive enough nasty strikes that you will likely be able to deal with it,” Arai said helpfully.

“Uhuh,” she said, shrugging off her ruined robe and then much of the rest of it; it would only slow her down when swimming, after all. “We will likely be gone for a day, maybe two – In all likelihood what we are after down there to really make those fate-perverting demons howl won’t be too elusive… but you never know...”

The Undren spoke up... “And what is it you seek down in that place?”

Arai stared down into the hole for a moment then tossed Pezvak the long sword, keeping only the short sword and the leaf before just stepping into the water and vanishing with a plop.

“Death…” she grinned and hopped in after Arai, leaving the spear and taking only the two remaining spear heads.

That was certainly what she intended to visit on them, for what they had tried to put in her head, and promised to do thereafter. They had been intending it anyway, but that experience with the wizened old evil had, if anything, solidified that determination to bring as much pain and torment to those evil demons as possible.

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~ RUSULA - ANCIENT TUNNELS ~

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Watching them sink into the waters without a sound, Rusula felt… conflicted. Both of the Ur’Sar clearly had a plan, although they were being cagey about it. They certainly didn’t seem as concerned about dangerous things below here as they were about potential pursuers.

“They gave us most of their kit,” she said eventually, passing Pezvak the other pack.

“Good choice. It slow them down,” the older Ur’Inan nodded. “Not good for fighting underwater.”

The three Ghoblan were standing at the edge of the shaft down, muttering as well in their own language.

“What matter?” one of the other Ur’Inan, Huljas she thought his name was, barked at them.

She walked over to them as well – none of them were especially strong, but their instincts were probably better than the Undren’s in places like this.

“Down there,” the most authoritative of the trio, whose name she was pretty sure was something like ‘Bright Fungi-Seeker’, pointed into the depths.

She peered into the depths, at the glittering pinpricks of gold drifting in the waters depths. If she focused she could just make out Arai and Sana sinking through them, their arms crossed, totally unhindered by either the fierce elemental mana within the waters or whatever the golden lights were.

“What are they?” she asked. “Some kind of water creature?”

“Fate-betraying lights…” the Ghoblan said. “Very dangerous thing, as dangerous as Soul-Seizing mushrooms, maybe second only to White Death mushrooms.”

“Lanterns of the Deep,” the Undren female, whose name she had finally pinned down as Eshukurutas, or ‘Eshu’ for short, said, coming over to stand by the edge as well. “Thing of darkness and death. They mutate from great achievement of Ancestor Moon Rat, then mutate again from Great Achievement of Dead Moon Fungi that…”

The Undren trailed off having the good grace to look a tiny bit abashed at that. Everyone here was well aware that the Undren owned that particular piece of calamity. Within their own ranks they were proud of it for Maker’s sake. To her, that was like being proud of what Mo’Kratha of the Ur’Khal had done in claiming the crown of Orcus from the people of Earth. Sure it was a ‘Great Achievement’ but it was also the kind of thing that got you remembered in a bad way by the Great Mothers and Fathers. Mo’Kratha had fallen for his arrogance and doomed far too many of their tribes in the process.

“Perhaps they seek such things to fight the Defilers. It is a good choice,” the Undren mused.

“Very insane choice,” the Bright Fungi-Seeker said drolly.

“Is true, if they die there, we have big problem,” Huljas grumbled.

“They survived a trip under the ocean,” she pointed out, feeling the need to speak up for Arai and Sana.

“So they said…” another of the Ur’Inan from Green Moon massif, named Ugrash, grumbled.

“They smell of Undren death; also survived alchemical dust. Still carry faint scars in their aura-scent,” Eshu said matter-of-factly.

“They survived your kind’s Maker-accursed spore weapon?” Ugrash muttered.

Having never really fought Undren, nor being familiar with their wider warfare strategies, she determined to ask Pezvak about that quietly later.

“They have big style. I hear rumours before capture that someone make western periphery of Mourncleaver Pit eat a big piece of rotten spider meat,” Eshu sniggered. “Swarmblood old ancestors spin on tails, now fighting big war over mana vein that appear by magic and ruin huge peripheral area of territory as well. It near Sar’Vash – which also suffer big ruin.”

She nodded, familiar with this already. Ancestral Shaman Argor had already made quiet enquiries about the pair’s exploits out west – the tribal elders had been impressed. The overall conclusion they had reached was that the pair were much more attuned to Sar’Ishara-Inan’s warlike aspects than her prosperity aspects.

“If they survive that much, they seem confident they return now,” Pezvak said, crossing his arms.

“We hope. If they fall here, we have big problem.”

“If they not return, we can only keep go on,” Ragash said from the doorway.

“What you make of their rune-work?” Ragash asked her, looking around the hall.

She eyed the runes. Most were hidden, which was terrifying in different way. She had not realised they were able to do that until now. Sometimes it felt like every time that pair turned around they produced some new oddity. The war in the cavern was another such thing. She had felt the tides of their Auram manipulation even up above, even with the searching eyes of the evils at the escarpment top boring into the earth.

“Right, you lot,” Pezvak scowled abruptly and turned away from the water. “Get to fortifying that room and recovering your strength. There are enough horrid things down here to occupy us while they are down there.”

-Very true, she silently agreed, turning away from the invisible death that now spread across the floors, walls and even ceilings.

Walking back into the hall, she saw the other Undren were gnawing away on a spider they had scavenged from somewhere. Shaking her head, she made her way to the back wall and sat where she could see the door. Weirdly, she was less concerned about the Undren and the Ghoblan than her own compatriots. There were three different tribes here, not counting her Cloud Arrows tribe. Ragash, Jelas and another mute Ur’Inan called Rukuala were all from the Thunder Mountain Tribe to the south. Huljas and Garlock, the two warriors, were from the Red Severing Hides Tribe while the remaining one, Ugrash, was from the Green Moon Tribe. The latter two were about as famous for being troublesome as the Gloomy Crags were and now that they were unsealed, she could tell all three warriors were stronger than she was. They seemed content to go along with the Ur’Sar for now, but whether they would be content to go along with Pezvak’s leadership in the interim…

Pezvak came to sit down beside her, followed by Luz a moment later. The Great Hunter didn’t even look in Sana’s pack and just sat down with it against the wall beside him and began to recover his own strength.

Everyone else seemed content to occupy their little niches of the hall, so she started to flip through the tome that Sana had passed her. It was a genuine spell book, the kind that tribes valued as an important treasure. Even the Thunder Mountain tribe would not look down on it. Had Sana not handed it to her without a care in the world, she would absolutely not have had it out now to look at it, but the damage was already done there.

Garlock in particular, who seemed even stronger than Huljas, had been looking at her pack for half the trip after they had been healed.

“Should have advised them not to heal those three,” Luz muttered next to her.

“They know good from bad, not make scene yet,” Pezvak said quietly. She could feel his own Auram cloaking them to give them some privacy, just as Huljas was now cloaking the three warriors.

“What rank that spell book?” Luz asked, probably to change the topic.

“Fifth Circle,” she said, flipping through it. “Only have seven spells, but all combine to make one big spell – one of each main attunement: Force, Fire, Arcane, Corrosion, Water, Earth and Vitality.”

“How fast for you to master one?” Pezvak asked.

“All of them are pretty comprehensive,” she mused. “I can cast any of them just by putting mana into the tome but…”

“That is inflexible,” Pezvak nodded.

“Yes,” she agreed. “If I have time, I can probably memorise two of them. The imprints are comprehensive.”

“Vitality and Earth then,” Pezvak said.

She nodded at his assessment. Vital spells were rare and Earth based spells were hard to resist but could be controlled much more cohesively than the others. Comprehensions on vitality were also important for healing and recovery. What could heal could damage… but what could damage could also heal with the right understanding, and this was a complete imprint, without any of the messing about and ‘codifying’ that the ancient mages who had made this place preferred to use to ‘protect’ their knowledge. Curious, she flipped back to the inside of the book to see if the original owner had left a name. The author was lost, the front cover too damaged, but sure enough, inside it she found a name which could be traced faintly in the common script from the world above – ‘To Timion Belmont, Good Luck in your studies’. Below that, someone had written ‘Donated, Mn16 - 239 Aug. //1721 AD Aug. 14th’

Sighing, she turned her attention back to the vital spell and started memorizing the symbols and their connections.

By the time she re-focused, the Ghoblan had also come in and built up a small shelter from scavenged rocks and masonry within which they were munching on some spiders and a few other odd things they had scavenged. The three warriors had set up a cook fire with mana-fire of all things and were roasting spider legs. It was probably not a smart idea given the light it was giving out and the flickering shadows, but certainly they would not listen to the three of them about this so she could only let that confrontation pass and hope that Arai and Sana’s arrays were up to the task. The Undren had come over and were busy… well, only Eshu was speaking. All the others had had their tongues cut out and their souls damaged in some way. Unless they got to 5th advancement, they would be mutes for life in all likelihood.

She left them to it, and politely refused the offered bits of spider when they eventually arrived – even cooked she didn’t like them. The toxins in them might be mellowed and diffused, but they tasted of puke no matter what you did and were the wrong combination of slimy and crunchy. Pezvak was also sat nearby, keeping an eye on the door while inspecting the metal sword that Arai had lent him.

“It is a good sword?” she asked, scooting over to sit beside him.

“It is best sword I ever see,” he muttered turning it over. “Blade pristine even if all the rest a bit battered, absolutely not simple thing – made of metal but not from here I think.”

“From the age before, from the world above,” she murmured.

That was another proper treasure.

“It just sword though, nothing very fancy about it,” the Great Hunter sighed. “It cut rock good, cut monsters better, but only as good as person wielding it, not like Chieftain’s blade.”

She looked up as a Ghoblan sidled over to them, bringing more spider. She frowned and was about to shoo them away, when Bright Fungi-Seeker squatted down and unwrapped three black glass daggers for them to see.

“I take these when no one looking, not good idea to let other Orcs have them.”

She resisted the eyebrow twitch that came with its insult, intended or no. Ur’Inan were not orcs. Orcs were an invention of the surface world by and large, and a short hand for ‘Orcnéas’ who were to their kind as ‘Defilers’ were to the Humans who had given rise to them.

“What are they?” she made to pick one up and then hissed in shock as she felt the creeping unease that came over her when she reached out for it.

“Tainted thing, how come here, concerning. Was in cavern, associated with Ur’Inan of the Blood Beast tribe that Defilers corrupted,” Bright Fungi-Seeker murmured.

“Why show them to us?” she asked.

“Some trustworthy, some less so, I leave with you because the Chosen Children trust you with old weapons,” Bright Fungi-Seeker muttered before standing up and scowling, taking the spider back with it.

She watched as they gesticulated a bit about the spider and then the two of them then started to eat the spider. When she looked back at the package, Pezvak had stashed it in his own bag without her even registering it.

“I worried about those three,” she said after a moment, eyeing the three warriors. “I think they are stronger than Arai and Sana realised…”

Pezvak said nothing for a moment, but she could see that he was also somewhat uneasy at the behaviour of the three warriors.

Eventually he just said, “They are, also, more importantly warriors in big tribes. They have skill chopping things up, but they not lead much, not in place like this.”

“And yet they still want to lead,” she grumbled.

Pezvak just sighed softly while she noted Luz was just looking uneasy.

The first ‘incursion’, if you could call it that, by some other creature came about an hour later – probably drawn by the scent of cooking food in all likelihood. Several long-legged spiders skittered through the hall outside and tripped one of the traps, filling half of it with swirling mists. The spiders were instantly rendered into greenish-purple mist and after a few minutes, the trap reset leaving a dozen ichor smears.

“Ghoblan step on that, not know how die,” one of the other two Ghoblan muttered.

After that, they saw an incursion every few hours or so. A slime died the same way that the spiders had, something else they never saw just became a red smear across one wall while a cave centipede thing became a very crispy delicacy for those who cared to sample it. The main reason for foraging was recovery in any case, but as it turned out, only the Ghoblan and one of the Undren were insane enough to move past the wards and explore the nearby tunnels to get various things. None of the rest of them were dextrous enough to bypass the wards in the tunnel mouths that Arai and Sana had placed. As such there was something of a divide within the group, because only one part were able to gather food, while the other half – the other Ur’Inan not of their group – ate a lot.

There were problems there as well. As the others recovered, it became clear that while Ragash was about her strength and Jelas and Rukuala were around that of Luz, all three warriors were actually comparable to Pezvak. As a result, as time wore on, and the pair did not return from the depths, Garlock in particular became bossier. Pezvak was nominally still in charge and she, as an ‘actual’ shaman, had some weight, but even that was fraught as they suggested several ways she could ‘help’ them get stronger and recover quicker – the commonality being that they might involve vigorous sex. She refused each time, having absolutely no interest in such a thing in this context, but with each refusal they got a bit more annoyed. Ragash and Jelas also refused them pointedly. At that point Huljas finally stepped in, but thereafter the nine Ur’Inan were neatly split three ways, with Ragash and Jelas never leaving Rukuala alone.

The other bone of contention among the other tribes was the identity of Arai and Sana. Ragash seemed to accept that they were Ur’Sar, but none of the three warriors seemed at all convinced, claiming they were firstly too well garbed and secondly would have surely volunteered to take offerings from them once they were ‘healed’. To this, she could only shake her head and wonder if the pair might not bury those three with the dead down here before the Defilers could do it. It was a reminder in a way that some people were just assholes, even after what they had been through and survived through sheer good fortune.

It was something of a mercy then, when the actual attacks started – for all that their ragtag group lacked strength compared to what was down here. Fortunately, the wards kept much of it at bay, and once she grasped the Vital Flare spell it turned out to be excellent for mopping up lower level spiders. By the time the first spider mother appeared and started throwing male spiders past the majority of the wards, all issues with ‘offerings’ or the ‘identity’ of their saviours were cast aside in favour of not dying.

“Maker’s cock, these things are smart!” Luz grumbled as he shot another male spider that was in the process of trying to scrub out a ward.

Pezvak just said nothing and swatted two more of them with the sword, easily cutting them and leaving Garlock to chase after a third, cursing as it tried to get into their side hall.

And they were aggravatingly smart, she had to agree. It was a reminder that outside of fungi and the thankfully quite rare slime pits, spiders were queen here. Peering around the doorway, she sent another cast of Vital Flare towards one of the tunnel entrances and was rewarded by seeing a nigh-invisible Spider Mother slink out of the way.

“I take it that thing is going to keep…” she trailed off as a second Spider Mother appeared then a third.

“By the nameless,” Pezvak scowled as they watched the third spider mother start to move into the hall.

She sent a vital flare at it, which it actually parried with a forelimb, shaking it and regenerating the damage in a matter of moments. Thereafter, it started to pick its way daintily across the floor, avoiding all the trap arrays that thousands of its brood had presumably died to.

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~ ARAI – PRACTICING APPLIED FUNGI LORE ~

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Arai hauled herself out of the pit and spat water, dragging three large, sealed stone containers full of Moon Mushroom fungi spores with her. Her greeting was a male spider blurring out of its shadowy stealth and trying to stab her in the eye. Sighing, she grabbed it and crushed it in her fist, refining its Golden Core as she sat on the edge and swept the room while she waited for Sana to appear.

“What a horrible…” she eyed the scrip on her wrist which cheerfully informed her that it had been five and a half days down there.

All around her, a steady rain of spiders pattered down from where they had been congregating on the ceiling, dropping into the water with plops or hitting the ground – no arrays triggered.

Sana came a few moments after carrying three more, pushing herself out of the water, deflecting a late falling spider or two in the process.

The sound of falling spiders finally stopped after a full ten seconds.

“I see you are all still alive… mostly,” she said eyeing the group who were peering out of the hall door – which was now half blocked up with stone.

“You took a long time,” Pezvak frowned, peering over the doorway.

“There were more slimes down there than expected,” she said, avoiding shuddering.

Eyeing the three warriors, who now all wore spider carapace armour, crafted from two spider mothers that had been dragged into the hall and butchered, she noted that they were all slightly stronger than Pezvak.

“I see you all managed to recover,” she noted.

“Yes, we recover well, Ur’Sar,” one of the warriors said eyeing her.

“…”

Sana just rolled her eyes and accepted what remained of her gear back from Pezvak, ‘ignoring’ the comment. She surreptitiously pretended she hadn’t noticed anything either. Their trip through the waters below had given her some time to think on the ‘nature’ of why Defilers were dangerous. Observing the group here, especially the three male Ur’Inan warriors, she was certain that not all the scars of their experience were ‘purely’ traumatic. Defilement could mean a whole lot more than just debauchery after all.

Passing her by, Sana gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Something to watch out for there,” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“Indeed,” she agreed, not looking up from where she was adjusting the ties on the barrels to make them easier to carry out of the water.

“I see your trip into the depths got you what you sought?” Ragash asked, eyeing the six small stone barrels.

“What is in them?” Rusula said, also coming over.

She could see the strength of the young shamaness had gotten a touch stronger in the last few days.

“What we need to make the pig demons weep tears of blood,” Sana said blandly.

“Yep,” she nodded, not elaborating further. If they knew the rocks were full of Eldritch Moon Mushroom spores, they would probably run screaming, based on their earlier assertions about their dangers. She could sympathise with them, because at one time she would have been running right there with them.

Thinking back on it, she had no idea exactly how good the symbol, and their physiques as a whole, were at counteracting the Eldritch Moon Mushrooms. Without it, this whole endeavour would have been futile. Thinking back to the things that that accursed pig demon had tried to put in her head, how it had twisted every memory she held dear in that instant and nearly corrupted all of them… It had taken things so sacred to her she barely dared touch them, memories of their mother and…

-By the time I am done with you, I am going to make sure you worship this daughter as a bringer of plague and calamity for all eternity! she swore grimly.

Sana gave her a look, but said nothing. Probably some of that had filtered through the link between them. In any case, she could tell her sister felt just as strongly about it. Even now, over a week later, with the mantra working tirelessly and the symbol sheltering her ‘sanity’ in this matter, she was still not rid of some of those scenes.

They had to backtrack a surprising distance to actually find some pig demons and their enslaved minions, during which time she became more and more certain that the lingering hooks of their brief captivity were with those they had rescued in more ways than she had initially grasped. Having seen what she had so far, she had made no comment on anything the women might have experienced, but they were only four, the Undren and the three Ur’Inan. The Ghoblan had also been in the cages but all the others had been outside from what she could recall of the scenes. The Undren males were skittish and their judgement was poor – to the point where the female Undren was nearly shepherding them like a pack, with the help of the Ghoblan, surprisingly enough. The three male Ur’Inan were not exactly insubordinate, but they kept trying to one-up Pezvak and make suggestions, clearly unhappy that they were going back towards the Defilers and not deeper into the darkness.

Exploration along the edge of the network of tunnels showed that that very path east was cut off by collapse or significant flooding then collapse, so the group they encountered were quite some distance to the east of where they had entered, ensconced in a miniature outpost which was doubling as a mine where they were extracting a grey, glassy mineral from the walls of a large cavern.

Sana stayed behind with the group while she went forward with a smaller jar, one of a dozen that they had brought up as a set within one of the stone barrels. The goal here was not to kill Defilers but to spook them enough that they fled back to one of the main camps. The enslaved themselves, who were doing much of the mining, were all male. According to prisoners, Ragash mainly, the pig demons brooked no possibility of revolt among those they captured. Females might keep their minds if it suited them, to elevate the torment they experienced. The lucky male prisoners were just tortured to death or eaten alive – the unlucky ones would have their minds taken somehow, in a way none of those in their group understood, turning them into something akin to a meat puppet driven by its basest desires and whatever instructions the pig demons commanded of them to the best of their effort until they keeled over dead. At that point they would be butchered and used as food for the small pig demons. The whole thing was beyond horrible frankly.

Dismissing those thoughts, she crept up behind a small pig demon that was molesting a mindless Undren some distance from the rest and used the leaf to pierce the top of the container and splash spores and Yin Qi rich waters from the depths over its head. The Yin Qi stunned it for several seconds, allowing the spores to contaminate it. It twitched and jerked, collapsing behind her as she skulked through the crude mine.

She had repeated the process some twenty times before finally slicing the jars top right off and hurling the rest of it into the main room where the Soul Foundation overseer was. It hit the far end of the hall, near a corridor, and she watched as the various small pig demons roiled around at the unexpected noise. The big one got order, but the damage was done. The spores had been walked all over the cave and several of the early bodies had also been discovered, just as she hoped.

Retreating back, she saw that the first one she had contaminated had already started to grow white veins and a few small mushrooms out of its head.

Arriving back, she signed to Sana that they should fall back. Behind them, there was a scream of rage and terror from the Soul Foundation pig demon overseers who discovered the instrument of their doom. There were some explosions and flashes of green fire that flickered around tunnel corners. The battle raged on for a while before finally falling silent. Moments later, dozens of terrified pig demons, mostly small ones, scattered down the tunnel they were in. Her soul sense caught spores on many of them, slowly burrowing into their bodies and corrupting them. Several of them were shrieking and banging on skin drums.

“What… did you have in the container?” Ragash hissed in shock as they hid in a side passage watching the chaos unfold.

“Retribution,” she shrugged, which got a bunch of glares from the male Ur’Inan and discontentment from the others.

Sana stepped in and added, “You know the mushrooms that give spores and turn people into zombies, the grey and purple ones that look like penises?”

“…”

The Ghoblan stared at the pair of them as if she had just declared they were crazy people while the Undren hissed and chittered uneasily in their own tongue… The Ur’Inan gulped and looked at the stone barrels…

“It’s fine so long as you don’t break them,” she said blandly. “They are made out of the qi-repelling stone.”

“Void-Stone,” one of the Ghoblan muttered.

One of the barrels was in fact Soul Setting mushrooms; they also had a whole barrel of Dead Sage's Lantern spores suspended in a thick soup of Yin Qi Water. The other three were all Eldritch Moon Mushroom spores. There was no point in telling them that they had huge quantities of the spores suppressed in their bloodstreams as well, held there by the oppression of the symbol as an absolute last resort.

-Ignorant people don’t panic after all, she thought to herself, and this way they would at least treat the barrels with a bit more caution than they had been until now, which was its own little revenge in a way for all the leering the three warriors had been doing.

Probably she could have told them earlier, but now there was no backing out and as Sana had pointed out, the three warriors were easily able to lug a barrel apiece, but had no way to damage them in the slightest, making it a good way to keep them under some kind of control.

“You have a means to harvest those… things safely…” Pezvak muttered as he moved beside her.

“You thought we were joking before?” she asked, giving him a sideways look.

“…”

“What we do now?” Rusula whispered moving up beside her.

“Now we wait for a bit,” Sana said softly.

“Yep, now we wait for a bit, unless you want to become a zombie,” she added. “Curing that sealing they put on you was one thing. Curing you from soul-seizing mushrooms, not a thing we can do…”

They waited half a day in the end before following them out. This time the rest of the group were more than happy to stay where they were, so they could move much more quickly. The hall she had seeded originally was now a miniature colony. Moving forward from there, they soon started encountering dead pig demons who had been fleeing. The enslaved were just dead where they had been working. Most of these corpses they used to seal off the exits in and out of this section of the tunnels.

-A pile of a dozen corpses with Moon Mushroom spores is not an easy barrier to overcome in a hurry unless you’re either of us, she thought grimly.

Keeping it secret from the others was mainly to avoid panic – it was clear that all the other groups had a deep dislike and fear of the Moon Mushrooms from their earlier conversations. Now though, she was starting to wonder how useful that decision actually was, made in haste as it had been. She was pretty sure the Ghoblan at least suspect something, even if they had also decided to keep it mum. It played into a wider problem as well, that she was starting to feel… pulled somehow. When she mentioned it to her sister, Sana was pensive for a while before agreeing.

“Yeah, the more I think about the nature of these creatures, the more uneasy I become,” Sana added. “Almost since we entered this place, since we were first exposed to the banners?”

“Defiling can have a lot of meanings,” she agreed quietly. “Not to mention the symbol…”

She looked inwards at the symbol in her Sea of Knowledge, which was working away as it always did.

“Yeah, the faster we can get away from here the happier I will be,” Sana muttered.

Finally, they arrived back at tunnels they recognised, close to the cavern town. Drums pointed ahead of them. She made the group fall back again, leaving the barrels, which were for outside, with them. A short distance on, they also divested themselves of all their gear and garments bore the leaf knife and one spear blade. Primarily, that was a precaution they had decided to take to avoid having all their gear contaminated with spores.

Heading back towards the cavern town, they found the door open. Inside, there was a hive of activity, much as expected. They had made it maybe a third of the way through by sneaking when a paralysing sense locked onto them and a desiccated, horrifically tattooed pig demon that she didn’t recognise appeared in front of her with a blur.

Her qi destabilized as it grasped her neck, its claws digging into her flesh and drawing blood. A ghastly, invasive sensation flowed through her body, further shaking her control over her unrefined qi, flowing together around her heart and trying to imprint some vile symbol on it. Its horrid tongue licked her face, and when she spat blood at it, it licked that up for good measure.

“You are very pretty… I will enjoy breaking you, little human,” it purred in a seductive tone that something that vile had no right to be able to use.

“I… won…der…” she rasped back.

It frowned and then shook its head… looking confused. She could see white veins on its tongue where it had licked up the blood. A moment later white veins started to appear on its fingers that gripped the bleeding wounds it had inflicted on her neck. Its beady eyes protruded with shock as thousands of spores present in her blood, no longer constrained by the symbol, set to work.

“W-what…” it managed to croak as white veins slowly spread across its twisted piggy face…

It staggered drunkenly back and tried to stand, but its qi was too chaotic. The miasma field around her was spreading slowly now. Sana, who had merely been frozen, just stood there, looking amused as she walked forward and kicked it in the chest, sending it sprawling.

“You are an abomination…” she hissed in its face. “I will enjoy watching your entire people become mushrooms… It’s the least I can do for all those you tormented over the aeons!”

“N…no-!” it half rasped… “Great…Father…Ner…Ner..o…n-!”

“Please… I… have… no… I… no…” the spores finally got into its meridian system and the Immortal Realm pig demon crumpled to the ground, its qi rapidly feeding the contagion within it as its lingering words hung in the air ominously.

The surrounding pig demons, who had been laughing and hooting and jeering and making all kinds of obscene gestures, were frozen now, struck dumb for several long seconds.

She sighed and all of them broke and fled in every direction. It was futile though: it was over for them as soon as the two of them entered the cavern, really. She strolled forward towards the side complex, making it nearly halfway there before three more immense soul senses suddenly fixated upon the two of them.

Frozen there, she watched as the miasma field around her reached two metres in diametre, feeding off the dribs and drabs of qi she was doling out to it. Both of them had several billion spores in their bodies after all – most of some small colonies’ eruption sealed within their fleshly bodies. All this would do was prolong the inevitable.

The three other old Immortal pig demons appeared in the air, well beyond the edge of the miasma field… as far as they perceived it. One, who was wearing that abomination of an artefact made of flayed skins, made a weird symbol and a lance of vile purple fire flashed towards her. The miasma field shifted and devoured the qi, forming a natural dispersion barrier as it sought to transform everything that wasn’t ‘the colony’… into it, and qi that wasn’t ‘of the colony’ was no exception.

“If a twelve star Spider Queen couldn’t do monkeyshit against this, what do you three evil things expect to achieve exactly?” she said mockingly, sending the thought out with her soul sense.

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~ BRIGHT FUNGI-SEEKER – WATCHING CHAOS UNFOLD ~

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Bright Fungi-Seeker watched the two humans who had managed to cage entire Eldritch Moon mushroom spore clouds in their bloodstreams bring entirely deserved death to the terrible false ‘Jash’ that idiots had actually deigned to give a name to – Ubri’Khund.

Her tribe held a special gift, a truly special gift – immunity to any toxic spores. This included, by happenstance, immediate exposure to the dreaded achievement of the Ancestor Moon Rat. Even so, she still did not dare enter the hall. There were other dangers there that could claim an unwary Ghoblan and it was a long walk back from this one’s memories to get to the point you had been. Especially down here, where the paths to the Low Kingdom had been sealed ever since the calamity.

Beside her, Wicked Stick and Spider Gnawer both watched, quietly impressed with the versatility of the pair. The others had all stayed back – they had claimed they were just going to check a little way up the corridor, and none of the others would care too much about them. They were smart, but not wise, even the Undren Eshu. Also very unobservant, even the Undren. Eshu was not a Seekerling or a Dream Seer and while the Undren liked to think they ‘knew’ mushrooms, compared to the Ghoblan they were just foolish dabblers.

Their tribe had been in the Starless Depths long before the humans came. They had walked into them in the early days of the world, through the Uncreated Place, seeking new places to dance, new skies to wander and new deeps to delve. Their people were as old as the eldest of the elves.

“They not come from west,” Spider Gnawer said after a while.

“No, not-nice elves not tolerate those two – have plucked disaster at root very quick,” she agreed.

Only the Ghoblan with truly old lineages, like them, knew that the oldest elves had a fastness down here. Even the Humans had missed it. Those elves weren’t nice elves either – although even that idea was a bit contradictory.

“Maybe not think of elves too much,” she suggested after a moment’s more thought. “Pointy ears have good hearing.”

“True,” Wicked Stick muttered. “Defilers aside, this not terrible land. Would be shame if one of them tree-hugging old carnivores decided on a whim that this was planar realm that only needed elves in it.”

“Where they come from then?” Wicked Stick mused.

“Not our problem,” she shrugged. Her survival instincts were, she liked to think, pretty good, even for a Ghoblan. She had only died nine times in the last century after all.

They watched the mushroom-borne carnage for a while longer before Wicked Stick spoke again.

“This like living reminder of old saying – ‘No matter how terrible you think are, humans always able to one up you if given running chance’.”

“That elves come up with such an arrogant saying not surprising. Elves give birth to Tarantis and Akalaraltis, Ur’Khal give birth to Orcus the Defiler yet always want to see others as biggest problem,” Spider Gnawer observed sagely.

“True, true,” they both nodded.

“Humans do make this place, then try to put whole place back together again rather than flood it and leave to rot,” she observed.

“Still think humans have special talent there. Certainly, they always do seem to find more inventive ways to make things worse, thinking that mess other people make couldn’t possibly happen to them.” Wicked Stick muttered.

“This why you not do stupid thing like make Eldritch Spore Plague Great Achievement,” Spider Gnawer nodded. “This why Ghoblan peoples still living despite all stupid things we do: we only offend other races’ Ancient Ancestors. Only Humans arrogant enough to offend their own Ancestors and think they, unlike anyone else, get away with it. Not even Elves that arrogant.”

“More than once anyway,” she pointed out.

“Ah, this true, easy to forget about ‘that’,” Spider Gnawer shuddered.

“Sorry, should not have said,” she murmured.

“It fine, important to acknowledge, even if remember very dangerous thing. Even here, world has eyes, even if they somewhat stunned. Remind them of that, might decide to cut losses, then make everyone else have big headache. One way or other, end very miserable,” Spider Gnawer said, looking down and then up almost involuntarily.

They watched on in silence as the Elder Ubri’Khund, true spawn of the pit, possessing bodies blessed by the creatures’ evil ancestors, failed to escape the twisting strength of the pair. They fell, denying their circumstances to the last, as their ilk was wont to do.

“A deserved end,” Wicked Stick said as the last one succumbed.

“Defiler, Devourer or Deceiver, all three deserve to be ruined,” Spider Gnawer agreed.

They watched the scene for a few more moments before turning back and heading towards the others.

“Humans are indeed scary,” Wicked Stick said eventually.

“Not just humans, old things have eyes people do not see,” Spider Gnawer mused.

“They marked by the Changer,” she nodded, having felt its holy pull around them to varying degrees since they crossed paths with the pair.

“Mmm not so simple thing…” Spider Gnawer said absently. “Their bodies touched by Changer – old thing, new thing touches soul together, makes miracle, makes calamity is flip side of same thing. Spins on edge, Changer is the moment things grow still. That piece of the world root, dead though it is, is of the All-Giving as well.”

“All-Giving is the scariest,” Wicked Stick muttered.

“No, Original Song is scariest,” Spider Gnawer murmured.

“Wrong,” she muttered “Red Mortal is the scary one.”

“Ah – forgot about that monster. Red Dust Mortal is indeed the scary one.”

“All of them is scary,” she suggested after a moment.

The pair also gave her a faint echo of another set of old powers. It was funny really, because for all that the descendants of that place were calling them ‘Ur’Sar’, these two were closer to the conceptual realisation of those acolytes of the Red Mortal’s principal disciple than anyone she had seen in many millennia, despite only have the most tangential links to the Strength of Sar.

She avoided looking at the two shadows, young and old, that stood in the tunnel watching them leave. Certainly, the other two saw them as well – but down here it was possible to see things, and Ghoblan who had been around a while all of them knew when to say nothing, know nothing and walk on, looking the other way – not to mention, the old shadow held a lantern.

When they had passed out of sight, Wicked Stick finally sighed and said, “That scary… was-”

Spider Gnawer clipped her across the back of the head and she fell silent.

‘Mother of Sky, she sees the dream, speaks truth to make all peoples weep – such a marvel, such a hope, such sorrow…’ she let the ancient prayer echo in her mind.

They met the Undren, Eshu, several hundred metres later. She was also peering down the tunnel, looking very nervous. Undren had excellent instincts, and their old Ancestors had offended quite a few things they shouldn’t have. It was little wonder she was on edge now.

“Well?” the Undren hissed at her as they made it back to the rest of the group.

“You don’t want to go there… very bad… Probably we have to find other way out. They come back when done,” Spider Gnawer shrugged.

“When you say very bad…?” the pretty Ur’Inan called Rusula asked looking worried.

“They mean you die, big regret, become one with world you never escape, everyone stop calling you smart, beautiful Ur’Inan Shaman with big boobies, call you stupid orc instead. Then probably burn your body and dissolve your bones,” Wicked Stick snickered.

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~ ARAI – ELDRITCH NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES ~

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Whatever it was that was preventing them from moving, the ‘Principle’ of the pig demons or some other manipulation, finally faltered as the last of the demons, the one wearing the revolting robe, succumbed to the spores and miasma. Had they fled immediately, they might have lived a while, she supposed, but their determination to try to attack them for those few seconds had meant they died those pathetic, unwilling deaths.

Making her way through the complex, she found the symbols, hidden within the altars themselves, and destroyed them with the leaf one after another. When the final one was sundered, the vile warping, seizing sense of defilement on her qi finally faded. The evil old things had actually super-charged it, trying to use it to disrupt the miasma itself, for all the good that had done them.

She brought the spores in her blood back under control with the pressure of the symbol and her Myriad Elements Qi. The Sundering Intent helped enormously as well, able to make tiny pockets for the spores to be held in, while not actually harming her in any way.

Sana looked around dubiously. “This is going to be annoying to move them through.”

“Absolutely,” she agreed, looking around the cavern.

Without the massive force of the initial detonation from the colony, the spores didn’t sit in the air for long unless deliberately agitated. Looking around, she could see they were already beginning to settle. The miasma from the spores infesting the bodies had not yet set in either, though once it did, this whole hall would become a vast new colony within a matter of days. Probably the pig demons would try to annihilate it by then…

“Hold on,” she said, pausing and staring at the various demon elders’ corpses with narrowed eyes.

It didn’t take long to lay down a bunch of trap arrays, simple single symbol explosive ones, near the elder’s bodies with various activation states – proximity, delay, vital force and so on. Anyone coming to mess with the bodies or having ideas of incinerating them or sealing them would hopefully get a very unpleasant surprise for their trouble.

“That almost seems like overkill,” Sana observed as she put the last few down.

“You think so?” she said.

“Nah, not at all. Just thought I should say it though,” Sana said.

“So, do we try to take them out through there or leave that as a last resort?” she mused, considering the main hall.

She watched as Sana swept out her Maelstrom Intent and gently shifted the spores out of the way, much as they had the dust. Trying it for herself, she found that while it took a quite a bit of focus, it was not unmanageable.

“So it’s doable-”

“But we have to use the symbol as much as our Martial Intent,” Sana finished for her.

After cleaning off the spores, they recovered their gear and made their way back to the group, who were waiting, rather impatiently to her, a mile back in the tunnels.

“We will likely have to go further west,” she said as they all exhaled in relief to see them return.

“Yep,” Sana said, lugging up one of the remaining barrels. “The cavern is now somewhat awkward for you, although in good news, it’s now utterly impassable to the pig demons as well.

“So what now?” Garlock scowled. “You killed a bunch of them and we are stuck in here?”

“Why we not go north initially, when we days ahead? Tribes have big warcamp there, welcome Ur’Sar with open arms,” Ugrash agreed.

“We already be close to it. If leave then, rather than waste time on-” Garlock trailed off.

“…”

Everyone trailed off and looked around uneasily. She kicked the wall as the creeping sense of something trying to seize her qi crept back.

“I thought you destroyed those banners?” Huljas growled.

“So did we, courtesy of the four 6th or maybe 7th advancement old demons we had to kill in that cavern,” Sana said with a glower.

“West... south, east…” she spun, feeling the subtle shifts in the grasping feelings.

“Nothing to the north…” Rusula observed dubiously.

“…”

“That seems easy then, we go north?” Ugrash said.

She just stared at them, silently, for a long moment. “You big advancement warrior for your tribe, I not think you that stupid,” she said, deliberately mimicking their bad La’taan/Easten.

“She right,” the Undren female scowled. “This say trap more clearly than hole in ground with spikes in it and small spider tied up on far side of it.”

“So I guess we are going out through that cavern after all,” she sighed.

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~ RUSULA – FLEEING THE ANCIENT TUNNELS ~

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Not quite sure what to expect, Rusula hurried after the pair, followed rapidly by Pezvak and Luz. Everyone else traipsed after them with varying degrees of trepidation. The exception, she noted, were the three Ghoblan, who scarpered to the front with some haste and basically started walking in Sana’s shadow.

As they made their way through the tunnels, her sense of unease started to grow… At first it was a weird niggle, brought on by the horrid sensation of her mana being disrupted. But the closer they got to the cavern, the more that faded away to be replaced with a different kind of disruption, a gentle pull on her mind and a whisper at the edge of hearing.

Both Arai and Sana paused and then she felt the air shift around her as Sana’s Auram Manifestation started to influence the surroundings. A moment later it was followed by Arai’s.

Glancing at them all, Arai said briskly, “Stay within two metres of us at all times, don’t get ahead, don’t go to the sides, and don’t touch anything. If you can walk in the air and not disturb the floor, do so. Carry those who can’t.”

“Carry?” Huljas scowled, looking unhappy.

She focused and managed to barely push herself off the ground, stepping forward. It was like walking in thick mud, and deeply draining. Pezvak grabbed her by the arm and shook his head. Nodding, she let herself be grasped by him, along with Luz. Ragash walked through the air with a bit more confidence than she had while Jelas scrambled onto her back. With a scowl, Huljas scooped up Rukuala.

“You two, take the Undren that we can’t,” Sana said pointing to Garlock and Ugrash.

She noticed by way of passing that Eshu was now perched on the barrel on Sana’s back while the three Ghoblan had all somehow managed to find purchase on Arai. The scene would have been bizarre, had she not seen the grim expressions that all three Ghoblan had.

Sana stared at their organisation for a moment and then sighed, shaking her head. Dropping back to the ground, the Ur’Sar walked over to a wall panel and put her hand against it. There was the sound of shifting, cracking stone and the whole two by two metre panel was dragged out of the wall by her.

“I knew these would come in useful for something,” Sana muttered as she punched two sets of notches through the ends of the panel and threaded the rope through it.

They watched as she imprinted a complex five symbol array onto the surface of the slab then pointed to the three warriors. “You three take that. Everyone else not confident in their stamina hop on it.”

“Why we carry it, not fight?” Ugrash said with a sour look.

“What will there be to fight,” Arai said with a sigh. “We will take the front. I’d say don’t go faster than us, but there’s little chance of that.”

She glanced at Pezvak, who was still holding the two of them and standing in the air. He just shook his head. “I can support the two of you easily enough for the time being.”

“This is a lot of precautions for some mushrooms,” Jelas muttered as she hopped onto the slab, followed by Ragash and Rukuala then the other Undren. Eshu stayed perched on Sana’s pack while the Ghoblan stayed on Arai.

She found it hard to disagree, wondering what they had unleashed in the hall that meant they couldn’t walk on the ground. The Soul Setting Mushrooms were famous to a point, but fire would clear them out quickly enough.

“Here,” Arai tossed her a talisman which she caught and then pushed some mana into. Immediately, the niggling sense of being pulled receded from being very distracting to merely annoying.

She nodded in thanks as they set off again.

“Be as subtle as you can with the air walking… We will use our Auram Manifestation to provide much of the shield. We have to cross the hall and the following corridors fast – without disturbing anything,” Sana said as they continued down the corridor.

“If you disturb something. You. Will. Die. Is that clear?” Arai added, sounding equally concerned.

“We understand…” Huljas frowned. She could see he was annoyed at the repeated assertions.

Seemingly happy to ignore his annoyance, the two Ur’Sar set off again.

Rusula had to concede that the whole thing was a bit comical – right until she passed the first of the pig demons. Eshu hissed in shock and suddenly went very still. She fancied she could see the matted fur of the Undrenfolk female actually raising. Looking at it, it was slowly inching its way along the floor. Its skin held a strange pale discolouration that gave it a weirdly blotchy look. The creeping sense of unease also started to return, but in a different way as they made their way along the middle of the corridor. By one of the side tunnels, she saw a larger pig demon, hunched over, hundreds of white veins growing out of it. In the corridor behind was a pile of corpses that almost seemed to glow faintly in the gloom.

They moved fast now, and the gloom was getting less… gloomy, keeping about two metres off the ground and following after Arai and Sana. Below them, she noted there were little white motes drifting in the air, like ash. They seemed to be settling out of the air, but quite a few drifted in the space a foot or so above the floor. If they had been walking, it would have been impossible to avoid them, whatever they were.

Garlock, Ugrash and Huljas were sweating, not from the heat either. They were terrified of something and rising higher with every pace they took.

“Ah, so this is what they did,” Pezvak muttered, sounding equal parts horrified and awed.

She pushed ahead with her own soul sense, which she had been basically neglecting due to the disruption and because she was being carried by Pezvak, and could only hiss in shock. They entered the hall a moment later and immediately rose. The scene before them was like some bizarre nightmare world where fungi were taking over. A swirling morass of green-white spores were drifting just above the ground. The ruined buildings of the cavern were coated in them and here and there. Around smaller clusters of actual fungi on corpses were small mirages. She focused on the nearest one and the whispering in her ears became more.

Walking above the plaza, her eyes were drawn to the largest fungus which was maybe the size of her head. It was growing out of a shrunken and desiccated pig demon that was covered in tattoos. Beneath the spores she could now make out thousands of pig demons, collapsed where they had been standing, their faces all locked in a disturbing rictus of horror and despair.

“Oh,” she murmured softly, finally understanding what this was.

The ‘Eldritch Spore Plague’. One of the great calamities of this place.

The three warriors were mumbling prayers to their old ancestors. On the slab, Ragash was hugging both Jelas and Rukuala – all three of them trembling in fear. The Undren were also pulled together, quivering. The Ghoblan on other hand looked grim, but were not panicking…

She was glad that Pezvak was holding her firmly with his hand, not just his mana all of a sudden. The disruptive properties of the miasma fields were meant to be without compare in all accounts she knew of them from the tribe’s shamanic records. As they made their way on, she saw three more large pig demons off to one side. All three were forming faint miasma bubbles, their destroyed bodies growing multiple mushrooms.

“A fitting end,” Pezvak muttered.

“It is...” she agreed. The scene was hypnotically horrifying – beautiful yet deadly.

Around them, she could see the shifting border of Sana’s manifestation as it gently brushed the spores away. Arai’s swept those ahead of them back the way they had come somehow, rolling them gently before them and ensuring they didn’t kick up too high.

Finally, they passed out of the hall and down the broad corridor and she could breathe out again.

“By the Maker-!” Luz gulped as they entered the second, much larger hall.

Here, the Ubri’Khund—the pig demons—were dead in the thousands. Some had collapsed but most were just frozen where they stood—whether in acts of flight, caught in debauchery or just going about idle things.

“Is this a mercy or not?” she muttered, eyeing the enslaved, who were everywhere.

“They had already lost their minds,” Ragash replied uneasily from the slab.

Crossing this cavern, they entered a third, filled with much more sturdy and fortified buildings; again in the Undren’s distinctive blocky style. Here, once again, the occupiers had tried to flee from the spore plague, but however it had been spread, it had overtaken them so rapidly and totally that any and all attempts to forestall it had been utterly futile. Slaves were thrown away meaninglessly to miserable fates. Prayers at bloody shrines rendered worthless, and banners... she shuddered and had to look away from those.

Arai gestured and the Ghoblan hopped over to the platform at last. She watched as the Ur’Sar drifted down to the nearest banner and shredded both it and the vile three-headed statue that it was held up by, before moving to the next… and the next.

“Are those… dr-rums?” Luz, who she noted was shaking like a leaf, mumbled.

Listening, she realised she could indeed hear drums and horns from ahead of them.

“When we get out, take the platform and immediately break for safety,” Sana instructed them without glancing over. “You should get on it too, or go to Pezvak,” Sana added to Eshu.

The Undren considered for a moment, then hopped onto the platform.

Arai re-joined them, having destroyed all the banners. The mana disrupting effect still remained, she noted, but it likely came from outside as much as here. Arriving at the exit, they passed through a chasm as the sound of drums and roaring and horns became louder–

The emergence from dark gloom to storm-lit overcast half-light was remarkably abrupt. They were at the base of the escarpment she realised, mid-storm-wave no less, as the thunder roared and the lightning struck down hither and thither at pillars. However, that was not what took her attention. Tens of thousands of the dreadful Ubri’Khund were mobilising, pouring out of the jungle-swamped ruins in all directions. Below them were a dozen platforms, each holding grotesque, withered and shrivelled pig-headed figures. Ahead of them, emerging from the ruins of a large vegetation-coated pyramid, nine towering trolls carried a golden platform that was ringed in a façade of life-sized golden figures engaged in all kinds of foul acts. Upon it was a large altar around which nine old demons were bowing, worshipping a three metre tall golden statue of a muscular, almost beautiful figure with three pig-like heads.

“Up, get clear,” Sana sent the command to them through her Auram Manifestation and Pezvak immediately started to race towards the nearest of the most easterly pillars. Behind them, the platform also rapidly rose as the others followed after them.

She saw Arai suddenly freeze in mid-air and then a miasma field rippled out of the Ur’Sar as she fell to the ground…

“What in the…” Pezvak hissed as they fled even faster.

The nova of spores that exploded out from the woman made her realise, finally, what was going on.

“They had the spores INSIDE them-!” Luz almost sobbed.

“How is that even-!” she mumbled, too shocked to even process it.

“Ah, shit,” Pezvak growled suddenly and she was flying through the air.

She crashed into the forest and then Pezvak arrived beside her as a bolt of green lightning split the air, narrowly missing all of them. Grabbing both of them, Pezvak hurtled up the pillar as behind her she saw a miasma cloud boiling out of Sana as well. Pezvak tossed the pair of them onto the top of the plinth and unslung his bow, taking aim not at the elders but at one of the trolls. She watched as the snow-white arrow hit a troll in the eye, killing it instantly. The platform wavered and the nine old demons casting were thrown off for a second time. In the intervening seconds, a veritable curtain of spores swept through the horde below.

The platform crashed down nearby and the Undren and everyone else scrambled off it. Below, she watched tens of thousands of pig demons succumb to the miasma like flies. The leaders on the shielded platforms on the ground were spasming and the elders on the great gold platform were screaming at their trolls to retreat even as the trolls themselves also succumbed and slumped down paralyzed.

“The seizing power of their demonic father’s great totem cannot fight the miasma,” Eshu, who had arrived beside them muttered in awe. “Truly the Great Achievement of Ancestor Moon Rat is without compare.”

“Certainly I will look at the Spore Plague somewhat differently after this,” Luz mumbled, shuddering as he picked himself up.

“You not stand here like idiots gawping at big style,” Bright Fungi Seeker rushed past them. “You running’s now or have much longer than you like to contemplate how die death worse than dying!”