After arriving at the cavern housing the fracture portal and the crystal that was absorbing mana from said portal they first settled down for a proper rest. After quickly taking care of his own issues, that is cleaning his armor and weapon while making sure that Lucky got enough pats on his head for his help, Sam stood up and took a quick tour of the chamber.
Aside from the portal on the stone platform and the pedestal, there was nothing interesting.
His next stop was the pedestal. He leaned closer, taking a look at the minuscule runes inscribed on the pedestal holding up the ball-sized dark crystal. Focusing his Mana Sense on the runic sequence, he tried to memorize how the mana flowed in them while his hands flew over his notebook, copying down the runes.
Seeing as the rune sequence, aside from being rather small, wasn’t hidden, it only took a cursory inspection to find the heart rune. It was a ghastly thing, but even so, it wasn’t shining with evil intent as Sam expected.
As he savored the mana pulsing from the unique rune, he felt dark determination and purpose tinged with great amounts of bloodlust. Thus, he concluded, hopefully correctly, that whoever placed the pedestal here had more purpose in mind than mindless slaughter.
That meant they were smarter than the run-of-the-mill demons. Which in turn could mean good or bad things…
Either Sam could talk them out of it, or they would become an enemy that is wicked hard to defeat.
With the runic sequence stored for later, as he planned to submit that and his report about this entire situation to the organization he had become part of, he straightened out, his back letting out a satisfying crack, and turned to the team.
“Ready to continue?”
Dan nodded silently while putting away his own notebook, no doubt filled with information about his experiments with fire and ice magic.
Katie simply jumped to her feet from where she was petting both Puffball and Lucky at the same time. The two animals whined in synchrony, but after a few seconds, they also joined their masters.
“Are we going to deal with the fracture?”
Sam nodded and stepped closer to the portal, wanting to see the details. As soon as his hand neared the swirling mass of mana, a notification screen instantly popped up.
[You and your team found a mysterious fracture by chance, however, somebody already interacted with it!]
[Fracture: Demonic Taint]
[A fracture containing demonic taint. However, somebody made sure that the taint didn’t leave the vicinity of the fracture. Enter and maybe you will figure out why they did that. Don’t enter and wonder forever about what could have been…]
[Time Limit: Until the crystal is filled]
[Charges: 7/7]
“Well, that’s interesting…” he mused out loud after reading the screen.
Clarissa just raised an eyebrow.
“There is something weird about this fracture. And it seems we have seven chances to figure it out.”
She stepped closer and reached out with her hand. Sam waited until she read the notification screen too and for her take on what was written there.
“What did you get from the pedestal?” she asked, clearly still thinking.
Sam shrugged. “Not much. It gathers specific mana and fills the crystal with it. I would need more time to find any purpose in that sequence.”
“Do you think somebody wanted this hidden?”
“So, they set the crystal to absorb any leaking demonic mana?”
“Yes. Probably some of it leaked either before the crystal was placed, or the crystal is not perfect. The eagles probably reacted to the demonic treants. If we get rid of the crystal and fracture powering it, then the eagles will probably also leave…” she said confidently.
Sam knew it wasn’t that simple. He suspected the Storm Eagle was a guardian of the mountain and valley and they received a revelation from a ‘god’ (the system) to do a little cleanup. Probably, if Sam and his team hadn’t arrived, they would have spent who knows how much time fighting the treants as the demonic plants grew stronger thanks to the leaking magic. Then, sometime in the future, they would be defeated and the monster horde would be unleashed on the world.
He had a few ideas, just based on tropes and previous quests about what was happening, but he didn’t dare to voice them. The system could be rather mischievous. He wouldn’t put it past the system to change the parameters of the fracture based on his guesses.
Still, Clarissa and the others were waiting for his verdict.
“Honestly, this could go in so many directions,” he said with a small smile. “How about we see what this is about?”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Dan and Katie nodded immediately, and Clarissa followed after them with a sigh. Lucky pranced around a little, then with a small jump returned to his shadow while Puffball gracefully jumped on Dan’s shoulder from where he jumped on Clarissa’s head, “Hey!” and landed smugly on Katie’s helmet.
Sam shook his head, gave his small team a last once over, and approached the fracture portal.
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On the other side of the portal, they found themselves in a much more natural cavern. The only difference was the size.
While the one they used to find the portal was wide enough that a few people could walk next to each other comfortably, the cavern system in the portal was big enough that there was an actual forest growing in it.
Everything was dark and covered by murky fog. The ceiling and some of the walls were covered by fungus and moss that glowed in an unearthly blue color, providing some limited illumination for people who dared to enter.
Just like the walls and ceiling, the trees were also covered by fungus, looking more like mushrooms with bark than any normal tree that one could find anywhere on the continent. Still, they had trunks, branches, and crowns covered by extremely dark-colored leaves. Which in turn hid their enemies from them.
Because as soon as they got into tentacle strike distance of one of the trees, they saw countless eyes open and zero on them.
“More of those moss monsters… ugh…” groaned Clarissa.
“Dunno, I think they’re kinda cute…” came the chipper answer from Katie who was already warming up, the familiar wild yellow energy coursing through her armor and sword.
Sam saw that Clarissa was about to answer, but thankfully the moss monsters hidden around the trees decided that their team needed some hugs from their tentacles.
And the battle was on…
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Thanks to their familiarity with the monsters, they quickly removed the ones that were hidden around them, leaving them with an empty clearing covered by disgusting pieces of moss and soil, mixed among the burned foliage.
However, all of them noted that the moss monsters inside the fracture were much stronger than outside. They still tore through them, mostly thanks to Dan’s fire magic, but they had to spend a little effort.
This showed them that the later mobs would be much stronger.
And lo-and-behold, they were once again surprised by the game.
From the direction of the other end of the cavern, covered in darkness and fog thanks to the distance came a crazed battle cry, causing the entire team to jump into readiness, weapons raised and magic charging up.
Sadly, once again, thanks to the thick mana in the air, his Mana Sense could only tell him the most basic information about the monster. It was fast approaching and basically saturated with demonic mana.
“Prepare yourself!” he exclaimed, raising his sword while the others got ready too.
Apparently, there was no end to surprises this day.
Out of the fog and darkness came charging three disheveled demons, clad in tattered armor wielding equally tattered and rusted swords. Sam would have despaired at the sight if it weren’t for their empty eyes.
The eyes were empty of any thought. There was only hunger and rage in them.
“They're crazy! Katie go! Lucky, distract the last one!”
Katie acknowledged his order with a battle cry and the next second, the clash of great sword and demonic blade echoed around the cavern as she clashed with the one at the forefront of the rabid charge.
The second one was instantly engulfed in an explosion of energy as the thermal bloom illuminated the cavern for a second as if the sun itself shined down on them. The last one took only a few steps before Lucky pounced on it from the side, sending it tumbling away, letting out roars as it hit the ground hard.
Sam didn’t know how much of that was anger and how much was pain, but he didn’t want to wait to figure it out.
He raised his own sword, concentrating briefly. Demons had an innate magic resistance that would need to be broken before they could be defeated. Granted, these were ravening berserkers, lacking any capacity to use their defenses aside from any instinctual usage.
Wind mana swirled around his sword, creating a rather sharp spear that started to let out a keening noise as the ever-sharp wind blades came into existence. With a little flex of his will, he added a minuscule amount of shadow mana to it, the dark color almost invisible in the thick wind mana.
“Katie, disengage!”
Katie did as she was told, unleashing a crescent of yellow energy, causing the arms of the demon to lock up as energy not unlike electricity coursed through the raging demon. In the next breath, Sam let loose the spear of wind mana he created and watched as it instantly crossed the distance between him and the monster, skewering it just under its throat, leaving a baseball-sized hole in the torso as his magic construct exited in the back only to continue forward and finish its journey in the ground creating a short groove.
By the time the body of the first demon hit the ground with a meaty thud, Katie was already on the other demon, Sam was charging up another spear while Lucky kept taunting and distracting the last one.
In the next few minutes, the remaining two raging demons fell one after the other, leaving the team once again alone in the cavern.
They gathered the drops, first from the moss monsters, then from the three demons. They dropped a lot of unrefined gold but no reagents or materials. However, after searching their tattered armor, they found the remains of a journal. Before it fell apart, finally giving in to entropy, Sam managed to copy down a few sentences that were legible.
“Anything, Sam?” Dan asked as they gathered around a hastily created table thanks to Sam’s earth manipulation skills. “If I remember correctly, you speak several languages…”
“Yeah, elven, dwarven, and sand people… There are no Demon Language 101 books in the library…” he explained as he kept going over the short few sentences trying to make sense of them. ‘Well, with my connection, there is a chance they would have helped, but demons are a pretty taboo topic…’ he mused.
They spent a few minutes staring at the text before giving up on it. Sam stored it in his inventory in a rather nice box and they gathered their wits and tools and headed deeper into the fracture.
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The deeper they headed, the fewer moss monsters they met, and the more rampaging demons tried to make mincemeat of them with a few demonic treants ambushing them. After the first few scared the crap out of them, they made sure to burn every visible tree they came across.
More often than not, it was actually a treant.
Once, funnily, they caught a demon hiding in the crown of a simple tree munching on a poisonous-looking mushroom. It made pretty funny noises as it fell, fully on fire.
Apparently, you can’t actually screech with rage when your mouth is full… Who knew?
Two hours later, they were sitting in the middle of a clearing, using Earth Walls raised by Sam as stools and tables.
Arranging the many pieces of texts looted from the berserker demons.
They couldn’t read them, but there were several symbols that looked like numbers that allowed them to put them in a hopefully good order.
“Still no idea?”
“Well, at this point it’s about what happened to them here in the fracture or maybe before,” Sam spoke up thoughtfully as his eyes kept taking in the text written in an unknown language. The other Sam knew the language but used it so little that barely any of that remained in the memories he inherited. He thought he recognized a few words, but without anything or anyone confirming his guess, he couldn’t really say one way or another. “My best guess is we’ll find the answer at the end of the fracture,” he finished, looking in the distance, trying to peer through the obscuring fog and shadows.