After retrieving the mana crystal inside the cyclophant- its purity was low, but it was the size of Sera’s fist and apparently that meant it had some value- the party left the battlefield behind and continued on. Since the cyclophant’s minions had cleared all the mist-warped animals nearby out they were able to proceed for some time with no more fights. As always, the dungeon’s traps slowed their progress, but only Rinnie and Tiriana were involved in clearing them, so despite the life-or-death circumstances Sera found herself growing bored.
“I was expecting this to be a bit more…perilous,” she admitted to Vivi as they walked along in the center of the group. Layla stood ahead of them like a statue, staring straight down the hall, while Cadenza was still keeping watch to the rear.
“That’s how it goes. Long periods of nothing happening and the occasional fight for your life,” Vivi replied as she shook her legs to wake them up. “Even in a dungeon the monsters aren’t totally endless. A room has to be empty for a bit before the mana settles back down.”
“It feels like we’ve been down here for days but we’ve only cleared what, two rooms and one and a half hallways? I guess I shouldn’t complain though, since I’m not doing a whole lot right now,” Sera said with a shrug.
“No, I understand how you feel. I spend most of my time channeling one or two miracles and that’s not really something I have to do consciously, so…it can get pretty boring. I’m happy to be useful, though!” Vivi grinned, flashing the map she was ever-so-slowly filling out. It seemed to depict anything the cleric had seen with her own eyes, which wasn’t much so far.
A pained shriek came from down the hall and both women looked over in concern, but it was just a mist-warped that had fallen into a trap. Actually, fallen was the wrong word. It looked like Tiriana, knowing where the magic traps were, had made a wall of ice to funnel the monster into a trap where it died with minimal fuss.
“Huh. Guess that’s one way to deal with them,” Sera said to Vivi. Time passed as their forward party members cleared the hall, and eventually they came upon an antechamber with a sturdy looked double door on the other side. Across the ceiling was a series of inscriptions running between the two entrances to the room, but a meter or so of the formation was scratched out just short of the other door. From the far side of the damaged portion a fine mist seemed to be leaking from the inscriptions, dispersing into nothingness quickly.
“Is that…?” Sera asked, looking at the mist.
“Mana. It’s so concentrated that it’s visible to the naked eye,” Vivi answered, eye wide with surprise.
“Looks like we found the damaged conduit. This shouldn’t even be visible, it’s only appearing so that the fault is identifiable,” Tiriana said as she examined the inscriptions.
“Doesn’t look like we can fix it right now. We’ll need to stop the flow of mana from the secondary core first.” Cadenza crossed the short chamber and examined the door. “This is enchanted, and it’s receiving mana from the core directly. We’re not getting through it by force.”
“Why would the secondary core have better defenses than the primary one…?” Rinnie wondered, rapping her knuckles against the sealed security door.
“I think this would just be a normal door without power. They were relying so heavily on enchanted defenses that without them we were able to just…walk on through,” Tiriana explained. “Tracing the connections…it looks like this door will only open on its own if we meet the programmed criteria, but there are two other locations connected to it. They might be emergency overrides for if there’s ever no one that can open the door the proper way.”
“We passed quite a few doors on the way here. Can you tell which ones lead to the overrides?” Cadenza asked the elf, leaning against the door.
“Not from here. The remote connections are running along the walls, though. I’d assumed they were for the traps, there’s no reason for them to terminate at this door if that’s the case. It’s only a guess, but I think we can follow them to the overrides.” Tiriana tapped a finger against her lips as she spoke, scrutinizing things invisible to the non-mages in the group. Cadenza seemed to be following something with her eyes as well, but given that she was asking, she must not have had the same level of understanding.
“Guess the nachzehrer thought that was more trouble than it was worth,” Rinnie commented as she looked up at the scratched out section.
“That, or they wanted to maintain the element of surprise. If they took the time to secure both overrides there would be a higher chance of being noticed. This section wouldn’t have activated until the main core was offline so the locals may not have realized it was damaged until it was too late. So…they likely damaged this conduit and then rushed the security stations for the main core, then used the overrides or a captive to enter the core chamber,” Cadenza speculated in answer to Rinnie’s words. “Let’s backtrack. Tiriana, let us know when we’re near the right hall.”
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With no other choice, the party returned to the room in which they’d fought the cyclophant. Most of the bodies were still there, but a few appeared to have been dragged off somewhere and a few were other monsters had shown up to snack on the carrion in the party’s absence. None were in any way comparable to the cyclophant, though, and they were wiped out in short order by Rinnie alone from afar.
Once the room was clear, Tiriana followed along the walls, eyes focused. There were six doors on the sides of this room that had gone ignored on the first trek through. Tiriana passed the first door she came across, eyes tracking above and over the doorway. When she reached the middle door she stopped.
“It’s this one. Give me a moment to check the other side,” she said, jogging past the cyclophant’s corpse. Sure enough, she soon confirmed the door mirroring the first was the one they needed.
“Let’s take…this one first,” Cadenza decided, picking the one on the right seemingly at random. As usual, Rinnie and Tiriana took the lead, but it quickly became clear it wasn’t necessary.
“Strange. This floor has so many traps, but this hallway is clear?” Rinnie said a few steps in. “I wonder if all the side passages are clear. Maybe it’s only the direct path to the core that’s trapped?”
“Maybe…it looks like these rooms are offices and labs, so they might have wanted to keep the security measures minimal. It’s strange that they’d leave the emergency overrides vulnerable, though,” Tiriana replied as she peeked through the side doorways in the hall. The doors was smashed open from the inside, presumably by monsters that had spawned inside. While the contents of the rooms were in disarray, the desks and papers in the offices were identifiable and the labs had spell circles on the floor and walls.
“Don’t let your guard down. If they skimped on the hallway that just means they concentrated their defenses in the security stations themselves,” Cadenza pointed out, getting nods from Rinnie and Tiriana, who sharpened their gazes and resumed the search for traps.
At the end of the hall the party found another door that had already been smashed open, and visible from the door was a vaguely humanoid figure that had been twisted and bent out of shape. The two women in the lead took a look into the room but quickly turned and gave the all-clear.
“Looks like the monsters got to this room first,” Rinnie reported as the others caught up. Several golems were scattered around the room in pieces along with a few dead monsters- hideous mist-warped animals that might have begun life as hippopotami. There were shattered crystals on the floor and in emplacements on the ceiling and multiple damaged magic circles on the walls and floor, while any furniture in the room was smashed to pieces.
Beyond the destruction was a metal door that looked like it had fought a battering ram and lost, leading into an empty guard post.
“…we should take a close look at the defenses here before we head to the other side. It’s possible the other station’s defenses are still intact, so we may be able to learn something useful,” Cadenza told the group before they headed into the guard post to find the override they were looking for. Tiriana took a few moments to look around at the various controls, searching for the one they needed.
“It’s hard to tell with so little to go by, but I think a lot of this was for surveillance. These resemble outdated scrying tools that went out of use…centuries ago, at least,” she said as she looked over a bank of crystalline hemispheres mounted on a grid against one wall. Nearly the entire wall was dominated by them save for some inscrutable controls that would have been waist-high for the giants living here. Tiriana moved on from those and examined the other stations, but even to her the intended usage of most of them was lost. Fortunately, she only needed to trace the connection from the outside that they had followed her to pinpoint the override they were looking for.
“If I’m correct, it should be this one,” she said, indicating a panel with a thick metal cover over it. The cover was locked, and surprisingly it was a physical lock and not a magical one.
“Move over, I’ve got this,” Rinnie told Tiriana, pushing her to the side lightly. The scout took out a set of tools and got to work on the lock. Given her height it was slightly above the level of her head, so she was forced to work while craning her neck, but it was nonetheless open in seconds. Underneath it, however, was a series of complex inscriptions and a crystal. Peering over Rinnie’s shoulder- not terribly difficult with her short stature- Tiriana evaluated the actual override.
“Looks like it’s a scanner. Judging by the height and size…it was probably meant for scanning something small, rather than a person’s identity,” Tiriana said after a moment. “I think we’ll need to find some kind of token to activate it.”
“…nah, I got this,” Rinnie said after a moment while sighing heavily. She got several confused looks- everyone knew she wasn’t a mage.
“You know how to bypass a magic security system?” Sera voiced before anyone else spoke up.
“Are you saying you can do it with only basic magic…?” Cadenza asked skeptically from near the door. Sera noted that even now she had one eye on the room outside.
“I may or may not have a certain set of skills. Ones that I definitely acquired legally. Older systems like this only have a single layer of authentication because the designers never anticipated the key being spoofed. But basic magic is all about making mana look like what you want it to, right?” Rinnie explained cagily. Tiriana and Cadenza both looked at her as if she were insane.
“Yes…but how could you possibly know what the key is?” Tiriana asked. “As far as I know, the newer systems are intended to spot unauthorized copies.”
“They are. It’s just that, those copies don’t have to be physical. Because they never expected that anyone could do this,” Rinnie said as she placed her hand on the crystal, demonstrating rather than explaining. Tiriana’s eyes narrowed.
“What? What did she do?” Vivi asked in confusion.
“She sent a pulse of raw mana into the device,” Tiriana replied. “You couldn’t have…”
“Couldn’t have what? Scanned the device and read the feedback to figure out what it’s looking for?” Rinnie asked conjuring a metallic disc in her hand. “That’s exactly what I did.”