Just as Meriocu promised, it was not even a week before the field camp received a visit from the first outside Sera had seen since arriving there. A strange shape approached from the east, neither ship nor plane but soaring through the sky as if it were the latter. It had no wings like a plane would, and its shape wasn’t hydrodynamic, so it wasn’t like the classic flying boat common in fantasy settings. Instead, the airship reminded Sera more of a bullet casing with the top and bottom flattened, the former to accommodate a deck on the top and the latter for landing.
There was no visible way for the ship to move itself, but at this point, Sera wasn’t expecting magic to be entirely logical. It probably moved entirely via magic of some sort. The airship came in for a landing a short distance from the camp smoothly and silently, with stubby landing gear extending from the bottom just before it touched the ground. Now that it had landed, Sera was able to get a sense of its scale. It was larger than a truck. At a guess, it had to be at least thirty feet long and tall enough to stand inside.
A door opened up on the side and a woman stepped out, at least six feet tall and with ash-gray skin. She had slanted eyes with yellow irises and hair that was a vivid yellow, more saturated than would be natural on Earth. Her clothes were loose and blowing, with strange, pale-green designs on them, and on her back was a sheath with eight rods sticking from it.
“Welcome to our little camp. I’m Tiriana, and this is Sera, my…apprentice, I suppose,” Tiriana said to the newcomer, though her own description came as a surprise even to Sera.
“A pleasure. I am Cadenza, an adventurer with the Aegis Company. I’m here at the behest of Sophonike Hippodamides. I believe your name was among those included in the report on this region?” the woman said, an elegant lilt to her voice that sounded almost as if she was singing. Tiriana seemed to react to the name of Cadenza’s sponsor, but didn’t comment on it.
“That’s right. I’m kind of the group’s representative, mostly because no one else can be bothered to talk to other people. Let’s head to the common room to talk,” the elf said, leading the way. Cadenza left the door to her ship open, either confident it wouldn’t be stolen or simply forgetful.
The trio entered the largest building in camp and Tiriana picked a table and sat down, with Sera sitting beside her and Cadenza taking a seat opposite.
“Would you like anything to eat or drink before we talk?” Tiriana asked.
“I’m fine, thank you. I’d like to wrap this up quickly so we can move onto the sites you found themselves. First, have you found any potential locations for a field camp closer to our places of interest? Specifically, the military base and the…fortified turtle,” Cadenza asked, saying the last bit as if she didn’t quite believe the words were coming out of her mouth.
“The region around both sites is mostly plains, so anywhere would probably work, but I’d recommend setting up atop the fortress itself. There’s plenty of space up there and it would be much easier to defend than a camp on the ground,” Tiriana replied, shifting to business immediately.
“And yet, according to your reports, the most likely to be hostile group in the area also happens to have brought down the fortress when it was still working. Wouldn’t they be able to attack us the same way?” Cadenza asked.
“Currently we think they got in through a lower entrance that was blocked when the fortress fell to the ground. There are secret entrances, but according to our cleric, Vivi, most of them aren’t usable, so there’s not many ways in right now, and we can guard the ones that are passable. It would be hard for anyone to climb up the rock faces, too, since they’re mostly smooth and the stone was reinforced heavily, so it would be difficult to create handholds,” Tiriana explained, apparently ready for the question.
“Seems like you thought of everything,” Cadenza replied with a smile. “How far is the fortress from the military base?”
“Not far. A few hours by flokka.”
At that point they started going over the minutiae of logistics, base setup, cooperation between the existing group and newcomers, and other topics Sera tuned out. She was really only present because she had nothing better to do, so Tiriana had dragged her along. Instead of listening she put extra focus into her ongoing attempt to condense a core inside herself. She was working on it at essentially all times, but she felt like she made more progress when giving it all of her attention.
“-Sera?” The mistwalker’s head snapped up when she heard her name, finding the other two standing up.
“Sorry, I was just working on my core. What up?”
“Cadenza wants to check out the sites from the air. Are you coming?” Tiriana asked. Sera hurriedly stood, eager to find out what the inside of an airship was like.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Yeah, sounds good.”
The trio walked back to the airship and stepped inside. Its interior was slightly more cramped than Sera had expected with a good portion of it to the rear of the door inaccessible, but the cabin portion was open enough to stand, just as she expected. At the front there was a seat for operator, which Cadenza settled into after leaving her weapons in the rear. Sera and Tiriana took one of the several other seats behind it, arranged similarly to those in a car with a lane through the middle.
It seemed that the startup process wasn’t instant, so they had a few moments to talk.
“Wouldn’t something like this be really useful for exploring?” Sera asked Tiriana when they were both seated.
“They’re hard to use this far out. In the inner ring, the ambient mana is enough to run on, but further out they need condensed mana crystals. The mana is too thin here to even make crystals, let alone run something like an airship, so it we’d have to pay a mint having them shipped out here just to use it,” Tiriana explained. That certainly explained why everything was so low tech- they could only use magic tools that could be powered by a person.
“I guess fossil fuels probably aren’t an option, either…” Sera mused, to which Tiriana gave her a questioning look. “It’s what we used to power vehicles on Earth. A kind of power source made out of plants and animals that are buried for millions of years.”
“Buried? We’ve certainly never found anything like that in Omichlódis,” Tiriana replied.
“Probably some weird effect of how land ends up here. Nuclear probably wouldn’t work for something this small, either…I never really thought about how hard it would be to make easily used vehicles without fossil fuels. I think you can make something similar by processing certain plants, but I don’t know how, and I don’t think it was all that good for the environment.”
Before Tiriana could say anything more, the airship lifted off the ground and accelerated rapidly towards the west. A journey that had taken them days on foot took only minutes by airship, so they were soon looking at the fortress from the air, from which it looked like a mere plateau. If she hadn’t seen it from the ground herself, Sera never would have realized it was mobile. Cadenza put the airship into a slow loop around the fortress and then stood, apparently leaving it on autopilot.
“Let’s go up top for a better view,” she said before leading them to a ladder with a hatch at the top. She and Tiriana went up first, with Sera in the rear. There was an odd lack of wind on the deck despite how high up they were, and Sera was disturbed to realize the deck had no railings to prevent anyone falling off.
“There’s a barrier,” Tiriana said after noticing her distress. She pushed her hand against the air and it stopped near the edge as if touching glass.
“That’ll take some getting used to…”
“It looks like there’s even less left of the town than I expected,” Cadenza noted, looking down at the fortress. “Was there anything significant in that keep? I can’t imagine there’s much to find anywhere else.”
“Only the controls for the whole turtle, which are useless without power. But there’s an extensive tunnel network under the surface with quite a few workshops that are fully intact. We’ve only seen a couple levels, and we didn’t have time to fully map them out or check every room and hallway,” Tiriana explained.
“There was an elevator we couldn’t use without power, too. If we could find some way to activate it or at least make use of the shaft we’d probably be able to access a lot more,” Sera added, keeping one hand on the barrier for reassurance.
“Mm, I remember you mentioning the tunnels in the report, but I didn’t realize they were so large. We’ll have to bring extra adventurers just to explore them…which certainly won’t hurt given the security considerations, anyway. Do you know how the elevator was powered?” Cadenza paced the deck as she spoke, seeming to be speaking mostly to herself.
“A large core. It was utterly destroyed, unfortunately, and my best estimation is that it would have been equivalent to a battleship’s core, so it would be…difficult to replace, to say the least,” answered Tiriana.
“I think even Master Hippodamides would find it difficult to procure one of those, but would it be feasible to hook in a smaller core to get other functions working?”
At this point Sera was only keeping up by assuming cores were somewhat similar to nuclear reactors, but she had absolutely no idea how they functioned. Did they produce mana somehow?
“Sorry to interrupt, but how are cores different from crystals?” she asked, hoping the segue wouldn’t be too disruptive.
“A core is an artificial copy of the crystals that form inside of mages and monsters. They draw in mana from the environment and condense it for use- they can be used both to make power crystals and to provide power. It takes a pretty big one to function in mana this thin, though,” Tiriana told her.
In other words, they weren’t like reactors at all. They were more like…solar panels, or lightning rods, gathering energy passively. At least that was one question answered.
“Where were we? Oh, right. Their power grid works on close enough principles that I think it would be doable. I can only guess at how many functions we’d be able to get working with a smaller core, though,” Tiriana continued. “If nothing else it should prevent the underground area from turning into a dungeon, or allow us to clear it out if it already has.”
“Would that not have been obvious when you entered before?”
“It’s been over a week since then and the fort was disabled weeks ago. By the time a new core arrives, the tunnels will have been accumulating mana for over a month, and they’re too large for me to ward alone.” Tiriana shook her head gravely, aware that this was a potential deal-breaker. No one wanted to sleep on top of a dungeon, where monsters could attack at any moment.
“I think that’s a risk my client will be willing to take. Since the area already has a high danger rating he already knew he would need to hire out multiple parties for Aegis Company, so that doesn’t change much. If it comes down to it we’ll just set up the core and then clear out whatever monsters are leftover,” Cadenza replied, to which Tiriana looked a bit relieved. “Let’s give that base a look and then head back. I think the fortress alone will be enough to get a full-scale research expedition approved, though.”