Finally having reached the surface, the party trudged through the ruins of a once prosperous town in silence. Mostly because of the magnitude of what had happened here, but at least a little bit because Tiriana was still sullen about Rinnie realizing she could have built ramps at any time before she herself ever did. There were no sounds but the crunching of boots on gravel that had once been brick, the ruins having long had time to settle past the point of collapsing on their own.
While it was quiet, that didn’t mean there were no signs of anyone disturbing the rubble. In places it had clearly been shifted unnaturally, exposing spaces where the falling buildings had formed small bubbles of safety. Survivors may have thought themselves safe there…before they learned that their rescuers were in fact their captors. The rest of the ruins were in such a state that any intrusion was impossible to tell apart from any other pile of rubble.
“I wonder if they even need people alive to suit them up,” Sera remarked when the silence had begun to grow uncomfortable. “They definitely seem to have a bit too much interest in the dead to be taking them for no reason.”
“We really need a better name for these guys than ‘they’ and ‘them,’” Rinnie muttered.
“Revenants, maybe. Or nachzehrer…if they’re even using the dead to make more of themselves that’s more fitting, but maybe that’s just gratuitous German.”
“I only care how to kill them,” Layla said in annoyance; even Sera rolled her eyes this time.
“No one asked. Go find a can opener for that metal head of yours,” Rinnie sniped back, noticeably distancing herself from Layla.
“Repeat that to my face, you ambulatory salad.”
As the two rivals began arguing again, Vivi sidled up to Sera.
“I like nachzehrer. I don’t know what it means, but we’ve already got something called a revenant,” the cleric told her. “That’s what we call the bodies of warriors that fell in dungeons and reanimated.”
“A nachzehrer is a dead person that emerged from the grave to drag the living back with them. Undead body snatchers, essentially,” Sera explained. “For all I know they’re doing something else with the bodies, though. I hope they are, even. Ignoring how grotesque that would be, there’s no telling how many of them there could be.”
“Not enough to leave a rearguard here…but maybe that’s precisely why they didn’t,” Tiriana interjected ominously. “If these…nachzehrer…can make more of themselves using corpses, they might have prioritized grabbing every body they could find over everything else.”
“That seems like it’s assuming a lot about their intelligence, but I guess it could be instinct.” Sera almost tripped over a small mound of rubble when she looked at Tiriana to reply, but caught herself at the last second, continuing on like it didn’t happen in spite of reddening cheeks.
“I know Layla said they weren’t very smart, but they were clever enough to take the fort in the first place. We should probably assume that even if the rank and file don’t have much going for them, something or someone is directing them.”
With that unsettling thought now in everyone’s minds, the group approached the central keep, which seemed to be the only structure left standing. It had doubtlessly seen better days, though. As they trekked around its outer perimeter in search of a way in, Sera observed numerous pits in the stone where bullets had struck and the occasional twisted remains of something identifiable only as having once been a metal object. She assumed they were weapons judging by their placement on the walls above, but she couldn’t tell from here for certain.
Even the closest ruins surrounding the fort within a fort had been devastated by whatever battle took place. Like the hall the group passed through below, residue from spells was apparent in the way the rubble had been scorched, blasted apart, and frozen in equal measures. In some places it looked like the stone had been outright melted into a blackened material like obsidian.
When the doors eventually came into view, on the side of the keep facing the head of the turtle it sat upon, Sera wasn’t sure if ‘door’ was even a word that could be applied to them anymore. They were rendered into so many charred splinters she was making assumptions just by concluding she was looking at the remains of a door at all. Were it not for the empty hinges still attached to the stone doorway, she might have thought she was looking at a barricade that had been blasted apart.
Within was a narrow space separating the outer wall from the inner tower. The entire keep wasn’t all that large, with the walls being perhaps twenty meters on each side and the tower only half of that. If there was grass in the courtyard once it had been reduced to ashes now. Two defensive emplacements flanked the door to the tower within, both barely recognizable in their current state.
“They certainly fought hard to keep the nachzehrer out of this place,” Rinnie said with a whistle, examining the devastated entryway.
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“How did the keep survive a quake that toppled the rest of the city?” Vivi wondered aloud upon seeing it up close.
“It was enchanted the same way as the fortress’s foundations,” Tiriana replied.
“But not the rest of the town?”
“This structure was meant to be permanent. The rest were transitory, to be replaced when needed,” Layla said. “It must have contained something important.”
“No sense speculating when we can go in and find out.” Having said that Rinnie walked into the tower, followed by everyone else. The ground floor was nothing but a burned out husk of a room, a trend that continued for the next several floors. The tower had been of such importance to its owners that they fought tooth and nail to keep any intruders from reaching the fifth floor, any discernable purpose to the bottom four lost to the flames of war.
Although Sera recognized none of what she saw on that final level, she and everyone else were certain it must have been the control center of the entire turtle fortress. As they walked amongst the numerous strange devices they found that the layout at the very least was recognizable: a dais with its own set of apparatuses in the back and several tiers of control stations in front of it, all easily within view of the person at the back.
“I don’t see any labels,” Vivi pointed out in frustration, having been denied a chance to translate anything for the party.
“The residents probably didn’t need them. Some of these look incomplete, though…there are some blank surfaces here and there that are too big to be left for no reason. Magical interfaces that shut down along with the core, I’d wager,” Tiriana responded while she examined a control station more closely.
“Why put so much effort into defending this room if the power was out anyway?” Sera wondered.
“It was the most defensible location left to them. They had nowhere else to run,” was Layla’s depressing answer to that question.
“And they took them all in the end…” Sera muttered, looking around the empty room. A thought occurred to her as she remembered a conversation with Vivi days back. “Hey, I heard Vivi mention potentially moving in here as a new base, but the, ah, nachzehrer, were sorting the core components for a reason, right? What will we do if they return for them?”
“We can probably reactivate some of the defenses…and we already know that they don’t deal well with mixed groups of mages and warriors, so we can fend them off better than the inhabitants here. We just need to return with a full research team, and with a find like this, we’ll definitely be able to catch some attention back home,” Tiriana said. Glancing at Layla, she continued. “Oh, don’t state at me like that. All our names will be in the report.”
“…who do you even send these reports to, anyway?”
“There’s a few different news agencies that compile investigation reports from adventurers on the rim and publish them. We give them a summary of what we’ve found and information on what they can expect to run into out here and they distribute it to the sorts of investors that fund research expeditions so they can have their name on the next big discovery.”
“And they just…believe everything you say? What if you exaggerate?”
“The first thing they’ll do is send their own people to check out our claims, of course. Sending a couple people out here for a couple days on a courier ship doesn’t take very long.”
“Huh. I would ask about the ethics of building a base inside the research site, but…” Sera walked over to one of the windows, a narrow arrow slit that gave the people inside the tower a good view but made it hard to see in form the outside. “I suppose there’s not much left to preserve here, anyway.”
“We’re not exactly looking at an ancient burial site, either. This is an abandoned construct that’s been unoccupied by its builders for weeks at best that we took from a hostile occupying force, not an archaeological dig site,” Rinnie chipped in from her spot at another window scanning the surroundings out of habit.
“So…we’re done here, right? I don’t see anything I can translate or bring back,” Vivi asked, a bit dissatisfied at that. If Sera had to guess, she probably wasn’t happy that her main contribution had been ‘living flashlight.’
“As done as we’re going to get. I’d prefer to take some measures to keep a dungeon from forming, but the underground sections are too big for a quick spell to help much…” Tiriana replied.
“How do you think they were doing it originally? Did all the spells around the fortress handle it?” Sera asked.
“It may not have even been an issue for them. Just because mana works that way here doesn’t mean it was the same in their world. But yes, we would probably need to reactivate a lot of the spell formations down there to stop it from happening. The only question is where we can get the power. There’s no way we could get a new core into that chamber below even if we could get one out here at all.”
“If we can’t do it, how did they get the core there?” Vivi questioned.
“Teleportation, probably. It’s dangerous here because it’s essentially playing with the same forces that bring monsters to Omichlódis, but if they didn’t have that problem, it would be easy.”
“You’d think people that advanced would have at least had a backup power supply,” Rinnie snarked. Tiriana froze.
“Say that again.”
“What? That they should have had a backup?” Rinnie asked in confusion.
“That. That’s it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have a secondary core, even if it’s weaker than the original. The nachzehrer might have even been maintaining a presence here because they planned to reactivate it,” Tiriana explained in excitement.
“Why didn’t the people that lived here use it, then? Wouldn’t it just activate automatically when the primary core failed?” Sera asked her next.
“Not if the nachzehrer knew about it and disconnected it first. They couldn’t shut down the primary core without a way to bypass security or disconnect it safely while it was active, but if the backup was still offline, they could have physically severed its connections to the power grid. That might just be what they wanted the primary core’s fragments for. Those are just the materials they would need to reconnect the secondary core!”
Tiriana paced back and forth across the room as she spoke, as much to herself as to anyone else in the room. Excitement was plain on her face: the look of someone scheming to play with a toy they never thought they’d have.
“So we need to find that secondary thing first?” Vivi asked, looking a bit lost.
“No…we’ll need more personnel for that. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of the tunnels running through this fortress. We skipped some doors that might have been hallways, never checked out the areas the lift can access, and there’s probably all kinds of hidden passages. But when we come back…that’s going to be our first priority.”