After two days of travel, Grobert stepped out of the fog lands. He looked behind him to see the tired and slightly struggling Anna behind him. Grobert didn’t bother to hide his smile. “Well, ya actually made it. Color me surprised.”
The woman had her hands on her knees and was taking a break to catch her breath. “Screw you, old man. You think that would stop me?”
Grobert didn’t answer her, turning back around to scan the thick jungle in front of him.
After recovering her breath, Anna approached and handed him the pendant. “I won’t need this anymore.”
He accepted the pendant without a word and tucked it away in a pocket.
“So, what now?” the girl asked as she too looked warily into the thick jungle.
She knew of the dinosaurs from her time in Grothlosburg, but not of the magical beasts that roamed this zone.
“Now we find a place to make camp. After that, I’m going to scout the area.”
“You’re not going to run off on me are you?” the woman asked as she followed him into the thick vegetation.
“If I were going to do that, I would have taken the pendant off you while we were in the fog lands.”
“…Oh,” Was all the reply he got.
“Unlike you humans, I keep my promises. Now be quiet, I need to hear in case something approaches.”
There was no more talking as the two cut their way through the jungle. Grobert was fairly covered in knives, the obsidian blades being sharp but not very durable for extended use. He did have one magically enhanced steel blade, but that was for fighting, not cutting through the underbrush.
Seeing as he had requisitioned so much material from Ashvale, Grobert had decided not to take even more in the form of good steel. There was no point in reducing the city’s supply of metal for some simple knives that would be discarded in the jungle. Not when the obsidian blades were just as useful.
Soon the pair came to a small stream. Grobert followed this stream to the base of a cliff where the water cascaded down from above to form a shallow pool at its base.
“Hmm, no cave but this’ll work. Probably better anyway, no animals will have made a home here.”
“Um, you expect us to make camp here?” Anna asked in confusion as she looked around.
Grobert only smiled. “Watch and learn.”
Before she could respond, Grobert drew on his power and plucked a one-foot cube of stone from the wall.
He continued doing this as Anna gaped on in surprise. Soon the cliff face had a tight stone hallway carved into it. Grobert piled the stones outside, forming a half wall that curved away from the waterfall to keep the area inside dry. The tight confines and sharp turns would keep most of the dinosaurs out as well.
Grobert continued excavating the tunnel deeper into the cliff until he got to where he wanted. Then he carved a small room and added a hole that exited through the ceiling for the smoke to escape.
“There. This will be safe for a night or two.”
“If you could do all this, why not just make one at the edge of the zone?” Anna asked as she stepped inside and looked around.
“The fog lands stone is very brittle, plus there are hot spots close to the surface. Unless you wanted to steam alive inside a cave, I wouldn’t recommend it. As for the jungle, it would have taken me hours to reach below the thick ground cover to reach bedrock. I needed to find an exposed vein of rock.”
“I guess that makes sense,” the woman acknowledged, dropping her backpack to the floor and sliding down the wall in exhaustion. “How long are we going to rest here?”
“A couple of days. I need time to set some stuff up and scout the area.”
Anna nodded as she slid sideways and set her head on the backpack. “I’m just going to take a nap then.”
Before Grobert could reply, the woman was asleep. He wasn’t surprised by her exhaustion, he had pushed her far harder than he should have just to see if she would complain. Surprisingly, she hadn’t. He shook his head and teleported some of the stones back to block the tunnel as he headed outside to search for signs of his prey.
When he stepped outside of the makeshift cave, he spotted his first target. It was one of the small dinosaurs that hunted in packs. And it was not alone. Three more were sniffing around the area, probably having scented Grobert’s decaying form. He had purposefully not taken a potion to see if it would attract dinos. Now that he knew it would, he could refresh his body. But first, he needed to deal with the uninvited guests.
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All four looked up from their sniffing, turning to face him. That action took a few seconds and was all the time Grobert needed. He teleported behind the first one and slapped it on the neck. He then quickly teleported to the remaining three, repeating the process.
All four creatures lay dead on the ground, their spines snapped from Grobert’s heavy-handed strikes. He made the corpses vanish inside a spell anchor and continued his scouting.
It was hard to find tracks in the thick undergrowth, but Grobert could still see the signs of passing dinos from the disturbed vegetation. There was no sign of the many-legged beast he had come searching for though. That was for the best, he didn’t want to have their camp set up in the things territory.
As he made his way back, Grobert teleported to the top of the cliff that housed their camp. From there he could see quite a distance into the jungle. A few very large dinosaurs poked their heads above even the treeline in the distance. But Grobert paid the plant eaters no mind. So long as he avoided them, they would likely not be a problem. What he was looking for were other cliffs or hills. He noted down a few on his rough map as well as a chain of mountains in the distance.
That would be his best bet for finding deposits of ore to complete his chain of teleporters. He gathered up a few dried sticks and teleported back down to the bottom of the cliff and headed back inside. It was hot enough in the jungle that they didn’t need a fire to stay warm, but he was sure Anna would prefer some hot food over the travel rations they had been eating. He knew he would.
A few days passed like this as Anna rested in the cave and Grobert expanded his search until he finally found the creature's tracks. He noted down the location and went back to finish the work on the telepad he had been working on during the night.
The ugly-looking device sat at the side of the cave, looking like some child’s hastily thrown-together science fair project.
Grobert moved over to his makeshift anvil, made from one of the stone blocks, as Anna watched on quietly. He took out some more metal and began hammering it between the two blocks to shape it.
“Why not just use a regular hammer instead of constantly teleporting that block above the other one?” Anna asked as she chewed on a piece of dino jerky.
The creatures tasted a lot like chicken or turkey according to Anna.
“I could. But I actually have more control doing it this way,” he answered as he summoned the block to an exact height above his ‘anvil’ and let it drop again.
When he was finally done, he was left with an eight-inch-long flattened bit of silver. He was glad the stones of the cliff were hard enough to work the soft metal. He took the bit of metal, used his magical blade to square up the ends, then carved a series of magical pathways inside using his teleportation ability to remove the internal material. He set the remains of the material inside his bag to remelt later.
After the bar was complete, he slid it into place inside the telepad. It was complete. He stepped back and looked at his creation.
“Are you going to finally tell me what that thing is?” Anna gestured to the telepad.
“No, but I will show you.” Not waiting for the woman to respond, he stepped onto the device and fed it some mana.
Anna scrambled away as the device started to whine ominously before Grobert vanished in a flash of light. When he appeared, he was standing in a fog-filled valley surrounded by red rocks. A very surprised-looking lizna greykin stood nearby.
It worked! Grobert did a little celebratory jig inside his head as he spoke with the lizna. It turned out to be one of the original lizna from before the Brotherhood’s attacks. After they had realized what had occurred, they came together to try and reproduce Norman’s potion. They weren’t entirely successful but they did manage to come up with an alternative, which allowed them to keep on living.
Grobert relayed that there were more lizna now, and they would likely come across them in the fog lands soon. He also had to disappoint the lizna, letting him know that the teleporter would not yet connect them back to Ashvale. But that the town had been rebuilt if they wished to visit.
The female lizna thanked him before scurrying off to notify the other survivors.
After the lizna woman left, Grobert bent down and popped the cover off of the teleporter. He adjusted a few settings and closed it back up. He would now be able to teleport back to the cave in the jungle. The device would need to be completely rebuilt before he could relink it to Ashvale. Part of the reason for that was the additional safety measures he had added to the teleporters.
With a barely discernable flash, Grobert vanished and reappeared back in the cave.
“You could have warned me!” Anna screeched as she heard Grobert return. The woman was stumbling about and feeling at the rock walls. “Damn flash blinded me.”
Grobert cursed internally, he had forgotten the flash issue. Chagrined by his mistake, Grobert handed the woman one of his potions. He would have to see if he could reduce the flash to less blinding levels. The gron could endure it, but human eyes were far more sensitive.
She drank it and soon her vision returned, then she tried to punch Grobert. He simply teleported out of her reach, causing her to stumble.
“My apology was offering you the potion. Don’t try my patience,” he responded flatly.
She flipped him off and went back to sit by her backpack. “I presume you are done screwing around with that thing?” she gestured at the telepad again.
“I am. Finish eating and we will begin moving further into this zone.”
“About time,” she muttered. “The faster I get out of this humidity the better.”
That was one of the things Grobert loved most about being undead. The lack of sensitivity toward heat and cold. As well as no more aches and pains associated with the changing weather.
After Anna finished eating, the pair packed everything up and left their cozy little camp behind. Grobert did fill the entire tunnel with the same blocks he removed. He couldn’t merge the blocks back together like an earth mage could but it would be almost impossible to notice the seams between them unless you were actively looking. Now if anyone came across the cave, they wouldn’t be able to get inside. Not unless they were an earth mage or a mage like him.
Grobert did one quick check to ensure no dinosaurs were nearby. Seeing that the area was clear, the pair set off deeper into the jungle. He would hunt his quarry after he dropped Anna off in Grothlosburg, he didn’t need her around to complicate his hunt.