--------
Karna was lounging on top of a half-crumbled pillar while leaning back on her elbows as the whiskers on her face twitched. ”We’re starting to get competition.” She announced while leaning forward and letting her feline features disappear. The Tressym part of her was very sensitive to spatial waves, which is why she had been keeping watch.
"I'm almost done. Are they coming our way, or just picking a random direction?" Arjuna's voice came out of an orb of light floating next to her head. His voice was accompanied by a sound of thunder and a loud whoosh of flames. They had created some more permanent communication devices with Arjuna for this trip.
“Hard to say exactly. They were headed towards our general direction but not towards us specifically. I don’t think they’ve noticed us. We just have bad luck as usual.” Karna speculated based on the heading of the ship she had noticed. She had felt their arrival and their general direction, but she couldn’t sense them anymore. Using a spell that could spot a single ship at these distances would’ve almost certainly revealed her own location. Assuming the other party was paying any attention, and you shouldn’t rely on the incompetence of your potential enemies.
Arjuna seemed to make a non-committal but displeased sound before the sound of a wall being broken by a heavy impact carried through. “Call the ship just in case.”
"Would the two of you stop yapping and help me!" Tsumi cried out in displeasure just as both she and an enormous hydra crashed through the outer wall of the ruined temple-looking building close to Karna. Tsumi kept cutting away at the hydra, but it wasn't working. As a seasoned mage and the Headmaster of the Academy, she was well aware of the usual weaknesses of hydras and had tried both cauterizing the wounds with fire, as well as freezing the damn thing, but nothing seemed to work.
“I’m staying out of that one. I hate Chaos Hydras. The buggers seem to be able to rotate their vulnerabilities and resistances. I’m powerful, but I’m also fairly specialized. Besides, this treasury isn’t going to loot itself.” Arjuna’s amused voice carried over the communicator orb.
“The last one did.” Karna pointed out with some amusement. Despite her tone, she wasn’t joking either. The last place they had looted had tried to make all the items inside vanish after they’d triggered a trap.
"Yes, well, I learned from that mistake," Arjuna said a little defensively.
“Disciple! Help! Now!” Tsumi commanded while slicing off another head with a beam of white light, while the hydra sent several beams of devastation elemental energy towards her, the elements were all different according to the head, and even Tsumi had trouble avoiding all of them.
“Fine, fine.” Karna’s eyes turned red and her fangs grew longer as she drew several bloody runes in the air. Suddenly a huge pair of bat-like wings made of blood appeared behind her back and struck against the hydra. Instead of hurting it though, the blood seemed to become absorbed by the hydra instead.
“Fat good that…” Tsumi started saying before Karna snapped her fingers, and suddenly the hydra bloated like a balloon before exploding into bits of blood and gore. The only thing that stopped Tsumi from being entirely covered in the stuff was the protective spell she had managed to barely cast in front of her. “…did. Well, I suppose that was more effective than I thought. You know, you’re much less fun now that you have enough power to be uppity, oh disciple of mine.”
“The blood of a Chaos Hydra is prime material for potions against…well, almost anything.” Karna just pointed out with a grin.
“Yeah, and now it’s splattered all over these ruins. And you filled the damn thing with whatever that red stuff was. I seriously doubt the blood is pure enough to use anymore.” Tsumi countered.
“You think injecting it with my blood made its blood less effective?” Karna lifted an eyebrow. Strictly speaking, the red wings were just a magical copy of her blood, but it worked just like the real thing.
“Fair point.” Tsumi gave a sigh of defeat and started casting spells to gather and purify the red blood scattered all over the ruined remains of some supposedly lost sect that had never even existed in the first place. Of course, the entire planet hadn’t even existed a couple of months ago, but the Expansion worked unlike anything else in the multiverse.
“A-ha! Finally!” Arjuna’s voice sounded over the orb again, and the sound of grinding gears and stone scraping against stone came through both the orb and the hole in the wall. “Come on. We have loot and plunder to acquire.”
"Just in time too," Karna said as the shadow of their airship fell over the ruins.
The two women walked inside the ruins and found the sealed door now open while the walls were covered in complex glowing runes. “The runes are a misdirection actually. The answer was purely mechanical.” Arjuna explained as he saw the two approach.
“Tricksy.” Karna nodded in approval. “So, what exactly did you do to anger the hydra?”
"I may or may not have tried a magical solution at first," Arjuna admitted without a shred of shame on his face, before leading the way inside. The vault was filled to the brim with stuff, neatly organized on countless rows of shelves. “Try not to touch anything. Most of it is probably trapped.”
Karna's eyes glowed deep blue for a moment before she nodded in confirmation. "All of this stuff carries the same curse. If you touch anything without breaking the curse, the spell starts to multiply the item uncontrollably, the copies obviously being fake. The mechanism isn't all that dangerous, but it will make things difficult as you'd be hard-pressed to find the genuine stuff. And if you try to dig through the fakes, you'll just increase their number with every touch."
“Tsk. Annoying.” Tsumi said while making a face. It wasn't the first time they'd run into basically harmless but vexing traps.
“Can you deal with the curse?” Arjuna asked.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“At the moment? No. This is an immortal level curse, even when compared to my skills and growth rate. There's some good news though. The curse only triggers if you get too greedy. Every person is allowed to take the contents of one shelf without triggering the trap." Karna explained. She'd actually used a similar curse in the past. It was quite handy in deterring greedy bastards.
“Ah, well then. We better spread out and pick something good.” Arjuna stated. he could sense many of the items were really powerful, and some of the ingredients seemed very precious.
“And don’t forget, once the three of us have taken the best stuff, we can have the crew come in and pick stuff as well.” Tsumi reminded them.
“Yep. The loophole especially created for people willing to share the bounty. Quite nice of them all things considered." Karna chuckled before allowing her soul to spread to cover the entire room. She could sense a bit of divinity from three places, though one of them was significantly stronger than the others. "You might want to look for something interesting there and there.” She pointed the direction towards the two other items before approaching the largest source of divinity personally.
It took a while to walk between all the shelves before she narrowed down the right spot. The shelf didn't seem any different from the others, except for the contents. The correct shelf was unassumingly to the side, surrounded by several dazzling and powerful-looking items. There were weapons, armor, pills, and even jade slips that obviously contained some kind of techniques on the other shelves. The one she was looking at had an oblong crystal chest that was closed and obviously designed to hide whatever was inside. If her soul hadn't been so strong, she wouldn't have been able to sense the divinity radiating from inside. This wasn't the only such chest she'd seen either, so it didn’t stand out from the rest. “I see. So, you’re not supposed to be able to tell what’s inside, so you have to pick it blindly. And other similar containers have mediocre stuff inside. How sly of them.” Even she couldn’t tell what was inside, so she couldn’t be sure if the contents would be useful to her. If it was some kind of peerless technique, then she’d waste her opportunity. Her own techniques were superior anyway. “Well, you have to take chances in life.”
She took a hold of the chest and decisively started walking back towards the door. “Oh, right! Gem!” The spirit came out in the form of an angel this time. “Pick a single item from a shelf. Doesn’t matter what, just pick one.” She knew Gem was stupendously lucky in her own way, so the spirit wouldn’t pick something bad.
“Alrighty.” The spirit said simply and vanished among the shelves.
“I hope that wasn’t a mistake…” Karna murmured to herself. She waited to open the chest until she was safely outside the ruins, and even then she cast several barriers to hide the energy of whatever was inside the chest. She didn’t want to attract any trouble after all. Once she was convinced of her security measures, she cracked open the chest and was suddenly flooded with the sense of divinity, proving that her precautions had been necessary.
In the chest lay a pair of odd gauntlets. Calling them gauntlets was not quite right either, as in truth these gauntlets were made by two parts connected by golden chains. The first part was a bracelet of sorts covered in runes and studded with several purple gems. The second part was made up of the fingers. They looked like segmented pieces made of the same metal the skin of her Titan form was made of. The fingers also looked a lot like bony claws that you could slot your fingers into.
As she wore the gauntlets, she could tell they were designed to re-size automatically to the wearer, and as they did, she noted that she retained almost full mobility of her fingers. She also noticed that the tips of the claws had small openings in case she had actual physical claws of her own that she wanted to use. Notably, she could use all her martial arts freely with the gauntlets, with the added benefits that came from the gauntlets, which she was unaware of so far. Whoever had done the enchanting had done quite a bit of work to hide the exact nature of the gauntlets. “Hmm, I’m going to have to spend a bit of time unraveling the mystery behind these babies.”
-----
"No," Arjuna said with a definitive tone.
“I recognize your concern father, and it is rather endearing, but I’m the best choice. My Titan bloodline grants me borderline immunity to most of the dangers inside the storm, and we both know by now that together we stand a better chance of finding any secret locations. My senses are sharper than anyone else here, and you’re good at dealing with any big nasties we might face. Someone has to stay behind to protect the ship, and that someone has to be either you or Tsumi. As much as I’d like to make an argument otherwise, I still can’t fight someone at the ninth rank with any hope of winning. And with all the new arrivals in the last few days, the odds of running into one are too big. We’re running out of time.” Karna patiently explained.
"And for the same reason, it's too risky for you to go. At this point, it’s clear that the juiciest secrets of this world are hiding inside the perpetual storm. The newcomers know they’re late for the lesser things, so they’ll aim for the big prize directly. We’re more likely to run into trouble inside the storm, and I can’t fight multiple enemies while also protecting you.” Arjuna countered.
“You two are really sweet, you know that? Look, Arjuna, the girl is right. Taking her along will more than quadruple your chances of finding whatever that storm is hiding, and you’re going to need some backup. Instead of thinking of her as a liability, why not think of her as watching your back. We’ve already seen she can take care of herself. And she's right. She is best suited for the environment. Her battle capabilities are heightened by a large degree once you're inside the storm." Tsumi joined the argument on Karna's side. She knew better than anyone that Karna was fully capable of pulling miracles out of her magnificent derriere at the oddest of times.
Arjuna seemed to be having a long internal struggle before he finally gave way. “Fine. But you’ll have to do as I say once we’re in.”
“Excellent!” Karna clapped her hands. She had never doubted things would end like this. The only question was how hard she'd have to try and convince her father. She didn't even have to make puppy eyes, so things had gone much more easily than she'd thought. "Tsumi, if you face any danger do as we agreed. Jump the ship away from this world and wait until we send you the signal to come back.”
"Will do, though I'm not a pushover either," Tsumi stated a bit displeased that she was being underestimated.
The father and daughter duo quickly made their way to the edge of the perpetual storm. They had no idea where to start looking, so any place was just as good as any other. Arjuna conjured up a spear made of shadow magic and pushed it into the wall of turbulent energies, and it took less than a second for the spear to be disintegrated by the winds and flying debris that was little more than sand at this point. Still, when the wind speeds were as high as they were, even sand would be able to wear down the most powerful magic. Even now, standing next to the wall, they were buffeted by storm winds strong enough to almost tear away any clothes they were wearing, magical reinforcement or not.
"That's going to be a problem," Arjuna muttered.
“I already told you. This world is on the border of the Divine Plane, and most of the power of this world is focused on that storm. Of course your magic will be torn to pieces. This is why you need me.” Karna retorted. “Just hop in my shadow and let me handle this.”
With a small sigh, Arjuna stepped on her shadow and seemed to disappear inside. Karna on the other hand assumed her Titan form. As she didn't want to draw too much attention, she didn't use her full height, so she remained at relatively controlled seven meters tall, while her skin took on the white metallic hue that seemed to be reflecting several different kinds of colors even in this dusk-covered world. Her skin didn’t have the durability on the level that the color implied, but it was still stronger than any metal found in the Higher Planes.
Without hesitation she stepped into the storm front and could immediately feel the grinding of small particles rubbing against her skin, trying to wear it down while she was being buffeted by storm winds moving at speeds that could not be seen in nature. Even her skin was slowly being worn down by the storm, but the lightning energy that filled the entire storm immediately revitalized it. Her heavy weight managed to keep her grounded even with her size, although with a bit of help from magic.
She picked a direction at random and started walking. The storm impeded her ability to sense things to some degree, showing that it was clearly magical in nature, but her soul was stronger than any spells woven into the storm, so she retained most of her senses. She soon got a feeling that the storm worked much like a magical maze. The actual location inside the storm didn’t matter as much as the direction you traveled. If you walked blindly, you could walk centuries inside the storm without finding anything, but if you were lucky, you could find the right destination within minutes. Good thing she could read the magic within the storm. She might not be able to stumble on the best location immediately, but she could find some locations quite easily.
She started walking, making odd twists and turns at seemingly random intervals. It took her little more than an hour, but eventually she felt the power of teleportation magic cover her. As she was being transported, she realized something. It seemed the creators of this teleportation formation were the same kind of pranksters that had seemingly designed the other locations. Why? Because the teleportation seemed to pick a destination for her at random. She might have picked the right way to trigger the formation, but that didn’t’ mean she ended up any closer to her goal.
As the teleportation finished, she could tell she was inside a pocket dimension of some sort. The storm was gone, and she seemed to be standing in a desert. The problem was that she couldn’t sense the edges of this pocket dimension, which meant it was damn huge. Maybe even as large as the world she had just come from. “Shit.”
She was about to call for Arjuna before she realized that he was gone. She had felt the formation take a hold of them both, but apparently it had not dropped them off at the same spot. “Double shit.”