37 – A crazy plan

Melina pulled on the metal handle of the door. A hiss, the rush of air, then the heavy slab of metal slowly began to move. Beyond the threshold they could see the deep light of something, blue like the rest of the energies of the mountain, cast a long shadow. A shadow in which they could also see another light, very faint and much lighter, a cyan that was of the same blue as the other light but different, like the way shallow waters are of the same water as the deep ocean. The room was quiet. The hiss of the door died in a low hum of air and servomechanisms holding it open, or perhaps trying to force it closed but encountering resistance. But the room was quiet. The shadow danced. Something moved, but it didn’t make a single sound.

Holding their breath, the party scanned the room.

There was a cube, floating in the air above a pool of something they couldn’t see in the center of the room. Its rotating surface bobbed up and down, and was crisscrossed with energy channels, dimly lit in the deep blue of the mountain, pulsing. As the party stepped into the room, the door behind them sealed itself shut with a loud bang of metal, and a hiss of the servos. Only then did the deep vibration of the room, like the breath of a giant, become audible to all.

“The cube. Its light changes with the breathing of the mountain.” Melina said.

“The amount of light in the lines on the cube’s surface is increasing as well.” Lisette said.

“It’s taking the energy from the monolith below.” Ishrin said. “We are directly above it now, I think. Remember how we saw energy gather on the monolith and shoot upwards in a beam? This is where it all goes. To power this… thing. Whatever it is.”

“Is it the heart of the mountain?” Melina said.

“Something more like a brain, I think.” Ishrin said, examining the thing from a distance while trying to remember all that he could about the stuff he saw on Mekano’s tablet while he worked. “And it’s waking up.” He added.

“Boss. You might want to see this.” Lisette called from the other side of the room.

There was a small tube of glass, suspended between two magnets and full of clear liquid that bubbled slowly. Inside the tube Ishrin immediately saw that there was another cube, exactly like the one at the center of the room, except instead of being several meters wide it was smaller than a fist. Its light was what he saw from the corridor: a soft cyan light that was very bright and yet barely registered with the low but powerful deep blue of the central cube. Next to him, Lisette was staring at the thing completely entranced, mouth wide open and eyes transfixed on the object. Her hand was reaching for it and almost touched it, but she yanked it back violently when Melina slapped her wrist.

“Don’t touch it!” She ordered.

Lisette massaged her hand and shook her head as if to clear her thoughts. “Sorry! I do not know what took over me.”

“I do.” Ishrin said. “I think we found the ‘lost spawn’.”

“Do we take it?” Asked Melina. “It’s our quest, right?”

Ishrin nodded.

“And what do we do with the…” she pointed at the huge cube at the center of the room, wary as if it could sense they were talking about it.

“We must destroy it.” He said. “Perhaps we should have never opened the door to this wretched realm, but now that we did… it’s our responsibility to make sure whatever this mountain hides, stays away from the prime material realm. Otherwise, well, you read the Guild records.”

Melina nodded gravely. “How do you suppose we go about this? I’m pretty sure that attacking the big cube or stealing the small one will reveal our presence. Is that right Lisette?”

The woman nodded. “Attacking will dispel the effect of the concealment.”

“Then we need a plan. An attack plan, and an escape plan.” Melina said, ears twitching whenever the deep hum of the mountain resonated through the room. “The door is sealed behind us, Ishrin, do you think you can get it open again?”

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He shook his head, “that trick only worked once.”

“There must be a ritual you can do to help us.”

He exhaled through his nose, “if only rituals could be drawn that fast. Everybody would use them!”

“So that’s a no.” Stated Melina coldly. “I say we have to do it anyway. Forget the quest, if what you told us about what this mountain can do is true… we need to destroy its heart, brain, whatever this thing is while we can.”

“Melina…”

“I am the leader. You gave me that power.” She spat. “Let me lead.”

Ishrin looked at her long and hard. Lisette beside him had a face that was unreadable as a stone. He inhaled.

“I never said we can’t try to whip something up. How comfortable do you feel about crossing universes?”

“You want to escape to another universe?” Her eyes almost bulged out of her head.

“No, no,” he waved his hands quickly, “I still don’t have the power to do that, and even if I did, I wouldn’t draw such a ritual here of all places.”

“Hmm—”

“But, I can repurpose part of the ritual to send us into the ether, and materialized us in the same universe rather than in another one, just with our coordinates changed.”

Lisette perked up. “It is a sort of teleportation.” She said. “But with extra steps.”

Ishrin frowned. “Well, I don’t see you having a teleportation spell, do I?”

She shrugged. “I do not.”

“And mine are too high tier to transport all of us out of here. Therefore,” he gestured at the room, tossing her a stick of chalk. “Ritual. Let’s get to drawing. How long do we have?”

“19 minutes.” Lisette said.

Ishrin hummed as he gave Lisette instructions to draw the ritual, wondering if the concealment spell came with a clock or if she had some sort of innate talent with time. Clocks integrated in spellforms when the magic had a timer were not unheard of, but they were advanced enough that the world of Prima Luce probably didn’t have any. Her… teachers, as she called the people who taught her the spell, either they were more powerful than Ishrin thought, or there was no clock.

“Okay,” he said, “any of you know Dimensional Theory?”

Lisette, who was already drawing the basic framework for the ritual according to Ishrin’s instructions, shook her head without turning back. Melina frowned.

“Dimensional Theory?” She asked, “I didn’t even know it was a thing!”

“You didn’t know dimensional magic was a thing?” Ishrin asked, perplexed.

“Magic, yes, theory? No. Now that I think about it, the magic had to come from somewhere, but it’s not like spells require extensive study. Most of the stuff we have comes from random intuitions and magical geniuses.”

Ishrin wanted to facepalm, but then he reminded himself that he was the same prior to discovering worlds that had invented the scientific method and learning it for himself.

Meanwhile, Lisette had risen from her crouched position to stare at him. Ishrin turned to study her expression.

“You know something, don’t you?”

She shook her head.

Ishrin’s eyes narrowed. “But you do have some hidden qualities, don’t you? I have been watching you. Look at this, what do you see?”

A thick stack of paper appeared from thin air, and the two girls didn’t even see the window into the other world that was Ishrin’s inventory open up before it was already gone. He held the first of the many sheets filled with scribbles and equations aloft, right in Lisette’s face. She stared at it blankly. She did not even wonder how and why he happened to have what appeared to be a dissertation on dimensional math in his inventory, a thing that was instead not lost on Melina.

“What if I told you that in order to overcome the material and tier restrictions for the universe crossing ritual, we can piggyback off of my own inventory skill as it opens a rift in spacetime? What do you make of it?” he asked.

“I… I…” she stammered.

“What if you had more time? What if you had all the time in the world to study this math?”

“I think I could make sense of it, yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“Ha!” Ishrin laughed. “Knew it! I always thought she was more than she let on. See this, Melina? We might be able to do it after all. Not such a crazy plan, after all.”

Melina tilted her head. “Still quite crazy, Ishrin.”

“Would you rather leave the mountain here?”

“Never said that.” She put a hand on Ishrin’s shoulder. “You two try to figure out a way to leave this place,” she said, turning to survey the room, “while Liù and I come up with a plan to do as much damage as we can to the cube. Right before the cloaking wears off, we steal the small cube, blast the big one with everything we have, and you two open the rift.”

She wandered off. “Lisette,” Ishrin said, “time?”

“14 minutes, 37 seconds.” She said flatly.

“Good. I only need you for the last part of the ritual, which will take 3 minutes. I will cast a spell on you, like the one you have already seen me cast on myself. I will empower it with all the cores I have in my inventory, as well as use your own magic to fuel it.”

“What does it do?”

“It will slow down time around you, making so you have all the time you need to study the scrolls. Can you do this?”

She nodded. “I can.” There was a twinkle in her eyes.

“You will have to disengage the spell manually, since to supercharge it I will have to leave out certain… safety measures. I will hold a sign in your face long enough for you to read when we have 4 minutes left, not three, which should give me enough time to explain the modifications to the ritual we need to do to make it work with the inventory rather than with a multiversal window. Okay? Understand?”

“I do. Do not waste time and cast the spell. I am ready.”