73 – The Ruins

“I figured it out!” Said Lisette enthusiastically. She was practically hopping up and down in excitement, staring at Ishrin with shining eyes.

They were at the door soon after, and Lisette explained the logic behind her every move as she carefully arranged the moving parts to fit the pattern she had divined. “See,” she was saying, “when I rotate this cog here, the steam only comes out of the left hand pipe. But when I rotate it together with the central one…”

On and on she went, until minutes later the door was open. It ground on its gigantic hinges, hissing with scalding steam that made Ishrin’s reactive armour shimmer with spent power. Nothing much, and the steam would have probably not hurt him, but the armour didn’t know that.

“Good job,” Melina praised Lisette, who beamed.

“Yep,” Ishrin added, threatening to send the girl into praise overload.

Behind them, Sir Westys team followed meekly, while Liù flew around the now much-changed tunnel and studied every feature she could see that piqued her interest. She was using the diagnostics tools of the SPAWN software preinstalled in the cube she had commandeered, exploring its capabilities and limits and never seeming to find them. As Ishrin thought about that, he was reminded of the quest he had taken back in Noctis, the very same quest that had led them to the mountain realm and then to here. Hadn’t it mentioned a lost spawn?

One clue might be coincidence, two is strange, but three make a pattern.

But then Sir Westys unwelcome voice yanked him back to reality, with vengeance. “What’s this abomination?” The boy muttered, and he was speaking about Liù’s holographic form barely hiding the cube beneath. “Where did it come from? Is it your pet?”

“She’s Liù.” He said, and then decided he would mess with the boy, “she’s a light-element pixie, can’t you see that?”

“What?” The boy stammered for a moment. “Have the depths of the Chasm got to you? Miss Melina, your… pet soldier has gone insane. Put him down before he puts us in danger.”

Melina looked at him with an amused expression, which he most probably misinterpreted.

Sir Westys, emboldened by his interpretation of her facial expression, felt the need to go on—now that he had the perceived upper hand in the conversation—so that he could leverage the situation and create animosity between the two.

“I can put that abomination down for you,” he said, and did not see the twitch to Ishrin’s eye, “so you don’t have to even go near it.”

Then Ishrin was on him, the change so sudden the boy didn’t even have time to register surprise at the fact that someone a full Tier weaker than him had come so close to him.

Ishrin had put a hand on his shoulder and was squeezing so tight it hurt, bending the expensive armour Sir Westys was wearing, and Sir Westys thought that for some reason the pain was spreading unnaturally through his whole body, making his every nerve tingle, while Ishrin’s armour shimmered into view, the construct suddenly gaining a threatening aura, like it was bending its will towards harming him.

“She is very much not an abomination.”

Sir Westys was, despite the threatening hand and aura, about to respond in tone. But then the strange being flew to Ishrin’s shoulder and now Ishrin was suddenly a tall, towering sight before his eyes, and the environment around him seemed to vanish into darkness while a pair of deep glowing eyes stared like judging embers behind a wicked smile. Sir Westys looked around, scanning the large cavern they were in, his eyes searching for his teammates. All three were looking at the scene, but as soon as their eyes met with his, they looked away and pretended not to have seen anything.

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Sir Westys swallowed thick saliva that stuck to the walls of his throat. He was completely frozen, his fight or flight response stunned into inaction by a power he had never felt before in his life.

Then Ishrin was just a man once again, his core the normal radiant power of a Tier 3 cultivator while the strange cube-pixie was once again just an odd creature, and sound and color returned to the tunnel. Sir Westys noticed that everyone had stopped and were looking at him.

“Good,” Ishrin said, “glad that you finally got the message.”

Taking the boy’s growl for one of defeat, as it rightly was, but missing the deeper connotations and consequences of such a show of force, Ishrin let the matter rest. The boy yanked himself out of his grip and away, running to his healer as quickly as he could without looking too defeated. Looking at the dent in his armor, he muttered, “fucking freak,” and retreated to the safety of his teammates.

Melina looked at Ishrin with a quizzical look for a while after the fact.

“The kid needs to learn,” he simply said to that, “it’s a little freebie.”

Melina shrugged, but her ears betrayed her actual mood. They were twitching. “I remember you arguing that it wasn’t worth it to try and teach everyone manners, when you might never meet them again. Who cares about a random kid, right? Our task is to escort him and keep him safe, not teach him stuff. Or rant at him. Unless, that is, you needed to blow off some steam. Do you feel better now?”

Ishrin nodded. “I do, yeah.” He was thoughtful for a moment, searching for something deep in his aura and core.

“Then it’s fine,” Melina stated with a smug grin, fangs showing for a moment as playfully glinting eyes locked onto his and made his heart flutter.

“Thanks,” he got out. What the hell was that?

But Melina wasn’t done. “It was kinda hot, seeing you get all worked up to defend her. Not from harm either, but her honour!” She sighed loudly, adding a bit of voice to it like a faint moan, “I wonder if you’d do the same for me, or Lisette?”

Before he could regain some composure and answer, she was already gone, back at the head of the group with Lisette, leaving him to watch the rear, awfully close to his least favourite person he had to escort.

***

Beyond the mighty door, another world had opened up to their eyes. It was a world of cogs and wheels, of halogen lights and of steam, where pistons and brass pipes were a part of the architecture as much as stone or brick were, sometimes also being a part of mechanisms and sometimes simply existing for the sake of looks. The floors were uneven plates of rusted, corrugated metal worn down by the centuries of exposure to the wet air of this part of the dungeon, corroded by humidity, and the lights embedded in the walls were struggling to fulfil their original purposes, straining to light the corridors. They hummed, a pained whine that filled the space between the silent adventurers with noise.

“They really do exist,” one of the boys they were escorting muttered in awe, “the Ruins of Tiamat Azur are real.”

A scoff followed, presumably from their team leader, but it was cut short by the sight that they had come upon.

At the end of the corridor, a room had opened where a gash in the ceiling exposed the impossible. From the wide aperture, upwards an open area spanned until the eye got lost in the ray of moonlight that shone into an inner garden overgrown and overrun by nature, reclaiming the space left for it. Plants grew among the pipes, roots upturned the metal plates, and dirt formed little mounds on the rust.

A Remote Elemental Light, cast by Ishrin, lit the place like the sun was shining on the plants, making them wiggle and reach out to this new source of nourishment and energy.

The garden was like the beating heart of a spreading mass of plant and life, from where lichen and moss was expanding like an advancing tide, following the trail of humidity and feeding off the light and heat of the incandescent lights.

“It doesn’t lead to the surface, we are too deep.” Ishrin said, looking up through the hole. “Yet there is moonlight.”

“Perhaps there is a hidden passage,” Lisette said, offering her explanation to Ishrin’s strange and matter-of-fact statement.

“Or perhaps it’s just more weirdness due to the high mana concentration of this place. Considering how much mana there is in the air, this place has been far too normal so far, I’d say.”

At times the lights flickered, the power that kept them running surging and then stabilizing again, and their hum was a scream, and the scream was agony of a place that was dying a slow death through the centuries. The door far behind them, ajar one second ago, slammed itself shut with an echo that reached their ears in a reverberating boom.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Melina said. “It feels like everything is moving, beneath the surface.”

“I do have the same sensation.” Lisette agreed with a slight nod, orders of magnitude more expressive than she was when Ishrin had met her.

Ishrin cocked his head. “Come on, it’s no time to get spooked by inanimate objects acting like they had a malicious will of their own. There’s powerful bracers waiting for us in these ruins.”