"So you're saying we're fucked." Erik summarized the info dump the girls had brought back from their stealth mission into the Revolution camp. They had not brought good news.
"It sounds pretty bad, yes." Lily nodded. "I'm not sure what we can even do. No matter what, it sounds like the town above is going to be gone. They're abandoning this site as fast as they can."
Caeden stared at the ground processing everything Cat and Lily had relayed to him and Erik. It was a lot to take in. They had found some of the leadership of the Revolution, finally. People that seemed to have more than two brain cells to rub together. It just happened at the worst time.
"It sounds like they did something to cause all this," Caeden spoke into the silence. "They were saying something about a suppression device, right?"
Lily nodded. "Yes, something about it deteriorating faster than they expected."
"I think that's our priority."
"Look, I'm all for diving into explicit danger, but what do you want to do?" Erik asked.
"I don't know. The situation as I see it is to either abandon thousands of people to death, or put ourselves in even greater danger and hope that we can resolve it by some miracle. I'm not willing to just give up without even looking. They said the mountain wasn't coming down for days. I think a few hours is a low enough cost to at least see if we can't figure out what is going on with this 'suppression device.'" Caeden laid out his thinking, letting the others digest it.
Lily nodded almost immediately. "I think it's worth the risk. Shrouded have a lot of things we can do that unshrouded just can't, even with ethertech. For all we know, the solution could be incredibly simple, just not something an unshrouded could ever resolve. Plus, now that we have an exit, there's always the option of looking at the problem, then getting Blaine down here and letting him deal with it. I doubt whatever is going on is something he can't resolve. He's a True Shroud and a Swordmaster."
Caeden wasn't sure he shared Lily's optimism about how easy a fix this would be, but he firmly believed not finding out was objectively a wrong choice. Ultimately Cat and Erik weren't going to gainsay any decision Caeden and Lily made in tandem, so they set out to find this suppression device and figure out what it was and why it was failing.
That mission ended up being almost hilariously easy. Cat and Lily journeyed back into the camp to look for more information, specifically for the suppression device's location, and just overheard an angry revolutionary shouting at five others about removing all the equipment from around the suppression device. This was within five minutes of entering.
The camp itself had changed drastically in the time it took Cat and Lily to leave, rarely what they had learned, set an objective, and come back. It seemed this Oswald man knew how to run an operation like this because in less than an hour from him dashing out of his meeting with the older man, he had buildings being taken apart, equipment being packed, and mining crews marching in from various tunnels interspersed around the massive cavern.
This also meant that the girls now had a much better understanding of the scope of this operation. It looked like there were several hundred revolutionaries involved. No less than five hundred, but likely not more than a thousand. They could only do a rough estimate because not all the personnel were ever in the cavern all at once.
Basically, this hidden Revolution mining base had a population three times the size of the small village Caeden had lived in prior to the Academy. It was amazing they had managed to keep so many people relatively hidden for what seemed to be a considerable amount of time. Clearly, the Revolution leadership was not nearly as incompetent as some of their members might indicate.
Since they now had actual directions for where to go, Cat and Lily grabbed the other two, and the whole team headed out after the group of revolutionaries sent toward the suppression device. It was slightly unnerving that they had no idea what they were walking into. This whole situation was strange. What was this suppression device suppressing that could cause the mountain to collapse? Why was it failing now, and how long had it been here? More than that, why was it here?
Arriving at their destination provided answers, but ones that provoked much, much scarier questions. The answers were disturbing enough on their own.
They followed a good distance behind the revolutionaries, using aura sense to rack them without being observed. The revolutionaries had nothing like guards or spotters, no defenses of any kind. It made it exceptionally easy to slip around the edge of the camp and avoid the hive of activity to follow their quarry.
As they traveled, the temperature grew from oven hot to lava hot. Literally, the walls around them began to mush under their feet slightly. It wasn't molten yet, but it was well on its way. The silver suits the revolutionaries wore seemed to keep them cool even at these temperatures, which was impressive, to say the least. Everyone other than Cat had to push their infusion to the limit to handle the heat. Well, not Caeden. His Physical Enhancement shroud carried the burden with ease. He was pretty sure he could swim in lava and be fine.
Caeden knew when they drew close to their destination. He knew because a massive dead zone appeared in his aura. Something he had never felt before in all his life. He simply could not sense anything in a space less than a hundred feet long and just thirty feet high in the shape of an egg laying on its side. The sensation, or lack thereof, was immensely disturbing.
Aura sense could not be stopped. It spanned out in a dome from the shrouded and covered every direction. Aura manipulation, manifesting aura to use it as a form of telekinesis, could be blocked by another shroud invading yours, but aura sense was immutable. Which was why Caeden had no idea what was going on. It was like someone had shown him dry water. Aura sense went everywhere. It just did.
Lily felt the same sensation some time after him. Gaining his Incarnation had significantly increased the range of his senses. He had told her that this disturbing bubble existed ahead of time but experiencing it was a whole different thing. Her already pale features became even more so. Caeden was sure he hadn't looked any better. It felt wrong. A perversion of nature made manifest.
They moved on.
They couldn't stop now. This unnatural pocket of space honestly made it even more important to find out what the Revolution was doing. A side-effect of the empty space was that they had no idea what the revolutionaries were doing in there once they entered several minutes ahead of the team. That meant they were walking into at least five unshrouded enemy combatants in an unknown environment. They advanced with caution.
The space was just around a curve in the smooth black tunnel. The veins of orange glowed more brilliantly than ever and pulsed like an actual heartbeat, albeit not a human one. It was a steady, uniform ebb and flow like a wave crashing and receding. This was the source of the veins that had brought them down into these tunnels in the first place. It was almost funny how much their simple plan had been derailed by unforeseen events.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Peaking around the corner, Caeden half expected to see a blank void like what his aura sense implied. Instead, his eyes showed another cavern shaped in the exact dimensions of the void in his senses. In it were four things. The two he expected to see were the revolutionaries they had followed and a scaffolding of ethertech surrounding the two things he hadn't expected. This must be the observation equipment these men had been sent to collect. This was further confirmed by the fact that the silver-suited figures were busy rapidly dissembling the scaffolding.
That encompassed what Caeden had expected. The last two things were much more concerning.
Taking up nearly a fourth of the room and sitting directly in the center was a giant pearlescent stone with a perfectly smooth surface. The stone's shape was a perfect mirror of the cavern it was in; slightly oblong, as if it were an egg laid on its side. It was primarily an ivory color but shot through with the same orange veins that covered all the surrounding tunnels. The key difference here was the circular patch of pure fiery orange at the top of the stone from which all the veins spread. It pulsed and burned with a vast, radiant energy that seemed to reach across the space and stab at Caeden's eyes with its intensity.
This was the source of the vast energy spreading across the mountain's depths.
That was disturbing enough. What rested on top of it, sticking out of the very center of burning orange, was so much worse.
Thrust into the heart of the stone was a sword that seemed to be forged from the Starry Sea. Inside the blade swirled galaxies and nebula, stars and supernovas. The only thing visible was the hilt, crossguard, and roughly three feet of the blade. The second Caeden laid eyes on it; he felt his shrouds, the wells of infinite power attached to his very soul, recoil and burn. They shifted about within him as if trying to run away.
Something was unspeakably wrong with that sword.
Continuing to look at it only caused the feeling of intense fear to exponent increase until he was forced to either run or look away. He chose the latter. Caeden had no idea what they had walked into. From falling to a lower area of Black Reach to the orange veins, to finding the Revolution base, to now this disturbing sword. Every time they looked further, this whole situation grew more and more disturbing.
Fruitlessly hoping he somehow imagined things, Caeden gestured for Lily to take a look. Her expression of abject horror ruthlessly crushed any illusions he had. This was real, and they had landed in the middle of it, somehow.
"What do we do?" Lily looked just as lost as he felt. They had no real understanding of what was going on in that room on any level.
"I…I think we need more information. The four of us can easily handle five unshrouded no matter what kind of tech they have. If we can contain them, Erik can do his thing and get them to spill whatever is going on in here. That sword…I don't think we can do anything about that. I can barely look at it, let alone touch the thing. I don't want to know what would happen if I tried. Capture the revolutionaries, extract information, get the unshrouded hell out of here." Caeden laid out what he saw as their best plan.
Lily nodded rapidly, her head bobbing. "Yes. I want nothing to do with whatever that is. Feels like my shroud is trying to curl up in a ball and hide."
After adding Cat and Erik into their planning session, they acted. The ensuing fight was simultaneously one of the easiest and one of the most terrifying experiences of Caeden's life.
The team went in hard, pulling out all the stops. They treated five unshrouded revolutionaries like it was an entire cavern filled to the brim with monsters. Everything about this situation had progressively put them all more and more on edge, so they weren't going to risk anything. It turned out to be the right choice.
Caeden charged in first, as he normally did. Coming along with him were two spectral soldiers and a cloud of spectral Swarm. He was fully formshifted into his golden body, towering nine feet tall. The second his foot crossed into the cavern proper from the tunnel, dropping a bit as the tunnel entrance was slightly elevated, everything began to go wrong.
Physical Enhancement wobbled and shifted. Suddenly Caeden felt like he was six months ago when he first discovered his second shroud. He lost much of his control over it, continuing on unaffected only because his shroud was already in its natural resting state. Caeden felt that if he had used one of his mnemonic forms like speed or defense, they would have collapsed back to golden body.
At the same time Sharp, which he was not actively using, experienced a similar regression. Caeden tried to pull on it to make a thorn, his most basic mnemonic, and the sensation was entirely different. Controlling Sharp normally felt as familiar to him as smithing. He had his hammer and anvil, working in perfect harmony with his body and mind. Now it was like his hammer had suddenly turned to rubber and his anvil to jello. The shape was the same, but the feel was completely different.
Not willing to let it stop him, Caeden forged on, slamming bodily into the closest revolutionary and bearing him to the ground with a rough tackle. He could hear the air whoosh out of the man's lungs as he hit the ground hard. It was a stunning blow, the man would not be getting up anytime soon.
While he did that, the soldiers and Sarm, which seemed unaffected, charged for other targets. Lily and Erik were soon to follow, but the second they stepped into the chamber, the strings of Stitch winding over Erik's arms wobbled and shook, and Lily's defensive Ice formshift, which made her look like a living ice sculpture, suddenly collapsed. Both forged on, but they were clearly affected the same way he was.
Even though they couldn't employ any of their more powerful, more control-intensive techniques, the battle was over near instantly. Five blindsided revolutionaries were no match for even handicapped shrouded. Still, Caeden couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if they had gone into a fight where they needed their greater mnemonics and abilities under these conditions. They would have lost badly.
Erik had all their new prisoners bound in short order and moved to take one into the tunnel for interrogation. The coppery-haired doctor in training had a technique he had created based on discoveries written down by a family ancestor that let him affect the minds of unshrouded in such a way that they no longer had a filter between their thoughts and mouths. It made for a perfect interrogation tool. He had to remove them from the chamber because the unnatural loss of control they experienced inside made it impossible for him to use the highly skill-dependent technique.
Caeden remained to watch over the other revolutionaries, as he was the most intimidating presence. The specters all stayed with him to help keep an eye on things. Just to pass the time, as the bound-up revolutionaries weren't going anywhere and he was here more as a precaution, Caeden walked over to take a better look at the massive glowing stone in the center of the cavern.
Up close, the iridescent sheen of the boulder was much more pronounced. It looked like a sheen of oil coated the surface. Caeden laid his hand on the rock, feeling it thrum underneath his hand. The block on his aura sense was all-consuming within the bounds of this cavern. He could feel nothing outside his own body. However, just to see what would happen, Caeden tried to use investigative sense of the stone anyway.
Caeden had two auras, one for each shroud. They were very different, owing to their diverging natures. Sharp was expansive, refined, and easy to use. It had a large range, especially ever since he had achieved Incarnation. Caeden could use his Sharp aura to observe things in great detail, down to the atomic scale. For obvious reasons, this was the one he primarily used day to day.
By contrast, Physical Enhancement's aura was small, chaotic, and limited. It extended only a little over a foot from his body, and he had almost no fine control over it at all. However, in this particular situation, his Physical Enhancement aura showed one benefit that Sharp lacked. Raw power. Sharp's aura was a scalpel, refined tool to be used by an expert. Physical Enhancement was a sledgehammer designed to break everything in its path. That factor had never been relevant until now.
Caeden found that he could combine the efforts of his two auras, using Sharp to define the path forward through the strange suppressive effects of this chamber and having Physical Enhancement break through. It was an exercise in multitasking, fine control, and raw willpower that Caeden had not expected. After a couple of tries that failed due to him not balancing his applications of the disparate shrouds, Caeden eventually, briefly, broke through the suppression, and his aura sense touched the stone. Its fundamental nature flowed into his mind, telling him exactly what his hand lay on.
The Heartstone of a Volcanus Gigantus.
"Oh. Oh no."