--- Balron ---
Balron felt naked.
He was wearing armor above a thick coat of clothing, but the basilisk's attack yesterday had broken his defensive enchantment. The strain had been too much, and had damaged one of the channeling crystals embedded into the device he used to protect himself. The faultline had grown over time, and by now it was leaking mana faster than he could recharge it. He had spent an hour trying to fix it, but it was no use. He would need to spend time on repairing this once they got back to Northpass. Not to mention the cost!
But then again, what use was saving up for a pension when you didn't live long enough to reach it?
With his primary defensive enchantment broken, Balron would have to rely on the much weaker secondary and tertiary arrays. He was practically naked.
Balron decided to distract himself from his misfortune by talking to Atrog. The orc was eager to learn what happened with Lilian the night before. The ride from Bells End to the Erundir facility was a good time to share the information, since they had nothing else to do.
Balron and Rania had talked to Miss Weaver over a round of drinks. Quite a lot of drinks actually, even by his standards as a dwarf. She said her curse frequently gave her a lot of reason to get drunk, and she had just had a particularly rough week.
Apparently she had been on business for the Coros organization in Athar, a country on the other side of the continent. The Coros were an organization of traders founded about two decades ago. They used truth telling spells on themselves and their customers to ensure mutual cooperation. As they put it, they sold "trust as a service". More recently, they had branched out to interact with supernatural creatures as well. Many fey and devils were unable to lie, but extremely good at bending the truth. Their experience made the Coros uniquely well suited to avoiding these tricks, and so they had hired warlocks to trade with supernatural creatures.
Balron gave them all about an eighty percent chance of dying horribly within the next decade. Or possibly suffering an ironic fate that was worse than death. That's what usually happened to people who thought themselves smarter than fey and devils. Balron was quite risk averse for an adventurer, so this wasn't for him. But he had to admit, if they could pull it off then the Coros were going to become incredibly rich and powerful. The return on investment from trading with a fey to exchange a "really pretty flower" for "some shiny yellow metal" was astronomical.
Lilian explained that the Coros had hired her because of her curse. During the course of her adventures, she had encountered many supernatural beings of all varieties, and the Coros wanted to make use of that by deliberately sending her into areas with reclusive creatures they wanted to make contact with.
It appeared that Tonos objected to having his curse monetized in this fashion. Strenuously.
Lilian did in fact encounter the fey she was after. She also found a cult. And a dragon. And a mad wizard. And many, many other things. She was pretty sure that Tonos wanted to make a point. Rania had a lot of questions about this and they kept talking for hours, but none of it was relevant in Balron's opinion. Atrog agreed that he would rather not know, in the interest of avoiding a headache.
In any case, Lilian explained that she managed to escape the utter clusterfuck in Athar by running into a portal without knowing its destination. She ended up in Oruk. Unfortunately one of the beasts the mad wizard was experimenting on had followed her, and that was how she had come to be chased by a basilisk.
The entire story sounded ridiculous to Balron, but divine intervention could be like that sometimes.
To Balron's surprise, Rania commiserated with Lilian about how much Tonos sucked. Lilian wanted nothing more than to be able to take a holiday for once in her life. She did however acknowledge that her curse came with perks. She kept encountering amazing people, and picking up magical items that would inevitably turn out to be useful later.
Rania mentioned that she had such an item as well, and went to fetch a strange potion from her backpack. Lilian looked at the potion's contents and then recited some weird prophecy she had apparently heard the week before. She claimed that that exact potion was something she needed. Rania traded the potion for something else, but both of the women were very secretive about it and wouldn't let him know. They claimed it worked better the fewer people knew.
After he explained this, Atrog put his face in his hands in frustration. "Now there are two of them. I fucking hate Tonos." He said.
"You are not the only one." Balron replied. "And Lilian is even weirder than Rania. She kept saying things like 'your teamleader Atrog, who is not here' instead of just 'Atrog'. I asked her why she did that, and she said it was because she did not know when the scene she was in started, and whether or not the audience already knew who all the characters are. Since she never knows when Tonos is trying to tell a story through her, she sometimes says things for narrative reasons like this. She claimed that this made Tonos act more favorably towards her."
"That sounds horrible. How is she still sane?" Atrog asked.
"Beats me. But at least one good thing came from that madness-inducing conversation: Lilian decided that she really ought to reward us for saving her. Her work for the Coros paid exceptionally well, and she said that if she didn't spend the money soon then Tonos would probably cause some mishap to make it disappear anyway. So she gave us three thousand gold for our help."
Balron held up a small bag filled with money. It was not literally filled with gold, of course. That would be difficult to carry. Different countries used different currencies. Lilian had paid them in notes backed by the central bank of House Mardok. This money was accepted everywhere in the world, and was arguably even more stable than actual gold.
Atrog perked up at this and smiled. "That's an impressive amount of money. Let's break the good news to Galanys."
This sudden windfall was almost as much money as they were getting paid for their extremely dangerous mission. Balron already knew what he would spend his share on: It would pay for part of the repairs on his primary defensive enchantment. That thing really was very expensive. As per the contract Atrog had written, Balron would receive an increased share of the pay because his broken defensive enchantment counted as an expenditure on behalf of the party. Even so, this mission would likely be a net loss for him.
But then again, he wasn't in it for the money. One of his reasons was that adventuring made people stronger, and Balron already noticed it. It could just be old instincts coming back, of course. But the basilisk had been an exceptionally powerful foe and as far as people understood, the rate of growth caused by adventuring depended on the level of threat one was faced with. If Balron had already noticed an improvement, then the gains Galanys received must be huge, given how weak her mana reserves were.
When the party entered the Cataclysm Containment Zone, Atrog asked Rania to take over navigation. She talked to the spirits to determine where the miasma was densest. Twice she asked Galanys to take the long way around when an area seemed safe to him. It seemed to work, as they arrived at the facility without incident.
They were in luck: The facility itself was not currently covered in miasma. That had been their greatest worry. If the miasma had been there, they could not have done much about it except to wait for it to move on.
Balron got to work quickly and expertly. He was glad to see that while his reflexes had slowed down, his knowledge had not been dulled with his age.
Balron tried to pick doors, scanned the walls for weak spots with divination magic, and spent some time guessing frequently used passwords on security glyphs. Many security systems were not reliable enough to last for three hundred years without maintenance, and sometimes humanoid errors made it easy to break through a system that would otherwise be impenetrable. The creators of the facility had to ward off every possible entrance, while Balron only had to find a single weakness to exploit.
He also sent his familiar Whiskers to scout out the area. Facilities like these had been well protected against being infiltrated by familiars, but the same weaknesses applied. Whiskers was intelligent enough to carry magic items with it that could be used to sabotage security systems from the other side.
After just an hour of work, Balron was in.
He felt oddly disappointed that it had been so easy. He hadn't felt this alive in decades.
"Good job." Atrog said. "And it looks like we are in luck. The miasma is still a ways off. Let's go while we have the chance. As discussed, Whiskers should take over watch duty now. We wouldn't want to be surprised by the miasma while we are in there and possibly without a way to escape.
"Rania, please ask Pebble to keep an eye out as well." He added.
The elf nodded and said "Pebble says they aren't really paying attention to the area right now."
"Who is ‘they’?" Balron asked.
"The miasma spirits." Rania answered.
"The miasma has spirits of its own? I thought it was a magical effect." Atrog said.
"I didn't know either because I haven't seen any miasma up close, yet. But Pebble says the miasma is made of spirits, and they are really angry." Rania replied.
"That sounds like very important information, Rania." Atrog said thoughtfully. "We should tell the authorities about this when we get back to Northpass."
Almost nothing was known about the Cataclysm, so every little bit of information could help.
They left Whiskers behind to keep watch and to warn them if she detected the miasma approaching. The carriage and the skeletal horse were left behind as well. The miasma did not harm nonliving matter, after all. Necromantic constructs did technically have a soul powering them, but they did not register as alive to most magical effects. Much of the difficulty in necromancy was in making sure that the soul powering the construct was held in stasis and did not experience anything.
This was why necromantic studies put such a heavy emphasis on ethics. If one did not care, then it was easy to create very powerful undead that put enormous strain and suffering on the soul that powered them. Creating constructs that avoided this was much harder.
The mages of Ossor had gone to a great deal of effort to determine the effects of necromantic spells on the soul. The safe spells that they published essentially turned the soul of the deceased into a weak but inexhaustible energy supply, while disabling their ability to experience anything. When the construct was eventually destroyed, the soul would move on to the afterlife as if nothing had happened. From the point of view of the person or animal whose soul was captured, this was simply perceived as a time skip between their death and their arrival in the afterlife.
Ossor was a strange country. They believed that going to heaven altered your personality, and that this was similar to true death. Therefore it was more ethical to bind souls in the hopes of reviving them later than to let people move on to the afterlife. Most people thought they were insane, but few would say that to their faces. Ossor was isolationist and ruled by a parliament of liches and other intelligent undead. During the Great War, they had been the only country besides House Mardok that the Azadian Empire had not tried to invade. Picking a fight with them was utterly suicidal, and Ossor had no interest in other countries so long as they followed their ethical standards for necromancy.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Of course, there also used to be countries that disagreed and banned necromancy altogether, but this had predictable results: When two countries fought, and one of them had skeletal workers to take over labor, and the other country did not, then naturally the first one was more likely to win. Several millennia of cultural evolution later, the only countries that were left were ones that saw no problem with necromancy. At least so long as one held to a standard of ethics that did not cause Ossor to take issue with you.
Like most people, Balron's testament specified under what conditions his corpse could be used for necromancy. His dependents would receive remuneration in return for this. It was similar to life insurance. Hopefully this would not come up for a long while.
Balron pushed such morbid thoughts out of his head. He had gotten distracted while thinking about the interactions between the miasma and necromancy. Such idle thoughts were useful for a professor, but dangerous for an adventurer who needed to be ready for anything. It had been the right decision to refuse a leadership position.
The party entered the facility.
Whiskers had not been able to get very far, so the interior of the facility was largely unknown to them. In Balron's estimation, there was little danger of any traps inside the building. After all, this was a government facility and not a mad mage's tower. The wards that protected the building would almost certainly have been lethal if Balron hadn't disabled them, but there was no good reason why the architects should put traps inside the facility itself. Still, it never hurt to be sure, and so they advanced carefully.
Rania and Balron walked ahead. The dwarf was the security expert, but the elf was very perceptive, and she might just get lucky and have the spirits whisper a warning to her.
Rania suddenly stopped and gave a hand sign. Atrog had drilled them all extensively on nonverbal communication for just such a situation.
Her gestures meant: "I hear something. People. One. Unclear intention."
The party stopped and nobody made a sound. Rania moved ahead slowly, gesturing at the others as she learned more: "They are alert. They have noticed us."
Rania then stopped and looked at Pebble. She had fashioned a necklace to store him, and was wearing the necklace around her neck. It looked a bit comical, to see a necklace with an ordinary stone instead of a gemstone, but it served its purpose.
After a few seconds of silently communing with Pebble, Rania spoke out loud: "Oh no. There is a Bad Guy. He knows we are here, and he is burning stuff. We need to hurry!"
Before Balron could react, Atrog had already rushed past him.
"Quickly! We can't let him destroy the evidence! Rania, threat type and capabilities?" Atrog asked as they ran.
"The Bad Guy is a mage! And he has critters with him!" She responded. "No, Pebble. Critters is not a technical term. I need to know what they are called in Common. Oh, they are veracs."
This was much more excitement than Balron had been expecting from this trip. Fortunately, veracs were not nearly as dangerous as the basilisk they had fought yesterday, so long as one did not get ambushed by a swarm of them.
Atrog and Rania charged ahead. Galanys and Balron did their best trying to keep up.
When he caught up to the orc, Balron saw the crumpled form of an elven mage on the ground, clutching his stomach in pain. The man's spellcasting focus had been scattered in the corner next to a burning pile of haphazardly thrown together documents. The majority of the room was taken up by now empty cages.
It did not take a genius to realize what had been kept in those cages only moments before, as Atrog was fighting off a group of veracs. Veracs were small but vicious and quick ambush predators. They looked like the unholy offspring of a chicken and a blender. What made them dangerous was that they tended to attack from ambush and swarm their victims with superior numbers. They would also be much more dangerous outside than in a building, as they were capable of digging through the ground to ambush people, but the facility walls were too hard for their claws. There were dozens of the little beasts.
"Subdue the mage, Galanys!" Atrog shouted. "I want him alive. We need to know what's going on here."
Balron was impressed. Fighting with dozens of opponents did not seem to stop Atrog from planning and talking at the same time. He was glad to see that Atrog was a more competent leader than the people he followed in his youth. He was still embarrassed about yesterday. When the basilisk had tried to eat him, he had started commenting about the creature's anatomy and habits. That was much better than freaking out of course, but Balron had to admit to himself that he really should have given more actionable information than he did.
Balron cast his telekinesis spell and began flinging veracs against the wall. It usually did not kill them, but it helped to keep them from swarming and overwhelming Atrog and Rania.
Hampered by the small office space, Rania had put away her bow and was fighting with a pair of daggers. She moved like a whirlwind, but the veracs knew how to fight as a pack, and it was only her two blades against a dozen pairs of claws at once, each time the beasts went on the offensive. She took wounds with each attack, and there were far too many of the creatures left. It was only a matter of time until she would get overwhelmed, so Balron focused his attention on helping her.
Atrog had a much better time. His heavy armor and his shield meant that the veracs could not touch him, even when they synchronized their attacks. His sword strikes were precise and strong, and although he killed more slowly than Rania, he was easily holding his own against the swarm.
When Atrog realized the state Rania was in, he paused in his strikes and muttered a brief prayer. A small burst of light erupted from him, and drew the veracs' attention. Balron recognized it as an enchantment spell colloquially known as "taunt". It was a simple spell that influenced the minds of enemies so that they saw the caster as the greater threat. It rarely worked on people, and anyone who was affected by it in combat would be the laughingstock of his unit for having such weak willpower. But it worked wonders against monsters.
The veracs switched targets, and they all began focusing their attacks on Atrog. Now genuinely pressed, the orc took to fighting defensively and left the killing to Rania. The elf took advantage of the opportunity and started dispatching the little beasts at an impressive rate.
Balron realized that the two of them now had the situation well in hand, so he focused his attention on Galanys and the mage.
He saw that the human was busy trying to knock the elven mage out by using biomancy to flood his body with drugs. Affecting an unwilling target with biomantic spells was extremely difficult and required concentration and time. It was normally useless in a combat situation. But the mage had already been disarmed and was in debilitating pain from being punched in the stomach by Atrog, so Galanys had the time.
While she was doing this, Balron focused his attention on putting out the fire in the corner. The more documents they saved, the more they would learn about what was going on here. It did not take much effort for him to put out the fire.
Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw the shock on Galanys' face as the man in front of her suddenly went slack. She stared at him for several seconds. By the time she recovered, the fight was over, and Balron had finished putting out the documents.
"Is anyone wounded?" Atrog asked. Everyone shook their heads.
"Balron, Rania. Cast divinations to check for more enemies." He continued. "Galanys, what happened here?"
"He died." Galanys said, still in shock.
Balron started to perform the requested divination magic, listening in on the conversation with one ear. Divinations cost less mana the more specific you were. It would not have been worth the effort to cast them beforehand. But now that they knew what they were looking for, it was worth it to avoid an ambush.
"It wasn't me." Galanys continued. "He killed himself! The man killed himself when I tried to knock him out. When he noticed my spell taking hold, he triggered a glyph in his neck, and the spell cut his nerves."
"A suicide switch?" Atrog responded in shock. "Who even does something like that?" He asked in disbelief.
"Well, the old government had multiple organizations that required this of their soldiers." Balron responded, having finished his divination spells without detecting any further hostiles. "During the Great War it was important for Oruk to maintain its technological lead, after all. For example, ..."
"I was being rhetorical, Balron." Atrog interrupted him. "Who does that sort of thing nowadays? It's a ridiculous level of paranoia."
After a few seconds of thought he added. "But it explains why he opened the cages. I was wondering about that. The veracs would have killed him next, but if he wasn't planning to survive then that makes sense. The facility looks like it doesn't have a back door he could have used to escape. Only one entrance."
"That's not all." Galanys added. "Tell me if you recognize this man, Atrog."
Atrog took a closer look at the corpse, then his eyes widened in surprise. "Isn't that the guard captain of Bells End? You know, the one you slept with?"
"Imagine my surprise. I thought so too, at first." Galanys responded. "But then I noticed something weird. Look at the scar here on his chest."
"What about it? I didn't notice a scar on his chest yesterday because he was wearing armor. Many soldiers refuse healing for scars if they hold significance for them, so this isn't unusual."
"Well, you wouldn't know," Galanys continued "but I got a good look at his scars last night. They were different. That scar went the other direction, and it was about two centimeters further down. This is not the man we met yesterday, he just looks almost identical."
"Are you serious?" Atrog asked. "That sounds pretty far-fetched."
"He is an Evil Twin!" Rania interrupted excitedly.
Atrog gave her a look that said more than words ever could.
"Pebble says he is! Well, not really." Rania continued. "But there isn't really a word for what he is in Common, I think? The word is really hard to translate and I don't think I'm supposed to say it out loud. Sorry Pebble! I didn't know that was a secret!"
"If you know something you need to tell us, Rania." Atrog said.
Rania just made a lip-sealing gesture with her hands.
Before Atrog could continue, Galanys interrupted him. "As much as I want to get to the bottom of this, if Rania knows something, but she says she can't talk about it, we should take her word for it. She is the shaman, after all. I think we have more urgent things to take care of right now. We should definitely discuss this later, though."
"You are right." Atrog responded. "Rania, if you feel you can't tell us for a good reason, then I trust you. But please think about this carefully. It sounds like very important knowledge."
"I agree." Balron said, as he moved towards the documents. Some of them had been damaged by the fire, but many were still intact. He pointed at them and said "We should take these with us."
There were too many documents to read through them all quickly, but it looked like most of them were irrelevant research notes. There certainly was no document labeled "My Evil Plan", despite what Rania might have hoped for.
Balron moved to put the documents into his bag, but Galanys took them out of his hands. She started leafing through them, scanning them with her eyes, page by page.
"Before you ask: no, I can't read that fast." Galanys said. "But I do remember what I'm looking at. I remember the images, but I don't comprehend the words when I read at this speed. I will have to go through the images in my head later, which will take many hours. But I can do this at any time later, when I have nothing else to do."
Balron was just as impressed as the rest of the team. He packed away the documents as Galanys handed them to him.
While they were doing this, Atrog investigated the corpse of the mage, looking for clues. Rania investigated the corpses of the veracs, but where Atrog clearly knew what he was looking for, Rania was mostly just showing the dead veracs to her pet spider Aranea while making excited fighting noises and re-enacting the battle for her. Apparently the tarantula had hidden away during the fight, and Rania believed it important that she was fully immersed in the adventuring experience.
Suddenly, Balron noticed a telepathic tug in his mind. Whispers wanted to tell him something. Familiars couldn't really talk like people do, but they could convey information to the person they were bonded with through a telepathic bond.
The miasma was closing in.
"We need to hurry!" Balron said. "Whiskers just informed me that the Miasma is getting closer."
Atrog responded immediately: "Galanys, stop looking at the documents and have a good look around the place instead. Memorize anything we can't take with us."
Galanys nodded and started walking through the rooms of the facility.
"We should still have some time." Balron said. "The miasma is just moving randomly and will take a while before it blocks the door. But better safe than sorry."
"I can help!" Rania said. "I could talk to the spirits and ask them to calm down. Maybe they will leave us alone."
"It's worth a shot." Atrog replied.
Rania closed her eyes and went into a trance. After a short time, she began talking to the spirits again. Not for the first time Balron thought that he would love to hear the other half of these conversations.
"It's nice to meet you! Wow, that's very rude. You can't say that! No, that wasn't me. It wasn't them either! That's terrible! Yes, it's really bad that you were betrayed, but that wasn't us. No really. You are not listening, are you? No, you are definitely not listening to a word I'm saying."
Rania came out of her trance and said "Oh no. I think I have made it worse. The miasma doesn't like people at all, and now it knows that we are here!"
Whisker's telepathic connection to Balron suddenly became more urgent.
"It's closing in quickly now!" He said. "The miasma is moving towards the facility from all directions!"
Everyone was shocked at this development. Galanys had overheard and came rushing back into the room, a fearful look on her face. The miasma could kill people in seconds. There was no known defense against it. From one minute to another, the situation had turned dire. They could all die in the next few minutes.
"I have an idea." Galanys said. "This facility has an entrance to the realms below. It's right over there." She pointed. "It isn't locked from this side."
"Does anyone know if the miasma follows people underground?" Balron asked.
"Nobody knows. I asked about it. It's unknown." Atrog replied. He looked at Rania for confirmation, but she shrugged and shook her head.
After a few tense seconds, Atrog said "It looks like we have no other choice. It's either that, or we all die here. I can't believe I'm saying this, but let's escape into the Realms Below."
After a few seconds he added "I'm so glad we practiced for this."
Balron could only agree. Preparation is key.