“What do you think is the meaning behind those words coming from the paintings?” All four members of the party opened their eyes at the same moment and the room was filled with utter silence for a few moments before Brienne decided to speak.
“At first, the voice said that it built this fortress to hide from some kind of ‘chaos’ and now it says that it tried to ‘create life’… Is that even possible?” Kamys’ was rather skeptical toward the words he just heard.
“Judging from what we saw, I think that this ancient wizard tried to associate himself with the strange mountain from paintings. I guess all of it is just a strange metaphor we don’t quite understand.” Dale started analyzing everything he saw and heard as coldly as ever.
“It might actually be the mountain itself speaking to us…” Before meeting his master, Boe would never even imagine such a thing, but now he could expect this theory to be true.
“Living mountain that levitates in a middle of an empty space and attempts to create ‘life’? Boe, did you hurt your head and we didn’t notice it?” Dale started loudly laughing while mocking Boe’s words.
“You should never underestimate how big this world is and how many unknown creatures exist out there.” Seeing Dale’s reaction, Boe coldly answered and immediately changed the subject, “Let’s split up and inspect all painting around us.”
“Brother Boe, don’t mind him. I think that your theory is a lot better than his idea of an ancient wizard who compares himself with the mountain.” Kamys hurried to catch up with Boe and tried to console him while Brienne quickly moved toward another wall. Even though she wasn’t afraid of Boe, nor was she mad at him, she still felt mixed emotions after the incident that happened in stone forest.
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After inspecting all three walls, the party gathered together again and started discussing what they found, “There are a total of twenty-four paintings on my wall. All of them are different, but I don’t seem to find anything special among them… Well, it’s better to say that all of them are special. Each painting represents a new unique world and none of them look like anything from our world.” Brienne was the first one to report results of her inspection.
“My wall also has twenty-four paintings and all of them are as strange as the stone forest was.” Dale already looked like he was completely healed.
Unique worlds that were different compared to their own was a rather weak statement if you would really try to describe what they saw on paintings. An endless field devoured in purple flames, a city, larger than the entire continent, that was teemed with bizarre creatures, a simple-looking wooden hut that was covered by menacing red eyes, a gruesome monster that looked like it could easily consume an entire house, a world with iridescent rain pouring on it and an ominous bloodied arena with countless seats for spectators were just a few examples of the worlds depicted on these paintings.
“Interestingly, our wall had only twenty-three paintings. But we noticed odd empty space between the paintings that looked like something disappeared from the wall. We think that it could be the painting of the stone forest.” Kamys voiced conjectures that he and Boe made earlier.
“So you think that every time we pass through the painting, it will disappear from the wall? Then is it possible that we have to go through a total of seventy-two tests before leaving this place?” Just thinking about going through seventy-two tests gave Dale a headache.
Seeing faces of all his friends tensing up, Boe added, “We can be wrong though. Don’t forget that this room is different from the previous one, so it’s entirely possible that each room has its own paintings.”
Before anyone had a chance to relax, Dale quickly responded, “Pretty sure that our hot-headed friend is right this time. I found a few paintings on my wall that I saw in the previous room.”
“Even if it’s true that we remove paintings by completing their tests, we still don’t know how many of them are we supposed to finish to get to the treasure we were promised.” Boe didn’t believe that the master of this fortress would make people go through so many tests.
After a brief moment of silence, Brienne was the one to break it, “Alright, let’s not think about something we can’t control. What painting do we go into this time?”
“Do we vote or just let Kamys fall into one of them?” Dale chuckled and looked at Kamys, who was trying to stand as far from paintings as he could.
“Don’t laugh too much or your wounds might open again and i don’t have that much potions on me, Your Highness the ‘Strike’.” As Kamys retorted his aura exploded with scorching heat and his eyes were burning with desire to fight Dale.
“Enough. Since none of us can decide, let’s just enter the one that is closest to the painting of the mountain.” Boe stepped in front of Kamys and his cold aura immediately cooled down air around them. Unlike Kamys, who lost control of his temper and released his power on accident, Boe controlled the amount of power his aura excluded so it wasn’t enough to intimidate anyone and only helped Kamys calm down.
Right after Boe started moving, Kamys took himself into his hands and followed his friend. Dale only shrugged his shoulders and followed the two with mocking smile on his face. Brienne was the last one to move as she still tried to keep some distance from Boe.
“This one, eh?” Dale recognized the painting to be one of the few paintings that actually left a rather deep impression on him after he inspected his wall.
“What the hell is that?” Kamys was trying to understand what he was looking at, but there was nothing in his mind that resembled the thing on the painting. That creature looked like it was created by just mixing up parts of different animals. It had a head of a bear, a torso of a tiger, wings of a bat, hands of a human and legs of a horse.
“Are we going to fight that… thing?” Brienne’s voice got shaky as she thought about fighting such an abomination.
“I’d rather not to, but if it will all come down to battle, be prepared to use all you got.” Even usually ice-cold Boe felt his heart beat faster just from a thought of fighting that thing.
Before anyone else could say anything or stop him, Boe had already touched the painting.
*WHOOSH*
Boe’s body simply vanished into thin air, but nothing changed on the surface of the painting.
“And just like that, he went inside without even thinking about possible consequences.” Brienne’s mind was filled with different thoughts as she saw Boe’s bold actions and just a moment later she followed his steps.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“After you, my friend.” Dale’s smile was as devilish as ever as he extended his hand to invite Kamys into the painting. Seeing Dale’s behavior, Kamys only glanced at Dale and proceeded to touch the painting.
“Should I just let them fight the monster while I wait here or should I enter a different painting?” Dale glanced at the other paintings on the wall as he slowly stepped away from the portrait of the monster. But just as he started inspecting other paintings, he suddenly heard a strange sound coming from all directions around him. “The room is… shrinking?” To Dale’s shock he figured out that the room started slowly shrinking from the opposite side and right into the corner where the monster was. ‘It’s too dangerous to go alone into another painting. I guess I’ll have to follow those three after all.’ Dale had no choice but to get back to where he came from and touch the portrait of the disgusting monster.
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*WHOOSH*
“So sorry, I had to tie my shoelaces. I hope you didn’t miss me too much?” Dale appeared in a middle of an ordinary looking field and immediately looked around. But before he could see the reaction of his three companions, he saw the scene which made his legs shake from fear.
*ROAAAR*
A hundred-meter tall, two-hundred-meter long towering creature was standing a few kilometers away from Dale. An obsidian colored body of a terrifyingly enormous rhinoceros slowly turned toward Dale and as he faced the monster, Dale's whole body started trembling. Shockingly, the face of an innocent human child was greedily devouring meat, guts and blood of an unfortunate creature whose body was now lying at the behemoth's feet. Just as Dale prepared to stealthily move as far as he could away from the monster, it suddenly stopped its gaze on Dale's body. The hideous face suddenly stopped chewing as the eyes of the creature started glowing red. In the next moment, before Dale could even react, the abomination started galloping through the field toward his location. A sharp killing intent broke out from the menacing crimson eyes of the creature and a thick cloud of dust was filling the air after each step of the monster shook the ground beneath its feet.
“What the fuck is that thing?!” Dale’s aura suddenly burst out of him. Coldness that killed all plants around him and shrieking howls resounding out of the translucent white spheres, which were circling around Dale’s body, appeared out of nowhere. Dale might be haughty, but he never was an idiot, so he immediately turned around and fled as fast as he could. But running away from such an enormously big creature across a plain field was as useless as it could be, so Dale used everything he got to search for his companions. He might not have a chance against the creature alone, but with three people assisting him, he was confident in his abilities to slay the abomination.
“Just turn around and use your attack on the creature’s neck,” Brienne voice resounded out of nowhere.
Hearing Brienne’s words, Dale quickly turned around and sent one of the white spheres that usually coiled around his body flying toward the monster. “Jan jaryloo,” Dale whispered the chant and the ‘Soul explosion’ technique blew the sphere up right next to the creature’s neck.
*BOOM*
An explosion was amazingly spectacular as the sphere let out its final exhausted howl and then dispersed into countless specks of mysteriously eye-catching white light. The creature’s neck burst open and green blood splattered everywhere around it. The huge body of the creature fallen onto the ground and after a few final twitches, the monster had finally died. A disgusting smell attacked Dale’s nostrils as the abomination’s insides flowed out of its body onto the ground and right at this moment, Dale quickly ran toward the dead body of the creature and whispered, “Jan tartyp aloo”. Countless white specks started escaping the creature body and then gathering into the translucent white sphere in Dale’s hand.
“Death attribute wizards are disgusting. Using souls of their enemies to feed their power…” Brienne, Boe and Kamys appeared a few meters away from Dale.
“So all those white howling spheres around Dale’s body are souls of living beings he killed?” It was the first time Kamys saw anything like that.
“It’s a ‘Soul capture’ technique, which is unique to royal family of dark elves. All death attribute wizards can manipulate souls of fallen enemies, whether to improve their weapons or own strength. For example, demons are able to directly absorb souls of their enemies to become stronger physically. But only Dale’s kin can command souls of fallen directly at their will.” Brienne was daughter of the King Karib, so she knew a lot more about other races and kingdoms than Kamys, who was raised inside of his clan.
“By the way, demons are only able to feed on souls of other beings; they can’t use souls of other demons. And that is the exact reason why humanity always considered demons to be their natural enemies.” When it came down to demons, Kamys definitely knew at least the same amount of information as Brienne.
Hearing all this information, Boe started wondering to himself, ‘Demons use souls to get stronger and I’m using the soul of a demon to gain strength… I wonder if it’ll have any negative side-effect on my personality… And how am I even able to do that if only death attribute wizards can do that?’
“Hahaha, have you all seen how easily I beat that little monster?” Dale’s cheerful voice disturbed Boe’s train of thought.
“Where have you been? We’ve been here for a whole day already and you just came?!” Kamys was infuriated as he came close to Dale with his palms clenched into fists.
“A day? Stop joking around, I only lingered for a few minutes in the room before coming here.” Dale was evidently not pleased with Kamys’ attempts to tarnish the former’s reputation.
“What the fuck are you talking about?! We fought these creatures for a full day already!” Kamys become even angrier after he heard Dale’s stupid excuse.
Before Dale had a chance to respond, he looked at his three companions and noticed that all of them had torn clothes, noticeable wounds all over their bodies and tired looks on faces. “I swear I only lingered there for a few minutes. I have no idea what happened…”
“Stop fucking-” Kamys had already started spewing out of his mouth and swinging his hands around from anger.
“Enough. No matter what happened, the important thing right now is to find a way out of this place.” Boe stopped Kamys mid-sentence and quickly changed the subject. “The creature you just killed is one of the weakest we met here. Any one of us can easily kill it single-handedly, but there are creatures far stronger than that. For example, a few hours ago we met a humanoid lizard and barely managed to kill it by using up all the trump cards we had. With you on our side, we might kill that kind of creature easier, but there still might be creatures stronger than what we encountered so far.”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH” A childish voice suddenly rang out from the nearby forest.
“Was that a human voice? A voice of a child?” Kamys took his sword out.
“Kamys, stop. That might be a trap set up by monsters. We don’t know how smart can they be yet.” Brienne was the first one to notice Kamys’ reaction, so she immediately tried to stop him from doing anything stupid.
“Brother Boe.” Kamys cast a last glance at Boe and charged toward the voice he heard.
“Kamys…” Boe hesitated slightly before taking out his Claws of Enthriil and following Kamys’ footsteps.
“That noble idiot…” Brienne clenched her fists and followed her partners.
“What? What’s happening?!” Dale was extremely confused, but followed his companions just because he didn’t want to be left alone in this strange world. “Brienne, why are we running toward the voice? Isn’t it obvious that it’s a trap?”
“The humanoid lizard we met earlier… We heard another similar voice before we met it. When we finally reached the location of the voice, we saw the lizard holding a human child. We all assumed that it might be a trap and child was some kind of illusion, so we waited for the next step they’d make. But before we could react, the lizard ripped off child’s head… After that, Kamys immediately jumped into the fight and we barely managed to kill the monster... And inspection of the headless corpse showed us that it was a real child.” Brienne’s voice slightly trembled when she described these events.
“And that’s the reason why Kamys is ready to fight unknown enemy? Is he an idiot? Why does the life of a single child matter?!” Dale’s voice was filled with genuine shock.
“I guess you’ll never understand him…” Looking at confused Dale, Brienne realized what a huge difference was between two of her companions. And then she wondered, to which one of them Boe was closer…