“Underwater tunnels? Aye. They’re real. Saw the portal meself when I was a wee lad. It’s a bear to open, I’ll tell you what. Takes some sorta magic. But you can walk clear from here all the way to the other side of the sea. Least, that’s the rumor.”
We’re across from an elderly [Sailor] who’s enjoying his second serving of rum, courtesy of Melina. Seated at a low, sticky table that’s been stained from long years of spilled drinks, we are deep into a conversation about the rumored sea people. Tables and chairs are packed in at haphazard angles all throughout the side room we’re in, as though maximizing usable space never occurred to anyone. The tavern is a maze to navigate, but we made it to our seats with minimal stubbed toes.
“Where can we find the portal?” Melina asks, leaning closer to the old codger we found in the tavern. She gives him the most winning smile she can muster, and I have to admit that she looks dazzling in the reflected mana lamp light glittering off her glass core necklace. I’ve never seen her gussied up quite like this. I don’t even know where she managed to get a dress on such short notice.
The ancient [Sailor]’s cheeks are flushed. He smiles at Melina, gazing at her like she’s a fairy from a children’s tale. He’s well past his prime, but he still looks smitten. “Dunno. Sorry to let ya down, pretty lass! It—well, it shifts. Magic. Never went to see the sea people meself.”
I suppress a sigh. We’re never getting any details at this rate. But he’s the only [Sailor] in the tavern who will talk with us. I hope the others are meeting more success in their fact-finding endeavors than we are. The rest of the [Sailors] and [Dockhands] we talked to have shut down our line of inquiry, and unless I miss my mark, they’ve been too afraid to talk. That just begs the question: afraid of what? There’s something off about the entire thing. I can’t figure out what’s going on.
He sniffs, rubbing his overly-red nose, and taps the side of his head. “Y’know who would know? Old Ned. Surprised ya haven’t asked him.”
“Our innkeeper?” Melina says, a note of interest brightening her voice. “I’ll bet he’s got a few stories to tell. I didn’t get the impression that he’s as eloquent as you are!” She flutters her eyelashes at him shamelessly. “Don’t you have any other secrets to share?”
The [Sailor] runs his fingers through the last remaining wisps of his thinning white hair, beaming at Melina. His smile suddenly turns sour, however, as something beyond us catches his eye. He shifts over on the wooden bench. “Another time.”
I glance over my shoulder to see what spooked him. The mayor bustles over toward us with a trio of rough-looking men in long coats. They’re each carrying harpoons that look like they could skewer a ship, and the roil of mana surrounding them tells me that they’re priming Skills in case of a fight.
“Trouble,” I whisper to Melina, keeping my voice low. “I’ll try to handle it, but get ready.”
“I’ll slow them if we have to make a quick exit,” Melina whispers back. “Don’t worry.”
I stand up, lifting my mug of rum toward the mayor with a big grin. “Good to see ya! Join us for a round? We were just toasting you for providing commission work for us.”
The toughs spread out, cutting off the table from the room, and the mayor steps forward, his face twisted into a mask of concentration. “You work fast. Impressive.”
“We aim to please,” I say, my smile growing wider. I reach out with a delicate touch of my Domain, searching for the rest of my team. They’re scattered throughout the tavern, enjoying a well-earned night off. Most of them seem to be singing or dancing in the next room over, but a quick pulse of my presence makes each one jolt upright. They’ll be on their way to come find me before long, I hope.
“Heard you were looking for other passages outta town,” the mayor continues. “Look, I said I’d ask around. No one’s available. Taking another path is a bad idea. Besides, it’s been a tough year. We could use the help getting through the stormy season. Stay here, make what we ask ya, and I promise that you’ll leave next season with pockets full of gold. Not safe to move in these conditions, anyway.”
“I’m flattered that you think we’re talented enough to help,” I say, still smiling at him with immaculate politeness. “But we really must be on our way soon.”
He glances at the table, his eyes squeezed shut for a few breaths before he looks back up at me. “I hate doing this,” he mutters. A sharp look from the [Harpooner] makes him flinch. He sighs heavily. “Afraid I can’t let you do that.”
“I see. Are you pressing us into service?”
He refuses to meet my gaze, shuffling back behind one of the big men with the harpoons and long knives. “Call it what you want. We’ll pay, ya hear? Doesn’t have to get ugly. Works out for the best if you agree. Everyone wins.”
“Ah! I didn’t realize you knew what’s best for us,” I say, blithely chattering on. “You see, we have very different ideas of what counts as a win, and I’m afraid that I’m tired of playing by other people’s rules. I’ll have to decline your offer, I’m afraid.”
His face goes stony. “Bah. Hate doin this, but there’s no other way. Grab the girl,” the mayor orders his assembled thugs. He glares at me. “You’ll get her back when we get our deal.”
Melina snaps, activating her Skill and trapping the three harpoon-wielders in a temporal bubble. At the same, she flings a big ceramic tankard of rum at the mayor’s face using [Object Manipulation] and another time-field to accelerate the throw, crunching his nose with the force of the impact.
My [Arcane Domain] unfurls in the same instant, helping me keep track of where all our teammates are as the entire tavern erupts in shouts and the scraping sounds of seats pushed back from tables abruptly. Relying on my Skill to help me navigate, I grab Melina’s hand and dash away from the table. Guiding her toward the back door is a must if she’s going to maintain her fields while moving; the temporal acceleration effect takes way too much concentration for her to run at the same time she’s moving, unless she brings the bubble of time along with us.
Behind us, shouts of anger and confusion break out, but I ignore them and run faster. It’s a shame it came to this, but I refuse to play by their rules anymore. Melina clearly agreed, since she started the fight.
I’m kinda proud of her.
It’s a rogue thought in the middle of our frantic dash, but I can’t help it. Melina isn’t well suited for confrontation, but she acted immediately. Zero hesitation.
The team streams out of the tavern behind us, led by Lionel. His sharp eyes and quick feet make him a perfect scout for this situation, and he takes the lead, finding us good footing across the rain-slicked cobblestones outside. “Head to the docks, Nuri! From what I gathered talking with the lads, the tunnels you’re after are underneath the water. I wouldn’t be surprised if that crusty guide of ours is heading there now, thanks to his weird Skill.”
Following Lionel’s suggestion, we dash through the town, a pack of angry [Sailors] on our heels. Mikko detours, rips up a loose lamp post, and chucks it behind us, knocking over a few of the frontrunners and buying us time. He seems to take grim satisfaction tearing up the very same lamp posts that he worked so hard to make the last few days.
“I’m not asking you to hurt anyone,” I gasp between breaths, turning toward Avelina, “but if you could raise up some scary pillars of flame, that might deter them.”
“Can’t you just freeze the ground so they slide?” Avelina asks. There’s an undercurrent of dread in her voice, so I don’t push the matter.
I reach behind me with my Domain, connecting to the wet cobblestones just ahead of the pursuers. Drawing all the heat out of the stone and rainwater is a trivial matter for my [Greater Heat Manipulation]; the water freezes over instantly as the cold shock covers the ground and turns it into a treacherous sheet of ice. When the first pounding feet hit the slick surface, they go flying, slipping and tumbling over each other.
I’d find it comical if I weren’t so enraged. I refuse to let anyone order my team around against their will again. Totten tried, and I went along for the most part. Even when I got angry, I let him off easy, settling for a blacklist against the trading post of Halmuth instead of pushing the matter further.
“You head to the docks,” Mikko calls. “I’ll swing by the inn and grab our bags. Can’t leave the core.”
“Not worth the risk!” I shout back. “We need to stick together and get out alive. Nothing else is important.”
“Don’t die, or I’ll track you down and give you a piece of my mind,” Mikko growls. He cuts away from the group abruptly, sprinting back toward the inn. Every time he reaches a lamppost, he rips it out of the ground with his incredible [Strength of the Forge Gods] and flings it at the thugs who’ve broken off from the group.
Yep. My brother’s the best.
I have no time to dwell on what an awesome guy Mikko is, however. A powerful working of mana surges behind me, and I fling myself to the side just in time to avoid one of the massive harpoons the thugs were carrying earlier. They’ve broken out of the time dilation, and now the three of them are hot on our trail.
I track the [Harpooners] in my Domain, blinding them with bursts of heat. I don’t want to use the weight of my [Domain] to bat away the projectiles if I can help it, since it will drain way too much mana, so I fall back on old tricks. A burst of willpower coats the ground beneath them in a layer of frost so they fall over, unable to target us.
I break off, turning a corner and panting in exhaustion. We haven’t run far, but pushing my casting through my Domain is taxing in a way that nothing else can match.
Rakesh releases a few of his birds. “I’ll hold them off, Nuri. Keep moving! We can’t let anyone fall behind.”
I blink in surprise, too taken aback to respond at first. What are his paper birds supposed to do against the [Harpooners] chasing us? Then I hear an ear-piercing screech behind us, shrill and biting, and I clap my hand over my ear and keep running.
“Amplification weaponized,” Rakesh explains smugly, winking at me as he picks up the pace. He’s never been the most physically fit, but the weeks of trudging through the Barrens treated him well, and he’s stronger and more agile than ever before.
“Smart.”
Between the sheets of ice and the terrible shrieks from Rakesh’s paper birds, the group pursuing us is forced to retreat and find an alternate path, buying us time to make the docks.
Mikko comes barreling down the road just as we reach the seaside. He’s got everyone’s bags hanging off his shoulders, including the massive, reinforced pack that he’s been using for the beast core. Best of all, he’s got some of Ned’s sweet rolls in a basket, tucked under his arm.
“Thank you!” I yell, dashing over and launching myself at my brother. I rebound off his muscular frame, my attempt to hug him leaving me staggering and dazed.
Mikko chuckles. “Of course, bro.”
“Can’t believe you ran back to the inn that fast. I thought for sure we’d have to give up the core. Anything else we leave behind can be replaced, but that’s priceless. You can’t buy something like that, Mikko. It’s not about the gold value; they’re literally not for sale. Every core has to be registered, but anything above high-Palladium is forfeit. Those [Hunters] didn’t know what they were dealing with, but it’s not something that I could ever get on the open market.”
“Good thing you’ve got me,” he replies. “Now, let’s get to the tunnels before we take a harpoon to the knee.”
Despite my misgivings, I’m almost relieved to see Azariah at the edge of the seashore when we arrive at our destination at last, following Lionel’s directions. He’s pacing back and forth, wrapped in a veritable cloak of pipe smoke, and a look of cold fury has settled on his face. Orav stands nearby, holding extra equipment.
“Stupid mayor!” Azariah growls when we get closer. “I told that git to leave you alone. What is it with greed these days? Every place we go, people are tryin to rip us off!”
“You’re the one who arranged things with Totten!” I snarl back. “Don’t act like you aren’t culpable.”
“It was the only real way forward,” Azariah insists. “I told you that already. I ain’t lookin to make yer lives miserable, despite what ya think.”
I cross my arms. “Is this why you got kicked out of Mahkaiaraon in the first place? Too many unilateral decisions like this?”
Azariah’s face darkens. “Don’t talk about that. Dig around and you’ll find more than you bargained for. You don’t know me.”
“Let’s focus on getting out of here. But we’re not done with this discussion,” I snap. “You have more secrets than I do, and that’s saying something.”
Azariah huffs. His smoke swirls around him, darkening into a foul black stream of oily consistency, and then vanishes. When it’s gone, he smiles, seemingly in a better mood, as if he siphoned off all his negative emotions and burned them away with his pipe.
Maybe he did. That’s handy.
“Didja figure out how to open the portal?” Azariah asks. “I’m a wayfinder, not a lockpick. If we can’t get inside, then we’ve got a real fight on our hands. What a pain. I’ll never be allowed back here. One less route open to me.”
“Not sure. Lionel?”
“Yeah, it’s a magic key. I can handle a physical lock, but this sounds like enchantments from what I could figure out. That’s probably a good deal beyond me,” he says, looking around with a puzzled expression. “But I still don’t see them. Tough to say for sure before I know what I’m dealing with. Where are they, anyway?”
“This way,” Azariah beckons. He leads us down a steep, shale-covered hill, walking at an angle so we don’t slip and tumble down to the rocky beach below. “Near as I can tell, they’re all underneath the current docks. Might hafta swim.”
“I hate getting wet,” Avelina hisses.
“Just keep moving. Let’s not get caught out in the open with enemies on our heels. They looked like they’re out for blood,” Rakesh says, casting nervous glances over his shoulder. “My birds are all gone. Can you believe it? They tore them up!”
“Maybe I should have tried a more diplomatic approach,” Melina mutters. “You’re a bad influence on me, Nuri.”
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“Diplomacy wouldn’t have worked,” Azariah says, surprising me by coming to her rescue in the discussion. “Remember I warned ya about the mayor? He ain’t got a spine. Whatever the rest of 'em tell him to do, he just goes along with it. Didn’t seem like a bad kid, when I first met him, but I’ve avoided getting entangled in issues here for a long time. Thought we’d slide under their notice, but then ya had to go and wave your fancy magics around under his nose.”
“That’s my bad judgment,” I say, shaking my head. I hop down from the last boulder to the beach. “I didn’t think that it would cause so much trouble. All I wanted to do was make a little extra money before we moved on to our final destination.”
“Extra?” Azariah explodes indignantly. He jumps down beside me, sending up a spray of pebbles and sand on the beach. “You’re already rich! What more do you need, boy?”
I meet his incensed gaze with a cold, calculated glare. “More than you know, not that it’s any of your business. Menders aren’t cheap.”
He tugs his beard, squinting at me, and grunts. “That’s right. Your core and channels are busted, you said. Don’t know that’s much of a problem. You’re practically a [Mage], anyway. Do ya really need more?”
“Focus on getting to the tunnels,” I admonish him.
Azariah spits to the side, but doesn’t push the issue. He squeezes down under the edge of the pier, scrabbling in cold, clay-like dirt, and we follow on his heels. The mud streaks all over my clothes, but I can’t stop in the middle of our escape to clean off. I push forward, relying on the pseudo-sight of my Domain to guide me through the sudden darkness underneath the pier.
Mikko’s strong hands latch onto my shirt so he can keep track of me in the dark. From the sounds of it, he’s guiding the next person behind him, and so on down the line. Everyone is holding onto the next person’s shirt in an unbroken chain so that no one’s left behind.
We reach the water a short while later. I don’t see anywhere else to go, but my Domain expands to fill the space until something clips in my sight. Glowing with the garish light of too many enchantments stacked on top of each other, a round door twice as tall as I am appears to be sunk into the seabed about a dozen paces out from the edge. We’ll need to submerge in the cold, inky-black water in order to enter, but there’s no other way.
“It’s about thirty or forty feet out, just under the water. Lionel, how are we getting in?” I ask. “Can you figure out the portal? I tried to dig up some clues, but no one knows much of anything.”
He shrugs. “Best I can figure out is that we need a key of some sort, but I can’t say for sure until I’m over there. Not fancying a swim right now.”
“No idea what those enchantments do,” I mutter. “Might be faster to simply overload the circuits with mana and get Mikko to pry them open.”
Azariah snorts. “Only problem is stopping the water from getting in. If we can enter, so can the sea.”
“Maybe,” I say, peering at the arcane traces and wishing I could decipher them. They’re not runes, strictly speaking, but they’re compressed spells, which still rely on the language of magic to operate. More or less. There’s some vague overlap, although it’s like trying to read a foreign language transliterated into my own alphabet. I understand the individual letters, and I can sound out the words, but I don’t know what they mean.
“Ava, light?” Melina suggests.
Avelina complies, and a bloom of gentle white flame sits in her cupped hands a moment later. She scuttles over, bent down to avoid hitting her head on the beams, and holds the flames close to me so that I can see what I’m doing.
In my notebook, I sketch out what I’m able to observe through my Domain, wishing that I’d had time to already master the scrying mirror trick that Azariah employs. That would make this entire process so much easier if I could just project what I’m observing. Nonetheless, I shut out my worries and fears, forcing myself to draw clearly and calmly. They’ll find us soon enough, but until then, I can’t fixate on getting discovered.
“Rakesh, Melina, do you recognize any of these?” I ask the scholarly pair, handing them my notebook while I scan through my memories to see if I can recall any of the shapes. “Some of the base runes are familiar, but I don’t see a way to open it.”
Above us, back on the boardwalk, I hear frustrated shouts and heavy boots clattering around as the [Sailors] look for us. Thankfully, they haven’t discovered our footprints yet, but it still makes me nervous. We’re trapped down here, stuck like rats in a cage.
My least favorite feeling.
I nudge my brother. “Mikko, can you roll a boulder over the gap in the pier where we came in? We need to buy time.”
“Wait! I recognize this one,” Melina says, her voice rising half an octave in excitement. “I think there’s a barrier function that keeps out water.”
“Good catch,” Rakesh says, nodding in approval. “Don’t touch that one, Nuri. If you avoid the barrier, and overload the enchantments locking the door, then Mikko might be able to force it open.”
“With leverage, maybe,” Mikko says, scratching his head. “If they’re as big as Nuri says, then I’m not sure I’m strong enough to open it since I’ll be swimming. Nothing to brace against to push or pull, y’know?”
I nod, considering his input. “All right, so we need something to anchor you. I don’t know if that’s going to be easy, however. We still need to swim out there, and I doubt you wanna drag a boulder with you.”
“I’ll light up the place,” Avelina offers. Her flames shoot out from her hands, multiplying and hovering in the area to illuminate everything underneath the pier. Her smile is sharp-edged and grim, but she seems committed.
“Nuri, break those scripts. Leave the rest to me,” Mikko declares confidently. He dives into the waves, swimming out to the sealed circular door with powerful strokes, leaving me with little time to override the enchantment with a burst of mana.
Prior to earning my [Arcane Domain], I’d never have had a chance. An enchantment on this level is well beyond my understanding, and usually has some built-in defenses to prevent wear and tear, let alone tampering. Leaning on my Skill, however, makes the task possible. With a burst of power, I throw the weight of my Domain against the ethereal traces in the door; for half a heartbeat, they resist, but they soon burst apart like a soap bubble as I flood power into the connection.
“Go!” I call out to Mikko.
He wedges his fingers into the handles on the doors, presses his legs against the frame of the circular door for leverage—I guess we didn’t need a boulder, after all—and heaves for all he’s worth. His muscles strain, but nothing happens. He pours more and more mana into his strength Skill, blazing like a bonfire in my Domain, but there’s no movement at all from the door.
“It’s not enough!” Mikko roars, his frustration making his voice louder than it should be if we’re still committed to stealth.
“My smoke might help,” Azariah says.
“Nuri, that looks physically stuck,” Melina points out. “Can you sense anything beyond the door? Anything on the other side blocking it?”
“Oh, good call.” I extend my perception farther, and sure enough, discover the problem. “You were right. I think there’s a bar blocking the door. I can sense it through my Domain. If we break it, then we can open the door.”
“How ya gonna break it from here?” Azariah says. “Let me condense some smoke in the crack and push it out.”
“Go ahead,” I say, rolling up my sleeves and prepping to wade out into the water. “I’m not sure if you can get through the seal, but give it a try.”
Azariah dives into the water without any further urging. He and Orav swim out to the big round doorway, and the young [Hunter] holds our guide in place while he attempts to use his pipe smoke to lift the bar on the other side of the door. It doesn’t seem to be going well.
“I’ll melt it if I have to,” I call, figuring out a plan as we go. Mana signatures ping in my Domain just then, and I spin around to glare up at the unseen assailants. “Let’s go! I’m sensing movement on the pier. [Harpooners] inbound.”
We all plunge into the water, making for the doorway ahead of us. Swimming isn’t my favorite activity since I lost a hand, but it’s not far to reach the portal. I’ll be in range to pull off my plan soon.
“Move, Ko,” I bellow.
“What’s the plan?”
“Gonna melt the bar. Once it’s weakened, shove the door and pull it apart like taffy.”
He turns, giving me a quizzical look, but shifts out of the way. “Need help staying afloat?”
“Please,” I grit out between my chattering teeth. The water is freezing. With my [Arcane Domain] active, and more urgent target for thermal energy, I can’t afford to keep running my [Greater Heat Manipulation] just to keep myself comfortable in the water.
My first attempt fizzles out.
“Getting a lot of resistance,” I mutter. “Tough to manipulate heat energy when I can’t get a good sense of it. I’ll have to overlay my Domain, I reckon.”
“I’ve gotchu!” Mikko assures me.
Resting against my brother’s strong frame so that I won’t go underwater, I close my eyes and touch the portal door with my right hand. I focus on extending my touch through the door to establish contact with the mana-infused steel on the other side. While I’m not touching it directly, I’m technically touching something connected to it, which should work.
In theory.
I push forward, seeking to establish a stronger connection. Mana flows from me, yet my progress barely inches forward. I shove more mana into the Skill, no longer worrying about how inefficient it is or how much I have left in reserve. We’ve gotta get out of here!
“I can’t do it!” I scream in frustration, clenching my hand into a fist and pounding against the side of the portal. “There’s too much resistance, and I can’t pull in enough ambient heat.”
“Mana-infused steel has nearly three times the melting point,” Mikko says, frowning. “I’m not sure you’ll have enough juice to melt through something that thick. My sense of the metal is that it’s pretty hefty. High quality stuff. Maybe turn it to glass first?”
“You’re a genius, Ko.”
“Yep,” he replies smugly. “Now get on it. This water’s making my skin shrivel up like a prune, and I can barely feel my toes anymore.”
I nod and get to work, an application of [Vitrification] queued up. I’m not sure how well it will work through my Domain; unlike my other Skills, forcing [Vitrification] to work without contact has been a fruitless endeavor so far.
Focusing on the task, I reach out to the mana-infused steel. My perception sinks into it, and I coax the runes in my Skill to pit themselves against the metal security bar despite the lack of physical contact. C’mon! You can do it, Nuri.
Like a key sliding into place and clicking in a lock, my Domain bridges the gap between me and the mana-infused bar on the other side of the circular door. I slam the rest of my mana into [Vitrification], turning a fist-sized section in the middle of the steel into glass.
I’m struggling to maintain the connection with my Domain. It’s slower to transmute than normal materials, but as soon as it’s mostly done, I switch to [Greater Heat Manipulation] and melt away. Once it’s pliable enough to bend, I pump my fist and nod at my brother.
“Hit it with your hammer!” I yell at Mikko
He brings the hammer to bear, not even asking questions, and the blow rattles my teeth in my mouth. Beyond the door, the weak point of the melted glass gives way.
The doors rumble open.
They open internally, which surprises me since it seems like a security flaw. Sea water doesn’t gush in, however, proving my suspicion right about the barrier enchantment.
I kick forward, about to enter, when Mikko grabs me and pulls me back. “Swim down to the bottom first! Otherwise, you’ll fall a dozen feet and break something.”
“Good point,” I concede, taking a breath and diving down. I swim until I reach the silty floor of the inland sea, and push myself forward through the barrier. I pass through it easily, with no strange fluctuations like stepping through a Rift portal. No water pours into the opening.
Once everyone’s through, Avelina relights her flames, giving us illumination. I blast out my [Greater Heat Manipulation] to dry us out, and Melina layers her temporal fields over the edge of our clothes, accelerating the drying process.
I motion them all over. “Close the door back up. We can fuse the metal bar back together to block our path. Mikko? Hold the pieces together side by side. I’ll turn them into glass again. Ava, can you use [Strong as Stone] so that it won’t break if they try to force their way through? We need to get as much of a headstart as possible.”
Mikko heaves the doors shut and slams the two ends of the security bar together, resting them in the notches designed to hold it in place. With practiced precision, we combine our Skills, overlapping effects and resealing the massive circular doors. Unless our pursuers have more potent Skills than harpoons—which are admittedly terrifying against fleshy targets—they aren’t likely to breach the gates anytime soon.
“Anything unusual we should know about the tunnels?” I ask Azariah, glancing around at the strange environment. “You seem to have more information about them than we do. I wanna make sure we’re ready for whatever we run into along the way.”
“Not a bloomin clue,” Azariah murmurs.
Avelina sends her flames down the tunnel, lighting the way for us. We follow Azariah, who’s trudging along already.
He turns back and beckons us. “C’mon. No idea what awaits. Just gotta pray the tunnels don’t collapse. We’re going down into the deep. Danger lurks, but the path forward hasn’t shifted. Skill still says this is where we need to go next. Not my first choice, but it looks like ya put your foot in it.”
My gut clunches. “Sorry. You did warn me about the mayor. Guess we shouldn’t have had anything to do with him.”
“Nothin for it now. Not yer fault his cronies are maniacs.” Azariah snorts. “Course, it’s kinda yer fault that ya never listen.”
“I don't know how we could have avoided it,” I say, caught between feeling guilty and annoyed at the accusation that this is all on me. “How were we supposed to know that selling our services was gonna create problems?”
“Cuz I warned ya!” Azariah says. He stomps off down the tunnel, puffing away furiously on his pipe. The smoke thickens behind him, solidifying like cooling glass, and cloaks his passage.
What am I supposed to say? He did warn me, and like a fool, I didn’t listen. I let my anger over Halmuth and Totten cloud my judgment. I thought Azariah would betray me again, just like all the other people I’ve come across in the last miserable year.
Melina pats my arm. “It’s not really your fault. We made this deal as a team. It seemed like a good idea. You can’t shy away from ever trusting anyone again just because of a few bad actors. Blame me, if you want.”
“Nah. You just did what we talked about, and did it better than I could. I appreciated you taking care of things, Mel. If I was proactive, though, maybe I could have gotten us out of there faster, or shut the mayor down sooner. Somehow, it feels like I failed everyone.”
“Nonsense! We all have a part to play, Nuri. We made it into the tunnels, and we’re on the way to our next stage of the journey. What is there to worry about anymore?” Melina asks, a soft smile on her face. She pats my back and trots off to walk next to her twin.
My teammates are getting farther away, and Avelina’s light is fading. No one seems to have noticed yet that I’ve lagged behind; they’re all too busy chatting and exploring the new surroundings. I don’t blame them, since I’ve never seen anything like the reinforced walls of the tunnels. There are some sort of mana traceries embedded in the walls, threading through like enchantments, yet without an actual spell form.
I peer at the phenomenon more closely, or as closely as I can now that I’m jogging to catch back up with my team. They aren’t actually enchantments, or at least they're not like any I’ve ever seen before. No actual Skill fragments or runic arrays from what I can tell. They are definitely mana-sensitive, though. They’re more like mana conduits, I realize, which makes me wonder if they transfer energy from a natural formation like the ones we ran into in the Barrens. Maybe that’s what powers the enchantments at the entrance to the tunnels.
Vowing to pay more attention to wise counsel, I run after my friends, deeper into the undersea tunnels. When I catch up, I reactivate my [Greater Heat Manipulation], blanketing the team in what meager warmth I can pull out of the ambient air. The farther we go, the colder the surroundings, but there’s still enough heat dispersed through the surrounding ocean water if I spread out my Domain and draw on the energy deeply enough.
“How far across is the inland sea, anyway?” I ask Rakesh. If anyone is likely to have taken a long look at a map, it’s certainly our [Researcher]. I’ll wager he’s probably memorized three different variants, just in case there are discrepancies between the maps.
“Roughly twenty miles at its narrowest. From Loch LaMara to Gilead, though, it’s closer to seventy-five miles across,” Rakesh replies without missing a beat.
“Four days if we conserve our energy,” Azariah says. “You’re a hardy lot, but I ain’t as young as I used to be. I’m not keen on marchin the whole way in one go like I could when I was young and bold.”
“Not as bad as I feared. I thought it was hundreds of miles from the way you talked about the journey,” I say, surprised at the answer.
“The sea’s a few hundred miles long, and there are jagged cliffs blockin the way north. Can climb em, but it takes weeks to move from camp to camp, and the wind is a terror.”
“Couldn't we have just found passage from a different town? Seems like Loch LaMara can’t be the only port,” Avelina says.
Azariah shakes his head. “Not a lot of beaches or harbors along the way. The coastline is unforgivin. That’s why Loch LaMara does such good business. Nowhere else for big ships to put in. And tryin to cross in a dinghy during stormy season ain’t any better than diggin a ditch and coverin yourself with dirt.”
“Any warnings from your Skills?” I ask Azariah. “I’ll try to do a better job listening if you’re concerned about something.”
Azariah’s eyes flick up and to the side, as though he’s reading something that only he can see. “Nothin. But lemme tell ya, sometimes that’s worse. When trouble comes, it’s usually twice as bad.”
“Guess we have no choice but to keep going. I wish we’d had time to pack food,” I say, glad that I’d stuffed my face at the tavern just before we left.
“Well, you might be surprised how long we last. Eating all that good meat in the Barrens will leave you pretty resilient,” Orav says. He winks. “But I packed provisions when Azariah told us we had to leave in a hurry.”
“Good man!”
He ducks his head sheepishly, then rakes his fingers through his hair, looking around the tunnels in wide-eyed wonder. “Who knew something like this existed? Got my wish after all.”
I clap him on the shoulder. “It’s a big world. This is just the beginning, Orav. I’ll bet our next few days will be even more exciting. Just wait. We’ve got an adventure on our hands, mark my words.”