Their journey didn’t last as long as Rieren thought it was going to. They had a good distance to cover, but everyone moved quickly. Even if they couldn’t use the Spirit Beast—there were far too many of them now thanks to many of the settlement’s survivors having joined them.
Rieren didn’t really mind the exercise. She was looking forward to reaching their destination and being done with the monsters.
“Have you determined what the purpose behind taking prisoners might have been, my lord?” Rieren asked close to the head of the group.
Mercion didn’t look like he wanted to talk about it, but he replied all the same. “We have found some strange connections between those who were taken captive.”
“What sort of connections?”
“They were a tight-knit group, apparently. They not only knew each other well, it was also reported that they spent most of their company with each other. Of course, this isn’t unnatural in and of itself. Little groups such as that form in such cases where people are sent far from their local area and have to make new acquaintances.”
“But that’s the thing, see,” one of the cultivators said, an older woman with a pinched look on her face. “Certain accounts revealed that they knew each other before arriving at Outpost Seventeen. For the monsters to target all of them in such a manner is quite odd.”
Rieren grimaced. More signs of intelligence. More and more, she kept seeing signs of clever coordination behind the monsters’ various actions.
“We think they were involved in something,” Mercion said.
“Something like what?” Rieren asked.
“Well, you are aware of the Avatars making their way into our lands, yes? I am afraid they were implicated in some sort of plot against the Avatars, or the ones being apprehended.”
“The undesirables,” Rieren muttered.
Mercion glanced at her. “You know of them?”
She nodded, deciding to take the plunge without fully implicating herself. “I have heard they were notorious in the previous timeline for going against the gods-controlled imperial court. Many of them even took powerful stands and were quite the troubling handful for the gods.”
“Which is why they are being targeted before they can be a danger,” Silomene said. She had on a little frown. “Harsh, but smart.”
“But to think that a Masked Avatar of the empire might have sent a bunch of monsters to do his bidding and bring him those he was to hunt down for himself…” Mercion shook his head. “That is incredibly difficult to believe.”
Rieren couldn’t fathom what exactly might have been going on in the Avatar’s mind, if this was indeed the handiwork of one. It was telling that the Avatars would be so brazen about their connection with the monsters now. Or the gods, for that matter.
All it reminded Rieren was of Appraiser’s strange combination with the Gravemark Puppeteer.
Rieren cleared her throat. Time for another plunge. Another blow against the paranoia that would keep everything a secret. “I have heard tell of Avatars who work quite closely with certain Abyssals.”
Mercion and several others in the group stared at her.
“Like our current predicament?” Mercion asked.
“Even closer, actually.” Rieren understood that the exact truth of Appraiser before his death would sound wildly preposterous, so she decided against going into details. “It is all hearsay, but I will not be surprised to see monsters doing an Avatar’s bidding.”
They didn’t need too long to reach the dungeon they were heading towards. Batcat was looking up eagerly from atop Rieren’s head. Clearly, it was intrigued by what they were about to find as well.
The situation was strange for Rieren. She hadn’t been part of a such a group effort before, not outside the Sect and with so many strangers in one place. In the previous timeline, things had been far more chaotic, and at this point in time, Rieren would have been heading straight towards a Falstrom moments before disaster struck.
Now, however, the disaster was slowly growing to a crescendo. Things were coming to a different kind of head, and her knowledge of the past wasn’t serving her as well as she wished.
In the previous timeline, the city had been attacked by a powerful monster called the Dreadflood. Considering that she had heard nothing of it yet, it would seem the S-Grade Abyssal hadn’t appeared in the Shatterlands. Considering the gargantuan size of the monster, it would be impossible to miss and on everyone’s lips at all times. They had some time on their hands.
Unless the true danger would come from a different direction this time.
The dungeon’s entrance was unassuming. Mercion slowed the group down at the lake’s edge, asking them to keep a lookout. The lake itself was a wide body of pristine and undisturbed water, its distant shore difficult to see from their location. Clearly a rather large lake.
One of Mercion’s retainers called them over to point at a hole between the roots of a large Carom tree. It led into darkness, but they all knew what that signified.
They had to enter the dungeon here.
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There was no point in all of them going down at the same time. Mercion selected himself, Rieren, Silomene, one of his retainers, and a healer from the settlement to delve the dungeon. Leaving the rest behind, he summoned a crackling web of lighting around his fist to send up flickering light, then led the way inside.
“Keep your guard up,” he said as he walked in deeper. “These tunnels are narrow. There isn’t much space to move around. That means the monsters we are likely to face are small as well.”
Comparatively small when placed beside creatures like the Life Stifler. They might still be one or more heads taller than the tallest cultivator in the group.
The dungeon itself was small. Nothing like the grand passageways carved out of the bedrock of Lionshard mountain in its dungeon. The floor was wet from lake water, and there was constant runoff plunking into little puddles and pools here and there.
Rieren smiled. So much water. She was in her element here.
Batcat growled low in its throat as they went deeper. Rieren had to comfort the kitten to shush it. It wouldn’t do to give their positions away, but it also meant the monsters weren’t far off.
In fact, they came across their first enemy after taking a turn. This led them into a wider room with two different doorways heading in different directions.
But before they could begin to decide which path to take, a creature dropped from above.
They all reared back, hands going immediately to weapons or channelling Essence to use. For good reason too. Whatever the creature was, it didn’t look friendly in the least.
It resembled a shark that had been granted humanoid limbs with claw-tipped fingers and wielded weapons that appeared quite deadly despite being rusted. Water ran from its scaly hide, and when it stood to its full height, the monster was half-again as tall as Rieren. Growths of oily warts, dead barnacles, and rotting seaweed crusted the creature’s broad back.
Ah. The monster proved Mercion’s idea of small passages meaning small enemies false. Its kind would only attack once they were in large rooms like their current one, where there was enough space for the big dungeon guardians to make use of their greater girth.
“It’s water,” Mercion pointed out, as though they couldn’t see the scummy liquid pooling at the creature’s bare feet. “That means it should be susceptible to this.”
The dungeon guardian let loose a groaning, gurgling roar, raising a reddish-grey harpoon. But it never managed to take more than a single step forward. Mercion thrust his hand at the monster like he was punching from far away, and a bolt of his bright lightning shot out and zapped the creature to a standstill.
It fell, twisting and jerking, onto the ground. Smoke came off its lightning-burned body.
“Which direction do we go?” Silomene asked, apparently not interested in their encounter with the creature.
Mercion pulled his eyes away from the still-struggling guardian and tried to peer through both doorways. “I am not certain. Did anyone see if the guardian came from one of the doors?”
Rieren cleared her throat. “We should take the right path.”
“Why is that?” Mercion asked.
“It leads down. Dungeons that start closer to the surface usually lead deeper underground. Also, consider that we are under a lake.” She reached out a hand. A stream of water that fell from the chamber’s ceiling wrapped around her wrist like a liquid bracelet. There was a slight tingling sensation coming from the water. “We also don’t want to be tricked and led to drown.”
“Trick how?”
“The left path would be the initial logical conclusion. Since we entered the dungeon with the lake on our right, going right would supposedly lead us closer to the water, and likely to our doom. But that is what the dungeon wants us to think. Using our own thought processes against us, we are more likely to meet more dangerous traps on the left.”
“This could very well be wild conjecture,” one of the retainers said from behind.
“Only one way to find out for certain, yes?”
They couldn’t disagree with that.
“Let us take the right and see where that leads us,” Mercion said after a moment.
For someone who would be the first to be hit, if anything were to occur there, he was surprisingly stolid about it all. Of course, he couldn’t appear to fear for his life when his honour was on the line.
Rieren’s “conjecture”—born from past experiences—turned out to be true. The path on the right didn’t hold as many traps or anything more dangerous. Just a long, narrow passage that led deeper into the dungeon. Just as she had predicted.
Of course, there were some traps. That was unavoidable. They were in a dungeon, after all. Thankfully, Rieren’s experience at delving made them trivial.
At one point, they came across a section where the walls threatened to close in on them. Rieren had begun to recognize how their steps made minuscule hollow noises, suggesting that there was space under the flagstones for mechanisms. That meant they were about to encounter a trap.
All it took was a light-footed approach through the rest of the chamber. Slower than before, certainly, but safer. They only needed to feel out every step, which allowed them to evade pressing on any pressure plates that would activate the trap itself.
“Ingenious,” Mercion said after they were past it. Silomene had recognized the pressure plate and had pressed down on it after every was past the danger area. The walls on either side began to close in. “I wonder who makes these things. They weren’t here before the apocalypse.”
“Dungeon Cores,” Rieren said. “They have strange powers. Let us proceed.”
They passed through another chamber with a greater number of those fish-creatures. Mercion’s lightning handily took care of them with ease. Rieren wondered if she would even need to fight.
Then she remembered that there might be an Avatar at the end of their little adventure. She was pretty certain she would have to fight then.
Though, what she wasn’t certain of was whether she would be able to take the Avatar on. Appraiser wouldn’t have given her a great deal of trouble. Well, not before he had merged with the Gravemark Puppeteer, at least.
But there were stronger Avatars, those who were well into the Mid- or even Late-Ascendant Realm.
Even with the Temporal Recollector’s help, Rieren would only have reached Early-Ascendant. That sort of realm-level strength disparity tended to quickly make itself felt in higher stages of cultivation. The only negating factor was likely the presence of Rieren’s own powers, namely an improved version of Reaver Stance. That could even the odds, potentially.
Rieren’s thoughts were cut short when they began nearing the next chamber. So far along their journey, they were accompanied by silence until they came across a monster or a trap, apart from the constant drip-drip of water everywhere and the noises they themselves made.
Now, however, they could make out shouts and clashing noises in the distance. There was a fight going on.
“Someone else is here,” Mercion said.
Rieren swallowed. Her initial impulse suggested it was the Avatar, but then she had poured Essence into her eyes to make sure. She was wrong. There were multiple people in the distant chamber, and none of the Essence being channelled looked like it was Avatar-level strong.
“Other delvers into the dungeon?” the retainer behind Rieren asked. “How? And why were we not informed before this excursion?”
Mercion straightened. His voice had taken on a resigned note. “I believe I know why. Come, let us assist before the monsters make mincemeat of them.”
Credit to Mercion for not hesitating to help, though Rieren was curious what exactly he suspected. She and the others continued following his lead, taking quick but noiseless steps to where the noises were now dying down. It seemed the fight was dying down.
When they finally reached the chamber, Rieren had to halt and stare. The people who had been fighting were from Lionshard Sect. People she knew. Friends.