Chapter 283 – Distant Observation

A little over a week later, while her squadron is still on route to Elwaine’s branch of the Heavy-Blade fleet, Emily’s drawn out of meditation by a pulse of mana from within her belt.

She opens her eyes and reaches in with her mana, pulling out a modified Terminal. It’s bigger than the model Silvia gave her, with several large plates of metal welded onto its back to accommodate a scrawling mass of runes and fragmented crystals.

When she activates the device’s screen with a spark of machina, the runic circuitry lights up as well, latching on to the signal being transmitted by a sister construct far away. A live image of Mensacus’ small dungeon-bound squad appears on the screen, standing in what looks like a ship’s airlock with Silica at the head, barely a metre away from the camera.

“Can you see, Mother?” Mensacus’ familiar voice comes through clearly, low enough that only Silica and Rotwire seem to notice.

“Clear as day,” Emily replies. “Is it opening?”

“We’ve been instructed to prepare for entry within the hour; the exact window is uncertain.”

“Mama’s here?” Silica yips excitedly, standing up on her hind legs to press her snout to the camera, surprising the pirates waiting behind her.

“She is watching over us currently, yes,” Mensacus answers his little sister calmly, reaching up to pull her paws from his chest and set her back down on the ground before his tentacles slide into view around the border of the video feed, readjusting the cloak to maintain the secrecy of the device. “She will be present in mind when it suits her throughout the duration of our excursion, so you’d do well to remain calm and prove your recent training has been effective.”

The sandy fox nods enthusiastically before sitting back on her haunches beside Rotwire with her head held high proudly, barely aware of the faint wagging of her tail.

Emily watches her children with a small smile playing on her lips. She runs through a few checks with her son, confirming the feed remains private and stable despite the distance separating them, with no one else in the airlock able to hear her but him, before falling back into the Spellweave as they await the starting signal.

A beeping alert eventually pulls her attention back to the video feed, and she watches Mensacus turn to face the exit hatch. It slides open with an audible hiss, revealing a tunnel of magical wind cutting through the vacuum towards a pulsing nexus of mana that looks to be sucking in all light around it. There are tens of separate branching wind tunnels leading into the dungeon portal from the ships orbiting it, carrying an eclectic mix of races in varying uniforms; FAF soldiers outnumbered two to one by hired hands.

Mensacus turns to let her get a sweeping view of every gathered group before he sets off at the head of the Heavy-Blade contingent. They watch as several eager squads ahead of them step into range of the spatial distortion spawned by the dungeon and get sucked in, vanishing without a trace, but Mensacus never breaks his stride.

Emily watches with bated breath as her son makes contact with the portal, waiting for any sign of their connection severing. The feed goes dark for a fraction of a second before blinking back to life with the image of an uneven, rocky expanse that stretches out for as far as the eye can see, covered by a cloudless, orange sky that casts a warm, uniform glow down on the dungeon’s floor. The groups they watched enter the dungeon first are already present, slowly spreading out from where the portal deposited them and scanning for danger.

“Has the connection held?” Mensacus asks, looking about as the rest of the party shimmer into existence around him.

“Yes. Everything’s stable, and there are no signs of any added interference,” Emily replies, reading the stream of data flowing into her handheld receiver with her machina. “Thankfully, it looks like there’s no temporal distortion to compensate for: time flow in there should be aligned to the outside world.”

One of the large FAF squads begins calling out instructions, organising the scattered forces into a loose formation with eyes on every side, and Mensacus complies without complaint. A couple of the smaller groups try to set off as the rest of their temporary allies are still entering the dungeon, sneering at the fiscushia trying to order them around and making a break across the open terrain.

“Marking the Vonraxor Pirates as uncooperative,” Emily hears one of the leading soldiers near her son call out. “They’re free game.”

Mensacus leaps on the opportunity, raising a limb swamped in his cloak and unleashing a torrent of darkness. The spell sweeps out towards the fleeing pirates, shifting into a writhing mass of serpents before engulfing them. A few flashes of gunfire, qi, and mana seep through the gaps in his attack, but the struggle ends without a single living being breaching his darkness. Mensacus draws the darkness back into his sleeve after a few minutes, leaving behind several desiccated corpses. He sends a few members of his squad out to retrieve of any usable gear.

Similar scenes play out on all sides of the quickly growing formation, after which nobody tries to copy the first wave of deserters.

The awakened soldiers keep shouting orders and moving the group out in a ring, leaving room in the centre as the hired groups finish coming through, and a steady flow of uniformed fiscushia follows. While the mass entry is still underway, Emily spots movement in the distance, too faint to discern any details through the camera feed.

“Are those dungeon beasts, or people that entered elsewhere?” Emily asks.

“Neither,” her son replies, glancing back at the pirates under his command and telling them to be prepared before turning back to the horizon and quietly continuing. “I don’t sense any life signs.”

The churning horizon quickly gets closer, allowing Emily a clear view of the rocky earth itself that’s shifting and rolling like a spreading wave. The rising stone lifts to twice her son’s height as it approaches, and cries of concern spread throughout the gathered fighters as a similar sight closes in on them from all sides.

Before the stone wave can hit them, it breaks and folds in on itself, collapsing only a few metres from where Mensacus is standing and leaving a wide expanse of loose, upturned earth. Everything goes still for a few moments before bestial shapes burst from the disturbed ground and charge towards the wall of bodies awaiting them.

The video feed becomes a blur of motion as Mensacus releases his wendigos to hold back the hulking stone creatures before casting out a dark mist that quickly eats away at the hard material composing them. The beasts vary in form, from bulky quadrupeds to sleek humanoids, but all of them share the same grey-orange tint as the ground around them, and there’s no sign of eyes or mouths on the rocks in place of their heads.

Salvos of attacks fly over Mensacus’ head and burst against the beasts weakened by his mist, tearing chunks off of the strongest and turning the rest to dust. The creatures keep coming even when their limbs are blown off, only stopping once they’re reduced to complete rubble.

“Still no life signs?” Emily questions, narrowing her eyes on the image of the fallen remains and looking for any sign of organs or a magical core.

“None,” Mensacus confirms, glancing over to check on Silica as she bites down on a car-sized stone monstrosity’s head, a jaw of wind twice her size mimicking her action around its torso, pulverising it with a torrent of jagged clashing air currents. “There’s no more mana in them than the stone around us, either.”

“Dungeon golems or a conjuration then,” Emily mutters, chewing on her thumb and half wishing she were physically present to gather data herself. “Has the mana density around you changed since entering?”

“No. It’s been stable, even when the ground turned up.”

“Likely golems then. If they’re being produced at this scale, your numbers are going to work against you. You’d be best off trying to keep moving and just ignoring them. They seem pretty weak.”

“Should we separate and make ground alone?”

Emily silently considers for a few moments, watching the wendigos tearing the golems limb from limb with ease while Mensacus corrodes their joints and slows their movement.

“No, play your part for now. We don’t know if they have a way of contacting the army outside to alert them of deserters: it may cause the crew more trouble than it’s worth. Just focus on keeping yourselves alive for now and see how the FAF plays it.”

“Understood.”

The clash with the endless swarm of rock continues for over an hour, and Emily quickly tunes it out, falling back into meditation.

Eventually, she notices the faint hum of static cutting into the audio feed filling the room and opens her eyes again. Unlike before, the video is choppy, dropping frames between movements and dipping in and out every few seconds.

She frowns and pours machina into the device, using a touch of mana to boost the connected crystals as well, forcefully stabilising the feed.

“What happened?” she asks the moment it clears up.

“I’m not sure what you mean, Mother,” Mensacus responds, twisting his arms in a jarring motion and driving a wall of dark spears up from the ground to lock a golem three times the size of a Cutter in place.

“Our connection is strained. I’m having to actively reinforce it to maintain contact.”

“I see. Dungeon entry just ceased, could that be it?”

“Likely. It looks like it’s harder to get a signal out when it's not welcoming people in.”

“We’re about to start moving soon. I can disconnect from my end and retry when we find anything of interest if you’d like to save energy?” Mensacus glances back, showing a crowd of thousands of bodies, most of them FAF soldiers, waiting to push out into the rocky wasteland.

There are several large vehicles near the centre of the formation, clearly the last to enter, with heavy plasma artillery and rail cannons primed for combat.

“Keep the connection on your end, and I’ll check in occasionally. Just send an alert if you do find anything.”

“Understood.”

Emily watches a bolt of heavy metal tear through the air over her son’s head, shattering the stone colossus he’s restraining and blowing open a long channel in the encroaching swarm, before cutting off her machina flow and letting the connection fizzle out. It’s oddly quiet sitting in her room alone, with only the constant hum of Harriet swimming just beneath her skin to keep her company.

I should get back to work on Rotwin’s elixir.

She vanishes into her Factory, leaving behind a faint, parted crack in space so the ship’s crew can contact her if they run into trouble.

***

The rest of the flight to meet up with Elwaine’s fleet is uneventful, and eventually Emily returns to her ship’s bridge to watch their arrival as usual. However, the sight that meets her is one she’s never seen before.

When trawling through the massive banks of data she gathered from The Net, she saw mention of another type of habitable celestial body other than planets, but the few images attached didn’t do them justice.

Floating in the empty void before them is what looks to be a flat disk of land. At its base is a thick layer of jagged rock that resembles the roof of a cave, and Emily can see the divide where dense stone turns to rich earth along the edge of the disk. The entire disk appears to be wrapped in a faint, hazy film, distorting the sight of any details or structures on its surface, and despite perfectly filling the ship’s canopy, Emily can feel that it’s much larger, space twisted in a similar manner to a dungeon but by qi instead of mana.

“That’s incredible,” she mutters, leaning over the pilots’ chairs as she drinks in the view.

“It’s your first time seeing a plane, right?” one of the two asks, glancing up and seeing her nod in agreement. “Well, you’re in for a treat then. Entering a plane’s atmosphere where you actually intend to land is a challenge we use to measure new pilots: wanna try?”

“Sure, why not?” Emily replies, anticipation curling the corner of her lips as the man disconnects his neural link and rises to let her take his place.