Chapter 301 – The Mountain Falls

“Do you have any of those concealment potions left?” Pod asks, turning to Ivor.

The alchemist silently reaches into a pouch at his hip, pulling out two vials of shimmering grey-black liquid and handing one of them over.

“Perfect. You won’t be able to use magic without breaking the effect, but you’re a good enough shot to deal with one artefact, right?” Pod continues, reaching back into his backpack armoury and drawing out a railgun rifle with silencing enchantments woven into the rails to trade for the potion. As Ivor nods, the young mechanic turns back to Mensacus and raises a finger to tap against his brows. “Can you connect and point us towards our targets? If he heads round the far side of the big ugly, we should have full coverage. We’ll let you know when we’re in position and fire on your mark.”

Mensacus doesn’t respond aloud, instead opening his third eye a crack and letting out two thin beams of milky-white mana. The beams connect with Pod and Ivor, and they both nod towards Emily’s video feed before dropping onto the cracked earth around them to hide from any possible observers.

While her apprentices are taking up their positions, Emily turns her focus back to the squadron surrounding her.

“Prepare for spatial movement. We’re going to wait in my pocket dimension for a little bit since the dungeon looks to be reaching its climax and I need to focus,” she calls out, receiving nods of assent as the pirates brace, letting her spatial mana take hold of them.

She tugs on the mana, pulling all of them, including herself, into her tattoos. Between one blink and the next, they appear in her Dimensional Factory, surrounded on all sides by various heavy weapons and Elisime’s hulking form. Most of her crewmates shift uncomfortably in the heavy energy filling the space as they look around in wonder, but a few of the synths seem oddly at ease and turn to Emily with curiosity burning in their gazes.

“Help me create some space,” Emily instructs them, sitting down cross-legged in the centre of the space, on top of the stabilisation anchor. “I’ll need it to pull our crewmates out of the dungeon. Treat my babies with respect – some of them are quite dangerous. Harriet will warn you if you touch anything that needs special care.”

Her familiar leaps from her flesh eagerly, joining the charge filling the air and spreading out to whisper commands to everyone at once.

Emily glances back at the link to her son and sees him still dodging the hulking mountain’s careless attacks whilst waiting for Pod and Ivor. The monster doesn’t seem to have any real focus, swiping indiscriminately at the ants swarming around it, and Mensacus is barely putting any effort into his return blows, throwing a few shards of solid darkness to keep up appearances but otherwise making sure not to draw more of its attention than he needs to. She turns her gaze away and pulls out her Terminal to call Silvia.

“Have you found it?” the vampire asks the moment the call connects, only glancing into her Terminal for a moment before turning her attention away as a blade of fire sails past her face.

“No,” Emily replies, listening to the faint sounds of battle coming through the two calls. “Mensacus just contacted me, so I’ve pulled my squad into my Factory to prepare to pull him out of the dungeon. They’ve found the final challenge, and it looks like an active dungeon core is the prize that sparked this conflict.”

“Truly? Well, that is a pleasant surprise. I take it you have a plan to claim it for us?”

“Yes. We’re working on it now, though I may be out of contact for a short while if I’m to contain it. I’ve only seen brief mention of dungeon cores in my exploration of The Net, but their tendency to latch onto any who make contact was mentioned enough to have me concerned.”

Silvia glances over with a knowing smile as she plunges her arm into a mechanoid’s chest.

“I take it you’re looking forward to the challenge?”

“Obviously.” Emily grins back.

“Well, enjoy yourself then. Do let me know when you’re finished. As you can see, I’m unfortunately a little too predisposed to stay and watch.”

They end the call, and Emily refocuses on her son’s view just as he gives the others the starting signal. There’s no sound to mark the start of their treachery, but Mensacus turns to give Emily a perfect view of several projectiles shooting out in rapid succession from a raised rock formation at the edge of the sinkhole. The gaps between the shots are barely discernible, and from the sudden cries of shock and pain, Emily knows Pod has hit his marks. She gladly welcomes the pride rising in her chest.

“Targets down,” Mensacus relays to her, turning his focus to the FAF soldiers nearby. “Are we to begin?”

“Go wild,” Emily replies. “If you’re to use them to power your attack, you may as well leave no witnesses.”

Mensacus chuckles and begins to order the Crimson-Blade pirates around him into action. Emily watches Silica split several small clones from her tail and send them off to trip the soldiers currently being attacked by the moving mountain, while the pirates begin openly flinging spells, bullets, and blades of qi towards the nearby mechanoids, breaking the unstable, unspoken truce between them. Ivor takes unseen potshots from the opposite end of the battle, but it doesn’t take long for him to give up and drop his camouflage so he can shift the terrain beneath people’s feet to interrupt their dodging and casting. Pod is more successful in his unseen attacks, with several people noticing their allies dropping and throwing up shields to protect against the sudden assault, but it doesn’t take long for them to track back the source of the shots and bombard his position with spells.

Chaos breaks out around the sinkhole as people turn on those closest to them, taking advantage of the sudden break in the peace to cull the competition.

Emily watches the fight with a single core, noting the shadows surrounding Mensacus deepening with each death around him, and uses the rest of her attention to prepare their extraction. She summons a large metal disk with several fractured space crystals embedded in the surface from one of Elisime’s cargo holds. There are hundreds of runes carved across its surface, and nearly a dozen crystals of various elements connected to them to aid in stabilising and powering the complex array.

She floods the disk with mana, activating several enchantments at once and freezing it in place above her head. She draws arcs of mana through the air, bending the energy in the dimension towards the array to help, spreading the disk’s influence to cover the growing clearing Harriet is directing the crew to create.

It takes nearly half an hour of focus and a quarter of her mana reserves to burn the supermassive array into the air around her. Mensacus’ squad uses the time well, removing the last of the mechanoid forces fighting the dungeon’s avatar with them and turning on the FAF. Mensacus deploys his wendigos and helps break through the shields of their supposed allies, but he otherwise stays in a passive role, spending as little of the lifeforce he’s gathering as possible and focusing on pulling back their crewmates as they take on injuries.

They lose two of their weakest in the process as attacks catch their energy cores before Mensacus can pull them back, but by the time the last fiscushia soldier falls, leaving only their crew alive in the large depression, most of them are only injured, thanks to Mensacus’ acute sensitivity.

“Take this.” Mensacus turns to Ivor as he rejoins him, pulling out and handing him a metal disk that’s similar to the one above Emily’s head: smaller and with only the matching halves of space crystals on its surface. “Charge it with your mana and keep it undamaged: Mother will use it to pull us out when I’ve finished.” He turns his attention to the rest of the scattered crew, spread across the sinkhole to keep the mountain’s attention split, with some of them collecting stray spatial storages when they’re free from attacks, and calls out: “The moment I have its attention, regroup and protect the alchemist! We leave the moment it falls!”

Various calls of acknowledgement echo from the communicator in Emily’s grasp, and she has to shoo back several curious crewmates who try to step into the active spatial array to watch over her shoulder. She links herself to the device with a stream of machina and beams the feed into the air above the array with a twist of light mana, letting them get their show as they settle among the dense metal forest of her creations.

Mensacus slides towards the bottom of the sinkhole, his split tentacles carrying him over the rough terrain with unnatural smoothness, and a thick cloud of shadows follows him, dark runes flickering just out of sight within it. The moving mountain almost immediately turns towards the dense energy signature approaching it, but thanks to its size, it’s slower to turn than he is to approach. The ground beneath him rumbles and shifts, jagged blades of rock shooting up to keep him back, but they dissolve on contact with his protective black cloud.

The chimaera throws his arms out a few moments after the attack fails, sending a flood of malice towards the building-sized legs of the avatar. The darkness swallows the limbs, and, after only a few seconds, the mountain starts to shrink. It howls in rage, the cry loud enough to shake Emily’s dimension even through the communicator, and drives its two hulking fists down in retaliation.

Mensacus springs back, firing the railgun built into his arm and using the kickback to propel himself clear of the thundering blow. He leaps on the opportunity and latches onto the monster’s arm before it can pull back, ignoring his own limbs starting to heat at the contact. He slithers up the avatar’s arm, dodging jagged blades of rock and molten sprays of heat as he goes, tearing towards its head.

The avatar glares down at him, and the glow filling its mouth and eyes grows rapidly.

Sensing the coming attack, Mensacus pulls the dark mist up from the monster’s legs, wrapping himself in it once again and spreading it thin to cover the entire arm he’s scaling. It blocks the video feed, but it also blocks the avatar’s sight, eating away at the surface layer of rocky skin to dull any sensations that could tell it where the chimaera is.

They don’t see the attack at first, but everyone in Emily’s Factory flinches as a roaring hiss pours out of the communicator.

Mensacus never stops moving forward, but he does spin on his axis to glance back, giving them a clear view of a solid beam of superheated rock rapidly approaching, burning away the protective cloud covering him and the avatar’s own arm with equal ease. The mechanical chimaera doesn’t flinch, purring with satisfaction as he flings himself sideways, pulling the remaining mist with him away from the now-disabled arm and landing on the still-functioning other.

The avatar shifts its aim, tracing a scorched line along the depression far below, disintegrating several corpses in the process. The avatar’s attack catches its other arm, and, though the first is already rapidly repairing, it’s enough.

Mensacus sucks in the last of the dark mist as he comes to a stop on the mountain’s shoulder, staring down the glaring creature with glee as the glow in its eyes dim and the pressurised torrent of magma from its mouth turns to a slow trickle pouring into a pool at its feet.

He raises his arms, coiling the mass of tendrils in tight as his dark tattoos pulse with power. The glow in the avatar’s eyes rapidly builds again and its skin shifts to try and throw him off, but it’s too late.

Mensacus’ arms unfurl and rocket forward, dark constructs wrapping around them as extensions of himself. The mass of tendrils bore through the mountain, several of them burning away on contact but a few of them finding their mark. Mensacus throws himself back, tearing free a pulsing orb of swirling red and brown light.

Emily watches with rapt attention as her son’s constructs are dissolved on contact and the orb begins to sink into the remaining parts of his arms.

“Mother, it burns!” Emily hears a hint of panic in her son’s voice for the first time.

“Keep feeding it mana and get to Ivor,” she replies calmly, ignoring her heart clenching and flooding her system with machina. “You’re a bad match for it, your malice should keep it from bonding properly.”

She knows at a glance that working out a way to store the core safely will take longer than she’d like, so Emily drops the holographic screen she’s made for the rest of the crew and pushes herself to start casting Temporal Shield while maintaining the massive array, feeling her cortex strain but ignoring it. She hears mutters of shock as time mana flows from her skin, but she tunes them out.

The moment she sees Mensacus make contact with Ivor, she activates the final stage of the spatial array.

Space twists, and the mana filling the dimension rushes towards the array to help power it. Emily feels more of her mana drain away and converts machina to make up for it, but it only takes a few seconds for the entire living dungeon group to appear around her.

She disperses the array, ignoring the burnt-out focusing disk that collapses to the floor and dissolves into dust, and turns to Mensacus.

She deploys an enchanted blade from her left palm and activates the integrated severing spell to cleanly slice off his extended arms, completely detaching the dungeon core trying to invade his system.

Emily grabs hold of his severed limbs with a flood of her own mana, floating them up into the centre of the dimension, far away from any other host the core could try to take. She can feel it burning away her mana to fuel itself, trying to reach back along the connection to bond itself to her instead.

“Thank you, Mother,” Mensacus says, collapsing in exhaustion beside her and leaning against her legs as Silica bounds over to curl up on her other side, rubbing her head against her in excitement.

“There’s no need to thank me, darling; now rest,” Emily responds absentmindedly, reaching down to stroke his head and scratch behind Silica’s ears as she begins sorting through possible sealing methods. “I’ll repair you later, but for now, I need to contain this one. They’re feistier than even you were when I first found you.”