Chapter 236 – Luck Runs Out

Caeileera - Day 55 - 63 Days Remain Until the End of the Mourning Period on Mavigan

The main entrance to the building was blocked off by thick vines. I was surprised that they didn't wilt away or something, but Phosi looked at me dead-eyed and said:

‘That’s not how plants work.’

‘A more pertinent question is: why aren't they on fire?’ Persephone mused.

‘Maybe the current didn't travel in this particular direction,’ Lilyth shrugged. ‘Making the actual question: How do we get past those?’

‘I can rectify them not being on fire…’ Persephone said in a vengeful tone.

I wasn't sure whether her scorn was directed at the plant or Lilyth.

‘How about we check out the loading bay door first?’ Phosi suggested. ‘I’d rather we don't add to the conflagration if we don't have to.’

‘Fiineee,’ Persephone pouted.

The side entrance was partially blocked by a rusted-out skeleton of something Phosi mentioned to be something called a trak.

‘Huh,’ Lilyth said. ‘I never expected to see one of those again. Like I remember seeing mentions of those being used by the Empire before, but to actually see a wreckage of one… This kind of feels like a priceless artefact. Too bad we have to go full ISIS on it.’

What's Aizees?

‘Those were mass-produced for the military,’ Phosi shrugged. ‘I imagine we’ll find another one if we keep exploring Imperial ruins. Maybe even it will be actually recognisable.’

That made me ask a question I’ve been wondering about for a while.

‘Why did the Empire have a military anyway? Didn't you control the entire continent?’

‘Caei, you can't control a continent-spanning Empire without a sizable military,’ Lilyth explained in a tone that suggested it should have been obvious. ‘Do you think every single part of it was there willingly?’

I guess not.

‘There were plenty of external threats too,’ Phosi added. ‘Monsters, the Warring Dynasties, the Celestial Khanate, incursions from other planes… the list goes on.’

‘Wait… the Celestial Khanate survived so long?’ Persephone sounded genuinely surprised. ‘I thought we beat them back in my time.’

‘So did the Empire. Multiple times. But they always came back. They haven't been seen since the Fall, so I guess they finally met their match.’

‘Who were they?’ Lilyth asked the question I was also wondering about.

‘Sky pirates,’ starry-eyed Aki replied. ‘My mom told me stories about them flying on islands and raiding Andermon and other continents.’

Flying on islands?

‘Not that far away from the truth, actually,’ Persephone smiled. ‘Those weren't islands. Just gigantic rocks they called Clanhold Arcs. They would descend from those on magitek airships and raid ground settlements for slaves, things they couldn't produce and riches. ‘

That does actually sound cool.

The Warring Dynasties were definitely less exciting - just a bunch of warlord states from the Kurehg region of Lughef, the Southern continent. They were usually too busy fighting among themselves for land and resources, but occasionally one of them would win and unite the land, at which point they would often try their luck with bigger prey, which rarely ended well for them. The Empire tried to stamp out once, but after some initial successes, they ended up embroiled in a guerrilla war for twenty years, after which they could no longer justify all the lives and money the whole mess was costing and retreated.

The coalition of warlords that formed in response to the Imperial invasion viewed that as an invitation to a counterattack, which went as well for them as could be expected, and they lost more men in a single battle than they did during the entire occupation.

Apparently, Phosi's great-uncle Jal served on one of the warships that fought in that battle. She went down after her ammo stores exploded as a result of getting hit by a broadside from a Dynasty frigate. Her uncle was one of the two survivors, though he had lost an arm and an eye in the explosion.

‘Uncle Jal loved telling the story of how he clung to a plank in freezing water awaiting rescue during family gatherings,’ Phosi reminisced with melancholy in her tone. ‘It was a harrowing tale, true, but it lost a lot of oomph by the twentieth time you had heard it. And yet… I would give up a lot to hear his war stories once again.’

After moving the wreckage and cutting through the steel lift door, we found ourselves looking at another vine barricade. This one we could squeeze through after widening a few gaps between the growths. Lilyth scouted ahead with [Remote Eye], and seeing nothing threatening, she signalled that we were safe to proceed.

A notification appeared in front of my eyes the moment I crossed the threshold.

Entering: Royal Magical Agriculture Institute MTLR-Black Research Facility

Type: Dungeon(Historical)

Difficulty: Deadly

Description: You find yourself in a place that only exists in the dark cracks in the fabric of reality.

Objectives:

• Reach the lowest level of the facility

• Confirm the death of the World Tree Sapling

Rewards:

1. 1. 50000 experience points

• Special reward from your patron

Well… fuck.

‘A fucking World Tree Sapling?’ Persephone gasped in shock. ‘How in the fuck?’

‘Aren’t those supposed to be good?’ Lilyth asked nervously.

‘I guess not in this case.’

‘What’s a World Tree?’ I asked, genuinely confused.

‘A huge ass tree with magic powers,’ Phosi shrugged. ‘Heard some legends about those.’

‘Yeah,’ Lilyth agreed. ‘Basically, some Terran myths say those connect the Heavens and Earth, some use them as a stand-in for an ecosystem. Turns out… just a large weed that fucking eats people.’

I looked at Persephone, but she just shook her head.

‘Likewise, I just heard stories about those. I actually investigated some of them, but the trees just turned out to be completely normal, if taller than most. I think there might be some in the Endless Forest, the Wanderer’s realm, but I have never been there.’

My curiosity sated, I re-read the notification and noticed another thing I didn't understand.

‘What does MTLR-BLACK mean?’ Aki was just as confused as I was, it seemed.

‘“Magical Threat Level Rating - Black,”’ Phosi explained. ‘It is how we classified the materials we handled. It goes through four colours: Viridian, Amber, Crimson and Black. Though MTLR-GREEN doesn't mean “harmless,” that would be MTLR-Zero.’

‘So what… this building can have some really bad stuff in it?’ Lilyth seemed less than happy at that prospect.

‘Not really. Magical plants rarely rank above Amber. We were just rated to handle higher-level threats. I think that during my tenure here, I have only seen two Crimson-level organisms and never a Black one.’

‘Judging by the fact that this dungeon is ranked as “Deadly,” I think that might change soon.’

‘Maybe we can find my old research journals so that I can make some notes on them,’ Phosi let out a raspy laugh.

‘Anything to advance the field of howfuckedarewelogy,’ Lilyth smiled.

One thing we quickly noticed was that the fire, despite seeming bad from the outside, was mostly confined to the outer rooms of the building. The interior ones were almost completely untouched.

Persephone quickly put them out; we didn't want it to spread with us inside, after all, and we spent a moment searching the topside floors for anything useful, but other than some rusted-out frames of some furniture, there was nothing.

Probably a similar case to what happened in the bunker. Anything organic has been absorbed over the centuries.

The weed itself, at least above the ground, was heavily damaged. Large parts of it were blackened and dead, and in some places huge chunks of it were missing as the water inside the branches cooked off, causing them to explode from the inside.

‘Remind me not to piss you off, hon,’ Aki laughed nervously after we finished examining a metre-thick vine that got blown apart into splinters.

‘I mean… There are people who survive lightning strikes,’ Lilyth smiled mischievously. ‘There was some poor sap back on Terra who survived seven of them. So all you will have to do that day is ask yourself: " Do I feel lucky?’

‘I met you, Caei and Ren, so I am the luckiest woman alive,’ she smiled.

‘Good answer,’ Lilyth smiled and wrapped her arms around the light bug’s neck.

I soon joined them, and the dark cloud that had been on my mind since the [Despair] spell hit me finally lifted.

No matter what horrors await us here, I will face them with the women I love, Phosi and Persephone.

The first sign of incoming trouble was Lilyth beginning to cough a few moments after we descended to the first underground. The air there was hot, humid and filled with spores. I had slight trouble breathing myself, but nothing like our furball.

‘You okay?’ I asked her.

‘Y-yes,’ she coughed.

Fucking curse.

‘Do tell us if it becomes too much for you,’ Aki stressed. ‘Don’t try to just “muscle through it.”’

‘Don’t… do- don’t worry. I doubt I- w-will be able to h… hide that.’

I gave Aki a worried look. The best thing for us to do would be to immediately kick Lilyth outside, but she would never forgive us for that. Not as long as she could keep going, at the very least.

Her stubbornness will kill her one day. Then again, who am I to judge? All of us should have left this cursed place the moment we saw that Dungeon notification. Maybe even straight after we recovered from one of the psychic effects.

Funny how easy things seem in hindsight, eh?

With all said and done, I am not sure whether it was complacency that finally got us, or our luck simply ran out. You see, after finding nothing threatening on the first and second underground levels, we decided that Lilyth should conserve mana and not bother with scouting ahead. The building was dead. The only thing of note we found was the top of the trunk of the sapling on floor 2B. It was protruding from a hole it made in the floor, and it was extra creepy as there were skulls, both mortal and animal, embedded inside the wood.

The weirdest part, however, was that all the branches and vines sprouting from it had been severed at the base, which both explained why some of them weren't damaged and left us with the worrying possibility that the Harvester plant might really not be as dead as we hoped for.

This was confirmed on the next floor when we discovered that there were various plants growing out of the vines. Mostly sweet-smelling flowers, but some of those were really weird. Like some of those looked like pitchers that were larger than my head. I looked inside one and saw some liquid inside it. It was the source of the sweet smell, and it looked really enticing.

‘I wouldn't,’ Lilyth wheezed just as I was to reach inside. ‘That’s most likely acid.’

‘Yup,’ Phosi rasped. ‘Those plants are carnivorous. That sweet smell you have been gushing over is used to lure prey. It is usually bugs, but judging by the size and the effect it has on you fleshbags, it might also view rodents and birds as viable options.’

I slowly backed away from the plant, staring at it suspiciously.

‘I don't think it is going to attack you,’ Aki tried to make light of the situation, but I didn't find any humour in it.

The sleeve of my robe caught on a large drop of some sticky liquid. It was at the end of a stalk of some kind, thousands of which grew from a vibrant-looking, tentacle-like vine on one of the walls in a lab on the fourth floor. I decided to go inside because of the large buds that reminded me of closed-up petals of a flower. We haven’t seen anything like those before, so I wanted to investigate them. The air in the room felt different, too, as it was hot and humid.

‘Just don't touch anything, especially those strands,’ Lilyth pointed to a series of thin ropes running between the remnants of furniture and some of the vines. ‘Those look like triggers of some kind.’

I tried to free myself from the liquid, but that only led to more of my sleeve getting trapped. Seriously freaked out, I just wanted to rip my sleeve off, but when I braced myself, I discovered that the flowy black-and-red mage robes I was wearing were a bad thing in a place like this, as the parts covering my legs got caught on some of the weird sticky spines from a different tentacle, this one at my shin’s height.

‘Fuck!’ I screamed.

‘Don’t fucking move,’ Lilyth said, suddenly appearing next to me, having used her [Shadow Form] to run up next to me.

I was about to ask why, but then the tentacle bent inwards with enough force and speed to whip around my torso and legs and painfully pin me to the wall. That only triggered more of the vines, and soon I was wrapped in them from my ankles to my jaw.

And then everything began to burn.

Aki - Day 55 - 63 Days Remain Until the End of the Mourning Period on Mavigan

‘Caei!’ I shouted, seeing my Alabaster Beauty’s distress and rushed into the room.

Lilyth, still not having fully recovered from the confusion that a bunch of tentacles whipping through her body caused, began to shout something at me, but I wasn’t listening as Caei began to scream in agony.

I want to blame my stupid lack of [Darksight] on what happened next, but in truth, I just forgot about the fucking strands.

Well… the sensation of running into something thin like a thread and feeling it snap quickly reminded me of them.

One of the large closed buds next to me opened quickly and silently, causing me to stop and look at what I had just unleashed.

There were spikes inside.

‘Wh-’ I began to say, but never got to finish, as there was a series of soft thunks, a feeling of multiple sharp objects piercing through my armour and entering my body.

As the force of the multiple impacts sent me flying, I felt myself pass through more of those damn strands.