Chapter 166: Worth More Than Any Purse

Skarn had limped out of the water and sat against a wall while Harl passed around more healing potions, complaining all the while. Vesk pulled his own boot off and drank his vial without taking his eyes from where Ondrel stood, the man's fingers folded into somehow still dry robes.

They lost a few minutes recovering, and Cal spent them cleaning his spear head on a patch of jackal hide and wondering after Ondrel's behavior.

Is he some kind of babysitter, like the one following Zenith? Guarding Leylith? It would make sense, but it could be something else, too.

"Six," Harl announced as they finally continued their descent. "Six Mana potions. I want that on an invoice settled with the Hall."

Cal frowned at the stingy Mycari. "What does the Hall have to do with your inability to—"

"The Hall sent us a guide that gets us ambushed and leads us into difficult encounters! They should be footing the bill for all of our bad luck!"

"Write it down," Leylith said, while Cal could only shake his head at the man's shamelessness.

"I am writing it down. I'm writing it all down. Four healers, six Mana, a Stamina, and one ruined shield." He shouldered the satchel and it clinked. "And there's the core left to pay for, with the tide at our heels."

"Then walk faster."

Cal spent the next few hours without needing to fight again, yet it wore on him anyway. A day and a half of holding his awareness taut was starting to catch up with him, and the night of restless sleep didn't help. Every thought felt slower than it should have, and he caught himself reading the corridor twice because he'd stopped trusting the first pass.

Vigilance is a consumable too, and nobody's counting mine. I'm gonna buy a box of the lozenges the next time I'm in Mirathra…

Past the following bend, they came to a wide room with half a dozen exits. He called out the one partially obscured by a slab of stone that had sheared from the wall.

"We want the second one from the left."

Skarn stopped, turning his shield toward the wide passage on the right and gesturing. "This is a well-known juncture, and I heard the main route is that one, second from the right. What are you trying to do, dull-ear?"

"If you want to go the long way, you can take that route," Cal declared, meeting Skarn's glare. "You can follow the rumors, or you can follow the guide you hired. I've got no more interest in getting caught by the tide than you do."

Harl frowned. "A wrong turn is time we don't have."

"I've walked this path before with a team from the Imperial Academy. Believe me or don't, but let's keep moving."

Leylith looked at the collapse, then at Cal, making a decision. "We follow the guide… for now."

The passage ran past a break in the wall at a fork Cal had been expecting for the last two hundred yards, fixed on the wireframe his last visit had burned into permanent storage. The grotto behind it stood open now, and empty; bereft of the longevity-granting flower that had earned him a mere essence stone. The reminder of it still grated on his mind, but [Portal] had been an excellent consolation prize. He still planned to collect more from Zenith… someday.

Eventually, the corridor widened, and widened again, and then the ceiling shot upwards and the core cavern opened in front of them. Harl whistled softly from the ledge.

"The guide has a better route than most. He has saved us time," Leylith observed.

Skarn spat off the lip. "Any dull-ear can read a map somebody else drew."

The cavern ran three hundred yards end to end, and the ceiling was crusted with luminescent growth that dropped a green pall across everything below. The floor stepped down in broken shelves of rubble and stalagmite rows toward the low ground at the center, where stagnant pools sheeted the stone that had been turned to glass. Off to the side of the remnant of Cal's last visit, the dungeon core slowly strobed. Seemingly made of crystal no bigger than a man's head and suspended a few feet off the floor, it had the warren's whole garrison marching in patrol around it, a hundred-odd defenders, rotcap trolls and lichen wraiths and fog hounds threaded through with a mass of shamblers and more.

And at the far right in a rubble-mouthed alcove lay two basilisks, each a dozen yards of armored grey bulk, resting with their lids shut.

Cal looked at it and could only think that this was going to take these delvers a long, long time to clear.

"Formation," Leylith commanded.

The battle for the core cavern ground on for five hours, carved out of a day that had little time to spare, with the tide coming due and every one of them feeling the seconds bleed away.

Cal would give Leylith this, though: her command was good. They couldn't fight a hundred monsters at once, so her crew bled them dry in a grinding cycle. She read the ground quickly and put Skarn in position between two stalagmite clusters, where the portions of the horde they pulled couldn't surround them. Harl was kept high and Vesk low, and when a lichen wraith came out of the rock behind Harl, Leylith had a lance built and away before Harl finished shouting.

That was the shape of the evening. Minutes of blade work, then some time resting and clearing the carcasses while Leylith meditated and Skarn's shield arm came back. Pull, kill, breathe, repeat.

What ultimately failed her was the quality of the material she was working with.

Skarn held the choke well for two hours and then began to falter. Harl fought from behind his crossbow and fought well, but each time he slung it to pass a vial forward the line bulged where his bolts had been. Vesk was the best of the three and the least willing to spend himself, cutting hindquarters and hamstrings and stepping out, cutting and stepping out, killing at a rate that would have finished the cavern sometime the following week. Leylith rode the ragged edge of etheric cavitation, cycling between her deadly spear and deadlier green lance magic while she tried to handle the flow of monsters.

Well into the fifth hour, a pull went wrong. Harl's bolt peeled a bigger group than normal and the group split, with the smaller half going wide around the choke point's stalagmites to the party's flank. They were coming at Cal at a dead run.

Cal counted five and had the bow off his shoulder before Skarn finished laughing. Two fog hounds led at a sprint with two shamblers lumbering behind, and a bracket fungus golem brought up the rear.

At the choke point, with four sets of hands and Leylith's magic and spear to lead them, a pack like this was a couple of minutes' work. Alone on open ground, the same five were a tactical problem, having speed out front, bulk behind, and armor walking last.

The hounds tended to become solid on open ground to help them run faster, and he had learned their patterns watching previous engagements. [Power Shot] fired too quickly for the lead hound to phase defensively and the arrow went through its open mouth and dropped it mid-stride at thirty yards. Its packmate was inside fifteen yards before he could nock again.

Nobody in the party turned to help him, not that he'd expected them to.

Freaking Mycari, Cal thought, scoffing internally.

He dropped the bow and took up his spear in both fists, having picked his ground: a narrow neck of stone between two flooded pans, where nothing could flank him without wading through the water.

The hound circled the stone, guttering in and out of solidity and testing him from either side. [Combat Analysis] counted the tempo of its phasing while he gave ground, and when it committed, he was already turning, the spear taking it through the throat in the brief moment it phased to bite him.

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The shamblers came on shoulder to shoulder, hides thick enough to shrug off a shallow cut. [Lancing River] rocketed his spear tip through the leading shambler and out its back, deep into the mass of the one behind it. Cal ripped the shaft free, and the first carcass dropped between them while the other monster reeled in pain. One of Selara's bestiaries had a whole chapter on these things, and he knew of a critical weakness. He hooked the butt of the spear behind the second shambler's knee and heaved. It toppled off stone into the flooded pan on the right, where it thrashed and drowned in eight inches of water.

Walking through the carcasses of its own escort, the bracket fungus golem took his spear in the shoulder plate, but the plate held, and instead the ash shaft Cal held cracked.

He let the broken haft go, drew Bael'zhar's plain cousin off his hip with his right and the bone-handled harvesting knife with his left, and stepped inside the golem's swing. The edge of the shelf plate raked four inches of his left forearm above the bracer on the way in, yet he drove the shortsword's point toward the joint where leg met torso, the blade skidding off hardened fungus with a shriek.

The creature pivoted, bringing a large limb around in a crushing arc. Cal ducked under the blow, the wind of it stirring his hair, and came up on its flank. He stabbed the harvesting knife along a seam between two plates, probing for purchase while the shortsword hacked at the same line, chipping away fragments of fibrous armor. The golem roared in anger, and their dance went on for some time, until it swung a clumsy, powerful blow that slammed into the stone beside him. He danced back, saw the overextension, and lunged. The shortsword's tip bit into the damaged seam, levering a plate up just enough. He drove the harvesting knife under it, into the soft pulp connecting the limb, and twisted.

The joint gave with a sloppy tear. The golem sagged, its leg buckling, and he finished it with a two-handed thrust of the shortsword through the center of its mass between two sections of armor, straight into the spiritual core that animated these creatures. It sat down hard in the water and came apart in a shower of spores and splintered fungus.

Every move of Cal's fight had been something a talented Peak E-tier could have shown. Hopefully. The pull that had been left to kill him had lasted a few minutes, and he was breathing through his nose while holding a shortsword he'd need to sharpen. Five dead things lay around the neck of stone and already the nearest carcasses smoked at the margins, their substance unthreading into the air.

Vesk had turned. He was standing with a long knife held loose in his fingers and a shambler dying at his boot, watching. Cal wiped the knife on his thigh and tried to ignore him.

Then the basilisks woke.

They came charging out together, hard and fast and crashing through any stone in their way, two dozen yards of plated grey muscle between them. The lead one opened its eyes when it drew close. Twin discs of silver light swept the line, and where that look landed, men stopped. Skarn seized mid-swing with his axe above his head, locked to the bone like a statue in dented steel, and the monsters they were fighting folded over him while his eyes rolled. The light clipped Harl next and his crossbow arm went rigid to the fingertips. He shouted something that had started as Mycari and lost the words on the way out. Leylith tried calling orders to correct the situation, but it was clear if something didn't happen quickly someone was going to die.

Ondrel walked forward into the tumult. He kept his arms at his sides and drew no rune in the air, and Cal was watching the man from sixty feet away with his perception wide open, so he would have caught the smallest scratch of a glyph. Everything happened inside him, in channels Cal couldn't see, and then it happened to the cavern.

The stone erupted. Roots drove up out of the floor in their dozens with shafts breaking rock as they came, and each one arrived somewhere that mattered. Shafts pinned the nearest basilisk through the skull and both flanks and the base of the tail in an instant, and its silver eyes went dark. More caught the second by the jaw, then the ribs, then ran it through lengthwise. The four trolls that had yet to engage died standing. The remaining horde came apart across the floor in one continuous calamity, the sound of snapping stone cracking like gunshots as creatures wailed.

It took perhaps sixty seconds. Nothing in the cavern moved afterward except Skarn, who toppled sideways as the paralysis let go of him, then dragged himself up out of the mass with his arm hanging.

"The guide's 'better route'," Skarn spat, gesturing at the carnage with his good hand. "I held that choke point hours, for this?"

"Not sure what I have to do with that," Cal started, "considering it's your job to—"

"Enough," Leylith declared. "It's done, and the core is open."

Pops sounded across the area as the big ones imploded, carcasses folding inward one by one, and Harl walked the ground behind the line with his satchel open, taking up stones and counting each one against what the run had cost. Cal harvested nothing, because there was nothing worth the knife—hide and gland would be dust inside the hour, and the stones went into Harl's count the moment they dropped. He had no intention of bending over with his back to these five anyway.

At the core, Leylith walked in alone. The other four stood aside at the boundary of the array cut into the stone and watched. She stopped beneath the crystal and turned her open palm up, and a thread of white light came down and touched her, and only her.

Cal watched her aura take the transfer and frowned slightly as he observed from a dozen yards further back.

Angelika Halmi would have opened a vein before she gave up a sliver of her share down here. These four are D-tier and fought all day. They earned it, and yet… who is Leylith to them?

"Damn Dominion and their bloody interference. They ration the core draw like a grain dole," Harl said to nobody in particular, gesturing at the floor beneath the floating crystal. "Turning our forest's bounty into their tally board—"

"Enough," Leylith commanded, lowering her arm. It was finished. And the going out was more stressful than the coming in.

They had been in the dungeon too long on the cycle's last day, and the tide was coming back in to reconstitute the core's defenses. In the cleared corridors the air filled with motes of loose essence drifting slowly and gathering into ever-thickening clumps, as monstrous forms began to condense. Cal walked past the lily grotto and found four faint shapes upright in it, half-made and still thin enough to see the wall through. In the wide hall, the standing water held the outline of a rotcap troll with shoulders already opaque.

Leylith set a punishing pace. Harl refused to hand out any more remedies, forcing Skarn and Vesk to hobble with their injuries for the final push.

Eventually something found its feet and drew air, crying out in rage as the party rushed by. Ondrel paused at a narrower section of corridor and set one palm against the wall, sealing the passage floor to ceiling in a cage of roots before hurrying on.

They came up the final ascent dispatching a few half-formed monsters as the dungeon filled in behind them, finally exiting through the shard barrier at full dark into the Virethane and blessed mundanity. Or at least, the Veraxian version of it.

One of the Ordo agents exited the cabin with the slate and drew his stylus across the six names that arose out of the stone, flaring and going dark. On the board beside the cabin door, the high tide count had thinned to hours. Skarn sat down in the moss for a moment to catch his breath.

Unsurprisingly, nobody paid Cal anything.

The fee was settled with the Hall in advance, of course, but what custom owed him at the end of a run was a tip, and every one of the five knew it, and all five of them found something else to attend to in that moment.

Typical.

"Rear-guard, get us home," Leylith commanded.

Ondrel came forward and lifted both arms.

Cal turned to face him and flared his perception, slipping into [Liminal Breath] and letting everything that wasn't the casting fall away as soon as he realized what was happening.

The silent mage worked both arms, drawing in open air against the push of the World's Breath. What came off his fingers was different and similar to what Cal had seen before. The spellwork folded through a pattern of interlocking hexagons instead of the tunneling spiral Angelika had used, ninety-odd recognizable runes chained more blockily than the Halmi variation.

[Perfect Memory] took all of it in around the exhaustion that was hounding him after two long days. Every angle, pause, depth, and density shift in the Mana was locked inside his brain. [Savant of the Mind] sorted it as it came in and set the new architecture beside the Halmi framework, and the differences between the two were worth more to Cal than any purse this party could have put in his possession.

A second Spell framework to cross-reference? Yes please! he thought giddily, finding a second wind. Maybe I need to hang around dungeon exits more often? Gotta catch 'em all, as Jack would say. But are portals really this common, or am I just a magnet for them?

Reality opened as a vertical seam, its border bleeding chromatic light, and the air on the other side had a different smell to it.

Through the doorway lay a bare room, with unpainted plank walls and no windows, a runelamp turned low in a bracket, an empty floor, and a shut door in the far wall.

"Guide." Vesk was the first to speak. "Our people keep a room in Deadfall for Ondrel to return safely to. You're welcome through it as a bonus for services rendered. Saves you a night on the Trace and a walk in the morning."

Cal was distracted as he weighed his options. It had been a long two days and he was eager to return to his own bed, but more than that, the first thing Vesk had mentioned kept turning over in his mind.

They keep a room for Ondrel to return safely to? Does that mean his version of the Spell doesn't have the scrying component? Maybe I'll finally be able to isolate those specific runes and figure out how to reverse-engineer it?

As an afterthought, he figured the only thing that gave him pause about using their portal was where a Mycari-kept room in Deadfall would be. Likely the enclave, with Leylith giving off strong nobility vibes. He'd have picked any other neighborhood in the village to return to, but he could get out of there quickly enough.

I need to get back home and start drafting out some Spell combinations with the handful of runes that don't overlap, and then I can—

"Appreciate it," Cal replied absentmindedly, stepping through as the five followed him. He crossed the boards to the far wall, done with all of them, and reached out to the door handle.