Rissa shrugged. “It probably means there’s something I don’t know about what’s going on. Maybe the Mercenaries’ Guild is actually working for someone else and that’s why it looks like something bigger? Or maybe we can find something out that way that leads us in a different direction and I picked the wrong trunk. That can happen, too; It’s not fixed until-”
Rissa stopped and shook her head, a giant grin crossing her face. “I was about to say it’s not fixed until it’s seen, but that’s not really true, is it? It’s not fixed until it happens.” She reached over and quickly hugged Serenity with one arm, then released him.
Serenity grinned. “Could be either, but if I’m in charge, I’m guessing the second is more likely. It probably doesn’t matter, I wasn’t really expecting to work with them anyway. Let’s check that one first.”
Serenity headed along the branch towards the tree Rissa had indicated. There were a lot of smaller branches coming off the trunk; some were big enough to hold Serenity’s weight and some weren’t, but he was fairly confident the larger challenge would be weaving his way through them. They could probably all actually hold his weight as long as he reinforced them a bit; after all, the space was very malleable.
Alternatively, he could shift and simply float up the trunk, but that seemed silly when Rissa was going to have to climb.
“Since we’re climbing the tree, that’s probably like wading in the stream. As you climb, you should see bits and pieces of the possible future. I didn’t set an end point or a goal, so we’ll just have to see where it leads.” Rissa set a hand on one of the larger branchlets. “We don’t need to hurry. Time is passing, but the visions don’t really relate to how quickly you move.”
Serenity knew that Rissa was half certain of what she was saying and half guessing based on past experiences which might have been altered by the curse. Those experiences were the best guide they had.
“Ready?” Rissa glanced at Serenity.
He put a hand on a branch, the same way she was holding one. “Yeah.”
They started climbing.
Juka looked over the group Sillon had gathered. For a group of mercenaries gathered by an experienced man, they were an oddly balanced group. Two warrior types, both Tier Four; a full mage with an odd specialty, Tier Three; two healers, Tiers Four and Two; a Perception specialist, Tier Three; and their leader a Tier Four … hybrid? Why would anyone stay a hybrid at that high a Tier?
At least he seemed to have put in the effort to keep his attributes up to par for his Tier. That was the normal hybrid weakness. He’d be slow to Tier up and would probably get stuck, but at least he wasn’t useless. Given their lack of a standard mage type, that was probably the role he usually filled. If he were under her command, she’d push him to choose. Indecision wasn’t helpful; specialization was power.
The second healer made some sense, since she was married to the leader, but she was a distinct liability.
This wasn’t the group Juka had hoped for when she put the invitation out to Sillon; he was clearly the old man of the group. Still, at least it looked like they listened to him enough to show up. They’d still do for one of the two tasks she had in mind; she’d have to give the small group infiltration to the three mercenaries her cousin sent and send this motley group after the mystery.
She’d hoped to do it the other way around, but this group didn’t seem well suited to infiltrating and sabotaging the priests’ efforts to coordinate the different combat-trained branches of the Church of Aeons against the planet-wide monster flood. She’d hoped they would be a better fit than this since they were a “diplomatic group”, but they seemed seriously lacking in intelligence specialists and undercover operatives.
Of course, it was entirely possible that those very specialists were hiding right in front of her, but if they were, they were better than any Juka had ever met. She was simply going to bet on them being a powerful combat team; some places preferred to use combat specialists for diplomacy as a way to show strength. It didn’t work out well for them in the long run in Juka’s opinion, but she wasn’t about to complain. It was far too lucrative.
Juka put on her best grin and moved to meet the group. Over-the-top enthusiasm was the key here; that would keep her in character for what she’d shown Sillon. “Thanks for agreeing to help! I have a task in mind for the seven of you; it’s a bit of an oddball since we don’t really know what’s happening at the facility, but that’s why I want you to go there. There are a handful of places that the priests withdrew to when the monsters broke out of the dungeons; most of them make sense as good places to coordinate or fight from. This one doesn’t.”
Juka laid a drawing of a tiny building on the counter. It wasn’t clear from the drawing exactly how small it was, but Juka knew it was about ten feet on a side as well as in height. There were no windows, but one of the walls was made so that it could - with some effort - be removed. The other three walls were stone. “At least fifty priests went into this facility in the past few days. The surface portion is very small, as you can see. All it seems to be is a set of stairs leading down; there isn’t even any security on it other than basic locks. We don’t know what’s there; all we know is that it seems to be important. We want you to find out what it is. If you can, destroy whatever makes it important.”
It was easy to get into the facility. Ekari picked the lock in about the same amount of time as someone who had to choose the right key would take to open the door. Serenity was impressed; he’d seen it before, but it was still slightly scary to know how quickly someone who was good could open a low-end lock.
Ekari maintained that she was only “adequate” and that her teachers were better.
Inside the building, the only feature was an eight-feet-wide stairwell. It was a long way down the stairs with no landings or places to stop, long enough that Serenity wasn’t looking forward to climbing them to get out. He might be Tier Four and capable of it, but that didn’t mean he liked the idea of climbing at least six stories’ worth of stairs, especially not if they had to fight on the way out.
When they reached the bottom, they found an unguarded but locked double door.
Exploring the facility was a blur. Most of the facility was unguarded, protected only by simple locks and obscurity. That changed when the fighting started, but even before that there were a few areas that were better protected, with either better locks or actual guards.
There was some fighting and even more talking, but it passed by without really making an impact on Serenity; he knew that Ekari somehow talked her way into a set of badges for the facility, but that was all he made note of. Instead, he watched as a map of the underground area was filled in.
It was expansive; the entrance they’d used was not the only one, but it was the only one close to Abiding Four. Most of the corridors had distance-shortening travel enchantments of one sort or another, the type that were used when truly extreme distances needed to be crossed but a portal wasn’t appropriate for one reason or another, usually mana cost. They traded speed for increased efficiency.
They explored the facility for weeks. Most of the protected areas led to either fancy areas or to work areas, often areas where enchanters were working. Enchanters seemed to be by far the most common priests in the area.
There was a common theme throughout the facility: a translucent green crystal. At first, Serenity thought it was just green glass, but it was in all of the workrooms and in many of the enchanted items. Even the corridor enchantments had bits of translucent green crystal in them when Serenity broke into one.
They had to walk that corridor at normal speed after that. Serenity regretted breaking the enchantment. It was worth it, since the corridor was only about five miles long and was therefore one of the shorter corridors, but it was still annoying. Fortunately, there were other undamaged routes.
Eventually, they’d explored everywhere they could without fighting their way in. They had no way to choose which one to attempt first, so they simply picked one relatively close to the Abiding Four entrance.
The vision showed only a few flashes of the fight, but the lack of injuries afterwards said everything that was needed. There was a little dried blood, so Blaze had probably done some healing, but it was well within what they could handle.
The corridor past the guarded door was extremely long and heavily enchanted. There were several more checkpoints they had to fight their way through, but it was obvious that they were traveling faster than the news of their assault, since the checkpoints weren’t at all alert.
Eventually, they reached the end of the corridor. It led them to a mining operation that horrified Serenity.
They were breaking pieces off of Lyka’s World Core. It was the source of the fragments of green crystal he’d seen throughout the facility.
That revelation knocked Serenity out of the future visions; he didn’t see what his alternate self did with the knowledge.
For some reason, he was standing back in the three-way intersection next to Rissa. The fact that he was shaking with anger wasn’t a surprise; the fact that Rissa was seated cross-legged with her eyes closed next to him was. Apparently he’d knocked himself out of the vision early, but she hadn’t.
Serenity paced a little to try and calm down. Once he was calm enough, he sat down next to Rissa to wait.
It was only a few minutes after Serenity sat that Rissa opened her eyes with a sharp intake of breath. “Serenity?” She looked around wildly and seemed to calm down when she saw him sitting next to her. “Oh good there you are. I lost you at some point in the vision.”
Serenity nodded. “When we found out that the Church is harvesting bits of Lyka’s World Core. I was pissed and that knocked me out of it.”
Rissa’s nose wrinkled in puzzlement. “What? I didn’t see that. I noticed you were gone almost at the beginning, when Juka was describing what she wanted us to do. I mean, you were there, but only as a part of the vision, not you you.”
Serenity blinked. He got what she meant, but did that mean she’d seen a different future? “Didn’t we get sent to investigate an unknown facility that turned out to be underground and enormous?”
Rissa shook her head. “No, we were sent to back up Ekari in an infiltration of the priests’ command structure in Abiding One. We messed up a lot of stuff, but I didn’t really feel like we accomplished much of value.”
Serenity set a hand behind himself and leaned back against it. “Huh. We saw totally different futures then, even though we tried to go in together and started at the same point. Maybe in yours we introduced Ekari as having a link to the priesthood?”
Rissa shrugged. “I don’t remember. I just know that I didn’t get the feel of something big and angry out of mine, simply the Mercenaries’ Guild mission I’d have expected.”
“Something big and angry could have been the World Core, couldn’t it?” Serenity thought out loud. “I bet my vision ended right before that.”
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