Serenity doublechecked the ritual. The guard at his entrance was still standing less than a foot inside the opening and the door was still open. That was partially unfortunate and partially convenient, so overall Serenity rated it as average.
With Rissa on his back, Serenity had to be careful. Under other circumstances, he’d have swung into the tunnel and taken the man out physically; it was likely to be faster. As it was, though, that would be risky for Rissa.
Instead, he trusted the ritual. Serenity climbed carefully down beside the entrance and carefully angled himself to look in at about waist height. It risked being seen, but there was no way around that without knowing exactly how the guard stood, and that was a bit more detail than he could manage. It was hard enough to even watch the ritual while clinging to the cliff wall; he couldn’t split his attention well enough to make out any details.
Still it was enough. Serenity relaxed his attention on the ritual and pulled it to the body climbing with Rissa on his back. It was less uncomfortable than he’d expected; his wings weren’t set up to have weight resting on them the way she did, but they were strong and sturdy while Rissa was relatively light. It helped that she didn’t move much.
He shifted his position so that he was clinging to the rock by his feet and left hand, then smoothly peeked inside with his hand ready to throw a magebolt. It was a good thing, too; as the ritual had shown, the guard stood in the opening. What it hadn’t shown was that the guard was watching the horizon; it took her a moment to react to Serenity’s presence, which was a moment too long for her safety. The Death Magebolt caught her squarely on the chest.
It didn’t send her to the ground, but it did push her into making a common mistake: she tried to move backwards. Serenity couldn’t tell if she was trying to get to cover, run away, or simply wanted more space between herself and the potential of a long fall. The mistake gave Serenity plenty of time to hit her with another Death Magebolt.
This time, she sank to the floor. She wasn’t dead or even unconscious, but she also wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. Death attacks could do that sometimes, but it meant he’d overwhelmed her. She’d probably be fine as long as she had time to recover, but that time was likely to be measured in days rather than the moments of the fight.
Serenity took the time to tie her up; she was unlikely to be able to attack, but he didn’t want to have her recover faster than expected and call for reinforcements. The other option was to kill her and there was no need for that; he had the time to take her captive and if everything went as planned there would be a place to send her, as well.
Serenity shifted again. He couldn’t pass as an Empire human if anyone looked closely, but runeclam armor would help make people not look. He couldn’t cover everyone this time, but he could manage himself and Rissa as long as he was willing to not have his Crystal Hilt available. The extra protection was worth the loss of offense as long as he didn’t have to fight the Viper; no one else here needed more than his ax could manage.
Blaze and Legion would have to be fine without armor; Serenity had enough trouble with using his multiform Skill that he didn’t want to make it worse by developing the ability to use more forms at once. Maybe someday he’d be able to equip larger groups even if he couldn’t actually be in multiple places at once, but for now he knew he was multitasking poorly.
The hallway wasn’t even close to empty, but it was notably emptier than when Serenity ran through it as Amily. They were seen repeatedly, but no one seemed inclined to argue or even worry about four people when two of them were in armor. More importantly, there weren’t any guards on the door to the hangar when they reached it. That was clearly one of the places they’d reduced the soldiers’ presence in order to put them out on the forest.
Serenity walked into the hangar as if he belonged there. That usually worked well.
His first glance around the hangar showed that a lot of work had already gone into trying to get the planes functional again. The broken bits weren’t gone, but they’d all been gathered together; Serenity guessed that was probably to protect the mechanics working on the planes.
There were a dozen people in the hangar. They all seemed to be focused on one plane in particular, one that had less damage to the wings than the others. The surface was smashed and had been removed but the underlying structure might still be intact; Serenity couldn’t tell. What he could tell was that there were still massive holes in the body of the plane; they seemed to have started with the wings for some reason. They were obviously stealing undamaged pieces from other planes but despite how long they’d worked on this one, it was still clearly incomplete.
Serenity grinned. :You did a good job smashing things, Rissa.:
He heard her chuckle softly. Her eyes were on the partially repaired plane, as well. :Wasn’t just me. Now, where’s this room?:
Serenity looked to his left, where the door was supposed to be. It was there, but it took him a moment to find behind a pile of what looked like dented shaped sheet metal. “This way.”
They made it to the pile before anyone paid any real attention to them. Naturally, that was when Legion whispered, “Zanzital’s group is at their door; Daryl’s is close but not quite there and there’s a guard at that door. I’ve told the people on the surface to start the attack.”
Serenity nodded. That was all expected; in fact, it meant they’d made good time. He’d expected to be a little behind Zanzital and Daryl.
“Hey, what’re you doing with those?” One of the workers must have been on his way to pick up some of the sheet metal; he objected when Blaze leaned down and started moving it out of the doorway.
Rissa stepped around the pile to a position where her armor could easily be seen, or perhaps simply where she didn’t have a pile of stuff between her and the worker. “This door isn’t supposed to be blocked. We need to get in, so this stuff has to be moved. You can move it or we will.” She set a hand on Blaze’s shoulder; he relaxed his grip on the metal parts and stood up again.
“Fine, we’ll move it. Not like anyone really goes in there, how could we know?” The man turned away and called for a couple of the people working on the plane to come help. Serenity couldn’t help but grin at the muttered, “better us than some muscleheads, this plane is already fucked enough.”
Rissa acted like she didn’t hear the mutter and pointed at the paint on the floor that outlined a space for the door to open. “It should be pretty obvious from the paint. That’s why it’s there, isn’t it?”
The worker grumbled but seemed to accept her authority to tell him to move the parts so she could open the door. As far as Serenity was concerned, it was an impressive display; he’d never been good at talking people into things like that, even when they knew they were supposed to do them.
Once the parts were out of the way, two of the three workers went back to the plane, including the man who’d originally objected. The one who lingered stayed a ways back and seemed more intent on the door than on Serenity’s group. He hoped it was just curiosity, but he couldn’t think of anything to do about it; so far, they’d avoided raising an alarm here and news of the fighting elsewhere in the base and on the surface had also not arrived, so everyone was still relaxed. He could wait for her to leave, but that would look odd in its own right.
Serenity shrugged to himself and opened the door. He wasn’t in such a hurry that he couldn’t take the time to examine the ritual before entering, but he definitely couldn’t just stand around and wait. He looked around the room. It was somewhat familiar from Amily’s memory, but Serenity noticed all sorts of details Amily hadn’t.
The floor of the room was covered in a design made of metra, a magically-active metal. Serenity didn’t know what it actually was; he just knew it worked well for magic in the Tier Ten to Twenty range; beyond that, you could melt it if you weren’t careful. It was probably overkill here, since the Viper was only Tier Ten, but it did mean that the ritual could be packed up and moved relatively easily.
Serenity’s eyes wandered over the design. The second thing Serenity noticed was that the outside of the ritual was liberally studded with monster cores. Those worried Serenity; not only were they not there when the Viper sent Amily away, but they meant the ritual was intended to pull more power than the ritualist in the center could supply himself.
You couldn’t tell everything from a setup like this, rituals weren’t runescripts, but you could tell a lot. The first thing Serenity wanted to do, before he allowed anyone to enter the room, was confirm that the ritual did what he thought it did. The fact that it sounded like a ritual to make Hollow Ones didn’t mean he was right; even if he were, it was possible that Amily had been lied to.
Before he was even able to confirm what the ritual did, something caught Serenity’s eye. There was mana moving around the ritual; it was active. Serenity’s eyes jumped to a section of the ritual, the section where the ritual master was clearly intended to stand.
No one was there, but there was an object that didn’t belong. It was more or less spherical and small. The top surface was silver-colored and metallic, which was how he missed it the first time, but the sheen on it was different. It wasn’t made of metra; it looked more like silver, but Serenity couldn’t be absolutely sure at this distance. A lot of metals looked like silver. Whatever it was, it was an enchanted but otherwise mundane object; Serenity could see the monster core in its side when he looked carefully.
“No one enter the room.” Serenity gave the command just before he stepped in himself. He didn’t have time to tell the others where to step, but Serenity could see a more or less safe path for himself. The fact that he didn’t actually have a heart anymore would help if this was truly a ritual to create a Hollow One; it wouldn’t have anything to anchor on. He might even be completely safe, though he wasn’t going to count on that.
Serenity could guess what was going on here: that was almost certainly a trigger of some sort. It was probably the reason the ritual was active and probably also the reason the monster cores were there; the power had to come from somewhere. He needed to shut it down and he needed to do it fast, and he couldn’t do that from outside the room.
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