The ant farm metaphor only intensified in Benjamin’s head as they slowly fought their way deeper into the stinking pit. Besides his light spells, the only things he could see were the green Phosphorescent fungus that dotted the walls and ceiling in places, the beady red eyes of their enemies, and the trail of mangled bodies that Matt left behind as Benjamin struggled to catch up with him. The man had become a monster and was practically lost to reason at this point. Benjamin had given up yelling for him to slow down. 

At this point, he only managed to catch up to him when he was fighting a particularly challenging enemy, which became more and more common in the depths of this place. Though the little buggers and their claustrophobic waves could be dangerous, one-on-one, even Benjamin could handle them with a sword. As the four of them slowly forced their way to the heart of the place, leaving hundreds of dead in their wake, larger monsters became more common. 

First were the hobgoblins. They were nearly the size of a man but perhaps twice as strong as one. That still wasn’t strong enough to stop Matt from ripping off their heads or their limbs and using them as a weapon, thanks to his rage, though. It was only in the center of the giant mound, somewhere much closer to the surface than they’d started, that they found an enemy that finally gave him pause. 

When Benjamin finally reached them and saw Matt and Emma squaring off against the giant thing, he wasn’t sure what to call it. A troll? A Megagoblin? The system helpfully provided the tag of goblinKing when he targeted it with a vampiric bolt, but the label didn’t seem fitting at all. It was a bloated, corpulent thing that was paler than the rest of its minions and covered in warts and boils. It was so large that its limbs were larger than any of his friends, and Benjamin doubted this thing had left its den in years. In fact, it couldn’t, he realized as he looked to the exits that diverged at random around the outside of the room. 

He didn’t cast his spell, though. Matt and Emma were too close, even for the narrow beam of vampiric bolt. Instead, he shouted, “Matt, we have to work together!” as Emma came running up behind him to help. 

Matt didn’t listen. Benjamin wasn’t sure he could right now, and as he charged forward, he wasn’t quick enough and was hit with the back of a giant hand hard enough to crack the stone wall he was knocked back against.

Could healing handle that kind of trauma? Benjamin wondered as he tried to think about how many bones that might have broken. He couldn’t say for sure, but the half-empty life bar was already refilling, so he’d take that as a good sign. 

Ignoring Matt for the moment, he cast a level 4  hasten on Emma to give her the best part of a minute to do as much possible while Raja struggled into the small cavern behind him to get in position to help the now blurring woman. 

“Aim for the eyes,” Benjamin grunted as he tried to determine what his best move would be. 

He would have said that he was worried about Raja hitting her by accident, but the way she flickered in the thin illusionary light, he wasn’t sure that anyone was capable of hitting her right now, by accident or on purpose. 

Oh, the goblin king tried, but each time its bloated fingers closed around where she was to crush the life out of her, she vanished. In fact, she didn’t seem to move. She just disappeared and reappeared as she switched from pose to pose while she struck at it. For all her ferocity, though, none of her strikes seemed to go deep enough to cause real damage, but she was certainly pissing it off, and the way it was starting to flail around made him worry that it might bring the whole shit-encrusted cavern down on top of them.

“You’re not the boss of me!” Raja laughed even as he pulled back on his string. “Personally, I think Emma likes it when all eyes are upon her. I prefer to strike at the heart of the matter!”

Benjamin only realized what his friend's bad pun meant as the arrow left the bow and arced across the room. “No!” he cried out, but the words had barely left his mouth before the arrow exploded in the thing's chest. Raja had just shot the giant corpulent monster with shockwave.

The whole cavern shook from that, and a couple of stalactites fell from the ceiling, but that didn’t bring the place down. Strangely, it wasn’t enough to bring the giant goblin down, either. It roared in pain and rose high on its launches to charge the two of them. In all that time, neither Emma’s cuts nor Matt’s heroics had gotten its attention, but Raja certainly had, and even the magical equivalent of a rocket launcher to the heart hadn’t been enough to drop it. 

Benjamin launched a level 3 vampiric bolt, certain it wouldn’t be enough, but he didn’t know what else to do. Chains of ice aren’t going to cut it, he thought to himself. 

Mentally, he went through the list of spells he had, and he dismissed each of them as insufficient. He was about to jump back down the hole and yank Raja after him so they could stay out of reach for another few seconds at least, but before he could do that, or Raja could fire his second shot, a giant shard of rock that had to be at least two hundred pounds slammed into the things chest. 

It took Benjamin as long to figure out that that was one of the fallen Stalactites and that Matt had thrown it as it did for the ugly behemoth to fall over. One second, it was bearing down on the two of them to crush them with its corpulence, and the next, its uncertain balance had been completely thrown off by the giant chunk of sharpened stone embedded in its chest. It died with a look of surprise on its face that Benjamin completely understood. He probably had a very similar look on his face as they hesitantly approached the thing. 

“Which. Way?” Matt grunted, making Benjamin look at him for the first time. 

The rest of them were spattered with the green blood of goblins. Only he was covered nearly head to toe in red from his own blood. Somehow, despite that, his hit points were almost full again. Benjamin didn’t know what to say to that. He was at a loss for words. He just pointed at the exit that looked like it had the biggest upward slope, and Matt set off again with Emma in hot pursuit. 

“Sometimes they scare me,” Raja confessed quietly. Benjamin nodded, but didn’t say a word. 

Over the next ten minutes, they fought all the way to the surface, and in all that time, they didn’t encounter anything half as nasty as what they’d just fought. In fact, by the end, there was barely anything left to fight. In less than an hour, they’d practically cleared out the entire goblin lair, which was insane but strangely true. 

When they got to the surface, though, Benjamin could only gasp lungfuls of clean, fresh air as he tried and failed the stench of all of this behind him. While he did that, Raja explained, “None of this was here two days ago.” 

As he spoke, he gestured at the giant, rock-strewn mound they were on top of. “All this… this was some meadows and a stream that wound around that way somewhere.”

Even in the evening light, Benjamin could see that he was right. The rocks were entirely different in both color and geology. Even the soil was an ugly rust-red color instead of the deep brown colors that was everywhere else. 

Before he could comment on that, though, Emma called out, “Hey, I think you two better get over here. We found something.”

Despite their fatigue, both of them rushed up the slope to where their friends were, and on the far side of the mound, they saw what Emma had been talking about. The ugly chunk of rock that they stood upon was 30 or 40 feet tall, and even though it had replaced a small idyllic valley not so far from the entrance to Lasthome, it didn’t blend into the surrounding foothills at all. However badly it might stick out like a sore thumb, though, the green embers located on the other side near a crude stone altar stood out even worse. 

“What do you think it is?” Emma asked. “Goblin magic? Do they have magic?”

Benjamin found it unlikely that they did, but where the Rhulvinarians were concerned, he was never going to say never. “No matter what the blood we’re covered in says, green almost certainly means rune magic,” he answered. “That probably means that that's the spot they summoned this mountain into existence from. Well, that’s left of it anyway.”

“How the hell do they summon a mountain anyway?” Raja asked, “And why don’t you have a spell for that?”

“Maybe one day I will,” Benjamin said as he started down the slope to investigate, with his friends right behind him. 

That was mostly a lie, though. He might figure out how it was done, but he doubted very much that he’d ever be able to do it himself. His soul was simply too damaged for works that large. In fact, he was pretty sure that even a powerful mage with a functioning soul couldn’t do it on his own. 

The big hint there was the bodies that were scattered around the still-smoldering summoning circle. Someone had done this, of course, but the fact that there were so many corpses behind meant they’d required more juice than any one man had to do it. Someone had used the lives of disposable slaves as batteries and amplifiers to make this happen. The big question was, why?

They approached the ring cautiously just as the last of the green fire faded away. The spell had been cast nearly an hour ago, and the fact that it had only now winded down hinted at the magnitude of the energies involved. He could see it everywhere, in the charred marks on the bodies and both the ground and the corpses, but they all ran through the altar itself by way of circuitry drawn in blood. 

So this is what they really meant by blood magic, Benjamin thought grimly. To him, blood magic was just a few spells and an ability, but now that he had a much better understanding of mana dynamics and how large spells operated, it didn’t surprise him at all that the Summoner Lords used their castoffs for exactly this sort of thing. After all, isn’t that what Lord Jarris has threatened to use him for the first night they arrived? 

The altar was somewhere between blood sacrifice and an impromptu switchboard. There were a number of gems nestled in amongst the carvings that might have been indicator lights, batteries, or fuses. On it and several of the corpses though, there were birds. No, not birds he realized as he watched them move and flutter from spot to spot. 

Origami paper birds. The paper was dark and the folds were uneven, but they moved as if they were alive, and somehow that made everything even weirder. 

He wasn’t sure what was going on. There was so much to unravel here. Most of the symbols were familiar to him, and the way they were sequenced seemed to make sense, but he took a few images using the heliograph protocol he’d built so he could study them further when he had time. 

Right now, what mattered wasn’t how they’d worked but why they were here. Benjamin looked around, trying to figure out whether or not they were walking into a trap, but there seemed to be only corpses and questions, at least until one of the bird cocked his eyes and looked at him. 

“Is it you? Are you him?” the thing asked that made it sound more than a little mad. “You must be. Your eyes are clear.”

Benjamin raised his arm to signal everyone else to stop as he looked around for the bomb that was going to blow him up and end their adventure once and for all. Instead, all he faced were more words as the small flock regarded him and then began to speak again.