“A prison? For that thing?” Sofia reacted, “First of all, I hope you are dead wrong, or things are not looking great for us, but also, how did you even get to that conclusion?”
“Three– No, four things,” Sonia answered, while she fixed her wings’ feathers one by one, “The loop is clearly there to trap sothing or soone, then there is that thing down there which, with how aggressive and weird it is, I could see soone wanting to imprison. Following that, it attacked us with that giant stick of ice, and what better environnt to suppress an ice mage or creature than a dry and hot infinite desert?”
Sofia nodded along, “I could see that… If that’s the case though, couldn’t they at least… I don’t know, put up a warning sign at the entrance? Also that’s only three things.”
“There might have been a warning sign, soti in the past. For all we know this loop might have existed for a million years, who the hell can tell? And, yeah, the fourth thing, I actually stumbled upon a prison in the forbidden layer in the past, though it had a bit more of a conventional look to it, but clearly with how fucked things are down here, and how hard it can be to leave, it’s a good place to throw the people you no longer want on the surface.”
“Hmm… Assuming you’re right, that doesn’t help us much. Pursuing that thing more wouldn’t be of any help since it’s also trapped here.”
“Maybe going into the sand is safe now that it’s busy kidnapping your immortal skeleton, at least?”
“We can try.”
“Pesle am try!”
The fairy disappeared, and the others kept exchanging ideas as they waited for the results. About a minute later, Pestle ca back, from above.
“No scream,” she said, “deep sand, then is very strong rock. Pesle is dig rock, appear in sky. Find nothing.”
“Interesting… There’s no sand falling from above with you, so either the hole you made fixed itself, or the sand doesn’t get looped like people do,” Sofia noted.
“Want Pesle go see?”
“You can go, but I’ll bet that you won’t find the hole you made,” Sonia said, “That screaming thing is clearly capable of bursting through so rock, I doubt breaking the loop could be that easy.”
“Pesle is be right back.”
The fairy disappeared again, while the others continued to talk about their options. Pestle fell from the sky again so ti later.
“Nonia is right,” she announced, “not find hole. But Pesle is has idea! If is jail we need find creator exit! Big loop only create inside. Creator is die here or is prepare exit, if it really jail we need find that,” she said, proudly nodding to herself.
“We can check the desert for anything that stands out. Might take us a while considering how vast it is even in a single direction,” Sonia suggested.
“It should be pretty fast, actually. I don’t usually use this tactic much because it can easily get noticed by the wildlife, but I can scout very large areas quite fast. Bookie, you’re up, wings formation.”
“Yes!”
Standing to attention, Bookie stopped daydreaming and diligently started summoning birds. First Crowie, then the other crows, the spinews, and the five big quetzalcoatlus. Since long range communication was hard even for Bookie due to the ambient mana, they had already prepared a counterasure, where small groups of spinews would form a wide line and be under the supervision of a slightly smarter crow flying behind them. If they found anything, they would notify their crow, which itself would send one of the faster quezacoatlus flying above back to Crowie, notifying the group that a discovery was made in their section.
Like this even without proper mana links, the skeletons could scout a long line of tens of kiloters at a ti and still reliably report back quickly.
The group had to wait for the birds to properly spread out, already the closest two spinews were barely visible on the horizon to their left and right, waiting for the signal. Two of the quetzalcoatlus ca back, one from each side.
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“All ready, depart!”
Sofia gave the signal, starting to fly ahead at the top speed her spinews could go. The two closest birds noticed and started moving, while the ssenger quetzalcoatlus returned to their positions. The group flew lazily over the hot sand.
Sonia followed behind Sofia, observing the spinews in the distance. “Do the birds really know what they’re looking for?” she asked curiously.
“Not really, when I gave the orders myself I usually made them report anything that stands out, which truthfully wasn’t great. But now I’ve delegated the order-giving to Crowie so I have no idea what he tells them.”
“The common language to skeleton-bird translator. Not every day you see that. You really have a peculiar style for a necromancer.”
Sofia shrugged as she flew, turning back to look at Sonia directly when she answered, since she could fly backwards fast enough to keep up with the birds. “I have not t many others, to be honest. Only the brighthall necromancy teacher and TLDR, pretty much, and I have never seen either of them fight.”
“Well I have seen so fight, and it’s huh, usually a lot more ssy than your style. Think your tournant battle against Sen, that kind of battlefield.”
“Oh, that one was ssy indeed…” Sofia agreed, looking up at the sky above, in a short ti they had already flown over almost a hundred kiloters in a straight line and had yet to find anything. “Ever seen an Ascended fight seriously?”
“Twice,” Sonia answered, “Once from afar, and once from relatively up close. And you really do not want to be close.”
“The one ti I got to see it I was ‘close’, and I can confirm it was not the most… Safe or comfortable. I was lucky to be under a very strong barrier at the ti. What about you?”
“Eternal Mountain had a disagreent with a Kleptra while we were out trading old relics I brought back up. Er’Arch, I don’t know if you’ve heard about that one, he’s rather notorious… Anyway, they battled it out to settle on a price for the transaction. It wasn’t a battle to the death, but if you know Kleptras you know holding back isn’t part of their vocabulary.”
“Oh, a Kleptra? How do they fight, actually?”
“No fucking clue. I almost couldn’t see them fight at all. All I got to see was the small cavern we were in gradually becoming a fucking active volcano, stranded in the middle on a small rock. They carved out a hole all the way up to the surface, leaving at the bottom surrounded by a lake of magma. The most impressive part is how they actually never hit despite the chaos.”
“... And who won?”
“The Kleptra settled down after it lost its head for the tenth ti, or so Mountain told … We did get the better end of the deal, when all was said and done. Though most of the profit went right back into fixing Mountain’s armor.”
Sofia had no idea what to say to that. To begin with, just the prospect of having to pay for armor repairs made her uncomfortable, but the thought of that elf’s full Mithrium plate needing repairs? That was nightmare material.
Sowhere, a Kleptra wearing a tiny black bowtie stopped in place, having a feeling that it had just been made fun of. He shrugged it off, fixed the even smaller badge pinned on the bowtie that said ‘Astronor committee’, and brought his attention back to the human-form grey-haired dragon in the middle of the room furiously typing on an illusory system keyboard.
Nex nervously paced around the room biting his nails while the dozen or so other mbers of the committee were staring at the screen showing the feed of the many orbital caras the dragon was toying with. With the system providing the advanced calculations to operate his own magic, the dragon scanned the empty space with several layers of detection.
Originally, what had kept this group busy for the recent decades was the search for the Phageid’s ans of invasion, but lately, old Avross, the dragon on the keyboard, had made a worrying discovery. Sun stood next to him, mumbling as Avross scanned through the feeds. “Not here… I don’t feel anything there either…” Until suddenly she went silent and closed her eyes.
“There it is again. Watch,” Avross announced, capturing everyone’s attention. The hundreds of cara feeds on the screen collapsed into a single view that showed a seemingly empty sector of space on the other side of the solar system.
The image flickered just as everyone stared at the screen, and the stars in the background seed to ever so slightly change position.
“And it’s gone…” Avross sighed, “Sun?”
Sun opened her eyes, shaking her head. “Couldn’t track. It’s too fast. Close to lightspeed. By the ti the information got to it was already gone.”
“And it instantly knew we were looking. This is not good…” Nex muttered between his teeth.
Sun continued her observations, “Still no idea what it is but it’s got a large sphere of influence, like a small planet. Little to no gravitational pull and no mana that I could detect, which is why it’s so hard to notice. I highly doubt it’s the Phageid. Either the watchers have a second space station closer to us… Or this is a new enemy.”
A heavy atmosphere reigned in the room as Nex complained in a corner, head thrown back against a wall. “Just what we needed…”
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