POV Mantis, shortly before seeing the first door...
The hole was vast.
Bigger than any natural structure should be. The walls descended in an irregular spiral, perhaps ford by that enormous flow of mutant beasts.
Carved by their corruption, shaped by their violence.
Between those walls, erging like deadly tentacles... The roots of the golden sprouts.
Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, interwoven in a network so dense that light from above barely penetrated beyond the first dozen ters.
Like a web waiting for prey.
The Mantis knew it couldn’t truly die, so without fear it deployed its wings completely and let itself fall.
Confidence was easy to have when being a projection, not a life.
Controlling its descent with minimal adjustnts, its mirror surfaces reflected the surrounding roots until it beca indistinguishable from them.
The nearest roots soon seed to notice sothing.
Air displacent... An anomaly in the pattern.
But then it activated Mimic.
Its body began to undulate.
Not randomly, but with the exact pattern of roots when they moved searching for prey. The sa rhythm, the sa frequency, the sa pressure against the air.
For the vibration-based detection system, the Mantis wasn’t falling prey anymore... It was just another root moving in the network.
Nothing worth investigating.
So it descended deeper... And the mana changed.
From Gold 3 at the surface. Now here, underground, the concentration was different. The mana from above had difficulty penetrating compacted rock and earth.
The one coming from below... that one was more ’solid’. But its distribution didn’t reach here, starting many ters down.
So the amount reached Gold 2 fast.
Then Gold 1.
The pressure diminished gradually. The Mantis’s projected form stabilized, its mana structure stopping the slight trembling it had inside its system.
The relief was like surfacing from deep water.
And finally... near Silver 3.
It touched the bottom.
Not with a crash, but with a soft landing that barely displaced accumulated dust. Its legs touched stone, and for the first ti since beginning its descent...
Complete silence.
The kind that made you aware of your own existence.
The golden sprouts didn’t reach down here because the place had too little mana for them. Their roots hung above like a deadly ceiling, but the ground...
The ground was another thing’s territory.
A chamber opened before it. Natural in formation but clearly modified. Several tunnels branched in different directions, each disappearing into darkness that even the Mantis’s compound eyes had difficulty penetrating.
But only one mattered.
Because only one had carved walls.
The runes began subtly. Small marks near the entrance, as if whoever made them was testing, experinting with the dium.
Then they grew.
More complex and elaborate. More... deliberate.
The Mantis moved toward that tunnel, each step asured. It was still territory of creatures sensitive to vibrations.
But upon crossing the carved tunnel’s threshold...
Sothing changed.
The structure was different. The walls showed no cracks or erosion. They were solid, insulated from the exterior by sothing more than simple stone.
Magic or engineering. Maybe both with a purpose built to last.
And the wild creatures...
There were no signs of them here.
No trace of burrows, no sll of nests or marked territories. It was as if this place were... repellent to wild life.
As if sothing in these walls displeased them or... scared them.
Maybe an ancient power or residual energy. Sothing that triggered instinctive avoidance.
The Mantis advanced deeper, and then it felt it.
Or rather, didn’t feel it. The mana pressure.
It had disappeared...
Almost completely.
At Silver 3, there should be constant environntal mana concentration. Not as much as in higher ranks, but present.
Always present.
But here...
The runes, were they absorbing the mana?
The question floated through the bond with Ren, who asked himself from kiloters away while pretending to pay attention to celebrations in the evaluation building.
But there was no ti to investigate.
The Mantis continued, more cautious now. Its steps avoided directly touching the runes, staying in the spaces between them.
Careful when not knowing what touching them might trigger.
The tunnel expanded.
Gradually at first, then more dramatically.
And the runes grew in complexity with it.
They were no longer simple marks. They were art... Intricate patterns covering every centiter of wall and ceiling.
Beauty and function combined, purpose disguised as decoration.
And they glowed with white light. Not golden like the spores Ren had activated, but dim, very dim. As if they were... dormant.
Did they need activation?
The question floated through the bond with Ren, who considered it from kiloters away while maintaining his social facade.
The runes were definitely designed to do sothing. But without power, without sufficient mana...
They were just beautiful marks on ancient stone.
Potential waiting for a catalyst, waiting for activation.
Then the tunnel turned.
And there, at the end of it...
Was a door.
Massive... Covered in inscriptions too.
And it was open.
Not completely, but enough for sothing quite large to have passed through it.
The Mantis approached with extre caution, every sense alert for traps or guardians or...
Nothing.
There was only silence.
Selphira and Julius’s warnings seed a bit empty now. Maybe the Golden sprouts were problematic... But it felt like unnecessary big caution about dangers that didn’t exist.
It crossed the threshold, sliding through the opening...
And stopped.
Well, there were indeed monsters, but...
Death ones... hundreds of corpses.
Maybe thousands.
They filled the chamber like a macabre carpet of corrupt flesh and twisted bones.
The violence frozen in ti.
Mutants... All of them.
But all were no doubt dead.
Their bodies almost dried by ti and lack of moisture. Their tissues had stretched over their bone structures that sotis had too many angles.
Those unnatural forms... Things that should never have existed.
And the other strange thing was...
They seed to be intact after death.
Outside, mutants that died were quickly consud by scavengers, by other mutants, or by the ecosystem that recycled everything. Depending on battle circumstances, they’d even be disintegrated.
But here...
Nothing wild entered here.
These bodies had remained untouched for months.
Preserved by isolation. Protected by whatever kept predators away.
And the way they’d died...
The Mantis examined the closest ones. Claw wounds, bite marks, blunt trauma that had crushed skulls and shattered torsos.
Physical attacks.
Brutal and direct personal violence.
There weren’t many light burns, the characteristic disintegration that purification left.
If Sirius had been here... If he’d fought here...
He hadn’t used much of his Tiger’s Light elent. Had most likely fought mostly with his beasts’ bodies and his own, his hands.
Why? Was he running out of mana pushing against the river of mutants?
Conservation? Desperation? Strategy?
The chamber extended far beyond what the entrance suggested, it was vast. A hall that must have taken decades, maybe centuries, to excavate.
Its walls followed the sa rune pattern as the tunnel, but here they were bigger.
More active.
So actually glowed strongly with that dim white radiance. As if they’d retained more traces of power from long ago.
Residual energy, of their purpose.
But the mutants had kidnapped the artifacts and reached here... Why were there no living mutants then?
Had the mutants given up being here already?
What had they co for in the first place then?
Through the bond, Ren considered the possibilities.
Maybe the sa way they’d retreated from the city when he joined their network, when his connection showed them they couldn’t reach what they sought without the "keys"... They decided to leave.
Maybe here they’d discovered the sa thing.
That this place, whatever it guarded, was beyond their reach for now.
Beyond their ability to access or understand.
But his assumptions weren’t as accurate as he thought.
Because the place wasn’t as deserted as he believed.
The Mantis saw it at the chamber’s end, where corpses were less dense.
A mutant.
Alive.
Enormous and segnted. A creature that seed to be half centipede, half many other things. Sothing that should never exist. Its multiple legs of different types on each segnt gripped the floor, and its body coiled in protective spirals around...
A stairway.
Descending downward.
Deeper into the earth... Further from light and life.
The Mantis didn’t move at all, but the mutant didn’t seem to have detected it. Its multiple eyes were closed or looking inward.
It was... guarding.
Not actively, just... present.
Mutants were mostly Silver Rank between 1 and 3 in strength, variable despite looking the sa. Their size was kind of a tell.
The Mantis was Bronze 1, weak without counting on Ren’s bonuses. But in theory, it could defeat a ’varied Silver’ power mutant with enough tricks.
Illusions, superior tactics and huge elental control compensating for inferior strength.
But the noise of combat could attract unwanted attention from any possible extra mutants from below. And besides...
It didn’t need to fight. Just needed to pass.
It climbed one of the pillars supporting the ceiling, its legs avoiding touching the light runes again as a precaution, because Ren knew they were spores. From there, it moved to the ceiling, camouflaging against ancient stone.
The mutant didn’t react.
Didn’t sense nor notice.
The Mantis positioned itself directly above the stairway opening. Calculated the distance. The angle. The speed necessary to...
It dropped.
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