Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Civil War

I'd apparently been worrying about nothing. Despite exploring a decent chunk of the cavern, I'd not encountered a single fox-kin. I'd even explored the few tunnels I'd found, but all were empty and none of them seemed to go anywhere. I'd seen pickaxes, artificial lighting and other signs of occupation, so maybe mine shafts? Then why had they all been abandoned?

The cavern seemed unfeasibly large, taking a couple of hours to walk from one end to the other, and it also widened significantly at the remote end compared to the wolves' plateau. It ended in a wall rather than another cliff, but even so, if this was a natural location, I found it hard to imagine the place wouldn't immediately collapse; there was no way the ceiling was properly supported.

By the time I'd done a complete loop around the outside, I was exhausted. I had my water bag with me and had found where the underground waterfall cascaded from above, as well as spotting a few abandoned canteens in the mines, but I hadn't brought any food, nor had I seen any abandoned. I'd been prioritising not annoying the spider queen, which was also my excuse for why I'd forgotten to ask her for things like new armour. Ah well; her old webs were now left unattended in the jungle, free for me to collect the next time I was up there.

As I entered the nearest copse of crystal trees and tried to catch myself a few crystal beetles to chew, hoping their insides weren't quite as crystalline as their shell, I pondered the consequences of the fact that I'd just walked around the entire cavern exterior but hadn't found any tunnels leading downwards. There was the one going up, and there were the mineshafts. There had been nothing else. Either this was the bottom floor already, in which case the arch-priestess should have had some knowledge of the holy sword, or else the entrance to the next floor was in the interior of the cavern.

My luck with the spider queen had been too good. I was due some retribution for it. What would the worst possible location of the exit to the next floor be? Obviously, in the middle of the fox-kin town. Why hadn't I asked Mi'taan? Right, I hadn't wanted to give away too much about myself, and even asking the question would have had implications.

Maybe there was no existing entrance, and I needed to mine my way down? That would be a pretty awful option too. I'd stuffed some tools from the mine shafts into my item box on general loot-everything principles, but that didn't mean I wanted to dig with them.

I broke open the shell of a beetle I'd managed to catch and slurped up the insides. It contained soft meat rather than more crystal, but as expected it tasted gross. I felt poison nullification kick in too, neutralising some weak toxin in the beetle's flesh. I really missed cooked food. If I was going to have to go back to the fox-kin town, it wouldn't hurt to nick some of their food on the way through. Would the survivor class have had a fire-starting skill? When the time came to pick a second class, something to help me cook was going to be high on my priority list.

With my impromptu meal and rest done, I headed back to the fox-kin town, keeping my eyes, ears and sense presence wide open. Despite the lack of fox-kin around the outer edge of the cavern, there must be some near their town, surely? They couldn't all have killed each other in the fighting I saw earlier.

Nearer the town, hiding in the darkness between two glowing copses, I saw no signs of ongoing fighting or fire, but there were obvious signs of recent combat having taken place outside of the town. Impact craters, long scars, glassy areas that looked as if the rock had been melted. Outside the gates I saw a row of stakes that I was pretty sure hadn't been there last time. The heads impaled on them certainly hadn't been; a row of mounted heads was something I definitely would have noticed. There was no way I could get close enough to see who they belonged to without being spotted by the guards, though. The number of guards on the gates and wall seemed to have dwindled since my previous visit, but there were still no gaps in the defences.

Sneaking in through the front gates seemed impossible. With the wall as well manned, or foxed, as it was, and given my non-existent climbing skills, it wasn't as if I could climb over anywhere either. How could I get in? Or at least, how could I find some information on whether a passage to the lower floor was really in there? My eyes settled on a structure outside of the town walls, the surrounding fields now almost entirely depopulated. I hadn't killed that many; Ja'yakril must have been caught up in the fighting.

There was no way to do this without him knowing I was back, so rather than any attempt at being sneaky, I walked up to the front door and knocked.

"Who is it this time?! Just leave me in peace. I had nothing to do with it!"

"Nothing to do with what?" I called through what I assumed was a letterbox.

There was a sharp intake of breath from inside, followed by a loud bang and a series of smaller clangs.

"No! Go away! I want nothing to do with you!"

"Oh? But last time you offered to take good care of me?"

"That was before you turned out to be, depending on who you believe, a blessed servant of the Goddess, or a demon hell-bent on tearing apart society from within."

"Or a unique monster who would make a good pet, unless you've picked one of the other two camps since. But I've never claimed to be any of those three things. If you idiots are going to fight each other over me, I want to do nothing except get out of your way."

"Then by all means, do so. If we never have to see you again, so much the better! What are you here for? Taking advantage of the situation to claim your revenge?"

I kinda had wanted to inflict a bit of poetic justice on him, but now that I was here, he was just too sad and pathetic. "No, I'm just looking for the way down. There should be a passage to a lower floor somewhere, and I need to find it."

"Down? Are you talking about the catacombs? The Lord lives above us, in the upper caverns. We live in the bountiful middle. Nothing lives in the catacombs; all that's there is death."

Catacombs? Death? It sounded suspiciously like floor three was the undead level. "Where's the entrance to these catacombs?"

"Inside the temple. Now, if that's enough information for you, please just go away."

That wasn't actually as bad as it could be. I could teleport into the temple. All I needed to do was switch my spawn point and visit the spider queen. She had ice magic, according to her appraisal. A resistance to that would probably be handy against undead.

Of course, that would be far too easy. I tried to switch my respawn point over and found that I couldn't select the temple. The option was doing an impression of a greyed out button; it was still there, but mentally clicking it had no effect. They knew nothing about how my respawn ability worked, so how had they managed to block it? Furthermore, why would the priestesses that controlled the shrine want to block it? It seemed that my teleportation was sealed, and I'd have to get in the hard way.

"Just one more question. How can I get into the temple?"

"Walk up to the gate and ask? Given that for the moment, anyone who expresses an opinion out loud that you're anything other than goodness personified ends up with their head chopped off, you can be sure the guards will let you in regardless of their personal opinions."

That answered which faction won. How surprising; I'd have expected the warrior caste to have better combat potential than the priesthood. Then again, half of the warriors were looking distinctly uncomfortable back when I'd been captured, and they were the ones their leader had chosen to bring with them on that mission. Presumably they wouldn't have brought anyone they thought would protest. It probably wasn't a simple case of one caste against another. I really needed to know what had happened before I threw myself back into it.

"Can you give me a little more information on what happened, at least?"

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"You said that was your last question!"

"I was hoping it was, but I don't want to walk up to a bunch of guards without knowing what happened since I was last here."

"Did you expect there to be an unguarded back door or something?!"

I heard some amount of muttering and grumbling from behind the door before it clicked and swung open.

"I don't want to be seen talking to you, so stop hanging around outside and come on in."

I wasn't going to argue; trying to hold a conversation stooped over and talking through a letterbox was not at all ergonomic. I stepped in, and he slammed the door behind me.

"If you're going to treat me like some sort of library, at least reciprocate a little. I went to check on your corpse after the last time you were here, and it was still there. The temple has confiscated it now, of course, so don't dare ask for it back, but I still want to know how that works."

The temple confiscated my corpse... If I ever found it preserved and mounted on display somewhere, I'd snap. "Nothing particularly interesting. When one body dies, I just grow another. I wouldn't have asked for it back, anyway. I don't have any particular attachment to my old bodies. Normally I feed them to a big carnivorous tree upstairs."

Ja'yakril stared in disbelief.

"What? I don't know what sort of burial customs your species has, but I die quite often. I really didn't want to have to deal with dozens of corpses cluttering up the place, especially not when they all have my face. That would be weird."

He frowned for a bit, then shook his head. Novice empath was telling me that he was nervous and unhappy, but from the sounds of it, it wasn't completely unwarranted. "Whatever. Come in and take a seat. Want anything to drink?"

That caught my full attention. Could I finally get some proper food and drink? "Yes, please. Very much please! I'll take anything you're offering. I've had nothing but raw bug meat to eat since I got here!"

He quickly returned with a glass of hot, brown liquid that smelt very much unlike tea or coffee, and a plate of black strips. They didn't look particularly appetising, and it was possible that fox-kin tastes deviated massively from my own, but by this point I was willing to try anything.

Novice empath advanced to level 4

I paused bringing the glass to my mouth when I noticed his nervousness skyrocket. I took the tiniest of sips, and sure enough, I felt poison nullification kick in. It actually struggled a bit to completely neutralise it, despite the tiny amount I'd drunk, suggesting that whatever was in there was powerful stuff. The drink was nice though, and with the guidance from poison nullification, I knew how much I could take. I continued drinking as the suddenly less nervous Ja'yakril started to talk.

"So, where to begin..."

He told a long tale, actually knowing the events in a lot of detail because he'd been dragged into some sort of trial after the leaders of the mage, merchant and artisan castes had got involved. Kind of obvious that would happen after the leaders of the warrior and priest castes had a big punch up inside the temple. In summary, the arch-priestess was dead by the warrior commander's hand, who had then fled the town. His current location was unknown. The warrior caste had suffered a massive blow to its reputation; that a guest of the arch-priestess had been kidnapped and tortured by the warrior caste was now public knowledge, as well as the fact that the commander had murdered the arch-priestess in the aftermath.

He'd also broken the shrine in the process, having invaded the temple again to get the attention of the arch-priestess, who had been avoiding him. That explained why I lost the respawn point. I should try to get a mana crystal ready in preparation for fixing it. Thank goodness that I'd already been granted success for my last quest before that had happened.

Not that the arch-priestess was innocent; she'd been one of the ones outside the interrogation room right at the end. All five leaders had been there, which explained why she hadn't rushed in to start with; they'd been holding her back. On hearing my yell, she'd burst in to find my corpse, showing obvious signs of torture, and had slaughtered everyone else in the room, leaving no-one to dispute my claim of murder.

Of course, then they'd found Si'janrii, whose injury had confirmed the other half of my claim. No-one had needed to ask exactly how my heavily bound body had ended up in a position to inflict that wound, which led everyone to believe that the first part of my claim had been equally true. The arch-priestess, she of the whole no-blood-must-be-spilt spiel, had gone on a complete rampage, decimating the ranks of the warrior caste up until the point the commander had stopped her. No wonder the wall's defences had been reduced, and fox-kin outside the town had been pulled back. They'd lost too many guards.

Maybe it had been my fault that things escalated so badly. Had I met with the other three leaders, I wonder what would have happened? Would they have been more reasonable than the warriors, or less zealous than the priesthood? Not that I'd had the option, with so little time left on trigger respawn; the best I could have done would have been to die quietly, which might well still have set the arch-priestess off. I would have been interested in meeting the mage leader, given that Mi'taan was far and away the most reasonable and intelligent of the fox-kin I'd interacted with.

"Thanks. That's plenty of information. I don't suppose you have a mana crystal worth at least a hundred mana lying around?"

"What? Why would I hand over something that valuable?"

His nervousness had been creeping back up as I'd drunk more of the poisoned drink without showing any effects, but he wasn't half as nervous as he should be if he knew that I knew. It stood to reason; if I knew it was poisoned, why would I keep drinking it?

"I won't tell anyone that you tried to poison me, for a start." And now he was showing the appropriate amount of nervousness. I watched his face turn so pale that he could have blended into a snowstorm. "For second, I'll be sure to tell whoever's in the temple that you were the one who provided the materials when I repair the shrine with it. What was that poison even supposed to do? You know my body is disposable, so I can't see what you hoped to achieve."

If he had something that he thought would persist across respawns, I needed to know about it.

He floundered for a bit, before collapsing in defeat. "It was supposed to send you to sleep. If I kept you alive but asleep, I could have neutralised you and prevented you from sowing any more chaos. For the record, I don't believe for one second that you're on a mission from the goddess, but I know full well who came out on top in this spat, and if I have to suck up to the winners, so be it. Let me grab a crystal, then I'll come with you. I want to claim my credit in person."

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