Chapter 42: Day 99 – Ansae

Ansae didn’t wait for a reply before taking a seat. If Blue could only talk through Shayma, then things would have to move at whatever pace it took to get her down here. Which didn’t bother her overmuch, since it gave her more time to overtly watch Blue and see if she could figure out how he ticked. Powers tended to defy their origins, but Blue was special even so.

Mostly, he was a dungeon, and as she understood it dungeons were created subservient. The Great Dungeons were subservient to the gods, the Red Cores to the mage-kings, and the green-capsuled spaces that drifted in the molten rock below the ken of most mortals were subservient to their attendant spirits. But Blue clearly was not subservient to anyone, and to be a Power, couldn’t be.

Not to mention that so far as she knew dungeons were about as intelligent as mana-springs or Source rocks. Which was to say, not at all. Oh, they were clever in very specific ways. But so were fire ants, and nobody was about to believe they could rise to become a threat. Let alone a Power.

He was also simultaneously more and less powerful than he should have been. Compared to the last time she had been inside, he’d progressed at a prodigious rate and the amount of mana circulating through his interior rivaled most mana springs. But he didn’t seem to be doing anything with it. There were no defenses, aside from the [Warding] which, she had to admit, was pretty good. No shields, no monsters - and with this much mana, he could be spawning some pretty effective guardians.

She expended a little bit of stamina to sharpen her senses. Given that Depletion had dropped her regeneration to effectively zero, she hated to do it, but given the negotiations she was here for it might be worth it. What she saw just made him even weirder. He was hosting people.

Actually hosting them. She could see the condensed mana where his core was, and the single cabin there was probably for his voice, that Shayma. But it was empty at the moment, with nobody there forcing him to grant the humans and demihumans space, so he was doing it of his own accord. Incredibly strange, but he’d bribed her with a place to stay too, so maybe there was a reason. Some benefit from hosting mortals, perhaps, a thought that made her wonder what the benefit was for hosting her. The lair may have been more for his benefit than hers.

Not all his guests were staying in their allotted space though. There seemed to be an adventuring party trying to delve deeper, which was a profoundly stupid idea for more reasons than she could readily count. It rather reminded her of how, ages and ages ago, greedy fools would occasionally try and plunder her hoard . Not that much of her hoard was even accessible to anyone but herself, but even a fraction of it was enough to register to some types of divination. Rather nostalgic, really.

She leaned back in her chair and watched them creep along. She could see straight through all the walls with her current stamina consumption, so she knew there was nothing around, and it was pretty amusing to see them so ready to fend off all the nothing that occupied Blue’s empty corridors.

Also nostalgic, that. Playing with mortals was one of the classical pastimes of Powers.

She did wonder what Blue was going to do to stop them, though. His Core was walled off so they didn’t have a direct line in, but the [Earth Invoker] could probably punch through given enough time and incentive. Even as she watched, Blue’s corridors twisted around to lead them on a convoluted circle. She could see that they were already cut off from the habitat above, with no way back other than digging through stone.

Speaking of which, it seemed the [Earth Invoker] noticed the serpentine paths, bending a wall inward for the group to take a shortcut. Great idea in a normal dungeon, but if she were Blue she’d be pretty annoyed. And indeed, he was making changes near their exit point, though the details escaped her. He had an astounding degree of finesse over the physical form of his structure, all the more impressive because his mana control was so sloppy.

They emerged from the artificial cross-corridor and she had an intuitive flash of danger a fraction before the [Blade Bulwark] brought his swords up to deflect...something. Mist erupted from the blades he held out to either side, and flying spray gouged fragments from the walls. In fact, whatever it was cut deep grooves in the swords themselves, which was impressive considering they were Bilib Ivory. The stuff was far tougher than steel, though it couldn’t be sharpened to much of an edge, which made using it for a sword questionable at best.

She pursed her lips. That was very interesting. There hadn’t been so much as a flicker of mana, yet whatever Blue had done held enough force that even the shrapnel from the wall inflicted injuries. Nothing fatal, but blood dripped from torn clothes and armor. “Godshit,” the [Blade Bulwark] swore. “Look what that did to my swords!”

The others consulted as they withdrew to a safe distance. Or what they thought was a safe distance, but this wasn’t an ordinary dungeon. She could see Blue altering the walls all around them even as they decided on their best route forward. Again there were levels of detail she couldn’t discern from where she sat, but the working was larger in scale than the first one. She imagined it’d be entertaining.

This time it was the [Heartfire Protector] who noticed something was happening. “There’s something hot in the walls, it -”

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That was as much as he managed before the entire passage exploded. Still with no hint of mana use, and without any trace of fire or smoke. The [Blade Bulwark] couldn’t hope to stop it, and didn’t. She had to resist the urge to clap as the party was reduced to torn corpses amidst the rubble. Not only had the trap, if that was even the correct word for it, been entirely effective, it had been performed without any actual mana. Oh, there was mana about, as there was everywhere the dungeon extended its reach, but none of it was spent in the attack itself.

Now, she could easily wipe out such a party on strength alone, but for a dungeon to do so was something else entirely. Almost everything they could do required an expenditure of mana, aside from the most basic functions of their biology. They could move their own features, and dig through stone, though slowly. But for Blue, slowly didn’t seem to apply at all. “I like it,” she said to the room at large. “Playful, but effective. I’d be interested to know how you did that!”

There wasn’t a response, of course. There couldn’t be. But she knew he was listening and, since she wanted to speak as equals, there was no harm in speaking to him directly.

It was amazing how even Powers were vulnerable to flattery.

Blue removed the corpses but only to relocate them to one of the fields of ice, above the habitat. She could even guess why. Until Shayma arrived, casting the bloodied corpses at the collective feet of the inhabitants was an extraordinarily blunt message without context. She should know, since she’d used that precise technique to good effect more than once.

After that, she settled in to wait. There didn’t seem to be any other entertainment brewing and all the reasons he had to ignore her still existed, so she expected it might take a few weeks or months. But she was very patient. It was something she’d learned after her first millenium.

She had expected Blue would make her cool her heels for a while. She would have, in his place. Even though Powers weren’t all equal, they had their own dignity and it would never do to underestimate one. Though admittedly Blue was very strange even among the Powers that she knew.

So she was actually quite surprised when not long after there was a flash of black and a piece of paper - not parchment, actual paper - appeared on the table. Not genuine teleportation, but some sort of well-practiced dungeon function. Exactly the same technique Shayma had used to materialize the Status sigil, in fact.

Lady Ziir, it read, in rather unpracticed handwriting. Still, it was better than the impossibly ornate calligraphy some people had used in the past.

Blue wants me to tell you that I’m in Wildwood Retreat and will be for some time. Probably another week. He is willing to discuss things with you but it will have to wait until I’m back and we can talk properly. Also he asks if you’d leave the guests alone, especially since they don’t know you’re down there.

Thank you,

Shayma Ell, for Blue.

It was the most casual note she’d gotten for a long, long time. It was actually a little endearing, and clearly Shayma still had no idea who she was. Actually, it seemed unlikely Blue did, either. He knew her name, somehow, but not the history associated with it. Admittedly, most of the people who knew that history were long dead, though some remnants of it remained. She was pretty sure they still called that particular moon Dragon’s Eye.

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