Chapter 21: Ch. 17: Descent Part II

Ward

/wɔːd/

Noun, a magical security and/or alarm system. May be a barrier or illusion designed to protect from, alert of or capture intruders.

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Arthur had been hovering above the forest for around half a quartz, searching for signs of construction. He’d almost given up when his [Mana Sense] had alerted him to something that might have been what he was looking for.

The erratic magical signature was well inside the range of his magical perception, around a radius of 1.5 metra at the very least. He hadn’t realised he was right on top of it because it had been covered by encroaching vines and overgrowth. Excited but no less cautious about his findings, he descended for a closer look at the vine-covered construction. It was in a clearing besieged on all sides by the treeline.

In its heyday, the relay tower was a ring of columns encircling a brick-laid bowl like Stonehenge. Each brick was a hexagonal pane joined to another by a seam of arcane metal, giving the bowl the appearance of a tessellated terrestrial dish. In the middle of the bowl that was 15 metra across in diameter, stood a four-sided, tapering pillar. The pillar was crowned by a crystal focus in the shape of a pyramidion.

Now that same obelisk lay askew against the outer ring, cracked and chipped. The pyramidion focus was a dull, smoky thing with hairline fractures that arced with magic like a short circuit. That was the source of the erratic pulses of magic that Arthur had felt.

With eyes on the tree-line, Arthur slid across the bowl of decrepit bricks, now overrun with moss. The ward keeping out the weather and intrusion had failed; otherwise, Arthur would not have been hovering across the relay tower.

He approached the source of the repeating magical signature, the obelisk proper. A couple of runes still flared along its magical traces and conduits. The others were defaced or degraded and were dead to magic.

He got as close as he could hover over a pool of fetid water clogged with leaf litter before he looked at the runes.

‘Hmm, [Basic Rune Lore] just tells me this is an emergency beacon of some kind but not what for... I am guessing it’s something like calling technical support. It must have run out of mana to be this weak. Figures, the recharging runes are degraded—’

‘I don’t think my etching tools can scratch this surface,’ he frowned. ‘So what could have possibly brought it down?’ He stood back to take in the entirety of the relay tower, looking from the pillars to the broken wall of another structure outside its perimeter. Crumbling brick was all that remained of the waypoint’s shelter.

‘I know it's a long shot, but let’s see if [Basic Repair] can fix the emergency beacon. First things first [Diagnostics!]’

The skill activated per usual and sent him its approximations of the magical problem that needed solving.

‘Hmm? [Diagnostics] shows me what can be partially fixed with what I have at hand but where? There are probably hundreds of runes in similar condition.

It will take me a whole week just to look for what needs fixing. Does "partially" mean temporarily? Ugh, nuances! Let me get done with it then. I’ll just do a blanket [Basic Repair]’

Arthur blasted the whole relay with [Basic Repair]. Part of the rune work glowed blue briefly, and that seemed to do the trick. However, that was oversimplifying it. The skill practically tanked a third of his mana reserves in one go and he had to catch himself from stumbling from the overdraw. It felt like the first time he’d tried to bind Overkill to himself. What came after that, however, left the hair at the back of his neck standing on end.

[Unknown]- Maintenance Log, Date AC 1524 this is relay tower designation aerland 12A reporting for routine ward re-enchantment. Relay crystal seems to have signs of mana bleed above tolerance levels; attempt to repair will take 2 days. Nothing else of note to report except that the runes also show signs of having been tampered with. Minor hindrance, no need for intervention for now. Signing out for day one.

[Unknown]- [Urgent Message!], if you are hearing this, please send for the Adventurers Guild. There is a monster infestation on this aerland. I fixed some of the runes yesterday and they seem to have been defaced again overnight; the wards didn’t even stop them. I will try to strengthen the wards tonight, though there is a chance a mana overdraw could affect the relay crystal…」

[Unknown]- [Urgent Message!]. I was a fool! This is no ordinary mo….ter i….estation. It’s a Vesper-damned ne.... of chimaera ..piders. The ..rood moth…. is intelligent and the hive is .. gold rank thre…. at least, if I don’t ma…. it ….rough the nig…. whoever gets this mess…., avoid the ….land and tell the guild!

The message transmission was cut out before repeating like a broken record player. Each iteration got worse and worse until the magic gave out and the runes finally went dark.

‘ Frag! I should have known something was wrong when the aerland was too quiet?’ Arthur gulped. The mana sail was spirited away to get his hands free as he powered the hoverboard with his own magic.

In the meantime, he readied the bound spell gestures [Gale] while he began casting [Spark Bolt] matrices to hold in his mind for the next 30 kardions. His eyes darted every which way as he watched his surroundings. Even though he had a straight shot towards the sky, the overgrowth at the treeline had never been so foreboding.

The only sound he heard was the sighing of the wind rustling dry leaves, which sounded eerily like the elegy of a vengeful spirit. Time seemed to crawl. Then he heard the crunching of stone behind him. Gooseflesh rippled across his forearms as he willed the Azure Surfer to turn around.

There, skittering from between the columns labouring under precariously positioned beams, was a nightmarishly black spider the size of a compact car. Delicate skeletal limbs conveyed an angular cephalothorax ending in a boxy abdomen while six pairs of all-too intelligent void-black eyes, darker than its exoskeleton, stared at him.

There was no malevolence roiling in the thing’s eyes as it regarded him with the indifference it would give a bug caught in its trap. Arthur was frozen with dread as it stared him down.

All of a sudden the relay tower’s bowl felt very small despite the open sky. Those clinking arachnid claws were the least of what he’d have to worry about. The liquid dripping from a grotesque pair of pedipalps couldn’t have been anything but venom.

“AvOid ThE aerlanddd, tELL THe GuILd!” The chimaera spider mimicked, voice off-key like a child's mockery. The spell broke as Arthur reeled from the onslaught of sound as the voice that was equal parts hisses, screeches, and chitters fouled his middle ear. Had he been frailer, he would have lost his balance, opening himself to the spider’s attack.

With a growl, he released his first volley of spells before the monster even thought to exploit the moment of weakness. The spark bolts splashed onto the spider in mid-leap, stunning them just enough for [Gale] to foul their flight.

The monster went crashing into the brackish water right behind him as he swerved out of the way. It gave an indignant screech, shaking itself to get rid of the water. However much it tried, Arthur had it right in sight as he let loose his ace.

The [Thunder Bolt] spell matrix cohered, snapping into his consciousness like a well-fitting tumbler lock; in the blink of an eye, an amber serpent bridged the distance between the youth and the monster. For a moment, something smelled like steamed lobster.

A peal of thunder accompanied the ear-grating screeches of its death throes before its abdomen burst like a bruised fruit. The sickly sweet smell of roasted twitching spider and ichor floating on the murk made Arthur feel queasy. Unfortunately, it was neither the time nor the place to upchuck the contents of his lunch. The noise of the chimaera spider and his spell had already drawn more to his location.

Skittering sounds and the rustle of deadfall were already echoing from beyond the tree line. Seeing his position was disadvantageous at a lower elevation he made as if to fly up the slanted obelisk, only to come up short. Without the flash boiled water turning into steam, he would never have caught the webbing that spun the length of the relay.

‘Scat’s creek!’ Arthur cursed. If that convoluted series of events had happened another way, he would have been stuck fast in the web as thick as his fingers. And knowing that spider silk was as strong as steel―

The second spider suddenly cut off that line of thought. ‘Frag!’ he swore, gliding the length of the slanted obelisk to put himself on higher ground. He yeeted two more spark bolts that caught it in the face, searing its compound eyes.

The spider flailed around, knocking onto pillars before slipping down the bowl of tessellated bricks. Its movements, though erratic, meandered so much that he was unable to finish it off before another one of its ilk joined it.

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Arthur panicked and blasted it, missing it by a hair’s breadth and scorching a column instead. Another [Spark Bolt] followed, then he spammed four in quick succession. The spider checked its smaller sibling out of the way just to get to him. He let loose a [Thunder Bolt] before it could get far from its brethren.

The spell skewered the larger one and burnt off the claw of the smaller—he did not wait to see what would become of them as he gunned his hoverboard to the opposite side of the forest. Staying in one place was like asking to be swarmed by the crawlies. Besides, spiders had an acute sense of smell.

As soon as he broke past the relay tower’s boundary, he shot upwards, holding his breath as if he would jinx his escape. Needless to say, he cleared the top of the trees. It was anticlimactic, but Arthur was thankful for small mercies. As he climbed into the sky, he left the [Message] relay tower and its unlikely wardens behind. He never looked back.

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It was terror that fueled his flight to the next waypoint and a stroke of luck that he caught the wind blowing in his direction. To say the second leg of his journey was expedited would have been an understatement. Before the day waned and a scintillating cloak of blue began to encroach on the western horizon, he made it to the other way station lying on a higher elevation.

Unlike his previous encounter, he found the ambient sound of a biome free from an invasive species welcoming. His adrenaline had worn out, and the bone-weary exhaustion of the first day of travel caused him to seek respite in the relay tower's equivalent of a maintenance hut . He got his first look at what an intact waypoint building would look like.

It was a quaint little building with a slanting roof of shingles turning green from years of rainfed moss. Three of its six stucco walls were covered in clumps of the stuff which started encroaching from the bottom of the walls, giving him an idea as to where the windward side was.

There was a bronze gate with filigree patterns twisting upon themselves, blue-green from oxidation, and it creaked when he pushed it open. But for the louvres aerating the little hut, he would have gotten a faceful of musty air. Seeing the miniature cobwebs made him start before he laughed himself hoarse from the escapade.

A blast from Arthur’s [Gale] spell properly shook off the dust and cobwebs before he retrieved the plane seat and a chromastone-lamp from [Inventory Chest]. The furnishings were meagre and included bunks moulded into the wall that one could put stuffing to sleep. A rotund wood stove sat in the middle of the shelter with a chimney that extruded through the peak of the ceiling, but he didn’t see wood anywhere.

‘Damn I am too tired for this,’ Arthur thought. His first night was going to be cold but there was no way he was risking an ambush at his most vulnerable. He even set up his alarm ward at the doorway by burying the wardstones in the soil.

That done, he looked at the familiar, albeit weather-beaten, rubber foam of the plane seat. It was flaking in places but a pulse of [Basic Repair] patched up the peeling upholstery before he gave the place another once over by the light of the chromastone lamp . As soon as his restlessness petered out, he slumped into the seat and let out a shuddering breath.

Then the day’s events came crashing back as if a dam had breached. Arthur replayed all the things that would have gone wrong with the encounter, shivering at how lucky he was to have unfrozen from the terror of seeing his first monster. The dark exoskeleton that would have deflected a mundane blade, wicked fangs dripping venom from chelicerae that would have crushed him while pumping him full of the stuff. Bristly hair, like a swarm of toupee-mimicking caterpillars made his skin crawl.

Arthur was lucky. The three monsters he’d encountered were male juveniles, inexperienced as hunters; they’d only been scouts ranging away from the nest . He’d caught them on the fringes of their territory.

Besides that, they were nocturnal. That they were even out during the day meant the nest was starving otherwise, he would have been in dire circumstances. Starvation meant their spinnerets had run out of web. The males were also less intelligent than the females, who might have migrated elsewhere on chutes made of web. Also the females could do more than just mimic voices.

[Eidetic Memory] made sure his brain had content for prime nightmare fuel as found recalling the details from the C index of Philiarz Oonswarner’s bestiary. Chimaera spider females could grow intelligent enough to morph into arachne, and then evolve further to have a humanoid form if they lived long enough.

Regardless, Arthur succumbed to his exhaustion , letting it swallow him in a fitful sleep. His soft breaths joined the soft hum of magic from the relay tower that night.

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Morning welcomed Arthur with an aubade of bird songs. The first he’d heard of it since he’d come into this world.

Daybreak was alive with the sounds of chitters, trilling, and all manner of calls from little critters. Diurnal creatures were already up and about before the dew had even dried from the grass.

The mist hung low to the ground, but the first rays of the sun were already giving chase. He would have appreciated the ambience for its normalcy, but he was anything but pleased. In his sleep-deprived state, it might as well have sounded like a racket.

His mind was tormented by nightmares of suffocating beneath a swarm of hairy spiders. Despite that, his travel-weariness had faded away to a dull nuisance at the back of his mind. After all , Arthur was tougher because of training. He didn't, however, have the luxury of time to just sit on his haunches and twiddle his thumbs.

‘Lovely neighbourhood,’ he scoffed, taking in every sound of creatures as he emerged from the hut. He scratched at his day-old stubble as he watched a chiroptemunk come foraging a few paces away from him, cheeks bulging with nuts. It chittered, regarding him curiously with its big almond shaped eyes.

It had brown velvety fur like a mink’s, with two stripes along its back. Its underside was a lighter shade of caramel; a long bushy tail that was too wide rustled with its frenetic movements. That was as far as the resemblance went as two wings with two padded and clawed digits erupted behind its forelegs.

The creature chittered , using its overarching claw digits to leap forwards unafraid of his presence. That was until it attempted to unearth Arthur’s wardstones and got a lashing of electric shock.

Arthur snorted in amusement. The animals hereabouts seemed used to the goings and comings of people, or so it seemed. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee.’ he yawned as we went to splash water on his face at the artesian fountain near the shelter’s walls.

A pulse of [Cleanse] cleared the gunky cotton feeling from his mouth. The magic felt like mist spraying in his mouth. Nonetheless, he missed the feeling of minty breath. He had toothpaste, but only one tube of it. Maybe an alchemist could replicate it? He didn’t ask Aeskyre to do something so frivolous for him.

After the morning ritual was done, Arthur checked his maps and compass for his bearings. He reviewed the dwarven explorer’s travel journal for things of note and updated his own travel journal, a leather-bound book of enchanted paper. It was another going away gift from Aeskyre. Of the updates to his travel log, he made sure to note the [Message] from the last waypoint, making sure that he’d alert the nearest Adventurers Guild.

This was all over a cup of valerian tea; the crisp notes of the tea and lavender aroma were a welcome comfort that chased away the fog of sleepiness and reinvigorated his mana pool. The day before, he had dunked it close to empty and the tell-tale pull of his navel that spoke of a mana exhaustion had faded away.

The breakfast accompaniments were heavy. Cob loaves, crunchy on the outside and softened with homemade cream alongside; kelp lettuce and slices of tamarillos, and common alliums. Eryth had no garden variety tomatoes and whereas Earth’s tamarillos grew on trees, Eryth’s grew on perennial shrubs.

Earth’s version of tamarillos had a tang stronger than a tomato and could be as sweet as a ripe mango. They were shaped like narrow tomatoes.

However, Eryth’s tamarillos were the size of Jack Be’s little pumpkins. They came in different colour varieties of indigo, orange, white and red. Arthur had Sylby’s Apothecary Guide for Herbalists and Alchemists to thank for that knowledge . As for the Auroch milk butter, it was so rich it was unhealthy. It was a pass as long as he had sugarless tea.

A few minutes later, he checked himself for travel. As was his wont, he inspected the hover board for flaws with [Detect Flaw]. He stowed away the plane’s seat, blanket, and chromastone lamp. After making sure he’d dug out the wardstones, he closed the gate to the waypoint’s shelter.

Before Arthur departed, he went to catch a glimpse of a fully functional relay tower. Much to his dismay,the diaphanous barrier of a protection ward stymied his chance of a look up close. It was now sinking in that some spells would be out of his reach unless he used an artefact if he hadn't mastered them yet.

From afar, the tall obelisk made of dark rock twinkled with the amber light of a hundred runes, like someone had taken the night sky and bent it into a 3D shape. The pyramidion relay crystal had a pulsating nexus of energy visible only as a haloed orb in the middle of the foggy crystal.

Occasionally, arcs of magic would shoot towards each of the faces. It reminded Arthur of a tesla coil trapped inside a sphere of inert gas that would arc outwards creating fascinating beams of multicoloured light.

However little he’d sated his curiosity, he jumped onto the Azure Surfer and took off towards his next destination.

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