Chapter 197: 197 – The God-Machine is Tired

After observing Strol’s fidgeting with the machine and its seemingly arbitrary responses in click-clacky, occasionally Fog-spraying responses, Zel did as the old soldier suggested. She walked right through the hoard-chamber, her eyes stiffly fixed on the corridor beyond. There was no door, no shining core, just matte-black stone floor and the bottom of a staircase.

Zelsys stepped into the corridor and made her way towards the staircase with Zefaris in tow, finding it curious that the staircase appeared to just stretch on infinitely upward.

One step up it, and nothing happened. Two, three, five, seven.

At the seventh step, something changed. It felt somewhat like stepping through a barrier, like some unseen, unassailable force had just judged her and deemed her worthy of passage.

The eighth step made everything unfurl. 

The stairs ended here, everything beyond this point simply vanished to reveal a narrow black-stone walkway that stretched some twenty steps above a bottomless abyss of swirling iridescent Fog.

It was certainly a hell of a view and would’ve put them on edge, but considering that Strolvath had already spoken with the Core put both their minds at ease. 

Reaching the end of the walkway had them peering into the swirling infinity below for a few seconds before something emerged from the depths. It was a… Vague, formless mass of iridescent gemstone that perpetually trailed this equally iridescent Fog. The shapeless cloud swirled about for a while, pieces sticking together and slowly taking a somewhat humanoid shape. 

The humanoid descended onto the very edge of the walkway, the remaining pieces returned to the swirling vortex, and it spoke. Its voice came from everywhere all at once, but it was soft. Indeed it was soft, and dull, and apologetic - it carried an exhaustion that surpassed any human reckoning.

“I must thank you for terminating the progenitor of the infestation that plagues my halls and clogs my mechanisms. You must be rightly expecting a reward, but… I am in no state to muster one you four are deserving of,” said the dungeon core’s avatar. It held out its hand, and a Fog vortex formed in its palm. From within emerged a small black-stone box of similar proportion to an eyeglass case, gently landing in the avatar’s palm when the vortex vanished. 

It stepped forward, and held it up so it was clearly visible. The top of the box split down the middle and opened, revealing three rows of seven off-white, oval shaped pills.

“The pills within this are yours to give away,” it said, then proceeded to explain what the pills did. “Swallowing one will crack the user’s Azoth Stone, forcefully pushing one past the bottleneck between First and Second Circle. A word of warning: it is an unpleasant ordeal even for the worthy, and may outright kill one if they have a weak constitution or a particularly developed Azoth Stone. The individual will excrete a great deal of impurities through the skin, and will emerge cleansed whether they like it or not. If one who does not have an Azoth Stone swallows a pill, the pill will emerge on the other end undigested.”

The box closed itself, and the avatar held it out within Zel’s reach.

“These pills are bestowed upon you not because you cleared the dungeon or purged the infestation, but because you did all this after having visited the Third King’s Oracle. As compensation for the absence of a proper reward, please take anything and everything within the hive. As long as you transport it in Fog Storage, everything should survive the trip to the surface.”

Zel cautiously took the pill box while the avatar spoke, finding that her hand just passed through the construct’s foggy form. She slipped it into the Butcher’s holster, and found a question gnawing at her mind.

“...What’s with the iridescent crystals and Fog?”

The avatar spread its arms, gesturing to the vortex that surrounded them. 

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“In the simplest possible terms, it’s the medium that I use to control the great cogworks, to form matter from the primordial Fog. It’s a mixture of Aether and Azoth in mundane terms. As you saw, it doesn’t play nice when a living thing tries to consume it, but it does have the unfortunate effect of sustaining a soul’s grip on the body well beyond the point of death.”

It held out its hand and an iridescent gem rose out of it, separating from the avatar’s mass. 

“Feel free to salvage what crystal you can from the Parasites’ corpses, it’s too tainted to reuse for its intended purpose. Passage through the Fog Gate will just separate out the Azoth component…” it said, and some two-thirds of the gemstone’s total mass vanished in a puff of iridescent Fog. What was left behind was an intricate latticework of white gemstone.

“...Leaving behind pure, stable Aether. It’s not exactly a king’s bounty, but it’s something.”

Zel was just about ready to turn and walk back down those stairs, but Zefaris asked another question before she could do that.

“By the Fog Gate to the surface, do you mean the one we entered the chamber through?”

“Yes,” nodded the figure, stepping back and over the edge and plummeting into the otherworldly maelstrom below. 

Still, the Dungeon Core spoke a final farewell, “I must return to my work. The Parasite left myriad holes for me to plug.”

The two beast-slayers turned and returned to the staircase, not looking back. Zef stuck around in the hoard-chamber after something caught her eye, while Zel returned to the strange machine to find Strolvath still tinkering with it.

He regarded her with a sideways glance and a question, but his focus remained chiefly on the strange machine. 

“Helluva view ain’t it? With the stairs and the walkway over the cosmic maelstrom. Gotta give it to the Dead Ones, they had a knack for grandeur.”

Zel murmured a vaguely agreeable noise, her attention having been grabbed by the device in favor of pointless busy talk.

“What’s that machine?” she asked.

“Do I look like I know?” Strol responded absent-mindedly.

“Yes.”

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