Collide Gamer

Chapter 1021 – Star Sanctum 1 – The Uncorrupted?

Jumping down the stairs was a pretty rapid way to descend past the layer they had entered on and down under the earth. The staircase continued downwards for quite a while, five-hundred metres at least. Had it been otherwise, they would have found out about this through Gnome or by sheer accident earlier.

They eventually arrived in an underground space. Like above and like the stairs, the corridors were wide and tall enough for two trucks, driving side by side, to fit. Unlike above, there was more than a circle with some attached rooms. There was a whole network of corridors that, while not labyrinthine by design, was difficult to navigate for people who had no idea about the floorplan. That almost all of them had a slight bend to them didn’t help. Between him mentally mapping things out and Siena checking out alternative routes, they were quickly learning the layout, however.

John wasn’t as comfortable with sending Siena ahead as he had been with the Mandala Sphere. Realistically speaking, the midnight elemental was a whole lot better at infiltration. She was faster, could go invisible and her aggressive combat capabilities let her take care of obstacles. The only disadvantage she had was that she couldn’t fly, but in these corridors, that hardly mattered.

All of that being said, he still didn’t like sending one of his girls into unknown, enemy territory on her own. Especially since all of the teleports were still on cooldown for another two and a half days. In their current situation, being careful in this regard was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

The main group still moved at John’s speed, while Siena ran as quickly as she could. Aside from her, only Nia occasionally separated herself from the rest. What the pariah was doing in those moments, he didn’t know, but she always appeared again and never strayed too far. At least as far as John knew.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“What’re we looking for anyway?” Rave asked. There was no need to keep her voice low. A steady drumming of feet, their sprint was the only sound in the well-lit corridors. Whoever was down there, if there was anybody, they would hear or see them coming from a mile away. “The centre?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but the corridors don’t curve towards the centre, so the point of interest is unlikely to be in the middle of the circle,” John answered, continuously updating the map in his head. Constant Instant Dungeon practice, as well as his considerable genius, had made him quite adept at visualizing such things. Every step they took was another update to the image, until he finally figured out the pattern. “The Fibonacci sequence.”

“The what now?” Rave asked.

“A mathematical sequence that’s often associated with the creation of pleasing image compositions, also known as the golden spiral… anyway, the point is, these corridors come together in this sequence.” He stopped and looked around. “Meaning that, if we follow the right curving hallway, it’ll deliver us directly to the heart of the layer. This way.”

“This sounds way too nerdy for the Lorylim,” Rave pointed out.

“This Sanctum, or at least the encapsulating structure, predates Lorylim influence on that asshole Enki,” Metra reminded her. “Sargon himself visited it. More importantly, Enki was always obsessed with reason.”

With the structure figured out, John soon found the path that spiralled towards the endpoint. Siena pulled further ahead, giving him, and everyone else in the mental connection, a preview of what awaited them.

There was a closed stone gate, similar to what they had encountered above. While that put an end to the direct path Siena could take, there were several pipes that stuck out of the ceiling and entered the chamber behind the gate through cut-outs in the wall. Given their decisively modern design and the function-over-form way they had been built in, John guessed they were a recent addition to a previously existing system.

Siena scaled the wall without issue. Part of her abilities, albeit seldom used, was the ability to attach to surfaces. Her claws and high-heeled feet somehow latched onto the wall with the strength of a clinging pad. Silently, she made her way up to the hole and then squeezed herself between a pipe and the wall. After a couple metres of crawling, she emerged on the other side. Rather than drop, she used her magical climbing ability to stay attached to the wall.

“There’s some kind of arena,” John described what she was seeing. “Round, with two levels. The watcher’s area is on the level of the current gate, cut by a large flight of stairs on the opposite side of the room. The depression in the middle makes up about half of the entire structure. In the middle, there is a massive apparatus. It looks like a sandstone basin on a pillar, lined with metallic runes.”

“The Starkiln,” Metra chimed in. “I’ve never seen it myself, but Enki had a contraption he used to forge stars before an audience. It was the lesser of two.”

“Well, it’s not what it’s used for anymore,” John said.

The Starkiln was the destination of all the pipes. Some, visibly older than all the others, ran directly into the pillar. They were mostly out of glass or other translucent materials and pulsed with power. Their power came from above, from whatever had fuelled the relay stations they had encountered in the middle levels. Several hundred additional pipes, smaller and added continuously through recent times, lead up to a large glass bubble. Perhaps it had once been used as a containment unit for the process of forging stars. Now it was filled to the brim with Lorylim sludge, a black swirl that spontaneously formed grinning eyes and staring smiles. The sludge was funnelled into the pillar as well.

Attached to the base were several cells of crudely worked metal. Like all other attachments, they lacked the deliberate beauty of the structure itself. It was like watching a worn industrial assembly line run through an 18th century palace. The two didn’t belong next to each other. The otherworldly fuel the structure used only made it worse.

“Mana factory?” Nia asked, having heard the description.

“In a sense,” John answered slowly. Until he was there and could use Observe, he could only guess. “The Lorylim take the place of what would usually be the extraction. Whatever else they are, Lorylim are an excellent magical fuel in terms of raw power. I assume that’s how they recycle the failures of their system. Those that end up defeated in the combat above are partly sucked down here, they fuel the teleportation spell and that keeps the system running.”

“Why would that system have such an overflow right now tho- the Gestalt people,” Rave answered her own question.

“Yeah,” John nodded. “Took a bit of time, but the ‘processing’ of all those extra bodies must be reaching its final stage… that may mean the Death Zone will ebb away if we just leave, but I’m not willing to bet on it.”

They reached the gate and waited. Letting Siena scout the arena first was wiser than to burst into a room they had only broadly analysed. Metra and Gnome positioned themselves to tear down the gate at the first sign of trouble, while the midnight elemental crawled down the wall. Once she was down on the floor, she continued her sneaking regularly, until she hit the edge of the watcher’s area. In order to stay quiet, she crawled down that wall as well.

John glanced over at Thana. The goddess of genocide had been following them, always quiet and always staring. Neither her aura nor any unneeded noises sabotaged their operation. She wanted to see them fail on their own accord, if at all. At least that’s how John understood it. His attention returned to Siena and more pressing matters.

The floor of the arena was made from densely packed sand, mixed with Lorylim spores that must have dropped down from the container above. Even if the pipes were without leaks, Lorylim had a tendency to end up on the other side of walls inexplicably. A side effect, as John now knew, of Tiamat’s influence. Where the goddess of chaos worked, rules were bent arbitrarily.

Siena approached the closest of the cells and looked inside through a gap in the hastily fashioned metal construct. Inside was a complicated mess of a seat that could have easily been mistaken for a futuristic life support system. Rather than supporting, the many tubes and wires were meant to allow the person seated in it to operate the repurposed Starkiln. Said person was a man of impressive stature and snow-white skin, who wore some kind of turquoise toga. His hair was long and brown. His eyes closed. His sight caused a spike of rage within Metra.

“Nabuzar,” she growled.

John didn’t need more than the name. “The First of Power,” he told Rave, Nia and, albeit she was just along for the ride, Thana. “Assumingly not corrupted.”

“Which means I will tear his fucking head off.” Metra’s whole body and even Rex Magnar quivered with the need of venting her aggression.

“Not yet,” he commanded her.

“…Yes, my king…”

Siena moved onto the second cell, where she found a man who was the spitting image of the first, safe for the colour of his hair and toga, blonde and yellow respectively. He was Salim, Second of Power, explaining the twin-like look.

The third cell held a woman, who wore a proper dress that was in keeping with the ancient Mesopotamian theme of the surroundings. It was of a deep purple colour; her hair was black and her skin of the brownish shade more expected of people who hailed from the Middle East. Not that skin colour was more than an aesthetic choice for sapient golems. The woman was Zicu, First of Order.

Next, dressed in a similarly impeccable fashion despite his chair-bound state, was a man with black hair and even darker skin. He was slimmer than the other two, the body of a bureaucrat rather than a warrior. He was Maskim, Second of Order.

Siena moved towards the last cell, still unnoticed. It was different from the other four, fashioned from different materials, but no less practical in its minimalist design. Its location was odd, not evenly spaced out as the remaining cells were, but put in randomly between two of them. A recent addition, evident by the much lower amount of Lorylim stains covering its framework.

Inside was a woman in a grey, metallically shimmering dress. Her hair was long and dark, her skin pale for someone of Middle Eastern descent, leaving it only with a note of brown. Like a perfect aristocrat carved out of sandalwood, she lay there – Seminaris, the First of Patience.

Seminaris being here meant that Sigmund was in the Death Zone as well. That was the worst news John had gotten since making his way to solve this issue. Sigmund’s Innate Ability was practically made for this poison jar scenario. ‘The permanent wounds matter fairly little if they are patched up with Lorylim matter,’ the Gamer thought. ‘If he entered this competition and carved his way up, he may be practically restored.’

While he considered this, a flash of pain reached him through Siena’s mind. A knife had been driven into her side. There was a moment of confusion, but John forced the answer and calm into her mind. Thresta, Third of Darkness, the same Metracana that had enabled Seminaris and Sigmund to flee in the first place.

Siena engaged in a flurry of motions and connected with her invisible enemy several times, despite being unable to sense her. Although Thresta’s ability to conceal her presence was evidently superior to Siena’s, her physical ability was inferior to such a degree that even the hurt midnight elemental could keep up.

There was no time to be lost. The commotion inside the chamber would doubtlessly alarm the other five Metracanas and John needed to seize the moment. Gnome and Metra broke down the door with magic and brute force. With a berserker scream, the First of Wrath leapt into the arena, the rest of the group fast behind her.

“YOU DISAPPOINTMENTS!” she roared, while those called out burst their way out of their cells. They knew the voice and that they had to react quickly.

‘I’m surprised that it took them until she screamed to move,’ John thought. ‘Do they not have a shared mental network?’

The question, just like Metra’s outcry, went unanswered, as she clashed with the First of Power. From the moment of impact, the difference in power was evident, as the first Metracana drove Nabuzar into the floor and then delivered a heavy kick to his head. The muscular man flew across the room.

“EHTRA IS DEAD!” screamed the First of Wrath, setting right after her, “AND YOU SERVE HER KILLER?!” Despite the overflowing rage, Metra didn’t use it to fuel her power. The simple reason for that was the addition of Rave and Nia into the combat moments later. Everyone descended on the Metracanas, showering them with spells and martial arts.

It wasn’t a fair fight. Metra had previously insinuated that her contract with John, and attachment to his system, had allowed her to overcome her previous power threshold. These six Metracanas were still bound to their previous limits, ranging from level 200 to 255. That was respectable, without a doubt, but it was nothing to the tide now washing over them.

All of them seasoned fighters, they must have realized the same. There was no prolonged engagement anywhere. Each of the Metracanas used their sturdy bodies to weather the attacks thrown at them and retreated to Seminaris’ cell. Their plan was obvious, which was why both John and Nia had already moved to intervene.

Mana flowed to Gnome, the season elemental forcing the cell of the First of Patience to slide away from the Starkiln by moving the ground underneath it. Seminaris teleported out of it and touched the teleportation device directly. A hateful glare in John’s direction was all she allowed herself before activating her dimensional magic.

Metra would have attempted to tear the spell apart, had the blank in the group not been faster. Anti-magic poured out of her and kept the spell from firing immediately. At the same time, the rest of the group tried to drag away at least one or two of the Metracanas from the tight circle they formed around Seminaris. A barrier formed around the group of ancient weapons, protecting them from Rave’s fists and Salamander’s flames for just one wave of attacks.

It wasn’t much and it would have been a doomed effort in the long run. All they had to do was outlast Nia’s anti-magic, however, and the odds were stacked in their favour. Truthfully speaking, it was incredible that Nia lasted even one second. She stemmed herself against the power that fuelled the Death Zone’s teleportation spell – an arcane weave that covered a surface larger than an entire US state. She faded quickly, had to let go, and the Metracanas were gone. The entire engagement, from the moment Siena had gotten stabbed, had lasted less than twenty seconds.

“FUCK!” Metra screamed and hurled Rex Magnar at the Starkiln.

John could neither blame her for this reaction nor did he try to stop her. ‘Salamander burn the Lorylim,’ he commanded instead. Observe confirmed that this was the machine keeping the teleport spell up. Without operators, it would certainly shut down. John would be happier if there was no machine whatsoever.

With it gone, one of their worries was eliminated.