EG Book 7 Chapter 26 (Patreon)

*** AUTHOR’S NOTE ***

I booked my editor for the end of February through the first two weeks of March, so I have until then to get the second and third drafts done. So here’s two chapters today!

*** AUTHOR’S NOTE ***

The vault was huge, easily ten meters wide and deep, with a height of five meters. The door opened into the middle of one wall, and along the back wall in front of us were stacks of silver bars that reached the ceiling. A smaller stack of gold sat to the right of the silver, and beside it was another ten bars of orichalcum.

Turning the vault into a maze were lines of Inscribed metal cabinets, each of them one and a half meters tall and a meter wide with two doors that opened into the two meter wide hallway. Sam darted forward to inspect the first cabinet. There was a wire wrapped around the handles, with a small lock holding the wire tight. Sam tilted her head in curiosity, then yanked downward on the lock. The wire broke.“The cabinets have Inscriptions for preservation, not to prevent theft,” she said. “The lock didn’t have any Inscriptions for preservation, so the wire grew brittle.” She looked inside. “Unfortunately, this is empty.”

“Even if we find nothing else, that wall of money makes this worth it,” Jon said. “Even divided among all of us. I absolutely cannot wait to play with some orichalcum.”

“You don’t smith,” I said.

“Well, yeah, but maybe we can grind some up and use it in a powder? Maybe it will be explosive, like you said aluminum is when ground into very tiny pieces,” he retorted.

“You and explosives,” Bridget said, shaking her head with a grin. “Come on, let us explore.”

Jon nodded and went to the other side of the makeshift hallway to start looking in the cabinets on that side. I just walked to the end of the cabinets and looked to the left. More storage lined the left side, while the right was the silver bars. More hallways extended back towards the front wall all the way to the end. The far end had two layers of cabinets instead of one.

To my right, though, the end was different. There was a large open area at the far right corner, with an Aether Glow that made me shield my eyes for a second, until they adjusted. I immediately headed towards it to discover a heavily Inscribed display case. Vaya saw me turn right, so she went left to explore down those hallways.

Inside the case, there were five weapons. The leftmost one was a two meter long halberd, sitting at a diagonal. The ax head on the halberd was huge at sixty centimeters wide. The hook on the back was smaller, as was the spear head on top. All of the metal was the same shimmering green color of orichalcum.

Next to the halberd was a jian, slightly longer than Xiao’s current sword but it would be perfect for him. On the far right was an unstrung metal bow. The bow had stripes of orichalcum and a silvery metal in it, and I was assuming that was what gave it the flexibility to bend. Next to the bow was a dagger with a twenty five centimeter long blade, making it just short of what would be called a short sword. Vaya switched to a dual long blade style, but she might be interested in the dagger, I thought.

I glanced at the center weapon, a staff with an eight pointed star on the tip. Inside the star was a black crystal. The staff was the only weapon without any orichalcum on it, and instead was made of a very dark gray metal, with black wood inlaid in the runes. Looking at it made my stomach clench, and I had an extremely uneasy feeling about it.

Sia felt uncomfortable as well, and the emotion spiked every time he glanced at the display case. “What do you sense?” I asked him.

“Death,” Sia said. “That staff is not meant for good.”

“Why do you think it is the display case”

“Just because something is evil, does not mean it cannot be expensive and rare. The four other weapons all look like they were made by the same person. You can see the similarities in how the blades were folded. Even the tips of the bow show the same pattern. The staff, though, does not.”

“I think the staff may be what the Naga are looking for. I wonder why it is not farther into the center?”

“Maybe the center of the city was more of an administration district, and this area was where the wealthy actually lived. Like how Azyl’s rich district is to the north of the city center, due to the presence of Azyl Academy.”

“Good point,” I said with a nod. “So we got extremely lucky that the Naga here were trying to open the vault themselves instead of calling for more help. Maybe there is another couple of banks or other places with a vault near the center that is keeping the other Naga busy?”

“No matter what, we do not have infinite time. How do we open this so we can take it away?”

“I do not know,” I told Sia. “Sam,” I called out. “Need your help here.”

“Coming!” I heard her yell.

About thirty seconds later, she walked over, and Fluffy jumped off her shoulder onto mine, on the opposite side from Sia. “That is disturbing,” she said, her eyes locked on the staff.

“Yeah. Sia and I think this is what the Naga are looking for. I want to take it away, then leave this area so they cannot get it. We’ll go to (city) to alert them to the Naga’s presence, and then head to Craesti City,” I said.

“Well, I will try to see if I can figure out the Inscriptions on this. Nothing I’m seeing right now points to the keys we used already,” Sam said, moving closer.

“Where’s Kami?” I asked her.

She looked at me absently, then shook her head. “She said she was going to stay in the atrium and watch for Naga. I’m going to need some more paper. Got any?”

“Sure,” I said, then found and brought out a stack and handed it to her. She had a quill and inkpot that she’d taken out of a belt pouch. With a plop, she sat down in front of the display case and grabbed the top sheet of paper. She pressed it onto the glass, then started to trace the Inscriptions that she could see. Tiny marks indicated the three dimensional nature of the runes. Once she filled that sheet, she put a small Aether rune on the edge, and it stuck to the glass.

Huh, I thought, leaning close to see the rune. That’s neat. I’ll have to remember that. It’s not very strong, but it’s enough for a sheet of paper. Maybe I can scale it up to use to attach my trisula to the sides of my legs? I’d have to ask her, or Librarian Narwan, how to use the rune properly for that, though. While she’s working, I’ll start loading up the gold, silver, and orichalcum.

With that thought, I walked back along the rear wall until I got to the pile of metal ingots. Each bar of orichalcum absorbed easily, but when I stacked them inside my ring I realized that they were actually floating a bit. I pushed more Aether into my ring, dragging my perception to right next to them. “Weird,” I said aloud. “It feels like the ingots are twice as big as they actually are. I wonder why? Did the Inscribed weapons do that same thing? Good thing I’ve got plenty of room in here.”

The gold and silver stored easily enough. I jogged down the row to find Jon holding a book that had seen better days. “Eh, I do not think the preservation Inscription was up to keeping a book intact for a thousand years,” he said. “The ink is gone and I am pretty sure if I sneeze the paper will disintegrate.”

“Let me have it?” I asked, holding my right hand out.

He shrugged and gave it to me.

I immediately absorbed it into my ring, where it settled on the table in the Portable Home. “There, I’ll keep it safe in my ring until we can get Librarian Narwan to look at it. Maybe he’ll be able to get something from it?”

“Sure,” Jon said. “He is a librarian. I have not found anything else of interest in the cabinets. Most of them are empty, and the few that were not mostly had piles of dust or rotten wood. I would say that this bank was mostly empty when whatever happened to the city happened.”

“Yeah, probably,” I said with a shrug. “So the gold and silver ingots were probably the bank’s collateral or reserves.”

“I found some coins!” Vaya yelled from the other end.

“Ooh, I want to see,” Jon shouted, taking off in a run. Bridget was already on the path towards the far left side. She looked over her shoulder and laughed at us, then turned sharply, using her movement technique to let her corner better.

Vaya was standing at the end of the little hallway, where a much larger cabinet was set into the wall. Inside were five bins. Two were full of bronze coins, one was mostly full of silver coins, one of gold, and the last had twenty seven orichalcum coins. “I guess they used orichalcum the same way we use platinum,” Vaya said, gesturing at the bins. She held up one of the gold coins. “Does that not look like Spirit?”

“Yeah, it kinda does,” I said, taking the coin. On the front of the coin, a M’Zee looked regally out of the metal with a crown on their head. The back of the coin had a tower engraved on it, along with writing that said, ‘Long may he reign!” I translated for the others. “Are the coins the same?”

“They all have Spirit, or whoever that is, on the front, but the backs are all different,” Vaya said. “The orichalcum coins have an Elemental Compass on it, while the silver ones have a winged horse and the bronze a building that looks like a fancier version of this one.”

“Neat,” Bridget said, pulling out a silver coin. “How many do you think there are?”

“A few thousand bronze, around a thousand silver, around five hundred cold, and twenty seven orichalcum. Though I honestly have no idea how much these will be worth,” Vaya said. “Aiden, store them for us?”

“Sure,” I said. Each bin stored easily, though the orichalcum coins exhibited the same strange metaphysical presence that the ingots did. We explored for another few minutes, finding two more books and a smattering of silver and gold coins. Two metal blades were found in a cabinet. They had not been Inscribed, but were elegantly created. The alloy they were made of gave them a brown-silver color, but none of us recognized them. Again, I pulled them into my ring.

“It’s a good thing we ate so much food on the way,” I laughed, “or I wouldn’t have space for this stuff,” I said. The blades were in the last line of cabinets before the clear area with the displace case.

Finished with the exploration of the rest of the vault, I returned to find Sam had completely covered the left half of the display case with papers, often stacked two or three high. “Sooo, I have no idea how to get through the Inscriptions on this,” Sam said. “There are quite a few runes I don’t know, though I can infer most of them by position. Like this one.” She walked over to point to a rune that was shaped like two xs touching. Three vertical lines were drawn through the letters, one through each x’s center and one through the place both xs connected. Above the lines, a notation told me that the xs twisted on themselves in the z-plane, and the vertical lines created another set of xs.

“Yeah, that’s weird,” I said. “Though, with only one twist, it could be a variant reinforce rune.”

“Exactly,” Sam said, giving me a grin. “I think this means reinforce structure, or reinforce plane, or something along those lines. More specific than a reinforce rune, and thus stronger in its niche. I thought about trying to disrupt some of the runes, especially the five lock runes around the handle, but I cannot so much as scratch the surface of the glass.”

“Well, I’ll try,” I said.

She moved over and cleared a spot on the glass. Pulling a piece of chalk out of her pocket, she made a mark. “Cut a few millimeters into the glass here,” Sam directed.

I nodded, then played around with some runes before creating a blowtorch technique. The tiny flame burned blue before turning a deep indigo as I cranked up the heat. “Shield your eyes,” I said, then bent to the glass. The bright light made me squint a bit, but my eyes had been strengthened like everything else about me. Which made me wonder about the Aether brightness making my eyes hurt. I shook my head and touched the flame to the glass.

The Inscriptions inside the display case flared, rejecting the heat from my torch. My finger started to grow hotter, but my own Fire could not hurt me. I frowned, and pushed, focusing on increasing the flow rate of Aether. After five minutes, I gave up. “Wow, you’re not kidding,” I said. “That case has some serious defenses on it.”

“Must have been owned by someone very important,” Sam said. “And unlike the wire and locks for the cabinets, this setup was done well enough to last forever.”

“Maybe we can just blast it down?” I said. “There are four Seed Core gatherers here, and Sia as a level six Beast is just as strong. Collect your papers off the case and I’ll try to just break the glass.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Jon, Bridget, Vaya, get ready to join in,” I said. “There is no way that this still has significant amounts of Aether left, so we should be able to deplete it fairly rapidly.”

“Does it have some kind of defense?” Jon asked.

“There is an alarm,” Sam said, “but it doesn’t have any active defenses that I can see.”

“Where does the alarm go?” Vaya asked.

“Uh, no idea,” Sam said with a shrug.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Aiden?” Vaya turned to me.

“An alarm would probably go to the manager’s office, and maybe the local guard station,” I said. “Since there’s no one there, no one will hear it. The ruined state of the buildings around us probably means it won’t work anyway, but it should be fine. Unless you all have a better idea?”

“Can you just store the entire case in your ring?” Vaya asked.

Everyone looked at me. “Okay, that is a great idea,” I said. I reached out with my Aether and tried to wrap it around the display case, like I did with the ingots earlier. ‘No can do. It’s attached to the wall too firmly for me to break off,” I said.

“Well, then let’s cut it out of the wall,” Jon exclaimed, and channeled a large Ice Spike that he stabbed into the stone. A tiny chip cut out of it. “This might take a while.”

We laughed. “Okay, Jon, Bridget, you take this side. Vaya and I will work on the other. Sia, can you cut away from the top? Sam, do what you can here in front.” With nods, we all got to work.

Ten minutes later, Sia said, “Princess Aleksandra reports that they have met up with Knight Kaminski, and killed another Naga search party. Hanna and Milenna took some injuries and will take time to heal. They are retreating to the safe house. Ming’s team is investigating another bank-like structure. They have managed to avoid the Naga in their area. Kami says all is quiet around our building.”

“Thanks Sia,” I told him, stabbing my trisula with Plasma Edge on it into the rock at chest height. It took significant effort to carve into the stone, its inherent Aether resisting our attacks. Thankfully, whatever Inscriptions were on the walls had failed at some point before. I guess the M’Zee never thought someone would tunnel into the vault from outside without detection. The external Inscriptions on anything but the door were much weaker.

We were barely carving into the wall, only trying to break the connections it had to the display case so I could pull the whole thing into my ring. We didn’t want to do too much damage, in the hope that we could fix it with some Earth Aether and keep the Naga guessing for even longer.

“Naga coming!” Kami shouted, pounding into the vault. “Lots of Naga are coming down the streets now!”