LSRO: Chapter 68 - Beneath the Core (Patreon)

Finally! We're going downstairs... down down down!

I'm really excited to work on this portion of the story! It'll be fun!

Without further ado!

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Chapter 68

Beneath the Core

Malakai gasped softly, as his feet touched the soft and spongy floor of the core level. About to speak, Lynx beat him to it. "We go this way."

Quinn raised an eyebrow at Lynx when he began to turn away from the center of the room. "What way?"

"This way, trust me." And the three of them followed Lynx to the left. Quinn was sure they were going to walk into the wall, but instead, they walked past a section of it into what looked like a very dimly lit, tightly spaced corridor.

Sure, her claustrophobia wasn't going to overreact to this at all. Fantastic. "What's this?"

"It's a service tunnel," Lynx said very slowly, as if he wasn't entirely certain how to explain it. "People... other thank you, should never get close to the core. Frankly, even this is pushing it, but I don't believe this is something just you and I can correct. So, using the tunnel we circumvent the entire core cavern and we don't risk anybody else being, shall we say, contaminated by that energy."

"Contaminated by the Library's energy?" Quinn asked, not entirely sure what to make of that.

"Why do you think the Librarians are required to have very specific affinities, Quinn?" Lynx said softly. "If they don't have those, the library's core will destroy them. There's no way to link to the library fully, as you do, unless you have the affinities that allow you to do so."

"Oh," Quinn said, feeling a little sad to know that no one else could lend the core company like she enjoyed doing, "I just thought it was a magic thing."

"It sort of is. It's also a neural network compatibility thing and for a lot of people even trying to connect to the core or trying to be directly near the core would result in mostly fried brains." There was a lingering sadness in Lynx's tone. Like he'd seen precisely that happen.

"Ew." Quinn said at the visual.

"At least there'd be something for zombies to eat," Eric said, his tone flat.

Quinn couldn't help the laugh that escaped her. Maybe it was nervous laughter because she couldn't help but wonder what might have gone wrong if she hadn't truly been compatible. Right now, she just had to concentrate on the filtration aspect. It didn't seem like something they could afford to screw up.

"Well, learn something new every day," Quinn said.

"Me too," Malakai said walking against the outer wall, and furtively glancing over his shoulder. "Are you sure this is far enough away from the core that I'm not going to have my brains melted?"

Lynx tossed him an evil smirk. "Maybe. But you are a darigháhnish, so how would I know?"

"That's a low blow," Malakai said. But even his lips were tugging up, he was fighting a smile too.

Quinn grinned to herself as they continued to walk the long circular corridor. Lynx wasn't kidding when he said that this was taking them the long way around the massive cavern.

Finally, after a little bit of small talk and several more minutes, they came to an opening. They stood on a landing. On one side were stairs that led down.

Quinn leaned over the railing and peeked. "Wow, that has to be, what, 40 odd stairs and a landing and wait there's more after that..."

Lynx nodded. "Yes. It's 40 steps for every level, after which there's a landing. Let's you rest up if you're climbing them before you have to go again."

"What's that?" Quinn pointed to the metal doors several meters down from the stairway entrance.

"That is the elevator and right now I wouldn't trust it not to stop and leave us in the middle of the rock." Lynx sounded very matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

"Oh," Quinn said.

"But," Lynx continued, "If we get the filtration system up and running like we need to, that shouldn't be a problem anymore and we'll be able to take it back up."

Quinn felt a wave of relief rush through her. "I like that. Walking down stairs is a lot easier than walking back up them."

"Yes, especially since right now there are eight landing levels, so you're looking at about 320 steps," Lynx said said.

"Seriously?" Malakai groaned. "That many?"

"Hey, think of it as a leg day," Lynx said, grinning.

Malakai scowled at him. "You can just teleport down there and cheat." he said at the same time that Quinn spoke.

"I've never been a gym rat," she muttered under her breath.

Malakai laughed. "Yeah, that shows in your training. Trust me."

"There's no need to be mean about it," Quinn said, but she felt a little more light-hearted than she had a few minutes ago. Malakai was right though. "Why don't you just blip to the bottom, Lynx?"

"Same reason Eric isn't just going to descend vertically."

Eric shrugged. "I thought I'd grace you with my company."

They all groaned, and began the trudge downstairs.

"Um," Quinn said, after they'd passed the first landing. She didn't like the way all she could hear was the touch of their feet on the steps. It was a very dull sound considering the surface of the steps was similar to the floor in the core room. "Tell me, shouldn't we have brought repair supplies with us?"

"Of course we should have," Lynx said, "and did. Malakai and Eric both have them in their storage."

Quinn wondered why she had completely and utterly forgotten about the existence of storage. "My mind has apparently become a sieve," she said.

Another two landings passed and Quinn was starting to sweat despite going downstairs instead of up them. She wanted to say, Are we there yet? But she very obviously knew they were not.

Malakai nudged her with his elbow. "You feel up to this?"

She flashed him a smile. "Yes, I actually do."

"Good," he said. "So stop sighing every ten steps,"

She grimaced. "Am I really doing that?"

"Yes."

"Okay," she said, and started running over her mental exercises as they took the rest of the stairs to keep her mind occupied.

The whole rest of the way down, while she demolished and rebuilt her new mental barrier tighter and tighter, she couldn't help but wonder just what it was like down below. She had thoughts about it, of course, but she knew that nothing was going to hold up to whatever it was.

When they finally reached the bottom, it didn't immediately open out into the cavern. Instead, they found themselves in a small ante chamber, and Lynx stopped them all.

"Okay, so, pop one of your balls," Lynx instructed.

Quinn had to stop herself from snickering like a twelve-year-old boy. Lynx flashed her a stern look, and she barely managed to choke down the laughter.

"We're about to walk in. I guess we're going to see if the suits can withstand the amount of chaotic energy that is theoretically bouncing around down here at the moment," Lynx continued.

"Why can't we feel it here? Aren't we super close?" Quinn asked.

"Yes, but there is a magical barrier in place that basically keeps the fumes from entering the Library," Lynx explained.

"Oh, good to know," Quinn thought. At least there was a barrier, so if she totally botched the entire operation, maybe they could at least evacuate the Library?

Malakai nudged her again. "You realize that you show almost every thought and emotion on your face, right?"

Quinn could feel herself blush. "Well, I didn't realize it was that bad, but I do now."

"Yeah, don't be so hard on yourself. You're not going to screw it up. It was screwed up long before you got here," Malakai attempted to reassure her.

Quinn barked a laugh out in surprise. "That actually makes me feel better, thanks."

"Are we up for this?" Lynx said.

Eric crossed his arms, hovering in the air. "We've been up for this all day," he said. "I wish you other beings would just hurry up. I could have been down here hours ago."

"We can't all fly, Eric," Lynx retorted.

"That's quite obvious," he said. But there was still a grin on his face as they proceeded forward.

The only reason that she knew they could walk through the wall, which looked very much like a wall, was that Lynx did it first, in corporeal form. Quinn could feel the barrier as they walked through it and fervently hoped she wouldn't get stuck in the middle of a wall.

"Watch out for that tree, my ass. Watch out for that bloody stone wall," she muttered to herself.

And then most of the thoughts in her head simply stopped. Right in front of them was a chamber, a cavern, so huge and encompassing that Quinn couldn't even comprehend it for a moment. It spread so far out in front of them that she could barely see the other side.

At even intervals, all throughout this massive underground body of liquid were pillars that rose all the way up to the ceiling. Eight of them were dark. Their sides, not the same stone as the rest of the ceiling or walls, had a strange blackness to them. They looked sort of like those old computers in movies that had pieces you could slot in and out of them. But these were dormant, there were no flashing lights, there was nothing.

However, two pillars over to the right, which was relatively close, stood one massive pillar. It was lit up beautifully, with blues and greens interspersed, going through dark blue, through many different greens, to a brilliant and pure light blue. Quinn knew from her readings that the chaotic elements had to go through filtration stages. It made sense that different colors would represent those different steps.

Around the base of that pillar, the black sludge was thin. It was easy to catch glimpses of blue through as it lapped at the base in a circumference of brilliant blue. The liquid moved. At first, she thought the black covering was solid, and perhaps cracked in places, but she realized that it was sludge. Thick, probably about two feet thick, the whole way around, except for right next to the fully functioning filter.

Beneath the sludge, now and again, as the liquid moved, she could see a beautiful, brilliant blue shining through.

Magic and Mana - practically sparkling.

And then, she finally focused on the tenth column, at the very far back left. It wasn't doing as well as its front-right cousin. Those little filter patches were more yellow, orange, and red, and in some places even black, than they were blue. There were only a few functional strips from what Quinn could tell from so far away. But, the rest were very obviously, and brightly, malfunctioning.

Because the sludge around that pillar, even though it was so far away, she could tell it was almost as thick as the sludge right near her foot.

She turned to Lynx. "You've got to be kidding me. That's the one I have to repair?" She pointed to the malfunctioning pillar.

He refused to make eye contact as he nodded. "Yeah, the one on the very far side."

"You have got to be kidding me," she repeated.

Lynx still refused to meet Quinn's gaze.

"I'm waiting," she said. "Why did you run that one down? Shouldn't they have been changed long before it got this bad?"

He sighed. "Look, we ran on minimal power to avoid stopping filtration altogether. Over the decades, we would swap which filters were active. Booting a third one up as we powered the second one down, briefly allowing them to overlap. At some stage during the closure, all of them were active. It's just that several months ago, this one started having difficulty, which meant that we couldn't swap it out for another. That's when I started reaching even further with the search. I was desperate."

Quinn cringed. She was only just now truly grasping how desperate they must have been when they found her. "Well, why can't we activate it now?"

"Because we're pretty much running on one filter and the amount of power required to fully reignite one of the other filters is a lot more than when you're just transferring operation. We can't afford to transfer from a malfunctioning filter right now. It'll be different once we hit the next power level, but we're still a ways away from that."

"Okay, I get it." She thought it through for a second. "So now you need to tell me how the hell am I supposed to reach that filter? The sludge isn't solid. Don't tell me to walk on water."

"That's the interesting part of this. Usually, we would use one of those." He pointed off to the corner where there was something that almost looked like a paddleboard.

"And let me guess, you can't paddleboard through sludge." She groaned at the thought of trying to paddle that thing through something as thick as sludge.

"Precisely." Lynx answered.

"So what do you suggest we do?"

"We are going to have to use a roundabout way to get there."

"Just spill it, Lynx." Quinn almost snapped but managed to leave it at clipped.

"Stop beating around the bush," Eric said. "Don't expect me to fly her. I cannot do that."

Malakai, in the meantime, had withdrawn one of his swords. He was polishing at a spot on it.

It was a sword Quinn hadn't seen before. It glinted black, sort of like Aradie's feathers did. Iridescent colors shone through it in a way that reminded her of tempered steel.

"We're going to have to cut through it for want of a better word," Lynx said.

Quinn grinned at the fact that he'd picked that phrase up from her. There was no way he'd ever said that before she came along. "You don't mean me, right?"

"No, you can't cut through it. That's why Malakai is here." Lynx gestured to their non flying party member.

Quinn turned to the elf prince. He shrugged. "It's a, shall we say, hereditary ability." He didn't sound excited by it at all. He cracked his shoulders back. "Let's hope it works," he said, and took a few steps back.

He glanced at all three of them, waiting. Then rolled his eyes and spoke again. "Step back further. You're not going to want to get hit by the aftermath of this."

Quinn shivered. She suddenly felt like this was a very bad idea.

"Okay," she said, watching him. "Be careful," she called out.

Malakai flashed her a grin and took a deep breath. He wound his arm back, holding the sword in a backward grip. He executed an intricate series of turns. Halfway through, the blade began to glow with an eerie, green-black light. Then he swept forward, going in low and dragging his right knee behind him as he lunged and executed a low, reverberating slice. A whooshing of wind accompanied the action.

And then it hit the sludge. A backlash of wind knocked them all on their arses. But when Quinn looked back to where the sword strike had hit, about six feet by four feet, was clear blue mana.

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I'm not sure I described the towers of computer hard drives they have for server rooms well... so that'll probably get fixed in edits lol

Let me know what you thought! Hope you enjoyed it.

Much love

KT