RD 2 Ch 26 (Patreon)

Chapter 26

I took a break as I felt a talisman tear in my spatial ring. Quickly pulling it out, I did my best to wipe the blood off my face as the hand mirror rippled, and a poor-quality image of Simone came up on the other side.

It was difficult to send messages between outside and inside an instance.

“Who’s that?” Nyx came over my shoulder, her snakes leaning possessively against me.

“Hi, Bran. Hi, you must be Nyx.” Simone smiled at Nyx. “I like your hair, very lively. I am Bran’s pregnant fiancée.” She held up the ring I’d given her.

“Oh. Oh!” Nyx’s snakes retreated off me. “Hi. I’m Nyx, this is Bran. Wait, of course you knew that.” She was getting flustered, and it was kind of cute.

“Simone, what’s wrong?”

“Everything was going well. Circe picked up your mother and me. Don’t give me that face, she’s treated us well. It was for our protection, in a very real sense, not some vague threat. Anyway, the leader of Tartarus showed up and stole your mother for looking into the branch. She was… off. Also, she wants to enter the instance once it stabilizes so she can meet the Blood Dragon.”

“That’s… going to be exceedingly difficult for her.” I rubbed my chin. There was no way that I could let that happen. Partially because I really didn’t want them coming in and trying to find the non-existent leech.

When they couldn’t find it, the situation may devolve quickly.

No, I needed to keep them out of the instance as long as possible.

“When the instance became unstable it still had one charge remaining?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Alright. Then I’ll just complete the instance before it stabilizes.” That would buy me some time. I should also check out the top of the mountain before I leave. Chances are if there was anything he did to the instance, it was up there. “How are you?”

“Well. Just bored. Gloria talks to me several times a day. She misses you and really wants you to come back so you can train with your father. She thinks it would be wonderful bonding time for the two of you.” Simone was being naughty.

“The training is that bad?” I could read between the lines.

“She’s getting stronger, but she’s been hiding from him lately,” Simone explained. “That’s normally when she calls me.”

Nyx was looking back and forth, confused. “I just missed something. Gloria is your other fiancée? What training is making her hide.”

“Later,” I told Nyx. My time with Simone was limited. “You avoided my question by talking about Gloria. So, it’s tense. My mother’s been taken. Circe is treating you well, though. How are the other two leaders?”

“They wanted to control me.” Simone sighed. “It really wasn’t bad. Just a big guy coming to pick me up from the Hercules faction. Nothing happened; Circe was there before he said much at all and swept me away. Her palace is lovely by the way.”

I rubbed my face. “Alright, thanks for letting me know. Sorry for making things chaotic. Love you.” The mirror was starting to lose its image.

“Love you too, Bran. I trust you.” She blew me a kiss as it faded.

“Oh, that wasn’t long,” Nyx said.

“Even though Zane and Galen have items to talk to the clan leaders, that type of item is quite rare,” I explained. “For my resources, cobbling this together was already a pain.”

“What now?” Nyx was looking to me for guidance.

“Up.” I pointed at the mountain. “The monsters are easy enough. Letting them level a little while we go check that out won’t be bad. If we can spot the bosses from up there, it’ll be an added bonus. We can clear all of them but the final one and the birds tomorrow. I want to save as many cyclops as we can for the last few days. So, we’ll do the mountain today and the two other mini bosses tomorrow. Then we’ll farm the birds for… a week. That’ll leave five days to clear up as many high-level cyclops as possible. Based on what I’ve seen, it’ll take about seventeen days total for the instance to stabilize. We’ve used up three, and today will be four.” I was counting on my fingers as I went, hoping I was doing the math right.

Some people always liked to double-check math.

“I think that’s right. The timing is a little off because we started mid-day,” Nyx agreed. “Not sure how my climbing is going to be, though.”

“Never know until you try.” I grinned at her. “Worst case, I’ll just carry you again.”

“Might just start with that and let me figure out climbing when we aren’t on a clock?” She posed it as a question.

I shrugged and offered her my back. We’d already passed the level of the cyclops at present. It would be better to wait for them to gain some levels for more experience and loot.

Nyx slithered onto my back, her tail coiling once around me before she handed me back the ring she’d been using. “Don’t want to drop it.”

Taking it without looking at the contents, I set off.

***

I reached the top and threw myself on my ass as soon as I got there. “You’re heavier than you look.”

“Don’t tell a girl that.” She swatted at me playfully, coming up short and not actually hitting me. “It was a long climb is all.”

“Very long. Probably used up most of the day in the end. At least going down will be easier.”

“Can you fly?” Nyx asked.

“Can I what? No, I can’t fly. If I could, I would have flown up here.” I sighed. “Let’s see what he was doing up here.”

At the summit of the mountain, there was a narrow ridgeline and a cave.

I could feel the magic coming from the cave. “I have an ability to fall. When I land, it’s a system thing, so I don’t actually get hurt from the fall. It’s called Drop.”

“What about me?” She hurried to keep up while trying not to slide off the ridge.

“You can ride along for it,” I reassured her as I got to the mouth of the cave and felt a barrier. “Let’s see.” Poking around, I quickly found an inscription and figured out how to disable it.

Taking out a camera, I took a picture of it.

“What’s that?”

“Inscription. Ancient one. I haven’t seen one like it before.” I made sure to get a few angles so I could try and replicate it later. It wasn’t often I got to add a new inscription to my list.

Its presence, however, made me wary, and I moved slowly, with Soul Gaze active to scan the roofs and walls as I went.

“We’re being really cautious,” Nyx said. “Like we aren’t supposed to be here.”

“The ancestor isn’t here. I got an ability from him as he left. I lied. He isn’t hibernating.” I was terrible at keeping my lies straight, which was why I preferred not to lie at all. “That doesn’t mean that he didn’t booby trap this.”

“What if he comes back?” she asked, her snakes on alert.

“I can say with a fair degree of confidence that he won’t be back.”

“One hundred percent sure?” She sounded hopeful.

I shrugged. “There are many mysteries that even I don’t understand. So, I can’t be absolutely sure.”

“You could lie to a woman and at least make her feel safe.” Nyx huffed.

“Then you wouldn’t be on guard.” I chuckled and continued through the passage until it opened up into a large steaming pit of water. “Of fucking course the leech lived here.”

“Leech? Oh, Blood Dragon, I get it.” Nyx laughed.

“Right.” I didn’t bother explaining and made a sword of my blood, swishing it in the water to see if anything moved.

The water burbled up like there was a hot spring down below.

Soul Gaze wasn’t picking up anything alive, but there were an absolute fuck-ton of inscriptions in the room. The water, the fake hot spring, whatever was holding all of the humidity, and I was fairly sure there were a few inscriptions that phased some of the humidity into my soul. My soul felt wet like it was going through a swamp.

“I feel funny.” Nyx pulled at her shirt, which was quickly plastering itself to her new and improved curves.

“How’s the hair?” I asked. “Your snakes getting frizzy?” I asked, stepping into the water cautiously.

It was hot enough that I’d probably look like a boiled lobster if I didn’t have so much vitality and Regeneration. Not so hot that I couldn’t wade through it.

For as giant as the leech was, the water wasn’t that deep.

The other side had another passage. That one looked promising for where the leech might store some loot, with a faint glow coming down the passage.

I was just sad that the inscriptions all around here weren’t so easily photographed for me to play with later.

My memory was solid, but it would probably take me a while to peel back the layers on all of these and figure out what each did.

“Fuck. I’m going to be a cooked snake.” Nyx hissed and shot through the water, her tail making her much faster at swimming than she realized as she got to the other side and out. “Heal me, please.” She batted her lashes at me.

I pulled myself out of the water and used Blood Transfusion on her.

She sighed and coiled around herself. “Noted. I do not like things that hot.”

“Does that mean no more hot showers?” I asked.

Her mouth hung open. “No hot showers?”

“That’s pretty hot, but it depends on how steamy you like them.” I moved to the next passage, smiling as I got into the next room.

“Not that steamy. Unless my sensitivity has changed?” Nyx bumped into me, lost in thought. “Whoa.”

The room was a perfect thirty-foot sphere carved out of the mountain. If I had to guess, this was the very center of the instance. Every inch of the place was carved in intricate inscriptions.

“That leech might have been an idiot, but damn, I kind of respect him for this.” I took out the camera and started taking picture after picture. There was probably someone with technology that could help me piece these together in a 3D model later.

I just had to get all of this documented.

“What do you think this is for?” Nyx asked.

“Controlling the instance,” I said with no uncertainty. “I would bet my last name that this is all that makes the instance stay level one and not fade.”

Floating in the center of it all was a sort of shallow bowl that put out bright yellow light. Each of the cracks almost responded with a purple shimmer.

“I’m not going to ruin this, am I?” Nix asked.

“No. This is carved a clean six inches into the stone all around us. Just don’t do anything destructive. I really don’t want to be in this instance if you do.” There was no telling what would happen.

I needed to fix the room and then leave it alone.

Also, I needed to see if I could rig this up to fix it so that after we left, the elders of the clan couldn’t come inside. I did not want to have to spend my life looking over my shoulder, wondering when they would figure out the leech was dead and show up.

“Umm. What do you want from me?” Nyx asked.

“Honestly? I just need to figure this out. It’s going to take me a few hours to make any sense of this.” I kept studying the various inscriptions, trying to take in the massive work that this leech had done.

“Alright, I’m going to explore a little more. There was another passage.” Nyx sounded a little distant, but her lower half was loud against the stone.

“Take the ring.” I tossed her the one she’d been using earlier. “I put some food, water, and a healing potion in there. Oh, let's do a quick talisman for you to contact me if you’re in trouble.” I bit my thumb and made a quick one before splitting it in half. “Let one of your snakes hold it and just bite through the paper if you need me, I’ll drop everything and come rushing.”

So far, it really seemed that the leech had been confident that no one was coming up into its lair. It probably had grown quite lax after having only level ones in the instance for so long.