Broken System Ch. 89-95 (Patreon)

Okay, I plan on slowing back down a little now. Largely because I was told by my publisher that they wanted to launch Book 2 with the audiobook... but then last week they released the audiobook. Why the change in plans? No idea. But here is the link to the audiobook if you want to listen to the sample or pick it up. I think it came out pretty great. 

Regardless - here are 7 more chapters for you to enjoy. 

Ch. 89 - A Wider View

Benjamin told some of the stories that followed, but mostly just the parts that couldn’t be told by anyone else. Whenever possible, he deferred to Raja or Matt. Even Emma told a few stories about everything that had happened, though her version usually involved very explicit details of gutting and decapitating Summoner Lords.

Benjamin thought it was a bit gruesome, and unlike everyone around him, he turned down the sweet wine that was being passed out to soften the blow. He remembered too well what insane dreams those gave him last time, and he decided that he was better off without them.

The Storyteller seemed a touch disappointed by his decision, but he did not make any effort to force Benjamin to get drunk. Sadly, Raja did not get that memo. “Ya gonna jussst sit there all nighttah?” he asked, pointing at Benjamin with his now empty cup. “Howw? Whhhy? Do you knows jussst how many of thsss beautiful ladies want a chansss to thank you fur sssaving them? Huh?”

Benjamin just shrugged at that. “You should enjoy yourself then. Maybe I will next time. All this talk of war and death, it doesn’t really put one in the mood for…”

Benjamin’s words trailed off as Raja pointed and smirked at Emma and Matt, who were making out in the darkness just beyond the edge of the firelight. All he could do was roll his eyes at that.

Okay, maybe most people don’t get turned on by war and death, he thought, mentally amending his words.

Still, half the camp was probably drunk, naked, or both by this point. They deserved to if that’s what they wanted; they could literally die at any moment, and now, apparently, Benjamin could add ‘Summoners dropping a mountain of goblins on top of their head’ as one possible way to die. That one would be interesting, at least.

Raja wandered off a short time later and left Benjamin alone at the central fire with the Storyteller, who eventually rumbled, “You have no interest in celebrating your victory?”

“Given the crazy dreams your punch inspires, I think this time I’ll opt out,” Benjamin said. “Everything else is quite good, though, and we really do appreciate the hospitality.”

“Of course,” the giant Tortiseman nodded. “Just as we appreciate all your efforts thus far to push back on the cancer, that is the manthings, no offense.”

Benjamin waved it off, untroubled. He knew they were unwelcome guests, and though he still worried about what might happen between the two sides once the battles were one and the Rhulvinar were gone, that was not a concern for today.

“You know she will want to speak to you whether it is in your dreams or in reality,” the Storyteller said finally. “She will not be denied.”

“Excuse me?” Benjamin answered as he did a double take.

“Look,” the tortoiseman nodded, pointing out a shooting star.

It was a faint, distant thing that should have burned up. Instead, as it arced through the sky, it slowly got brighter and closer. Half a minute later, it was an angry orb streaking toward the celebrations.

“No, that can’t be,” Benjamin murmured.

The Tortiseman merely nodded at that. “If you will not come to her, she will come to you,” it said with a smile. “I would hurry to her side now before you really anger her.”

With those words, the meteorite slammed into the grass a few hundred yards from the camp. The waves of grass rippled out in the light of the explosion, but darkness quickly returned as they refused to burn.

Even before the light faded, though, Benjamin was up and running toward the impact crater. He hadn’t specifically been trying to avoid the fiery woman, but he realized now that’s what it could seem like. Given how many lives were dependent on her good graces, that was a remarkably poor idea, and he ran toward her to let her know that wasn’t the case.

The Throne of the Sky Sea looked much different than she had in their last meeting. Even as she stood up, glowing with the heat of re-entry, he could see that much. Before, she’d been a woman of pure fire. Now, she was a woman of iron, like an actual meteor, and her skin was decorated by both craters and the complex striation that were often found on those stellar objects once they’d been polished. She was radiating heat, though, and glowed an angry red color, making it impossible to approach within ten feet of her before he had to shy away.

The grass had the same idea, and each piece bent back as she walked so as not to catch fire. As she strode toward him, he retreated from the heat, but already Benjamin was sweating despite the otherwise chill night.

“I come all this way, and still you do not bow?” she asked with a tone that bordered on offended.

For a moment, Benjamin almost dropped to one knee as he felt the same pressure that he’d felt so long ago in the Arboreal Throne’s tree palace, but when he saw the contemptuous smirk and the amused expression on her pockmarked face, he stood his ground. “But this is the second time we’ve met. Surely, we are old friends by now,” he said with a sweep of his hand and a mock bow.

“Bah,” she said with a laugh. “You are friends with my sister. More than friends. You and I are merely comrades in arms.”

“Then the only ones that need to kneel to us are our enemies!” Benjamin said helpfully, trying to turn her mood. It was enough to make her smile at least, and as she slowly cooled to something closer to ambient temperature, the two of them walked.

“Tell me of your victories, oddity, and your death as well,” she commanded. “I am interested in both.”

As Benjamin started to speak, he couldn’t help but wonder if simply getting trashed with everyone else might have been the wiser course, but it was too late to get out of this now, so he told her what she wanted to know. It’s not like it was a secret or anything. Only the part about how close he’d come to coming apart at the seams was really difficult to talk about.

He made it a point to tell her the good news and the bad. They had freed tens of thousands of slaves, defeated or co-opted several other armies, and completely leveled Arden. They’d also lost their chief advantage in fighting the Rhulvinar, though, and going forward, they would be more on guard against his tricks.

“So you can no longer defeat them?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that. I just need time and resources, and I can whip a couple surprises,” he said with a smile. There was no point in elaborating. If he told her he wanted to build a fuel-air bomb or try to harness a novel network architecture, she wasn’t going to understand. The Throne didn’t want the details. She just wanted him to make it happen.

“If you need something, you have but to name it,” she answered. This time, she looked earnest rather than arrogant.

“I know, and food and shelter is more than enough, but I need some pretty complicated stuff for what I need to do next,” he said, trying to figure out how to say what he needed to say without offending her.

“The entire world is within my purview,” she smiled coldly. “You think there is something anywhere I could not obtain for you if the need were great and the cause was victory?”

“It’s n-not that,” he stuttered. “It’s just we’re in a field in the middle of nowhere and—”

With a sweep of her hand, she brought down a small cavalcade of comments or meteorites. These didn’t strike the earth as she did. Instead, they skimmed the ground just long enough to shine a light on the whole area before they returned to their place in the sky. What they illuminated made his jaw drop.

Standing not so far from where they stood now was a giant turtle that dwarfed the giant campsite he’d been in until a minute ago. The thing was dozens of feet high and hundreds of feet long. It’s a goddamned aircraft carrier with legs, he thought to himself.

“Is that a…” he started to ask, but words failed him.

“That is the island of Skaros,” the Throne told him. “She lost her home when the inner filled up with the Rhulvinarian ships that belch smoke. She stays as my guest until such time as the waters are free for her to return home. There is a lovely city on her back where your fellows have been staying until recently, and there you can find many forges and whatever tools you might need to make your trinkets.”

“That’s helpful, thank you,” he said as he came to grips with the fact that there was a Kaiju just standing there in the darkness. Sometimes, this world made no sense to him whatsoever. Why would they need him and his system when they had a 1000-ton walking fortress they could grind the enemy to dust with?

Benjamin shook his head to clear it. That was a later question, he reminded himself as he focused on the conversation. “But I need equipment that’s more precise and delicate. I’ll need precious stones and metals like bronze and—”

“Ah,” she said, nodding like he’d finally said something that made sense. “That is something that the Jade Throne could have helped you with, but she is a prisoner of the Summoners, so—”

“So you can’t help me?” he asked, disappointed.

“Nonsense!” the Throne of the sky sea thundered, glaring at him. Her temperature had cooled, and so had her demeanor, apparently. Benjamin noticed that her formerly shiny metal skin was starting to oxidize. “Never accuse me of not being able to do something. It is a deadly insult. It just so happens that in the days before our sister’s fall, a few of her stone children were abroad. I have given them refuge, too. If you travel to Lasthome at the root of Three Peaks, they will help you. They would do whatever is required to save their mother.”

Benjamin opened his mouth to ask where such a place might be, but sensing that, the Throne stomped, and the grasses directly in front of her burst into flames. This time, it was not flowers or lines that grew to show him the way. Instead, the embers of the dying foliage traced the broad plains, and dark lines indicated the river and the sea coast. One ember glowed white hot in a sea of reds, and he knew that was their destination.

It was a place that was to the northeast of where they were now on the other side of the river, but he couldn’t say how far. Distances always seemed to be in flux in this strange world. Absolutes like time and distance seemed to be very human concepts that were as alien to this world as the magic of the rune mages.

“Well, if they can help me, then I think we’ve still got a good chance,” Benjamin said. “Thank you.”

She smiled at that. You can thank me by winning. She was colder now. Her movements had been growing stiffer, turning the whole walk, but this time, her jaw squeaked as she spoke. She was rusting solid before his very eyes.

“Umm… Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need me to get you some fire, or…”

The Throne didn’t say anything. Her mouth had rusted shut. Instead, she shook her head twice with some effort, and then, without another word, she froze solid into place.

Benjamin watched her for several minutes, more than a little confused. In the dark, it took him longer than it should have taken him to notice that she was literally crumbing to dust before his eyes. Within only a couple of minutes, so much of her body had sublimated that her head fell off, and a few minutes after that, her body was gone on the wind as if she’d never been there at all.

“And I thought things would be less weird if I didn’t drink,” he chastised himself as he started back toward camp.

Ch. 90 - Until We Meet Again

Benjamin was one of the few people sober enough to watch the sunrise over the giant turtle the following morning. It was an impressive sight. He wanted to go up and explore it, but instead, he helped the clay people prepare breakfast, which consisted of sweet fry bread and fruit.

The food itself was good, but he helped because he couldn’t help but admire the strange glazes and patterns that developed on those strange men and women when they got too close to the flames. He still hadn’t been able to decide if the strange fae lived for only a day or two or if they were reborn anew with every sunrise; both seemed equally likely, but he really couldn’t say for sure.

They were intelligent, friendly, and talkative people, but when they were newborn and barely differentiated clay mannequins, it was impossible to tell them apart. It was only when patterns and colors were baked into their pale skin that they started to take on a bit of character. One might become a beautiful woman with a splotchy raku glaze pattern, and the other might take the shape of a man with daubs of rust-colored lines and splotches that looked almost like war paint.

It was a fascinating series of contrasts, and it was more than enough to occupy Benjamin’s attention until his friends rejoined the land of the living. Raja and Emma both emerged with hangovers, but thanks to Matt’s lesser cure spell, those effects vanished as soon as he noticed them.

It’s a pity that spell can’t do anything for fatigue, Benjamin thought to himself as he yawned.

He’d been too excited to get much sleep, and as soon as he started explaining why to his friends, he could tell he immediately had their attention. Well, he had their attention once they finished gawking at Skaros, who loomed unperturbed far above them.

“So first wood men, then clay men, and now stone men, huh?” Raja asked with his mouth half full. “Do you think they’ll be the ones that will be able to keep the big bad wolf from blowing our house down?”

Emma rolled her eyes, and everyone else just sort of looked at Raja, prompting their friend to double down. “What? Not funny?” he laughed. “Not by the hairs of your chinny chin chin?”

“I think I liked it better when he had a mute button,” Matt said flatly.

Everyone laughed at that, even Raja, but when Benjamin suggested they split up, everyone got serious again. “You mean split up the army?” Emma asked for clarification.

“No, I mean like all of us,” Benjamin said with a shake of his head. “Right now, we have all our eggs in one basket. If the Sorcerers ever find us, they could wipe us out in one shot. You saw what they did with that mountain thing.”

“Still not a good enough reason,” Matt said.

“Look, I know you two don’t want to be separated, but if you each took a thousand men, then you could—” Benjamin started, carefully explaining why it was a good idea as he was peppered with interruptions.

“Just because I need to focus on building some hardware doesn’t mean the rest of you need to sit out,” he said with a sigh.

“God, you can be such an idiot, Benjamin, you know that?” Emma said with a smile. “We’re you’re fucking friends. As much as I love killing these assholes, we’re not just going to go fight this war without you, you know? We’re in this together.”

Matt nodded at that, and Raja opened his mouth but quickly closed it again as he realized he was about to ruin the moment. Despite the fact that what they wanted to do was nearly pointless, he still appreciated the gesture. He didn’t want to be split up from them either.

Eventually, Benjamin relented, and Matt picked a few warriors from his inner circle that he thought would make for excellent leaders in his place, and they built the plan together. Despite not having an exact map, it was a pretty simple plan: the current army would divide into four groups of nearly a thousand people each, and they’d all take different paths to the inner sea, wiping out every plantation and soft target they could.

Without the siege magic that Benjamin had in mind, those groups would skip any fortresses or strongholds and focus on achievable victories that starved the beast. It was a simple plan, but even simple plans could fall apart pretty quickly when the enemy could summon more soldiers and summon monsters without too much effort.

“The fact is that thanks to the centaurs and all the other fae that dwell in the sea of grass, we know where the area is, but they don’t know where we are,” Matt said, impressing the plan on the men who would be taking over before Benjamin made the announcement to everyone. “That is our biggest, and right now our only real advantage. You need to pick your fights carefully, or they’ll whistle us down to size in no time, and as soon as a summoner takes the field, your archers have to take the bastard out ASAP.”

There were some questions about why they couldn’t break the other side’s mind control anymore, but all Benjamin could tell them was that he was working on it. Truthfully, if he could locate the Prince’s privileged ports, he might yet succeed, but those were long odds. “Things were a lot easier when we could make them switch sides on command,” he agreed.

All of this was just putting off the inevitable: standing up in front of thousands and explaining what was going to happen next. He’d wanted to tell them everything, but Matt had argued that just like in a real military, important information like, ‘we’re going to craft a super weapon that will turn the tide of the war and let us defeat the Rhulvinarians once and for all.’ In the end, he mostly just thanked everyone for working so hard for the cause and told them that they were splitting up so they could continue using the hit-and-run tactics they’d used so successfully until now.

People clapped and cheered at the appropriate moments, but the whole thing still felt inadequate to Benjamin, and as he stood there on the back of the cart that served as his makeshift stage, he couldn’t help but wonder how many people in the sea of faces would die before he saw them again in a few months.

After that, Matt took over and explained that they were going to fight and kill as many as possible, and then they would all reassemble near the inner sea to conquer the cities there. Though the audience stayed enthusiastic, as Matt stacked goal on top of goal, Benjamin couldn’t help but feel exhausted.

Any part of what they needed to do to achieve victory sounded hard, but when he put them all together like that, it seemed impossible. They needed to sack hundreds of smaller settlements several larger cities, and beat off an unknowable amount of nearly immortal mages that could teleport large armies and small mountains at will.

Matt called it “A challenge they couldn’t refuse.” Benjamin had to force himself not to laugh at that. That was the understatement of the year.

Lunch was already cooking by the time all of that was done. Matt spent a few minutes with his generals, then finally returned to his friends and said, “Alright, we can leave whenever you want.”

“There’s one more thing we need to do first,” Benjamin corrected him.

“What’s that?” Raja asked.

Benjamin didn’t answer, though. He just started walking toward the giant turtle. There was zero chance he was going to miss out on the chance to explore something like that.

He had no idea how to get up there, but that wasn’t about to stop him, and after a few minutes of asking around, he found out that the answer was a few lifts operated by mules and capstans at the edge of the shell. The wooden cages were the ricketiest elevator he’d ever been in, but no matter how much it swayed in the breeze, it never felt like it was about to give way, and a few moments later, they were on the mottled shell of the majestic creature’s back.

Even forgetting that this was a living creature that moved slightly with each breath, it was a surreal experience. Narrow footpaths wound between tightly clustered buildings that scaled the side of the monster. More than anything, the adobe buildings resembled cliff dwellings of the southwest, and on the slopes that were too steep to build, terraced gardens had been built up along the flanks.

Benjamin talked to the humans who were too frail to join the celebrations and learned much about the simple way of life they lived as they drifted around the sea of grass. Mostly, though, he learned that Emma was afraid of heights.

No one had known that until now, not even her, apparently. Well, she must have known about it at some point in the past and forgotten, with everything that had happened, though. Still, she clung to Matt for dear life on trails where the rest of them only held the rope handrails with a light grip.

Raja teased her about it as he showed off, using mana-fueled powers like hunter's grace and disengage to leap from perch to perch like he was filming a particularly ill-advised parkour video. “You’ve got to check out this view,” he said, standing on a particularly exposed beam with nothing but a five-story drop below him. “It’s to die for.” Benjamin rolled his eyes, but Matt finally shut him down by threatening to throw their friend off the side if he didn’t stop.

All in all, it was a town built for hundreds, and perhaps half of those seemed to be human. The remainder were mostly clay people, with a few beastmen scattered around in an almost random mix.

Even though it bordered on the surreal, the tight, nearly verticle confines of the two- and three-story buildings were filled with the same smells of cooking and laundry, and they heard everything from women singing as they knitted and spun to smiths hammering and children playing. It was a beautiful place. There was even a temple built to the throne at the very front of the shell.

She might be ambivalent about what she was going to do with the manthings on her side, but it was clear, from the amount and variety of the offerings that had been left there, that the manthings loved her and would love nothing more than to stay if they were given the chance. He hoped that would be the case.

Honestly, he would have loved to stay here, too, if they didn’t have so much to do. A beautiful view that changed every day and a giant turtle to slowly rock you to sleep. Who could ask for anything more? Benjamin thought to himself as he took one last long look at the impossible town and its even more impossible location.

Sadly, after the hour's long tour, with the sun nearing the far horizon, it was time to be on their way. They had a lot to do, and every day this war dragged on, hundreds more people were going to die.

Ch. 91 - Last of Their Kind

That first night, the four of them camped just far enough away that the turtle city they’d just left was little more than a bulge on the darkening horizon and roasted a bunny the size of a large dog for dinner. Even without any of the centaurs to accompany them, they made better time after that.

Intellectually, they knew that the war was still raging around them on a variety of fronts, but somehow, it was like they’d been excused from all of that, at least for a moment, and each day on their strange trek held a new adventure. One night, they stayed in a miniature underground city where they were hosted by prairie dog-kin, and another, they stayed in a giant well, feathered nest that that had been long abandoned in a tree that was so lonely that nothing but grass could be seen in any direction.

They only had to resort to combat on a single occasion when they were swarmed by anthropomorphic grasshoppers half the size of a man. Arrows were of limited effect as they lept back and forth through the thick foliage, but ice held them in place long enough for them to be shattered or crushed. Emma didn’t even need that advantage, though. She moved so quickly now that the things might have been paused as she cut a bloody swath through the tiny predators.

“Why do you think they attacked us?” Matt asked that night around the campfire. “Every other creature in this whole area either gets the hell out of our way, or they help us. Why would some bugs take issue with that?”

“Because I was getting bored of walking and needed a real workout,” Emma said with a laugh before anyone could offer up a serious answer.

“Who knows,” Raja answered. “Maybe they were hungry. Maybe they were summoned from another world by rune magic like us. There’s no way to know for sure.”

Benjamin just sat there quietly for almost a minute before Matt’s steady gaze from across the fire finally goaded him to. “It could be like the Wolven, where not all of the throne’s neighbors are happy about it,” he guessed. “I think it’s more like… not everyone is on the same side. I doubt that half these groups will still be working together when the Rhulvinarians are no more.”

“No?” Matt asked. “You don’t think it’s all one big happy family?”

“Well, we know that the court of the Arboreal Throne has some fault lines, but this…” Benjamin paused for a moment to consider. “You remember what the centaur said about the deep valleys? There could be whole insect kingdoms out there. There are certainly sea kingdoms and probably bird kingdoms too.”

He almost told them what the Throne of the Sky Sea had said about how the grasslands could contain infinities in a finite space but decided against it. It was complicated and not particularly relevant. Still, he thought about it quite a bit in the days that followed.

Some days, they pushed through grass taller than their heads with nothing to go by but the internal compass built into Benjamin’s status spell, and other times, they found paths made by something large like the buffalo-ish things that they occasionally saw in the distance. Somehow, despite the fact that they didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t get lost.

When they finally saw the low triple-peaked mountain in the distance that pretty much had to be their destination, his friends debated how they could have possibly gone straight there on the first try without a road or map. To Benjamin, the answer was obvious, though. The grass sea was a distorted place. It probably had more in common with the Bermuda Triangle than the Great Plains.

They were probably stuck going pretty much exactly where the Throne wanted them to go for as long as they were here. Hell, if they decided they wanted to be difficult, she could probably light brush fires and start stampedes to steer them more directly. That realization suddenly made the Rhulvinarian roads make a lot more sense. If the world could become a maze whenever you got lost, then you never wanted to step off the path.

There was no path here, though. It had taken just over a week to reach the mountain, but it took another half a week just to find the entrance, which turned out to be a secret door carved to look exactly like a boulder.

“How random is that?” Raja asked as he gathered everyone up and explained that he’d been taking a little rest break, and the whole thing had slid aside.

“Hey, at least it wasn’t locked,” Emma said. She’d been growing crankier by the day as they walked around this mountain with no idea precisely what they were looking for.

“Well, maybe next time they should lay out the welcome matt for us, just in case,” Matt said gruffly. “Don’t they know we’re in a hurry?”

“Maybe?” Benjamin said as he used lesser illusion to create light so they could go further down the tunnel. It wasn't what it was for exactly, but if you created the illusion of fire, the light it cast was still very real. “I’ve given up guessing who is talking to who about what in this place, you know? I just know that these might be the only people in the world who can help us with what we need, so be nice to them, okay?”

“Maybe doesn’t sound promising,” Raja said, shaking his head as they went deeper. “Do you have any idea what these guys are supposed to look like?”

“All I was told is that they were children of the Jade Throne,” Benjamin shrugged. “So that means, what? Dwarves? Gnomes, something like that.”

Emma sighed. “How could you not ask for more than that? They could be snake people or literal moles?”

“Right?” Raja smiled. “Nothing in this place is screaming Snow White to me, you know?”

Benjamin didn’t really get the reference, so he ignored it. Instead, he focused on their surroundings to try to intuit what they might find ahead. The passage they followed was a very shallow slope deep into the mountain, and though it lacked lights of any kind, it was perfect in all other respects. The floors were smooth, and the walls were always perfectly square to both the floor and ceiling. It was a stark contrast to both the primitive conditions they’d dealt with up until now and the melted, irregular passages of the Rhulvinarian buildings.

He wasn’t surprised when they found a stone door at the base that was so well-balanced that it pushed open with the lightest of touches or a large antechamber at the bottom dotted with several braziers adding the flickering orange light of their coals to his pure white life which he quickly extinguished out of respect for the inhabitants.

He was slightly more surprised when they found a guard in that room and that they towered above them as the eight-foot tall shadow of a woman who was wielding a crossbow the size of a ballista.

“Halt right there, intruders,” she said with a voice that echoed strangely off the walls and made it hard to tell much about her from it.

“I was told to expect four manthings, but I’m in no ways sure that you are them.”

When the Throne had told him that they needed to seek out the Jade Throne’s stone children, he’d assumed that it was a metaphor for dwarves or something closer to his experience. The last thing he’d expected was an underground giant, and he found the very idea more than a little unnerving.

How is someone with fingers thicker than my arm supposed to help me with metal forging and precision engineering? He asked himself as he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Easy now,” he said cautiously, “The Throne sent us to—”

“You’ll answer my questions, or you can turn around and leave right now,” the voice boomed, interrupted. “Now tell me, what did you come here for?”

“To build the weapons, we need to defeat the Summoner Lords,” Benjamin said quickly. “We’ve been fighting them for months now and—”

“We know very well what’s happening on the surface,” the guard answered. “That’s the only reason you’ve been allowed to come this far. All we want in life is to murder those who hold our mistress captive. I know who sent you, and I know you want weapons, but before I let you waste anyone’s time, I want to know what weapons. Specifically.”

Benjamin looked to his friends, and they looked back at him uncertainly. This wasn’t playing out how any of them thought it would.

“I don’t know how well versed you are in the constraints of mana engineering and—-” he started to say.

“We practically invented it,” she said proudly, “but go on.”

“Well, then you should know that what I need more than anything is high-purity metals, preferably gold, silver, and bronze. Probably a couple dozen pounds at least to form the core for an enchanted object that can handle at least 15 mana a second for a series of flexible algorithms I’ve created. 20 would be better, though.”

“Is that all?” she asked flippantly, looking at him like he was a moron.

“Gems, too. The larger, the better. I have some other things I want to work on, too. They’d be like bombs, sorta, except—”

“Fine,” she interrupted, lowering the crossbow as his answers seemed to finally placate her. “This won’t be a complete waste of our time. We’ll help you, but only because you get us one step closer to freeing Mother.”

“Mother?” Raja asked. “I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but how do you know she’s still, you know…”

“You manthings no nothing at all about the way the world works, do you?” the giant statue did the most unexpected thing then. It didn’t step out into the light or turn and open the door. Instead, it began to shrink.

Benjamin instantly whirled on his heel to find a much smaller shape than he expected, walking out of an alcove behind them. The guard wasn’t an eight-foot-tall giant. She was a three-foot-tall child, and even as she approached them, she was lowering a beaten copper megaphone from her lips with a mischievous smile on her face.

“What?” she laughed. “Not quite what you were expecting?”

All of them shook their head mutely, unsure of what to say. It was clear to Benjamin at least that children of the Jade Throne were more than a little paranoid, though he was not yet sure why. They lived in a secret home deep beneath the earth and used tricks to hide even their size.

“I guess not everything is as it seems,” Benjamin said, for lack of anything else to say.

“That’s an understatement!” Raja quipped. He was the only one that laughed at his joke, though.

“I am Feldsparia, and all of you should feel honored,” she said as she pushed open the door in front of her to give them the first glimpse at the tiny little half-scale city beyond. “You are the first, the last, and the only manthings that shall ever be allowed in our refuge. Welcome to Lasthome.”

Ch. 92 - Lasthome

Before them, in the cavern, lay a city in miniature. The buildings were stone, the roads were straight, and the streetlights made from slender iron rods topped with glowing crystals dotted them at regular intervals, brightening up the dark cavern enough to a twilight level and giving them just enough light to both navigate and appreciate the city.

Benjamin was glad that they did. The city was a tiny work of art. Everything was straight lines, and only at the edges of the cavern, where precision was forced to give way to the shapes that nature demanded, did the streets curve and twist in artful patterns. There, the buildings spiraled as they climbed up the walls of the cavern and the stalactites and stalagmites to create tiny high rises that towered above the orderly city.

Lasthome was by far the most aesthetic thing that they’d seen since they’d come to Aavernia, and perhaps the most modern, too. Though it was much less stunning than the Arboreal Throne’s tree castle, in Benjamin’s eyes, the fact that he could see just how much hard work went into it rather than springing up from magic left him stunned as he studied the details.

For all he knew, the tree had been grown in a single day, but just looking at the tiny town that lay spread out before them, he could see that it would take lifetimes to produce, and there was a certain grandeur in that as well, even if the result was a bit more humble.

To his eyes, the city appeared to be carved from a single piece of stone. Oh, there were seams in every building and every street that showed the efforts involved, but they were so small that he knew the whole effort had been made with great planning and precision.

That alone was enough to give him hope that these people might be able to help him with what he needed after all. He’d studied Feldsparia’s crossbow with an eye toward understanding how sophisticated their tools might be, but the fact that each light post they passed was made of delicately twisted wrought iron answered all his questions in that regard.

“It’s kinda dead in here,” Raja said quietly, breaking Benjamin’s train of thought to realize the same thing. “Where is everyone?”

“Lasthome is…” Feldspaira trailed off. “Well, you will meet the others, and we will tell you more then. It is time for dinner now, anyway. Everyone will be gathered in the great hall.”

Communal dining for a city of hundreds or thousands seemed like a strange choice. Benjamin but he said nothing, though. Instead, he looked around at the city and took his friend's words to heart.

The whole place really is deserted, isn’t it? He thought to himself.

No matter what their guide might say, it was clear that this city didn’t have as many inhabitants as it should. The stone streets were barely rutted, and in many places, it was clear that the dust was settling thickly. Lasthome might have been a beautiful city once, but now it was something closer to a tomb or a memorial.

A few minutes later, they walked inside the great hall. It was the only building large enough that they’d be able to enter it easily. Inside, he was distracted for a moment by the gilt ceilings and the delicate inlays in the wall panels that seemed to be detailing important moments in the past. Benjamin would have loved to study them, but when he noticed just how few of the stone children were in there to greet them, he lost all interest in the minor details.

Besides the guard, there were only six of the stone children here, and that gave Benjamin a bad feeling. He stayed quiet as Feldsparia went around the room and introduced everyone, noting the rock-themed names seemed daily universal, and when the time came, he introduced himself and his friends.

Finally, when he could take no more, he asked, “So how many more of you are standing watch or working the forges?”

“This is everyone,” Phosdan said sadly. Though he looked no older than the rest of them, the way he sat in the middle, in a place of honor, had marked him as the leader in Benjamin’s eyes from the moment they’d gotten close. “When you entered, we summoned everyone to greet you properly, so the mines and forges are currently closed.”

“But the city,” Benjamin asked. “There were so many houses, so much effort… How can it—”

“Was there a great battle?” Matt asked. “If we can lend you a hand against any enemies you might have, we would be glad to do so.”

“No battle,” Phosdan shook his head. “Not in a long, long time. We have made peace with the worms below, and since we have the Throne of the Sky Sea’s protection. So, none of her servants from above would dare to attack. No, the only enemies we currently face are time and boredom, I’m afraid.”

“Could you explain that one?” Benjamin asked, but the boy shook his head. “Not right now. It is time for dinner, and all things must be done in the proper order. Such sad talk can wait until there are no appetites to spoil.”

The food that was brought out for the four of them was a simple stew of meat and root vegetables. Feldsparia apologized. “It is rare we have guests of flesh. You will forgive us for being out of practice.”

The food was fine. It was plain and a touch over-salted but hearty and filling. It was better than what they had around the campfire most nights, so it was nothing to complain about. The stone children’s food, on the other hand, was… strange. They feasted on nuggets of colorful ores and small chunks of crystal mixed with finely ground rock.

It was a surreal experience watching them clear their plates, and Benjamin tried not to stare at the sight while he focused on the conversation. Several times, Matt or Emma tried to steer the discussion to the empty city, and each time, their hosts turned it back to the war.

Other than some token interest in what Benjamin wanted to create, all they seemed to be interested in was how many Rhulvinarians they’d killed. Indeed, they seemed more than a little disappointed to find out that they’d been focusing on freeing their slaves as opposed to killing their sorcerers.

“You can’t let a single one of those monsters live!” Granitia yelled. Despite the fact that she had a high, childish voice, her words, and her fervor reminded him more than a little of Emma.

“We won’t,” Benjamin said, choosing his words carefully, “But the priority has to be on saving who can be saved.”

Several of the stone children looked at him crossly, but before they could disagree, Matt chimed in, “Every person we save is another soldier in the war against a common enemy.”

That at least everyone agreed with, but the growing argument was only set aside when Phosdan finally weighed in. “We used to believe that, too, that every life was worth saving. We thought each creature was a beautiful, unique gemstone. That was why we sheltered the Rhulvinarians, and we were wrong to do so.”

There was silence after that as everyone reflected on the words, and it was almost half a minute before Benjamin said, “We heard that they pretended to be refugees and that they did terrible things and were sorry about that. The Rhulvinarians took us from our homes, too. So we want—”

“If they had just taken us from our homes, we could yet build a life without them, but that will never happen. Do you know why that is?” the boy asked, fixing him with those sad stone eyes.

“Because they still control the world island?” Benjamin guessed, unsure.

“I will take them to the shrine and show them what they must know,” the stone boy said as he stood, the crumbs of rock on his plate forgotten. “The plans and schematics can wait until tomorrow. Any of you are free to accompany us but not required to.”

As Benjamin and his friends followed Phosdan out of the hall, no one joined them. Benjamin knew that would be the outcome as soon as he saw the sadness carved into the faces of the other stone people. They walked in silence, but only for a short time before Phosdan began to share his story with them.

Out of the seven children that they met, he was the oldest, at nearly three hundred years of age. Out of all of them, he was the only one who had a clear memory of how the world worked before those first Sorcerers split through a crack in reality and found their way to another world.

“There were over 40,000 of us then,” he explained. “Theoretically, there should have been 44,444 because that was the number that mother had decreed, but there were almost always fewer than that. Accidents happen after all, and even stone men can be broken in battle, and sometimes our mother had other things to do besides carve new children to replace us.”

“She… carved you?” Raja asked, “Forty thousand of you? Like one at a time?”

The Jade Throne was a woman of infinite patience and kindness,” he said, almost choking up. “The Arboreal Throne takes the time to plant the seeds, and the Throne of the Sky Sea lets her children rise from the dust all on their own, but our mother made each and every one of us for a specific reason, and now those reasons are as lost as she is.”

“I’m very sorry for that,” Benjamin said. “So, where are the rest of the survivors?” Benjamin asked, not sure what else to say.

“There aren’t any. None that we know of, anyway,” the Stone boy confessed as they approached a large building near the center of town that looked like a mausoleum more than anything else. Only thirteen of us were off the island for any reason when the Summoner Lords rose up and seized it for themselves. We didn’t know that, of course, as we started congregating here. We built this city in the hopes that there would be more survivors, you see. It was planned for 4,444, but we hoped that if we could even get 444, then we could find some sense of normalcy, but, well, you’ll see.

Phosdan held his tongue as they approached the large building, and Benjamin contemplated what it must have been like to build a city for decades, with the near certainty that no one was ever going to fill it. In that sense, the houses and shops that surrounded them weren’t ever intended to be homes. They were tombs for all the ghosts that they couldn’t escape.

He didn’t really understand, though. Not until they reached the shrine. He’d assumed that it would be a place of mourning for their mother, and indeed, the Jade Throne was represented in a single piece of lovingly carved jade almost twice as tall as he was, but there was more to it than that. She looked down sadly, with tears in her eyes, as she gazed down at the ruin that was her world. In her broad arms, there was an island that he could only assume was the world island, but it was covered in the shattered corpses of thousands of individually carved stone children.

It was a terrible attention to detail, and one by one, each of them turned away, unable to bear it. It was only when Benjamin noticed that those same shattered bodies were carved across the walls and the ceiling that Phosdan began to speak. “They spent years growing in strength while they claimed to be looking for another world they could escape to so that they might leave us in peace.”

“They weren’t, though, right?” Raja asked, “They were up to no good?”

“They were not,” the stone child agreed. “We helped them build ever more complicated hardware to further their goals, but in the end, they were studying us to figure out how they could enslave us with their systems, and when they could not, they cast a single spell that shattered everything made of stone for hundreds of miles in a single instant. Just like that, every subject of our mother was dead or maimed in a moment, and there was no one left to save her when they moved on her next.”

“Is it even possible to kill a goddess, or a Throne, or whatever?” Benjamin asked, unsure. “The Arboreal Throne told me she’s lived many lives surely—”

“Death is not as permanent for the natives of our world as it is for yours,” Phosdan told them. “Even all of our dead brothers and sisters, every single one of them awaits us in the stone, but it is her hand that is required to carve them out of it once more. The Jade Throne can be killed, but she will always come back, which is the greatest problem of all.”

This time, Not even Raja was dumb enough to stick his foot in his mouth, and they all stood there waiting for the stone child to get a handle on his emotions before he continued. “She always comes back, and they always kill her again. Over and over and over again. They strip mine her soul for the rare and impossible elements that it contains. It happens every day, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.”

Benjamin’s heart broke at that. He had known that the men and women they fought against were evil, but until now, they’d been a casual, utilitarian evil that saw others as nothing more than resources to be used. This information pushed them well beyond that, though. After this revelation, it would be impossible to see the Rhulvinarians as anything but monsters.

Ch. 93 - Weapons of War

That night, they slept in a market square that had never seen any use because the only buildings that were large enough for them to fit in were ornate and ceremonial, and they had no business turning them into sleeping quarters. At least there in the square, complete with little stalls and wagons, it felt like a diorama or a set rather than a tomb, and Benjamin was grateful for that when the lights of the city slowly dimmed to near-perfect darkness. The end result made the walls and parts of the ceiling look like a vast starfield, and that was almost pleasant.

Well, that was where they tried to sleep anyway. His friends talked late into the night about what they were going to do to the next sorcerers that crossed their paths. It was a conversation that was well past bloodthirsty, though there were some funny moments.

Raja kept making jokes about a movie called Snow White, and when Matt finally had enough and asked him to explain it, his only response was, “Look - how can we be in a city with seven dwarves, and you need to explain to Snow White to you, man? The shit writes itself!”

Benjamin didn’t disagree at all, but he mostly tuned it out. Instead, he lay awake in his bedroll, staring at his codex interface and trying to decide the most likely way that such a spell would have worked and how much mana it would have cost. These weren’t just theoretical questions, either. He would love nothing more than to build magical smart weapons that could selectively target his enemies because, right now, the alternative was carpet bombing.

Benjamin really only had like three ideas for building new secret weapons, and he was fairly sure that none of them were far enough out of the box that they couldn’t be anticipated by his enemies. He could build magic items with crystalline cores to store an excessive amount of mana the way that Arden’s city defenses had done to build some massive bombs, he could build devices to sniff out the unencrypted commands that the Rhulvinarians issued and use that information to co-opt some measure of their own forces, and he could build a sort centralized network interface that would let him conduct the mana of an army like it was an orchestra rather than a bunch of individuals.

The first two were so simple he could do them himself, but the third one… well, in any model he tried to code, the mana demands just amped too much to be of any good. It was one thing to cast gale shield and use it to deflect missile barrages or use a modified chains of ice spell to try to stop any sort of artillery the mages had but to do anything serious, he was going to need to build a central focus that was at least a little stronger than his poor broken soul.

Benjamin had a few points left. He could get an ability or a new spell, but he held off. He wasn’t sure exactly which rune structures he was going to need to copy. It would be better to wait until they were further along in hardware development. For now, he just looked at the spells he already had, willing some inspiration to strike from the way the runes linked together. What was some advantage he could give to his men when the time came?

He wouldn’t get any answers tonight. That would have been okay, except that he spent half of the time in his dreams slaving away at answers with impossible solutions, and the other half-remembered how easily Arden’s defenders had repelled the waves of men that had been sent to attack them. Only in this version of events he was on the wrong side of the walls and sending hundreds of his own men to their deaths as he tried and failed to reach the walls.

When he finally had enough of those, he sat up from his fitful sleep, but with no clear indication of whether or not it was day or night, he merely sat there until someone else stirred. Eventually, the lights of the city began to brighten, and together, they made their way up to the Great Hall to figure out the plan.

At that point, everyone was served warm bread or hot stones, depending on their preferences, and then they got to work. Matt was going to discuss weapons with their chief smith, Regolin, to see if anything could be done to improve their bronze blades to steel. He was just as young as the rest, but because of either fighting or industrial accidents, there were chips and gouges that had been repaired with burnished gold, giving him a veined, marbled effect that the rest of his kin lacked.

Emma was going to discuss the overall history of the conflict, both recently and in the decades before their arrival, with Phosdin and Granitia to see if they might find some new strategies amongst the very long memories of their hosts. Benjamin was going to work with Jaspric and Feldsparia to finalize his designs, which left Raja to do some hunting. “I’m getting claustrophobic down here in the dark and just want to stretch my legs a bit,” he told their hosts. Truthfully, though, they all felt bad that the stone children were making food for their guests that they weren’t even capable of eating.

“Three hundred-year-old magical beings have better things to do than bake bread,” Emma had said so succinctly earlier, “So either you’re going to go look for something we can roast, or I am.”

That had decided it. They were here to get a real, tangible benefit for the cause they all cared about, not be freeloaders. So, each of them went off to do their own thing. For Benjamin, the hardest part was dealing with the absolute certainty that two artisans he’d been paired off. Every idea he brought up was shot down. They knew exactly what stresses a given material could take thanks to the testing they’d helped the Rhulvinarians so long ago.

No matter what he proposed, Feldsparia piped up with, “It won’t work,” or “I don’t care how thick you make it, that much power is going to make it explode.”

It wasn’t until he described the simple bronze rod that he’d poured so much power through to create the ice bridge that allowed them to escape from Arden that he finally got their attention. According to their math, such a thing shouldn’t have worked, but it very clearly did. This was enough to finally get them to engage, and they dived into the equations with both feet.

For the next few days, his ideas were no longer crazy; they were just difficult. While everyone else checked in on them occasionally, the three of them schemed, and more than that, they tested. The stone children had stockpiled a vast array of metals and alloys for lack of anything better to do over the last few decades, and they tried running different amounts of magical energy through different materials and thicknesses. They did this with and without ornamentation, with and without water, and with and without any other factor that they thought might play a factor, and it turned out that all of them did, to some degree.

The Summoner Lords made their magic items very pretty, for prestige as much as anything. Benjamin doubted that the Prince he’d killed so recently would have worn the most powerful armaments in the world if they clashed with his outfit on a given day. It turned out that beauty played no part in how quickly it took a given piece of bronze or gold to melt under the strain of a specific spell. What did matter, though, was surface area, and in the case of many decorative elements, that amounted to much the same thing. The more twining ivy leaves that you carved into an object, and the more braided herringbone chains you attached, the more you increased the surface area.

Benjamin was unsure if the Rhulvinarians had known this at one point and forgotten or if it was just a happy accident. None of them knew why it worked, but it very proveably did, and that was all that mattered. And when you added water to the mix, well it worked shockingly well.

“Human machines, not magical ones, but the kind that burn fuel… like the car I told you about, they often use water for cooling,” Benjamin explained to them at one point when they were doing experiments to understand the cooling property of water versus other similar liquids like mineral oil. He didn’t know why Matt’s SUV needed water for its radiator, but he’d seen that information in the owner's manual on their most recent trip, and he dutifully passed that information along.

After a couple days of testing, though, it looked like his crazy ideas weren’t so crazy. His simpler ones, though, were harder to test. They had to find some way, though. He couldn’t just charge up a 200-karat gemstone and hope that it exploded when they launched it at the target.

In the end, after a little trial and error, they resorted to building hand grenades and dropping them into an underground chasm a few miles away from Lasthome. It was a spectacular little show, to say the least, and on their second and third rounds of testing, they invited others to come and watch the light show as they tested a variety of different stones and various rune combinations to build a predictable delay into them.

The result was a brilliant explosion that was a combination of everything. The blasts took on the vivid colors of the rubies and emeralds that they used, as well as the elemental effects of the mostly fire spells that Benjamin used to activate them. The result was an underground fireworks show full of violet pinwheels and bright red starbursts like the world had never seen before.

After all the equations on chalkboards and discussions of optimal ridge patterns, it was a nice break. It was practically celebratory, but all too soon, they were back to their little workshop as they returned to the hard problems.

As Jaspric said on more than one occasion, “Making things blow up is easy; it's making them not blow up that’s going to be really hard.”

Still, despite the fact that it felt like they were going at a snail's pace, they’d made great progress for only a week of focused effort. The three of them were in the middle of discussing the specifications and trying to calculate what the minimum weight could be when an earthquake struck. Instantly, conversation ceased, and Benjamin looked to Feldsparia and Jaspric for guidance as to what they should do while dust fell from the ceiling.

“Earthquakes happen sometimes,” Jaspric explained. “It’s a perfectly normal natural process. There are any number of reasons that could cause—”

He stopped talking as a bell began tolling and echoed through the caverns to a cramped workshop that they’d managed to wedge themselves inside to try to design what it was he needed.

“What does that mean?” Benjamin asked. “Is there a fire, or are they just—”

“It means we’re under attack!” Feldspaira said as she stood and moved to the door to grab her crossbow and darted out of the room with surprising speed for a person made of pure stone. Jaspric followed right behind her, but Benjamin was slower. He maneuvered as best he could through the hallways, but they were just a little too small for him to hurry. He needed to, though. He was sure this was their fault somehow. They’d brought the fighting to these people, and somehow, he was going to have to fix that or die in the attempt.

Ch. 94 - The Flood

Benjamin had no idea what to expect, but even before he reached the main cavern, he could hear the sounds of battle. He drew his sword as he squirmed out of the narrow door, and when he finally got outside and climbed atop the nearest single-story home for a better look, he almost dropped it.

Shapes were pouring out of large rents in the north wall that hadn’t been there before. It took a moment for him to figure out what they were, but with the hideous green skin and the beady red eyes, there could be no mistake. Goblins were here.

How? Why? He had no clue, but that didn’t change the facts.

He looked around and saw that all three of his friends were charging toward the enemy from different parts of the city along with several stone shapes, but even as he moved to join them, he wondered what good 10 people could do against dozens or even hundreds. That worry didn’t stop him from hopping down and running to join his friends in the heart of the action, though.

The gibbering mob came at them in a wave, flooding a whole district of the tiny city in just the last few minutes. In fact, because of the half-scale size of the buildings, the invasion was made both more comical and more terrifying. His brain just couldn’t help but see an endless army of giant goblins rampaging through a normal-sized city.

He didn’t need to get anywhere close to the action to start helping, though. Instead, it launched a level 3 vampiric bolt at the part of the widening mob furthest from everyone else. The spell all but drained his mana, but even as he drained his health to fix that problem, the rush of life force replenished him. The fact that it was laced with rage and flickers of brutal memories was just enough to make him cringe as he prepared to cast the spell again, but he bit the bullet and did it anyway.

Of all the spells he had now, this was the one he’d fiddled with the most. Ever since he’d noticed the splash damage in the forest so long ago, he’d wondered at the best way to tune it. Now he had the area of effect version, which is what he was using now since it knocked the little buggers over five or ten at a time like bowling pins, but there were other versions as well. He had a beam to make extra sure he only hit one target at full power and a combination with some of the blood burn runes that hit an even wider area and did a little bit of damage constantly for several minutes to everyone affected.

It only took a couple seconds and a script to swap them out, but right now, this was exactly what he needed: a big life-draining shotgun he could blast over and over again as he shot into the crowd. The best part was that it wasn’t even damaging the buildings, unlike Raja, who was firing a single arrow into the air and having it come down as dozens of mana charge duplicates.

The two of them were basically the only ones on crowd control. Everyone else was cutting a bloody swath through the monstrous crowd toward the rifts that they were pouring in from. Emma was a bloody whirlwind. In fact, it was almost impossible to see her because she was moving so quickly; instead, you were forced to rely on the path of destruction she left in her wake.

Matt, by contrast, was an implacable juggernaut. He’d been having the stone children work on some steel armor for himself, despite the dampening effects it had on magic, and between those fine steel plates and his rampant healing powers, he was all but untouchable. Though he could use his boosting magic like titan’s strength on other people, he mostly just used it on himself, and that raw power was on display here. Every blow either crushed a skull or ripped an enemy in half.

There simply was no stopping him. The only ones who were nearly as strong as Matt now that his rage was overflowing were the stone children. They fought with oversized polearms and repeating spring-driven crossbows, but unlike his friends, they fought as a team, which was apparently a rare magic ability because, in a year of these crazy moments, he and his friends still hadn’t quite figured it out.

Maybe it just takes hundreds of years, he thought to himself wryly. Surely, Matt and Emma will be back on the same page by the time they go gray.

Despite all they’d done, they were still slowly losing ground. Those furthest to the front were caught in a near standstill, and even though Benjamin and Raja had a shooting gallery and were killing at least a score a minute, the green tide was getting closer and closer to them.

Benjamin fished around in his pocket and felt some of the charged gemstones in it. If he were to use all of those, that would probably take out a couple dozen, but it wouldn’t be enough to get him to the fissures, which he desperately wanted to freeze solid to stem the tide.

While he tried to figure out the best move, he had a moment of Epiphany. Why did he need to use the crystals he had on him when he was surrounded by crystals. Streetlights dotted every corner of the city. Part of him realized that if he stole the contagion protocol from his data leak spell and combined it with the life drain and a restructured detonation rune, he could probably blow out every light in the city.

If I had a real mana pool, he reminded himself.

It would take more like 30 mana to cast such a complicated spell, and he really shouldn’t be planning such complicated things on the fly. It might not be him who would die from his mistake, and there was no way that he could shield his friends from the impact either.

Though it wasn’t smart or even feasible, part of him still wanted to try for the challenge of it. He couldn’t help but imagine waves of concentric detonations as the whole grid of glowing crystals detonated in violent amber and white explosions.

Something more targeted might be a better choice, though. For a moment, he hesitated, and then he decided to pull the trigger. If he’d prepared this earlier, it would have been a cakewalk, but on the fly, he went for simple. He eyeballed the size of a crystal near the edge of his casting range. He changed the enchantment to reflect the larger mana capacity and made the trigger condition full mana. Then he spent the next several seconds draining his mana bar by dumping it into the crystal at the same time as he filled it up again by emptying his health bar.

By the end of that, he was down half of his life and feeling a little dizzy, but the thing was full. He had just enough time to wonder what he’d screwed up when it didn’t go off right away, and then the thing detonated catastrophically.

For a moment, he worried the thing had fizzled and he’d wasted 30 mana. Then it erupted in a blast of incandescent that was so bright that he was still seeing spots seconds after the last of the shimmering magical sparks had faded away to nothing.

Only then could he see the devastation that his improvised explosive device had wrought. The buildings nearest the thing were completely obliterated. That shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d used Arden’s mana batteries as literal demolition charges. What was surprising was the range. At least fifty goblins worth of pieces were painted across the buildings that were still standing. Beyond that, it was hard to say because the debris from the massive blast had blown out the lights for a ways in each direction.

Suddenly, he was glad he hadn’t tried to get fancy. If he’d rigged the whole thing for a chain reaction, well, he might have made the entire collapse and bury them all alive. That would have been one way to take out the goblins, of course, but taking everyone with them was simply too high a price to pay.

Benjamin upped his estimation of the danger of some of his plans and pushed forward, using vampiric bolt to fix some of the mana he’d lost while everyone else took advantage of the lull in the goblins that his bomb had created. The crowds were thinning out now, and he pressed forward toward where everyone else was, more than cognizant that he would be far less effective and far more at risk as everyone crowded together.

“Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?” he yelled as he tried to be heard over the din of battle. They’d probably killed a hundred goblins by now, but the things were still pouring out of their jagged rents like it was a busted pipe.

Emma ignored him, Matt probably didn’t even hear him, and Raja was too far away. In the end, the only one who bothered to respond with anything more than an angry glare was Phosdan, who said, “This can only be the work of the summoners.”

Obviously, Benjamin thought, though he wasn’t rude enough to say it. There was only one group that could have done this, but the question was why they’d done it now. Was this a random thing? Was it targeted? Did they have a way of tracking him, or perhaps one of the items he was carrying, like the Prince’s medallion?

He didn’t know, but as he sealed the smallest of the rifts with an adapted, overcharged application of chains of ice to turn the three closest goblins into a frigid cork, he knew they’d have to find out quickly.

There was the briefest of conversations there, and the divisions were laid out quickly. The stone children would stay here and mop up the stragglers, while the humans pushed deeper into the goblin lair to figure out what had happened.

Part of him knew that the plan was dumb because the smaller warriors were clearly the better choice when it came to tunnel fighting, but he didn’t care. There was no way that they were going to put Phosdin, Feldsparia, and all the rest in any more danger than they already had.

Besides, Matt had already pushed ahead without them, and they were going to have to hurry to keep up with his implacable killing spree.

“You want me to go with you or stay here?” Raja asked as Benjamin started to climb inside after Emma. “Not a lot of room for a bow in there.”

“You’re right,” Benjamin said, “But I’m pretty sure when we get to the surface, we’re going to need you and your arrow-powered missile launcher. So, maybe you should come along just in case.”

Raja brightened at that and quickly followed Benjamin into the dark. He had no idea this went to the surface, of course. This deep underground, it felt like he was crawling around in a giant, stinking ant farm, but this wasn’t an accident or a coincidence. Someone had done this, and Benjamin was fairly certain that whoever that someone was, they'd be waiting for the four of them on the other side of whatever hell they were about to crawl through to find their answers.

Ch. 95 - What in the Hell…

The ant farm metaphor only intensified in Benjamin’s head as they slowly fought their way deeper into the stinking pit. Besides his light spells, the only things he could see were the green Phosphorescent fungus that dotted the walls and ceiling in places, the beady red eyes of their enemies, and the trail of mangled bodies that Matt left behind as he struggled to catch up with him. The man had become a monster and was practically lost to reason at this point. Benjamin had given up yelling for him to slow down.

At this point, he only managed to catch up to him when he was fighting a particularly challenging enemy, which became more and more common in the depths of this place. Though the little buggers and their claustrophobic waves could be dangerous, one-on-one, even Benjamin could handle them with a sword. As the four of them slowly forced their way to the heart of the place, leaving hundreds of dead in their wake, larger monsters became more common.

First were the hobgoblins. They were nearly the size of a man but perhaps twice as strong as one. That still wasn’t strong enough to stop Matt from ripping off their heads or their limbs and using them as a weapon, thanks to his rage, though. It was only in the center of the giant mound, somewhere much closer to the surface than they’d started, that they found an enemy that finally gave him pause.

When Benjamin finally reached them and saw Matt and Emma squaring off against the giant thing, he wasn’t sure what to call it. A troll? A Megagoblin? The system helpfully provided the tag of goblinKing when he targeted it with a vampiric bolt, but the label didn’t seem fitting at all. It was a bloated, corpulent thing that was paler than the rest of its minions and covered in warts and boils. It was so large that its limbs were larger than any of his friends, and Benjamin doubted this thing had left its den in years. In fact, it couldn’t, he realized as he looked to the exits that diverged at random around the outside of the room.

He didn’t cast his spell, though. Matt and Emma were too close, even for the narrow beam of vampiric bolt. Instead, he shouted, “Matt, we have to work together!” as Emma came running up behind him to help.

Matt didn’t listen. Benjamin wasn’t sure he could right now, and as he charged forward, he wasn’t quick enough and was hit with the back of a giant hand hard enough to crack the stone wall he was knocked back against.

Could healing handle that kind of trauma? Benjamin wondered as he tried to think about how many bones that might have broken. He couldn’t say for sure, but the half-empty life bar was already refilling, so he’d take that as a good sign.

Ignoring Matt for the moment, he cast a level 4  hasten on Emma to give her the best part of a miniature to do as much possible while Raja struggled into the small cavern behind him to get in position to help the now blurring woman.

“Aim for the eyes,” Benjamin grunted as he tried to determine what his best move would be.

He would have said that he was worried about Raja hitting her by accident, but the way she flickered in the thin illusionary light, he wasn’t sure that anyone was capable of hitting her right now, by accident or on purpose.

Oh, the goblin king tried, but each time its bloated fingers closed around where she was to crush the life out of her, she vanished. In fact, she didn’t seem to move. She just disappeared and reappeared as she switched from pose to pose while she struck at it. For all her ferocity, though, none of her strikes seemed to go deep enough to cause real damage, but she was certainly pissing it off, and the way it was starting to flail around made him worry that it might bring the whole shit-encrusted cavern down on top of them.

“You’re not the boss of me!” Raja laughed even as he pulled back on his string. “Personally, I think Emma likes it when all eyes are upon her. I prefer to strike at the heart of the matter!”

Benjamin only realized what his friend's bad pun meant as the arrow left the bow and arced across the room. “No!” he cried out, but the words had barely left his mouth before the arrow exploded in the thing's chest. Raja had just shot the giant corpulent monster with shockwave.

The whole cavern shook from that, and a couple of stalactites fell from the ceiling, but that didn’t bring the place down. Strangely, it wasn’t enough to bring the giant goblin down, either. It roared in pain and rose high on its launches to charge the two of them. In all that time, neither Emma’s cuts nor Matt’s heroics had gotten its attention, but Raja certainly had, and even the magical equivalent of a rocket launcher to the heart hadn’t been enough to drop it.

Benjamin launched a level 3 vampiric bolt, certain it wouldn’t be enough, but he didn’t know what else to do. Chains of ice aren’t going to cut it, he thought to himself.

Mentally, he went through the list of spells he had, and he dismissed each of them as insufficient. He was about to jump back down the hole and yank Raja after him so they could stay out of reach for another few seconds at least, but before he could do that, or Raja could fire his second shot, a giant shard of rock that had to be at least two hundred pounds slammed into the things chest.

It took Benjamin as long to figure out that that was one of the fallen Stalactites and that Matt had thrown it as it did for the ugly behemoth to fall over. One second, it was bearing down on the two of them to crush them with its corpulence, and the next, its uncertain balance had been completely thrown off by the giant chunk of sharpened stone embedded in its chest. It died with a look of surprise on its face that Benjamin completely understood. He probably had a very similar look on his face as they hesitantly approached the thing.

“Which. Way?” Matt grunted, making Benjamin look at him for the first time.

The rest of them were spattered with the green blood of goblins. Only he was covered nearly head to toe in red from his own blood. Somehow, despite that, his hit points were almost full again. Benjamin didn’t know what to say to that. He was at a loss for words. He just pointed at the exit that looked like it had the biggest upward slope, and Matt set off again with Emma in hot pursuit.

“Sometimes they scare me,” Raja confessed quietly. Benjamin nodded, but didn’t say a word.

Over the next ten minutes, they fought all the way to the surface, and in all that time, they didn’t encounter anything half as nasty as what they’d just fought. In fact, by the end, there was barely anything left to fight. In less than an hour, they’d practically cleared out the entire goblin lair, which was insane but strangely true.

When they got to the surface, though, Benjamin could only gasp lungfuls of clean, fresh air as he tried and failed the stench of all of this behind him. While he did that, Raja explained, “None of this was here two days ago.”

As he spoke, he gestured at the giant, rock-strewn mound they were on top of. “All this… this was some meadows and a stream that wound around that way somewhere.”

Even in the evening light, Benjamin could see that he was right. The rocks were entirely different in both color and geology. Even the soil was an ugly rust-red color instead of the deep brown colors that was everywhere else.

Before he could comment on that, though, Emma called out, “Hey, I think you two better get over here. We found something.”

Despite their fatigue, both of them rushed up the slope to where their friends were, and on the far side of the mound, they saw what Emma had been talking about. The ugly chunk of rock that they stood upon was 30 or 40 feet tall, and even though it had replaced a small idyllic valley not so far from the entrance to Lasthome, it didn’t blend into the surrounding foothills at all. However badly it might stick out like a sore thumb, though, the green embers located on the other side near a crude stone altar stood out even worse.

“What do you think it is?” Emma asked. “Goblin magic? Do they have magic?”

Benjamin found it unlikely that they did, but where the Rhulvinarians were concerned, he was never going to say never. “No matter what the blood we’re covered in says, green almost certainly means rune magic,” he answered. “That probably means that that's the spot they summoned this mountain into existence from. Well, that’s left of it anyway.”

“How the hell do they summon a mountain anyway?” Raja asked, “And why don’t you have a spell for that?”

“Maybe one day I will,” Benjamin said as he started down the slope to investigate, with his friends right behind him.

That was mostly a lie, though. He might figure out how it was done, but he doubted very much that he’d ever be able to do it himself. His soul was simply too damaged for works that large. In fact, he was pretty sure that even a powerful mage with a functioning soul couldn’t do it on his own.

The big hint there was the bodies that were scattered around the still-smoldering summoning circle. Someone had done this, of course, but the fact that there were so many corpses behind meant they’d required more juice than any one man had to do it. Someone had used the lives of disposable slaves as batteries and amplifiers to make this happen. The big question was, why?

They approached the ring cautiously just as the last of the green fire faded away. The spell had been cast nearly an hour ago, and the fact that it had only now winded down hinted at the magnitude of the energies involved. He could see it everywhere, in the charred marks on the bodies and both the ground and the corpses, but they all ran through the altar itself by way of circuitry drawn in blood.

So this is what they really meant by blood magic, Benjamin thought grimly. To him, blood magic was just a few spells and an ability, but now that he had a much better understanding of mana dynamics and how large spells operated, it didn’t surprise him at all that the Summoner Lords used their castoffs for exactly this sort of thing. After all, isn’t that what Lord Jarris has threatened to use him for the first night they arrived?

The altar was somewhere between blood sacrifice and an impromptu switchboard. There were a number of gems nestled in amongst the carvings that might have been indicator lights, batteries, or fuses. On it and several of the corpses though, there were birds. No, not birds he realized as he watched them move and flutter from spot to spot.

Origami paper birds. The paper was dark and the folds were uneven, but they moved as if they were alive, and somehow that made everything even weirder.

He wasn’t sure what was going on. There was so much to unravel here. Most of the symbols were familiar to him, and the way they were sequenced seemed to make sense, but he took a few images using the heliograph protocol he’d built so he could study them further when he had time.

Right now, what mattered wasn’t how they’d worked but why they were here. Benjamin looked around, trying to figure out whether or not they were walking into a trap, but there seemed to be only corpses and questions, at least until one of the bird cocked his eyes and looked at him.

“Is it you? Are you him?” the thing asked that made it sound more than a little mad. “You must be. Your eyes are clear.”

Benjamin raised his arm to signal everyone else to stop as he looked around for the bomb that was going to blow him up and end their adventure once and for all. Instead, all he faced were more words as the small flock regarded him and then began to speak again.