12 Miles Below

Greyroamers could outright swim through the forest like fish in a stream, and Kres had to keep himself steady, legs moving to the beat of the wolf sprinting under him. It didn’t tire out his wings, and his legs were strong enough to keep up with this pace.

The carrion the greyroamers had brought with them soon vanished down their gullets, the giants needing quite a lot more than Kres to keep moving. It didn’t slow down the mission greatly as Kres would take wing during those hunts and spot prey for them with far more ease.

By the time they reached the Great Tree, they found the area to be almost clear of the infestation. Almost, but not quite safe. The miasma was further off in a sloping valley, the spores floating through the air unable to climb up the mountain. It had been slowly eating up tree after tree to climb up, and the pace was clearly languishing. There was nothing to oppose it here, and so it hadn’t been in any hurry.

Silverfur watched the contagion from a tall rock, snarling slightly. “Danger.” He muttered.

Kres gave him an affirmative squawk. “Too close. Should deal with. Not sure if mission done in one hour or more.”

The greyroamer nodded at his side. “Ready.”

It was a thing Kres liked about their species. They seem to organize and understand each other almost instinctively. Plans were formed in a matter of seconds, from idea to execution. There wasn’t the lengthy preparations that the Odin favored, nor endless back and forth bickering.

So Kres took off from his perch, carrying with him the small explosives. The Seidr were in charge of crafting those along with other tonics and medicine, but this one recipe Kres had taken the effort to learn how to brew. Surprisingly, it was less alchemy, but instead craftsmanship. A surprise the Seidr were in charge instead of the Smiðja.

What made it so deadly was the very core of the explosive. A drop of power cell fluid. The very same might and power that fueled machines and even the Icon herself. All of it stemmed from the mite fountains, and so these explosives were the embodiment of mite wrath.

It made sense for them to be so catastrophic in result.

The infestation responded quickly to his approach. They weren’t stupid. Driven by madness, delusion and whispered words from the contagion - but stupidity wasn’t among the traits stripped away.

They knew an Odin flying above meant a bombing run. Plague bats flew out of the trees in a panicked cloud, including two hawks and other birds of battle who’d been dumb enough to be taken. Kres was used to having a team to work with, but he would have to make do with just himself. The only true danger came from the hawks.

He folded his wings into himself, then fell down like thunder, wings making micro movements to let him weave through the small cloud of enemies. He’d brought the right weapons for exactly this. His talon let go of a small metal rod, an elastic string keeping it tied to his foot. It trailed right behind him. At the right moment, he twisted himself around, letting the inertia lift the rod from its position behind him.

His current speed did the rest of the work, as the rod slammed into the side of a hawk’s wing, while he narrowly avoided the talons. Bonebreakers didn’t need to strike hard, and didn’t even need to kill. All he needed was to knock any hawks out of the air first. And the weapon did just that, breaking the hawk’s wing.

One down.

He lifted his dive back up, now long past the cloud of enemies. He flew as fast as he could forward, slowly climbing in altitude until he was over the valley where a dim tan fog flowed through the wilting trees. He had to deal with the second hawk to be free, and it would soon catch up to him.

Indeed it did, clawing random gibberish at him, beak wide open, claws extended out under, sheer fury and rage guiding its movements. Kres twisted on himself, letting the bonebreaker soar in an arc behind his foot, where it slammed directly on top of the hawk’s head, slamming the entire beast down. Not strong enough to smash the skull, but clearly good enough to give a concussion.

From there Kres barrel rolled in the air, forcing the bonebreaker to zip around and slam into the recovering hawk’s right wing. He could hear the weapon break hollow bones with ease. It was done, the hawk floundered in the air, dropping down like a stone.

Kres rightened himself, then began to pull upwards. His beak turned down to the instruments by his chest plumage and he yanked at a pull string, hearing the click and roll of one bomb delivered. He caught sight of it, zipping straight down at the diseased forest ground. Kres flew further up, following his training by near instinct now.

Right. About… now.

He turned his ascent into a dive the next moment, tucking his wings protectively over his chest, beak ram-rod straight at where the explosion would come. It was not even two seconds after he’d begun his dive.

Fire and destruction lit the entire forest, looking like a small blinding balloon. Kres was too far away for the heat and destructive force to damage him, but the following shockwave and air turbulence was instantly felt.

He knifed through the wave with little problem. The cloud of bats and birds chasing after him were not so lucky, flying near parallel to the explosion. Too close to the explosion, and with nearly full surface area exposed, the shockwave shattered and sprained bones en mass, and the air turbulence scattered them out of position, some losing balance completely and tumbling down into the flames.

What was left of the enemy was easy to slip past, and Kres launched another explosion. After that, whatever was left of the aerial defense had completely collapsed and Kres was free to bomb the infestation at all the critical nodes. Flames burned through the forest, clearing out the miasma and forcing whatever animals had survived to flee.

Those weren’t his to handle. Indeed, the greyroamers were already dispatching the disorganized foe, ancient human blades cutting feet and necks with impunity. No longer protected by the clouds, half burnt alive, and disorganized in the chaos, the greyroamers couldn’t ask for better prey.

In one afternoon, the infestation had been dealt with and all that was left behind was a slowly charring vale, which would be far harder for the infestation to retake.

He flew back and landed on the wolf’s perch, letting his wings rest from the ordeal. Five bombs had been used in total. He’d expected to use more, but the infestation here had been mild.

“A good fight.” Silverfur said, wagging to contentment. The blade he held in his mouth didn’t make greyroamers too much harder to understand thankfully.

Kres gave a nod, mildly tired and letting himself decompress from the few near-death moments. “Mission.” He said next. “I’ll scout.”

The greyroamers nodded, deciding to go on a quick hunt for some food in the sections of the forest that hadn’t been consumed yet, while Kres flew off to the Great Tree. It was hardly an issue to spot, looming over them all as it did.

The location the mites had sent had three coordinates to it, which meant it wasn’t simply a matter of place, but also height. The icon had told him to search for something about the height of a large tree, but it was more likely he needed to find something on or within the Great Tree itself.

He flew closer, observing for anything out of the ordinary. Up the giant trunk, silver platforms grew like nests grew on the hull of the icon. When he landed on them, he found nothing out of the ordinary. They were simple platforms, either as decoration or to help landbound move through the tree.

Near the base of the tree, giant roots extended out before forming up to the center trunk, all of them clearly resting on the silver giant cubes that were frozen in the air. But there was something that didn’t belong.

A flat panel of complete black lay on the ground, and Kres explored the oddity. The metal was almost alive there, veins of blackness moving across it like worms, as the entire thing was slowly… consuming itself? Kres wasn’t sure, but he could tell it had been larger before. There were indents on the ground that were far too straight to have been natural. As if the entire plate had been far bigger before, and had fallen straight down.

Kres looked up and found his target. Up inside the tree, there was something embedded right inside one of the thick roots leading to the tree trunk. Just about the height of a large tree, exactly as the Icon had mentioned.

A black cube of some kind, with one panel having been jettisoned down. There he found a metal circle of some kind, wires connecting it like silk strands to the side of the cube. It floated silently, empty. He flew up to it to search and only found more questions.

The circle was massive, and it was no small feat to fly from one end to the other. But besides floating within the remains of the black cube, moored inside by the thick cables, he saw nothing else.

A gigantic structure with little point.

Hours passed as he searched around for a possible clue to the mite construction living within the tree’s root. He’d even gone down to check the tower mentioned by the past Vindr. It wasn’t standing anymore, cracked at the base and toppled over, where one of the tree’s massive roots had passed over. It must have slowly pushed against the tower until the tower broke before the tree’s might. The rest of the crater under the tree was equally being reclaimed by the roots as they weaved through the floating silver cubes.

The greyroamers had made their temporary home here, building a small den in the ruins of the tower base.

“We stay.” Silverfur had told him, his tail wagging to determination. “Mission important. We see it to the end.”

Kres figured this was because he himself was to be aimless after this. And he still had plenty of bombs left. To a pack like the greyroamers having an Odin on hand to craft and use these was easily worth waiting a month. Not to mention his beak and talons could craft many things the poor landbound pack wasn’t able to make for themselves without hiring a ringtail.

Silverfur had seen an opportunity here, and he was perfectly willing to wait it out. Clever little beast.

It did take Kres a few days to figure it out. The giant construction didn’t have anything that looked like it would accept a cube, but that was because control over it wasn’t done there. He’d found a mite terminal built into a cavern nearby, where it conveniently had line of sight on the black half swallowed cube in the far distance. There, he’d found a pedestal with a single imprint, the same exact size of the cube he had. This was where Astrid’s crazy creation had to be placed. Kres knew it almost the moment he’d spotted it, flying right back to the greyroamers to report his finding. They followed quickly behind him, leaping through the rocks and mountain to get to the hidden cavern.

Kres wanted to wait, to study more the inner workings of the machinery here inside the cavern, but he knew that was the Odin within himself speaking. Silverfur simply asked him to place the cube, almost from the moment he walked into the cavern. Decisive as a people, the greyroamers were.

So he did, having one of the greyroamers lift him up so that he could properly set down the cube. Bulky thing for his beak, but his claw was enough. The moment the cube slid into place, it began to glow bright blue.

Nothing happened.

But Kres had a feeling it wasn’t here that anything was happening. Instead he turned his gaze to the black cube and it’s mysterious giant circle floating within it.

There had been a change there. Where before the circle was hollow, now there was a blackness, to which he couldn’t see the other side.

“What that?” The greyroamer asked, confused.

“Not sure.” Kres admitted. Another puzzle to the mite madness. “Will study.”

Silverfur gave him a nod, “Will defend. Clean up any stragglers.”

The infestation was scattered around, but they wouldn’t be for long. Once the survivors of the bombing regrouped, they would swarm around with whatever life force they had left, biting and trying to spread the congageon anew before the burns and inner damage ended their lives. But that ultimate swarm could be reduced greatly if the greyroamers constantly chased down anything they found. It also made for a good source of food, so long as the infested animals were fully roasted, and the bones avoided. Greyroamers were good enough to do that on their own without Kres to help them, though they didn’t prefer this kind of food.

Four more days passed and the blackness within the giant structure remained an enigma to the rogue Odin. Whatever it was, he needed to figure it out before the Gungnir arrived. It had been long enough for Tanik to come chasing after him. The only blockage the warrior priest might run into is getting a copy of the map location Astrid had provided.

Kres had learned a few things over those days. For the first, there were no controls within the mite cavern. He could only drop the cube on the pedestal, or pick it up. If he grabbed it, the blackness vanished, leaving only the metal circle. If he set it down, the blackness returned at the center of the circle, all the way to its edges. No direction seemed to matter to the cube.

Second, he learned that blackness wasn’t a physical barrier of any kind, but more of a veil. Any stone he threw at it was swallowed up. Vanishing. And it never returned.

He suspected this was a weapon of some kind, capable of destroying any matter put through it. Perhaps the mites had wanted them to wield this kind of power against the infestation? He couldn’t be certain.

The infestation was growing harder to manage, each day the greyroamers were running into more and more targets. Many of which were perfectly healthy, scouts of some kind from the mother colony. Silverfur predicted they had perhaps two or three days at most before the swarm fully materialized and raced across the vale to reclaim it all. Kres told them they wouldn’t need to worry, only to spot the swarm’s gathering point early enough, and he would expend a firebomb to deal with it.

That mollified the greyroamers significantly. The perks of having an Odin among them, who was armed to the beak.

Fortunately, they didn’t run into that problem. When the fourth day came, Kres found that the answer to the mite mystery hadn’t been his to discover. But rather, his to stumble on.

He’d thrown hundreds of rocks into the blackness, testing how it dealt with any kind of matter, from living animals, to plants and even insects. Everything he threw into it vanished forever, nothing came out of the maw.

Until the fourth day, when the glowing cube lifted from its pedestal, flipped around to one edge and slammed down back into place.

And then something came out of the blackness.