Mage Tank

Nuralie and I waited for an hour in case our allies were on some sort of time delay, but moved forward with the assumption that the party had been split. Even though the Delve had no express time limit, it didn’t mean that individual sections weren’t conditioned on completing them quickly. It was better to use the time and scout at least.

When I checked the party interface everyone’s names were grayed out except for Nuralie. I was still paying the mana cost for keeping Shog summoned, although Life Warden was no longer active on Etja. I cast the defensive buff on Nuralie after confirming she’d accept it, then reached out with my aura. I used it to try and feel for the location of my missing allies but came up empty. Wherever they were, it either blocked my aura or was far enough away to be outside of the indeterminate–but very big–range of my passive. I couldn’t detect any sign of their presence with Soul-Sight either.

There was also no door or other entrance behind us, only more of the curving hallway. Absent a portal or other obvious way for everyone else to reach us, it seemed more likely that we were on our own for now.

The entire hallway bent in the same direction to the right of our original bearing, which we arbitrarily decided was east. Coordinated Thinker would allow us to stay oriented if it mattered. I took a deep breath and blew it out, letting my lips motorboat.

“Forward or backward?” I asked.

Nuralie peered up and down the hall, although she’d already looked it over a hundred times. She plucked at her bowstring with a nail. It vibrated like a harp but made no sound. I had no idea how the string stayed silent, but I also had no idea how the loson kept live frogs in her inventory. Nuralie sighed, her expression weary and resigned.

“We were facing north when we appeared,” she said. “We have no reason to prefer going south.”

I thrust my finger in that direction.

“Then we head north!”

Nuralie stepped into the vegetation that lined the hallway on either side and disappeared. I gave her a minute to stalk ahead of me, then moved down the hallway with Somncres balanced on my shoulder and Gracorvus in its targe configuration. I walked at a steady pace but didn’t hurry, giving Nuralie time to backtrack and signal me if anything seemed amiss up ahead.

The hallway was a whole lot of the same for the first fifteen minutes until a stairway opened up on my left, its entrance lit by rows of glowstones. Nuralie stepped out from between a pair of ferns and we both peered down into the stairwell, watching for any sort of movement or traps. None of Nuralie’s Sense abilities went off, so we decided to check it out, leaving a glowstone of the first step and marking the wall in case anyone caught up to us.

The stairs descended until we were several hundred feet below ground. The gentle illumination from the stones around us revealed evenly cut stairs without wear and clean of any dust or debris. We soon found the bottom, which was bathed in soft yellow lighting.

The landing opened into an underground chamber, its height taking up most of the elevation of our descent. It was filled with carefully manicured gardens, lush with bright flower beds of honey and vermilion. Bushes grew in sweeping rows, fastidiously trimmed and arranged to form perfect arcs. The hedges embraced a small pond sitting at the center of the space, its crystal-clear surface broken by blooms of blue-green algae. A meandering line of stepping stones led the way across.

Behind the bushes grew squat trees, their canopies as wide as they were high. Heavy fruits hung from their limbs beneath sharp leaves, bright blue and covered in small bumps that glistened as syrupy liquid slowly dripped from pinprick pores.

Symmetrical beams of light crisscrossed the chamber, filtering in through a skylight above and directed by a series of sparkling mirrors that enhanced and brightened the golden beams. A scattering of dust and pollen drifted through them so slowly they were nearly fixed, like tiny bubbles in amber.

Across the pond was a small basilica. Each row of hedges ended between a pair of colonnades that lined the paved parvis before its arched double doors. The building’s outer walls were lined with ornate windows set with opaque glass, its roof a series of small, pointed spires surrounding a wide dome at its top. The doors were open, and flickering light spilled out from within. The entire building radiated a sense of peace.

My eyes were wide as I looked over the visual feast. I hadn’t realized how draining the month-long maze had been with its tight corridors and endless, repetitive decor. Even the murals of the final section had been laid flat against walls in claustrophobic and geometric passages. The sight laid out before me now was like a six-course meal after four weeks of stale bread and potted meat. It was the most magical place I’d seen since my visit to the third layer.

Truly, it was a wondrous vision.

“Who do you think takes care of all this?” I asked. Nuralie’s eyes slowly glanced toward me.

“That is the first thing your mind turns to?”

“No, seriously,” I said. “Is there an entire staff of landscapers hiding in the walls?”

“Perhaps there are golems.”

I scanned the space, hunting for any animated garden gnomes.

“Think they’ll wanna fight?” I shifted my hammer on my pauldron. “This Delve has been terrible for my cardio.”

“We do not need to do cardio.” Pause. “Not anymore, now that we have our training stats filled out.”

“It’s mental training,” I argued. “Learning to adapt to the feeling of feeling like shit.”

“I do not think you need help with your pain tolerance.”

“Cardio’s different,” I said. “I hate cardio.”

“Then why are you upset?”

“Because I want to learn to love it.”

“You cannot torture yourself into loving something,” she said, looking at me like she’d just told me something that might hurt my feelings.

“Eh, speak for yourself,” I said. “What’s the move? Explore the church?” I pointed my hammer at the fat, blue orbs growing in the trees. “Eat some of that forbidden fruit?”

“Do not eat unidentified foods.” Her tone indicated that it wasn’t a suggestion.

Nuralie moved to the edge of the pond and studied the stepping stones. She walked over to a hedge and crouched, disappearing into its shadow. Soon after, she stepped out from a bush on the far side of the water. I followed suit by casting Shortcut. She winced at the loud crack it made when I appeared. I looked back at the stepping stones.

“Were they trapped?” I asked. She shrugged.

“Better to be safe,” she said, then disappeared into the hedge again.

I tapped my foot and waited, tossing Somncres into the air and catching it a few times. Eventually, I saw the loson step out onto the walkway behind the basilica’s exterior columns. She motioned for me to approach, and I floated through the air with Gracorvus, silent as a snail.

A subtle wind blew from within the church, refreshing my mind and filling me with a sense of tranquility. It smelled like spring flowers and freshly baked bread. Nuralie scoped out the interior and soon after gave the all-clear. I walked inside.

The space within was also lined with columns that reached up to support the edges of a domed ceiling. Each side of the room was molded into a half-sphere, equal in size to the dome at the center. It looked like the building was made up of five large, overlapping orbs. The walls were Corinthian, the windows edged with intricate brackets, and the floor a stunning mosaic of ivory and scarlet.

On the opposite side of the room were ribbed shelves rising to the ceiling into a triangular apex. They were filled with hundreds of glowstones, flickering like they were on the verge of calling it quits altogether. Before the rows of glimmering stones was a simple altar, its top angled to face us and brimming with harmonious appeal. We approached carefully until we stood before it, studying the carmine object sitting upon its cream-colored surface, gleaming with goodwill and a hint of danger. It glowed with a soul halo, gray and swirling as though buffeted by brisk winds.

It was a button.

A big, red button.

I scratched my jaw, pleased to feel the full beard that had grown in over the last few weeks. It was still short, but part of me looked forward to the process of growing it back out. I was still deciding how I wanted to shape it, but it wasn’t quite big enough for a trim yet.

“Obviously we shouldn’t press this,” I said. “But on the other hand, I wanna.”

Nuralie furrowed her brow. There was a line of text just above the button, carved into the stone surface of the altar. However, it was celestial and made my eyes ache when I looked at the letters. Neither of us could read it. Even my Spectacular Vernacular bonus didn’t seem to help. No matter how talented a polyglot one may be, it’s tough to pick up a language that melts your brain.

“Sense anything?” I asked.

“It is divine,” said Nuralie. “This entire building is sacred as well.”

Nuralie’s Inquisitor skill revealed entities profane or sacred to her deity. We’d been questioning whether that revealed it only to Nuralie, or to everyone else around as well. The wording made it unclear.

“Is that why everything feels like it wants me to care for myself and stay out of trouble?”

She looked at me, bemused.

“Yes?” Pause. “My experience of its sacred nature is more profound, though.”

“Sounds like good evidence to push the button.”

“Please do not,” she said. She walked away from the altar, looking down at the mosaic floor. She walked from one side of the room to the other, then all along the perimeter. “There are 64 living creatures beneath us, but they are unmoving.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Are they evil?”

“No.” Pause. “But that does not mean they are not hostile.”

I focused on the ground, trying to perceive any souls hidden beneath. Nothing showed through, even after concentrating on breaking illusions and stealth. I looked back at the button, raising the sensitivity of my Sight and studying the soul surrounding it.

As Nuralie continued to investigate the ground, I felt a tingle and realized that she was using her skill in Divine Magic for something. My Sage Advice evolution was trying to trigger, so I focused on the evo and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Always be kind. Please rewind.” I stroked my beard as I delivered the discerning insight.

Nuralie looked up and raised an eyeridge.

“I don’t think that Divine is the right angle here,” I clarified. “We should go back and look at it from a different perspective.”

“It is a Spiritual section of the Delve,” she said slowly. “And Dimensional. This is not a Divine challenge.” She turned back to the floor and I felt another invitation from Sage Advice to help her out, this time with Spiritual Magic. I ignored it for the moment since I only had 3 total charges and they took forever to come back. Instead, I focused on what we knew.

“The button has a soul halo,” I said. “The things in the ground don’t. It’s unusual for something living to not have any spiritual essence, so they might be connected.”

Nuralie nodded along, eyes running the length of the room.

“There are threads,” she said. “They are faint, but it is a web connecting them all together.”

“They aren’t true soul connections then,” I said. “Otherwise I could see them.”

“Then it is something that affects the spirit,” she said, “but that is not the spirit itself.”

“The web connects to the button?” I asked, eliciting another nod from Nuralie. “Then maybe the button channels the soul inhabiting it through the threads and into the living creatures.”

“Which is why they are dormant.”

“So, if we push the button–”

“They come to life,” she finished.

“Then I am still in favor of pushing the button.”

She frowned.

“There are 64 of them.”

“We’ve fought bigger groups. Besides, they might not be antagonistic.”

Doubt sprouted across Nuralie’s features so quickly that I worried she might pull a facial muscle.

“Yeah, okay,” I relented. “Maybe we should check everything else out first.”

Nuralie concurred, and we spent a couple of hours running over the church and the gardens outside. Nuralie took a few of the sticky fruits for study, took cuttings from the bushes, and picked several of the flowers as well. She held one out to me, a shade of red soft enough to border on pink. I accepted the gift and tucked it behind my ear. She looked me over with approval and we moved on, having found nothing else of note.

We continued down the hallway in the same direction, now traveling southeast. Eventually, the curve brought us south before gradually turning west. It was taking us in a big circle. After a little over twenty minutes of walking, we were three-quarters of a turn from where we started and found another stairwell. This one was dark, a wave of cold air billowing up from it.

We studied it for traps and surprises but found none and decided to descend. Its confines grew steadily darker as the light from the hallway fell away. The steps became rough and started to crumble beneath my feet, though Nuralie’s steps left no mark of her passage. Neither of us had trouble navigating in the gloom and avoided two spots where the stairs had collapsed completely, leading down into a pit with no visible end. We reached the bottom landing after several minutes, this one soaked in a shifting gleam of haunting blue.

The architecture of the basilica had been rounded and majestic, its environment flush with life and awash in a sacred aura. This space was dominated by sharp angles and thin points.

It was a cathedral wrapped in death, its essence odious and profane.