Chapter 75: Mausoleum

“I want to explore that place. But I’ll only take along volunteers; I won’t make anyone come with me,” Derek announced.

In lieu of a verbal answer, Ye-in’s hand smacked against the back of his head. He might have dodged, but he hadn’t heard her move over the sound of Atticus facepalming.

“You’d have to be crazy to go. And you know we’re all just as insane as you, when it comes to stuff like this.” She added with a brilliant grin. “The real question is: who’s staying behind to watch the ship?”

That was a good question. And one that left a deafening silence in its wake.

You could have heard a pin dro- … Derek’s head whipped around at the sound of a clatter, only to see Atticus picking a small sewing needle back up off the table.

The man shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

Derek snorted. “Well played.”

It wasn’t an answer, though, so things fell silent once more until Mimi spoke up.

“I’ll stay. I’m stronger in here than out there, and I can counter any exotic nonsense they throw at the ship,” she said, voice small.

“I promise, the instant we find something, we’ll come get you,” he declared.

“You know, we might be able to fly the ship over there …” Atticus suggested, offering the one option Derek had seriously hoped wouldn’t come up. Because his argument against it was incredibly weak, yet instinct told him it would blow up in their faces. Or rather collapse under their feet.

“I’m getting a very bad feeling about what’d happen if we tried that. We’d be sitting ducks and fall out of the sky the instant main propulsion got hit.”

Which was unlikely, but something deep within warned him that just that would happen if they made the attempt.

Yet Atticus shrugged. “Point taken. Then we can just clear the path, and she can follow us with the ship.”

That might actually be the solution …

“So, we’re doing this?” Derek finally asked.

***

Two hours later, Derek, Ye-in and Atticus were trudging across the frosty highlands, straight towards the location of the bunker.

Well, Derek was trudging. Ye-in was doing something more along the lines of a proper military march, confidently striding forward, tower shield on her back, longsword at her side, looking ready to knock some heads together.

As for Atticus … well, the closest comparison Derek could make would be an unholy hybrid of a toddler on a sugar rush and a cat with the zoomies, silently zipping back and forth ahead of them as he “scouted.” Which mostly just wound up being him gutting whatever random creatures crossed his path.

When he wasn’t facing a horde, and could choose the moment of engagement, he could apparently be pretty lethal.

All three of them were wearing what the armory had designated as scout-armor, built for mobility with segmented armor plates, complete with unobstrusive pockets meant for any random findings they might want to carry along with them. They also had directional lights built into them at various points, to shine either where the wearer’s head was turned, where they were pointed, behind them, or anything else one might want to set up.

Though Ye-in was the only one using them, Atticus had excellent night vision on his own, and Derek was once again borrowing the sight ability of the Cosmic Leviathan.

It was pretty quiet, all told, but Derek knew better than to voice that out loud. Hell, even thinking the “q-word” made him cringe internally. He’d spent too long being taught the basics of space warfare by actual sailors.

But he’d rather spend a bit of time worrying while effectively being escorted by the others than wind up having to fight his way through another horde. Or whatever you called a huge group of eldritch monstrosities.

A confusion? A chaos? Or maybe a clusterfuck?

Derek snorted inwardly. He most certainly wouldn’t try to make that a thing, no matter how funny an idea it was. Every species of animal having its own special kind of name for their group was one of the most fundamentally idiotic Aspects of the English language.

It had started with medieval hunters of the asshole aristocrat variety wanting a special kind of lingo to suss out any “low-class impostors” that might tag along with their hunting trips and only gotten more ridiculous from there. He certainly wouldn’t be expanding the practice into the modern day, even if Derek was fairly certain that some bellend had already gotten started on that nonsense long before he’d ever even been born.

Ahead, he saw Atticus suddenly come to a dead stop, the instant cessation of movement far more noticeable than his constant motion had been.

Instantly, Derek reshaped his [Aura], sending it washing past the other man and through the hill he was standing on to look for whatever he was looking at.

He wasn’t skilled enough with seeing through it to achieve the same clarity of vision he could with his eyes, but he did get a decent look at it, granting him three vital pieces of information.

The creature was big.

The creature was an eldritch monstrosity that wriggled uncomfortably with limbs stretching off into directions the human mind was not built to comprehend.

And lastly, he had its exact location.

Dramatically raising his hand as he cast his latest spell creation was utterly unnecessary, yet felt oh so right as mana began to gush out from him.

One second, two seconds, three seconds … and now the trap was unescapable as the ground bulged up around the creature and it vanished from his [Aura’s] vision, simultaneous with Atticus jumping in shock and the ground underfoot trembling very slightly from the reverb of the explosion that had atomized their enemy before it could do more than glare menacingly at their scout.

Spatial Collapse (spell)

Explosions become far more damaging when they happen in an enclosed space. And this explosive spell brings its own enclosed space along with it.

First, it will warp space around the target to ensure that no matter which way they face, they will always be facing the densest nearby object.

Second, it will temporarily delete the space between the atoms of the innermost layer of the prison, forcing them so close to each other that they repel each other with explosive force, unleashing a wavefront of fire and force towards the center.

Third, the caster watches as the temporary walls retract and the atomized remains of their foe blow away in the breeze.

This spell is a sufficiently delicate working of magic that it cannot be cast upon an enchanted or inherently magical target (such as the body of a System-empowered sapient). The size of the targeted area can be freely scaled up or down depending on need, as can the degree to which the atoms are forced together (experimentation recommended).

Cost: 300-15,000 mana

Admittedly, it was three times the cost of [Spatial Detonation], both the minimum and maximum, but the concentrated force of the explosion let it actually live up to the promises made by the description.

Ahead, Atticus flashed him a thumbs up without turning around, then waved him and Ye-in over … while pointing in very much the wrong direction. Derek sniggered briefly. Then he caught sight of what the other man was looking at, and it took his breath away.

Instead of yet another lifeless barren expanse, they were greeted by a scene of utter carnage … or rather, that was what it had to have been, decades ago.

Old scorchmarks that would have been washed away years ago if the planet’s weather hadn’t been crippled by the transformation.

Deep scratches and clawmarks that clove stone and were occasionally decorated with splashes of purple that Derek was almost certain were blood.

And, of course, the clearly artificial structure that had been the center of the monstrous assault, a pair of metal doors that could have belonged to a shipping container by size, visibly bent outwards, showing that they were at least twenty centimeters thick and had been designed to be sealed shut with bolts as thick as his forearm.

All around them were countless scratches and gouges, so many the rock looked less like a cliff face and more like freshly churned farmland.

And slightly off to the side sat a platform of black stone, serving as the ceiling of the visible bunker, gleaming like obsidian yet scuffed in the center where something heavy had landed and/or taken off repeatedly, leaving Derek to assume he was looking at a helipad, or maybe somewhere meant for a spaceship to land. A small one, no bigger than two times the size of their Dragonfly.

“We might be able to bring the ship over here, if that thing is as tough as it looks,” he suggested. “Once we figure out what that is, at least.”

The object in question was a block of something that had been exposed by one of the corners of the landing pad having been sheared away. A dull black thing that tickled something in the back of his memory, but he wasn’t quite sure of what. Weird, but not eldritch weird. And trying to analyze it from the perspective of [Starship Upkeep] told him that it was a “non-functional computer.”

Or something.

Atticus all but teleported over to it, pulling out his phone and running it over the “device.” The scanners in their phones were utter crap compared to anything more dedicated to information gathering, yet they were also not “better than nothing,” and could be helpful. On occasion.

Only Atticus stuck his phone back into his pocket with a look of disgust a moment later.

“Okay, scanner’s busted. It says this thing …” he nudged it with his boot, “… is just a solid block of carbon.”

But then why did [Starship Upkeep] insist it was a piece of tech, a computer no less? Derek was much more willing to believe his friend’s phone had glitched than that there was something up with the [System] … yet it was entirely possible that both were correct.

They were looking at the remains of a computer, made entirely out of carbon. Because carbon was an absurdly versatile element, which could be built into all sorts of molecular structures, from diamond to graphene, from carbon fibre to nanotubes. Some of those were electrically conductive, others were excellent if impractical insulators.

In theory, that was all you needed to build a piece of tech.

In practice … it’d be a pain to make and an even bigger pain to repair. There was a reason why “all carbon electronics” were the sort of idea that might cross your mind the first time one learned about how carbon could be made to conduct electricity, only to be dismissed the instant one thought about the real-world implications.

Yet the aliens had clearly thought otherwise, because they were, well, alien. Different species, different brains, different patterns of thought … it wasn’t without reason that multi-species research projects had a tendency to end in fistfights.

He slowly walked over to it himself, squatting down next to the damaged section. Then, he poked it with his finger and cast a very dialed-down [Lightning Bolt] into it. A nine-volt battery would be a nuclear reactor compared to what he’d reduced the spell to, allowing him to at least attempt to follow the lightning’s track through the device.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

It wasn’t exactly the best way of analyzing a piece of tech; even at extremely low power ran the risk of breaking something, and couldn’t give him concrete proof of anything, but it did show that there were some very funky things going on with the device’s conductivity.

Sweeping his [Aura] through the rest of the platform revealed nothing else of note, and he relaxed.

“I think that might have been some kind of automated guidance system for landing spacecraft, but it’s broken, and I can’t see anything else that might cause an issue.”

“I’m more worried about the ground giving way again,” Atticus said. “We just got the ship fixed.”

“It’s solid as far down as I could scan. And it’s clearly been used before,” Derek pointed out, gesturing to the marks clearly visible near the center of the platform.

“I’m just saying,” Atticus shrugged. “But I’m flying the ship. We’re doing this carefully.”

***

Half an hour later, the Dragonfly set down lightly on the landing pad, and Derek marched out quickly, marveling at how cool the ground underfoot was. Whatever this material was, it had dispersed the heat at a genuinely absurd rate.

Slower than its typical human equivalent, granted, but those used magic to achieve that effect. This was just raw mastery of materials on a level humanity had barely even thought to attempt. Or, at the very least, gotten beyond the theoretical stage.

If there were any aliens still alive, they’d likely find themselves inundated with questions once the rest of humanity learned of their existence. Yet … if there were any, they’d have shown themselves, wouldn’t they? Even if they’d missed him, Atticus and Ye-in walking up to the bunker, they couldn’t have possibly overlooked the arrival of the Dragonfly.

And it should have been obvious that they weren’t dealing with yet another variety of eldritch bullshit, because that was very easy to identify as being something wholly unnatural.

Taking a deep breath, he began to walk down the stairs that led to the entrance, [Aura] sweeping his surroundings with such intensity that he liked to think that not even an errant microbe would be able to escape his notice, only a distant part of his mind noting that the stairs were sized for a species quite a bit smaller than humanity, making them one hell of a tripping hazard. The doors were comparable to the human “standard,” however … hopefully, that wasn’t a matter of an oversized freight entrance, and the rest of the bunker would fit him and his friends just fine.

Stepping up to the bent and broken doors, Derek made one final check of the translation gear he had equipped. Earbuds, loudspeaker attached to his collar to broadcast the alien language, assuming the software had figured it out, translation program in his phone …

This would be oh so easy if he had the [Omniglot] [Skill], which was available to everyone … but you needed to reach the 4th Evolution for that, and Level 100 was still quite aways away.

For now, he’d have to pray that his phone and the computers back on the ship it was connected to would be able to sub in as a translator.

Unless they were all dead in there. Derek slapped down the idea that that might be a good thing the moment it tried to crawl up from the part of himself he did his damnedest to keep locked away. It would have made things oh so easy, so very much less awkward … he bit down on his lower lip with enough force that he was surprised he wasn’t tasting blood.

Should he create a [Skill] to block intrusive thoughts? Could he? It’d be a bad idea, yet feeling the knot of guilt lodged in his gut from a mere errant thought, it was tempting to try …

In lieu of hashing that out, Derek instead hauled himself into the opening, using [Aspect Integration] to let his flexibility match that of the Cosmic Leviathan and make the effort much less of a chore. Behind him, he could hear Ye-in mutter curses in Korean as she followed, though neither Atticus nor Mimi seemed to have similar trouble.

Though after ten seconds or so, they were all inside, even if Ye-in was still looking a little pissed.

“No one goes anywhere alone; we stay together and keep going until we’ve explored every room,” Derek ordered, as though he hadn’t given the exact same instructions several times on the way over.

And then he began to creep forward, looking into the first room on the left … and promptly jerked his head back, curse dying on his lips as the full reality of what he was looking at was sinking in.

For what was in that room was not only the first body, but also a whole lot of things that were likely supposed to be on the inside were instead covering the walls. The fact that they were doing so in some kind of pattern was only making it all the worse.

Derek couldn’t read the writing; he couldn’t even begin to start trying to translate it, yet it didn’t take much to identify the pattern.

The being hunched over against the far wall, resting on hands and knees, head low, long-since desiccated by time, had written on the wall, always the same thing, over and over again.

If these people wrote from left to right, top to bottom, the same way humans did, it had started with some manner of proper writing implement, then switching to some kind of bodily fluids other than the purple goop he was assuming to be blood. And then blood had become the medium of the message, painting those same words on the walls, again and again, until eventually, the creature had simply … stopped, halfway through yet another repeat, and fallen there, in a manner oddly reminiscent of kneeling in prayer.

Or, perhaps, that had been on purpose, a dying being choosing a pose to adopt upon realizing their death was imminent?

Derek swallowed. It was depressing either way.

Behind him, he could hear Ye-in bite back a curse of her own, and a shocked gasp that had to be Mimi.

Atticus, on the other hand, asked the question that should have been at the forefront of all their minds.

“So, we thinking this is an ‘exposure to the eldritch makes go mad’ thing, or a ‘couldn’t handle the end of the world’ thing?”

“Regular psychological trauma …” Derek said flatly, only to belatedly add, “… I hope.”

It wasn’t like they could do anything about it if it was a fundamental issue with the planet.

He reached up and grabbed the camera at his lapel, twisting it side-to-side to ensure it caught everything, feeding it into the ship’s computers to start the translation process. For all that an endlessly repeated series of words would help.

And then, he stepped inside to get a closer look at the body, no longer quite as worried about inadvertently disturbing the scene, now that he’d gotten it on video.

He instead needed to get a good look at the remains. Respectfully, of course.

Whoever this being had been in life wasn’t immediately apparent, though certain things could not change through decomposition alone.

The alien was short, though not quite as short as the size of the stairs would indicate, topping out at a little under one and a half meters, wrapped in some manner of garb that bunched up like a scholarly robe around the torso and hips, yet were incredibly tight below that. In life, they’d have likely clung to the legs like some kind of gimpsuit.

In the meantime, the face, insofar as Derek could see, what with it being heavily decayed and smushed against the ground, was bizarre. A front row of teeth that curved inwards like what one would see from a shark, while the molars seemed almost human, and unless he was very much mistaken, he could see hints of a second jaw inside the mouth, like what moray eels had. So they could clamp down on prey with the inner pair and bite them to death without having to release their target every time they opened their mouth so they could chomp them once more.

What the hell do these guys eat? Derek wondered, jerking his head back with a start.

Though before leaving, he made sure to note that this alien, at least, had six fingers, which was perhaps a more relevant piece of information than it might seem at first. For every known species in the universe had mathematics based on how many fingers they had. Like humanity and its base ten measurements.

And knowing that the aliens used base twelve maths from the start would come into play in all sorts of ways, though most of the benefit would be for the computer alone.

“Make sure to focus on taking a video of anything that has both writing and images,” he ordered.

Once again, this was the obvious way to proceed, standard practice not only since well before he’d been born, nor since meeting aliens had become likely, but since the idea of alien contact had been considered.

But somehow, the idea of not saying anything, or, worse, letting out some generic platitude about “being careful” felt way worse.

Together, they headed around to examine the first room on the right next. That one turned out to be almost entirely empty, save for a few evenly-spaced concrete slabs that looked to be the right height for a bed, at least for the locals. For your average human, they’d be perfectly sized tripping hazards.

The scraps of fabric covering them also lent credence to the “bed” theory, but overall, it was in no way helpful, so they quickly moved on until they were stopped by Mimi, who gestured at something protruding from the ceiling, right next to a recessed door that opened up into an absurdly narrow corridor.

“This looks like an emergency exit sign, and there’s a tunnel through there that looks like it was built to be collapsed from either end in case of emergency,” she announced, a wave of her hand and burst of magic lighting up what Derek assumed to be some manner of artificial fault lines racing through everything beyond the opening.

“That sign’s a little low, isn’t it?” Atticus asked. “Was the architect getting kickbacks from the local concussion clinic or something?”

“It’s not too low for the locals,” Derek said. “And that looks like writing, next to the sign. Might help the computer get started on the translation.”

Though it wasn’t like they knew what the lettering actually said. It could mean everything from “emergency exit,” as seen all throughout human space, to “run through here in case of emergency.”

Or it could be something entirely different, like “sign will glow red to indicate the emergency exit has been collapsed.”

Or even “if you are currently on fire, please extinguish yourself before using this exit.”

You never knew with aliens. And there was every chance the entire bunker didn’t contain enough reference material to allow them to decode their language.

They headed onwards, but not before Atticus laid behind a spell that would alert them if something tried to come in through the emergency exit, and they also made sure to seal the door.

Four more rooms later, they were done with the top floor and headed down, along an incredibly wide ramp that had tiny sets of stairs running down along either side. Between the fact that the ramp had clearly been built for smoothness, and the winch at the top end, it certainly seemed like cargo containers were meant to be slowly sent to slide down/get winched up along it. Another entry for the “huh, that’s weird” file, but nothing beyond that.

The second floor was very similar to the first, minimalist rooms that were clearly the equivalent of kitchens, bedrooms, offices, etc. … at least until they found their second body.

It was similar to the first in that it confirmed the various biological features that had caught Derek’s eyes on the first one, except this one’s manner of death was far more obvious.

An oddly-shaped but still recognizable handgun in the figure’s left hand, a small hole in its mouth and a much larger hole in the back of its skull, and the wall behind it being painted with blood and brain matter spelled out the story quite clearly, even if no one was quite willing to voice it out loud.

“Once we’ve catalogued everything, we’re burying these people,” Derek decided. “If we haven’t figured out what their culture has for funerary rites, we’re going to do our best.”

There was a long moment of silence before Mimi spoke up.

“I don’t think we should bury them here,” she whispered. “This world drove one to insanity, and the other to suicide. They should be able to leave it in death.”

“Scans first. If we bury them in a way that doesn’t allow researchers to dig them up again, they’re going to come after us with torches and pitchforks,” Atticus pointed out, then gestured at the blood spatter. “And we can get tissue samples from that. No, scratch that, we have to. We’d never hear the end of ‘ruining the scientific opportunity of the century,’ and all that.”

Derek sighed. Not something he’d have immediately thought of, but certainly something that needed to be considered.

Then, they headed down to the third floor. More of the same, but with four more bodies that just seemed to have lain down and died on their beds, without any signs of trauma that they could identify.

It felt selfish and insensitive to be concerned with the potential reaction of the scientific community at this junction … and it absolutely was, which hardly helped the gnawing guilt of marching through this tomb of horrors.

Eventually, on the fourth floor they passed a bookshelf, then, the tomes resting upon it shockingly human on the outside, but trying to scan it revealed that the pages within were incredibly stiff.

Like papyrus without the feeling of fragility, according to Atticus, though Derek had no earthly idea where he might have gotten experience with the medium.

A good thirty minutes of rote scanning later, the computer had several thousand pages worth of words to chew through, but was still yet to produce even a single actual translation.

Derek sighed. They really did need to find some kind of starting point. With the kind of computer support and high-quality software they were playing with, they wouldn’t need a Rosetta Stone; something as simple as a picture of a dog with a tag that said “dog” might potentially be enough. Anything, really.

Fifth floor.

This one was rough, practically filled with bodies, compared to the ones above.

Some were even thinner than the first few that had been found, leaving Derek to suspect starvation. Others were sitting or lying down next to cups that stank something awful, but failed to set off an alert when he scanned them. He still suspected suicide by poison for those, but it seemed the toxin was of the “interfere with specific portion of species-unique biochemical process” variety, rather than something more generically dangerous, such as chlorine.

More books to scan, more signs whose names felt like they should be at least somewhat self-explanatory, and more scenes of tragedy that he was rapidly growing numb to.

It was the sixth floor when things finally changed.

“Did the printer explode or something?” Atticus asked, putting into words what they’d all been thinking, staring into a sea of the aliens’ oddly stiff paper, all with various stuff printed on them.

“Or something …” Mimi offered, voice soft, hand pointing at something in the far corner. A device sat there. Clean, off-white pages ready to receive information were stacked high on one end, while the floor on the other was strewn with ones densely packed with writing, even one stuck halfway out of the machine.

A printer, clearly.

What was equally clear was just what had interrupted its process. There was a body sprawled across the floor beside it, having buried a power cord under itself, and yanked the plug out of the wall when they’d fallen on it.

Of course, the plug in question was some kind of three-pronged claw-thing that seemed like it had initially been designed to gouge out eyeballs, but it was still recognizable thanks to the context.

“Whoever that was must have worked themselves to death trying to get all this printed, but I have no idea why,” Derek suggested.

“I think I might know,” Ye-in said as she straightened, holding one of the few pieces of paper that looked to have been deliberately placed outside the door, rather than haphazardly strewn across the place like everything else. “Does this look like a language primer to anyone else?”

“It doesn’t not look like one,” Atticus shrugged, clearly hedging his bets.

Derek disagreed. It most certainly was a language primer; the combination of writing and pictograms didn’t seem like they could be anything else, and the placement next to the door felt deliberate, especially contrasted against the chaos that was the rest of the room.

Which threw up the question of who the hell it was for, though … these people had computers, advanced material science, and paper that had survived perfectly intact in conditions that had mummified the sapient inhabitants of this planet. The only people liable to need a primer to understand the language were … well, it wouldn’t be anyone from this world, that was for sure.

In other words, this had been put here for aliens that came across this place. Them, basically.

And wasn’t that a mindfuck …

“Okay, I guess we have a lot of scanning to do, once we’ve cleared the rest of the bunker,” Derek announced. Though, considering they were on the lowest floor of the bunker, there likely wasn’t very much else to discover.