Chapter 480: Mine XVIT

Tasmin let out a long shuddering breath, her chains clattering loosely against her leather greaves as she collapsed back onto her heels.

She was completely exhausted, her muscles burning with lactic acid and her dark harness soaked in sweat and black blood.

Across the chasm, Brida slowly pulled herself up to her feet.

She let out a long wheezing sigh, raising a battered, armor-plated gauntlet to wipe a thick streak of black blood from her cheek.

She walked slowly over the smoking rubble, stopping beside Tasmin.

She looked down at the smaller panting woman, and for a moment, her wild battle-crazed face softened into a remarkably gentle expression.

"Hey," Brida murmured, offering a hand to haul Tasmin up.

Tasmin took it, letting Brida pull her to her feet.

"Good fight," Brida said quietly, looking out over the quiet devastated cavern.

She paused, and then let out another soft, tired breath. "Look... about the ledger and about Lord Silas."

Tasmin blinked, looking up at her.

"You found the nest, Tasmin," Brida said, her tone carrying a rare, solemn weight. "You tracked it through the seams. You held the bastard down so I could land the cleaver. I’m... I’m going to let you have the win. You report this to Lord Silas. Tell him you cleared the staging ground. That’s what sisters do, right? You deserve the reward."

Tasmin’s amber eyes widened in stunned shock.

Her heart tightened in her chest as a wave of overwhelming warmth washed over her, completely melting the competitive edge she had held all morning.

’She’s... she’s really letting me have it?’ Tasmin thought, a soft emotional flush rising to her cheeks. ’After all that bickering... after breaking through the wall... she’s stepping aside for me.’

Tasmin swallowed hard, her voice trembling slightly with raw gratitude.

"Brida..." Tasmin whispered, reaching out to touch the dented pauldron on Brida’s shoulder. "I... thank you. I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier. I shouldn’t have called you an ox, you really saved—"

Before the words could fully leave her mouth, Brida’s gentle solemn expression violently shattered.

A massive smirk split across the brawler’s face.

WHOOSH!

Brida kicked off the stone, leaping twenty feet straight up into the air and grabbing the jagged edge of the breach she had smashed through earlier!

She pulled herself up into the tunnel, poking her head back out to look down at Tasmin with a roaring hysterical cackle.

"GWAHAHAHAHAHA! ARE YOU DUMB, TASMIN?!" Brida screamed down into the cavern, clutching her stomach with laughter! "DID YOU ACTUALLY BELIEVE THAT SHIT?! YOU THINK I’M GIVING UP THE REWARD?!"

Tasmin stood completely frozen with her jaw slack.

"I’M TAKING THIS WIN STRAIGHT TO HIS BEDROOM, YOU SILLY BITCH!" Brida hollered, already sprinting down the tunnel toward the surface. "I’M GOING TO TELL HIM I CLEARED THE WHOLE NEST SOLO! I’M GETTING PREGNANT BY DINNERTIME! SEE YA, SISTER!"

Her heavy steel-toed boots echoed through the tunnel as she ran off at top speed, laughing like a maniac.

Silence returned to the cavern.

Tasmin stood alone in the center of the bloody pulverized hollow.

Her outstretched hand slowly lowered as her gentle touched expression hardened into a look of pure homicidal rage.

Her left eye began to twitch with such violent intensity that her eyelid felt like it was going to snap.

’...I really, truly, passionately hate you, Brida,’ Tasmin thought, her veins practically turning to liquid ice.

SHSHSHK!

With a soundless, furious hiss, Tasmin’s physical body dissolved entirely, melting into the pitch-black shadows pooling along the floor.

She surged up the vertical shaft at terminal velocity, determined to catch the brawler and slit her throat before she ever reached the Lord’s quarters.

Far to the northwest, nestled deep within the frozen jagged labyrinth of the outer crags, lay Mine XVIT.

Unlike the relatively modest and contained hollow of BVR Star, XVIT was a monster of a subterranean formation.

The cavern mouth was nearly sixty yards wide, opening into a colossal, sweeping chasm that descended miles into the subterranean crust.

Deep within the cavern, the darkness was entirely banished.

Standing at the front of the expeditionary column, holding her wooden staff lightly in one hand, was Goddess Eluned.

The former World Spirit didn’t carry a torch as she didn’t need one.

Her entire physical being was radiating a soft incandescent green luminescence.

The verdant light pulsed like a gentle, living heartbeat, bleeding into every shadow, illuminating the vast cavern with the warm vibrant clarity of a midsummer forest canopy.

Walking beside her, her scabbard slapping rhythmically against her leather-clad thigh, was Morwenna.

The Pirate Queen looked up at the ceiling, then turned her sharp amber eyes toward the glowing green woman beside her, letting out an annoyed exasperated click of her tongue.

She rolled her eyes so hard they practically caught on her eyelids.

"Do you really have to glow like that, you ridiculous light-weed?" Morwenna muttered, adjusting the fur mantle around her neck. "My eyes are burning... You look like a walking, overgrown dandelion."

Eluned didn’t flinch. She simply tilted her head, a serenely venomous smile curving her soft lips.

"Oh? Does my natural vitality offend your delicate eyes, Captain?" Eluned asked, her voice like honey and bells.

With a smooth practiced flick of her wrist, Eluned reached into the sleeve of her robes.

She pulled out a small crisp rectangular piece of enchanted parchment and held it up right before Morwenna’s face.

Morwenna’s eyes locked onto the image and her breath instantly hitched.

The parchment was an enchanted high-definition spiritual photograph that Eluned had quietly snapped early this morning before Silas had left the bed.

’She doesn’t know I have two... hehe~’

The image showed Morwenna lying completely, shamelessly naked across the velvet sheets of Silas’s master bedroom.

The duvet was pulled low, showing the smooth athletic expanse of her tanned back, the deep curve of her waist, and the flushed messy-haired look of complete vulnerable bliss plastered across her sleeping face as Silas’s hand rested comfortably against her bare hip.

An apocalyptic crimson blush exploded across Morwenna’s tanned cheeks, traveling all the way down to her collarbone.

"WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?!" Morwenna screeched, her tough ruthless pirate captain persona violently melting into flustered hysteria.

She lunged forward, her hand snatching at the paper like a striking viper.

SWOOSH!

Eluned’s hand blurred, retracting the photograph back into her voluminous sleeve with the casual fluid grace of a high goddess dodging a clumsy child.

"Ah-ah-ah," Eluned purred, swaying her hips playfully as she stepped just out of reach, her green eyes sparkling with mischief. "A lady should never destroy art, Morwenna... Especially art that proves our fierce sea-dog sleeps like a purring kitten when our Lord cuddles her..."

"I AM GOING TO CHOP YOU INTO FIREWOOD, YOU LEAF-BRAINED PARASITE!" Morwenna roared, her hand dropping to the hilt of her Tidebringer, her knuckles whitening as she prepared to tackle the goddess right into the dirt!

"Uh... Miss Eluned? Captain Morwenna?"

A small gravelly voice broke through the impending catfight.

Both women paused, their heads snapping toward the left wall of the cavern.

Standing beside a grounded colossal Phase 1 Titan Golem was a stout, clean-faced dwarven miner named Bodil.

The dwarf had her hand raised cautiously, holding a heavy-duty pickaxe in one hand while looking between the glowing goddess and the furious pirate with wide, nervous eyes.

"What is it, Bodil?" Eluned asked, instantly smoothing her expression back into a mask of divine, maternal composure as she smoothed the front of her robes.

"There’s... an issue with the survey, ma’am," Bodil said, pointing a soot-stained finger toward the cavern wall.

Morwenna frowned, walking over with heavy, aggressive stomps, her blush still faintly lingering on her cheeks.

"What issue? Did the vein pinch out?"

"No, Captain," Bodil replied, shaking her head.

She pulled a coarse wire brush from her belt and vigorously scrubbed at the dark stone wall, wiping away a thick layer of mineral dust and frost. "Look closely."

Eluned stepped forward, her ambient green light illuminating the cleared section.

Both women leaned in.

The wall didn’t look like ordinary basalt or granite.

Beneath the chalky dust, the material was terrifyingly uniform.

It was a dense seamless metallic mass that looked remarkably like a natural cave wall at first glance, but as the dust cleared, the truth was laid bare.

The entire cavern was not carved from stone.

...The cave itself was made of the alloy.

It was a vast continuous subterranean shell of an unknown high-density mineral that pulsed with a deep dormant mana field.

The metal was a dark iridescent slate-gray, laced with microscopic veins of pale silver that thrummed with ancient pressurized power.

"It’s a continuous deposit..." Eluned murmured, her slender fingers reaching out to touch the metallic surface.

She closed her eyes, feeling the staggering amount of the earth mana locked inside. "It isn’t a vein running through stone... The entire chamber is a hollowed node."

"Aye," Bodil nodded grimly. "And that’s the problem."

The dwarf stepped back, planted her boots firmly into the dirt, and brought her dwarven-forged tempered steel pickaxe back in a full two-handed swing.

TINK!

The sharp, metallic chime echoed off the walls.

Bodil lowered the tool, pointing to the point of impact.

There was no crack and there was no spider-webbing fracture line, hell there wasn’t even a dislodged fleck of dust.

The heavy master-forged steel pickaxe had left behind a microscopic hairline scratch barely an eighth of an inch deep, while the shockwave had sent painful bone-jarring vibrations straight up the dwarf’s forearms.

"It’s too hard," Bodil reported, wincing as she rolled her wrists. "Standard dwarven mining technique can’t crack the bleed-line because there is no bleed-line... The entire formation is uniform. If we try to mine this with standard tools, we’ll shatter fifty pickaxes before we fill a single golem bin."

Morwenna crossed her arms over her chest, tapping her boot against the floor as she scowled at the impenetrable metallic wall.

"Then we don’t pick at it like birds," Morwenna declared bluntly, her pirate instincts taking over. "If the box won’t open, you break the whole damn box. Let’s collapse the cavern... We bring the golem’s siege fists up, crack the ceiling, drop the entire chamber, and haul the shattered boulders back to Thora’s foundry to be melted down."

Bodil looked horrified. "Captain, you can’t! This alloy is tied into the tectonic foundation of the ridge! If you try to use blunt force to shatter a mass this dense, you’ll cause a seismic collapse! It’s too strong! You’ll bury us all alive before the metal yields!"

Eluned stood quietly, listening to the debate.

She turned her gaze upward, looking at the solid, eighty-foot-thick ceiling of metallic alloy and mountain rock that hung over their heads.

A faint serene smile curved her lips.

"Too strong?" Eluned whispered softly. "Nothing born of this earth is too strong for my Roots."

She planted the base of her wooden staff lightly against the cavern floor.

Eluned didn’t shout an incantation as she simply closed her eyes, exhaling a single gentle breath.

VUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

Deep within the mantle beneath their boots, something colossal suddenly woke up.

KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

A deafening earth-shattering detonation tore through the ceiling of the cavern.

The solid, eight-foot-thick plate of impenetrable metallic alloy and eighty feet of mountain granite above them violently ruptured outward in an explosion of pulverized dust and flying boulders.

Shooting straight up through the shattered ceiling and launching fifty yards into the howling, snowy air of the Umbral Basin was a colossal radiant emerald root.

The root was as thick as an ancient watchtower, covered in glowing green bark and pulsing with raw World-Tree mana.

It curved gracefully against the iron-gray winter sky, arching like the spine of a sleeping dragon, before plunging back downward through the mountain flank.

CRASH! KRRRR-GRIND!

More massive roots burst from the earth, wrapping themselves around the entire exterior and interior of the cavern like colossal, living wooden cages.

The roots squeezed, their divine fibers constricting with steady hydraulic pressure, perfectly stabilizing the fractured mountain while simultaneously carving clean massive slabs of the impenetrable alloy away from the bedrock without causing a single cave-in!

Out on the frozen surface of the basin, a pack of roaming corrupted beasts that had been stalking the ridge froze in mind-shattering terror.

They looked up at the colossal glowing emerald root towering against the blizzard, their crimson eyes wide with paralyzing dread.

What in the name of the gods was this apocalyptic power...?

And sitting silently atop a jagged, frost-covered basalt spire barely three hundred yards away, completely undisturbed by the howling wind, was a small solitary bird.

Its feathers were a mottled gray, blending seamlessly into the storm but it did not shiver.

Its sharp, unnervingly intelligent eyes slowly narrowed, locking onto the glowing roots of the World Spirit with cold precision.

The bird turned its head slightly, watching the emerald light pulse against the snow, and remained unnervingly still.

"Squawk..."