Chapter 290 B4 Chapter 46 - Destroyed Level

If not for the cracks in the reddened levelstone puffing foggy air, the blight would have been just about unrecognizable.

Nothing remained. The abundant vegetation that had created a cozy alcove for Boblin to live in had disappeared, probably by the effects of something violent. The ground consisted not of red soil or dirt, but pure levelstone, as if the soil itself had simply been deleted out of existence. Snapped bits of tree bark and tiny clumps of redsoil lay here and there, left over from whatever disaster had destroyed the level.

“Oh, wow,” Alda said next to Vivi. “This is the fourth level?”

Vivi’s mouth hung open, while a slingshot launcher was being aimed at an ethereal aura a few hundred feet in the distance. With the landscape perfectly open, Vivi could spot at least five dozen auras close and far away. All of them were alerted of the live ether cores that had just appeared, turning their heads in Vivi’s direction.

“Alda… You haven’t seen the fourth level before, have you?” Vivi asked.

“No,” Alda said. “I heard it was a wasteland, but this? What in Ythar’s… No, what in Noxbryn’s damned creation is this place?”

”It wasn’t like this a month ago,” Vivi said. “This used to be brimming with vegetation. Poisonous vegetation, but it was still alive. It’s like…” Like what? What could have done this?

“It’s like a tsunami ate everything,” Cael said, awe and fear mixed in his voice.

“That might just be what happened,” Anthony said. “The eighth level suffered a similar fate at the start of storm season. The soil itself was ripped free and reanimated.”

“Wouldn’t there be more monsters in that case?” Alda asked.

Anthony regarded all the auras in their surroundings. Most of them seemed to be ghost blades or mere clumps of burning ether—monsters that spawned when the surges had no hosts to use for reanimation. Each one wielded enough ether to kill a maxed out inexperienced fighter, but the wandering monsters were by no means the creations of a level-breaking disaster.

“Looks like a surge or a storm broke here after the disaster,” Cael said, coming to the same conclusion. “Those aren’t the usual monsters of the blight, are they?”

“No, the blight’s hosts spawned odd amalgamations,” Vivi said. “There were never hostless monsters. The blight always had something to reanimate. The soil if nothing else.”

In a way, the ghost blades and hostless monsters were less disgusting than the amalgamous creations Vivi had to deal with when stuck on the blight, and they’d probably be easier to kill as well. Feng, one of the slingshot operators, aimed his launcher with the laser pointer and killed the nearest monster in one clean shot.

The implications, however, left them with one clear problem.

“So, if the whole level used to be full of hosts, and that’s all now gone…” Alda said. “What the hell has been reanimated?”

More snaps resounded as weaker monsters kept dying. They pondered that silently.

“Another behemoth?” Vivi asked.

Anthony’s frown didn’t look happy. “The behemoth wasn’t created by a tsunami. Its spawn point shows merely a crater in the sandstone. This, however…”

“A strong tsunami would sweep away the monsters it creates regardless, would it not?” Cael said. “It might just be a bunch of smaller monsters.”

“I pray to the gods that you’re correct this time, damnit!” Alda’s aura flared, as if ready to fight. “And I pray to Ythar that he actually knows how to deal with this mess. Vivi, how far was our way up again?”

“Two hours of walking if we move swiftly,” she said. “Lucius, give me the directions.”

“Straight ahead,” he said and accompanied the words with a mental direction, like a slight pull drawing Vivi’s attention in a specific direction. She took the first step, and everyone followed.

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Behind her, Suanna, a tall woman with thick horns and a slingshot launcher on her shoulders, was saying, “Season’s so chaotic that the fourth level is destroyed, and now’s the first we hear about it!”

She received a few amused snorts, as if it had been a joke. The type of disbelieving smiles one gave when the situation was just too absurd to take seriously.

Vivi pushed the facts to the back of her head. Traveling here could be deadly, if only because they didn’t know what was happening. But they had to get to the third level, and they had to hope that the upper levels weren’t demolished as well. If the teleporter in Frievania’s ruins was also destroyed, the trip to the surface would be prolonged by weeks of walking, which they lacked the rations for. There wouldn’t be much to scavenge if the level had been ripped apart to this extent.

The one positive was that, with all vegetation and dangers of the blight cleared out of the way, advancing forward was considerably easier. Everyone had to protect their boots from the heat with ether and laying a backpack on the ground seared the fabric, making the one break they took rather uncomfortable.

To save missiles, Vivi killed as many monsters as she could with Dawnpour’s shockwaves. The range was lower, and the shockwaves weren’t as destructive, but the monsters weren’t strong enough to withstand the force.

Two hours later, the exit loomed in the ceiling, and Vivi was happy to see that the trip through the blight was amongst the easier parts of the coming journey, much thanks to the fact that they didn’t meet whatever the disaster had reanimated.

The hole up to the third level was much shorter, though a lot more cramped. Vivi had to take off her armor to crawl up the crack between the levels. She’d already taken the path twice.

Please, let the third level look normal, she pleased in her head.

She couldn’t have been happier when moist and dirt-stained moss still grew on the upper side of the crawl space, almost blocking the entrance. She pushed the growth aside, and was met with a swampy smell of water and muddy vegetation.

The eastern side of Frievania was cavernous with a low ceiling, but much livelier than Vivi would have assumed from the third level. The swamp had more water than mud, each step submerging into the moss. The trees grew low, and their leaves were closer to black than green. That, combined with the permanently dim daylight gems, gave the third level an eerie atmosphere akin to the blight, just without the poison and hideous animals. To her right was a larger puddle of standing water, disgusting by all means, but the frog that hopped from dark lilypad to the next looked perfectly normal.

Some three hundred feet in the distance lay Frievania’s collapsed moss-covered walls.

The city had never been a grand fortress. The low ceiling didn’t allow for that. In its prime, the city had looked like an overgrowth of moss. Humans purposefully grew moss and vine on city walls to dissuade surges from reanimating them, since they hadn’t invented proper surgeways yet.

Today, the amount of collapsed stones overwhelmed the swamp. Moss had been ripped off from the walls when the storm pillaged the city, and no further measures had been taken to prevent a surge from reanimating the collapsed city. The hunters had essentially abandoned Frievania.

By some miracle, a new storm hadn’t reanimated the stone into whatever amalgamation of rock this would spawn. The city looked just like it had the last time Vivi was up here. Still, she had brought a surge forecaster just in case. She summoned it from spatial storage and offered it to Essi.

“We’ll set up camp in Frievania,” Vivi said. “Scan the area to make sure you’re not standing on a buildup of ether, but stay as close to the teleporter as you can. I will visit Surchester and Ythar alone.”

“Alone?” Essi asked.

She nodded. “If anything goes wrong that you can help me with, I’ll send a signal for you to teleport after me.”

“This is the smartest option,” Cael said. “We are Vivi’s escape route and her back-up plan. A full teleport to Surchester would be too risky. Alone, Vivi will have an easier time being inconspicuous.”

I’ll cause a scene regardless, Vivi thought. Cael was right, though. The demons wouldn’t be of much help inside. If Vivi was attacked, they could possibly save her.

They entered the collapsed city, walking on the rocks with the most secure footing. Ythar’s teleporter, thank the storms, still lay where they’d left it. Teleporters weren’t built of ordinary stone. It was said that Ythar had conjured them with some indestructible miracle ingredient. Vivi wasn’t sure if that could be true, but the teleporter was definitely sturdy, having survived the storm with minimal scratches to the patterns on the hundreds upon hundreds of runes making up the ring.

Everything was ready now. She just had to go to the palace to meet a god.

She hesitated, however, and found herself staring at the teleportation ring. It clearly operated with runes, just like a skill wisp. The teleportation rings weren’t magical or a divine creation of god. They were just science.

But Ythar had created it. He knew the science behind this. Someone out there had created skill wisps as well. None of these just suddenly appeared in the world. Something had created them.

I’ll need to draw this for Civar later, Vivi thought. Maybe it could be possible to make sense of all these runes, given a few years. Right now, Vivi couldn’t have guessed how all the different combinations reacted with each other.

Pondering that would take way too much time. She stepped on the ring and thought, Lucius, take me to Surchester.