"Nothing?” Beth asked, looking at Sera first.
“Can’t detect a single thing up there. Doesn’t look like it’s sealed, either, so I’m already guessing we’re alone in here,” Sera replied with a shrug.
“Bjorn?” Beth said, looking at the titan descendant.
“All quiet,” he grunted, having the head of his hamr against the floor and leaning against it. Even with the lazy posture, he was still more than prepared; soone who didn’t look closely might not notice that the end of the haft of his weapon wasn’t centered on his forearm but pressed against his wrist. A quick, small twist of his right wrist while clenching his hand at the sa ti and he would already be swinging his hamr. With the kind of stats and skills the team had, it wouldn’t really matter how fast soone was, sobody below Ascended just couldn’t get the jump on Bjorn when he was like that.
“Ship can detect problems. Sensors are good enough,” Blood grunted, arms crossing as Val leaned on her left shoulder with her right arm, looking through one of the few docunts they found with her left hand.
“Any idea what this was?” Beth then asked.
“Path construct,” Val said with a casual shrug. “It’s ant to look like sothing from a world with a decent level of developnt that was used as an office, but it’s one of those things where everything is just a bit…off.”
“How so?” Beth asked.
“Like the places we’ve been, including that kobold place on your world. ant to look like a kobold colony, but fully generated by the Path,” Val clarified.
“Right. Any idea from what we found on what exactly we’re looking at?” Beth said.
“Looks like sothing that’s ant to hold so kind of power source,” Andrea said, also reading through sothing. “I think we should just clear the tower and gather everything we can and see what other items or things are in here.”
“Think there’s anything hidden?” Beth asked, but looked to Blood, the wolf having the keenest senses and most experience as a scout/infiltrator of the group.
“I’ll nose around. Haven’t sniffed anything like that yet,” Blood returned with a shrug.
“Sera. Up,” Beth said.
The dragon nodded and flowed up the stairs. She wasn’t so great scout or stealth specialist like Blood was working on becoming, but she could still move quickly and silently, even despite her large size and enormous mass in human form. Not only that, but it was Sera, the second toughest of them all next to Bjorn, aning that she could afford to walk into a powerful trap or monster, or a really powerful beast, and barely flinch from it. None of that was of a concern here, however, as the entire rest of the tower was empty, at least of any obvious threats, though Sera wasn’t sure about the top floor. She had scouted all the floors going up, all of them having an open floor plan, and it was only the last floor that gave her any pause, though she signaled the others it was safe to investigate. Bjorn stayed downstairs, not wanting to try his massive bulk on the stairs after seeing Sera, both short and slimr than he was, already at about the limit in terms of room on the staircase, and that was considering Sera had leaned forward when climbing.
The top floor, as Sera had said, was different, but they left that for last, the group combing through all the other floors. Those mainly consisted of more offices, sleeping quarters in the style of barracks, a full cafeteria, storage rooms full of shelves, and a room that looked like it was ant for bathing but didn’t have tubs and the shower nozzles were at strange heights. The way so of the floors were set up further went to prove Val right, Beth thinking that only the Path could make a tower like this. If so architect had designed the place to be like this, then they, and whatever interior designer had helped furnish it, should be taken out back and shot.
The group gathered anything of interest, though there wasn’t all that much, and t just below the top floor, everyone going over the paperwork they had found. That would likely present the biggest clues as to what was going on here, other than investigating the top floor, and Beth wanted to have a better idea of what was happening here, and possibly in the whole system, before they went poking around with things that looked dangerous. The docunts and other few relevant items they found were pretty enlightening, to say the least, but it pointed at sothing much larger that they would be dealing with. Then again. Beth hadn’t thought that it was going to be sothing small when they hopped through the portal and found an entire solar system on the other side.
“It’s a key,” said Val, papers spread out around her, the tall woman taking notes on a small pad. She could have worked entirely through her communicator, but so people still preferred a tactile surface to write, annotate, and draw upon before uploading such things through their communicator.
“What’s a key?” Beth asked, frowning a bit. A lot of what they were looking at dealt with runes, primarily through the lens of enchanting, so she was having a little bit of difficulty following the rapid turns Val was taking with her logic.
“The whole solar system,” Val mumbled. “No, wait, that’s not right. There are anchors, points that are very important. Oh, I see.”
Beth just crossed her arms and waited, letting Val and a few of the others scan through the rest of the docunts and co to a conclusion. She could piece together a few things, but she wasn’t as far advanced as Val and Kris in understanding runes, even though Kris was an alchemist, so she let the two girls get everything sorted. Sera and Blood were fiddling with sothing the wolf had found on a shelf while the rest were watching Val and Kris from over their shoulders, other than Bjorn who was still on the first floor and perfectly happy to stay down there.
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“Okay, we’ve got it,” Val said. “Sera, what’s upstairs?”
“There’s so kind of green gem about the size of my fist when I’m in human form in so kind of a cage up there,” Sera said. “It’s surrounded by a few arrays that look like they’re still channeling power into the cage or the gem or both. Not really sure what’s happening there, but I thought it would be dangerous to ss with, especially because there’s so kind of anti-tamper runes on so of the pieces up there.”
“Okay, right, that’s good,” Val said. “Well, not good about the anti-tamper runes, necessarily, but good that it looks like it matches.”
“So, what’s happening?” Beth asked, giving the tall, pale woman a slight frown.
“Right, sorry, let explain,” Val said, straightening and putting the papers away. “Looks like there’s so kind of key here. Not sure entirely a key for what or what kind of key, that parts a little vague. If Kris and I are correct about the notes here, there’s a location on each of the planets, and maybe two of the moons? Three of the moons? Not sure about the moons, but a location on each planet that has sothing like this gem. We need to get all the gems and take them…sowhere. I think it might be the sun, but that sounds kind of crazy. Anyway, that should either unlock whatever it is or it gives us the key. Sorry, the diagrams and notes are a bit confusing. We need more information.”
“How hard is getting this gem going to be? Is it going to blow up if we tinker with it?” Beth asked, still frowning slightly as she glanced towards the ceiling.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so. Let Kris and I ss with it for a minute; we should be able to grab it,” Val said.
“I hate to be that person, but only if I watch what you’re doing. If sothing goes tits up, I can block it or teleport you two out,” Beth said.
“That’s fine,” Val said with a shrug, starting to walk up the steps.
“Everybody else, back downstairs. If you hear any explosions, just go back to the ship. I’ll make sure they’re fine,” Beth ordered.
“Right,” Sera said, quickly shepherding everyone else out of the room and down the stairs.
Normally, this would have been at least a bit of a bad idea, but Beth was pretty relieved that Val and Kris could understand almost all the docunts. If it was sothing that would need Ascended or Exalted to handle it, she assud that a bunch of Experts with knowledge of runes equivalent to a Master wouldn’t be able to understand anything on the papers or on the top floor. She walked up after the kresnik and phoenix, glancing around to see a half dozen arrays gathering and converting mana before pumping that mana into a frawork of mana steel and mana silver. The green gem Sera had seen was floating in the middle of the frawork without touching anything.
“Three of those arrays are feeding it refined spatial mana,” Beth said to the other two, slightly widening her stance and crossing her arms under her breasts as she stared at the gem.
“Good to know,” Val murmured, already scanning the frawork and the runes feeding in the mana.
Beth just stood back and watched, able to hold the sa position for days at a ti without getting tired at all. The other two were fast and efficient, scanning everything in the room before putting their heads together and energetically discussing the runes and their effects. It took a bit longer than Beth thought it might, or maybe hoped it might, but after about two hours Val proposed a course to Kris to get the gem out without blowing them both up. She glanced at Beth, still standing with her arms crossed, and the pseudo-Exalted just shrugged her shoulders and indicated for them to get on with it. Val and Kris before nodded, took deep breaths, and started unwinding the runes and getting ready to crack the frawork apart. Despite her more lax appearance, Beth was ready at a mont’s notice to grab both the other girls and throw them through space down to the others. She was going to kick them out if they failed and try to grab the gem herself; the amount of mana she was sensing was a lot, but even if everything in the room went off at once, she could still tank it to the face and live, even if it would suck.
Fortunately, it didn’t co to that, as Val and Kris had done their howork right and were able to neutralize the anti-tamper runes, stop the flow of mana, and weaken the frawork. Once they had all the delicate work done, the two of them were tired, and that’s also where they ran into a big hurdle, not able to fully break open the frawork and get the gem. Beth told them to leave at that point and, after one glance, both of them sprinted down the stairs, grabbing the others and telling them it was best to get out. Beth popped her neck, shifting her head back and forth, before cracking all her knuckles by just clenching her fists as she walked up to the frawork. Despite how tempted she was to do a little concussive recalibration, she was going to be a bit more delicate. A bit more delicate didn’t actually an delicate, however, and she slamd a booted foot into the floor, embedding her heel in the tile before grabbing part of the frawork and starting to haul on it. Out of all the people on the team, nobody had her stats, at least not in terms of Strength; Blood was a bit higher than her in overall stats, truth be told, but the wolf focused heavily on Dexterity and had dumped so significant points into Endurance, as well as a few extra points into Intelligence and Wisdom. In terms of raw, brute strength, coming from the Strength stat, Beth was top of the team, and that was further amplified by having her Ideal, which just passively made her stronger, as well as skills like Beastly Tyrant that also passively boosted her.
Maybe she was a bit too worked up after a few days of sitting then standing around, but she started hauling on the bars with a power equivalent of close to a hundred thousand Strength, factoring in her Ideal and passive skills. That was way too much for the frawork, even with several of the reinforcing runes still active, and there was a terrible, grinding shriek and a loud crunching sound as the fra around the green gem crumpled like brittle glass, the tal literally shattering in places as the shock was too much for it to withstand.
“Oops,” Beth said, looking at the fragnts of mana steel and mana silver embedded in the ceiling.
“Oops?! What ‘oops’?!” Val shouted up all the way from the first floor, having waited to leave just in case Beth sohow needed help deciphering sothing.
“Don’t worry about it! It’s fine!” Beth yelled down, walking over and grabbing the green gem. There was a blast of spatial mana, but this was her domain, quite literally in the case of one of her skills, and she suppressed the fluctuations with barely a thought. After that, the gem seed to grow quiescent, and she pocketed it, by that she ant tossing it in the reliquary, before stomping down the stairs.
“Well?” Val asked when Beth joined her.
“I might have used just a touch too much force on the cage,” Beth said, holding her thumb and index finger just a hairsbreadth apart. “Just a little, just a tiny bit.”
“Please tell you didn’t shatter the gem that is one-seventh the key to solving this weird anomaly?” Val asked, though it was more a demand than a question.
“Relax,” Beth said, rolling her eyes as she made the gem appear briefly. “I blew the cage up away from the gem, thank you very much.”
“Blew the cage up?! You just had to bend the bars slightly! You damned gorilla!” Val snapped, grabbing Beth and shaking her. Well, trying to, as shaking Beth with Val’s stats was like Beth’s dad trying to pick Bjorn up and shake him.
“You get too worked up,” Beth snorted, grabbing the kresnik and throwing her over a shoulder to an angry squawk. “You should trust your team leader more.”
“You’re as bad as those fools I was in charge of for years!” Val raged, though she wasn’t really struggling to break free of Beth’s grip.
“First of all, I’m the one in charge here,” Beth said with a big laugh. “Second of all, those chucklefucks couldn’t even beat more than a decade ago even given overwhelming odds; unlike them, when I say I’m gonna smash sothing, I smash it.”
“You-!” Val grumbled, twisting around, reminding Beth that a kresnik had both too many joints and too much flexibility. Despite Val having nothing reptilian about her, she reminded Beth of a snake as she wrapped around her as Beth hauled them both into the cruiser.
“Are you so kind of constrictor now?” Beth grumbled as she tried to twist the taller girl off of her.
“I’ll show you a constrictor,” Val snapped, twisting further around Beth before the, again, much stronger girl got a proper hold and pulled. “Wait, wait, wait!”
“Oh, not so tough now?” Beth asked.
“Blood Stars! You trying to pull all my limbs off?!” Val exclaid, finally getting free of Beth’s grip and popping upright.
“The snake impression doesn’t suit you,” Beth said nonchalantly, shrugging as she stepped onto the bridge.
“You-!” Val exclaid again but couldn’t seem to find the right words, or insults, to express her indignation.
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