"Well, that’s pretty obvious,” Beth said in a slightly sarcastic voice.
“Haven’t encountered anything that crazy yet,” Blood grunted.
“By our standards, anyway,” Andrea said, getting so gruff from the rest.
“Don’t go jinxing it,” Beth complained.
“Well, we do have sobody that can kill early Ascended-level beasts by herself, so we shouldn’t be that concerned,” Val said.
“I don’t know about early Ascended-level, but I am pretty strong,” Beth said with a laugh, flexing in her seat.
“That’s level six hundred, Beth,” Val said, shaking her head.
“Well, I guess, but even that wurm didn’t feel like sothing at the level of an Ascended,” Beth replied.
“Just because you’re too powerful for your given rebirth and level, that doesn’t an that anybody else wouldn’t have struggled with that fight, or even died during it. Soone could only even get to level six hundred on their twentieth rebirth. An Enlightened at rebirth nineteen would cap out at level five hundred eighty, assuming they went all the way to the max,” Val lectured.
“But we clearly show that people can fight up quite a few levels even at our rebirths,” Beth said.
“We’re, uh, how do you say it? The exception that proves the rule, you moreso than most,” Val said with a sigh.
“People should work harder,” Beth said with a shrug.
“A lot of those people die young,” Val retorted.
“Well, okay, that’s true,” Beth said with a small nod, acknowledging the point.
Blood, anwhile, had brought them in and set the ship down just outside the front door of the tower, though that was the opening into the tower at all, with there being no other opening or any kind of blemish or anything on the exterior of the structure. The tower was set up like all the other towers they had encountered, at least when it ca to the doors, as it was another airlock with a second set of doors beyond the first that kept the tower sealed while the external doors were open. What was different was the fact that there was no big, open room on the first floor, or any floor thereafter, but instead the floor was split into a couple dozen small rooms, all of which were interconnected without hallways in between. The group had to navigate the rooms, which was not all that fun, particularly not when considering the average size of the mbers of the group, and that was when everyone was in their human form. Sera would have barely been able to fit in the entire tower if it were hollowed out in her dragon form, and one couldn’t discount Kris or Neph or even Blood.
Navigating mazes wasn’t Beth’s strong suit, but she let the team handle most of the work as she floated along behind. There was so kind of restriction within the tower on spatial skills, which she also felt she could break, but she didn’t even need to ask the group to know that was a bad idea. People with spatial mana were rare and usually fairly powerful and Beth had found already that it was the habit of enchanters to link anything blocking spatial mana with alarms and failsafes that would trigger even when the anti-teleport or anti-space enchantnt was pushed against, let alone breached. Whatever the enchantnt was, if she flexed her skills, not to ntion her Ideal, she’d be just as likely to set off so catastrophic chain reaction, at least, catastrophic for the gem they were there to find, and she was far too excited over the ultimate treasure when all the gems were gathered to endanger the final one.
Setting aside any catastrophic reaction, she followed the team through the maze to the top of the tower, the trip taking longer than she expected. It was just like the Path, or whoever had first built these structures, to throw a wrench into the plan at the final part, but the tower was filled with enchantnts and traps that the team had to disable. The reliquary’s odd rules ca into play again, the rules of the Path enforcing that this was a dangerous challenge appropriate to the team’s level and that they could receive very limited interference from outside sources. That ant it was mainly Val and Blood working on the traps, with help from Kris and Neph who could recognize so of the chanisms and who could point out what was poisoned and how to counteract it. Beth was at least a bit useful in that her Ideal was so powerful, in comparison to the things they were dealing with, that she could use it to burn away certain parts of enchantnt traps without them reacting. Her Ideal could burn parts so fast that they would, for all intents and purposes, be instantaneously vaporized without triggering any negative reaction. It was still more of a sledgehamr than a precision scalpel, but it certainly got the job done very parts of the enchantnts that needed a little force to solve the problem.
It was about four hours of disarming and investigating and navigating the maze before they were at the top floor, which was laid out very similar to the other towers, fortunately for them. That ant much more puzzle solving and enchantnt deciphering, but the team had gotten quite good at it and it didn’t take them very long. Beth, not having to protect the team from any level six hundred wurms, participated in the disarming, wanting to start actively stretching her knowledge of runes. Most Experts, and even many Masters, wouldn’t lean into runes all that much yet if they weren’t enchanters, but Beth and the team had had the foolishness of that hamred into them a long ti ago and thus had been studying runes for years at this point. She wouldn’t say she was as good as a dedicated enchanter at this point, Val still being able to run circles around her, but Beth wasn’t going to confuse a heating rune for a freezing rune at this point. The array they were dealing with were complex interlocking of hundreds, or in many cases, thousands of runes that served a particular function. The team wasn’t breaking that function, not in itself, but all arrays like that would have security features that would be built in to stop exactly what the team was doing; a third party coming in and stealing whatever was there without the person or group who set up the array being there to stop them.
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The first thing Beth did, helping Sera and Neph on an array, was identify as many of the runes and rune strings as she could. They couldn’t do anything to a complex piece of runework if they didn’t what all, or nearly all, the runes were for. After figuring out the runes, they could then classify them into functional runes and security runes, or that was the way Zel and the other Empyreans explained was best to go about tackling an array-breaking session. After separating what was functional, or doing the actual job of the array, from what was security, it was then down to fully deciphering the security runes and figuring out how to break them without either triggering them or creating a destructive confluence that would cause the whole thing to go haywire. Going haywire in almost all cases, by the way, ant that the thing would explode, quite spectacularly, often causing a chain reaction with any other surrounding arrays, as the release of mana, the shockwave, and the destabilization of the space in the area would cause a runaway effect that was very hard to contain or stop. That ant that deciphering security runes was always done with a lot of caution and a lot of bated breath, as a single mistake, while not necessarily fatal, could lead to so terrible consequences, all of which would defeat the point of the decoding in the first place.
Fortunately for the whole team, not only did they have a dedicated enchanter in Val, they had all studied runes and had a good understanding of what the arrays in this strange solar system were doing, as well as having a good idea what all the security formations were for. Beyond that, of course, they had the Empyreans to fall back on, and a setup like the one they were studying didn’t trigger the kind of restrictions that sothing like the labyrinthine lower floors triggered for the reliquary. Zel was probably the most knowledgeable overall about runes and enchanting, with Beth suspecting he was at the peak of Sage and ready to step over into Divine, which he might have achieved even before the reliquary if his attention hadn’t been split so many ways during his life. He still wasn’t exactly on the level of Old Tom and his recalcitrant group of Legends and Myths, but they weren’t banging their heads against the work of Myths here, they were decoding things equivalent to what an early to mid-level Master enchanter could lay out. One would think that would an that Zel, or even a few of the other interested Empyreans, might be able to just glance at an array and figure it out, but that was one of the beauties, and frustrations, of rune shaping. There were a billion runes out there, and there were an octillion and one ways to combine those runes, so deciphering wasn’t just sothing that could be done with a single glance and a little knowledge.
Beyond the deciphering was the actual breaking, which itself was always a delicate task. The arrays in the lower part of the tower they could have Beth just smash through in so cases because they had already done the deciphering and knew that even the array backfiring wouldn’t be an awful thing. That and the fact that Beth’s power was enough that those simpler arrays, especially once they were already partially unraveled by Val, could just be extinguished with a combination of her Ideal and spatial skills. Spatial skills were really the bane of a lot of things, as the ability to manipulate space was very, very difficult to counter without either using imnse complexity or an insane amount of power. It was also, as a small side note, the reason that Mortaine was feared, as dinsional magic was even more complex and powerful than spatial magic; as Beth and the team had seen amply demonstrated already, trying to keep the scatterbrained Exalted out of anywhere was an effort in foolishness. He had a similar power in breaking apart arrays, enchantnts, magical bindings, and so on, as the power of dinsional magic could, in a single instant, send part or all of a series of runes and/or materials into a separate reality, and when part of a set of runes suddenly didn’t exist in this universe, they tended to stop functioning right quick.
Fortunately, they didn’t need Mortaine, or even much of Beth’s power to crack through the array, though they did have to take extra ti as all the arrays in this room were synced together. That wouldn’t always happen, even with a group of arrays, and none of the other gems, despite being fed by a group of arrays, had had them as tightly interwoven as the group of arrays within this room were. That ant they had about a five minute window to either shutdown or redirect all six arrays or the whole thing would go more than a bit pear-shaped, but the team was more than skilled enough that a simple issue of timing wasn’t sothing that stymied them. They cracked all six arrays within ninety seconds of each other, more than plenty of ti, and Zel peeled the frawork open like an overripe lon and plucked the gem out before tossing it to Beth.
“Finally, we can see what this is all about,” Beth said, rubbing her hands together after storing the gem in the reliquary.
“Not here. We should move to space before trying anything,” Zel said before he too disappeared into the reliquary.
“Good point,” Val agreed, leading the way as the team retraced their steps through the tower.
They made it back out in just a couple minutes, though they did argue a bit about whether they actually needed to take off and go to space to try…well, whatever they were going to try with the gems. Eventually, Beth just said flying at so remote place in the system would probably be best, which was more than Blood needed to hear, always eager to get more flying ti in. They navigated to sowhere that would have been equivalent to the asteroid belt in Sol System, though here that was between the third and fourth planet, positioning them far enough from the sun that anything dangerous that might happen there would take so ti to reach them. Finally, they gathered in the cargo hold, with most of the Empyreans popping out to see what all the fuss was about and maybe get their hands dirty if sothing truly exciting happened to happen. Beth brought all seven gems out and was a little disappointed when they didn’t hover together or anything cool like that, sighing as Bjorn carried a small table over and set it down in the center of the cargo hold for them to put the gems on. It appeared that whatever the gems were for, if they were for a greater purpose than just refining and storing mana individually, was going to be sothing they needed to figure out. She had hoped for so big, bright light show with the gems rging or opening a portal to the Eternal Depths or sothing equally crazy and cool, but that wasn’t going to happen, and now a dozen people had crowded around the table and put their heads together.
“What’s it look like?” Beth asked after a minute.
“The gems are all linked together, that’s pretty clear,” Val said, stretching and kneading her back for a mont before sighing. “It’s another puzzle, or should I say, it’s another array that we have to solve. We’re trying to figure out how all seven gems link together, and once we figure that out, then we can link them and get them to do…whatever it is we’re expecting.”
“Looks like it unlocks sothing,” Erosh said, turning over the athyst in his hands and frowning at it. “I think these things act as a key, but I’m not sure for what.”
“I believe they contain sothing within them,” Odorra said.
“No, that’s not right,” Zel, always cantankerous, disagreed, though without any hostility in his voice. “They’re ant to contain sothing within them, but they don’t contain whatever it is right now.”
“So, they’re so kind of storage device?” asked Andrea, who was sitting on a crate against the wall behind where Erosh and Odorra were standing.
“That appears correct,” said Mikhael, the wandering emperor, who’s curiosity had been aroused by the strange resonance of the gems. “I would wager that, once we figure out the array, they gems will interlink and store within them, well, sothing. It also appears that sothing is rather large.”
“And how long is this puzzle-solving going to take,” Beth asked, arms crossed as she leaned against the bulkhead next to the door into the lower hallway of the ship.
“You can’t rush brilliance,” Zel said, which surprised Beth.
“That almost sounded like a joke,” she said.
“He has his monts,” Erosh said. “They’re centuries apart, but they did sotis occur.”
“Easy for you to say,” muttered one of the others.
“It will take at least a few hours and might take a few days,” Zel said. “The array between the seven gems is far more complex than anything else we’ve dealt with on this little excursion.”
“Well, hop to it then,” Beth said, waving at the group before pulling up so files on her communicator.
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