Chapter 3 #2
Stronger. All right. Alsen pushed out more force, compressed it, shot it at the creature, and had it explode. Luna, jumping away from the creature, covered her eyes. A thunderous boom echoed through the hall. His ears started ringing, his head feeling as if something stabbed it through both ears.
The creature flew away, hitting the far wall with a loud boom.
Alsen covered his ears. Deafening himself with his own spell. Brilliant.
Luna bolted to the creature. It swung the tentacle tendrils at her, but Luna weaved among them with ease.
She threw a dagger at it and jumped. The dagger hit it in the eye socket.
A split second after the impact, Luna reached it with the leap and kicked the dagger’s hilt with a spinning kick.
The dagger lodged deeper. The creature cracked, its head and neck almost splitting.
It lashed with the tentacle tendrils, swatting Luna away, sending her tumbling into the side wall.
Damn it. Alsen pulled a whole lot more of his power. In nearly an instant, he molded it, raised his hand, and aimed the spell. Lance of Annihilation.
The energy split the air, annihilating everything it touched in the creature, digging into the wall beyond. Heat filled the air. But the creature’s head and torso were gone, a good thirty feet of a tunnel of disintegrated rock beyond it.
Alsen exhaled. “Are you all right?”
“This wasn’t weak at all!” she shouted from the wall, already standing, tucking the dagger behind her belt.
White text floated in front of him.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: ENEMY DEFEATED – VOID-ANIMATED PRIESTESS]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 150]
[LEVEL UP!]
[CURRENT LEVEL: 2]
“Oh, hey,” Luna shouted. “I’ve got more of the white text. What does level up mean?”
“That you get some more points to spend.”
“Oh, sweet.” Luna focused for a split second and then started jabbing the air with her finger, apparently navigating the system menus.
Alsen refocused on the notification. Void-animated? That sounded significant, so he made a mental note to research it later. If nothing else, it was an enemy class he might encounter more often.
“Hey,” Luna shouted, apparently finding it unnecessary to walk closer to him. “We need to find another one. It tells me I need 50 experience for the next level, and this gave one-fifty, so getting another one would get us another level.”
She caught on to the system fast. He conjured its menus—the temple could wait—and went over them.
Indeed, he had 150XP, with lvl2 requiring 100, and lvl3 needing 300.
They should have been level two already because of the ogres, but that seemingly counted only at the next experience gain due to them entering the System.
He walked to the remains and crouched beside them. “The System called it void-animated. Do you have any idea what that could mean?” The stone of the monster now seemed ordinary, like any other marble covered in moss. He stretched out his sense for mana and found none.
Luna finally approached him, so she didn’t have to shout.
“No idea.” She kicked a rock away. “Void is usually connected to souls and dreams. Like, sure, I guess it had like a partial soul or something, but Void is usually heavily spiritually oriented. Void-animated makes about as much sense as baked out of daggers. It doesn’t go together. ”
His mind served Alsen the image of Luna serving him a cake made of daggers. He snorted. “I’ll put it down as something to investigate. It could be relevant.”
“Or it’s called like that because someone thought it sounded great. That’s the origin of most names of constructs and animated beings.”
Well, she had a point. He stood, looking at the surrounding walls. Religious carvings, mostly destroyed by time and whatever had collapsed the wall. He tried to analyze the patterns.
“Hey,” Luna shouted from ahead. “There’s another room here.”
With a sharp inhale, he tore his eyes from the walls, looking into the tunnel he made with his spell. Luna stood inside, three-quarters of its length in, pointing towards a side.
No way.
He walked to her, finding that the spell accidentally dug a path to a different chamber. No exit led through it, only a blockade of rocks where the door used to be.
The ceiling formed a dome above them, filled with shiny points. Reflective crystals, dozens of them, woven into a pattern on the dome ceiling. Alsen studied the pattern. This wasn’t a decoration. Whoever put this converging spiral embedded with crystals up did so for a very precise purpose.
Fascinating.
A screech of a dagger on stone from the side jerked him out of concentration. He glowered in that direction. “What are you doing?”
Luna looked at him, confused. “Trying to climb up, so I can pluck the gems out. They might be valuable.”
Right. Of course. That was what was important. “Give it a moment, so I can study them.”
“Study what? It’s obviously some constellation of their god or whatever.”
“No, it’s not. I spent quite a while studying the night sky last night. There was no hint of such a pattern.”
She frowned. “Oh, really, so you looked at the sky covered by hundreds of stars and can tell what patterns were or weren’t there?”
Alsen smirked. “I have excellent memory.” He turned his gaze back to the ceiling.
What could the spiral display? Was it a map or a part of some prophecy or a religious symbol or really just a decoration?
Well, for a decoration, it wasn’t pretty enough. He ruled that out.
A religious symbol would display some being or be something easy to draw or remember. A spiral that went through over twenty points wasn’t that. Yes, it could have been a picture from the religion’s mythos, but those were always simple, at least in successful religions.
This religion might not have been practiced anymore, but it clearly did well enough in the past to have a temple like this. So, most likely not a religious symbol.
A map?
Unlikely, that would have needed it to have a recognizable start or some environmental context or something, anything, that was recognizable.
A crack of bones on the floor echoed through the room, throwing him out of the line of thought.
With a murderous glare, he looked for the source of the sound.
Luna stood above a now headless corpse by the wall, a clean skeleton covered in decayed clothes. “Sorry,” she said. “But look at this.” She reached into the statue’s hands, and pulled out a stone tablet.
She was not sorry. She did that on purpose, and he knew it. “Later,” he snapped, refocusing on the ceiling.
Where was he?
Ah, right, the spiral. The spiral, fundamentally, could mean convergence to a goal or inevitable fate. This didn’t look like a goal, so a prophecy of some sort, a prediction, some doom spiral.
Wait a second… he recognized one of the carved symbols next to one of the crystals. A formation of six stars in an unusual, tight pattern. He recognized that.
Back in his home world, the sighting of the six-star phenomenon had entire tomes written about it. It happened once, precisely once, about a hundred and twenty years before he was born.