Lillene
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Chapter 829 - Basilisk Extermination
🕑 Added 2023-08-19 22:36:16 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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Over the next few hours, they explored the control room. That did indeed seem to be what it was, though Serenity wasn’t certain why it was here; it seemed to be entirely redundant with A’Atla’s AI managing the ship and its engine.
Samantha and Liam were excited, at least.
Eventually, Serenity and two of the soldiers went out to hunt down any remaining basilisks. As long as they weren’t in a large group, they were easy enough to deal with and it was definitely safer to find them while hunting for them than to have them appear when you weren’t expecting them. It also meant that Serenity could check out some of the other rooms that made up A’Atla’s engine.
During the exploration, it became clear that the fighting was even more extensive than Serenity had realized. There were several walls where the damage marks just stopped, clear evidence that A’Atla had repaired them at some point in the past. Serenity marked them on the map he was going to give Samantha and Liam; there had to be something important behind those walls or A’Atla wouldn’t have repaired them. There were a lot of other marks it hadn’t done anything about, after all.
Serenity knew he needed better maps of A’Atla’s exterior damage. The repaired walls all faced towards the portion of A’Atla that had been cut off; was it possible that they were where the attackers literally cut their way into the ship? That made all too much sense and might well explain the damage, even if it hadn’t been the concerted effort to break prisoners out that Serenity suspected it was.
The sinking of A’Alta probably coincided with the Godwar that damaged Gaia, after all. They might well be separated by a few years or even decades, since that would seem like very little time to the spirit of the planet, but breaking out the survivors of a previous war did seem like it would be a good start to a new war.
There were several other suits of black-and-red armor as they explored the area. Most were more damaged than the first one; one of the suits even hid a basilisk that had apparently petrified its occupant, climbed in to eat him, then went into hibernation.
Other than the armor, Serenity didn’t find anything important. Oh, there were magical items, mostly tools, that would probably have Samantha and Liam absolutely ecstatic; Serenity didn’t care about them. He couldn’t use them and they didn’t have any way to show him things he didn’t already know. What he wanted to find was a mage’s study, but if there was one that still existed on A’Atla, it wasn’t here.
There had to be one. The Wizard of A’Atla had clearly spent decades on building A’Atla, never mind the time he spent on it after the catastrophe. No mage would spend that long without reference materials on spells!
The other rooms they did find were interesting, at least. They were clearly made to handle large amounts of mana; there were even several other manastreams. The group avoided those, since they didn’t block the path. There weren’t any protective wraps on coathooks near those manastreams, either. There was no obvious way to turn the mana into movement, but Serenity was certain that was hidden in some of the enchantments laid out on the floor of each room.
It was too bad they weren’t runework. Serenity could have understood that. These were enchantments, instead. They created spellforms that Serenity could interpret when they were active, but even the active ones didn’t have anything for Serenity to learn at this point. He might care if he ever needed to move a giant hunk of rock through water once he was high enough Tier to actually have the mana to do it, but that was a very long way off.
That was, after all, one of the many advantages of enchantment. Like both runework and rituals, it could be used to do things that simply weren’t possible for a single spellcaster of the same Tier. It was worse at almost all of them except in one very important way: enchantments didn’t require a spellcaster to operate them.
Well, technically, runes didn’t either but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Runes did require someone who understood them to create them in the first place; no such understanding was required for enchantments. You had to know and be able to make the enchanted item but you didn’t have to understand what went behind it. At least, Serenity thought that was how it worked; it wasn’t like he was an enchanter.
Enchantments were also, somehow, smaller than runes. Serenity didn’t understand that; there wasn’t enough information there. It gave them a large advantage for making small items; properly running a weapon required something that could take the runes, like the blade of a sword or an ax’s head, while enchantments didn’t require that surface area. There were weapons that were simply too small to bother with using runes on. Serenity didn’t think that was happening here, however; the first Wizard of A’Atla had plenty of space.
In almost all other ways, enchantments were worse than either runes or rituals. Serenity didn’t know why the Wizard of A’Atla had chosen them over runes, but it was clear that he had.
Serenity knew he’d be back to study the enchantments even if he didn’t think he’d learn anything from them. Now that he was back on Earth, time was no longer against him so he could spend some of it to make sure there wasn’t anything to learn from an unlikely source.
Not that there was time for that right now; they needed to finish searching the place. It took hours to be relatively confident they’d gotten all of the basilisks. When they were done, they had a late lunch together before Samantha and Liam went back to examining everything in the control room.
Serenity and the two soldiers with him went outside the manastream to clear out any basilisks that might be there. It was obvious that it needed to be cleared, since they were definitely going to want to set up a way to get past the melted stone door that didn’t require Serenity or Ita to manage it.
They only found two basilisks on the far side of the manastream, but that was enough to make Serenity glad they checked.
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Apollyon swore as he watched the moving images one of his weaker underlings pilfered from the humans exploring A’Atla. How had they gotten into Tartarus so easily? The usurper had tried to trap him in there again; it only failed because the usurper’s skill with stone was worse than the quality the island could make and Apollyon had come prepared to fight A’Atla herself. Yet they’d gone through the sealed gate instead of the back exit!
Not that A’Atla had fought; she’d simply acted like the stolen prison she was. She’d apparently also sealed up the back exit, so maybe it wasn’t so unbelievable that they’d gone through the gate instead. It was too bad that they’d cleaned out the basilisks, but that had always been a low-probability plan. With luck, there would be a basilisk egg somewhere that hadn’t hatched, but Apollyon knew he couldn’t count on that. Most of them had hatched when the group walked up to them.
It was the fault of that mixedblood Serenity; it had to be. He was clearly the threat Apollyon would have to deal with before he could sink A’Atla. The one piece of good news was that there was a lot of information about the man. He claimed to have dragons’ blood, which was all too believable; dragons were one of the few species that could stand against a god with some expectation of winning. Apollyon would just have to deal with it.
He also had some ability with Death magic, like that impostor Hel. Apollyon remembered that woman all too well and could only be grateful that he was able to end her in secret after his first escape; her legions of the dead would have been terrible to fight with his reduced forces. Even better, Serenity seemed to be a poor Lord of Death, as he didn’t have his dead fight for him.
Apollyon didn’t yet know everything he wanted to about the man, but that was fine. He knew enough to know how to take him out of the fight: he had a wife and child. Getting someone into the tunnels might be difficult but it should be possible. Serenity would stand down if his family were threatened. It was foolish but mortals were usually weak and did not accept that it was easy to find more women and sire children.
That left only one real concern. As far as Apollyon could tell, there were only two people worth worrying about on A’Atla, the mixedblood and a human named Tom Cooper. Cooper was the one who blocked the probe into the tunnels and did something at the usurper’s temple; Apollyon still didn’t have a clear answer as to what, but at least he hadn’t avoided Apollyon’s primary trap; the temple had collapsed, which meant he ought to be infected with the Night Fire’s commands.
It was somewhat concerning that he hadn’t yet tried to contact Apollyon; that made it clear the man was strong-willed, even if it had only been a week. The curse took time to work unless Apollyon was able to infuse a truly incredible amount of power into it. While the temple held that much power, Cooper would have needed to be inside it and be hit with multiple secondary traps to be severely compromised.
If nothing else, Cooper would be a good source of information on Serenity. He’d probably also be a good choice to handle Serenity’s family; it was easy enough to twist someone into thinking they were doing something to protect the family, after all.
Maybe Cooper would even allow Apollyon to bypass Serenity completely. If he knew where the weapons the usurper stole from Apollyon were and was able to recover them, Apollyon could simply sink A’Atla again. It was easy enough; a large enough strike at the collection point hidden in the usurper’s temple did it the first time and ought to do it again. Serenity would go with it and he’d no longer be Apollyon’s problem. Control of the dead didn’t mean you could return from it.
It would be nice to solve the same problem the same way again, even if it was accidental the first time.
He needed to make certain he had an alternative ready, however. It was too bad that he didn’t currently have control of a roc; they competed for control of the skies with dragons and could have been turned against an island hiding a dragon relatively easily. No, he was going to have to prepare his old standby. Cooper might have taken out a small demon, but it wasn’t the only one he had access to.
If only he could find the demon that was somewhere on A’Atla. His people had caught hints of it in the days after Cooper handled the probe, but he didn’t have any more information on it. With any luck at all, it was a Greater Demon; that would explain a great deal. It might even explain where Cooper came from; Serenity was well explained but Cooper came out of nowhere.
He hoped it wasn’t a Demon Lord that was supporting Cooper; clever demons could be annoying and another Demon Lord might well be able to turn the Night Fire against him.
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Author's Note: No, Serenity doesn't like or value enchantment. At all. It's just a substandard replacement for ...
...
Why does he keep finding himself examining it? And thinking of all the places it's actually somewhat useful?
Comments
Danielle Warvel
Haha, Apollyon is so much more in the dark than I expected, and Serenity it hilariously good at lying to himself. 😂
