As the group arrived near the Coiled Serpent, the capital of the Naga homeland, they all started to feel a strange sensation washing over their bodies. It wasn't something specific, just a general sense of wrongness, as if they were approaching a place that should be left alone. If they all hadn't dealt with an actual curse in the past, they would without a question believe that this place was cursed.
But since they had that experience in dealing with the curse that attached itself to Alex, they could tell this wasn't the same case. It was similar in a way but also very different. The wrongness didn't come from one specific thing. It was more about the environment itself. More diluted.
Confused by the situation, Hera asked Oberon to take his goggle form so she could try to see if the mana surrounding the city was normal or if there was anything wrong with it. To her surprise, putting on the goggles, which were supposed to be completely transparent, was almost like putting on heavy-duty sunglasses. The type you would wear when you were watching a solar eclipse. Meaning that this was not just a strange reaction that Oberon was having to the environment, but the actual mana created by something nearby.
It was wild to think that such a high density of mana could exist in a room by itself without anyone or anything activating it. As a matter of fact, the only place that was even close to this when it came to the density of mana was in the greenhouse where the Strength Spirits were being kept. Or at least that's what the Empress was assuming.
Ignoring the situation with Shane, Hera used the communicator to pass along what she was seeing. And she wasn't the only one. Alex could tell that there was something deeply wrong in this area, something that was absolutely foul and corrupted. Something that her Legacy was telling her she should fix while at the same time urging her to get as far away as possible from it.
Even Bonnie could tell that there was something wrong thanks to the constellations. One of the skills that her Legacy gave her was related to divination, although not in the fortune teller's sense of the word. Instead, it was more about knowing what was happening under those stars. And the specific constellations that she used for that were telling her that there was something very wrong in the city.
"Should we keep going?" Hera asked.
"Yes," Shane replied.
And there was no argument here. That was the right thing to do. After all, they came here to discover more about the city. And knowing that there was something wrong with it was just a half discovery. It wasn't truly a way to know what was going on here. To make matters worse, this room was right beside the Harpy homeland. If this could somehow spread, they would be in a lot of trouble.
The main problem that Hera was having was that she couldn't discern where that mana was coming from. Since they were talking about ghosts, she learned a bit about the more dark-leaning types of magic. And not in the sense of just shadow as in what Helena uses, but the curses, the hexes, the necromancy and such. But neither of those types of mana fit with what she was seeing.
This felt more primal, more attached to the environment, as if it wasn't just a case of the surrounding area being affected by something. But that didn't really make any sense.
Hera touched the button for the microphone again and asked, "Shane, do you think the Emperor might have done something like this?"
There was a pause before the enchantress replied. "I don't know. Maybe, but it doesn't feel right. The Poison Lake was something that the Naga would do. They have the technology to create a loop and let it run for a long time. But this feels like more of a fundamental change. It's like…" she wasn't able to put it into words.
"It's like the room is being resurrected." Hera spoke, and her words hung heavily in the air.
That wasn't something that any of them ever considered. As a matter of fact, the idea that a room was being affected by magic was nothing short of absurd. The idea that the room was being resurrected somehow was even more bizarre.
Yet when looking at the mana around them and the feeling that they were having, it was hard to argue against that idea. It really felt like someone was trying to resurrect the room itself, which was causing this disturbing feeling to seep out from it.
As the group got closer and closer to the city, now technically inside that gigantic cloud of mana, they started to notice slow movements on the streets. It was hard to tell from this distance since it could be just the vegetation that was growing near the base of the city, rustling in the wind, but they could almost see something else through the leaves. It was only when they approached the middle tier of the city that they saw what truly was hiding beneath.
All across the streets, in the buildings, bursting out of the windows, there were people. More specifically, those that once were people. Skeletons and zombies, flesh puppets and ghouls littered the streets in numbers much bigger than what the structure itself should be able to withstand. They were climbing over each other, stepping on broken bodies, pushing the small and weaker ones under the surface of that ocean of undead.
Even from this distance, Hera and her friends could hear the constant cracking of bones as those poor creatures that were pushed below were unable to hold the burden of the weight of all those on top of them. The Empress even watched as one particular skeleton cracked and shattered beneath the pressure, only to be reformed again by the magic that was surrounding the area.
Yet just as soon as it became pristine once more, it was too much, and the bones cracked for a second time, shattering into dust before slowly starting to reform themselves again. And by the sounds, it wasn't the only one stuck in that perpetual loop of repair and destruction.
No one was joking around anymore. No one was talking, and the tension that was lingering in the group vanished, replaced by something much worse. What they were watching was not natural. Even in the most gruesome dungeons, they wouldn't see something like this, not in this way, not on this scale, not without a reason.
You could eventually find a dungeon where some maniac was doing awful experiments, but they always had a purpose. They always had a reason to happen, even if the reason only made sense in their twisted minds.
But the undead that were stuck at the bottom of the piles were not there because some greater force was controlling them to be there. They seemed to be just walking around and be unlucky enough to fall back into the pits that the city was forming.
Hera gestured to Bonnie, and they started flying towards one of the larger streets where the guardian beasts were supposed to be moving about. The hope was that getting close to a place like that would allow them to see what was happening at the very bottom of those piles and piles of corpses. Yet even those massive pathways were completely filled with undead. From top to bottom, there was not a single space anywhere that seemed to be safe or that was even remotely free from the thousands upon thousands of Naga corpses that existed in this city.
"This is wrong," Shane shook her head.
"Yeah," Alex mumbled, still feeling the constant pressure from her Legacy to both run away and purify this entire area.
But the assassin knew that her Legacy wouldn't be enough. She wouldn't have enough mana to cleanse an entire city, not without some very powerful skills that she didn't have. The best way to go about this would be to find the source of that awful mana, cleanse it, and then wait for the room to slowly fix itself as it was supposed to do.
They did a couple of laps around the city, trying to see if there was any place at all that could be less crowded with zombies, skeletons, and other types of undead, but to no avail. The entire place was worse than a graveyard. There were just so many of them that it felt strange to even be nearby, as if the presence of the living should not be around so many of the dead, almost as if it was some sort of taboo.
"Can anyone find anything here?" the Empress asked, hoping that maybe someone saw something that she didn't. But they all gave a negative reply.
"What do we do now?" Hera asked, more towards Shane than to anyone else.
She knew that the enchantress was the one most interested in the Naga capital. And if she were to start arguing that they should explore it, it would be hard to stop her. But at the same time, Hera had no intention of doing so. The place was too much of a mess for any of that. But even the enchantress, as fanatic as she was about the Naga, seemed to understand that this was a situation well beyond anything they could handle right now.
During the trips surrounding the Coiled Serpent, Oberon was resting on top of Hera's head. She had already removed the goggles as the darkness was too much to allow her to see what was going on in the city. But that didn't mean that Oberon himself was not paying attention. He spent the entire time trying to understand what this magic was, or at the very least locate its source. And now, in one of the go-arounds, he noticed how there was a specific tunnel that had a much thicker layer of mana.
With a quick mental message, he showed Hera what he was talking about, and she had to agree. It was very weird. The tunnel connecting the Coiled Serpent to the Emperor's seat was not just filled with mana but completely blocked by it. When using the goggles, Hera herself couldn't even see inside, but when removing them, she could see that the density of undead was smaller in that specific location.
Telling her friends about it, they all moved to land on top of the tunnel connecting the two parts of the city. The entirety of the pathway wasn't protected by a roof. There were some spots that had covers, and on top of those covers, there were no undead there, likely due to the fact that no one was able to reach that area.
They landed directly on top of one segment that had the most intense density of mana and started to look around. The undead below still seemed to be oblivious to their existence.
As soon as they landed, Shane tried to enchant the stone beneath them to become translucent, but it was too big for the spell to take hold. All she was able to do was distort the colors of the roof of this tunnel somewhat.
Alex and Bonnie didn't really have any real options. The astral witch suggested using the Telescope constellation to make Ruby become some sort of camera, but she wasn't entirely sure if it was going to work. However, Hera had a better plan, one that wouldn't need experimental effects.
Through the small gap that revealed the floor below, she summoned her Court, already past the gaps, and told them to spread out and see what they could find. Directly below them, Nimbus would stay in his sentinel form while Oberon was allowed to roam about freely. The rest of them had specific areas that they should be looking into in hopes of finding the source of all this magic.
But despite all the preparation and all the planning, it took just a few seconds for everybody to find something strange, something that apparently was exuding that mana. And it wasn't a spell circle, a mana crystal, or the body of a monster. It was something that not a single one of them ever considered being the culprit for the situation. Something that they never even assumed to be possible to cause something like this.
A doorway. A doorway to another room that was, instead of its usual pure white color, starting to lean into the gray.
"What the actual fuck," Hera gasped.
Everybody turned to her. And the Empress quickly explained what her Court was seeing, and the eyes of her friends started to get more and more wide with the revelation.
"Is that even possible?" Alex asked.
"I don't know. I never heard anything like that before," Bonnie shook her head.
"Neither have I," Hera replied.
Shane was looking around as if the sky was going to give her an explanation.
"Hera," the enchantress turned to the Empress. "Do you still have that question thing?"
The Ophidianite, nodded. "I do, but I have a similar thing that might work first. I don't want to waste that on something that we're not really going to get much follow-up on."
Shane wasn't really sure what was going on but nodded, accepting that it could be something related to the Guides.
Hera asked everybody to give her a few moments as she stepped out and created the cocoon formed by the soundproof bubble, [Blade Accord], and [Noble Shroud], making sure that there wasn't a single speck of light from the outside reaching into that protection.
Yes, if she wanted, she could call the Guides of this room and have them answer a few of the questions related to all of this. But her intuition was telling her that they wouldn't be able to help that much, because if the mana was coming from a doorway, the issue wasn't in this room but somewhere else. All she needed was to get the confirmation. And hopefully, a quick message to the Guides she already knew would be enough for that.
She quickly typed on the tablet and sent a message to the group chat.
Hera: Can mana from one room leak through a doorway to another?
The reply came almost instantly, as if the Guides were sitting and watching them move about this place, ready with a message already typed, only waiting to press send.
Capri: Yes.
Peaches: It can. It means things are bad on the other side. It would be great if someone was able to solve that issue.
Hera: And you can't give me any more information about that?
She tried to at least get a little bit more from them.
Peaches: We can't. It's something we don't really understand.
Hera had less than a second to read that message before the app froze and closed. She quickly tapped it again to open and saw the group text there. Her question still existed, asking if they couldn't tell her anything more, but Peaches' answer had changed. Now it was just saying that they couldn't say anything else about it. That detail about it being something they couldn't understand wasn't there anymore.
With a frown, she tried to think and left the cocoon. Hera couldn't really think about something that the Guides couldn't understand. After all, they were part of the system, part of the MAZE. For them to not understand something meant the system itself wasn't able to understand something. And there wasn't anything that the system couldn't understand.
Hera froze and looked down at her Court. While there wasn't anything that the system couldn't understand, there were things on the edge of its understanding. Legacies, for instance. The Guides had already told her that they were things that were outside of the parameters imposed by the system or, in other words, something that the system couldn't really understand, and by extension, neither could the Guides.
Could all of this truly be the fault of a Legacy? Would there be a monster on the other side that was powerful enough to cause this kind of effect?
The Empress was unsure what to do with this information, but she still shared as much as she could with her friends.
"How many undead are down there?" Shane asked.
"Just a handful. Maybe 20 or 30, and they seem to be near the north and the western side of the tunnel. The other side, the coast is clear. And the doorway is near the middle, a little to the west."
"Do you think we could reach there without any of the zombies and skeletons and whatever else is there noticing?"
Hera paused for a moment. She knew that the Court would be able to do that without a problem, and so would Alex. Shane was an explorer, and she did have the Assassin role as well. The only one who didn't really have anything specifically for stealth would be Bonnie, and leaving the researcher alone here on top of the tunnel wasn't really a good idea. Then again, the Empress knew zombies were not really well known for being perceptive or smart.
"I guess. Are we just going to take a look at the doorway, or is the idea to go through it?" the Ophidianite finally said.
"I think it depends on the layer. If it's a high layer, we don't go through it. But if it's a low one, maybe it's worth a shot trying to see if we can find out why that is happening on the other side."
"But we're not even sure if doing this, resolving the thing on the other side, will make all this undead go away, are we?" Alex asked.
"We're not, but it's a step in the right direction. At least it feels like one. I was also thinking maybe this has something to do with a Legacy," Hera tried her luck on sharing her theory. "That's kind of the only thing I could think of that goes against some of the most basic rules of the MAZE, you know? So maybe, yeah, a Legacy is to blame."
"It's as good as anything. We can decide what we do from there," Shane replied.
They lowered to the ground, leaving the ceiling of the tunnel with the help of Nimbus. Ruby wasn't really well suited for small descents like this, even in her flying form. The tunnel itself was beautiful. They could see the remnants of old carvings and the care that was taken to make sure this passage was always in good condition, as both the floor and the ceiling had roughly the same signs of damage, likely due to a spell or something that was protecting both.
Hera wouldn't be surprised if the Naga had developed a way to imbue construction with spells to keep their buildings standing for so long without maintenance, especially considering how they were well versed in eternal spell weaving. Essentially creating spells inside structures through pipes or small tunnels.
She sighed and focused on the task at hand, walking towards the middle of the doorway, the gray doorway that was roughly in the middle of the tunnel. They had no idea what to expect from it or even if it would be functional, but with each step they took, the tension started to grow as the possibilities flooded their minds.
Were they about to find an extremely powerful being who was responsible for all this? Would there be a monster on the other side waiting for them, or would they just discover some effect created by the MAZE that was causing all of this? They had no way of knowing, and each step seemed to only increase their worry.
However, Alex quickly gave everybody a tap, and they felt their minds calm. There was no exchange of words, but they understood that this energy that was surrounding the area was also doing something with them, preying on their fears, on their anxiety, and on the things that made them worried and scared.
Their steps slightly echoed through the tunnel, causing them to pause every time a zombie or skeleton seemed to turn their way, but even then, the creatures left them alone. After what felt like hours but in reality were mere minutes, the four of them arrived in front of the gray doorway.
On the very top of the doorway was the usual symbol that represented the new room. This one had a field of flowers, but intermixed with the flowers were graves, skeletons, bones, and broken swords.
Out of curiosity, Hera reached out and touched the doorway, knowing that she was the strongest of the group and likely the sturdiest, and a notification appeared in front of her.
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Would you like to enter Fields of Elysium - 15th layer
[Yes] [No]
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