Chapter 382 — Into the Depths of Shadow

A nearly transparent shimmering barrier at once appeared beside every Steel Ranger warrior; the Breeze Shields kept out any vapors that might be harmful. Amber, meanwhile, curled her lip, her figure fading in the air and vanishing, then slipping through the gate as a twisting shadow.

A moment later the half-elf poked her head back out. "Come in. It's safe inside—and it looks like there's been a landslide or some geological shift; half of it is flooded."

Behind the heavy isolation gate lay a vast hall shrouded in gloom... no, to Sojilin's eyes this was less a hall than a primitive cavern, with only a few traces of artificial construction within.

The space beyond the door was immense, by rough estimate at least as large as two dock squares. In all that vastness, only a few places showed man-made stone slabs, stone pillars, and platforms where equipment had once been installed; apart from these, only a handful of collapsed sheds dotted the spaces between those structures—perhaps small huts where researchers had once rested and worked. All the rest was bare rock. On the dark, high vault overhead hung stalactites, dripping water now and then from the roof, while in the lower half of the cavern groundwater that had seeped in from who knew where had gathered into pools and streams of every size, soaking those ancient works in the seep.

A kind of luminous moss grew among the damp rock walls and stalactites, so that although the cavern was dim, it was not wholly impossible to see by. Yet that eerie light did nothing to dispel the oppressive feeling the cave gave off; it only made those within more uneasy.

With one exception.

Amber, transformed into shadow, leaped nimbly among the boulders of the cavern. The dim, somber environment suited her quite well. After checking several nearby footholds and platforms with shadow-jumps in what amounted to showing off, she returned to Sojilin. "Everything's been cleared out too. But it's strange... this place looks more like it was never finished. The cave isn't even capped... or did the people who built the Fortress of Defiance back then deliberately build it this way?"

"That is not impossible," Sojilin mused. "Perhaps they were making use of some pre-existing magical environment in this cavern for their research, in which case they could hardly alter the cavern's structure or add too many man-made things here..."

Tir listened to their analysis from the side and found it exceedingly boring. She had no interest in the shadow research land-dwellers had conducted a thousand years ago; that was not a field the sirens excelled in. But the seep-water here did interest her—this place, so rich in moisture, seemed very well suited to sleeping...

Changfeng Fortress. The instant the strange attendant uttered the words "all things shall perish," Francis II had already reacted. He flung up his left hand, and a solid magical shield took shape almost instantly, holding off the monster whose skull had burst and whose flesh had twisted and mutated.

At the sight of that nauseating flesh-monster, Francis II's expression shifted slightly, but the casting motions of his hand never paused. With his free right hand he swiftly traced out a series of magical runes, compressing complex and profound incantations into a few brief syllables. With a shrill, piercing crack, a blinding burst of arcane energy exploded between the magical shield and the monster, and the force of the blast flung the creature clean away!

After the monster was thrown back, Francis II's expression changed sharply. He did not call for the guards.

The assassin had come in within seconds of Master Duke's stepping out, and the fight just now had made noise enough. Even without his calling for help, the guards, or Master Duke, should have come rushing in at once.

But they did not. Not a single one.

The people here wanted the King dead.

The monster that had been blown off its feet was writhing madly on the ground, healing before his very eyes and clambering back up; the arcane blast, fired at almost point-blank range, had not dealt it a fatal wound at all. The instant Francis II saw this, he made the wisest decision available to him at that moment —

He raised a hand and loosed a fireball at the monster to hamper its movements, then in the same breath dashed straight for the nearest window and leapt!