The lift doors were sealed shut and covered in a dense lattice of glowing red runes. Ephor Ultimer had superimposed his own Artifice over the original Elpen mechanisms, creating a mighty lock to keep the chaos of the surface from interrupting his work.
Still, it wasn’t as powerful as the blood wards that had surrounded the estate. He could destroy it.
But as Nick went to channel mana through the Shard for a strike, he was stopped.
“Wait," Rosmaria croaked, approaching the runes with narrowed eyes. “Ephor has always been fond of trickwork. Yes, I see he deliberately layered several runes on top of one another. By shattering the protections, you risk triggering the fail-safes built into the shaft, destroying it.”
She drew a silver knife from her belt and dragged it across her cheek. Blood welled up, dark and rich, which she gathered in a gauntleted hand. She then pressed it flat against the doors, uncaring of the burning red runes.
Nick watched in silence. It was a fascinating display of magical authority, and he could see that Rosmaria wasn’t directly contesting Ephor's power.
Instead, her blood resonated with the estate’s foundational architecture, and through that connection, she commanded the stone and metal beneath the Artificer's lock to shift out of alignment.
Red runes flickered and died as their anchor points shifted. Finally, the doors groaned, sliding open to reveal a wide, circular platform.
They stepped inside, and Rosmaria pressed a sequence of hidden plates on the lift's interior wall, sending the platform down into the dark.
The drop was agonizingly slow. As they sank deeper into the earth, the ambient ether grew wilder. Nick rolled his shoulders, feeling a distinct friction in the air, as if two opposing magnetic fields were grinding against each other.
"He is pouring an ocean of mana into the ritual," he observed, impressed despite himself as he studied the currents bleeding up through the floor grates. “The one I believe to be Ephor is providing the raw horsepower for the summoning, while Alexander is creating some kind of vacuum, likely to drag their patron up from the Abyss.”
“So he’s not foolish enough to open a breach," Rosmaria muttered, her breathing shallow as the strain of the potion weighed on her failing body.
“I’m guessing that was his intention," Nick corrected, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the shifting frequencies. "But the underlying structure is wrong. The pull is reflecting off something and echoing in ways I don’t understand.”
It was a brilliant, if horrifying, piece of spellcraft, now that Nick could see its shape. Ephor was casting downward, trying to open a door in the floor of reality. But Alexander had been the one to paint the foundational arrays, and from what he could tell, he’d polarized the runes at the bottom of the sequence. Rather than a simple pull, the array served as a cosmological mirror.
Ephor's immense power struck that mirror and slingshotting upward, bypassing the physical plane and tearing into the heavens.
The temperature in the shaft began to rise. The cold, creeping dread of the Void burned away, replaced by a heat that felt all too familiar. The golden lifeblood of the World that Nick had gathered earlier stirred restlessly in his coils, recognizing the encroaching presence of the divine.
His observations were cut short as the lift slammed to a halt.
They were nowhere near the bottom, yet the shaft doors opened to reveal a corridor lined with lumen-stones.
“They must have severed the descent lines before beginning," Rhea noted after inspecting the lift and peering into the corridor. "He really doesn't want company.”
“Can they be repaired?” Nick asked.
“No,” Rosmaria grunted in displeasure. “Not quickly enough.”
“Then we’ll take the stairs," Gaelen said, stepping off the platform, eyeing every shadowy nook with suspicion.
It was a good thing, for the corridor was a gauntlet. Someone had retrofitted the maintenance levels with traps, and soon, hidden compartments in the walls hissed, venting highly corrosive alchemical gas.
Probably Nestor’s work. He seemed fond of this kind of thing and would probably have gotten a kick out of knowing that even his own workers were always dancing on the edge of an ugly death.
Nick summoned a rotating cylinder of wind around the group, trapping the gas in the air currents and funneling it harmlessly into the ceiling vents, yet that was only the first trap.
As they rounded a corner, they nearly walked into a staging area. A dozen Ultimer guards, clad in combat gear, were reinforcing a barricade of overturned crates. A mage stood behind them, weaving a complex spell to collapse the ceiling.
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Gaelen prepared to charge ahead and give them the cover they needed to punch through, but a sudden commotion behind the barricade halted him.
Two servants in drab gray uniforms, carrying crates of alchemical supplies, abruptly dropped their burdens. One of them, a young woman with a hard expression, shoved a flask into the mage's satchel. She then grabbed her companion, and they threw themselves behind a solid stone pillar.
The flask detonated. Green fire consumed the mage and the three guards nearest him, blowing a hole straight through the barricade.
Not ones to let such a gift go to waste, Nick and Gaelen surged through the smoke.
Nick caught a disoriented guard with a palm strike to the chest, sending a burst of air into the man's lungs that ruptured them instantly. Gaelen fell upon them with murder in his eyes, his blade finding gaps in the remaining guards' armor and plunging deep.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have participated in the defeat of [Paul Thossos, Knight of House Ultimer - Level 76]
You have participated in the defeat of [Cimelius Estates, Mage of House Ultimer - Level 73]
You have participated in the defeat of [Soldier of House Ultimer - Level 61-65] x12
+127,200 Exp
The skirmish ended in seconds, instead of the prolonged combat it should have been. The young servant woman stepped out from behind the pillar, coughing from the smoke. She looked at Gaelen, her eyes dropping to the amber of his irises, then to the old woman in the mechanical brace.
"My father worked in the kitchens for House Elpen," she said, her voice shaking yet resolute. “He always said the true lords would return.”
Gaelen offered her a respectful nod, memorizing her face. "Get to the surface. Avoid the courtyard, where the Black Hounds are fighting. Find the smugglers near the western canal with as many of our people as you can; they will give you safe passage.”
The servants didn't waste time, sprinting back up the corridor.
“I’m always surprised by how many loyal retainers your family still has," Nick noted as they pushed past the ruined barricade, drawing a murmur of approval from the others.
On the second floor, they met only silence, and no one was foolish enough to trust it.
As soon as they’d left the stairs behind, they heard a crash, and Nick felt great bars of Null Iron fall across the exit, sealing them in.
If we’d just been spies, this would mean our deaths. I doubt anyone below Prestige could break through them in any meaningful length of time.
However, they had to keep moving forward, so they ignored the blocked path.
The second portion of the trap soon revealed itself as hidden panels slid open, revealing homunculi clad in chainmail and plate armor.
Unlike their counterparts fighting above, these creatures had been blending seamlessly into the ambient mana, as they had been inactive until that very moment, explaining why Nick hadn’t sensed them.
Incredibly thin wires wrapped around the first two, shredding them into pieces before they could even launch an attack, despite their mighty armor.
“Don’t just stand there!” Rosmaria roared.
A lance of [Zealous Flames] flared from the Shard, striking another, while the stone rippled below, forcing several others to dodge out of the way.
A pillar emerged from the liquid ground, allowing Gaelen to alight on it and jump off, landing on a homunculus as it regained its balance. Dark power rippled through his dagger, lending him superior strength and allowing him to wrestle the being down so he could plunge his blade into the helmet.
More fire was summoned, washing over the enemy and herding them, whereupon [Righteous Gale] fed the flames, turning them into a blazing inferno.
Mana rumbled as the homunculi tried to break through the encirclement; while the first two failed and burned in the attempt, the others used their fellows as battering rams and rushed out.
Were this a normal battle, Nick would have fallen back, repositioning to batter them down, but Rhea was there with him, and he couldn’t get them both out in time in such a narrow environment, so he summoned the [Crest], allowing the homunculi to slam into it and feel its electrical charge.
Soon enough, Gaelen was at their back, plunging his dagger into them and unleashing its cursed power.
The homunculi twitched before their internal cores shattered.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You have participated in the defeat of [Homunculi of House Ultimer - Level 70-78] x10
+198,300 Exp
As they recovered and began to move out, a deep boom echoed through the stone walls, shaking dust from the vaulted ceiling. As Nick extended his senses upward, he saw that more presences had entered the fight, this time mounted.
He relayed as much to the others, who didn’t seem very pleased.
“It must be Ultimer reinforcements. Our men didn’t bring horses,” Rosmaria said, her eyes fixed on the path ahead. "The northern barracks have finally mobilized, then. They’ll smash into Varg's rear guard.”
The sounds kept coming even as they hurried on, with Nick relaying the happenings beat for beat.
He could feel Varg himself finally take to the field, carving through mounted knights as if they were greenboys, but it was clear it wouldn’t be enough, since his men were falling too fast.
Yet before things could turn for the worse, more figures approached, and a large group fell upon the knights as they were wheeling for another pass.
“That must be our people hitting their flanks," Gaelen explained with a tight smile.
The battle for Toneburg raged on all fronts, and Nick could tell his companions wanted little more than to turn back and offer their aid, but down in the dark, the true threat was reaching its zenith.
They descended a wide, spiraling staircase, the air growing hotter with each step. The stones themselves began to hum, vibrating at a frequency that made Nick's teeth rattle. The ether was tearing itself apart, caught between the rules of the mortal world and the growing presence of the divine.
Soon, they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Before them stood a set of massive, circular vault doors forged from an alloy of silver, iron, and bone. They were heavily scarred, bearing the marks of Nestor's failed attempts to breach them over the past decade. A darker magic had been used more recently, and Nick recognized the taint as Alexander’s work.
It wasn’t even particularly powerful, but it was insidious and tied to blood, making him suspect the ex-vicar had used many sacrifices to try to form a key for the lock.
"The entrance to the Forge," Rhea whispered, torn between nostalgia and anger at its state.
Through the thick metal, Nick could feel the ritual spiraling out of control. The abyssal anchor Ephor had established was cracking. Blinding light from the heavens was bleeding down the tether, answering the profane call.
From what little he could tell, Ephor seemed trapped in a flood of his own mana, desperately trying to hold the reins of a chariot already plummeting off a cliff.
If we had to break through these doors, we’d be here long after they were finished. Fortunately, we have the original key here.
Indeed, Rosmaria pressed both hands flat against the cold metal. She closed her eyes, her expression smoothing, and synced her soul with the grand machinery she had bound herself to ten years earlier.
The locking mechanisms deep within the walls disengaged with a thunderclap, and the vault doors ground open, splitting down the middle. Golden light spilled into the corridor, accompanied by the smell of burning blood and the sound of reality tearing at the seams.
Nick steeled himself and stepped through.
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