This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 141

Chapter 141 - Weird Notifications

Preston sensed the urgency in her voice, immediately dropping to his knees next to her. “What’s going on?”

Wes scowled. “Did you get a milestone?”

“No… no I…” Eve shook her head. “They’re not from my class.” She looked down at the white lines running along the floor beneath her. “I think they’re from the enchantments.”

Wes’s eyes shot open. “I’m sorry, what?”

As if to punctuate his point, a deep and scraping groan reverberated throughout the cavern, pulling the attention of all present back towards the great doors. Under their own accord, they slowly eked shut, their locking enchantments flaring to life behind them.

[Alert!] Gate Enchantments Restored!

Eve dismissed the notification with a long and drawn-out exhale. “I got a series of messages warning me about a Mana leak, then one saying the gate enchantments were about to fail, then one saying they’d failed.” She pointed back at the doors. “Now they’ve closed, I’ve got one letting me know the gate enchantments are back up again.”

“That’s impossible,” Preston breathed.

“Well, I’m staring right fucking at it.”

Wes scratched the back of his head. “I think ‘impossible’ might be too strong of a word where we’re involved.”

Preston shook his head. “There is no magic that can fuck with the notification system. It’s inviolable.”

Wes froze where he stood, voice suddenly lowered to little more than a whisper. “No it isn’t.”

“Shit.” Preston paused, suddenly remembering the time Wes’s notifications had been very much violated. “I’m sorry. My point still stands, though. Barring ancient apocalyptic forces that have been sealed away from our reality, nothing should be able to interact with the system. Especially not some random enchantment.”

“I wouldn’t call it random,” Eve said.

“Maybe it’s an illusion?” Preston offered. “Or somehow faking a notification?”

Eve shook her head. “If it were an illusion, you could see it too. If it were messing with my head to show me things, Defiant Mind would resist it.”

“Great,” Preston sighed. “The Burendians could interfere with the system. That doesn’t sound the least bit problematic.”

“But why here?” Wes asked. “Why you?”

Eve pushed herself to her feet, eyes forward. “This is the capital, right? Maybe this is the only place they set it up before they had bigger things to worry about. As for what triggered it… I can think of two possibilities. I either took up some part of the enchantment when I was draining Mana from the door, or they were only ever going to work for me.”

Preston blinked. “The enchantments think you’re Burendian.”

“Or that I’m the flesh-Mana hybrid the Burendians were trying to create. Or I’m just the closest thing to a Burendian they’ve seen in millennia.”

“If it’s that…” Wes breathed, “can you control it?”

“Let’s find out.” Eve inhaled, holding the breath in as she focused her mind outward. With as much of her considerable will as she could muster, she issued the command.

Status.

Nothing happened. “Status,” she tried speaking it aloud. Still nothing. She went through a dozen variations asking for everything from a status report to a help menu, but try as she might the strange notifications failed to materialize. She shook her head. “No luck.” Without waiting for the others to remark, she reached downward with her will, tugging at the flow of Mana through the floor beneath her feet. As it torrented through her, a notification appeared.

[Alert!] Mana leak detected!

She let go. “I can’t interact with it directly,” Eve explained. “But I can trigger it to send out an alarm.”

“So the Burendians highjacked the notification system for an alarm?”

“It’s gotta be more complex than that,” Wes argued.

Eve nodded. “Either it sees me as a random citizen who deserves danger warnings but doesn’t have direct access, or there’s a control room somewhere we need to find—probably close to the leyline.”

“Could be both,” Preston said.

“Or neither.” Eve shrugged. “My gut says there’s gotta be more to it, but it’s entirely possible it could just be a complicated alert system. In the meantime, I get the impression we’ve got some sentry constructs to fight.”

Actually… Art sent, I think somebody beat us to them.

Three sets of eyes turned to follow Art’s indication, spotting three piles of rubble across the vast entry chamber. They approached to investigate.

“Whatever these were, they weren’t sentry constructs,” Preston said as he ran a hand over a broken chunk of marble the size of a horse. “They’re too big.”

Sure enough, the closest of the three fallen constructs seemed to have been made of a dozen slabs of enchanted stone all bigger on their own than an entire sentry of the style they’d fought in previous ruins. Of course, previous ruins hadn’t had an entry hall cavernous enough for anything this massive, but the sheer scale of the things was impressive.

“It’s the capital, isn’t it?” Eve said. “Makes sense it’d be better defended.”

“Or at least it was,” Preston muttered.

“Over here!” Wes called, down on hands and knees to peer under one of the inert slabs of stone. “There’s another root.”

“Just the one?” Eve asked.

“Yep.”

“It’s gotta be Alex,” Eve reasoned. “Both this construct and the dead snake only had one root, which matches the fact her spear has a long cooldown. If the roots were somebody’s class ability, there’d be more of them.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Preston said, eyes wide as he stared at the remains of the third construct. “She blew this one up.”

Eve followed his gaze to find a pile with the largest slab—doubtless the ‘body’—broken in two around circular impact, with chips and shrapnel and marble dust showered about the surrounding floor. No signs of elemental force remained, no traces of fire or ice or any other spell-ready Mana. “Who do we know that summons roots and can also make explosions of pure Mana?”

Wes nodded. “That’s confirmation enough for me. Alex has been here. Whether or not she’s still here…”

“No way to know,” Eve said. “The dead snake was at least a week old. It’s possible she got what she came for and left in that time, or that she got trapped or is still looking.”

“Or that she’s waiting for us,” Preston added.

Eve nodded. “We should assume for now that she is, that she’s laid traps, and that she’s more powerful than before, having completed her secondary quest for the crown.”

“Probably smart,” Preston said.

Wes cracked a thin smile. “At least she took care of some of the monsters for us. Kind of like trading one threat for another.”

“Don’t remind me,” Eve groaned, gazing forlornly at the fallen constructs. “All that exp gone.”

“Don’t worry,” Wes patted her on the back. “There’ll be plenty of exp where we’re going. If we survive.”

Preston snorted. “I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty of exp even if we don’t survive. It just won’t be us that’s getting it.”

Wes grinned at him. “That’s the spirit!”

Eve snorted. “Alright, then. Which way then?”

In lieu of two long hallways spanning the entire outpost or a single passage leading to an open rotunda at the center of the stronghold, two dozen doors lined the side walls of the entry hall, matched by three more at the back, right behind the fallen constructs.

“It’s a palace, right?” Preston asked. “I’d bet all those side doors lead to storage rooms and pantries and servants’ passages. A few probably lead to places like the dining hall or ballroom, assuming the Burendians even had balls.”

“I don’t know,” Wes interrupted, “fucking with the notification system seems pretty ballsy.”

“Ha-ha,” Preston laughed sarcastically. “If we’re looking for some kind of control room, I’d bet it’s down one of the side doors. The leyline access definitely is.”

“Alternatively, the throne room is absolutely through one of these central doors,” Eve countered. “As would be any council chambers and royal suites. The Burendians had royalty, right? There’s a literal Crown of Burendia; there has to have been a ruler.”

Wes exhaled. “You’re also assuming Burendians would’ve built a palace the same way we do today. If the leyline—or ley node that I expect we’ll find—was so important to them, it’s entirely possible it’s the centerpiece of the palace, not tucked away.”

Eve nodded. “Forward it is, then. Whatever design principles the Burendians held, it just makes sense that the important shit would be at the center. Makes sense to explore that first, then.”

“Any preference which?” Wes asked.

Preston turned to Art. “Can you sense anything?”

The trellac shook his feathered head. If there’s anything alive up ahead, it’s either shielding itself or the enchantments are blocking it out.

Eve shrugged, stepping up to the door on the left. It was a wooden thing, etched with swirling abstract images yet untouched by enchantment. Whatever magic kept it intact through the ages ran around it, not through it. “We’re going to explore them all, eventually. Doesn’t really matter where we start.” With no sense of urgency nor solemnity, Eve grasped the handle and twisted.

The door didn’t budge.

“It’s locked.”

“All the more reason to open it,” Wes said.

Eve grinned. “I like the way you think.” Having, in her career as an adventurer, very rarely if at all been remotely dissuaded by a locked door, Eve stepped back, raised her foot, and kicked it in.

[Alert!] Interior Door 19 Breached!

“Welp, if there are any Burendians here, the alarm system just let them know where we are.”

“Really?” Preston asked. “I would’ve thought the loud crashing sound of you kicking down a door would’ve done that for it.”

“No, that was for all the monsters that don’t get the alert notifications. Gotta make sure I don’t discriminate against you inferior humans when I accidentally announce our presence.”

Preston sighed. “Of course.”

The hallway, while wide and grandiose, was decidedly human-sized—or Burendian-sized as it were—which posed a particular difficulty to a particular winged drake. Having grown far too large to fit through such passages, Reginald had long become accustomed to keeping watch outside, even if he didn’t like it. For companionship’s sake, Art stayed behind with him.

Eve, Wes, and Preston forged ahead, stopping for a moment to stare at the ornate carvings upon the walls. In a few places, iron bars hung horizontally above heaps of dust where tapestries had once hung before disintegrating to the inexorable crawl of history. Similarly, the nine-foot-high ceiling showed signs of paint, but whatever images had once decorated it had long faded to a few mere chips and thin splotches of color.

“Wherever this goes,” Preston muttered, “it’s too small to be a throne room and too fancy to be a control room.”

Eve shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, we’re exploring them all, remember. Besides, this path looks just as likely to have what I’m looking for.”

Preston sighed. “Do I want to know what you’re looking for?”

Wes snorted. “The same thing she’s always looking for.”

“Exp?”

“Exp.”

Eve laughed. “I just hope Alex left us something to kill.”

“The fact the door was closed and locked is a good sign for that. Alex wouldn’t have picked it, she’d have kicked it down like you did.”

“Which means she probably hasn’t been this way,” Eve followed Preston’s reasoning.

As if to further prove her point, a scraping sound of stone on stone echoed down the hall ahead, its source powerful enough to shake the floor beneath then. Chips of ancient paint and bits of dust rained down from the ceiling above.

[Alert!] Defensive Measure 1873 Activated.
[Alert!] Defensive Measure 1874 Activated.
[Alert!] Defensive Measure 1875 Activated.

Eve stopped short, sharing the notification with the others. “Sounds like constructs up ahead.”

Wes let out a sharp laugh, clapping Eve on the back as he did. “Well there you go. Something to kill, coming right up.”

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