Chapter 394: 394. The Key Has Been Found, But There Are These Mysterious Weirdos

He was wrapped up on his left ankle and had a long contusion on his right side, but his eyes were clear, and he sat up.

Iris covered the distance between the entrance to the passage and Veylor in about four seconds, at which point she stopped just short of him and stood for a moment looking at him with an expression that contained too many things to be readable as a single emotion.

"You’re a fucking idiot!" she said with a loud tone, and then she gave him a hug.

"Iris..." Veylor said. "I know... I’m sorry about that..."

"I was so worried...! I thought I was going to lose you!"

"I know." He reached up and took her hand. "Sorry for making you worried."

She stayed there for one more moment, then went down on her knees and wrapped her arms around him in the careful, deliberate way of someone being precise about not making injuries worse and said nothing else.

Rex looked away and looked at Aurelia instead and saw her looking at him already, with the measuring expression of someone who has heard something about a person that ruined her son’s life, but still it was her son’s action that did it.

He said, "Aurelia Morr Nightwing."

"Rex Rexilion," Aurelia said. "It seems that you truly are worthy, and I must apologize for my son’s actions that will occur later."

"Save that for late," Rex said. "I already beat Elaris and her husband in Nightwing’s tradition."

Aurelia was shocked to hear that, so she glanced at Iris just to see the truth in her nodding. "There’s no way..."

Aisella moved through the group, her healer’s assessment actively engaged. She touched foreheads and wrists, asking questions in her brisk, warm manner.

Meanwhile, the rest of the expedition joined in, checking for injuries, distributing supplies, and ensuring that the six individuals, who had been surviving on emergency rations and cave water for three days, received adequate water and food.

Rex helped where he could, watched the room, and thought about the lower chambers and the Key.

He also noted, based on the brief examination he’d been able to make of the group, that the skeleton Aisella had found near the entrance to the wider chamber system had already caught her attention.

She went to it twice between patients, crouching down and examining the remains with the careful precision of someone who had been trained to read physical evidence.

The third time she crouched there, she looked up with a small frown that meant she’d found something that didn’t fit the expected pattern.

"Miss Elizabeth," she said. "This body is a mage’s corpse..."

"The energy signature in the bone structure is still partially readable, indicating that this person had significant arcane training."

Elizabeth came and looked. "One of the expedition members?"

"The equipment wreckage matches up with Academy expedition gear from about eighteen months ago," Aisella said. "But the cause of death is nothing we’ve seen from any of the monster types."

"There’s structural damage to the bone that appears to be intentional, and it seems... targeted."

"Someone killed them," Alexander said.

"Someone who knew exactly what they were doing," Aisella said.

She looked at the group, and there was something careful in the way she phrased what she said next. "This person was killed by someone who understood mage biology and knew where the structural vulnerabilities were."

There was a moment’s silence in the chamber.

’Wait a minute...’ Rex thought.

He looked at the skeleton and considered the east approach, the deliberate corridor collapse, and Durvan’s description of two years of targeted disruptions to canyon traffic.

"There are still other presences somewhere..." Nerith said to them. "And it’s... five of them."

"We need to investigate," Iris replied. "We have to eliminate everything that’s been causing this!"

He thought about the five presences that Nerith’s nature channel hadn’t been able to fully resolve, somewhere below and ahead of them, and the primordial energy he’d detected in that direction even from the surface.

He thought of Gelion Amorphis and his independent intelligence network and his second-stratum contacts and the fourteen months he had spent building something inside Mordecai’s infrastructure.

’You’ve got to be fucking kidding me...’ Rex clenched his fists. ’My elemental mastery could read this signature... and there’s no fucking way those motherfuckers in the Underlayer are the cause of this again.’

He kept his thoughts to himself, where thoughts about unsolved puzzles tended to stay until they resolved themselves into certainty.

...

The group descended to the third level while Aurelia’s survivors waited at the entrance of the second, equipped and as comfortable as the cave permitted. Iris paused briefly to share a few words with Veylor, words that Rex couldn’t catch, before returning to the front of the formation, her blades resting at her hips and her jaw set.

The third level announced itself with a change in the air: cooler and damper, imbued with the mineral sharpness of deep stone. It possessed the unique acoustic quality that Elizabeth had mentioned, where sounds seemed to originate from slightly off positions, arriving a fraction of a second before or after expected.

This effect was subtle enough that most people would likely adapt within a few minutes and cease to notice it, yet it was undeniably present.

The instant they passed the threshold, Nerith’s leaves ceased their motion.

"I can still read it," she said before anyone could ask. "It’s just... different."

"The signal’s older, and it’s not like reading in the present tense... it’s more akin to what the stone remembers.

Elizabeth asked, "Do you still sense presences?"

"Yes." She paused. "There are still five of them." 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

"Up ahead and down... they’ve been sitting still for a while, so they’re either waiting or they’re stationed."

"Stationed means that they knew that we were coming," Alexander said. "It seems like they’re going to be our enemies, huh?"

"We’ve established that they have advance knowledge." Elizabeth said, "Just keep on moving with caution."

When they arrived at the lower chambers, it was bigger than the upper levels because the natural scale of the formation increased rather than decreased as they sank lower, the geological opposite of what Rex would have expected from the outside.

Down here, the walls were composed of different, older stones with long-dried mineral deposits that left the surface striated and almost metallic in the light. The floor was flat enough in most sections that the walking was easy despite the depth.

Nerith’s hand stroked Rex’s arm.

"They know we’re here," she whispered. "The stone is reporting our movement."

"The vibration profile is clean at this depth."

"How far?"

"Maybe a hundred meters." She said, "In the big terminal room ahead."

"That’s where the Key is, and... that’s where they are."

Rex thought about the situation for the time it took to walk ten steps. Then he considered the order of things to come and arranged what he knew into a workable sequence.

The entrance to the terminal chamber was a wide natural arch, the stone above it naturally sculpted by geological time into a shape that seemed almost intentional. Elizabeth listened for about ten seconds with her fist clenched on the threshold, and the group stopped.

From within the chamber came an utter silence.

She looked at the group and then walked through the arch.

The chamber was vast, the ceiling so high that their lights barely reached it, the walls receding far enough into shadow that the far end was lost to darkness. The floor, nearly level, exhibited a slightly iridescent quality where the light struck it, thanks to centuries of mineral deposits.

In the middle of the chamber, about thirty meters from the arch, there were five mysterious figures.

They were in a loose but very deliberate formation, not a haphazard one. One person in front, one at the front person’s right shoulder, and three more in a practiced rear triangle.

They were dressed alike, and this was no coincidence. Their matching dark, fitted gear was neither armor nor typical travel clothing; it was designed for both purposes.

On the chest of each garment, a symbol was burned cleanly into the fabric—geometric, symmetric, and faintly luminous. Rex’s energy perception identified this glow as intentionally activated.

On the floor of the chamber, at the feet of the center, stood a low stone pedestal. Resting atop the pedestal was an object that Rex’s earthen authority instinctively recognized, much like a magnet is drawn to iron.

It was a key-shaped artifact composed of compressed dimensional material, a construct that existed only at the intersection of deep arcane art and ancient geological power.

’So that’s the key to the underlayer, huh?’

"I must discover a way to obtain it before they do..."

Rex looked at the five figures and felt something he categorized carefully. It was not quite surprise, not quite concern, but the sharp analytical attention that came when something didn’t fit the established framework and needed immediate reassessment.

They were not demons, that’s for sure, but they carried no necromantic signature, no system energy that he could detect in his range, and no divine designation.

But underneath the surface layer of their energy, where most perceptive mages would have stopped looking, there was something older and heavier than any of those things, which was a primordial resonance that predated the current divine framework.

’Second stratum,’ he thought.

’Wait, no... Not quite.’

’Something that had access to the second stratum’s power base but was not native to it.’