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Punishment Reincarnation 31
🕑 Added 2024-02-17 17:37:04 +0000 UTC(Changed title to reflect the new RR title)
31 – Locked door
Melina got up and walked over to where Lisette was currently stretching and flexing her body. She had cleaned herself after learning Ishrin’s spell, or else the foxgirl would have never approached her. The spell had worked quite well, removing all the gunk and foul smells and leaving a faint trace of a flowery scent she couldn’t quite place. It reminded her or a spring breeze, of prairies and open fields.
“How do you feel?” She asked.
The black-haired, red-eyed woman took a couple practice swings at the air with her twin blades.
“I am at the peak of Tier 4. I can feel it, the power within me eager to find a new way to express itself.”
“The bottleneck,” Ishrin said, getting up from where he was sitting. “And a hard one at that. Glimpsing the Dirac Sea.”
“We will worry about it later,” said Melina quickly, “it’s not safe to break through in here anyway.”
Ishrin nodded while Lisette turned to regard the tunnel leading deeper into the mountain.
“How about a meal first?” Ishrin proposed. “I have some leftover mushroom stew from a few days ago.”
“Ishrin…” Lisette said, voice low, “I do not know how things were in your world, but it is unsafe to eat food that’s been cooked several days ago unless you refrigerate it.”
Melina chuckled. “I must agree with her, who knows what happens to stuff in your inventory.”
“Nothing, really,” he said, “things get suspended in time. Or, at least, put in a time dilation differential so large that I have yet to notice anything happening inside.”
“Oh, well. If that’s the case…” Melina trailed off.
“I will have some.” Lisette said.
They sat down around the remnants of the ritual circle. With the blood gone, all that was left were signs and grooves in the stone that made no sense, and held no leftover power, along with a slightly diminished atmospheric mana density around the area. Ishrin took out the stew, still hot in its pot, along with some wooden cutlery and bowls. They ate in silence, and every spoonful reminded him of how nasty the stew was. He really needed to find better ingredients.
As he looked up, his eyes met Lisette’s. She was holding back tears.
“I know it’s bad, but—”
“Ishrin,” she said seriously, “this cooking… it is phenomenal. It reminds me of my past. Things I had almost forgotten. Thank you.”
“It is good!” Melina said with a playful smile. “Why did you say it was bad? Are you trying to be humble?”
The rest of the meal was spent in a light mood, with playful banter and casual chit-chat. Before long, they were finished with the meal and it was time to finally set off.
***
The frosted over cavern was one long tunnel dug in the ice, venturing deep inside the mountain. It went on and on, longer than any of the three adventurers thought possible, defying the laws of nature, bending their senses and twisting their perception of space. The party was lost. On the walls of the tunnel, that still snaked around the base of the mountain without ever going up, were strange things. Angular shapes, dark and sometimes pulsing with energy, projecting numbers and images, beeping and alive with strange energies.
Not electricity, but not magic either. There were forces at play here that baffled even Ishrin, who despite his many travels was not an expert in technology.
“I might be a little out of my depth here,” he muttered.
But he was not unheard. “I feel you,” huffed Melina. “I am the leader of the party, and yet I feel unnerved. Mere tunnels shouldn’t unnerve me at Tier 6.”
Lisette went to examine one of the strange things that poked out of the ice. “You know what these things are?”
Ishrin nodded. “Broken pieces. Remains of machines. I don’t know what their purpose was, but now they are no more than broken relics.”
Yet, they still seemed to work. Or at least, to retain some sort of function, an echo of their original directive. Their light was not extinguished, and in fact they seemed to glow with ever brighter light with each passing second. The mountain was awakening, it seemed. And it reacted to their presence, the hallways of ice becoming alive with light when they passed, and descending into a dark gloom as they left. A strange echo of noise, a ringing like the hum of electricity filled the cold air.
“It does make me nervous,” Lisette said. “How do the lights know when to turn on?”
“Sensors,” Ishrin said, but bit his tongue when a tremor shook the tunnel. It was weak, but deep. The rumble echoed through the thick ice, like a low growl of the earth, and small cracks appeared on the surface of the weakest of icicles that hung on the ceiling like a thousand tiny swords.
“What was that?” Asked Melina.
Ishrin shook his head.
“Keep your eyes wide open. I don’t like this.”
Eventually they came upon a great door. It was frosted over, like everything in this maze with only one corridor. Blue, of a deep magical blue that was blinding to the eyes and was even more painful to magic vision. It was closed shut.
Melina looked it over. “Can you open it?”
“I can try.” Ishrin said.
He approached the door and tried to break the ice that covered its every surface. Before he could even touch the cold steel and the hidden mechanisms that held the door in place, the ice was his first obstacle. However, it didn’t seem to budge. Lisette soon joined in the effort, and Melina too followed. The three bombarded the door with everything they had: Ishrin tried to take control of it with his telekinesis – he could apply a great force even at this early stages of his power – switching to other forces when it did not work and even trying to punch it with all his might or skewer it with his Magic Pebble sword.
Lisette swung her blades at the ice, but the sharp metal slid off its surface without even chipping it. Melina’s magic was just as ineffective, being reflected back when it came in contact with the ice. The projectiles retained the same power they had when they were casted, and she had to stop before she put the party in danger. One such magical blade, shining green with the power of wind, impacted against Ishrin’s armor before vanishing, but he didn’t react, and only he had a rough idea of how much damage his enchanted armor took. Even though just a reflected blade, it was still a Tier 6 attack, and Melina did not fail to notice how the man did not even flinch.
Finally fed up with the door, Ishrin cocked his head. Liù flew from his shoulder to stand before the door, and the two seemed to have a lengthy conversation between them without uttering a single word. Lisette observed them impassively, looking first at the pixie and then at the door. Eventually the pixie looked at her, shrugged, and went back to Ishrin.
“What’s wrong?” Melina asked.
“She thinks that the ice will reflect the beam back and damage us.” Ishrin said.
“You can understand each other like that?” The former guild master asked incredulously. Then she shook her head. “Gah, why do I even ask? But yeah, it makes sense. It can reflect magic, so it’s probable that it can reflect elemental power too.”
Meanwhile Lisette took initiative. Something that left the other two adventurers to question if what they were seeing was true, or if they were imagining things. She smiled at Liù and motioned with her hand for the pixie to come and play with her! Not only that, but the small pixie gingerly took flight and inched closer and closer to the adventurer. Melina wondered if Ishrin was telling Liù to indulge Lisette or if it was of her own initiative, because the little magical creature went to perch on Lisette’s shoulder and sat there, her little legs dangling and swinging happily, with her little feet sometimes hitting Lisette’s armor and making a clang.
It was a strange sight, seeing the cold and emotionless Lisette not only take initiative, but smile happily while a small creature of another realm, a summon no less, chimed and sang on her shoulder.
“I see you are getting close! How nice!” Ishrin said. Then he looked at the door again, refocusing on the task at hand barely a moment before Melina began to speak. “Don’t worry,” he waved her off. “I’m not wasting time. I was thinking.”
She nodded. “Okay. I know we are all lighthearted here, but this is a mission. We need to take it seriously.”
Ishrin nodded. “See that thing over there? It’s a console. It’s the technological equivalent of a magic interface.”
Melina studied the frozen over screen, that even now was displaying strange words whose meaning she could not understand.
Standby. User authentication required.
“Can you use it to open the door?” She asked.
“I don’t think I can.” Ishrin said after fiddling with it for a while. “I know how to use technology, but I don’t really know how to hack it, I am afraid.”
“Hack?” She echoed him, “what does it mean?”
“To take control of it.”
Melina sighed. “What do we do then? We go back?”
“I have another thing we can try. Or rather, someone.” He said, frowning. “This look like a hack Mekano could probably pull off in five minutes or less.”
There was envy in his voice, she noticed. And something else. Whatever or whoever Mekano was, Ishrin wasn’t too happy to call upon him for help.
“Lisette, do you have the Tier 6 crystal from the monster we killed earlier?” Ishrin asked.
The woman fished the large crystal out of her adventurer’s pouch. “Here.”
“Thank you. You two can sit back; this is going to take a moment.” Ishrin said. “Actually, Lisette can you help me?”
Melina propped her back against the icy wall and watched, thinking. Why did Ishrin not ask her for help?
Bad thoughts. She shook her head. Her magic armor glowed around her, and she could feel it slowly using its accumulated charge to oppose a force against the wall, keeping her body a few millimeters away from the ice. She wondered if it did so because it considered the ice hostile or because it was preventing her from hitting her back against a solid obstacle. Regardless, it was a very complex and powerful magic, one she even had an intuitive mental understanding of while it was active. Remarkable, a testament to Ishrin’s power.
Which only made her more jealous. As if Lisette was stealing him away from her. As if he was going to help Lisette, but not her.Which was unhinged to even think about.
Except. What even were Ishrin’s goals?
She had made her goals clear to him. Yes, he agreed to help her, which was nice. But it did nothing to reassure her whenever she thought about the fact that she had no clue what his own goals were. Survive? Get stronger?
Which also begged the question: how did he get here? Because if she could find out how he got here, then perhaps she could divine what he wanted to do now that he was here. Did he want to return? Did he want to escape? Cut ties with the past? But if that were true, why call upon Mekano? Did they really have no other choice?
It was no use to speculate.
There was a gaping hole in the information Ishrin had shared with her, and everything seemed to revolve around it. Despite how much Melina wanted to just flip out at him and ask him about all these things, she knew she couldn’t.
She was the party leader, and even forgetting that—for a moment—she just had too much to lose.
