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MAZE - Chapter 1117 - Waiting for Scouts
🕑 Added 2025-10-15 05:45:22 +0000 UTCTwo days after the revelation that Gwendelan's Legacy caused the undead horde, Hera still could not go back to the Fields of Elysium. She wanted to go there and start trying to figure out a way to stop the undead from being a problem. And the most obvious way of doing so was to kill the king. Although according to history, King Gwendelan should also be undead right now.
This dated back all the way to when she first became an explorer, the moment when she participated in the test prior to gaining her role. She faced a version of the skeleton king, something created by the guild to test her abilities, to make sure that she could run a dungeon and come out victorious. But now, seeing that she was really going after the king, she truly believed that the undead version she fought back then was closer to reality than she initially assumed.
For that reason, she spent the last couple of days studying everything she could about King Gwendelan and the undead emperor, but there wasn't that much to discover. History had lost the specifics. People still remembered that the emperor was an awful person who used his Legacy to subjugate countless kingdoms and kill all of their rulers, including slaughtering the entire population of some of them just to increase his undead horde.
King Gwendelan, had betrayed the emperor after breaking a deal with him and then took the Legacy unto himself. Unfortunately, when King Gwendelan acquired the Legacy, it wasn't enough to let all the people trapped by it rest. As the army that had been raised did not vanish as he was hoping. Instead, he came to the realization that the only way to get rid of this Legacy would be for some other Legacy holder to come and kill him.
King Gwendelan tried doing that, and there were a few reports of powerful Legacy holders going to help the ancient king to die. But the reports also said that no one was successful. People could imagine that maybe either the king got cold feet or that something stopped them before they could reach the new Legacy holder. And then, according to the other reports of later expeditions to get rid of the horde, it seemed like the king, or whoever was still controlling the Legacy, still existed in his castle to this day.
The problem was his castle. It was not located in the Fields of Elysium. It was actually in a room called, the Evergreen Kingdom. But Hera couldn't find any information about that room specifically, and neither could the rest of the alliance. The expeditions that had been more recent failed to reach the seat of power.
Hera only spent a couple of hours on this, because that's how little information was available about them and how widespread it was. This wasn't the same as looking for a niche time period or trying to track down a very specific family's contributions. It was equivalent to asking who invented the internet or who discovered electricity. Very easy to find, and all the information had already been compiled a thousand times over.
Once she finished the initial explorer test, she got curious about the people who were involved in it and had searched about it. And the same happened again after her assassin role test, which only served to further solidify what she already learned the first time she tried looking into this kind of thing. But even with the added information the alliance could provide using the reports given by those who found the traces of Gwendelan's horde, there wasn't much for her to learn. The types of creatures she would find had most likely changed in the past few hundreds of years since that last encounter.
The reason why she had yet to do anything else related to the Fields of Elysium was the fact that everybody, including Shane, was asking her to wait. Hera didn't want to do that. She wanted to just rush towards that room and start working on a solution right away. But she couldn't afford to do so alone. Even if her Court was there, it was still not enough for her to fight an entire army by herself, especially one that seemingly didn't have any levels.
Although according to some of the reports made by the teams that encountered the undead army of King Gwendelan, there was a reason for that. Only some of the monsters that were created actually gained a status level. Those were the people who were affected by a different aspect of the Legacy, one that allowed them to retain the abilities they had once they were living. Aside from them, anyone who was simply a corpse that was reanimated would be considered as part of the same skill, not its own individual creature.
In a sense, this Legacy should be very good for leveling up, especially if it was possible to reanimate the same corpse over and over again. All people had to do was kill a powerful person, bring them back, and kill them over and over again in order to gain more experience. Of course, that's only if the experience did count after the effect of the skill. There was also the possibility that people could only gather experience for the first kill. Actually, figuring out how that worked was very complicated.
The Empress had ample time to consider those possibilities since she was forced to be on standby waiting for Typhera to prepare the scout team and for another group to arrive, which was now something they could afford to do since they were considerably closer. Funny enough, this second group was the one that arrived first, as the scout team still had one key person missing.
The second group was a trio of mages. They were called specifically because their abilities were likely too difficult for the undead Legacy to replicate or for their undead versions to utilize, and the creatures they would summon to fight likely could not join the undead army, because they were already undead and couldn't be brought back again, or because their physical body would be nonexistent if they were destroyed, leaving nothing behind to be reanimated.
As things were being set up for the expedition, the royal explorers were even joining the support group, making sure to organize any sort of meeting or necessary items that the expedition would require, along with more people on the alliance side who were working to do the same.
Still, the Empress took some time to talk to the mages and learn more about their schools of magic.
Hera understood the basics of necromancy. It was essentially a mixture of hemomancy, or blood magic, and bone crafting, where you just combined them to create skeletons, zombies, or if you focused more on the magical side of things, you could create specters and ghosts to follow your commands. She didn't actually understand how to do those things, but she had enough knowledge of the discipline to understand the gist of how it worked.
The same could be said of the golems. After all, they were just basic summons, much similar to Hera's own Court. It was almost impossible for her to hear the golemmaker speak two words about his craft and not immediately understand what he was talking about.
The one thing that was outside of her area of knowledge was the summoner. She had heard something about that kind of ability in the past but never delved too deep into how it actually functioned. Learning from someone who had expertise was very interesting. The idea of summoning was very similar to golem making, but instead of creating something out of raw material or something like that, you would simply create something out of a specific element, like fire, water, or air.
In addition, unlike golems, who followed a specific set of orders, summons had their own will, so to speak. They were not actually sentient creatures, but they would do things that followed what their element was supposed to do. Or at least, that was the explanation the summoner gave Hera.
What that actually meant was that summoners didn't really have fine control over their summons' actions. Instead, it was a more general idea. For instance, she could summon a rock elemental, and that elemental would focus on protecting her and defending from incoming attacks, as rock was sturdy and supposed to be about protection. Fire was related to destruction and would attack the enemies of the summoner relentlessly.
There were some nuances on how much mana of a specific type could be added to the spell in order to change the behavior, but out of the three schools of magic, summoning was the closest to the idea of cast it and forget. You didn't need to be micromanaging what your summon was doing as it would do what it was going to do. There were some spells and skills to help guide it, but it wasn't something that functioned out of the box, so to speak.
Hera found the idea strange and unintuitive. She would be leaving too much to chance, and it would be hard to properly control what the summon was supposed to do. But then again, she wasn't someone who could argue much about that kind of thing. Her Court was too unique, and most people who used some sort of summoning skill or fought with minions didn't have the luxury of having completely sentient beings at their beck and call.
But even that conversation only helped distract the Empress for a couple of hours. She still had to wait for this mystery person who would be joining the scout team, but no one seemed to be wanting to share who they actually were or why they were so late.
The one person who managed to figure out a way to distract Hera was her dad, and completely by accident. It had been only a few days since he became an Ophidianite, and there were still a lot of things he was learning. One of them happened completely by accident.
They were having lunch at their house with Hera barely paying attention to whatever conversation Eridan and Renette were having. That's when her dad reached out to eat a particularly large muffin that Bonnie's mom made. After eating the first one, which was considerably large, Eridan grabbed another and decided to shove the entire thing into his mouth. As both a joke and because he really wanted to eat another one before Renette took it away.
But instead of simply opening his mouth, he unhinged his jaw and took the entire muffin into his mouth in a single bite without even squishing it. Bonnie's mom was absolutely horrified at the sight, but Eridan was completely fine. He wasn't choking or anything like that. And he swallowed it whole.
After doing that, Eridan couldn't stop giggling and tried again. Renette seemed to be less freaked out by that, but she still wasn't really excited about what was going on.
But Hera realized that she never explained to her father that they could unhinge their jaws like snakes and eat things whole. As a matter of fact, she couldn't remember if she had ever even shown Eridan that they could do something like that.
And for the next couple of hours, they took turns eating increasingly more absurd foods in a single bite as a way to showcase who they were now.
