Blue Core

The people of Anton’s Village were doing quite well in their new home. Anton Marn himself would have been proud of their work, even though they would all cede much of their success to the land they worked. Especially since they would make that admission. A farmer might be proud of what meagre living they could scratch from a rocky, hostile land, but a better farmer would be prouder of finding the best land and the best crops they could manage.

It was really good land.

It was weird land, since it lacked insects to pollinate or worms to make the soil better, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. It also lacked birds or rodents to prey on the crops and weeds to choke them, but nobody was going to complain about that. Most city folk would think that wouldn’t leave much work to do, but they would be wrong. Planting and tending their fields with only a fraction of the usual beasts of burden and tools was still back-breaking labor.

There were sharp limits on what Blue could or would do. The pre-ploughing of the fields was a one-time gift, for example, although it actually hadn’t been done all that well the first time around. Like many of the other things to do with farming, it had been done with only a vague idea of what the job actually entailed. Fortunately, lacking rocks or even roots from grass the expanses of soil weren’t too terrible to tend using only hand tools.

Other than moving buildings or adjusting gross structural features, he ignored the rest of the requests or suggestions. There was no tayantan orchard, for example, which was a shame and something she’d have to correct if Taelah could corner Shayma long enough to convince her. Surely Blue would listen then, and correct the travesty.

Still and all, under the influence of the flowers and maybe whatever else Blue could do, they’d managed their first harvest two weeks after planting. The best part was that there was nothing strange about the crops in question. Kon root grew quickly and was a staple besides, but easily went bitter and she’d seen how Affinity mana could twist it into inedibility. Another reason to generally stay in low-mana areas.

There had been only the one issue, which was hard to blame on the location. There wasn’t much to be done about a group of elite monsters sweeping in and wrecking the place. If it hadn’t been for that Keri girl, they’d still have people laid out after all that. At least Blue was nearly as quick to repair things as Keri was to repair people, though all the crops were a complete loss.

“Are you sure?” The man asked again, as if he didn’t notice Taelah surveying the fields and making notes. She never had caught his name, just one of Iniri’s men who seemed to be the one that bothered them most often.

“War or not, there’s still work to be done.” Taelah told him. “I don’t care that the teleports are going down, it’s not like we really need Refuge.” Really she still thought the town’s name was awful. “We have food and water here and things need tending whether there’s a battle going on somewhere else or not. Anton’s Village is staying.”

“Very well,” he said, clearly exasperated. “Queen Iniri has made it clear you can stay, but keep in mind none of the Classers will be able to help you if something happens.”

“Yes, yes,” she waved him away. They didn’t need Classer help to till the land or harvest melons.

The man grumbled and stomped off, stepping through the teleportation ring set in the middle of the chamber. Taelah eyed it as the ring itself vanished, effectively locking them inside. Not that it felt like inside. Not with the wind and the water and the green and growing things, and even with its flaws the fake sky overhead made the whole thing feel quite roomy.

“Y’realize that if things go sour with them, we’re fucked?” Glenn said bluntly, appearing from wherever he vanished to whenever the higher-level Classers came around.

“As are they, if we run into more issues with the harvests.” She frowned at him for his language. “I don’t blame Blue for burning up the forest on the surface, but there’s just no way to support this many people without us now.” Several hundred people burned through preserved food very quickly, and even without the usual vermin issues they were frankly on the brink of starvation. She’d heard that dungeons could produce food directly but Blue never had, which was just as well since it’d put them in a very unfortunate spot.

For a while there was no real change despite the teleporters being gone. The fake sun moved through the fake sky, the breeze blew with the water that came in from the ice fields above, and Taleah’s fantasies of tayan-fruit pastries spun hazily in the back of her mind. Then without any prior warning all the lights went out.

There was dark, and then there was this dark. Even on the deepest of nights there’d be stars shining somewhere beyond the clouds, points of mana or fire or lantern-light, just small things to break up the black. Here there was not, and the darkness was so absolute she couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or closed.

Shouts of alarm came from all directions, as well as people calling names as they tried to find each other in the sudden blackout. Even [Mana Sight] wouldn’t have helped, if any of them had learned the Skill, because apparently Blue’s mana was invisible anyway. She just cursed, wishing she’d had the foresight to fuel a lantern or even put a candle somewhere she could light it, but they’d grown too dependent on Blue’s convenient, ever-present slices of daylight, which they could even turn on and off themselves.

All that was gone. The breeze continued, as did the trickle of water, so it wasn’t like everything had come to a halt, but the lack of light was bad enough. “Haerar!” She called into the darkness. He was the only one with a Skill that would let him make fire and light out of nothing, though it wasn’t much. Just [Kindle] from a misspent youth before realizing he didn’t really have what it took to be a mage. “Can you get a fire going somewhere?”

“Yes ma’am!” His voice floated back from somewhere far away. She was just glad he wasn’t up on one of the terraces. Whoever was up there was far out of shouting range. Carefully, she put her hands out and groped around the storage area until she stumbled into a barn. By touch alone she couldn’t figure out which barn it was, and she cursed the sameness in Blue’s constructions. They were quality, but identical, which wouldn’t have happened if they’d built the things themselves.

Her fingers found a door and she opened it, sniffing. Platehoofs, definitely, which let her orient herself a bit. The chicken pens were that way, the shaeff barn was that way, the water she was hearing was that stream. Her eyes tried to conjure shapes out of absolute darkness, hallucinatory little flashes of outlines that weren’t there at all.

Suddenly real light flared, some distance off. It seemed Haerar had managed a torch, which was accompanied by a few cheers as people gravitated toward the beacon. Plus a few curses as they immediately tripped over on uneven ground, which made her smirk as she made her way carefully, carefully, toward the torch. Despite the circumstances the sight put her in a much better mood. Fire was the core of civilization.

Then the ground bucked under her feet and sent her sprawling. Rumbles, growls, and creaks echoed through the chamber as the dungeon shuddered, and she could suddenly feel the weight of uncountable thousands of tons of rocks above their heads. She really regretted not taking the offer to leave the farming chamber, though if Blue’s dungeon collapsed the surface wouldn’t be very safe either.

“Waugh! The silo’s melting!” The shout came from somewhere to her left. The tremor seemed to have knocked out Haerar’s torch, and while he’d probably get it started again soon enough that meant, once again, everything was pitch black. And the buildings were melting.

“Then get out of it, stupid!” Someone called back.

“Get everyone and everything out of the buildings!” Taelah yelled, for whoever could hear it. She followed her own advice and hauled on a door that, indeed, groaned and juddered against a jamb that no longer fit it quite right. “Come on,” she said to the platehoofs, and did her best to mimic the whistle Tienn used to call them. With the creaks and groans the barn was making, it didn’t require much encouragement to get them out, even if they weren’t particularly happy to move in the darkness. From the noises they were making there might have been some minor injuries, too, but that’d have to wait until light came back.

If it did. She’d heard something about Blue fighting but what was even going on? Was he hurt, or unconscious? Dead? She didn’t know enough about dungeons to know anything about what was going on. All of a sudden she knew exactly what the drawback was from this land that seemed too good to be true.

Another tremor rocked the chamber, and water splattered down on her from somewhere above. She knew there was an enormous cap of ice up there, and the thought of a sudden flood...well, it was about the same as the ceiling collapsing on them. Taelah gritted her teeth and forced away the crushing weight, real or imagined, as she navigated her way blindly past the confused herd of platehoofs and onto the next barn. They were Anton’s Village, and they weren’t going to let a simple thing like a collapsing dungeon ruin their livestock.