Explorer of Edregon

It was only late afternoon by the time they left the shrine of rebirth, so their group leisurely made their way across the rest of the Bands' fragment as they approached the next unknown fragment in the second ring around Terra. Vin had to admit, it was nice getting to take their time for a change and simply enjoy the beautiful landscape as they traveled. They didn't end up running into any monsters, though they did spot a herd of those fluffy looking deer that the Red Dawn had used as mounts. Vin even spotted one that looked like it still had a saddle on it, who must have escaped from the Red Dawn and rejoined its herd sometime before the group had been taken out.

I wonder how Curash is doing, he thought as they neared the next fragment. Curash, the twice prestiged Hunter of Men who had been both the leader of the Red Dawn and secretly following Golrim's orders the entire time, had taken off on a mission to track down and eradicate the last few members of the murderous group who had managed to escape their ambush in the Sacred Forest. Curash himself had admitted he wasn't as fast as the two who had gotten away, but he'd been confident in his ability to find them.

Vin was curious about the man, and not just because he was possibly the highest levelled person he'd met in all of Edregon. Curash was apparently soul-bound to Golrim, which meant he no doubt knew all about the mysterious former advisor. While they'd reached the point where Vin and the rest of the council now trusted the Logistician, Golrim was still a man filled with unknowns, and Vin was far too curious to allow his past to remain hidden forever.

It was a shame Kym refused to talk about Golrim, but Vin had long since given up on that front.

Finally, they got close enough to the next fragment that the distant terrain wavered and changed, and Vin nearly tripped over his own feet in shock.

The next fragment was filled with thin, rocky spires stretching up out of the ground, each reaching multiple stories up into the sky. The entire fragment appeared dark, no doubt due to the thick, black clouds sprawling across the entire sky, and he could hear distant rumbling.

Which made a lot of sense, seeing as the fragment had forked bolts of lightning raining down from the sky every couple of seconds.

The five of them stopped and stared at the darkened fragment, watching as bolt after bolt cracked down, hitting the tall spires seemingly at random. In Edregon's typical weird fashion, they hadn't been able to see or hear anything from the fragment until they were about a quarter mile away, but now, the constant booms of thunder seemed utterly endless.

"Uh…" Scule finally spoke up after they spent a good minute or two watching the lightning strikes. "Maybe we skip this one?"

"Who would even live there?" Shia frowned, staring into the fragment in confusion. "I get some fragments are abandoned, but so far, every fragment at least initially had people living on it before the Gods took it. What kind of people would want to live in that?"

"They might not be very advanced," Vin pointed out. "Remember the swamp guys that Scule encountered? The ones the divine warrior slaughtered? They weren't much more than primitive people, right?"

"Yeah, other than a few basic mushroom farms, not so much." Scule nodded, still staring at the constant lightning strikes. "They lived in holes in the trees. Definitely not an advanced people."

"Well, we won't learn anything without going in," Alka said, shrugging as she continued toward the fragment. "I'll go in first and see what happens."

It didn't take them long to cross that last quarter mile, and as suggested, Alka stepped into the fragment ahead of the rest of them. She walked forward a couple dozen feet, spinning around slowly with her arms out. She even tried waving her warpick over her head a bit, but the closest lightning strike was still a good few hundred feet away, hitting a spire like all the others.

"I think it's safe!"

"I'm not sure how comfortable I feel betting my life on that!" Scule called back, flinching at yet another crack of thunder.

"If you don't mind running through the desert fragment, you could head north back to Terra," Vin offered. "We could just meet you there after this."

"You're seriously going to go in there? Do you see the constant lightning strikes?!"

"I don't know too much about weather, but I'm pretty certain lightning is supposed to be drawn to metal. And Alka's basically a walking suit of armor," Vin pointed out. "Seeing as she's not getting hit, I think the spires will protect us."

"Easy for you to say, you'll survive at least one bolt," Scule said, clicking his tongue before glancing at his companion. "Reginald, thoughts?"

Reginald peered out of Vin's pocket, eyeing up the lightning for a few seconds before squeaking something and nodding toward Alka.

"You're crazy," Scule scoffed. "But fine. We're in. Apparently."

"If you guys walk on the ground for once, you'll probably be the least likely thing in this entire fragment to actually get struck by lightning," Shia teased, hopping off Blossom and converting her back into a staff before joining Alka.

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"Hilarious!" Scule called out after her, before doing just that. He and Reginald hopped down to the ground, and made their way in on foot. Grinning, Vin followed right behind them, noting his newest notification.

Second Ring Fragment Discovered! 1,000 exp gained.

One thousand down, quite a few to go for level 40. Dismissing the notification, he winced at the loud crack as a bolt of lightning came down only a few dozen feet to their right, slamming into one of the tall spires and leaving a blinding afterimage in their vision.

"Gah! That's going to get annoying real fast!" Scule grumbled, rubbing his eyes.

"Alright, guess we head toward the center," Alka decided, turning and leading the way. "I don't have the faintest idea what kind of monsters might spawn in a place like this, so keep your eyes peeled."

As it turned out, the answer was one none of them saw coming.

The next hour was spent slowly wandering through the field of spires, flinching at the occasional bolt of lightning that struck closer than the others. For once, they were all on foot, moving at little more than a simple walking pace, which meant it was rather slow going as they made their way deeper into the fragment. Just as they were beginning to start growing complacent, it happened.

As the only two members of the group that should survive a direct bolt of lightning, Alka and Vin were at the front and back of the group respectively. While Vin was rubbing the latest afterimage out of his eyes, he caught something move out of his peripheral vision. He had just enough time to blink and turn toward the movement when the small rock spire to his right suddenly twisted around and lunged at him.

New elite monster discovered! 500 exp gained.

"What-" was all he managed to get out before the spire slammed into him, sending the two of them tumbling to the ground as it wrapped around him like some sort of snake and began constricting. The monster had been pretending to be one of the smaller spires, but even those were nearly two stories tall. Vin struggled to do anything as his arms were quickly pinned down at his sides, and the base of the spire revealed itself to him.

Where the spire had been attached to the ground, was a flat mouth filled with rings of teeth, like some sort of giant tapeworm. Vin paled as the monster screeched at him, and went to bite down on his head to finish what it had started.

Right before a blue-black gleam sliced through the air, cleanly decapitating the monster.

Alka stood in front of him, staring at the blood spilling out of the long, thin monster as its muscles went slack and it fell off of him. Her mithral-drathsteel blade flashed with every bolt of lightning, and she flicked it to clean it of the unwanted blood.

"Well that's gross," she said calmly, kicking the head over and peering down at the rings of teeth that had been moments away from tearing into Vin's face. "Guess we know what to look out for now."

"This fragment sucks!" Scule shouted, pointing down at the monster that could have eaten him in a single bite. "You have to stay near the spires to remain safe from the lightning, but some of the spires are secretly monsters like that thing? Hells no, let's get out of here!"

"It's not as bad as it seems," Shia said, helping Vin up and giving him an apologetic smile that she hadn't been faster on the draw to help him. "The monsters have to imitate the smaller spires, otherwise they themselves would be at risk of being hit by the lightning. So long as we're cautious around the small ones, we should be safe."

"I can use Sense Stone to figure out what spires are real and what spires are fake now that we know what we're looking for," Vin said, his heart still racing from his near-death encounter. At the very least, his divine boon would have saved him from getting his face torn off, but if the boon hadn't dislodged the monster wrapped around him, it may very well have just gone right back to trying to eat him a second time. "That was an elite monster by the way, if anyone was curious. So I can't imagine we'll run into too many of them."

"It's better than a Trunkback," Shia scoffed.

With their plan in place, they decided to continue forward. They were already a few miles into the fragment at this point, so they managed to convince Scule that they might as well see things through rather than turn around. Over the next few hours, they encountered far more of the elite monsters than Vin would have expected, taking down five more of the fake-spires with relative ease. Knowing they had to be the smaller spires, Vin was able to save his mana only for when their path would bring them close to one, and a quick cast was all it took to confirm if the spires were rock or monster. Because the monsters' mouths were at the flat end, pressed against the ground, all it took was a quick slash from Alka's sword at waist height to decapitate them and take them out.

Using this method, they made great time through the fragment, and it wasn't long before they spotted something distinctly different in the sea of rock spires.

There, near the center of the fragment, stood one massive spire far larger than all the rest. It had to stretch up nearly ten stories or so, and was at least thirty or forty feet wide. It had smaller spires jutting out of its side that angled upward, like some sort of strange, leafless tree made of stone, and the entire structure appeared to attract lightning so much that it was practically an unending stream of electricity flowing down to it from the heavens.

Most noticeably, there was a large, dark hole that led into the mega-structure near the ground, and Scule sighed as they spotted it.

"…We're going inside the giant death spire, aren't we?"

"Come on, you don't even sound excited at the thought of stealing whatever's in there?" Shia teased, pointing at it with her staff. "Maybe it's getting struck by so much lightning because it's filled with gold and riches!"

"Maybe it's being struck so frequently because the people inside pissed off the Gods," Scule countered, his eyes reflecting the near-constant bolts of lightning slamming into the spire.

"Either way, I don't see a welcoming party, which means we kinda have to go in," Vin said, using a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding display of power. "Once we say hello and figure out what we're dealing with, we can make a plan. At the very least, we'll be out of the constant lightning storm. And away from the elite monsters that keep trying to tear our faces off."

"I do like the sound of that," Scule muttered, conceding the point.

Having come to their decision, the group traversed the last few hundred feet to the giant spire and walked straight through the dark opening.

Hopefully whatever was living within the giant spire was open to uninvited guests.