Chapter 1089 (1/2)

Randidly raised his eyebrows as he looked down into the pit in front of him. Gleaming azure waters about ten meters down from the edge of the hole on which Randidly stood seemed to obscure a strange light that filtered up to his eyes. “This is the Fate armory?”

In addition to the two guards that had escorted Randidly and his three subordinates down the mountain face opposite the Great Rift, there were around twenty nervous-looking guards that stood around the pit with their weapons raised defensively. These score of guards were, as far as Randidly could tell, an emergency group that wasn’t generally together based upon their widely divergent uniform and armor choices.

But it’s not like the System seems to demand any sort of uniform from its soldiers. Maybe I’m reading into their posture too much.

When he received the affirmative nod on this being the armory from one of their two guards, Randidly turned to face forward once more. As he looked down toward the dappled light coming out the pit, he wondered idly what had occurred that had convinced Lord Miln to station so many people here.

And why are they jumpy as rabbits?

“It looks like a lake,” Zagnal said as he rubbed his chin. Randidly agreed with him, but he was still sour enough at Zagnal’s presence that he didn’t vocalize his thoughts. There was a need to keep up a united front of disdain toward this spy, after all.

The more talkative and dismissive of the two guards snorted. “Heh, a lake? Are you fucking blind? This is one of the most tightly guarded locations on the frontlines. That is no mere lake-”

“-it’s liquified Aether,” Randidly supplied quickly in order to deprive the know-it-all guard of the satisfaction. His eyes widened as he looked down into the hole in front of him, trying to judge its size and depth. Compared to the Dungeon that Randidly had been led to on Earth that possessed a similar Aether feature, this ‘lake’ was nowhere near that size. But as Randidly focused, he could tell that the depth in front of him was deceiving; likely the Aether was being used to stretch or shrink the area below.

And with the light coming up, it was basically just guesswork on Randidly’s part to try and determine how deep it was.

Which made a certain amount of sense. This was supposed to contain thousands of years worth of Fates. Some things could be among the gleaming lights teasing from within that liquified Aether, but this armory wasn’t as impressive or militaristic as Randidly had been picturing in his mind.

The guard looked at Randidly with a disappointed look, likely because he had ruined his moment of verbal superiority over Zagnal. All of which was likely fine, was it not also wasting Randidly’s time. But as the guard glared at him, Randidly’s breath caught in his front because he noticed something else about the armory below. A shiver ran through his image body, starting from the tip of his toes and running to his black hair on his head.

There was no evaporation. Not a hint of the titanic energy that was contained below was wafting upward. Although the surface of the liquid Aether was covered with playful ripples, there was no whiff of energy.

Randidly slowly spun around on his heel and surveyed the surrounding area. To control that amount of energy… it’s absolutely insane. It’s hard to know how much Aether gets condensed to become liquid, but it isn’t a small amount and keeping it there requires pressure. The individual who is in charge of this…

Recovering some of his haughtiness seeing Randidly’s shock, the guard chuckled. “Yes, pure, liquid Aether. And I don’t even know why the Supreme Commander allowed you to come here. Heh, maybe it was a sense of humor. He even let you choose two fates… but do you images think you can handle the pressure of liquid Aether? And you-”

The guard’s focus shifted once more to Zagnal. Zagnal could only clench his scaled hands and endure the overt mockery. “You with all of the strength of my farts, can you resist being corrupted by the powerful Fates that lay within this pool?”

Randidly ignored the talking and continued to survey the surrounding area. He had ignored the guard’s earlier boasting about this being one of the most heavily guarded locations on the front lines, but after seeing that someone managed to completely keep the liquid Aether well behaved, Randidly felt that it might not be too much of an exaggeration. Someone with a lot of fucking power was in the surrounding area.

Of course, I bet the place with the most protections is Lord Miln’s sick fucking body chamber… Randidly thought with distaste. But then he focused on the task at hand and continued to scan the surroundings.

The armory was in a small valley hidden between two steep ravines. In terms of location, it was one that would have been extremely easy to overlook, if they hadn’t known what look for. Even with the correct path, the way they arrived was through an extremely narrow passage with high stone walls on each side. Inside the valley itself, the space widened somewhat to allow four or five larger tents to be pressed up against the gentle slope down to the roiling liquid Aether below.

But aside from the pit, the tents, the guards, and some common necessities to living, there wasn’t anything else in the valley.

As Randidly looked around, he was once more convinced that most of the guards there were extremely nervous. Randidly ignored those people; those shaky soldiers were just here as window dressing. Instead, he continued to allow his Grim Intuition to guide him and spun to consider all of the surrounding individuals.

And then Randidly found two people that seemed completely absent to his Perception. They sat by a fire quite a distance from any tent, squeezed up against the high stone walls of the valley. An old man was tending the fire with a stick and an old woman was smoking a bone pipe. Although they felt completely ordinary, they were anything but.

After taking a deep inhale, the woman blew out a thin stream of smoke that spiraled up in the air in front of her to form the fluttering silhouette of a bird. Its wings beat rapidly and it hovered in front of her with its head cocked to the side.

Then, shaking her head, she raked her hand through the bird and it dispersed to nothing. She took another deep breath of smoke and held it in her lungs, seeming to consider. Then she released her breath, this time from the corners of her mouth. The smoke drifted downward to form two grey squirrels, and due to the coloration of the smoke, they possessed a remarkable likeness to the actual animals. Randidly seemed to be able to see every individual hair on their bodies, comprised of delicate strands of smoke.

The old man turned and said something Randidly couldn’t hear and the old woman laughed. Grasping with his thumb and forefinger, the man pinched a tongue of flame from the fire he was tending and tossed it to the side. It hit the ground between the two smoke squirrels and blossomed upward into a rapidly growing flame. But as the fire stretched and spread, Randidly realized that it wasn’t truly the shape of fire he was seeing.

The old man had sculpted a meter tall tree out of a pinch of flame. Delighted, the smoke squirrels darted up the tree and chased each other frantically. The flames of the tree spread and suddenly it wasn’t just the trunk and branches but luminous red-gold foliage that Randidly could see. The casual display left Randidly floored.

Yea, those seem like the people who are in charge here, Randidly thought nervously. After releasing a steadying breath, he walked over in their direction in order to speak with him.