Blacksmith of the Apocalypse

Chapter 1254: A hole

Carving away the very floor under their feet hit by hit, and putting the debris in his inventory, Seth created a shaft that went straight down. Every few hits and stores, the 2x2m shaft became over a meter deeper.

“Oh, hi!” the mining blacksmith suddenly exclaimed, as he found chunks of iron ore and specks of among the debris, they had actually grazed an iron vein. Seth marked it on the map before he continued. Maybe it was a good idea to strip mine this place instead of keeping to the existing cave system.

“Tsk, my inventory is full,” Seth exclaimed when they were about halfway the distance to the cavern where the golem eye had found the supposed birthing pools. This was the limitation of a playerʼs inventory. Unless he put the rubble in crates, he could only stack 99 big pieces.

Although Seth had emptied his inventory for the most part before coming here, he had also collected a bunch of stuff on the way here. If they couldnʼt get rid of the rubble, there was no use in continuing like this.

“Canʼt you use “Compress”?” Al asked from the side. “You could also try storing this stuff in legion,” she added, mentioning Sethʼs space ring and mobile home for golems that couldnʼt be stored in the inventory.

“Now that you mention it...” the blacksmith mumbled surprised. He wasnʼt too keen on filling his pocket dimension with rocks, but the spell was a great idea he wouldnʼt have thought of this quickly.

“Compress” was an earth magic spell, that would quite literally compress earth or rock, hardening it but also fusing several smaller pieces into a big one, depending on the power put into it. It was a basic spell, the blacksmith had to learn in the beginning but he had forgotten all about it, since his goal had always been the petrification spells.

Seth dumped out half an inventory slot worth of small boulders, filling their hole back up by almost 3 meters. Then he cast “Compress” and the mass of lose rocks, turning them into one chunky boulder almost 2 meters in diameter, touching the walls of the shaft.

He brought out the Mindreaper Bow to empty one of his inventory slots and placed the boulder inside, before doing the same with the other half of the inventory slot, allowing him to put the bow and another boulder back in his inventory. Like this, he condense all the filled slots in his inventory into one slot with 47 massive boulders.

Following the new process, Seth kept mining, storing, condensing and storing until the floor under their feet finally broke away and allowed them to fall into the cavern below. At this point, Seth had one full stack and another 12 boulders in his inventory.
“Hmm, is it me, or does this look a little different?” the bard asked a little befuddled..

“No, it does seem a little...dry?” the sorceress agreed with him.

Feather-Falling to toward the bottom of the massive cavern, Alʼs soft light illuminated the whole place, allowing them a good look at the golem eyeʼs find. It did resemble the structure that stuck to rock faces like pockmarked growths they had seen so far, but it was like the difference between a living and a dried out sponge.

The birthing pools they came across so far always had a sticky and moist look to them, being covered in holes filled with weird fluids, even in fiery desert plains, they always looked wet. Yet, here in a damp cave, it looked like a dried husk.

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Most of the pools covering the structure were dried up or only contained a thick, viscous-looking sludge. Seth was able to spot the corpses of half-formed beast, perished during birth, stuck in the dry surface of some other.

“Say, Al, could it be-” “This place is abandoned? I also think so after seeing this place. It would explain why the creatures left in these caves are so weak.- Also, look over there,” she said and pointed at the wall of the massive cavern.

Following where she was pointing, the blacksmith spotted what looked like a cave in. it seemed like half the cavern had collapsed on the path that would have led to the gate from this place. Whether this was the reason this place was abandoned, or just a consequence of lacking maintenance was unclear.

Seth was momentarily distracted when he signaled the golem eye to return to his hands, so he could retrieve the data properly. Surprised he found that the scout had also entered this cave through a small tunnel further up the wall. It was a small, natural tube carved out by water.

“Hmm this place was actually cut off by the cave in. Did they decide it was not worth excavating again?” Once again there was the question what came first. Did the entrance collapse because it was abandoned or was it abandoned because of the collapse?

However, judging by the way the other demons had treated the birthing pools, both possibilities seemed unlikely. Other demon relocated these massive structures instead of abandoning and building new ones, when faced with the Guardian Tree.

This small cave in couldnʼt even stop Seth and Al from coming in, why would it be enough for the birthing pools to be abandoned? There was also no reason to abandon such a valuable structure in the first place, right?

“Should we take a look inside?” the sorceress suggested, groping around the other wall of the alien rock pimple. Using their experience on other world, Al actually managed to find the opening mechanism. Massive stone doors that were invisible before, receded a step inwards before sliding away to the sides.

The corridors beyond were dark, the lights that were present in others examples of the the structure, were off and only Alʼs light existed in this place. The blacksmith and the sorceress ventured inside, to look for clues about the current state of the birthing pools.

Looking for clues was not hard at all, the entrance hall was already filled with corpses of demon that looked similar to TanoʼMol. The desiccated bodies of human-sized goat-people were littered on the floor.

Despite being mummified, the wounds that took their lives were still visible, especially those that still had the remnants of rusty weapons sticking out from them. Nobody saw the need to point out the obvious. The birthing pools were not abandoned, there was a fight.

“This one looks different. Maybe they were the invaders?” the sorceress spoke up. She had stopped a little ahead of Seth, in front of a specific corpse. The scene told the story of a desperate fight. Three goats had wrestled down their attacker, to take him with them to the afterlife.

The mummy if the attacker looked human, except for its size of 2,5 meters. Although the skin was dried up and gray, Seth also recognized a pair of pointy ears. So it wasnʼt just a big humanoid, but something akin to an elf. This was the first body apart from the goats they saw here.

Al used her magic to pull the bodies of the goat demons off the big elf, revealing that the presumed attacker wore an elaborate armor, wrought from . Several gashed in the armor showing remnants of dried blood showed what they died to.

It had taken a long fight and the combined effort of three goat demons to take them down. Taking note of this, they went on to explore the structure, only to find most of the rooms and facilities in this place completely destroyed by magic and explosives.

“Wow, they really left nothing intact. i think we have seen enough, letʼs leave,” Seth suggested when they ran into their fifth fifth dead end of collapsed walls and ceiling. There was no point in exploring any further now.

Together with the valiant image of the elfʼs fight close to the entrance, the picture of what happened became relatively clear. The place had been attacked and destroyed long before the the hell gate was opened on Urth. The beasts that had followed the call of the gate were just the weak descendants of remnants that had populated these tunnels after this place was abandoned.

“Looks like we are lucky. If this place is abandoned, we can just claim it,” the bard said happily. The best negotiations were those that didnʼt even need to happen, in his opinion at least. An off-world mining site in the middle of Delta was a great gain, even if it didnʼt solve Minas Marʼs main problem.

“itʼs a shame,” Al sighed, looking at the birthing pools. While Seth was happy there wasnʼt actually anyone left that would try to contest their claim, the sorceress looked at the ruin of the birthing pools with sadness. “ I would have loved to research one of these place for future reference, but the states it is in is irreparable.”

For a moment, Seth imagines Al being able to copy the technology of the abyss and creating birthing pools to spawn army of demon beasts. He shuddered.

“Yeah, such a shame.... come on, letʼs go. We still more places to prospect. No need to cry over spilled milk,” he quickly changed the topic and tried to get her away from this place. he had no interest in these demonic pimples spawning all over Urth.