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Chapter 195: (3/8): The Danger From the Core

Clank… clank…

The sounds of metal striking at the stone, chipping off great chunks, rang through the whole hall. Camilla couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what the hall sounded like when the reliefs were being sculptured, probably by master craftsmen. Did they need ladders to get to the higher locations, or did their wings suffice?

Next to her, a flame mage dressed in red robes that denoted her element squeezed her staff tightly until her fingers grew white.

“What are you scared of? It’s just a core. It’ll all be over once we find it. Judging by how this kind of stuff usually goes, the door will open, and we can get out of here,” her partner said, elbowing her. He was much calmer than the mage was, a large smile gracing his face. The mage managed to squeeze a smile back out at him.

“Thank you…”

Thud… thud… thud… thunk.

The front liner smashing at the rock froze as the sound his mace made while striking the surface of the last unbroken part of the once-magnificent titan changed. A dozen pairs of eyes flew toward him, at the spot he was hitting. He paused. “What should I do?” he asked.

“Continue. Everyone, gather around and stand guard. Activate any reinforcement magic you might have,” Cadaelia replied.

“W-why?” The mention of reinforcement magic scared the hunter out of his wits. “Is it going to be dangerous?”

Cadaelia stared at the big stone, narrowing her eyes as she tried to estimate the size of it, but shook her head in the end and gave up. “Normally, no, but then I’ve never seen such a big construct before. The core is probably overly large as well. Honestly… why make one gigantic construct instead of making several smaller ones? It’ll be more effective…”

“Vice-captain…”

“Ah, sorry, I got distracted. Continue but retreat if anything feels off,” Cadaelia ordered, breaking off from her muttering.

“Well, here goes…” The hunter raised his mace and smashed down with all his strength. With a metallic clank, the sphere hidden within the stone dented while the brittle rock outside flaked off. With a few more strikes from the other hunters, the sphere was quickly extracted, looking a lot more beat up than before.

Everyone present could use magic, so the instant that the metallic sphere was held up, over a dozen minds swept over it, trying to find out anything of interest. All they could detect was a huge amount of earth mana still trapped inside, along with a complex system of formations.

After examining it for a bit, Camilla remembered how the spells that powered her own body looked and thought that there were some similarities. The overall appearance was quite close, but at the same time, each individual detail had a massive number of differences.

It made sense. Both a construct core and an undead’s body was a way to move something inanimate. Both could regenerate. However, whereas an undead had a soul, a construct didn’t. The other difference was that the type of mana required to fuel the structure was different.

If her spells were so similar, then was Kagriss’s spells within her core even more similar, or were there more differences? Camilla snuck a glance at Kagriss, finding her girlfriend deep in thought.

After looking the metal ball over, Cadaelia nodded. “Yup. That’s a core all right. It’s very… big…”

Indeed, the core was easily twice the size of someone’s head. Of course, compared to the body of the once-whole titan itself, which now laid in small piles of rubble here and there, it was absolutely time.

Cadaelia practically drooled as she held it in her hands. “Oh my god there is just so much!”

“So much what?”

“So many things to learn! Those darn stone elementals… ahem, no offense to you,” she said, blushing when the stone elementals looked at her, “they always keep the methods of creating large-scale constructs to themselves.

“The bigger the construct, the more complex the formations have to be to make it move, and past a certain point, it takes decades to get to the next step. Worst thing is, constructs of different materials have completely different formations needed, so a master at creating flame constructs can’t necessarily create earth constructs.”

She caressed the core. “You lot that aren’t interested in formations just don’t understand. Formations aren’t just one plus one equals two. You can achieve one plus one equals three if you’re good enough, but at the same time, if you want a bigger construct…or any large-scale formation system, the complexity becomes akin to multiplication rather than addition.”

“She was talking while all aloof about Beitra and his obsession over hobbies, and now look at how she is when she’s near hers. At least Beitra was under a strange spell, but what about her?” Camilla whispered. “Can you guess her hobby?”

She elbowed Kagriss, and when Kagriss did not reply, she caught Kagriss staring at the metallic ball as well, absorbed in the esoteric inner workings of the core. Although Kagriss was nodding, Camilla had long stopped talking. “Are you even listening?”

“Hang on…”

Camilla rolled her eyes. “I get it, I get it…”

She sat down on the ground, preparing to wait for as long as it took for Kagriss to be satisfied, even if it took hours or days. She could wait. But although she was willing to be patient, others weren’t.

The hunters were getting restless, and a few of them had wandered toward the door. Camilla frowned. Why wasn’t the gate opening? They defeated the guardian, the angelic titan, did they not? Was there some other condition?

Camilla tried to decipher the formations that covered the door, trying to glean some secrets that might help her understand, but the massive array of mana circuits embedded within the metal made her dizzy. She couldn’t even last a full minute before she felt like throwing up and the world began to swim in front of her eyes.

There was just too much to take in and she had no idea where to begin. It wasn’t that she’d never tried. She tried once when she was a templar, only to gain nothing but the basics from it. Surprisingly, under Kagriss’s tutelage, she actually managed to get her foot into the intermediate level’s door.

Perhaps Arvel was just a bad teacher, but Camilla didn’t think that was it. Something changed that allowed her to partially unlock the power of a magus… although even if she had greater access to magic now, she was still going to focus on being the best warrior she could be in order to protect Kagriss.

On one hand, she would stay inflexible, but on the other hand, it was more efficient to specialize and dabble a little bit in other subjects, but no more than was necessary.

Of the two of them, Kagriss was of course the one more knowledgeable in formations, so she poked Kagriss. “Hey, stop drooling at the core and look at the door. It’s still closed. It has formations too, and a lot of it, remember?” she added after no response from Kagriss.

That got her attention. Kagriss reluctantly tore her gaze from the metallic core that she was investigating and turned her attention to the massive gate that showed no sign of opening. One of the hunters kicked the door, only to jump back and stare at the door in awe.

Kagriss took all that in and shook her head. “That door won’t be opening any time soon.”

“What? Why not? Is it because of the core?” Camilla asked. “Do we have to destroy it?”

“Oh no!” Kagriss gasped in shock. “Of course not. The trigger leads further inside, beyond that gate.” She pointed at the inner gate, which still remained closed, for some reason. Camilla looked at it doubtfully, but didn’t question Kagriss’s conclusion. Kagriss was rarely wrong.

From experience, Kagriss would rather say nothing than say the right thing… at least most of the time.

“So how do we leave? Do we break the doors?”

“I personally wouldn’t…” Kagriss said, then something caught her eye and she pointed at something near the door. It was a group of hunters gathering around a tall orc that was holding up his mace. The orc’s muscles bulged, showing clearly how physically strong he was even without magic. To make matters worse for his target, magic now coursed through his body.

However, Kagriss shook her head and finished her sentence. “Or you might end up like him.”

“…huh?”

The hunters began chanting encouragement at the orc. “Go, go, go, go! You can do it! Bust it open!”

Bolstered by his comrades’ voices, the orc puffed up his chest, pulled back his hammer, and then swung as hard as he could. The metal head slammed into the surface of the gate, and before anyone could react, it bounced back. But it didn’t just bounce back normally.

Instead, with a hollow thud, the mace tore out of the orc’s hand and blasted backwards as if fired from a cannon spell. It smashed through a bystander’s hand, turning it into a bloody pulp in an instant, as if the thing that was hit by the mace was not the gate, but the bystander’s hand.

The hunter stared at his crushed hand for a moment before he howled in pain, collapsing to his knees. His voice was loud enough to grab even Cadaelia’s attention, and she rushed over in worry.

The whole thing left Camilla speechless, and she turned back to Kagriss. “Like that?”

“Like that,” Kagriss said, nodding.

“…Why didn’t you warn them? That might’ve killed someone.”

“I don’t know them. And they shouldn’t be hitting something that’s clearly defensive and covered in formations without knowing what the formations do first. Cadaelia was right there. They could’ve asked,” Kagriss said, crossing her arms. “As you can see that gate is covered with a counter-force formation. It takes a certain amount of mana to return the attack and it’ll weaken the formation slightly, but unfortunately… The formation is constantly being supplied with new mana. Even if we abandoned safety, it’ll take hours to break through.”

Camilla held up her hand, feeling the dense mana in the air.

There was probably an accumulator formation elsewhere in the dungeon that was drawing mana from this dense region of mana and feeding it into the formation… She hated this kind the most.

“So… Can you dismantle it?” she asked hopefully.

Kagriss shook her head. “It’s too complex. And it has too many redundancies for me to break through. Generally, the number of interlocked formations that can be formed or broken at once depends on the mage’s skill, but in the end, numbers always win…”

“So you’re saying that a bunch of mages worked together to create this formation system?” Camilla asked.

“Correct. And, as far as I can tell, there are only three qualified arcanists here. Me, Cadaelia, and that one.” Kagriss pointed at one of the hunters holding a staff, one that Camilla hadn’t even noticed before Kagriss pointed him out. “I believe that Cadaelia and I are equals, but even five of us cannot break the system without backlash, let alone two and a half.”

“And a half…” Camilla felt sorry for the last arcanist, but after she thought about it, she put away her sympathy. She wasn’t a qualified arcanist herself, so wasn’t she even less than half? The thought was depressing.

“So the only way is to head further in? But how can we do that if the inner gate is closed?”

Just as Kagriss was about to reply, something changed in the air that made her pause.

Whereas Kagriss could only feel that something was wrong, Camilla was sensitive enough to identify it. The density of holy mana increased. It was a familiar feeling, and when Camilla searched her memories for the last time she felt like that, she found that it was when the titan was first defeated.

At the time, she had just brushed it off as just a mistaken feeling of hers—that was becoming a habit; she needed to trust her instincts more—but now, it seemed that was not the case.

“The holy mana in the air is increasing,” Camilla muttered. “Get ready to create a shield.”

Kagriss nodded and gathered her mana, ready to instantly release it through a spell formation she’d already prepared.

“What do you think is happening? What is the mana suddenly increasing?” Camilla muttered. “It definitely has something to do with that core though. And the inner gate. Right?”

“I don’t know… but I think it’s your fault.”

“What? Why is it my fault?” Camilla asked, bewildered at the sudden accusation.

“You said that things ‘can’t be this easy,’ and now look where it got us.” Kagriss smiled at her.

Camilla’s words stuck in her throat as she realized that Kagriss could joke even in such a fatal situation. Was there anything that could faze her? But if Kagriss wasn’t worried, then perhaps she shouldn’t be worried either.

She took a deep breath and smoothed out the wrinkles of worry from her forehead and brows, and returned Kagriss’s smile.