For once, I was glad of the necromancer's predilection toward using mindless undead as guards rather than living troops. It was the only reason I even risked going into the base once more. Undead were stupid. As long as I pulled a cloak to my head, and hid my life signature with a simple biomancy trick —simple in terms of mana costs, as it was complicated enough to strain my newly-expanded capabilities to the limit. Though the existence of the escape tunnel helped me to relax as well. As long as I stepped out of the base, I was confident of escaping. After all, it wouldn't be the first time I avoided the search of an undead horde.
Still, even with those advantages, my heart was beating like crazy as I walked deeper into the base, feeling the oppressive death energy getting thick enough to instantly kill a low-leveled person. Even with my resistance, I could feel my lifeforce getting damaged. Worse, I was afraid of using a healing spell, as such a pure flare might pull the exact attention I was trying to avoid.
[-13 HP]
Since I didn't have a map, I decided to follow the unusually-thick death energy toward its source, which, despite the inherent risk, was better than walking around without a direction in the huge expanse of the base. There must be something interesting at the source, maybe evidence strong enough to convince the Headmistress about the seriousness of the subject.
The sooner I find something convincing, the sooner I could leave this oppressive place.
With that in mind, I walked forward, doing my best to stay in the shadows. It was a pity that I didn't have a skill to enhance my sneaking abilities, but luckily, my extreme agility was enough to compensate for its lack, at least when they were not actively looking for me. Still, all the while, I continued to get damaged by the aura of the place.
[-39 HP]
I hid in the shadow of an open door, helped by the fact that the lighting conditions of the base were rather horrendous, to a point that I suspected it was an ecstatic choice, to make the place seem even more dramatic. Regardless, it helped me to avoid the attention of two necromancers that walked just a foot away from me, their attention on each other as they argued about the best way to reanimate a goblin.
I let them disappear around the corner before I started following the sound of their footsteps. They came from the same direction as the first necromancer, which meant that they were out patrolling, and likely was about to report.
My carefulness turned out to be a good idea, because soon, another set of footsteps joined them, and they came to a stop in a large room. I stayed away as I could see they weren't the only occupants of the room, but even from the distance, I could see that the room was special.
First, the rest of the rooms and tunnels were barely more than natural caves. They had been clearly created in a hurry, with no care about the quality or details. That room was different. It was chiseled much more carefully, walls covered with dark gray marble, with several obsidian pillars to add some gravitas.
It was interesting to see that even in their half-dead state, necromancers were not free from the grasp of the vanity.
Unfortunately, vanity wasn't the only reason for the obsidian pillars. Even from a distance, I could feel the thick magical presence of several wards dancing around the room. At first glance, I could see that none of the wards were related to combat, instead of focusing on secrecy.
I would have preferred offensive wards. The current anti-spy setup prevented me from using magic to hear them. To make it funnier, I doubted I was the target. Considering the lack of security in the rest of the compound, they clearly didn't expect a hostile force to slip in, meaning the security measures were targeted to each other. I was a victim of circumstances.
If the room was less crowded, I might have tried to avoid the wards, as most of the spells were geared in for preventing remote spying attempts. However, while my acting abilities were fine, they were certainly not enough to bluff a group of necromancers in a dangerous secret mission that I was a surprise addition to their mission, sent by higher-ups, or something equally ridiculous. I doubted I would try that anything less than Grandmaster Speech, and even then, it would have probably been crazy dangerous, rather than plain impossible.
In the end, skills were not infallible.
With a sigh, I decided to continue toward the source of death energy that covered the corridors. Finding their operational headquarters was nice, but ultimately pointless without any physical evidence. If me being an eyewitness was enough to earn the trust of the Headmistress, I wouldn't have taken the risk of infiltrating the base this deep.
I moved toward the source of the death energy, the closer I got, the more painful the passive assault of the death energy became.
[-61 HP]
Even then, I smiled viciously when I arrived at the source. My destination turned out to be another huge cave, not as big as the one that kept the undead army, but still rather huge. There were exactly a hundred obsidian pillars around the room, each radiating death energy, but they weren't as interesting as the seven cages in the middle of the room, holding seven dragons —six corpses, and one alive.
I couldn't help but feel my eyes widen as I saw an actual living dragon, its emerald scales gleaming under the flickering lights of the cave. The bone dragons I had faced during my battles were nothing, mostly because they were raised from the corpses of the dragons that had died ages ago, and their powers were limited. As a faction, necromancers were a threat because they had managed to discover several historic dragon graveyards, using these millennia-old corpses to create the backbone of their armies.
An actual live dragon was something completely different.
One reason for the difference was their strength. Unlike most of the creatures, it was hard to guess a dragon's strength from the surface. They did not have the telltale signs of power, so battling against one was always a gamble. And just to make things worse, even the weakest one could probably contend against my current strength and could get away alive, if not victorious.
The strongest ones, according to the legends, were able to destroy whole armies and ruin cities.
Another reason was their mysteriousness. It was a relatively well-known fact that dragons provided no experience when killed —bone dragons did, but since they were necromantic constructs, it wasn't surprising. Of course, that didn't mean that a relatively weak dragon wasn't a good target for hunting. They might not provide any experience, but their bodies were arguably the best magical material in existence, easily worth a fortune.
With their intelligence, however, it was really hard to catch them. That part, there was no real agreement. Some claimed that they were even more intelligent than humans but held back by their aggressive nature, the others claimed that they were just very intelligent animals, with a particular leaning for low-cunning, but regardless, it didn't change the fact that the dragons were hard to find, and even harder to capture alive.
The fact that necromancers had managed to capture one alive was rather scary.
It was obvious the whole cave was designed to force its conversion to undead, but it didn't look like a regular reanimation —which only created bone dragons, which, while dangerous, nothing really groundbreaking. Since they were going through that much effort, wasting enough mana to create a deadly miasma just as a side-effect, there was no doubt that they had other ideas.
[-163 HP]
The dragon was the only thing that was alive in the room, but not the only one that had a consciousness. There were eleven liches in the room, seven of them were wearing white robes and carrying bone staffs, their empty eye sockets glowing with an eerie blue. Each was sitting on top of a cage, and channeling the energies of the ritual they were conducting, the death energies invading the body of the dragon more and more.
The remaining four were wearing black robes, and carrying huge, ceremonial staffs from mahogany, watching the perimeter carefully. There was no doubt that they were strong, but I didn't how much. I was willing to test, however.
After all, I just found the distraction I needed.
I stood still for a moment, carefully examining the obsidian pillars, trying to understand their connection to the ritual. Deciding to take a risk, I gathered the smallest amount of mana I could push out while still maintaining connection, and slipped it toward the nearest pillar.
[-2 Mana]
I was caught the moment my mana touched the pillar, but not by a target I expected. The dragon's eye met with mine in a subtle movement, and suddenly, I was sure of something. Dragons were definitely intelligent creatures. At least, this one was, because I could see its expression shifting slightly, one that conveyed its request for help despite its monstrous face. And it did so without alerting the liches.
That level of subtle communication was not something an animal could achieve.
I nodded, then gestured it to wait. It was partially a test to see whether my understanding was just an illusion, but when it nodded subtly, I decided to accept my plan was correct. I made a few gestures, and it responded with subtle shaking of its head or the movement of its eyes, until we had a very rudimentary sign language, enough to convey the basic ideas.
Then, I turned my attention to the obsidian pillar, and slowly pushed more and more of my mana inside it, once again, tantric skill providing its worth. Drawing my own runes on the pillars was the better method of breaking a ritual, but I didn't trust myself to that while four liches with mahogany staff watched the perimeter. It was a small miracle I wasn't already noticed.
[-70 Mana]
Of course, while my direct invasion was much harder and wasteful, it also had a certain advantage. It left no direct evidence of my intervention. Of course, a determined examination might reveal that the source of mana was different than the others, but it was much less noticeable than the presence of a glowing rune.
I stood still for twenty minutes, slowly spreading my magic while trying to ignore the effects of the death magic on my body, but in the end, I managed to infect fourteen obsidian pillars through my connection with the first one, while sweating horribly. My body was hurting all over from the stress of controlling all those different sources of magic, and the erosion effect of the death miasma that already drained more than half of my health was not helping.
[-4423 Mana]
[-1277 HP]
Still, I made sure to keep my mana pool near-full, because I was going to need that during the next part. I was confident in breaking the ritual, but the rest was total chaos. I didn't know how strong the necromancers were, and I didn't know how much energy the dragon had remaining. I hoped that it was enough to make it move.
I took one last breath, making sure my mana was distributed across the nearest pillars, still unnoticed by the necromancers.
Then, I gave the dragon the signal to act.
The dragon was a prisoner for a long time, cramped, exhausted, and tortured by the death energy that was constantly channeled by a cabal of liches. Even then, when when it raged, I understood the reason for the legends about them. It might be exhausted, but when it smashed against the bars of the cage, the shock traveled across the room, forcing the four liches to turn inward to help their fellows suppressing it. Even then, for a moment, despite all of its disadvantages, it looked like the dragon was about to get its freedom, the cage cracking under its assault.
That impression didn't last for long, however. When the four black-robed necromancers raised their staffs and cast their spells, a complicated web of black energy fell over the dragon, wrapping its wings as it extracted a furious roar. Their staffs glowing brightly as they prepared to subdue the creature. The white-robed ones that were channeling the ritual were suitably distracted by the sudden rage of the dragon as well.
It was an excellent opportunity for me to act, one that I hadn't squandered. I flared my mana, an effect that spread through twelve of the fourteen pillars I had managed to infect with my mana.
They exploded simultaneously.
The chaotic shouts of the liches put a smile on my face, especially when their gazes danced on the remaining eighty-eight pillars. Eighty-six of them were starting to flicker, so naturally, they grabbed their attention first, not the two that maintained their stability.
A big mistake from their end, because these two still contained the majority of the mana I used to infect the ritual. A ritual that was conveniently going out of control with some pillars already destroyed and others flickering out of control. A ritual that connected me to the dragon.
I used the connection to send the mana to the dragon.
It was the trick I first used on Titania then perfected on Helga, with great benefits. So, while using the trick, helping the dragon get stronger wasn't my only objective. I also wanted to use the opportunity to probe its abilities, and maybe unravel a couple of mysteries about it. Maybe even get a peek into its soul space if I could manage.
However, the moment my mana touched its skin, I lost control of it, turning the second part of my plan impossible. Still, that was only a side benefit. The more important part was the sudden shine in the dragon's eyes as my mana touched its skin before letting out another roar, this time even louder.
The roar wasn't just sound, however. No matter how strong a roar was, it wouldn't just unravel the defensive wards around it like they were made of summer clouds. The necromancers tried to cast their spells, but they were too distracted by the sudden reversal of the ritual. They were a second too late to prevent the dragon from bursting out of the cage.
The dragon's first action in freedom was to open her mouth and spew out a flame so hot that it was bright white. Its flames spread around in a circle, hitting all six cages around it simultaneously, immolating the dragon corpses that were being used as a focus for the ritual.
Some of the liches that were sitting on top of the cages were quick enough to defend themselves, but not all of them. Two of them evaporated immediately under the raging flames. The rest managed to protect themselves from the flames, but not all of them did that flawlessly. Unfortunately, the one that was standing on top of the dragon's cage, who was clearly the leader, had survived. I had a feeling that it was the strongest one, evidenced by its survival despite the dragon directly targeting him in its follow-up attack.
However, that retaliation cost the dragon quite a bit. The black-robed ones used the opportunity to retaliate, each letting out dangerous bolts of necrotic energy, all from close quarters. Despite the closeness, the dragon dodged two of them, showing surprising agility considering its size, but the other two connected with its bright green scales.
The attack pushed the dragon back as well, but luckily, it moved toward my side. So rather than trying to resist, actually moved with the blow, leaving the necromancers behind.
"Stop it," called the leader, but he was unable to do so, because I had decided to leave one last gift, and used the two pillars under my control to further wreak havoc into the ritual, much easier considering I didn't have to care about not killing the dragon accidentally.
The dragon managed to enter the tunnel as the ritual started to collapse, and all liches turned their attention to stabilize it, preventing it from exploding. As much as I wished to go and kill them, revealing my presence would be counter-productive if I couldn't take all of them before reinforcements arrived. Even with the ritual collapsing, it was a long shot.
Then, I turned my attention to my unlikely ally.
—
[Level: 23 Experience: 263100 / 276000
Strength: 28 Charisma: 38
Precision: 21 Perception: 25
Agility: 25 Manipulation: 30
Speed: 23 Intelligence: 30
Endurance: 22 Wisdom: 32
HP: 1126 / 2737 Mana: 3152 / 3565 ]
SKILLS
Master Melee [100/100]
Master Tantric [100/100]
Master Biomancy [100/100]
Master Elemental [100/100]
Expert Arcana [75/75]
Advanced Subterfuge [50/50]
Basic Speech [25/25]
PERKS
Mana Regeneration
Skill Share