"Looks like you managed to capture one of the fire mages, impressive. I thought you'd end up getting really burnt out if you tried to do something like that, Wolf, but did you have to maim him that much?"
"I'm only responsible for the arm and nose, the rest of the damage to his body was done by you during the battle."
"I don't know why you're so happy with him capturing a mage who was already badly wounded, he's all wounded. I can easily see that the mage made some holes in his body, the boy and the scout and not a warrior."
Idiot goat.
"You're right about my injuries, but they were inflicted by the two green-core warriors I just killed before capturing the mage. These punctures were made by the element of water and not by fire."
The grumpy old goat was clearly annoyed by my responses, but before he could respond Raven got up from the bench she was sitting on. That sudden movement alerted the entire team who started looking for some new enemy.
"This is no time for childish fights, Terra just sent the signal he's seeing this way. He must have finished with the cultists who tried to escape through the two tunnels, before he arrives to move that damn metal plate you must heal the Wolf. When our path is clear we will go down and kill most of the cultists, don't worry too much about capturing the warriors, we just need a few mages to interrogate later."
"But try to capture the necromancers, they may just be here to process the materials, but that also means that one of them must be responsible for transporting the material to the next base. Our best chance of finding the cultists' really important base is the necromancers."
It didn't take even five minutes for the metal plate behind Raven to start moving by itself, the tunnel to the floor below opened and most of the team descended through the tunnel to deal with the rest of the necromancer.
Only me and Taric were left behind, when I looked at him, I could see that he's already got his breath back, but his aura and elemental energy reserves are still low, but there's not much to do about it. He spent a lot of energy and didn't have a good amount of time to rest, I can't say I'm much better than him, during the last fight I spent my energy not caring at all about the future.
My only objective at the time was to kill the cultists who were still alive in the room, but now me and Taric need to continue cleaning the rooms on this floor, it wouldn't be good if any survivors of the massacre had much time to heal or prepare a revenge, I doubt it. let any of them be happy with what just happened.
"Do you want to rest more or do you already want to start cleaning the rooms?"
"I think we better get started soon, I doubt it's good to put off our task any longer, to lots of rooms to clean. Why do cultists have to make so many side rooms?"
"If the rooms are the same type as the ones I went through before, they must all be cult wizard workshops. It looks like they need a separate, controlled environment to process materials."
"I hope I don't even start a fire with my light element, you can choose the order of the rooms, Wolf. Try to pick an empty one now, let's leave to kill cultists for the second room."
"Okay, but I don't think your light element can cause a fire. In the last room I used the flashlight you charged your elemental energy with before the operation, the materials in the room weren't much affected but the cultists had great trouble seeing me I must have looked like a dark blur to them the entire combat."
"I'm glad it was helpful; I was quite surprised when Lightning asked me to put my elemental energy into this lantern. How much power is left in that flashlight?"
"Almost nothing, I turned it on max to blind and maybe affect the cultists' senses, but I think I only followed them a little. Not one of them was a death element user for the purification property to have a direct effect on them."
"Um, my light element is more useful against undead than death element users, to expect you could blind a death element warrior is almost ridiculous. The purifying properties of my light element are too small to ignore the aura a warrior has."
"Okay, so let's try to find some undead for you to feel more useful."
Getting a glare from Taric who has no sense of humor, I think I'd better correct myself.
"Just kidding, let's go to an empty room. But after her there might be some cultists or undead."
I lead Taric into a seemingly empty room, and I say this because I'm so afraid I'm wrong. Since I discovered that the undead can be 'invisible' to me, not a room is empty anymore, especially where necromancers live and work.
I don't know how popular the habit of leaving the undead is with necromancers, but for the rest of my life I will always have to watch out for undead or any other kind of being that escapes my eyes. I really wish they were more omnipotent, but at the end of the day I've already been very lucky and being born with them and they're just an unexpected mutation, expecting them to be perfect was a really stupid thought.
Upon entering the room calmly, I did not find anything unusual and I say this taking into account what was already expected to be found inside this room, not even a type of record or reports other than a book next to the door that must be used as a record of the material entering and leaving this workshop.
This very empty room, apart from the open cupboards full of human parts and only one table in the center of the room where the mage or warrior responsible for that room must have worked. There isn't any kind of organ hanging on the walls or drying out here, the room is full of bones and very few body parts like legs and arms that have had their blood drained.
When opening the boxes near the door I only find more bones organized inside the box, it seems that there is really nothing special about this room. As I check out the open boxes and cabinets in the room, Taric is focused on the ledger, he's probably trying to figure out how many people have already been processed in this room.
Depending on the number you can find out how many more sources the cultists at this base get their slaves from, I doubt that all the material that came to this base was stolen from Canos.
"I doubt there's anything useful here, we'd better go to the next room.
"I agree, this room is only for sanding and organizing the bones of slaves. But in this book, there is something useful, it seems that the bones in this room are arranged for two different destinations, unfortunately their location is not marked in this book they are just referred to as base A and base B, and it seems that base B and the one that receives most of the bones."
"It would be weird if the location of the bases were in this book, Light, who would put the address of a secret base in an unprotected book like this that the only function is to record the number of bones that pass through the room."
"We'd better go to the next room."
Leading the way to the next room I hold my blades as from a distance I could see that the room has a good amount of mana inside it, I don't even see a core inside but I eat the amount of mana and death elemental energy inside this room is bigger and mixed with the element of life there's a good chance we have to face some kind of trouble entering it.
Upon entering the door, I am greeted by a very strong metallic smell that comes from something I didn't expect to see.
"I thought blood was useless to these cultists, Light, because there are so many vats of them here and most of them seem empty."
"I don't know, but this is not common"
This room which is colder than the others is full of blood, which the other room had in white because of the numerous bones this room has red. Several vats of preserved blood, some smaller where to a darker blood that must be some sort of mixture to preserve or modify the organs within them.
But even though the contents of this room are strange and unexpected, it's not even a place for an undead to hide. Unless he's sleeping in a vat of blood, that would be scary stuff.
An undead breaking into madness from a vat of blood and a scene from a horror B movie, but before I could comment on it an agonized roar reverberated through the entire base.
"What was this?"
Before him there were several sounds of battle and some screams, but not one as sinister as this.
"It wasn't an undead, that was a human scream."
"Undead can have humanoid bodies, Light."
"Yes, but even they don't have a voice like that. The undead would have to have been designed to mimic the human voice and as far as I know that kind of undead don't exist, magic beasts with that ability, but undead don't."
Suddenly Taric and I felt the earth on the floor and walls of the room break apart, cracks began to form throughout the room as the underground base vibrated from the combat taking place on the deeper floors.
"Best we go, Light?"
But before Taric could give his opinion on what was going on, a chunk of floor in the center of the room started to break apart and sink.
"Run!"
Before the entire room collapsed, I grabbed the book that was on the table by the door and ran out into the main hall. Taric in his heavy armor was in front of me and didn't stop when we reached the main hall.
He kept running to the surface and I followed him, I won't be left behind now. Unlike the rest of the team, we both don't have an earth mage to protect us from the collapse.
Upon reaching the surface, the tremors subsided a lot, but the problem was the sound of the underground base collapsing. Taric and I backed away from the entrance inside the base to make sure the ground beneath us didn't sink.
It didn't take long for both of us to see the nature-covered cabin begin to sink into the ground. Looks like the fight below was too violent for the base structure to heat up.