"I'll go ahead." Kong Jing told them the moment they entered the cave in the hill.
"It's stuffy," Ebony commented after half a day.
The resupply party moved fast as the tunnel floor seemed pretty flat but that changed in half a day. The route was only lit by their phoslamps and they had to slow down or risk bad bumps.
Ebony was perfectly fine following the light while he stayed in the dark and Mark's helmet had a dim internal glow of mana. He had better night vision with the help of runes. They were only going straight and slightly downward so it wasn't hard for Ning Xin to follow either.
She was bored. There was nothing she wanted to do underground except spend some time with her Kong Jing but she left without her.
Two days of following a group of people that may or may not know they were here passed. Kong Jing returned and complained that there were too many split paths, thousands of them as she dived deeper and deeper.
The 2 other groups of people that were following this supply party weren't anywhere close and Ebony had no idea where they were either. He wasn't surprised, those people waited as a huge congregation of people outside the city gates. There was little chance they could follow in secret so multiple strands of foreign mana he was sensing in his range must be some kind of item that let them follow the resupply party's path.
Today, the carriage-pulling beasts were unleashed and the resupply party unpacked to physically carry everything. The path was no longer wide enough for carriages. Not everyone was carrying a large pack, there was always a small group on alert so there were likely monsters here.
In the next week of quick march, nothing attacked at all. Not a single monster.
That sped them up a lot and Ebony found out the reason was Kong Jing deporting the mud golems to the rear so that these people could move faster. He joined in and gave her some tricks to attempt. He got her to teleport a large group at their rear to make the run ahead. They would fight back if it were a couple so they had to gather more than a few monsters before scaring the resupply party to move ahead.
The mud golems were scant and only earth golems showed up after a while. They were a force to be reckoned with when underground. The resupply party had their warrior smash the golems with pure strength. This depth didn't trouble them that much.
"Haha, you're quite the devil." Kong Jing laughed when they reached a long downward slope and he suggested rolling a massive rock down.
Too bad they smashed the rock up with ease, it hadn't been easy to find that rock. The slope had been too unnatural and he overheard them thanking someone for making the slope so it must have been an earth mage. The slope covered kilometres of vertical height and saved them a lot of time.
It didn't get warmer as they dived deeper, it got cooler. If his Mental Mapping was accurate, they were actually under Hoarfrost Glade but just the edges.
"How deep are we now?" Ning Xin asked.
"More than 2 gors." He replied with confidence." The rest of the way seemed like a whole team of earth mages were working to make the trip smoother but Kong Jing ran out of space to send monsters away from her range.
Topaz golems showed themselves.
They were much like the ones in Ordina but at level 260 they were only slightly weaker than Na's main body. As the dungeon 'boss' Na was a buffed-up monster with everything the dungeon could do to strengthen so these wild topaz golems were truly wild. A lot slimmer than the mud and earth golems due to the narrow tunnels.
The resupply party struggled but only because of the environment, they handled the topaz golems with practised efficiency and took the pure topaz instead of the impure earthen version in Ordina. Practised efficiency it may be but they were too careful, they always tried to squeeze as many people as possible without inferring with each other in the tight space so every encounter took hours. Mostly having someone with an earthwall enchanted shield to block hits and everyone else to fire arrows.
The moment the earthwall spell on the shield was hit, it would start breaking down by the topaz eating them up and even the arrows that landed on their opponents would crumble within a minute. Ebony could sense that they didn't joke around with the mana used on the arrows just so that they wouldn't crumble the instant they touched the topaz golems.
Mark's assessment was that they were going ham on the investments. They had multiple enchanted shields and were transporting enchanted weapons too. With only a few of them being runic. Enchanted stuff was usually stronger but cannot last as long. Even so, runic weapons didn't fill the streets and were not something you could obtain in bulk.
As for themselves, if they were to fight there was no chance they wouldn't be found out even though the one in charge of keeping an eye on the resupply party was Kong Jing. They were following pretty closely in retrospect. It was a wonder how the resupply party didn't really keep much of an eye behind them.
There was a limit to how much he could silence out sounds, the upper limit depended on how violently the air and ground was vibrating against the limits of his Mana Vibration skill. The good thing about the fighting style of the natural Topaz Golems he saw was that they were not able to use earth magic so they didn't have to worry about collapse.
Not even Kong Jing could break the ceiling here and that was reassuring.
"I'm going to go blind…" Ning Xin complained about travelling in the darkness.
They haven't reached the underground tomb that is supposedly so vast that they wouldn't necessarily bump into the possibly hundreds of people that were currently exploring or staying at the nearby camp.
Ebony's group wasn't planning on intruding the camp but directly to the tomb so they didn't really have to follow the resupply party all the way. They just needed a glimpse of the 'vast' tomb.
The journey so far had been impressively smooth and even boring because the resident space mage was sending everything away. Other than golems, there were monster moles, monster earthworms, some weird octopi thing that could survive being frozen completely through and also survive the frying pan. There were many more and the variety alone was making things difficult for the party of 60.
They didn't rest much if at all. Not much for them but Ebony was fully rested in the 3 to 4 hours that they stop in total every day. They couldn't even sleep for the full period since they needed to take watch, needed to cook for everyone if they weren't eating rations, clean and check the equipment and patch up cuts and bruises.
"We were lucky they already went through here twice and the narrower areas had been widened for the large procession of people."
"Well I doubt they widened it as they explored downwards."
"They've been down here for years and even in this resupply party, there are 4 earth mages." Mark shot down.
"Point taken. The earth mages must get awesome manipulation levels for manipulating some dense earth."
They didn't have a reply for him as Kong Jing started teleporting them without their consent.
"Found it! Only a little deeper and oh it is massive."
"Aren't we only a little more than 2 gors deep?"
"That's how vast it is. Tomb my ass, it's a city down there..."
"A city of?" Mark sensed his new master's pause in speech and knew there was a bright smile under her mask.
"It's a fortified city of topaz golems breeding all sorts of monsters and hundreds of factories producing more golems. Alright, we're here. Right below the floor is a vast cavern with an army of golems that can turn anything they touch to dust. Ready?"
"Tell me we're not destroying the place." Mark pleaded. They wanted to gain things here, not destroy them.
"From what I see. The most golems down here have the same runic engraving on them as the one you found. But a lot of them glowed a different colour. And…I don't recognize the runes on the buildings. I'm guessing everything down here was made by Dwarves or some other underground race." Kong Jing's feet were tapping in irritation. She wanted to go and check it out already.
"It's the Dwarves, they were the first to start expedition parties down. They probably knew about this place from some old documents they found. The one leading the expedition currently camping somewhere near us is a Dwarf." Mark kneaded his temples as he repeated the information that he already told them sometime during their exploration together.
They had plenty of time to chat over the week since they didn't fight anything and Ebony could soundproof them. It was mostly Mark pestering Kong Jing with questions about runes. He was too uptight to read a book while exploring, something about expecting the unexpected.
All in all, none of them were very talkative people and the journey so far had been passed by in silence. They 'helped' the resupply party move so much faster than they normally would and made it to their destination in one piece. Their space mage even personally redirected monsters that would wipe their guides out away but that was only known to herself. All Ebony knew were huge vibrations from around him that suddenly disappeared.
While they were making the journey down and the craftswoman couldn't stand the boredom, she went to search for metals to mine. Even if she managed to find anything, she didn't report it to them.
The craftswoman had spatial awareness that was not stopped by thick earth, she told them they were standing on a floor less than 5 metres thick. She didn't wait for much longer and brought them along with her past the floor.
Ebony was as calm as ever but Mark was holding back his screams when he was falling all of a sudden. They were in the air now and he probably couldn't fly.
He couldn't help but ask after half a minute of falling as he took in the sight of the city brightened by the glow of moving golems, "aren't you going to bring us somewhere out of sight?".
"Uhm…I can't manipulate the space here."
"What!" Mark yelled in shock.
Ebony helped to slow down their descent, Ning Xin was good enough to carry herself but not others.
"Let's land on that tall building." He pointed to the flat ceiling of a tall building with fewer glowing movements around.
They descended slowly, then they were brought to a stop in the air. Where it was supposed to be air spawned a translucent sheet they stood on, it glowed and every walking humanoid under them snapped their heads up.
"Those don't look safe." Mark looked at the tower with a massive yellow orb that was starting to brighten up below them.
Ebony grabbed Mark while the other pilot grabbed the craftswoman and they shifted to the side, ascending as much as possible. The barrier formed out of nowhere and he didn't react in time, now they alerted the entire underground 'tomb'.
As for why they called it a tomb, he was going to guess it was the monument of a gravestone that was hundreds of metres tall with words he wasn't able to make out when he was falling through the air.
Four yellow beams phased through the translucent barrier, accurately aiming for each of them. He blocked two of them with his Imperishable Frost Scales that he was bringing along under his robe. The space mage was actually still able to use space magic, he saw the two beams returned to the city and landing on buildings. Nothing happened to those buildings but they were not about to test it on their bodies.
He searched the walls and ceiling but it was dark since they were far from the tomb and his senses only shied away from a hundred metres. They might not have wanted to teleport in.
"Should we break in?" Ning Xin wanted some action.
"Of course not! If we break in every single golem knows where we are and we can't even touch them. Let's get to the wall and blast open a cave ourselves. They don't seem to be exiting the barrier to chase us." Mark then yelled for Ebony's attention as the yellow beams doubled in number.
His Imperishable Frost Scales took one shot and the topaz mana penetrated halfway through on impact before they started to consume or grow onto his ice mana. Thanks to how compressed they were, his scales weren't crumbling immediately and could take two more hits.
He let Mark down as they ran on top of the transparent barrier towards the closest wall. Now that they had the ability to move normally, dodging wasn't impossible but the beams doubled after every shot. When it hit 32 beams for each of them, he was thinking if he should help Mark again before the next shot dropped back to 1 beam but three times as thick. It was originally as thick as a finger.
The pattern continued as the beams doubled in quantity.
"Careful, we're about to reach the edge of the barrier." Ebony said when he saw that the others were running at their speed.
"Which sick bastard designed this?!" Kong Jing was the second to notice that the barrier wasn't a dome that sloped down as they reached the edge, it had been a square so they had been running on a flat surface.
He caught Mark and leapt off the kilometre or so they were above the city. They needed to cross a few kilometres to reach the end of the underground space. When the beams reached 32 again, the next shot got thicker yet again but back to one.
They reached the wall and Mark charged up to stab his spear in. It took 5 seconds for him to charge mana and the walls detonated. Everyone hid behind Ebony's shield that he formed just like old times. Yellow beams the thickness of an arm smashed into his shield one after the other but he was blocking for all of them and the magic tower shooting them seemed to only need 2 seconds between each shot.
"You might want to dig or blow up a tunnel faster," Ebony said when he felt his shield getting bombarded and crumbling from within.
Ning Xin and Mark worked on the boom boom while Kong Jing worked with him but it was very clear to him that her space magic didn't have her usual grandeur.
Although no horde of monsters or an army of earthen humanoids were sent after them, there really wasn't a need to.
Within a minute, he needed to envelop them as part of the wall as the beams were so thick and numerous that dodging while they had to tear a tunnel open behind them was impossible. He could practically feel his scales being devoured from within and the encasement they were in continued to glow brighter due to the build-up of topaz mana inside his scales.
The earth here was extremely tough, Ning Xin didn't have many skills that helped to dig. She resorted to melting the earth which made it unbearably hot for Kong Jing. Mark seemed more energetic with the influx of heat while Ebony had already gotten used to it, just enhancing himself coated himself in a freezing cold layer. The craftswoman on the other hand, did not like being in between extreme heat and cold.
With how slow the process was going on the fire team, he could only assume the melting point of the earth here was incredibly high too. Mark was once again doing better which was really surprising. His explosive spear thrusts were really widening the cave.
"Uh oh," Ebony said when he sensed the attacks stop.
"Why uh oh? Maybe we're out of range or they gave up." Kong Jing already brought out a black colour mantle to wrap over herself. She couldn't have believed they were out of range since the two diggers only got through 3 metres of dirt that could fit 4 of them tightly.
"The surrounding mana is being drained. Faster and faster." He was the most sensitive to ambient mana.
He bit into the stock of ice mana in his robe and Glacial Model formed and got to ramming large tools made of ice. It wasn't really efficient as they had to dig at the same spot so only 3 models were formed. They were all getting compressed as fast as possible as they were going to be useful as Imperishable Frost Scales too.
He let the shield down a tiny bit to see the dim light from the walled tomb that looked exactly like a city with a huge stone monument that was a gravestone. The tall beam shooting tower was far away but he had good sight, it was now blue in colour and he didn't like it. He quickly closed the opening shut and all his Glacial Models broke apart to join the shield.
Icy Weighted Quiver Domain was fully displayed, he tried his best to focus all his mana to ice and maybe the vibration side. His domain was controlled by him so he could make it such that other people were not under its effects. Unsure if a beam of mana that acts a little like light would be repelled, he still cast Chaotic Repulsive Membrane over the shield and he also cast it on all of them.
He continued to cast all of his strengthening spells and compress their lifeline while the others hurried to go deeper. Something already hit his shield but just like the yellow beam, he didn't feel any physical force from it. The lack of knockback made him think it was very similar to a beam of light. He stood behind their backs, directly behind Ning Xin. His body was a worthy shield.
The blue beam was phasing through his ice with at least ten times more ease. There was little delay in the crumbling of the strongest barrier he could form this time. In the split second the barrel-thick beam pierced his shield and was about to do the same to him and those behind him, Kong Jing joyfully laughed. "We're out!"
The three of them found themselves in an empty tunnel right before they were blasted with that blue beam of death.
"That was close, we just reached where I could manipulate space normally again." Kong Jing didn't sound so worried for her life but Ebony was sure that the craftswoman would not survive that beam either. Maybe with her equipment but definitely not her body. Even as a Grandmaster or a Xeng.
The two fire users were resting against the tunnel wall as they sat limp. They were drenched in sweat and exhaustion despite it being a couple of minutes of exploration.
"Ell." Mark cursed after catching his breath.