Lacking access to the real system, and with his personal system also completely silent, Velik wasn’t entirely sure he’d get the same forewarning everyone else did. He’d considered sticking close to people under the assumption someone would tell him, but ultimately decided that it was better to be on-hand for when the divine beast broke free of its confinement, however long that might take.
He could sense the undead below his feet, thousands of feet down. They stomped through the necropolis, rushing back and forth doing the gods only knew what, each and every one a little hole in the field of essence that suffused everything else. Before he’d merged practically all of his skills into a single one, he couldn’t have noticed that, but now, it was easy. The whole necropolis was laid bare to his senses despite the thousands of tons of rock separating him from the city, if only in his sense of essence.
And there was a thing down there, right below Velik’s feet, miles away. He could tell now, could differentiate the fine threads of essence all woven around each other. Everything was connected to it, everything except him and the undead, who’d become something more organized in the last few hours and were now steadily approaching the surface.
Velik wasn’t sure what their intentions were, but he was strong enough now to casually eliminate them no matter the numbers they brought to bear against him. If they were simply fleeing the resulting cataclysm of the divine beast below their bony feet, he’d end them when they reached the surface. If they had some other reason for fleeing the necropolis, well, he’d decide once he learned it.
His time outside the Garden had taught him that, if nothing else, there were monsters who could make crude approximations of civilization, who wouldn’t attack on sight. And he knew for a fact that there were undead down there that spoke. There was intelligence in those crimson pinpricks of fire they called eyes.
He suspected it wasn’t a coincidence that a massive beast capable of consuming essence was buried beneath a literal army of undead warriors utterly immune to the ravages of essence loss. That reeked far too much to be a coincidence. It had to be some god’s plan, which meant he might have an ally of convenience.
The first distortion appeared about three hours after Velik got there. It was subtle at first, a tightening of lines that already had no slack that manifested itself as an almost imperceptible quiver. Velik might not have noticed it except that it was replicated a million times over in every single thread of essence.
The next sign was a bit more obvious. An underground explosion rattled the very mountains, and the sound of collapsing rock grinding against itself was near deafening. Velik was inclined to think it was a purposeful collapse, orchestrated by some intelligent power that had deliberately waited until all the undead were clear of the blast radius.
Long cracks appeared in the ground, some of them a fraction of an inch wide, others spanning several feet. All of them ran for a few hundred feet out from the epicenter of the blast, where the ground started to sag. What few root systems there were were utterly incapable of holding the topsoil in place, and large clumps of it quickly fell into the darkness.
Essence strands twisted and flexed as the divine beast they were attached to writhed beneath the crushing weight, and Velik spared a moment to wonder what was happening to the people and monsters on the other end. I should have snagged something weak to serve as my early warning system. Oh well, it’s too late now and obviously not needed.
After a few minutes, everything stabilized. There was a noticeable dip a few hundred feet wide and maybe thirty feet deep, but otherwise everything was quiet. Velik returned to his seat and waited, silently watching as the man-shaped blots in the essence trooped their way up to the surface.
It didn’t take long for the first one to appear, drifting up out of a hole it blasted through the bedrock rather than take the winding paths to the cave entrance Jensen’s team had used to gain entry to the necropolis. The figure was a skeleton clad in ragged robes that drifted around its frame, supported on winds of pure mana.
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It surveyed the damage with narrowed eyes, an expression Velik found particularly amusing considering its lack of muscle and flesh, but somehow the magic in it let it reshape bone to achieve the expression anyway. Nodding to itself and apparently satisfied with the results of its work, the lich cast a look around the mountainside.
It froze when it spotted Velik casually sitting a few hundred feet away, its jaw hanging so loose that it was a wonder the whole bone didn’t fall off. “You,” it hissed, the sound carrying across the open air to slither into Velik’s ear like the monster was bare inches away. “What are you doing here?”
“The same as you, I think.”
“Doubtful. You’ve caused enough trouble for us already,” the lich said. “We’re already dealing with one catastrophe. We don’t need… your… interference.”
The monster trailed off as it considered something. Its burning pinprick eyes flickered from Velik to the collapse, back to Velik again, and then fixed on a point far below where other undead waited. “You had something to do with this, didn’t you? But how… We stopped you from getting too close last time.”
“You did? Oh! You were one of those two down in the cathedral that I beat up.”
“You didn’t—That is, I mean, it was a…” the lich sputtered, before finally sighing and saying, “You could leave us a little dignity and phrase more politely than that.”
“Sorry, I’m not in the habit of sparing monsters’ dignity,” Velik told it dryly.
He could sense more of the monsters coming up the same breach the first one had made. It was obvious this one was only talking in an attempt to stall until reinforcements arrived, and Velik was sorely tempted to eliminate it on the spot. He wasn’t sure if it could come back from a [Void Lance] like it had from his older, weaker skills, but even if it could, it wouldn’t happen immediately.
But the image of that lizard man making a pair of pants kept coming back into Velik’s head. Monsters outside the system had very different behavior patterns, and these undead technically weren’t a part of the system, either. They had no essence. Even more damning, they technically had a society and appeared to have some sort of social hierarchy.
Velik had thought the necropolis was just the ruins of some human city lost to time, but now he wasn’t so sure. There was an easy way to find out, though. He could just ask the lich floating in front of him. It had casually drifted forward, cutting the distance between them in half, and done so in such a non-threatening manner that it merely appeared to be moving toward him to easier facilitate the conversation.
If Velik couldn’t see the lich’s mana twisting around as it prepared various spells to overpower him with, he might even have believed it. None of those spells could touch him, not even in his sleep. [Magic Eater] was still a part of his final essence configuration; it would devour the lich’s spells without leaving so much as a trace behind.
“Did you build the necropolis?” Velik asked abruptly.
The lich, taken off guard by the sudden question, froze in place. “My people did,” it answered after a moment’s hesitation. “Some three centuries before I was born. Ours was the greatest of human civilizations. That was why the gods bestowed us with the… honor… of serving as the cradle.”
The way the lich said ‘honor’ made it clear to Velik that it considered the act of service to be anything but. “Don’t get on too well with the gods, I take it?”
“Back then, we wholeheartedly believed in Darshu. A few thousand years of being cursed to undeath to act as—well, never mind that. Suffice to say the glamor of the position wore off a long time ago.”
Velik snorted. “It’s barely been a year for me and I’m already ready to tell the gods where they can shove it. Manipulative bastards.”
The lich nodded slowly, seeming surprised by Velik’s blasphemy, but it let his words pass without comment. “Why are you here, then? Did the gods send you to bear witness?”
“No,” Velik said. “If only it were that easy. I’m here to kill the damn thing, to clean up their big mess for them.”
“You know about—” the lich cut itself off again. Its eyes narrowed. “You’ll fail. We’ve taken your measure. You’re strong, for a human, but not nearly powerful enough even if your own power wasn’t about to turn against you.”
“That will be quite enough of that,” a new voice said. This lich was dressed in far fancier robes, and ones there were mostly intact, if a bit threadbare around the edges. “An outsider such as this mortal has no place in conversations about these topics.”
More liches spilled out of the hole, thirteen in total. The new leader approached where Velik and the first lich waited, and the others casually spread out to surround the three of them. “You are lucky you are not walking the streets of fabled Accelit, human,” the leader said. “We would cut you down where you stand if you dared trespass.”
Accelit… Accelit. Why does that sound familiar?
Velik pushed it out of his mind. That the necropolis had a name wasn’t relevant at the moment. All that mattered was the increasingly unstable essence field, an indicator that the divine beast was starting to stir.
“What are you going to do when it wakes up and breaks free?” Velik asked. “It can’t be long now. Do you think you can stop it?”