A New Star Chapter 99 (Patreon)

I could understand, after a couple days moving through the Ice Peaks, why nobody came here, and not just because of how dangerous the previous two pieces of terrain were. The Ice Peaks were really something else, both from the roughness of the terrain and from the number and strength of beasts that populated the area. It also didn’t help that there were two other factors at play, one being the size of the mountain range, which was genuinely enormous, dwarfing most ranges I had seen in my previous life. The second factor wasn’t directly related to an expedition that would be coming here, but still was a tangential point; I was lost. Not that I didn’t know where I was generally; I had a decent idea where I was in relation to known points, but I had no idea where the city I was looking for was or how to find it. It shouldn’t be that hard, of course, as a city, even a smaller city, was still something rather large, but the mountain range was incredibly vast, inhospitable, and the size and sheerness of the mountains meant a whole star fleet could be hovering a mile away and it would be hard to tell.

I imagine expedition had similar troubles, though they wouldn’t exactly know what they were looking for, other than anything valuable. Rare was it, to my understanding, for an expedition into the Wilds to have a specific goal in mind, as the information on the Wilds was so inaccurate that planning specific routes and destinations was all but meaningless. Even planning to go find thing A, whatever thing A happened to be at the time, could be a strategic and logistical nightmare, and I was sure that many of those expeditions ended rather ignominiously.

I couldn’t spend forever out here, either, especially given how much stuff I had already gathered. I was always grabbing herbs and anything else that caught my eye that I passed, and I occasionally killed a beast that looked like its blood and body would be useful for some alchemy. I had plenty of stuff to take back home already, but I needed to control myself a bit, as my goal hadn’t been harvesting during this trip but exploring. I was moving over another ridge on the shoulder of a mountain when Alexandra spoke up, pointing me to the northwest over the next mountain up that way. It took a few hours for me to navigate down into the valley, up over the cliffs and the shoulder of the second mountain, especially given how steep and tall this latest batch of cliffs and obstacles were.

My patience and Alex’s senses were rewarded, however, as I trekked along a ridge on the far shoulder of the mountain. I saw the first building in the distance as I got to the highest spot on the ridge, coming around a section of the mountain in the next few minutes to see more buildings unfurl before me. The city was still some distance away and it took me a minute to realize what I was seeing, but whoever had built it had chopped the top off a smaller mountain, and they had done it a not inconsiderable distance down from the peak. The mountain they had chosen was butted up tightly against several other mountains, making getting to the city extremely difficult, and I could see no route that made that any easier. Even if the city were ancient and the terrain around it had settled in the intervening years, there should be some sign of a road or pass, but there was none. Either the people who lived here had dug tunnels, they got in and out by airship or teleporting, or they were so isolationist that they never left and never welcomed any visitors. Personally, I was thinking option number two, considering the danger underground and the vulnerability tunnels in a mountain range this dangerous would be, but it could always be something else.

The one thing that stuck out to me was the area around the city; there had to be half a mile of clear space, though it wasn’t a perfectly even circle or anything. The ground was also not perfectly level, but the open area around the walls was fairly even and regular, which pointed towards the city’s founders having created it. Good line of sight and a good defensive posture; I approved. The walls themselves were quite impressive, even compared to something like the capital city I had just been in a few days before. Massive blocks of black stone had been cut incredibly precisely; it wasn’t just that they were joined very cleanly, which spoke to general good craftsmanship, but the outer face of the wall was so smooth it resembled glass. A massive pane of glass, too, as the wall extended over a hundred feet into the air, towering over the open space around the city.

Even with the massive, impressive walls, I could still see at least some of the buildings and architecture within the city, though I certainly couldn’t see everything, even from my elevated position. The one thing that stood out, after the impressive walls, was a massive tower at the direct center of the city. The tower had to five hundred feet high, and it wasn’t a thin needle of a structure, either, but was a blocky, imposing edifice of marble and metal. I could see that there were large windows on higher floors, though they had been coated to prevent prying eyes from easily looking within, and there was a large construct of metal and what looked like crystal on the roof.

The city certainly didn’t disappoint, not that I had expected a lost city of some ancient civilization to be disappointing, but it was really something else. The one thing I would say, however, was that I had a rather strange feeling about the place, not because it was abandoned, or apparently so, but there was something in the air. I had trouble articulating it, but there was something oppressive in this pseudo valley that the people of the city had built for their home, something that blackened the air, proverbially, and set a weight about the heart. I was not taking that as a good sign, though it wouldn’t discourage me from examining the place. I did, however, remember what the high orc brothers had said about the place; I wasn’t just going to run up and try my luck.

The first order of business was to scout the area, especially considering that Alex had sensed something strongly from over here. Given her extremely high affinity to death and death magics, that was not a particularly good sign, especially given the tales I’d already heard about the place being eerily empty for many years. Though, circling around the place was going to be a massive pain in the ass; the clear area around the city was about it. The people who had lived here hadn’t cleared anything apart from that half mile stretch and I didn’t want to get that close to the city, especially not as there wasn’t any cover in that open area to hide behind. I would have to circle around by trekking across the surrounding mountains and that was a bit of a daunting prospect.

It turned out to be even worse than I had feared just standing on the ridge and staring at the mysterious city. The lost people of the city, which is how I was going to refer to them until I had some evidence they were found, had picked their spot well. The surrounding mountains were large, abutted each other in abrupt ways that meant there weren’t really any large valleys or open passes between them, and they seemed tailor made to be as inhospitable as possible. It almost made me want to just approach the city directly and take my chances, but I had both the orcs’ word and a feeling that that would be a very bad idea. Instead, I climbed and leapt and shifted back and forth over the five mountains around the city, trying to examine the city from different angles and elevations as I did so.

There really wasn’t all that much to see, and I was starting to thing there was some kind of obscuring formation keeping prying eyes from looking within. The only two things I had any clear view of were the massive walls and the part of the central tower that rose above them. While those two things could tell me a bit, there was still an awful lot of information missing. Considering how I had been warned rather harshly about how dangerous the city was, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get much of a view of anything. I couldn’t even see if there were any mountings on or in the wall for weapons or defenses, which was quite frustrating, and the specific layout of the city eluded me.

After hours of this, I had mostly circled the city, still at some appreciable distance, and I was ready to try a couple things. I didn’t have a long range scanning technique or equipment, so I wasn’t going to be able to get anything very concrete without getting close, but I did my best to get a good idea of the city’s general shape and the mana signature of the place. There was definitely something in the air that was a bit…off, though I was having trouble identifying the feeling and what was going on. Given that, among the other things, I was going to be extremely cautious when approaching, and I worked my way back around to where I had first come from, or close to it, before deciding to take a run at it.

I meant a run in the metaphorical sense here, as I certainly wasn’t sprinted at an unknown and dangerous city, and that caution was well rewarded. I was still not even to the cleared area on what likely used to be the hip of the mountain the city was built upon before I ran into trouble, and it wasn’t beast or monster trouble. In fact, as a side note, there was a distinct and disturbing lack of any kind of life at all within the large valley. There were no birds or flying animals or beasts in the air, nothing on the ground or clinging to the rock faces, nothing burrowing or tunneling deep below. As far as I could see, hear, smell, and sense with my mana, the place was dead, dead as a doornail, and that was very disturbing for several reasons. Even if animals and beasts had learned to avoid the place in general, there should still be something at the edges of the valley, not to mention some of the extremely strong beasts I had given a wide berth as I made my way here. Either it was too dangerous for S- and T-rank beasts to be nearby, which said an awful lot about the place, or they were there and hiding, which also said a lot.

The reason I had said my caution was rewarded while approaching was I had triggered the first defenses, and it went a little towards explaining why there was nothing close to the city. I didn’t even understand what I had stepped on or through or in, or if it was just proximity to the city itself, but a sudden current of electricity built up around me before discharging in an impressive blast. I had danced out of the way, finding that my lightning affinity gave me enough resistance the blast did little more than singe a bit of the edge of my cloak. Still, that was a hell of a lot of power for something so far from the city, and it had to be the city, as I could not detect anything nearby that could have done that. Something able to produce such a high-energy attack had to have some kind structure and, more importantly, power source nearby, but I was surrounded by nothing but rocks and a bit of moss or lichen.

That was another thing, too, not to get too distracted while I was being bombarded by lightning, though I hadn’t actually been struck a second time, having danced back from the initial hit. The Ice Peaks were harsh and a lot of the mountains had bare peaks, bare shoulders, and slopes where the plant life petered out early. Here, though, there was practically no plant life, with the cleared area around the city being empty of pretty much everything, not even lichen surviving there, which was rather concerning. Even going further out, there was little but a few sedge grasses and some moss on the boulders; the whole place had so little life it couldn’t possible be natural. Now, whether it was something in the city, some defense of the city, some nearby beast, or even something else that I didn’t currently understand doing this, I had no idea. The only I could say about it was that it wasn’t a good sign. Not at all.

I had to test the defenses a little, and so I didn’t just leave right away, but circled around the city a bit and tried to approach the empty area from different positions. Whatever the defense that was detecting me was, it was both accurate and sensitive; I wasn’t even in the cleared area around the city but in rough terrain, yet it found me at the same distance from the walls, no matter the boulders around me or the obliqueness of the angle of approach. Whatever the detection network the city, or whatever or whoever it was that was attacking me, was using was rather superb and didn’t seem to need any time to reset or recharge. I had tested that last bit, and it could dish out half a dozen of the electric charge buildups in a row without breaking a sweat, or so it appeared, so overwhelming it with a high number of incursions in a short time frame was unlikely to bear fruit.

The next thing to try was to use The Dark, as I couldn’t really fly through any of various means at present, and trying to keep darting forward wasn’t working nor likely to. The Dark proved able to fool the very first layer of defenses, and I was aware enough of the general world to see it had fooled the second; there were traps, actual physical traps or defenses, at the edge of no man’s land. I would have liked to examine them in more detail, but I couldn’t do that in The Dark, and dropping out of the dark would just invite more electrical attacks, not to mention that I could also set the trap off by even getting close to it, let alone trying to inspect it. I would have to move cautiously and see what happened if I bypassed these traps while in The Dark. I was curious how close to the wall I could get before anything detected or tried to stop me in this strange plane of reality, or unreality, whatever the case may be.

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