SB: Chapter 260 – Approaching The Forge (Patreon)

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Looking off into the distance was a pillar of black smoke going up into the clouds, with the wind pushing it to the side. The smell of ash and fire lingered in the air, even far away. I noted the snow had gone from white to grey.

The temperature didn’t increase unfortunately, but at least the dark season was over. We had made much better time once it started becoming light outside. This quest was almost over.

Once we stopped for the night, it was time to test some things while we were at a far enough distance to run away if needed. The first question was the nearest demon, and Compass Of Desire pointed in a completely different direction. I cut off the skill and let out a small sigh of relief.

Thinking monsters were just too dangerous. Give me a more powerful but stupid monster over a thinking demon.

My next question was nearest monster. My Compass Of Desire spun around and pointed right towards our destination. No, not right at it, it was slightly offset. But since we were this close and the difference in directions from my two skills was only a couple of degrees, the monster was probably near this forge.

Nearest dungeon entrance, got me the same direction as the monster. So, the monster was at the dungeon entrance. I thought about that for a couple of minutes. It was like that giant floating ice monster that had fought the demon. Too big to head back into the dungeon, but it desperately wanted Mana. Unlike a demon it couldn’t easily reject such a thing or think of alternatives, so it camped the dungeon entrance.

I felt a shiver of fear go through me. If I had tried to get here through the dungeon entrance, I would have run right into the monster. If the demons hadn’t killed it, it was probably over level 300 like the last one, which meant it was absolutely impossible to fight.

Boris had very little Mana. While Ozy was strong, unless he attacked another monster, monsters ignored each other. That left me and I could kind of hide myself. The problem was the tier of my hiding skills. Only Empowered Stealth was at a high tier.

The question was if I should scout first. It would let me assess the risk but also increase the chance of discovery. While I wanted to ask a question like ‘nearest monster over level 300’, Compass Of Desire did not like qualifiers. You asked for something and got the closest thing that met that category.

This was adjusted for items I had personally held and knew. I could ask for ‘my coin’ as a qualifier and it was fine. The divination skill was insanely useful, but it had limitations, where I couldn’t just get all the information I wanted out of it by asking super precise questions.

Sneaking in by myself was better. Boris wasn’t capable of escaping like I was. While he was strong, his stamina and base speed were lacking.

“I am going to scout ahead tomorrow. Just like the time I left to deal with the demon. I should be back within three days,” I said.

“I understand,” Boris stoically replied and said nothing else. I took my time to make sure the cave was properly and comfortably set up for him. It would also give him a chance to fully recover his stamina points.

I left Ozy behind as well to keep working on metal pieces for a sled. I should have stocked up on raw materials at the College. A lesson for next time unfortunately. While I had prepared quite a bit, I hadn’t thought things would go in this direction.

The next day, after breakfast, I left while it was still dark. The cold quickly broke through my Cold Immunity. The skill helped but it was far from holding steady against the environmental effects of this hellscape.

As I got closer, I saw that there was a huge structure built into the side of the mountain, with a massive smokestack in the center of the mountain, churning out black smoke. There was also sea water that wasn’t frozen at the base of the mountain, at the bottom of some incredibly steep cliffs.

The closer I got the temperature also increased as well as the ash covering everything. It wasn’t a smokestack, but some kind of volcanic vent. I wouldn’t have thought of that normally, but after the attack on the College, it felt eerily similar.

The snow and ice started to turn into slush, mixing with the ash, to turn into a crunchy and icy mud.

The massive structure wasn’t just smoking from the large top vent, there were holes and damage across the entire complex built into the side of the volcano. There were multiple buildings that seemed connected and merged together all across this side of the mountain. I noted that a portion of the structure rested over a cliff with pipes extending out from the rock face, above salted water.

I soon spotted a road and began to approach the Forge on the road, not spotting anything dangerous, besides my Danger Sense slowly increasing. There was a long pockmarked switchback road leading up to two very large doors that were twice my height. There were no other ground entrances or windows on the building.

The only other openings I saw would be the vents, pipes, and the holes in the rooftop. None of those other entrances were particularly appealing. Reaching the main door, I took time to listen. There was the sound of air moving, nothing else as far as I could tell. The ash was still drifting down. I wanted to use Clean, but held off. No need to alert whatever monster was hiding here because I was annoyed by the ash dirtying everything.

I gave the front door a light push. It didn’t move. I pushed harder and there was a small amount of give. Thankfully there was only a small scraping noise as I pushed the door open wide enough to squeeze into the complex.

There was a grand entrance hall, three to four times my height with a row of columns on either side of the entrance. I checked above and behind me, but there was nothing hiding as far as I could tell. I slowly advanced into the building.

I advanced down the center of the hall. While it might seem better to stick to one side, this was a large structure. If I took things too slowly, I would be here forever. I wasn’t going to rush, but I wasn’t going to crawl like a snail unless there was a threat.

There were several side passages and doors off this main hall. At the back there were two staircases leading up a level to another set of large doors. Seraphim Quest was pointing off to one side. The nearest monster was close, but the separation had grown from a few degrees to about 15 degrees. The monster appeared to be straight forward, while the Seraphim Quest was leading me off to one side.

I went in the direction that the quest was indicating, opening a door to a side passage. I made sure to mentally keep track of my route. I also didn’t check the side doors, unless I planned to go through them.

After passing through three more doors to other passages, I finally opened another door to a large room. There was a lot of machinery I had no clue what it did. It was also all inert, not a hint of Mana flowing through it. One machine off to the side was partially melted and destroyed.

I then stopped in front of the largest machine at the back of the room, that extended up through the ceiling and floor. No hint on what it did and it was completely inert. My Seraphim Quest was pointing at this machine.

How was I supposed to destroy the cursed blade with this machine? At least it was intact, but it was frustrating that the quest wasn’t simple. I asked Compass Of Desire to point me to the nearest location with information about this place.

I left the quest room, as I was calling it, and followed my other skill through the corridors and into a room with several metal alcoves. All of them were empty, except for one with a humanoid golem.

The golem probably had information about this place, but it was clearly inactive. I checked it over and it was an old servant model. They were much more common back during the heyday of the Eldarin Empire. They had come to be seen as a symbol of oppression, since the enslaved dwarves had been forced to build them. After the Eldarin Empire had collapsed they had fallen out of favor.

Opening up its chest, there was a scattering of Mana dust, the residue left behind by a Mana core being completely consumed. I scraped the dust away with my hand and then put in a red Mana core. I carefully closed the chest back up of the golem.

It wasn’t automatically turning back on. It was in a deep shutdown. There was not even a residual charge of Mana in its pathways to restart it. Restarting it would be tricky. Normally a specialist was needed to get a golem back online after a deep shut down.

Thankfully I knew my runes and had seen a similar golem before in one of my runic classes. I also had some basic tools, which had been standardized back during the time of the Eldarin Empire. I popped open a side compartment. I slowly rotated a vent to allow for Mana venting by creating an opening and exit clearly labeled in Eldarin. This would normally drain the energy too fast, but the void in the Mana pathways needed to be flushed out since all the Mana had dissipated.

I had enough control over my Mana to inject a small stream of it into the golem. Normally this was done with a potion, but I didn’t have such an item or the ability to make it. This was the poor way to restart a golem and it wasn’t good for its long term Mana pathways. But it had information that I wanted.

Some of my Mana came out of the exit port of the vent I had twisted open. I closed the vent back up and then moved away from the golem. It should have gone from deep shutdown to regular shutdown with the injection of my Mana.

Just had to wait for the Mana igniter to catch. This really was ancient technology before the Mana implosion engine. The golem jerked as there was a small surge of Mana from it. Its eyes lit up red as it began twitching several times.

There was the problem I was expecting. My Mana wasn’t the right kind such a golem was designed for. It was meant to run off Mana cores. The potion used to pull it out of a deep shutdown, was basically liquified Mana cores with certain additives. My Mana wasn’t the right type and was clashing with the golem’s systems and the Mana currently moving through its systems.

The golem had opened a vent itself, to purge my Mana. I wasn’t worried about being detected by the nearby monster. This amount of Mana was incredibly small. That was why I had used a red core instead of a better grade.

There was nothing to do but wait. I could only hope that whatever the golem used for memory was still working properly. If not, this quest would go from hard to approaching impossible very quickly. While I was highly knowledgeable, the machines in this Forge were very unique and I had no clue about their function or purpose.

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