'F.u.c.k! My only hope is that Vladion is still messing around with-' Scarlett's hopes died the moment she saw Lith sitting on a stone, eating some jerky and drinking a tonic.
Right after shrugging off Life Maelstrom's effects with Life Aura that turned the Firstborn's physical strength into a defensive wall, Vladion had unsheathed his sword, Primordial Thirst, and decapitated his opponents.
If the gap between a deep blue and a bright violet mana core was big, that with a full red blood core was even bigger. The moment Vladion had taken the gloves off, the creatures were already dead, they just didn't know it yet.
"This is odd." He said. "The last time we fought against more than two Guardian's bloodlines whereas this time they were either lesser Griffons or Dragons."
"My thoughts exactly." Lith and Scarlett said in unison. "Probably being able to use Origin Flames or Life Maelstrom was the prerequisite to become a prototype, but what the real project is after are Griffons and Dragons."
"Xedros?" Lith remembered all too well the Father of all Wyvern's obsession with becoming a Dragon.
"Impossible." Scarlett shook her head. "He knows nothing of healing magic and you can't improvise yourself an expert. Besides, if he really was capable of something like that, Xedros wouldn't have spent the last 1,500 years whining. Although…"
The Scorpicore adjusted the Eyes to have an approximate idea of their location. They had flown for too long and she had focused on the energy signature too much for caring about the direction they moved.
"You're too paranoid, kid." Scarlett said while sighing in relief. Xedros was one of the few elders of the Council that would give her a run for her money. "We haven't moved back to the Kingdom, we're even deeper in the Empire."
"Can you show me?" Vladion asked after drinking the blood he needed to return to his peak condition and fix his equipment, storing the rest in his dimensional object to give it to his children later.
Scarlett tapped the Eyes, making a 3-D holographic map appear. It showed both the surface and the underground network of tunnels they had traveled through.
'I can't wait for you to be able to do the same.' Lith said, brimming with greed and envy.
'Same here, but never forget that I'm more than a piece of your equipment, I'm your partner.' She said.
'I never thought of you otherwise.' He replied, giving her the equivalent of a telepathic embrace. 'By the way, do you want me to try and retrieve the Eyes of Mom?'
'Thanks, but no thanks.' Solus chuckled at the joke, grateful for his thoughtfulness. 'There's no point for us in collecting all the pieces of Mom's set since I'll probably have all of their abilities once I fully recover.
'I took the Hands only because the Kolgans abused them whereas Scarlett is a good person. She uses the Eyes like you would, so I'm fine with her keeping them.'
"Great Mother almighty." Vladion said. "We're exactly in the middle of the Eclipsed Lands. At this point, I don't need the Eyes of Menadion to know our destination. We need to go here."
The Firstborn pointed with his finger at an underground location a couple of dozen kilometers away from them. The place was in the middle of nowhere, with no settlements either above or below the ground.
"What's so special about it?" Lith asked, taking the words out of Scarlett's mind.
"It's located on the borders between three Awakened Lords so each one of them assumes that the others will guard it and does nothing. Also, it's the perfect place to set Arthan's Madness.
"Here there's Lightkeep, here Nightingale…" Vladion tapped in several points of the map where the undead cities were hidden, yet revealing no pattern.
"Okay, you lost me." The Scorpicore said. "All the cities are distant as f.u.c.k from each other and from your so-called "perfect place." I can't see them forming an array even if I squint my eyes and tilt my head. What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about a powerful mana geyser left in a no-man's-land, so close to the Eclipsed Lands that someone capable of using Warp Arrays can reach them all in one step from there. Is it clear now?" The Firstborn said.
"How can three regional Lords not care for a mana geyser?" Lith was flabbergasted.
"Because there will be nothing useful there for at least 500 years and each region has more than one." Scarlett replied. "Once metals or crystal form, they'll settle it with a Spirit Duel, but until then, no one gives a damn."
"Do I have the time to recover naturally or do I have to use Invigoration?" Lith asked.
"Let's rest a bit." Scarlett consumed a tonic and food as well, giving her violet core and the several auxiliary cores in her body the nourishment they needed to replenish her mana.
"Tier five Spirit Spells are all-powerful but also ungodly mana expensive. If our enemy has weaponized a geyser, we need to make every use of Invigoration count."
"Mortals." Vladion scoffed.
As an undead, he only needed to feed in order to instantly recover his strength without wasting precious uses of a breathing technique. As an Awakened, however, Invigoration would only give him mana, so he still needed a source of life force to keep his blood core balanced.
The silver lining was that any kind of life force worked, even one poor in mana since that would be obtained from the world energy.
Scarlett used that time to read the information that the Eyes had collected by analyzing the Altered Sphinx and shared it with the others.
"It's just a hypothesis, but the only way to Awaken someone and refine their body at the same time requires either a bloodline legacy or Forbidden Magic. We might be dealing with an Awakened." She said.
"Can't we call the Council, then?" Lith asked.
"First, they would never make it in time, second, we've got no proof. Those Altered Beasts would have died in a few hours anyway. Plenty of people found faulty ways to Awaken in the past. As long as they die, the Council doesn't care, just like for Lichhood."
It took Lith's group half an hour to recover their mana since their bodies had suffered no damage and they had each used just one Spirit spell. Once they resumed the chase, Scarlett soon noticed that Vladion's prediction was correct.
The energy signature they were chasing was exactly located over the mana geyser. On top of that, the close they got, the stronger the signal became.
'Order and Chaos, there must be hundreds of liters of Ambrosia there. How many people died for this Madness?' She thought.
It took them a few minutes to come close to their destination. They stopped a couple of kilometers away from it so to study the arrays protecting the area and the number of guards they had to face.
Contrary to their expectations, there were neither guards nor arrays.
