'The silver lining is that now we know who is worth protecting and who is just dead weight.' Solus said, making Lith worry about her mental condition.
She was perfectly fine, it was just that the closer she got to achieve her human body, the more protective toward Lith she became. Solus still valued all lives, but she was willing to make sacrifices to preserve her own happiness.
To her, a bunch of suicidal idiots wasn't worth the risk of a lifetime of solitude.
Many of the Professors swallowed loudly, thinking they had just signed their own death warrant. Gaakhu, instead, wasn't worried. Berion was just a single man that coincidentally was in charge.
There were many others in the army that would share her vision and help her to protect her status.
'It's pointless to worry about a minor failure. Bureaucrats only care about results. If I bring back something valuable, this blunder will be dismissed as an insignificant incident.' She thought.
The expedition team started to examine the array down to the smallest details, double-checking everything. Quylla was very annoyed by the prolonged wait. She was eager to see what was on the other side of the wall.
It took them half a day to complete their study and another half to make sure that their spell would destroy the formation in the safest way possible. The morning of the second day after Quylla's epiphany, the spell was finally cast.
Just as Professor Neshal had predicted, by tampering with the sixth hidden array formed by the overlapping of the other five, their finely balanced structure collapsed. Two arrays were destroyed, while the other three became purely ornamental.
The door unlocked, turning on its hinges as if it had been properly preserved for all that time. Moss and dirt fell from its crevices, throwing up a lot of dust.
"Oh shit!" Was the collective opinion of the expedition the moment they could see what was waiting for them. Kulah wasn't a city, a village, nor a shelter. It was formed by long rectangular buildings that looked all the same.
They had been built out of some unknown pale blue material that was neither rock nor metal. It emitted a bright luminescence that made the whole area around the buildings as clear as the day.
The roads connecting the buildings were covered by a layer of dust several centimeters thick. It proved how no creature, living or not, had walked them during the last decades.
Each facility had only one access, consisting of wide double doors made of metal, and no windows. Each door was sealed by a yellow array visible to the naked eye.
It was shaped like three concentric circles inscribed with unknown runes and fueled by both purple crystals and the mana geyser underlying Kulah.
With Life Vision, Lith could see that there were cable-like devices that ran across the whole compound, carrying the world energy to the various arrays, including those the expedition team had just deactivated.
"This is a fucking military base!" Morok said, taking the words right out of everyone's mouth.
"Lith, what do you see?" Phloria asked. Her question made no sense to the others, yet no one dared to move. Any country would react to intruders accessing to a secret compound with extreme prejudice.
The Odi were likely to have left a lot of nasty surprises behind.
"The coast is clear, but we can't allow ourselves to relax. Everything, and I mean everything, is still perfectly functional." He pointed at the arrays on the doors, which were supposed to have faded centuries before.
Lith started to chant gibberish while preparing his spells, quickly followed by Morok and Phloria's soldiers. Once he was done with his preparations, he took a step forward.
The door and the stone wall started to flash with bright red color and emitted a high pitched noise. The surviving arrays activated one after another, but because of the damage they had sustained, they could only produce a series of sparks and sizzling before imploding with a thud.
Lith kept watching around, waiting for something to happen.
"Morok's log: add to my report how the old fossils would have been the death of us if we didn't destroy the arrays before entering." He said, drawing on himself several mean looks.
Morok was about to reply when Lith's prudence paid off. Life Vision showed to him a life force rushing through the several centimeters thick dust layer covering the floor, making it come to life.
It took the form of a colossus over 3 meters (10 feet) tall with bright yellow eyes. Aside from the eyes, it had no features nor definite shape. The whole dust cloud was its body, and the creature used it to try and drown Lith.
"Oh gods! A sand golem." Said Professor Ellkas in a panic. "It's supposed to be impossible! Where the heck might the core of that thing be?"
Phloria didn't care if it was possible or not, the only things worrying her were that it was standing right in front of them and that Lith had yet to react.
"Hold your fire!" She said while raising her open hand in the air to reinforce her command.
'Sand golem my ass.' Lith thought. 'Golems have no life force whereas this thing is alive. The obvious response would be to burn it, but if it was me, I would have filled the air with something volatile.
'Even finely dispersed flour is highly flammable and if this thing is what I think it is, the resulting explosion might kill me.'
Lith was right about almost everything. The creature in front of him was alive and flammable, but it wasn't an explosion the real threat fire posed. It was a fungus-like creature he was facing and the dust was actually its spores.
Putting it ablaze would have caused a small explosion strong enough to send them flying everywhere, killing the expedition in a matter of seconds. The creature was capable of moving each spore individually and was using them to flood Lith's respiratory system, making it impossible for him to breathe or cast new spells.
The spores were also able to feed upon their host and drain their fluids to increase their numbers. Surviving to such multi pronged attack was nigh impossible. Unless of course one had fusion magic.
The darkness coursing through Lith's body fed on the spores and turned them into nourishment while Invigoration allowed him to study their attack pattern.
"Ingenious." Lith said while releasing a series of darkness magic pulses that slaughtered his grain sized opponents. The fungus emitted a prolonged, bass noise that Lith interpreted as pain.
The creature retrieved all of its spores, condensing them to assume a physical form.
"Gods' there are so many things we can learn from the Odi." Professor Gaakhu said while following Lith's lead and releasing a wave of darkness energy. The creature opened its body in response, letting the spell harmlessly pass through the empty space it had created.
Lith would have liked to give the Professor a piece of his mind, but the eyes of the creature were drawing his attention. There was no fury, pain, or battle spirit in them. Lith knew that look, it was how Carl and Tista looked at him when they were little.
It was hope.
