Keiran

With just about everything else on my list of immediate tasks finished, I began searching for my entry point into the deep tunnels and caves under Derro. Worst case, I knew where to dig straight down from, but, if possible, I’d prefer to teleport past that and save myself a few thousand feet of excavation.

“You’re sure you want to do this now?” Querit asked. “Even if you come back with the moon core tonight, it’s not going to generate so much mana that it makes a significant difference in the next few weeks. You could spend that time updating your demesne’s enchantments instead. It would be a safer bet.”

“I could,” I admitted, “and that will likely be my next project. But you said you wanted another day to eke out every possible efficiency before finalizing the new design, and this seems like the best use of my time until then.”

“And if the enemy mages show up again while you’re gone?”

“I’ve made contingencies,” I said.

I wouldn’t be taking much with me for my underground expedition. Any enchanted item I brought would only duplicate spells I could cast directly, often fully reclaiming the spent mana in the process. For all of that, there were two new additions to my arsenal.

The first was my own emergency recall bracelet, forged not because I suspected I’d encounter some sort of problem that forced me to retreat, but so that I could return home quickly in the event that Ammun’s forces arrived while I was busy. It was far too expensive to be used for casual teleportation, which was why the official plan was just to drop a platform down there when I was ready to leave if I didn’t have what I’d come for.

The second piece of gear I’d fashioned was a little garden trowel I’d somewhat whimsically created to serve as the base for a set of transmutation inscriptions that probably wouldn’t be necessary, but which could buy me some time in the event the ground collapsed on me. I wasn’t a fan of the idea of being buried alive, especially not at that depth and surrounded by giant flesh-eating worms. The trowel was designed to let me compact any sort of dirt and stone in a five-foot radius around it, theoretically leaving me inside a sphere of rock that I could then teleport out of.

Querit still didn’t know about New Alkerist, though I was sure he was keeping track of my comings and goings as best he could, so he knew I was going somewhere. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he’d correctly speculated on what I’d been spending my time on, but as long as he didn’t know where the town was, that was good enough.

Even if he tried to examine my personal teleportation platform, all he’d find was that it wasn’t linked to anywhere else, and that I’d removed all the markers that would help scry my destination from the stone. I trusted him more now than I had a few weeks ago, but not enough to put my family in danger.

“Just keep doing what you’ve been doing,” I said. “You know how best to spend your time. I should be back in a few hours, but don’t hesitate to use the transmission stone if you think anything weird is going on.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I will.”

My scrying mirror focused on a narrow tunnel that was almost completely vertical. Most of the paths the worms ate through the sand and dirt collapsed behind them, but this one hadn’t. That was probably a combination of a slab of stone above it and gravity carrying what sand had fallen in there away. “This will be my entrance,” I said.

Querit peered over my shoulder at the tunnel. “Four feet wide. How far under the surface is that?”

“Not quite two miles,” I said.

“You’ll have a hard time breathing down there,” he warned.

“I have spells for that. If the sand worms can do it, so can I.”

Finally, Querit was out of arguments. He’d make it clear that he thought I was wasting my time, and I’d decided to go anyway. There was no point in trying to talk me out of it. I wasn’t really sure why he’d fought so hard anyway. Maybe he was afraid I’d die and leave him all alone in this new world.

I left his workshop ten minutes later via intra-demesne teleportation and jumped across the island to the spot I’d picked out with my scrying mirror from my platform. I appeared in complete darkness in the vertical shaft dug out by a worm that could swallow me whole. It was surprisingly warm down there, even by desert wasteland standards.

The first thing I did was cast an earth sense spell to get a feel for what might be lurking in the sand around me. The burst of mana from my teleportation spell was contained, but anything close enough might sense it. As if to prove my fears true, something rumbled through the ground.

The tunnel next to me burst open, spraying my shield ward with sand and rock. A moment later, a truly gargantuan worm appeared at the edge of my earth sense. It crossed the distance, pushing what sand it didn’t consume in front of it like a ship’s prow parting the waves, and I got an instant’s look at a cavernous maw ringed with row upon row of teeth before I was inside the monster.

I summoned my staff from inside my phantom space and drew mana through it. Great, jagged pillars of ice exploded outward in every direction, carving apart the worm’s guts and piercing its thick skin from the inside-out. The worm convulsed, silent but for the grinding of dirt around it, but it could no more spit me out than it could swallow me deeper. I was a caltrop in its throat, stuck fast and slicing it further apart with every move it made.

Blood dribbled from the wounds I’d dealt the monster. I watched it run down the edges of my conjured ice for a long moment while I held myself in place with grand telekinesis. The worm was probably strong enough to contest even a master-tier spell, but it was in no condition to leverage its body. It didn’t matter either way. The only muscle it could bring to bear against me was the inside of its own body, so either it cut itself apart thrashing in pain or it cut itself apart trying to dislodge me.

It died after a minute’s struggle, and I sliced my way free.

The brakvaw would have loved to have this thing, but it was too big to fit into my storage box without chopping it up. Besides that, all its squirming had completely destroyed the tunnel I’d arrived in, leaving me no choice but to start digging. Once again, I extended earth sense and tried to get a feel for what was going on around me.

The brief scuffle had attracted attention, but they were lesser worms that were far easier to deal with. The biggest trouble I had was keeping myself from being buried alive as their attacks collapsed the tunnel I was in. That did nothing to stop them—burrowing through the ground was how they spent every second of their lives—but it was a nuisance for me. My little trowel turned out to be a very good pick, though the rock shell it created around me was too brittle to stop the sand worms from breaking through it.

I’d expected to have a network of semi-solid tunnels to follow downward, the literal passage of the giant worms roaming around down here, but I hadn’t been able to find one with my extremely limited scrying capabilities. Truthfully, I was lucky to have found the relatively narrow passage that I’d teleported into from so far away. Now that I was here, however, I could feel my scrying beacons moving around.

That gave me a direction to start in, and I set about building my own tunnel into the depths, one that was properly reinforced to handle worm attacks without dropping a thousand tons of dirt on my head. It was every bit as slow a task as it had been back up below Derro, but other than my rough start, things went according to plan. Worms showed up; I killed them. I went back to digging. Occasionally I left one of my beacon orbs behind.

Two hours later, I found what I was looking for: a round tunnel in the sand ten feet wide with walls that were hard packed and relatively stable. Even better, it was going in roughly the right direction to reach the knot of scrying orbs that had initially drawn my attention down here.

I walked through the darkness, completely reliant on a single wavering speck of a light orb, no bigger than a grain of sand and so faint that without invocations enhancing my night vision, I still would have been blind. The goal was not to attract any new worms, especially not the big ones. I didn’t want them breaking this tunnel apart now that I finally had a place to walk without having to fight for every inch of progress.

The tunnel didn’t take me straight there, but even following its wandering course got me to my goal quicker than any other option. I wasn’t actually sure where I was in relation to the surface anymore, but at this point, it hardly mattered. All I cared about was finding the bottom of this nest.

The ground became less sand and more dirt and stone as I descended lower until I finally reached a point where the tunnel I was following started to curve back up. Apparently, the sand layer only went so deep, and this particular monster’s magic wasn’t sufficient for cutting through hundreds or thousands of feet of stone.

I considered following the tunnel I was currently in back up in the hopes that it would loop around the pocket of stone I’d found, but the more I stretched earth sense out, the more I became convinced I’d bumped into an underground wall, one that there was no way around. If that was the case, then I’d have to go through it. Unlike a sand worm, my magic could cut through stone just as easily as anything else.

One good thing about traveling so far below the surface was that the smaller, weaker worms avoided the area. I wasn’t sure if that was because they physically couldn’t get down here or if there was some other reason, but the larger worms were comparatively rare, and that meant I could cast spells with less risk of them finding me.

Less risk wasn’t the same as no risk, as a burrowing sand worm even bigger than the one that had initially attacked me proved. I ruptured its mana core and stole the mana from its body, not because I needed it, but because I didn’t want anything else nearby that might notice the free meal to show up and partake. I still had plenty of space for extra mana in my mana crystal, so I harvested everything I could get before returning to work.

And then I finished excavating a hole two feet wide and thirty feet deep through the wall. The last chunks of stone fell away into a vast nothingness so big that no echo of them crashing to the ground below reached my ears. Curious, I flew forward into the void myself and sent my scrying spells out into the dark to see just how big this cavern truly was.

I didn’t detect any kind of life living down here, which wasn’t terribly surprising given the lack of water or light plants needed to grow. Without that, there was nothing to base an ecosystem off of, and since there was no ambient mana radiating out from the world core anymore, there would be no monsters that could live without food, either.

Which was why I was terribly surprised when something big, fast, and invisible crashed into me and slammed me into the wall.