The wind from the coast carried the tang of salt, molkswood, rust, and sunbaked shit. The trees of the jungle had thinned along their way toward the coast, giving way to sand, palm trees, and an obscene amount of crabs.
Before them stood the ruins Deacon had referred to hours prior.
The outpost in question looked to be half-sunken into the sand and falling apart as if the shoreline had been trying for decades to bury it after its fall. Thick ivy snaked down the broken faces of the crumbled outer walls, tufts of jungle grass burst through cracks in the cobbled courtyard that was semi-devoured in sand.
We could possibly use this ruin as a secondary place of operations if we give it a good touch-up, Deacon mused to himself. Jass and Sam are good enough with earth magic for it to be an option for us to consider.
The structure was built from heavy stone bricks, weathered ones, but they were still solid in make, and though time and tide had worn the bottom half of it, much of it still stood. A brick tower on the further left side of the outpost leaned precariously toward the ocean with half of its upper floor missing, and a rusted bell dangling outside by a rusted bronze chain.
Deacon squinted at the stonework, one hand resting on Echoform's hilt.
"These bricks..." he muttered. "They look like the ones from the underground prison I visited on day one here."
Deacon crouched beside a fallen column, running his fingers over the deep green moss clinging to the sides. "Yeah, same grains and make."
Jass stood at the mouth of an open corridor that led down into one of the many exposed basements that could be seen within the exposed building ruins that made up the outpost. Crouching, she picked up a rock half the size of her palm and tossed it down the stairs that led into the corridor in front of her.
"Looks like it goes deep… I wonder how deep?" she said before she signaled for Deacon and Esmerelda to be quiet for a moment so she could toss her rock.
They paused, as the only thing they could hear was the sound of the stone Jass threw into the open corridor bouncing off the stone steps before it, then grew quiet as it hit a wall and came to a stop.
Deacon glanced at the others. "Alright, we know our training, so I won't say anything we don't know already, but just keep in mind that I remember seeing silhouettes when I went past this area on my boat."
Sand crunched beneath their boots as Deacon, Jass, and Esmerelda carefully and cautiously made their way deeper through the ruins of the outpost – where most of the walls had collapsed inward, the underground entrances that were now exposed to the sun looked to be caved in, and what remained of old furniture were little more than bleached, splintered wood strewn across the courtyards and chambers.
Esmerelda slowed near what looked like a collapsed guardpost built into the outer wall. She crouched, brushing away sand and brittle ivy to reveal a series of rusted metal bars and thin, crumbling posts.
"Huh..." she murmured, frowning slightly. "So, this wasn't the back end of the outpost – look here." She gestured to the ground, where a mostly-buried fence line wound awkwardly from the far corner of the outpost toward the cliffs. "Looks like there used to be a boundary fence here, maybe a perimeter. Most of it's either been eaten by the sand or smothered under moss, but it leads right toward that cave mouth behind the ruins."
Deacon followed her line of sight. Looking through the destroyed back wall of the guardpost and toward the cave fissure in the side of the cliff.
"That's where I saw those silhouettes," he said under his breath, narrowing his eyes at the cave. "But I'm not seeing anything in them at the moment."
A loud crunch of loose debris and a sharp whistle that followed it made both Deacon and Esmerelda whip their head toward the direction from which the sounds came.
Jass was several meters away, half-leaning into a shattered windowsill that jutted out from a section of crumbling wall.
Jass dusted her hands off on her thighs and gave a short grunt of effort as she hauled herself through the shattered windowsill and back onto the sand-swept floor of the ruined corridor. "Nothing in there but salt-rot and a big-ass centipede," she muttered with distaste, rubbing her hand against the side of her leather leggings as she caught sight of a smear of dust and dried beetle blood streaked across her palm. "…Gross."
Deacon snorted. "Maybe you should canvas where you put your hands before putting them in such places."
"You really want me to bring up what happened in the swamp camping trip we had five years ago?" Jass shot back, already stepping toward the collapsed hallway to the west, and scanning the path of collapsed stone archways that blocked their way into other buildings within the outpost.
As they pushed forward, Deacon took the lead, Jass flanking left, and Esmerelda trailing slightly behind, the three of them had their weapons out and ready to use them at any moment, with Deacon in particular having created a fireball that hovered beside his head and was ready to fire at any second. Sand scraped lightly over stone in the breeze, whispering through broken doorways, while seabirds cried in the far-off cliffs. And yet... underneath it all was a quiet stillness too heavy to be natural.
They kept close, eyes scanning each shadowed arch and fractured floor tile for movement. Deacon's blade, Echoform, was fully drawn from its sheathes and in both hands.
"Let's start turning over stones," he said, nodding to a collapsed corridor that had likely been a stairwell leading to some place once, now little more than a mound of crumbled wall and displaced ceiling stones. "Check for trapdoors, hidden doors, anything still sealed. I'll keep watch if anything pops in to say hi."
Jass strode forward, cracking her knuckles. "This one doesn't feel like it's completely caved in," she said as she crouched to the floor and placed her palms against the floor of the ruin. She exhaled slowly, before beginning to mutter under her breath as the earth beneath her responded.
With a sharp grind of shifting pressure, the hundreds of stones began to rumble and make their way out of the entrance of the downstairs corridor – either by rolling up the short flight of stairs or flying and placing themselves in a pile in the far end corner of the ruin.
"It's been a while since I've done non-augmentation earth magic," she said after a few moments, quickly catching her breath. "I got rid of most of them, but something's jamming them about five meters in, big boulders." She paused. "I'm gonna need some help in removing the smaller rocks around them so I can get rid of the larger ones, you able to help Esme?"
"Of course," Esmerelda nodded, already stepping beside her, with her hands raised and beginning to chant.
A faint shimmer of earthen mana danced over her fingertips just before they began to sink into the smaller stones beneath the larger ones that Jass had exposed.
Together, the two women worked like counterweights. Jass guided the large chunks away while Esmerelda disassembled the smaller debris, piece by piece.
Sweat slicked Jass's brow by the time she manipulated the final boulder from blocking the continuation of the stairwell that revealed to descend sharply into the shadows. The air rising up from it was cool, damp, and touched with pungent stench of shit and piss.
Deacon stepped closer, peering in, taking notice of the large amount of cobwebs that had fallen to the floor and laced the tops of the steps. "This looks like it hadn't been opened in centuries..."
"The spirits don't have anything particular to say about this stairwell," Esmerelda said, brushing grit from her sleeves. "I'd rather we come back to this later, once the smell clears up."
"Okay… then I guess we'll circle back around to this one," Deacon said. "We'll sweep the surface level of the ruins first and un-collapse as many of these underground entrances and hidden trapdoors as we can before start to truly explore them, because they could potentially lead into each other and being locked behind something we could have opened could potentially fuck us over."
They fanned out while keeping each other within line of sight. Jass stalked the inner base of the ruined tower on the far left of the ruined outpost, her eyes flicking from the sunbleached and rotten floorboards to the moss-covered and hole-riddled walls. After twenty minutes of cautiously and carefully searching, she knelt beside a dislodged floorboard that looked oddly untouched by the rot that infested the wooden floorboards and ran her fingers along the grooves of a hidden seam – a trapdoor, cleverly fitted between the ancient flagstones. With a touch of mana, the wooden trapdoor shuddered and slid aside with a deep groan, revealing a short ladder descending into darkness.
"Got another one," she called. "Looks like an emergency escape hatch or maybe a storage tunnel."
Esmerelda nodded in acknowledgment but didn't look over. She was busy probing the side of a small structure that might've been a barracks. Her magic slithered into the cracks between the wall and foundation, and she hissed softly to herself. "There's a hollow chamber behind this wall," she murmured. "The stonework's fake past this point."
Deacon made his way toward her, his boots crunching over broken tile. "Think you can open it?"
"Definitely, but it won't be quiet," Esmerelda warned.
"Doesn't need to be."
With a small pulse of mana from her palm, Esmerelda sent a burst of wind mana into the wall. The stone caved inward, and almost instantly, the falling rubble, dust, and sand that were falling froze midair, caught by Esmerleda's wind manipulation, before rushing past them and piling neatly against the side of the barracks. The destroyed wall now revealed a narrow corridor that led into a dim room that smelled of mold and metal but quickly became illuminated by Deacon's Ignis.
They didn't go inside just yet.
Deacon scanned the interior, one eye squinting. "Storage room… maybe an officer's quarters. It could be more than one of these. Good place to find equipment."
Jass pulled back her sleeve and shook the dust that got onto her arms. "I say we keep cataloging them for now, then hit them all at once in a loop. If we just pick up as we go, our hands would be too filled to continue searching."
Deacon nodded, his tone low as his eyes darted toward the cave fissure. "Yeah. Just keep your eyes sharp and remember what I said about seeing movement around here, okay?"
The wind picked up around them again, this time blowing in a colder draft in the direction of the cave.
The three of them turned slightly toward it, quietly.
"Alright," Deacon said after a beat. "Let's clear the last few structures. Then we go below."
***
Staring at the large pile of gold and silver coins atop a large sheet of cloth, Deacon could only whistle in appreciation as the Identification Relay, the wristband that could detect the value of items within Floor Three, calculated the value of the coins to be 3,918.
Beside the pile of gold and silver coins was a bracelet called the Bracelet of Reflexive Warding that, according to the Identification Relay, was valued at 2,191.
Item Name: Bracelet of Reflexive Warding
Type: Accessory – Bracelet
Rarity: Rare
Description:
A smooth silver band etched with faint ruins of a lost civilization. It is said to have been crafted by a mage who feared being struck in the back by all those around him, who he believed to be after his magical knowledge and grimoire. The bracelet reacts instantly to unseen threats, surrounding the wearer in a shimmering mana shield the moment danger strikes (Once per day). For those who understand that awareness isn't always enough.
Effects: Reflexive Warding
Provides: +10 Wis
Requirements: Humanoid
Both Jass and he had instantly agreed that Esmerelda should be the one to wear it considering her low Vitality and Endurance stats. It was also then that Deacon noticed that Jass had given Esmerelda her Gilded Band of Clarity that offered +5 Int, +5 Wis, +5% Cast Speed.
"Look what I also found," said Jass as she came out of a trapdoor.