Author Notes: Really guys, I said I was slowing down, I didn't say I was going to abandon this series. I appreciate your PMs asking about it but no, I'm not quitting. As I said, I'm simply slowing down so I can finally get started on other stories I've been brewing in my mind for months to years at this point.
~ Chapter 35 ~
"Luvia!?" ~ Shirou called out, understandably surprised as he came out of the giant king's ironworks and practically ran into his Finnish... girlfriend? Lover?
A question for another time. The teleport obelisk outside Sepermeru was quite literally a dozen meters in front of the ironworks' entrance, so his group couldn't help but run into Luvia's. The blonde was guiding the befuddled survivors of the attack towards Sepermeru after splitting the pirate's treasure among them, giving each of them enough money to buy a decently-sized manor to start their new lives in the Exiled Lands. She did of course also arm them as best she could, opening the base's armory to them, wanting to be sure all that silver and gold wouldn't just transform them into targets for whatever brigands may have survived this far.
To be fair, after Conan, Shirou, and recently the giant's king Silent Legion went through them, there really were only so many brigands left in Sepermeru, really.
"Sherou!? What... why... no, there's no time, listen!" ~ she hurried up towards her friend and began explaining things so far.
About how at least one of the refugees had been working for Mek-Kamoses, the exiled sorcerer Rin and herself had previously run into and refused to help 'learn the secrets of these land's sorcery' since the man seemed to be the power-hungry, remorseless type. Especially given how he seemed eager to study the enslaved undead of the giant kings' Nameless City to invade his native Stygia and seize power there. She told them about the raid on their (however temporary) home, and more importantly, about Mei's capture or death.
Both Conan and Rin needed to stop the young redheaded young man from running off to help his friend, reasoning that, to begin with, he didn't know where to find the sorcerer in the first place.
"Besides, we all need to heal and re-equip ourselves first, Shirou." - reasoned Rin.- "You brew more of those healing potions, I'll patch up Conan, and Luvia can sneak ahead and scout the place. We're talking about a sorcerer here. Even if has lost his magical powers, it would be suicide to run into any spellcaster's sanctuary unprepared."
Shirou didn't like it, but he had to admit that Rin was right. He sighed and his shoulders sagged as he calmed down.- "Alright, let's hurry back, then... hm~ Luvia, weren't we going to try and keep the obelisk's network a secret, though?" - he asked after a moment.
"I wanted to find you and tell you about what happened. Besides, there's no telling if anyone else among the refugees are working for that man, so I wanted them out of our home. Its not like I am throwing them out into the cold, anyway. I gave them enough gear and gold to fend for themselves for a good while, you know?"
"Eh?" - Rin looked at her
"I found the pirate's treasure. Well its gone now so it doesn't really matter..."
Rin felt like it mattered very much, but decided to say nothing. Safety is always more important than wealth, after all. If you can buy safety with money, it is always cheap. Besides, she didn't even see the treasure to begin with, so she couldn't miss something she never had, right?
Sepermeru was barely fifteen minutes away from the obelisk, so escorting the refugees to it was literally nothing more than a brisk walk, and then they left Razma to help both them and her people while they borrowed Conan to heal him at their base and hopefully recruit him for Mei's rescue.
"...I hate sorcery." - the barbarian grunted as he looked at the obelisk his friends wanted him to use. To teleport, no less!
"More than a broken shoulder?" - countered Rin
"You make a good point, Girl." - the blue-eyed Cimmerian sighed as he followed his friend's instructions, and appeared with them in the middle of their 'map room'.
"Shirou, potions. I'll heal this guy's shoulder in the meanwhile."
"Prepare some antidotes if you can, Boy. That sorcerer's name sounds Stygian, and those vipers love using poison."
"Thanks for the heads-up."
With that, Shirou went into the girl's workshop to avail himself of their alchemical supplies, while Rin guided Conan into the private areas of their base so she could treat his wounds with the tools there, and Luvia took off to scout ahead, intending to look over the Stygian's known stomping grounds before coming back for her friends.
"Quite a place you've built for yourselves here." - the Cimmerian comments in appreciation as he enters the private areas of their base, looking at the carefully polished and carved walls and floor. There are even vaulted ceilings and delicate statues between them along the walls. Green plants grow under the effect of bright magical crystal arrays, blooming with colors and floral scent, while in the deeper parts of the base, there are fur rugs and even woven carpets on the floors.
"As a former thief, I have to say your home looks very tempting." - he half-joked
"Yes well, you probably don't know what a Bounded Field is, but if I wasn't escorting you in, you would have tripped so many alarms and curses by now we would probably rush home to find you as a dead, dryed up newt on the floor."
"A newt, is it? I'd get better."
"Doubt it. Now that we're here, lay down on the table." - Rin helps Conan to the large polished boulder they use as a massage table next to the bath, and has him lay down on it.
"Take your armor and shirt off." - she explains while removing her own armor.
"Hm. I may change my mind on sorcery yet." - he jokes, enjoying the reddening of Rin's face.- "Relax, Girl, I'm only playing with you. Unless that really is what you have in mind, in which case I may actually change my mind about sorcery still."
"As if!" - the raven-haired magus exclaimed, with an indignant tone and a full blush.- "There are such rites, but I just want to clean your wounds and make sure you don't have any bones poking out of your flesh before getting started."
"Shame."
Rin could tell the giant of a man was joking, but she still huffed indignantly. All the same, she set water to boil while she brought out the crystal arrays and other healing tools.
"...you talk as if you had seen your share of magic users. What sort of mystery did they have?" - she commented while waiting for the water to boil so she could get started on cleaning his wounds.
"There was a high priest who could turn into a giant snake, and some foolish old sorcerer who created an invulnerable monster."
"If it was invulnerable, how come you are here?" - she asked while placing the cyrtals into place.- "Was he on your side?"
"No. The monster was invincible, but if you shattered its reflection, you shattered the beast."
"Alright that is a rather unique weakness." - admitted Rin.- "How did you figure that out?"
"The room was surrounded by mirrors everywhere. I accidentally broke one and saw the beast wounded where I struck at its reflection."
"...good thing tempered glass isn't a thing here, then." - said Rin as she began moving to the kitchen area to recover the now boiling water
"Tempered glass?"
"Basically glass that is about as strong as bronze plates, I think." - she replies while lowering the water at the 'feet' of the stone table, reinforcing her hands, and soaking a clean cloth in the hot water to begin cleaning Conan's wounds.
"Does it has to be this hot!?"
"Who knew you were this delicate? I am sorry your highness, I will try not to burn your delicate self."
"Why does it have to be hot, anyway?"
"Well..." - it took quite a while to explain germ theory to the man, but it did make for an interesting conversation piece, and Conan was especially happy when she mentioned that, lacking clean water, beer would do as an acceptable source of liquid since it had enough alcohol to kill bacteria, but not enough to harm his liver unless consumed in truly absurd amounts.(1)
~O~
Meanwhile, Shirou was doing his best to split himself in two, running from the workshop to the kitchen and back as he prepared various medicinal foods, drinks, and potions.(2)
Purifying water, distilling aloe essence, using the alchemical base, infusing od into the mix... honestly, the procedures were so similar to cooking that Shirou took to potion-making with gusto, and his structural analysis gave him just as much of an advantage in potion-making as it did for cooking, letting the redhead boil, distill and infuse at the perfect time and in ideal amounts.
To be quite honest, it was almost enough to make him think he wasn't completely third-rate as a Magus. Or almost. For some reason he couldn't understand, the bracelet didn't do a very good job of reducing a potion's weight, which meant that while he could carry 100 logs inside it and be practically unaware of it, as little as 20 potions mounted to a considerable amount of weight (3).
'I wonder if I could add something to give the tea different effects?' - he thought while sipping from a cup, and feeling what few wounds he had left go away.- 'Why can't I just fill my waterskin with tea?'(4)
He could feel himself calm down as the infusion's effect spread through his body, and yet he kept growing worried about Luviagelita and Mei. The first because she was out there alone right now, the second because she was in obvious danger.
And as much as he knew Luvia was a much more competent magus than himself, he couldn't help but worry about her, too.- 'To think she was worried about being even remotely tomboyish.' -To him, there was nothing tomboyish about the elven-like pale Finnish beauty. She was just athletic, that's all. He hoped he had impressed that fact upon her, but he was willing to make his impression clear to her as often as it took.
"I hope she's alright." - he said outloud, and he was talking about both Luvia and Mei.
~O~
Mei was not alright. Not by a long shot. I wasn't the bruises or the torn ligaments, as those she could ignore. She was a tough young woman, after all, and with more than enough grit to bear such light wounds. She was much more worried about what she suspected was a skull fracture and the ones she was absolutely certain were forearms fractures. Especially since she needed to apply force on her arms to push the thick and heavy wooden beam on the Wheel of Pain.
Her Master expected her to do a good job of it, after all. No, wait- ...she didn't have a master, did she? Mek-Ramoses was not her master, not her friend, and definitively not her Master. He's her captor, right?
She dug her toes into the sand and kept pushing the wooden beam. Her mind felt fuzzy, but thinking about her master and doing a good job made it feel better, clearer... no, wait-
Wait-
~O~
Mek-Ramoses had taken residence near a mountaintop carved into Set's blessed appearance. The elder god had created the snakemen, whose true name is a secret, and gifted to them malice, cunning, and envy. These, in its and their mind, were more than enough emotions for a rational living being, and they proved it by enslaving or suppressing every single new race as it appeared and ruling an empire that lasted for millions of years, or perhaps even longer than that.
Other races had their place, but the snakemen were first among equals, for they alone had the malice to play them against each other, keeping them weak, but vital. The Elder Races, spawn of the Elder gods and other entities from beyond the veil prospered... so long as they did so under the snakemen, and so long as they offered sacrifice to Set.
This was so for ages uncounted, and when Man descended from the trees, the Elder Races found that the gods craved for the souls, flesh, pain, and blood of Man. Thus they banded together, and thus did they subjugate mankind while lands drifted, sunk, and rose. Continents were born, shifted, and were forgotten until Crom was born from Man, hunted the Elder Gods, and either tore them apart or sent them back to the beyond.
Yet Crom did not rule the race of Man. He laid down his sword, as his fight was done and he had done enough, yet in his final kindness to Man did Crom gift them with courage, for that is the one thing Man needs to shake off the shackles of their oppressors, no matter the shape they may take.
Thus it was that when the Giant Kings arrived from the stars, they found the gods were small and simple entities, easily satisfied and bargained with. And they traded for ancient knowledge, and followed the will of Set, worshiping the elder snake and building great temples in its honor, and eventually sheltering the weakened snakemen in their northern lands, for they are Set's firstborn, and doing so pleased their god. And thus did they invite a deathly poison into their lands.
Man, too, worships Set, for it is a cunnin and ancient deity, full of secret and forbidden lore, and easily bribed with the still-beating hearts of Man, whom it secretly hates even as it whispers secrets that sorcerers and priests think mighty, yet are as nothing to its true sons. And that's why Mek-Ramoses took residence in the shadows of Set's great temple, gathering followers and preparing sacrifices of Man's bloody hearts, so that the Elder snake would whisper secrets of sorcery into his ears, and free him from the bracelet's shackles and make him strong, if only so he could offer it more hearts still.
'Those were not here last time.' - thought Luviagelita as she studied the ramparts, palisades and fortifications around the snake-shaped mountain.- 'Not did that guy have so many guards.'
To be fair, it was a mountain carved into a snake shape rather than a natural formation, as the many, many giant king ruins and properly-sized stairs openly displayed. Mek-Ramoses had simply taken advantage of it as his knowledge as a former high priest of Set to rally believers under his banner.
As far as Luviagelita was concerned, that was fine. A religion that openly traded in human sacrifice and fed human hearts to its deity was a group she could definitively could Gandr without remorse. Sure, they're not as bad as a nation of cannibals, but they're almost there.
The problem was the golems and the thralls. Golems were not exactly a new concept for Luvia. Such constructs were famous enough within modern magus society, even if she was quite sure she had never seen any quite like these before (seriously, a golem with an incense burner for a head? Just why.). The thralls were a bigger problem, since she knew Shirou, bless his kind soul, would definitively want to rescue them somehow, and it would be damn hard to tell which guards were bewitched thralls and which were willing followers of Set.
She went around the encampment, and much to her chagrin, found that it covered all sane approach routes, leaving only a thousand-foot-tall, sheer-drop stone cliff uncovered, and even that had a small palisade at its top. Unless they managed to come up with something along the lines of an invisibility spell, there would be a major fight on their approach.
~O~
"And that's six." - Shirou sighed in satisfaction as he placed the last invisibility potion on the table next to the alchemy cauldron. He had found one in the giant king's ironworks, and after using Structural Analysis, was quite happy with being able to replicate the results.
He actually felt like a proper Magus. If only a little. Those books from the cavern had all sorts of useful stuff in them, and he was eager to see if he could brew some sort of potion to help Luvia and Rin with the prana overflow issue they've told him was the reason for their... ahem, initially forced intimacy.
Sure, he wasn't dead or celibate. He was more than happy to help them 'cleanse' their system whenever they wanted him to, but he'd be even happier if their intimacy came from a place of care or desire rather than a literal life-or-death only hoped the girls wouldn't kill him over it.
Author Notes: Not much to say, still working in those other fics, polishing the plots before starting to work on them, since I'd rather know where I'm going instead of just stumbling my way chapter to chapter. There's nothing wrong with thinking outside the box and letting your characters come alive and take charge, but I want to have a box before I can think outside of it, and I really prefer to have an idea of at least the major events I want to happen, and in which order.
FUNCOM has done great improvements to the game over the last year, and with the incoming Age of War, it looks like a lot of stuff is on the horizon... I just wish they made elephants into proper mounts, and bothered to check the maximum speed a rhino can run at, or maybe just watch some videos about how nimble they are, because right now rhino mounts drive about as well as a brick-through-jelly, and have the stamina and mobility of a beached whale with lung problems.
1 - Yes, really. And if you have stronger stuff, like vodka or whiskey, you can dilute it with less than clear water and still be safe after the alcohol kills most bacteria and parasites on it. Plagues like Cholera sometimes skipped entire neighborhoods simply because the local bar had a good, cheap beer.
2- Aloe soup and Herbal tea are food and drink that also heals you (a bit) after consumption, while lasting quite a few hours after preparation, so they're actually pretty great. Used to be better but got nerfed several months ago... wait, was it years ago? Wow Conan Exiles is actually pretty old now.
3- I'm looking at you FUNCOM, fix this shit. What do you mean 20 potions = 100 wooden logs!? Are you Bethesda making every single bobby pin weigh 0.1 lbs, now? What do you mean a single flask weighs as much as my armor's chest piece!? Are they made of glass or osmium!?
4- Yeah, why can't we, FUNCOM? Or Aloe Soup, while at it. Or heck, booze.
And while at it, why do we need to harvest and ground crystal to make glass? You can make glass out of sand, and you have us start the game in the literal desert, you know? You let us harvest ice from the frozen rivers, let us pick up sand out of the desert. Maybe just the shores by the river if you wanna be exquisite about it. Crystal could be reserved for fine cups and tableware. Maybe sculptures.
Absak - Archer looking for work
Ariuru - Young stygian girl, sister of Ctesphon. Adopted by Razma.
Asger - Tanner
Birch - Alchemist looking for work.
Ctesphon - Recently freed slave. Adopted by Razma.
Ladagara - Half-giant daughter of Ymir.
Llarn - Tier 4 armorer, reinforced armor.
Maev - Tier 4 blacksmith, adds extra armor penetration to weapons.
Njoror Battleborn - Tier 4 Armorer. Reduces the weight of equipment
Pavlov - Awesome elephant. Can do drifting in sharp corners.
Rojo - Greater Shalleback
Razma - Shemite princess.
Rouge - Greater Shalleback
Vatessa - Tier 4 cook.
Yael - Tier 4 smelter
