The group of rabbit-kin didn't have to go too far to reach the blueshine waterfall. But they couldn't move as fast as most would have liked.
Rabbit-kin were naturally fast, and those descended from the lord rabbit more so. While those in other parts of the world simply had the reflexes and movement of a rabbit, those under the nightshade barrier had the marks of nightshade.
Most had marks on their ears, but all had a pair of marks on their thighs. Unlike the ear marks, which could enhance the audio sense, those on their legs used the power of the barrier to enhance movement speed.
But the adults weren't the only ones they brought. Asergia valued children in many situations, as they held the potential to grow into proper soldiers for the clan. But the individual rabbit-kin had to care for the elderly. Even with the extended longevity granted by rank, the limit of ruby-rank for those on the surface of the nightshade region left many clans with elderly.
Most treated their elderly far better than Asergia treated those in his clan. Most, including the rabbit-kin currently escaping from their former home.
They made camp for the night, setting up beside the river. They didn't light fires, as the light of the barrier above was more than enough to see even in the darkness of the night, especially with the star stream high above.
The almost straight line of stars was still an astrological mystery, even to the resident astronomist of the clan. Not that he could gather too much, without a reliable source of glass, it was far more difficult to observe the night sky with any clarity. But they still gazed up in wonder once in a while.
Of the rabbit-kin on guard, Atu was staring back at the dimmer village behind the large group of her kin. She was more closely related to the lord than most of the kin, but she didn't begrudge them for it.
She felt the occasional glance her way, sometimes by a regular person, and usually by one of the kids. But she ignored it. They didn't need to know about her. Not that they'd ever come to visit before.
She felt a little angry at her own kin, but couldn't focus on it. Something new was lighting up the distance with a cerulean light, slowly shrinking as it approached.
Azotreh kept using Gelatinous Compression to shrink smaller and smaller, but there was a limit. Gelatinous Compression at level 13 simply couldn't compress the amount of slime they'd gotten from the consumption of the town's various buildings.
[Gelatinous Compression has reached level 14! +1 Concentration to Endurance]
The advance helped a bit, but the sheer quantity of mass couldn't be compressed back to their regular size. As they moved towards where they assumed the rabbits had gone, they suddenly felt pain lance across their side.
They attempted to create an eye, as they had before, but felt an odd resistance. The cold will sharing the avatar halted their attempts to form any way to see the injury. Then they felt it again, new pain.
It was lancing, and despite their relatively low percent pain resistance, it didn't feel reduced at all. If anything, it felt even worse than usual.
It felt as if pieces of their body were repeatedly sliced off in quick succession. They roiled against the pain, attempting to shift their surface to claws and fight off whatever was attacking them. The cold will once again asserted its presence and stopped them from any form of combat.
They didn't understand. Even when the cold will took control, it only worked in their interest. It piloted them around the town, avoiding damage where it could, and assisting them in their goals, and the goals of the rabbit-kin. Yet it was stopping them from stopping what was hurting them.
They felt it over and over as slicing pain cut through the edges of their globby body. Each cell seemed to scream as it was cut away. They couldn't feel where the mass was going, as it seemed to vanish the moment it was cut away.
[Slicing Pain (0.03%)]
It took minutes, during which time they didn't seem to move. Finally, as an aura rapidly approached the still decreasing mass of slime, they got two system notifications. Even without eyes to see them, they still received them as audible messages in their mind.
[Gelatinous Compression has reached level 15! +1 Concentration to Endurance]
[Slicing Pain (0.04%)]
As those two echoed in their mind, they suddenly regained sight. Their slime mass compressed enough to return to their original size, only for Atu to appear, still in her full armor. She pulled the regularly sized Azotreh into a tight hug.
"What happened? I saw flashing lights. Are you okay?"
Azotreh nodded. They felt okay now, even if it hurt like hells in the moment.
They sought out the cold consciousness that had returned to modulating their aura, asking it what it knew. It didn't respond.
"I- I don't know…" They responded, quietly.
"What do you mean you don't know? It happened exactly from where you were coming from."
"I was still… not human in the moment."
Her face soured for a moment, but returned to normal before Azotreh noticed.
Atu led Azotreh to the small camp, with people pulling out all sorts of equipment. Tarps and tents appeared from thin air. Food, from fruits and vegetables to savory meats, all simply pulled out of nowhere.
Atu pulled a small round tablet from her inventory and showed Azotreh how to use it. They still looked away as a small flame lit up in the center, but was otherwise fascinated by the flow of mana. They could feel it with their aura, even if they couldn't see it.
They followed her hands with their eyes as she moved with ease over the fire. It didn't spark or change in intensity as she used the tablet to heat a stew she had made in her home and put in a bowl. She had tens of such bowls and so easily gave one to Azotreh.
They simply spent the night sitting together, Azotreh in Atu's lap. They felt the gazes from across the camp, Atu especially. But she simply crushed the envious with her gaze and aura.
Nicholas was only getting started.
He wasn't truly cutting the gneiss with magic; there was no point in such an action. It's not like there was somewhere else to send it, other than into the mouth of the beating heart on the wall. Even then, how much gneiss would be needed to get one raw material?
Instead, he used the power of the nexus to compress the rock. It would serve as better protection against cave-ins and wouldn't waste the material.
Shaping the gneiss wasn't hard. The relatively soft stone, combined with the instinctive knowledge granted by the innate ability, and his own understanding of stone, allowed him to push and pull it almost to his whims.
He did discover that there were limits to how far the stone could be compressed. An eventual point where it simply broke rather than growing any denser. But he didn't care that much.
He only needed to compress it enough to suit the needs of the incoming guests and the dungeon's continued development.
After a couple of hours of just pushing the mana through stone, he stopped.
He had created a room, a perfectly square room measuring five meters by five meters by three meters. It felt a little unstable to his poorly trained eyes, but it didn't actually look like it was going to cave in. Not that he could tell that well either.
He was curious back on earth, but curious did not mean he knew the structural integrity of poisonous gneiss.
He'd discovered on accident that the rock released a kind of airborne toxin when cracked, when he'd compressed the stone too much. It wasn't terribly strong, and whatever the orcish body was made of resisted it, but a couple of ants had died almost instantly.
He barely understood what differentiated the ants and the orc body he was inhabiting. Or any of this, dungeons and everything. But he didn't have time to pay attention to whatever all this meant. Guests were on his doorstep.
The next thing he shaped was a staircase down. It was more of a bunch of square bricks shaped into giant steps, but he didn't really care about aesthetics right now. Time was fast, and he had so much to do.
Fuzem didn't seem interested in his stone working project, still dropping tiny mana crystals into the nexus with the other salamanders.
Errazorrus only started helping once he realized what the true goal was. He took the new rat blueprint, made another champion out of it, and helped dig.
Eventually, they made a smaller room at the bottom of the staircase. It was about six meters below the first room, and barely big enough for the orc. But the orc wasn't its intended resident. Instead, the giant eye and the beating heart around it began to slide along the wall. It made its way down, down, until it fit snugly in the room built for it.
Finally, after all of that, they also moved the ant queens down and began to instruct the ants to dig tunnels back to the surface. Tiny tunnels, but a way for them to reach the main room.
Cave living was… still fine. Even if Nicholas saw far too little of the sun, it's not like it mattered much. The sun was usually dimly exposed in the sky under whatever kept this forest under an eternal twilight.
The final change happened almost four hours later, just as the sun lit up the horizon, the ants finally reached the main room. They'd dug their tunnels up and could now move between the nexus and the wider world.
Only after their tunnels were dug did Nicholas commence the final stage of his plan and covered up the hole.
He wasn't sure it would work, and it didn't at first. But the ants expanded their tunnels to be closer to the size of the rat that Errazorrus was now inhabiting, and after that, they finally managed to cover over the staircase without a bright flashing notification and some kind of aura disruption.
It seemed that the dungeon had to be accessible by at least something as large as a rodent. Or, the nexus had to be. The dungeon itself… they weren't sure on the limits. They only knew they couldn't completely close it off to the outside.
But finally, with their major construction effort complete, Errazorrus returned to sifting through his own memories, and Nicholas went to welcome the new guests to their tiny dungeon. It would be rough on them for a while until they had more space, but somewhere safe was what Azotreh and the rabbit-kin needed.
Azotreh got up as dawn broke over the distant horizon, its crimson light changed to a reddish-purple by the barrier above their heads.
Azotreh had gotten a couple of hours of rest, though Atu had not slept a wink through the night. Constantly on guard for possible predators and possibly revenge from the rabbit-kin.
She didn't train Azotreh, too busy with her task of keeping her kin safe, even if she seemed to dislike it. There was an odd tension in her shoulders as Azotreh awoke, laid out beside her in a thick blanket she had also drawn from her inventory. She seemed to carry just about everything in her basic inventory. Not that Azotreh was much different.
But they woke up, soft grass beneath their horizontal body. It had been a while since they had experienced the laboratory or the dark depths of that goblin's layer. But waking up each morning to the sun, or to just the humble warmth of Atu's home, had allowed them to heal just a bit.
This morning, though, there was something else of particular interest. Distant sounds of marching echoed through the forest.
Mason was hiding in a tree. It was undignified, insulting to his blood. But he didn't have a choice. As dawn broke on the horizon, he still heard them. Thousands, tens of thousands of marching feet. They moved in orderly rows between the trees. They bore shields and spears, rode horses, or something that looked like them, anyway.
It was a sea of green, and not in the way that a forest is. Green bodies moving south, so many green bodies that it was impossible to see the ground.
They made camp each night, Mason had heard them. They laughed and joked, polished gear, and all sorts of other things the barbarians shouldn't be capable of.
He'd had a lot he knew challenged in this accursed forest. Almost been killed a half dozen times. But seeing the small forms of goblins running around with smiles as camps broke down was by far the most disturbing thing he'd seen.
The foul monsters grinning. Smiling as they moved among the powerful towers of green muscle. It made him want to puke, if his body could do that anymore.
He couldn't believe that asshole Leo insisted they follow the wave of horrific monsters as they moved south. They were nearing the desert at this point, and Mason's skin burned at the horrid heat. His system was littered with notifications about some kind of curse of the heat. It was nightmarish.
Especially once he saw the orcs using the blessed system themselves. Grabbing things out of thin air with the inventory, instantly swapping to their gear each morning, and some kind of comfortable clothes at night.
The only reason he didn't pounce on them to demand what humans they had ripped their systems from was the commands of Leo. Mason had developed his aura for the sake of his area powers and boon aura ability, but Leo and Maria both had higher developed senses. They both knew the orcs below started at nickel-rank and only went up from there. He couldn't imagine how much violence would be needed for such beings to ascend even once.
He was simply joining his party in spying on the orc warband, or army, as the case may be. They had to report this to the church. The orcs had to be heading south through the desert for a reason. They had no food in such a barren landscape, and seemed less equipped for the heat than either of his druidic companions.
He wanted to leave this party as soon as he could and get away from these blasphemers, but had no capability to do so. He couldn't venture through this forest alone anymore.
Even so, he was glad Alabast had spoken up on leaving. If the mage hadn't said anything, Mason would have simply commanded the commoner to leave after they reached the desert. Spying was one thing; putting themselves in danger was another.
Just as they were about to turn around, three figures emerged from the back end of the green mass. Two were orcs, one male, one female. Both towering masses of muscle.
The third was slim, but gave off a dangerous aura. As if here mere presence were a curse on the world. When Mason activated his Eyes of the Noble, he saw that the air around her was sparking with purple energy. Incredible quantities.
He wanted to hide; he had no idea what kind of monster was returning north, but wanted no part of this scouting party any longer. He would have used one of his talismans to escape, but Leo beat him to the punch. A bright flash of white and orange, and suddenly the group of six was standing near the new hole in the Nightshade Barrier.
Doctor needed to know about the orcish movements, and the nightmarish thing he saw heading into the forest. Good people didn't deserve to die needlessly against that thing.