Whenever he'd used the sedation spell on the awakened trees above ground, they'd gone crazy and begun sending out a distress call. Both times he'd seen the broad ant and antenna ant use the same ability, it had been a much lesser instance. Whatever thread cluster regulated the ability, the trees seemed to have a much stronger version of it.
But more importantly, he'd seen a Spatial affinity thread cluster within the soul structure of one of those colossal trees, back when he'd escorted that Delver team with Sh'kteiro. It was a gamble to hope that inciting the distress call might somehow activate the root-portal.
Caen cast the paralysis spell he'd adapted. He still didn't have a good enough understanding of the trees’ anatomy, but this was an undoubtedly stronger spell.
Like every other time, he could tell that the spell hadn't worked. From the tree's soul structure, Caen could see it call for more ants.
He began backing away quickly. He ducked out of the way of a root. Another smacked him in the chest painfully, punting him into the floor. He rolled away from a few others snapping down towards him. The other roots were writhing and shaking in a disturbing manner.
“That actually worked!” Zeris said. “We need—something’s coming through!”
A broad ant, taller in height than Caen was and broader still, moved out of the root-portal swiftly. Two ants followed it.
Zeris had already moved away, lifting her rifle. Caen scrambled to his feet, unsheathing his sword.
“Out of the way!” Guinevere roared at them. A crackling sound was their only hint.
Caen dove out of the way as she lit up the chamber with startling blue lightning. The broad ant had begun using its spatial ability, but not quickly enough. Caen flickered Soul-sense at it.
Guinevere reached the broad ant with an empowered step, sword raised. Caen dashed for one of the smaller ants. Disrupting its Body-enhancement, he cut through its head. Zeris had taken down the other one with shots to the eye.
Caen engaged the broad ant from behind. Flickering Soul-sense, he cleaved halfway through its leg, but that didn't stop it from tunneling through space to appear at one of the exits. Ants started flooding into the chamber through another exit.
“Portal!” Zeris shouted.
Caen reached her with a few steps, Guinevere with one empowered step. Holding hands, they dove through the portal.
As soon as they landed in a heap in a new, rounded chamber, they scrambled away from the root-portal. It was incredibly uncomfortable and slightly painful moving through it. Caen wheezed loudly. A root had hit him in the site of his gunshot wound. Now he felt like his insides were being twisted into tight shapes.
With Caen panting, they all exited the chamber and began running through a passageway.
“Again?” Zeris asked as they ran.
“Again!” Caen wheezed back. He hadn't recovered from the spatial transport.
“Wait, again, what? What are you planning?” Guinevere queried.
“We'll agitate the roots again, try to get another root-portal to activate,” Caen said.
“And jump through as soon as it does,” Zeris finished.
“You people are batshit crazy. Let's fucking do it.”
As soon as they spilled into another rounded chamber, Caen was already Mimicking a colossal tree's affinity through the root portal in the chamber. This tree was right above them, and he could see the visual elements of its soul structure stretching dozens of feet above ground, from roots to branches.
Zeris and Guinevere huddled beside the root-portal, some distance away from Caen, and he placed a hand to the root-portal he was Mimicking. The moment he imitated its affinity, he would cast the paralysis spell.
“What? Why isn't it working?” Guinevere asked.
Caen kept his gaze fixed on the root, still getting his breathing under control. “Takes… a while.”
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“But you just did it quickly back there.”
“I won't do it any faster… if you keep distracting me,” he said. He understood her frustration. They could hear the frenzied chittering of the ants behind them.
Once he could, Caen cast the paralysis spell. Like clockwork, the roots writhed violently and began shooting for him. He slid out of the way quickly.
“Active! Go, go,” Zeris screamed.
They went through together, landing in another empty chamber. Breathing heavily, Caen growled through the excruciating discomfort even as he connected to Zeris. They all turned to face the root-portal, Guinevere in front of them.
“Low on mana,” she said. “But I can still use lightning a few more times.”
She'd shown them her mana storage device and had topped herself up twice already. She had just enough mana left in it to fill up her reserves one more time.
Caen was already Mimicking Zeris's fire affinity.
By the time he'd Mimicked her affinity, not even four minutes had gone by. He began Impassioning her fireball, when she let out a sigh.
“It's inactive,” she said, putting out the fireball.
“Phew,” Guinevere said.
Caen dropped his connection to Zeris and began Mimicking a tree.
Since Guinevere's healing potions had nearly run out, Caen attended to all their wounds, starting with his own. Burns, gashes, cuts, bruises.
He didn't do anything extensive. Running out of mana would be very bad for him. He'd run some tests last week that clearly confirmed that aspects of Mimicry wouldn't work if he was out of mana.
* * *
After eating their rations with as much moderation as their excessively healed bodies would allow, Caen replenished a significant portion of his mana reserves with a boosted Spirit-healing affinity.
He then practiced adding modifiers to his paralysis spell. In his exhaustion, he bungled something and ended up paralyzing his entire left foot, instead of just the little toe.
He immediately cast sleep abeyance on himself. The mental fatigue had started creeping up on him insidiously. He was putting more pressure on his body than sleep abeyance was typically designed to bear.
The injuries, the repeated instances of Blood-healing, Guinevere's diluted healing potion, the physical exertion and combat, and, of course, Mimicry's effect on the body. Will fatigue was also starting to creep up on him, but there was little he could do about that beyond taking snatches of time to just meditate and calm his mind and spirit.
He would Mimick trees—via their roots—and Zeris. Guinevere, too, whenever she was doing stretches, though rarely. Now she was sitting with her eyes closed in the dark chamber, supposedly meditating. When Caen connected to her, he noticed two active thread clusters in her soul structure.
One was Body-enhancement, as he'd expected to see. But the other, oddly enough, was Dream-guarding.
When Caen conformed his Dream-guarding affinity to hers, he was surprised to find that it was stronger than Zeris's by quite a bit.
He'd intended to go into the Deep Astral later, but this would allow him to do it with more ease than he had the day before.
He announced to them that he was going into the Deep Astral. In moments, he was jerked through astral space and into Vai's waiting room with force.
Hshnol was watching him with a very serious expression. “Ar’Caen Ereshta'al, you do not look well.”
“Things are a little rough down there,” Caen admitted easily.
“Your cousin and the other combatants?”
“One of them died of injuries he'd sustained earlier. Zeris and Guinevere are tired, a little injured, but they'll live.” He sighed. “It's… bad. Are they any closer to finding us?”
“High Priest Sh’kteiro is combing through the Plane in search of you both. Master Vai has been in a meeting for the past few weeks. I… have not been able to contact him. But I am currently on my way down to the Odaton-plane Plane as we speak.”
“We've been marking the floors of every chamber we've teleported into with tyyr ink,” Caen said. He went on to elaborate on what the numbers signified and which markings depicted chambers they hadn't teleported into but had simply come across.
When he returned to the Material Realm, Zeris was sitting to the side of the root-portal, inspecting it with spatial acuity. Guinevere was pacing the floor of the dark chamber, chewing furiously on her thumbnail.
“You okay?” Caen asked.
“I’m fine. Just on edge.”
Caen stood up, already precasting a Body-enhancement spell, in case he needed it later. “I'm going to take a look around, do some scouting. I'll be circling back every four minutes.”
“I'll stay alert,” she said. They'd chosen to forgo using light sources completely in order not to draw ants. They'd hear any that approached, and Zeris would be able to tell if the root-portal became active.
Caen still had his goggles on. Guinevere hadn't believed his lie about having a high Gleam affinity.
After nearly two minutes of quietly brisk walking, he neither heard nor saw anything. He circled back to the chamber. Guinevere, still pacing, glanced in his direction but said nothing. Caen took the next exit and moved along the passageway; there was an immediate fork in the path. He took the first one. Once he'd been moving for nearly two minutes, he hurried back to the chamber.
Before he reached the fork in the path, he heard loud chittering coming from up ahead. Then a gunshot.
Caen broke into a sprint.