Broken Lands

Chapter 343 – Single Team Maze Run

The first zone they encountered in the Maze was chilly and mostly barren. It wasn’t a desert; there was no sand. Instead, there were large patches of dead-looking brown dirt with occasional low bushes, twisted stunted trees, and patches of smaller vegetation in the low spots. It didn’t look like there was any place for monsters to hide until they came too close to one of the twisted trees and it closed its branches around Ci’an’s owl form as she flew ahead of them.

The tree was already on fire by the time Sophia had her fire feathers floating in the air around her, but she sent a couple of precise strikes at the tree to aid Xin’ri’s efforts. It probably wasn’t necessary, but overkill was better than underkill.

Ci’an did not escape unharmed; the tree managed to puncture her wings in three places when it grabbed her. It couldn’t kill her without first removing her shield, apparently, and it didn’t have time to crush her. The surprise attack was more than enough as far as Sophia was concerned. With Dav’s healing, she was fine in a few minutes.

“Is there any way we can avoid this sort of thing?” Sophia glanced around the group. “I had no idea the trees were monsters. I’m still not seeing anything obvious that made that one different from that tree over there or anything that makes me think that tree is or isn’t also a monster. All I can say for certain is that it’s not enchanted like a golem; I can’t really tell if it’s a plant or an animal or what.”

“I believe that I know which zone this is, and about a third of the trees should animate when you get near. The people who wrote the zone description weren’t certain if the others weren’t monsters or if they simply weren’t hungry.” Dav pulled out a book and flipped through it quickly. “Ah, here we are. There are notes from the Shield of the Sun’s expedition that go into a little more detail than I remembered. The sign to watch for, apparently, is that the trees sit on a slight rise in the ground.”

Sophia looked around. Dav was right; every single tree she could see, all five of them, was slightly elevated above the ground around them. It wasn’t particularly obvious, because the ground was decidedly not flat to begin with. In fact, there were a lot of hollows and rises that were all about the same size and roughly circular. “Can these trees move?”

“Almost certainly,” Dav answered. “They’re stealth attackers normally, but the guard at the gate is supposed to be a giant walking tree. I don’t know if we’ll have to face it or not. As for the rest of the vegetation …” 

Dav flipped a page, but it had to be for effect. He barely glanced at it before he continued. “Most of it will attack; if I’m reading this right, what it really wants is your blood. I guess the problem here is moisture. The few things that won’t and a handful of the things that will are supposed to be excellent alchemical supplies, but they require skill and knowledge to harvest. We’re better off moving on.”

“Meadow would love this place.” Sophia shook her head. Maybe she should invite the older woman on a gathering expedition some time; Meadow would probably like that. It would also give her a chance to pick Meadow’s brain about what her team did about figuring out zones. She was pretty sure it wasn’t all that different from what Sophia’s team was doing, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

This wasn’t the first time they’d been surprised, but at least this time Dav was able to immediately identify what they were looking at. In some ways, the “used” zones were the worst; you couldn’t know if you were going to be attacked or not. It was entirely possible that the zone was completely cleared out by whoever went through it first. 

On top of that, even in a new zone you usually didn’t know what you were facing until you saw it, because there were so many zones that looked the same. The same monsters could easily appear in different locations, as well; you just couldn’t know ahead of time. That was the real danger of the Maze as far as Sophia was concerned: lack of knowledge until it was too late. 

In this zone, now that they knew what the danger was, it was easy enough to avoid. The only real problem was finding the link-gate that let them leave the zone, and even that was only a matter of time. About half an hour into their journey, Ci’an saw one in the distance. Burnt and disturbed ground, bits of charcoal, and several broken tree limbs made it clear that this was the exit the previous group used. The gate guardian hadn’t recovered, so they were able to make it through the completely plain link-gate with no difficulty.

The link had only a handful of burnt trees and an old campsite to the left. The trees looked enough like the bloodthirsty trees from the zone that Sophia could guess why they were burnt. The campsite was probably where the last team stayed; they’d probably found out about the trees the hard way.

Honestly, Sophia wasn’t sure why they hadn’t simply burnt the trees before they settled down. She wasn’t about to trust any gnarled trees right now, especially not ones that looked like they’d been twisted by high winds. Outside of mazestorms, the links in the Maze didn’t have high winds. 

To the right, there was a stand of trees that looked sick. A closer look revealed that most of the trees looked ordinary except for browning leaves and dark spots on the trunk, but there were a handful of trees that looked short and twisted scattered among the sick trees. Sophia readied her fire feathers but hesitated to use them; was burning down the damaged trees really the right move?” “I think there are more of those tree monsters over there.”

That drew everyone’s attention to the trees. Unlike Sophia, Xin’ri didn’t hesitate and there was soon a bonfire on that side of the link. It was entirely too close to one of the link-gates for Sophia’s comfort, but two of the three were untouched. One of the three had already been used, based on the rocks carefully placed near the entrance, but the other one away from the fire wasn’t in use. None of them had any lettering, so it was easy to decide which one they were going to slip through.

Dav stacked some rocks in front of it in the sign that meant ‘in use,’ just like he’d done outside the Maze, and then they headed into the next zone. It was better than staying with the fire and it was still morning, after all.

The next zone smelled wet. It was sort of nostalgic, in a way; it reminded Sophia of the water drainage tunnels where she and Dav landed under Old Kestii when they arrived in the Broken Lands. 

Once Sophia turned on her magelight so that they could see, the resemblance wasn’t just the smell, either. They stood in a stone tunnel in shallow running water. Moss covered part of the wall and grew in a few patches on the floor, which told Sophia that the channel wasn’t regularly scoured clean - or, at least, that it hadn’t been scoured recently. 

Unlike the tunnels under Old Kerstii, there were metal fittings for torches mounted along the wall. Clear burn rising from the fittings confirmed that yes, it was definitely torches or some other form of fire that was used here. That surprised Sophia; were the tunnels used for transit often enough to make lighting them worthwhile? Wouldn’t someone working on the tunnel carry light with them instead of trying to light the whole tunnel?

“Who’s there?” The words echoed down the tunnel, followed by a light source that turned the corner. The light came from a lantern, held by a man that seemed to be dressed in loose-fitting clothing. His pants were tucked into tall boots, but beyond that Sophia couldn’t make out much about him in the shadows. “Oh, you’re the plumbers, aren’t you?”

“Plumbers?” Sophia didn’t know what he was talking about, but she’d learned from the expedition that it was best to play along with whatever the zone thought they were doing. It was the easiest way to find out what the normal completion requirements were.

“Yeah, come on, follow me. Are you here for the bubbleswarm or the nettlefish?” The man turned around and walked back the way he came, giving Sophia a better look at him now that his light wasn’t in the way. He was older, probably in his sixties, and dressed in stained gray clothing. The top was pale and looked like it had once been a cream color, while the pants seemed to have started off life brown. The boots were black and looked like rubber overboots to Sophia’s eyes, something she definitely hadn’t expected to see here.

Sophia wasn’t certain what either of those were, but the bubbleswarm, at least, sounded sort of like a monster. She still knew what the right answer was. She’d only done a handful of scenarios like this across their visits to the Maze, but they were by far the best sources of Wisps and aurichalc they’d found, especially if they did everything. A group with people who knew how to gather resources might be able to do better that way, but that definitely wasn’t Sophia’s team. “We’re here for whatever you need. What can you tell us about them?”

A bubbleswarm was a monster that looked like a bunch of soap bubbles. They were the reason the storm sewer’s walls were as clean as they were; they ate everything they could as they passed by. They were normally not a problem, because they disliked light and fled from fire, so it was easy enough to keep them away when people had to go into the tunnels. If anything, the bubbleswarms were helpful; they kept the sewer from becoming clogged.

The problem was that when there were too many, the bubbleswarms would overcome their fear of light and rise into the city above from the storm drains. It always started at night, but before long they’d rise during the day as well. They were overdue for a culling.

There was one warning that their guide gave that worried Sophia: using fire on a bubbleswarm was a bad idea. He didn’t know why, but he knew that much. Sophia’s guess was that it had something to do with why they fled from fire; her first guess was that they probably used hydrogen for lift. It would explain why they avoided fire and it was easy to believe that rupturing a hydrogen-filled lift sac in the sewer would be a bad idea. Sophia wasn’t sure it would explode, but she didn’t want to deal with having the oxygen in the air burned away even if it didn’t.

Lightning was probably also a bad idea, but some sort of physical projectile would probably work well. That made dealing with the bubbleswarms Xin’ri’s problem, since she could manage a lot of small projectiles easily if she used her stone staff or her ice staff. Metal and wood would likely also work, but they weren’t as suited for the conditions.

They encountered their first bubbleswarm moments after the old man finished describing them, almost like he’d deliberately timed it. Sophia was certain that was simply the way the zone was designed, but it was still convenient.

It was even easier than they expected to kill the bubbleswarms; they popped the moment Xin’ri passed anything through their space, just like ordinary bubbles. They left a strange-smelling residue, but that was all.

The old man led them down several different corridors and had them kill most of the bubbleswarms. Each time, he stopped them before the last few bubbles were popped; he wanted some to survive. Once he was satisfied they were following instructions, he started to describe nettlefish while they finished clearing out the bubbleswarms.