After leaving the ruins, hidden by nature and time itself, the two of them, free of the watching eyes in the city, headed in the completely opposite direction of where they were heading.
They might have lost their tails, but neither of them was a hundred percent confident that they fooled every magical or demonic scrying technique. Thus, the subterfuge. Both of them were wearing a single-use artifact that was supposed to be hiding their presence, but professional paranoia won in the end.
The two of them first headed into the forest, in complete silence and continuously scanning the area around them for even a speck of molecule being out of place. Then, with a small jump, they ascended to the top of the forest, running over the thickest branches, leaving no footprints, but totally feeling like they were in an anime.
“I’m so turning this into a short video…” Tim whispered as they stood on one of the mighty branches of an equally mighty ironwood tree and surveyed the area around them.
Sam looked at him, then nodded. “Make sure to send it over when you’re done… Though don’t include that I missed that step…”
“I mean it was funny…” Tim grinned and Sam just grumbled as they headed off.
After at least an hour more of maneuvering directly under the canopy and then the underbrush, followed by a quick swim in the river, they were finally forced to concede that if somebody was following them through all this, they might as well witness everything, because they might be professional paranoids, but there was a limit even to their patience.
So, Tim and Sam decided that it was finally time to really head for their true destination.
According to what Tim explained to him, they headed into the mountains.
“Now what?” Sam asked as they stood at a fork in the road, with some giant rocks serving as guideposts with directions and distances carved into them. Some pointed toward the mountain, displaying the distance toward the outlook on the top, or the mine near the bottom of it, and some were pointing toward smaller towns and villages, while the last one with a rather huge distance, pointed toward Vividora, the capital city.
Tim stood there in the middle, turning around a few times, trying to spot whatever he was looking for.
“Apparently, there was supposed to be a sign that would direct us to the next spot,” came from the other man.
Sam let out a sigh and took a seat on one of the small rocks dotting the roadside. Then, he closed his eyes and started sweeping the area with his mana senses. He found many small things, enchantments, and small magics, a few lost artifacts left behind by hikers and travelers but nothing that would count as a sign.
“Aha!” came the shout from Tim, causing Sam to open his eyes and look over at the excited assassin. He was holding up a small rock, with almost invisible carvings on it. The carvings made no sense to Sam, but Tim obviously knew what it meant. Tim then turned over the rock, slid a small slate off it, and revealed a small scroll.
Unfurling it, he spent a moment studying it before looking back at Sam and pointing toward the left fork, leading higher up the mountain.
“That way!”
So up on the mountain, they went. Not too fast, as they didn’t want to make too much noise and get their enemies’ attention. They stuck to the shadows and hopped from cover to cover.
Honestly, Sam felt a little like a kid playing in the garden with his friend. Granted, back then the magic was in their imagination, but the feeling was almost the same. Based on the focused grin on Tim’s face, Sam suspected his feelings were similar.
A while later, suspiciously not running into any monster or traveler, they reached another fork in the road. One visibly led around the mountain, while the other terminated shortly at some old stone stairs, carved directly in the mountain.
They didn’t approach the fork, instead watched it from a distance, hidden by both magic and a very big rock. It was a pretty nice rock…
“I assume, we go upwards?” Sam whispered to Tim who was checking the scroll he found.
“Do you see a tree with a trunk that has some runes carved into it?”
Sam looked around and spotted exactly two trees in the middle of the fork, sheltering an old bench under them, then he looked closer and saw that both had several runes carved into them, some fresh but others looked centuries old. They were probably added over the years to prevent the harsh weather from destroying the flora that managed to grow so high on the mountain.
‘It was probably someone’s favorite resting place…’ he mused as the view from the bench seemed to be a killer one.
“Anything particular?” he asked.
Tim held up the scroll that showcased a crudely (and very amateurishly) drawn rune of the gate.
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Sam looked back at the trees, and now that he was aware of what he was looking for, he cast his mana senses at them, very discreetly seeking out the old runes. Then he stepped out of the cover of the rock and began ascending to the small clearing holding the trees and bench.
“What’re you doing?” Tim hissed after him.
Sam just waved him off. “Don’t worry. They’re not watching…”
Tim hesitantly followed him, but he was still looking around paranoidly. “What do you mean by that?”
Instead of turning around, Sam spent a moment looking at the gorgeous view before turning back toward the two trees, bench, and mountain.
“Look at the mountain. Don’t you think something is missing from it?” he asked idly, as his eyes traced several runes on the trees.
Tim stepped next to him and looked up. “Huh?” Then a moment later. “Well, I’ll be…”
Sam nodded and stepped closer to the trees while glancing at the mountain for a moment. The entire side, now that they were looking at it purposefully, looked as if something was roughly scooped out of it. At first glance, it looked like the mountainside collapsed and turned into an avalanche in ages past, but from this point, they could spot some very artificial-looking angles and edges.
“Illusion?”
“Yeah, thankfully not a pocket dimension.”
“Why?”
“Ever heard the story of putting a bag of holding into another bag of holding?” At Tim’s nod, he continued. “This is something similar. According to my research, doing a demon summoning is like putting an industrial pump into a dinghy and turning it on in the middle of the ocean.”
“So bad?”
“Well…Funny watching it from outside, but not enjoyable from inside.”
Tim let out an appreciative hum at the picture Sam painted, then stepped up to the tree and ran his hand gently over the carved surface of the tree.
“Can you open the door without alerting them?”
Sam leaned closer to a particularly small set of rune clusters and hummed thoughtfully.
“Probably. Would take time, though… Question is do we want to wait?” he asked as he opened his Grimoire, which appeared in a flash of muted gold, and began to scribble down notes about the sets, there were some potential uses of this set that he could imagine using.
“I’d prefer to sneak in, yeah…” Tim answered drily as he sat down with a heavy sigh on the bench and watched Sam’s note-taking. “How long?”
“Give me an hour – no, two hours – and I will get you in, or explode. Either or…” he answered idly. “The hardest part will be finding another spot we can enter…”
Tim blinked a few times before facepalming. “Right. Of course, they would be watching the entrance…”
“Indeed. So, if you have a book with you, then it’s time to take it out. I won’t be up for much conversation…”
Tim let out a sigh, retrieved a thick book about enchanting and Sam started unraveling the runic magic protecting whatever it was protecting.
‘Probably the most doom-iest doom castles that ever doomed…’
Sam was rather happy.
Decoding and solving the runic enchantment was rather fun, and would give him some rather nice options. Plus, he managed it in an hour and three-quarters…
After that, it was child’s play to find the boundary anchors and follow them to a secluded part of the mountain where no casual hiker, traveler, or guard would venture. They had to do a little hopping from rock to rock and some rock climbing, but with their stats and magic, it was almost too easy.
Now sheltered from the environment and eyes in a small alcove, he approached one particular stone on the ground. It was the top piece of a much bigger stone firmly inserted into the ground in such a way that nothing would be able to budge bar some powerful magic or divine intervention.
‘Do I count as a divine intervention?’ he mused as he kneeled and began to carve runes into the ground around the anchor with his own magic, referencing his Grimoire while Tim anxiously stood behind him and watched over his shoulder.
Soon a small runic circle took shape, concentric circles in concentric circles, encircling the anchor, then Sam focused for a moment and gently touched one of the runes he carved with his index finger, which in turn lit up with gentle light.
The light quickly spread to the other runes he carved and soon the anchor for the defenses was surrounded by a gently glowing runic circle. Another motion with his finger and the almost invisible rune on the stone also lit up and emitted a thin tower of light.
One more motion and the tower of light – the width of maybe a finger – split into two at the bottom, creating a triangle, which then another line of light connected at the bottom.
And in the space surrounded by the light, a new sight greeted them. The previously missing piece of the mountain reappeared, complete with a slightly crumbling and slightly renovated castle ruin, lit up by torches and lanterns, the background painted in all hues of orange and red by the setting sun.
Sam grinned and turned to Tim. He held his hands out and bowed a little.
“After you, my good Sir!”
Tim nodded and stepped through the threshold while chuckling. “Much obliged.”
He waited until Tim was full through before throwing out a few plates with runes on them, to hide the location from a casual observer, then he also stepped through, throwing out more plates.
“I’ll leave it open,” he explained to Tim, who was already observing the surroundings. “I have a feeling we will be needing an escape route…”
“Prudent. What does your mana sense say? Mine doesn’t have the range for this.”
Sam looked for a comfortable-looking rock and took a seat, closing his eyes and spreading his senses far and wide.
Instantly, he was hit by the stink of foul demonic magic, swirling around the castle like a cloying smell around a carcass.
“Well, I can confidently say we are in the correct place,” he said after a minute, frowning and trying not to retch.
“What about the ritual?”
“Either it is completed or they haven’t started it yet…”
Tim let out a breath of relief, then reached under his cloak and retrieved a simple-looking dagger that screamed dangerous to Sam’s senses.
“Silence Dagger?” he asked curiously. Silence Daggers were called that because no matter what a person did with them, they stayed silent. Ocassionally one could find a rarer version which also cursed the creature you stabbed with a Silence debuff. Sam suspected that Tim was using one of those.
Tim grunted in acknowledgment then raised the dagger and twirled it in his fingers. “Started as one, but I found a ritual to turn it into a focus, which, in turn, made it an evolving item.”
“Badass…” Sam replied with wonder in his voice. There was no strict way to turn an item into an evolving item. There were rituals, enchantments, natural and unnatural phenomena that would do it, but no surefire way to ‘automate’ the process. The last number he remembered reading – well, he remembered the other Sam reading it – was that the chance of it happening was less than zero point zero zero zero zero one percent. Tim was truly an anime protagonist…
He stood up and did a few stretches before removing his cloak, which would just get in his way, and turned to Tim, who did the opposite and pulled his cloak even tighter around himself.
“Ready to do some cheeky sneaky breaky?”
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