"What do you want to do?" asked Moxlin. "This seems like a very polite way of getting the thing without going all murder-crazy about it."
"I'm not sure I like the idea of fighting an entire party. I sensed they are at most in early F-Grade, some even barely in the middle of G-Grade, but there are twelve of them."
"Maybe still give it a try? If the hole gets too tight, we can always run. It's what this place is for, anyhow."
Axl nodded, and quickly let Moxlin set up a hiding place within view of the clearing, and stepped forward, accepting the quest.
The kobolds turned to look at him, their Mana tightening for a moment before they started to laugh.
"A single G-Grade?" an archer yelled in lightly accented Saptish, lowering his bow. "Kid, is this your first time out of the walls? Grow desperate for Brosia after stealing a taste?"
One of the mages held up his hand, suddenly serious. "Third fang, third fang!"
The group immediately quieted, their weapons out again, on full alert. Axl sighed in annoyance. For a moment there, he hoped they would grossly underestimate him and go for a one-on-one duel, but looks like that damned mage sensed his high Attributes or something.
"You're not from Treeheart, are you?" the mage asked, eying him cautiously.
Axl shook his head. "Just a wandering cultivator passing through."
One of the scouts got closer to the mage, whispering in his ear, which Axl could just barely make out with his high Perception. "He has two dimensional storage items, the pouch and the ring, and that armor is of peak G-Grade material. From the hilt on that sword, it's just as good. I bet he's some sort of G-Grade princeling that came here with a token and more money than sense. Could be an even better windfall than the obelisk drop."
The mage hesitated for a moment, still looking at Axl, and then gently brought his hand down, out of Axl's line of sight, and then quietly snapped his fingers once. The party's grip on their weapons tightened, their fanged faces grim with lethal resolve.
Axl bent his knees lightly and dripped [Webcutter], ready to draw, waiting for the notification. If this is what they chose, he had no qualms in giving it to them.
>>Defending party selected unlimited deathmatch.
No more notifications, no time to prepare, the mages started manifesting their glyphs and the archers drawing their bows. All with what seemed like glacial slowness to Axl.
Not wanting to wait for their attacks to start piling up, Axl ran up to the party, focusing the empowerment of [Mana Shroud] on Agility, easily able to reach the front lines before a single arrow was let loose.
The two shield-bearers at the front flinched, slitted reptilian eyes wide in surprise at Axl's speed, and with a single slash of his sword, he severed one of their arms out entirely and cut deep into the neck of the other. The metal of their armor was weak, not better than the middle of G-Grade, so easy for his sword and his Strength to overpower.
With another step, Axl was within their formation, and he slashed at the mages and scouts, the mages all dead in a moment, together with two of the scouts, a third leaping away to escape, only to have a [Venombite Fang] stab him in the back, piercing his heart and nearly bursting from the other side of his chest.
The melee warriors barely had time to turn before this was all done, and Axl made use of their distraction to stab another in the forehead, neatly killing him, and taking down another with another kunai to the neck, nearly cutting his entire head off.
The two remaining warriors froze, then one dropped his spear and fell to his knees while the second turned to run away. Axl threw a kunai at the runner, the blade piercing his helmet and killing him.
"I forfeit! I give up!" The last kobold's voice was uneven with fear. "Please!"
Axl hesitated. On the one hand, these kobolds tried to kill him, but on the other, he did need intelligence on that village that almost certainly was his destination. Plus, it wasn’t like these kobolds did something as unforgivable to him as Brillhit. But more importantly, would the system see this as a victory?
As if to answer his question, he got a notification.
>>Challenger party successful and is now designated the defending party.
>>Whetstone of Sharpness (F-Grade) will form in 12 minutes, 05 seconds.
Convenient. Just enough time to get some useful intelligence from the kobold.
Axl brought his blood-slick blade near the kobold's neck. "How far away is this Treeheart, and in which direction?"
"Th-that way!" the kobold pointed due North, exactly where his Call of the Void was leading him. "Two days' hike at a measured pace, if you cross the two nearest valleys and over the next two hills, it's in the next recession. There is a large domed building in the middle, right at the major obelisk. You can't miss it."
Axl cleaned his sword's blade, then sheathed it, squatting in front of the kobold. "Tell me literally everything you know about the place."
-x-
A hour later, Axl was back on track, rushing towards Treeheart, one natural treasure richer. To his disappointment, the moment it was created, seamlessly materializing at the obelisk's base, the towering glyphic construct's Mana shifted, changing into some mixed fire and terror attunement that was far less interesting to him. Not only that, but it was far weaker, clearly only starting the process of building up the necessary density to materialize another natural treasure that would take several days, at least.
Clearly, this meant that all one had to do to get treasures in this area was find an obelisk and camp out, the obelisks themselves being very hard to miss. Focusing on [Mana Shroud], Axl could also vaguely detect from a distance what kind of treasure an obelisk would make and how close they were to dropping, now that he knew what to look for. This was a very different system from the scavenger hunt for natural treasures in the longhouse area, but frankly, one he preferred, it being much quicker and efficient, not to mention more easily able to target preferable types of treasure.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
The only downside was that it was far more confrontational, each obelisk being a hotbed for conflict over the drop. Apparently, the kobold party he just fought had that same day fought two groups of beasts and one party of elves. Not to mention one jacked up human pretending to be a water-elf.
His kobold prisoner was very useful, in fact, and Axl barely needed to flex his Charisma at all. The short reptilian was more than happy to spill every possible morsel of information, rumor, or random guessing he had, all in a desperate, unending stream. This created a small issue, since Axl was fairly sure that if he let the kobold return, he'd equally spill the beans on him, and that wasn't great. Still, he felt that killing the prisoner outright would leave a sour taste in his mouth.
He briefly considered tying him up and leaving him behind some of Moxlin's illusion arrays, but that would only delay the problem and give him more intel on what their little group was capable of. Instead, Axl decided to toss the kobold into the Greenhouse Crossroads rift. Apparently, if one only beat the first or even second fight, they wouldn't unlock a rift to get back to their starting point, a detail Tem had told him that Axl had ignored since it didn’t apply to him, given his extra access from his total clearing and nobility title.
With the kobold, however, Axl felt there was a 50-50 chance that the G-Grade kobold would survive one round of the trial, and doing so would land him in some far-off corner of the sanctuary, where he likely wouldn't be able to rat him out to the metal dryad's forces. This seemed like quite reasonable odds to Axl, but apparently, the kobold thought this was a death sentence, turning into an incoherent blubbering mess of frantic begging when Axl told him the plan.
Realizing he was likely underestimating how hard the rift trial could be to a regular cultivator, Axl let the kobold take all the gear from his previous party, the mage leader having a crappy dimensional bag in his backpack. None of it was any good anyhow, so Axl felt it was no real loss. He even gave the kobold some G-Grade healing potions that were made obsolete by his F-Grade ones, and finally Axl gave him one of the F-grade shortswords from the dead orc.
Moxlin was positively livid at what she saw as unnecessary waste, and after her tirade, their prisoner was more scared of her than of him. But more properly geared up, the kobold felt more positive about his chances, a thread of hope quietly shining behind the dense wall of fear that still emanated from the little guy. Axl genuinely hoped that he'd make it.
The next obelisks that Axl passed by didn't seem interesting enough to check out, mostly because their attunement wasn't useful to either of them. One was borderline worth it, a healing-focused attunement that would at least trade very well, but it was still in the early stages of building up, so it wasn't worth the wait. So Axl simply charged on, in less than a day reaching the hilltop that overlooked Treeheart.
It was exactly as the kobold described it, an outer wall barely four meters high, an inner wall a bit over ten, both sturdy-looking stone, even if the inner wall was thicker and more formidable than the outer, and also had a moat around it at least a hundred meters wide. There were only three gates leading into the town, the southern one he faced and one to the northwest and northeast, the two northern gates facing mining outposts further along the nearby hills, the southern actually leading to a beaten path, almost a road, that led to other settlements in the area.
Between the two walls were numerous packed houses, grey bricks and wood closer to the outer wall, further inside becoming larger and made of more even stone. Within the morass of uneven housing were four obelisks like the one he saw before, each one having its base in a small walled area of simple packed dirt.
However, dominating the settlement was the large dome at its center, nearly two hundred meters wide, a dark grey mass that felt positively imposing, punctuated by the much larger obelisk that rose from its center, towering nearly a kilometer into the air, its glyphic heft positively impressive. It was one of the major obelisks in the area, dropping peak treasures only once a year, but triggering a massive area-wide quest for its conquest. Apparently, if there weren't enough local challenges, the Deep System would bring forces from outside, leading to a particularly brutal siege.
Just outside the dome were three large warehouses, and to the side a smaller enclosure that looked like the ribcage of some massive creature, clearly the prison of the purple-eyed elf that reached out to him. While the outer ring of the city was positively teeming with elves and kobolds, the area within the inner walls was rather sparse, with only a few guards patrolling the area, mostly the area between the three warehouses and the dome. Strangely, they seemed to actively avoid Aria’s prison. He'd have expected her to be under heavy guard instead, but this was undeniably convenient.
Axl retreated slightly and found a very out-of-the-way nook between boulders where he and Moxlin set up an illusory array for the night, now time that he saw Aria again. The more he thought about what the purple-eyed elf had said, the more he felt her prediction was unnervingly accurate. When he had to not just beat the gardener but capture him alive is how he came up with the idea of using the calcium-depleting poison instead of the centipede poison, and there was a good chance that without that idea, he'd have tried to brute force the fight. This would have most certainly made his state far worse after the duel, if he even managed to survive it, and then less likely to survive Brillhit's sneak attack.
It was rather annoying that the true value of the advice was rather impenetrable until after it happened, making a small part of him still wonder if it was just a coincidence. Was it all just cold reading? Maybe she could've guessed he was going to a trial, because what else do people do in this place? But what about the mercy bit? How often would rifts allow for that, especially in the more advanced phases of the challenge?
Regardless, it was worth checking out, especially if he couldn't get the void treasure right away, and Moxlin strongly agreed with this too, being in fact excited about meeting a fortune-teller. Stranger things were routinely common in this land of impossible power, so it wouldn't be that unbelievable if some people could see the future.
So he leaned back and slowly let himself sleep while Moxlin took the first watch.
Axl sat at the cantina, using his daily rations today, the tray in front of him full of an indeterminately brown sludge streaked with blood. Axl wondered why he didn’t get a spoon, gagging at the thought of eating the foul mixture.
"Hello," a beautiful woman in a simple dress sat across from him, her purple eyes and hair shockingly foreign and strange, yet looking at her deeply relaxed his mind. "I see you're nearby now. I'm glad you survived your trial, struggler."
The words shook him, and he realized the dream, not so much in what she said, but from the frail stature and sharp-ended ears making him remember she was an elf, and all that entailed.
"Me too," he replied. "I saw Treeheart from above, the inner region has your prison in it, rather near the central dome. I guess you were being literal when you said you were in a ribcage?"
"Yes, that is where I'm being kept." She looked aside, as if into the distance. "Anyhow, I should give you further guidance before I'm caught sleeping. The most important thing is that if you lay eyes upon Venva Livir for more than ten breaths, you will die. If you forsake all else, heed this, she is beyond your ken right now. Secondly, kill fewer than seven guards in your time within the inner walls, or your future attempts at the void treasure will be made harder. Lastly, upon awakening, approach the southern gate in four hours, heeding this time as precisely as you can, so you can avoid Treeheart's most insidious trap."
Axl nodded, stamping every single word into his memory, flexing every bit of Intelligence into the task. It was also good to finally learn the metal dryad's name, as well.
"Are you alright?" he asked. "Is this Venva dryad treating you well?" The words felt strange as he said them. Why did he ask? Would it change anything he could do if the answer was no?
"I should tell you," Aria looked away, as if embarrassed. "That true dreamers cannot lie, and thus one displays much of their nature when speaking, especially without training in the practice. I'm sorry if I took advantage of your ignorance in such matters, to test your intentions."
Axl narrowed his eyes, thinking back to all he said to her, but ultimately found he didn't reveal anything too important. "I'll keep this in mind going forward."
She smiled widely, the dream fading into a pinprick brilliance in her eyes, and he awoke.