Board & Conquest: A Godly LitRPG

They had dug up the tomb.

It had taken the better part of the day and reinforcements arriving to help secure the perimeter, but Victoire and her allies had uncovered a massive structure buried deep beneath the jungle and the murk: a blackstone pyramid about the size of Lord Wepwawet’s own Idol, with four horn-like claws reaching out to the sky atop it. Carvings of werelings, lunarians in deep meditation, and constellations covered its entire surface except for a closed set of rounded gates sealed shut at the base.

The Divine Peacekeeper Force had immediately dispatched its best mages on the scene alongside Lady Artemis’ shamans to keep the jungle’s creatures and Brood at bay—particularly a local worm kaiju that called the place its territory.

Victoire surveyed everything from her temporary command post. So far, the excavation had gone uninterrupted, but her instincts told her this respite would not last. The tomb had to boast magical defenses worthy of its occupant, and she couldn’t rule out the possibility that Beelzebub might try something to interrupt them if he somehow learned of the operation.

It might cost him his existence on Elphion, after all.

Victoire sensed her god touching her mind. “How’s the excavation going?”

“We’ve uncovered most of the tomb and found its entrance,” Victoire reported. “Wintresse, Gaspar, and Renarde are trying to unlock it. They’re optimistic, but there’s no telling when they’ll succeed.”

“I see. Good work.” She could feel his unease and trepidation on his end of the telepathic line. “I hope we’ll find what we’re looking for inside that thing.”

Victoire could understand his enthusiasm. It had taken them the better part of the year and cooperation with allies from all over Elphion to track down this place, after Renarde and Gaspar’s archeological digs in Mortis helped them finally translate the carvings found in Grand-Loup’s tomb and beyond. Their findings indicated that Archon’s words rang true; that a lunarian might have helped the first werelings during their rebellion, for which they were exiled by their cruel kind as punishment.

“You truly think it’s the only way?” Victoire asked.

“It’s our best lead,” Wepwawet confirmed. “We’ve looked for Beelzebub everywhere. We’ve mapped nearly all of Elphion’s mana leylines and actively monitor them, yet we’ve found nothing. His Idol has to be on one of Elphion’s moons. That’s where the blackstone comes from.”

Victoire looked to the sky with a sigh. Only one of the two moons was visible in the sunset, like a silver eye staring down at the world below. “Quite a long way up.”

“Yes. This world’s technology is decades, if not centuries, away from crossing that gap even with our help and guidance… but the lunarians had to make their way down to Elphion somehow.”

“They still do,” Victoire insisted. “It stretches credibility that we’ve faced so many lunarian-related incidents over the past year. They can’t have all crawled out from hibernation.”

The lunarians had been a persistent threat to Elphion ever since the Promesse incident nearly two years ago, with their subversive activities having increased after Whiro’s Incursion. They had exacerbated the Valentine-Zoramesh crisis, and some spies found in Shadazar suggested that they had likely ‘encouraged’ the local population to partake in pirate raids in the Wyld. They had then broadened their efforts towards sponsoring terrorist attacks—by brainwashing thralls who would then commit murders, funding anti-god or separatist groups across various nations, or just paying fools and catspaws to sow chaos—and sabotage the Divine Peacekeeping Force to weaken their efforts to exterminate the Brood.

This implied a large degree of organization, maybe even a hierarchy, and a central headquarters issuing orders to agents on the ground. Not all lunarians could be Champions that Beelzebub could micromanage. There had to be a chain of command and logistics involved.

“They must have a ship or teleportation network of some kind,” Lord Wepwawet said. “And if our archeological research about this Betrayer is accurate, then his resting place might hold a clue.”

“Resting place?” Victoire scoffed. “That’s assuming they’re even dead.”

“True. Be careful.”

Victoire nodded as her god cut off the communication to focus on other matters. She then moved to check on their archaeologist team. While the mages worked to unlock the gate, Renarde and Goreville were busy examining the pyramid’s carvings.

“So?” Victoire asked them. “Any luck translating them?”

“Patience, my dear,” Renarde replied. “I’m eager to please, but any translation I can come up with will be only an approximation at best.”

“There’s something about this place that calls to my torc,” Goreville added, his hand clutching the Torc of Grand-Loup around his neck. “I feel its spirit stirring like it did in Promesse.”

Victoire glanced at her shield. It too had grown warmer the more they excavated the pyramid. “There’s something here, but…” Victoire cleared her throat. “I don’t feel any aggression from my shield.”

“Me neither,” Goreville replied. “This pyramid calls to the torc, but it doesn’t inspire animosity.”

“They could have been forged there,” Renarde suggested. “The prehistorical lunarian empire stretched across all of Elphion, and the Wyld used to be a very different place than a jungle infested with giant monsters.”

“What do you mean, the Wyld used to be different?” Victoire inquired.

“I had my suspicions, but I am now convinced the Wyld used to be an island split from Elphion’s larger landmass.” Renarde searched inside her bag and brought out a most peculiar object. “Check this.”

Victoire’s eyes widened when she recognized the spiral shape. “A seashell?”

“The miners found it when they excavated the pyramid alongside a few others,” Renarde confirmed. “They’re not old fossils either, which means this part of the Wyld likely used to be a coastline.”

“But we’re leagues inland,” Goreville pointed out.

“That is what bothers me,” Renarde said. “We know catastrophic climate change followed the end of the lunarian-wereling war in ancient times. I thought this might have been the result of terraformers, but a whole island merging with a continent should take eons rather than centuries. This implies a sudden and violent reshaping of the world.”

Victoire crossed her arms. The sudden ice age that brought the wereling revolt to an end, those huge chunks of blackstone they’d found around the world—including the one that created the magmorians—and now this reshaping of the landscape… her gut told her they were all linked somehow.

And she had the feeling she wouldn’t like the answer to that particular mystery.