Chapter 107: Secret Vault
Clearing more than a dozen twisting, pitch-black stone tunnels and bypassing several heavily fortified defensive lines guarded by iron-clad Children of the Omen, the column finally arrived at the specific coordinates Morgott had designated as his sanctuary.
This sector comprised an immense, vaulted underground storage vault. Far removed from the foul, stagnant drainage trenches patrolling the outer quadrants, the space was dominated by several rare, gargantuan iron water mains feeding the upper wards. Tucked within the damp recesses of the masonry lay towering mounds of abandoned cargo crates and dry thatch. Hundreds of silent Children of the Omen were resting across those piles of straw, the limbs of several warriors tightly bound in rough, blood-stained linen bandages.
Monitoring the bleak perspective, Tolisha could no longer suppress the protective weight within her chest, her voice emerging in a hushed whisper. "Your tongue applies the title of a home to a wilderness of this nature?"
Morgott's tall, slightly hunched frame suffered a brief stillness across the flags. He let out a low, weary chuckle that carried a heavy layer of self-deprecating sorrow. "An absolute certainty, little sister. This defines the premier sanctuary our hands could isolate beneath the stone."
The assembled demigods fell into a heavy, respectful silence, tracking his boots up a short flight of stone steps to enter a spacious, independent masonry warehouse.
Lucia scanned the interior. In truth, the chamber commanded absolute zero decorative appointments. The solitary furniture occupying the stone floor comprised a battered, long oak table ringed by seven or eight crude chairs, accompanied by a pair of rickety wooden cabinets and a worn, fraying straw mat anchoring the far corner.
Evaluating his daily routines, this young prince—whom the hidden tribes revered as their Omen King—clearly sustained a life of identical, un-shielded hardship as the lowliest of his people.
Not long after the guests had settled onto their cushions, a pair of massive Omen warriors entered from the shadows, hand-delivering two wooden platters piled high with the roasted meat of gargantuan sewer lobsters. Morgott extracted a handful of gleaming, glazed ceramic cups from his cabinet, pouring warm water for each member of the council before bowing his head. "The environmental variables of this basin score as exceptionally poor; my house petitions your patience regarding the mediocrity of our hospitality."
Lucia desisted from offering any insincere courtly pleasantries. He simply inclined his head in gratitude, reaching his fingers out to harvest a thick segment of the lobster meat straight from the shell to execute a bite. The primitive culinary method of basic boiling implied the flesh would lack any complex, refined flavors. Yet, the precise watch the meat cleared his lips, his marrow instantly registered a powerful, high-voltage current of primordial energy surging violently through his veins.
"The quality scores at an exceptional height," Lucia commented following a brief watch of genuine surprise, his silver eyes flashing. "The fibers compress a remarkably pure layer of energy."
Radahn, who was already aggressively dismantling his portion with an un-courtly appetite, voiced his immediate agreement. "The layout is text-perfect, brother. The absolute purity of this vital current out-scales the reservoirs clutched by many celebrated Golden Knights guarding the upper wall. Does this define the specific force the capital ministries catalog under their titles as the power of the Crucible?"
"The calculation is absolute," Mohg explained from across the table, his fingers casually turning over a shell. "These specialized alpha crustaceans have navigated the deep warrens across vast cycles of time, and their biological frames have steadily, systematically absorbed the ambient currents of the Crucible. Without that continuous energetic nourishment, their carapaces would mathematically never have achieved these colossal dimensions."
"Consequently... the vital force clutched within your own bloodlines operates on an exceptionally volatile, un-bracketed frequency, unconsciously altering the evolutionary parameters of the fauna sharing your perimeter?" Lucia asked, placing his empty shell back onto the platter.
"Perhaps the math reads that way," Morgott answered, a bitter, tragic smile formatting his lips as his cane rested against his knee. "Our flesh was conformed from birth to bear the weight of a defiled curse; it aligns with our destiny that our presence would drop a layer of mutation across the beasts of the earth."
Hearing his elder brother un-roll that negative, self-sacrificing ledger a secondary time, Mohg secretly pursed his jaws, though his mind registered too much exhaustion to lunge into an active argument across the dinner table.
The structural reality of this phenomenon may not score as simply as their traditions believe, Lucia turned the variables over within his thoughts. While these two Accursed Princes and the tens of thousands of exiled Omen packing the underground waterways did indeed constitute the single largest concentration of Crucible energy within a thousand leagues of the Erdtree, their bloodlines were mathematically not the primary source code behind this "defiled curse."
The Omen anomaly—which had suddenly erupted across the realm and registered a massive exponential increase during the Unification Wars—had yet to have its absolute genetic origin traced by the high scholars. The baseline birth rate of horn-bearing children within the royal capital ring out-registered the statistics of the outer provinces by an immense margin, and the ministries possessed zero rational explanations for the disparity. To assert that the physical mutations manifesting across the fauna of the sewer systems emerged strictly from the presence of the Omen children was to completely put the cart before the horse.
Exactly as the active symptoms of the rot disease intensified the closer an operator's boots drew to the capital ring, the seemingly magnificent, un-rivaled golden metropolis rising above their skulls was by no means a pristine, sacred sanctuary; there remained dozens of deep, terrifying secrets hidden behind the foundations of this holy soil.
Could the layout track back to the madness of the Three Fingers? Lucia's mind involuntarily mapped the memory of the colossal, sealed stone gate buried within the deep geometric basements of the capital across his past life, the barrier that securely isolated the Frenzied Flame from the surface.
Yet, tracking the historical logs his intellect had gathered across this current lifetime, the grand caravan of the wandering merchants had not yet suffered their legendary political purge; their lineages had not yet been buried alive beneath the masonry to summon the Flame of Frenzied Ruin through the collective trauma of their annihilation.
"Turning our focus to the architecture, Lord Morgott," Lucia asked tentatively, his tone relaxed. "Does this storage vault define the absolute deepest tier of these subterranean waterways?"
Morgott offered a slow nod, his gravelly voice steady. "The layout is roughly text-perfect. Below these flags lies the absolute structural foundation engineered when the architecture of Leyndell was initial mapped. The strata consists exclusively of reinforced metals and monumental stone pillars that have been systematically enhanced with high-durability sorceries and ancient divine wards."
"Is that the configuration?" Lucia nodded slightly, desisting from pressing the line further.
Commanding the current altitude of his spiritual perception, if Morgott's jaw had formulated a single drop of deception to answer his impromptu inquiry, his vanguard would have detected the variance within a microsecond. Since the Omen prince was disclosing the absolute truth of his ledger, strictly two strategic possibilities remained—either the Flame of Frenzied Madness had yet to manifest its signature within the capital basements, or its core was buried at a geographic depth that far out-scaled the layout of the sewer maps, and the two brothers remained entirely blind to its existence.
He allowed a long breath to escape his lungs, dropping the mystery from his immediate considerations. The tracking of the Frenzied Flame did not constitute the objective of his current deployment, and regardless of what specific horrors sat waiting beneath the stone, his present parameters lacked the voltage to safely touch those cards.
Across the subsequent half-hour, the council finished the platters, their voices turning over trivial matters dividing the upper court and the under-realm. With the trusted presence of Tolisha—who had personally hand-delivered medical salvation to multiple Omen outriders down the timeline—the social equilibrium dividing the group became increasingly harmonious and un-fused.
The exact watch the simple banquet concluded and the two silent attendants cleared the wooden boards, Morgott's features settled into a serious, heavy expression. He had finally reached the primary strategic ledger his tongue had cited before clearing the tunnels.
He cast a highly precise, analytical look at the scarred, un-crested mercenary plate armor encasing the frames of Lucia, Radahn, and Kristoff, his cane striking the flagstones. "Your vanguard has cleared the grates today explicitly to scout the parameters of the Battle Festival commencing a moon down the calendar, correct?"
"My intellect fails to decode by what specific calculation three royal demigods would choose to register their names to participate in an activity engineered strictly for commoners to fight and bleed for the amusement of a box. But regardless of whether your steel is chasing advanced combat training or merely seeking a temporary watch of adrenaline, my voice must hand-deliver a non-negotiable counsel: withdraw your entry scrolls from this festival—at least desist from crossing the line this winter."
Kristoff checked the countenances of the two princes flanking his position, noting their silence, before speaking directly to the Omen lord. "And by what logic do you issue the warning? Does this winter's Battle Festival enclose a variable that separates its format from the previous iterations?"
Morgott let out a dry, ragged cough, his fingers tightening against his iron-bound cane. "By clearing the outer rings, your outriders should already command a comprehensive blueprint of this tournament and the corrupt noble interests backing the sand. Your library likely archives the data point proving the prey chosen for this cycle's hunt defines the Icefield Trolls supplied by the ministerial seals of Duke Duolis. But what your networks have mathematically failed to decode is this: those specific northern entities have completely out-scaled the administrative parameters of common prey."
"Exactly sixty miles north of these walls, nestled within the mountain folds, sits a monumental subterranean Secret Vault belonging to the private house archives of Duke Duolis. Every winter before the opening match of the Battle Festival triggers its compliance, the high nobles of Leyndell temporarily imprison their pre-prepared livestock within that specific bunker. To guarantee those wild tribes lack the capacity to breach their containment to harm the common citizens of the outer ring, Mohg and my own shield permanently execute a secret reconnaissance scout at this watch of the cycle, auditing the species, the exact numerical volume, and the physical stability of the livestock."
"Across the previous cycles, the logs recorded minor herds enclosing roughly two hundred demi-human rebels or Misbegotten thralls; the single highest-voltage threat across the grid was represented by those two sorcery-proficient queens. Our outriders could effortlessly avoid their tracking by simply hiding our campfires within the deeper stone shifts. But this winter... the ledger has suffered a catastrophic deviation."
He let out a heavy, bone-weary sigh, a sequence of deep, uncontrolled coughs rattling his chest before his silver eyes locked back onto Lucia's visage. "My intellect cannot verify whether Duke Duolis has completely lost his sanity, but his private transport lines have crammed over one thousand seven hundred Icefield Trolls into the tight confines of that Secret Vault. And analyzing the ruptured blood vessels formatting their eyes and the frantic, rabid velocity of their movements... every single mountain giant clutched within that dark holds a status of absolute, permanent madness!"
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