12 Miles Below

Gear rustled and clinked as our team trekked through the rocky ground. Wordlessly, we reached a good stopping point for the day, and sounds of packs settling down on the ground rang out as we all split into our respective task. A camp was setup and manned pretty soon, before we split into different groups for meditation or overwatch. Today was ration bars a la salt. Not a lot of fresher things to find in a dead serile mite city, unfortunately. Not even bugs.

I’d spent some time underground already with four other Winterscar knights and Captain Sagrius, they’d ‘escorted’ me to the undersider city where Kidra was last known. I say escorted with quotes here because we were all powerful enough to solo travel around the underground even back then, so the escort was mostly ceremonial. The trouble was what could possibly be waiting at the end, that’s what they’d come down for.

The same applied here. Even the exact same knights had come down with me. Allaris, Zent, all the regulars I’d seen at the Winterscar courtyard, running drills and practice with Kidra. Not every single Winterscar knight, but ten of our best along with the Captain.

Now most were running occult drills and training within the digital sea inside Cathida’s armor, forcing the engram herself to drill them. Others were sitting around the camp, quietly talking or keeping an eye out to the distance. Captain Sagrius had become a nexus of sorts, due to the amount of clan knight souls he carried within him.

Those were venerable knights within, each having decades of experience. They’d come down and then deliberately followed Lord Atius because they’d already lived a full life. Their estate and dependents were grown and taken care of. The wealth of experience among all of them were exactly what the new Winterscar knights needed down here. They felt they could do the most good by coming with us on the expedition.

The Winterscar knights had a more… religious aspect to it. I’ve told them everything already - they all knew I hadn’t done anything dramatic with the gods, just happened to be in the right place at the right time and made the best of things.

They were convinced I was on some kind of quest that would change the world. In their defense, we were camping out with the first Feather in centuries to break free mentally, and escorting her down to where she’d be able to break free physically as well. And the mites certainly seemed to think there was something to Wrath and her destiny. So while helping her be free isn’t going to change the world - Wrath herself might go on to do something that could.

We grabbed our gear, packed the camp up, and set back off. Searching through empty streetways and taking quick glances through buildings.

Underground remained consistent to what I’d been used to on the other hand. A routine quickly took place in our group. We would search through different sections of the mite city for that terminal, find a place to camp out when we struck out for the day, sleep and move on the next day.