The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family-Chapter 387: A City Like a Corpse (4)

Reidar stayed crouched behind a pile of jagged basalt, focusing on the [Overmind Consciousness] link. The twelve Vorathid Sky-Hunters, shrunk to the size of wasps, moved through the palace's interior.

The first few rooms were empty. They looked like storage chambers, maybe, or offices where the furniture had rotted away or burned, leaving only ash and scorched stone. That actually happened to most of the rooms, so the Sky-Hunters moved on.

The visual feed was dim, but his summons allowed Reidar to map the hallways easily as they passed under high ceilings and through corridors lined with the same darkness.

The more the Sky-Hunters checked around, the more the palace seemed to be an administrative hub of sorts; plus, the architecture reflected a higher social tier of the sort, or at least something belonging to the rich. The government wasn't excluded.

The summons went through the building without problems, which reassured Reidar there were no monsters, until one of the summons found a staircase leading down. It descended into the basement. The insect flew down the steps, and at the bottom they found a corridor lined with heavy doors.

The Sky-Hunter pushed through one of the doors. Inside was a large chamber filled with shelves and tables.

Materials were scattered around: metal ingots, crystal fragments, and bundles of wire. There was much more, of course, but most of it was stuff Reidar couldn't even name, and he had no idea what it was used for. However, there were various degrees of degradation there. Some of the items were intact, but most of them were ruined.

Reidar immediately saw traces of Mara, as she left boot prints on the ash covering the floor of the building, weaving between the shelves and stopping at the center of the room.

But there was something else.

In the center of the room, drawn on the floor in white chalk, in an area cleared of ashes and debris, was a magic circle; It was almost complete. The lines were drawn as if Mara used a ruler or something like that; the anchor points were filled with materials: chunks of metal, fragments of bone, and other small things Reidar didn't know what they were.

On Earth, the Church of Unbinding used thousands of human and monster sacrifices to provide the raw mana needed to bridge the gap between worlds. Here Mara was alone. She didn't have a "battery" of followers to fuel the spell.

Reidar looked at the failed circle. Even though Mara was getting stronger by absorbing the planet's dense and abundant ambient mana, she was still too weak to get fresh materials from monsters, and that was why she was still trying to find the materials by scavenging, rather than getting the mana abundant materials from creatures.

Even if she could kill them, she had no way to do enough in a short amount of time. On Earth, she had infrastructure and people helping her.

Here, she only had what she could find.

<So, Mara had been here… I was right.>

His high A.C.U.M.E.N. and not a scant amount of F.L.I.P. helped him. Though Reidar didn't know how much it was because of his ability to predict correctly what she did or simply because of dumb luck.

However, while the magic circle interested him, there was something else that he put his eyes on. On a central metal table, the Sky-Hunters spotted a rectangular object—a diary made of a grey material Reidar didn't know.

Reidar made the summons check the palace again, but since everything seemed to be ok, he pulled his focus back to his own body.

<The Sky-Hunters found no monsters, and the palace is empty, at least on the ground floor and in the basement; either the Ignis didn't use this place, or something else is keeping them out.>

He paused.

<I'm going in.>

It was a stupid idea, but that diary… Maybe it was important, maybe not. Curiosity was killing Reidar, and since it looked like there was nothing around, going to check it wasn't a bad idea.

<No. It's certainly stupid. I should let the Sky-Hunters bring me that thing but…>

He wanted to go and check the place himself. After all, seeing everything from eyes that weren't his was different.

Besides, he might have missed some clues about Mara. The Vorathid Sky-Hunters weren't exactly good at precision work like this.

Reidar opened his eyes and stood up. He signaled his Apex Menagerie to hold the perimeter at the entrance; they were too large to fit in regardless.

"Stay alert," he said to his wolves, and stepped across the threshold. "And keep ready to bring me out of here."

He looked at the entrance. "This place is a tomb."

His boots echoed on the polished, ash-covered stone. He moved as fast as he could, following the map provided by his scouting bugs, descending the staircase whose balustrades were carved into alien geometries.

The corridors were cold compared to the outside, and the air smelled stale. Reidar summoned the Shadow Sovereigns. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

He reached the lower floor and entered the chamber his Sky-Hunters had found.

The room matched what the Sky-Hunter had shown him—shelves lined the walls, stocked with materials, while tables were covered in tools, fragments, and components, and in the center of the room sat the magic circle.

Reidar approached it slowly, and at that point he got certain that Mara had drawn this; he recognized her work from the incomplete circles he'd found in the other cities.

But while the thing was filled with materials, something must have not worked, which either meant the materials didn't have enough mana in them or that something prevented her from activating it.

<Ok, at least some good news. >

He stood and looked around the room. Mara's boot prints were visible in the ash near the table.

<She must have been here recently.>

A frustrated snarl died in Reidar's throat. Her failure trapped him as surely as it trapped her, and while he was happy she failed, Reidar was also starting to think that there was no way out of this place unless he stepped in and helped her get the materials. But even if he did, was she going to collaborate?

<I doubt. She would most likely kill herself rather than help me get back on Earth.> He paused.

<Where else could she go?>

Reidar pulled out the map and unfolded it. The palace was marked, but there was one more location on the map that he hadn't reached yet. There were many places where Mara could have gone.

<The capital… Yeah… The capital is the best bet, but which are the capital cities among these?>