Axl spent much of the rest of the day studying Brosia and laying the groundwork for creating some sort of counter or antiserum. However, as nighttime approached, he decided it was time to head out and do what he had come for, or at least scope out his targets. Hopefully, even if he fully raised the alarm in the city, he'd have more than enough time to escape before the metal dryad and her forces could rush back.

  The moat ringing the inner wall was oddly clean-looking, a turbid green and dense with algae that felt refreshing to [Mana Shroud]. He was taking an idle walk along the inner city, passing by upscale shops and dimly-lit restaurants, even buildings where half-naked elves and various other types of women beckoned to the passers-by. While he pretended to focus on some distraction or other, he was in fact carefully eyeing the guards atop the inner wall, their regular patrols and occasional glances down at the idle hubbub beyond the moat.

  Their attention was not lapsing often, but it did have holes in them, the patrols not quite dense enough to cover the entirety of the wall's ring, often a slightly rushed pair leaving a gap in detection behind them as they paced ever so slightly ahead of the next pair of guards behind them. Still, they were all in early F-Grade and likely focused on Perception and perhaps even had dedicated detection Skills, so Axl didn't want to underestimate these defenses.

  So he spent several hours trading, unloading much of his more useless gear and exchanging it for F-Grade stuff. He didn't find anything particularly useful, the single most interesting being a [warm stone] that, if eaten, would give you a single Attribute point in Endurance, Perdurance, or Blockage, whichever of the physically defensive Attributes one happened to have. It wasn't even particularly expensive, since it grew at a decent rate from the nearby mines and was only usable once per grade. More than using it directly, Axl hoped he could learn how to make a better empowerment potion by studying it, so he bought five of them.

  As the small hours of late night approached and the bustle of the street life grew quieter, Axl entered a narrow alley between buildings, ducking behind a corner to look out at the moat and the inner wall's patrols. Moxlin activated the talismans she'd prepared for this kind of occasion, and a bubble of air surrounded her face.

  Right as Axl saw a gap in the patrols, Axl quietly dove into the murky moat water, then quickly swam down, breathing in the dense, loamy water through his gills. They barely required any purification with his poison-clearing organ, mostly just filtering out some grime, and even that became less dense as he descended. He swam down for over a minute, surprised by how deep the moat was. Still, it was a lucky break, since it would make it even less likely for them to be caught sneaking in.

  The waters ahead seemed clear of any threats or traps, as far as he could tell with [Mana Shroud], but he still proceeded slowly, carefully and deliberately crossing the bottom of the moat. He was, in fact, relieved when he saw a trap, a large triangle nearly reaching up to his waist, half-hidden behind some fake algae. Clearly, it was meant more to attack large, charging vessels or creatures than a single person sneaking in, likely from the yearly sieges the greater obelisk triggered. After that first one, there were several more, and after a few careful minutes sidestepping the bulky traps, Axl reached the other side.

  The inner wall was contiguous with the edge of the moat, there being no inner shore to speak of, which he presumed was supposed to make any approach harder. It only helped Axl, however, because he simply started to scale the wall, figuring that he'd be largely invisible to any patrols until he was basically on top of them. He was afraid somebody from the buildings on the other side of the moat would see him, but there was nothing he could do about that, other than wear his darker backup armor and hoping either nobody would be up or willing to get involved in something like this if they happened to notice.

  Still, he paused just before leaving the waterline, straining to see if he could detect the patrols above, but with the distance and beyond the stone, his Perception simply couldn’t reach, even fully boosted by [Mana Shroud]. However, he did notice a set of F-Grade creatures in the water, appearing right at the edge of his range and closing in on his position, and Axl took that as an indication that he should just go on, feeling lucky he didn't have to fight creatures underwater, possibly drawing undue attention to his approach before he even got started.

  He reached the middle of the wall without problems, then noticed one of the creatures breaking through the water below, and he kept still, even as the large creature leapt up, reaching out to him with a long, webbed arm, but barely missing before dipping back into the water. It looked like an alligator of sorts, but with long arms and legs, its Mana so water-attuned Axl had difficulty detecting it past the water's surface, its sharp claws and hard scales clearly indicated other affinities as well.

  Slowly, he kept climbing, looking upwards, in case one of the patrols looked down at the splash, even if the noise was much quieter than Axl would've expected for the creature's bulk. But nobody looked, luckily.

  Just as Axl was a meter away from the edge of the wall, he saw a talisman along the wall, deftly colored to blend into the rock. An alarm array, producing a simple line connecting to another talisman to the left and right, that if crossed would alert the defenders. Axl smiled and quickly shrugged twice with a shoulder, his quiet indication for Moxlin to come out. He felt he could've dealt with the glyphic construct himself, but might as well let the dedicated artisan do it.

  She crawled to the top of his head and stared at the talisman for a moment, then reached to it with a forepaw and made a minuscule, almost invisible set of alterations to one of the trajectory glyphs. The detection thread of the talisman linking that one to its nearby ones now was within the wall's stone, and even with a close inspection, the alteration would probably look like a fabrication defect, not a break-in, unless being examined by a real F-Grade master of the art.

  Axl waited for the next set of patrols to pass, then he leapt over the ledge. He had planned to quickly leap into the inside of the wall, but one of the patrol members turned his head to look at his partner, continuing their idle conversation, and Axl froze, thinking he had been detected.

  But the guard simply looked ahead, nothing in her body language indicating he'd been seen. Axl stared at their back for another few seconds, then finally looked over the inner lip of the wall.

  The area was even more clear of people than before, so Axl leapt down, rolling as he hit the ground to soften the sound of his landing, then rushed to the nearest warehouse, behind a series of mine carts lined up against the side of the building. He stopped and waited, the long seconds tense as he expected the loud, shrilling alarm to come up, what the kobold described as the wail that would always come up from the inner walls when somebody was caught sneaking in. Fortunately, it had only happened a handful of times in his twenty years of memory, so it wasn't a regular occurrence.

  After a full three minutes, Axl was convinced he was in the clear, and slowly and meticulously he started to make his way to the central dome, [Mana Shroud] fully focused on making his Mana contiguous with the air's. Furthermore, he activated one of Moxlin's camouflage arrays, turning his body semi-translucent. It was the latest project they had decided she should try to get him, since learning that the void treasure was in a settlement, requiring exactly the kind of sneaking around they were currently doing. The array was quite easier than the illusion array she'd previously learned that would make an entire copy of Axl, so she had managed to get the hang of the F-Grade craft easily enough. Unfortunately, it required some prep to activate, setting several talismans in a circle around him, and placing some on his body, so he wasn't confident he could've done it outside the moat, or that the array would function properly underwater, so he left it for when inside.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  The central dome had only one entrance, a large doorway with metallic minecart treads leading into it. This was a problem, since Axl expected such a large single point of entrance to be well-defended and monitored, even if it was not trapped, which was unlikely. So he settled nearby, inside one of the minecarts, below a loose tarp that covered it. There were pieces of some odd orange ore in the corner of the cart emanating a strange Mana signature, so Axl swifly put as much of it as he could into a small box and took it into his chest ring, to look at more carefully later.

  He then settled in to monitor that entrance, and barely an hour later, it opened, the large double doors opening fully as a heavily armored soldier in the middle of the F-Grade stepped out, waiting outside the door.

  Within, Axl could see a tree in the center of the dome. It was massive, taking up much of the dome, its trunk almost leaving the bounds of the major obelisk, the spiritual glyphic construct neatly centered on the large plant. The tree had a silver coloration, somewhat reminiscent of the metal dryad's body, and glowed gently, filling the area with a light that spilled out into the packed dirt ground just outside the dome.

  The tree had knotted, dense roots that filled the dome, even jutting out of the ground, all of it gripping the orange ore which filled the ground and almost every nook and cranny between its roots. Strangely, none of the roots were allowed to leave the dome, flaring up as they reached the edge of their enclosure, but unable to go beneath, suggesting the dome might be closer to a sphere, also cutting into the ground itself.

  The tree itself was undoubtedly where the void natural treasure was located, Axl's Call of the Void clearly honed into a point just below the tree, right where the trunk met the soil. This was a problem, since he felt it would take quite a lot of effort to displace or dig around that massive tree.

  More importantly, he saw two other fighters at the base of the tree, both at least in the middle of the F-Grade. The one that left the building was soon joined by a kobold, also in heavy armor, and the kobold went inside, while the heavily armored elf left. A change in the guard was staggered so only one of the three guardians would swap out at a time.

  Axl exhaled, wondering if he could somehow take on those odds, perhaps by sneaking in when one of the guards waited for their swap, then taking in three at once? But that could easily turn to four at once, if he got discovered, not to mention any alarms that would bring in even more reinforcements. Not to mention that each of these could be approaching Soffal and Suliana's power, and he was unsure if he could take even one of them.

  He thought for a moment, staring at the closed door, feeling so close, yet the risk of trying any more now seemed unjustified. After a few more frustrated minutes, he even turned to Moxlin, but she quietly shook her head when she saw the look on his face, and returned to his pack without a word.

  Annoyed, Axl ducked into one of the warehouses, wanting to see if he could steal some stuff before getting Aria out. He justified the impulse by saying to himself that this could throw the dryad off his true goal of the void-attuned treasure, perhaps painting him as a simpler thief of opportunity. But the reality was that he really only wanted to vent his frustration at the setback.

  The entrance to the warehouse closest to Aria's prison wasn't protected by any talismans, and the door was even unlocked. Slowly, Axl crept in, needing a moment for his eyes to accommodate to the gloom.

  He blinked, unsure of what he was seeing. He'd seen some messed up stuff in the Vikam invasion, and thought he'd survived through enough not to be shocked by anything else. Still, but he still froze at the warehouse entrance, seeing countless corpses strewn out in clusters, near the base of growing clumps of orange ore. The bodies were frozen in place, faces contorted in fear or pain, their bodies contiguous with the orange ore growing from them like fruit from a tree.

  He slowly approached the nearest clump, still unable to process what this meant, seeing with [Mana Shroud] an elven boy barely older than him, his internal Mana slowly fading as it turned into the twisted orange ore. Axl then realized the final effect of Brosia, it helped this process along, a transitory state between any given internal Mana or core and producing the ore.

  Luckily, Axl could tell they were all dead, their brains necrotic and souls long faded, their lingering cultivation being propagated by the strange green liquid taken root. A relief, since at first, he thought they were all still alive, in a state of perpetual torment.

  "Wow, this is a really efficient web," said Moxlin, her voice quiet. "And I thought us spiders were brutal with eating our children that weren't worth the investment. Guess we have nothing on metal dryads. "

  "Do you think they know?"

  "What?"

  "The guards, the dryad's elite. Do they know about this? Do they drink Brosia themselves? Or that they get something from this too, say from that big tree."

  Moxlin shrugged. "It doesn’t seem like a particularly big secret. We did just walk in here, after all, and there are a lot of corpses here. But I sure doubt most of the people outside do, wouldn't be so many takers if it was common knowledge, and the kobold you rifted sure didn't mention it when talking about Brosia or the dryad."

  Axl frowned as he considered the situation more fully. This wasn't just a pile of enemy corpses being reused for something, this was the dryad's own people. The kobold he captured had spoken with admiration and some loyalty about her, and having your cultivation corrupted like this felt like a violation.

  Wasn't the dryad powerful enough without resorting to this kind of thing? Her tree was placed at a major obelisk, and she had a straight-up army at her command. Was this kind of cruelty really necessary? Something about it reminded him of the Vikam elves and their casual violence, the lack of efficiency and wastefulness in how they fought.

  Axl took a long breath, recentering himself, and proceeded to the other end of the warehouse, beyond which should be Aria's prison. On the way, he idly swiped the contents of various full or half-full carts, taking as much of the orange ore as possible, if only to spite what was going on here in some small way.

  At the far door, he looked out at the many lines of corpses neatly stacked in the corner, waiting to be infused, almost six dozen people in simple white frocks that reminded him of a hospital gown similar to the ones used in Piril. He took those also, their hearts beating despite a nearly liquefied brain, Mana corrupted into a sickly green mockery of life and nature. They were more reagent than living creature, since they could be so easily taken into his dimensional storage to begin with.

  He tried taking some from the orange clusters too, but they were merged with the ore, which itself was merged into the floor, so he couldn't pry it away without it dissolving into a disgusting slurry of barely held together bodyparts and viscera.

  Behind the corpse pile, Axl saw a large trapdoor with staircases that led far down, a set of gurneys at the end of the staircase. Clearly, the bodies were transported this way, likely to avoid drawing attention to the masses of dead being sent to the inner sanctum of the city.

  Outside, Axl crouched behind a line of empty mining carts, again pausing for a few minutes to make sure he was still undetected and no alarms raised, then looked up at Aria's prison nearby, a bleached skeletal rib, as if a segment of a giant snake was carved up and stuck to the ground. A simple, two-meter-high wall surrounded it, no guards outside the wooden door leading in.

  Taking another few moments to regain his bearings, Axl refocused on [Mana Shroud], noticing Moxlin's camouflage array was about to fade, but would certainly make it this last stretch. They both examined the door for traps and arrays, and finding none, opened it and walked in, quietly closing it behind them.