Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sonia made everyone rub themselves with sticky leyline sap to mask their smell from the ants, and they took their time looking for a safe way to go up. They observed for a while, spotting a few possible tunnel entry points that very few ants seemed to use, and waited until there was an approach opportunity.

After a long wait, one last ant turned away from the hole, and the group flew up without a word. They all entered the same leyline root tunnel, Pareth first followed by Pestle, Sonia and Sofia. Crowie and Bookie were unsummoned to avoid cluttering the space too much.

“What now, do we send scouts ahead?” Sofia asked Sonia while running behind her.

“No, that’ll only get us spotted and surrounded faster, our only goal is to go up, should be pretty easy. It looks like the tunnels are too narrow for the ants to turn around so if we can get past them they can’t follow.”

“Easier said than done!”

“Told you getting a seed was going to be dangerous! I don’t even know of anyone ever managing to bring one back in the first place!”

Sofia almost stopped in place, “How do you know so much about them, then?!”

“You think the god of mana would have any issue explaining how the leylines work? She used this kind of setting in her books all the time!”

“The fucking erotica?!”

Sonia laughed, “You actually know about those? Didn’t take you for a woman of culture like that! That’s right, but you didn’t hear it from me!”

“I’ve not read many but the settings were never in the forbidden layer!”

“I take it you never read ‘The heretical duke’s magical wood’? It’s a leyline, that’s what the title’s really about! And also his dick!”

“...”

Maybe we deserve the cataclysm.

Through twists and turns the group advanced through the tunnels. Pestle was actually flying ahead, invisible, and managed to always warn everyone in time before they ran into an ant. They managed to avoid the ants through their invisibility and camouflage, letting them pass by, or by diving into side tunnels and dead ends. But that strategy could only work for so long. To avoid one incoming ant they ran back a hundred meters and took the first fork in the tunnel that they found, only to come face to face with another ant.

“Sequance A!” Sonia called out.

While they waited earlier the group had formulated a few possible ways to deal with the ants, and Sonia was given the shotcalling role as her arrows were often the initiator on the plans.

Following her call, she fired an arrow tipped with a tiny glass bead at the ant, curving around Pareth’s side. The arrow sunk right into the ant’s mouth, and the glass bead broke, releasing a foul smelling liquid. For the ants that relied heavily on smell, this was a debilitating blow, though it would not stop it for long.

That was just enough time for Pareth to safely grab both of the ant’s pincers, and Sofia to slide in between his legs, and get under the ant. She got direct contact with the ant’s exoskeleton. Killing it with her usual bone blender technique was impossible with how much her aura was suppressed, but she had enough control to fuse a few key joints and articulations without much effort.

The ant was locked in place, and that was all that really mattered. “Done! Follow!” Sofia said, standing up on the other side of the immobilized ant. Even like this it could start to use its spells as soon as it stopped being distracted by the putrid smell, so they did not have a second to waste. Leaving the ant behind, the group ran even faster than before through the tunnels.

“Did you see it?” Sofia asked the others once they were far enough away and had started slowing down a bit to let Pestle take the scouting job again, “There were a ton of yellow mushrooms growing on the ant’s underside.”

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“I noticed, too,” Sonia answered, “I suppose it’s not surprising, since they’re covered in bark.”

“They were heavily magic-filled,” Sofia added, she knew since her hand had inevitably brushed against the mushrooms when she touched the ant’s exoskeleton.

“As is most everything here, just consider yourself lucky they didn’t shower you in itchy spores.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“If you ever spot orange mushrooms with purple dots, stay the hell away,” Sonia answered.

The tunnel network was quite vast, and even with the focus on taking all the paths up, it seemed like they could climb forever in these roots. More than once the group was spotted and even surrounded, but they managed to always escape the encirclements somehow. Now Sofia even periodically summoned her one worker ant to temporarily seal a tunnel by just standing in it. With this they managed to advance at a good pace. Night eventually fell, and the buzzing of mosquitoes reached even into the root tunnels, but the monsters themselves didn’t, so it did not change anything.

“It looks like the further we go the more ants are covered in mushrooms,” Sofia noted, as the group took a short break in a dead end to recover stamina.

“Yeah, there are even some growing on the roots here and there if you look carefully,” Sonia added, “Definitely not normal. The ants aren’t the smartest, but the tunnels are otherwise very clean so it’s surprising they leave the mushrooms alone like that.”

“Too bad we can’t get a proper system Identify of them down here. Might be that they’re worth a lot and we’re just leaving them behind.”

“They’d have to be worth more than their weight in gold to be worth carrying back,” Sonia said, crouching down to look at the tiny yellow mushrooms growing on the ground from closer up.

“With magical plants you never know what the alchemist might find valuable.”

“I guess it can’t hurt to bring back a sample in a sealed flask, with some luck you can grow them on your skeleton ants outside of the forbidden layer.”

Sofia ended up collecting some mushroom samples in tiny bone vials, hoping it would make Alith happy when she returned. When Sofia’s stamina was back up to full, they got going again.

As they climbed, the winding and random root tunnels slowly turned into long straight lines carved by the ants directly into the leyline wood. They were finally reaching the trunk, but the tunnels kept going, and so did they. The further up they went, the more the mana density should have gone down, as they were moving toward the surface of the forbidden layer. Instead it kept going up, to the point that it started feeling noticeably uncomfortable again. To make the matter worse, the more they went the wider the tunnels were. Already they were getting large enough that the ants could turn around and cross paths by having one on the ‘ground’ and one on the ‘ceiling’. Soon they would be wide enough to let two ants just run side by side.

Nevertheless, the group was getting really good at dealing with the stray worker ants, and they kept pushing, until the tunnels started getting too large.

Sonia raised a hand, “Stop, turn back, we need to find an exit. Those tunnels are getting wide enough to let the big ants in. It’ll be safer to continue outside from now on.”

“No need for an exit,” Sofia interjected, “My skill can carry us out through the trunk.”

Sofia summoned the graveyard Nymphs, who appeared directly inside the walls. Sofia had called for them several times in the root tunnel but they never showed up, they only did ever since they had entered the leyline trunk.

“Do I need to do anything?” Sonia asked.

“Just let the Nymphs grab you into the spiritual plane, they’ll carry us outside.”

Sonia nodded, and grabbed one of the ghostly hands that popped out of the wall like Sofia did.

The Nymphs were abnormally slow, as if pulling the group through a deep swamp, and the spiritual plane was blindingly white like staring into the sun. It was impossible to see anything.

Don’t let us out if there are ants nearby, Sofia ordered the Nymphs as a precaution.

It took almost ten minutes to reach their destination, but the nymphs let the group out of the trunk. The group was standing on a wide branch of the leyline, with no ants in sight.

Sofia looked around, a bit surprised to be suddenly surrounded by bright cyan leaves. The smallest leaves are taller than me. “A single branch is big enough to build an entire city on…” she absent-mindedly commented.

“And the branches get bigger the higher you go. Some leylines are a lot more visible in some of the layer’s wide open areas, they’re truly gigantic. Not to mention the hidden parts.”

“How big is a single leyline?” Sofia asked.

Sonia answered while looking around to make sure there were no ants nearby, “From what I understand, a single one can span tens of thousands of kilometers.”

Sofia seemed to have an epiphany on the spot, “The bones of the world…” she mumbled to herself.