The first sign that he wasn't alone out here came as footsteps, deliberate, unhurried, closing from somewhere behind him on ground that should have carried no one at all.
"Search," Remus said.
Skill Activated: Search.
Maelstrom Seekers Detected. Ambush Imminent.
He'd read enough, on the road up from the coast, about the twisted little settlement clinging to the Maelstrom's outer edge, fanatics who believed the storm's madness was a door rather than a wound, to know exactly what was closing on him now, and he didn't waste time being surprised by it.
Item Retrieved from inventory: Stone Guardian.
Item Retrieved from inventory: Wind Archer.
Item Retrieved from inventory: Scorch Swordsman.
His three Greater Constructs settled into a loose triangle around him with the same patient creak of joints he'd come to find almost comforting by now, Stone Guardian taking point, Wind Archer covering the flank, Scorch Swordsman's blade already glowing dull orange in anticipation before the first Seeker had fully broken cover.
They came in ragged robes, chanting something in a language Remus's Identify skill flatly refused to translate, and Stone Guardian's first swing scattered the front rank like thrown dice, granite fists connecting with a sound like a quarry collapsing. Wind Archer loosed arrow after arrow into the gaps the Guardian opened, dropping three more before they'd closed half the remaining distance, and Scorch Swordsman waded into the rest with the calm, methodical efficiency of a man harvesting wheat rather than fighting for his life, his blade leaving smoking, cauterized lines through anyone who got close enough to try their luck.
It wasn't clean. A handful of Seekers scrambled up Stone Guardian's own back, clawing for purchase, forcing Wind Archer to spin and fire nearly blind to clear them off before they reached anything vital, and Remus watched, hands tight at his sides, doing the one thing he could never quite make peace with doing: nothing, personally, while three constructs he'd built took every hit meant for him.
By the time the last Seeker broke and fled back toward the settlement's crooked spires, the plain around him was littered with the fallen, and Remus felt the same old itch he always felt after watching his own creations bleed on his behalf: a useless, familiar wish that his class had ever once let him carry a blade of his own into a fight like this, rather than commanding it from three careful steps back.
"I know," he said, quietly, to no one, tucking the thought away with the rest of the ones he never quite finished having out loud. "I know exactly what this looks like from the outside."
Skill Activated: Search.
Abyssal Maelstrom in 20 Meters.
He approached the boundary carefully, Identify already reaching ahead of him before his boots had crossed the last visible line of solid ground.
"Identify."
Poison Gas Detected: Maelstrom Vapor.
Colorless, odorless. Prolonged exposure: hallucination, disorientation, madness, death.
"There's got to be a simpler answer than everyone assumes," he murmured, and set to work.
Craft: Nose Mask. Materials Used: 1 x Cloth, 1 x Charcoal Filter.
Craft: Full Face Respirator. Materials Used: 2 x Leather, 1 x Glass Lens, 1 x Charcoal Filter.
Craft: Breathing Apparatus. Materials Used: 3 x Steel, 2 x Rubber Seal, 1 x Compressed Air Tank.
Item Created: Lesser Construct (Test Subject) x 3.
He sent the first test subject in wearing only the nose mask, and watched it stumble four steps before it folded to the ground and stopped moving entirely. The second, in the respirator, made it perhaps twenty steps further before the same collapse claimed it. The third, sealed fully inside the breathing apparatus, walked on into the churning grey fog and simply kept walking, its steady, mechanical footfalls fading until Remus lost the sound of them entirely.
He waited longer than felt comfortable, charcoal turning between his fingers, the Maelstrom's low, constant howl doing nothing to settle the dread of not knowing whether a thing he'd built with his own hands had just been lost for good. When the construct finally re-emerged, steady, intact, its apparatus's lenses fogged but unbroken, Remus felt something in his own chest unclench that he hadn't fully registered clenching in the first place.
"Store. Preserve," he said, pulling the construct back into his inventory whole rather than breaking it down, the way he'd learned to keep anything complex enough to be worth calling by name, and fitted a matching apparatus over his own face before he let himself think too hard about what he was about to do next.
The fog swallowed him whole three steps later, and the world on the other side of it opened into a vast chamber carved from raw stone, at its center a gate built from stacked, glowing runes and two towering pillars, light pulsing along its arch in slow, patient waves.
"Identify," Remus said.
Item Identified: Nexus Gate.
"I don't imagine there's a version of this where I don't just walk straight in," he said, mostly to steady his own nerve, and stepped through the light before he could talk himself into thinking better of it.
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