911 Back From The Mines
Angelina and her party joined us for today's dinner inside of Ambil's workshop. The place has never been this lively before. Ambil had been rather overwhelmed with all the people constantly getting inside his house, but he had already grown a bit used to it after a couple of weeks. He was just happy to have many friends I believe. Despite the outer layer of his personality, which is rough and a bit grumpy, he was someone that was always craving for connections and bonds with others, someone very lonely.
"Just how many friends are you bringing to my house now, Planta?" He complained again, although he didn't seem all that angry actually.
"Hahaha, we're sorry for coming all the time, Ambil. We appreciate your hospitality though." Angelina laughed out loud while drinking a huge jug of beer in a single drink. "Phew! Nothing beats pigging out inside BNLO, where I don't have to care about my weight or whatever!" She said that right before beginning to munch of a giant dragon burger I had prepared with leftover dragon monster meat.
"You're such an alcoholic, Angelina. Just how much are you drinking every day inside of BNLO?" Wondered Anikitty. "Is this how you'll get better?" She was eating a lot herself.
"I think we shouldn't be talking about such things…" Gandalf sighed. "Ahem! Anyways, about what we found; it was quite a lot of stuff."
"Yeah, here." Erdrich said, quickly giving me a bag full of stuff.
"Oh? Wait, this is…."
I quickly stored the bag inside my inventory before its odor were to leak out. It was a bag full of Demonic Crystal Shards and also of broken demonic relics and another demon book! It was quite surprising to find this inside a single bag. Did they had to handle the materials so roughly?!
"Those shards inside are from a Demonic Core." Angelina explained while cleaning her mouth with a handkerchief. "We had to shatter that thing into pieces, so the Demonic Beasts stopped being born. It would have escalated to something even worse if we didn't have the assistance of the Queen's Shadows."
"Demonic Core? What's that?" Rita asked curiously. "Come on, tell us the juicy details."
"Well, first of all…"
Angelina was the worst at explaining how things went, so it was up to Gandalf to tell us. He told us that they had gone to the mines as per request of the King. After all, we found three routes leading to the origin of the demonic book we once found.
The first route we took led us to the noble district where we discovered Lord Magica and his malefic family of zombie demon chimeras, which ended on him becoming a demon himself. However, there were two other routes.
One of them led to the Mine Dungeon where this city extracts a large quantity of their resources from, owned by the Kingdom, there are all kinds of workers there, from miners to hired mercenaries and adventurers to clear the areas out of monsters.
They walked through a special route that led them where they ended confronting the Demonic Beasts. Apparently, these creatures were hiding very deep into the dungeon, in between many very tight corridors almost inaccessible to most.
"We had to really get rough with the walls. We blasted them using magic and made Erdrich's undead carry out all the rubble for us to keep moving." Said Gandalf.
"You really worked them to the bone there, hah!" Erdrich laughed over his lame pun.
"Anyways, so once we got to the end of it, we found them nya." Said Anikitty, drinking some cold milk tea. "We had to be sneaky though, there were at least two hundred of them roaming around, watching over the rest, which were still developing eggs."
"So you found a whole nest full of demonic beast eggs?!" Jenny cried. "Eeek, that's freaking creepy! And how did they look like? Wait, what are Demonic Beasts anyways?"
"They're like Monsters infected with Demonic Miasma, they become stronger and smarter, and often obey someone that has some authority over them, like a demon or a demonic cultist." I explained. "Or so I believe it is…"
"There wasn't a single soul aside from those insect-like creatures though." Angelina said. "Only that, the Demonic Core in the center of an altar, surrounded by a very complex Magic Ritual Circle containing countless Demonic Runes, it had the shape of a Pentagram, and it was drawing power from who knows where to fuel that huge red crystal."
"The red crystal was then controlling the Demonic Beasts, like some kind of Artificial Intelligence left there to take care of them…" Gandalf said. "It certainly had a mind of its own, and masterfully controlled the Demonic Beasts to protect itself."
"Though, we ultimately managed to shatter it. Once that happened, most of the Demonic Beasts were unable to fight back with coordination and fell against our army of summons and AOE attacks, mostly coming from Gandalf and Angelina." Said Anikitty. "Those assassin shadow guys that serve the Queen though, they were really strong. Only around ten of them came with us, led by a really pretty woman. But they were able to handle half the Demonic Beasts and allow us to break the Demonic Core in time!"
"Yeah, anyways, once we destroyed the core, we had to quickly slay the rest of the monsters. We got plenty of EXP out of the entire process." Erdrich nodded. "We're getting closer to max level already. Doing World Quest-related stuff always brings a ton of EXP man."
"And so when you destroyed that Demonic Core, you found these things?" I asked while browsing through my inventory. "Another book almost identical to the one we found back then. I don't even want to grab it because I'm totally getting a headache again. And then there's the crystal shards, and some broken relics? They look like rings, bracelets, candles… imbued with pentagrams and demonic energy."
"Yeah, we suspect they used that to perform a Demonic Ritual." Angelina nodded. "The shadows went back to the Queen with the rest of the things, they didn't let us grab everything for ourselves. There were more books they took."
"So that's how it is…" I nodded.
"However, there's something else we wanted to show you, Elayne." Angelina suddenly took out something.
