X Centaurus Ch 01

"This is getting kind of-- okay, extremely dangerous!" yelped Fey as the enchanted suit of armour angrily stomped toward them.

The suit of armour ignored her words of course and lunged at the four of them in a screech of grinding metal, eager to kill. Its sword slashed out but Vivi's glowing longsword swung up in a brilliant counter and sliced open the armour's front revealing the completely empty interior. The enchanted armour clanked and stumbled backwards in time for the dozen weapons telekinetically orbiting Flora's floating body to zip forward and smash into it, hammers, daggers, and spikes, to crush, slice, and pierce.

The enchanted armour resisted and they fought on.

Fey, and the adventuring band she was a member of, had earlier descended into the dungeon assuming it was like any other, and it had appeared that way at first, simple slimes, a few dim-witted goblins, nothing they couldn't handle.

But then the monsters had started to get tricky. Enchanted suits of armour weren't exactly unheard of, but the strange craftsmanship of the armour was unlike anything any of them had ever seen, all angular spikes and cruel edges with black bladed swords in armoured fists.

The leader of their band, a strong willed red-headed elf named Ellaria, wasn't one to back down from a challenge however and she had blasted the armours apart with her typically explosive style of pyromancy. Mostly that seemed to do the trick, but sometimes an armour was strong enough to hold itself together under the barrage and they were forced to fight up close. That meant Vivi, a five foot white-furred fox biped, and Flora, a three and a half foot pink-haired shortstack gnome. Not exactly typical races for dangerous fighting.

The enchanted armour they were currently battling was starting to look pretty ragged and each step it took had a stuttering tremble. The band relaxed slightly seeing that it was close to going down, but suddenly the armour surged forward in a last desperate attack. Its sword came up and Vivi only had a moment to cry out before the blade slashed up her side spraying blood over her white fur.

"No!" screamed Ellaria as Vivi slowly slumped to the ground, a paw clutched to her side.

Ellaria thrust her palm forward and a cone of fire obliterated the heavily damaged armour sending chunks of flaming metal careening down the stone corridor.

"Fey! Heal her!"

Fey trotted forward and lowered herself down beside the fallen vulpine fox girl, not so easily done being a centaur, but still, she managed. She held out her hands over the wound and after a moment it began to heal over, the wound sealing and leaving clean snow-white fur behind.

Vivi breathed a sigh of relief and climbed to her feet. She held out her paw and Fey grasped it, grateful for the help to get her hooves under her. She was small for a centaur, her horse body more pony like than horse like, meaning that the top of her head only came up to a little under six foot eight inches.

"Thanks for that, I should have seen that attack coming, my fault."

"No problem, I'm just glad you're okay."

The fox girl smiled shyly up at Fey.

"I was wrong about you, you are good at what you do, I guess I was being kinda speciest expecting you to fight. I really should know better, it's not like I don't get flak for being a front liner with my height and build."

"O-oh, it's fine, just got to keep in mind not to judge a book by its cover, aha..."

"Hey hey hey, enough with the feelings and stupid shit, we're in a dungeon, save that crap for later," said the gnome. She was levitating herself in a reclined position as though relaxing on an invisible couch. Various sharp metal instruments lazily orbited around her.

"I wouldn't put it quite that way but we do need to focus, this dungeon is unusually dangerous. Speaking of which," said Ellaria as she turned to look down the gloomy heavy stone blockwork corridor.

A clanking and scraping sound filled the air and around the corner dozens of enchanted armours stomped, each holding up a black long sword in a pair of armoured fists.

"That's a bit more than just unusually dangerous Ella! If we fight that we're gonna die!" yelped Vivi staring at the oncoming wall of metal.

"Er, right. Run!"

Ellaria double palmed the air and a pair of massive fireballs shot down the corridor to explode and fill it with light and fire. She turned on her heel and legged it in the opposite direction, quickly catching up to the rest of the band who were already making haste. Behind them the wave of living metal charged through the fire, their metal bodies wreathed in flames.

The group dashed down the gloomy stone corridors, Fey's hooves clacking against ancient stone while Flora whizzed through the air.

They rushed into the chamber that contained stairs back up to previous floors and the exit. The problem was that there was now no stair to be seen.

Fey looked around in disbelief. Where there had once been a rectangular hole in the wall with a broad set of stairs up there was now flat heavy stonework with no indication there had ever been an exit there at all.

"What the fuck?! What is this!" cried Flora. She hurled an orbiting hammer at the wall and it pinged off without even marking it.

Ellaria eyed the blank stone warily.

"This isn't a normal dungeon. Somethings wrong here."

"You think?! Blow a hole in the damn wall already!" yelled Flora jabbing a finger at it.

Ellaria set her jaw and brought up her hands. She hurried as the sound of clanking metal became distantly audible.

A huge azure fireball swiftly coalesced out of the air and then compressed in her palms to about the size of a fist.

"Get back."

The others rushed to do so as she hurled it at the stone. The fireball rocketed forward and struck the wall with an ear splitting roar. Blue fire washed out and away from the impact point until half the room was ablaze.

The group squinted and peered through the fire but as the flames died out they could only look on in dismay at the completely undamaged stonework.

The sound of metal boots entering the room broke the silence.

Fey didn't hesitate. She grabbed Vivi and Ellaria and tossed them onto her back and galloped full tilt away from the armour with Flora floating in her wake. She picked one of the many corridors leading out of the chamber and fled down it leaving the armour in her dust.

"We've no choice! There's gotta be another way out!"

Ellaria hooked an arm around the centaur's waist and leant forward.

"No, I don't think there is another way out. This dungeon, it's telling us we need to kill the boss before it will let us leave."

"That's insane! Dungeons aren't alive!" cried Vivi.

"This one is it seems, or at least being controlled somehow."

"Fuck that plan! That's just a shit way to die! You saw how nasty those armour fucks are, their boss is gonna fuck us up waayy more!"

"Got any better ideas?"

The gnome scowled at her.

"Exactly. Buck up or button up, we're going down."

Ellaria jabbed a finger ahead and Fey followed it to see a stair through one of the many side passages ahead. She slowed and stepped inside. She paused to let Ellaria and Vivi off her back and the band made their way down the steps, Fey awkwardly, centaurs were not made for stairs.

This stair seemed larger and longer than the one they had descended originally, and grander, revealing itself as their meagre light descended into the blackness. It took them nearly half an hour to travel to the bottom of the huge shadowed stair. They even had to break a few times to rest. Vivi mentioned several times how strangely gigantic the stair was, none of the band had come across anything like it in a dungeon before.

It felt like it took forever but, eventually, they reached the bottom. A massive door over twenty foot tall greeted them at the end. Bronze and verdigris with age and wear it featured strange strutted helix-like designs in relief and what looked like eggs framed in leafy laurels. Large angular runes were engraved at the top of the door but none of them had any clue what it said, the language was completely unknown to them.

"This is probably the important bit, you don't put nothing behind a door like this," said Vivi in a hushed tone.

"Why are you whispering, The doors closed," said Flora drifting past, a finger twisting in her ear mining for wax.

"I- hey! stop criticising, this place is spooky!" said Vivi defensively.

"Whatever you say foxy. Look, I'll handle this."

The gnome sat up and stretched on her invisible floating couch. She cracked her knuckles, and then waved her hands vaguely at the door. The door trembled and vibrated on its hinges, dust and dirt and patches of degraded metal flaking away as it shook. Then, with a terrible screeching grinding sound the door began to swing slowly open, leaving a mess of debris in its wake.

The band cautiously peeked inside as it widened. There wasn't much to be excited about, just darkness. As the doors fully opened they stepped inside, nervously looking around.

Darkness swelled around them, the small island of light from a yellow flame that hovered over Ellaria's head a lonely pool in the oppressive pitch-black.

Fey's hooves echoed noisily against the flagstone as the band made their way forward.

"Hello! Anybody out there!... Come and get some!" yelled Flora.

Vivi shot her an angry glare.

"Stop that! Gods, can't you take anything seriously for once in your life!"

Flora blew a raspberry at the white furred fox.

A small red light suddenly flicked on. Fey wasn't sure if it was small or just really far away. In any case, it was only a dot in the sheer black wall of lightlessness.

The band stared at it, frozen and ready to bolt.

A metal sounding clunk and an echoing bang made them flinch.

Suddenly a voice echoed out of the darkness. It sounded mechanical and metal, an incredibly artificial voice.

[Welcome to the collection facility. Facility currently in er--ERR--error.]

"What was that language? What did it say?"

"Dunno, never heard anything like it."

[Facility has been operating for ten, thous- thousa- hundred- year, years, years. M.I Magical Intelligence tasked with magically syphoning Virility from all life forms planet wide and storing for reseeding after collapse of creator's civilization ten- thousan- hundred- thousand years ago.]

"How do we shut it up? Where's the boss?"

[Creators failed to preserve any number of their kind for rebuilding before collapse. Facility without target. Facility operating on original command. Facility currently failing to contain collected Virility. Exceeding maximum containment despite cannibalising material from unused lower cities to build additional bays, despite extreme unprecedented levels of Virility compression, despite use of emergency overflow tanks. Facility is currently seven hundred trillion units past original specification of Virility containment.]

A clunk caused a very distant flood light to turn on, then another, then another, the lights clunked on one by one getting nearer as they came to life. Once they reached the hundreds Fey realized she was looking down a stupendously vast hall that had to be at least ten miles long and a mile tall. The walls and floor were slanted inward and vast cylindrical glass tanks filled every free spot each containing a large lakes worth of white fluid. Rows and rows of the things, an unimaginable amount of fluid.

The band stared open-mouthed at the insane space, mind-bogglingly vast. Then, to their side, the next floodlights started clunking to life. Their eyes swivelled to see another hall the same size as the first, endless seas of massive glass containers. They gulped as the next row of lights began to flick on, then the next. In total there were seven of these stupendous halls that all converged on a massive stone platform that the band had emerged out onto.

Even the usually snarky and foul-mouthed gnome could do nothing but stare with her jaw slack and her eyes wide in sheer disbelief.

"Wh-What...?"

"What is this? What is this?!"

"I don't know! I don't know! I don't know!"

The group trembled in fear. This was grandiosity and architecture on an unimaginable scale far beyond anything they had seen in their lives.

"What the fuck have we stumbled on?! My gods, this is insanity! Who could build such a thing!"

"This place is old magic, ancient magic," whispered Vivi. "Dragons, Titans, some crazy species like that- they made this, this, whatever this is."

"There's no boss is there? This was never a dungeon, we were just walking through an automated security checkpoint."

"Does seem that way."

"W-well what do we do? Who the fuck do we even tell about this?!"

"The Queen?"

"No way, fuck that bitch, you're thinking all wrong. The question is how do we turn a profit off this for ourselves."

"Flora, we don't even know what we're looking at, an endless supply of white stuff. It could be as worthless as water."

"Hmpph."

The group were interrupted from further argument by another mechanical grinding sound, this time from below the platform. They turned to see a bronze orb with a verdigris green patina slowly rise up from in front of the platform. That wouldn't have been that intimidating except for the fact that the orb must have been over six hundred foot in diameter, a vast thing, its body made from colossal shifting plates of bronze that glided over each other eerily. The center of the orb was shaped like an eye with the plates forming into an iris, the center a cross.

"Who said there was no boss? Gods save us."

[Stored Virility of all civilizations and entire biosphere at limit. Emergency externalizing totality into closest soul container.]

"We should go. We should definitely go. Whatever it just said does not sound good."

"It... It could be friendly?"

The rest of the band looked at Ellaria in disbelief.

They were distracted however by a rumbling, the floor upon which they stood began to shake as though struck by an earthquake. Fey panicked and her hooves slipped on the stone causing her to fall to the ground along with Ellaria and Vivi.

"Fey!"

An ear shattering sucking sound rent the air and the band looked on in shock as the white stuff in every single container began to drain downward into huge meters thick clear flexible tubes that ran between every tank. Each tube bulged outward alarmingly as the white stuff was forced into it.

The white stuff swiftly ran through every tube and rushed toward the platform. The shaking increased, plumes of dust and rubble fell from the ceiling as incalculable volume and mass was shifted at immense speed. The Band looked below the giant floating eye and saw that hundreds of massive clear flexible tubes ran up into its underside. The white shot up the tubes and into the orb. The orb shuddered as the entirety of all the tens of thousands of lake sized tanks gushed into it. It sunk in the air as though carrying an impossible weight. Each plate on its body rattled and shook as though trying to hold together and barely managing to do so. At last the white stuff stopped flowing in, the halls were emptied, and the orb hung heavy in the air. Its body had near doubled in size as plates shifted and ground against each other desperately trying to hold it all back.

Flora floated forward and stared down the giant mechanical eye.

"Hey, stop stealing my loot! That stuff was mine by finders keepers losers weepers right!"

[Target acquired. Injecting- Injec- Extreme orders of magnitude overload- Warning, safety measures engaged. Safety measures overridden. Target acquired. Injecting totality now.]

The gnome blinked up at the massive construct as a point of white light began to glow at the center of the eye.

"Flora!" Fey cried. She scrambled to her hooves and galloped forward as the light from the eye became so bright that everything went white. Shading her eyes Fey leapt and grabbed the gnome by the ankle and flung her backwards as an even brighter light lanced from the eye.

She could do nothing as the light struck her, she convulsed as she was frozen in the air, white light bathing her body as it streamed from the rapidly shrinking bronze orb. Then it finished and she dropped to the ground.

[Total collected Virility of thousan- hundred- hundred thousand ten- years of entire planet emergency externalized into nearest target soul. M.I Returning to original syphoning and build up directive.]

The orb lifted up in the air and the hundreds of massive clear tubes detached from it to fall to the ground over a thousand feet below with a deafening crash that caused the entire structure to shake.

"Oh no! Fey!"

The gnome, vulpine, and elf rushed toward her.

Fey looked up groggily.

"I'm fine, I think, whatever that was must have missed, or it's broken.

"Are you sure?" said Ellaria as she carefully checked over the centaur's body. "You... You look okay..."

Fey stretched her limbs.

"I feel fine, actually, I feel pretty good!"

"I don't think that was an attack to make you feel better Fey but that's not important right now," said Vivi looking up. The trembling hadn't stopped, in fact with the fall of the tubes it had started to get worse and blocks of stone were beginning to come loose from the ceiling. "I think we need to get out of here, like right now!"

Fey looked up in dismay as a block of stone the size of a mansion detached from the roof and slammed down amongst the glass containers.

She scrambled to her hooves.

"You're right, this place is a death trap."

She decisively grabbed the vulpine and elf and threw them on her back. She then grabbed the gnome out of the air and turned on her hooves toward the door and shot forward with an explosive bound. She galloped forward as the band desperately held on.

"Holy shit how are you going so fast!"

"I'm not, this is as fast as I can go while carrying you lumps!"

She shot through the door as a block of stone the size of a small hill took out the side of the platform. Her hooves hit the stairs hard and she drove herself upward, each hoof slamming down on the stone steps hard and accurately, gone was the awkwardness, she simply powered up the stairs. To her surprise she found she didn't need to rest or have a break and she managed the entire monstrous stair in just a few minutes.

"G-gods! Slow down Fey I feel like my ass has been beaten to a pulp riding you bareback! Get a saddle if you're going to pull this!"

"And let me go you damn overgrown pony!" squawked the gnome who was squished up against Fey's breasts, hugged in a death grip.

She let her go as she stepped from the last step of the stair.

"Sorry, I just feel really energetic for some reason, I'm not even winded!"

"Bullshit. Something's wrong here."

"It's fine!" said Fey, waving her words aside. "Let's just get out of here first."

She dove into a gallop not giving time for the others to reply and they could do little but hang on. The floating gnome was nearly bowled over by her passing and screamed obscenities as she careened into a wall before gathering herself. She had to speed through the air to keep up with Fey.

She rushed down the dark shaking corridors, several enchanted armours flashed by but they were far too slow to even react to her presence and it took less than a minute for her to arrive back at the original stair which was now no longer blocked.

Strangely the entrance to it looked a little smaller to Fey's eyes, curious, but she supposed that whatever strange magic had made it disappear in the first place could change the size of it.

She charged up the stair and onto the next floor. A pair of startled goblins who had been peering down the stair suspiciously were taken by surprise and had to scramble to get out of the way or risk getting trampled. Fey didn't pause and moved into the chamber beyond where there was another stair, also around a dozen goblins. She thought the entrance to this stair was smaller too but that must have been her imagination.