With all five of them sitting just outside the safe room, Eli and Lucy still healing from their wounds, Eli explained everything that had happened with the mountain and the goat eel monster. Then he opened it up to suggestions adding that they needed a way to fight incorporeal monsters without causing rockslides.
“Are incorporeal monsters susceptible to magic attacks?” Beau asked.
“No idea,” Eli said. “I know that physical attacks aren’t very effective.”
“I think we should all go next time and we can all try things that might work carefully,” Cody suggested.
They all looked at each other and basically decided that they didn’t want to sit around anymore so his idea was a good one. They gathered all their things and got ready to head out, Lucy was basically healed but Eli’s back was still closing up, so he stayed in the back. Cody was in the front, then Beau, then Bethany, then Lucy, and they found his original path up the mountain and started climbing. They made it to the spot where Eli had gotten hurt and they spread out a bit to see if they could find the shadow eel, but they didn’t see anything. Without anything else to check, they started working their way up, Beau and Eli were shaping the path as they went in case they needed to retreat quickly.
After another hundred feet of climbing they found another goat, this time, before they could even see the eel, Cody made his way over to it and hit it on the head with his shield. The goat staggered then rammed its head into his shield with a loud clang and a small shockwave of force. Some small rocks fell down but not many so he continued to fight it, this time hitting it catching it in the neck with his sword. The attack had made Cody almost lose his balance and he fell against the rocks of the mountain, the eel poked its head out of the goats mouth and made a screaming screeching noise that had everyone tense up. Lucy was shaking and Beau fell to one knee, Bethany seemed fine, and Eli just had goosebumps again.
Cody was hit by the noise the hardest, only being a few feet away from it and it had been facing him when it made the noise. He was not ok, his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he started having a seizure, if he hadn’t already been up against the rocks, he would have fallen for sure. Eli conjured a throwing cudgel and tossed it at the goats face, it passed right through the eel but the goat wasn’t so lucky, its face was crushed in and it started to fall. However, just like last time, shadow tendrils came out of the goat and held it in place as the eel sucked it dry and absorbed all life and magic from it. The eel was staring straight at Eli, floating in mid air flicking its tail back and forth, but this time the eel seemed more arrogant than before. Eli wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he could feel how self assured it was.
When the eel looked over at Cody, Eli blinked between them and covered his hand in chaos magic and snatched the thing by the neck. This looked like it was going to work, until the eel started to siphon off the magic on his hand and they passed between his fingers until it was free. He braced himself for an attack but the eel just went into the mountain, phasing right through the rocks. This was so unexpected that he just stood there for several seconds trying to figure out what was going on, then he remembered Cody and picked him up and carefully navigated the rocks to get back to the group. They could see the top now and it looked like the top of the mountain was a flat space, probably where they would find the boss. Just because they could see it, didn’t mean it was close though, so they started walking up again with Cody on Eli’s back like a backpack.
They saw another goat but Eli just tossed another throwing cudgel and they ignored the eel, it did its fear scream taking Beau and Lucy to the ground again, but it just hung out where the goat had died for about twenty seconds then vanished into the mountain like the other one. Eli assumed that that is what happened to the first one as well, he was starting to think that navigating the mountain and finding all of the goats was going to be needed to unlock the boss at the end. He didn’t share his thoughts with the group yet, they were already discouraged by how difficult it was to climb this mountain, whether it was slipping from loose rocks or cutting yourself from grabbing or rubbing up against razor sharp rocks, they were not having a good time.
Finally they reached the top of the mountain, it was a flat smooth rocky surface about fifty feet across in almost the shape of a circle. There were nine braziers around the edge of the mountain top, with three of them lit with black fire. That confirmed Eli’s suspicions that they needed to kill the other goats to get the boss to show up. However, for now, they wanted to take a breather and take stock. Most of the cuts and bruises were healed or almost healed by now and they needed to figure out how they would go after the rest of the goats. While they were discussing if they should break up into two groups to get them faster, Lucy walked over to an unlit brazier and put her hands on it.
The others stopped talking and looked over to her, she was on her knees in front of the brazier whispering something to herself as she held both sides of it. Sensing what she was doing Eli took a step closer, he could feel that she was trying to get it to light with her shadow magic. The words she was whispering was some kind of ritual magic that she was using to change the flavor of her magic to more closely resemble that of the eels. It looked like it was working, at least at first, then Eli noticed that the magic beneath the brazier was building and he tried to run over to her but an arch of black lightning jumped out of the brazier and struck her in the chest, knocking her back hard enough that she was going to fly off the mountain.
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Eli blinked to be right in her path, just as she would be passing over his head, he grabbed her foot and was able to pull her in but she hit the ground hard and the wind was knocked out of her. Luckily, aside from a bruised foot, that seemed to be all the damage she sustained from the ordeal. She came to her senses quickly, her face was bright red and she was apologizing profusely to everyone, apparently it was a trick she had learned from her father that learned from Eli’s mother. She used it to walk amongst the normal people to get a sense for how the tribes were handling business and how the leaders were treating their people. Lucy explained that everyone in the chaos realm could sense magic, at least the magic of other people, and that's how they could tell who the powerful people were without having to have met them before.
As interesting as this was for Eli, they needed to pick up the pace, between the slow climbing and all the scouting, along with the injury recovery, they had been on this floor for as long as it took them to clear the first floor. So he wanted to hurry things along as much as he could. He quickly made some decisions, Beau would stay with Lucy on the top since she still seemed very shaken up. No one was drawing attention to it, but she had wet herself again and Eli was starting to worry about her, maybe she had been through a lot more trauma than he had originally thought and that's why she seemed to do that so often. Either way, she needed time to gather herself, so the rest of them would go goat hunting.
It was slow going, as the mountain was not any easier to manage on the other side, it took them another five hours to get all the remaining goats. When they returned to the top, all nine braziers were lit, but the boss hadn’t appeared, instead the center of the flattened mountain top was open and there was a larger version of the braziers inside the hole along with a stone tablet with writing on it.
“The nine burn black, the nine are contained”
“Combine the nine, combine the contained”
“Find the magic, Shin’gol will be sustained”
After they all read it, it was easy to agree that it was a riddle and a hint, but they couldn’t agree at all on what they were supposed to do. Cody thought they could just dump the braziers into the big one, but they couldn’t be picked up. Beau thought they would have to try and combine all the flames, but didn’t know how to do it really. Instead of spitting out a random idea, Bethany had Eli come over to one of the braziers and told him to really study it to see if he could pull the magic from it. It turns out he could, but he couldn’t hold it in his body, his internal magic rejected it and it flowed out of him and back to the brazier.
They tried several other things until they got lucky with Eli encasing the magic in his hands to hold it without it being absorbed. He tried to push the magic into the center brazier but it just flew back to the original brazier. The only logical next step was to try and gather more than one at a time, which turned out to be rather difficult, the different flames didn't want to combine so he had one in each hand. This was taxing work since it required so much focus to make two individual cages for the brazier magic with his magic. They didn't want to combine, but they did want to be absorbed, so when he got to the third one he pulled all three inside himself and forced them together there at the same time. It took four tries, but he got them together and then he stumbled over to the big brazier and a larger shadow eel jumped out of his chest and into the brazier.
Eli rested for a minute, he was so drained by that that he put his cloak on and used its once a day ability to recharge a bit. Assuming there were fifteen people in here, it would be easier for them to only have to do one each, but the other tried to contain the magic from the braziers and it just sucked out some of their magic and went back to the brazier. He knew he had to do it himself and got to work on the next three, it was much faster now that he knew what he was doing but it was still just as draining. If the boss appeared right after the third one, he would be at less than a quarter of his magic when they would have to fight it. However, he wasn’t sure how much time he would have to combine everything so he pushed himself to get it done anyways.
After the third group of three was deposited in the center brazier, a larger eel coalesced in front of them pulling all the magic out of it to make itself whole. The mountain rumbled and a 7 foot tall goat came running up the mountain like it was running on flat land and stopped when it reached the top. The goat opened its mouth and the eel dove inside, somehow fitting its twelve foot long body inside the eight foot long goat. The goat lowered its head and black electricity sparked down its horns, then the hole in the center closed and one of the nine original braziers lit and wind started flowing from that direction. It stopped its front right hoof into the ground a few times and then charged at them, they tried to scatter, but Cody charged back at it with a shield bash, his strongest skill.
The goat and Cody crashed into each other creating a loud clang followed by cracking noises, Cody had broken his shield arm, but the goat had a small crack on one of its horns as well. The goat backed off and the eel poked its head out letting out a fearsome scream straight out of nightmares authored by Lovecraft. This time everyone but Eli was down on one knee, the eel disappeared and the goat looked ready to charge again but before it could build up momentum, Eli charged it and swung for its cracked horn with his cudgel. The goat went wildly off course with its charge, it started to recover but the horn being broken upset its balance and it ran straight off the edge.
