Chapter 397: Chapter 397

"We should rejoin the others and pass along the message. There isn’t an active portal here, though we should do something about this beacon." Dominic decided.

Amie smiled. "I think that I have a most wonderful idea. You see, beacons are set to their exact location by default, but that’s not the only spot that they can be linked to.

You can set a location and then move them. So, we can put the new arrivals somewhere much better than here. Perhaps the bottom of the lake somewhere? Or out in the ocean?"

Dominic smiled. "Oh, that could work, but you could also just move it vertically, and they wouldn’t be likely to notice the difference."

Amie laughed at the thought of monsters falling from thousands of metres in the sky, but it wasn’t practical. The vertical adjustment was something that every mage knew they would have to do when they tried to open a portal.

But if you moved the beacon location to the middle of the ocean, it would be too far from anything for them to correct it after the fact.

"I will do the adjustment. It needs to be too far for them to fix it after they’ve started the casting." Amie replied, then took the plate from him to start inspecting the spell that had been placed on it.

"Oh, this is good. Not only is the target set, the origin is set. I can trace it back to the location where the monsters were coming from, and where they’re being sent back to." She explained after a few minutes.

"In that case, can we open a portal for a few seconds before you change the destination?" Dominic joked.

"If we do that, we might as well destroy this beacon, because they’ll know that it’s compromised and shut off its link."

Dominic sighed, "Well that takes the fun out of things. It’s better not to let them know that we found it for now. If they send one load of monsters into the ocean, that’s enough for a start."

The pair turned toward the direction the other monster camps, making sure that there was nothing else coming while Amie focused on changing the destination of the beacon.

All seemed normal, and the few monster patrols they could see in the distance hadn’t noticed anything off about the Minotaur camp.

"Alright, the portal is relocated. I also added a tracker to it, so I will know if it’s been reactivated. If they attempt to fix what I changed, I will know that as well. We can go join the others now."

They moved silently through the abandoned fields, headed for the location where they should have found the other group members. There was a Manor House visible in the distance, but as they approached, Dominic didn’t smell or hear any of their group members.

"Something is off." He whispered to Amie.

The mage nodded, and drew her pistols. "Should we check it out?"

Fifty metres from the house, Dominic felt the pulse of magic that indicated he had just breached a barrier, and then noticed that the appearance of the house had slightly changed.

The door went from closed to open, and there was a broken window, plus the smell of blood.

Old blood.

"Another cult." He whispered, then noticed that Amie was stuck on the other side of the barrier.

She was speaking, but he couldn’t hear her.

Then, she motioned to one side, and Dominic saw that the rest of the group was outside the barrier, surrounded by a second, smaller dome of magical energy.

He signalled her to go see what was up with them, and primed an Arcane Blast as he approached the house. As he approached, Dominic could hear the voices from inside, but there were background noises that didn’t match a Manor house.

There was a portal active, and it led to wherever the mages were gathered.

Dominic considered his options, then heard muffled voices near the door.

"We have those adventurers locked down in the field. Should we go collect them for the rituals?" A woman was asking.

"Give them an hour to stew. The more fear they have, the better. The mages with them aren’t strong enough to break our barrier, even working together." An older sounding woman replied.

In his storage cube, Dominic began organizing munitions. He didn’t dare to make more so close to the portal, but he had plenty on hand.

He moved them all into an empty crate that was intended to store a shipment of rifles for the army. It held hundreds of mortars, enough that he wasn’t worried about them being insufficient for the job.

Then, he carefully ducked his head to look in the door and saw that the open door was the portal, and that the other side was a round stone room with a spell circle in the middle, and windows all around.

A tower of some sort, most likely the top floor of a mage tower belonging to a member of the Skiple Royal Academy.

The two women had their backs to him, and they were still discussing what to do with the adventurers as a man with a curved blade in his hand cut open a young woman on an altar by the back of the room.

The tortured woman’s eyes caught Dominic’s and then the crate in his hands. The moment she realized what he was doing, she smiled. The mage cutting into her paused, satisfaction on his face.

He thought that she was broken, and he was likely right.

But when Dominic stepped to the door and tossed the crate full of mortars in, he realized that things had gone horribly wrong.

[Fireball] detonated the contents of the crate, and Dominic leapt aside.

A dull boom shook the air, followed by the sound of crumbling stone, then falling rocks, as the flames licked the air above his head.

Then, the portal collapsed, ending the devastation at this end, and Dominic looked back into the house.

It looked undisturbed, with a layer of thick dust on everything.

But the dust was too perfect. Like it had been laid with magic, and not affected at all by the wind or the passage of time. He had to investigate.