The depths of the Society base were different from what Alice was expecting. The previous Society base had been like a makeshift fort. Most of the important bits were above ground, and while there was a basement, it was small. It had mostly been used for storage. At first, Alice thought that this base was similar. However, as the group started to search the aboveground regions, she started to wonder. The Society base was different. The parts of the building that were above ground were filled with random magic supplies, and not a single test subject or report. It was almost like a glorified storage closet, filled with random bits and bobs. Alice had even started to wonder if the group had mistaken the owners of the base somehow. Perhaps the base wasn’t a Society base at all, but just a group of Mages that disliked civilization and set up a giant base in the woods for some reason? As ridiculous as the notion seemed, the base simply didn’t match her expectations based on the last Society base she had seen. Then, one of the [Mercenaries] hired by Ethan found the real base. Near the back of the base, there was a hidden trapdoor which led to an underground floor. Since the group had found little aboveground, they quickly moved through the trapdoor. The first floor of the underground facility was where things started to get weirder. The first room in the underground facility was filled with crystals. Lots, and lots, and lots of crystals. Alice had never seen them before. She had no idea what type of crystal they were, what they were supposed to do, or what they were made of. They weren’t particularly unusual to her various types of mana-sight, either. They were neither mana-rich nor mana-poor. They were somewhat pretty, but didn’t really stand out. If she had seen them while walking down the street, she probably would have thought they were some kind of raw gemstone that could be shaped into jewelry for upper middle class [Merchants] in this world. The rest of the first floor was filled with a bunch of other supplies, all of similarly baffling nature. There were wooden sticks that had no special attributes, clothes that looked almost like those of a [Priest], but didn’t belong to any religion Alice knew of, etc. They were just random odds and ends, without any unusual mana characteristics or physical characteristics. The second floor was filled with test subjects. Unlike most Society bases, the captives on the second floor were mostly alive - which was a small miracle. Only one in twenty were dead, which was an incredibly low casualty rate by the standards of most Society experiments. However, almost eighty percent of the captives had succumbed to some form of class madness. Several of them looked malnourished, or dehydrated, or both. Alice frowned when she saw that. Eighty percent… was a very high number of people to succumb to class madness. Back in the capital of Morendia, Alice was willing to bet that less than ten percent of the population had succumbed to their class mana. Things there had reached a stage where it was hard to care for the sick and mad, but they were still sort of under control. In the Society base, the number of mad had already reached a point where there were few sane survivors left. Alice leaned in closer to the odd enchantment, and after a few moments of examination, frowned in confusion. “The pure mana layer looks like it prevents other things from poking at the enchantment,” said Alice. “If I had to guess, it’s probably inspired by the way all living things resist external mana manipulation, but for some reason the [Enchanter] made it out of pure mana instead of organic. I would expect the Society had far more [Organic Mages] instead of people experimenting with pure mana. I don’t know why they used this particular mana type to accomplish this. Budget or material limitations, maybe?” Alice shrugged. “The organic enchantment looks like it recognizes certain people, and then turns the enchantment off for those people. Clever, but nothing too unusual.” “Why prevent people from entering or leaving this floor, though?” asked Jonathan, as he eyed the enchantment. “Is it to prevent escape attempts from the prisoners?” asked Cecilia, as she eyed the doorway. “It would make sense, at least.” Ethan, shook his head. “The source of the enchantment is still odd. Alice makes a good point. Why did they make this out of pure mana and not organic? If they were going to mimic an aspect of ‘life,’ organic would have been much easier. Besides, the society usually doesn’t do double-layered locks to prevent escape attempts. They control prisoners by enchanting the cells, not inconveniencing the researchers. It’s the reason a few prisoners have managed to escape from them, occasionally. The Society tends to have somewhat sloppy security measures for less well-funded bases.” Then, he turned towards the vast underground floor they had just traversed. “Though, this clearly isn’t one of the less well funded ones.” “Then it might be to keep something else inside of the next floor. Or to keep intruders and [Spies] out?” Alice shook her head. “Either way, let’s be ready. Just in case something unusual appears.” After that, Cecilia got to work disabling the enchantment. After about a minute, the enchantment fizzled out of existence. “Pretty fast,” said Ethan, appreciatively. “I could brute force it by just slamming it with blasts of kinetic force, but you deactivated it much more quickly than I could without breaking the whole thing.” Cecilia blushed, and smiled. “I’ve been working on enchantments a lot recently, since I was helping with the team of [Enchanters] back in Illvaria. I’ve gotten some good levels in [Enchanter]. The new Perks help a lot.” The group moved past the doorway and into the next floor of the base, where Alice understood one of the mysteries about the door enchantment. “It’s filled with monsters,” she said, jerking back. “And mana. The mana here is actually far more dense than in the rest of Morendia. Not quite double the mana density, but pretty close.” None of the monsters had noticed her yet, but Alice doubted that would remain the case for long. Jonathan stepped in front of her, while Ethan sprouted mana tendrils like a deadly flower. Allira’s eyes glittered dangerously, before she squinted her eyes and stared at the monsters. “These are rather rare monsters,” she finally said, after several seconds of thinking. “They usually don’t survive this far north, because the mana isn’t dense enough for them. Most records refer to them as ‘air leeches.’ They devour the air from around them, regardless of where it is located or what it’s shielded by. Then, they replace it with a sort of airborne… acidic… toxin. The properties of the substance they produce is quite unusual, since it can spread to new clumps of air and convert that into more of the acid-toxins. Eventually, the substance runs out of mana, at which point it solidifies into a clear, hard substance. They tend to hunt in packs, and they’re especially hard for humans to fight. Even though it costs them a lot more mana, they can replace the air inside your lungs with their special substance, so the moment you step near them, you start dying. In addition, they have the ability to transform their body into air, which they do when they feel close to death. They’re a massive pain for melee combatants to fight. They’re also pretty rare. I haven’t seen any since the last war with the Sigmusi, and before then I had never even heard of them.” Alice frowned. “Can you deal with them?” she asked. “I can, but I figure Ethan would be a better matchup,” said Allira. “I’d have to spend several Perks dealing with them, and I’d rather keep those in case we run into a second army of researchers or something.” “I can do it,” said Ethan, as he took a step towards the monsters. Then, Alice saw thermal mana start to swirl around his body, mixed in with rainbow mana. A few seconds later, one of the air leeches finally noticed Ethan. It started flying towards him at a breakneck speed, but it was too slow. Alice felt a blast of heat rip its way out of Ethan’s body, before cooking most of the air on the third floor. It was like the space in front of them had turned into a giant oven. The air leeches immediately noticed Ethan, and started charging towards him. Several of them also turned their bodies into air, in a desperate attempt to survive. Their actions meant little. Without any further spells or actions on Ethan’s part, the monsters quickly fell apart. In thirty seconds flat, the floor no longer had monsters on it. “They’re gone. One of my Perks is gone too,” said Ethan, as he glanced at the dried-out, desiccated corpses of the monsters. They looked oddly similar to plastic bags, at least in Alice’s opinion. “Anything else on the floor?” asked Ethan, as he turned towards Allira. “Give me a moment to check,” said Allira. She started singing, and the shadows rose in response, before they started swarming the floor. A few minutes later, the shadows returned to her. Allira shook her head. “There aren’t any other monsters in here. There aren’t any other documents, either,” she said. “There are a lot of human corpses here, and that’s it. I’m not sure what they were trying to do here, either.” Alice sighed, and stepped fully into the third underground floor. “Let’s see if we can dig any secrets out of the dead, then,” she said. The group started investigating the floor, but just as Allira had said, there were no other monsters, no documents, no anything. Alice found that frustrating. The Society was usually quite gung-ho about recording their monstrous experiments. This was the first time Alice had seen a Society base that had basically no records at all of what they were trying to do. It was just… a pile of long-dead human corpses, and monsters roaming the floor for unknown reasons. “Odd,” said Ethan, after the other Immortals and [Mercenaries] on the floor reconvened. “I can’t tell what the Society was trying to test here at all.” “Hmm…” Allira frowned. “It seems base, in general, might have been testing the links between human beliefs and their environment. if that’s the case… maybe this floor was similar?” Jonathan nodded. “It seems like as good of a guess as any. All of the human corpses we found were placed inside of isolation chambers, but all of them had one-way windows that let them see outside of their cells. A ridiculous amount of craftsmanship and resources were put into making it possible to see out of the cell, without alerting the monsters to the presence of the humans. If I had to take a wild guess, I would say that the Society wanted to see if human beliefs could influence monsters?” Alice frowned. Jonathan’s speculation was a bit of a leap, since they didn’t have very much information yet, but it did make sense. “Why kill all of the prisoners then?” she asked. Then, a moment later, a question struck her. One that she would have been interested in testing, if she had no morals or bottom line. “I wonder if human beliefs continue to influence their surroundings after they die.” Ethan laughed, a grim, bitter laugh. “That sounds about right.” He turned to Allira. “Allira, did these air leeches seem any different from usual air leeches?” Allira shook her head. “No. They seemed pretty normal to me.” Then, she frowned. “But we did kill them very quickly. It’s unknown what ‘change’ the Society tried to make to these creatures, if your assumption is correct. So it’s hard to say whether we would have spotted any smaller changes to the monsters.” Since they didn’t have enough information, the group quickly moved on. Much like the difference between the second and third floor, the staircase between the third and fourth floor had an enchantment that kept unidentified life forms from moving between floors. Cecilia disabled it, and then the group stepped into the next floor.