384 Base III : Run

"Urgh! There's snow allover my body! And in places that snow is not supposed to be in!" Rhea complained as we made our way down the mountain. Initially we have every intention of heading into the city at the foot of the mountain, but Roan reminded me that we were pressed for time, especially since we were chasing after people.

The best option was to go find the material we need for our so called mobile fortress/hotel, and then move in the direction of those gods and their army. But nevertheless we needed information, which is where Gus and Teluna came in, we had to split up with them as they headed to the city to find out about the geographical and political layout of the Dungeon's first floor.

We needed to know the distribution of power here, and exactly bow things were ran. This might have been the home of the wood sprites, but they were s reclusive bunch, and the first time they ever got a chance of leaving their forest, it was as slaves, so there wasn't much info that they could offer to me as far as the layout of the first floor was concerned.

Our current destination was the Soul Catcher Oak Grove, it was a forest or rather a particular area within a forest that had oak trees with the ability to steal the souls of other people. Almost no one is able to harvest those trees, and it's know that they're not just resilient and somewhat conscious according to Roan, but they were capable of performing spells of their own. So basically they were semi-sentient trees that ate souls, it probably made them a very dangerous venture for anyone interested in obtaining them, but by virtue of the ability to eat souls, it's made them the easiest target for me to deal within the confines of the first floor, but that might just be overestimating the first floor of this dungeon a bit.

We moved southeast, and for the most part we remained within the confines of the mountain that stretched all the way to the sky and led to the surface. No one might know us, but there's no telling who was who on this planet, especially since other gods have already arrived, so it was best if we kept off anyone's radar for now. According to Roan, the journey to the soul catcher oak grove would take us anything from a week to 10 days. But that was just at walking speed, we could arrived there much faster if we could use a carriage or had mounts of our own.

Now normally that would have been a problem, but we were vampires, apart from speed, we had our crests with it's ability to teleport over long distances, heck it brought Xaseah, Teluna, Rhea and Gus thousands of light-years right to where I was. Basically you could say the crests were like beacons to everyone, and if it's owners had enough power, then there was no distance they couldn't cross, granted of course the crest had the proper teleportation skill.

"I'll go on ahead with Roan to lead the way, you guys teleport to our location after every hour, we should be able to cut our travel time very short if we do it that way." I said to Xaseah and Rhea, looking after the rest of the wood sprites would be up to them for now.

I didn't even give them a room for argument as I picked up Roan under my arm and shit forwards leaving a sonic boom behind as my speed broke the sound barrier. Maybe it would have been better to fly instead of running across the landscape, however flying would be more conspicuous, and by wrapping my aura around my body, I can negate the effect my extreme speed has on the environment.

Roan an I ran for almost fifteen minutes before we came to a gorge. The gorge was practically hundreds of meters deep, even with my powerful eyes, I couldn't see through the gloom that was below, but I could still hear the screeches and wails of monsters beneath. I turned my eyes to the south of the gorge, there was some sort of city with a massive bridge over the gorge. However the thing about this city was that it was built on both sides of the gorge, like some sort of gate house, and the only way across was to move from one city across the bridge to the other.

It was a beautiful sight from here, but I had nothing to do there, so I can't place any sort of attention on it at the moment. I moved towards the gorge and jumped over, but scarcely had I gone over it did I feel some sort of suction force coming from it, it was trying to drag me down into the gloom beneath me, but honestly... it had to try a lot more harder than this.

I crossed over to the other side of the gorge, and apart from Roan who looked like he had been dipped in a pool of sweat, everything was fine. I looked down into the gorge still hearing the roars and inferno wails of the monsters within it, but none of them were a threat, whatever they were. I turned and resumed my race across the land, crossing rivers and moving past villages, towns, cities, forests, and prairies. After an hour I came to a stop at the foot of a mountain range, I let Roan down and soon enough the wood sprite unceremoniously hunched over and disgorged every last shred of food left in his stomach.

There was a whoosh and pop besides me and Rhea, Xaseah and the rest of the wood sprites along with golems appeared in front of us. Each and every single one of them had their attention drawn to the still vomiting Roan, maybe I should not have moved as fast as I was, now look at him. I had no choice but to wait for him to stop and tell me where we are, because based on the looks the other wood sprites seemed to be giving the area we were, they don't seem to recognize it.

"Master! You overshot our destination by two days *hmmmgh!* this is too far in the north *blergh!*"

Oh! I guess I really shouldn't have been running too fast. Even though my aura had covered Roan and this wasn't my fastest speed, we had still ran past our destination by two whole days of walking, I turned to look at Xaseah who was looking at me with a raised eyebrow and couldn't help but look sheepishly at her while I shrugged my shoulders.

"Let's try this again." I said with a smile, much to the horrified look on Roan's face.