Chapter: 552

“No clue… but I guess we’ll find out.” Jay said, looking towards the pyramid.

The party walked across the endless field of helvetian soldiers towards the fifth pyramid, weaving through the dead statues. It was an eerie feeling.

Each of the kneeling statues were still as tall as them, silent as they eternally sat, and Jay and Anya solemnly navigated past them quietly.

Jay wondered how such a big army originally could have been sustained with food among other things, but then he remembered a mural he once saw of Helvetia.

The vibrant green city was thriving with plants and life, making it seem that they were just as in touch with nature as they were magic.

Losing their living, breathing city must have only fuelled their desire for revenge even more deeply.

It seemed quite backwards as they went from a city filled with nature and magic to a paved wasteland where the statues were very much anti-magic.

Up ahead something stood out. It was a strange triangular prism pointing out of the ground; a monolith. Like the path and the gate it was similarly a cream-white colour. It was about five meters tall and as wide as Jay’s shoulders.

Despite itself being white and implanted into a white path, it stuck out like a sore thumb, like a beacon amongst the endless black-stone soldiers.

“Odd…” Jay thought as he approached it.

Jay checked the statues around it before getting closer, making sure they were actually deceased like all the others.

His escape plan was relatively simple: run.

The numerous dead soldiers would block the path of any other pursuing statues, as they were large and wouldn’t be able to slip through the graveyard as easily as Jay or Anya would.

Thankfully, there were no living statues around and Jay concluded that it wasn’t some elaborate trap, so he approached the white monolith.

Jay saw his reflection as he drew nearer to the white monolith, and after looking at each side, he found that at the back of it something was socketed into it.

“Hey, here you are,” he smiled, immediately trying to pull it out of the socket; it was the white locket he lost, which had since flown away.

Unfortunately it wouldn’t budge, and neither could he try to pry it out as the white locket was a perfect fit – there was absolutely no seam.

Jay funelled some mana towards it but it acted as if it were now just another inanimate object.

“Mm” he frowned lightly. Whatever he had sensed in it before had similarly disappeared, its power all gone.

As the triangle monolith was halfway between the pyramid and the gate in the middle of the road, it seemed quite obvious this was some sort of automatic gate key – but Jay only had more questions.

– Why was this one key left outside the gate?

– If not for Jay, who was it meant for?

– Whose magic charged the key, and why did he feel a strange connection to it?

– Why had the gate been shut in the first place?

– And what did that have to do with all the guards being mass-executed, or ‘freed,’ as Sedulus would say?