The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3) Jonathan Brooks (read me like a book .txt) 📖

Their groaning response only served to make her chuckle.

Chapter 33

Malachite let himself drift off for a while, the exhaustion from being drained repeatedly just too much for his mind to handle for long.  There wasn’t much of interest that he could observe at that point, anyway, because the projection map that the blue invaders had been looking at disappeared and there was currently only one of the monstrous people in the room.  Since it was manipulating the panel on the long table in front of its figure, the Council Leader couldn’t see anything; after a while, he realized that all he was doing was staring at the back of the invader for no purpose.

He wasn’t sure how long he had drifted off, but a loud, annoying ringing noise woke him up.  His first sight of the room again was of three more of the blue-skinned invaders running into the room, followed by a purple-colored one, barking orders.  Orders that he couldn’t understand, since it was in no language he had ever heard before, but the tone was obvious enough that it told Malachite what was being conveyed.

Looking around as much as he could, he saw that many of the Fairies that had been captured and were imprisoned with him were awake as well, the loud alarm-like noise waking up even those that had been unconscious for as long as he had been there.

The large map projection was suddenly back up, as detailed as it was before, and he could see that the northern part looked very similar to how it appeared before.  Whatever the six-armed people were doing to the strange panel, they were able to manipulate the map so that it concentrated on the south, right where the glowing dot from earlier had been.  Correct that, where it still was.

There were 21 distinct symbols surrounding the dot, which he still assumed was Tacca’s Dungeon Core, gathered around as if they were hunting and had finally cornered their prey.  As far as Malachite could tell, from the perspective of the invaders, everything seemed to look alright; he didn’t see any reason to be alarmed.  Maybe they just want to know that their deed is done?  If those 21 symbols represent those they sent out to destroy Tacca’s Core, there’s no hope for her.

Unexpectedly, there was a blurring of those symbols, as if they were somehow being obscured.  The Council Leader could tell that something significant had just happened, because there was some frantic hand-waving and yelling, and another series of angry noises reverberated throughout the room.

Then – if he hadn’t seen it himself, he wouldn’t have believed it – the room’s walls seemed to be sucked into the floor, and the ceiling seemed to lift away as if it was some kind of hat.  Before his eyes and mind could register what was happening, Malachite’s world abruptly became so much bigger.  Whereas he had felt as if the area outside of this room had been large, it hadn’t prepared him for just how big it really was.

He looked up…and up…and up until he could barely make out the ceiling of the gigantic room he was in.  It must be at least 1,000 feet above my head, if not more.  The walls of this new room were even more impressive, as when he looked at them in the distance they were practically just a blurry image, as they were so far away.  Where am I?  What is this place?

All he could tell from his vantage point – as he couldn’t really look behind him that well – was that they seemed to be in the corner of a much larger space, made from a similar metal material as the original, smaller room.  There were lights everywhere along the walls, blinking or static, and there were strange lines running along them that he eventually worked out to be passageways behind some sort of transparent glass barrier.  There were other oddities nearly every other place he looked along the walls and the ceiling, but he was distracted by something else on the floor.

He couldn’t believe what he was looking at, as his mind couldn’t comprehend it at first.  What he originally thought was some sort of organic-looking black pillar about 50 feet away from his position, turned out to be something else entirely.  As he looked up again, he finally rearranged his brain into focus, only to realize what he was looking at: a 100-foot-tall, black-colored, 12-armed invader.  It wasn’t holding any weapons, thankfully, but Malachite was sure that if it had been armed, each weapon could destroy half of a Raider village in the blink of an eye.

It took all of his willpower not to pass out again, though this time it was from fear rather than exhaustion.

The map projection rapidly expanded, until it was so large that he couldn’t even keep it all in his current field of view.  There was a painful, deep shout that Malachite immediately knew came from the giant invader, and the focus again was on the southern Wentrylock mountain range and Tacca’s Core.  The symbols were present, though still obscured, and he saw them move around slightly, as if they were somehow tracking each movement of their people on a real-time basis; he wasn’t sure how he knew that was what he was looking at, but he instinctively knew it somehow.  Plus, it just made sense; otherwise, they wouldn’t be so intent on watching it.

Then one of the symbols, which had been blue to start with, suddenly stopped and turned red.  Another one switched to red and froze a moment later, then another, and another.  Now that he could see them better and they weren’t moving, he realized that 16 of the symbols were exactly the same though with little marks next to