Aetherios System [Slow Build OP MC, Isekai LitRPG/Cultivation] Chapter 41: Chapter 37: Rite and Wrong

Read chapter 41 of Aetherios System [Slow Build OP MC, Isekai LitRPG/Cultivation] by TTReynolds on NovelPedia.

Chapter 37: Rite and Wrong Chapter 37: Rite and Wrong After an hour of painstakingly looking at every inch of the bars in his cage, Alex could unhappily say that he had no way of breaking the things. No attempt at brute force at his disposal would work. And his studies of the glyphs on the metal -and as he came to learn, the stone slabs above and below him- made him unable to break the enchantment the script provided either. He had made some more progress in the skill though. Skills: Glyphcraft: Beginner 12.0% Alex had learned quite a bit from his study session. Connecting lines, amplifier glyphs, charging glyphs, it was all very complicated script work from what he could see. Luckily, he knew how to read electronic schematics, and that knowledge translated—albeit slightly—to the works of [Glyphcraft]. They made sense to him in a strange way. Despite this, he still couldn't break them. So he swiped away the popup screen and sighed. He looked over at Devon and Lance, his physically closest teammates on his left side. He could see the answer to his unspoken question in their eyes before they even shook their heads at him. They didn't come up with anything either. Alex didn't have time to look at Allie before they all heard it. A rustling noise in the darkness. The scraping shuffle of feet, many feet. It was the approaching march of their kidnappers. He saw the torches before anything else. Dancing fires that bobbed with their holder's gait. Soon after the Kobolds came into view from the previously unnoticeable dark tunnel in the cavern wall. There were dozens of them all moving in an unorganized cluster. Alex heard their movement as a march, but they did not appear disciplined enough to have kept it up. Once they all shuffled into the cavern the added torches they carried illuminated the rest of the large stone room for Alex to finally see its size. For what he assumed was a cave room, the place was large. Fifty feet across, and almost the same wide. The ceiling was a dozen feet overhead, no stalactites hung above them, somehow Alex was disappointed by that. "Check the livestock, I must prepare." The voice was the clacking hiss of the kobolds that Alex remembered from his first encounter with them. The ring translated their language into perfect English but with some sort of species accent. Even with that added change, Alex could recognize the voice he heard as female. He pressed his face against the metal bars to look into the group of Kobolds. They were spreading out now, some taking up places against the walls and some walking towards the cages that held Alex and his friends. One of the figures stood out to Alex as the only possible source of the female voice he heard. A female kobold clothed in a robe of patchwork fabrics. In one hand she held a scepter or a short staff, in the other she held a white stone. The torchlight shimmered over the surface of the stone making Alex think it was a stone or gem of some kind. The female seemed to be the leader of the kobold group. Her better attire and confidence in giving orders were a dead giveaway to that fact. What worried Alex was that she seemed to be some kind of mage. He believed himself able to handle any of the kobolds he saw in melee combat. Throwing magic in the mix put that into doubt. Is she like, a shaman or something? Alex watched the kobold mage as she walked to the center of the cavern. With the extra light, Alex was able to see some sort of stone altar set up there. It was a stone slab that came up to the kobold's waist and was as long and wide as her body. Large lines were etched into the stone slab in patterns that Alex recognized as more [Glyphcraft] scripts. The lines connected into the floor and spread out into a circle ten feet across, the slab and the mage stood at the center. Alex wasn't close enough to see the details or study the glyphs, so he couldn't tell what they did, but he assumed it wasn't anything good. Nothing good for him and his friends at least.