Also in the past...

Errant brought Grace’s point from nearly his heels, overhead, and down, hewing through the neck of the Stone Jotun Warlock he had just hamstrung. Black earthen energy spewed out of the wound with the geysers of blood, sparking and flaring against the residual energy of his Pact, even if he hadn’t called on his Wrath.

He stepped away from the blood as vivic energy started to bubble, flaring quickly as the residual energy of the Dark Earth Pact of the Stone Jotun leaked away. It didn’t stop the Pact from harvesting the Jotun’s soul, of course, but it would eat away the ten-foot corpse with great speed.

Residual Holy energies burned around his Sword. Consecrating his Sword and making it a Warlock’s Glaive was an extremely back-handed way of accessing his Wrath without actually discharging it. It required a Greater Soulbound Weapon, Eldritch Glaive, One Strike, and Consecrate Weapon Feats, and a fair degree of skill at manipulating Wrath... which was rather difficult to come by if you didn’t actually use it.

It wasn’t the same as a true Eldritch Glaive, of course, which actually manifested Wrath as a solid weapon of its own. This way, the Wrath inside him naturally flowed along his soul and ‘filled up’ the Sword, like it would fill up his arm, and so was discharged when he struck with it. Given that he had his Purity Mastery at Five, that meant a fixed +36 damage, 6d6 topped out, which was nothing to sneeze at.

Since he was a One Strike stylist anyways, it didn’t bother him to slow his attack pace down in order to strike a devastating blow each time.

He sniffed the air, and looked around at the trappings of this shrine. Battered flesh and splintered bone began to rejoin as he stopped using his Wrath for other purposes, and it healed him from inside.

He could see that this place had been repurposed from the original worship of the Stone Jotuns’ racial deity. If he had to make any guesses, this runt of a Stone Jotun had gone dumpster diving for the power to overcome his lack of Stature, and found it in something Below.

An Aberrant Power, not strong enough to grant Divine spells in mockery of the gods, but more than strong enough to grant a Warlock Pact, giving the runt power over earth and stone... and the Stone Body enhancements, making him tougher, stronger, and sturdier than his bigger kinfolk.

This Jotun Runt had come back here, and either killed or driven away the original worshippers, slowly bringing the younger giants, in awe of his power, into his fold, and suppressing the elders. A Power from down deep in the darkness, which should not be rising to the light, was showing its strength here.

Erant had killed six of the junior Warlocks, and fully a dozen normal Stone Jotuns. How many more had been sent to other tribes to take them over, he did not know. At least they had not started gathering here... or perhaps, they weren’t gathering here...

He looked at two of the idols that had been Shaped into existence; inhumanoid forms like pulsing veins of earth wrapped around a malformed brain, just begging to be cloven with Grace and then crushed with a few proper blows of the Warlock Jotun’s own mace.

Best tool for the job, after all.

He’d seen two lesser versions of this thing in the were-boar home, giving him a good idea where the weres’ Curse had come from. It was probably a direct blessing from that Thing waiting down in the darkness.

Stone Jotuns were among the most peaceful of the Jotuns. They were herders and carvers, not really caring about outside events, content with their lives and the message of the stone.

But they were Jotuns, and once their primal urges were stirred up, they were hard to put down. Their Stature mindset made them look down on anything shorter than them, and once it came to the fore, their aggressive territorialism could be redirected into brutal conquest. If they were whipped into a mood for battle, it would take little for them to bring in lesser Jotuns, given their easy relations with them all, and so assembling a large force would be remarkably easy.

Had he just headed off a catastrophe, or stumbled into one in the making?

Soul Magic and Warlock Pact magic had some great synergies, including alternate ways that avoiding using Tats. Angel Walk and Angel Weight were very similar to Cloudstepping Sandals, so simply channeling the power of one into the other let him access the power without having to dedicate Wrath to doing so. Angel Eyes’ Devasight gave him extraordinary visual acuity in even very dim light, but provided no benefit in darkness. However, a Halo Crown was simply a method of manifesting the light of the soul, and shining it out his eyes was a perfectly workable substitute.

So it was that his eyes were now basically flashlights. It wasn’t the same as 360-degree illumination, but effectively wherever he was looking was lit up, so the fact everywhere else was dark was moot.

It also freaked out the Jotuns, which was somewhat understandable. His eyes were literally glowing like incandescent bulbs right now, and if he didn’t have Devasight, making him immune to brightness, he’d be blind. The Stone Jotuns, dwellers in lightless stone caves, had darkvision, so having no light source basically meant little to them.

Having The Light as your light source could potentially reveal a lot of things. That was one of the things he was once known for in the game, meshing all these different things together with the strength of a Vajra soul. The Light from his eyes swept the room, seeing where stone had been naturally worn away by water, Shaped by magic, cloven by tools, or worn away by the press of massive limbs. Angel Eyes opened his visual spectrum up to all the colors, including those above and below human vision. He picked out the cunningly hidden door from its surroundings by the change in crystal structures, and the stalagmite that levered it open by the residue from the hands touching it.

He knocked it over with an elbow, the Shaped stone inside pulling a counterweight, and the stone door pulled back and slid aside with barely a whisper of sound. He strode within, eyes shining the way and doubtless alerting any guards inside... not that he had sensed any, but they could easily be out of his range, and Stone Jotuns could be as motionless as statues if they desired.

Constructs and similar things didn’t move around randomly, of course.

The new area looked to be the living chambers of the tribe’s Shaman, taken over by the Warlock. He scanned it quickly, looking for the glow of magic, things hidden or out of place, and naturally higher places where Jotuns liked to stow things from little thieves.

There was a big heavy chest behind a removable section of wall, whose lock happened to fit that symbol he’d lifted off the severed neck of the dead Warlock, so out of place among his belongings. Errant opened the chest up, and was rewarded with the cold hard glare of magic.

Looked like Equipment from slain humans that hadn’t been sold or traded off, probably some of the adventurers who weren’t expecting Warlock Jotuns, judging by the level of the gear and the Blast marks on it. He spent some time stacking them up to take up minimum space, and then pulled the Disk from his Masspack to haul them out.

After all, he hadn’t found the tribe’s wealth yet, and he didn’t feel sorry about depriving them of it, especially after finding that mound of ground human bones in the den of their cave bear pet...

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Air was moving past him.

The stinking edges of the morphing creature that had flattened itself around the entrance hissed behind him, carved apart with two cuts of Grace. Its disguise was good, but only in visible light. In UV, it was obviously not part of the stone, and when close enough to use tremorsense through the stone, not part of that, either. The lurking thing was very surprised when he cross-cut it into four parts.

It wasn’t powerful enough to harm a Jotun, yet there were signs of passage. So, this was a guardian beast. And... there was air streaming past him.

This was a mining tunnel, once following a vein of gold. He could see the remnant crystals in the walls, the main vein long removed and sent to be crushed and smelted somewhere else. Being a Jotun mine, it was spacious enough for multiple men, and built and reinforced very stably, feeling as safe as going through a natural cave. He picked up the airflow moving in past him very easily.

Sizable nuggets of gold ore and a few thousand assorted coins were stacked up on the Disk behind him. He’d be making a lot of money when he finally went back to human lands, especially if he could exploit the continuing vein of gold at the bottom of the lair.

He was heading down and into the mountain. Air coming in at the bottom of a mine... was strange, unless there was an emergency exit down here somewhere.

The mine tunnel opening out into another cavern didn’t surprise him at all.

He looked out into the cavern, which had a fair degree of phosphorescent minerals, molds, mushrooms, and the like. The Light from his eyes didn’t supersede them, only making them shine brighter as he looked at them.

His Alchemy Ranks informed him that there were a fair number of valuable alchemical comps in this place. The Jotuns could have made a fair amount of gold harvesting just the easily reachable ones, or using them for their own Potions. Power comps were power comps, after all.

But he saw no signs anything had been disturbed here. He did, however, see veins of aural darkness stretched like living shadows across the walls.

The Light followed them back to the other side of the cavern, while a breeze ruffled his hair. A glance at the ground showed signs of giant feet flattening a path there, but not with the weight of a Jotun carrying lots of ore to dispose of.

He paced down that way fearlessly, eyes glancing right and left, looking for surprises, finding nothing except a spreading Evil Aura under his feet... which burned and flinched away from his boots. Touch of a Heavenbound, and all...

There was an air flue in the ceiling here, ascending the mountain. More than large enough for a person to enter, too.

They hadn’t mined it out, because they had dug into this flue, which led up, up into the mountain... and also way, way down.

His eyes fell onto that dark pit, twenty feet across and going down far, far beyond his light. He could see the Evil worming up along the stone from below. He didn’t know if Things had come out from here, but their influence had certainly reached up here, from down below the roots of the mountain.

And also down from above. He had a pretty good idea where this flue went. Going down would be an interesting experience, but likely suicide. He hadn’t come here to start a voyage into the Felldeep.

He dropped a coin on the ground, glowing with Eternal Light. A marker, as needed. He put his foot on the wall, and walked up at a vertical, Angel Walk defying gravity so long as he remained in contact with the stone. His Disk followed him as he walked up to the ceiling, shifted to ‘upside-down’, wove among the stalagmites there, and headed over to the open flue.

He stopped next to it. Upside down, it looked like a pit to his perspective at the moment. He took out a vial from inside his Masspack, and began to apply the scent-reducing oil from within all over himself.

Stormcrones had an incredibly acute nose for the smell of children and young creatures, and he probably still qualified, amusingly enough.

Without hesitation, he stepped into the windpipe and started his ascent to the peak ten thousand feet above, where waited the Stormcrone Zouma.