As they settled down from the fight with the Tunnel Terror, Regina took a deep breath and decided to check in with her hive. Before she did that, though, she took a quick look around, to make sure there weren’t any other monsters lying in wait to attack them.

If there were, she couldn’t sense them. It had been surprisingly easy to fight the monster in the near darkness, since its smell and sounds had still told her its position very clearly. It probably helped that it had been pretty big. The lack of light didn’t make it easier to assess her surroundings, though. At least, she probably missed any subtle hints there might be. But it was enough to tell they weren’t in immediate danger.

Some of the others must have sensed their fight, or at least echoes of it. Tim in particular seemed a little anxious as soon as she focused on him. It’s fine, she told him calmly. We had a bit of excitement, but it was an easy fight, really.

That’s still not very reassuring, he replied drily. Did you have to come on this excursion yourself, my Queen?

That’s just how things turned out, Regina said, and even she realized she sounded a bit defensive. I don’t think Leian would have waited around until I called an army of drones to me, either.

Tim didn’t press the issue, although Regina wasn’t sure if he was convinced or just didn’t want to argue with her. He wasn’t wrong, of course, and Regina did realize that she had once more put herself in danger, but she was also pretty sure she didn’t have much of a choice. At least not if she wanted to get to the bottom of … whatever she was hoping to find here, she actually wasn’t sure.

“Alright, from now on, I’m going to take point on any fights, and Ira, you’re staying support,” Max said. “My Queen, please hang back. Tia, your role is to help before and after the actual fighting, unless someone gets too close to Regina. The same goes for everyone, unless you’re sure you can help.” He glanced around. “Is everyone ready?”

“Sure,” Regina said, an amused smile on her face that she quickly suppressed. “Let’s go.”

They started climbing the staircase leading up out of the train station quietly, keeping their eyes peeled. It was somewhat worn down, but not enough to make the going difficult for the group. Regina looked around, once more debating if or how much artificial light she should produce. In the end, she decided it was better to get by with as little as possible.

She also focused on her other senses, but still couldn’t find other minds nearby. Except for primitive life, probably insects and even rats and the like. Life would find a way, even in a shut-off underground ruin.

Above the train station, the next level was much more open, and Regina saw the remains of roads and even buildings, although they were mostly collapsed. It looked like most of this was collapsed, actually, leaving only pockets of air and actual space. Things got better in the direction they had roughly been heading in, though.

Regina wasn’t sure how much of the city was still standing. How much could be, given the situation. If it was buried underground, presumably it would all be covered in tons of dirt and rock and they’d have to prepare an archeological excavation to dig it back up. On the other hand, the Cataclysm had supposedly done lots of weird things, and sinking an entire city into the ground wasn’t the weirdest she could think of.

As they continued, it turned out that she seemed to be both right and wrong in that guess. Regina was starting to think the effects hadn’t been contained or homogenous — which made some sense if one thought about it — but at least some of what happened did seem to leave parts of the city relatively intact here.

It took quite a while to get this far, not just because of the distance involved. They had to divert from their impromptu road several times, and one time Regina actually had to sit back and wait while Tia and the others dug through an obstruction in their way. Still, their path was probably reasonably clear, all things considered, and it allowed them to get an impression of the city around them.

There were in what she’d call a giant cave that was actually a pockmarked, twisted network of smaller caves. Some parts were completely caved in, some just gone, leading into a dark abyss, and some twisted in strange ways from the mana surges. One chain of buildings looked like someone had squeezed non-Euclidean geometry into reality, and staring at it for more than a second made her eyes slide off. Other parts were just weirdly mutated, or turned into a block of some unknown material. Regina practically felt her perspective on magic expanding just by seeing all this.

Presumably, large parts of the city were in fact completely gone, wiped out above ground and then overgrown with centuries of natural accumulation of soil and vegetation. This was just one part that happened to be partially preserved. Regina couldn’t see far, but she was starting to figure out how to use her mana senses and psychic sensing for life better, so she had a rough idea of where this mishmash transitioned into pure earth again. Even in that, there were little bits of life, and the mana flows noticeably differed.

My Queen, Max finally said to her quietly, glancing at the others. We should stop and rest. We need a break.

Regina stopped walking and turned back, looking at the drones and sighing. She knew he was probably more concerned about her, but drawing her attention to the others’ exhaustion wasn’t just a trick. Alright, she responded, projecting to all of them. We camp here for the night. She glanced up. While they couldn’t see daylight themselves, her link with the rest of her hive told her the time. Well, for the rest of the morning or so, anyway.

They found a reasonably intact house that didn’t seem to have suffered too badly, at least comparatively, and settled down on the roof. Max took the first night, and while Regina intended to stay up for longer, she quickly found herself drifting off. The day had been quite mentally taxing.

About six hours later, she jerked away from a nightmare involving chains of printed paper trying to catch her and turn her into an ice sculpture. Regina stood up quickly, nervously pacing and jumping between her drones’ heads to look through their eyes.

She’d been expecting something to attack them by now. Sure, she’d sensed some smaller monsters that had mostly moved away from them - probably sensing their strength - but nothing remotely more threatening than the Tunnel Terror they’d dealt with. Well, the whole ecosystem here seemed pretty anemic, which actually made some sense if she thought about it, but still …

Why the hell had Leian pointed them here, anyway? Not that I don’t appreciate the opportunity to see what became of the city, at least part of it, of course. But are we actually going to find something useful here?

Her group quickly packed up and set off again, eating sparsely from the rations they’d brought along. While Regina had prepared, she hadn’t really expected to be gone for very long, so their food supplies were a bit meager. That wasn’t really a problem, though. They could go for days without food without really impacting their performance. If all else failed, they could also get water from the moisture in the air, using magic directly or indirectly. Still, it was probably better not to linger here for days.

Although it didn’t seem like that would be an issue. They reached the back part of the buried cityscape, the end of the segmented cave system that housed it, after only a few hours. There was a tunnel leading away from this area, which Regina could tell would probably connect to the underground tunnels they’d been using before. She also still remembered the seemingly rather modern defenses she’d encountered in that area, though, so she wasn’t going to head straight there.

“There don’t seem to be any of those automatic machine guns or whatever we heard previously, when they opened the door,” Max mused quietly, probably following the same line of thought.

Regina nodded. “Those were apparently rather recent additions, which makes sense,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect this city to be some kind of military hub.”

“How so?” Tia asked, frowning.

“Because of its location,” Regina explained. “I’ve been thinking about what I can remember of the geography and the current situation — I mean, before the Cataclysm. The Empire was basically a collection of semi-independent states at the best of times, despite the best efforts of the Imperial parliament and government, but one area they did cooperate was the military, and, mostly, foreign affairs. It’s kind of ironic; they couldn’t even agree on what to rename the country, despite everyone agreeing it should be, but still.”

“Why didn’t they rename it?” Max asked. Regina realized he was just prompting her to keep talking, but she didn’t mind. Talking about it probably helped pull together the information she remembered.

“Well, no one agreed on what,” she said. “For the more straightforward suggestions, something like Empire of Europe would have caused the remaining European countries to kick up a fuss and damage foreign relations, and for Central European Empire, the parts of the Empire which didn’t consider themselves in Central Europe would have kicked up the fuss. So they kept something objectively stupid like ‘Holy Roman Empire’ because it didn’t offend anyone in particular. Even if Rome had only been actually part of the HRE again for, like, thirty years, since Northern Italy joined.”

“Any why did they cooperate in matters of defense and foreign policy? Who were they afraid of?”

“Well,” Regina said slowly, “the alliance with Britain was getting strained, but I don’t think anyone really expected that to turn hostile. I guess the actual opponent was Russia. It’s kind of ironic, since the Empire had finally ‘thrown off the shackles of monarchy’ for good and didn’t even have an Emperor anymore, and the communists were actually moving away from a totalitarian dictatorship to something more genuinely democratic. You’d expect that to have made relations easier, not tenser. But I guess with the problems in East Asia and everything, things were just getting worse in international relations all over the world.”

“What about the rest of the world?” Max kept prompting, as they picked their way down a mostly clear side street.

“Well, the United States was too busy with the messes in the Americas to pay much attention to anywhere else. And India and China seemed to be heading headlong into an actual war. And the less said about that post-colonial, or not so post, mess in Africa, the better. Although the HRE didn’t actually have any colonies there or anywhere else.”

“Sounds like it was just a really bad time for extradimensional visitors to come and make things worse,” Tia said quietly.

“Yeah, I guess, but it might have been even worse later on.” Regina frowned. “Anyway, we’re hundreds of kilometers from the Russian border here, in the middle of the country, so there wasn’t any reason for there to be a large military presence.”

“Can you think of any reason why the Hivekind would have come here instead of anywhere else?”

Regina paused, not just because she wanted to look around and orient herself. They were moving roughly along the outer walls of this section now, parallel to where they’d already been. “Good question,” she responded thoughtfully. “I guess we did have one of the largest population densities in the world in Central Europe, and it was one of, if not the most technologically advanced part of the world. And not currently involved in any violent conflict, unlike the US. As for this city in particular? I have no idea. Maybe because it was somewhat close to the capital, while not actually being there?”

“Are we sure the Hivekind were actually doing anything meaningful here?” Max asked. “Or did they just have a small satellite base?”

Regina paused. “You know, good question. We haven’t seen any sign of them so far, have we? Besides where we started.”

The others exchanged looks and shook their heads.

Regina sighed. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere like this,” she said. “With the aftereffects of the Cataclysm, trying to find anything just by stumbling upon it is probably a fool’s errand. I’ll try and see if I can use my more esoteric senses, despite the disruptions around here.”

“Would they have needed another location or more space beyond the facility we’ve seen, even if they had a major base here?” Ira asked.

“I think so,” Regina replied. “Even if only a few Hive Queens ever came through the portal, which I think is likely, they would have had their own drones. I can’t imagine a Hive Queen choosing to have only two or three drones with her unless she really needed to.” And the base they’d entered from wasn’t that big, especially considering they hadn’t found much in the way of a residential section.

Regina looked around and jumped onto another open terrace, although she wasn’t sure it had actually been intended to be open to the air originally. She settled down in a cross-legged position, then closed her eyes and started meditating.

Over the next hour or so, Regina felt like she made some progress in understanding the weird magical anomaly taking place here, but she couldn’t really say the same for her primary goal. She wouldn’t let that stop her, though. Instead, she just moved to a new location and tried again.

It took over half a day before she finally found something. If she’d started out here, she might not have, in fact. She had gotten a little better at both sensing the small differences in mana, and looking past distracting phenomena in her vicinity. Either way, Regina was almost certain she had found a trace of the Hivekind now. There was something similar to the kind of patterns she’d sensed before. Something intricate but robust, in a different style - for lack of a better word - than anything she’d sensed from local mages. Or, for that matter, the gods.

She wordlessly let the others know about her discovery, then stood up, stretched and jumped onto the road before making her way there. Flying would be easier, but she was cautious of trying it in these surroundings. She could sense the faint relief the others felt at something finally happening. Even the most interesting surroundings could get dull after a while if you just sat and waited.

This Hivekind base was built into an existing building rather than rock, which Regina supposed made sense. It looked like an old warehouse or office building, maybe a combined one, where they had basically left the outer shell intact and remodeled the interior. That’s what the mana flows suggested, anyway, and most of the windows were also gaping, empty holes that allowed a glimpse into the building’s interior. Regina stared at it from the outside for a good ten minutes, but she didn’t really find much else.

Sighing, she walked forward and laid her hand on the door. Then she shivered, feeling a slight change in the mana around her. It felt like something was pressing down on her, but only very lightly, like a metaphysical net or blanket.

Then the door slowly slid open. It got stuck halfway through, but Regina barely paid attention to that. She could sense the enchantments beyond, although they were mostly decayed.

“Well, that was easy,” she muttered.