Somehow, I should have seen this coming.

Just getting a direction, alongside a rough estimation of distance was far too easy. No, instead of venturing into the city, or at least along its border, the vector we were following only cut through part of the outer city before sending us off, into the fields beyond.

Luckily, there was a fairly well-maintained road, alongside a few signs that gave me a good idea of where we were headed, though the knowledge was not something I relished. This plan of mine was a true stinker unless the mercy of some Deity of Chance was with us and made it a cruel and unusual joke that the vector leading us towards a particularly dense cloud of Death and Decay Magic was sending us past the sewage treatment plant the signs around us indicated. It was possible, but more in a vague hope for a better world instead of it being a realistic proposition. No, we were headed towards the plant and unless I decided that I didn’t want to know, we’d be stuck with the stink. Or maybe the entire sewage had already decomposed, the change was months ago, so there shouldn’t be any fresh sewage coming in.

Amusingly, the way towards the plant was quite nice. There were mostly fields, a, luckily intact, bridge over a defunct highway and more fields alongside a small irrigation ditch until we came close. It wasn’t hard to detect the place once we were close enough, it quite literally stunk to the high heavens. I had no idea how that worked, I had assumed that after months of a broken sewage system, the sewage would have decomposed to the point that it didn’t stink any longer, alas, it seemed like I thought wrong. Or maybe the stench of decay had simply seeped into the soil in some arcane manner, desecrating, or maybe defecating, the ground forever more.

Maybe I should have expected that there was no wildlife anywhere near the area, nothing I could detect anyway. It was eerily quiet as if even the wind was unwilling to come here and pick up the stench, only the dark, somewhat mouldy, buildings of the facility, surrounded by a partially corroded chainlink fence. Nothing that would keep us out, if we wanted to leave by any other way than the road, nothing that looked like trouble, at least from a distance.

Moving into a fairly secure formation, with Lia and Silva in the lead, Luna with Alex on her shoulder in the middle and me in the back, we continued past the gates and into the facility itself.

When I walked past the gate, I glanced at it and immediately called a halt, noting a strange sheen on the metal, accompanied by a slightly sharper scent in the air. It was incredibly difficult to differentiate the strange scent from the stench we were surrounded by, but when I took a moment, I managed to isolate it. The entire fence was infused with the energy of Decay, not strong enough to destroy it but strong enough to weaken it, to the point that I could bend a sizable piece of metal with about the same amount of force I’d have needed to bend a bit of cardboard before the change.

To get a better idea of what that meant for the fence, I quickly conjured up an Icicle, giving it a sharp edge akin to a knife, and tried slicing through the chainlink fence, thinking it would simply part. Instead, it stretched as if the fence wasn’t made from metal but from rubber. Now, my interest was thoroughly roused and I tried to cut it with all my strength, only that my strength wasn’t enough to make the sharp edge go through the rubbery metal, it simply stretched, pulling the rest of the fence with it in an incredibly weird display of mangled physics. The upper part of the fence shouldn’t have stayed where it was, but for some reason, it did just that, as if the razorwire up top was somehow glued to thin air.

“Huh,” I muttered, staring at the stuff after taking a step back, slowly letting the force I had put onto the fence dissipate. “Let’s see what that thing can do.”

With a grin, I used my Ice Magic to push the bladicle against the fence again, after we all moved quite a bit away from it. There was no need to take a risk if something weird happened, though compared to the physics-bending the upper part of the fence had done, I wasn’t sure what counted as ‘weird’ and what I should count as expected.

Again, the fence stretched to comical proportions, looking very much like some sort of massive slingshot, as I kept pushing more and more Ice Magic into the Icicel I had conjured. It took a bit, and by that time the metal fence had stretched over two metres out of its original pane, but then the grip of my Ice Magic snapped and I was treated to a fairly amazing display of physics in action. The fence gave off a twang that reminded me of a bow, only far more powerful, the air vibrating with the force of it, and the icicle turned into a highspeed projectile, moving fast enough to part the air with an audible crack. Sadly, the thing wasn’t made to withstand that amount of force without some serious magical reinforcement, causing the Ice to disintegrate from the air resistance. This meant that the magical energy I had poured into it the whole time had to go somewhere, and as it was Ice, it discharged in a cone of freezing energy, looking somewhat like a shotgun, or the massive cone of cold I had conjured way back, beneath the glacier.

There were a few noises of shock from Lia and Luna, accompanied by excited chittering from Alex, who looked like they were about to hop off Luna’s shoulder to grab the fence, right here, right now.

“We should explore further before we consider harvesting the stuff,” I told the others, my ears already perking up to hear if anything was making its way towards the commotion. Whatever else I had done, our chances to stealthily explore the facility were, quite literally, shot, thanks to the noise and the magical burst accompanying it.

After briefly checking out the area affected by the blast of freezing energy, and a quick look at the fence that had returned to its original condition, we continued further into the facility. There were multiple buildings, one large administrative building, one that looked a little like an indoor swimming pool and multiple that were the size of large or medium sheds. Those shed-like buildings most likely housed some sort of machinery, as they were located next to the various open filtration pools, but I’d have to get closer to check.

From afar, there was no movement to see in any of the buildings, nor in the open areas between them.

Our first stop was the largest building, as it was closest to the gate. The parking lot was completely empty, showing that during the change nobody had been there as one might expect, and the door remained locked and the windows unbroken. Not that anyone would really care for a sewage plant, well, nobody but Alex. I had a feeling they’d be highly interested in what chemicals remained, either to experiment or to use as weapons.

Getting the door open was fairly simple, a quick conjuration of water, moving it into the lock to feel out the mechanism, freeze it into Ice and I had a simple key and could turn it. Amusingly, that was the hardest part, actually turning the key, the time the door hadn’t been touched had caused some corrosion to make things a little more difficult. Oil would help, but given that I didn’t really care about the door, a bit of brute force did the trick.

Inside, there was more dust, a few offices with paperwork and a small laboratory. There, we lost Alex for a bit as they excitedly chittered, hopping off Luna’s shoulder to Lia and urging her into the lab. Luna and I checked through the rest of the building while the two of them were gathering as much of the equipment from the lab as they could, including the chemicals.

The most exciting thing Luna and I managed to scrooge up was a box of milk that seemed to have developed a life of its own, though not quite in the classical way milk normally did. Instead of turning sour, the milk had turned into a strange slime-like creature, partially devoured the box it used to come in and tried to do the same to us. Luckily, its diminutive size prevented it from being a fast-moving danger, giving me more than enough time to dispatch it with a blast of freezing energy.

Somehow, I wasn’t sure I was excited about this any longer, if a carton of milk could turn into a slime creature, what about everything else in this place?