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Chapter 104 - The Deep Dark
🕑 Added 2024-08-23 17:00:08 +0000 UTCEmily sinks below the surface quickly, the current gripping her and forcing her down the moment she relaxes. She channels light through her hands, illuminating the water below as she approaches the riverbed at speed. The bottom is revealed, showing a gaping hole just wide enough to fit Emily, dragging in the surrounding water with immense force. The closer she gets to the hole, the stronger the current grows, to the point where Emily isn’t sure she’d be able to resist it in such a limited space.
If there’s purchase on the sides of the tunnel, I may be able to pull myself out. But there’s no way the others will be able to swim out. This is possibly a one-way trip.
Frowning, Emily grabs The Clock from its pouch before letting herself slip into the hole. She shoots through the tunnel, descending tens of metres before the narrow passage bends, slamming her against solid rock and dragging her down further. She bounces off the walls a few times as the passageway twists and turns, quickly closing the vertical distance between her and her Diver.
The travel is disorienting as her direction changes repeatedly, but Emily simply focuses on her feet, watching calmly and waiting for a change. After a minute of shuttling through the narrow, twisting channel, her feet hit a swirl of churning water, too rough for her to see through, before she’s shot out into the open air, overshooting the water that continues to plummet into the unknown.
The moment the space opens up around her, she calmly channels mana through the Air Walker, forming a solid barrier against the soles of her feet. Her legs compress, absorbing her momentum, before relaxing as she drops and twists gracefully to place her feet below herself before creating a platform to stand on.
Emily looks around, pulling off her Gills before pointing her hands in all directions to try and take in her surroundings. She finds nothing but the ever-persistent darkness that clings unnaturally to her skin, sending shivers down her spine as it noticeably encroaches upon the glow from her hands.
“It’s gotten stronger,” she mutters, conjuring a ball of light and tossing it above her head, pouring mana into it. “And I think it’s alive.”
A small zone of light slowly forms around her as more and more mana flows into the spell, forcing the darkness back. Emily looks around her haven of light, drinking in the new space.
Behind her is a small waterfall, blooming from a solid stone wall and falling into a quickly flowing river below. The water is an eerie mix of black and grey, the fog seemingly having lost its vigour, blending into the inky water, no longer separated like before. The riverbank is completely clear of fog, and though there are still crystals lining the roof, they’re all pitch black, seemingly drawing the light away from the tunnel around them instead of providing it.
Emily walks forward, lowering herself onto the riverbank and stepping onto the smooth stone.
“Might as well have a look around before I reset,” she mutters, glancing back up towards the mouth of the waterfall a dozen metres above her, watching the powerful torrent of water cascade into the flowing water, the hole she came through now obstructed by the living darkness. “That would be a massive pain to go back through.”
Emily takes out her boat as she walks, dropping it into the water beside her and checking The Clock.
If I move for eighteen hours, I can return to right before I entered the dungeon to save damaging my boot and wasting potions. I guess I’m getting a rematch after all.
With an amused smile, she continues into the darkness. She reduces the size of her light to reduce the mana drain, opting to walk with a two-metre area of vision and sending a bird ahead with a thermal pack to compensate. She pulls out the Diver’s tablet and checks their relative position as she moves, her amusement changing into excitement as she confirms that she’s moving towards it now on the correct elevation level.
I’m getting closer.
An hour later, walking through the empty tunnel alone, Emily suddenly freezes as she hears a faint clicking sound. She lowers into a combat stance and advances, scanning through her bird’s eyes to locate the source as the sound slowly grows louder.
She sees a flicker of movement through the bird before her connection is suddenly severed. Emily pauses as her brows furrow in anger, before she activates her own infra-sight and continues on, a crackling magic circle forming behind her in preparation to greet her bird’s killer. The clacking sound gets closer, but Emily doesn’t see anything in the tunnel ahead, and her opponent doesn’t seem to notice her approach either.
This darkness seems to be limiting the range of my infra-sight. No wonder it got my bird. I probably flew straight into it. At least it’s providing cover for me too.
She comes to a halt, cancelling her infra-sight and instead channelling earthen detection. Instantly she locates her target and, without wasting a beat, she unleashes an arc-bolt on it. The foe seems to notice her detection, turning to her the moment a pulse of her earth mana reaches it, but it’s too slow to dodge her attack, taking a torrent of burning plasma to the head.
It lets out a horrid screech that quickly slurs as millions of volts surge through its body, melting through the armour that protected its head and causing it to slump to the floor in a twitching mess. Emily approaches the fallen figure, bringing it within the glow of her light and finally seeing her enemy.
The creature is as big as Emily, with smooth, black, chitinous armour and two deadly scythes lying limp before its chest, attached to multisegmented, whip-like arms. Its body is split into two torsos, one small one: connecting its head, and arms, and one large one with twelve jagged legs sticking out. It’s a grotesque mix between a praying mantis and a spider that sends Emily’s survival instincts into overdrive the moment she sees it. Recognition flashes through her eyes as she remembers a key piece of information about the abomination of nature.
Mantolyc are metal and earth-based creatures with high lightning resistance… And they have three brains.
Her realisation comes just in time, as her control core immediately diverts all her cores into assistive processing, cancelling her light and detection spells but slowing the world around her. Machina flickers beneath her skin in silent command, and Emily twitches back, wrenching her head away from the creature in the nick of time.
A sharp blade whips up as she moves, carving a channel through her body armour, barely meeting any resistance, before catching against her throat and gouging a deep line from her collarbone to her chin, taking a chunk out of her jawbone on the way past.
It fucking baited me!
Emily grits her teeth, ignoring the stinging pain and the gushing outpour of blood, forcing herself to go on the offensive to save herself from the perilous situation she has walked into.
A near-instantly cast acceleration spell charges her body with magical lightning to match the biological kind already coursing through her system, and she presses forward, sliding in under the now-raised scythe. Both her arms stretch forward, one moving to deflect the second scythe as it cuts towards her chest, and the other slamming a palm home into the centre of the creature’s smaller abdomen. The Claw underneath the palm crackles with machina, overdrive stressing it to the max as Emily activates the firing mechanism. A single, razor-sharp blade flies out, punching a hole clean through the first torso and into the armour of the second behind it.
Unfortunately, the blade doesn’t carry enough power, but Emily doesn’t let her assault end there. With two of the creature's three brains destroyed, Emily takes advantage of a slight pause in the mantolyc’s movements to throw herself under the creature, arriving at its slightly softer underbelly.
It immediately goes to crush her, relaxing its legs to drop its full weight on her, but Emily reinforces herself with rock body, the spell wrapping her limbs in dense earth mana that allows her to forcefully hold up the oversized bug’s immense weight by jamming her elbows into the floor at her waist. Her bones creak slightly under the force, even with the help of the spell, but Emily doesn’t care, a manic, triumphant grin covering her features.
“Checkmate,” she mutters, ignoring the pain that shoots from her injured throat as a giant magic circle forms between them.
Emily is given plenty of time to cast a large spell now that she doesn’t have to worry about the creature’s arms, and the mantolyc realises its mistake as a blazing arrow of light slowly forms against its abdomen. It tries to stand up, but does so far too late as a clean, searing hole is bored through its centre the moment it releases the pressure on Emily’s arms.
Emily rolls to the side as the creature goes slack, dropping to the ground with a thud. She rolls onto her knees, standing up smoothly and casting a light again, to look at her fallen foe, while raising a hand to her burning throat. It comes away covered in blood and, looking past it, she sees a waterfall of red cascading down her front.
Well, shit.
She starts channelling a healing spell, but it only stems the bleeding, struggling to close the wound in a reasonable time. Clicking her tongue, and wincing in the pain, Emily reaches into her belt and pulls out a vial of healing potion. She pops the cork and pours the glistening crimson liquid onto the wound. It slowly starts to knit back together and, after two more potions, the loose flaps of flesh on either side finally connect, sealing the wound with a raw scab.
Emily frowns, resisting the urge to sigh while gently massaging her sore neck with healing light, and kicks the mantolyc’s side in frustration.
I let my guard down. I wasn’t expecting to run into a third circle beast so quickly.
Her frown slowly shifts into a grin as she looks out into the darkness ahead.
I’m getting closer.
She sets off again, leaving the corpse behind and heading towards her Diver. She runs into a few groups of beasts in the dark, the moles, screamers, and lightning eels still present in the new layer, and she even encounters another mantolyc, which she brutally dismantles, shredding it to pieces with the Claws in a battle of whips.
By the end of her time limit, Emily manages to reduce the distance between herself and the Diver by a quarter.
This is amazing. It may only take a few days to catch up with-
Her thoughts are interrupted when the dot on the receiver in her hand suddenly vanishes.
“What?” she mutters in surprise, the aching in her neck already faded. “Something destroyed it. At least I know what direction to go in.”
She pulls out The Clock, glancing out into the darkness and watching it writhe as she turns back time.
Now to convince Jules to go underwater...
***
Emily drops out of the folds of time a hundred metres away from the dungeon gate, approaching it quickly with her friends.
No injuries this time.
She enters the dungeon alone, once again convincing everyone not to follow, and quickly gets to work culling the horde. She rips goblins to pieces with wide, sweeping arcs of her Claws, punches holes through hobgoblins, and decimates the mages with deadly magical precision. She successfully clears out the portals spewing monsters a few minutes faster than the first time: with less mana lost, and an inconsequential amount of extra stamina used.
Emily pulls out the Whisper as the chamber begins creating its golem, loads it full of explosive bullets, and aims it at the growing tar-like creature in the centre of the hall. She lines it up with the forming left hip, flicks the firing selector into full, and unloads the moment the black mass solidifies into stone. Five shots fly out in an instant, each a soft hiss followed by a harsh crack, then a thundering boom that drowns out the following rain of empty casings hitting the floor.
The golem’s hips, stomach, head, and chest are blown to pieces in that order, with the loud shattering of the core occurring as the head vanishes this time. She calmly switches the magazine in her gun back to standard rounds and sends it back into her storage before claiming her reward.
Emily leaves with a smug grin, proud of the efficiency of her dungeon clear, and faces her friends with the loot once again. They leave to continue down the tunnel soon after, this time without having to wait for her to lick her wounds, and arrive at the crossroads after a short trek through the tunnel.
“Do we really have to backtrack?” Dante asks, kicking a rock into the water once again.
“No,” Emily answers decisively, drawing her friends’ attention in an instant.
“Really? Where are we meant to go then?” Tom asks.
“Where else?” Emily asks with a grin, tapping the ground with her foot, a brown magic circle quickly spreading around them. “Down.”
Enzo and Ivor both recognise earthen detection instantly, activating the spell themselves and inspecting the ground below them. It takes them a few moments, but they both soon pick out the odd, faint vibrations descending further than they should, brought by the crashing current flowing down into the tunnel in the middle of the junction.
“There’s a tunnel underwater,” Enzo mutters in surprise. “Do you think we’re meant to go through that?”
Everyone turns to Emily for an answer, and she doesn’t miss the look of horror on Juliana’s face. She reaches out, taking Juliana’s hand reassuringly as she nods.
“Yeah. The tunnel is wide enough to fit a person, and it continues down towards The Diver. I’m certain that it will take us closer to our goal. But I don’t think we’ll be able to come back along this route,” Emily explains, her lack of confidence sending a wave of unease through her friends.
“So, we may get stuck down there?” Enzo asks with a hint of caution.
“Yes and no,” Emily responds with a sigh. “I don’t think we’ll get stuck. I’m confident in being able to work out a way back out, no matter what. I’m just not sure how long it will take.”
“Then it should be fine, right?” Dante says, confidently hitting his fist against his palm. “We came down expecting to jump into the unknown, right? Why are we getting nervous now?”
Enzo casts a distasteful glance towards his friend, but his expression quickly falls into one of resignation as he lets out a sigh.
“I hate to admit it,” he starts.
“But he’s not wrong,” Tom finishes, surprising everyone.
They all look at him with varying degrees of shock, to which he responds with a small scoff and a self-deprecating smile.
“I know you’re all pretending I’m here to carry stuff, but Emily’s belt could do a better job. However,” he grins. “If there’s one thing I am good at, it’s throwing myself headfirst into stupid situations without thinking.”
A small smile creeps its way onto Emily’s lips.
Maybe I was too harsh on him.
