Vespera paced back and forth. "Why is there demonic magic inside the envelope Bib gave us, Sol? What else is there?"
"Coordinates," I said, reading the text. "It says that the guild arcanists have detected an anomalous magic manifestation, with epicenter right around… here."
I opened the map feature of my guild token, entered the coordinates, and stared. Elyra linked with me to see what was going on, while Vespera kept pacing.
"Guys," the demon called. "Where do the coordinates lead?"
"The skitterpede hole," the angel said, swallowing loudly.
Vespera tore the slip from my hands to check for herself. "What? First the demonic magic, now this? Something is going on. Huh…"
The rest of the quest contained the actual instructions on what to do. Basically, scout the area and report back any findings. The more stuff we could learn about the anomaly, the better the guild would pay us.
There was also a note, saying that any findings were legal property of the guild and that any theft would be punishable by confiscation or, in the worst cases, by expulsion or even execution.
Then her eyes landed on some handwritten text at the bottom. It was from Bib.
The unwritten rule is always the same: finders keepers, so long as nobody can prove you were cheating the guild. The job posting will become public tomorrow. I expect that a lot of people will come to 'investigate', hoping to get themselves a new slave—that's a real possibility with a manifestation like that—or some artifacts. The guild officials will arrive last. Once they get there, the fun's over. Usually, they do this because the risk is not worth the reward. Better to send the workers into a possible meat grinder, and let them kill each other. The killers will be marked by their tokens, and they will be expelled and all their goods confiscated. The smart ones will become more powerful workers, which the guild is fine with. And anything that remains behind is the guild's to keep with zero risk to them.
With this, I hope you can consider us even.
"Well," Vespera said with a huff. "There's only one thing we can do, I guess. We better head there immediately, spacer boy. We have been avoiding it for too long already."
I agreed. These kinds of things tended to fester if left unattended. Fortunately, our situation had changed since last time. We were stronger, and I had some skills that made me actually useful in a fight. We were still very inexperienced, of course, but at least we could put up a fight.
"We were level 2 back then," Elyra said.
Vespera grinned. "And we managed to defeat a level seventy skitterpede, didn't we?"
"It was level forty-one," the angel deadpanned.
The demon shrugged, still grinning with her fangs in full display. "So what? Ten times our level. We were amazing and now we are even more amazinger!"
Elyra and I shook our heads in amusement, although I had to concede that she had a point.
We walked to the dark, eerily silent forest, and found the hole right where we left it.
"What else were you expecting?" a rather confused Vespera asked. "Silly spacer boy, did you maybe think the hole would have moved while we weren't looking?"
"Things in space move all the time," I said in my defense.
She cocked her head. "We are not in space, though? You sure you are okay in the head?"
I realized that she was teasing me. When she sensed that I was onto her, she broke into laughter and didn't stop until Elyra began to move the stones and logs we had put around the hole to hide it from view. I went over to help, but the demon laughed again and stopped me.
"Let Elyra dig!" she exclaimed. "I wanna see the trash panda in action! Hey little angel, can you smear dirt on your face again? Make those little cute horizontal lines on your cheeks like last time!"
"No," came the reply in a monotone voice.
But the demon's red eyes were pleading. "Please, please, please?"
"No," she reiterated. She did more than just that. Walking over towards us, she grabbed Vespera by an ear and pulled her towards the hole.
"Ow!"
"Dig. Help."
The demon looked at me and pretended to move like Elyra. "Dig. Help. Hurr durr—ow!"
After administering the pain again, the angel looked at me.
"I'm helping!" I said immediately.
In the end, I did almost all of the work. With my Strength, I moved massive logs and boulders without even breaking a sweat, and in a few minutes we were ready to descend.
"Shared mana pool?" Elyra asked.
I nodded. The bond between us intensified, drawing us just a little bit closer to each other. Our mana pools merged into a bigger, deeper one. It was like a lake with three tributary rivers, each one contributing to its total capacity and regeneration.
Now we were finally ready. I went first, silencing any protests, with Vespera right behind me and finally Elyra—ready to cast a shield as needed.
This reminded me. With a slight pull on the shared mana, a weightless shield made of translucent feathers in the shape of an angel wing appeared in my hand. It was large enough to be unwieldy, but I managed to point it downwards as I descended down the tunnel.
I reached the end and landed on the ground, looking around through the shield. My eyes confirmed what a [Navigational Ping] Elyra had fired off a few moments ago had already told us.
"All clear!" I yelled.
I helped the girls down, and we took positions. Elyra drew some mana, and her wings and halo began to glow with soft, ethereal light. Strangely, but perhaps not surprisingly, so did my shield. The new sources of light banished most of the shadows, revealing a large cavern with a few tunnels leading out in different directions.
"No skitterpedes," I said. "Last time, they swarmed us the moment we landed here."
"They were coming from this side tunnel here," Vespera pointed. "Maybe they have retreated further back?"
"Or they might have migrated," I theorized.
"It's no use speculating," Elyra said. "What do we do now, Sol?"
She looked at me, expecting some direction. I checked the guild token. On the way here, I had used the enchanted quest slip's feature to remotely accept the guild job, hoping it would give me more information.
"The quest says to investigate the area," I said.
"Job," Vespera corrected me. "They don't like the word quest. Weirdos."
I gripped my shield, wishing I could use [Triumvirate's Armory] to also manifest the sword at the same time instead of being forced to switch. Seeing that both girls were waiting for me to do something, I walked towards the tunnel Vespera had pointed towards.
"Let's go there," I said. "See what's inside."
We walked for several minutes, with Elyra casting [Navigational Pings] at regular intervals. The ground was uneven, dotted with stalagmites and rocks that had fallen from the ceiling. It was also wet, water pooling up in shallow puddles that splashed when we stepped on them. Here and there, crystal lights hung on the walls, creating small islands where moss could grow into a miniature ecosystem.
"Look," Elyra said, bending down. "Something tore up all the vegetation."
"The ground's all messed up too," Vespera added. "Think it was the skitteres?"
It looked like they had all moved in a frenzy, and the tracks were fresh.
"Something might have triggered this. What changed?" the angel asked.
"None of us are good at this," I said. "It's no use speculating."
She agreed, and we continued deeper. The tunnel bent and wound several times, maintaining the same general direction but slowly going down. We must have started a few meters below the ground, but now we could have easily been twice as deep as that. The light from my shield and Elyra's wings clung to us like a mantle, banishing the darkness but only in our nearest vicinity.
"Still no monsters," Vespera said. She was getting antsy, we all were. "Where did they all go?"
After what felt like hours but, according to the clock feature of the guild token, was actually only forty minutes, the tunnel began to change. The walls smoothed out, and the light crystals became more frequent. While still damp, the ground was more even, and the whole place looked made rather than natural.
Vespera caught up with me, slowly walking forward while sniffing the air like a cat following a scent.
"I think I can smell demonic magic again," she said. "It's faint but it's there."
She took my hand, then looked at me.
"Quick sensory share?" she asked.
"Go ahead," I said.
She squeezed, and a new stream of sensations entered my mind. It was like I had two noses now. One was giving me the same old sensations as usual, the smell of damp stone and stale air. The other told a completely different story.
"I can feel it too," I said. "And it's getting stronger."
Letting go of my hand, the demon did the same thing with Elyra. She too could feel it. We were getting closer and closer to… something.
I kept the shield ready. Its weightlessness almost made it feel nonexistent, but its shimmering texture and the light coming from it reassured me. The world was filled with swirling lines and the shape of feathers when seen through it, but it didn't hamper my vision at all.
Something caught the light, far away beyond a bend in the tunnel. We all stiffened, slowing down and preparing for a fight, our bond deepening. No longer were we sharing only the mana pool, but our senses and thoughts were all in sync.
It was a strange, heightened state that came just shy of sharing a mind. We couldn't do that, of course, or two out of the three bodies would become shambling zombies. No, this was different.
I—no—we scanned the darkness beyond the reaches of the light we emitted, but nothing was moving. Elyra fired off a magic ping to scan the area, and we parsed the sensory feedback coming from the skill. Nothing too strange, according to it. No magical plants or animals or monsters. Eerie.
We walked, the light now illuminating rusted metal bars. The ground was littered with them. Boxes were scattered on the floor, and we spotted the remains of a campfire. On the wall near the boxes was a shattered light crystal, while a bit further down the tunnel more metal boxes lay corroded and half broken.
It took a moment for us to realize it, but they looked like cages. Now that we knew, we even spotted a lock. The rust had made it fall off the cage it was supposed to keep closed, and the whole door had broken off its hinges and hung at an angle to the side.
Did something burst out of here? We wondered together. Our thoughts were like the inner monologue of a single person, just in three flavors.
Do we think it might be the manifestation the quest talked about?
Job. Not quest, silly cat-angel.
If so, it could be a sentient monster.
What does it even mean?? Bib just gave us the fucking envelope and the paper slip as if we were supposed to understand it?
Hey, there's a room here. We need more light.
On cue, Elyra's wings and halo, as well as my shield, increased in brightness. The draw on our mana pool intensified by a fraction, but we were still almost at full capacity.
"Wait," the angel whispered. "Let's ping it first."
Right. I waited a moment, and then a [Navigational Ping] went off. It revealed a room full of… stuff. Then the magical radar-like wave touched something at the center of the room. A creature. A monster. It passed through it, and it somehow sensed it.
Its eyes snapped open, locking onto us.
"Uhh," I muttered. "I don't think it's happy we woke it up."
◈◈◈
Status: Sol Nightguard
General Level 6
[Bound to the Fallen] Level 4
Str: 90
Dex: 15
Vit: 115
Int: 15
Wis: 15
General Skills:
[Matter Reclamation] 3
[Heavy Load Bearing] 2
[Navigational Ping] 2
Class Skills:
[Resonance Castling] 1
[Paradoxical Mending] 1
[Triumvirate's Armory] 1
[Aspect Manifestation] 1
[Rejection of Fate] 1