Chapter L (50)- Seabed Ruins

Kizu stared at Anata. It was hard to say, not having seen her in so many years, but, in a weird way, the girl did resemble his sister. At the very least, she had his sister’s black hair - if far more disheveled - and maybe the same ears poking out from under it. Was this the dangerous deal she had mentioned in her letter? Had Anna been cursed by the bloodspawn? But for what purpose? A blood bag with no memory of the outside world, trapped in the body of a child - was that all this was to them? A way to keep her helpless and stupid while they fed?

But the more he studied her, the less it made sense. Her face looked different than what he remembered. Her eyebrows were a bit thicker, her jawline softer than Anna’s. Her pale skin and red eye could be the result of a curse, sure, but why would they change her face?

“Do you know my sister, Anna?” Kizu asked.

The girl, still pouting from his refusal to free her, wiped her eyes and glared up at him silently.

“Listen,” Kizu said, trying to be patient, “I need to find my sister. If it’s possible, I’ll bring you back with us. But I need to find her first.”

The girl looked up at the trap door, then back down at him. Somehow, he knew that was all he was going to get.

At the moment, this girl was his only lead to his sister. If he did manage to escape, what would happen if his spell continued to route him to the girl? What if this had been doomed from the start? What if his sister really was…

Kizu pushed the dark thoughts aside. He’d leap that hurdle when he came to it. At the moment, he needed to prepare himself. He took out an explosive potion, keeping it ready while he gripped Sojan in his other hand.

Then he focused on a patch of floor a meter in front of him and jumped. But, instead of being rerouted to the beacon as he had expected, he instead appeared on the patch of floor right where he’d been aiming. Nothing had interfered with his spell. He sighed. So much for that plan.

He spent the next few hours on the trapdoor, dangling from the ceiling while he tried fruitlessly to decipher the enchantments in place. The only thing he managed to figure out was that there were, in fact, designed to keep divination spells from coming in or out, among other forms of magic. Beyond that, they were over his head. By the time he finally gave up, Anata had long since fallen back asleep.

Frustrated and fatigued, Kizu took his blanket out from his pack and laid it out on the floor. At this point he was pretty confident Anata wouldn’t try to drink his blood while he slept. The floor was hard, and his pack made for a poor pillow. The room continued to glow, never dimming. The temperature was just chilly enough to make him shiver. If he hadn’t been so exhausted from the day’s trials, he would have struggled to sleep a wink. Thankfully, for once, sleep embraced him with open arms.

Something seized his consciousness and yanked it from his body. He was formless as he was dragged away and brought up, but the nameless force didn’t seem to know where it was going beyond the vague notion of ‘up.’ Kizu managed to wrestle control away from the force and directed them west. He could feel Mort in that direction. Mort was alive. That fact alone was an enormous weight off his shoulders.

They found Mort perched on Ione’s shoulder while she worked on a summoning circle. They were moving as if through a thick layer of honey. Every movement took three or four times longer than it should have to complete.

Kizu looked over at the entity that had dragged him from his body. He recognized Anata now. In her phantom form, her red eye glowed ominously, making her look nefarious.

“Mort!” Kizu called to the monkey. “Ione!”

Neither one reacted.

“No,” said Anata, so quietly that Kizu thought it was his imagination for a moment. Her voice was like a gentle breeze.

“They can’t hear me?” Kizu asked her.

She shook her head.

“But I heard you when you found me.”

She gestured at his ears.

Kizu thought about that while Ione finished her chalk drawing on the floor. They moved so slowly out here.

“I was listening,” he finally guessed. “That’s why you were able to talk to me. I reached out to find my sister several times and you were able to find me, and eventually speak to me through that link.”

Before that though, she’d still led him to the box with Sojan. Why him? How had she found him?

Anata said nothing. Kizu doubted she understood it any better than he did. But he was sure of it now - there was some sort of connection between Anata and his sister.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“Thank you for bringing me to them. But if we can’t contact them directly, we should go back and get some real sleep. Tomorrow-”

“Up,” Anata said instead. She dragged his consciousness away from his friends. Kizu barely managed a glimpse of the upper level of the dungeon’s fiery rivers before they soared past them. They surfaced on the beach near the villas. There was a party going on at the moment. Several Shinzou Academy students were stretched out on the sand, soaking up the sun, while others tossed an oversized ball to one another. The ball fell unnaturally slowly as they passed it. Kizu thought some of the students looked familiar, but he didn’t know any by name. He thought about going over towards Emilia’s villa, but Anata started off towards the waves.

“Wait,” Kizu said, trailing along behind her. “Where are you going?”

She didn’t answer.

It was a strange feeling. Kizu felt he should swim, but instead they just drifted through the water with no resistance. Schools of colorful fish slowly swam by as they plunged through. He tried to hold his breath instinctively, but soon realized that air had become a nonissue in his current state.

Then he noticed the ruins scattered across the seabed. Broken remnants of ancient architecture covered the seafloor like coral, their designs reminding Kizu of the building back in Hon that he’d passed through to enter Shinzou Academy. There were marble pillars jutting out of the sand at despondent angles, old enough that they’d been turned green by algae. What few walls were still standing housed sleeping fish. Anata guided him to a circular building with a mostly intact roof. The entire structure had been overrun by a coral reef. If Kizu had any breath in him, the sight of those myriad reds and oranges would have stolen it from his chest.

Inside the building was a grand, crimson orb that thrummed with power, floating a meter off the seabed. Kizu approached it cautiously. Even in his current state, he could sense the sheer intensity rippling off of the artifact. It thrummed, undulated rhythmically like a beating heart as it cast shades of scarlet over the ruins. Kizu had no doubt that this was the sort of artifact delvers dreamed of discovering. And here it was, not even in the World Dungeon.

Anata sighed audibly and settled down near the orb, as if relieved to see it was still there. She stared up at it, basking in its presence. After a few minutes of admiring it by her side, Kizu decided to explore the surrounding ruins.

He couldn’t get too far from Anata before the girl yanked him back, but his invisible leash still granted him enough range to examine the outer perimeter of the building and the surrounding ruins buried in the reef.

As Kizu watched a school of fish dart by, surprisingly quickly in comparison to everything else around him, he noticed bubbles floating up from the entrance of a cave that appeared to lead straight down.

Kizu eased himself down and saw a stream of bubbles emerging out of a crack in the sea floor. He tugged at the leash on his soul, irritated he couldn’t move any further in. Then, quite abruptly, he didn’t want to anymore.

An eye, with a slitted pupil as large as he was tall, opened on what he had assumed to be a cavern wall off to his right. The massive eye focused on him and the head attached swerved around him, revealing itself to be a massive black eel with spots of white.

“Ah, sorry,” Kizu said, putting his hands up. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

If it understood him, his words didn’t do anything to cool it off. The eel snapped at him, its cavernous maw more than large enough to swallow him whole. Deciding to not lean on his ethereal nature against a magical eel the size of a castle, Kizu dove to the side, plunging through the stone floor. He submerged himself entirely underground. Keenly remembering the stone-tunneling monsters that he’d read about in the Hon expedition journal, Kizu kept on diving as far as he could go, just in case. He kept his trajectory at an angle back towards Anata to keep himself at the full length of their tether as he pivoted around her position. He didn’t make it far before his head popped out of the dungeon’s ceiling.

Right next to a river of molten fire.

Kizu yanked his head back. Even though he couldn’t feel the heat of it, it didn't make him any less panicked. He was at the end of his tether to Anata anyway. Nowhere else to go, he began to ascend back towards her.

Thankfully, no giant eel monster appeared as he rejoined her. The girl was still staring up at the orb. She looked dazed, almost intoxicated.

“Anata, why are we here?”

She ignored him.

Instead of going back out into the nearby ruins and chancing another encounter with the giant eel, Kizu settled down inside the circular building. He wondered what it had been built for. Some sort of ancient religious service seemed to be the most likely answer. As he studied it, he realized the walls were covered in extremely faded murals. Approaching one, he studied it carefully.

The first mural showed several different ships all converging on an island. The people on the ships looked savage while the islanders appeared scared as they hid in the island’s foliage.

The mural beside it depicted a large throng of people groveling before a man in an elevated tower while he gave a speech. The man wore what had once been a black robe, but was now a faint gray. Kizu found his eyes fixated on the face of the man. It looked like small rubies had been embedded in the mural to serve as his eyes. It reminded Kizu of the bloodspawn, except where their irises were red, the entirety of this man’s eyes were rubies. Likely just an artist’s dramatic flair, but Kizu felt unsettled by it all the same. He moved onto the next mural.

It was harder to make out this scene than the last one. Kizu saw bodies scattered across the ground, though the mural was too faded to tell if they were prostrating themselves, or asleep, or… something else. One thing that stood out clearly, though, was the solitary figure that stood in the middle of the scattered souls. It had those same rubies for eyes, and this time it wore a smile on its face. The man’s arms were outstretched over the mass of fallen people.

The next mural was of a faded crescent moon. If there had been anything else to the original depiction, it had long ago been worn away by the sea.

Just as Kizu was moving onto the next piece of art, he felt something tap him gently on the back. He turned around to see Anata standing there timidly, shifting her bare foot. She pointed down.

“Time to go?” Kizu asked.

She nodded, looking downcast.

The next moment, she was dragging him off. They fell even faster than they had risen. The World Dungeon’s passageways were a blur to him as they descended. Thankfully, Anata knew exactly where to go.

In a cold flash, Kizu was awake and gasping for air. On the bed beside him, Anata slept undisturbed. Kizu’s entire body felt cold as ice. His single blanket not nearly enough to stave off the goose prickles. It felt like ages before he was able to drift off again, but he managed it. This time he slept soundly, and without a single dream.