Chapter LII (52)- The Escape
Kizu got no more clear answers from Anata. She appeared to know even less than he did. She didn’t even seem able to comprehend what family was, let alone who her parents might be. When he asked her who’d taught her his language, she just tilted her head and pointed up. From what Kizu understood, she had picked it up by divining her way up to the surface and eavesdropping on students. But that didn’t match up quite right, because every time she dragged him to the surface in the days that followed, everything up there was always slowed down to a ridiculous degree. Trying to listen in on other students’ conversations was painful. When he tried asking Anata about the altered passage of time, she just looked confused.
Thankfully, Anata didn’t drag him up to the surface every time he slept. He managed to get some decent sleep most days, a vast improvement on his sleepless nights at the academy.
His days were filled with practice. He mostly focused on improving his jumping. By the end of his second week trapped in the box, he could manage not only a hundred short jumps in quick succession before running low on blood, but also about half as many when he brought Anata along as a passenger. It was an absolutely staggering improvement, the sort that would have taken him at least a year under normal circumstances. Likely even longer. Here in the box, though, whenever he got dizzy, Anata was there to give him a drop of her blood. She was an endless well of power to draw on.
The only thing slowing down his progress was his leg. Whenever he jumped, he would fall a few inches. While he slowly managed to jump closer and closer to the ground as he improved, it still put a lot of pressure on his damaged leg.
But, in the time he needed to let his leg rest, he kept himself busy by practicing other spells. It progressed at a less remarkable speed, as it used significantly less blood than jumping, but Kizu did practice his control over elemental spells as well. By the end of two weeks, he had almost perfect control over a pebble he had found in his shoe. He could not only send it zipping in any given direction, but he could also call it back to his hand like a boomerang. A self-taught achievement.
For practice with boiling and freezing water, he had let the algae in the corner slowly drip its slime into a small cup from his pack. After straining it dozens of times through a cloth to purify it as best he could, Kizu had a murky liquid to practice with. And his practice yielded results. While not the fine level of control he had over the pebble, Kizu could still manipulate the water out of the cup and freeze it or boil it at will. He got to the point where he didn’t even need to be touching the liquid to manipulate it, just as long as he was within half a meter of it.
Fire proved a lot more difficult to practice. Anata was terrified whenever he managed to create a flame, so he could only work on it when she was asleep. That meant no refills on blood until she woke up, so it progressed at a painfully slow pace.
With no previous instruction on how to control air, Kizu wasn’t sure where to even begin. He wished he could look through the books in the library, and once he had tried to steer Anata there during one of the occasions where she dragged him to the surface. Unfortunately, Anata refused to let him guide her. The closest he managed to get was wandering the school grounds with her for a few minutes before returning to the underwater ruins. She appeared obsessed with those ruins and always ended up there when she took Kizu along with her. It unnerved him a bit, but it was out of his control for now.
When she was awake, so long as he wasn’t playing with fire, Anata would watch with rapt attention whenever he practiced. He often caught her mimicking his movements out of the corner of his eye, but if he turned toward her, she would always drop what she was doing and look at the ground as if he’d caught her stealing.
One day, while practicing jumping, Kizu popped over to the other side of the room and looked back, preparing a return jump, but stopped himself. Anata had collapsed on the floor, eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling. Kizu only had a moment to start panicking before her body lurched across the room at an unruly speed. In the time it took his heart to skip a beat, she was standing beside him, looking very pleased with herself.
“Anata,” he said, when he found his voice, “What did you just do?”
Her pleased expression turned to anxiety in an instant. She bit her lip, drawing blood with her sharpened canine, and looked away.
“Can you demonstrate that for me?” Kizu asked, when he realized he wouldn’t get a verbal explanation from the girl. “Show me one more time?”
Anata glanced to the other side of the room. Then she collapsed to the floor again, a lifeless pile of flesh.
This time, Kizu was ready. With his spellsense, he watched Anata’s phantom sweep across the room. Then, when she reached her destination, her body snapped toward her position. It ragdolled across the room at an unbelievable speed. In the process, it knocked his pack, lying on the floor nearby, out of its path.
Kizu stared at her. Then he remembered what Roba had told him back in his lessons. There were other ways in which one could jump. But they were significantly less safe than the method she’d taught him. Kizu suspected this was one of those methods. He avoided thinking about what would happen to her body if she tried to bring it through something solid.
“Anata, that’s amazing!” Kizu couldn’t help but exclaim. “Do you think that you could bring me along with you?”
Anata perked up at his praise and nodded enthusiastically. She walked up to him and tentatively touched his hand. In the next instant, he felt himself peeled away from his body; he watched as his body collapsed in a boneless heap next to Anata’s, but he could still feel her holding his hand as she guided him across the room. Then, instead of his soul snapping back into his body, like it usually did when in this form, Anata dragged their bodies to them. Kizu couldn’t help but flinch as his body slammed into his soul.
Then it was over, and he stood there feeling completely normal. He grinned. An idea was born in Kizu’s mind. He’d need time to prepare it, though.
Fortunately, he had time to spare, as nothing changed inside the box no matter how many days passed. Unfortunately, he was almost out of his sustaining food and water potions. Once he ran out, he would have to join Anata in licking the algae off of the wall. Kizu dreaded that, but he also felt extremely guilty about taking all the vials with him. He could only imagine the stress Ione and Mort were under, forced to find food in the dungeon this far down. And he could only imagine it, because Anata refused to let him visit Mort after that first day. She always stubbornly dragged him along to the underwater ruins, no matter which way he tried to pull her.
Days passed, and Kizu was mentally preparing himself for the worst, when finally, the day came that the trap door above him shifted, creaking open. Neither the noise nor the movement were what first alerted Kizu to the prison being opened up. It was his bond with Mort slamming back into him, reinstating itself. It felt like slipping back into a well-worn boot. He finally felt whole again. Thankfully, it only took him a moment to recover from the shock.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“How’d you like the frog, Anata?” someone asked from above. “We had a bet going - did you eat it? Or did it starve?”
Kizu grabbed Anata’s shoulder.
“Now!” he hissed.
Despite her terror, she closed her eyes. From the outside looking in, he watched their bodies collapse bonelessly to the floor.
And then Anata was dragging him with her, up, up, out of the box. They flew past the bloodspawn whom Kizu recognized as the one who’d dropped him in the box to begin with, and then Anata dragged their bodies back to them.
Kizu’s limp leg clipped the bloodspawn’s jaw on its way up to him, sending the monster sprawling.
A moment later, Kizu was back in his body. Reacting fast, before gravity could pull them back down to earth, Kizu reached out with a gloved hand and grabbed a hold of the ceiling. He activated the glove’s enchantment, sticking him to it. With his other arm, he swung Anata across to land safely on the other side of the trap door, before dropping down himself.
The bloodspawn was still dazed, but it was slowly finding its feet. Kizu wasn’t about to let it get its bearings. He threw one of his explosive vials at the monster, and shielded Anata from the sight with his body as it went up in flames. He flinched at its screams, but didn’t have the luxury of going easy on the monsters right now.
Snatching Anata into his arms, Kizu dashed away. He followed the reestablished bond, letting it guide him back to his familiar. He chose the most direct path forward at every fork and let nothing distract him along the way.
The dungeon was colder than he remembered, this area more like a stoney castle than any natural structure. A castle trapped inside a glacier, perched atop a mountain, maybe. There were torches on the wall, but they glowed an eerie blue and exuded cold instead of warmth, somehow. Glittering sheets of ice coated the walls, and Kizu barely managed to catch himself as he slipped on a patch of black ice on the floor. His leg protested the stumble and he could feel the enchantments on his leg brace faltering, but he didn’t slow down. It felt like the bone of his calf had splintered and only needles kept it together, but still he ran through the pain. The extra weight of Anata and his pack bore down on him with every step.
Anata seemed unaware of his pain as she gaped at the dungeon around them. Several times he noticed her eyes following a painting they passed, or a frigid suit of armor. Still, she clung to him as he dashed through the corridors, not showing any sign of wanting him to slow down or stop. Not that he would have, even if she’d found her voice to ask. He layered an illusion over them, camouflaging them with the wall they ran alongside. Unfortunately, the shadows cast by the torches were too difficult to keep up with, so more than a cursory glance could reveal them.
Twice, they passed bloodspawn and narrowly managed to avoid detection. The third time, he wasn’t quite as lucky. But in the spawn’s confusion, Kizu still managed to smash an explosive vial over its head. The monster’s screams were the end of any remaining shred of stealth. Kizu started setting fires in their wake in hopes of deterring any pursuers. It seemed to work, though he worried about leaving such an obvious trail. But he supposed that was better than the spawn nipping at his heels every step of the way.
As he rounded another corner, Kizu barreled straight into someone. The collision left Kizu and Anata in a heap, but the other person managed to catch himself on the wall and keep his feet.
Kizu’s immediate instinct was to hurl an explosive at the new threat, but he hesitated. The man’s eyes, for he was a man, weren’t scarlet. Instead, they were a clear ocean blue. Only then did Kizu realize what the man was carrying under the crook of his arm. The Atlas to the World Dungeon.
“Basil?” Kizu proclaimed, stunned.
“Ah, yeah, hey Kizu,” Basil said sheepishly. “Um, fancy running into you here, of all places. I was just, um, scouting ahead.”
Kizu had no idea how to process Basil’s sudden appearance. It seemed far, far too bizarre to just be a coincidence. On the one hand, he was genuinely relieved to run into a friendly face in such a hostile environment. On the other hand, he almost wished Basil was horribly injured, or an obvious captive on the run like them. That would at least serve as some retribution for what he’d done. But Basil looked to just be strolling through the corridors without a care. That begged the question. Was this a friendly face?
“What are you doing here? We almost died because you left! I don’t even know if Ione is alive! You stole my atlas!”
Basil wilted and looked away. “Just…scouting ahead.”
Kizu forced back the pain of his friend’s betrayal. At the moment, he needed to think of Basil not as a friend, but as a resource. Maybe an unreliable one, but a resource nonetheless. If nothing else, Kizu didn’t think Basil would purposefully try to get him killed. He had to trust that instinct. He took a deep breath and compartmentalized his feelings.
“Basil, we need to get out of here. Where’s the exit?”
“Ah!” Basil exclaimed, obviously relieved to move on. “Just right this way.”
Kizu followed Basil, with Anata fidgeting in his arms.
“It’s horribly cold down here,” Basil chatted amicably, as if they weren’t running for their lives through enemy territory. “I absolutely hate it. The cold makes my transformations stiff. Whenever I sleep, I wake up almost frozen through - it takes me an hour just to thaw! I’ll be glad to put this place behind me. Lucky thing, too, that I only got here a couple days ago. Another two and you’d be hauling back a stylish ice cube.”
“You just got down here?” Kizu asked breathlessly, as they moved quickly through the corridors. “Where have you been the last three weeks?”
Basil gave him a side eye, brows furrowing. “With you?”
“What, like in spirit?” Kizu snapped. “If you don’t want to tell me, just say that.”
“No… like I was with you in the Sonney chamber a couple days ago. Then I decided to, um, scout ahead. And I found you here. Carrying around a random kid.”
“She’s my niece,” Kizu said absently.
“So, you found your sister? Mission accomplished?”
“No. Just her daughter.”
“Well, that’s great news! Now that you’ve rescued her you can introduce her to a comb. What they’ve done to her hair is horrid. A crime. Honestly, a comb might not be enough - a stylist would tell you to shave it bald and start over. Even I can barely spot the potential under all those knots.”
Kizu stopped to peer around a corner. No guards. “You’re sure this is the way out?”
“Yeah, of course. I’ve been scouting out this whole place. Know it like the back of my hand.” Basil raised the back of his hand for emphasis. It swirled, shifting into an image of a map. Then he pointed down a separate hall. “Over there are the coffins that the spawn all sleep in. Okay, okay, they aren’t really coffins. They mostly sleep on drab mats on the ground. And maybe sleep is the wrong word. They enter a trance-like state of meditation.” He pointed in a different direction. “If you go down that way, you’ll make it to some sort of recreational room. Tons of weird card games. They do a lot of gambling to pass the time. They’re surprisingly bad at it for immortal creatures with all the time in the world to practice.” Then he pointed down the way they were going. “And down there is our way out of this frozen abyss. Back into the Labyrinth. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised you don’t know the way out. How did you get in?”
“They have a beacon that redirects any nearby jump to a containment room.”
Kizu reached over and awkwardly snatched the World Dungeon Atlas out of Basil’s hand. He flipped through it one handed, his other still holding Anata. They continued on down the passage, Kizu’s attention split between the book and keeping a lookout for more bloodspawn. He did his best to ignore his throbbing leg.
Anata, for her part, had buried her face in his shoulder. She peeked out occasionally at Basil and their surroundings. It seemed as if she was trying to decide whether she was curious or terrified of the shapeshifter.
A quick scan of the book let him know that Basil was telling the truth for once. It looked like they really were on the right track towards the surface. Kizu felt relieved to be able to give a measure of trust back to his friend.
In the next room they entered, the door slammed closed behind them of its own accord, dislodging icicles from the ceiling. The room looked like a frozen pond. The cold blue fire torches blazed on the walls, casting a preternatural glow over the place. Basil shifted uncomfortably, huddling in his fur-lined coat.
As Kizu stepped forward, careful of his footing, he realized they weren’t alone in the room. A cloaked figure was frozen under the ice in the center of the room.
Kizu glanced down at it, trying to see under its cowl. Its eyes opened. Eyes akin to pools of blood. Eyes that glowed brighter than the torches on the walls.
While Kizu stumbled back, Anata squirmed out of his arms and ran. Not away, but towards the figure frozen in the ice.
The ice cracked. The monster stirred.