Chapter XLIX (49)- Anata

The box was bigger on the inside. Not massive, but large enough for a plain looking bed and some floorspace. The walls thrummed with a soft vermillion light.

The moment the lid clanged shut, he felt his bond with Mort sever. The splitting of his soul knocked him off his froggy feet. It took him a long moment to recover. When he did, he found himself staring up at the ceiling. Even with his base knowledge of enchanting runes, Kizu was able to recognize a few from his sister’s divination book. Enough to infer that the box was sealed off from the outside world. No magic in, no magic out.

Relief washed over him. That meant Mort wasn’t necessarily dead - just cut off from him. While unnerving and deeply uncomfortable, temporary separation was far from the worst case scenario.

Kizu suspected a tree frog's strength wouldn’t be enough to lift that heavy metal lid, to say nothing of any mundane or enchanted locks it might be fitted with. Rather than waste time and energy trying, he hopped around the room, exploring the prison.

A pale, scrawny girl slept in the bed, curled up in a ball under a thin blanket. Kizu quietly hopped to the bed and hid under it. The last thing he wanted was a young bloodspawn waking up hungry and finding him as a tasty little snack. Minutes passed, but the girl didn’t wake up. She barely made a noise.

When the potion’s effects wore off and Kizu was back in his normal body, he crept out from his hiding spot to observe the girl.

Kizu judged her age to be maybe seven or eight years old. Her raven black hair looked smooth, but it was a mess of tangled knots. She was doll-like, her dark hair juxtaposed with her pale, blemishless face. She still didn’t move. It didn’t even look like the girl was breathing. Something about her nagged at him. Like he should know who she was. What had the bloodspawn called her? Anata? Thinking back, he recalled hearing another spawn mention the name weeks ago while hunting him.

Kizu looked up at the metal trap door on the ceiling. It was well out of his reach; thankfully, though, he had come prepared. He took out his enchanted gloves. Doing his best to move silently, so as to not wake the monster child, he activated the enchantment that allowed them to stick to surfaces. Painstakingly slowly, he climbed up the wall and onto the ceiling. He pushed against the door. Nothing. It didn’t even budge - locked after all. Kizu cursed quietly. He debated trying to blow it off its hinges with an explosive potion, but the room wasn’t large. His fire-resistance potions wouldn’t matter much if the concussive force or the smoke killed him.

Kizu took out Sojan and tried prying the door open with the enchanted knife. He figured that something as heavily enchanted as Sojan wouldn’t snap from the attempt. The knife held, thankfully, but it yielded no results. The lid was sealed so tightly that he couldn’t find any purchase with the knife.

A quiet yelp broke his concentration.

Kizu looked down over his shoulder. The bloodspawn girl had woken up. She stared up at him with intense heterochromic eyes. One red, the other black. She clutched her blanket to her chest, as though it was a shield that could protect her.

“If you try anything, I’ll burn us both up,” Kizu threatened her at once. Then, once he’d had a second to think it through, asked, “Do you know how to get out of here?”

The girl shook her head, shrinking further down behind her blanket.

Kizu immediately felt guilty. The girl looked absolutely terrified. He doubted she was lying - she looked as much a prisoner down here as he was.

“Listen,” Kizu said, climbing down awkwardly. “I need to get out of here to help my friends. Are you sure you don’t know a way out of here?”

The girl shook her head again, looking down at the floor. She mouthed the word ‘no,’ although no audible noise came out. As she did, Kizu caught a glimpse of a single sharpened canine tooth. Not two fangs, like the other bloodspawn he’d encountered. It wasn’t that the second fang was missing, either. It was just… a normal canine tooth. He stepped forward to better examine her single scarlet eye. Was she some sort of defect?

“Can you speak?” he asked the girl.

She managed to meet his eyes, but she made no attempt to speak. Kizu took that as another no. In summation, then, he was stuck in a magical box with a defective, mute bloodspawn.

“Are you going to try to eat me?” Kizu asked her bluntly.

The girl flinched back and shook her head violently, horrified by the suggestion. Then her eyes widened as she looked at Kizu. She crossed her arms and pushed herself away from him, burying herself further in her blanket.

“I won’t eat you either,” Kizu reassured her. “The people who threw me down here want to drink my blood, though. Drain me dry. You’re absolutely sure they don’t feed you any blood?”

The girl looked very confused. She glanced at a small nightstand nearby. Kizu went to it and opened the top drawer.

A knife, its blade a blood red steel, sat on top of a black handkerchief with the name Anata embroidered on it in crimson thread.

“Anata,” Kizu said. “Is that your name?”

The girl nodded.

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“And this knife? What do you use it for?”

Anata reached for it, gesturing for him to pass it to her.

Kizu kept a hand on Sojan, just in case, and handed her the knife hilt-first.

She sliced her hand open.

Shocked, Kizu lunged forward to grab the knife from the girl. He silently cursed his stupidity, handing a dangerous object like a knife to a child. But Anata only smiled as he snatched the knife away from her. Then, before he could react, she pressed her small, bloody palm against the back of his hand.

His vision swam at the contact. All around him, his senses flared up. The stale air suddenly became fragrant with the aroma of his own sickeningly sweet sweat, the slight mildew odor of the bed’s blanket, the tang of iron from the girl’s bleeding hand. He could taste the odors in the air. His own saliva was bitter in his mouth as he absorbed everything around him. And the sounds. Even trapped inside the magically sealed box, he could hear his own breath like a fog horn, alongside the skittering of an insect crawling on the wall and the wringing of Anata’s other hand as she twisted it under her blanket in nervousness. All of this, alongside the rapid beating of the girl’s heart. He understood his body’s equilibrium unlike ever before as gravity tied his feet to the floor, felt every slight shifting of his weight and the flexing of every muscle fiber.

Most of all, though, he felt the sheer power of Anata’s blood warping his spellsense. For the first time, he could sense the magic within him as well as the magic without. He suddenly had a comprehensive understanding of the blood flowing through his veins. He knew, without a doubt, that just that little bit of contact had somehow renewed all the blood inside himself that he had spent over the last two days in the dungeon. He felt it accelerating his body’s natural growth and replenishing his blood to its peak potential. Not only that, it felt more potent. Stronger than ever.

The euphoric experience lasted less than a minute in total, but that minute was enough to fully renew him. When she lifted her hand from his, the smear of blood on the back of his hand had completely been absorbed by his skin’s pores. He felt better than he ever had in his entire life.

“You’re…” Kizu swallowed. “You’re not a bloodspawn, are you?”

She stared at him with blank confusion.

“You might be the exact opposite,” he said, examining her. “They take blood, draining the vitality from their prey, but you give blood. You renew magic. You give life.”

Anata continued to stare at him, bewildered and clearly not understanding. Her hand still dripped blood on her sheets.

“Here,” Kizu said, ripping off the cuff of his sleeve. She stiffened as he bent over her.

“I won’t hurt you,” he assured her. “Just stay still.”

She winced as he bound the cloth around her palm tightly. It wasn’t as clean as a bandage should have been, but his clothes were better off than any of her things. As he let go and wiped off the blood with his other sleeve, he frowned. Her hand was covered in scars. Some were thin white lines, long faded by time, but others looked almost as fresh as the one he’d just bandaged. It wasn’t just her hand. The scars continued all the way up to her arm, to the sleeve of her threadbare shirt. Kizu had a bleak suspicion that they didn’t end there.

“How long have you been here?” he asked her.

She stared at him blankly.

“Have you ever left this box?” Kizu asked, rephrasing his question.

She shook her head. Then she stopped and frowned. She mimed sleeping, closing her eyes and putting two hands by her ear.

“You leave in your sleep?” Kizu asked, confused.

She nodded vigorously.

“What do you see when you sleep?”

Anata pointed her finger at his chest.

And Kizu understood.

All at once, he remembered another figure with one red eye that had been haunting him since his arrival at the academy. He remembered the phantom footsteps that had led him to his necklace and the Atlas of the World Dungeon. He remembered the silent silhouette that had tracked him and his friend through the bushes beside an academy path. And, like a crashing wave, he remembered the pitiful figure he had seen when he drank Emilia’s divination wine.

“You spoke to me,” he said, remembering. “You said ‘please.’”

Another vigorous nod.

“Please, what? What did you want from me, this whole time?”

She bit her lip, her fang piercing through and drawing blood. Then she pointed straight up at the ceiling.

“The trap door?”

She gestured up again. Higher.

“You want out of the World Dungeon?”

She didn’t nod her head this time, instead just focused on Kizu with a child’s wide eyes, pleading.

Kizu looked away, ashamed. “I shouldn’t. I came down here to help someone else, and I’ve still got a ways to go. I don’t even know where I’ve jumped to. It’ll be incredibly dangerous, trying to get where I am going. And I don’t know how I’d get back here afterwards.” Not to mention the fact he didn’t even know the way back up to the surface without his atlas.

The girl looked stricken. She once again tried to bury herself under her blankets, this time to hide the tears shining in her eyes. But Kizu still saw them.

Guilt gnawing at him, Kizu tried to put her out of his mind. He reached into his pack and started doing a quick inventory. His fingers lingered on his spare set of chalk. With his connection to Mort temporarily severed, he doubted that he would be able to divine his sister’s location outside the box. Especially with all of the enchantments etched into the walls to keep magic out. Still, Anata had more than replenished his supply of blood. At the very least, he had to try.

He sketched the complex ritual sigils onto the stone floor. He barely glanced at the divination book for reference, knowing them almost by heart after hundreds of repetitions. By now, he needed the divination book more as an anchor for the spell than as an actual source of information.

Closing his eyes, he channeled his senses through the spell.

Kizu’s eyes shot open.

His sister was close. Closer than he ever could have imagined, closer than could possibly be the case. She was here. In the box. He cast around frantically, searching for a hidden alcove, an illusory space, anything. Then he realized where the spell was pointing.

Pointing him to the shivering lump of a child, sobbing silently under her blanket. All along, his divination spell had been guiding him to Anata.