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 (though far more disheveled) and maybe the same shape of ears poking out from under it. Had Anna been cursed into this form by the vampiric spawn? But for what purpose? A blood bag with no memory of the outside world and in the body of a child. Maybe that was all a consequence of whatever curse they put on her. Keep her helpless and stupid while they fed off her.

But as he studied her more, it didn’t make sense. Her face looked different than what he remembered. Her eyebrows were a bit thicker and her jawline softer than Anna’s. Her pale skin and red eye could be the result of a curse, but why would her facial structure change along with it?

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

The girl, still pouting from his refusal to free her, wiped her eyes and glanced at him but gave no response.

“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. That gave him very little to work with.

At the moment, this girl was his only lead to his sister. If he did manage to get out, what would happen if his spell continued to route him to the girl? Divination spells would be rendered utterly useless.

He decided to leap that hurdle when the obstacle approached. At the moment, he needed to prepare himself. He took out an explosive potion, keeping it ready while wielding Sojan in the 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 in front of him. Nothing interfered with his spell. He sighed. So much for that plan.

He spent the next few hours at the trapdoor, dangling from the ceiling while trying fruitlessly to decipher the enchantments in place. The only thing he managed to figure out was that there were some very strong enchantments to keep divinations from leaving the room. By the time he had finally given up, Anata had long since fallen back asleep.

Not knowing what else to do, Kizu took his blanket out from his pack and laid it out on the floor. By now 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, he would have struggled to pass out. Thankfully, for once, sleep embraced him.

Something seized his consciousness and yanked it from his body. He was formless as he was dragged away and brought upwards. But it didn’t seem to know where it was going beyond the vague notion of ‘up.’ Kizu managed to wrestle control and directed them, not up, but lateral. He could feel Mort in that direction. Mort was alive. The fact let a load of tension out of him at the very least.

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

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

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

Neither of them made any sign of acknowledgement.

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

“They can’t hear me?” Kizu asked her.

She shook her head.

“But I heard you when you found me.”

“You.” She gestured at his ears.

Kizu thought about that while watching Ione slowly finish 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 talk to me because of that link.”

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Anata said nothing. Kizu doubted she understood it any better than he did. There was some sort of connection between Anata and his sister.

“Okay, if we can’t contact them. We might as well go back and get some real sleep.”

“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 beach party going on at the moment. Several of the students were stretched out on the sand soaking up sun while others tossed an oversized ball to one another. The ball fell unnaturally slow 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 into the waves.

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

But she didn’t answer.

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

Then ruins, scattered everywhere, began to pop up along the seabed. Broken buildings with ancient architecture that reminded Kizu of the building back in Hon that he’d entered to arrive at Wave Edge Academy. There were pillars sticking out of the sand, turned green by algae. Old walls that were still intact housed sleeping fish. Anata brought him over to a circular building with a mostly intact roof. The entire building had become overrun by a coral reef. If Kizu had breath, he would have found the myriad of reds and oranges breathtaking.

Inside the building, a large sky-blue orb thrummed while floating a meter off the seabed. Kizu approached it timidly. Even in his current state, he could sense the sheer power rippling off of the artifact. It thrummed and undulated rhythmically like a beating heart. Kizu had no doubt this was the sort of artifact delvers dreamed of discovering. And it wasn’t even in the World Dungeon.

Anata sighed audibly and settled down near the orb, as if relieved by the fact it was still there. She simply stared up at it, as if basking in its power. After a few minutes, Kizu, not knowing what else to do, decided to explore the surrounding ruins.

He couldn’t get far from Anata before the girl yanked him back, but his invisible leash still granted him enough distance for him to examine the perimeter of the building’s exterior.

As he 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 drifted himself down and saw a stream of bubbles emerging out of a crack in the cave’s floor. At his leash’s end, he couldn’t move much further in, but all of the sudden, he didn’t want too anymore.

An eye, with a slitted pupil as large as he was tall, opened on what he had assumed to be a cavern wall on his right. And not only did it open, the pupil focused on him. Its head swerved, 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, attempting to swallow him whole. Deciding to not count on his etherealness against a magic eel the size of a castle, Kizu dived to the side, plunging himself into the stone floor. He submerged himself entirely underground. But still, Kizu decided to go as deep as he could, just in case that gigantic eel could also burrow. He didn’t make it far before his head popped out of an upper level 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 wary of the obviously deadly substance. He was at the end of his tether to Anata anyway. Pivoting, he began to ascend back through the ground towards her.

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

“Anata, why are we here?”

But she continued to ignore 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 most logically answer. As he studied it, he realized the walls were covered in extremely faded murals. Approaching one, he studied it carefully.

It appeared to depict a large throng of people listening and groveling before a man who gave a speech in an elevated tower. The man wore what probably used to be a black robe but was now faded into a light gray. Even in the blue shades of the underwater, Kizu found his eyes fixated on the face of the man. It looked like small rubies had been placed over the mural for his eyes. It reminded Kizu of the vampiric spawn, except their irises were red, this figure’s entire eyes were rubies. Maybe just an effect done to depict the person’s power or nobility, but Kizu felt unsettled by it all the same. He moved onto the next mural.

It was harder to make out the scene than the last one. Kizu thought he saw a depiction of bodies scattered across the ground. But it also might be a lot of people sleeping. One thing was for sure though, a single vertical figure stood in the middle of the horizontal ones. And it also shared those rubies for eyes. It wore a smile on its face and outstretched its arms over the mass of fallen people.

The next mural was of the faded image of a crescent moon. If it originally had anything else depicted on it, 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 ever so slightly 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.

Then the next moment she was dragging him off. They fell even faster than they had arisen. The World Dungeon’s passageways were a blur to him as they descended. Anata, thankfully, appeared to know exactly where to go.

In a cold flash, Kizu jerked awake taking a massive breath of air. On the bed near him, Anata slept, undisturbed. Kizu’s entire body felt so chilled. His single blanket couldn’t keep off the goose prickles. Eventually though, after what felt like ages, he managed to drift off again. This time, he slept soundly and dreamlessly.