Chapter LVI (56)- Academy Bells

Again, the entire labyrinth seemed to shift. This time though, the spawn appeared to be as ill-prepared for the event as his companions. The dungeon itself tilted, throwing everything and everyone to the side.

Kizu kept the bell clenched in his fist as he was tossed to the side. He rolled with the impact, quickly recovering. The ring of the bell sent a reverberation down his arm, completely numbing it.

Before the spawn could recover, he rang the bell again. Intending to try to control the dungeon’s shift, this time he also channeled through the bell, like how he would cast a spell using his familiar bond. He didn’t have a specific spell in mind, instead just channeling his power and intent, in the same way he would with a divination ritual.

Information overwhelmed his senses. It only lasted less than a second, but he understood the dungeon. It was alive. And it appeared to be near sentience as well. It grew and adapted. It hated being still and stagnant. The bell let him advise it. And speed things up. He lost control of the dungeon as it instead shifted the area around them. It felt like it was stretching after a nap, simply movement for the sake of movement.

Again, everyone ended up in heaps all around him. A spawn clawed at him, attempting to wrestle the bell out of his hand. It almost succeeded, the numbness had spread from Kizu’s arm, up the entire right side of his body, making every movement unwieldy. Thankfully, Sojan grabbed ahold of the creature and bit down into its calf. Sojan jerked it back, displaying a surprising amount of strength as it pulled the spawn off of Kizu.

The third time Kizu rang the bell, he was fully prepared.

With the soft chime, he coaxed the World Dungeon into shifting. Opening up new tunnels under the spawn to send them down into the lower layers. He felt the dungeon’s approval at his suggestions like a bolt of lightning down his spine. The electric zap cut through the numbness and Kizu had to shut his eyelids to keep his eyes from popping out of his skull.

Chasms opened under the feet of the vampiric spawn. Several tried to leap away, but their footing was gone with no warning. He heard one swear loudly in a foreign language, reaching toward Anata with a clawed hand as it fell into the void below.

Ringing the bell again, Kizu closed those chasms. He also asked the dungeon to open a path leading upwards. It complied, completely agreeable to his requests. Again, Kizu found himself breathless as another jolt went through him. His vision blurred. The next thing he knew, Ione was by his side, shaking him.

“I’m fine,” he lied, trying to sit up. It took him a moment to realize the dungeon wobbling was due to his vision. Large black spots dotted his line of sight, blotting out and obscuring large swathes of his vision.

Basil said something, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. He could hear the sounds fine; they just didn’t make any sense. Basil cocked his head and made the same sounds again at him.

“I don’t understand.” Kizu reached up and touched his ear. Where his earring usually hung, was only a bit of residue from crumbling metal.

“We can’t talk to him now,” Ione said. “Until we get new earrings back at the academy.”

“You can still understand us though?” Kizu asked Basil.

He nodded. Kizu had the suspicion that Basil was happy about not being able to be questioned for the rest of their return journey.

Something to worry about later. Kizu looked over their surroundings. The holes that had opened up in the ground had completely sealed over, trapping the vampiric spawn somewhere deep under their feet. And now a slanted path led upwards. A quick glance at his atlas told him there were no traps ahead. Just a straight path up. In fact, it seemed to actually bisect paths and rooms that it encountered, creating dead-ends for those passages in favor of this one.

Next he took a quick look at each of his companions. Ione was covered in dirt and with heavy bags under her eyes, but otherwise appeared uninjured. She was looking over her massive bear summon, which looked to be in far worse condition. The constantly shifting labyrinth had broken its leg and one of its necks appeared to have snapped.

Mort jumped onto Kizu’s head. Throughout the fight, he had managed to stay out of danger for the most part. He was definitely in the best condition out of all of them.

Basil appeared anemic and had opted to lose all but one of his arms. He gave him a shaky thumbs up with his one working arm and smiled.

Sojan lay sprawled on the ground. Still in the spawn’s body, it smiled up at him with vampiric fangs. No blood flowed from the many gorges and slices missing from the body, but it appeared even paler than the spawn’s usual appearance. Even if the body was in good enough condition to continue, which it wasn’t, the blood seemed almost completely drained from it. Kizu yanked Sojan from the spawn’s back and pocketed the blade. The monster spasmed a bit, but then lay still.

Finally, Kizu looked over Anata. Still strapped onto Ione’s summoned lizard creature, she looked unharmed, but her entire body was shaking, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Okay,” Kizu said. “Let’s keep moving. This path should lead us back up towards the top of the World Dungeon.”

The spawn might have fallen deeper into the dungeon, but better to not chance any more encounters with them. Kekkon very well might send more reinforcements. Kizu had no way of knowing the number of spawn that lived down here.

Kizu took one step forward and immediately crumpled to the ground. His leg throbbed.

Ione sighed and dismissed her injured bear. Then she immediately started sketching on the dungeon floor with a piece of chalk. A minute later, another of her lizard creatures crawled out of the summoning circle. She climbed aboard.

“This is my max right now for creatures this size,” she explained. “I am already lightheaded, so if anything happens to these guys, you’ll have to walk.” She directed the lizard carrying Anata closer to Kizu.

Leaning against it, Kizu rose to his feet, putting his weight on his good leg. Then he reached up and pulled himself on top of the lizard. He felt Mort, on his head, flinch in pain as a result of their bond. Kizu’s bad leg had to be manhandled into position, causing agonizing pain, but he managed to get himself into a sitting position behind Anata. She was still shaking, but it lessened slightly as she looked over her shoulder at him. He pulled the lizard’s skin flap up, the sticky skin securing them in place.

Ione’s lizard approached Basil and he got the hint. He said something unintelligible before winking and heaving himself up to sit behind her.

As they traveled the ascending path, Kizu kept one arm on Anata to stabilize her as she dozed off while he held his open atlas in the other. He kept expecting the dungeon to shift back at any moment. He noticed other areas on the map move, but his path remained stagnant.

“What do you know about her?” Ione asked, sidling her giant lizard up to him.

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“Who? Anata?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, the other half monster, half human creature that’s drooling on your arm right now.”

Kizu glanced down. Sure enough, there was a damp spot on his outfit’s sleeve where Anata rested her head. But over the last few weeks his clothes had been through a lot worse than a bit of slobber, so he didn’t care.

“You think I could have that?” Ione asked, gesturing at his wet sleeve. “I mean, seems like a fair trade for dragging me down here. I’ll even trade you outfits. Basil designed them to be matching, so it would just be a matter of refitting it to you.”

“No, full stop,” he said. “And besides, you said you broke the enchantments on your clothes, why would I want yours?”

“What about some hair? I mean, that can’t be that bad. Just a couple strands.”

“You’re being creepy.”

She grumbled and eyed Anata.

“Well then, what are you going to do with her? Hide her under your bed?”

Kizu thought about it. “I’ll send a letter to my parents. It’s their grandchild. They’ll probably want to take custody.” Maybe ‘want’ wasn’t quite the right word, but they’d do it.

“And your sister?”

“If she hears about Anata, maybe she’ll come home.”

“She didn’t for you though.”

Kizu winced. There was a stupid, egotistical part of him that hoped nothing would change.

“I’d rather she came home safely,” he said. “Than have her out there in the unknown. If she hears about Anata, there’s a chance.”

“Okay, but if she doesn’t? What’s your next step?”

Kizu considered it. “I’ll try tracking down a friend of hers. I found a record that listed someone as an ally of Anna. I mean, at least his ally’s name had been redacted, so I assume it must have been Anna. He’s my only real lead on where to go next. At the very least, he might be able to explain her mindset towards the end of her time at the academy.”

Ione looked at him. “You really are tenacious.”

“You’d do the same for your sister.”

She cocked her head, deep in thought for a moment. She frowned slightly.

“You’re right,” she finally said. “But I think maybe for different reasons. Just being related to someone doesn’t create identical feelings. I mean, would you go these lengths if your brother disappeared tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Kizu said without hesitation.

Ione blinked, stunned for a moment. “Really? But by all accounts, he despises you.”

“So, I should hate him? He’s my brother.”

“Didn’t he get you arrested back when the semester started?”

“I guess so. And, yeah, that was really frustrating at the time. But can’t you hate the actions of someone without hating the person?”

“Aren’t we all just an accumulation of actions?” she asked in reply.

“No. We’re people.”

There was a pause. “Maybe you’re right though,” he admitted. “I definitely would still try to find him…but maybe not as single-mindedly. I’d like to think otherwise, and it’s easy to say. But maybe that’s not realistic. Can I still love him without really liking him all that much? Is that too contradictory? Also, then again, maybe if I helped him, he’d change his mind about me.”

“If I rescued my sister,” Ione said. “She would probably hate me until her deathbed.”

Kizu stared at her, at a loss for words.

“Like I said, we have a different relationship.”

It was only then that Basil decided to pipe in with a nonsensical word and a wink.

Ione groaned. “I forgot; he can still understand us. What do you think he just said?”

Basil smirked from where he sat behind Ione.

“My guess?” Kizu said. “Something about your sister and relationships.”

Ione wheeled on him. “You stay away from my sister! Keep in mind this is my lizard you are riding on. I will shove you off and leave you down here. Don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t. It is within my rights as summoner.”

Basil simply raised his one remaining arm and gave her a thumbs-up in reply.

—

The tunnel brought them directly to the door leading up into the academy. There were no stops, only the seemingly endless slope upwards along a slightly curved path. No other piece of the dungeon interfered or connected with their path. Kizu found himself marveling at the small bell’s power. With this combined with the World Dungeon Atlas, the relics deep below the earth could be uncovered with ease. He couldn’t shake the idea that it had fallen on him incredibly conveniently. Maybe there was some sort of all-knowing god actually watching out for him. He remembered hearing that some of the people in Edgeland worshiped something like that. Though, if it did exist, it seemed to only help out in weirdly specific circumstances.

The rest of his party slept, trusting the mounts to follow the path. Even Basil dozed off, his body slowly melting onto Ione who sat in front of him. But Kizu remained alert, his mind wandering onto his schoolwork and what his next course of action would be for finding his sister, until the door finally came into view.

A groggy Ione dismissed her summons, and they entered back into the academy.

Everything looked exactly the same as when they left. Logically, that made sense. It had only been a few days. But for Kizu it felt extremely odd. After several weeks of living a wildly different life, to stumble into his little study area under the stairs and find the chalk marks still relatively fresh and untouched, was bizarre. As if the entire experience had only been a strange dream.

He turned around to comment on it and found Anata standing on the other side of the doorway, wide eyed. A moment of panic washed over him as he realized that Anata was half vampire lord. And the spawn couldn’t normally leave the dungeon. He lifted a hand toward her, and she stepped through the threshold and took it. He let out a sigh of relief.

“Well, that was a miserable experience,” Ione said. “Next time, I'll stay back and sunbath on the beach. Especially since you decided to bring the most interesting monster home with you. Now, if you don’t mind, I have an overdue appointment with my bed.”

“Wait,” Kizu said. “Can you take Anata with you?”

Despite claiming to be sleepy, Ione perked up at the request. “Really? I do have quite a few experiments I want to try. Like, how long can she hold her breath? Can she touch silver without issue? She seems to understand words, but is her tongue unable to make complex movements?”

Anata gripped his hand tighter and looked up at him with her big, mismatched eyes.

“Nevermind,” Kizu said with a sigh. “You go on, I’ll see you in class.”

“Are you sure? How are you going to be able to smuggle her into your rooms?”

Kizu slipped his necklace around Anata’s neck. Then he cast a simple illusion spell over her current clothing, making her look like a stuffed potato sack. Mort then leaped atop her, appearing to sit on top of the sack.

The hardest part of getting back to his rooms wasn't bringing Anata. She simply followed behind him obediently (though she did get distracted by some students playing with a ball that was enchanted to follow the closest person, attempting to strike them) and one of the nice things about being enlisted into a magic academy, was that nobody questioned a potato sack tailing them as they walked. Everyone just kept doing their normal morning routines. Kizu was even pleasantly surprised when Anata walked through a sunny courtyard without issue. That implied she didn’t inherit any sort of sun allergy.

No, the hardest part was physically walking there. He relied on Basil’s support. But Basil wasn’t that much better off. What the changeling ended up doing was transferring most of his mass and muscle to one side. So, between the two of them, they managed to have two functional legs.

As expected, Anata passed into their dorm’s painting seamlessly, Kizu’s necklace working perfectly. And, after all that work, Kizu collapsed on his bed. The assault of exotic scents from Basil’s perfumes gave the room a comforting, almost nostalgic, aroma. It felt so good to finally be back in a real bed.

“Don’t leave the room,” Kizu muttered to Anata, who still appeared as a potato sack, as he slipped off into sleep. It was dreamless and wonderful.

Naturally, when he woke back up, Anata was gone.