Bayce and I flitted like one single, unified arrow down through the murky waters. She managed to turn her body in the water so that we could both face the center of the pond. Not that that was helping at the moment. In this darkness, my vision was hardly any better than hers.

I didn’t know exactly when we would find the pond floor, but we wouldn’t be touching bottom so much as cratering it. We needed some way to stop short before we crashed, and to do that, I needed more light.

Amber Beam, don’t let us down.

I activated my latest Skill. If only it weren’t a laser—then I could just keep it hanging around us for a while like a portable, hands-free lan…

Wait, I didn’t have to launch it and it was exactly that?

Yes, the so-called beam was just diving downward with us, hanging steady over my shoulder.

And with it, I began to see. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I saw fish swimming about as normal, my sharp eyes catching the meager light reflecting off their scales. Beyond about a school’s worth, they were little more than shadows. And beyond even that, near the fast-approaching ground, I saw something more massive, and the dim splotches of its hide.

The Geographic Carp is down here…but they didn’t respond.

Maybe the fish was obstinate, or just plain tired, but a better explanation was that thanks to someone’s interference, the Carp simply hadn’t heard.

I came up with that explanation one second later, when the entire pond-world flickered into TV static and we were suddenly falling through the thin air of a cavern.

My mind could hardly process, except—

Air!

Heavy!

FLOOR!

Thinking only of instant self-preservation, I was about to curl up into a Guard when Bayce saved us both.

“Lowgravlowgrav,” she cried like a single mantra, and we fell through the clouds of twin Spells—then we were plummeting so slowly that Bayce had the time and power to put us right-side up just before landing softly on her toes.

She set me down on cold stone. I stared up at her in wonder, at both her dazzling Spells and her own instinct. Even though she spent a lot of time indoors, and didn’t have any knack for interacting with wild creatures beyond fondling…Bayce had a quick mind and was far from defenseless.

Of course, right after that, and with a lot of help from the Amber Beam ball still with me, I stared around us at the room we’d fallen into. Up at the perfectly intact ceiling—no way we’d broken through that. And then at the walls all crowded with old junk.

But this wasn’t the basement of the lycanborn mansion. There was nothing fancy about it. The walls were blandest of bland stone. One archway led out to pitch-blackness.

I could start feeling around to learn more, but I was a little afraid to.

Bayce, too, was hesitant. The first thing she did, after pursing her lips, was summon a tool from her Inventory (or maybe it was Inventories plural, given all the bangles). It was a very long, off-white wand. Or maybe it was a candle—or both—since she then murmured “fire” and the end of it flared alight.

Now a bead of fire as steady as my Beam helped illuminate the room. Only as much as an ordinary torch, maybe less.

“I’m not touching anything,” she said, but her face spoke more of suspicion than fear. “It’s a trap, right? She used magic to reroute us and toss us in…some sort of a crypt.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Even quiet words echoed.

I was starting to feel miserable. Even beyond the whole terrible reason we’d come here, the damp of the pond was still all over us. My static Beam, though it pulsed faintly, wasn’t letting off any warmth, and Bayce’s even-smaller fire barely did better. This was not helped at all by the clammy air here. In fact, it was so clammy and ice-cold that I could almost swear we were underground…

And that this whole place hadn’t been touched in centuries?

I checked my Map. It threw back nothing but question marks.

image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map108-1.png]

Error: Location not found.

A lump rose in my throat. This whole place was outside of my System’s ken. It was beyond the Wood—no, worse than that, because the village of Outlast was slightly out of bounds and being there never gave my Map trouble. This had to be a corrupting place. In a worst-case scenario, it had wiped out every place I’d been.

I checked my Quest the way you’d scratch a burning itch. It still told me I’d discovered 53 percent of the Map, so at least there was that.

Not that it made me feel any better…and nor did putting a tracker on Bayce. What good was that if I couldn’t even see the tracker, let alone anything else?

I walked as close as I dared to the stuff along the walls. Broken tables, broken chairs, broken…chains? Twisted iron bars and rusted handcuffs?

Bayce had gone the other way, studying the barest scraps of paper clinging to life on a wall, their words long faded.

She shook her head violently (incidentally sprinkling drips everywhere) and simply marched through the archway. It was hard to pick between careful deduction and urgency here—the task of saving Reed deserved both—but at this point, no plan really did seem like the best plan.

Except Bayce disappeared instantly.

Just the way I imagined it happened to Reed: she was there and then she was instantaneously gone.

Which gave me a very good reason not to speed ahead.

As scary as this was, we did now have enough leads that it wasn’t all-out existential guilt I was feeling. Bayce wasn’t dead, she was, um, disappeared? She had to be. So, level-headed as I could be, I came closer to the arch and peered through.

It wasn’t absolute dark out there. Actually, it kind of looked like the first rows of a jail…but with no signs of life.

Looking up and down along the walls and floor of the arch, I found no trace of glitchy shimmers, and yet I felt they had to be somewhere. After all, in low light, they were hard to see.

—Wait! I was overthinking it! Ignoring the simplest way out! Bayce was probably waiting on the other side of that passage. After some initial fright, she’d likely just expect me to hop in and follow.

So I hopped in.

Just like before when we’d been falling underwater, the world luminously broke. After a millisecond, the world was back.

Not only was this a totally different room…it also had no Bayce.

I felt carpet under my feet—damp and rank. Instantly I heard a snarl.

In fear, confusion, and utter surprise, I jumped backward, unintentionally throwing myself back into…

A different room. The frigid stone floor sent a shock through my body as I almost hit a towering block.

Behind it were more blocks, several holes in the wall, a hatch in the floor. Hooks in the ceiling? Maybe a kitchen—the shape of the hole suggested an oven. But all that really mattered about the room was that it was overrun by wild animals, many likely vicious.

Come to think of it, some leavings had been in all three rooms, but that first one had definitely not been their main haunt. The smells were far thicker here. Which made sense if that had been a dead-end dungeon guard room, as I was suspecting.

Please don’t assume I was consciously thinking all of this. The thoughts churned in the back of my head as I struggled to focus on Bayce and Reed and where or how to find them.

But it was very hard, and not just for the reasons humans would expect.

You can smell a lot in trails and leavings. My sense of smell in the Vencian Wood had never been all that great, and any slight improvements I’d had came from practice and, little by little, becoming more familiar with animals in the Wood.

When the leavings were as concentrated as this, though, and when they were from other mammals, the story was clearer.

This kitchen was fully as disgusting as a crypt-like kitchen sealed for centuries with its own ecosystem of wild animals could be expected to be. How there could still be food around here was anyone’s guess. (Wait…magic.)

Just standing here for a single second made my heart race, in a way that the monstrous snarl and the sheer fact of being near that hall of ancient jail cells hadn’t. What in the world was I smelling?

It was some combination of hormones, or even the traces of slowly evaporated sweat. It screamed with…fear? No, not exactly.

Rage?

I lurched as I heard another snarl—a chorus of them. Maybe there really wasn’t instant magic food in this kitchen, because I got the distinct feeling that every animal in here wanted to devour me.