[Mana Touch] was a pretty curious Skill, from the little bits of use she’d given it while being carted around. It was a rather ‘toggleable’ type more than a ‘usable’ type, meaning that as long as she didn’t manually turn it off, she could feel her own mana all the time like a tactile sensation.
Which, unfortunately, meant that she could also feel every tiny bit of flesh and sinew and veins and everything inside her body. Constantly.
[Mana Tank] was a terrible combination with [Mana Touch].
It was immensely disturbing, so she’d decided to just turn [Mana Touch] off whenever she wished to practice or not feel the slimy sensation of her intestines wriggling in her stomach like lazy worms.
The Skill was also interesting because of how mana itself functioned.
Mana itself could go through walls, should its wielder demand it. It was a bit of a Resolve type of issue, willpower, in other words.
Willpower wasn’t tangible, nor measurable, nor even a resource or an energy. It was purely mental, and thus, different for everyone. It was a very uncertain thing to say that ‘I have enough willpower to do this’ without trying first. It was simply arrogant of a mage to say ‘I can make my spell do this’ without having attempted it first.
Most people didn’t mess around with Resolve too much.
It was, after all, the only Attribute that mentally affected its wielders, and most people were very hesitant about mental changes to themselves from the notoriously unpredictable System. People could get stuck on ideas that were false, or become so heavily invested in a belief or ideology that it was impossible to break away from it, even when presented with factual evidence or rational arguments.
It was one of the reasons that most highly ranked religious officials had such high Resolve. Unwavering faith required unwavering willpower to not be swayed by other gods or corruption, or… something like that.
In contrast, for most regular folk, they’d rather keep their minds relatively malleable. Even mages, who were the biggest benefactors of Resolve points, were only instructed to put a maximum of three to five into the Attribute. After all, if one’s mind becomes too stuck up on ideas and the like, learning becomes difficult, or at least, so it was said.
Others disputed and disagreed with that, as was the ever-evolving nature of social debate, but regardless, the general census of the population’s perception when it came to Resolve was ‘don’t touch it too much unless necessary’, at least from what she had observed.
So, she'd never planned on putting more than a single point in the damn thing.
But.
[Mana Touch] was her only real means of perceiving her surroundings.
So when she realized she could only force her mana to move through the floor or walls for about a couple inches, she let out a heavy sigh, opened the system, and dumped her banked up point into Resolve, despite the intense desire to put it into Soul.
As useful as it would be to have a bigger soul, and thus a bigger rate of mana regeneration, she was more interested in either Endurance or being able to use her mana more efficiently. And considering her current companion, she felt... not safe, but safe enough to try and do something stupid.
The change adding a point to Resolve was surprisingly fruitful, almost doubling how much her mana could penetrate the walls. About eight inches instead of three to five. The mental battle of sending out her mana with the intent to pierce was not intense, but it wasn’t easy either.
Maybe if she had finer control of her mana, she could just summon a cluster of mana into a wall and feel using that way, but her range of both controlling and feeling the mana was… very good for her level, but nothing extraordinary.
The tactile sensation of moving through objects was likely exactly what ghosts felt, she mused, as she used her limply hanging hand to feel along the floor and a little bit through it. It was so odd.
Mostly out of boredom, she turned her palm to face the direction the wolf - the fucking wolf she still couldn’t get over that just HOW - was moving in, just to test her range. Feeling through things wasn’t as important as feeling things in general.
A few pulses of directed mana, and…
If she had eyes, they’d be considerably widened right now.
While her normal ability to sense through mana would have been restricted to maybe ten feet, with the assistance of a high power [Haste] at that, [Mana Touch] helped her feel her own mana at a much larger distance.
For twenty or so feet, a pulse of mana would give her a very accurate feeling of her surroundings, before the sensation faded.
In fact, it was so accurate, she could probably draw the rectangular tunnel they were in like a capture crystal in her mind, minus the colors, down to the texture of the pipes nailed to the ceiling above them.
Of course, this long-range perception of her own mana didn’t extend at all to controlling the mana at any respectable range, but... but she could see. Her natural mana regeneration was already good. Combined with [Mana Tank] and [Mana Conduit], seeing semi-permanently, for at least like... ten feet, wouldn't cost any mana.
Hope blossomed in her chest, like a withered, crumpled flower finally feeling the sun, its first drops of water, and she smiled.
When she got out of here, she'd have a chance.
They continued their silent trek through the darkness for another long, uneventful hour before Emhreeil decided to just get used to feeling every muscle fiber of her body pass through phantom fingers, turning on [Mana Touch] once more and starting the mana exercises she’d learned.
Her mild motion sickness coupled with the sensation did make her dry heave and retch a couple times, making her companion stop and nose her head, but she powered through it, nuzzling the wolf's snout back with the side of her head before going back to training.
Having spent another hour without feeling anything but the light wobbling of her body in its slimy bonds, she realized that the sensation would take a long time to feel less... utterly revolting and skin-crawlingly uncomfortable.
At least she knew exactly what the condition of her body and bones was.
The long and short of it was that she was actually starting to have a rather gaunt figure, and her bones were healing at a frankly ludicrous speed.
She supposed drinking fucking wolf's blood would do that.
The cracks were growing infinitesimally smaller by the hour. Rather than a couple months, she expected she'd be able to walk in a couple days or a week at most. Even though her left leg was healing wrong, the bone fragments just a bit misaligned and likely going to end up with her having a semi-permanent limp, she was just overjoyed.
Her future seemed less and less uncertain by the second. She could see, sort of. She would be able to walk, and she'd have mana capacity and regeneration that people would kill their mothers for. Her debts were wiped out along with her tormentors. And her legs were healing. Sure, she'd have to buy a slave to... to drink blood from them to keep the 'Vampiric' trait up until she could find a vampire to turn her. And... and she had a heavy dislike of the practice, but she'd be able to heal that way.
And in the hypothetical scenario that she would be unable to find a vampire to turn her, she could always just... work. Adventurer, mercenary, seamstress or factory worker, anything, and live, save up, fix herself up. She'd just release the slave back into society as a free man-
Her mind provided her with the image of her, one armed, weak and alone, starving, trying to get her slave to just willingly give her his blood in an inn room.
Her chest tightened as her throat went dry. The padding of the wolf's feet turned to the slapping of flesh on flesh, the filth tugging her hair down turned to thin, calloused fingers in her hair, the veins turned to ropes, the wolf's fur turned to rough sheets. The world grew distant. She choked on air, her hand tightening on the wolf's fur.
"Say something." She rasped out, gasped out through lungs that felt like black holes that would never get enough oxygen, realizing she was having another one of those- those episodes, and the wolf suddenly stopped, twisting its head around to nose at her face with a faint whine, and she desperately nuzzled back, dragging her fingers through its fur with all her strength, the sandpaper-like texture helping her ground herself as she crushed the remnants of her nose into its neck, her breaths uneven and her shoulders quivering with a sob she refused to let out, gritting her teeth with spite and hatred.
She wasn't weak. She wasn't going to let her stupid brain win. She was in a desolate, godforsaken tunnel in the depths of the Dungeon, with a wolf and nothing else around them. She wasn't going to let her mind convince her otherwise.
Her grip tightened, and she forcefully turned the wolf's head, her forehead rubbing up against the side of its head as she gasped in air, feeling the real world return to her piece by piece, the freezing nose of her companion brushing against her right shoulder, confused grumbles and little whines of concern letting her know exactly what her companion was thinking.
It took a minute or two, but eventually, her grip loosened, her body slowly relaxing, her mind settling down as the void inside her lungs filled with air.
It took another minute or two for her breaths to return to some semblance of pace, and she sighed, her fingers brushing the left side of the wolf's neck as they rubbed their heads together. Like animals. No masks, no judgement. Just two animals trying to survive together. In that moment, that was all they were.
She found that she rather liked the simplicity of it. Some animalistic, primal part of her recognized this to somehow be a bigger expression of trust and care than even the tightest hug, and she let a small smile form on her face.
"Thank you, buddy. I'll return the favors one day. I swear. I owe you so much." She whispered, and the wolf, likely realizing she was no longer on the verge of having one of those shellshock-like episodes, chuffed, gave her shoulder a single lick, and turned around to continue its trot, as if nothing ever happened.
She appreciated that a lot more than she expected she would, yet her mind still wandered back to her previous statement.
'Release them back into society as a free man.'
Yeah, she doubted she could handle that. She'd just get a female slave.
...
Maybe.
People probably sold fresh... anything blood somewhere in this fucked up place, right? There was no way that wasn't a thing. Alchemist guild?
She sighed and sank back into her slimy bonds, deciding to turn the overthinking part of her brain off for the moment. She'd cross that bridge when she got to it.
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The structure they were in was quite simple, starting out.
The room they’d been in was some sort of half-emptied out storage area.
Right outside that room was a large rectangular room full of odd machines with empty canisters mounted atop them, with a dizzying mess of wires and fine bits of machinery going into the ground and splayed out all over the floor like the spilled innards of a corpse.
Having sensed nothing in the way of upwards mobility but a few too-tight vents in the middle of the ceiling, the wolf was faced with two options.
Moving back up that endless pipe they’d arrived through, an even more exhausting journey considering that it would be upwards this time, the wolf was bulkier, and they wouldn't fit into the pipe with the human on its back, so they'd go back to dragging.
Or just going down the long rectangular tunnel that was nestled at the corner of the room behind a dozen gutted machines, and hoping it would lead to freedom.
It chose to take its chances with the tunnel.
It was, frankly, an almost relaxing trek, besides the human's odd bout of paranoid fear. Though it could relate, considering she was blind. It too had one such episode when it was... significantly smaller and had gotten some strange-smelling liquid in its eyes. It couldn't see for an entire day. Every little noise had made its heart leap up to its throat.
But regardless of that little hiccup, things were nice, silent, and boring. Despite being an hour and a half into it and not yet sensing any end to the tunnel, it didn't even feel the need to speed up all that much, deciding to conserve energy for what could be another nigh endless journey.
To its right were some metal rails embedded into the stone, taking up about a fourth of the tunnel’s width, and to its left and above it were a bunch of small, rusted pipes, stuck to, and throughout, the stone. Eight feet tall and twelve feet wide, it was quite spacious.
At some point, mostly due to boredom, it considered why and how that ‘Roof-Tumor’ insect had ended up down there. Perhaps fallen down through the pipe? Or willingly chose that area as some kind of nesting spot due to how remote it was? Maybe it should have checked around for eggs…
Its conclusion was that it didn’t matter. It was just thinking for the sake of thinking, at that point. Not thinking of anything just drew attention to the gnawing hunger in its soul, which it could mostly ignore, provided it had a distraction.
The human’s petting was a good one, for example.
After stopping for a bit and sitting on its stomach and chest for a short recovery nap, it continued, occasionally growling ‘Haste’ at the human to speed things up a bit without exhausting itself, and finally, it sensed a change in the vibrations after a particularly hard slap of its paw into the floor.
It might have stumbled a bit from the confusion of being bombarded with information, but the human’s yelp brought it back to the real world quick enough for it to hurriedly straighten itself as it parsed through what it felt.
About a hundred and fifty feet away, the tunnel ended in two giant metal doors, behind which opened up a larger area it couldn’t feel any details about.
Finally, a change.
Its pace redoubled into a jog of sorts and the human, obviously, feeling the sudden rush due to her attachment to it's back, raised her hand up to rub along its head and ears again.
It was very pleasant, so it tilted its head up and around for her to properly give it the pets it wanted, seeing as it didn’t need its head to be stable to navigate.
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“Found an exit, buddy?” She whispered a question, and the wolf chuffed in acknowledgement, more out of habit at this point than as a genuine answer to a question it couldn’t yet understand.
A hundred and fifty feet turned to fifty, and the wolf felt the pungent miasma of dried oil and stale, dusty air wafting through the gaps in the closed doors. A stench that would become far worse, it assumed, when it broke through, considering there wasn’t any wind down here and it could still smell it from this far.
It was actually kind of mind-numbing…
With a sense of distaste, it trotted up the last few feet to the doors, occasionally stomping a paw without breaking pace, just to get a better feeling of the room beyond.
It was massive.
Considering the things humans built, it wasn't sure why it was even surprised anymore.
Despite being right next to the doors and stomping down with its paw, utilizing their combined weight so much that it felt a light bruise forming on its paw pad, it couldn’t reach or feel the other end of the room.
From its perspective, the doors just opened up to a vast abyss of empty air looming over a floor riddled with complex networks of pipe, cables, and inner valve systems. The surface of said floor was peppered with bits of debris, rotting tools and giant pyramid shaped machines that tapered up to large pipes that reached up to what it assumed was a ceiling it could only barely feel the outline of before that too faded.
That, and the pyramid-like parts of the machines all felt strangely hollow. Likely gutted like the ones from before, in a less messy manner.
It was curious, but it didn’t know anything about human machinery beyond some vague, surface level labelling, so it refrained from making assumptions or dwelling on it.
Instead, it focused on something much more important, which was getting through the doors.
They were really thick, maybe eight inches, heavy, and their insides were a complicated mess of fine machine-work that seemed to be some sort of locking mechanism. Either side had been dug into the wall itself, so just brute-force charging it wouldn’t do anything but bruise its shoulders.
The strangest thing was that whatever metal they were created from, it seemed impervious to rust, and had that faint, barely-present tingle of mana.
It scrutinized the length of its nails. About an inch long.
And if the locking mechanism was sufficiently damaged… it should be able to just push them open, right?
For the first time in about two hours, it laid flat on its chest and stomach, and started slowly retracting the slime and veins, making sure not to waste any of it by being hasty.
The human shivered.
“This is so disgusting.” She murmured, wriggling a little before settling down again. “Then again I’ve been drinking wolf’s blood and pissing myself for days so I feel like I should be past the point of giving a crap. What do you think?” She asked lightly.
The wolf just chuffed, clicking its chitinous fangs together, barely audible to even itself. Having new limbs still felt so strange. That, and the clicking was oddly satisfying. Almost amusing, actually.
Clickclickclick.
“True words of wisdom, oh wizened wolf.” The human sighed out in an odd tone. Sort of tired, but also light and… it couldn't quite tell.
A minute or two later, the wolf slowly loosened its tail from where it was curled around the human’s knees, snaking it off to the side, before slowly shuffling the human off its back towards the left after the veins packed themselves back into their sheath.
Readjusting to the feeling of its mucus veins becoming part of its innards again, it shook itself, hoping the outer bits of slime would dry and peel off quickly. It didn’t like the feeling of its fur being so sticky.
Also, it thought it could feel a tiny pebble in its flesh sheath, which was annoying.
Shaking off the mild discomfort, it walked up to the wall, getting up on its hindlegs with its forelegs positioned over the lock.
Thankfully, the lock was just at four feet tall, exactly at the right height for the wolf to begin its arduous but boring task.
It hooked its claws, and angled one paw’s ‘fingers’ to the left, while the other angled to the right.
And then it got to scratching.
Despite feeling no resistance when cutting through the iron, the deafening screech of rent metal made it flinch and flatten its ears, having grown used to the quiet mumblings of its human and the soft pattering of its paws.
But what really made it freeze in place, was the sudden burst of sparks that flared out across it's vision.
It just stood, shock-still as their light faded, leaving it in complete darkness once more.
But to it's unadjusted eyes, the imprint of their light danced and writhed, a hundred subtle shades of color it had never seen before just suddenly… there. It knew, conceptually, that some things were supposed to be a certain color. Many different ones that it simply couldn’t imagine or conceive of, but were in its head regardless, occupying space as labels to throw on things.
Until now, that was all they were. The blood it saw might seem brown-yellow to its canine eyes, but it knew that it was, from the perspective of whatever source its knowledge came from, labelled with the color descriptor ‘red’.
It knew that, but it had never seen other colors. So when in those sparks, it saw orange and a familiar yellow with a billion tiny little shades in between that made the sparks so mind-numbingly beautiful, it could only freeze as its mind engraved the sight to memory.
It covered one of its nails with silent darkness, just to be rid of the noise, and slowly scratched the iron, eyes glued to the door. Nothing.
Then it gave a second scratch, a far more aggressive one, mildly paranoid that it had somehow messed up and wouldn’t see the sparks again. To its immense relief and joy, they did appear, just like the first time, sudden, violent little bursts of immeasurable beauty. Speed seemed to be the key.
And this… this was just two colors of the wide spectrum that human eyes could see.
What would it be like when it got to the surface? Would it even see the same world as before?
It quickly sheathed its paws in soundless darkness, and started frantically scratching, putting rents into the iron in one direction, and then shaving pieces off by scratching in the opposite direction, making a jagged hole into the middle of the doors, bit by bit.
It paused when it felt a very faint rush of mana wash over itself and the door, and it twitched an ear, noting that the human had a hand extended towards it.
Whatever she was doing was harmless, so it just got back to scratching a giant hole into the door, five shavings of iron at a time, slowly but surely making a small pile around its hind paws, eyes firmly glued to the near constant stream of sparks.
It was just so pretty.
So pretty that it actually forgot what it was doing sometimes, randomly scratching at the door just to watch the sparks.
By the time it started scratching off bits of the finer machinery inside the door, its shoulders were starting to grow sore, so rather than open the door and continue with tired legs, it walked back to the human, moved to her left side, then threw a paw over her waist and plopped its head down on her shoulder, shuffling into her side to get comfortable.
The human sighed out some of her human sounds and moved her elbow up to tilt her forearm backwards, just to rub along the back of its nape.
It was much more comforting than it would have assumed. Especially considering it didn’t know what it was being comforted from. Maybe some subconscious fear it hadn’t worked out? Regardless, it fell asleep fairly quickly with a small squeeze of the ‘sleep’ sack, as it had deigned to call it from now on.
Perhaps its streak of creativity hadn’t yet ended, because in that short nap, it decided to add a little chitinous fang at the tip of its tail, covered in hair-like chitin to make it blend in a little better when curled in. Then it made a second venom gland near the tip of its tail. It was extremely small, maybe only being able to produce about three to five drops on demand whenever it had to inject something, but that didn’t particularly matter. Every drop of that venom could probably paralyze most of a human’s body, nevermind anything smaller.
Another minor change was thickening its skull a tiny bit, just as a precaution more than anything.
Then it got up again with a jaw-popping yawn and a back-popping stretch with a tiny growl of satisfaction. After poking the human awake, despite her feeble protests, it walked back to the door, swept aside the pile of metal shavings, and hopped up to place its paws on the shredded mess.
Then it got to work on making it an even bigger mess. Despite cloaking its entire ‘fingers’ in darkness, the constant clicking and popping of the complex machinery being shredded to even finer, but disconnected, bits, was annoyingly loud.
That was without mentioning the sound they made as they added to the small pile. The sparks definitely helped soften the auditory irritation though. Distracting and wondrous as they were, they were also a great motivator for the wolf to push forward and get to see light again.
Just to see what other colors it could now see beyond ‘orange’.
It wondered what blood really looked like in the light. Was 'red' as pretty as sparks?
The dizzying network of gears, ranging from eye-squintingly tiny to the size of the wolf’s paw, was quickly destroyed in just a minute or two. Two opposing metal rods surrounded by a spinning circular framework of metal were next, and the wolf took a moment to pause and shake its paws, feeling the dozen tiny cuts covering each.
They itched more than hurt. Annoying.
A light punch to the more intact parts of the door let the wolf feel the innards a bit better, as well as sending a cascade of tinkling bits of metal to join the small, second pile at its feet. The doors certainly felt looser.
With a tilt of its head, it turned and put its left shoulder to the door, unsure but fairly positive that the exit was no longer locked.
It sunk its claws into the stone just for good measure, activated [Bloodrush], and started pushing, its hind legs shaking from the effort, feeling the stone around its nails crack a little as it put all it had into pushing forward.
For a single, long second, nothing happened, and then something in the door snapped with a tiny jerk, and the doors began to move. It wasn’t smooth, the hinges sticky with dried, dust-crusted grease and only making things harder, but it made progress.
About three inches, in fact, just enough for a tiny gap to appear in the doors, prompting a wave of stench to slam into its nostrils in an almost physical sensation. It only had a single moment of tension to sneeze, continuing to push through, before something in the door got stuck on a half-shredded, bent gear.
With a growl of frustration, it snorted in a vain attempt to get the mind-numbing stench of oils and gasses out of its nostrils, then hopped up again and frantically scratched at the shredded locking mechanism, before dropping down and bracing its shoulder to the right door as quickly as it could, before [Bloodrush] ran out.
Another heave, with its shoulder only against one door now and no lock in place, and the metal softly groaned as it began to slide back on sticky hinges, the wolf constantly adjusting its legs to rake its nails through stone for added traction as it growled in effort.
After a few seconds of pushing, a gap just wide enough for itself and the human to pass through was made, and the wolf leaned back with a relieved breath, then shook the bits of shredded metal and gearwork off its fur.
Or rather, tried to.
It was all completely stuck into the remnants of the mucus covering its backside.
And the wolf, not wanting sharp bits of metal in and around its innards, as numb and unnecessary as those particular innards were, got to learn very intimately the extent of its flexibility, carefully shaving off bits of sticky fur dotted with iron bits for almost half an hour before it felt comfortable with grabbing the human again.
It had to see if it could somehow circumvent that little issue. Stickiness was never pleasant.
Putting her on its back was as awkward as the first time, with the wolf having to swing the human onto her back, lay on her chest, and then annoyingly swing them both upright, but it managed to fairly quickly bring them both to travelling condition.
“That… smells like rotted fuel and stale air. I doubt it’s an exit.” The human murmured as the wolf walked through the doors, its head swivelling around with its ears, not particularly liking the oppressive ambiance of distant, muffled thuds echoing into the room from the vast unknown.