Anna, who was at the entrance leading to the first floor of the labyrinth located in the sewers below the capital, suddenly paused in her steps as a strange foreboding feeling overwhelmed her senses for a moment.
The mysterious vision then replayed in her mind, of a strange underground lair dimly lit by glowing moss, with a blurry humanoid figure standing in the middle of charred floors, clawed walls, and other signs of an extreme fight.
In front of the blurry man, two bloody mess lying on top of puddles of blood remained motionless, as if they were dead.
The vision then disappeared, causing Anna to snap back awake.
“What happened?” Noel asked, curious and mildly concerned. “Was it the vision again?”
“Yeah…,” Anna hissed as she rubbed her head aching with mild levels of pain. “It’s been getting more frequent lately, and clearer too, but the people in it are still blurry beyond recognition, especially the guy that wasn’t dying.”
“Hmm,” hummed Noel. He rubbed his chin and tried to analyze the situation, but even he hadn’t encountered something like this in his long life as an archmage. “Well, whatever, it’s not like the deaths of two random people would concern us that much. Although I do think whatever the vision is about is probably inside this labyrinth according to your description of the place.”
“Probably…”
Unknowingly to the oblivious duo, a large swarm of microscopic organisms swished and moved around like a one unified entity, with eyes and ears listening in and eyeing their every move and sound. Through those invisible entities masked away from the human eye, a young man stood behind a counter inside a certain bakery, with one eye closed and one eye open, and his vision was split in half showing two different views.
…
It’s that vision again. Rob thought as he sat behind the counter in their bakery while Elaine was busy goofing around in the kitchen reading a random book.
Rob wasn’t the one to delve too much into the morals of his actions. If it benefits him, it benefits him, and logic tells him spying and reading Anna’s mind was a beneficial action.
And, since that vision was constantly plaguing Anna’s mind and Rob could read minds, he had already seen the whole thing, and much clearer than Anna’s too since he can use mind magic to help him remember it clearer, but even so… It still appeared blurry.
It wasn’t just because of her fuzzy memories, no, something like that was something Rob could fix with a bit of elbow grease. The vision itself, the transmission of that message was tampered with by some strange force, and something tells him that the abrupt ending of that vision is related to its broken nature.
But what could have tampered with it? I already confirmed that the arms and legs of Tyr are the spirits of the world, hence Anna’s great affinity with them, but nothing about spirits should relate to a vision like that, so Tyr must have had a great helping hand on it.
Ugh, I’m too fucking lazy to think about this! And it’s too wasteful to use Fortune Stealer and steal the truth since it’s probably gonna incur a great luck expenditure.
But let’s see. The vision has three main characters. The living man, and the two dying men. One of them seems to have golden hair, while the other has silver hair. On the other hand, the last person has no features at all, like every detail about them is completely erased.
It’s like they’re me, a complete mystery that steals all the details Tyr knows about the great villain Mammon…
Oh… Rob leaned back on his chair with a blank gaze. I’m so fucking stupid.
It’s me… I had stolen all those details so that strange prophetic vision of an unknown cause is fucked before Anna can receive it fully. Now, prophetic visions are related to time, and since spirits are the main way Tyr controls the world, then it’s probably the mythical spirits of time.
And since I’m so fucking smart, I must have left a clue as to how this came to be, perhaps a sub-message or something? Rob replayed the vision in his mind again, scrutinizing the fuzzy details before finally finding ‘it’.
It was so obvious now that he had this grand and boisterous idea bubbling inside his little brain, and he couldn’t help but curse his dumbass self for missing such a detail, but oh well, all’s well that ends well.
On the ground below, near the foot of the unknown man standing menacingly in complete silence, a series of words were written in crystal clear detail, unlike the fuzzy backgrounds around it.
5/20/663. The 20th day of the 5th month, a Saturday… That’s today. Rob gawked. Well fuck, it seems I have a lot on my fucking plate today, eh?
As he thought so, his eyes lost their luster for a moment before they then returned, while space warped for a split second.
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In an empty pocket of space, hidden from the eyes of the very world itself, a humanoid man made out of shadows, wearing a strange white lab coat and a pair of glasses appeared somewhere on the edge of the world’s atmosphere.
He looked down at the entire world beneath him, a world covered in white fluffy clouds, with greenish masses of land and clear blue oceans. He then muttered, “Fuck, let’s hope Fortune Stealer wouldn’t drain too much of my luck. It was strained quite a lot when I mind fucked Simon, so it should have gotten a lot stronger than my original estimates.”
With a snap, the man disappeared.
…
Kain snapped his fingers, causing a small orb of light to form on top of his hand. He looked around the surprisingly large hole they were in, with a semi-spherical shape, and asked Rhett, “Why did we stop here?”
“I was dying, okay?” Rhett said with an exhausted tone. Sweat poured out of his glistening body as he cursed, “If you guys weren’t there, I’d have been able to escape to the tenth floor. All of the monsters there would have been a breeze by then.”
“Well, you should hurry up healing so we can leave this place already,” Alice mumbled while she glanced at her necklace. “Shit, the ambient here is too dense, we wouldn’t be able to teleport out of here.”
“We can still run out of here. I just need to rest for a while and the monster should be gone by the time I’m in tip-top shape-“
Loud footsteps echoed outside the hole they were in, with the ceiling and ground shaking with each thud they heard. Using a quick spell, Kain and Alice looked through the hole as if it were transparent, while Rhett’s ears twitched as his senses were sharpened to the max.
Outside of their hole, the giant molten monkey continued to walk, perhaps confused over their sudden disappearance. It looked around, leaving behind a scorched footstep with each step it took, while its search proved futile.
The trio remained silent as they subconsciously stopped breathing. The ears of the molten monkey twitched as it tried to hear their location, but to no avail once again.
It continued to walk, passing by their hidden hole. Finally, it punched the wall angrily as chunks of rocks fell to the ground before it then sat on the ground loudly with a low growl. It seemed to have stopped moving altogether and it just sat there, angered and bewildered over its lost prey.
The trio remained silent and focused. Only after a considerable while did they relax and loosen their tensed muscles.
“Well, fuck…” Rhett sighed.
“Why did it have to stop there?!” Alice whispered and tugged at her hair exasperatedly.
“How unlucky,” said Kain. “That was the closest route to the exit too!”
“Let’s check the map, the tunnels are interconnected anyways so it shouldn’t be too hard to look for one,” suggested Alice.
“Great idea!” praised Rhett.
Alice then activated one of the magically imbued rings on her hand and a 3D illusory map formed in the air in front of them. The exit leading to the floor above glowed brightly with a blue light as they started to highlight some paths that would lead outside.
“Shit, it seems like we’ll have to be really silent to get out of this place. The monkey has an acute sense of hearing that it’s almost like echolocation, and its eyesight is pretty good even underground since it can emit light itself,” explained Rhett.
“Well, I have some invisibility rings here, so that solves the eyesight problem,” said Kain. He then took out two rings from his storage ring and gave them to both Alice and Rhett.
“What about its hearing?” Rhett asked.
“I know a spell, it’s called silent steps. It would cover our feet in a layer of mana that would deafen our steps, but only our steps,” said Alice.
“Okay, great,” exclaimed Rhett. “Then it shouldn’t be that much of a problem escaping this place then! We just need to go out there, sneak our way through, and freedom!”
“Quiet down, you buffoon,” warned Alice. “It might hear us, remember.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rhett said hastily. “But that’s a big relief. I thought we were really gonna die for sure now.”
“Hmph, you should learn to have some faith in us, you know? We’re not just some dead weights that are holding you down,” said Alice as she crossed her arms with a smug grin.
“Oh, right, haha…” Rhett rubbed the back of his head with an awkward smile.
“Let’s recuperate for now. Here, I have some healing and stamina potions ready,” said Kain as he passed on a couple of vials to the other two.
“Thanks,” Rhett said gratefully.
“Nice,” said Alice.
“After that, we should recover our mana to full, and rest our minds before going outside again,” suggested Kain.
“I don’t mind waiting for a while,” said Rhett. “My muscles are a bit sore from all that fighting and my mind’s practically dead.”
Alice also agreed with Kain’s plan.
So, with the plan to rest, Rhett unceremoniously lied down on the ground, closed his eyes, and began to nap. After all, sleep is a great way to rest your mind.
Alice on the other hand crossed her legs and began to meditate while silently gathering the ambient mana in the air to fill her reserves.
Lastly, Kain leaned his back on the wall while cleaning his sword, since a broken sword would lead to his strength diminishing quite greatly.
Around here? Mammon thought curiously as a chunk of wet mud rose up from the ground to form a strange sludge monster with hollow sockets for eyes and a indentation for a mouth. It looked around the area curiously as it blended in with the monster population, before finally finding the inconspicuous hole that the trio hid in.
Smiling deviously, the mud monster nudged itself away for quite a distance and stopped at a certain point in the straight tunnel ahead. Opposite to where he stood would be the molten ape sleeping soundly after it had decided to take a nap, blocking off one part of the one-way tunnel.
Grabbing the ground with his muddy hands, Mammon grunted and raised his arms to the sky, causing layer upon layer of thick mud to connect from the ground to the ceiling above. One wall after another fused and unified into one thick rock blockade, which then completely enclosed the one-way tunnel.
Laughing like a villain who had just performed a mischievous move, the mud monster returned back to the ground and disappeared, leaving the enclosed tunnel in complete silence.
…
Anna and Noel were high up on the seventh floor, rushing through the different levels of the complex labyrinth while demolishing any monsters that came their way.
Noel revealed the godly skills of the person known as the greatest archmage to have ever lived, while Anna displayed great progress on her spirit magic. It wouldn’t be long before she becomes a respected mage too, as long as she has enough mana reserves and skill.
But, they were still a distance away from reaching the eleventh floor, and the place where the trio were hiding was pretty far from any of the mapped entrances leading to this floor. If Mammon had to give an estimate, it would take around ten-plus minutes for them to descend to the eleventh floor of the underground labyrinth.
So, with nothing else but to waste time, he whistled a playful tune as a spiritual ghost in the walls of the complex cave system, inspecting everything like a mere observer who had nothing to do.