Felix watched as the front lines began to crumble, before Miria picked him and began running. Due to her strength, Felix doubted that Miria was seriously struggling with his weight or his movements, but just in case, he did his best not to wriggle around too much. He didn’t want to put more strain on Miria if he could avoid it, and he was also afraid of being dropped.

However, he felt his heart start to sink as they really ran away from the battle. Even though he had known it was coming the moment Miria picked him up, a part of him had been hoping for a miracle. Some crazy idea to turn everything around, or another city intervening, or… something.

On the islands, when he had hunted with the hunters, they had always succeeded in killing the landbeasts. Sometimes that success came at a price, but they had always won, with the help of the madness-inducing ocean.

What went wrong this time? Why were the Orukthyri starting to push through the front lines and kill the soldiers behind them?

Felix felt his thoughts and memories swirling around his mind as Miria fled with him through the tunnels, right behind Sallia and Anise.

His thoughts kept returning to one critical question, over and over again.

How could this be happening?

Felix thought back to battle, and felt a mixture of shock and sadness as he thought of the battle lost. However, now that he truly sorted through the details of the city’s military, he started to see why this battle had ended in a loss.

The tunnel that the city had fought in wasn’t very suited towards the Orthanoid soldiers as a battlefield. Normally, a tight, enclosed space was advantageous for the defenders of a city or area, because they could prepare a great deal of traps to deal with the attacking force by forcing them into a killing field. However, the damnable Orthan tunnels removed ‘blockages’ in the tunnels, making that a fruitless endeavor. Because of that, instead of an advantage, the tight, enclosed spaces of the tunnels had instead become a disadvantage. The best way the Orthanoid soldiers had to fight against the Orukthyri was by swarming and enveloping them. And in a tight, enclosed tunnel, doing so was nightmarishly difficult. And since narrow, confined spaces also restricted how many soldiers could interact with a battlefield at once, the battlefield was actually quite suited for the Orukthyri warriors, who had high quality soldiers and low quantity.

More importantly, however, was the fact that the city’s army was used to fighting warfare in a very specific way. The soldiers bought time for the spellcasters, and the spellcasters blasted down everything while hiding behind a shield wall. Most denizens of the dark weren’t bright enough to explicitly take out the spellcasters, and so the soldiers worked hard to present just enough of a threat to distract enemies while the spellcasters did the heavy lifting. However, the Orukthyri were at least intelligent enough to figure out where the threat was and use ranged weapons to remove it.

Not to mention, a lot of key mechanical knowledge was missing form this world. People only invented things to solve problems they faced, which was why a lot of key inventions in his former homeworld had been invented. In his first life, people had invented cannons to take down massive city walls, once catapults and trebuchets proved insufficient. However, in this world, spellcasters had generally been dominant enough in warfare that there had never been a ‘need’ for complicated mechanical contraptions before the Orthan empire fell apart. And in this era, there were no city walls that people tended to attack, meaning that when the city actually needed them, there were no mechanical traps or pieces of equipment they could fall back on once the spellcasters proved useless against the Orukthyri.

Once the city’s army was forced into a situation where most of the city’s spellcasters were taken out of the picture by the Orukthyri’s magic resistance, and where their tactics of holding off an enemy in a narrow space and waiting for the spellcasters to win the battle fell apart…

The army also fell apart.

Not that it mattered now.

Miria came to a stop, and Felix was brought out of his thoughts as Miria quickly set him upright. He was no longer being carried like a sack of potatoes, which was nice. He quickly glanced around the area, making sure that there weren’t any denizens of the dark or Orukthyri attacking the area. He doubted any of the denizens of the dark would reach the city this quickly, but they would come sooner or later. After all, there wasn’t a coordinated army to push them back anymore.

What mattered for now was escaping before they arrived. Luckily, most of the Orukthyri horde had been killed by the army, so they wouldn’t be able to quickly annihilate the city. It might take several minutes, or even a few hours, for the Orukthyri to really finish butchering the population. Even if each Orukthyri was close to invincible now, with the only threatening spellcasters out of essence, they could only kill so many people per minute. That meant everyone had much more time to escape the massive creatures.

Felix noticed a few system notifications pop up, but blinked them away. Now wasn’t the time.

“How fast can your family members move?” Asked Ella, turning towards Felix and the others. “If they can move fast, get them to grab any valuables and then get back here within ten minutes. We have four shapers-casters, so any city we come to will definitely take us in. We’ll head overland for one of the other entrances to the underdark: I know the surface settlement had contact with a few other entrances, and some of them are close to other cities. I have a rough idea what we’re looking for, so we just need to-”

Bang!

Felix heard something crash in the distance, and he saw some civilians start turning towards the tunnel entrance where the soldiers were fleeing from the Orukthyri. They had come faster than he expected.

“Move!” Yelled Ella. The group quickly broke apart, scattering towards their houses.

Felix noticed that their group wasn’t the only one moving. Some civilians started booking it, moving as fast as they could as they started preparing to flee as the realization that the army had lost started to set in. Meanwhile, other civilians simply stood, staring at the caves in a stunned silence as everything they knew started to come crashing down.

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He grimaced, feeling a strange mixture of guilt and sadness. The Orukthyri survivors might have been few, but there were still enough to kill many of the surviving residents of the city. And the denizens of the dark that came afterwards would force many of the survivors into even more desperate circumstances. If he had just been a little stronger, a little more active in his last life, maybe he could have gotten a Keyword ability and done more during the battle.

But would it even have mattered?

Felix thought of the items he had been learning how to make, and the combat abilities he had managed to display while fighting the Orukthyri horde. He laughed bitterly.

He loved making items the most. The intricacy of messing with a blueprint, the feeling of creating something new from raw materials… they were things that made him feel happy. However, the multiverse wasn’t such a kind place that he could simply make items and be safe.

He was starting to realize that now. In his first life, he had learned how to fight, and he had kept at least a minimum level of fighting abilities in this life as well. However, he needed to be able to do a little more, clearly. Perhaps there was a way to turn item-crafting into a form of combat ability? For the first time, Felix found himself dearly wishing that he could not only perform adequately during a fight, but that he would excel at it. He didn’t want to experience something like this ever again.

He stumbled through the city streets, moving as quickly as he could. He wished that his physical abilities were better: he had boosted them a little bit during his training using Sallia’s items, but they were nowhere near the monstrous stamina and speed Sallia and Miria had with the help of their runes.

He moved faster, quickly reaching the home he shared with his parents, and knocked on the door.

“Mom! Dad! We need to go!” He yelled.

He opened the door, and saw that his mother and father were already halfway done packing, thankfully.

“Felix! I’m glad you’re safe!” Said his father, dropping the clothes he had been stuffing into a backpack and rushing over to hug Felix. “Grab your clothes and a few days of food and water. Did any of your friends…”

“My friends are safe…” Felix felt bile rise up in his throat as he thought of Lauren, who had been splattered by a rock. “My master is dead.”

“Lauren is gone?” His mother gave Felix a look of pure shock for a moment, before it turned into a harder frown. “Then we really need to get moving. Did Miria’s teacher live?”

Felix nodded.

“Then we’ll follow her. Neither your father nor I are quite as good at spellcasting as we used to be since we put our adventuring days behind us, and we always had low essence pools. But we can still manage a few third circle spells a day. Having a shaper could make travelling quite safe. Is she waiting for us?”

Felix nodded.

“Then let’s get packed within a few minutes and go.”

The three quickly rolled up all of the belongings they needed to survive, including food, water, and some other daily necessities, before heading back into the city.

It seemed that more people had started to realize things had gone horribly wrong in the time Felix and his family had packed up their belongings. People were fleeing like headless chickens, heading towards seemingly random tunnel exits and heading into the darkness. Felix wondered how many of them would reach another town.

He felt dark thoughts rise up again, before he forcibly pushed them down and sped up. Now wasn’t the time.

His mother and father kept pace with him, and soon, they arrived at the place where Ella was waiting.

Miria had a strangely hollow look on her face.

Felix felt a surge of worry. He wasn’t used to seeing Miria look like this. She was always excited, or happy, or interested, but he realized that perhaps he was taking Miria’s mental state for granted. She was always the sunshine of their little group, and seeing her so hurt made Felix realize how much he relied on the positivity she brought to the group. Seeing one of his friends look like this felt awful. Sallia didn’t look much better, but she had better control over her facial expressions.

“Are you all right?” he asked both of them.

“My family already left,” said Miria. “I think I missed them by a few minutes. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, or if they’re safe…” Felix suddenly had a better idea why Miria looked so devastated. She was the one that had emotionally invested the most into her family in this world, while he and Sallia were a little less connected to their parents.

Sallia immediately gave Mirai a hug, and Felix noticed that Sallia’s family was also conspicuously absent. He decided not to ask.

He sighed, and then turned towards Anise.

At the very least, Anise’s parents were there. They looked a little shell-shocked, much like Anise, but they still had food and clothes packed up for the journey. Anise seemed the most baffled out of everyone here, almost as if she were just going through the motions. Felix made a mental note to check up on her later, but there wasn’t enough time right now.

Ella glanced at everyone, before nodding. “We can talk later. We need to move. Follow me.”

After that, Ella quickly moved into the distance, heading towards the Fort that guarded the city from the surface.

Ella quickly led the group through the abandoned fort, navigating easily through a few halls, before reaching the mechanism that opened the gate.

“Miria! Sallia! Move this with me!” she yelled.

The two darted forward, and Sallia grimaced as she used her bruised arm to crank open the gate with Miria. Due to their incredible strength, however, the gate opened quickly.

It only took a minute to widen it enough that everyone could slip through. The group of four parents, four children, and Ella moved through the gate, right as Felix heard people in the city start to scream in fear in the distance.

The Orukthyri had probably made it into the city.

Ella didn’t bother opening the gate any more, now that everyone could pass through. The group slipped through the gates and stepped into the passageway beyond the fort.

Then, they spent nearly ten minutes jogging through tunnels. Ella was obviously familiar with this route already, and led us from one inconveniently small passage to the next.

Despite Felix’s growing numbness to the situation, he occasionally took a look at Miria and Sallia’s faces, to see if they were holding up well. He wasn’t very good at managing emotions, but he seemed like the most emotionally stable group member right now. If he needed to step up and look after the others, he would.

Miria had a strangely numb expression. She wasn’t very excited, even though the group was finally going to the surface. He knew that she had been dreaming about exploring the surface for years now. For Miria to see this and not be excited felt… wrong. But given the circumstances, it made sense.

He pushed down a bit of embarrassment, and then moved over to Miria to give her a hug. Even though Felix was never a particularly physical person, given how often Miria doled out hugs, she obviously liked hugging people. And right now, she clearly needed one.

After several minutes of travel, the group emerged from the caves.

And for the first time, they saw the surface of the world.