Chapter 434 - Reign of the Crowned III
Her legs swinging back and forth, Sylvia fought back the urge to yawn as she watched over Claire’s training—the snoose had decided to take some time to learn under the avian grandmaster. She was in the midst of a spar, fighting against a penguin with a bladed shovel. The clanging was so rhythmic that it almost put the fairy to sleep, though the fault laid as much with her seat as it did the back and forth. Even in the middle of winter, Starrgort’s internal operations kept his body just warm enough to serve as a heated bed. And for the fairy at least, his size was right on the money.
She continued to totter for about ten minutes, but she forced herself to stay awake until Claire was done with practice. Only then did she rise from her mount and float her way over to the snakemoose’s side.
“That was a pretty close one.” Sylvia healed the two fighters as she spoke. Both were wounded, but Claire was a little better off. She’d emerged victorious with only a few holes poked between her ribs, while the penguin was stuck with a fist-sized cavity carved through its guts. The lyrkress’ recent improvements were made by leaps and bounds. Just last week, the penguin had handedly defeated her. “I almost didn’t think you were actually gonna win.”
“I was confident,” said Claire.
The penguin was a little less convinced. It crossed its arms, tapped a foot against the ground, and brayed in annoyance while Claire stuck out her tongue.
Sylvia couldn’t help but giggle. It was strange to think that Claire had developed a number of friendly rivalries when her head was usually filled with murder, and it was even stranger to see how well the whole scenario played out. There were a few misunderstandings and shuffled identities in the mix, but either way, the crowned rooster was more friendly than hostile. Finally. The perfect opportunity.
“So uhmmmm…” The tiny fairy fiddled with her tail, glancing nervously between her pet and the ground.
“What?” asked Claire.
“How long are you planning to stay here?”
“A little longer,” said Claire. “I’ll need another week to earn the rooster’s approval. Why?”
“A week sounds a little ambitious,” said Sylvia. “But it’s ‘cause I was thinking of maybe heading out for a little and getting a few levels myself.”
Claire slowly tilted her head before lifting the fairy by the scruff. “Who are you and what have you done to Sylvia?”
“Oh, come on. That’s just rude!” huffed the furball. “I wanna level sometimes too, you know!”
“You’ve taken exactly none of the opportunities you were given.”
“That’s not true! I technically leveled up once that one time I used my ultimate.”
Clarie rolled her eyes. “You didn’t do that because you wanted experience.”
“I know, but like, I started spying on everyone while I was bored, and everyone seems really motivated. I’m basically the only one sitting around doing nothing, other than Starrgort, but that’s only ‘cause you never use him.”
“And the real reason?”
“You’re catching up to me too fast, and it’d be really weird if you actually ended up being stronger than me,” said Sylvia.
“Does that matter?” asked Claire.
“Mhm! It matters a lot!” said the fox. “If you get stronger than me then I’d end up being your pet for real!”
“You already are my pet,” said Claire.
“No, I’m not! You have it backwards!”
The usual banter continued until it was interrupted by a series of honks. A familiar flamingo stepped up to Claire and pointed at a group practicing in front of the rooster’s throne.
“No, we’re not all his pets,” said Claire. “And I’ll get back to training in a second.”
Another honk.
“Uhmmm, I don’t think pets and disciples are ‘basically the same,’” said Sylvia. “Anyway it doesn’t matter! I’m going now.” She transformed back into a fox as she spoke. “I’ll come find you again in a few days, even if you end up heading out onto the mountain.”
“Okay.” Claire pulled the furball in for a hug and gave her face a nuzzle. “Have fun. Be safe.”
The fox could feel her chest tightening as the familiar, comforting scent flooded her nostrils. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she found the urge to beg for more intimacy. There was probably nothing wrong with kissing her goodbye. She might have been able to play it off as a joke, even if it was refused or poorly received, but dismissing the thought, she pushed Claire away before her smell could further corrupt her mind.
“I will, don’t worry!” Smiling cheerfully as she could, she leapt into the snow and bolted for the woods. She waited for the sounds that indicated the lyrkress’ return to training before spinning around and watching as she descended into one of the pits. She almost didn’t want to go. But with a gulp and a shake of the head, she turned around again and darted into the undergrowth.
From there, it didn’t take long for the chicken’s training camp to vanish. A few seconds of sprinting through the trees, and she was outside the domain, placed atop a snowy mountain all by herself for the first time in forever.
Well, almost.
The isolation lasted for all of three seconds before she looked up the nearest slope and found one of their companions. The grey and black furball was waiting just outside the chicken’s domain, his arms crossed, his feet tapping the snow, and his mouth curved into a bit of a grin.
“Hey,” he said. “Took you long enough.”
Sylvia blinked. “Uhhh… have you been expecting me or something?”
“Yeah, for the better part of a week,” he said. “I knew you were desperate to get into her pants, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“H-huh? W-what are you saying!? I’m not desperate to get into her pants at all!”
“I might’ve just believed you if you didn’t scamper back to Llystletein to learn that one spell your grandfather mentioned the moment you woke up from that wet dream last week,” said Panda, with a snicker. “God, my sides. Shit was hilarious enough to pay back my whole-ass investment. Free fucking theatre seats just for hanging around.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“W-wait a second! H-how the heck do you know any of that!?” cried the fox.
“I’m not even the only one who knows,” said Panda. “You do realise she caught you moaning her name in your sleep, right?”
The fox turned so red that the change in her skin tone was visible through her fur. “W-w-wha!? T-there’s no way that’s true!”
“You can ask her, if you want. Doubt she cares too much, honestly. She’s been pretending not to notice,” said Panda. “Anyway, enough about that. I’ve been meaning to tell you, whenever you finally decided to set out, that you’re gonna need to be extra careful. You’re basically the hunters’ main target. No telling when they might change their minds, ditch the plan, and nab you early.”
The raccoon looked to the fox for an answer, but Sylvia was too busy lying in the snow with her face in her paws and curled up into a ball of embarrassment. The bubble around her perfectly soundproofed her screams, preventing them from leaking out into the world.
The bubble’s edges distorted each time she screeched. Panda tried to invade the barrier, but he found, as he touched it, that it was far too well reinforced, perhaps even the product of some concept or other. He could only cross his arms, lean against a tree, and wait out the rest of the tantrum.
All in all, it took roughly twenty minutes for it to pass. Sylvia was still red and sniffling by the time she emerged from her shell. Panda wanted, needed, to mess with her, but a single look cut his commentary short. As hilarious as it might have been, he could tell that she would retreat again the moment he pulled the trigger and there were more pressing matters at hand.
“So you know that group that attacked the others?”
“Yeah?” she asked, with a sniffle. “What about them?”
“They’ve been trying to find a good way to get at you,” he said. “They’ve got countermeasures for most of your abilities. You’d best keep on your toes and make escape plans.”
“Wait, really?” She blinked. “I’m pretty sure they don’t even know most of my abilities.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but they’ve basically got enough of their shit together to make a run for the bank,” he said. “One of theirs is so crazy good with vectors that your ultimate is probably off the table. I doubt you’ll be able to summon your vessels or even access the shit you’ve got in your tail.”
“Mmmnnn, that sounds pretty bad,” said Sylvia. “But I think I’ll probably be fine. Where are they right now?”
“Not too close, not too far.” Panda pointed a paw towards the west. “Maybe about a dozen-odd mountains that way? They’re beefing themselves up near Lana and the boys.”
“Isn’t that like, really bad? I should probably go help them,” muttered the fox.
“Nah, you’re fine. Just go level,” said Panda. “I got ‘em covered.”
“Are you sure? I don’t really mind anyway.”
“I’ve gotten paid for about a year’s worth of work, so I’m gonna do a year’s worth of work,” he said. “Relax.”
Sylvia spent a few seconds evaluating the raccoon before she finally nodded. “Mmk.”
She started walking off, but the other furball grabbed her by the tail before she could get too far. “Hold on. Don’t go running off just yet.”
“What now?”
“Running around and randomly murdering wildlife isn’t gonna amount to much of a payday. I’ll show you to a good spot.”
“Okay.”
“You able to track me if I vanish?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Follow me.”
A smile crossing his lips again, the raccoon suddenly disappeared. It wasn’t like he had thrown together a set of vectors to connect two points in space time, nor like he had overridden his absolute position. The raccoon simply ceased to exist, only to appear somewhere else after a half-second delay, as if his body was erased and reconstructed at another location.
Still, Sylvia was able to track him. Quickly pinching the two places in spacetime together, she walked through the resulting portal and joined him in front of a lonely cliff.
Opposite the fatal drop was a massive, sparkling cave. Its mouth was shaped almost like a qiligon’s, only deadlier and almost a little more canine. Stepping into the cavern, she followed the raccoon down a flight of stairs and through a portcullis made of rusted iron. Checking the new notification in her log right then, she confirmed that she had entered a dungeon—a dungeon that went by Builledracht’s Maw.
Its entrance didn’t look that different from the exterior, but the walls began melting into a strange, oozing liquid as she got further into the cave. There were still a few lights, bright green flames that danced aimlessly throughout the darkness, but they offered little in the way of illumination.
It didn’t seem too wise to touch the dark liquid—Sylvia could feel a sort of strange power coursing through it—but she decided to walk through it after noting that Panda was doing the same.
The ankle-deep goop was uncomfortably viscous. It clung to her fur when she lifted her paws, only to suddenly snap back and release her once she got too far. The slime never clung to her for long, but it left her feeling filthy regardless. It didn’t help that its rancid, half-rotten scent was prominent enough to blind her nostrils. She hated it. She wanted to be enveloped in Claire’s scent instead, and it was doing away with the few bits that’d rubbed off. To make matters worse, the goop sapped and weakened her magic. It wasn’t quite powerful enough to overcome the effects of her regeneration. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Stealing only fifty thousand points a second, it consumed even less than the abilities she always kept active.
The problem was how. Its peculiar method of draining her mana wasn’t like Claire’s, which simply wrenched the raw energy away. It almost felt more natural, like it was draining her mana the same way a spell would. But because she hadn’t initiated or otherwise sanctioned the action, it came as a bit of a surprise, like an elderly person suddenly finding their pants soaked following a moment of felicitation.
“This is one of the toughest dungeons you’ll find around here,” said Panda. “Hell, for pure mages like you, it might even be the worst of them all.”
“Is it?” Sylvia took a moment to scan her surroundings and sniff at the air. “It doesn’t really seem that bad.”
The subspace itself didn’t seem to be all too impressive. The mana was dense, but not so dense that it concerned her, and while the dead, serpentine creatures splattered all over the floors, walls, and ceilings, appeared to have tough, magic-resistant hides, they didn’t strike her as being particularly impressive.
“You’ll see,” said Panda, with a chuckle.
His reaction was suspicious enough that Sylvia raised her ears and confirmed again that Allegra was responsible for much of the carnage. It was already fairly obvious from the residual mana, but the rabbit’s chanting made for even easier identification. All of the crashing and banging revealed that she was still in combat, though the site of it was a ways away.
The sounds grew clearer as Sylvia progressed through the cave. Eventually, after wading through far too much goop for comfort, she found the rabbit in the middle of fighting the floor’s boss.
Her opponent was a rat-snake—not a snake with a taste for rats, but a rat shaped like a snake. It wasn’t particularly large. Both its width and height sat right around a meter, but its length must have been at least fifty times that. Its body was covered in a thick layer of pale cream fur, with white and brown spots all over. It didn’t seem to have any legs, but it did have a few pairs of clawed wings running along the side of its body.
The limbs in question were kept closed when the snake dashed around the cavern, but it opened them up to create a series of small parachutes whenever it leapt off the walls.
It was a cute, fuzzy, and delicious-looking creature, prey by all means, and yet, Allegra was struggling.
The beast was outright immune to her magic. It wasn’t like the rabbit relied on brute force. She struck it with boulders and fired blasts of lightning straight into its mouth. She tried concentrating her magic into an incredibly dense arcane blast, she captured its face in a bubble in an attempt to drown it, and at one point, she even turned the room into a vacuum and collapsed its lungs entirely.
But it was all ineffective.
Even in the odd case that she did some sort of damage, such as the instance where she compressed a series of shockwaves into a tiny space and unleashed them all inside of the rat-snake’s skull, the monster would rapidly regenerate by feasting on the mana that flooded their magic-rich surroundings.
It almost seemed like there was no way for her to kill it.
But when Sylvia stepped up to join, Panda stuck out his arm and kept her from the fray.
“Leave it,” he said. “This kill’s what’s fueling her thousandth level. Let her spend her own cash and prove to the gods that she can roll high as hell.”