“What was that sound?”
The ground shook beneath Akemi, and chips of rock showered down on top of them. Her and Bamo had been pacing around the cave for the better part of fifteen minutes, failing to find an exit, when the vibrations began—at five second intervals at first, now they came constantly.
“Is she… angry with us?” Bamo offered.
Akemi gave him a searing look.
“The cave? Surely.”
“Not the cave. Her. The… Dark Lady.”
Akemi paused to frown. She hadn’t even considered that. It sounded completely stupid on the surface of it—even if there was a god out there, she never understood why people thought it would be watching them, out of all the gazillion creatures, it seemed awfully narcissistic—but this was Kodra, not Earth. Her assistant was a talking bat, for god’s sake.
“I don’t see why she would be,” she answered seriously. “As far as I remember, there’s no rule about killing other disciples—there’s only bonuses for hanging out with them. Plus, Nocturne seems to have zero problem murdering his lackeys. What would make us killing a measly drotling any different?”
Bamo didn’t refute this, and they kept walking. Walking fruitlessly, she might add, because the cave seemed intent to spin them in endless circles. They’d exit the area with the pool, end up in the middle cavern, then exit through another door to wind up in the pool. The only constant was the falling rocks, which would land at Akemi’s feet every few seconds.
“The rocks aren’t falling directly on top of us,” she realized, glancing up at where they were coming from. They always seemed to shed themselves from the wall, not the ceiling, suggesting that perhaps … “there is no ceiling,” she finished, eyes glinting. “Duh.”
She had been so consumed with the kill, and then the discovery, that she had forgotten the obvious. The illusion. The forest floor most likely sat right above them.
Just as she was about to suggest that Bamo fly them out of there, a body came soaring from above, plummeting from that milky blackness—and landing with a dramatic shuck onto the floor.
Akemi immediately recoiled into the darkness, and shoved Bamo to do the same. She inspected the person from afar, and realized by its dimensions that it had to be a drotling. The creature was already rising to a standing position, huffing out rapid breaths. Its face had lost all its childlike charm; it was now fully exposed rot that was halfway to spilling out. It was barely alive.
“She—she,” the drotling muttered in drotlish, stumbling toward them. He didn’t seem to notice them, he was just mumbling to himself incoherently. “Fi–fire. Everything burns…”
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Akemi summoned her ball of hornets, and thrust it just before the drotling’s face, so it wasn’t quite touching. “What are you talking about?” she asked urgently. “What’s happening up there?”
The drotling screeched, even more mulch falling from its face in the process. It didn’t have enough energy to recoup it like Mort had, so it just sagged like a paper doll, involuntarily falling into Akemi’s orb. The horde of insects devoured it in seconds.
You have defeated a level 8 drotling - 300xp gained
Piles and piles of more drotlings came descending from above. They were screaming, practically running mid-air. Some of them were on fire. Whatever the state of them, they were too delirious to notice Akemi and Bamo; they all went running for the bath, dousing themself in the cool water and burying their heads in the sand.
“The mercenaries,” Akemi realized, eyes widening. “The ones the Calamari sent. They must have caught up with me. Shit, how did they even find my location?”
“You mean the Calamity?”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said, already dragging Bamo past the floods of flaming drotlings. She carried the insect ball at her side, and it sliced through the horde like a knife through butter. The mulch bags burst into free experience points. “Come on, bat boy. Fly us out of here?”
“How am I supposed to fly past—this?” he said, waving madly at the drotlings as they dropped like flies from above. They were fleeing from whatever it was at an alarming rate.
Akemi scrambled onto Bamo’s back, hugging her arms around his neck. “You’ll find a way!”
With a groan, he flourished his wings. Akemi had never really seen them at their full wingspan, and they were huge—nearly the entire length of her. They were strong, and by the looks of them, heavy. To her surprise, instead of immediately sailing upwards, he began to scale the rock wall on the other side of the room, claws digging into the pockmarked stone surface.
“What are you doing?”
“I need leverage. You’re heavy.”
As they climbed, the illusion began to slowly break. Akemi could see two distinct worlds in front of her—a cliff’s edge, and then immediately under it, a barren cavern. A feathery boundary existed between the two, a blurry heatwave. Drotlings were clipping in between the two scenes like a glitch in a videogame. It was so surreal that it made her stomach turn unpleasantly.
Once he’d gotten to an adequate height, Bamo bounded off the wall, swooping down and under a falling drotling before sharply spiking up again. They rose with a ferocious quickness, soaring high above the forest floor. Air throttled through Akemi’s hair and chilled her bare skin; thanks to her shirt serving as a tourniquet, she was down to just a bra on her upper-half. Goosebumps littered her arms and crept up to her collarbones.
Below them, the enclave was burning. That much was clear from the thick, black smog hanging just below the treetops. The drotlings’ shelters had collapsed into burnt heaps, their gates crumbling. Dozens of sack-shaped bodies littered the ground. It was like a morgue for mulch.
“Can you see the mercenaries?” Akemi asked, breathless. She hugged impulsively tighter to Bamo’s back, a mixture of cold and scared—she couldn’t shake her aggravating fear of heights.
“Did you forget who you’re talking to? Or is this another of your badly timed jokes?”
Akemi grumbled, because—yes. She had forgotten. He probably couldn’t even see his own feet.
“Take us close to the ground, but still right above the smoke. I don’t want them catching sight of us before we see them.”
He obliged, but Akemi didn’t need to get much closer before she spotted it: the figure, alone, stepping apathetically over drotling corpses. This person was short and thin, and dressed in understated black robes, frayed at the edges. In the palm of each hand, the figure held an actively burning flame. The sight made Akemi’s stomach drop. She knew.
“Is that—” Akemi’s throat went dry, and it wasn’t just the wind. “Is that Pyre?”