All their preparations done, the girls went to sleep without even eating, with one of them staying up to stand guard and a rotation planned out.
I’ll stay with them and work on my blood, do you want to go out? We could use a bit of early exploration to make sure this place is really safe. The things written in the letter and what we’ve seen don't completely match and that’s bothering me.
Pareth stood up and stayed still for a few seconds.
Is something wrong?
In his hands appeared a small shield of light with a weird shape, which he showed to Sofia. Bird shield? Oh, you want to go with Crowie? Is that it? Sure.
Sofia ripped the page from the book of skeletons and the small crow skeleton formed out of the mist like it always did. It hopped around on the ground, cuddled against Sofia’s leg for a few seconds, and then flew up to the top of Pareth’s skull. Sofia then sent them off through the barricaded door with the help of the graveyard crew.
Opal curiously watched these happenings from her side, sitting on her bedroll, the mute girl had volunteered to take the first watch. She grabbed her notebook and scribbled something, when she was done, she turned to Sofia with a smile and showed it to her. It was a small and rather crude drawing of Crowie, accompanied by the word ‘Cute!’.
“You have great taste,” Sofia whispered back with a smile of her own. She internally debated summoning her bigger group of fifty crows right then but she didn’t want to wake the other girls. Summoning a bone slate she wrote a longer message for the mute girl.
“You can sleep if you want, it’s fine, I’m here to watch over the five of you. There’s no real need for a night watch."
Opal shook her head.
“Alright then. I’m going to be doing weird things, don’t worry about it, just necromancer stuff.”
Opal gave a sign that she understood but instead of ‘not worrying’ she kept staring at Sofia, curiosity shining in her eyes.
I should have seen it coming. Well, whatever.
Sofia had been inspired by Nicet’s base building kit in Sovuln, and before coming to Brighthall, when she prepared in the sect, she had bought a few thick panels of reinforced glass. She could make walls with bone whenever she wanted but windows were trickier, thin bone could be somewhat translucent, but that wasn’t really satisfactory, hence the stored glass. Bringing out three such glass squares and a few bones to act as joints, Sofia encased her corner of the room in a bone and glass box.
Should be enough to cover the sound and smell, and I can still watch over the whole room.
The mute girl watched the process, visibly confused, but what really got a reaction out of her was Sofia cutting her wrist to let the blood flow. Sofia just turned on her Health bar display and winked at the girl. The blood loss was slow enough that her passive regeneration from [Bone Dominus] almost negated it completely.
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Second step of the Light forging realm :
Your blood becomes light (48 / 126 441 drops converted)
Let’s aim for a hundred drops tonight! I need to speed this up.
----------------------------------------
Pareth slowly made his way through the mansion, he checked every room on the way, noting the presence of quite a few shades, which never attacked him, but there were a few things which were abnormal. First of all, he had gone through the entire thing and found no stairs at all. There was clearly a second floor and an underground, but no way to reach them. Secondly, it had taken him several hours to go through hundreds of rooms, so long that Crowie had expired and returned to the book, when the mansion was nowhere near that large from the outside. Lastly, after reaching the main hall again, he discovered that the entrance was gone. Where the door used to be was now just another hole-ridden wall with the darkness of the night beyond.
He tugged at Sofia’s consciousness.
----------------------------------------
You’re back, want me to get you in?
Sofia clearly got the feeling from her link with Pareth that this wasn’t it, so she connected her senses to his.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That’s just the entrance hall.
Pareth turned around.
Oh.
Well, we did notice that the dungeon was weird before. I am not too surprised. I just hope it’s not another Margin situation.
Try punching the wall?
Pareth turned to look at the barricaded room’s direction.
What? Don’t want to wake them up? It’s about time they woke up anyway, but fair, I’ll get them up myself, give me a second.
Sofia cleaned up her mess and stored the glass box.
[Venerable physique of the primeval void] ♢ - Second step of the Light forging realm :
Your blood becomes light (112 / 126 441 drops converted)
Not quite the hundred I hoped for, but faster than before. I just need to keep getting faster. The pain isn’t as bad now that I’ve gone through it a hundred times…
It was currently Shaily’s turn to be up.
“Shaily, help me wake the sleeping princesses, will you?”
“Morning already? Do we let Lola sleep, then?”
Right, three of them are actually princesses… “No, her too.”
----------------------------------------
Everyone was soon grouped in the main hall, with Sofia explaining the situation.
“The normal plan was to have you all clear this dungeon today then go investigate another one at the lake for the rest of the week, with me faking my death halfway through the second dungeon to gauge your reactions and see how you perform without me as a failsafe. But as you can see, the way out is gone. The dungeon having a life of its own wasn’t part of the planning I have been given at all, so I’m taking charge. But I’ll still let you have some fun and try to resolve it on your own.”
The students were surprised at the sudden turn of events, especially since Sofia’s tone was so relaxed and casual despite what she told them. After some quick exchanges between them, En asked the obvious, “Are we trapped in? Can’t we just break the wall? We can see some light from the other side…”
“This is why I’m canceling the entire thing instead of just letting this go, I can already sense what is on the other side of this wall, and it’s not the outside. Lola should be able to tell as well.”
Lola focused on the wall and after an initial muted yelp of surprise, she took a few steps left then right, her face gradually turning to a paler shade of blue. “This- How does…”
“I don’t know, honestly. I’m thinking it must be some very weird space magic. Pareth, break the wall.”
Pareth advanced, grabbed one of the planks by the rotten holes, and yanked it out. On the opposite end of the wall, another plank disappeared. Pareth moved out of the way. On the other side of the wall was the entrance hall. The light came from them.
“It’s… Like a mirror?” Shaily asked as she observed Pareth through the hole on the other side.
“Kind of?” Sofia answered, “It’s hard to understand what’s really going on.”
Sofia threw a bone through and it came out on the other side of the wall. “The room is linked to itself I guess.” She stuck her left hand in next. It did not feel any different than normal, she could still feel and see her hand on the other side, but she could also see it sticking out of the other hole in the wall a few meters to her right. She controlled the bone on the floor to fly back to her hand and retrieved it. “Yeah I’m pretty sure now, this isn’t another space, it’s just like this wall is a teleportation portal to this room.”
Pareth ripped up all the planks of the wall one by one, revealing the full thing. It really was like a weird inverse mirror. By standing at the center Sofia could touch fingertips with herself. Pareth tried completely walking through, and unsurprisingly, he simply ended up coming out of the other side of the wall.
Sofia explained her new plan, “Well, you see how it is. That wasn’t planned, but honestly I am confident in being able to escape this. As long as it doesn’t seem too dangerous, I will let you five give me ideas to try to get out. This will be a good experience for later, I think. Might as well make the most of this situation. If all else fails, I’ll get us out another way and wait for rescue. Oh right, I have also taken control of the monsters in the dungeon, so we can use them if need be.”
Deep shadow appeared all around the room and the temperature suddenly dropped.
“These are winter shades, they have ice magic and can hit pretty hard. You would have had to fight them if things proceeded normally, but they didn’t.”
“You control monsters?” Topaz asked, incredulous.
“I’m a necromancer and Shades are undead. Is that really weird? I think being trapped here is weirder. Honestly I have a hard time believing the headmaster would approve of sending us to this place if he knew things could go wrong, especially since I am a new teacher and four of you are nobles. So my theory is someone is fucking with us, and it could be malicious.”
The initial surprise gone, the five girls were surprisingly calm, and they all came up with ideas on how to get out. First and foremost was to try the other walls, so they returned to the room they had spent the night in and repeated the process of taking out a piece of the wall that should have led outside. The result was the same, the room was mirrored onto itself on the other side.
“Let’s try the ceiling next then,” Sofia said and shrugged.
Of course it wouldn’t be so easy.
I do wonder what’s going on, though.
It’s great that they managed to stay calm. But this is really strange. Is this part of the event too and the academy just purposely kept me in the dark to mess with me or something? This isn’t funny.
Screw this. If anything goes wrong, I’m teleporting everyone to Zangdar.
----------------------------------------