A girl in tattered sackcloth limped through a tunnel. Her left leg was drenched in blood and dragging along a length of thorny vine around the ankle.

Behind her silently lumbered a hulking hybrid beast, moving on four massive armoured legs and with a giant rose flower blossomed out in place of its head. Thick bronze scales covered the rest of its body, tapering off just before giving way to a sleek green tail.

Her eyes seemed to be filled with hope when she laid eyes on the two Seraphists who were walking forward to meet her. One wielded a whip made of bone while her companion, a massive warrior cladded in steel armour, held a long spear made of ocean water with a white foamy tip.

Death, however, already caught up to her. From the heart of the hybrid’s rose flower shot out a rod of bronze with barbs running along its length. Manziholet had once witnessed a ballista bolt tear through a person’s chest, and the sight before him practically mirrored it when the rod met its prey.

The barbs held her in place as the rod retracted, dragging her toward the flower. The girl was still opening her eyes wide and reaching her arms forward as though she was seeing Invincible Light in flesh, before her entire body was swallowed into the red petals.

Beside Manziholet, the dead girl’s priest muttered a prayer. The young man, called Gersimi, had done so many times as his congregation got sent up one by one as scouts for the expedition. At this point, his words sounded like a guilty goodbye.

Ahead, Chiorou and Mirish engaged with the Quorathene beast. With longer range, the former’s Deathspine Lash struck first, its boney tips slicing through the air before crashing into the giant rose. Infused with the Force of an Armament, the lash tore through the dense layers of petals, shredding them into scattered fragments.

The hybrid reared back, its remaining petals vibrated as if it was roaring in pain, before stomping down and responding with a shot of the barbed rod toward the Archivist, but its trajectory was efficiently intercepted by Mirish’s <>.

The Miracle’s spearhead, made of solidified ocean foam, slided against the rod and cut away its bronze barbs. The maneuver also redirected the rod upward, buying Chiorou enough time to coil her whip for a horizontal sweep across the hybrid’s front knees, shattering its protective cap plates and slicing into the exposed green flesh beneath.

Meanwhile, Mirish took advantage of his Aquabound Spire’s momentum to reposition the spearhead across the rod, then cleanly severed it, leaving the hybrid with only a quarter of its main weapon.

As the beast stooped forward, Mirish shifted left, aiming for its ribcage. As the spear travelled, the man switched on the Miracle’s second state, unraveling the foamy spearhead and part of its upper shaft into a swirling vortex of churning ocean water.

The Aquabound Spire slammed into the ribcage as neither a spear nor a mere mass of liquid, but as a massive sledgehammer. The vortex fortified and kept its shape upon collision, delivering a crushing blow that sent shockwaves through the beast’s frame. The bronze bones splintered and scales flaked away among an eruption of green sap.

With the Armament condensed into its original state, Mirish stabbed it deep into the wound with one fluid motion before the regeneration capability even had time to kick in.

The Quorathene, ingenious as they might be, had so far demonstrated hardly any usage of Miracle. To build their grand creations, they had seemingly relied only on physics and biology more advanced than humanity could ever hope to imitate, but those were also two fundamental principles of the universe that Seraphists considered suggestions from the weak.

As such, when the Armament erupted again inside the beast, no Miracle manifested to counter or contain the damage. Whatever botanical organs that were keeping it alive became horribly compressed between the forming vortex and the bronze scales, squeezing out more sap and putting it in a state of sudden shock. The beast collapsed, no longer remembering how to stay alive.

For the sake of scientific curiosity, the most important line in the job description of all Archivists, Raka decided to halt the expedition’s advance there. After witnessing the volunteer being swallowed, he wanted to inspect its digestive tract. The thralls were equipped with saws, axes, shears, and set to carve open the monstrous beast.

They found the young girl, half-digested, in a sac right after its throat. Next to her was another volunteer, both looking very much like they had been on the wrong side of a particularly enthusiastic cooking experiment.

When they sliced an opening on the sac, the slime inside came gushing out onto the silvery stone floor and almost ate away a thrall’s legs. The destructive alchemical property was not terribly rare, but the durability and elasticity of the sac itself were impressive enough to be harvested. After all, one hybrid’s nightmare digestion sac was another man’s premium-grade undershirt.

Stolen story; please report.

It was folded and stored away in a glass jar filled with preservative liquid, before being transferred on cart further back to the surface, along with various miscellaneous items of the Quorathene. Nothing would attack the carriers on the way, since the tunnel up till now had been a long and winding path down underground at an angle so shallow it might be offended when anyone called it steep, with no split or diversion or hidden rooms where hybrids could stage an ambush.

The floor continued to be decorated with complex bronze geometry while luminous fruits cast their gentle glow along the path, as if the Quorathene had to foresight to shock and awe the hairless monkeys who would eventually explore here. Repeats in decorative patterns existed though, and it would be quite tedious travelling for so long, had each twist and turn not led to a checkpoint chamber guarded by Quorathene hybrids or some deeply inconvenient traps that pretended to be treasures.

The former would be burned away by the Fireguards after each time the Seraphist finished them off, and smoke was quickly ventilated by the breeze, although it still carried the stubborn scent of crushed lemon leaves and the bitter taste. The latter, consisting of plants that released sleeping spores or giant blades that dropped from the ceiling, were easily destroyed by Miracles or disabled by throwing enough volunteers at them.

Also, despite the tunnel being wide enough for ten carts rolling side by side, therefore leaving plenty of free space, the leftover metal parts or any obstacles would be cleared by a team of thralls to make room just in case they needed to dash off like their lives depended on it.

Not that the shameful possibility was high but, in the expedition's best interest, the Ruin of Vonna should boast greater dangers enough to cause it from now on. The reason was that Manziholet had been unceremoniously relegated to rear guard duty – an absolutely thrilling role primarily involving sitting back and observing the other Seraphists do all the cool fighting.

“There’s such a thing as too much boredom,” he said, blocking Raka’s way. The Archivist was going back to get the next volunteers. “I must inform you, just for the joy of making things interesting, a certain person is dangerously close to doing something very reckless.”

“Don’t you forget? Learn and support, novice.” Raka walked past him and arrived before the congregation, now reduced to only seven. They sat huddled around a feeble campfire. Their thin sackcloth garments offered little protection against the constant breeze. Even then, they resiliently refused to eat or drink, perhaps seeing no point in hydrating for the imminent death.

“Priest,” he said, “time to choose another pair.”

“Please, no more,” Gersimi stood up to reply, his slender hands clenching. “You can easily handle the monsters. Why drive us towards pointless death?”

“Exactly,” Manziholet said from behind. “Let me scout ahead instead. We are, by every measure, superior to mortals. I can do their work faster, better, and without wasting precious time.”

Raka turned to face the novice. “A sound argument. You have convinced me. You’re now in charge of burning duty with the Fireguards. Maybe you can use their flamethrowers and shut up much better.”

He had already known to use those weapons. They were not as complex and mystical as the mercenaries advertised their employers, hence not worth his attention. Manziholet raised both hands in deflection. “I was joking.”

“Go back to your position,” Raka gave an order, to which Manziholet followed without further complaint. He had, after all, informed the appropriate authority of a morale issue amid the expedition. Any unexplained explosions henceforth would be a leadership problem.

Meanwhile, despondent as the priest might be, he managed to convince two more of his followers to go lest they all face a worse fate. They took each other’s hand and walked ahead deeper into the Ruin of Vonna toward the next chamber while invoking the name of Invincible Light in hope of divine intervention against whatever bronze-flora hybrids awaited.

Manziholet found himself idly fascinated by their action. Gersimi’s congregation members were young enough to have dreams of their own, yet they had chosen to dedicate the remainder of their bright future to the faith. He knew people with centuries behind them who could not even decide what to have for breakfast, let alone readily commit their existence to something greater than themselves, although that something had a high chance of being an Outsider in disguise.

They had even dared to preach against some of the Church’s most sacred practices, an act so audacious that it should earn a round of applause for sheer gall. The orthodox clergy had long ensured that all planets followed a singular guideline to faith, one personally approved by the Holy Solongo himself. Yet, the heretic Gersimi had not only gathered a sizable number of followers but also managed to keep them on for quite some time before being imprisoned. If somehow her methods or ideas were to be replicated on a wider scale, then the Church might face an unprecedented upheaval, which would be quite fun.

The next checkpoint chamber soon came into view. Like many before, the space was circular and had no doors. The volunteers hesitated, then, with another prayer, stepped inside. He tried to look from the perspective of these scientifically impaired: Faith was useless, obviously, but perhaps admirably useless, the kind of futile gesture that lets despair stand a little taller, wear a coat, and call itself conviction. Like polishing the floor on a sinking ship, it could hardly stop the inevitable but at least made the whole catastrophe sparkle on the way down. Maybe that was why the faithmongers prayed to God, because the act of hoping and believing had a little meaning in itself. In that, there must be a strange kind of salvati–

While his mind took a lengthy detour into the land of deep thought, the two poor fellows got vivisected into bloody chunks of various sizes by a hybrid with pointy and sharp tentacles. It had dropped down from the ceiling as soon as they set foot inside the chamber. The priest Gersimi muttered another guilty goodbye at the sight.

Such was life, Manziholet thought. On the bright side, their Invincible Light, if He existed at all, had so far demonstrated no observable evidence to suggest that He was incompetent at solving complex puzzles. He should easily piece them back together in the afterlife.