Quinn dodged past a strike at her chest, brushing around the large claw in a far smoother movement than what she would have accomplished a couple of weeks ago. Her knife, chipped as it were from overuse, flashed in the dim light as it arched forward. The blade snaked around the other claw and dove into the crab’s large eyes in a smooth motion. Then, just as the crab began to react and flail, she gathered athyrn into her armored arm. Her entire arm, including the dark chitin vambrace, turned to a dark mist as she safely retreated from the crab’s dying attacks. Its claw smashed up through the mist, but it was inconsequential as the mist gathered back to the rough form of her arm.
A mere second later, her arm shifted back to flesh and blood as she watched the critter die. It was an odd feeling, watching something bleed out. She was no stranger thanks to hunting in the past, but it was still weird. And just a bit thrilling. To be there in the final moments…
Quinn shook her head. She couldn’t allow herself to be distracted now. The most dangerous moments weren’t in attacking the crab but in the minutes after. The scent of a fresh kill would carry up and down the beach, drawing others like sharks. She had nearly gotten caught in such a situation just a couple of days ago, and she refused to repeat such a thing.
She smoothly cut across the weak points in its armor in a well-practiced movement. Four legs dropped from the creature's torso, which she promptly gathered. With her loot in tow, she scampered off towards a different part of the monolithic ocean cavern. She moved quickly, cutting a clean path through the sand until she moved half a mile along the black beach.
A small, tiny little hole in the wall sat maybe twenty-thirty feet above the dark sand. Quinn gathered her loot and tied it to her back using a thin piece of rope. The rope, roughly made from twined seaweed, securely held the legs as she climbed up the rock wall. Her feet, bare except for a few wraps of cloth, easily found footing until she forced her way over the small ledge.
The dim light of the glowing fruits cast a shade over most of the space beyond the tight entrance, though she could still see the small cave quite well. It was a roughly hewn cave attached to the cavern only through the crack. It was about the size of a small room and was absolutely covered in bits of black crab shells and other nicknacks she had gathered in the weeks she spent trying to survive. Most of it was useless like the several bones and talons shucked around.
A single thing stood out more than anything else in the room. A skeleton, human albeit relatively massive, sat curled up in the corner of the room. It wore armor, though the leather straps had long rotted away. A greatsword was half-hazardly lying next to it, as rusty as the armor adorning the skeleton.
The corpse had freaked her out the first couple of days in the small cave, but she couldn’t leave. This place was the safest she had found, and she wouldn’t let such a silly thing as a corpse scare her off. Sure she had thought about tossing the body out to ease her mind… she didn’t though. She figured it would be disrespectful to the dead to be forced out of its resting place.
Quinn undid the seaweed rope and tossed the bits of crustacean onto a small outcropping on the side of the room. With a bit of imagination, one could see the boulder as a small table built into the side of the cave. Or at least that’s what she told herself since it was where she ate most days.
She idly hummed to herself as she began to clean out the bits of crab meat from the legs. It was a habit she picked up when the silence began to wear down on her. Of course, it wasn’t true silence since there was the near-constant sound of water lapping at the shore. That, and the occasional screeches and roars as critters of the deep battled each other. Still, it added a humane vibe to the inhospitable place that helped keep her sanity. Although she would never admit it, being stuck underground for weeks was starting to get to her.
Her meal vanished in short order. Once upon a time, eating raw meat had been unsettling to her. Now she was quite used to the blood sloshing in her mouth as she ate. It was better than the greasy messes she had eaten in her old world, at least. However, she had to admit it was making her sick to eat only crab. She cast Magellan’s Drink and washed the meat down.
Quinn glanced down at herself. She had kept rather clean the four weeks she had been down here. Or at least she thought it was three weeks. Compass was her only way of keeping the days straight, and she forgot to cast it quite often. She was too busy with other things, like bleeding out.
Anyway, Cleanse had been a great boon for keeping herself clean. She didn’t know if she could’ve kept herself together so well if she was constantly covered in gore. To be fair, almost all of it was her own gore. It had been an… unfortunate few weeks.
Her clothes were in good shape too. Kinda. Her pants had long turned to shorts. They just kept getting cut up and splashed with acid until there was barely anything left of the fabric below her knees. At that point, she had roughly cut the pants into a much better form of clothing. Thankfully, that didn’t affect the noise-suppressing enchantment too badly since the runes were right around her waist.
Her feet were bare except for the bandage wraps covering them. They protected the significantly less tender flesh from the sharp bits of bone and occasional shards of glass on the black beach. It was a must-have after she nearly lost her foot to a particularly nasty talon that drifted onto the beach.
The mottled gray sagen was miraculously still in one piece. However, this had to do with most of her injuries being from the front. It had been rather safe at her back. It was splattered with its fair share of blood over the weeks, though Cleanse took care of that issue just the same as the rest of her clothes.
Her shirt, her supposedly cut-resistant shirt, had a long, jagged slice along the right side. The edges of the cut were burnt an even darker shade than the rest of the fabric. The dim light barely showed through the jagged hole, revealing a pale scar along her flesh. Earning that scar had been a rather horrifying event that she definitely didn’t want to remember
.
The terrible event had happened a couple of weeks in when she was fighting a Spine Snatcher, the worm thing that had pulled her down. When she said ‘fighting’, it was more like running and dodging as she tried to cast Sparks. Spine Snatchers - or at least that's what A Traveler’s Guide: Monsters called the horrors - were incredibly resilient and her only method of winning was to scare them off with bright light.
See, Spine Snatchers didn’t have a brain. And they had a hypersensitivity to light. It was a perfect combo that made them rather easy to scare off. Assuming, of course, she lived long enough to cast Sparks. Quinn dodged a burst of acid from the thing’s mouth as she retreated further up the tunnel leading back to the oceanic cavern.
It was then the earth started to tremble terribly. It was like an earthquake centralized right around where they were fighting. The Spine Snatcher had gone stock still, which should’ve been her first warning something was wrong. Instead, the idiot part of her decided it was the perfect time to put some distance between the two. She barely got a couple of unstable steps before the rumbling unnaturally ceased.
Quinn thought this was a good thing. The shaking made it hard to walk, and she had put enough distance between the Spine Snatcher to cast Sparks from relative safety. It was a good thing. Right up until the rocks behind her exploded outward. A couple of large chunks hit her in the back, knocking her over just in time to see a shape emerge from the ground. A large shape.
She immediately froze any and all attempts to move as she sensed an overwhelmingly dangerous being. It looked a bit like an ape lumbering about, assuming apes were covered in deadly spikes and large enough to bulldoze a building. Oh, and had six arms to boot. It was about ten feet tall and built almost entirely out of muscle. Dark fur covered the figure from head to toe and spikes jutted out of every surface. Three eyes sat on its face, trembling with excitement in the dim light of the tunnel.
The Spine Snatcher screeched. Now, the worm horror screeching was nothing new to her. The absolute terror in its voice was. Even when its brethren had been scared off by the light of Sparks, they had only squealed in surprise. Not fear. It wasted no time as it tried to run away from the new threat.
The reason for its fear was soon made abundantly clear. The brutish monster raised its hand with a hideous sneer across its face as its head snapped to the sounds of its skittering. The nearby rocks followed its motion, closing up the tunnel just in front of the Spine Snatcher.
The Spine Snatcher wasted no time burrowing into the rocks. The acid along its flesh helped the oversized worm as it bore into the rock just as she had seen it do before. The rocks sizzled and melted, but the worm didn’t even move. From her spot lying amongst the rubble, it looked as though the rocks were surging like water, following the will of the six-armed ape. They constantly flowed to replace the melted bits, not allowing the Spine Snatcher to get anywhere.
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It slowly moved forward, its each and every foot falling precise and loud as it leisurely walked behind the worm. Its gentle, easy gate was a complete counter to the worm's increasing attempts at a getaway. It writhed faster, harder as it tried desperately to get away.
It proved to be for not as the spikey ape gently, almost as if a best friend, wrapped its meaty grasp around the shaking Spine Snatcher. Its hand wrapped around the tail, completely ignoring the sharp spines and acid covering the thing.
Then, the ape simply began to walk back to its original tunnel. It looked as though it didn’t struggle at all as it toted the worm. The worm didn’t remain idle. It desperately dug into the ground, slamming its spines as if to halt the process of the monstrous ape. It used its entire strength, which was enough to pull something miles below the earth, to resist.
The dark being didn’t even notice as it continued to pull with seemingly zero effort. It arrived back at its whole, glancing around one last time up and down the cave. It was at that moment, Quinn realized the earth-shaking monster was entirely blind. Its three eyes passed over her, not seeing her small form among the rubble. And then it simply climbed down the hole, pulling the worm along with it. Just before the worm was pulled all the way down, it turned to Quinn. Hatred was evident in its entire body as it shook.
Before she could even stand up, the worm lunged at her, snapping its acid spike out to her. Its spines pressed down on her, forcing the breath out of her lungs as it attempted to squish her organs out. She scrambled underneath it, trying to push it off, but it was too strong. Acid dripped off its flesh, splattering across her shirt and face. She withheld a scream, terrified the ape creature would come back up, as the acid slowly burned into her flesh.
The worm struggled, pressing down onto her as its spines punctured her thigh. Her chest started to grow hot as her shirt burned under the Spine Snatcher's acid. The Slaythren Spider Silk was strong, resisting the burn, but eventually, that resistance was too weak. A single spine forced its way down through her shirt, cutting into it as acid poured into the wound. Her inside burned under the abusive might of the worm. There was nothing she could do as it slowly tortured her. Nothing she could do.
A flash of intense pain coursed through her, and then the worm simply disappeared. A screech of fury radiated from the ape’s tunnel as the creature's clamp-like head was pulled fully down into the dark.
It had been a struggle to return to her cave after that, and an even larger struggle to heal the intense damage to her sides. She had spent four days stuck in her little cave as her intestines patched themselves together.
The new additions to her look were the bits of chitin covering her arms and legs. They were roughly made pieces of armor, only held together by seaweed straps handmade by herself. The armor was an idea she had just a few days after her run-in with the ape. It had done a wonderful job of protecting her. The crabs had a hard time punching through it and it was resistant to Spine Snatcher acid. The best part? The chitin was ultra-light.
It was just unfortunate she couldn’t make a chest plate or helmet. Her skills were barely enough to make the already rounded bits into armor, and there was no chance she could make a chest plate. She had tried, of course, but the results were terrible. The jagged cuts of the chest plate ended up bruising her more than anything else.
Quinn stood up from her seat at the outcropping and headed to her ‘bed’. Realistically, it was just a flatter piece of cave than the rest of the room. She had chipped off the bits of stone that protruded and smoothed out its surface for a mostly comfortable bed. It wasn’t the best she slept on, but at least she didn’t have to sleep curled into a ball
She laid down for the final time on her stone bed. Today was the day. Maybe tonight was the night? She wanted to cast Compass to clear up the confusion, but she needed every bit of mana she could get. Quinn closed her eyes for a brief moment. She was finally escaping. Or die trying.
She spent a few hours collecting her valuables and pouring over the magic in her books. She needed to be prepared for whatever lurked in the Citadel. With everything of value either on her or in her pack, she cast one last glance around the space before peaking out of the hole in the wall. She sent a glance up both ends of the beach, noting the new crab burrows up and down the shore. Far off to her right, she could see some kind of dog-like creature sniffing around a bunch of bones. It was the same kind that stumbled across her the first day.
Quinn wasn’t too worried about it. The creature was called a Deep Hound according to A Traveler's Handbook: Monsters. They were one of the few creatures she had seen recorded in the book. Deep Hounds were scavengers and massive cowards. They only turned aggressive in a few circumstances but would run away for the most part.
She climbed down the wall and approached the cold ocean, making sure to dodge anything suspicious. A deep breath flowed into her lungs and she stepped into the freezing water. The ex-scientist breathed a few more times as her body adjusted to the cold and began to prep her new spell, Surf.
The spell was the main reason it had taken her weeks to even attempt to leave. The spells in her book were good for their purpose, but none quite fit her requirements. She had attempted to make a tier-two spell out of the two-tier ones she spotted. It had only taken a few days to create and test, thankfully. She could cast about three spells between breaks for her mana to regenerate.
And It worked, somewhat. She had gotten a thirty-second ride away from the shore before her magic faded away. Since it was only tier-two, it didn’t have anywhere near the right durability or speed to go about a mile out. That had been a terribly cold, and fearful, swim back. The dark shapes in the water had been a lot closer than she ever thought they would.
So, her solution was a tier-three spell of the same kind. It took weeks of testing to get exactly what she wanted. She could only cast a single tier-three spell with her mana capacity, so it took a very, very long time to get it right. Two brutal weeks of constantly testing magic, avoiding Mana Reversion, and waiting for her mana to regenerate. It wasn’t exactly her idea of a good time, especially when you added how inhospitable the underground ocean was.
But today was the day! Quinn had finished all her preparations and mostly finished her new spell, ‘Surf’. The magic worked, probably. At least it wouldn’t cause Mana Reversion anymore… She also had enough crab legs shoved into her bag to survive a couple of days. Her weapons and armor were as good as they were going to get. And she had brushed up on her other magic spells. This was as prepared as she could ever get.
Quinn focused, drawing over half her mana out of her heart in a smooth motion. The weighty substance weighed down her legs as it flowed to her feet. Unlike most spells she had used, the magic circle formed up below her, only slightly visible below the water.
She concentrated. The first circle was easy as it filled itself in in a second. It was like carrying a plate. The second was slightly less so. The runes shook on occasion as she sketched them in with her dark-purple mana. Chains snapped to the first, connecting the two circles. If tier-one magic was like carrying a plate, tier-two was like carrying a plate with an oversized vase of water on it. Not impossible, but difficult if unprepared.
Tier-three magic was like holding a tub full of water on top of the vase. She forcibly slowed down as chains looped up to a third circle. Her mana flowed, leaving her body as it ascended the path of chains. Ever so slowly, the third circle took shape. She then began the long process of etching the sixteen runes a tier-three circle required. Each rune threatened to topple her proverbial tower as the area below her feat thrummed with power. Every rune, she would slow down slightly and force her breathing to remain calm. Her Water Attribute helped here, smoothing out the process.
And before Quinn knew it, Surf was ready. She released her hold on the mana, watching in anticipation as the magic shuddered and the water around her began to change. A small platform formed, feeling solid to her feet. She was soon standing on the water instead of sinking into it. She wrapped her sagen around herself, praying the enchantment would hide her from the prying eyes of the depths.
She stabilized herself as the waves smacked against the beach, keeping on the small platform of magical water. If she had to describe the sensation, she would equate it to surfboarding. She had never gone in her old world, but it felt similar to what surfing looked like in the movies.
Quin took a deep breath. She had never actually tested it on water, though she couldn’t imagine it was too different from the tier-two variant. She sent a mental command through the tether of mana connecting the two. The water under her shifted at first before slowly moving forward. The speed amped up until she was soon catapulting across the water like a jet ski. Every time the surfboard hit a wave water burst upward. It would’ve drenched her if the sagen hadn’t been wrapped around.
Fear was her predominant emotion as Surf carried her across the ocean’s surface. Fear of the dark waters she raced over. Even with the dim glowing berries, she couldn’t see more than a foot underneath the eerie surface. It was quite unsettling. Quinn didn’t let the fear sit in her as she kept on anyway. She had a destination and she wouldn’t let anything stop her.
Diversions, however, were fine. She circled any darker patch of water and avoided the fins sticking up. She even had to pass around a lone tentacle raised out of the water. It delayed her by quite a bit. She felt absurd as she moved over the waters. Just a few of- no… it's already been two months since she's been in this world… It's only been two months, and here she was gliding around on water purely through magic. It was crazy to think she didn’t even know what magic was just a couple of months ago.
As she approached the black citadel, she got a closer look at the details. The entire thing was built out of black and gray stone. It had five massive towers settled around a central keep with thick black walls linking everything together. An extremely thick vine descended from the roof and curled around the tall keep, casting an ominous glow with its red fruits.
The entire place looked worn down with stones cracked and parts of the walls collapsed. Some of the walls even had long, unnatural scratches across them. The scars looked as though a titan had attempted to attack the lone citadel at some point.
Whatever the place was, it had been here for a long time. She carefully circled the walled keep, noticing all of the potential entry points. On the opposite side of the beach, there was a spot where the wall had fallen into the dark ocean. She decided against it, noting the water looked much darker inside of the walls. Too dark.
She eventually settled on a crack between a wall and a tower. The tower had shifted at some point, angling in a different direction of the wall. The intersection between the two had broken, leaving a crack leading into the tower.
Quinn slowed down and guided her ‘surfboard’ to the crack. She peaked up and down the sides. Water had long entered the weathered wall and the entire length was waterlogged. The only dry- err, dryish ground in the place was the staircase leading up into the tower. Surf carried her over to it as she stepped off of its flowing surface onto the mossy stairs.