While Emily tests out her new skill, her birds assess the nearby streams of water pouring from the walls. Most of the falling torrents stem from small holes that they completely fill, but a few are similar tunnels to the one they arrived through, with a river running through the centre and banks on either side.
Emily’s focus narrows on one such tunnel as she steps up to the edge of The Abyss. She pulls out The Clock, checking the exact time, before she steps out into thin air. An invisible platform forms beneath her foot with the help of the Air Walker, quivering slightly as Emily pours extra mana into the artefact to resist the fluctuating mana being drawn into the hole below.
She walks through the air, rising up towards the tunnel entrance. Her birds flutter over, as she steps onto solid ground again, landing on her shoulders and head so she can store them again as she sets off down the tunnel. After tucking them all away, Emily breaks out into a sprint, lightning wrapping her legs and wind pushing her forwards as she races upstream relying purely on her spatial awareness to navigate in the dark.
An hour later, not finding a single enemy, she comes across a split in the path. It continues in two directions, so Emily slows down to a walk and sends a bird down one path as she takes the other. She maintains the connection with the bird on the other path for a short while, until the tunnels deviate, moving too far apart and breaking her link.
“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue in slight irritation, restarting her sprint. “This is going to take a lot of resets. I should work on a third circle speed spell.”
Emily sets her secondary cores to work and follows the river upstream, passing several splits and beasts as she goes, ignoring the latter and checking The Clock periodically. Almost exactly twenty-four hours after leaving The Abyss, she slides to a halt and looks around the bare cavern she has reached after turning back from several dead ends. She glances at the slowly moving pool in the centre, being filled by porous holes in the cavern walls, and quickly drops her boat in, using its scan to check the bottom for abnormalities. Finding nothing, she squeezes the button on The Clock, sending herself back to the ominous pit of darkness.
***
Emily repeats her actions again: walking through the air to reach her target tunnel, wrapping herself in several second circle speed-enhancing spells, and rushing upstream, covering far more ground than her friends could in a day. She follows the same path as last time, taking the alternative route at the two-way junction that led her to the cavern, aiming to fill out her quickly forming mental map.
This time as The Clock hits twenty-four hours she finds herself in a normal stretch of tunnel with no end in sight.
“Not this route,” she mutters, rewinding time once again.
***
Emily falls into a monotonous pattern, slowly mapping more routes through her chosen tunnel. Most paths turn out to be dead ends, where she finds water flowing in through small cracks that she could never hope to fit through, stretching far enough into the rock to leave her detection range whilst remaining narrow. Each time she hits one, she turns back and returns to the last split, ruling out several options in less than twenty-four hours, much to her relief.
Four perceived days into her task, Emily finishes a new spell: lightning step. It follows the same principle as wind rush, the second circle wind spell that she’s been using, wrapping her legs in the chosen element. But, unlike her second circle speed enhancements, it’s almost completely contained. As she runs, other than a few tendrils singeing the floor and causing a sizzling crackle with each step, all of the power is focused internally on increasing her speed.
However, due to the spell’s mana cost being much higher than that of its two second circle predecessors, Emily notices her mana slowly draining as she moves. Luckily, she balances out the loss by pulling from her machina reserves, doubling her mana regeneration speed since both reserves refill at the same pace regardless of the other, allowing her to maintain the spell the whole time.
Lightning step helps her cover more distance with each reset, but it still takes her weeks of frozen time to come to the conclusion that the first tunnel leads nowhere.
“One tunnel down,” Emily mutters, looking over the nearby walls from her abyssal perch. “Goddess knows how many more to go.”
She lets out a small sigh, pulling up the system window of her two new spells to raise her mood.
¯¯¯¯¯
[Lightning Step]
[Circle:] Third
[Cost:] 600 Mana/minute
[Description:] Charge the caster’s legs with lightning to enhance agility.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[Air Walk]
[Circle:] Third
[Cost:] 8 Mana/step
[Description:] Solidify the air under the caster’s feet to allow them to walk freely.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
_____
“It took a while, but at least I can give Jules the Air Walker now.”
Her eyes narrow as she looks at the two spells side by side.
I wonder if I could combine these? It would be convenient to only have to cast one movement spell in combat. I’ll have to be careful not to make it too complicated though. I’m already pushing it by only using two threads for air walk: it requires more fine control than any of my other spells just to use it normally.
Setting her secondary cores the challenge, Emily turns her attention to the birds fluttering between the nearby streams of water.
“It’s kind of strange that there aren’t any beasts here. I would have thought there’d be something thriving in this dense mana,” she mumbles, glancing at her stats with a lopsided grin. “Well, other than me.”
¯¯¯¯¯
[Attributes:] Strength 20 (26), Dexterity 64 (67), Agility 50 > 51 (56), Vitality 17 (22), Intelligence 120 > 123
[Health:] 270/270
[Stamina:] 530/530
[Mana:] 16605/16605
[Machina:] 16605/16605
_____
My cultivation has been noticeably faster since we came down into this deep layer. It’s a shame none of these loops are adding to it. Maybe I should delay by a little bit of real-time before we leave...
A flicker of motion below catches her eye, and her gaze instantly snaps down to rest on the swirling liquid darkness below. However, as her eyes scan across the shifting surface, she can’t spot anything out of the ordinary, sending a shiver down her spine.
“Maybe a little further away from this hole...”
Her contemplation is interrupted by one of her birds finding a second possible path. A glittering green magic circle forms beneath her feet as Emily calls back her birds, joined by a crackling blue weaving of runes surrounding her legs. Both circles finish forming and pulse with power as the last bird comes to rest in her storage.
Emily flexes her legs, springing forward, vanishing and reappearing in the middle of the air, suspended above The Abyss. She slams into an invisible barrier of air, the green runes around her pulsing, coming to an immediate stop as her legs compress before firing her down at an angle towards the new tunnel. She flies through the mouth of the tunnel, kicking off the wall and smoothly landing on the ground in a sprint, maintaining her momentum as she treks upstream once again.
***
Time drags by in frozen time as Emily checks tunnel after tunnel, slowly moving along the cavern walls. She runs past dozens of mana crystal veins, and hundreds of herb patches, ignoring them all in pursuit of an exit.
A few of the third circle beasts she sprints past try to stop her, but the only one that succeeds is a screamer she runs into in a narrow hallway without water that branches off from a tunnel with a flowing stream. The harsh screech that hits her as she approaches it hurts Emily enough, making her ears bleed despite her earrings, that she stops just to blow the offending creature to pieces with a few well-placed shots from the Whisper on full power.
As Emily’s beginning to lose hope, the monotony of her task wearing on her patience, she arrives in a cavern half a day into a tunnel. She pauses as she steps in, her keen ears immediately alerting her that something in the room is off.
I only hear flowing water behind me.
Curious, she sends an orb of light into the air, pouring a large amount of mana into it to force back the darkness and illuminate the space. The cavern is wide and open, surrounded completely by solid walls, other than the path Emily has entered through. The ceiling is bare, with only a few stalactites reaching down, and in the centre of the room, ringed by a thin walkway of stone, is a still, black lake.
Emily’s eyes light up with anticipation as she summons her boat to her hand.
“Please have an underwater path out,” she mutters, lowering the machine to the water.
However, as soon as the metal disturbs the surface, Emily’s instincts scream, and she feels a fluctuation of mana below the surface. Reacting quickly, she pulls away her hand and kicks back, narrowly escaping a whipping black tendril of water that slices through the air where her head has just been.
Emily drops into a crouch as the surface of the lake bubbles and bursts. Tens of thick, black tentacles reach up from the depths, swaying in the air as the water bends, rising up with them to double the number of limbs. At a quick glance, Emily counts over a hundred swaying limbs, filling the room and angling to strike her.
“Now that,” Emily mutters as a flood of crackling, sky-blue runes flow from her. “Is a titan of the deep.”
Both of them burst into motion at the same time. Emily sprints sideways as a flesh tentacle slams into the floor, narrowly missing her and cracking the stone it impacts. Two tentacles of water follow the flesh closely, redirecting to try to catch Emily as she runs away, her spells still forming. They both burst harmlessly against the rocks, shaking the ground beneath Emily’s feet and covering her in a cold spray as they disperse.
The archite lashes out with more of its limbs aiming both at Emily and ahead of her. She grins as magic and muscle fall towards her, dropping into a slide to avoid an arcing horizontal swipe that brushes against her chest on the way past, sucking out a drop of her mana during the brief contact, before she springs off her palm to leap over a lower sweep and continue her sprint.
Both of them move so quickly that Emily circles the entire room with tentacles shattering the ground behind her before her first spell finishes casting.
What a great chance to test my new masterpiece.
Filled with excitement, and with a manic grin fixed on her face, Emily pops the spikes out of her boots, digging her heels in and quickly coming to a halt as she twists to face an approaching tentacle. She bends her legs, her muscles tense as a snake ready to strike as the blend of blue and green runes around her legs pulse, a new spell activating.
She flashes forward, leaping off the floor to meet the tentacle mid-air in a twisting kick. Her leg meets flesh with force and magic, blowing away a chunk of inky blood and muscle in a crackling blaze of lightning, overpowering the beast's mana draining spell with ease. The tentacle drops into the water, injured, and Emily starts to fall with it. Before another tentacle can bat her out of the air, or worse, catch her, Emily plants her foot on solid air and leaps up again.
She kicks off the air twice more to dodge tendrils of water, visible streaks of lightning flashing down her legs and growing thicker with each step, before meeting another physical tentacle. This time, instead of taking out a chunk, her kick rips the tentacle in half, sending electricity down into the water and draining the streaks condensing around her legs.
“KRAAAA,” a gargled screech emanates from the water, shaking the cavern.
“We’re just getting started,” Emily says as she leaps off the air again, building up the charge in her legs once more.
As she rips another tentacle to pieces, all the others pull back into the water, leaving only those formed from water to continue trying to catch her. She dances through the air, twisting and flipping to avoid each strike, never letting the water touch her as the lightning around her legs builds into a violently crackling mass.
Emily bounces off the walls, stalactites, and even the surface of some of the watery tentacles, using her magic to avoid touching them, as she waits for the beast to make its next move. After a few seconds of failing to touch Emily with its magic, the titan of the deep pushes apart the water’s surface with eight thick tentacles, each twice the width of a person.
Emily lands on the wall as they rise, hesitating for a fraction of a second and glancing up at her other prepared spells, hiding among the stalactites waiting to be unleashed.
Hmm. Not yet. I still have another feature of sky step to test.
Her gaze falls back to the swaying tentacles as she kicks off the wall to meet them.