The voidlings screeching pulled me back to reality and reminded me that both of us had, in fact, just fallen into lava. My first reaction was, of course, panic. White hot lava usually isn’t exactly a good thing to be in contact with, as the voidling was so readily demonstrating. Even with its higher tier and attributes, the lava was doing quite a lot of damage. The thickness of the molten rock made it difficult to escape, the wild thrashing of the voidling only serving to pull it further into the slag. I do suppose this proved that this particular voidling didn’t have a teleport ability as the only thing it could do was struggle as the lava refused to let go.

I could only observe this for a split second because almost as soon as I fell into the lava, I was completely submerged. And, although I was blinded by the bright liquid, I could feel myself sink further. I too, struggled against the lava and screamed as the lava burned me alive. Or, at least I thought that was happening.

It very quickly became apparent that I was perfectly fine. I ceased my struggle as I analyzed my current situation. I was definitely completely submerged in lava, which wasn’t good. I had seen the voidling struggle against the thick nature of this deadly liquid, but I found that I could move around relatively easily. The lava had a bit more resistance than water, but I could swim around relatively unimpeded. And, while I was most definitely hot, it didn’t feel like I was being damaged by the heat.

I realized what was going on after swimming around for a bit.

I was fine because I’d eaten the lava fruit! In my panic from being confronted with a host of ultra-powerful voidlings coming to hunt me down, I'd all but forgotten about this newly acquired skill. I quickly pulled up the list of my skills and, sure enough, there it was. The passive I’d gained from eating the fruit not only gave me immunity to lava but also made it so that I could freely swim around in the stuff. The one issue I found very quickly was that my gills weren’t exactly compatible with lava. While I was still immune to the lava, I couldn’t take in any more air while I was submerged. I quickly swam upwards and breached the surface, taking in precious air.

There was no sign of the other voidling when I checked my surroundings. All I could see was the bubbling lava, surrounded by the walls of the volcano. I weighed my options as I kept my eyes on the sky, looking out for any other voidlings trying to get at me. I could jump out of here and continue running as far away as I could. Or, I could stay here and take my chances. I had just gotten solid proof that lava was bad news to voidlings as well, which made the inside of the volcano an advantageous position for me. Then again, I’d seen the stronger voidlings blowing up entire swaths of land with little to no effort. If they wanted to, they could just blow this volcano sky-high and fish me out of the rubble.

I remembered the advice Tim had given me. Get as far underground as possible, since it would be harder for the other voidlings to find me. Not sure why that would make it harder, but at this point, I just had to trust that Tim wasn’t lying to me. If these volcanoes worked even remotely similar to how they did on Earth, I should be able to dive deep below the ground by swimming straight down. The problem here was air. I know I could hold my air for a long time, but I had never tested my limits in this regard. If I went underwater, I had my gills, and the void had breathable air for some inexplicable reason.

Remembering that I just needed to survive until the rescue squad arrived, I made the decision to go for a swim. I once again activated my void cloak for good measure, took a deep breath, and submerged myself once more. Oriented straight down, I simply kept going. No clue how far down I already was, I furiously used my wings to propel myself ever deeper. As I went on, I kept on wondering what the hell was going on up there.

Did the giant voidlings finish their fight? Had one of them triumphed over the other and was once again coming after me? What about the rest of them? There had to be quite a few who made it out of the brawl. Did they know I was here? Tim said it would be more difficult to find me, my void cloak making it even harder. But was it enough? How much longer until the travelers showed up? Would it be safe for me to go back up as soon as they did? Or would I have to wait until they took care of the voidlings?

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Having no way of confirming any of my questions, more and more of them piled up. Every second that passed when I wasn’t blown to smithereens by a world-ending spell was both blessing and a curse. I had survived a tiny bit longer, but the fact that nothing was happening continued to ramp up my nervousness. I felt like I was back in the deep ocean of the fifth layer, paranoid and alone. Although, this time I knew that a very real threat lingered around me.

I kept going down, although at this point I was relatively certain that I’d gone way off course. Oddly enough, I was able to tell that I was still vaguely going downward. The lava was constantly rising to the top and as long as I went against the stream I knew I was continuing down. I continued like this for what felt like hours, but I knew that my paranoid mind was playing tricks on me. I was expecting something to happen with every passing second, and it never did.

Except, something felt very wrong all of a sudden.

An odd feeling of inertia came over me and I felt like I was going sideways instead of down. The reason for the odd feeling revealed itself soon after when I emerged from the lava into the open air. All around me was lava and stone flying in the same direction and I quickly realized that the worst-case scenario had taken place. One of these damn assholes could sense me in that volcano and blew the entire thing away!

I knew I only had a little time window until I was discovered. My eyes locked onto another volcano in the distance and a scant few moments later, a void portal opened up above said volcano. I didn’t go through the portal, though, and instead reapplied my void cloak. My wings snapped open as I activated my speed skill and spell, dodging debris as I used the force of the attack to speed away in the opposite direction. Just as I’d thought, my void portal was discovered and soon after the volcano I’d been aiming for blew up as well.

I silently thanked the two-headed voidling for showing me this flaw and started randomly opening and closing portals, occasionally actually going through. My tactic seemed to work, confusing the assailant by giving tons of false positives in a short time. My VMP pool was suffering as I opened portal after portal. At some point, I managed to catch a glimpse of the rampaging voidling. As it turns out it was the one that looked like an amalgamation of worms. It would seem like it had won the earlier fight, its opponent nowhere in sight. I did also see some other voidling wildly searching for me, giving the worm voidling a wide berth.

“Stop running!” A rumbling voice shook the earth, and I could only assume that the speaker had been the worm collective.

I didn’t heed its command, obviously, and continued running for dear life. The worm titan apparently took issue with that and started preparing something big. I had to assume that it had grown tired of getting fooled by my portals and was going for a blanket bombing approach. I cursed under my breath, thoughts racing to come up with a solution for what was coming. I was incredibly far away and the only thing I could tell about the spell matrix that was forming was that it was fucking huge.

Which was bad news.

I toyed with the idea of trying to use a precise void jump to try and dodge whatever was coming, but without knowing what exactly it was, it was but a pipedream. Maybe I could hide behind an open portal to redirect the spell, a scuffed shield, essentially. Apparently, the wormy abomination didn’t want me to have the time to come up with effective countermeasures, even if I probably didn’t have any. I saw the matrix flash, knowing that the spell was about to be unleashed, whatever it was.

My own spell, void jump, snapped into place, the portal a blind jump into the bowels of the nearest volcano. I jumped through the portal, once again embraced by the glowing hot lava. All of my defensive skills snapped into place and, as I wondered if I should have picked a defensive spell after all, I prayed to whoever would listen.

Waiting for the impact.