While Emily tests out her new skill, her birds assess the nearby streams of water p from the walls. Most of the falling torrents stem from small holes that they pletely fill, but a few are simir tuo the ohey arrived through, with a river running through the tre and banks oher side.
Emily’s foarrows on one such tunnel as she steps up to the edge of The Abyss. She pulls out The Clock, cheg the exact time, before she steps out into thin air. An invisible ptform forms beh 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 tunrance. Her birds flutter over, as she steps onto solid ground again, nding on her shoulders and head so she store them again as she sets off dowunnel. After tug them all away, Emily breaks out into a sprint, lightning ing her legs and wind pushing her forwards as she races upstream relying purely on her spatial awareo navigate in the dark.
An hour ter, not finding a single enemy, she es across a split ih. It tinues in two dires, so Emily slows down to a walk and sends a bird dowh as she takes the other. She maintains the e with the bird oher path for a short while, until the tunnels deviate, moving too far apart and breaking her link.
“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue in slight irritatioarting her sprint. “This is going to take a lot of resets. I should work on a third circle speed spell.”
Emily sets her sedary cores to work and follows the river upstream, passing several splits as as she goes, ign the tter and cheg 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 g the slowly moving pool in the tre, being filled by porous holes in the cavern walls, and quickly drops her boat in, using its s 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 as again: walking through the air to reach her target tunnel, ing herself in several sed circle speed-enhang spells, and rushing upstream, c far mround than her friends could in a day. She follows the same path as st time, taking the alternative route at the two-way jun that led her to the cavern, aiming to fill out her quickly f 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, stretg far enough into the rock to leave her dete range whilst remaining narrow. Each time she hits one, she turns bad returns to the st split, ruling out several options ihay-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 sed circle wind spell that she’s been using, ing her legs in the chose. But, unlike her sed circle speed enhas, it’s almost pletely tained. 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 sed circle predecessors, Emily notices her mana slowly draining as she moves. Luckily, she bances out the loss by pulling from her maa reserves, doubling her mana regeion speed sih reserves refill at the same pace regardless of the other, allowio maintain the spell the whole time.
Lightning step helps her cover more distah each reset, but it still takes her weeks of frozen time to e to the clusion that the first tunnel leads nowhere.
“Ounnel 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.
ˉˉˉˉˉ
[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 uhe caster’s feet to allow them to walk freely.
_____
“It took a while, but at least I give Jules the Air Walker now.”
Her eyes narrow as she looks at the two spells side by side.
I wonder if I could bihese? It would be veo only have to cast one movement spell in bat. I’ll have to be careful not to make it too plicated though. I’m already pushing it by only using two threads for air walk: it requires more fine trol than any of my other spells just to use it normally.
Setting her sedary cores the challenge, Emily turtention to the birds flutteriween the nearby streams of water.
“It’s kind of strahat there aren’t as here. I would have thought there’d be something thriving in this dense mana,” she mumbles, gng at her stats with a lopsided grin. “Well, other than me.”
ˉˉˉˉˉ
[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
[Maa:] 16605/16605
_____
My cultivation has been noticeably faster since we came down into this deep yer. It’s a shame none of these loops are adding to it. Maybe I should dey 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 s across the shifting surface, she ’t spot anything out of the ordinary, sending a shiver down her spine.
“Maybe a little further away from this hole...”
Her ption is interrupted by one of her birds finding a sed possible path. A glittering green magic circle forms beh her feet as Emily calls back her birds, joined by a crag blue weaving of runes surrounding her legs. Both circles finish f and pulse with power as the st bird es to rest ie.
Emily flexes her legs, springing forward, vanishing and reappearing in the middle of the air, suspended above The Abyss. She sms into an invisible barrier of air, the green runes around her pulsing, ing to an immediate stop as her legs press before firing her down at an aowards the unnel. She flies through the mouth of the tunnel, kig off the wall and smoothly nding 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, ign them all in pursuit of a.
A few of the third circle beasts she sprints past try to stop her, but the only ohat 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-pced 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 alertihat something in the room is off.
I only hear flowing water behind me.
Curious, she sends an orb of light into the air, p a rge amount of mana into it to force back the darkness and illumihe space. The cavern is wide and open, surrounded pletely by solid walls, other thah Emily has ehrough. The ceiling is bare, with only a few stactites reag down, and in the tre of the roed by a thin walkway of stone, is a still, bck ke.
Emily’s eyes light up with anticipation as she summons her boat to her hand.
“Please have an uer path out,” she mutters, l the mae 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. Reag quickly, she pulls away her hand and kicks baarrowly esg a whipping bck tendril of water that slices through the air where her head has just been.
Emily drops into a crouch as the surface of the ke bubbles and bursts. Tens of thick, bck 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 quice, Emily ts over a hundred swaying limbs, filling the room and angling to strike her.
“Now that,” Emily mutters as a flood of crag, 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 sms into the floor, narrowly missing her and crag the sto impacts. Two tentacles of water follow the flesh closely, redireg to try to catch Emily as she runs away, her spells still f. They both burst harmlessly against the rocks, shaking the grouh Emily’s feet and c her in a cold spray as they disperse.
The archite shes out with more of its limbs aiming both at Emily and ahead of her. She grins as magid muscle fall towards her, dropping into a slide to avoid an arg horizontal swipe that brushes against her chest on the ast, sug out a drop of her mana during the brief tact, before she springs off her palm to leap over a lower sweep and tinue 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 ce 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 ing to a halt as she twists to fa approag 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 fshes forward, leaping off the floor to meet the tentacle mid-air in a twisting kick. Her leg meets flesh with ford magic, blowing away a k of inky blood and muscle in a crag bze of lightning, overp the beast's mana draining spell with ease. The tentacle drops into the water, injured, and Emily starts to fall with it. Before aentacle bat her out of the air, or worse, catch her, Emily pnts 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 fshing down her legs and growing thicker with each step, before meeting another physical tentacle. This time, instead of taking out a k, her kick rips the tentacle in half, sendiricity down into the water and draining the streaks densing 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 aentacle to pieces, all the others pull bato the water, leaving only those formed from water to tirying to catch her. She dahrough 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 crag mass.
Emily bounces off the walls, stactites, and even the surface of some of the watery tentacles, using her magic to avoid toug them, as she waits for the beast to make its move. After a few seds 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 nds on the wall as they rise, hesitating for a fra of a sed and gng up at her other prepared spells, hiding among the stactites waiting to be unleashed.
Hmm. Not yet. I still have another feature of sky step to test.
Her gaze falls back to the swayiacles as she kicks off the wall to meet them.
KeroKeron
