They sit together in silence as Emily creates an orb of metal, covered in runes. She hands it to Juliana after applying the final touches and adjusting the runes on the Diver’s receiver to link with the ransmitter.

  “This thing’s very simple,” she says, pointing to a dense cluster of runes oop of the orb. “Just i a burst of mana here, and I’ll get feedba the receiver.”

  Juliana does as instructed, p a small burst of mana into the tool and watg the dispy above Emily’s tablet light up.

  “And iurn, it will vibrate if I do the same.”

  Emily is mana into the tablet, and the orb buzzes lightly in response.

  “Couldn’t you have just made unication crystals?” Juliana asks, iing the plicated weave of runes around the silver orb.

  “The less information transferred, the less it’s affected by the dense mana down here,” Emily expins. “The unication crystals used by The ant are great for normal le transfer, but they suffer once you step into areas with strong mana or vast fluctuations. They give simplicity and ease of use over reliability.”

  Emily pulls out a sheet of paper and her quill as Juliana siders her words, quickly drawing a diagram of the turns o reach the archite’s cavern.

  “This is the path you o follow,” she says as she hands the finished map to Juliana. “We’ll keep in tact the whole time. Send me a signal every two hours and I’ll send one back. Okay? If I don’t hear from you on time, or if you send three pulses to ask for help, I’ll e straight away.”

  Juliana nods as Emily stands and offers her a hand, pulling her up too.

  “Oh, and make sure you doer the st cavern without me. Send five pulses in a row when you arrive, then wait a little distance away. I think there’s something big living there.”

  “How big?” Juliana asks with a hint of nervousness.

  “Big enough to be a threat to you guys,” Emily says, sweeping Juliana up and preparing lightning step. “But I’ll be able to deal with it easily enough.”

  She sprints dowunnel with Juliana ging to her, surprised by the sudden burst of speed. It doesn’t take long for them to catch up to the others, where Emily drops Juliana and the barrier disc off, quickly expining how to use the tter, before turning and rag back towards The Abyss.

  ***

  The few days roll by without much rest for Emily. She keeps her cores on a rotating sleep pattern as she delves into the caves to fill her belt with herbs and crystals.

  Juliana keeps to their schedule, sending a pulse via the unicator every two hours, even passing it to someone else to keep it up while she sleeps. However, ohird day of gathering loot, nothing happens when their pime for unication passes, and Emily’s heart rises to her throat.

  She starts rag back towards them, her haing on The Clock, ready to reset if any harm has befallen them, but is quickly broken from her anxious trance by a single pulse of purple light. Breathing a sigh of relief, she returns to gathering resources, ign the sour taste left in her mouth.

  On the m of the fifth day of separation, Emily receives five pulses in a row through the tablet, letting her know the others have arrived. The moment she receives the message, Emily sends the st of the darkness crystals she’s been harvesting into her belt and starts running towards the exit.

  It takes her a little over half a day, but, in the evening, she arrives at a small encampment a few hundred metres dowunnel from the archite’s cavern. She steps through the sound barrier, entering a small bubble of light formed by a campfire and several light packs.

  “Hey,” she calls out, her friends turning to greet her.

  “Wele back. Good harvest?” Enzo asks curiously.

  “You could say that,” Emily says with a grin. “There’s quite a lot of mana crystals down here.”

  “Right,” Enzo responds, his voice ced with barely cealed disappoi, fusing Emily.

  Before she question his strange respohough, Daerrupts.

  “You should keep everything you gathered down here.”

  Emily’s focus snaps to him, fusion tinting her gaze.

  “We’ve been talking about it, and we all agree,” Hester adds.

  “We’re already getting more than we could have hoped for with everything else we’ve collected so far,” Tom joins in.

  “And you’ll need resources more than us,” Ivns, only adding to Emily’s fusion.

  “What do you mean I’ll hem more?” she asks, a hint of caution ione.

  “When you leave The ant, you won’t have easy access to magical resources anymore,” Enzo expins.

  Emily’s eyes widen, her gaze drifting to the still-silent Juliana, a budding sense of betrayal twisting her gut. Before the feeling take root, Hester cuts in to reassure her.

  “Juliana didn’t say anything, don’t worry. In fact, she refused to even firm you were pnning on leaving. Ivor did that, aill didn’t eborate.”

  Emily silently moves to sit beside Juliana uhe watchful gaze of everyone else, pulling the guilty-looking girl into a hug to calm them both down a little.

  I never even specified that I was leaving straight after the expedition to Ivor. Ah well, I don’t think anyone here would warn the Mandragos even if they khe truth. I wouldn’t have brought them with me if I thought they would.

  Her eyes soften a little as she looks over her friends and releases a sigh.

  “Fine, I’ll keep everything from down here, but how’d you know?”

  “We guessed,” Tom answers, everyone else but Ivor nodding along with him.

  “You guessed?” Emily says with slight disbelief, raising a hand to rub her brow. “Was it just a wild shot in the dark till Ivor firmed it?”

  Ivor frantically shakes his head, his hands blurring into motion to expin himself.

  “They were already pretty much certain. It was weirder to keep denying the truth.”

  “It’s not his fault,” Hester adds, reag over and patting him on the shoulder to get him to rex. “I’ve had my suspis for a while, but the expedition and gifts were the main giveaway.”

  She taps her armour as she speaks.

  “It’s not expected that you provide high-quality gear for other members of your expedition and, other than to Juliana, you arely in the habit of giving us things. Also, you clearly favour efficy - you literally just ran around alone for the past few days because it was more effit thaing us to help - yet yht Tom on this expedition.”

  “Hey!” Tom cries with mock offe the sudden jab, drawing a few chuckles as Hester ignores him and tinues.

  “If you weren’t treating this as a st ce to spend time with us, I don’t see why you would do that.”

  “I don’t strike you as a gift giver?“ Emily asks, slightly surprised by Hester’s reasoning but uo refute it.

  “Ha, no,” Hester scoffs. “Be ho. If you weren’t pnning on leaving soon after, you would’ve just e on this expedition alone, wouldn’t you?”

  Emily takes a moment to sider before relutly nodding her head.

  “Yeah. I probably could have found The Abyss within a week or two if I tried.”

  “That fast?” Dante questions.

  “Yeah. I have several speed spells, and you already know I don’t need sleep. So, I probably would have run straight here at full speed without rest.”

  “Crazy,” he mutters, going quiet again as Hester once again takes trol of the versation.

  “Anyway, you tell us why you pn on leaving?” she asks carefully, fearful of pushing too hard and striking a nerve, with barely held-back curiosity obvious ione.

  “Sure.” Emily nods, slipping out of Juliana’s arms and standing up. “But first let me deal with the beast in the cavern ahead. I’d rather not get attacked in the middle of the night.”

  Hester fshes her an uanding smile, and nobody else utters a word of pint.

  “Good luck. I’ll get started on some food then.”

  Emily moves to leave the barrier, but pauses as arikes her. Her lips curl into a grin as she turns to interrupt Hester.

  “Hold off on cooking for now.”

  Without another word, she vanishes into the darkness outside. Instead of charging ahead to start the fight, Emily walks upstream slowly. As she moves, she pulls a small drawstring pouch from her belt and opens it, revealing a glistening purple powder ihat seems to distort the space around it: powdered space crystals.

  She holds the pou one hand and pulls a small k of mythril out with the other. With a delicate blend of fire aal mana, she turns the metal into a putty-like texture and splits off four small orbs, each the size of a fiip. After withdrawing her mana from the remaining k, she pces it ba her belt while keeping the four orbs afloat with her mana trol.

  She uses her free hand to reato the pouch, taking a small pinch of the purple powder and p it onto one of the orbs. She repeats this with the other three before pulling closed the drawstring and putting the pouch away as well.

  Emily kneads two orbs with each hand, fully incorporating the powder and dyeing the silvery metal with a pale, purple hue. She presses the orbs into ft discs before deftly w them into perfectly even s.

  Satisfied with the result, Emily withdraws her fire mana, releasing the now-solid s and keeping them afloat with her metal mana as the Whisper falls into her arms from a faint purple mist. She racks the bolt, catg the ejected bullet with her mana before she pops the magazi and produces a new one from her belt, this oh a small water droplet engraved on the side.

  She slides the magazio pd racks the bolt forward silently as she steps into the open, dark cavern. Lifting the Whisper onto her shoulder, Emily lowers the s into one hand, releasing her metal mana and iing a burst of space mana into each, suddenly causing the s to take on a dim, otherworldly glow. She holds one between her forefinger and coiled thumb, flexihumb and firing the out over the ke. With a few precise, lightning-fast movements with her fingers, she repeats this three more times and all four s hit the water with one sound.

  The moment the s hit the surface, they’re suddenly pulled down into the tre of the ke. Emily grins, uo see it happening but feeling her mana, still infused into the s, moving doidly. She drops the Whisper from her shoulder, taking it in both hands and aiming at the floor as four twisting, purple magic circles form in front of the barrel.

  She shuts her eyes, fog on the position of the moving s as she lines up her gun and flicks it into silent. The moment the four s pause in the same location, Emily fires a single shot towards the rock below. As the bullet silently leaps from the barrel, the first magic circle pulses with power and the bullet vanishes.

  Emily listens carefully for a rea, hearing a low, irritated hum.

  The s are below its mouth.

  Instantly uanding that her bullet missed the creature’s body, Emily rapidly shifts her aim.

  I o fire up.

  She points to the ceiling, picturing the archite’s form above her. She lines up the barrel of her gun, flicks it into full power, and fires three shots in quick succession, each aimed for one of the beast’s hearts.

  All three bullets vanish through the magic circles in front of the barrel, and Emily hears three soft thuds as the bullets carve their way out of the water and embed themselves into the roof far above.

  “KREEEE!” A harsh screech of pain follows soon after, signalling her successful attack.

  Emily jures a light, filling it with mana to illumihe cavern as she watches the water with bated breath, waiting to see if her initial assault ehe battle or not. To her delight, the surface remains still, not a flicker of motion from the denizen below.

  Did I destroy all three of its hearts, or is it waiting for me to es domain?

  With an air of caution, Emily approaches the water, summoning her boat and tossing it out into the middle of the ke to check. She ects to the dete array of the mae, sing the water below and finding a giant, motionless form sitting on the kebed.

  “Looks like I killed it,” she mutters with a pleased grin. “Teleportation is such a useful skill. It’s a shame The ant only gives out a few, barely useful spatial spells and their teleportation circles are obscured. If I had some more solid refereerial, I may be able to actually move myself, instead of being stuck perf tricks with small objects.”

  Emily steps out into the water, sinking down with her light orb close behind, struggling to force back the darkness uer. As she approaches the archite, it doesn’t move a muscle, and the inky bck blood filling the water around her all but firms its death. Pg a hand against the smooth bck flesh of the oversized octopus, Emily siders how to deal with the corpse.

  It’s far too big to take with me. I’ll just grab its ink sad a few portions of flesh.

  Emily gets to work, quickly separating several slices of flesh from the thick tentacles sprawled around the kebed before moving to the tre of the corpse and digging through the beast’s ans to find its ink sac, a useful ingredient in several potions. Finished with the body, Emily checks the tunnel below, realises it’s once again blocked, and takes a few mio push the archite out of the way with a few well-pced currents.

  Afterwards, she returns to their camp, delivering a sb of tentacle to Hester to cook.

  “What’s this?” she asks, poking at the estic flesh, oozing bck blood as she prods at it.

  “A piece of a third circle archite,” Emily responds with a griling down beside Juliana again.

  “Really? How big was this one? Is it actually a titan?” Hester asks curiously as she starts separating the meat into slices to cook.

  “About twenty or so metres tall for the main body I guess?” Emily says, making a rough estimate.

  They chat casually as food is prepared a without bringing up Emily’s departure again until their ptes are scrubbed .

  “Damn that was good,” Dante says with a satisfied sigh. “I should eat seafood more.”

  “Agreed,” Enzo curs, silence falling over their group as everyone slowly turns their attention to Emily.

  Notig their i, Emily lets out a tired sigh and braces herself to expin her retionship with the Mandrago family.

  KeroKeron