Part 31 - Revelations IV

  All things considered, what Elizabeth had just pulled off was something close to a miracle. Funny, given that gods, goddesses and miracles were actual things that existed on Pallos.

  Blue classes were broken.

  Most people at her age and level would be sitting on classes in the red to yellow range. Divine classes skipped it all to be in a tier that just made her abilities absurd. She was made aware that divine classes had their perks, and Aegis had tried to impress upon her that the power granted by them could cause someone to become ridiculously overconfident, and that would get them killed.

  She really should have died there. Her knowledge and skills allowed for some pretty extreme feats, but those last two enemies were puzzling her. She had somehow gotten lucky to have encountered enemies that had serious vulnerabilities to whatever sound had been going off periodically in the depths of wherever she was.

  She needed to fully analyze the fight and learn. Learning would instill in her a series of lessons she could use to live long enough to get back above ground and back to civilization.

  The Chariot had given her a very brief burst of power that had equalized a gap of roughly six hundred levels.

  Liz began to hobble her way back towards the empty city and the relatively safe spider threats before something else decided she was a tasty morsel they might try.

  First item to consider, the slime.

  She was incredibly ill-suited to fighting something so durable. A one hundred thousand cost to handle the creature quickly was a horrible sign. Her whips also were not a great tool for use against that sort of monster, though she could train some skills on them.

  On the other hand, the creatures were not much of a threat to her. She would never be so slow as to be caught by one, but a scenario did exist in which the others showed up to the fight sooner, and then forced her to retreat, where the path would be blocked by the slime.

  A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of how such a small difference could’ve been the end of her.

  Second, the big cat.

  The Stalker had been a dangerous foe made much simpler by her blessing. Any other scenario, she’d have been hunted down and killed by a series of sneak attacks from the darkness. Solution? Probably to try a light source. She hadn’t given that option much consideration, but it might’ve made the threat go away.

  She stumbled slightly as she emerged from the tunnel, her hand no longer having the wall to stabilize against.

  The gates to the city were close, so she hardened her armor to make her movements a bit more rigid. Her bones being solidified by her [Crystalize] skill was awkward for her.

  On second thought, she was going about it the wrong way.

  [Gemstone Manipulation] had evolved from the skill she’d gotten used to using for mobility for a long time already. She could use it on the gems currently in her bones and just puppet her entire body in the same manner. She continued on with a little less difficulty.

  Third topic, the giants.

  The Hollow Dwellers hadn’t left the gore behind that she’d been expecting. They appeared to be armored within a skill-based combination of earth, stone and mud, though she hadn’t stuck around long enough to poke around inside.

  They were incredibly high level for what they’d been. She didn’t want to say they were easy to take down, but they had been unusual creatures. Elizabeth could see them being quite dangerous, in theory… but they didn’t strike her as apex predators. She had assumed they had come in search of food, but perhaps it was the wrong angle.

  Her first encounter was simple to explain. The slime had simply been there.

  The second encounter had been a predator, but not one she could see eating the slime—or even being capable of killing such a creature.

  The third encounter was highly susceptible to sound…

  Elizabeth had a revelation.

  She’d been using a whip for the slime. Whips made their signature cracking sound when they broke the sound barrier, though Arlyen had explained that in different terms. The sound must have carried for massive distances, which had likely attracted the other creatures.

  None of which explained the Hollow Dwellers behaving so profoundly when they heard the echoing thunderous noise later.

  Elizabeth had a lot of questions, but she’d reached the place where she had climbed down the wall. It wasn’t too hard to climb back up, but the spiders around the city would be a mess for her to deal with while looking for a safe place to rest and ruminate further.

  She made for the secret tunnel that had once led to the portal she’d broken.

  Thankfully, it hadn’t become home to more spiders since she’d been gone, and with how tired she felt, she was quick to pull the secret wall section as close to sealed off as she dared, then [Crystallize] the gap into place.

  Liz also didn’t fail to create some etched runes to handle the air situation.

  Sitting down and leaning against the wall, she decided to begin making a few basic rules based on her overall thoughts and experiences.

  First, remain silent.

  Second, consider light to ward off certain predators.

  Third, always prepare an escape.

  Fourth, don’t waste time on a single foe.

  Fifth, don’t risk an encounter with multiple monsters at once.

  Overall, the basics of her rules for survival were fairly simplistic. She also didn’t have much bandwidth left for thinking any deeper.

  For the time being, she needed to rest.

  Elizabeth decided the next thing she should do was make a map.

  It wasn’t going well.

  She had capped both her classes, sure. Could she class them up? Of course not.

  She had seen how small some of the spiders had been, and she knew making air holes might invite something to sniff her out and break in.

  Classing up took anywhere from minutes to days.

  She couldn’t just bunker inside of somewhere and hope the air runes would hold up. With her luck, it would be like Heron Lake, and she’d be down for days only to never wake up. It wasn’t a safe option.

  Back to the map idea.

  She had gone down each of the three tunnels, trying to use her [Perfect Recall] to map things out.

  Each time, she would try to extend her map only to find something had changed. A new tunnel would open up in one place, or a collapse would cut off another. It was maddening, but it was life. She was alive, and she was going to stay that way.

  Seira was there to keep her company in her mind periodically, but their tea parties had no place in the depths.

  Oddly, when she had gone vertically up or down, she would generally encounter much higher level monsters, and the sound of the thunderous noise, which turned out to be going off extremely regularly at every thirty minutes, would become impossible to hear after a very brief ascent or descent away from that layer.

  Remaining quiet on the level of the city meant the threats were spiders, slimes, stalkers and sometimes the random things that were seen traveling up or down from one layer to the next.

  It explained the giants. They’d been attracted by the sound her whip had been making, which carried up and down easily, while the booming cut off at a specific elevation. It had to be the result of a skill, but she had no idea what was creating it. It did seem to drive off most of the other creatures in the process, though.

  Liz didn’t have a map, but she did keep learning.

  The issue was that she was no closer to an escape.

  She didn’t want to stray too far away from her current home base of choice, and therefore hadn’t gone to investigate the noise.

  Elizabeth was at her limit, however.

  Her diet had become a fun mixture of scrounging some mosses and mushrooms, [Minor Botanical Transmutation] to turn things into ingredients, and then throwing together a tasty slime meal.

  She had run out of the small number of decent places to gather her ingredients from.

  Sure, she had prepared for several weeks of supplies, but had run dangerously low already.

  And so, she had resolved herself to make for the source of the sound.

  She had a solid plan, but not knowing where she might be able to find her next shelter without incurring a ridiculous cost in conjuring material was something to be cautious about.

  It was finally time to get moving.

  Elizabeth made her way into the tunnels.

  The sound never seemed to have a source, but instead always seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was a clear trick of Sound skills.

  That had been her clue.

  Her blessing allowed her to see the mana at work, which she could track the directional flow of, more or less. The mana from the skill traveled fast, but in the split second it took to reach her, she did have a north star, so long as she didn’t blink.

  She had even been offered a [Staring] skill to help, but it was an otherwise useless skill.

  Instead, Liz made her way through the dark, attuning her senses to the various sounds around her. She’d seen a ton of the [Cavern Stalker] creatures. They were everywhere. Attuning herself to the rhythm of the caves didn’t help her realize when they were near, but it did tell her when other things knew something was wrong.

  Silence meant danger, while subtle sounds meant everything was in order.

  She kept moving.

  She avoided fights after the way her first encounters had gone, knowing the resulting clashes would only attract more predators eager to snack on a weakened victor.

  Sleep came in short bursts, but her nerves weren’t the only thing preventing a solid cycle. Each night she would dream of any number of haunting experiences since her accident. Sometimes, the twisted horrors of the void gnawed upon her soul. Other nights, the smuggler leader managed to stab her in the heart. The worst nights were spent thinking of the deaths in Mourningloft, wandering the streets, knowing the people would die and she wouldn’t be able to do anything for them. The screams before she hit the water seemed to eternally haunt her.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Liz slept by deploying her armor away from herself into a cocoon of sorts, made from the best layering of the toughest gems she had. Effectively, she simply blended in as a gemstone deposit within the caverns.

  Speaking of gemstone deposits, she found several. They made for great opportunities to expand her arsenal, but often they weren’t strong enough to be worth the added weight. It wasn’t like she was finding diamonds exposed to the caverns where she could simply snag them. That just wasn’t how one found gems.

  She gathered food sources on occasion to refill her stocks, but she never stayed in one place for long.

  After days of travel—which begged the question of what kind of skill had so much range—she encountered a bone-chilling creature.

  It was well established that she was not suited to handling slime related creatures.

  [Inevitable Shluggoth - Ooze Lvl 1,518, Sound Lvl 1,416, Acid Lvl 1,508]

  That was not something she would be tangling with.

  It hunted using a Sound skill as a decoy that would cause fleeing creatures to stumble into the tentacled slime creature’s waiting mass. It sounded like sagging flesh slapping stone, lurching down the caverns and seeking out prey. The name and level both sounded like a big blob of ‘nope’ and she did not want to be dinner for the creature.

  Elizabeth ran from it.

  Fear? She was probably somewhat afraid, but she had to be reasonable with the risks she took, [Conviction] pledge be damned. Thankfully, the skill didn’t penalize her heavily for something the system deemed a tactical response.

  She escaped from it, and kept an ear out for the general sounds of the cavernous symphony, but never heard it again. Given the other creatures she’d seen, it was among the level range of creatures that just passed by the level she was remaining on. Some of the things from above her went into the range of level two-thousand. They were rare, but they existed.

  In the end, she never saw it again, but she had a lot of respect for the echoing sound she was chasing on the floor that seemed to keep things like that from lingering nearby.

  Her target sound also never grew louder, and the closer she got to the source she’d been tracking, the more she began to notice that the skill was originating from two places, at a minimum.

  She’d been venturing through the caverns for roughly a total of a month, if she counted back to when she had broken the portal. A time count that she’d based on the times she got tired enough to sleep.

  With no way to actually gauge the time she’d been in the undersea lab, she had no way to truly know, but she figured she’d been missing for close to three months already. She’d actually been missing longer than she’d been above ground.

  The depths of the caverns just seemed to never end.

  Her mind was beginning to falter, but her sheer tenacity and a lot of attention from the goddess kept her from giving up.

  In all honesty, she had spent more of her time on Pallos feeling less than mentally stable, so the caves shouldn’t have been such a huge difference, but she simply didn’t have the training to pull off the fixation she needed.

  That was how she’d ended up making the mistake that led to her being surrounded in an intersection by the cavern stalkers. Light did not turn out to be a deterrent to them, unfortunately.

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 714]

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 746]

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 316]

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 324]

  [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 315]

  Based on the levels, she’d encountered her first mated pair with their children.

  She had avoided that exact situation for so long thanks to her rules and because the creatures seemed to be mostly lone hunters that avoided grouping up. Liz had been avoiding the first two that had begun hunting her when she’d been cut off by the three lower level ones.

  Liz wasn’t given the liberty of taking the time to form a plan.

  The first low level one to lunge at her set the entire confrontation into motion.

  She ducked low, forming her whip as she prepared for a battle of careful attrition.

  The six legged cat behind her—one of the adults—assisted the child by trying to nip at her right leg, which was, as usual, not made from flesh, thankfully.

  Compared to the larger one, the youth was slow and it really showed. The risk level from the kids was small, but the parents would be a nightmare if they got serious. Instead, the pair seemed to be assisting their younglings by supporting them in their hunt. An interesting thought to their intelligence, or simply their instincts helping their young level up.

  Liz spun, but the parent seemed to notice that her leg had no softness to dig Dark-coated teeth into, and instead tried to slip back into the shadows. Interesting how Liz had enough Vitality to resist the ability for the Dark element to cut through materials more easily.

  The youth sailed over her head as she began to rotate the whip around her body in a defensive pattern.

  The three that had yet to attack her began to circle around her quickly, making it hard for her to keep track of them all at once.

  Thus began the battle of her desperately dodging while the hunters each wore down her defenses with sneak attacks while her back was turned.

  Liz didn’t have the advantage in the situation, and she knew it. She had one major option for changing the odds in such a predicament.

  She burned one hundred thousand mana, still a bit more than half her pool.

  [The World]

  She wanted to groan.

  She’d been using cards occasionally when she had the freedom to try them during her travels, but the arcana she’d just drawn was an unfortunate memory…

  She dodged and fended off a few curious advances that tested her while she was briefly distracted.

  The World was a card that supposedly meant fulfillment. It was also the card she’d drawn for her tarot reading the day she’d been sent away from Earth. It was a bitter memory and a reminder she didn’t need during a fight.

  She shrugged off the negative emotions, choosing to embrace the card and see what it would do for her.

  Liz’s eyes lit up in glee as she felt something similar to the senses of [Earth Shattering Arts] returned to her.

  She could feel the world around her, embracing her and telling her everything about where she was.

  She finally could sense the creatures perfectly, feel their muscles tense up before every attack, and control the flow of the battle much more easily.

  It also informed her that several presences were headed in her direction, meaning she was on a ticking clock.

  Elizabeth could even feel roughly where she was located, but that was a revelation for later. She had a battle to win.

  The moment the next plucky youth tried to lunge for her—once again aided by a distraction attack from an adult—Liz caught the smaller cat by the throat and brought it slamming down to the floor as her whip wrapped around the adult and dragged it off course.

  The cat she’d brought down struggled, raking at her with hind claws that failed to penetrate the gemstone armor coating her body. The youths were so weak, Liz was depressed that they’d given her so much trouble.

  Elizabeth squeezed the creature’s throat as the rest of the family lunged at her in sync.

  They were too late, and she’d already broken the beast’s neck before they could stop her.

  [*ding* You have slain a [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 324]!]

  Then the monsters were all over her.

  Only two of them could be a threat, and one of those was still being flung away by her whip, the fight being handled in rapid speed granted by high stats.

  She allowed the younger ones to bite at her and tear at her armor with their claws. Instead, she targeted the adult, focusing her gemstone left hand into a single spike, similar to the patas she’d used against the dire wolves back in her first real battle.

  This time, the cat didn’t have the thick fur the dire wolf had, and Liz had a lot more experience and power.

  The point drove into the soft belly of the cat where she got a very intimate experience with how internal organs felt with her hand buried to the wrist inside the monster.

  Liz stepped forward and under the attack, trying to use the momentum of the cat’s lunge to throw it clear of her.

  Instead, she felt a weight—more than those of the young cats—pressing down on her as the other presences entered her more vivid perception radius from The World, which thankfully was a card with a surprisingly long duration.

  Liz fell to her knees under the immense pressure, then kicked up the mana supply to her [Gemstone Manipulation] to force her body to return to a combat stance.

  A shining axe made from burning light sailed through the air at her side to sink itself into the young cat that had been pressed into the ground.

  The rest of the cats all seemed to be similarly forced to the ground as four out of the five figures emerged from the passageway next to her, all of them completely silent. In fact, they had silent footsteps and their weapons made no noise from impacting the creatures, either.

  She didn’t have long to study the newcomers, but given the human-looking woman with the axe next to her, she decided to roll with them being temporary allies.

  Liz turned to the adult cat her hand was still slightly buried in and began the typical gruesome act of finishing it off. Just a few quick stabs in the chest while it was immobilized by the Gravity skill around them.

  [*ding* You have slain a [Cavern Stalker - Dark Lvl 714]

  The newcomers quickly handled the others, and Liz turned to face the group, stepping back and remaining on guard as the gravity in the intersection returned to normal.

  The woman in front was something that looked human, but The World still gave her some feedback that the creature wasn’t a human at all. The others in the group were a mix of races. One was a strange sort of sapient dinosaur person covered in stone armor with a huge sword/shield thing made from bone. The next two were different types of unarmed fishpeople, one resembling a shark and the other resembling… something colorful. The last member of the group was a stout dwarf that was lugging around a bulky metal box on his back, and his outfit made him the oddest, despite being the second most normal race to Liz’s eyes out of the bunch.

  In order, they seemed to be:

  [Warrior - Ocean Lvl 944, Radiance Lvl 1,021, Healer - Light Lvl 515]

  [Warrior - Mountain Lvl 516, Fossil Lvl 467, Arcanite Lvl 129]

  [Mage - Ocean Lvl 907, Sound Lvl 854, Metal Lvl 256]

  [Mage - Ocean Lvl 768, Gravity Lvl 663, Celestial Lvl 349]

  [Artisan - Steam Lvl 313, Metal Lvl 256]

  “Who are you?” Liz felt the urge to be excited to see people finally, but she also knew better than to jump to conclusions after all her experiences.

  All of the team before her winced at her voice, and then the shark person strode towards her.

  She took as many wary steps back as they took towards her.

  They raised both their… hands, she supposed, and then stepped towards her again.

  Liz could take a hint, and her mana finally crept up enough for an emergency card draw if she needed one. She stepped forward, and the shark person laid a fin/hand on her shoulder.

  She did notice a small dip in her Mana Regeneration as the skill settled over her.

  “What’s an adventurer doing out here all alone? Never seen you before. And your language is weird.” A male voice reached Liz as the shark person stared at her intently, mouth moving in strange ways.

  Memories of the grave robbers back in Heron Lake resurfaced at the mention of adventurers, which made Liz a little annoyed.

  “I’m just lost. Been in these tunnels for… weeks, I think.” She stuck to the barest honesty she had on hand, thankful to notice her voice didn’t echo around the caves anymore.

  “You understand me, and I understand you, but I don’t know the language you’re speaking. It stinks of divine mischief.” The shark person seemed to be disdainful of the divines based on that statement.

  Finally, the human-ish person laid a hand on the shoulder of the shark, stepped to the front, then spoke.

  “Apologies. We are the Heavy Blades, a team of Hunters from Hammerstrike Prime. You may call me Shaana. It is unwise to make noise in the caverns, so we heard your battle. Saw you get buried under the stalkers and rushed to help. Are you injured?” The human-ish woman spoke in a kind tone, and her voice had a subtle soothing effect that was either her tone or some Skill. Either way, Liz wasn’t about to let her guard down.

  “I don’t need a [Healer] right now, so I’ll be fine. I’d appreciate a guide to a city, though. Those stalkers were hunting me for a while, apparently the adults were leading me to an ambush.” Liz could feel the battle adrenaline wearing off, and The World’s effects fading as well.

  “No problem. How’d you end up alone? Did you get separated from the rest of your adventurer party?” The woman just kept going with the assumption she was an adventurer, which annoyed her more, but it was hard to tell how they might react to her not being one. Ambiguity was for the best until she had more information. Sylvestre had once explained that traveling without proper backing in some countries could lead to problems.

  “Honestly, it’s a long story. I’m not sure where to start. How far away is the place you’re from?”

  “It is a couple of cycles’ travel away. As I said, I am Shaana. What is your name?” The woman hadn’t tried to close the distance, and Elizabeth was sure to maintain her wariness, but from the sound of a ‘cycle,’ they’d be traveling together for a while. She’d have to let her guard down eventually.

  “My name is Cattleya Campanella. You may call me Cat.” Liz lied through her teeth as usual. She was well aware that she’d been going around the party that night as Anallaya, and had been known as Fate during the trip prior. With her luck, there’d be a standing bounty for her in connection to Exterreri and those names would get her into trouble.

  “Nice to meet you, Cat. These are the rest of the members of the Heavy Blades.” Shaana pointed to each in turn, starting with the dinosaur person, then the shark, then the colorful fish, and finally the dwarf. “This is Ilwa, our tank. Lagunar, our scout and ranged mage. Tetra, our tactician and support magic specialist. And lastly, our sup’porter’ is ‘Lugger,’ who carries around our supplies and helps with updating maps and pathfinding.”

  Liz nodded to each one in turn, but kept her distance. She’d been exposed to far more dangerous people in Pallos than she had been to the well-intentioned. She was also wearing a fortune’s worth of gemstones, most of which were not conjured.

  “Well, if you’d like, we’ll let you keep the two you killed and we’ll harvest the other three? I apologize if we stepped in on your fight when you didn’t need it, though.” Shaana gestured towards the stalker corpses and gave her a cautious look in the dimmed light of her shining axe.

  Elizabeth could only frown in confusion, then shrug. She didn’t see a way around asking.

  “Sure… But, harvest what?”

  Shaana looked at her with some noticeable surprise.

  “The claws? For money? How do you not know about that when every Hammerstrike town uses Stalker Claws for a secondary currency?” The woman’s words made Liz want to groan in despair.

  She’d taken down more than a handful of the stalkers that had tried to hunt her in the depths as she had traveled along. She could’ve had a ton of money if she hadn’t been leaving the corpses behind.

  “I… got lost down here after some portal brought me to an abandoned city. I’m from the surface.” There was no way she was going to get away with coming up with a lie in the situation. She wasn’t sure what was actually believable.

  “I see. A surface dweller. You are a very long way from home, my friend.”

  Liz nodded. “I know.”

  After all, The World had given her a vague idea of where she was, and Liz had found out that she was somewhere within caverns that existed deep below the ocean.

  There would not be an easy method of returning to the surface any time in her near future.