-Callen-

  Gramit turned his back towards us, and along his back numerous spines rapidly grew out. His exposure let Sis’s arrows through as more and more stuck into him, pinning him in place on the roof, but that didn’t stop what came next. A wet squelching noise rang out as the needles burst out. Dozens of needles peppered all across the platform, leaving us no way to dodge. With instinctive precision Callia and I slid side by side and sheltered behind a stone I summoned from the void.

  The needles pricked into the stone surface but failed to get any notable penetration. However, while the needles didn’t threaten us immediately, I could feel the toxic gasses’ effects, and Callia was also deteriorating. I reached over and healed her from the poison and then treated myself. From the fact that I could continuously heal the poison, it was apparent that the air was poisoned. Callia, taking advantage of a gap in the needle barrage, popped out to launch an arrow screaming into the ceiling with force. The crack of energy from the arrow’s impact was unmistakable. It was one of the void arrows we had used on the frog when helicopter hunting.

  The sphere of energy ripping everything into the void, however, was significantly smaller. Despite that, the man's entire upper torso was ripped into the void. I let out a short breath as the squid legs and stomach fell from above, flopping onto the ground. I took a step to approach it, but Sis was having no risks. A second arrow slammed into the legs and, just like the first, created a sphere of energy consuming everything that the first arrow hadn’t.

  “Um, Sis, I think the first arrow did the job.” Cautiously I moved over to her side while examining the dome we were now trapped in. “Didn’t we agree that using those arrows was too risky since we couldn’t control the area they affect?”

  “Callen, did you really want to fight it out with that guy? He could regenerate from any injury, had all kinds of weird animal bits, and if he realized we could actually overpower him, he would’ve dropped the floor out from under us.” Speechless, I could only nod along, accepting her justifications. To be completely fair, there was also the fact that the size of the void sphere was variable according to size and vitality. With how easily her arrows blasted the man to bits, it was reasonable to justify that it wasn’t something he invested in.

  “Fair enough, but the first shot seemed to get the job done. Why double tap the legs?” The first arrow made sense, but it felt like a waste of arrows to use one on legs.

  “The guy was a mosh pit of weird survival characteristics; for all we know, he had a second brain in his heel. The guy had literally bragged about adding what sounded like a cockroach to his body. No, the crazy bug man gets a full annihilation; no more regeneration antics.” I just nodded along with the logic. It made sense, however, because Sis annihilated his legs, it seemed we wouldn’t be able to recover the runic control stone.

  Sadly, despite having dealt with Gramit, the room was still being flooded by poisonous gasses, and it seemed prudent to find a way to let the baron out of the trap he had fallen into. My best solution was to try making a new controller, but this was something entirely new. How to make and link a runic device was something I had only briefly touched on in the past. Then there was also the difference of languages. I sigh as I begin examining the runes the earthkin used to drop the surrounding floor.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  -Callia-

  Callen was thoroughly occupied trying to reverse engineer the control device, and I was left to my own initiative. The first thing that came to mind was recovering all the captives who had fallen when the trapdoors originally opened. Making my way over to the entryway that was blocked and peering down into the trap, I struggled to get a sense of how deep it was. It wasn’t that it was a bottomless pit, but something was obscuring my vision.

  Jumping straight in would probably be the reckless kind of idea Callen and the others would berate me for, so I’ll take the more careful approach. Shifting from the void space, I acquired a spare rope and tied a wooden stick to the end. Ideally if it isn’t deep, I’ll hear the stick hit the ground, but even if I don’t hear it hit, I can dip the rope past whatever barrier is blocking my perception and pull it back up to see if I can come back up. Down it went, and there was no sound of any impact as I fed the whole rope down. However, as I pulled the rope back up, an unfamiliar weight on the end was immediately apparent.

  It was too light to be any of the test subjects we had subdued, so I carefully reeled the rope up until, standing on the wooden board on the end, I saw what appeared to be a young boy. He was thin but not to a dangerous degree, and I noticed his hands and eyes matched a tiger. He was looking up at me and seemed to light up in happiness. My reservations were set aside, and I immediately pulled the boy up. Up close I could tell he was in the age range between 10 and 12.

  “Hey, are you ok? Anyone else down there?” I tried asking him, but the boy just clung to me crying, but it didn’t sound like a human’s cry; instead, it sounded more like a really upset cat. Mentally I filed another piece of him that had been transformed, but outside I rubbed the boy's back, calming him down. Quietly I whispered to him. “I’m going to go check for others. Here, this is my brother; get his attention if you need help. I’ll be back soon, ok?” The boy seemed to calm down and eventually softened his grip enough for me to move back over the hole. With the kid offloaded onto my brother, I anchored the rope before lowering it back over into the hole.

  Sliding down, I soon saw nearly a dozen children, each with different levels of mutation. They seemed both nervous and excited, with some moving closer and others hiding behind their friends. In the middle of the room the restrained bodies of the various hybrids who attacked us that had fallen down were piled up. Seeing this, I felt both a sense of relief and disgust. The fact that this had been done to children was something that made me sick, but the relief of knowing this won’t happen again, at least not by the hands of Gramit, was the silver lining.

  “Hello everyone, you don’t need to be afraid anymore.” I lowered myself down to their level to appear less threatening. My eyes moved from child to child, trying to project assurance and care. Gradually one comes up to me, and I pick her up.

  “I’m going to help all of you leave this place, but I’m going to need a couple trips. When I go up, I’ll leave you with my brother and your friend who came up to meet me.” Gradually, trip by trip, I managed to pull out all the kids from the first door and moved on to the next zone. A quick check showed another batch of kids, though these ones hadn’t been altered yet. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction that we hadn’t been too late to save these kids but also considerable concern as the number of test subjects jumped from the dozen that had been strapped in the other operating rooms to easily at least a hundred stored in these containment cells.

  Meccas’s escape

  Meccas slid to a stop as the chimera finally collapsed from the massive chunks of flesh that had been cleanly sliced through. As the fight came to an end, the runes lined along the edges of the cage went dim again. Smoothly he walked over to the wall at the bottom of the container and struck with all his strength. The runes flared to life once again, but this time they didn’t hold. All throughout the facility, runes collapsed, and sounds from above reached down to Meccas.

  Meccas heard the soft pattering of children’s feet and the gentle, if slightly overwhelmed, voice of Callen as he tried to reassure the children. Without his perception of distance being blocked, Meccas jumped precisely to the trapdoor and cut a hole through it where none of the children were. Pulling himself up, he saw Callen standing in the middle of the room trying to wrangle children while also working on a runic device and holding up a stick that shone with enough light to see clearly in the room.

  The children, seeing the large ‘monster’ climb out from the middle of the room, cried in alarm, running towards Callen, clinging, and hiding behind him. Meccas just turned towards the entrance and, with a single swing, breached the barrier at the room's entrance. Callen just looked at the incomplete device in hand and sighed as he tossed it away.