The cavern became quite a bit wider over the next few minutes. Lev took a good look around, finding nothing out of place. A few of the stone shapes surrounding him were abnormally sharp, but his brain glossed over them.
“Report?” he asked the present company.
“No movement,” the older scout rumbled, subdued because of the incredible depth and unnerving silence surrounding them. “No signs of life either.”
“The stone is… unique,” Beatrice remarked. Lev had to agree.
Unlike the usual gray stone, the walls surrounding them were a shade so dark that they almost seemed a deep blue. Peering closer also revealed that there was a lot of mana running through the stone, much more than any cave they had seen before.
Once again, he just noted that detail and focused ahead. Some part of him commanded his entire willpower to empower his armor with a bit of his regeneration, before he forgot about that as well.
More minutes passed in unbroken silence. The bubble continued forward in the large cavern, one that had leveled out a bit to provide a straight path. He couldn’t see where it ended, only that it would let them get away from the ants. The horizontal distance covered would hopefully reveal an exit path that would let them escape unnoticed.
A few meters below him, a small mound of dull white caught his attention. It reminded him of healing for some reason, but closer inspection revealed no such connection.
Weirdly enough, he couldn’t decipher what he was looking at. Yet, nothing seemed to feel wrong, nor could he detect any danger in his vicinity.
Is this some weird form of quartz? Lev wondered. I do remember people getting excited about finding new types of stones on the internet, only for it to be some form of quartz.
Again, his mind forgot about it, and the bubble kept moving without pause.
“Why did the path straighten out all of a sudden?” the girl leader asked.
“I also can’t feel any sonic vibrations at all,” the sound mage added.
Lev looked back towards the two of them. Their words sounded alarming, and yet, just like him, they were calm and collected. By his side, Beatrice was also starting to relax, opting to sit down in a barrier seat instead of standing and remaining alert the entire time.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “You guys probably know more about cave systems than I do.”
“Hmm.”
Yet again, they lapsed into silence. Lev felt himself slowly getting lethargic, and for whatever reason, his brain deduced the cause to be the constant alertness.
Odd. We’ve been basically resting for the past few hours.
No enemies to be seen. No other signs of danger. Compared to how he usually was outside the walls, he couldn’t possibly imagine being relatively alert being the cause for his sudden tiredness.
That made him grip Stargazer even more tightly. But beyond that, he soon forgot the momentary wariness as well.
Time slowly stopped holding meaning. The bubble continued to glide deeper into the cavern, and astonishingly enough, the natural structure seemed to be endless.
Lev was fine with that. The downtime let them all regenerate their pools to full comfortably, and even he would be topped up once Beatrice was close to full.
A white spot on the ground caught his attention. Slowing the bubble, he floated close to that spot, scanning it intently. Something prickled the back of his neck, though he ignored that.
Is this… white blood? Paint of some sort?
The white blotch had some weird dimensions. He could feel his Perception attribute and Mana Perception struggling to make sense of the ever-changing size of it, the latter getting ever closer to evolving, but it was of no use.
A few seconds later, he moved on. Looking back out of habit, he found all the scouts lounging around the food table, at ease and looking forward to escaping. It was a big difference compared to how they were not long ago.
He and Beatrice were still in their driver seats, so they had a full view of the empty cavern.
Lev turned to his right, glancing at some sharp stone shapes. Had he seen them before?
Shrugging, he cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. Finding a single clue of something out of place, he stood up, mana now leaving his body in droves.
All of it was converted into lightning. He finally had a lead on what his senses had missed before, though he couldn’t show his hand. Concealments were sneakily carved on his right arm, an extra layer created on the limb for that purpose.
With shadow mana, the assailant had no hope of ever noticing the attack charge. When he was certain that he had a clear shot, Lev stood up and aimed in the same motion…
STOP! NO!
… and held himself from firing at Beatrice’s armored head in the nick of time.
Heart pumping in his chest like a war drum and ears ringing like never before, he collapsed back into his seat. The forcefully suppressed alarm and dread tried to rear its head, just barely succeeding in warning him.
Something’s very, very wrong…
“Lev?” Beatrice asked, not getting up from her seat. That scared him even more. “Do you see something? Are we getting close to an exit?”
“Y-” Lev gulped, trying to steady his erratic thoughts. “I think so.”
She doesn’t notice anything, he concluded, terror firmly gripping him now. The scouts are just as out of it. Holy fuck, I almost killed her.
He gazed around, realizing what was going on. Something was trying to…
His expression slowly eased, a strange sense of serenity rushing to his head. What was he thinking about?
Something was… something was trying to do what? What did I see? Oh yeah, I had almost caught an enemy sneaking around us, except it escap-
Lev’s head snapped towards the ground. A flash of white, a familiar scene. Remembering how many times he had seen it required a gargantuan effort, and, frustrated at the lack of an answer, he commanded his oddly low willpower to rush to his head.
That turned out to be a horrible idea. His brain was empowered slightly, revealing what he was looking for, but it was accompanied by a shower of blood that burst out of his nose and ears. Willpower was, at the end of the day, a means to empower mana manipulation and all its derivative applications. Using it on the body was suicidal at best.
None of the physical outcomes could hold a candle to the white-hot pain. It was all encompassing, permeating his entire being as if someone had thrown him into a pool of acid.
He screamed, clutching his head. Even through the agony, he didn’t miss that no one reacted to it. That made it even worse.
The pain, however, also lifted an insidious spell off his fraying mind. He could finally see what was wrong. Suddenly, the bubble was completely still, and no one around him was seated. Instead, they were frozen in place, the scouts behind Lev, and Beatrice by his side. No one had moved a muscle since they had entered the cavern an indeterminate amount of time ago.
That came with even more realizations. His throat was so dry that trying to gulp almost made him shriek. His eyes were faring no better, and even his body, enhanced by all the Constitution, could barely stand upright.
He didn’t spend time to consider what that meant for others. No, his entire focus was dedicated to deciphering the horrid situation to find an escape. Looking down, he finally realized what kept garnering his attention.
Bones. A whole carpet of bones covered the cavern, with the closest monstrous skull being the only white piece, relatively unscathed by the passage of time. Lev remembered how he had realized it was a bone when they first entered, except whatever was affecting his mind had made him forget.
He spared a glance to the right, confirming his suspicion. The sharp stones were four fangs of something truly massive, jutting out of the morbid ground like a partially-intact ribcage.
The mind blending couldn’t go on. Without wasting another moment, he channeled a large amount of mana through his famished body, converting it all into lightning. The sudden usage of mana also tipped off the responsible creature that something was up.
Shapes came into vision, crashing into his bubble. Through the mental feedback, he could feel that shadow mana was the only thing keeping the wraith monsters at bay. Like blobs of shadowy dust with too many eyes in their fluid shape, they tried to phase inside the bubble, rebuffed each time.
Unfortunately, that also brought to light the state of his crumbling willpower. It had kept up a steady conversion of shadow mana the entire time, channeling most of his regeneration into the bubble’s enchantments.
As a result, he doubled over with a groan, willpower finally relieved of its task as he gave it the order to retreat. The invisibility enchantments flickered, then turned inactive.
Shadow mana persisted, doing its best to keep the barriers rigid in a way that could hold back the wraiths. The fuel lasted for only a few short seconds, during which he barely found his bearings again.
Bringing Stargazer in front of him, he almost fired a tiny Fracturing Wave at the nearest monster. It swiveled out of the way almost tauntingly, gliding towards the scout teams.
Lev made the mistake of looking at the girl leader. She was frothing at the mouth, coughing out a bloody mist.
Seeing that he didn’t have any more time, he channeled healing mana into himself. Pushing past the debilitating pain from healing such a weakened body, he thrusted Stargazer at the shadow blob.
It dodged as expected. The bubble floor underneath him cracked as he altered the trajectory beyond what should’ve been possible, slashing by tearing a few tendons in his frail state.
The glaive went through the shadow monster, dispersing it into a black mist when a tiny explosion of lightning exploded inside its body.
That, however, also tossed all the frozen humans to the ground. They collapsed with worrying groans and whimpers, which further deteriorated his mental state.
Desperation crept up on him as he realized there was a whole army of blobs waiting right outside the bubble, basking in his misery. Two more stepped inside, their singular eyes creased in glee in anticipation of the psychological torture they were about to inflict.
He refrained from using any magical attacks this time. The blobs always remained close to the other humans, forcing him to be precise and careful.
A sizzling bolt of shadow mana pierced through Beatrice’s armor the moment he slowed down to consider his options. Mistakenly, he had assumed that the monsters lacked the means to hurt the humans, given they hadn’t done so yet.
That turned out to be false. A shrill scream erupted out of the aura mage’s powered armor, one that Lev felt traveling down his spine.
Anger surged, white and hot. Willpower, even hurt and low as it was, cleared the fog in his mind. For a small moment, he wasn’t under an illusion anymore.
He almost paused. That would tip off his hand, for he had noticed that Beatrice was unhurt during that brief moment of clarity. There were no blemishes on her armor, and the shadowy blob didn’t look nearly as well-put together as it should’ve been.
Then the illusion took over again, and the cavern darkened even more. The monster continued its taunting dodges, teasing the glaive while always keeping the other humans in the blade’s path.
Lev kept up the dance, displaying the same desperation he was feeling earlier, even as his emotions rapidly settled. The monster was somehow feeding his panic and fear, empowering them to a point that he couldn’t think straight.
The blindfold fell away just as easily as he had been influenced, showing him the actual reality.
Everyone around him was alive, or the monster wouldn’t be trying to kill them through him. They were also not incapacitated to the point that Lev was the only real threat, so he could also rule out their dying while he was searching for a solution.
Killing another two shadow blobs, he breathed in heavily, projecting a grim and tired physical condition. He didn’t even have to pretend. However long his willpower had kept up the shadow mana fuel had taken a huge toll on his soul, and he could feel his manipulation slowly weakening. Moments like this made him glad that he had Extraordinary Soul to rely on, for he didn’t need to be a genius to realize how an ordinary mage would’ve fared in his place.
His body and mind were basically caught in the crossfire. Fighting in the current state was only possible because of a small stream of restoration mana entering his body, keeping it from falling apart even more. Dispatching the four blobs took only a little while now that he could think more clearly.
Still, he kept up the facade while converting mana. The bulk of it was converted into lightning mana, whereas the rest was shadow mana to conceal the orb in which he was storing all the lightning.
Eight blobs darted in this time, no longer playing around. Lev could see them form shadow bolts, each flying towards the humans.
Sizzling impacts and terrifying wails echoed inside the bubble, but he stayed still. The shadow bolts lacked… something important. They felt hollow, just as the sounds from the humans, regardless of how realistic, just weren’t right. As if missing some crucial component.
He changed his angle of thought. Human screams had nuance to them. Each person screamed differently based on the occasion, which the monster could reliably manage.
What was missing, then? The haunting sounds… they lacked surprise. Or terror. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was.
The imitations of screams lacked proper emotion. Fear, pain, and desperation, all of them felt lifeless in a way, which clued him in on what he was missing, something connected closely to emotions.
Willpower.
Each shadow blob was made with intent. They had a weight to them that kept their shape coherent. The shadow bolts, however, were illusions that weren’t meant to accomplish anything. They just needed to exist, and using willpower on a show would be a proper waste.
Now that he had the missing key, he stared at the blob monsters. To keep up the act for a few seconds longer, he attacked the nearest one, the glaive passing inches from its body.
From up close, he looked into its dozens of tiny eyes. Clumps of shadow mana inside them were the first clue. Zeroing in on that detail, he moved to the next blob, trying to bisect it.
It twirled around the glaive, in the path of an arrow that was previously hidden by shadow mana. The construct also detonated inside its body, releasing a tiny payload of lightning.
As the monster burst into a shadowy firework, Lev finally noticed the connection. He couldn’t see willpower, no. Mana Perception could probably never accomplish that.
What he did see, however, was the mana affected by willpower. It was denser, more intense than the rest of the shadow mana making up the blob, and that thin line of mana led him straight to where the caster stood outside the bubble, on top of one of the fangs jutting out of the ground.
It looked like a robed mage, except too tall and gangly to be a human. The moment their eyes met, it vanished with a reverberating screech, and so did all the shadowy blobs.
Lev remained still. He needed a moment to recover from the rollercoaster of emotions the past few… days? Weeks? He just needed to digest what he had gone through, especially how simple the whole situation was at the core.
This can’t be it, right? We didn’t go through so much just for it to end like this, right?
Manually teleporting all the converted lightning mana into his bubble’s walls to not disturb his battered willpower, he took a deep breath. Then he willed it to explode outwards.
The whole cavern lit up in a titanic blast that scoured every possible escape route. Moments later, the monster perished as well.
[
You have slain [Shadow Puppeteer - Level 488]
]
After everything, it really did end just like that.****Author's notes: Apologies for the missed days. I wanted your opinion on this chapter because, theoretically, I could've easily stretched it to two or three chapters. Do you think I rushed it, or does it read fine? It was also really hard to write for whatever reason, so I'm not sure if it turned out well or not.