Chapter 42: Chapter 40 – Things that crawl

~Christy POV~

It has already been more than a week since Iris left me behind on her mission. If only I wasn't a hindrance at the time... But I'll aim to be strong enough to stay by her side when she returns. Still, I wonder what it is about her that I'm so attracted to... I pondered it absently while crushing a man's hand beneath my shoe.

He had several wounds of various kinds across his body. Burns, cuts, bruises, punctures. It wasn't as if I were harming an innocent soul however, this man was an Alchemist. Scum to be cleansed. And training dummies to further my study of magic on. So far I have mastered the school of Material magic, at least up to 6th tier. The Orthodox schools of magic and developed frontier magic is ranked into 10 tiers, with 1 being the lowest. However, each tier is exponentially harder to achieve than the last.

It's only thanks to Iris lending me her magic books that i was able to develop my magic so far... That said, I have also developed my own Frontier magic. In this case-

Alchemist: "P-please...! I-if there's nothing else... Please sp-spare me....!"

Christy: "Please shut up, you inhuman maggot." I said, a look of disgust and humility on my face as I shoved the bottom of my staff into his neck and channeling my magic into it, before twisting and pulling at the magic inside, resulting in the flesh and bone of the man ripping and twisting apart, his gurgled groans dissipating with a pop! of his head, separating from the body.

I've learned to control the threads of mana I inject into people. It's surprisingly easy to kill a person. Humans are so extremely frail, it's even more amazing that we've come so far as a species... If only these parasites weren't holding us back. I heaved a disappointed sigh as I left the scene of gore plastering the backstreets of the mou district.

The reason I was even keeping this one alive so long was to find the rest of his filthy kin. I'm still lacking in the way of information gathering, since I could only find out one hideout... If it were Iris, surely she would have discovered more... Oh well. I cleaned myself off with magic and decided to go to the mercenary guild to investigate the available contracts for today.

If it wasn't uprooting the scum within the city, I was picking up contracts at the guild. Sometimes I would be recruited into a temporary party and explore the frontier of the caverns. We would encounter goblins and other similarly low-level creatures, dregs that crawl amongst the dust and echos of the dark.

Soon enough I got the nickname "Frontier Witch" from the mercenaries, taken from the fact that I use frontier magic to rip up anything that gets too close, and my mastery of material magic. With the spare money I earned and the materials I gathered, I visited Ms. Illivan to order some combat mage robes.

I requested the robes to have a balance between coverage and ease of movement. I learned from Iris how important freedom of movement was, and so decided to have my future outfits retain a degree of freedom. That said, I wanted enough coverage to protect from the elements, and armor to absorb damage when absolutely necessary.

The resulting outfit was a reinforced undershirt, knee-length skirt and socks, a cuirass made from crag drake hide, and a hooded overcoat made from magic-enchanted wirefiber fabric. The undershirt was a deep purple matching the skirt's hem, while the cuirass was a gunmetal grey, and the coat an obsidian black.

My image had already become more elegant and slick, and I made sure to let Illivan know how satisfied I was by giving her a tip, and promising to return in the future. I hoped Iris would also approve of the new look... All I could do was wait, for now. And wait I did while cleaning up the cities, flushing out as many of the Alchemists as I could find. I still underestimated just how long I would be waiting...

~~×~~×~~×~~×~~×~~×~~

~Iris POV~

It had already been a day since I had started wandering around in these ruins. Something I learned while walking around was that the palace and the rest of the "city" were actually interconnected through these grand corridors. Accessing them was mostly impossible, but I could tell that residences, businesses, and other facilities were built directly into the stone, rather than being constructed in a large open area.

Licht: "It reminds me of dwarven cities from fiction in my world. Digging out cities from deep within the stone."

Iris: "Dwarves huh? I wonder who built this city anyway. And why did they become a fallen civilization with this technology?" I mused, continuing to wander through the grand halls, devoid of illumination.

After wandering around for a while, I came to the realisation that it was strange. The utter lack of monsters in this place. It wasn't as if I was being inattentive or that I was missing something, there simply wasn't any other living creatures in this labyrinth of ancient corridors. Though there have been signs of death or monsters, none actually existed. Not even corpses.

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The only reason I could think of, as I came across a massive stairway going up, was that this was the large creature's territory. The entire floor, somehow, was the place that thing lurked. I began climbing the stairs up to the next floor. To be more accurate, it was more like a ramp for two roadways with a set of stairs on either side, with supporting pillars in the center. The scale is surreal.

I soon reached the next floor. The ceiling was higher than the last floor, with buildings stretching just as high up. The difference was that this area looked less extravagant than the floor below. Perhaps the bottom layer was for high nobility and royalty, a palace-area you could say?

There were also smaller walkways between buildings at certain intervals. Most of these seemed intact, and either led to another major road, or continued into a maze of other corridors between the many buildings of this underground metropolis.

~~×~~×~~

Iris: "Im going to go insane if I don't see another color soon, even if it has to be blood!" I complained, irritated after having wandered around aimlessly for a few hours now.

Licht: "Hopefully we can find a map soon. The bottom floor was in a worse state than this area. Surely that will have color."

Iris: "Hopefully we can read an ancient map. Surely they won't use some kind of alien symbology for stairs, or the direction 'up' would they?" I pleaded to no one in particular. I'll just have to hope whatever is watching over me isn't a sadist.

Soon though, my thoughts were interrupted by a strange scent. Like the hint of brine, instead of the stale scent of rock. I focused up immediately as my body tensed, and I began to look around more cautiously. I was still travelling through the main roads, looking for something that could be considered a directory.

And just in luck, I found one. I looked around the corner of a building, seeing a round plaza. There seemed to be statues, or objects of interest within the plaza, but they had been ruined beyond identification, at least at a glance. More importantly, I could see something that looks like a board on the edge of the plaza.

I could also see many strange-looking objects lurking about the plaza. They were odd-looking orbs propped up on a series of spines, with other spines sticking out upwards. Seeing them twitch and meander about slowly, they were deep ones of some kind. Not much bigger than me, legs included, while the "orbs" were only about as big as my torso, if not smaller.

At this distance, I couldn't tell what sort of senses they had. Sight, hearing, smell, maybe even touch. So how did they hunt? Did they? I unslung the rifle from my bag, which at this point I had fully charged. Then, I slowly crept towards the plaza. It was only maybe 50 meters to the board.

As I slowly closed the distance, none of the creatures seemed to react to me. I had approached up to the opposite side of the road from the plaza. Maybe only 20 meters to the board, 25 for the closest creature. I picked up a stone from the ground and flung it over to the other side, about 10 meters to the right of the monster. It hit the ground with a Clak-clak clak...

The "legs" ontop of the creature unfurled, extending out as the legs supporting it began to lean it towards the sound of the rock, as it rolled onto the newly unfurled legs. It was utterly silent while rolling towards the sound, CRACK, as one of its legs shot out, flinging the rock away with its impact. I could see one or two other creatures crawling about normally, then was this how they approached prey?

I silently moved towards the board, giving the now-dormant creature a wide berth. I couldn't even see the attack, faster than even a bullet. Was it just a trait for Deep Ones to reserve energy for bursts of extreme movement? I soon reached the wide bulletin board, moving around to the front. Just as I had hoped, there was a map of the layer on it. 

I began looking over the map, and was relieved seeing the symbols remained legible. I let Licht memorize the map and plan our route to the next level as I thought about these creatures. Did they detect things via sound, then? But something bothered me about that conclusion. Now that I was closer, I couldnt see any sort of sensory organs on the core of the creatures. Not even a mouth. How, then, did they live and detect things...?

Licht let me know he was finished and I turned to the dormant creature. I summoned a magic dart and shot it at the ground near the creature. It hit soundlessly, CRACK, once more its limb shot out like a bullet. I see, it detects vibrations. My light steps at this distance wasn't enough to provoke it, then. In that case, I suppose it would be easy to hunt these things for material, and perhaps, food.

I maneuvered around to an empty road and raised my rifle. I picked the closest target and, with a magical optic appearing above the barrel of the rifle, fired with deadly accuracy. A loud noise rang out to accompany my shot, which I soon realised to be a mistake.

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