Chapter 57: Chapter 57: Extraction

Staring down at the mouse in her grasp, Fiana was puzzled. There ought to not be any rodents within the tower. The slimes, the tower's 'cleaners,' were relentless in keeping the tower clean.

The slimes would not tolerate a speck of dust nor would they accept pests. Every and all things they saw as 'filthy' would be captured within their gelatinous bodies and be digested within. Only a few areas within the tower were exempted from their presence, one of them being the terrariums.

Fiana found it extremely odd that the mouse was able to make it past the five floors without being detected. The only explanation she could think of was that the mouse had stowed away in someone's belonging and wounded up here.

As the thought came to her, Fiana turned her sight towards her bag. She was the only one here at the time and she doubted that the mouse could have survived in the company of the Dandelion Mandragoras and their ravenous appetite for Aether overnight. As such, it must have arrived in her baggage.

"Could it be........."

While Fiana was in thought, the door to the terrarium slid open. It would appear that another caretaker was entering. Fiana thought to greet them, but in that moment of distraction, the mouse bit down on Fiana's hand.

The mouse's teeth did no damage. Fiana had taken precautions when picking up the small creature and had covered her hand in Aether for protection. The Aether formed a soft, membrane-like surface over her skin and hardened upon physical trauma. Something as weak as a mouse's bite couldn't have been able to hurt her. Or so she thought.

A sharp pain suddenly ran up Fiana's hand as blood flowed profusely from her index finger, where the mouse had bitted. The unexpected pain caused Fiana to loosen her grip and allowed the mouse to slip through, landing on the floor with a meaty splatter before reforming its shape and making a dash for the exit.

Shocked, Fiana looked down at her hand, trying to understand what had just happened. There, she found lodged in the side of her finger two small shards of Aethervoid glass. The mouse must have been modified to fire them out of its body using its muscles somehow as an added countermeasure against mages.

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A small cry could be heard as a seemingly young mage yelped in surprise. Frightened by a mouse that had suddenly rushed out of the terrarium that she worked in, the mage quickly dodged to the side, not wishing to even touch the rodent.

The mouse, on the other hand, paid no attention. Having swallowed a bellyful of seeds from the Dandelion Mandragora, the spike of crystal that was its behavioral matrix drove it to its next objective.

As the mouse ran, from above, blobs of gelatinous bodies began to fall, each one landing where the mouse was just a moment before. It was clear that the blobs were trying to capture the mouse. However, the mouse was fast and ran in an irregular and hard-to-predict pattern, deftly avoiding capture as it darted left and right.

Theodore knew that once the mouse undead leaves the confines of the terrarium, the slimes would begin to emerge, attempting to clean up the tower with their ingrained fervor. As such, Theodore made it so that the mouse would scutter about like a dying cockroach even as it makes its way towards the extraction point.

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Using the mouse's innate senses, the mouse undead followed the airflow even as it dodged the incoming slimes, catching the attention of the mages walking by. It was unfortunate that there were witnesses, but it couldn't be avoided. There were simply too many variables that Theodore was incapable of accounting for. The only thing he could do was to make sure that the mages couldn't trace the mouse back to him.

In time, the mouse arrived before a vent, secured with a grate that a mouse of this size usually wouldn't be able to pass through and installed in a high place where it couldn't reach. However, having been in the tower at least once, Theodore knew what to prepare for in this instance.

Like suction cups, the mouse's feet firmly stuck to the clean and smooth wall of the tower interior and quickly climbed towards the vent with ease, all the while dodging the slimes dropping from above. Once it reached its target, the mouse undead, having all of its bones and a majority of its organs removed, easily squeezed its way through the grate and made its way inside.

The slimes, tenacious as they were, gave chase and even began to appear within the vent as well. Though, as if designed in such a way that they would not clog up the vents and prevent airflow, no matter how much the slimes tried to trap the mouse, they always were inclined to leave a gap in their entrapment, ones just large enough for this boneless undead to exploit.

After what felt like a long time, the mouse saw the light at the end of the vent. With one last spurt, the mouse squeezed its way through the final grate, the spike-shaped behavioral matrix sticking out of it barely scraping by before the mouse finally arrived outside of the tower.

Having made it out of the tower walls, the mouse began to plunge towards the ground as there were no platforms on which the mouse could stand on. There was only a steep, slanting wall of the tower which became narrower the higher up it goes.

The mouse plunged for many meters before flattening and spreading its body wide, using its own skin as wings to glide across the air with. By this point, the behavioral matrix was barely sticking on, about to fall off at any moment. If even just the behavioral matrix was found, there was a possibility of it being traced back to Theodore due to it being made of Aether within his own body, crystalized along with his blood, protein, salt, and traces of materials usually found in one's bloodstream.

Fortunately, a black shadow swept by just in the nick of time, grabbing the mouse out of the air with its talons and taking off into the distance.

With that, the little undead thief was extracted.

***

End of Chapter 57

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