Chapter 41: 41: The Underneath Part 4

I fell to the ground the moment my hands were free from their bindings. It was like all of my energy had been sapped away by the sight that had unfolded before me.

Rin hadn't needed to die.

Rin hadn't even needed to be here.

Now, she had perished in the very room that her abusers had locked her away in ten decades ago, by a creature that was desperate to devour her very essence. A creature that had succeeded in devouring her very essence.

[ Mission failed! ]

[ Penalty applied: XP gain from your next ten fights will be cut in half! ]

I let out a scream, raw and guttural. I didn't care too much about the penalty that had been applied, but the pop-up from the system was the final confirmation of what I knew to be the case. Rin was dead, and there was no longer anything I could do to save her.

I felt Yr'Arl hoist me up from my foetal position on the floor. I leaned on him for support as he dragged me up to a standing position. The world past in a blur as I was taken back up the stairs and through the horror show that was the warehouse floor.

With the sole exception of Lara, I hadn't really lost anything after coming to this universe. It'd been fight after fight of constant escalation, but I'd managed to hold my own if not outright win every single battle that I had been a part of. Even when Lara had sacrificed herself that had still technically been a win, I mean I had received a reward for getting through it.

This situation though, no matter which way you painted it, was a total and complete loss.

"Where's Rin?" Fal asked as we drew closer to her. That just set off my anguish all over again.

"She… Did not make it through the ordeal," Yr'Arl replied, as he gingerly set me down on the ground.

"I… I'm sorry," I rasped. "I couldn't stop it… That thing… It was too powerful."

Fal looked at me in disbelief, her eyes cycling between all manner of colours as her emotions went just as haywire as my own.

"It was not Jacob Lyre's fault," Yr'Arl said. "I am truly of the belief that he did everything that he could in order to safeguard Rin's life. But, in the end, I do not think that even all three of us together would have stood a chance against the horrifying creature that stalked those halls."

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"So...There was a Null Space Invader down there?" Fal asked, the realisation dawning on her.

"No… I've fought Null Space Invaders, and this wasn't just that," I said, as I finally tried to pull myself back together.

I had borne witness to something more horrifying than I ever would have had to see back in my home universe. But, I was likely to see even more horrifying things going forward. If we were going to stop even more people from dying in the exact same way that Rin had died I was going to have to get back on the horse. There wasn't a moment to lose. Who knew how many of those things were waiting out there.

"It was… a hybrid of sorts… an amalgamation of two beings, forced together and integrated at the most base level," Yr'Arl began.

"Someone has taken a Null Space Invader and, somehow, has managed to fuse it with the DNA of a creature from my homeworld, the homeworld of the Humans, Earth," I said.

There was a gasp from both Fal and Yr'Arl, clearly the cat-like alien hadn't known where the rest of the creature's genetic makeup had come from.

"On Earth, they had these creatures called spiders, little arachnids with exo-skeletons, eight legs, and the ability to shoot webbing out of spinnerets," I began to explain. "For the most part they weren't dangerous at all, but despite that a lot of people managed to get arachnophobia, an inherent fear of all arachnids. For some reason, someone has merged the DNA of a Null Space Invader and the DNA of a spider. That… thing… was the result."

"I didn't even realise you could splice a Null Space Invader with another creature, it sounds absurd… and I'm sorry Jacob… but it sounds like something only humans would be able to do," Fal said.

I nodded. I had come to a similar conclusion. The Humans of this universe relied much more on their technological prowess than any ability with manna, primarily because they had no real aptitude for magic in the first place. If Null Space Invaders subsisted off of manna, and could absorb and redirect it, then the perfect enemies to fight them would have been the human race.

That meant that humanity was also the primary suspect in being able to create Null Space Invader hybrids. The fact that the creature had been hybridized with something that could only be found on Earth was just the final nail in the coffin.

I hadn't come from this planet's Earth, and I was getting tired of blaming myself for all of the wrongs that my species had done in this universe, but I had still held out some level of hope that one day I'd be able to meet another human. The isolation of being surrounded by alien life did get to me sometimes.

But this? It was the final straw. If humans had done this, I was going to put them down. Hard.

"Either way," I said, finally drawing myself up to a standing position, "We still have a mission, and we still have people to save. Fal, I'm not going to let your partner die in the same way that Rin did, and I'm not going to let Akash die either. We're going to save them, no matter what it takes. So, to that end, did you find anything on their servers?"

Fal's eyes finally stopped cycling through all of their colours. They settled on one that I knew the emotion for.

They settled on green, the Lyrin colour for hope.

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