NOVEL NEXT Chapter 443 – Welcome
The passengers Tess’ [Farsight] spotted were killed by a hoard of monsters that seems to have surrounded us as well. Tiny bug-like things that cling to the walls and spread an invisible poison through the air.
It's powerful enough to slowly kill people approaching level 200 and even over it if you stay longer in it or if it's more concentrated.
At first, you only feel a bit lightheaded; later, you start having trouble breathing, and by the end, you find your lungs have been paralyzed and now you can’t breathe. Sure, your enhanced body will allow you to survive a bit longer given its reduced need for air, but between that and your knowledge of what’s to come, it only serves to prolong your suffering.
Tess and Min-Jae work with the other groups to kill these monsters from a distance, while others hang back and disperse the poisonous clouds with wind based abilities, reducing the potential for harm through dilution.
And so we continue. A group of 30 people or so, all making their way deeper underground to meet this shut-in Champion who’s apparently been here for the last century. Step by step, we keep finding more and more corpses belonging to the other passengers.
We eventually start seeing other groups head back the way we came, rushing to get back to the Deathtrap and the cave we started in, either in an attempt to fix the old and rusty SDAT or to hide while they wait for us to do all the work.
They can’t move Deathtrap though, not even a bit. There is not a single speck of mana remaining in the core, and all the important rooms are closed off. Heavy metal-plated doors sealing the entrances. Especially after the emergency shutdown the remaining guide and I triggered.
I’m also dead certain that the monsters will just be waiting there as well.
The slope of the tunnel starts increasing at a steady rate as it grows ever wider, despite already being wide enough to accommodate a large building within its walls. Like tiny sparks of light, our orbs and items fly through the air, throwing light on just small pieces of it, unable to light it entirely because of the sheer size.
I have a theory, I think the reason it’s so wide is so that more sand can rush in. The thylarin brothers said a grain of sand could easily trigger the extermination protocols if the Champion were to make contact, but I can’t help but think there would have to be another way to trigger it.
What if the Champion left his cell? Or figured out a way to use mana somehow? I know that’s how I would go about it if I wanted to trap something so powerful.
Walking even deeper, we find a group of 20 people, all dead, each one sliced into dozens of pieces.
The cuts are extremely smooth and clean, and it looks like it all happened at once. I keep my orb floating over the bodies and create another, moving it a bit further down the corridor before taking a seat. The others follow my lead, observing from a distance and trying to discern the cause of the carnage before us.
I sense Izzy and Sophie seeking out any living beings. Tess is scanning with her eyes and Min-Jae uses his eye, seeking out any shifts in the local gravity. He said that everybody should have the tiniest gravitational field, so he should be able to see it with his yellow eye. He hasn’t been able to do it yet, but he keeps trying nonetheless.
“We’re all going to die down here.” The guide cries plopping down on the ground next to me.
His face still bears an expression of exhaustion, tiredness, bags under his eyes, messy hair.
“Want to try to fly Deathtrap?” I ask him curiously.
“We can’t.” He says, resolutely shaking his head and burying his face in his hands. “The SDAT was made like that on purpose. Yes, for a while, you can control it with two people, maybe one, but then the ship starts its checks, and if there aren’t three people at the controls, it will stop flying.”
“Could you modify it?”
“Given a few weeks? Probably yes, but actually no. I can’t talk about it any more, but if I tried to modify it, I would die.”
“Worst case, I’ll take care of it,” I shrug my shoulders.
“That doesn’t solve our problem with mana.”
“Yup, you are right.”
Our conversation ends with that, and I go back to looking for whatever killed the other passengers.
Unfortunately, Tess beats me to it. “Threads, there are spider-like threads stretched out across the tunnel and more below.”
By way of demonstration, she reaches out with her [Psychokinesis] and grabs a severed leg. She lifts it up and to the right, at which point it splits in two, cut by an impossibly thin and strong thread, almost without resistance. At least that’s what I think is happening.
Though that does beg the question, what if someone with a very high constitution or high levels of body strengthening tried to walk through, would they be able to tear these threads apart? Logically, it should be possible.
I watch as they find the thread closest to us and test different stuff against it. They try cutting into it with a weapon, and most of the time the weapon loses, the only thing that seems to work without damaging the items are weapons of mid epic and higher rarity. Disruption skills don’t work either, of course, the threads clearly weren’t made with mana. You can’t even sense them with mana senses.
Fire seems to work well against them, it just needs to be concentrated a bit and the thread will burn. A serious weakness, but understandable.
We loot the bodies for anything worthwhile and continue deeper.
The groups under Famir and Heryd the vyssari lose two members, to a thread they missed and by moving too far to the side. One of them doesn’t die instantly and screams begging Lily to heal him. She even moves to help him, but Tess grabs her shoulder and holds her back. She whispers something into our healer’s ear, and the man dies a few seconds later.
They loot his body, and we continue.
Ten minutes later, we find ourselves approaching a bridge. It’s just wide enough for a single person to cross and stretches far, far into the distance. I launch a small thermal orb right over it, and it is impossibly straight, and Tess continues to watch long after the tiny speck of light disappears.
Our best estimate places the distance at a few miles.
The structure of this bridge alone makes me more nervous than the threads before, more even than our ever-decreasing mana reserves and the dangers ahead.
The bridge is made out of stone, but there are no support pillars under it. It’s as thick as a person and a bit wider, and the only supports are the anchor points where we stand and the other side.
And yet it still holds strong. Tess and Min-Jae grab some huge stones and launch them far ahead, where they crash solidly into the middle of the bridge, resulting in no damage at all. The bridge doesn’t even shake, despite the stones being heavier than six men combined. And to top it all off the only thing to either side of the bridge is a pit of darkness, yawning below, an almost liquid sort of darkness that refuses to be driven back by our skills, and items.
Any light that touches it doesn’t pierce deeper, but the stones we throw in fall for almost 20 seconds. Min-Jae puts the estimate at around a mile deep.
Of course, I could fly, I could use kinetic energy to move myself to the other side.
But I don’t.
Together with the others, I step on the bridge and walk carefully.
The bridge doesn’t shake, there are no monsters popping up, there are no other traps. Even so, my heart is beating wildly.
Step after step, our group of thirty odd people quietly traverse the narrow bridge. No one says a word. No one makes a sound.
I can fly. I repeat to myself. I’m superhuman and there are dozens of ways I could survive the fall. I could use an anchor, I have my mana arms, and I have kinetic energy. I could even survive the landing, using my skills to slow my fall. But for some stupid, illogical reason, my heart won’t stop trying to jump out of my chest.
I shouldn’t be afraid, but I feel fear, and I’m savoring that feeling.
One of Heryd’s vyssari falls down. He just loses his balance and screams, immediately disappearing into the darkness under the bridge.
We can hear his voice as he falls for the next 20 seconds, growing steadily quieter, and then there is a thump and silence.
Then something starts eating the body.
We shouldn’t be hearing it from this distance, and yet we can. As audibly as if the beast were right next to us. A wet noise of a sharp maw tearing still-warm flesh and slurping on the blood. We hear bones snapping and something akin to slurping noises.
When it finally does stop a few seconds later, I know the body is gone. And we continue over the bridge slower than before. Quieter than before.
By the time we reach the middle of the bridge, the darkness surrounding it reaches our knees. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s not smoke, It’s not a skill, it’s certainly nothing physical I could sense. Our lights stop being able to pierce it.
The bridge that was already narrow is now gone, invisible to us, the stone under our feet an only reminder that it is still there.
Our small expedition stops and I can feel something touching my feet, something I can’t see or sense. There is no mana, no heat, no kinetic energy in the movement.
A scream breaks out somewhere behind me, and another member of the expedition falls into the darkness below.
Twenty seconds. Thump.
More sounds of tearing flesh, and snapping bones.
Then quiet.
Someone laughs maniacally and launches a bombardment of attacks into the darkness below us.
Nothing changes.
Around half of the expedition turns around to leave.
Those that stay are the members of group 4, Dravos, Drekar, Kallus, Heryd with some of his group, and Famir along with the bulk of his.
“Let’s continue,” Tess says, her calm voice ringing out in the darkness, just before she jumps into the air, leaping over several other members of our expedition.
She lands gently in front of everyone, on the narrow bridge that is now invisible. Just a small deviation, and she would be falling down.
Silence reigns.
I can fly, Tess can fly. There are dozens of ways to survive this. I remind myself of that once more. But something feels off.
Everyone here is either approaching level 200 or well over. So why did those people just fall? Why weren’t their reflexes quick enough to grab the bridge? How could that happen when they can bulldoze through most buildings. Hell, some of them could probably destroy entire cities.
And yet they still managed to fall from the bridge?
Something touches my feet again, it feels like a wave washing over my feet, like a myriad of snakes crawling over my legs.
Everyone seems to be feeling the same sensations too, some swing their weapons at whatever it is.
They hit nothing.
We continue to walk much slower, everyone takes step after step, feeling for the edge before committing to a step. Our progress slows to a crawl, but we continue all the same.
Tess refuses to tell us how far we have to reach the end, so with no other choice, we walk.
No one else falls, and we reach the opposite side of the bridge.
Having finally reached the other side, we turn to look back the way we came, the darkness has retreated back under the bridge which still stands, just as solid as before.
I etch that view into my memory. A narrow stone footbridge lit by my orbs, and the darkness below, the pitch black depths looming as if they were waiting to consume the light.
We turn our backs and continue.
There are no more monsters, no doors, no traps, and like that, we reach the center of this place and light it as much as possible.
Once again we find ourselves on a massive platform, surrounded by the same darkness as before. We throw a few stones into it. They fall for 20 seconds just like they did before, only to be swallowed by the silence.
We cross that darkness on another footbridge, this time much shorter. Only a tenth of the one from before. No one dies this time.
The platform is extremely big and circular. The surface is made of a dark blue metal leaning towards black. It’s extremely smooth, there are no cracks, no imperfections. It almost looks alien. The platform has three bridges branching off into a series of different tunnels, including the one we used. It’s likely that there were three entrances we could have taken - and the Deathtrap happened to fly into the closest.
In the exact center of the platform is a massive, perfectly round hole cut cleanly into the metallic surface. The edges are unnaturally smooth and precise as if they had been made by something far beyond anything we know. The sides are smooth and polished, plummeting straight down, its depths seeming to rival the height of a fifteen-story building.
We can see the bottom, where the light reflects faintly off the same alien material, giving it an unsettling, mirrored look.
And there sits a single man, his back resting against the wall.
He’s looking up. Not just in an effort to see out of the hole either, he’s looking straight at us even before we look over the edge.
The man has blue skin, but this thylarin has six arms, instead of the normal 4. Or he would've, were 5 of them not reduced to a set of short stumps poking from his white clothes.
He smiles at us and waves his remaining hand.
“Welcome,” he says, his voice calm and oddly soothing.