Keiran

My shield ward flared to life, protecting me from the impact – but not the pin. Whatever had smacked into me, I still couldn’t see or sense anything at all. I scrunched my eyes closed, wove mana together, and took advantage of the universal weakness of practically all subterranean creatures.

Light bloomed in the air around me, prompting a startled and pained cry from a… thing. I’d never seen anything quite like it. Its whole body was transparent, only visible now because of the light reflecting off its skin in scintillating patterns as it flailed about. It was a giant, easily twenty feet tall, with mitts the size of my chest.

The monster pulled away from me, releasing me from the wall and letting me fall away from it. That was great, since gravity allowed me to put some distance between us, but at the same time, my light orb dropped with me. As soon as the monster was outside its radius, it became completely invisible again. I halted my descent and forced the orb back up, but the thing was already gone.

Something slammed into me from behind and sent me spinning away, but it was gone again before the light could reveal it. I had a simple solution to that: more light. Six more orbs flashed into existence around me, illuminating everything within a hundred feet, but no monster.

The light stung my eyes, but a bit of magic fixed that up. I sent out the orbs to scour the open air, but whatever the thing was, it was quick enough to get away. The orbs spun around me in an ever-expanding circle, not revealing anything, but not letting it get close enough to hit me again, either.

If it wasn’t going to come back into the light, I’d just have to hunt it down. Just because I couldn’t see it with my eyes or sense its mana didn’t mean it could hide from my divinations. There were dozens of ways to detect monsters, everything from vibrations in the ground to shifting air currents to sensing blood or even the presence of life itself. Something was going to show me where this creature was; I just had to figure out what.

Actually, now that I thought about it, there was no real reason to do this the hard way. Light spells were cheap, even without lossless casting. How big could this hole under the ground possibly be?

The lights flared as I poured more and more mana into them. When that failed to illuminate the whole cavern, I added more lights and set them to flying about randomly as they expanded.

The creature, whatever it was, was fast, I’d give it that. Three different times I caught light reflecting off parts of its body as it dodged around. Each time, I concentrated more magic into that area, only to find that it was gone again. Frowning, I started trying to calculate just how quick it could move and whether I was actually leaving it avenues to escape through in the darkness. Based on my initial assessment of its size, I should have already fenced it in.

Even if I wasn’t catching it directly with the light, just the mere presence of the orbs should have been enough to blind it, but the creature didn’t seem to be hindered at all. Perhaps it had some sort of short-range teleportation ability, though if so, its core shielding was so strong that I still couldn’t sense it at all. If not that, then it had to be some sort of shape shifter.

Or I was mistaken about how many opponents I was fighting. There was no reason to assume only one of the creatures existed.

More surprisingly, despite being up to twenty light orbs all shining at four times their normal strength, I still couldn't find the ends of this cavern. Despite the many, many stories saying otherwise, our world was not riddled with endless underground caverns and tunnels. It barely even had the worm-eaten tunnels I’d been following, and those were only temporary. Not even the rock worms plaguing the mountains around my valley dug caverns like this.

A simple novice-tier spell obviously wasn’t appropriate for this situation anymore. Fortunately, light was a very common side effect of many conjurations, and trying to hunt down my attacker—and failing—I was plenty annoyed.

A line of fire cut through the darkness, stretching out a thousand feet, then two, before finally splashing against the stone. It was joined by a dozen more streaking away from me in every direction, all filling the cavern with the light of day. When that still wasn’t enough, I cast explosive blasts into the air all around me, each one a burst of brilliant white fire that sent waves of heat rolling into my shield ward. Without my magic to protect me, my lungs would have been seared by my own spells.

And there, finally, was the thing that had attacked me. It was vaguely humanoid but with too-long arms and a hunched appearance. It had no real neck to speak of, just a head that sat directly on its chest. A long tail curled around its feet, and it took me a moment to realize that there was some sort of skin flap connecting its torso and arms together to form something approximating wings.

That was all the detail I could get, since even in bright light, it was still nothing more than a shimmering outline. It could have fur or scales or be completely naked flesh for all I knew. What was important was that I had eyes on it. The next flame lance I cast was aimed directly at the monster,

It shrieked in agony and tried to flee, but I kept the light on it. It was fast, but not to the speed I’d expected, which likely meant it needed the darkness to freely shift around using some spell similar to shadow step. Given its sheer size, it probably had the mana reserves to use a spell that cheap a hundred times, even with a dormant core. Since I had no proof that its core was dormant, I had to assume its movement was unlimited as long as it was in the darkness.

It was the perfect predator for its environment, but once it was exposed in the light, there was nothing it could do to fight back.

At least, that was what I thought, until it ripped up a chunk of stone out of the floor with its bare hands and threw it several hundred feet in my direction with startling accuracy. I caught the stone with greater telekinesis and redirected it back to the monster, though just barely. I wouldn’t have been able to stop the missile’s momentum with an intermediate-tier spell, not at that weight and speed.

The stone crashed into the monster and sent it sprawling, leaving it wide open to be struck by a few more flame lances. Less than a minute later, its shrieks ended and it stopped thrashing. Its body flickered into true visibility once its mind no longer shaped its mana, which I could now feel draining out of its corpse.

It had pale, colorless scales, sickly white like so many other creatures that lived in lightless environments. Really, it was the perfect ambush predator for this giant cave I’d found myself in. The strange part was that there didn’t seem to be much of anything else here for it to actually eat. Admittedly, I still hadn’t found the walls on this place, but I had to have covered a fair amount of its interior just trying to hunt down my attacker.

This was all a distraction, in the end. I wasn’t here to go spelunking or fight off unfriendly wildlife. I was here to find a shortcut to the worm nest my scrying beacons had alerted me to. Whatever this monster was, whatever it hunted to feed itself, and however good it was at doing that were not details that were relevant to my goals.

I cast out scrying spells in every direction while I flew west and kept myself in a wide area of bright light just in case there were any more of the camouflaged beasts roaming around. I was unlikely to see them outside the sphere of light centered on me, but as long as they didn’t attack me, their presence remained nothing more than a curiosity.

My scrying quickly revealed the presence of no less than six tunnels leading away from the cavern. Four went in completely the wrong direction, going east and south at least far enough to not make it worth the time to explore them in the hopes that they’d turn back farther in. Of the remaining two, both went generally westward, but one sloped down and the other remained level. Since I needed to descend deeper under the surface, it was an obvious choice which way to go.

Still, I sent scrying spells down both of them to make sure they continued in their general directions. After a few thousand feet, I started to reconsider my initial choice. The downward sloping tunnel was dropping at such a sharp rate that I suspected I’d end up having to burrow back up to get to the worms. It might be better to just keep going west until I came out the other side of this chunk of stone and got back into sand. Then I could try to find new worm-bored tunnels to follow.

Unfortunately, scrying through hundreds of feet of solid ground just wasn’t feasible. No matter which choice I made, it would ultimately be a guess. After considering the path both tunnels took, I decided I’d be more likely to find the edge of the stone by going straight, and started down the appropriate tunnel.

I’d only gone a thousand feet before I slowed my flight and came to a halt. Scrying spells could sense mana, but it wasn’t nearly as easy to feel it out as when I was there in person. There was a mass of mana down there, though, something big enough to be noticeable and entirely stationary. It probably wasn’t a chunk of moon core, but it was worth investigating.

I turned back and started down the other tunnel instead. A few minutes later, it turned into a straight chute that narrowed too much for me to get through without altering it, but a simple stone shape spell got me past that bottleneck and gave me access to another cave.

Unlike the first one I’d entered, this one was only about two hundred feet wide. Its walls were a smooth and glassy black, like volcanic glass, and its floor was wavy like the sea on a windy day, only frozen in place. In the middle of all that was the source of the mana I’d sensed down here, and it definitely wasn’t a chunk of Amodir’s moon core.

It was a stone tree, for lack of a better word. There were no leaves, and the branches were too evenly spaced and symmetrical to be anything but purposefully designed. The trunk was thirty feet tall and five feet wide, smooth black stone just like the rest of the chamber. Strangest of all, there were millions of tiny holes in it, just big enough for some ant-like creatures to crawl in and out of.

Much like the monster I’d killed up above, each one was transparent, seemingly made from the purest living glass. That was where the similarities ended. They had no reaction to the encroaching light of my magic at all, not a single one of them.

It took only a moment’s examination for me to realize that they had no eyes to see with. No amount of light would matter to them, because as far as these creatures were concerned, there was no such thing. If I remained motionless and silent, would they be able to sense me at all?

‘It has been thousands of generations since we were last threatened by the devourers,’ a voice calmly announced in my head. ‘But do not make the mistake of thinking that we have forgotten the old ways. Take this as your one and only warning to turn back now, while you can still leave under your own power.’