Chapter 21: The World Below
The descent began in near-peaceful silence.
Freya moved at a steady pace through the tunnel, the bandit’s sword in hand, Kyū and Roku trotting on either side of her. Last time, these galleries had been crawling with goblins. She was expecting to find the same vermin.
She was wrong.
The first silhouette that lunged out of a recess stood a good head taller than her. Skin of gray shading into dark green, broad shoulders, a crude club in its fist.
A hobgoblin? Freya froze for a second. Alone? Last time they only had one, and it was the leader of the nest...
The creature charged. Kyū was faster.
The little Berserker shot forward like a cannonball, slammed into the monster’s knee with a dry crack, and ran up its torso, shredding everything on the way. The hobgoblin collapsed before it even understood what was attacking it.
"Kyu!"
"Nice work." Freya stepped over the corpse, thoughtful. The nest has evolved... That promises to be fun.
What followed proved her right. Two more hobgoblins further in, then a third, each dispatched by the fox duo with an efficiency that almost spared her from raising her sword at all. Kyū barreled straight into them, true to his path. Roku slid along their flanks, striking at the joints, precise, economical, silent.
Those two complement each other well, actually.
It was at the bend of a long corridor, after the fourth hobgoblin, that the window appeared.
[ The Mycofox Soldier "Roku" has met the conditions for evolution! ]
[ Please choose an evolution path: ]
[ -> Path of Rage: Mycofox Berserker ]
[ -> Path of the Bulwark: Mycofox Sentinel ]
[ -> Path of Shadow: Mycofox Stalker ]
"Oh! Roku!" Freya crouched down in front of the little soldier. "It’s your turn!"
Roku stared at her with his eternal grumpy look.
"So, what would you like? Rage, like Kyū? The bulwark? Or shadow?"
The fox tilted his head, seemed to weigh the question. Then his mushroom slowly turned black, until it nearly melted into the gloom of the tunnel.
"...Shadow, then." Freya smiled. "I should have guessed. Sir prefers to work unnoticed. System, the Path of Shadow for Roku, please."
[ Evolution in progress... ]
[ Mycofox Soldier -> Mycofox Stalker! ]
Light wrapped around the small figure. When it faded, Roku hadn’t grown a single centimeter, but everything about him had sharpened. His fur had darkened to an inky gray, almost liquid in the dimness. His legs had lengthened, slim and supple, ending in needle-like claws. And his luminescent cap had flattened, swept back, its glow dimmed to a faint halo, like a lamp turned low.
[ Roku — Mycofox Stalker — Rank E ]
[ Skills: Shadow Step | Shadow Strike ]
"Look at you..." Freya reached out to scratch him. "A proper little assassin."
Roku turned his head away, as if he found the compliment unnecessary. But his cap, for one second, flushed pink.
Kyū circled his comrade, sniffing him from every angle, visibly annoyed at no longer being the only evolved one in the group.
"Come on, boys. Let’s keep moving."
The tunnel kept descending, and after a while, it opened onto what Freya had been both dreading and hoping for: a chamber. Wide, high-ceilinged, lit by a greenish glow.
And at its center, surrounded by three hobgoblins, stood a goblin unlike any she had ever seen. Small, hunched, draped in hides and bones, a staff topped with a skull in its hand. Crude symbols painted across its whole body, and in its eyes, a gleam of the same sickly color as the chamber.
A shaman.
The staff rose before she’d even finished the thought. A sphere of greenish energy formed at its tip, swelling by the second, while the three hobgoblins were already charging.
"Kyū, Roku! The big ones are yours!"
The quill pen leapt from her pocket in the same motion, and a wall of ink rose across the monsters’ path, breaking their charge. Kyū slammed into the first one head-on with a shrill roar. Roku, for his part, had simply vanished, before bursting out of the second one’s shadow, claws first.
Freya never took her eyes off the shaman.
"System! Enchantment Gacha on this blade!"
[ Activating Enchantment Gacha... ]
[ Rolling... ]
The world seemed to slow. The wheel spun somewhere at the corner of her vision, and Freya felt her heart speed up, that familiar mix of excitement and terror of a gamer watching a pull.
Please, not a Rank G, not a Rank G, not a—
[ Enchantment obtained: Supreme Sharpness — Rank A ]
[ The enchanted blade cuts through matter with extraordinary keenness. Duration: 24 hours. ]
A Rank A?!
The bandit’s sword lit up with a bluish gleam, a thread of light running the full length of its edge. The worn, chipped blade vibrated softly in her hands, as if awakened.
The shaman hurled its sphere.
Freya didn’t think. She lunged forward and swung the sword in a wide arc.
The blade met the sphere of energy, and cut it in two. The halves streaked past on either side of her and exploded against the walls. Without stopping, carried by her momentum and her newly strengthened body, Freya crossed the distance to the shaman.
The goblin only had time to widen its eyes.
The blade went in at the shoulder and came out at the opposite hip. There was almost no resistance, just a soft, sickening give — flesh, bone and bone-staff severed in a single motion. The upper half slid slowly sideways, with a wet sound she wouldn’t forget anytime soon, and the two pieces crumpled to the ground in a spray of dark blood. A smell of iron and entrails rose to her nose, acrid, thick.
Freya looked down at what remained of the shaman, at the blood dripping along her bluish blade, and at the spatter dotting her sleeve.
...I see. The gore is multiplied when you’re on the front line. She swallowed, stomach at her lips, unable to look away. Kyū was doing me a real favor, actually.
Behind her, one last rattle: the foxes were finishing off the third hobgoblin. Silence fell over the chamber again.
"...Wow." Freya gazed at her blade, the bluish thread still running beneath the blood. She was torn between elation and a slight dizziness. A Rank A, and I carve up a spellcaster like a stick of butter. So what would a Rank SSS even look like...? she thought, already picturing herself splitting mountains in half, giddy as a child.
She shook her head, and her gaze turned to the back of the chamber.
Where last time there had been nothing but darkness, a passage now opened. And at its far end, very far away, something was shining.
Light? Down here?
She exchanged a look with her two foxes, and stepped into the passage. The glow grew as she advanced, warm, golden, brighter and brighter, until the tunnel suddenly opened wide.
And Freya stopped dead.
"Huh?"
Before her, below, stretched a world.
Not a cavern. Not a chamber. A world. An immensity as far as the eye could see, so vast her eyes couldn’t find its edges, crowned by a vault so high it vanished into luminous haze.
Mana crystals. Thousands, millions of crystals embedded in the vault and the distant walls, shedding a soft golden light that bathed everything, like an eternal early afternoon. An artificial sun, shattered into an infinity of glittering fragments.
And beneath it, life.
A forest stretched for kilometers, immense trees with trunks as wide as towers, their canopies swaying in a breeze that had no business existing. In the distance, a colossal silhouette moved among the treetops, a long-necked beast calmly grazing on the crowns of the trees, indifferent to the rest of the world. Flocks of flying creatures wheeled higher up, too far to identify, their wings catching the crystal light in flashes.
To her right, a waterfall poured down an entire cliff face, feeding a river that wound glittering through the forest. The rumble of the water reached her, muffled by distance, mingled with the cries of unknown animals, songs, calls, the whole hum of a complete ecosystem living down here, beneath her feet, for who knew how many centuries.
Freya stood motionless for a long moment, the sword hanging at the end of her arm, her breath gone.
This is...
She had no words. She, the jaded gamer who had combed through hundreds of virtual worlds, stood at the edge of this one like a child at her first fireworks.
An entire world. An entire world hidden beneath my lands.
And on the heels of that thought came another, cold and clear.
This is what the anonymous one is after. It can’t be anything else. Her gaze swept the luminous immensity. Is this what came of the battle between the demigod and the dragon king from the legend?
She let the idea settle, then, for now, tucked it away in a corner. The calculations could wait. Because in front of a sight like this, even the Calamity of Greed had the right to breathe for five minutes.
"Kyu! Kyuuu!"
Kyū was already tearing down the grassy slope below, wild with joy, rolling through the tall grass before bouncing back onto his paws. Roku followed at a more dignified pace, but his swept-back cap had flushed pink without him being able to do anything about it.
Freya laughed, and went down after them.
The grass was warm under her palms. She let herself drop into it, and Kyū pounced on her at once, kneading her stomach with his little paws, his snout burrowed into her neck. She grabbed him with both hands and lifted him above her.
"So, you like it here? Hm?"
"Kyuuu!"
"Yeah, me too." She set him back down against her and scratched the top of his skull, between the two horn nubs. The little Berserker, terror of hobgoblins, instantly melted into a purring puddle of bliss, his cap bright pink.
Don’t ever change, you.
Roku came and settled against her hip, all casual, as if by pure coincidence. She scratched him with her other hand, and the three of them stayed there, sprawled in the grass of an impossible world, under a sun of crystals.
A true paradise, in the middle of her lands.
Freya closed her eyes, just for a second, and smiled.
Alright. Let’s just enjoy this. It can’t hurt.
That was when the shiver ran through her.
Not an ordinary shiver. Something she had never felt in her life, not in this world nor the old one. An icy jolt that started at her nape and raced down her entire spine, raising every inch of her skin, emptying the air from her lungs. Kyū and Roku sprang up in the same instant, fur bristling, fangs bared, their caps turning a livid white she had never seen on them before.
Her body knew before she did. It turned her head on its own.
Far away, at the edge of the forest, something stood among the trees.
A silhouette. Humanoid, but too tall, stretched out like a shadow at sunset. Entirely black, a matte, total black that reflected none of the crystals’ golden light, a cutout of nothingness laid over the landscape. It had no face. No features, no mouth, nothing.
Nothing, except two eyes.
Two red eyes, gleaming, that seemed to float on the surface of that perfect black, detached from any anatomy. And from its back rose two wings. Immense, half-spread between the trunks, so vast they could have wrapped around a house, membranous and black like the rest, cutting their shape against the luminous forest.
It didn’t move.
It was watching her.
From hundreds of meters away, Freya felt that gaze settle on her with the precision of a hand on her throat.
And her whole body, every muscle, every nerve, every instinct inherited from the depths of time, was screaming one single thing at her.
Run.
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