Chapter 106: An Evil Spirit [Bonus Chapter]
Tasmin moved up to his other side with her chained daggers already slipping into her hands with a soft metallic clink.
"I don’t hear any breathing, my Lord but the ambient mana down there feels heavy."
Silas looked back at the five ironwood carts.
They were filled to the brim, overflowing with millions of credits worth of raw ore... well except one but it was almost full
They had achieved their goal. The smart, safe play would be to turn around, seal the cave, drag the loot back to the Blessed Land, and ignore the creepy hidden tunnel until he had a bigger army and better gear but Silas was a gamer from Earth.
And gamers didn’t ignore newly discovered map zones when the prompt popped up on their screen.
"The crates are full," Silas said, looking at the squad. "We’ve maxed out our hauling capacity for today so we don’t have anywhere to put more rock."
He turned back to the dark void, his grip tightening on his pickaxe handle.
"However let’s see where this goes."
A collective grin spread across the faces of his women.
They were tired of hitting rocks anyway as they were fighters.
Brida cracked her knuckles, tossing her mining tool aside and hoisting the massive axe onto her shoulder.
The gravity runes on the axe flared to life, humming with violent intent. Tasmin twirled her daggers with the dark crimson flames igniting at the tips and casting a sinister red glow over the dust.
Eluned floated forward, holding her hand up.
She summoned a bright, glowing green orb of pure nature mana, illuminating the smooth walls of the hidden tunnel.
"Stay in formation," Silas ordered with his tone shifting back to the commanding Lord. "Watch your corners. If something jumps out, we turn it into paste."
Without another word, Silas led his squad forward, stepping over the rubble of the broken wall and walking straight into the dark.
The air grew colder with every step they took.
The sounds of the dripping water from the main cavern faded away, replaced by the eerie dead silence of the subterranean corridor.
The smooth, melted walls reflected the green light of Eluned’s orb, showing no signs of pickaxe marks or dwarven engineering.
"Whoever made this didn’t want visitors... I’m sure of it..." Thora muttered, walking close behind Silas with her lightning-runed shortsword drawn. "This rock is fused. It takes intense sustained thermal heat to glass obsidian like this."
"Keep your eyes open," Morwenna whispered, her hand tight on her cutlass.
They walked for what felt like ten minutes with the tunnel winding gently downward in a slow spiral.
The wireframe map in Silas’s vision kept updating, drawing a path deeper and deeper under the Umbral Basin.
Finally, the narrow corridor began to widen. The smooth walls opened up, leading into another chamber.
They walked for what felt like ten minutes, the tunnel winding gently downward in a slow spiral.
The wireframe map in Silas’s vision kept updating, drawing a path deeper and deeper under the Umbral Basin.
Finally, the narrow corridor began to widen. The smooth walls opened up, leading into another chamber.
Silas kept his grip tight on the handle of his pickaxe.
He half-expected to see a towering boss monster waiting in the dark.
He expected a rusted dungeon filled with traps, or a nest of corrupted beasts ready to tear them apart however what he didn’t expect to see... was a jewelry box.
Eluned floated forward, her glowing green orb of nature mana pushing the heavy shadows away.
As the emerald light washed over the room, the walls caught the illumination and reflected it back with blinding intensity.
The entire cavern was pristine.
It wasn’t made of the rough dark obsidian they had been mining closer to the surface. The stone here was a smooth, milky white, looking almost like polished marble.
And embedded into every single inch of that pale stone were massive clusters of pure silver ore...
It didn’t look like raw iron or standard mythril. These crystals glowed with their own faint cold light.
They branched out from the walls like frozen metallic lightning bolts, catching Eluned’s green orb and fracturing the light into a million different shimmering prisms.
The silence in the room was deafening.
Thora pushed past Silas with her heavy boots clicking against the smooth floor. She slowly reached up and pulled her welding goggles off her eyes, letting them hang around her neck.
Her jaw physically dropped.
"Boss," Thora whispered with her usual abrasive tone completely gone.
She sounded like a kid standing inside a vault of gold. "I have worked the deep-mountain forges since I was old enough to hold a hammer... I know the melting point of star-iron and I know the grain of void-amethysts."
She took a slow, hypnotized step toward the nearest wall.
"I have never seen this metal before in my life," Thora breathed.
Silas stared at the silver formations.
If a master dwarven blacksmith didn’t even recognize the material, the market value back in Valoria City would be astronomical depending on what it could be used for
Corporate guilds would bleed their accounts dry just to get a single sample of an unknown high-tier ore.
"Is it safe to mine?" Silas asked, scanning the room for traps.
Thora didn’t answer him.
She was already in a trance.
She walked right up to a massive, jagged silver spike protruding from the pale stone at chest height.
She didn’t pull out her pickaxe. She reached her bare, calloused hand out, wanting to feel the raw texture of the unknown crystal.
"Wait..." Eluned said sharply.
The Goddess of Nature didn’t just speak. She stopped hovering and planted her bare feet firmly on the stone floor.
Her glowing green eyes snapped wide open with the pupils dilating into sharp slits.
A wave of intense suffocating cold flooded the cavern, instantly dropping the temperature below freezing.
"Do not touch that!" Eluned shouted, her voice ringing with raw divine authority.
Thora’s fingers were inches from the silver crystal. She froze, looking back over her shoulder in confusion.
Silas saw it the exact second Eluned yelled.
It wasn’t a physical monster... It didn’t have bones, or armor, or a name bar floating above its head...
From the dark, shadowed crevices directly behind the silver crystal, a thick, invisible mass of dark smog violently poured out.
It moved with terrifying speed, rippling through the air like an oil slick in water. As it hit the green light of Eluned’s orb, the smog briefly took shape... a swirling, chaotic mass of screaming, distorted faces and jagged claws made of pure shadow.
It lunged straight for Thora’s outstretched hand.
Tasmin cursed with her chained daggers flashing as she tried to throw them, but she was too far away.
Brida roared, swinging her battleaxe, but hitting smoke with a chunk of heavy metal would do nothing.
Eluned didn’t flinch.
The Goddess thrust both of her hands forward and she didn’t bother with a chant.
A blinding explosion of emerald light erupted from her palms. The pure uncorrupted life energy shot across the room, weaving and twisting through the air with mind-bending speed.
The light hardened into thick, glowing vines of solid nature mana, forming a massive, intricate net right in the space between the silver crystal and Thora.
The dark smog slammed into the divine net.
SCREEEEEECH!
A horrific ear-piercing shriek tore through the cavern. The sound was so foul it made Silas’s teeth ache.
The smog thrashed and boiled against the glowing green vines, just inches from Thora’s nose.
The dark entity tried to slip through the gaps, but Eluned’s magic was too dense.
The life energy burned the shadow on contact, sizzling like water thrown onto a hot skillet.
Thora stumbled backward, finally realizing exactly how close she had just come to dying. She fell on her rear, her eyes wide as she stared at the shrieking mass of smoke trapped in the net.
Eluned clenched her jaw, sweat beading on her forehead.
"You vile disgusting parasite," Eluned hissed as she snapped her hands into tight fists.
The glowing net of vines violently contracted.
The emerald roots crushed inward with terrifying force, squeezing the dark smog into a tiny compressed ball of shadow.
The shrieking pitched higher, vibrating the stone walls before abruptly cutting off.
Pop!
Eluned crushed the entity out of existence. The dark smog dissolved into a handful of harmless gray ash, drifting down to the smooth floor.
The blinding green light faded, leaving the cavern illuminated only by the soft glow of the silver crystals and the floating orb.
Silas exhaled a slow tense breath.
He loosened his grip on his pickaxe, looking around the massive room to see if any more shadows were creeping out of the walls.
The room was clear. Whatever that thing was, there was only one of it guarding the silver...
"What the hell was that?" Brida asked, keeping her massive axe raised.
Eluned floated over to the pile of ash, looking down at it with profound disgust. She wiped her hands together like she was brushing off dirt.
"An evil spirit," Eluned explained with her voice tight. "A parasite born from stagnant, rotting mana. It doesn’t have a physical body so it feeds exclusively on souls."
She turned around and glared down at the dwarf sitting on the floor.
"If that smog had touched your bare skin, Thora," Eluned said, crossing her arms, "it would have ripped your soul straight out of your chest. You would have died instantly. There would be no bleeding and no wounds. You would have become just an empty rotting husk."
Silas frowned.
A stealth-based enemy that bypassed physical armor and caused instant death on contact.
That was a nightmare scenario for a squad that relied heavily on brawling and high durability...
’If there’s one hidden cavern down here with a soul-eater guarding it,’ Silas thought, scanning the pale walls, ’it makes me wonder if there are other hidden rooms scattered through this place. We barely scratched the surface of this tunnel system. We really need to sweep this whole place...’
He looked back at the heavy ironwood carts they had left behind.
’Later as of right now, we’re maxed out. We take what we can carry and get out before something else wakes up.’
Thora didn’t look traumatized. She didn’t look like a person who had just been a fraction of a second away from a soulless death.
The dwarf simply dusted off her tight canvas trousers, stood back up, and walked right back over to the silver crystal.
"Fascinating," Thora muttered, pulling a small magnifying glass out of her pouch.
She leaned in, inspecting the ore where the smog had just been. "The crystalline structure is practically flawless. It doesn’t even have standard bleed-lines so we’re going to need to chisel this out from the base."
Eluned stared at the dwarf with her mouth hanging slightly open.
"Are you broken in the head?" Eluned demanded, floating up right next to Thora’s ear. "Did you not just hear me? You almost died! You were a millimeter away from having your soul eaten by a shadow! Are you not afraid of dying?!"
Thora stopped inspecting the rock. She lowered her magnifying glass and turned around.
She looked at Eluned then she looked past the Goddess, locking eyes with Silas, Morwenna, Brida, and Tasmin.
Thora smiled.
It wasn’t her usual arrogant degenerate grin but a soft incredibly genuine smile that reached all the way to her eyes.
"I wasn’t afraid," Thora said softly with her voice uncharacteristically tender. "I saw it coming at the last second, sure but I didn’t panic. Because I knew you were right there, Goddess... I knew the Captain had his sword ready. I knew Tasmin and Brida were watching my back..."
She reached out and gave Eluned’s arm a gentle grateful squeeze.
"I’m a blacksmith," Thora continued, her words echoing warmly in the quiet cave. "I belong behind an anvil. I have no business walking into a dungeon but I followed you guys down here because I trust you. I know Captain and the rest of you will protect me, no matter what jumps out of the dark so thank you."
The silence that followed was heavy with emotion.
Eluned’s glowing green eyes widened.
The anger melted off her face, replaced by a sudden intense wave of shyness.
A soft blush dusted the Goddess’s cheeks. Even Morwenna, the hardened pirate queen, looked away, clearing her throat as a faint pink hue spread across her pale skin.
Tasmin smiled proudly, and Brida thumped her own chestplate in a gesture of loyalty.
Silas felt a warm swell of pride in his chest.
This was his team. Despite all the bickering and the clashing egos, they actually cared about each other.
They functioned as a family.
