Four endless pits of horrible nothingness that made my wings twitch and my heart pound in my chest. Four. That’s how many we encountered while creeping down the tunnel at an exasperatingly slow pace.
One was hidden as well as the first chasm Mia ’discovered’, but I detected it easily when my mana seeped through the outer layer of ice. The next was easier still. The ice layer wasn’t thick enough to hide the gaping void underneath, and our keen eyes picked it out without the need for mana.
The third was incredibly tricky, and I almost missed it on my first sweep. The ice was thick enough to resist a casual inspection. I was actually lifting my foot to step forward when something caught my attention.
I wasn’t sure what my mana was telling me at first. It kept encountering small disruptions as it seeped through the ice, forcing it to make small corrections and slip past obstacles. Only when I took a much closer look with both my mundane and supernatural senses did I realize small faults stretched over the entire section of the passage.
My mana confirmed that the faults weren’t natural. In fact, they were the result of foreign mana laced throughout the ice. That’s what my mana kept refusing to interact with.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to reach this conclusion. In my defense, the foreign mana felt like what you’d normally find in ice. Elementally aspected and definitely icy in nature, it blended perfectly with the surrounding ambient mana.
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It was the faintest presence of soul traces that helped me figure it out. As natural-seeming as the mana was, it still clearly belonged to someone. Someone had woven their own mana throughout the cavern section, jury-rigging the floor to collapse underfoot and deposit careless intruders into the emptiness below.
This hinted at a certain level of intent and skill I hadn’t expected from the locals. Both their smell and the description provided by the soldier who’d spotted them pointed to a low-level civilization. Something on par with cavemen, perhaps. Considering how young the world was, this made sense.
So, to see them lay a trap this subtle and intricate? A trap that almost fooled me? My proverbial hackles were definitely raised.
I wasn’t alone, either. When I told Mia what we were dealing with, her tail literally poofed up in displeasure.
"Are you sure? They’re that magically advanced?"
"Maybe not. No runes," I grumbled, still glaring at the floor. "This isn’t some amazing marvel of magical engineering. But their skill with mana? Yeah, that’s… impressive."
In the end, I picked Mia up and just flew over that entire section. The cavern was rapidly widening as we went further underground. Even so, the trap covered the whole width of the tunnel and stretched for a good seventy or eighty feet in length, which made me more annoyed and even more cautious.
After all, the locals had to pass safely through this tunnel, too. If they felt comfortable traveling such a long distance over a steep drop, it meant they had a way of attuning the mana to themselves while crossing. Otherwise, they would fall prey to their own trap. Explore more at freewebnovel
The amount of mana manipulation this required was staggering. They were either imbuing their intent into the mana so it could always detect their own people, or each individual member of their tribe or clan or whatever had to attune themselves to a set mana frequency that would disarm the trap while they were passing through.
Neither were skills I would expect such a young civilization to possess.
The final trap we found was another cave section with unusually thick ice, but this time, the trap portion of it came from above. Thankfully, the unnaturally organized mana configuration of the cavern tipped me off immediately that something was wrong.
Even if I wasn’t on the lookout for soul traces in ’natural’ mana, I would have noticed the mana strings that dangled from the ceiling. A bit of inspection showed me that the strings were attached to massive icicles jutting down from the cavern’s roof. If we brushed across the strings, the ice spears would drop on our heads, which would then also collapse the ice layer and drop us into the abyss below.
Overkill, you say? Clearly, the locals didn’t agree, because the strings were abundant.
It was here that I was finally forced to mess with their setup. I’d avoided damaging the other traps for fear of alerting their maker, but I had little choice now. There simply wasn’t enough space to squeeze past the mana strings, not unless I wanted to waste a ton of mana contorting through them like a character in a cheesy spy movie.
That was decidedly not my cup of tea, so snipping I went. Of course, I was smart enough not to just collapse the whole thing with a wave of mana. I didn’t use mana at all. Instead, for the very first time, I used the power of my soul.
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Since my ascension, I could feel and manipulate my soul to an extent I hadn’t known was possible before. I could will it to billow out around me in a nebulous cloud and affect the world beyond my body. The range of impact extended only six feet from me, but in this case, that was enough.
Extending a spiritual ’tentacle’, I used it to gobble up the trace amount of soul essence left behind when the locals’ mage put up the mana threads. Without that essence to keep the intent of the mage firmly rooted in the mana structure of the strings, they dissolved easily.
I was hoping that if their maker could sense their disappearance, he’d assume it was a natural process taking place. Unstable mana constructs like that always lost stability over time until they eventually unraveled on their own.
That done, we proceeded onwards, knowing that we might need to kill any scouts the locals sent to check on their trap.
Then we almost fell to our deaths again.
I was in the lead this time. When the ice crumbled beneath my feet, my wings took over, beating frantically with no conscious input from me. I shot up into the air so quickly and so violently that I had only a moment to widen my eyes before I crashed into the ceiling of the cavern, loudly.
Cursing and sputtering, I floated back down to Mia, who had an unbearable smirk gracing her lips. I gave her my most fearsome glare, practically daring her to make a comment.
The cat was not deterred.
"You should do that again," she purred. "The mortals a continent over probably didn’t hear the clang."
I couldn’t really say anything in my defense. I had crashed into the ceiling with all the speed of a runaway train, and my armor did protest the impact rather loudly.
That didn’t mean I had to like it.
"I’m going to push you into the chasm," I snapped.
Mia tilted her head, giving me a frustratingly adorable look of innocence.
"You can’t. There’s no hole anymore, see?"
I was about to demand what in the world she was talking about when my eyes fell on the spot where the hole left by my foot should have been. But there was no hole. The ice looked unbroken and unblemished.
I admit that my frustration got to me at that point.
My feathers took on a decidedly more metallic glint, and my left wing carved through the air. Making a furrow in the ice, it slashed first through the thick floor and then through the false layer that had almost caught me. I watched the cut first with cold satisfaction, then mounting disbelief as the trap-floor repaired itself right before our eyes at record speed. The ’regular’ floor remained messed up, though. The jagged cut left by my feathers simply vanished without a trace where the false surface began.
"What in the world…?"
I knelt down and cautiously placed my hand against the ice, sending a spike of my mana right into the floor. The trapped section writhed like the disturbed surface of a lake, and then ribbons of ice rose up to try and wrap around me. I put a stop to that with a pulse of mana that sent them reeling.
Only then, as a whole section of floor rose up and started to creep towards us, did I realize that I was looking at one of the ice creatures. Its movements were unnaturally jerky, and it froze up every couple seconds, but that’s undoubtedly what it was.
Flapping my wings, I drew my sword and went straight for the creature. I was still quite clumsy at aerial combat, but cutting something up with a sword is a relatively straightforward process, even if the ’something’ is a fifty-foot long icy rope masquerading as a floor.
The creature was a lot bigger than the ice constructs we’d encountered earlier, so it took a while to die. Eventually, though, I either hit something vital or just did enough damage to pull its soul from its body, drawing it into my sword.
Like before, my implement of death took its toll. But the majority of the soul passed straight into me.
In a rush, I got the knowledge I craved.
For most of its life, the creature had lived just like its smaller icy kin. Its path only diverged when it was captured by the locals. The creature didn’t have traditional senses, so I still had no idea what those locals looked like, but I could feel the bundle of icy mana that burned within them through the memories. It was this bundle of mana that the locals used to nourish and bribe the creature, feeding it until it grew to its current size.
When they were satisfied, they directed it to this spot, condemning it to a small eternity of motionlessness. Every moment of its existence was spent lying in wait. At the first sign of intruders, the creature would collapse sections of its body and send the unwelcome travelers plummeting to their deaths.
This didn’t happen often, but when it did occur, the creature was supposed to report to the next passing group of locals. They would grant the creature a small amount of mana as payment, and the aching hunger in its core would be appeased for a little while.
As I digested these memories, I could feel most of my frustration giving way to curiosity. In fact, when I got past the indignity of those annoying traps, I found I was looking forward to my first personal encounter with the local magic users.
Their work was, for lack of a better word, unique. Even in the creature’s soul, I couldn’t detect a single sign of formalized magical casting. Somehow, they had imbued the thing with a spell that had dominated its will, compelling it to obey when it should have struck. Somehow, they had bent ice mana to their control and used it to set some decent traps.
It wasn’t hard to ferret out what was still annoying me about those first two traps we’d encountered. Rather than carefully cultivated magical principles and structures, the locals’ brand of magic seemed to function entirely off of intent.
That couldn’t be right, though… could it? For something like that to work, you’d need to have enormous amounts of mana and a soul powerful enough to imprint your desires on the world. It wasn’t a matter of just using enough force. You had to function on a level of existence which could bend the will of the world, or even the local laws of reality, to your whims.
I had only ever seen something like that from the general himself. Even Crewe, for all his terrible majesty in combat, did not come close to that level of proficiency. The question, then, became: how was a bunch of magical cavemen accomplishing things that only the highest level spellcasters were capable of?
I didn’t have a good answer, but I was dying to find out.