'Just what is going on up there?' Callane thought, gritting her teeth and clasping her hands into fists as she tried to fight off the overwhelming sense of powerlessness.
Hidden underground, all she could do was register every shake, every noise, and every wave of mana, trying to piece them together to form some sort of picture of the events above.
But just from those few cues?
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All that Callane could tell was that the fight continued.
The shaking didn't stop. Instead, it only grew more intense and… louder, with the noise of Theo's attack soon reaching even as far underground as they were. It was only after several minutes that the intensity began to first decrease… and then change, implying some sort of shift.
Not the end of the fight — not when the walls of Callane's underground hideout continued to shake, with bits of dirt and stone continuously trickling down the walls.
But something definitely changed.
The one bigger shake that came every few seconds continued to grow weaker and weaker, even though the noise it caused kept growing louder. On the other hand, the weaker the main attack became, the stronger the follow-ups turned out to be.
Then, for the first time in what felt like ages, the noises stopped.
Squinting her eyes, Callane looked up while making sure to slowly, precisely count the seconds down.
'One… two… three…'
Gritting her teeth, she continued.
'Four… five… six…'
Standing as she was, Callane braced herself for another noise of a powerful attack… only to be met with nothing but silence.
"Is it over?" one of the mercenaries asked. In the darkness of their underground hideout, however, Callane couldn't even try to see which one.
"I don't think so," someone else replied. "But we will see if we just wait for a bit. If that guy comes back to bring us out of here, then yeah, the fight is over. And if not, then… well…"
Judging by the voice, it was the guide from the Abyss Guild speaking.
As for his hesitation at the end, it was clearly directed at Callane, with the man lacking the confidence to outright state the other possible outcome of the fight that would result in the silence they were all experiencing right now.
Still, seconds passed… but no new noise came. It was as if all the fighting above had now completely…
BOOM!
As if to catch everyone off guard, the underground hideout shook again — this time even stronger than in all the times before. Then, however, the outside turned perfectly silent once again, only making everyone wonder what the hell was actually going on up above.
"At this point, I believe we should consider our options," one of the mercenaries spoke out. "And my lady, even if that man really is who we came here to extract, if he…"
No outside event caused the man to cut his sentence short.
It appeared that after Callane and her display of proficiency with her mace, the mercenaries suddenly found it hard to bring up the potentially upsetting reality they were trying to face.
"If he died, then we still need to wait for the gate to open again," Callane calmly pointed out, trying to direct her voice in the direction she heard the guide speak from. "Or would you rather be stuck at the wall, doomed to forever miss the actual passage, all the while fending off the attacks from the monsters he is fighting with?"
For but a brief moment, the underground hole filled with silence, matching the level of noise coming from above.
"What if, in two days, he still fails to show up to free us?"
Finally, someone dared to pose this one burning question.
What should they do if the man they were here to recover turned out dead, leaving them locked in this underground hole?
Quite noticeably, however, Callane couldn't hear anyone even bring up the issue of getting out of their underground safehouse… or, by changing one's perspective, their underground prison.
After all, with how malleable the dirt around them was for the distant explosions to shake off bits and pieces of dirt and stone, only a complete amateur or a civilian would struggle climbing the wall up. And once sufficiently high enough, they could tunnel their way out with their bare hands with relative ease.
No.
The problematic parts about their potential return all lay in the implication of what was above them.
And if the man suspected to be Theodore Evilbane wasn't there to bring them up… then it most likely meant he died, succumbing to the attacks of a monster they never even got to directly see.
A monster that was more than enough to make Callane freeze in terror with just the influence it had over the neutral mana all around!
Still, by now, its influence over the mana had decreased to the point where Callane could hardly keep track of it. And while that hopefully meant it was about to be killed off…
"If he doesn't show up in two days…" Callane bit down on her bottom lip before taking in a big breath of air and raising her head, even though any sort of theatrics would be absolutely pointless in the near-absolute darkness of their hiding hole. "Then…"
Poof!
Just like it appeared from out of nowhere when Theo enclosed the hole, the seal had now vanished, flooding the dug-out with intense daylight.
The light was so intense Callane had to shield her eyes with her forearm, taking her sweet time before her pupils adjusted, allowing her to look up to…
To a bloodied, weary Theo holding on to something as he leaned down into the hole.
"It's over. You can come out and fuck off now."
******
The last, mortar-like salvo brought the boss's health points to a level where it was either dead or hanging on to life by a pixel's worth of health points.
'Just how lucky of a bastard are you?!' Screaming out in his thoughts, Theo gripped the edge of his lookout window, staring with all his might at the cracked shell of the now merely big monster.
One more shot was all Theo needed to finish the job. Heck! Judging by the state it was in, the boss was likely to just go and die all on its own if left alone anyway!
Still, for Theo to attack it again, he had no other choice but to wait for his guns to reload.
'Even if it means firing upon other guns, let's make sure to blast the living shit out of it,' he thought grimly, already manually moving the aims of several other guns, only to then ignore the warnings that flared up before his eyes when he pushed the aim so far out of its original limits, the resulting explosions were now quite likely to damage other guns of Theo's defenses.
For now, though, the damage mattered not. Any gun that would be broken by the barrage could be replaced.
But if the monster revealed yet another card to play — a card it had hidden for so long — then, with most of his guns already neutered, what else could Theo do to defend himself?
'Just a little longer…!'
Counting literal seconds, Theo waited for his guns to speak again.
'Five… And six!'
As expected, as predicted, within the standard reloading time, Theo's guns spoke again. Yet, right before they did so, the monster's shell cracked open again, now revealing just an amoeba-shaped slime hiding within as it constantly morphed from one shape to another.
The guns shot. Focused on the void entity, Theo could almost see the shell smash straight into it and then… just cut straight through, but not before the voiderling changed its shape for one last time, launching one of its tentacles straight at the young man's face poking out of the window!
'Fuck!'
Sparing no time to curse out loud, Theo pulled back into his watchtower, desperately attempting to avoid this last-ditch attack.
'And here I was trying to be wary of a hidden card in its sleeve!'
The voiderling's spear-like projectile, however, was subject to the whims of gravity. And with its own weight pulling it down, rather than striking through the open space of the lookout window… it struck just below the lookout's edge, cutting through the concrete only to then come out on the watchtower's inside, piercing Theo's shoulder before lifting him up and then nailing him into the watchtower's roof, where the spear finally lost its momentum only to instantly shatter and explode in a puff of blackened smoke.
'Shit!'
With the piercing, burning pain exploding in his shoulder, Theo blacked out for a moment, only to come back awake when he came down from the roof of his watchtower and crashed into its cold, hard floor.
The fall didn't help Theo's injury, only sending a fresh wave of inhumane pain to his brain, nearly paralyzing the young man in the process.
'All that pain… from such a simple wound?!'
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Screaming out against the injustice he was suffering through, Theo ultimately opted to give up on his pride… and use a total of five ability points — points he was saving up to get more blueprints of better weapons — all just to get himself healed.
The healing process was as miraculous as it was outright stupid.
The moment Theo decided to sacrifice those points, a strange power suddenly welled up in the middle of his stomach, only to then explode… but only precisely in the direction of his wound, soon dulling out the pain before forcing Theo to watch how his flesh regrew within the gaping hole of the wound, only for the skin to then quickly patch the hole up, leaving his shoulder exactly as it was before the attack.
[Healing Completed!]
The pop-up announcement appeared before Theo's eyes, as if to mock him for wasting such a valuable currency as the ability points.
Still, with a full series of other messages now only waiting for Theo to look through now that the boss had finally and properly died, it was more than likely Theo was going to recoup those costs anyway.
"It's better to take longer but do it while safe than risk infection or some sort of otherworldly curse just to skimp on points I hardly use anyway," Theo reasoned out loud as he slumped down on the floor of his control tower, taking his time to merely calm his heart down.
It was only after Theo managed to calm down and then even get some short rest that the other problem of his situation finally reared its head in Theo's mind.
"Now that the monster's properly dead…" he muttered, glancing over at the new timer that, just like the one before, showcased a total of sixty hours Theo had before the next wave of challengers would come, "what do I do with those people I've hidden underground?"