Still another hour?
“Probably,” Nyx said.
“Didn’t help that we went the wrong direction at the start,” the Dragon chuckled.
I groaned. “How on earth did you get the directions wrong, Nyx? Azmuth literally gave us a map to use.”
“Well, sometimes people make mistakes, okay?” the spirit said.
“You’re not ‘people’.”
He gasped. “How dare you.”
We paused for a second, and then chuckled.
Acnologia sighed. “Your theatrics are quite hard for an old Dragon to keep up with.”
I’m older than you, you know.
“Then please act it.”
Ouch.
“We should get back to focusing on our task.” His tone was stern. “It does not comfort me to know the screams of a companion will resonate through that volcano if we fail.”
I froze, and my chest tightened. Don’t need that image in my mind. I don’t want it.
“I wouldn’t have brought it up unless I had to, Diablo.”
“So, this Infinity Sword,” Nyx said. “Have you heard anything like it?”
“Nothing,” the Dragon said.
“Diablo?”
“Well if the Dragon doesn’t know something, I doubt I would know it.”
“So that’s a no?”
“That’s a no.”
“Should we ask Ijyela?”
I shook my head. “We’re not going to do anything with that kind of information anyway. That sword is not going to the Dark Lord.”
“And Freya?”
“We’ll save her.”
“How?”
“I’m…still working on that part.”
“Well, work faster. You know what he said about—”
“I know!” I yelled. I know, goddamn it.
“Maybe it is best we drop this topic until it is more relevant to the discussion,” Acnologia said.
And as if on cue, a screech pierced the air, echoing past us. I looked ahead, and a grin shone on my face. I know that sound.
“Diablo, straight ahead,” Acnologia said.
Twenty hazy forms shot toward us, flying through the skies. Well. They’re moving a lot slower than I’d expected though.
“Maybe they’re cautious this time,” Nyx said. “The last battle didn’t turn out well for their species, did it?”
“This is probably a completely different group from the ones we saw before though.”
“Probably.”
“Diablo, what do you wish to do here?” the Dragon asked, keeping his course. “Do we head straight on or do we head down to the surface? I cannot maneuver away from so many whilst in the air.”
“Nah, head straight for them.” I tapped my sword sheath. “This is a good chance to let off a little steam.”
“I…understand.”
We picked up the pace, and in about ten seconds, the creatures were much clearer in my vision—a flock of twenty Night Bats. I stood up on Acnologia, balancing myself on his back.
“Spells?” Nyx asked.
I shook my head. “Don’t need them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Make sure you catch me!” I yelled and shot forward, running along the Dragon’s back and propelling off his head. I soared through the skies and right into the flock of Night Bats. The creatures didn’t avert their path even after they saw me coming.
Perfect.
I slid Dawnbreaker out in a mere instant and I swung the weapon in a wide arc, slicing through the necks of the first three Bats. I tapped onto one of the bodies just as the head dropped and pushed off it, launching into another part of the flock. The bats’ momentum slowed down, possibly because of me, but they only helped my cause.
I hacked and slashed, cutting of heads and wings, and using a dead body to push myself further into the flock.
Metal sliced into flesh and blood split into the skies, with the scent carrying in the wind and the color splattering down to the clouds. In the blink of eye, twenty Night Bats fell toward the ground, headless or wingless, and all of them dead.
I pushed straight up off the last cold body, and lifted myself into the air by about fifty yards higher. A flash of black surged beneath me, and the next thing I knew I was on Acnologia’s back once again.
“Well, that was certainly…interesting,” Acnologia said
“And just how much ‘steam’ did you have to let out exactly?” Nyx asked.
I flicked the blood off my blade and slid it back into its sheath. “Let’s just say meeting another flock of bats won’t be the worst thing.”
“Poor bats,” he said. “I hope the Ga’em doesn’t grant us a nickname for this. It’d be weird to gain a title like ‘Bat Exterminator’ or something.”
“Wait,” I blinked. “The Ga’em does that?!”
“I can’t tell if you’re excited or panicking, and that bothers me.”
I paused. “I’m actually not sure either.”
DING!
Congratulations! You have defeated:
Night Bat Flock (Lv 409)!
No title for you. Better luck next time. Reward: 340,000 XP. Reward: 1,200,000 Sol. Reward: Fangs of the Night Bat (x6).
I eyed the screen careful, and exhaled before I closed it. “Didn’t get a ‘Bat Exterminator’ title.”
“It was probably unlikely something like that exists though,” Nyx said.
“That’s true. If anything, there are a lot more species I’ve killed more of than—”
I froze.
And now, in a span of three days you’ve taken down three armies of thousands of soldiers each.
The Time Lord’s words echoed into my mind.
“Zoran?” Nyx asked. “Is everything okay?”
My lips hardly moved. “Yeah.” I said softly.
“Okaaay.”
I tapped the Dragon’s neck with my fingers, distracting myself. “How much longer to the Plateau, Acnologia?”
“It is closer than Nyx had mentioned,” he said. “We will be there in another fifteen minutes.”
“Nyx, you just get everything wrong these days, don’t you?” I grinned.
“Hey! I try my best okay?” he said. “And to be fair, the one who usually looked at maps for us was—”
He paused.
I supplied the missing word. “Freya?” I said, resisting the urge to turn back and glance at the volcano beyond the horizon
The spirit took a while to respond. “Yeah.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll get her out.”
“I know. She’ll be safe. She’s a strong one.”
The empty skies loomed above us, and filling the air with darkness. There were no stars out. There had been none over this place.
That was an ill omen to me.
Alright. Time to stop looking at the sky then.
The fifteen minutes to the plateau passed by quick, even though we’d spent them in absolute silence. Acnologia descended soon, heading through the clouds, and emerging down to the lands underneath.
“We’re here,” the Dragon said.
The wisps of dark clouds disappeared from around me, and the scenery emerged. A large structure, similar to the cliff I’d seen before, rose from the ground. A steep incline, many miles wide, and the plateau itself, extended further than I could see.
“That’s where he thinks we’ll find the Infinity Sword?” I blinked. “It’s huge!”
“Well,” Nyx started and said nothing else.
“Let us move closer,” Acnologia said. “Remember, the Dark Lord mentioned a crevice that was close by. Finding that should be our main goal here.”
“Understood.” I kept my eyes peeled. The Dragon flew past the incline and over the plateau. Its surface was nothing out of the ordinary—dark and dry, just like the rest of the ruins. But it was simply a bump in the vast landscape around us.
Well, its size implied it was a pretty massive bump, but a bump nonetheless.
“Stop
saying bump so much,” Nyx said.
I grinned.
I tried to pick out anything of value to us from the scenery below but found absolutely nothing. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find something either. A speck of any color but black would have probably been spotted from miles up in the air.
“Do you guys sense anything?” I asked.
“Nothing,” the Dragon said.
Nyx sighed. “Same here.”
“Odd,” I said. “You’d think that this oddity would be easier to spot the closer we got to it.”
“But we also do not have the same mental awareness of Ijyela and possibly Voora as well,” Nyx said. “Those two have been searching for such things a large part of their however-long-lives. They have a trained mind to pick out things like this. We don’t.”
“That’s true. But I still find it a little weird.”
“We have not sensed the oddity since we came to these ruins, correct?” Acnologia asked.
“Yeah.”
“Is it possible something happened to the oddity?”
I blinked. “I mean…maybe? I don’t think it’s likely, given Azmuth sent us after it.”
“Maybe something is just suppressing its presence,” Nyx said.
“I’m not too fond of that explanation either, but I like it so let’s go with that.”
“Anyway, did you see anything of interest on the ground?”
I shook my head. “It’s like there’s nothing there.”
“Maybe we should turn back?”
“And go to the volcano empty-handed? No. We’ll find this.”
“No, I meant go back and recheck.”
“Ah, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
“I think if this place was hard to find, Azmuth would have told us,” Nyx said. “He seems like he needs this weapon fast as well. He’s not going to refrain from giving us helpful information for no reason.”
You don’t know him well enough, I chuckled.
The Dragon turned around, and flew back to where we came from. I kept my eyes glued to the ground once again, and tried to pick out any kind of difference on the surface. A minute went by. Then two. Soon we were nearing the plateau’s incline itself and we still hadn’t seen anything.
I didn’t lose focus though, and kept staring at the ground.
“THERE!” I yelled, nearly falling off the Dragon as I pointed.
Acnologia twisted a bit, accommodating for the stumble, and then stopped, hovering in the air. “What?”
“There.” I pointed once again, at a slice of grey within the dark land. It was incredibly minute, and hard to see, but the distinction was there. A pebble rolled down the hill, and the moment it touched the grey, it fell straight through, disappearing.
“The crevice was here,” I said. “It was just…hard to see.”
“Wow,” Nyx said. “I would not have picked that out even if you flew me over this spot a hundred times.”
“That is…worrying, spirit.” Acnologia said and then descended. “How safe do you think it is?”
“Not at all?”
The Dragon chuckled. “Sounds like a normal day.”
“Look at you, being all humorous.” I smiled.
Acnologia tucked in his wings and dived. The slice of gray land was wider than him and thick enough to let us through. The black-bodied beast eased through the gap and took us from the dark skies of the ruins, to the darkness of the crevice inside.
There wasn’t much of a difference to be honest.
The tunnel opened up quickly, but just enough to give Acnologia room to spread out his wings. The stones studded into the walls were dark, just like the ones on the surface, but rounder instead of sharp. We fell and we fell, and the time passed by endlessly.
“Diablo, I am unsure of how easy escape is from a place like this,” Acnologia said.
“I’ll use my Shadow Travel skill if it comes to that.”
“Are you certain you can use it in here? What if it turns out to be like in that cell, where your Dark Arts spells were suppressed?”
“Well, we’ll just have to wait and find out if that’s the case, because we literally have no other choice right now.”
The Dragon kept plunging and the darkness kept expanding, as though this was our battle to get to the end and the darkness’ battle to keep us from it.
If that was the case, then the black shades were winning at the moment.
Five minutes had passed and we were still plunging. The stones around us looked identical all around, and seemed like they’d been arranged on the wall.
Did someone work on this tunnel then? I blinked. That doesn’t make sense.
“Okay, why is this taking so long?” Nyx asked. “I’m kind of freaked out now.”
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing up. “It’s almost like—”
The spark of dull light above us receded as we dived down, and then flickered, expanding into a larger shape, only to receded yet again.
“We’re falling down in a loop.”
“Eh?” the spirit blinked.
“The light above us.” I pointed. “The light from the entrance keeps contracting and expanding. Like it would if—”
“We were falling and then suddenly found ourselves at the top once again.”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
“What the heck is going on here?”
The Dragon twisted his wings, catching the air and holding us in place. The light above us went stagnant now, no longer contracting, no longer flickering. Nothing.
“So, we are in some kind of loop,” Nyx said.
“But how?” Acnologia asked. “I have sensed no spell in here. How would such a space loop be possible? I haven’t even heard of such magic.”
“You’ve also been asleep for millennia.”
“That is hardly the point, spirit.”
“I know, I know. It IS odd that something like this is happening without traceable magic.”
“Well, that just means it’s not magic,” I said.
“Or that we’re just really bad at tracing things in general.”
“I think the Eternal is right, spirit,” Acnologia said. “We have been around magic for many thousand years, even if we spent a few of them asleep. I trust in my ability to tell if there is a spell I am being affected by. I do not think I am that incompetent.”
“Magic or not, it’s clear there is a space loop of some sort keeping us here,” I said. “What do we do about it?”
“I sense no runes or anything of the sort,” the Dragon said. “There is no source for this loop magic.”
“Yeah,” Nyx said. “It’s almost as if something physically picked us up and dropped up back up. Without us noticing.”
“Wait a minute.” My eyes widened.
“What?”
“The Dark Lord. Remember he said.”
“Eh?”
“He needed us to do this. He needed me to do this. And there’s a reason why.”
I lowered my hand, palm facing the darkness beneath, and concentrated. I felt a mental wave push out of me, a concentrated one scanning everything between me and the bottom of this pit—if a bottom actually existed.
My forehead throbbed. A howl echoed from beneath us, and bounced off the walls. All of a sudden, the stones light up, and each surface of black now contained a single rune of silver on it. With the number of stones in this tunnel, and a rune on each of them, the whole place switched from black to white in just the blink of an eye.
A howl screamed in our ears yet again. A large pair of eyes, the shade of dark blood, emerged from underneath us.
“What the heck is that?!” Nyx asked.
“That,” I grinned, “is the reason Azmuth couldn’t do this himself.”
***
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“What the heck is that thing?” Nyx asked.
“A pair of eyes for the moment.” I stared at the red shapes and used my Analyze skill.
DING!
; Warning!
Subject cannot be Analyzed.
I rolled my eyes. Of course it can’t.
A howl screeched once more, and the eyes shot up to us, almost as if they were attacking with just their gaze. The Dragon hovered in place, not moving an inch.
“What are we going to do?” Nyx asked.
Attack.
I leaned over Acnologia’s side and put my hand down, with my palm facing the eyes. “Oskis!” I yelled.
A blast of fire raced out, and the flames pushed deeper into the tunnel, past the spirit, like the thing didn’t even exist.
“Okaaaay. So that clearly doesn’t work,” Nyx said.
The pair of red shades raced up. No body, just the eyes.
I pulled up my hand. What do I do to this thing?
“Command it.” Acnologia flapped his wings once to keep us in place.
I turned to the creature. Command it. The eyes were about fifty yards away from us, rushing up at a faster speed than before. Whatever this thing was, it hadn’t attacked us yet, but I wasn’t eager to find out what that would feel like.
I frowned. How am I supposed to command it?
My hand faced downward, but no words or spells laid swimming in my mind.
The red pair of eyes was now twenty yards beneath us, and rising faster than before. The Runes on the stones around glowed brighter as the eyes passed by them, reacting to its presence. I closed my eyes, sending myself into my personal darkness, and limiting my mind to just one thought.
An image of the pair of red eyes formed within my mind, and I imagined a transparent shield of light around it, trapping it. The creature I conjured up thrashed about in there but the walls held strong, with not a single crack or a scratch tearing into them.
I opened my eyes back up, and pushed my hand forward. I felt a throb in my chest, and a wave of light shot out, disappearing into the already-bright cave. But I could still see it, far after it had seemingly disappeared from view, and up until it hit the red pair of eyes.
The creature instantly froze, stopping at about ten yards before us. Its form convulsed, like a desperate prisoner clawing at his chains. A screech scorched through the tunnel walls, and a smile curled onto my face.
The Eternal: A Boxed Set (World of Ga'em Book 6) Page 89
