WIEDERGEBURT

by Varnell, Brandon

  “Her special ability?” Fay asked.

  I nodded. “I believe she has the ability to attract Demon Beasts with her Spiritual Power. It draws them in and causes them to go crazy. At least, that is what it seems like to me.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone with that ability.” Fay frowned.

  Shaking my head, I said, “Me neither, but that just concerns me more. How did the Leucht Family find someone with such a unique power?”

  It was a question I couldn’t help but ask. I didn’t think Dyr was a member of the Leucht Family herself. Of course, there was no evidence to prove that she wasn’t, but I had a good intuition for these things, and it was telling me that she wasn’t related by blood to the Leucht Family. This just gave me more questions. Who was she? How did she have such a unique power? And where had the Leucht Family discovered her?

  I knew I wouldn’t receive any answers right now, so I stood up and dusted myself off. I felt a pair of eyes on me and looked at Fay. She was staring at me with a curious tilt of her head. Smiling, I held out a hand toward her.

  “I’m feeling a bit restless, so why don’t we go exploring? It looks like this room leads deeper into the mountain.”

  Fay gave me a resigned smile as she placed her hand in mine. “You sounded like Kari just then.”

  “I suppose she has rubbed off on me a bit,” I replied with a laugh as I pulled Fay to her feet. “Anyway, we can’t do anything else right now, and I’m too full of energy to just lie around.”

  “Are you sure exploring is a good idea right now?” she asked. “I feel like we should be thinking about how to meet up with Kari and the others.”

  “We can’t do that until we know where we are. The Ring of Marji that connects me to Lin also doesn’t work at this range, so I can’t use it to track her location. The most I can tell is that she’s alive,” I explained. “This might be one of the ruins that have been already been excavated. If that is the case, then knowing which ruins these are will help us figure out where we are in relation to Nevaria.”

  Fay couldn’t disagree with my logic, so the two of us traveled through the entrance on the opposite side of the massive hole in the wall. I noticed right away how big it was. At least ten times taller than I and thirty times wider, the entrance looked like it was made for a monstrous Demon Beast rather than a human. The archway entrance led into a long hallway made of stone. The sound of our footsteps echoed down it and bounced back to us.

  “I’m a little shocked to discover there are ruins inside of a mountain like this,” Fay muttered, her voice echoing. “I heard that most ruins are the remains of ancient cities that existed before the Great Catastrophe.”

  I glanced at the walls as we walked down the middle of the hall, channeling lightning into my eyes so I could see clearly. The walls depicted giants fighting against a horde of Sekbeist. I knew from my time in Niðavellir that all these ruins detailed the war against the Sekbeist, which was the cause of what we knew as the Great Catastrophe. These ruins were for the Lintilskudd—the so-called Lightning Giants, ranked third of the Nine Great Races.

  “There are a few ruins like this one, though,” I informed her. “There probably aren’t many here in the Demon Beast Mountain Range, but that’s because there were never that many cities located in this area to begin with.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Fay.

  The hallway ended up branching off in two separate directions, which made me pause for only a minute before choosing one to travel down. It was dark in this tunnel. I furrowed my brow, held up my hand, and pushed my Spiritual Power through my palm. It felt like something was pulling out my essence. Then a small sphere of lightning coalesced over my palm, crackling as it lit the area around us.

  Fay looked at me, then held out her hand, moving it in concentric circles. Flames ignited above her hand, gathered together in a sphere shape, and further lit the hallway.

  “From what I understand, the Demon Beast Mountain Range has always been a dangerous place, so very few people were willing to build cities here.” I paused as we took another turn, then started again. “There’s some evidence to suggest that a lot of the cities located here were fortresses that had been used during a great war that embroiled the entire continent, but any documents pertaining to this war have been lost to the ages.”

  The war I was talking about was, of course, the war between the Nine Great Races and the Sekbeists. I wanted to tell Fay about it, but I held back. Truthfully, I didn’t know how to broach this subject, nor how to explain why I knew so much. It wasn’t like I could just tell her I came from the future. I didn’t know if she would believe me, but if I was in her place and someone told me they had traveled through time, I would think they were crazy.

  “That sounds rather fascinating,” Fay said. “I’m sure Kari would love to learn about this.”

  “She probably would,” I agreed. Just as I was nodding along with Fay’s words, the Spiritual Pressure from two people caused both Fay and I to stumble.

  “This feeling…” Fay muttered as I activated Spiritual Perception and quickly zoned in on the unique Spiritual Signatures of the two. At that moment, not only did I feel Lin’s relatively restful mind as she dreamed of something pleasant, but I found a bright golden aura battling against an electric yellow aura. The yellow one I knew vaguely but not enough to recognize, but there were only two people in the entire world with a golden aura like this—and one of them was the empress.

  “It’s Kari,” I said.

  “Really?!”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  Grabbing Fay’s hand, I picked up the pace and began heading in the direction I felt Kari’s Spiritual Aura.

  Kari woke up to find her body was no longer wrapped up in Lin’s tail. That was odd. She looked over and found Lin lying right next to her, shoulders and chest moving as she rhythmically breathed in and out. While the Lamia’s tail was no longer trapping her within its embrace, the other girl was still hugging her. It looked like her tail had just slackened sometime during the night.

  The fire was still burning merrily right next to her, which made her wonder if someone had been feeding it wood… but no. It didn’t look like that was the case. At least, she didn’t think so. The more likely answer was that she’d just woken up soon after falling asleep because she was having trouble sleeping.

  After all, how could she sleep when these ruins remained unexplored?

  Lin’s arm slid off Kari’s chest as she sat up and landed on her lap as she looked around, gazing at the other sleeping figures strewn about the floor. She saw Catalyna dozing against a wall, Marko sleeping on his side, Finn on his back, and Ander several meters from Finn. The others were all spread out.

  Everyone is asleep…

  Would now not be the perfect time to do some exploring of her own? She knew now wasn’t the greatest time, that their situation was dire, but since they were here, it would be a shame not to explore at least a little bit. Yes, it would be a crime. A great travesty to all of humanity and explorers everywhere.

  Gently removing Lin’s arm from her lap, she placed it on the ground and began to stand up.

  “Darling…”

  A soft mumble made Kari pause. She glanced at Lin, who was mumbling restlessly in her sleep. The girl moved onto her back, face scrunching up as her tail moved seemingly of its own accord, thumping against the floor. It seemed like she was having a dream. From the cold sweat forming on her brow, it wasn’t a pleasant dream.

  Kari bit her lip as a war waged within her, with one side telling her that she needed to go exploring, while the other told her that she couldn’t leave Lin alone. This battle raged on until Lin finally settled down. As the girl grew quiet, Kari reached out and brushed some bangs away from Lin’s face, then leaned forward and placed a soft kiss on her forehead.

  I really do feel kind of like an older sister…

  With that heartfelt thought firmly locked in her mind, Kari carefully made her way across the floor, stepping
around the people resting before exiting the room. After entering the hallway, she looked around. This hallway came to a dead-end, which meant if she wanted to explore further, she needed to go back to the staircase and choose one of the other paths.

  Nodding, she wandered off until the light from the fire had disappeared, then raised her hand and moved it around in a clockwise circle. She released some of her Spiritual Power. It trickled through her fingers like a slowly flowing stream, illuminating the ground with its radiance, then it was expelled outward to form a small sphere above her palm that released a bright light.

  Aside from the staircase and the hallway she had come from, there were two other paths to choose from. This junction formed something of a cross. After giving it a moment of consideration, Kari journeyed down the middle path, which turned out to be a long hallway that stretched out for quite a ways.

  The hallway ended and a room suddenly opened before her. With an oblong shape, the room looked sort of like a fork in the road. There were two paths she could choose from, left or right, causing her to bite her lip in indecision.

  She was about to choose the left path, but then she paused upon feeling a soft breeze blowing in from the right. Pointing the sphere in that direction, she focused her Spiritual Power and moved her hand to direct the light, causing a beam to shoot out in a cone shape that illuminated the hallway. There didn’t seem to be anything there. However, there was a breeze coming from this one. Moving the sphere back and forth between the two hallways, she finally chose the right.

  Kari wasn’t sure how long she traveled down this hall, which was more winding than she would have expected. She felt incredibly small as she walked through this place that seemed to be made for giants. There wasn’t anything to note in this place. This particular hallway was fairly empty of adornments, and even the murals located in the entrance hall were absent here. All she could do was listen to the sound of her own footsteps.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.

  Pausing as an extra tap echoed around the hall, Kari stopped walking and turned around, shining her light behind her. She didn’t see anyone. Her lips twisted into a frown as if gravity had taken hold of them. She could have sworn she’d heard the extra tap of a second set of footsteps.

  A feeling of caution welled up inside her heart. However, this didn’t stop her from walking on. She continued down the hall until it widened into a gigantic room that was even bigger than the entrance hall.

  It looked like she was standing on a walkway several dozen meters above the ground floor. This walkway wasn’t the only one around either. Multiple catwalks spanned this room, some above her, some below her. All of the catwalks had a width of maybe twenty meters. There were numerous doorways like the one she had just emerged from. Where did they lead to? She didn’t know, but a part of her was eager to keep exploring.

  She walked up to the walkway’s edge and looked down. The bottom floor was pretty far, but not so far that she couldn’t see it. There was something strange below, an elevated platform surrounded by several statues. Like everything else in these ruins, it was massive, easily fifteen or even twenty times larger than she was tall. Sitting atop the platform was what appeared to be a pair of massive hands forming a strange archway.

  Kari took several steps back—then yelped when she bumped into something behind her. She spun around and leapt back, then paused. Glancing at the person standing behind her, she tried hard to hide her frown behind a polite smile.

  “Finn,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I thought that should be obvious, Princess Kari,” Finn said with his usual dashing smile. “I was woken up by the noise you made when you left the room and decided to follow you. There is no telling how dangerous these ruins are, so I wanted to make sure I was around to protect you.”

  If you wanted to protect me, why did you not say anything to announce your presence until just now?

  The question was on the tip of her tongue, but she held back, knowing that saying something of this nature would only cause problems. Unless he did something that harmed her, Lin, Fay, or Eryk, then she would not react to his strange and creepy mannerisms.

  “I see. Thank you very much for your concern.” Kari offered a polite bow of her head.

  Finn’s smile seemed to grow fixed for some reason, but he waved his hand as though to tell her not to worry. “Are you planning to continue exploring? If you wish to, I shall accompany you.”

  For just a moment, Kari seriously considered accepting his offer despite not trusting him—but it was only for a moment. Then she slowly shook her head. “No, I believe we should return. I will need to be well-rested since I plan on searching for Eryk and Fay tomorrow.”

  “Oh?” The fixed smile grew stiff. It gave his face something of an ominous appearance. “I don’t want to seem mean or heartless, but you have to realize that the chances of them having survived after acting as decoys to draw away the Demon Beasts is very slim. It is regrettable, but they are probably dead by now.”

  “I am aware of how dangerous their situation is.” Kari gave Finn a confident smile. “But Eryk isn’t the kind of person who would be done in by something like this. He’s stronger than anyone I have ever known. He might even be stronger than my mother. I know he’s alive.”

  Thoughts of Eryk caused Kari’s chest to grow warm. It was a gentle heat that spread to the rest of her body.

  She was very worried about Eryk and Fay, and understood there was a chance they were both dead, but she had chosen to place her faith in them. Until she found proof that they were dead, she would continue to believe they were alive. Kari wouldn’t give up hope. This was what she had learned from her last time traveling through the Demon Beast Mountain Range with them.

  “Eryk. Eryk. Eryk. He’s all you ever talk about,” Finn suddenly snapped, his voice no longer polite. Now it was an angry growl to match the scowl that had appeared on his face.

  Kari almost took a step back out of fear, but she didn’t. Doing that would have made her feel weak. She didn’t want to be weak. What’s more, while this man might be a powerful Nevarian Spiritualist, that didn’t mean he was stronger than her. She had been training with Eryk and Fay for over sixty-three days. Their training was harsh enough that she often felt like her body had been broken and remade after each session, so she was confident in her newfound strength. If it came to a fight, she would not lose to this man.

  “He isn’t all I ever talk about,” Kari said with narrowed eyes and a frown. “You would know that if you spent any time with me. And besides, it is only natural that I would speak fondly of the man I love. What is so wrong with that?”

  Those words seemed to only make Finn angrier. His face turned a deep scarlet as veins throbbed on his forehead. A strange pressure began emanating from him, which she recognized as a light Spiritual Pressure. Wisps of yellowish Spiritual Power wafted from his body like a miasma.

  He took a step forward. “You should stop thinking about that idiot and look at someone more deserving of your attention! I’ve been in love with you far longer than Eryk has! I’ve loved you for years! Look at me! Pay attention to me!”

  “Why would I do that?” asked Kari with a scornful gaze. “I don’t even know you. We have never spoken before this expedition. The only thing I know about you is that you’re a Nevarian Spiritualist who entered the Spiritualist Grand Tournament and fought against Fay. That’s it. What makes you think I’m going to fall in love with you just because you love me?”

  Cruel but necessary words. If people fell in love with one another based on how the other person felt, this world wouldn’t have so much heartbreak, but that wasn’t how the world worked. Someone might fall in love with a person they admire, but that didn’t guarantee the person they loved would return their feelings.

  While her words were indeed the truth, Finn didn’t seem to care for the truth. He stood there with his head bowed. The bangs covering his face cast shadows over his eyes, stirring up a
n ominous feeling within her chest and causing Kari to begin circulating Spiritual Power through her body. It thrummed with life and light. Her body felt primed. She was ready to activate her Spiritual Aura at any time.

  “It’s not fair,” Finn muttered. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair!” The mutters turned into loud shouts that echoed across the large room. “I can do everything that man can! I’m strong! I’m worthy of you! More worthy than him!”

  With glaring blue eyes narrowed in anger and frustration, Finn took several steps toward her. She wondered if he realized his hand was on the hilt of his rapier. This time, she did take a step back as she prepared to fight, bringing her hands up in a basic bare-handed combat stance.

  Kari did not really know how to fight bare-handed. She had never been trained in it, but she had watched Fay spar against Eryk during their training, so she could at least somewhat mimic her friend’s actions.

  “I do not know what makes you think you are more worthy of my love than Eryk is.” Kari continued to move backward along the walkway, even as she cursed herself for not bringing her ranseur. “However, the only person who can decide who is worthy of receiving my affection is me, and I decided that the person I want to give myself to is Eryk. Sorry, but I have no interest in you.”

  Finn was gritting his teeth now. He drew his sword out with a sibilant hiss of steel, lightning suddenly skittering along both his body and blade as he unleashed his Spiritual Aura. The Spiritual Pressure now pushing down on her was indeed impressive, but it was still nothing compared to Eryk, who made it a point to fight with his Spiritual Pressure so she could become acclimated to the feeling. Thanks to that, Finn’s Spiritual Pressure felt quite weak.