Chapter 800 - Powder trail

Author note:

Heavy construction work going in my street at the moment, they're peeling off and redoing the road, it was one hell of a struggle to write through all the shaking and the noise. I managed somehow, but if it gets too bad I might take a day or two off to wait out the construction noise.

I usually don't have a hard time focusing on work but man was it hard today.

On a side note, you'll have my exact new-year break dates soon, will be taking two weeks off as usual, just not sure when exactly yet.

Anyways, happy reading ✧ദ്ദി( ˶^ᗜ^˶ )

About an hour after the group had started moving again, night suddenly fell, as if someone had obstructed the ambient light that had seemed to permeate the forbidden layer until now.

In the distance, the orange monkeys started to make a lot of noise, screeching and roaring, as if fighting each other or fleeing some kind of danger.

“What’s going on?” Sofia asked in a whisper.

“Night,” Sonia answered, “Some places like this one have a day and night cycle, not synchronised with the surface. I still have no idea how it works.”

“Well, it’s not actual sunlight, at least,” Sofia said, since she would have known from her mana regeneration and Bookie’s blessing if it was.

“Guessed that much, either way, this is where we stop for the day, now we need to prepare for the night.” 

“What do we do?”

Sonia shook her head, “Can’t say yet. We have to wait and adapt. The strangest things down here tend to happen during the ‘night’ and it’s always different. Often it’s a lot more dangerous. It’s best not to move around too much unless we have to. And tell me immediately if you feel or sense anything wrong.”

“Should we at least move to that cliff up ahead? We’d have at least one direction we’re safe from. I can also make a bone shelter.”

“The cliff is fine,” Sonia said, the group immediately starting to move from tree to tree to cover the few dozen meters separating them from the upside-down rock face. “Shelter may or may not be a good idea. The night’s effects should start to come soon. We’ll know then.”

“I really admire your calm in a situation like this,” Sofia commented. No matter how used she was to dangerous exploration, her nerves still always tensed up in front of the unknown. Pareth was the same, uneasily tapping his boot on the tree branch he stood on.

“Focused, not calm. I’m still nervous, but good at hiding it, I guess? Anyway, be ready for anything. Some nights are fine, some are extremely nasty. Depends on the place, but how the monkeys keep screaming out there is not a good sign.”

“It’s getting distant,” Sofia noted, “They’re moving. Maybe we should follow? They must know how to survive the night.”

Sonia shook her head, “Not worth the risk of running into one of the big ones— Sofia, your hand!”

My hand? Looking down at her own hands, Sofia was horrified to find her right hand missing. As if the dragon scale armor had been cut through, her hand was entirely missing.

In shock, she moved arm up to look at the stump, but her hand reappeared, as if leaving a tiny invisibility bubble. 

“Ouch. I lost some health,” Sofia said, observing her returned hand. The armor, at least, looked perfectly fine, but she had lost almost three hundred thousand health as she pulled her hand out. “It’s not healing…”

Health : 21 269 400 / 21 557 907

Sonia frowned, looking at the spot where Sofia’s hand had been. “That has potential to be a pretty bad one. Be careful, they might hurt more the longer you stay in them.”

Pareth made himself smaller, which would make him less likely to inadvertently touch an invisible zone, while Sofia pulled a bone stick out of her armor to prod the place her hand had been in moments before.

The tip of the bone disappeared, and the more Sofia pushed it in, the shorter it got in her hand.

“It’s really some kind of invisibility zone,” Sofia commented, pulling the bone out. The part that had briefly disappeared looked tarnished and cracked, as if it had been gone for hundreds of years.

My aura can still manipulate it at least…

“Expect more of them to appear,” Sonia warned, “The monkeys were probably fleeing to a place where there are fewer of these zones.”

“I see… I get why moving at night is a bad idea now.”

“This one is particularly nasty if you want to move. I’m trying but I can’t feel the zone at all. Did it feel like anything while your hand was in there?”

“No, I could feel my hand as usual, it’s only when I pulled it out that it hurt.”

“Hmm. Let me try something.”

Sonia pulled a handful of white dust out of one of her pants’ many pockets, and threw it up, spreading it around with minimal movement. In the thin cloud of dust, the group observed multiple spheres in space where the dust disappeared, reappearing after falling through. The one near Sofia was the largest, for now, but the spheres seemed to be changing size, and very slowly drifting around. “They’re already here, just quite spread out… More of them seem to be growing than shrinking…”

“Do you have a lot of that dust?” Sofia asked.

“No much no. We need another way to keep track of those,” Sonia answered, slowly shifting her position to avoid a bubble that drifted close to her wings.

“I’m a bit worried about what might happen if those hit our head or mana heart,” Sofia said.

“Probably nothing good. If it doesn’t get worse than this, though, it’s not too bad. The forest is silent now, it’d be dangerous if we had to flee, but if we can just avoid the spheres here all night, we’re good. It’s really rare for multiple night oddities to happen at once, so this should be all there is.”

Sofia pulled out a handful of bone from her armor’s chest, turned it to dust and threw it up to replace Sonia’s dust that was starting to thin out too much, making the zones clearly visible again. “I guess I should keep doing that all night. Is the night always the same in fixed places?”

“Not always,” Sonia answered, “but almost. Sometimes it can randomly get a second oddity, as I mentioned before, but those death spheres should basically always be all over the mirror valley at night.”

Pareth crouched to let a sphere fly over his head. Sofia threw more bone dust in the air whenever visibility started to become low, and the group silently shifted around the branches to avoid the spheres.

The spheres seemed to slightly become faster, and they gradually grew. While a lot of them were eyeball sized-the first time Sonia had used dust, now there were basically none under the size of a fist. Even the ones which had been slowly becoming smaller at the beginning were now expanding gradually.

I wonder if this inspired the ranking tower’s orb floor… Sofia thought as she contorted to squeeze herself between three moving spheres.

Pareth’s bulky frame made him the most vulnerable, but luckily his actual bones were often safely out of the way even if the spheres grazed his armor. Sofia had no trouble avoiding the danger with her 360° vision, and Sonia also managed quite well. Her owl features showed more, now that she frequently checked behind her, turning her neck in ways that looked less than healthy. She was still the one who took the most damage, a sphere unexpectedly appearing from the branch under her feet, and eating through half her leg before Sofia noticed and warned her.

Sofia tried checking the view from the spirit plane but that did not help at all, and the Nymphs seemed very uneasy around the mirrored trees for some reason. The group thought about digging into the cliffside or up into the ground above, but the spheres came in and out of the terrain and trees as if they weren’t there, so that would offer no protection. They could only endure, contorting on a few branches under a constant shower of bone dust.

At the start they had relatively few mess ups, but after eight hours, with the spheres getting bigger and faster the longer the night stretched for, even Pareth was starting to mentally fatigue. Pestle had long unsummoned herself, while the trio struggled and prayed for the night to end, their life totals all under half.

An ear-breaking hum shook the silent forest with no warning. It was very loud. Too loud. So loud that the Abereth appeared from the void in between the trio, suppressing the sound with its [Aura of silence], and it was still uncomfortable to hear.

Sofia spotted the pink mass appearing out of a huge invisible death sphere. 

Right under their tree.