Arc F1.10 | Chapter 5: Into the Heart of a Beast

The man’s fingers moved over the cool stone of the tunnel as he attempted to find his way along the path, more twisting now than it had been earlier. Previously, he had been lighting his way with a core ability, but now, as he moved closer and closer to horrid heart of this place, he had been forced to snuff the light out, lest he attract any attention.

Eventually, he would need to snatch all attention to himself and hope the Baalphorian girl hadn’t been killed yet. For the moment, he wasn’t about to draw attention to himself—for one thing, if it became clear the Baalphorian girl was already dead, he was going to be fucking right out of there; for another thing, if he dragged attention to himself now, he would struggle to get close enough to find the girl and determine her fate for a while. In that time, the girl could be killed or sucked deeper into the caverns, and really, why had his stupid fucking nephew decided to set up camp so close to this part of the cavern?

It wasn’t really the heart of the cave system that existed above Falmíer in any real, geologic way; rather, it was a term used for in regard to all of the cave systems that had similar issues with infestations—a term for the lairs of the most dangerous of the cave system’s inhabitants.

Sometimes, the cave systems that existed above Lüshanian cities were relatively simply. If all those myths about the Lowdouran having created them were to be believed—and the man generally found himself inclined to believe—it was possible that the vast differences between many of the cave systems was due to a different in those Lowdouran’s abilities or personalities.

If the Lowdouran had been weaker or stronger, their cave systems would turn out one way or another—it was impossible to guess if stronger meant more control, and therefore, simpler designs, or if weaker meant fewer branching paths. If it was a personality thing, perhaps some Lowdouran hadn’t been too concerned with the possibility of an invasion, and therefore, had made their cave systems more straightforward, those who were the paranoid sort creating the mazes that existed above some of the cities, often seemingly without strategic reason.

Falmíer had one of the more complicated cave systems, from what the man knew. Hundreds of tunnels wrapped through the many levels of the system, hundreds never meeting up and having only one true exit either into the city or back onto the surface. Many of the tunnels were so far removed from the surface that entirely unique creatures and ecosystems had developed, millennia separating plants and animals from anything found on the topsoil of the nation, so many evolutions having occurred for each species that they became distinct to everyone but those who knew how to compare flora and fauna and glean evolutionary paths.

Of course, other creatures that lived within the most complicated of the nation’s cave systems were ancient monstrosities, all of their closest relatives extinct for one reason or another—and often for good reason.

The place the girl had accidentally gone towards housed one such creature, it's nearest ancestor that had dwelt on the surface having been hunted to extinction at least ten thousand years ago.

“Take this,” a kolrathi had told him before he left home, intent to find his little fucker of a nephew. Had the man not been in a hurry, attempting to track the brat down before he managed to get himself involved in some stupidity—stupidity that still had the man scratching his head—perhaps he would have properly stared at the item the kolrathi gave him and wondered what the fuck?

“That place has a heart”—that was the last message he had received on his xphern before vanishing into the dead space of Falmíer’s cave system. At that point, it hadn’t taken him long to realize that the stupidly ancient weapon the kolrathi had given him and the message were connected—a warning about what he would find within the cave system.

Originally, the man had assumed he would come across his nephew being consumed by the things; hence, he had actually taken to following the markers of do not go this way, you fucking dumbass that decorated the part of the cave system his nephew had chosen to descend at. As nothing could truly alter the cave system itself, the markers were nothing but stones, placed here and there and directing those who knew to look for them which way to go—or in this case, which way not to go.

Imagine his surprise when, as he had been preparing to head down into the heart of the Falmíer cave system and risk a confrontation with the apex predators who dwelled there, he had heard his nephew arguing with someone—arguing with himself, as it turned out.

As the sound hadn’t been coming from the direction of the heart, the man had waited, scaring the shit out of his nephew when the brat had come around the corner holding his kidnap victim. Idiot.

For a time, the man had thought himself lucky. Perhaps the future that the kolrathi had seen had only been a possibility. Had he not been there, his nephew—clearly lost and apparently not coming at all along the path he’d come in through despite his best efforts to follow that path he’d originally taken—might have gone down into the heart.

Crisis averted.

All was good.

At least, it had been until the Baalphorian girl woke up, pretended to be afraid of him, then blasted him with those weird bubbles before vanishing down into the heart.

Now, he chased after her—not literally, as he’d already fallen on his ass once and very much didn’t want to attract the attention of the monsters lurking here until the perfect moment.

Fuck was this all so annoying—and fuck the kolrathi for giving him only the vaguest of warnings and this ancient willbrand. Did the thing still work? The man only knew it from myths, where it and similarly designed willbrands had been used to wipe out the ancestors of the things he was about to be left fighting. The willbrands were strange in that they had an additional chemical added in during creation—something that wasn’t really done anymore. Willbrandsmithing was a dying art, and certain aspects of it were already all but dead, including the ability to add extra material into the creation process. It was unfortunate—many of the most powerful of willbrands had always been those specialty models, created for more specific purposes.

It was strange, but in no way did the man know much about the why of the death of willbrandsmithing as a profession. It was one of those things that had seemed sudden and slow, all at once. It was also something that had seemingly crossed the continent, as though, within the space of a single breath, the majority of willbrandsmiths had simultaneously decided that, nope, they were done. There would be no more innovation, no more teaching, no more anything.

Some still practiced; few of them taught.

Some professions died out for a reason; willbrandsmithing seemed to have no reason for it. If the man had to describe the way the willbrandsmiths he had met over the decades acted… it were as though their passion had been ripped from them. It that weren’t bad enough, at the same time, it seemed as though the majority of governments the continent over had switched to focusing on core abilities or skills for combat, leaving willbrand use to those lucky enough to have inherited one, and fuck if it wasn’t disturbing.

In a fight, willbrands were impossibly important—in a fight with someone with a far lower D-Level or an irregular deviation, willbrands could literally mean the difference between life and death. It kinda begged the question of whether the aether or her enemies were tugging about the passion and inclination to use and develop willbrands.

There was no way to know—it wasn’t like the kolrathi ever shared anything useful with him, even this hint that he was going to be fighting fucking monsters something of an outlier in their communication with him—but the man did wonder.

All this was to say that he was heading into battle for a girl he didn’t know with a weapon he had never used before that hadn’t been maintained in fuck knew how long. If he was lucky, the last truly good willbrandsmith who had been aligned with his family had done maintenance on it. Even that would have been a few centuries ago.

Lovely. Just what he wanted today.

Seriously, if he ever found his nephew, he might just kill the brat—certainly, he was going to demand answers from him about why the fuck he had decided to kidnap the random girl!? What the fuck was a random Baalphorian girl going to do for them?

Dumbass. Some part of the man hoped the idiot would never escape from the cave system. The world’s intelligence would go up a substantial amount from his loss alone.

Pushing aside thoughts of his nephew, the man slowed his movements further. He had long ago wrapped a hearing-augmentation ability around his ears, listening for any creature that might try to sneak up on him. There had been none; either the path that the girl had gone down wasn’t one used by the creatures, or they were all distracted by the girl herself.

Now, the man pushed that ability further, amping up his hearing until he could hear bugs wiggling through the smaller tunnels of the cave system, going about their lives. There weren’t nearly as many as there should have been, only creatures that either weren’t considered worthy food by the monsters lurking further down into the cave system or who had become lost in their work lingering within those tunnels.

Shifting along, the man tilted his ability, pushing it outwards into a bubble that travelled along the tunnel ahead of him. A small tendril of energy connected him to that bubble, the sound of the nearby insects falling away in favour of what the bubble was gathering: more bugs, the quiet shift of debris as they moved, and then.

And then.

The man had never seen the monsters of this place before—this wasn’t the sort of adventure anyone with a brain willingly went on. What he had seen? ****Drawings of their ancestors, skewed by time and artistic style—to say nothing of the differences millennia of evolution had made. More terrifying, he had seen the doodles of hunters without brains, all skewed by terror and limbs lost during their attempts to flee the things, as though their reckless hearts hadn’t led them to seek the things out in the first place.

Eventually, when he was able to see the things, the man would have to compare the experience of hearing them with the experience of seeing them. Currently, the man was unimpressed, the sounds they were making reminding him more of twittering songbirds than anything else.

Songbirds were not something common in his homeland; the majority of birds that called that dystopic urban landscape home were horrid things, pecking garbage from the streets and coating the world with shit. Every so often, a songbird would lose track of itself and end up in the city. Sometimes, the man would catch them, knowing that other monsters of the city—the humans themselves, as well as the occasional larger animal that prowled the streets, tipping over garbage cans and hunting down smaller prey and humans weak on drugs and faded dreams—would kill the thing. Eventually, he would take any bird he’d given temporary sanctuary to with him on a trip out of the nation and return it to its proper home, but until then, those birds would live in his garden, twittering away, innocent and lovely.

If he hadn’t known that monsters lurked within these tunnels, the man would have thought that a million songbirds were waiting, singing their lovely song and longing for sunlight. Some people—perhaps even the girl he was seeking—might have assumed that, surely, if there were songbirds, an exit must be nearby. They would run, unafraid, because what creature capable of making such sweet sounds could possibly be a monster, tempting prey to it with a lovely song?

Then, the terror would come.

Then, the horror of the nest they had just run into, willingly making a meal of themself, would come.

The man wasn’t going to run into that place, but fuck if he didn’t still feel the idiot, wandering his way into the stomach of a beast, all for a girl he didn’t know and the lingering feeling that he couldn’t let her die, for it would break his heart.