Chapter 970 - You really shouldn’t try to eat that

“Pareth!”

With Pareth appearing near Sofia, she immediately grabbed his arm and pulled him inside of the ECA facility to at least have some cover.

“Let’s mark each other first.”

Sofia used [Roaming Free] to mark Pareth and he left the lesser version of the mark of [Find] on her, so now there was no chance of them ever losing each other.

While the fog was dense enough to prevent Sofia from seeing even two meters away, it presented no danger so far. The forest was still deadly silent.

The eye I left and all the thralls outside are gone. I can’t even tell if they died or I just lost connection to them.

The inside of the facility was already completely filled with fog, nonetheless, Sofia ventured deeper inside.

One of the cells down there was labelled ‘Closed Doors’. That’s one of the things they were keeping prisoner. I did think it was weird how everything had its doors open in the city, and the moment we went into a home and closed the front door, the fog came. Then this weird hypnotism happened… She told Pareth mentally. The room seemed empty but let’s investigate.

Not even taking the time to go down the stairs, Sofia and Pareth used the graveyard Nymphs to phase through multiple floors until they got back to their starting point. They found the ‘closed doors’ cell in no time, which was open like the others, and contained almost nothing at all. It had no vents, no openings, only an empty steel doorframe, and a broken padlock lying on the ground.

Sofia picked up the shattered padlock, it was just regular steel, so it bent like goo under the pressure of her hand.

They really thought this toy was decent enough security?

I sort of get it now, one of the prisoners that escaped broke the lock, so the ‘closed door’ opened. And there we are now. There’s clearly something about opening doors… We might have actually lucked out by teleporting out of the house instead of going through the door.

Then again…

Let’s try stuff.

Pareth immediately copied Sofia’s hand movements when using [Roaming Free] to tear through the planes.

Yeah I was thinking of trying that too, let me see…

Reaching out to tear space open, Sofia only managed to open a rift to the spiritual plane where the graveyard Nymphs were still waiting around to pull the both of them back up, and the margin which was just as empty as usual. She could not reach anything else.

Pulling her hands back and letting the rift close, Sofia could only come to the conclusion that this was still the regular physical plane, no matter how strange the fog was.

Ok I have another idea but it could be really dangerous. Be ready.

Pareth nodded, getting fully fired up for battle with the [Sanctified grounds] ready to go.

Meanwhile, Sofia pulled bone from her armor to form a bone slate. Quickly the slate turned into a door, and the door was slotted into the steel doorframe.

Immediately they both felt the pull.

Hand on the handle, Sofia opened the door. A cloud of fog even denser burst out of the opening, engulfing both of them. Before she could even see beyond the door or step through, Sofia lost her connection to Pareth.

She grabbed to the side where he was an instant ago, and only found the thick mist there.

Slamming the door shut, Sofia spread her mana senses as far as she could. She was still in the underground ECA prison, but Pareth was nowhere to be found.

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Tssk. Trying to separate us? I think not.

Checking with the Inquisitor’s mark, she found that Pareth’s current location was both still right next to her, and also some place an actual eternity away. If the usual distance she crossed with her transposition for training was a lightyear or two, then Pareth’s second position felt at least a hundred million lightyears off.

What a load of crap.

Again grasping at the void, Sofia reached for the Inquisitor’s mark she had left on Pareth. Space bending between her fingers, she grabbed Pareth’s arm from millions of lightyears away.

Got your location now. Letting go of Pareth’s arm, Sofia split space open. Using the mark as an anchor point like this was the only way to open a rift linking two different places in the same plane with [Roaming Free]. Space resisted, the great distance putting up a fight against this violation of natural laws, but Sofia and the Lords’ powers did not care, using all of her strength, she pried open an unsightly rift with both hands, and jumped through to join Pareth.

The rift snapped shut behind her.

Pareth was not surprised by any of this, in fact he paid Sofia’s arrival no attention, fully focused on protecting her should something suddenly attack. The fog around them was too dense to even see their feet, all Sofia could tell was that the ground she landed on felt strangely soft and sticky.

Where in hell…

There was absolutely no ambient mana here, so Sofia had to spread her own for her mana senses to reach anything.

Ew! Shit!

Sofia quickly cast a small explosive bolt and slammed it into the ground at her feet. The explosion blew the nearby mist away, revealing what her mana senses had shown her. They were in a fleshy tunnel, like the throat of some gargantuan monster, and surrounded by countless flesh tentacles slowly closing in on them, while pores opened and closed in the fleshy walls, spewing out more fog every time.

Pareth instantly struck with his sword drawing a full circle. His blade harmlessly phased through Sofia’s head, while it unleashed a long strand of [Arclight] splitting the flesh tentacles like crops ready for harvest.

There were no kill notifications, and the tentacles kept advancing, their missing top half quickly regrowing, not shedding a single drop of blood.

It’s all a single organism!

More fleshy tentacles started to sprout from the flesh right under Sofia and Pareth’s feet as well as from the ‘ceiling’ above while the dense fog quickly closed back in. Each single tentacle was not too strong, but when three lunged and grabbed Sofia’s left arm all at once, she started to struggle to move. That was only for an instant before Pareth’s sword sliced them open.

The bolt basically did nothing. Pareth, keep culling them!

Stomping on the tentacles that tried to grab her feet, Sofia plunged her hand into her chest to grab her dagger. You made a terrible mistake giving me a chance to get inside of you!

Canceling her demon form, as soon as the hole in her chest closed, she stabbed her own heart. Thick dark blue blood flowed profusely out of the wound kept open by the dagger.

The cursed blood flowed down Sofia’s armor, seeping into the flesh at her feet.

There was an almost instantaneous reaction. The ground underfoot began pulsating violently, the nearby tentacles became shaky, and the entire tunnel began to rumble as blue veins quickly spread through the flesh.

“I manage the tentacles, you clear the fog, let’s move!” Sofia ordered, jumping ahead and slicing through the tentacles with a piercing bolt coating her staff. Following right after her, Pareth’s weapon turned into a giant folding fan, each stroke blowing away the fog obscuring the path.

More and more fleshy tentacles grabbed Pareth and Sofia both as they advanced, while Sofia spread her blood everywhere.

Constantly having to stop to cut down the grabbers, Sofia ran through the winding fleshy tunnels following the places with the densest fog until she found what she hoped for.

A larger pore in the ground that looked like two fleshy doors opening and closing in rhythm, letting out a lot more fog than the smaller one.

I just knew it closed back in way too fast for just these tiny holes!

Without hesitation, Sofia slashed through the tentacles in the way and jumped down the hole when it opened again. Pareth followed right after, and they both fell together through a column of mist too dense to see the tip of one’s nose through it.

While they fell, Sofia pulled the dagger out of her chest and transformed again to be ready for a potential fight. She expected the organ producing the strange mist to be well protected.

At the end of the long descent, Sofia and Pareth crashed through a second set of closed fleshy walls, destroyed by the force of their fall.

They both suddenly found themselves upside down, and crashed into a steel wall.

They were back in the underground facility, and the bone door they had just come tumbling out of slammed back shut behind them.

It made us open doors to send us out?!

NOT A CHANCE!

Sofia instantly sent Pareth into the halls. [Regret]! And disappeared.