Had Ren really gone down so far?
‘How could someone with a spore survive that?’ she wondered while silently advancing.
She thought it would just be another case of juvenile stupidity but maybe this hadn’t had anything to do with him.
The destruction became more evident as she descended.
At 250 meters, the mana grew denser. Her beast was superior to most in its rank, but even it had limits. She could already feel the pressure building, and the fused worms at this depth were truly massive, their segmented bodies casting grotesque shadows in the dim yellow light.
The tunnels here were wider, the work of greater worms and Living Tunnels.
But it seemed the enormous beasts had hastily abandoned their galleries, half-built structures telling the story of a panicked flight. Something had scared even these territorial creatures from their domains.
One suddenly emerged from a hole and nearly crushed her against a wall, forcing her to perform two consecutive blinks to evade its segmented body. The effort made her stop to catch her breath behind a rock formation, the mana pressing against her senses like a physical weight.
When she was given her mission, she hadn’t expected to do this kind of thing…
The worst part was that no one would know.
No one except her handmaidens, of course.
The thought almost made her smile, the girls everyone believed were simple noble followers were much more than they appeared, cousins and handmaidens.
Three handmaidens for the three cousins, playing their parts perfectly in two teams… How had they already found the classroom, class, and school they were in? Was there a skilled spy in the school?
Though the constant exchange of groups, pretending not to know each other… It was an entertaining game of actresses and also served as study for their future lives in high noble positions.
Learning to act and be a spy was part of why she was here, after all, watching her cousin was her original mission.
Though lately the headmaster, the only adult who knew the truth, seemed more interested in knowing about the mushroom boy than her cousin and the king’s daughter.
It was fine. She wouldn’t have been able to fulfill the real mission anyway. She loved her cousins, besides…
Her cousins had always been observant, even when pretending not to be. The mission would have failed.
So the mission to watch Ren was better, she could take it more seriously and didn’t have to lie in the reports. But this no longer had anything to do with Ren either…
‘How could he have reached so far down with just a spore? Impossible, this couldn’t have been his doing… My objectives seem to change too quickly. But I have to find out what happened here.’
At 275 meters she found the first signs of deep Assassins, proboscis marks on the walls and remains of consumed prey. But something had driven them away. The territorial beasts had abandoned their usual hunting grounds.
At 300 meters, the trail of destruction reached its climax.
The mana was a bit denser now. Each blink required more concentration, and the rest periods between each use grew longer.
A deep Assassin emerged from a corner, its proboscis extended.
She remained completely still. Deep Assassins didn’t hunt by sight. They depended on detecting vibrations, and right now she wasn’t generating any.
The Assassin moved slowly, its sensors sweeping the area.
Her previous steps must have alerted it.
When the beast came too close, she panicked, took a step back and used her ability, appearing several meters beyond. The Assassin advanced to the location of the last step and stopped, confused.
Its prey’s vibrations had completely disappeared.
The beast began moving in a search pattern, its sensors working methodically. She waited, studying its behavior.
The Assassin approached again. This time, when she transported, she did it behind a rock formation she had been studying but it wasn’t perfect. The sound of her landing was muffled, but not far enough, the assassin felt it, she needed a more distant target to lose it.
The beast turned instantly toward the new vibration, its proboscis cutting through the air where she had been a second before. Her next blink took her to a larger tunnel and she ran.
The Assassin pursued her, guided by her footsteps’ vibrations.
The signs of destruction were more evident here, pulverized walls and marks of recent combat.
The Assassin kept chasing her, but something made it stop. Its sensors detected something else, something that made the beast instinctively back away.
A roar shook the tunnels.
The girl, not having to worry about the assassin now and confident in her skills, peered cautiously around a corner.
A hydra, its two heads covered in recent wounds.
Her mother had told her about them, but two heads meant gold rank, what was it doing so high up?
Normal hydras only had one head and lived at around 1000 meters underground in the zone beneath the school, that was all that appeared in modern records.
Information about multi-headed ones were relics of an earlier age, mentioned in texts so ancient that no one in Yano had bothered to verify.
Her uncles or her father could have done it.
Her father definitely had the power to obtain a hydra egg. But their interests had led them down other paths, to beasts they considered “better.”
No one had wanted the hard task, or risk their life if even a little, in an expedition beyond 2000 or 3000 meters of depth just for the possibility of finding a hydra egg.
Its scales, beautiful as diamonds, gleamed weakly while it faced a figure she hadn’t noticed before.
The man, if it was a man, had two beasts.
The hydra attacked with one of its heads while the other tried to charge a ray. The man blocked the attack with his claws, the impact making the rock beneath his feet crack.
She remained hidden, observing.
The hydra was weakened, its movements slower than they should be, and the ray in its second head barely managed to form sparks.
The man, on the other hand, seemed furious.
“Where is it, idiot?” his voice resonated in the chamber. “How did you let them steal the egg? Now you’ll be my new egg, a plan B!”
The hydra responded with another attack, but it was obvious it was rapidly losing strength. The man dodged and counterattacked with a brutal combination of his two beasts.
Then, the golden hippogriff manifested completely outside his body, its 5-meter form filling the chamber.
The abyssal scorpion remained fused with him, its influence evident, the mutations it caused different from anything she had seen in Yano.
‘Yino,’ she thought while observing the mutation patterns. ‘Father told me that only they have perfected fusion with abyssal beasts. He’s like those from the attack with Professor Zhao.’