Chapter 166: Eyes

Jaxir dropped through the broken floor and found himself falling into a cavern so large that the walls disappeared into darkness on either side of him. Black crystal covered everything he could see, but thousands of tiny lights fluttered beneath its surface like fireflies trapped inside polished stone, turning the cavern into a field of dim stars. For several seconds, Jaxir forgot that he was falling at all.

A wolf lay curled across a wide shelf of black crystal, its body made from the same dark material surrounding the cavern while little points of golden light drifted beneath its surface. The creature was probably only ten percent smaller than a mature horse, yet there was something so clean about the shape of its body and the slow movement of those lights that Jaxir couldn’t help thinking it might be the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, video game or otherwise.

Then the ground reminded him that beauty wasn’t going to do much about fall damage.

"Oh, right." Jaxir pulled out his Sapphire-Emerald Glider Wings rather than wasting mana slowing himself down, and the wings snapped open behind him as they caught the air. His descent flattened almost immediately, carrying him in a wide arc toward the crystal shelf below.

The wolf sensed him sometime during the descent and slowly lifted its head from its paws. Its eyes opened to reveal two pools of dark silver surrounded by faint golden flecks, and its ears shifted forward while it watched Jaxir glide toward it. There was no growl, no sudden gathering of mana, and not even the slightest hint that it planned on standing.

Jaxir landed around twenty meters away and allowed the glider to fold back behind him. The wolf followed the movement with its eyes before resting its chin against its paws again, looking about as concerned by his arrival as someone watching a leaf fall from a tree. Somehow, despite the complete lack of human features, Jaxir could practically feel the laziness coming off the thing.

He cleared his throat and waited for another few seconds, but the wolf continued staring at him.

"You know, usually things just attack me first and we can call it a day." Jaxir shifted his staff in his hand while the wolf’s ear twitched once. "This whole lazy streak you’ve got going is going to make this a lot harder."

The creature offered no response, so Jaxir focused on it and allowed its information to appear.

Name: Mutated Black Gem Alpha (Mage)

Level: 12

Jaxir’s eyebrows rose slightly at the Mage designation, confirming that the Gasini had at least been honest about what they sent him here to find. The wolf’s tail shifted behind it in a slow sweep before flopping back against the crystal with a heavy thud that echoed farther than Jaxir expected. His gaze immediately dropped toward it.

The creature was large, but that sound told him size wasn’t the only problem. Its tail had barely moved with any speed, yet it struck the floor with the weight Jaxir would’ve expected from dropping a sack of sand weighing somewhere around a 150 or 200 pounds. If the rest of the wolf carried the same density, getting hit by one of those paws was probably going to feel less like being clawed and more like having part of a boulder thrown at him.

Jaxir raised his staff and settled into position.

The wolf stared back.

Several seconds passed before Jaxir slowly lowered the staff again, and the wolf’s tail made another lazy sweep behind it as though congratulating him on finally figuring something out. Jaxir sighed, walked forward until only a few meters separated them, and sat cross-legged on the crystal floor.

"I don’t wanna do this either, buddy." Jaxir rested his cheek against his palm while studying the wolf’s face from much closer now. "Why’d they have to make your eyes so realistic?"

The wolf stared back at him, and something about those dark silver eyes made the joke die before Jaxir could think of another one. At first he had mistaken the look for laziness, but laziness still came with wants attached to it. Someone lazy wanted comfort, sleep, food, or simply to be left alone. This was emptier than that.

Jaxir knew those eyes.

He had seen them in the mirror after his parents died, back when days stopped feeling different enough to bother keeping track of them. He had seen them again after Jahbri left, when even the pain eventually dulled beneath something worse and he stopped caring whether he ate properly, slept properly, cleaned himself up, or did much of anything beyond letting one day turn into the next. There had been no dramatic moment where he’d decided to give up on himself. That would’ve required enough feeling to make a decision.

He had simply stopped seeing a reason to participate.

There wasn’t anger in them, or fear, or even the weary irritation of an animal that wanted Jaxir gone so it could return to sleeping. It looked at him the same way Jaxir remembered looking at the ceiling for hours after waking up, aware that the world was still there without understanding why that should matter enough for him to move.

For a moment, the cavern disappeared from his thoughts.

Jaxir remembered the silence of the house after his parents were gone, how much larger every room had seemed without them in it, and how quickly that silence had become normal. Then Jahbri had disappeared from his life too, taking one of the last things that had still managed to drag a real reaction out of him, until even missing her became something he carried without having the energy to fight against. He had hated that version of himself only after he started becoming someone else again.

Jaxir didn’t know why anyone would program something like this into a beast, or whether something inside Divinity had actually happened to leave it this way. Whatever the answer was, the Black Gem Alpha didn’t look like it was waiting for death so much as it had stopped caring whether death eventually came.

The two of them remained there, staring at one another.

Jaxir needed access to the Gasini, and killing a Mage creature was the test he’d been given. Without them, finding the final inheritance tied to the Mage Gods could become considerably harder, especially now that he knew other players might already be pursuing the same quest. Unfortunately, knowing exactly what he stood to gain didn’t make raising his staff any easier.

A minute passed, then another, while neither of them moved.

"This is awkward." Jaxir scratched the side of his face and glanced around the cavern, as though another Mage might conveniently walk out from behind one of the crystal formations and volunteer instead. Nothing moved except the lights trapped inside the walls, and when he looked back, the wolf hadn’t changed position by so much as an inch.

He could attack first, and judging by the creature’s current mood, it might not even stop him. The thought should’ve made the test easier, yet all Jaxir could see was that same dead weight behind its eyes and remember how furious he would’ve been if someone had found him at his lowest point and decided his unwillingness to resist made him convenient. Somehow, killing something that wanted to tear him apart sounded far simpler.

Jaxir sat there for a while longer before eventually shrugging his shoulders.

"Yeah, I’m not doing this tonight." He opened his menu while the wolf watched him with the same exhausted expression. "See you tomorrow, I guess."

Jaxir logged off.

The familiar darkness disappeared and the inside of his Divinity pod returned around him, leaving Jaxir lying there for several seconds while his mind adjusted to being back inside his real body. He climbed out, took the nutrition pack Dr. Obrey had left as part of his schedule, then headed upstairs for a shower. After everything he’d done today, getting to bed at a reasonable hour somehow felt like the strangest accomplishment of all.

Jaxir slept through the night without any calls dragging him awake, then got up the next morning and continued the work he’d been doing outside. He spent some time on the lawn without pushing himself past the limits Dr. Obrey had set, showered once he finished, then headed back downstairs toward the pod. The entire time, part of him kept wondering whether logging out beside a Level 12 Mage had been one of the dumber decisions he’d made lately.

He settled into the pod and logged back into Divinity half expecting a death screen to be waiting for him.

Instead, he found something else entirely.