174 - True Darkness

Alexandra looked at the hole in the mountainside. It was covered in deep darkness. She hadn’t known that darkness could be deep.

“Go,” Speck said.

“One moment. If there’s a battle down there, we need to be careful about how we approach this.”

“Fast. Is. Careful,” Speck said.

"No. Fast is fast. You saw the symbols on those corpses. The pyramids are from the Architects, the open hands from the Paladins of Yshar. The former are enemies. The latter might be. This is actually dangerous. Don't rush in. We stay quiet, we stay together, and if I say retreat, we retreat. No negotiating that.”

Speck hesitated. “Fine.”

She was already making a stupid decision in getting involved. Might as well not outright throw her life away. But Zeynep might be in there. Even if she wasn’t, two holy orders coming to blows near the region she was hiding in could hardly be a coincidence.

Investigating would serve her better than staying passive. If they were coming for her, perhaps now was the best time to deal with them.

She opened her journal.

Steady Balance 5 -> 6

Familiar Contract 6 -> 7

Solar Affinity 4 -> 5

Alexandra raised an eyebrow. She hadn’t expected her Solar Affinity to level up.

Solar Affinity Training Quest Completed x 1 -> 80 contribution points

Did I understand a conceptual truth?

The system didn’t lie. But it was strange that she hadn’t noticed.

Quest Journal

Daily Reset: 06:00 | Streak: 146 Days | 10% All Stats, 10% Skill experience

Next Milestone: 250 Days

Daily Quests:

• Flip a coin landing on tails seven times in a row (0/7)

She grunted. Easy. But it was going to be annoying.

Unless…

She took out a coin.

With her dexterity approaching the one hundred points mark, she could manipulate the odds in her favor. She just needed to flick the coin with the right impulsion.

“There,” she said, landing her first tail.

A few minutes later, she was done with her daily.

Flip a coin landing on tails seven times in a row (7/7) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 DEX

Daily Quest Streak: 146 -> 147

“See? Easy.”

“Hurry.”

“Right.”

Alexandra shook herself out of her streak-fueled obsession and focused her attention on the opening along the mountainside.

Her senses didn’t quite reach far enough inside. It was like the darkness was rejecting her, like swimming in a viscous liquid.

“Can you sense what’s going on inside?” she asked.

“Little,” Speck answered. “Darkness. Weird.”

“Try to figure out what’s going on.”

Alexandra drew her sword and stepped closer to the hole. The ground was rugged, as if an explosion had detonated here recently.

“Speck. Stay close. Don't go roaming on your own once we get inside.”

“Want. To. Look.”

“Not until we know what's down there.”

“Boring.”

“Dead is more boring.”

Perhaps Speck was starting to understand the situation wasn’t normal, because it agreed without arguing more.

Alexandra stepped through the opening.

The darkness swallowed her whole. One moment she was outside in the sun, the next she couldn’t see her hand if she waved it in front of her eyes. The darkness was complete. Pitch black.

She called Rays Of The Sun.

Nothing answered. Well, not quite. She felt the heat radiate from the place she had cast the spell, but there was no light.

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She tried feeding more into it. More heat. Still no light.

“What’s going on? Speck?”

“Tasty. Darkness.” Speck said. “Feel. Through. Me.”

She focused on the sense she had borrowed from Speck through Familiar Contract. It was severely restricted. She could see even less than when she first got the skill.

“Is it better for you?”

“No.”

Speck's senses extended a little further than hers by virtue of its nature as a darkness elemental and its understanding of conceptual truths. But even it was feeling the pressure.

“Speck, mark the entrance.”

A pause.

“Can't. Find. It.”

She swiped her senses behind them.

Nothing.

The sounds of battle were muffled, coming from every direction at once.

“Fuck. What do we do?”

“Consume.”

She winced, clutching her sword. “You do that. I’ll see if I can find something.”

What did I get myself into?

She walked deeper into the hole.

The battle sounds shifted. Closer now, or she'd turned around without meaning to. She couldn't tell anymore which way was the entrance. A clash of metal rang out somewhere to her left, then behind her, then above her.

She stood with her sword raised, blind, listening.

Something moved.

Not footsteps. The darkness itself had thickened in one spot.

“Speck.”

“Dinner. Is. Served.”

A darkness elemental. She cast Rays Of The Sun only for it to be nullified by the ambient darkness.

“Can you deal with it?”

Speck didn’t answer. It shifted inside the darkness, throwing itself at the other elemental. Soon, Alexandra couldn’t tell them apart. Their sources flowed around one another as if water and oil were trying to merge.

Alexandra was powerless to help.

*

Speck was in heaven.

The darkness was tasty.

Its source shivered when Alexandra stepped inside the hole, and it felt the dark envelop them.

Then Speck watched as its familiar tried to conjure her solar skill. Bane of darkness. A fitting partnership, for each of them covered the other’s weaknesses.

The spell failed. There was heat, but darkness was neither hot nor cold. There wasn’t light. Snuffed out. Absorbed. Blocked. Speck couldn’t tell.

Exciting.

It hummed, feeling the relaxing embrace of the eternal night. This darkness wasn’t natural. It was true darkness.

If the ghost were there, it would praise Speck to no end. Darkness that could overpower light was a conceptual truth worth studying.

How did it work?

Speck narrowed in on the spell as Alexandra tried to cast it again. It felt the hostile solar truth flare for an instant before being swallowed by the superior element.

Got. It.

Speck’s elemental source solidified again. It was inching closer and closer to Gold.

If it so willed, Speck could do the same and extinguish its human’s solar magic. Inversely, it could free her from the darkness and let her act more freely.

Should it?

There were other concepts hidden within the darkness. Speck’s senses were still muffled. Besides, its familiar needed the practice. Challenges were made to be overcome.

Besides, dinner was about to present itself to Speck.

Some meals were meant to be savored.

Alexandra would manage.

*

Alexandra was completely lost.

As the battle between the two darkness elementals gained in intensity, she wasn’t able to recognize Speck from their enemy. All she knew was that Speck was alive. Their link told her as much.

She flexed her senses, trying to expand the area they covered. To no avail.

She cast Rays Of The Sun again.

Nothing. The heat bled out into the dark. The light never came.

“Fuck.”

She tried again. Fed more into it, the way she had in the entrance. As expected, doing the same thing over and over didn’t alter the result. The darkness took the spell. No light. Only warmth.

She breathed. That was her best tool. She had to make it work.

Alexandra relaxed her shoulders. The darkness was blocking her light. It wasn’t a tangible thing. Just a higher conceptual truth clashing against hers. How could darkness block light? This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t acceptable. Light was supposed to tear through darkness.

Borrowing Speck’s senses, she saw the darkness from a different perspective. Darkness feared light, which was why it tried so hard to drown it. Light, however, had no care for darkness. It ripped through it as if it wasn’t there. Darkness only existed where light couldn’t reach, whereas light was its own source.

Even at night, the sunlight reflected off the moon, and in the morning, the sun always rose.

The sun didn't need permission to rise.

The sun always rose.

No exception.

She stopped feeding mana into the spell, and instead focused on the idea behind it.

Dawn.

Light broke.

Not a flicker. Not a struggle. It simply arrived. A flash imprinting a scene into her eyes. Gone in a second.

The sun always rose. So the sun always set.

Solar Affinity 5 -> 6

But it was enough.

In that half second she saw a man three paces to her right, spear held tight, shield raised. He wore the heavy plate armor she’d seen on the corpses outside. On his shield: a pyramid.

The dark swallowed the light again and took the image with it, but not before her stomach had already dropped, confirming the thing she feared when she first saw the aftermath of the battle in the pass.

That man was an Architect. Those were Lila’s men.

“Fuck.”

I knew I shouldn’t have come here.

She didn’t think he’d seen her. The flash had been too brief. The brightness would have blinded him too. She looked at Speck’s fight. There wasn’t much she could do.

Then she tried extending her sense toward the Architect. This time, it pierced into the darkness as if her flash had weakened it. Soon, she had the lock onto the man’s position.

He was holding off against another darkness elemental.

She didn’t think either the Architects or the Paladins had come in here willingly. Whatever had pulled them inside the hole was using the elementals to wear them off.

The man was alone. Isolated.

Perhaps she should have been more worried about the situation. After all, she was in the hole with them.

But at this moment, all she could see was a fight she could take. Gold-rank. It wouldn’t be easy. But unlike the darkness elementals, the Architect was tangible.

He could bleed. And if he saw her, he would make her bleed.

So why not take the initiative?