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The tunnelway led to a small cavern of glowing mushrooms that shed a sickly green luminescence around the cave, the light leaking into a point I determined would be good to hold out in.

If worst came to worst, I could always retreat further down the tunnel to another one of the points that I had noticed along my journey.

I looked at the quest timer again.

[[00:12:43]]

Only twelve minutes…

My mind wandered as my gaze swept over the mushroom-filled cavern before me.

What did the timer mean, I wondered. It was a countdown to “attack”, or so I had assumed, but at what point did the System consider us being under “attack”? Did that mean that the demons were creations of the System if it could so accurately predict where and when they would do things? If so, then were just those specific demons under System control?

The green luminescence was hard to see by, only letting me see faint contours and shapes in the mushroom field throughout the cave.

They were all small mushrooms, clumped together in little batches, and the largest of them grew to about ankle height, as wide in diameter as one of my fists, maybe.

I closed my eyes, deciding to use the time I had left to practice with the echo sight that Krylla had taught me.

It was hard, at first. When I shut my eyes, there was only darkness, the faint glow of green leaking into my eyelids. I tried to focus on sounds at first, the sounds of my breathing, of my shuffling as I tried to calm my nerves, of the steady thump of my heart.

Still, darkness. I remembered what Krylla had said… Each breath a wave… I focused harder, only thinking on each exhalation I sent out, imagining the breaths as little, tactile waves that returned information to me as they collided with the cave.

After a few moments more of darkness, I felt the vague sensations of the cavern as I shifted my position again, my leg numb from where I was sitting on the stone ground.

It was like a little faint bubble of sensation around me that I could have even been imagining, nothing more than a false image created by my mind as it desperately tried to hunt for some sort of sight.

I felt it wasn’t the case, though. I was in that almost trance-like state of half-consciousness from when Krylla had imbued me with the feel of the technique. Time passed as I focused on each breath, feeling the bubble of sensation slowly inch outwards as my mind grew accustomed to receiving and interpreting the information in such a way.

Then, in a similar vein to the heat sense I had acquired from that secret dungeon, I felt something coming down the tunnel. Many somethings, to be exact. Where the heat sense felt almost like a dull pinprick in my mind where I might have left my keys or remembered where something was, what returned from the echoes was more a thrumming sensation, a distant sound that I could pinpoint.

I opened my eyes again to see the System’s countdown timer.

[[00:00:00]]

Twelve minutes had passed before I knew it, and whatever I was waiting for was just reaching the opposite end of the cavern, which I still couldn’t see through the dimly lit green mushrooms.

I stood fully in place and pressed myself against the side of the wall, smothering my blue light with my hands, realizing again that I had yet to get a replacement for my cloak. The stone wall was cool to the touch against the bare skin of my back.

Clack, Clack, Clack.

The sound of clanking metal drew closer to me, and I made out the faint silhouette of the lizard-like demons.

They were the same as the ones in the cave that Krylla had shown me not long before, except they were very much alive and were equipped with a variety of weapons and armor.

Luckily, at least, they didn’t look to be an organized or uniform unit. They looked more like a mishmash of whatever armor they could find from who-knows-where that had grouped together under a common purpose.

As the clanking got closer, it stopped suddenly, and the twinge of an arrow being loosed from a bow reached my ears not long after.

I couldn’t see it through the darkness, but I could guess what they were shooting at.

I moved suddenly, lowering myself into a ducking motion and catching a proper glimpse of them before debating briefly in my mind on my next course of action.

The most obvious and safest thing I could have done at that moment was to turn the corner and wait for them to advance. However, I didn’t know if they had any mages among them that could try to strike me with an area spell from around the corner, or if they had any other such tricks up their sleeves like explosives or the trick arrows that were commonly found amongst archer classes.

Instead, after making a snap decision, I dashed forward towards them.

Krylla stood stock-still in the pitch-black confines of a narrow section of the tunnel system. To reach her, the demons would have to go almost single-file through a section of the passage in front of her.

She sensed them clanking down the tunnel long before they arrived, her echo sense picking them out one by one. There were over thirty of them at a single glance, and there could have been more behind them as well.

Her mind lingered for a moment on Aizen, worried about how he would hold if he was against similar numbers. Her class was all about mimicking the endurance of the earth and standing in the face of overwhelming numbers, but she wasn’t sure about his.

The first of them saw her and said something in their strange, clicking language. They stopped before the tunnel became too narrow and shuffled around as one of their number came forward with a bow.

It was a poor weapon to use in the tunnels, and she couldn’t imagine why they wasted their time when they could have had a mage be just as effective if not more so than an archer who could only shoot down the straight tunnels that didn’t extend anywhere near a bow’s maximum range.

Krylla remained standing perfectly still as the archer drew an arrow and aimed it carefully at her, his body twitched and almost seemed to glitch at the moment he fired—the telltale activation of a skill.

Her cornerstone skill, «Unbreakable Foundation», came into play. It almost tripled her already high Endurance and gave her damage reduction to ranged attacks on top of that if she remained standing in one place for a certain amount of time.

The arrow flew true, striking her with its full force in the forehead…

Snap!

The arrow’s shaft snapped with the force of the impact, the razor-sharp arrowhead not even breaking her skin. It was as if it had truly struck nothing more than stone.

Click, click, click!

More clicking sounds came from the demons as they debated on what to do before they soon reached a conclusion and began filing down the tunnel toward her.

…And she slaughtered them.

One after the other, the almost manlike lizard demons crashed against her.

Her axe cleaved through them effortlessly, their armor little better than warm butter against an even warmer knife.

They fell before her and died with hardly a sound, each cleave of the axe ending a life as more poured towards her.

Their bodies soon clogged the tunnel, making it difficult for their allies to pass over.

Eventually, there was a lull in the attack as she sensed more gathering on the other side of the tunnel, past the piled-up bodies of their comrades.

A brief flash of heat washed over her before a wave of fire followed, incinerating the bodies that had piled up.

[[«Earth’s Wellspring»]]

She used a channeled, reactionary skill that instantly chilled her skin and generated a sheen of water around her for as long as she focused on it.

Kshhhh.

The flames continued for a few seconds, clashing against her water shield and producing a hefty amount of steam until the flames ended and she let the skill drop so that she didn’t waste mana.

Whatever had cast that spell, its Magic stat must have been high if it could incinerate the bodies like that. It was likely that their leader had arrived.

***
My mad dash seemed to have surprised them, at the very least.

Mushrooms went flying as my feet plowed through them and sent the still–glowing fungi flying through the air, providing more illumination to the scene.

Boom!

As if reinforcing my decision, the draft of an explosion wafted through the tunnel behind me and pushed me towards the demons.

KRKKR!

The earth shook, and the tunnel caved in where I had just been.

‘Didn’t Krylla say something about the Relic always keeping two pathways open?’

I recalled that she had said something of the sort, but I didn’t really have time at that moment to wonder about how or when the Relic would sort that out.

At least I didn’t have to worry about one of the demons slipping past me.

The archer had just enough time to widen its eyes before my fist and the earth-like gauntlet around it blew through its chest with surprising ease.

Not ready for such little resistance, I fell forward with the blow.

The soft mushrooms cushioned my roll and squished against my back as I tumbled briefly before righting myself.

I still didn’t have much experience in fighting multiple opponents at that point, but one thing I had picked up on from some of the games I had played all those years ago back on Earth was that the key was to always keep moving.