The stale recycling scent of the cave walls had become a prison of its own making. When Kael finally engaged the Phase Rune, slipping through the solid stone of his sanctuary like a ghost through a memory, the world outside greeted him with a violence of color and air. He deactivated the mana gate in his lungs, allowing the sweet untainted air of the dungeon to flood his system. For a heartbeat, he was not a hunted thing; he was simply alive.
Then the world screamed.
A blur of predatory gold and shadow tore through the treeline. Kael did not think; he reacted. The Compendium flared in his mind, stripping away the brief joy of freedom and replacing it with the cold clinical calculation of an optimizer.
[Warning: Hostile detected.]
The calculation hit him faster than the beast. He snapped a thin film of Arcane Mana over his skin and simultaneously flooded his phase rune with Earth Mana, intent on sinking into the safety of the crust. But he was too slow. The predator was a five meter tall nightmare of muscle and fur, the same apex hunter that had stalked him two weeks prior.
The cat's claws sheared through his Arcane Shield as if it were wet parchment, the force slamming him toward the loam. Kael felt the wet hot slice of teeth and talons as a massive gash opened across his chest. Blood sprayed, coating the forest floor in a frantic red arc. The pain was a white hot iron scoring his ribs, a brutal reminder that in this ecosystem, he was still the quarry.
He collapsed into the earth, his legs phasing through just as the beast's weight hammered the spot where he had stood. Even submerged, Kael felt the rhythmic bone shaking vibrations of the cat's fury. Below the surface, the world was a claustrophobic tomb of cold damp soil and the iron scent of his own blood. He tried to channel Flesh Mana to seal the wound, but the Compendium chimed with a grim warning.
[Biological stabilization failure. Phased state inhibits cellular reconstruction. Exit phase to initiate healing.]
Trapped between bleeding out in the dark or being shredded in the light,
Kael rose from the ground like a vengeful ethereal spirit. This time, he saturated the rune with pure Arcane Mana, pushing himself into a state of near perfect intangibility. The cat lunged, its massive paws passing through Kael's chest with the harmlessness of a breeze. The beast let out a confused yowl, its eyes widening as its lethal strike met nothing but air. Kael did not just feel like a ghost; he felt like a predator becoming kin to the wild magic.
Echo erupted from his shadow, a streak of chitin and iridescent wings. She clashed with the predator in a spray of sparks and mana. Kael winced as a ghost of the impact rattled his own ribs through their connection. He pushed through the mental strain, that familiar hammer and chisel sensation of maintaining Soul Mana and Arcane infusion simultaneously, and opened his mana sight.
The cat was not bleeding physically from Echo's strikes, but its soul signature was flickering like a dying ember.
"She is not hitting its body," Kael realized, his voice a raspy whisper. "She is shredding its spirit."
He saw the opening. This was no longer a desperate hunt. It was an execution, and he was finally strong enough to choose how it ended. He channeled Arcane Mana into the air, manifesting shimmering chains designed to bind the beast's very essence. The cat dodged with an instinctual grace, but Kael was already moving. In a high level display of control, he kept his body phased but solidified his hand. He sprinted through the beast's physical form, an uncanny horror that left the cat frozen in mid leap, and slapped four Stone Beetles onto its fur as he passed.
The cat let out a roar, not a sound, but a concussive wave of mana infused air. The frequency shattered Kael's concentration. The Phase Rune buckled and failed, dumping him back into physical reality right in front of the beast's snarling maw.
For a fraction of a second, Kael wondered if all his careful planning had only taught him how to die more efficiently. Death loomed, yellow eyed and hungry.
But Echo was faster. She dived from the canopy, her pincers locking onto the cat's neck while her stinger buried itself deep into the creature's spine, unloading a concentrated dose of venom. As the predator convulsed, Kael hurled the spike spell he had perfected in the mindscape.
A spike of earth, refined and rotating like a drill, erupted from the ground. It tore into the beast's side, a spray of gore marking the impact. The panther beast roared in a final desperate attempt to claim its prize, but Kael had already vanished, sinking back into the silent cold embrace of the stone.
As the darkness of the earth took him, Kael swam through the earth and reached the mountain. He felt the immense pressure of the granite and the cold humming mana of the deep roots. He emerged and could see the beast was down, suffering from its injuries. Kael knew that the predator would simply heal itself if given the chance and would come to hunt him again. He had to finish the fight once and for all.
The stone beetles were extracting the mana, yet Kael still had the bleeding gashes on his sternum. He channeled Flesh and Life mana simultaneously. It was much harder than he thought it would be. Lilian did it so effortlessly. He finally was able to coax the mana like he wanted, channeling it directly into his wounds. The flesh stitched as if sizzling, and a white hot pain ran through him.
Kael let the Compendium. Then Kael started mending the flesh. At first, he was just channeling the mana, but Kael soon found that Flesh mana behaved erratically. It caused more problems than it solved if left to its own devices.
Kael very slowly started channeling the mana again. He began to create strands of Flesh mana to sew both ends together and then channeled the Life mana to soothe the injury. There were still minor scars left on his body, but he was no longer bleeding. He felt a flash of frustration at these crude human limitations. He had the knowledge, but his execution lacked the elegance of the runes he desperately needed.
Compendium, do Rakshar memories include any manipulation runes?
[Query Initiated: Rakshar did not possess any manipulation runes as he did not require them.]
Kael let go that thread of thought and focused on the beast.
The beetles were now starting the feedback loop. The predator howled with a dissonant, guttural pain. It writhed on the forest floor, its powerful limbs thrashing uselessly against the air. Echo did not waste any time. She descended with predatory grace and sank her mandibles into the crown of the cat's head. Kael watched, fascinated, as Echo began to sip something intangible from the beast.
The cat fought with the last of its strength to dislodge her, but its movements were heavy and lethargic. Whatever Echo was draining acted like a sedative, siphoning away the very spark of its life. Kael opened his soul sight and witnessed the impossible. The cat was physically shrinking, its mass collapsing as Echo took deep, rhythmic sips from its soul.
When Kael reached out through their bond to inquire why she was doing this, he received a flood of strange alien impressions. He saw a flash of a thousand buzzing wings and a vast golden chamber deep in his mind. She was serving the hive.
Serving the hive how?
He watched in silence as the process reached its terminal point. The massive creature was being hollowed out, its essence recycled into the iridescent guardian at his side. After a few minutes, Kael called back his Stone Beetles. They detached from the matted fur and scurried back to him, engorged with stolen mana. All that remained of the five meter tall predator were its teeth, scattered on the dirt like white stones.
Kael felt a pulse of satisfaction from Echo. She projected a clear need for more to continue the growth of her hive. They should hunt again. With the task complete, Echo dissolved into a streak of light and returned to his soul for rest. Kael noted with a touch of envy that the wounds on her carapace were already fully healed, erased by the sheer potency of the soul essence she had consumed.
Kael stood alone in the clearing, the silence of the dungeon returning. He looked at the teeth on the ground, then at the scars on his chest. He collected the teeth and put them in his spatial broach.
Compendium, in the dungeon layout that we have extracted from the Rakshar memories, is there an area where we would find both earth aspected beasts and those that use manipulation spells for an element?
[Query Initiated: There is a danger zone where stone monkeys live. At the initiate stage, they possess stone skin and can manipulate earth instinctively to extract metallic ores from the ground. The monkeys become powerful the more ores they eat. Their body is fully evolved into metallic bodies and at stage they are magus level beasts. The danger is the monkeys are too many and when one of them diesmonkey in the region gets enraged.]
Kael narrowed his eyes. They were perfect for his needs. If he could isolate low level monkeys and capture them, he could perform his experimentations and gather enough data to proceed with his flesh mana research. The communal nature was a risk, but the reward of observing instinctive earth manipulation was too great to ignore.
Compendium, calculate a safe route to this zone and make sure that I remain undetected. I cannot afford to trigger a regional frenzy before I am ready.
[Query Initiated: Calculating safe route to observe the monkeys in their natural habitat. Cost: 5 CP. Current Balance: 825 CP.]
Kael did not hesitate. The cost was a small price for the precision he required. He felt the cold weight of the Compendium processing the request.
[Route mapped. Avoiding primary needle hound corridors and apex predator territories. To maintain stealth, a subterranean approach is advised for 40% of the transit.]
Kael took a final look at the clearing. He centered himself, feeling the Phase Rune thrumming with renewed energy. He did not walk away. He simply leaned back into the trunk of a massive tree and allowed his body to slip into the wood, then deeper into the stone beneath it. Kael kept traversing the route, sometimes he would run on the ground and sometimes he would traverse the earth itself as guided by the compendium.
Kael could see and feel many life forms throughout the dungeon and he knew if the compendium was not guiding him, he would have run into some powerful being and had to fight for his life. After two hours of travelling, Kael finally reached his destination and he saw that monkeys covered the whole area.
What was most shocking was they were not living like animals. There were small stone huts protruding from the grounds, arranged in a tight defensive circle around a central pillar of mana lit stone. One of the monkeys sat nearby, casually polishing a shard of raw iron ore against its palm as if it were a precious tool.
Rakshar considered them beasts, but Kael could see that they had evolved beyond that classification. They had a society. Kael found a hollow tree in the forest and he carved a hole in the wood to observe them. He sat there and started his observation, watching their instinctive manipulation of the earth with a growing, cold focus. He knew he would need a lot of time to achieve his goals.