/Multiple hunter teams vanished at disparate points in the tunnels. Tracking devices broken, final spots recorded. What the hells is happening out there? Are we really having whole teams hunted down by people barely past the integration?! Get your act together, I wanna see a report of their team comp, stat!/

  -Envida Irest, branch head of the Hunter’s Guild in Espiree

  - - -

  Living in the caverns is a little dreary. They’re dark, damp, and the food is mid at best. There are no baths, and that’s been getting on my nerves, too. We need some more infrastructure, but none of us have been offered a cleaning job yet.

  I don’t mind too much, really. Other than the baths, I can tolerate the food. I like the darkness, even, and I have no issues with things being cramped. It’s calm, and so long as I keep warm, it feels nice. Sometimes I ask Richard for a little help with that, and the little hiy’ht enjoys sitting next to me.

  She sometimes hums a few calm, quiet tunes. I hear them more, now that my phone is out of battery. That’s honestly the worst bit of all of this.

  The caves echo. I like Richard’s humming, but her hymns get distorted by the caverns, and the echo is exhausting. It makes it hard to focus, when there are occasionally dripping and skittering noises. But I can’t use my headphones, since those, too, ran out of battery. Bay better figure out how to recharge them soon, or I’ll do it myself.

  We have, however, gotten a lot better at navigating the tunnels. There have also been fewer hunters than we expected. Occasionally we find a colony of insects, but we’ve always been able to dispatch them. It’s kinda annoying, I don’t really wanna kill the critters, but such is life. I don’t get too broken up about it, either.

  Instead, I focus on the mana maze. Whenever I get bored, I form my mana into a stylus and scratch runes into rocks. If I mess them up, they like to explode into mana-shrapnel, which seems like I might be able to use in combat, but it’s horribly inefficient. I could just make mana orbs and have those explode for cheaper and less time.

  Plus, Bay’s job is much better at helping her make bombs. I try inscribing those, too, seeing how the enchantments react. Unfortunately, most of the runes I know are for storing or moving power, as well as sending and receiving signals, rather than anything else. I’m still learning from our water-items, but it’s slow going.

  Ah, I wanna steal more.

  With a sigh, I relegate myself to practicing the enchantments I already know, and shoring up weaknesses in them. It’s slow going, but I make progress.

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  [Inscription 5 > 6]

  [Job up! Enchanter 7 > 8]

  Another point trickles into vessel, and the pressure against my chest grows again. I sometimes have to pour a little bit of mana into [Flesh Restoration], just to deal with the minor amounts of damage it’s doing. I could just keep my mana bottomed out, but honestly? This is good practice for my heart stat.

  To train power, I also keep [Suppression] active on myself. With the skill being my highest, the efficiency of mana is pretty good, and I can keep a weak version on me with just what I regenerate. It’s almost like a passive effect, a constant workout for my mind and body. It’s nice, like stretching a sore muscle.

  Plus, it helps me understand it and my other skills. Using [Suppression] when I try to solidify mana, or change its shape, makes it much harder. I use it when I practice with the mana maze, and I even deconstruct my own skills sometimes, just to see what would happen.

  It’s fun. I learn more about mana, more about skills. Another hunter team finds us, but they’re looking ragged even as they show up. We take them down with little fuss, to the point where I don’t even level from it, the tower not deeming them a challenge.

  “What do you think they encountered in the tunnels?” I ask absent-mindedly, while practicing my mana a bit.

  “Maybe a gloomstalker?” Richard suggests.

  I hum in thought. “Nah, don’t think so, it woulda killed them all.”

  She nods, just a bit. “Fair. Probably some cave insects, then,” she notes.

  “Probably,” I agree, then put the thought aside.

  “They smelled weird,” Richard says.

  “Hmmmm,” I hum.

  When I do so, she quiets down, focusing on the food. She stirs the pot, filled with mushrooms, water, and cuts of meat. We found a small cavern with a dirty spring in it before, and using the purifying waterskin, we can now make stews. Lovely.

  Richard’s cooking is good. I think she has a cooking-related job, but I haven’t checked yet. She doesn’t volunteer much about herself, and I respect it. She sure can eat, though. Makes fires, then eats them when we’re done, while also monching plenty of food herself. We forgive her, ‘cause she cooks well.

  A few more days pass that way. We walk through the caves, relying on Thatch to spot things and Norman to check them out. We gather up mushrooms where we can find them, cooking them into meals. Jess turns some of the less disgusting cave-critters into decent looking cuts of food. And we survive.

  I sigh. Is this… really it?

  All that anger I had at the [Darkbreaker] is still there. I still wanna kill them. I still want to bring Sylves’ arm back, but at the same time, I’ve been feeling a bit stuck. The lack of challenge, of lethality, is making me anxious. I wanna throw myself into the thick of it again, not stand in the back, casting [Suppression] over and over. I’ve run out of magic items to take apart, too, and tracing the runes on the mana maze is getting boring.

  We’re not even fighting anything fun. Just insects. They’re mindless little critters who’ve done nothing to deserve what we’re doing to them. I don’t mind hiding away from strong enemies like a rat. I don’t want my friends to get hurt. But surely, they could spare a couple bounty hunters that don’t almost die in the tunnels, right?

  So, when, after some days of scurrying, I find an ant around a corner of a tunnel, I’m intrigued. Ants, huh? Weren’t those known for levelling cities?

  How curious.