Soulless Soul

Chapter 68: The Light in the Darkness

Sky was just being paranoid.

The terrifying roar that had just sounded out from somewhere in the jagged forest had long faded off, vanished into the oppressive, empty silence filling the night. Creatures were crying out to the wilderness around them, im in the dark, and Sky’s clone’s immediate wave of danger had just been a hyper-attentive response to a shadow passing by.

No glowing eyes had peered out from the narrow slits of their barricaded stone shelter, and the distant, grinding sound of behemoths’ progress remained just that - distant.

With a head full of thoughts, Sky returned to the center of the platform and sat down cross-legged. An All-Rounder Passive Attribute was an immensely intimidating concept to have on a potential enemy, as well as comforting for an ally. Sky wondered what other deep truths Crazy Hope was hiding in her status sheet, what Chloe’s forged equipment did precisely to a person’s soul foundation, and the sheer complexity of the Dungeon Array’s mechanisms was dizzying.

After a while, he beckoned to his Soul Clone. The ethereal figure glided silently over the uneven floor, an expression of an unearthly, hollow statue fixed to its featureless, translucent face. It came to a halt just on the edge of their ledge, a flawless sentinel and guard built out of his own spiritual essence.

It took up a position just on the edge of the shelter, its spiritual presence weaving out in grids to encompass all sight-blinds in the immediate region.

Reassured by the immaculate vigilance of his projection, Sky closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep. He leaned on his upper back against the rough rock wall, tightening the cloak around his chest to preserve the little warmth he had left. It didn’t last long, and several minutes of struggling passed before images of his previous fights, the horrific visages of the Savage Beasts, gray eyes of Vesper, haunted his tired mind.

During the night, however, a sudden impulse woke him up. It wasn’t a loud noise, nor a physical touch. It was, rather, an immediate jolt of danger emanating out from his soul core, pricking his spiritual senses in an alarming way that didn’t concern his actual, bodily senses.

Hbbis heart pounded furiously in his ribs, sending an enormous rush of adrenaline over his sluggish veins. He grabbed hold of the hilt of his weapon before his eyes had caught on the absolute blackness of the cave.

Did something come to kill me?

Had one of the stealth-type apex predators slipped through his clone’s? Or had some other horror from bthe depths sensed him out and sought to snack on human meat. The lower sectors were infamous for beings that fed solely upon the dense, highly refined spiritual essence of the Awakened, tracking their prey down by the heat of their unseen soul signatures.

Sky glanced around, his eyes darting through the dark corners of the stone-ceiling. Vesper and Chloe remained perfectly motionless, their soft, rhythmic breathing signifying that they were completely unaware of his sudden panic.

However, it seemed that the area just below the tree was clear.

Sky couldn’t hear anything unusual, either. There were no noises of scraping claws, no wet breathing of a hidden monstrosity, or rustling of the predatory leaves of the gargantuan flora from the lower trench. Everything was silent - heavy, and more than suffocating.

"Anythin’ wrong?" Sky whispered Sky turned his gaze towards the sentinel, his brow furrowed with deep confusion. The clone hadn’t taken up a combat stance, nor did it radiate the aggressive spiritual pressure it normally was supposed to demonstrate in the presence of a hostile entity.

The clone silently pointed out a certain direction. Its arm stretched over the stone platform edge, facing straight out at the great, open abyss of the cavern floor below them.

Sky turned his head and squinted, walking forward in silent, careful steps. He kept his weight distributed to even sides to avoid making a sound on the loose gravel, and pressed his shoulder against the cold stone of the cave opening.

Sky quickly understood the reason why his clone had decided to wake him. It wasn’t immediately a threat to their lives, but it was an oddity that Sky could never miss in a place like this.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t have noticed if he had been asleep, or if he didn’t have a clone whose perception was fundamentally tied to the spiritual spectrum.

Far in the distance, several kilometers away, a small orange light shimmered in the darkness. It was a lone, fragile speck of warmth amidst an ocean of absolute black, a single star that had somehow appeared at the bottom of the world.

Its reflection rose and fell with the movement of the waves. The light seemed to be coming from the huge, subterranean body of water that snake-crawled through the lowest trenches of the sector. The rhythmic bobbing implied that the light was attached to a vessel, a floating platform, or the crown of a colossal creature breaking the surface.

He just stared it for a while. His mind churned through a dozen possible explanations, calculating the trajectory of the water currents and wondering if whatever was carrying that light was slowly migrating their position in.

Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared...

The light vanished. It wasn’t gradually fading off, but was, rather, snuffed out instantaneously, as if an immense curtain had drawn over it, or whatever bore it was suddenly dove back into the crushing pressure of the deep water.

"Other Commons? A natural phenomenon? Or some monster laying a trap?" Sky muttered questions to himself, his voice a low hiss against the wind. The sheer unpredictable manner of the Dungeon made every option equally probable.

Memories of the nightmarish deep-water creatures Sky had encountered on his first Dungeon Run immediately surfaced in his mind. He remembered the suffocating weight of the dark water, the rows of translucent teeth, and the absolute, helpless terror of facing things that existed entirely outside the established rules of the upper floors. The cold sweat broke out over his collarbone.

Sky shook his head, forcing those intrusive memories down into his subconscious’ dark corners.

Forget it. There wasn’t anything he could do against a mystery occurring kilometres away in the night. Speculation would only drain his strength.

He lay back down and tried to get some sleep again. He tucked his cloak back over his shoulders, settling his head on his rolled-up pack in an attempt to force his mind to relax.

But, this time, he could not seem to fall asleep. Making things worse, he started to feel poorly.

Pangs of hunger weren’t unbearable, but they were steadily intensifying. It wasn’t a normal kind of hunger that had come from having an empty stomach; it felt like a hollow, gnawing ache radiating from his core, demanding a specific type of fuel that standard rations couldn’t provide.

The thirst, however, was worse. His throat felt like it was lined with sand, and nothing he could swallow, however much, could take the parched, burning sensation away.

Looks like the food we ate didn’t satisfy me at all. The meat they had consumed earlier felt like ash in memory, providing no actual sustenance to his changing physiology.

Sky frowned, looking up at the night sky, that looks like an unseen ceiling of a cave.

Something was happening to his body. It was a subtle, creeping one that had steadily accelerated since he had achieved his recent progression milestones.

His thirst felt unquenchable by standard water.

His physical state had also undergone a strange change, one that was quite peculiar to how he felt it - it was as if his body had been struggling to keep pace with the evolving, rule-breaking nature of his underlying soul structure.

Something was wrong. He was changing, molding himself into something that didn’t quite fit the standard definition of a human Common anymore.

In the end, Sky was still awake until -

Something grabbed his leg.

His legs felt like a band of frozen iron had been clamped around his ankle, freezing his blood instantly.

His eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated shock. He had not felt a ripple of air in contact, nor have his clone sent a warning through their mental link. The attack had bypassed every line of defense he had.

Before he could shout, before he could suck enough air into his lungs to warn the sleeping girls, another hand clamped over his mouth. Long, leathery fingers reeked of stagnant water and decaying vegetation.

Sky moved his torso violently, driving his elbows rear-back with all the physical strength he could muster, trying to get free of the vice-like grip.

But the grip was too strong.

He could not wake Vesper or Chloe. He could not scream or make a sound, and his frantic thrashing was masked by the sudden, violent howling of the wind outside shelter. The two girls remained asleep, just a few feet away, and totally unaware that their sentry was being systematically neutralized.

His body suddenly was dragged towards the edge of the tree. Sky’s fingers clawed desperately at the smooth rock, his nails tearing as he tried to find a single crevice or handhold to grip. But there was nothing.

Then-

He was pulled over.

Sky’s body plunged into the darkness below, falling away from the safety of the platform and the oblivious warmth of the campfire. And the last thing he saw was the faint silhouette of something dragging him deeper into the night. It was a large, elongated, shape that seemed to blend perfectly with the shadows, its long, webbed limbs pinning him tight as they plummeted down the giant tree together.

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