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They sit together in silence as Emily creates an orb of metal, covered in runes. She hands it to Juliana after applying the final touches and adjusting the runes on the Diver’s receiver to link with the new transmitter.

“This thing’s very simple,” she says, pointing to a dense cluster of runes on the top of the orb. “Just inject a burst of mana here, and I’ll get feedback on the receiver.”

Juliana does as instructed, pouring a small burst of mana into the tool and watching the display above Emily’s tablet light up.

“And in return, it will vibrate if I do the same.”

Emily injects mana into the tablet, and the orb buzzes lightly in response.

“Couldn’t you have just made communication crystals?” Juliana asks, inspecting the complicated weave of runes around the silver orb.

“The less information transferred, the less it’s affected by the dense mana down here,” Emily explains. “The communication crystals used by The Covenant are great for normal long-range transfer, but they suffer once you step into areas with strong mana or vast fluctuations. They give simplicity and ease of use over reliability.”

Emily pulls out a sheet of paper and her quill as Juliana considers her words, quickly drawing a diagram of the turns needed to reach the archite’s cavern.

“This is the path you need to follow,” she says as she hands the finished map to Juliana. “We’ll keep in contact the whole time. Send me a signal every two hours and I’ll send one back. Okay? If I don’t hear from you on time, or if you send three pulses to ask for help, I’ll come straight away.”

Juliana nods as Emily stands and offers her a hand, pulling her up too.

“Oh, and make sure you don’t enter the last cavern without me. Send five pulses in a row when you arrive, then wait a little distance away. I think there’s something big living there.”

“How big?” Juliana asks with a hint of nervousness.

“Big enough to be a threat to you guys,” Emily says, sweeping Juliana up and preparing lightning step. “But I’ll be able to deal with it easily enough.”

She sprints down the tunnel with Juliana clinging to her, surprised by the sudden burst of speed. It doesn’t take long for them to catch up to the others, where Emily drops Juliana and the barrier disc off, quickly explaining how to use the latter, before turning and racing back towards The Abyss.

***

The next few days roll by without much rest for Emily. She keeps her cores on a rotating sleep pattern as she delves into the caves to fill her belt with herbs and crystals.

Juliana keeps to their schedule, sending a pulse via the communicator every two hours, even passing it to someone else to keep it up while she sleeps. However, on the third day of gathering loot, nothing happens when their planned time for communication passes, and Emily’s heart rises to her throat.

She starts racing back towards them, her hand resting on The Clock, ready to reset if any harm has befallen them, but is quickly broken from her anxious trance by a single pulse of purple light. Breathing a sigh of relief, she returns to gathering resources, ignoring the sour taste left in her mouth.

On the morning of the fifth day of separation, Emily receives five pulses in a row through the tablet, letting her know the others have arrived. The moment she receives the message, Emily sends the last of the darkness crystals she’s been harvesting into her belt and starts running towards the exit.

It takes her a little over half a day, but, in the evening, she arrives at a small encampment a few hundred metres down the tunnel from the archite’s cavern. She steps through the sound barrier, entering a small bubble of light formed by a campfire and several light packs.

“Hey,” she calls out, her friends turning to greet her.

“Welcome back. Good harvest?” Enzo asks curiously.

“You could say that,” Emily says with a grin. “There’s quite a lot of mana crystals down here.”

“Right,” Enzo responds, his voice laced with barely concealed disappointment, confusing Emily.

Before she can question his strange response, though, Dante interrupts.

“You should keep everything you gathered down here.”

Emily’s focus snaps to him, confusion tinting her gaze.

“We’ve been talking about it, and we all agree,” Hester adds.

“We’re already getting more than we could have hoped for with everything else we’ve collected so far,” Tom joins in.

“And you’ll need resources more than us,” Ivor signs, only adding to Emily’s confusion.

“What do you mean I’ll need them more?” she asks, a hint of caution in her tone.

“When you leave The Covenant, you won’t have easy access to magical resources anymore,” Enzo explains.

Emily’s eyes widen, her gaze drifting to the still-silent Juliana, a budding sense of betrayal twisting her gut. Before the feeling can take root, Hester cuts in to reassure her.

“Juliana didn’t say anything, don’t worry. In fact, she refused to even confirm you were planning on leaving. Ivor did that, and he still didn’t elaborate.”

Emily silently moves to sit beside Juliana under the watchful gaze of everyone else, pulling the guilty-looking girl into a hug to calm them both down a little.

I never even specified that I was leaving straight after the expedition to Ivor. Ah well, I don’t think anyone here would warn the Mandragos even if they knew the truth. I wouldn’t have brought them with me if I thought they would.

Her eyes soften a little as she looks over her friends and releases a sigh.

“Fine, I’ll keep everything from down here, but how’d you know?”

“We guessed,” Tom answers, everyone else but Ivor nodding along with him.

“You guessed?” Emily says with slight disbelief, raising a hand to rub her brow. “Was it just a wild shot in the dark till Ivor confirmed it?”

Ivor frantically shakes his head, his hands blurring into motion to explain himself.

“They were already pretty much certain. It was weirder to keep denying the truth.”

“It’s not his fault,” Hester adds, reaching over and patting him on the shoulder to get him to relax. “I’ve had my suspicions for a while, but the expedition and gifts were the main giveaway.”

She taps her armour as she speaks.

“It’s not expected that you provide high-quality gear for other members of your expedition and, other than to Juliana, you aren’t exactly in the habit of giving us things. Also, you clearly favour efficiency - you literally just ran around alone for the past few days because it was more efficient than getting us to help - yet you brought Tom on this expedition.”

“Hey!” Tom cries with mock offence at the sudden jab, drawing a few chuckles as Hester ignores him and continues.

“If you weren’t treating this as a last chance to spend time with us, I don’t see why you would do that.”

“I don’t strike you as a gift giver?“ Emily asks, slightly surprised by Hester’s reasoning but unable to refute it.

“Ha, no,” Hester scoffs. “Be honest. If you weren’t planning on leaving soon after, you would’ve just come on this expedition alone, wouldn’t you?”

Emily takes a moment to consider before reluctantly nodding her head.

“Yeah. I probably could have found The Abyss within a week or two if I tried.”

“That fast?” Dante questions.

“Yeah. I have several speed spells, and you already know I don’t need sleep. So, I probably would have run straight here at full speed without rest.”

“Crazy,” he mutters, going quiet again as Hester once again takes control of the conversation.

“Anyway, can you tell us why you plan on leaving?” she asks carefully, fearful of pushing too hard and striking a nerve, with barely held-back curiosity obvious in her tone.

“Sure.” Emily nods, slipping out of Juliana’s arms and standing up. “But first let me deal with the beast in the cavern ahead. I’d rather not get attacked in the middle of the night.”

Hester flashes her an understanding smile, and nobody else utters a word of complaint.

“Good luck. I’ll get started on some food then.”

Emily moves to leave the barrier, but pauses as an idea strikes her. Her lips curl into a grin as she turns to interrupt Hester.

“Hold off on cooking for now.”

Without another word, she vanishes into the darkness outside. Instead of charging ahead to start the fight, Emily walks upstream slowly. As she moves, she pulls a small drawstring pouch from her belt and opens it, revealing a glistening purple powder inside that seems to distort the space around it: powdered space crystals.

She holds the pouch in one hand and pulls a small chunk of mythril out with the other. With a delicate blend of fire and metal mana, she turns the metal into a putty-like texture and splits off four small orbs, each the size of a fingertip. After withdrawing her mana from the remaining chunk, she places it back in her belt while keeping the four orbs afloat with her mana control.

She uses her free hand to reach into the pouch, taking a small pinch of the purple powder and pouring it onto one of the orbs. She repeats this with the other three before pulling closed the drawstring and putting the pouch away as well.

Emily kneads two orbs with each hand, fully incorporating the powder and dying the silvery metal with a pale, purple hue. She presses the orbs into flat discs before deftly working them into perfectly even coins.

Satisfied with the result, Emily withdraws her fire mana, releasing the now-solid coins and keeping them afloat with her metal mana as the Whisper falls into her arms from a faint purple mist. She racks the bolt, catching the ejected bullet with her mana before she pops the magazine out and produces a new one from her belt, this one with a small water droplet engraved on the side.

She slides the magazine into place and racks the bolt forward silently as she steps into the open, dark cavern. Lifting the Whisper onto her shoulder, Emily lowers the coins into one hand, releasing her metal mana and injecting a burst of space mana into each, suddenly causing the coins to take on a dim, otherworldly glow. She holds one coin between her forefinger and coiled thumb, flexing her thumb and firing the coin out over the lake. With a few precise, lightning-fast movements with her fingers, she repeats this three more times and all four coins hit the water with one sound.

The moment the coins hit the surface, they’re suddenly pulled down into the centre of the lake. Emily grins, unable to see it happening but feeling her mana, still infused into the coins, moving down rapidly. She drops the Whisper from her shoulder, taking it in both hands and aiming at the floor as four twisting, purple magic circles form in front of the barrel.

She shuts her eyes, focusing on the position of the moving coins as she lines up her gun and flicks it into silent. The moment the four coins pause in the same location, Emily fires a single shot towards the rock below. As the bullet silently leaps from the barrel, the first magic circle pulses with power and the bullet vanishes.

Emily listens carefully for a reaction, hearing a low, irritated hum.

The coins are below its mouth.

Instantly understanding that her bullet missed the creature’s body, Emily rapidly shifts her aim.

I need to fire up.

She points to the ceiling, picturing the archite’s form above her. She lines up the barrel of her gun, flicks it into full power, and fires three shots in quick succession, each aimed for one of the beast’s hearts.

All three bullets vanish through the magic circles in front of the barrel, and Emily hears three soft thuds as the bullets carve their way out of the water and embed themselves into the roof far above.

“KREEEE!” A harsh screech of pain follows soon after, signalling her successful attack.

Emily conjures a light, filling it with mana to illuminate the cavern as she watches the water with bated breath, waiting to see if her initial assault ended the battle or not. To her delight, the surface remains still, not a flicker of motion from the denizen below.

Did I destroy all three of its hearts, or is it waiting for me to enter its domain?

With an air of caution, Emily approaches the water, summoning her boat and tossing it out into the middle of the lake to check. She connects to the detection array of the machine, scanning the water below and finding a giant, motionless form sitting on the lakebed.

“Looks like I killed it,” she mutters with a pleased grin. “Teleportation is such a useful skill. It’s a shame The Covenant only gives out a few, barely useful spatial spells and their teleportation circles are obscured. If I had some more solid reference material, I may be able to actually move myself, instead of being stuck performing tricks with small objects.”

Emily steps out into the water, sinking down with her light orb close behind, struggling to force back the darkness underwater. As she approaches the archite, it doesn’t move a muscle, and the inky black blood filling the water around her all but confirms its death. Placing a hand against the smooth black flesh of the oversized octopus, Emily considers how to deal with the corpse.

It’s far too big to take with me. I’ll just grab its ink sac and a few portions of flesh.

Emily gets to work, quickly separating several slices of flesh from the thick tentacles sprawled around the lakebed before moving to the centre of the corpse and digging through the beast’s organs to find its ink sac, a useful ingredient in several potions. Finished with the body, Emily checks the tunnel below, realises it’s once again blocked, and takes a few minutes to push the archite out of the way with a few well-placed currents.

Afterwards, she returns to their camp, delivering a slab of tentacle to Hester to cook.

“What’s this?” she asks, poking at the elastic flesh, oozing black blood as she prods at it.

“A piece of a third circle archite,” Emily responds with a grin, settling down beside Juliana again.

“Really? How big was this one? Is it actually a titan?” Hester asks curiously as she starts separating the meat into slices to cook.

“About twenty or so metres tall for the main body I guess?” Emily says, making a rough estimate.

They chat casually as food is prepared and eat without bringing up Emily’s departure again until their plates are scrubbed clean.

“Damn that was good,” Dante says with a satisfied sigh. “I should eat seafood more.”

“Agreed,” Enzo concurs, silence falling over their group as everyone slowly turns their attention to Emily.

Noticing their interest, Emily lets out a tired sigh and braces herself to explain her relationship with the Mandrago family.