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Emily’s friends all look at her in confusion.

“What do you mean by the end?” Ivor signs the question on everyone’s minds.

“I have reason to believe there is a single set endpoint for all of the streams in The Crystal Waters,” Emily answers, receiving several silently raised brows. “What do you guys know about the formation of mana-dense regions?”

“They form on junction points of multiple mana veins,” Juliana answers quickly, having listened to Emily’s ramblings about The Glade before.

“Yep, and if you have a junction of mana veins, what does that mean?”

Everyone silently considers for a second. Enzo suddenly starts, realisation flashing across his eyes.

“There’s possibly a single point where all of the mana veins intersect.”

“Exactly,” Emily confirms with a nod.

“But how do you know there actually is?” Hester asks. “Couldn’t the mana veins just pass very close by each other? Or maybe even only a few meet and the others just pass by. How can you be so confident there’s a single goal?”

Emily grins at her questioning.

I can’t tell them that the system told me. I guess I can tell them a bit about where I found the Mensacus.

“I can’t be certain, but, last time we were here, I mentioned swimming around in a lake to try and find the cause behind the grogler hordes, right? Well, when I was down there, I found a hole going somewhere, leaking powerful mana. I took some measurements and I’ve been analysing them in The Dome, comparing them to my notes on The Glade and the rest of The Waters, and it’s led me to believe that that hole leads to a point of massive mana density that’s spreading through the rest of The Glade.”

“I see. And you believe that point is the end point of The Waters?” Dante says.

“Yeah.” Emily nods. “So I want to follow the river until we find that point. I have some tools prepared to try and follow that hole back to its origin too. So, as long as we get back to that lake and that hole is still there, we have a great starting point to find the end.”

Her friends nod in understanding.

“That seems reasonable enough. Worst case, I guess we just travel around The Waters for a bit before returning, right?” Hester says, serving up the finished bug meat patties.

“I trust your judgement. I’m sure we’ll be able to find your goal,” Ivor signs confidently.

“Ha, thanks big guy,” Emily says with a grin, taking a large bite from her food and being surprised by a juicy burst of rich, mana-dense flavour. “Damn. These are really good.”

“Thanks!” Hester says, beaming with pride as everybody digs in, giving equally impressed reactions.

As they munch away on their food, they move on from the topic of their goal with newfound confidence in their objective.

“I hope we run into some more enemies in there,” Dante says after a few minutes, gesturing to the crack with his head. “There have been boringly few fights on the way here. And most of them have been used for training.”

Emily chooses to ignore his grumbled final sentence.

“Yeah, there was an abnormal amount of beasts on the last expedition,” Enzo adds thoughtfully.

“Do you guys have any idea why?” Tom asks.

“Isn’t it because you killed most of the beasts in this area last time? Don’t they take a while to gather again?” Juliana questions.

“This amount is more normal,” Enzo answers. “I’ve been on a few expeditions this deep into The Glade before, and the last trip was the weird one.”

“Also, magic beasts form quite quickly in The Glade. Our slaughter shouldn’t affect the number of beasts here for more than a few weeks. It’s been long enough to return to normal,” Ivor adds helpfully.

“I see.” Juliana nods, turning her head to look at Emily. “Why were there so many last time then?”

Everyone else turns expectantly to Emily as well.

“Why do you think I have the answer?” Emily asks with a teasing grin.

“Because, even if you don’t, you usually have a reasonable guess?” Dante says sincerely, making her chuckle.

“Well, luckily for you guys, I think I do know the reason. A curse.”

Her friends look taken aback by her answer, most of them falling into careful thought. Tom, on the other hand, looks at Emily dubiously.

“Aren’t curses just stories told to scare kids?” he asks dismissively.

Everyone turns to look at him with disappointment.

“What?” he questions defensively, shrinking back under their gazes.

“Haaa,” Hester sighs, rubbing between her brows in frustration. “This is why I told you to spend less time looking at the past, and more on your magical studies. Curses are just another area of magic. Didn’t you think magic was a tale told to children until the Dahlia family approached us?”

“Oh,” he squeaks, his eyes opening in shock and realisation.

Emily laughs at the siblings as Ivor looks at her with understanding in his gaze. She notices and turns her attention to him, gesturing with her head that he has her attention.

“Is this related to the skull you found in the lake?” he signs.

“Yes, it is.” Emily nods, remembering the lie she used to cover up the Mensacus. “I think the object I found in the lake was cursed. I took a sample and analysed it afterwards, and it was a mix of darkness, ice, and death. I think it was riling up and gathering the nearby beasts to try and kill more things.”

“How can it be made of death?” Dante asks doubtfully.

Ah. They don’t know about conceptual elements.

Emily frowns at the gap in Ulean mages’ knowledge.

“Just like mana can be attributed with an element, it can also be attributed with a concept. It’s far more complicated, but I’m certain the concept of death was part of the curse’s make-up,” she brushes it off, not going too deep into the explanation and hoping her friends won’t ask too much.

“I guess that makes sense,” Enzo nods, looking unconvinced.

They fall silent for a few moments before Tom moves on from the serious topics, and considers how curses and magic became common fantasy stories among commoners if they’re real. They finish eating shortly after and, after cleaning up, Ivor leaves first to rest before his watch, and everyone else soon follows.

It doesn’t take long for Emily and Juliana to be left alone, leaning against each other in front of the lightly crackling fire. Their watch passes quietly, with Juliana returning to her weaving and Emily pulling out a few mechanical parts to tinker with to keep her hands busy as she watches their surroundings through her scouts. She leaves twice to deal with a few bugs crawling out of the tunnel, but otherwise, the night is calm.

***

The next morning, they have bug burgers for breakfast before breaking camp. Emily recalls her scouts, keeping only a single bird and spider out, before sending the bird to retrieve the barrier disc.

“Will that thing even work in the tunnels?” Dante asks as it falls into Emily’s waiting hand below.

“Of course it will. It’s designed for high adaptability, it should work in all terrain,” Emily replies proudly.

They all gather before the large crack in the ground, gazing down into the gloom below. Emily sends the spider down the slope and lands the bird on her head, reaching up to pull the thermal pack off. The small legs unlatch from the bird’s chest, and Emily drops the pack into a pouch at her hip before pulling out another similar pack with a light crystal embedded in the centre.

She clips the new light pack to the bird and turns to face her friends.

“From this point on, we don’t have a set path anymore. I’m going to try and follow the same route we took last time to reach that lake again, but the tunnels may have shifted, so I can’t guarantee we’ll get there. I also have no clue how long this will take, so say goodbye to the sun for a while,” Emily says with an excited smile. “Let’s go make history!”

She turns on her heel and steps forward, dropping down the small gap to the slope below and walking forward confidently. Her friends follow closely behind, taking the step down to the slope more carefully and walking with less surety, the swirling mist around their feet making it hard to see their footing.

They move down until the billowing fog lining the walls has fallen to cover only the floor, being replaced by insidious darkness. The bird still perched on Emily’s head lights up, filling the tunnel evenly with a constant, white light. The field of light fills from wall to wall and stretches out ten metres down the tunnel. The centre of the bird’s chest glows, runes lighting up around the embedded crystal, but it remains dim enough to be comfortable to look at.

They continue down the path ahead of them, Emily’s spider scurrying along ahead to warn them of any threats in advance. Nothing approaches them and, within ten minutes, they arrive at the first branch in the tunnel, splitting off in two directions. Emily pauses, noticing movement down the right path through her spider. She sees two fire spitters crawling along the walls, seemingly eating something.

“We’re gonna make a quick detour,” Emily informs her friends. “We want to go left, but I see some bugs on the right and I think they’re eating herbs.”

Nobody argues as Emily leads them down the right-hand path. They quickly start to hear the faint clicking of moving mandibles as they walk around a corner and into view of two roach-like bugs, munching away on a patch of moss. Emily’s enhanced eyes allow her to see the moss in fine detail even from ten metres away. It’s a dense mass of brown and green, with a rippling pattern, like waves around a stone dropped in a pond, as it spreads from a crack in the wall that it seems to grow from.

“Eartworn,” Emily mutters under her breath, just loud enough to grab the roaches’ attention. “Dante, don’t attack the herbs. Hester and Juliana, you two deal with them please.”

Dante grumbles, dismissing the spell he has started to form, as Juliana and Hester both begin chanting. The bugs turn to face them, clacking their mandibles and hissing in anger at the intruders interrupting their meal. They scuttle down to the ground, their jaws’ hanging open as flaming bile builds up.

Emily calmly watches without raising a finger, trusting her friends, and recognising Hester’s chant. Two balls of fire are shot towards them, but Hester finishes casting in time. A bubble of water pops up around the group, and the fireballs burst helplessly against it, sending out ripples along the barrier, but otherwise achieving nothing.

At the same time, Juliana finishes casting, sending an arrow of wind accurately into the open mouth of one of the bugs. It violently curls in on itself in pain, shrivelling up as green blood leaks from its mouth.

“Nice shot,” Emily compliments her as the second bug notices the death of its friend, and the failure of its attack, and turns to run.

Juliana starts chanting again, but the bug scurries into the darkness, leaving the bird’s light field before she can finish. Emily wordlessly taps the floor with her foot, sending two sharp spikes of rock into the bug, one from the floor and one from the ceiling. The rock from below stabs up through the bug’s head, and the one above pins the base of its abdomen to the floor, crushing any resistance left in it.

“Damn,” Hester mutters, dismissing her barrier.

“Don’t worry,” Emily says, patting her and Juliana on the shoulders as she steps past them to approach the eartworn. “You made the right choice there. Letting an enemy escape is preferable to your party being severely injured. Especially when our main goal in engaging them was the moss they were eating.”

“It’s a shame to let it go though,” Tom grumbles. “We could have taken plenty of meat from it.”

“Let it go?” Emily questions, flashing a grin over her shoulder as the bird on her head takes off, flying forward a few metres to reveal the dead bug, lying in a pool of green blood with two holes carved through it. “Why would I let it go?”

She turns back to the magical moss, pulling out a large glass terrarium lined with rocks. She opens the lid and places it down at her feet before conjuring a small blade of metal in her hand. Gently, she scrapes the moss from the wall, depositing it in the jar in strips.

At the same time, Tom disassembles the two bug corpses with a little help from Ivor. They finish separating them into pieces and burying the organs in the floor at the same time as Emily scrapes the last clumps of eartworn into her terrarium. She seals the top and sends it back into her belt before turning and leading her friends back to the split in the path.

They take the left-hand path this time and continue on. Each time they run into another split, Emily follows the same route as last time, trying to guide them towards the lake.

They run into several groups of bugs, some fire-spitting roaches, and others fast-moving centipedes secreting acid from their skin. Emily sits back, letting her friends deal with them for the most part and only acting to throw up barriers when an attack gets too close to someone.

They also run into a group of iron-clawed moles, that Emily excitedly moves forward to face, telling her teammates not to interfere. Unfortunately, her improved body renders the moles' resistance futile, killing her fun. She slaughters all five of them, with a single quick slash to the throat of each from her Claws, before calling her friends over disappointedly and stripping the corpses of their claws.

Emily keeps track of the time on The Clock, and once they reach the late hours of the evening, she steers them towards a small dead-end cavern to settle down in.

However, as they reach the entrance to the cavern, following the spider Emily sent in in advance, Emily hears a sudden rush of squeaking and wingbeats.

Shit.

“Cover your ears!” Emily calls back while activating her earrings.

Her friends start in surprise but quickly follow her instructions, raising their hands to their ears. A second later, a loud cacophony of screams fills the cave. The harsh sound makes Emily’s bones vibrate, causing her minor discomfort, whilst her earrings protect her from the worst of it.

Her teammates aren’t so lucky. All of them let out pained exclamations as the wall of sound hits them, their hands not enough to protect them.

Emily reacts quickly, casting infra-sight as she brings the Spitter to bear. She flicks it into burst, charges it full of machina, and squeezes the trigger twice, flicking her wrist with inhuman speed and accuracy to send six crackling bullets into their attackers.

The screeching cuts out instantly, silence falling suddenly over the cave, only to be broken by six light thuds as the bodies hit the floor. Emily turns back to her teammates as they pull their hands away from their ears, revealing lines of blood trickling down their faces.

Whoops. I should have kept a bird or my own eyes in infra-sight the whole time just in case. I let my guard down too much.

Internally berating herself, Emily approaches Juliana, cupping both her ears between her hands and channelling a healing spell, wrapping them with light.