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After healing the light damage done to Juliana's eardrums, Emily gently wipes the blood from her face before moving quickly between her friends and healing them too.

Damn, that used more mana than I expected. It feels like I'm wasting a lot to heal people. Do I need a better understanding of the human body to heal more efficiently? It couldn't hurt.

Emily adds a reminder to her notes while turning away from Ivor, the last to be healed. She approaches the dead bodies of their attackers under the light of her bird, hovering in the air in the center of the small cavern.

The creatures are large, with a wingspan slightly bigger than Emily's, and a lithe torso the size of her forearm. They're hairless, with gray, stone-like skin stretched thin from their sides to the small claws at the ends of their wings.

“Screamers,” Emily mutters, walking beside Tom who's poking one with a knife.

“Their skin is hard,” he says. “Do we want any bits?”

“Only their voice boxes. Don't worry, I'll deal with these ones. They're much harder to harvest.”

Tom nods as the group spreads across the cavern to set up camp while Emily presses an extra button and tosses the barrier disc into the air, letting the anchors burrow into the surrounding rock. The moment it sets up, a sound barrier wraps the cavern, and the disk lights up with a warm glow, giving off a calming light.

Emily's bird lands on her head, and she pulls off the light pack, switching it with a thermal pack, before sending her scout to sit on a cable in front of the exit.

Dante sets up a campfire at the same time, which Emily drops down next to start butchering her screamers. She pulls a small knife from her belt and channels the machina into it. The energy crackles along the blade, sharpening it as she lowers it to the top of the first corpse's neck.

She slips the blade in beneath its jaw and slides it along, splitting the stone skin open to reveal the raw flesh beneath. She cuts away at the muscle and sinew, quickly locating the screamer’s larynx and pulling it out. She summons a spare jar and drops the bloody organic matter in, before tossing the harvested body to the side.

She repeats this five more times as her friends finish setting out sleeping bags and join her and Dante around the fire. They eat and chat as usual, before turning in for the night, leaving Emily and Juliana together on watch, under the dim light of the barrier disc.

Emily glances over at Juliana’s weaving, seeing her pull out a few dried flower petals and lay them on top of a wind-imbued rune twisted into the weave.

“What are you making?” she asks curiously.

“Nothing,” Juliana responds, quickly covering the rune with her hands and turning a pleading gaze on Emily. “Don’t peek.”

Emily raises a brow, but after a few seconds of puppy dog eyes she chuckles and looks away.

“Fine, keep your secrets.”

***

The next day, they continue heading through the tunnels towards the lake, this time with Emily using infra-sight just in case. Midway through the morning, Emily spots a three-way split in the path ahead through her spider.

“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue in irritation.

“What’s wrong?” Juliana asks with concern, the rest of their friends tensing up at Emily’s sudden exclamation.

“Don’t worry,” Emily says, noticing their tension. “It’s nothing major. It’s just the tunnels have changed. There’s a three-way split in the path ahead where I was expecting two, and I no longer know if we’re heading in the right direction.”

“What does that mean then?” Tom asks, relaxing.

“Nothing much. Just that we need to navigate blind from now on,” Emily answers, shrugging off the minor setback. “Besides, it may not make much of a difference, since I don’t know how much the tunnels have shifted.”

They catch up to her spider shortly, and Emily chooses the left route, keeping as close to their original path as possible. They keep winding deeper into the earth, killing off the cave-dwelling creatures that block their path and harvesting a few herbs in their way.

At just gone midday, a little after Emily was expecting them to reach the luminis layer, they stop in front of a split in their path branching off at a jaunty angle. Emily pauses uncharacteristically as they reach the split.

“Why are we stopping?” Enzo asks, confused when Emily doesn’t plow on ahead as at most junctions.

“I spotted some movement down this tunnel so I’m sending a scout in to check if there’s anything interesting before we move on,” Emily explains, keeping her focus on the connection with the spider skittering off into the darkness.

The images being transferred to her, created from the spider’s scans, suddenly expand. The narrow tunnel containing a few wandering bugs opens to a wide open cavern with a writhing mass of movement in the centre, distorting into a blur she can’t distinguish.

Hello there. Looks like there’s a gathering of beasts. Maybe a nest? I’ll have to get a closer look. It seems like something is interfering with my detection.

Emily turns her attention back to her friends, looking at them with an excited grin.

“I think we found a nest.”

Her friends start in surprise, with various reactions from nervousness to excitement.

“Is it big?” Juliana asks tentatively, being reinforced by an exaggerated nod from Dante.

“I’m not too sure, something is interfering with my detection spell so I need to take a closer look to know. But, there are quite a few bugs in the tunnel to get there, so I expect so. Keep quiet until we know what we’re up against. We may be able to surprise them.”

Emily marches forwards, followed closely by her friends, who begin chanting as they step off their original path. Flying lightning forms around Emily’s right arm as she pulls out the Spitter with the other, screwing the silencer into place.

Without stopping to harvest the bodies, Emily continues forwards, forcing her friends to follow on high alert. Emily spares the corpses a quick glance on the way past, quickly identifying the creatures.

She whips back flying lightning and turns her barrel on another target, but a twisting projectile of fire flies past, digging into its head and setting it alight. At the same time, a blade of water cuts into the the last uninjured ant. Emily grins at her friends’ coordination, flicking the Spitter into single fire and shooting a finisher into the burning ant in sync with Tom doing the same to Hester’s target.

“Good job,” Emily praises them, lowering her weapons and moving on.

Tom and Hester quietly fist bump each other behind her, drawing a laugh from Dante and Enzo as they prepare more spells. They walk deeper into the tunnel, closing in on the supposed nest and killing a few more scouts.

The nest enters Emily’s magical perception before they turn the corner to face it, and an excited shiver runs down her spine.

“It’s a nest alright,” she mutters, feeling over a hundred inhuman magic signatures gathered together in organised formations around a pulsing mass of mana. “They’re set up for a siege, and appear to be guarding a vein of mana crystals. Hester, barriers please. Everyone else, prepare for a full force assault.”

They pause for a moment to prepare, their adversaries already waiting, motionless, for them to approach. Emily reaches up and taps the light pack on her bird’s chest, sending a burst of mana into it to temporarily overload the spell.

This should light up the whole cavern. I’ll need to swap out light packs and recharge this one later though.

She next starts preparing spells, dismissing flying lightning and kicking all of her cores into gear. Mana explodes out of her, giving her nearby friends a sense of danger as a dense pressure pushes down on them, before twisting into a swirling mass of runes as several magic circles form around each other, carefully positioned to not cause interference.

Orange, white, blue, and silver mix together in a beautiful blend of colours. Arc forms a contained, crackling orb of lightning over one of Emily’s shoulders, as fireball forms a swirling orb of flames over the other. Her skin crackles with lightning as mana seeps into her muscles, enhancing her speed, and the final silver circle freezes uncompleted, waiting to throw up protections with a moment’s notice.

With infra-sight still active to assist in differentiating targets, Emily turns back to flash her friends a confident smile.

Her friends smile back, even Juliana and Tom giving confident nods as they steel themselves for the coming battle. Emily continues down the tunnel, quickly turning the corner and seeing the narrow pathway start to open up.

Jackpot.

“Kill everything in sight!” Emily calls, sending her bird up to the roof of the cavern to illuminate the space fully, and sending arc’s orb forwards while releasing her hold over it. “Leave the wall to me.”

“Shit, Enzo!” Hester wins and cries in panic, hoping for another barrier.

Emily's friends freeze and turn to look at her, unable to keep casting spells with their targets blocked.

“It's a bit basic,” Emily admits shamelessly, even as their attention is drawn to the extravagant bow and arrow hovering above her. “It's the simplest third circle metal defense spell I could come up with. A thick wall that my allies can't even see through.”

“How were you meant to shoot that thing with a wall in the way?” Tom asks, gazing up at the bow and arrow in awe.

Emily points forward with a smug grin, opening a small window in the metal wall and releasing the heavy metal arrow above her. With an explosion of sound and mana, the arrow rockets out, drawing a straight line through the battlefield and into the defensive wall covering the nest.

“Like that,” Emily finally answers Tom's question.