“I swear to do my best, Teacher.” Asterios made a respectful bow, to which she nodded gratefully. “But I do wonder how accurate that assessment is since it seems like you know a lot about the inner workings of True Dragons and Dragons in general.”

  “Know your enemy better than yourself. That’s the only way the weak can survive.” She met his eyes resolutely. “It’s the way of our people. And many other people below True Dragons. We had centuries to study our oppressors and learn about them. They don’t study themselves. At least the majority don’t, as you can imagine.”

  “Yeah, I can acknowledge that.” He nodded to himself. “I bet those who do end up being the strongest and don’t share the secret to their power, like Red or Black. My father has clearly been looking into a lot of different stuff that True Dragons wouldn’t normally pay attention to, right?”

  “I must say, I really enjoy having a bright student such as yourself.” Althea’s smile grew more exquisite, which made Asterios feel like he might be blushing a little under her delighted gaze.

  Before he could respond, though, they both sensed a change of atmosphere. Immediately turning their faces forward, they saw the party take a cautious stance. Past them, two vaguely humanoid shapes shambled around with extremely slow movements, emitting the noise of scraping stone.

  The entities had relatively smooth skin—or rather surface since it resembled dark gray stone—and it didn’t look like they had any joints. That didn’t stop them from being able to move on their sturdy legs, which bent rather naturally, contradicting the solid material they were made of. They kind of resembled a desert cactus as their limbs were attached to a blocky thorax without a neck. They had holes for eyes and mouths. A colorful mist wafted out of those openings, different for each monster.

  “What in the everloving fuck is that?” Rudy scrunched her face. “Some weird kind of a Golem?”

  “Eidolons,” a familiar voice answered.

  “FUCK!” The adventurer woman almost jumped out of her skin as she spun around with an angry frown. “Warn a woman, would you?!”

  Asterios snickered and walked closer to Abyss, who had just popped into existence between them. “Eidolons?”

  She turned to him with that passive expression of hers. “Another replica of an entity from one of the worlds I have visited. They are necromantic spirits living inside stone bodies. The only way to defeat them is to shatter the crystal anchoring their souls to their frames, usually stuck in one of the holes. They are both highly resistant to physical and magical damage.”

  He paid more attention to the weird creatures and noticed that the left one had a blue gem embedded in its eye while the right one showed a purple crystal at the roof of its mouth.

  “And who the fuck are you even?” Rudy snarled at the mocha-skinned woman. “Another motherfucking Dragon?”

  “No. She is something much more.” Althea joined Ast’s side.

  “This is Abyss and I guess she is the closest to what you could call a goddess.” Asterios smirked as he gestured at their interdimensional ally.

  “Personally, I do not enjoy considering myself a goddess. It’s too pretentious. You need just a little bit of power for mortals to start worshiping you,” Abyss responded, but her words didn’t stop everyone from paling once more.

  Viona did have a faint twinkle in her eyes, though.

  “Will we be able to handle these guys?” Asterios asked Umbra’s creator.

  “You will. I can’t be so sure about your companions,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  “I have an idea.” Viona captured their attention. “It will need time to succeed, though. As long as it’s not a magical or physical attack it should work fine, yes?”

  Abyss nodded curtly.

  “Let’s give it a try,” Tesser joined in. “What do you need us to do?”

  They began discussing their plan while Asterios and the two ladies retreated. He wondered briefly why Abyss had decided to show up, but he figured out that she still wanted to study and examine this weird phenomenon so it was obvious she would be following them further in.

  Soon enough, the party was ready for action. Viona closed her eyes and brought her violin up to her cheek, taking a focused position. Irelia and Rudy dove in to engage the enemies while Douhlim jogged up to him and the draconic lady. He handed Asterios and the others a pair of earplugs each, confusing him a little. The short man gestured at his own ears and sprinted away. Shrugging at Althea, Asterios put them in and she followed suit.

  The melee fighters exchanged blows with the stone statues, mostly evading and blocking the heavy swipes of the weighty creatures. The Eidolons were slow but also as sturdy and resistant as Abyss had made them sound like. Tesser’s spells had no effect on them and the blades left no scratches on their surface. Even stabbing the crystals resulted in nothing. Asterios had a feeling that those were as tough as the gem their Skeletal Dragon opponent had embedded in its skull, if not more.

  It was clear that there could be nothing done by the group other than kiting the monsters around and perhaps trying to get past them. Maybe the floor wasn’t a kill everything challenge like the one above and it truly had some kind of a quirk they needed to figure out. The Eidolons could simply be a nuisance. And danger, of course.

  But, after about two minutes of watching his friends dodge and evade, Asterios noticed something else. The pressure in the air had been gradually rising and only now had he realized that it was actually because of vibrations. His eyes snapped to Viona and he understood that she had been playing since the very beginning and was ramping up her melody.

  One more minute passed and the vibrations started making him feel uncomfortable. He could imagine how painful the music would be to his ears without the stoppers. His enhanced vision was fuzzy from the shaking. The others definitely had it even rougher.

  Then, the melody seemed to reach its crescendo and the stone entities gradually came to a stop with janky movements. They put their arms around themselves as if they were in pain and shook. When they froze completely, he saw their gems crack and something akin to a wailing soul escaped from within, flying up and then dispersing, though he could not hear anything, of course. The crystals lost their glow and the Eidolons remained in their final positions, unmoving.

  The vibrations ceased as Viona finished her performance. Rudy gave her thumbs up with a big grin as Irelia poked one of the monsters with her sword. Everyone removed their earplugs and walked up to the funny statues.

  “Great job. Am I right to assume you used a high-frequency sound to shatter the gems?” Asterios praised the smart bard.

  “I did.” Viona’s cheeks showed a trace of a blush. “I was wondering if that would be considered a physical attack too, but I hoped that the vibrations might damage the crystals from inside. I’m really glad it worked.”

  “It was impressive,” the young Knight commented honestly.

  “And damn uncomfortable.” Rudy groaned. “It’s hard to fight when your entire body is literally buzzing.”

  “Worth it.” Douhlim snickered. “I liked how it tickled my balls.”

  She smacked the dwarf on the back of his head so hard he almost toppled. But, when Asterios met Rudy’s eyes, she bit her lip and looked away with a delicate flush. He snorted quietly. She had definitely enjoyed at least some of those sensations too. He wouldn’t be surprised if she came to Viona later to ask for an encore.

  “How did you do that, by the way?” Tesser asked, turning to the magical minstrel.

  “It’s one of the techniques I employ during my performances. My wind spirit can carry the sound further and also make it louder. Once during my stay at a very exquisite inn, we overdid it a little and all the windows suddenly shattered. That’s what gave me the idea to try it here, intentionally focusing on making it as powerful as possible,” Viona explained.

  “That’s vicious.” Rudy laughed. “I’ll have to remember not to fuck with any magical bards in the future lest they explode my tits off.”

  “I think these are the key to this floor,” Irelia said, showing everyone the two cracked gems atop her hand.

  “Why do you think so?” Althea raised a curious brow at the young girl.

  “I saw a carving in the wall we passed that showed something similar,” she replied.

  Asterios exchanged smiles with his mentor. They too had taken note of those sculpted pictures. Viona suggested checking it out and they followed their knightly friend as she guided them back to the nearest depiction.

  And truly, it showed some race of people surrounding a magical formation. It quickly became clear that those were the Eidolons. A few of them danced past the edge of the circuit while the others took rather specific positions inside. The gems of the latter were definitely sculpted differently. Asterios and the others weren’t sure if it meant that they had to find special crystals or that they would become activated after entering the formation.

  “Alright. According to this thing, we still need like eight of those gems. Let’s just hope that they don’t need to be intact. We are fucked if we will need to lure ten of those things into some weird array,” Rudy said with wince. “How do we get there, anyway?”

  “It felt like these pictures were becoming more frequent in a certain direction,” Irelia noted.

  “You seem to have an eye for art,” Viona commented with a soft smile.

  The young girl blushed timidly. “My family owns a lot of paintings and sculptures. I always liked looking at them.”

  “We don’t have any other hints so let’s try it,” the bard added.

  Irelia guided them again, heading in more or less one way. As she had said, the carvings started appearing on more walls. While they differed from each other with some minor details, they always depicted the same scene of ten Eidolons standing inside the magical formation.

  While moving forward, they stumbled on more enemies. To avoid having to experience Viona’s enhanced music too many times in quick succession, they lured the creatures until they gathered them into packs of three or four.

  The battles were still difficult since the stone statues hit like frenzied bears or worse, but the party managed to get through it with minor injuries healed by Tesser. Irelia proved to be a great addition to the team as she could use her artifact shield to receive powerful attacks on it without struggling too much.

  In the meanwhile, Asterios kept practicing until Althea interrupted him once more.

  “You are doing much better than I assumed you would,” she admitted. “There’s one more step in this exercise and I believe you are capable enough to introduce it into your rhythm. Basically, instead of following the same pattern each time, you are going to switch between the four states seemingly at random. To make it easier, I will be in control of the timing for now. Assume that zero is the concealed state and three is the most expanded.”

  He nodded in agreement and they began right away. Asterios noticed how difficult it was right from the start. He had thought he had gotten used to the different states but it just wasn’t true. When Althea dictated the order at random, he struggled to expand or shrink his draconic aura to perfectly fit the desired state, getting slowed or stuck on those in between.

  It quickly became clear that he really needed the change. With how fast he was progressing, he would have ingrained the single order too deeply into his subconscious mind and created a bad habit that could have hindered him in the future.

  Thanks to that, he gained even more respect for his draconic mentor. Althea was attentive and experienced enough to judge when was the right moment to switch things up. It was truly a pleasure and honor to learn from her and he could tell that he would be getting so much stronger and better at draconic things under her tutelage.

  About an hour later, they had twelve cracked gems and stood in front of an entrance to a wide chamber. Peering inside, they found a swarm of Eidolons surrounding a raised platform that glowed with purplish light. No one seemed to stand on the surface of the supposed array, which they couldn’t yet see. It truly felt like a place of power.

  “They don’t seem to be alive,” Tesser commented after they stared at the unmoving statues for a while.

  “Maybe they weren’t dancing in those depictions but actually… dead?” Irelia suggested.

  “Possible.” Rudy sniffed. “Let’s go?”

  They warily walked inside and passed a few frozen Eidolons, noticing that they did in fact lack their gems. It was a graveyard.

  Arriving at the central stage, they examined the complex formation. Asterios had no idea about a single thing it consisted of. The whole array felt alien, like no magic or language he had ever stumbled on. But still, the human-sized circles present inside it at various points seemed rather clear.

  Irelia carefully stepped into one but nothing happened. She exchanged glances with everyone and brought out one of the gems she was storing inside her spatial storage, a gift from the talented elves, of course.

  The moment the crystal popped into the air, it shone with blinding purple light. The ring underneath her also activated and began releasing wisps of swirly energy that traveled throughout the air. Those spiritual strands began flying into the openings of the dead Eidolons, slowly waking them up.

  “Get all the crystals out, quickly!” Viona shouted.

  Since their party was smaller than the number of circles, they began hastily placing the gems inside the rings, jogging from place to place. Rudy’s party held onto them exclusively so Asterios and Althea simply watched their surroundings, looking for any immediate threats. The Eidolons looked like they needed time to fully awaken.

  When the final gemstone touched the formation, the array exploded with a wave of mana which almost knocked everyone off their feet. All the Eidolons shuddered and stood up, releasing strong light from their holes. The army was no longer slumbering.

  “Two portals!” Rudy pointed out and everyone noticed the familiar ponds of swirling darkness.

  Without further ado, they ran towards the one leading further down and dove into it one after another. Escaping the impending swarm, they surfaced in a completely different environment.

  First, the tunnel looked… weird. It was kind of rounded like something had burrowed through it. But, second, the walls didn’t seem solid. At least from afar, their surface resembled… flesh. Dark gray but still flesh. Asterios had no doubt they felt tender and mushy in touch. And third, the atmosphere was definitely somewhat humid and smelled of death, decay, and something else.

  “Oh. This is a quite unfortunate predicament,” Abyss said impassively while looking around.

  Everyone turned to her.

  If the goddess considered this place bad, just how fucked they really were?

  Chapter 41

  Just a Scratch

  “And what exactly is this unfortunate predicament?” Rudy asked, looking around at the unusual cavern.

  “I’m afraid we are not located inside a typical hallway. What you can see all around us are the insides of a Devourer. A living thing,” Abyss replied.

  “A Devourer?” Asterios raised a brow at her.

  “It’s not exactly a monster like the usual creatures you can stumble on in the wilds. It doesn’t have a brain, bones, or such. The Devourer is basically all intestines,” she continued her explanation. “They start as a little patch of flesh, slowly growing bigger and bigger as they consume other living beings. If no one notices their growth, they can cover an entire building or a dungeon floor like this one. The structure melts away while the Devourer retains its shape.”

  “Wait. So we are in the stomach of a who knows how massive all-consuming monster?” Douhlim paled a little as he stepped away from the closest wall.

  “In simple words, yes.” Abyss nodded faintly. “And our time is limited.”

  “How so?” Irelia tilted her head lightly. “I don’t see any gastric acids or other dangerous substances. Can’t we just look for an exit?”

  “The very environment is lethal. The air you are breathing is already slowly eroding you from inside. At first, you won’t notice a thing. Then, your throat and lungs will start itching. Soon, internal bleeding will join in and it will be a matter of seconds before you collapse, slowly decomposing into nutrients that are going to be absorbed by the Devourer through its flesh,” the mocha-skinned lady answered, looking down at the young Knight. “And you will be the first to fall.”

  Irelia’s eyes widened and she swallowed thickly.

  “Is it because she is a teenager?” Asterios frowned slightly.

  “It certainly can be viewed as part of the reason, but not exactly.” Abyss shook her head. “Her body is healthy and trained, but only pure spiritual energy can fight off the Devourer’s toxin. You and your teacher are relatively safe for a good while. The adventurers can hold out for a few hours thanks to the years of experience they have with mana, but the human girl is still a novice with it. I suspect she will start showing first symptoms in less than half an hour, remaining alive up to an hour at best.”

  “Shit.” He clicked his tongue as Irelia glanced at him with a bit of anxiety in her eyes. “This place is trying its hardest to get rid of us. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to bring you guys into the unknown.”

  “We just have to figure out how to escape in less than half an hour, no?” Viona stepped forward. “There has to be a weak spot inside this creature or something. Are we not even going to try?”

  Asterios understood that she was putting on a brave front as the elected leader of the team even if their current situation scared the creative bard a little. It was appreciated and a very good sign. She didn’t panic but instead thought about the mental health of her companions.

  “I’m going to find this thing’s asshole and blast it right open!” Rudy sneered, swinging her weapon wildly.