The Beginning After The End (Beckoning Fates Book 3) (28 page)

I jerk my hands back in pain as
Curtis releases his first phase of his Beast Will.
 
Confused, I try transferring mana to him
again but the rejection from his body is even stronger than the first time.

Did the mana from his beast will
reject my mana?

Before I had the chance to try
again, Curtis began gathering mana for his World Howl technique.

He crouches, lowering his center of
gravity to withstand the recoil of World Howl, the mana from both his body and
the atmosphere gathered in front of his open jaw.

During this time, I rush to where
Tessia was curled behind the front line and scooped her up.
 
Getting Tessia out of here would be
priority.
 
I was partly to blame for
this mess.
 
I should’ve done a
better job to prevent something like this from happening in the first
place.
 

“WORLD HOWL!”
 
Curtis unleashes his powerful breath
attack, but the mutated Queen must’ve sensed that something was wrong because
it immediately changed its target from the wounded Professor Glory to
Curtis.
 

“Oh no you don’t!”
 
Bellowing at the top of her lungs,
Professor Glory leaped up and grappled the mutated Queen in flight in hopes to
deter it from reaching Curtis.

“BOOOM!”

As planned, my mana transference
paid off as Curtis’ trump card blasted a large hole through the rubble,
clearing a path to the now visible stairway entrance back to the surface.

“EVERYONE!
 
HEAD FOR THE STAIRS!”
 
I roar through the sound of rocks
falling and Snarlers growling.
 

“GO!
 
NOW!”
 
Professor Glory shouts too as she
struggles to hold her own against the Queen Snarler.

The exhausted class makes one final
push towards the entrance as Professor Glory holds the Queen at bay while the
wall of Snarler corpses keeps the ones alive at bay for the brief moment.
 

“Claire, I’m trusting Tess to
you.”
 
I hand Tessia over to Claire,
who seemed to be in the best shape right now.
 

“You’re not planning on staying,
are you?
 
You can’t be serious.
 
As your commanding leader in the
Disciplinary Committee I forbid…”

“Just
go…”
With the limited amount of time that we had, I release a sharp
killing intent to get my point across, making her flinch backwards in surprise.

Helping the drained Curtis back to
his feet, I push both of my Disciplinary Committee teammates towards the front
entrance of the cave before turning back to where Professor Glory was fighting.

“Why the hell did you come back,
Arthur.
”
 
I
could almost feel the amount of frustration in my professor’s voice as she
snapped at me through gritted teeth.

“We’re going to need both of us to
kill this thing.”
 
Taking Dawn’s
Ballad back out from my dimension ring, I unsheathe it.
 

“You better hope this thing kills
me because you’re going to be regretting not following my orders.”
 
She responds, blocking a blow from the
Queen’s sharp claws.

“Hey, I’m a professor too,
remember?”
 
I give her a weary smile
before making a sharp swing with my blade.

“You’re too smart for your own
good, Arthur.”
 
She smiles back
while shaking her head.
 
The
situation didn’t seem too good as the mana transference made me use most of my
mana.
 
If it weren’t for mana
rotation, I probably would’ve gotten backlash already.

While battling the Queen and
keeping her busy enough so the rest of the class could get out safely, I notice
that the last one is Lucas.
 
Our
eyes lock in for a brief moment before he turns back his head and disappears
into the entrance.
 

I could’ve sworn I saw him snort
before he turned away.

“GRAAAH!”
 
As the fight continued, I managed to
sever one of the Queen’s wings so it wasn’t capable of flight any longer, but
its thick fur was preventing us from doing anything more than giving it shallow
wounds.
 
This mutated Queen, which was
almost 3 meters tall on its hind legs, was filled with wounds from both
Professor Glory and I, but it didn’t seem to bother it at all.

“I don’t think we can kill this
thing.”
 
I shout to Professor Glory,
who was on the other side of the Queen Snarler.

“We’ll need to at least bind it
somehow so we can escape.
 
I don’t
think the Queen will follow us out of the dungeon!”
 
She responds as the Queen howls in
anger.

“I need you to keep it busy for 5
seconds, professor.”
 
I reposition
myself so Professor Glory was in my view.
 

“Okay.”
 
She doesn’t question what I’m about to
do as she unleashes another burst mana out of her core.
 

As Professor Glory leaps towards
the mutated Queen, I put my sheath back into my dimension ring and grasp my
sword with both hands.
 
With the
seal gone, I use the last of my mana to will lightning into Dawn’s Ballad.
 

“HAAAA!”
 
Without mana strengthening my body, my
dash towards the Queen Snarler feels like a crawl.
 

“Move!”
 
At my signal, Professor Glory dashes out
of the way as I stab my sword into an already existing wound that I managed to
inflict just earlier between its shoulder blades.
 

*CRACKLE*
 
*CRACKLE*

“KRREEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!”
 
The sudden shock seemed to be effective
against the Queen as it began to spasm.

“LET’S GO!”
 
Without even being able to pull my sword
back out from the Queen Snarler, Professor Glory grabs me by my waist and
carries me towards the front entrance.

As the hordes of Minions got in our
way, Professor Glory cleaved our way through until we reached the front
entrance.

“GRAAAAAAAAAAH!”
 

“H-HOW?”
 
Professor Glory could only gasp as both
of us looked up.
 
The Queen, with my
sword still embedded in its spine, somehow recovered enough to make one
desperate leap to keep us from escaping.

“Hurry!”
 
I was currently dangling on top of my
professor’s shoulder as I tried to snap her out of her shock.
 
With the mutated Queen Snarler almost
upon us we just managed to avoid her sharp claws before she landed hard on the
ground.

Without the luxury to even look
back, we made our way past the minions and into the hall when I see the mutated
Queen crawling her way towards us.
 
I guess my last attack did some damage because it wasn’t freely mobile
as it awkwardly limped towards us, using its claws to drag its body.

Reaching the end of the hall where
the stairs began to ascend, I noticed something odd about the Queen Snarler
that was just a couple meters away from us.

Well… every bit of that mutated
Queen was odd, but this was different.
 
As it reached closer and closer to the beginning of the staircase where
we were, its face and body began pulsating.
 
Tumors began growing sporadically in
random parts of its body and face.

Don’t tell me…

“BOOM!”

Before Professor Glory could even
turn around, the force of the explosion pushed her forward while she lost her
grasp of me, who was still on her shoulder.
 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the
explosion caused by the Queen opened up a large hole.

“ARTHUR!”
  
Through gritted teeth, I heard my
professor’s desperate cry as she reached her hand out for me, but it was too
late.

“Save Tess!”
 
I call back out weakly before using my
last bit of mana I’ve been gathering for the short amount of time to augment my
body.
 

After what seemed like hours of
falling while being knocked between various rocks that also fell down along
with me from the explosion, the speed at which I’m dropping down keeps me from
stabilizing myself.
 
I spread my
arms and legs, desperately trying to find anything to grab onto to stop myself
before I become a splatter mark on the ground where I land.
 
Fortunately, my right hand catches onto
a jutted tree root.
 
Unfortunately,
that was the arm that was dislocated not too long ago so the sudden jolt sends
a sharp pain that makes me want to bite through my lower lip.

Dangling with my right arm that
feels like its about to rip off, I send Sylvie a mental transmission.

‘Sylv.
 
Are you there?
 
I fell quite a bit down but I’m still
okay.
 
Do you sense where I am?’

“…”

There’s no response.
 
I can’t even sense my bond.
 
I immediately start worrying if something
happened to her, but with the Queen Snarler dead and the rest trapped inside
the dungeon, I don’t think that was the case.
 
It was more likely that I was either too
deep down, which I doubt, or that something in this area is warded off and
sealed from the outside, or more accurately the surface.

By the extent of how much I fell
down, I doubt I was on any of the immediate floors below it.
 
Did the explosion unveil a hidden
passage to some room somewhere inside the dungeon?

Speaking about explosions, the
explosion caused by the mutated Queen Snarler was odd.
 
The blast was big, but I got the feeling
that the explosion wasn’t meant to kill whoever was near it.
 
If that were the case, my body, along
with Professor Glory’s, would be in a much worse state than it is now.
 

“Ugh…” As I continue dangling on my
injured arm, I feel myself losing grip.
 
I let out a couple quick breaths to ready myself before I pull myself up
with right arm up enough so my left arm could take its place.

“Ergghh!”
 
Through gritted teeth, I resist the
temptation to just let go and leave it up to God or the gods or any gods,
whatever they worshiped in this world, if any.
 

As I now hang on my left arm, I
test to make sure my right arm isn’t dislocated again.
 
Thankfully, it still seems to be in its
right place.
 

After a quick assessment of my
body’s condition, I look around, except all I see is darkness.
 
It wasn’t as simple as it simply being
dark; it was pitch black.
 
That feeling
of when you shut your eyes so hard that it seems like different lights are
oozing around in your vision or that feeling where no matter how hard you
squint, your eyes can’t adjust. That was what I was feeling right now.

As I activate my mana rotation, I
disperse the mana I have covering my body to only my left arm holding onto the
branch.
 
I have to use this “break
time” to gather as much mana I can.
 
Augmenting the little bit of mana I have into my eyes as well in hopes
of being able to see something, I can only let out a sigh in defeat.
 

‘I’m not blind… am I?’
 
I can’t help but think to myself as I
augment my eyes again.
 

Just to comfort my needless worry,
I break one of the most basic rules in situations like this.
 
I produce a small fire on the tip of my
right index finger.
 

Looking at the warm red and orange
flicker of fire on my fingertip I breathe in relief before extinguishing the
flame.
 

While vision is an important thing,
the last thing you want to do in a dark place like this is draw attention to yourself.
 
Now that the enemies here, if any, know
of my location, I needed to move.

Since I couldn’t see, I use wind to
sense the type of space I was in right now.
 
I had no idea how narrow or wide this
hole that I was in was, but I assumed it wasn’t too wide since I hit quite a
few objects along the way while falling.

Sending out short, soft bursts of
wind, equidistant
,
around me, I
figure out that this ditch, for a lack of better words, had a diameter of about
10
meters.
 
The scary part, however, was that I
couldn’t even sense how far down I was and how much further I had to go down
until I had a floor to walk on.
 

What I had to decide now was whether to try and climb back up or make my
way down.
 
By how much I fell and
all of the other debris that fell down along with me, chances were that the
opening at the top would already be covered.
 
With Sylvie not answering from outside,
I had no way of knowing if she could open up an exit for me.
 

That only leaves me with going down.

*Sigh*

No matter how rational and levelheaded I was, I couldn’t help but feel a
bit anxious in this situation.
 
More
so than immediate dangers in front of me, a situation like this, where I
couldn’t see anything or even sense any life forms made me more edgy.
 
In the case where the army of Snarlers
was in front of us, I knew what I had to do and I could think of how to deal
with it.
 
Right now, I could neither
imagine nor predict what might happen in the next couple of seconds, making me
all the more tense.

Augmenting both my hands with earth attribute mana, I’m able to bury my
hand into the side of the giant abyss-like hole, creating a handhold for
myself.
 
I position myself flat
against the side with both my hands dug into the wall to keep myself from
falling.
 

In a steady motion, I pull my augmented hands out of the side of the wall
and allow myself to fall before I claw my hands into the wall again to
stop.
 
The amount of stress it put
on my arms made me cringe every time but this would be the fastest way to make
my way down.
 

Gripping, letting go, gripping, letting go, gripping, letting go.
 
I had to keep my body flat so I don’t
start falling away from the wall.
 
I
also couldn’t wait too long before I had to grip the wall again because it
would be a lot more dangerous to try and slow down after picking up too much
speed.
 

I let out pulses of wind every now and then to try and see how much farther
I had to go down.
 
Even after around
3 hours of gripping and letting go, according to my internal clock, I have yet
to sense a floor anywhere close beneath me.

‘How long is this fucking hole.’
 
Without even the luxury to vent my frustration aloud, I was left to rant
inside my head using words I think even the most vulgar of adults would find
inappropriate.

I know everyone warns Adventurers about the dangers and unpredictability of
dungeons but both the Dire Tombs and even this supposedly low level dungeon has
proven to cause me more trouble than the times I adventured with Jasmine
without the use of magic.
 

I mean, what are the chances that the time when I’m supposed to go into the
D class dungeon filled with E class monsters, a freaking army decides to
welcome us on the first floor.
 

The minion Snarlers weren’t even that bad, to be honest.
 
We were stupid for using so much fire
magic when we had no ventilation but I was handling most of them without even
using mana.
 

That Mutated Queen was the problem.
 
How the hell was she so strong?
 
Was it because she ate the other Queen?
 
Is it even possible to just get power
ups like that?

As I continued debriefing to myself the events that occurred earlier, I
kept gripping and letting go of the stone wall, falling down further into who
knows where I was now.
 

As I let go of the wall and fell down, I timed myself before burying my augmented
hands into the wall again.
 
However,
unlike before, my hand wouldn’t go inside.

“What the…”

I desperately tried clawing at the wall but even with the augmentation in
my hand, I wasn’t able to make even a scratch into the wall.
 

The surface of the wall was different now.
 
It was smooth; too smooth for it to be
natural.

I was picking up speed as I persistently tried to bury my fingers into the
wall, hopelessly.

‘This isn’t working.’

Careful to let out as little noise as possible while I continued falling, I
rhythmically let out pulses of wind around me, as a sort of makeshift
echolocation.
 
Through sending out
faint pulses and measuring how long it took before it hit a surface, I could
locate, in my head, potential footholds and handholds to make my way down.
 

Easier said than done.
 
The
theory worked great in my head but trying it without practice proved to be
harder than I imagined it to be.
 
There were few handholds I could try and hang myself from but my
makeshift echolocation technique wasn’t as accurate as I wished it would
be.
 

I ended up missing a lot of the potential supports and it just became
harder as I picked up speed.

Fortunately, I still didn’t sense the floor anywhere close to me so I had
time, but if I fell down any faster, even if I could grab onto a support, I
wasn’t sure if my arms would be able to take the stress from stopping suddenly.

As I continue fumbling my arms against the wall to search for anything that
may slow down or stop my fall, I’m able to finally sense the ground.

Fuck… This isn’t good.
 

I had about 200 meters before my body becomes a puddle on the ground.
 
That left me with about… 6 seconds?

Fuck.

Turning around so that the wall was to my back, I gather all of the mana I
saved up ‘til now.
 
It would take
about 4 seconds to focus enough mana into the spell.
 

‘Wind Bullet.’ Stretching my arms out in front of me, I unleash a barrage
of fist-sized bullets of compressed air to the other side of this giant hole I
was in.

If I could create enough force to push myself back against the wall, I
would be able to slow down enough to survive the fall.

*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*
*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*

As the air bullets collided into the wall about 10 meters away from me, my
body began pressing harder and harder against the wall behind me from the
recoil of the spell.
 
I couldn’t do
anything besides grit my teeth as I felt the back of my uniform and my skin
burning off due to the friction.

I could feel myself approaching the backlash stage but I just desperately
let out all of the mana I could muster up while using mana rotation.
 
As the air bullets continued colliding
against the other side, pushing me back harder and harder into the smooth wall,
I approached the ground.

50 meters…

40 meters…

20 meters…

I see a faint light!

10 meters…

5 meters…

“AAHH!!”
 
I feel myself slowing
down as the burning pain coursing through my back becomes numb.

2 meters before I reached the ground.
 
I let out one last, large pulse of compressed air straight below me.

*CRASH*

“!!!!!”

*Cough*

My eyes bulge and the only sound I can make is a painful cough as the jolt
shoots straight up my body.