Call of the Abyss [Book 2 Complete]

Sigh

Julia relaxed a little as the pile of Barrowlord slag cooled. The battle was over, and they'd triumphed.

"Uh…" Elulis said, pointing at the blade still stuck fast in Julia's chest.

Julia readjusted her weight back to normal and, with a yank, pulled the blade of the sword out of her body, where it clattered to the ground.

The four elves stared at her with visages of mixed emotions. Julia patted the hole in her armor, revealing undamaged skin beneath.

"Surface wound. No biggie," she said nonchalantly.

Elulis started laughing, while Ithshar shook her head. Jallis smiled, and Sahveth bent down to pick up the sword, weighing it in his hands before tossing it back down.

"Dahm'Zahra indeed," he said, returning to his place within the group.

"Keep your guard up. Just because this lot is defeated doesn't mean we are out of danger. We will scout the rest of the town before we investigate this incident further," Ithshar said, motioning Julia back into their previous formation.

It took around three hours to clear the rest of town. They found nothing, essentially. No bodies, no bones, and no signs of struggle. In some cases, there were even plates of half-eaten food on tables. It was as though the residents vanished immediately and without a trace. They must have been taken into that portal, but what could have happened to render them completely unable to resist?

Now back at the site of the battle, Julia collected the remaining fragments of crystal that she'd shattered. It didn't look special at first glance, but when she held it in her hands, she could see a swirling menagerie of colors within its faces. There were kaleidoscopic colors bursting into existence and then disappearing beneath the surface of this crystal. It was like nothing Julia had ever seen before.

As she picked up the final piece of the larger crystal shards, lost in her own thoughts, Trixy slid around her chest and inspected the piece Julia had just picked up.

Gulp

Before Julia could even react, the piece was gone. Trixy ate it.

"What the fuck was that?!" Julia shouted, not used to Trixy doing chaotic things like this.

"Why did you eat that?! We don't even know what it is! Spit it out! Come on—throw it up!" Julia yelled, now wrestling with Trixy like a dog chasing its own tail. She kept spinning around Julia's torso in a way that made grabbing the half of her body with her head impossible.

"You might as well give up, Julia," Ithshar called from a few strides away, where she was examining some of the remains of the small army they defeated.

"There is much about ruwāhîn that is unknown, but I believe they have an intuitive understanding of food that is compatible with their bodies. They also have frighteningly quick digestion of whatever they choose to consume. If it were poison, it would likely already be affecting her," she explained.

That made sense. Julia also knew things about her spirit body instinctively—like the fact she no longer needed to breathe or eat.

Trixy poked her head out from underneath Julia's armpit and stared up at her with glistening eyes.

"...don't think you're off the hook. I saw you eating those Barrowlords, too. Please tell me you only ate their cores, not all the…meat inside of them," Julia said. Trixy looked away and disappeared behind her back again.

Julia sighed—partly in disappointment at Trixy's diet, partly to suppress a retch threatening to claw its way out.

She stored the remaining crystal pieces in her bracelet to ponder later and sat down with one of the Barrowlords' cruirasses beside her. She was going to need extra material to fix her chest plate, after all—which she removed and set in her lap.

Running her mana over the Barrowlord's armor, she felt that it was similar to steel, but slightly different in its mana repellent nature. It wasn't perfect, certainly—she could press her mana into it—but it was certainly more resistant than steel. Still, the composition of the metal was similar enough that she should be able to both manipulate and integrate it well enough.

Organizing the tasks in her mind, she listed them: scour the rust and corrosion around the holes in her armor, siphon a sufficient amount of material from the Barrowlord's armor, integrate it with hers, and suffuse the new patch with her mana to convert it to Aletheian-Steel that matches the rest of the armor (hopefully).

As she got to work, Julia reflected back on the battle. Playing the events back in her head, she realized that there was something…off about the battle—about her specifically. She recalled ideas popping into her head suddenly, but not the way ideas did normally.

Her little trick with giving Trixy her consumption mana was a logical derivation of her existing abilities, but it wasn't like she had come to that conclusion. It just appeared in her head—as though the deduction step had been skipped entirely.

Not only that, but Julia acted strangely during the battle. Getting into someone else's guard was not something she would do rationally—especially getting in a Barrowlord's guard—they were much stronger than she.

That was foolish for a caster, even a martial one. Yet she not only did that—she pulled a Barrowlord closer to her with its sword rammed through her chest…and then shoved plasma down its throat—or what was functionally its throat. That wasn't like her at all, though the tactic worked.

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The thing that bothered her the most was shifting her form so much. In the back of her mind, she was disquieted by all the changes that had been made to her body so quickly. She knew she was no longer human—and hadn't been for quite a while—but humanity was so core to her identity that she was afraid to embrace that change. Who was she if not a human?

That she casually tossed that internal struggle aside in the heat of battle unnerved her. If she could shed that dilemma so easily when pressured, what else would she shed if her life depended on it? Did she have any morals that she could stick to, even in the face of death?

"My walîn once said that people reveal themselves truly when their lives are on the line."

Nadhem's voice echoed in her head—who would she reveal herself to be?

Julia's attention was drawn to her chest plate. During her reflection, she had apparently managed to finish the armor up to the point of converting it to Aletheian-Steel. However, as she was flooding the small patches in the front and back with her mana, something strange started happening.

The patches had formed into the cuirass as a darker steel—not quite black—but a dark gray. That color was now seeping through the rest of the plate, as moving through the material like small snakes. It stretched out into thin strips and settled underneath the raised chest portion.

When the movement finished, it looked like there were three thin, gray ribs on both the left and right abdomen of the cuirass. Julia thought they looked almost exactly like skeletal ribs.

"Work with graveyard materials, get graveyard looks," Julia sighed. She simply didn't have the energy to wonder what had just happened or why. She just prompted the System for information on her now-finished cuirass.

Great—the System had named her cuirass without her input or consent. Was that why the ribs formed—the System did it? Regardless, Aletheian-Blacksteel, huh? So, blacksteel must be the alloy that the Barrowlords' armors were made from. A fitting name for a material garbing such monsters, and fitting for such sinister looks.

She stood up and put the repaired cuirass back on, annoying Trixy, who had to move. She walked over to the sword that had pierced her and stored it in her bracelet for later examination. She didn't know what the elves wanted to do with the remains, but surely this was hers, right? It would've stabbed straight through her heart if she had still been human!

Actually, that was another lesson she had to learn from this encounter. She got cocky after taking down a few of the Barrowlords, which led to her losing track of her enemies. How could she have let such a hulking monstrosity sneak around her?! Honestly, it was pretty embarrassing—on top of nearly being fatal.

Her core wouldn't be harmed much by physical weapons, but if that sword had some kind of enchantment she couldn't quickly counter, she might have actually died. After all, it had gone straight through it.

She was very fortunate that she had prior exposure to their death mana and could counter it quickly and without issue. If this was the first time she encountered it, it might have just consumed her core entirely and killed her before she could do anything about it.

She was powerful, true, but she was not invincible—not by a long shot. She'd have to remember that next time she started feeling the tide of battle shifting in her favor.

"Anything else to do here?" Julia asked, walking over to the group. They were gathering up the Barrowlord materials, including the hunk of slag that Ithshar had created out of the last Barrowlord.

"Nay, we make for Veshari," Ithshar said, nodding to the other three. They stored their spoils in the belts around their waists—storage artifacts, apparently—and headed out of the town. It took only around thirty minutes to reach the valewyn this time—much faster when not sneaking.

They mounted up and were on their way in just a few minutes. Ithshar was back at the helm, while the others—Julia included—leaned against the braces. Julia figured it was as good a time as any to go through her notifications. She focused on making the System condense the notifications into a more summarized and legible format.

Julia's vision suddenly blurred and readjusted. Things looked largely the same, but there was more…depth? Is that what it was? She couldn't figure out how to describe it, but it was like she had been looking at a two dimensional image that suddenly popped into three dimensions. She saw…layers—or something—that weren't there before.

She got a little dizzy and had to close her eyes for a second. Getting this upgrade on a boat speeding through the marsh was probably not ideal. Though, she also now realized why upgrades weren't applied until one checked the notifications. Something like this could have actually killed her if it happened in the middle of combat.

She opened her eyes and deliberately unfocused them, deciding to distract herself with something else while she got used to the new vision.

Clearly, she had been awarded partial credit for that small army's destruction. She wasn't sure why initially, but after a minute of thinking, it was pretty easy to see why the System classified distracting—and ultimately defeating—the army's leaders as valuable to the larger conflict.

She would have to remember to ask what Wraiths were when she got back since she hadn't fought them before, but everything else in that kill log looked about right—just over a thousand enemies. And this squad took them all out, plus one of her own five enemies. These people were truly impressive.

As she thought about her gains and what her new Skills did, she realized how tired she was. It was past midnight now, and it would likely be late morning by the time they arrived back at the city. Still, there was no way she'd fall asleep before the mission was officially complete. She was not a child that needed to be carried to bed after playing all day.

She shook herself awake, having just dozed off while thinking about not dozing off, and planted her feet on the ground. If sitting on the brace was going to lead to nodding off, she'd stand instead. She was not falling asleep on the way back from her first mission with the most impressive squad in the marsh. She was not.