Explorer of Edregon

"Shia, if this is your idea of a joke…" Vin trailed off, his eyes widening as he looked down and realized what she meant. There should have been absolute nothingness beneath them, seeing as all the clouds were up above their heads. Yet even with the darkness of night, he spotted what looked like movement down in the abyss below them. It was incredibly hard to make out, but if he squinted, he could just barely see what she'd seen.

Something long and dark was moving down there.

Something big.

"What do we do?!" Scule hissed, clearly having spotted the same thing the two of them had as his face paled. "That has to be the biggest bird I've ever seen!"

"Stay calm, it might not even know we're here," Vin said, trying to reassure him as his mind whirled. They were in absolutely no position to try fighting off some sort of aerial-monster. The four of them were treading water above a seemingly endless abyss of open sky. Vin's mana was halfway drained at this point, and Shia was severely weakened without any actual ground or plant-life to work with. She still had her staff at least, but that didn't give him much comfort when he saw the distant darkness shift again, confirming his suspicions that whatever was moving down there, it was far larger than anything they'd ever faced before.

"If monsters live down here below the cloud layer, the winged-people might refuse to help Lumel come this deep looking for us," Shia said quietly, shivering for an entirely different reason than the cold water they were submerged in. "They must know these things exist."

"It might not be as bad as it looks," Vin argued weakly, unable to tear his eyes off the distant movement below them. Without any actual objects to act as a reference point, it was difficult to pinpoint just how large the creature hidden within the darkness truly was. There was a chance it might only be the size of a house.

Yet the more he saw different patches of darkness shift and move, the more he couldn't shake the feeling that it was larger than the entire citadel wall.

"Guys, I'm freaking out!" Scule exclaimed, his voice so high pitched and squeaky that Vin thought Reginald had suddenly learned to talk for a second. "It's getting bigger!"

"You don't know that," Shia said shakily, sounding like she was trying to convince herself more than him. "It's too far away to know for sure. If it truly is as large as it looks, why would it even be interested in us in the first place?"

Vin nodded silently, still staring down at the shifting, slithering mass in the darkness. The harder he looked, the more he felt as though he could almost make out what was hiding down in the abyss beneath them. He could almost feel his new Beyond the Veil ability kick in, as he suddenly made out something definite within the darkness.

Two massive, dull red eyes peered up at them, each one at least as large as his entire body. Far too late, Beyond the Veil gifted him some information on the distant creature, and he realized they'd made a horrifying mistake.

Grand Arcane Discovery! 25,000 exp gained.

New Epic Monster discovered! 10,000 exp gained.

Level up! Adventurer of the Arcane lvl 41.

+3 attribute points

"It can sense mana!" he shouted, knowing there was no point in remaining silent any longer as he jerked around in the water and snatched the fire-knife from Shia's hands by the blade, ignoring how it burned into his hand. "It eats the clouds that form down here! That's why the layer is empty!"

"What do you mean, it eats mana?" Scule asked, looking back and forth between him and the darkness that was beginning to shift around just a little bit faster. Somehow, Vin knew without even asking that his friends hadn't seen the same dull red eyes he had, and for the first time, he envied them for not having his class ability. "So it's a monster?"

"An epic monster!" he confirmed, securing his fire-knife to his belt as he grabbed Shia and yanked her close, startling her out of her own staring contest with the darkness. "We need to get out of here, now!"

"But the plan! We'll just fall down here again if Lumel isn't waiting for us up there!" Shia said, still not understanding what was down there. Vin didn't blame her. She hadn't seen Beyond the Veil like he had, and she couldn't possibly fathom the sheer size of the creature they had drawn the attention of. This wasn't like the extra-dimensional epic monster he and Alka had taken down during the battle for wave four.

That thing in the darkness was very much flesh and blood, and it would swallow them in an instant if it reached them.

"Hold on tight!" he said, ignoring her continued protests as he threw together the runic formation faster than he'd ever had up until that point. "Redirect Gravity!"

The four of them were practically ripped out of the Aqua Sphere as gravity flipped them around and began dragging them back up into the sky they'd fallen from. He dumped mana into his runic formation so fast it almost felt like it was going to fall apart, practically shoved mana hand over hand into the spell in his desperation to get them out of there and away from what lurked below. Holding onto Shia as they fell upward, he uncorked a mana potion and chugged it, daring to glance back at the monster that was now above their heads with their gravity and orientation having been reversed. They'd fallen out of the water and moved at least a hundred feet closer to the cloud layer.

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Two dull red eyes stared back at him, rapidly growing in size as the impossibly large monster moved through the abyss below and grew closer.

Vin couldn't tell if it was even trying to catch them, or simply lazily moving in their direction. The monster was so large there was just no way to know.

Either way, he didn't want to find out what would happen if it did reach them.

"Enhance Gravity!" he shouted, his entire body lurching as he began dual casting and their speed increased, the magic desperate to get them up to the cloud layer before the darkness did. He didn't understand why, but somehow, he knew thanks to his ability that the monster lurking in the sky below wouldn't follow them up there. It was safety. It would protect them.

It was still too far away.

"We're not going to make it!" he shouted, his face blanching as the eyes in the darkness suddenly began growing in size faster and faster as the monster closed in on them. As he'd suspected, trying to guess the size of a creature in an abyss of nothingness had been a futile effort. Based on its eyes, its body wasn't anywhere near as large as he'd first thought it was.

It was much, much larger.

Technically, thanks to the Epic Monster Slayer title he'd earned taking down the extra-dimensional monster that had attacked camp the other week, Vin actually had resistances against monsters and their unique attacks that scaled with the rating of the monster. Despite that, he had absolutely no intention of testing his luck against it if he didn't have to.

In fact, the very same title should have given him a warning that this monster even existed. According to the wording of the title, he was supposed to get a heads up as to when and where epic monsters were going to attack. He didn't know if the massive monster had simply been too far away for the title to kick in, or if it had managed to hide from his System-granted title somehow, but either option was equally terrifying. The moment he'd finally made eye contact with it, the title finally started working and he'd known it was going to attack.

While he panicked, trying desperately to shove more mana into his two spells than either one was capable of taking, Scule reached into his cape and grabbed something, waving it in front of his face as he stared at the growing monster in sheer terror.

"Throw it! Throw it now!"

The moment Vin saw what was in Scule's hand, he understood immediately. Using his golem arm, he snatched it from the petian before winding back and flinging it out into the abyss with as much force as he could physically muster.

And seeing as his arm was capable of crushing iron in its grip and knocking fully grown warriors back dozens of feet with a single punch, that amount of force was nothing to scoff at.

Vin screamed as he hurled the extra mana gem they'd stolen from the floating library into the abyss, the brightly glowing stone leaving his grip like it had been shot out of a cannon. Artifact Extraordinaire enhanced the strength of his artifacts even further, including his own prosthetic arm, and he could have gone back and kissed his past self for deciding to choose the passive back at level 35 over the other options. He hurled the gem with so much force that he felt his own arm actually dull and go inert, the constant blue-lights emanating from his knuckles flickering and dying out.

As they shot up into the sky with incredible speed, rapidly approaching the cloud layer now directly below them from their flipped gravity, they could do nothing but pray to whatever Gods were listening as the glowing blue mana gem flew off into the distance. That mana gem was strong enough to power Alka's entire body. Dense enough to supercharge Vin's arm. Impressive enough to shock Deorer, the dwarven Smith of Relics, and admit that such magic was leagues beyond anything he could ever create. The question was, however…

Would it be enough?

For the first time since he'd peeked Beyond the Veil at the creature lurking in the abyss, the dull red eyes still largely covered in darkness shifted ever so slightly off of Vin's own, turning to follow the glowing mana gem tumbling off into the distance. The monster seemed to hesitate for the barest of moments, as if struggling to decide which of the two meals presented to it would taste better.

That brief moment was all that they needed.

The four of them shot through the cloud layer with so much speed that they blasted straight through three different clouds before they even realized they were in the clear. Due to Vin's Enhance Gravity spell, they were actually falling upwards far faster than they had originally been falling downward. Even so, Vin didn't lay up on the spell in the slightest, even going so far as to down his second mana potion, and then his third, despite knowing the returns would be barely worthwhile.

Regardless of his newest ability informing him they'd be safe up here, he wanted to put as much space between him and that horrific monster as physically possible.

In that last moment, when the monster had hesitated and turned ever so slightly to follow the mana gem, he'd actually spotted something else in the darkness even farther below, almost miniscule by comparison from the sheer distance between them.

Another set of eyes, these ones a darkened grey like a storm cloud.

The monster hadn't been alone. There were more of them down there.

"Vin, we're going too fast!" Shia screamed as they shot upward so fast they had to look like a blur to anyone watching. The wind was whipping past them so violently that she was forced to practically press her face against his ear in order to be heard. "What if there's more of that thing above the cloud layer?!"

That snapped Vin out of his fearful response, and he quickly stopped casting Enhance Gravity. It didn't end up mattering all that much, however, as he came to a startling realization.

He was officially out of mana.

Even as the pounding headache began to set in, Vin grit his teeth as the world suddenly flipped around on them again as Redirect Gravity flickered and died within his core. They were still flying upwards with incredible speed thanks to their sheer momentum, but they were now fighting against regular gravity every step of the way.

Soon enough, they'd come to a stop, and gravity would start pulling them right back down into the waiting maws of what lay below.

"What do we do, what do we do?!" Scule shouted, no doubt coming to the same realization that he had. "Can you do that water bubble again?!"

"I'm out of mana!" he snapped, irrationally irritated from the throbbing headache pounding against his skull. "Shia, anything?!"

"I'm a Druid, I can't fly!" she shouted as she desperately rooted around in her bag of magic seeds Erik had given her long ago. "I don't have anything that will help!"

"If that's the case, then we're going to die," Vin said, feeling a sudden wave of calm wash over him as their upward momentum began to slow down even further. Any second now, regular gravity would bring them to a complete stop, and they'd find themselves plummeting back down toward the gaping maws of whatever horrifying monsters lived below. It seemed almost fitting, in a way, that the thing to finally do him in would be a monster. The same thing that had claimed the lives of so many other Explorers who dared to wander this strange new world.

Edregon had given him a lot these past few weeks, and it was time for the Gods to collect.