Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

Adon and Rosslyn dropped at a fast clip, accelerating through the air with each passing second.

The Princess, Adon could feel, was not afraid. She was weirdly at peace, almost sleepy, which worried the butterfly more than an actual fear response would have. As she fell, though, he tried not to think about that problem. The issue of potential hypothermia was what he was solving by having her fall.

Instead, he focused on clinging to Rosslyn's body. He used Transformation to make his limbs into tethers that wound around her shoulders and waist while condensing his wings into a tougher, denser state.

Then he waited.

The drop was silent except for the sound of the air whistling around them. Rosslyn didn't say anything or even think any distinct, verbalized thoughts, and she closed her eyes after a few seconds. Her body relaxed a bit.

Adon almost could have imagined she was falling asleep, except that her grip on the yeti's fur remained as strong as ever.

He heard a single clear thought from her as they accelerated downward.

I trust you. Her inner voice sounded unnaturally calm.

There was a little part of Adon that wanted to question whether she was wise to trust in him, but he managed to dismiss that quickly. He had already been here, done this—had been so certain of himself that he had literally told Rosslyn to take a trust fall less than a minute earlier. And he knew that her sense of certainty was justified. These sheer drops attached to Rosslyn were an area where his competence was absolutely trustworthy—even if there was a massive additional weight this time in the form of the yeti's upper half.

They fell for a few minutes straight, or so Adon estimated. At least two minutes.

Adon waited until the air started to feel different—for the cold to fade to a gentle chill, like being inside of a refrigerator—and then he repeated the Transformation he had made on the way down previously, when Rosslyn was unconscious.

His body shifted to its human form, his tendrils turning to arms and legs that gripped Rosslyn tightly around her arms and waist. His wings turned to massive billowing things and then into a single surface, a parachute connected to his shoulders and reinforced with all the mana he could spare.

The force of the air struck them hard, but Adon was prepared for it this time. He just gritted his teeth and endured the feeling that his wings might be torn away from his back—and looked out, once again, for a place to land them. He couldn't continue this forever. Forgetting about the physical strain, this form combined with the mana enhancement to his wings was burning through his reserves of power incredibly quickly.

The way their drop slowed down, he found himself able to see the cliff face much more clearly, instead of watching the stones blur together into a gray smear on his vision.

After around twenty seconds of floating, he saw a dark opening in the wall, and he darted toward it without looking too carefully where he was going.

Any port in a storm.

The pair collided with solid stone, but the wall they struck was perpendicular to their direction of travel; they had made it inside of a large cave.

Then Rosslyn and Adon slammed against the ground, skidded at high speed, and continued bouncing forward, taken by the wild momentum they had carried into the cavern. Adon was almost shaken loose from Rosslyn by the force of these impacts, but at some point, the Princess had placed an arm around his leg.

Her body seemed to have regained the strength that the cold environment had sapped mere minutes before.

As they skidded, her knees bent slightly and she gritted her teeth each time she took the impact with both legs, but her body did not buckle under the force. She even managed to bounce along the ground in such a way as to stay upright and in some degree of control of their movements.

Most impressive was the fact that she kept Adon on her back, when he felt the terrifying sensation that he was about to go careening off in his own direction and splatter headfirst against solid rock.

But in fact it was Rosslyn who collided with stone, when they finally hit a wall full-on, with all their remaining momentum, and canceled it out. She took the impact on her center of mass, like a gut punch. Her legs and head struck a moment later.

Adon's face hit the wall a second after hers, undoubtedly with a fraction of the impact, and it felt like someone had smacked him in the head with a frying pan. The world spun.

Should've snapped back to a butterfly, he thought numbly. But then Rosslyn would have carried their momentum through her mass alone, dangerously increasing her velocity. At least Adon was pretty certain that was how physics worked.

Below him, still somehow standing on her two feet, the Princess let out a small grunt and made no other reaction that Adon could hear. He looked down and realized that she was still holding the yeti with the hand that wasn't helping to secure him on her back.

That was intense. How can she just stand there like that?

At last, Rosslyn let out an exhale and dropped to the ground.

"We should try not to do that again," she said, eyes closing once more. They reopened a second later, and she gave Adon the ghost of a smile.

"Every crash you walk away from," Adon said, smiling weakly back. Then he shook himself. He was surprised to realize he was speaking with a human mouth again. The fatigue hit him a second later.

"I think I need to go back to butterfly mode," he said. Then he yawned. "Then let's eat."

"If you have to," Rosslyn said. She pouted slightly, and coupled with her obvious exhaustion, her face looked completely uncharacteristic for a moment. Adon was reminded of how young she was, despite having all the responsibility that she did heaped on her shoulders. "I will prepare the meat."

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Then he snapped back to his mystic butterfly form, and the Princess was back to business.

With her dagger, she quickly peeled off the outermost layers of fur and skin from the yeti—which Adon immediately began consuming, as there were still bits of flesh clinging to them that he could dissolve with his stomach acids and then suck up through his proboscis.

As he was doing this, Rosslyn finished skinning the creature, stuck her sword through the yeti's center of mass, and ignited a fire in her hand with pure mana. She seemed to have come fully awake now, her hands and flames moving with unerring precision. She began turning the meat over the fire, slowly cooking it.

Over the next hour, Rosslyn cooked the outer layers of the yeti and carved them away from what remained of the body until she had a pile of meat that would have been sufficient for several meals under more ordinary circumstances.

She set some of the cooked meat in front of Adon, who consumed it despite having already sated his basic hunger needs with the raw flesh—just for the superior taste of the cooked meat compared with the scraps of uncooked stuff.

Rosslyn ate slowly at first, clearly restraining herself. Then Adon made an excuse to leave for a few minutes—said that he would check the surroundings to see if there was any danger, though they were in a dark area where nothing was moving, probably a gap between levels.

The Princess quickly agreed. As Adon slipped out of sight, he heard the sound of chewing intensify.

For the next ten minutes, he explored aimlessly. Though he had thought this dark space was a mere gap space set in the terrain between floors, Adon began to suspect that he and Rosslyn had fallen further than he realized.

I just wanted to get us out of that cold, he thought.

But of course, "out of that cold," by means of a sudden drop further into the Dungeon, meant deeper into potential danger.

All around him, he slowly started to see the evidence that he had brought himself and Rosslyn to somewhere hazardous.

There were no living, moving things, not yet. All was in darkness, but his insect eyes could still make out the shapes of things.

Littering the ground, he saw a trail of scattered bones. They appeared to be human, though there was no scrap of flesh or clothing or hint of structure to the train of pieces that would either confirm or deny that idea.

Where had they come from? Had enough humans entered this place to make such a spectacle? Had the Dungeon somehow reached out and brought dead bodies down to this level? There were no answers, just cold, dead reality.

Adon saw ribs, femurs, hip bones, and more. All the hard pieces that made up the underlying structure of a body, lying strewn about like so many fallen leaves.

As the butterfly flew on, it felt as if he had come upon the ruin of some decades-old slaughter.

A part of him wanted to go back to Rosslyn as soon as he saw the hint of death. She might be in danger. They could both be. But his survival instincts, honed over long weeks in the garden, told him that he should not return to her just yet.

The Princess was capable of defending herself, while Adon could conceal himself better than any organism he had ever encountered. The one thing that he could do right now that she could not was try to grasp the nature of the enemy that existed on this floor—or former floor.

The path that Adon was flying along forked, and Adon took the left, just because it was the side closest to Rosslyn.

The trail of bones continued, although it thinned slightly. Adon thought for a moment that this part of his pursuit was about to reach its end.

Then he almost bumped into something hanging from the wall.

He fluttered his wings quickly to keep back from the object that had been concealed behind the latest corner.

What is that? Adon thought, disgusted.

He looked past it, and he saw other things of the same kind, as well as additional varieties.

At last, he understood why his path to this place had been strewn with bones—and even why the bone trail had thinned at the end.

It was all related to this place, to this workshop of horrors.

Hanging on every wall and, in the distance, from the ceiling, Adon saw human bodies in various states of decay and semi-assembled human skeletons. They were mounted on hooks, suspended from chains, nailed to walls—secured by various means to every surface in this strange cavern room that Adon had stumbled into.

The butterfly was immediately tempted to fly right back to Rosslyn.

It would have been one thing to come across a mere collection of bodies. Strange, mildly disturbing, and a good reason to leave very quickly.

But Adon sensed something more alarming about these cadavers.

The corpses had the distinct odor and faint glow of mana about them.

Adon could see a faint aura around the bodies and a slight glow in every pair of eyes—or empty eye sockets, in the case of the skulls. Something had altered these bodies, and Adon sensed that it had left them not fully dead, as corpses ought to be.

He drew nearer to one of the more intact bodies, and suddenly the room lit up slightly.

The source of the new light were some strange, spectral candles attached to the walls. They emitted an eerie purple glow, hinting at supernatural properties.

And they made it easier to observe the contents of the creepy room.

Adon could see the waxy flesh of the corpse he had approached up close in fine detail—and a strange piece of information struck him.

This place did not smell of decay. The sickly sweet smell of rot, the musty odor of old bones, the cough-inducing miasma of corrupted flesh—none of them were present.

The room had all the odor of a hotel lobby, as if it had been freshly cleaned.

Had something been expecting company down here? Was it still expecting visitors?

Some power had sanitized it or suspended the rot somehow—ordered it into a disciplined state. And its dwelling place appeared to be more or less intact. This cave had not collapse in the general cave-in earlier.

As Adon questioned, he heard a growl—and he immediately threw himself backward through the air.

Fluttering away, he saw the source of the sound: a rumble from one of the dead men, the one he had drawn close to.

You can make sounds? Adon thought. But I guess you can't speak anymore.

Or perhaps it could, if Adon had the patience to listen. It might depend on what sort of power had taken it upon itself to raise these dead humans.

But he wasn't thinking about trying to talk to the creepy things. Adon was wondering if he would do better conjuring flames to burn all these unholy wall decorations to ash or just fleeing in the opposite direction and getting the Princess out of this level as quickly as possible.

At least he couldn't see anything moving besides the jaw of the corpse he had approached. It continued slowly growling at him, though the sound seemed to be losing energy now that Adon had distanced himself slightly.

It was possible these things acted on proximity and wouldn't do anything unless some foreign entity approached too close to where they had been positioned by their creator.

If that was the case, Adon just needed to exit this eerie chamber, and he should be safe for the moment, at least.

As the butterfly reached that conclusion, Adon heard the sound of bone cracking from behind him. Suddenly he was no longer alone.