Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

Adon braced for impact in his stretched out humanoid form, his body suddenly ten feet tall and four feet wide—slightly overemphasizing width in order to better conceal Rosslyn, running away behind him.

The butterfly had concealed and conserved most of his strength all that day and throughout the chase with the Gold-Digging Ants.

Now, as they converged upon him, he finally cut loose, employing the physical strength of the body Transformation had built for him, plus a healthy infusion of Mana, to batter the opposition.

The first three ants to reach him, he squashed between hands that had grown to the size of frying pans. The monstrous bugs splattered messily, their physical bodies frail beneath the thin golden plating that surrounded their vulnerable internals.

Yeah, you don't want any of what I am right now! Adon thought excitedly, adrenaline pumping throughout his ridiculously massive body. He couldn't maintain this shape—or at least not this size—for very long, but he was going to get a lot of mileage out of it while it lasted.

His fingertips, reinforced with Mana, scraped a nearby chunk of ceiling and, with a twist and a grunt of effort, broke loose a thick stalactite.

Then he was swinging that stone club around like it was a flashlight in the dark, bashing ants to his left, to his right—the creatures seemed to rush at him faster now that he was standing and fighting, but they had yet to properly overwhelm him. With the improvised weapon, he thought that he could hold them off for a few minutes at least.

And most importantly, the ants did not try to rush past him to get at what might or might not be behind him. They focused on the problem right in front of them like good, predictable little drones.

Adon gave the thick club another swing, scraped the ground, and mashed four ants to paste beneath the stalactite.

Ten minutes? Maybe eight or nine minutes? Less? He wasn't sure how long he could keep this up for. Since he was not only using Transformation to reshape his body into a radically larger form than his mass could normally justify, but also reinforcing his body and enhancing his reflexes and movements with Mana, he was burning resources quite quickly.

With these fast-moving ants, that was just necessary to hold them at bay and prevent any from getting past.

But could he hold out long enough for Rosslyn to escape somewhere the ants would not be able to easily trace and follow?

The section of cavern they had been running through was mostly a straight line so far, so Rosslyn might need to go some distance before she could round a bend or otherwise find an opportunity to duck, unseen, into a smaller sub-cavern.

Adon was tracking her location in the back of his mind, even as he kept track of every insect monster that entered the fray with his eyes and his other physical senses. Rosslyn was doing her best to get further from the fighting as quickly as she could, following Adon's request that she ensure he did not have to fight for longer than necessary.

Yeah, I can hold out until she gets somewhere, he told himself.

The worst case scenario would essentially leave the Princess and the butterfly in the same place they had been before relative to their enemies, except with Rosslyn now at a substantial lead relative to the surviving ants, whose ranks Adon thinned slightly with each passing minute.

Adon swelled one of his feet to clown-like proportions and stomped down on three of the giant ants at once.

This is kind of fun, he thought, grinning his big, exaggerated mouth.

—

Rosslyn raced away as quickly as her feet would carry her, eyes scanning the walls—head continuously darting back to where Adon stood in his strange, giant form, fighting the monsters. She knew it didn't help the mission to watch him at work, but she couldn't help it.

He was working so hard to keep her safe and ensure that the two of them could complete the final element of their mission. It was so… heroic.

But that also meant she should not keep staring back. Above all, she couldn't waste his efforts. He was risking his life right now.

She ran faster than she had when she had just been trying to stay ahead of the ants. She went for broke, burning up her physical stamina in the hopes that she would find a place to hide away.

She looked into every likely-seeming nook and cranny in the walls, checking them especially carefully once she was further from the front with the ants. She knew she needed to be difficult for them to see in order to be able to vanish convincingly.

Rosslyn was familiar enough with insects to know that ants could not see very far away. These ants were scaled up to large dog size, so their vision would probably be enhanced to see further away.

But hopefully they would not have clear vision further out than a couple hundred meters.

She waited until she was around three hundred meters away to start looking more carefully at the rifts in the walls surrounding her. She was disappointed to find that most of them were shallow. Some of them were too narrow for even her fairly slender form.

And in order to check the depth of each opening, Rosslyn had to get close. With the unreliable violet crystal lighting that only activated when Rosslyn got near the area she wanted to see, plus her monocular vision, she had no other way of actually checking if one of these spaces were the proper dimensions.

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Getting further away, and having to physically approach visually check each opening she considered using as a hiding place, took up time. It made Rosslyn nervous.

How long had she been forcing Adon to cover for her?

Three minutes? Five? Longer?

She resisted the urge to look back again—that would only burn more time—but she began to worry that he might get seriously hurt. She tried not to think it too loudly. She knew he was still sort of in her head, and she didn't want to throw him off in the middle of fighting.

Rosslyn had learned to sense Adon's mental touch, after a fashion. She knew when he was inside her mind, and she thought she could even dimly tell where he was in her thoughts.

When she first considered him as a romantic possibility, she had known that would be strange—to experience a relationship with someone who could read her thoughts all the time. But it was surprisingly not uncomfortable.

Rosslyn felt like herself around Adon. There just wasn't much that she needed to hide.

Maybe that was why this situation made her so anxious. She felt a sense of apprehension—the unshakable sense that she and Adon were about to lose each other.

The Princess ducked toward another opening in the wall and silently prayed as the crystals within the crevasse began emitting their subtle violet light.

Please be the one, please be the one…

—

Giant-mode Adon felt it as the Princess, now fairly distant, discovered a new opening in the wall.

He sensed her feelings of hope and relief, and he allowed himself to hope, too.

The ants were beginning to get a little too numerous, and his resources a little thin. He needed Rosslyn to find someplace good to hide soon.

An ant crawled up the wall beside his ten-foot-high head, and Adon reached out a hand to smack it. But the lack of energy made him just slightly clumsier, slower in squishing it this time. The ant got off a bite before Adon corrected his movement and killed it, injecting some of its venom into his thumb.

He scowled and took a few steps back. More ants were encroaching around his feet and ankles, taking advantage of his arm being slightly slower in the seconds after venom had been injected. There had been a few instances of Adon taking some venom damage already, and both he and the ants knew what the effect would be.

There were other ants crawling up the walls to the ceiling, also apparently trying to get past—perhaps hoping to take advantage of the distractions around his feet.

Adon realized it was going to work. There were too many of them, too concentrated near him. He would need to give ground here.

He stomped around, took a couple of steps back, and assessed. Ants were beginning to move past him now both at ground level and on the ceiling, the former group probably assuming that the dozens that swarmed Adon's ankles were enough to handle him—and looking for the other target they had likely been given by whatever controlled them.

Pretty soon, I'm going to have to shift back to butterfly mode, Adon thought. Rosslyn, I hope you're already safe somewhere…

—

That little nook was not the one, and the Princess raced on as quickly as she could.

Another crevasse. Another disappointment. On to the next opportunity.

Rosslyn kept going, determined.

As she reached another opening in the wall, she saw that this crevasse met her requirements. There was enough space for her to squeeze inside and sit down—lie down, if she wanted to—and it was deep enough to keep her from quickly being seen by passing ants. They would have to really turn and focus on that space to spot her.

Then an alarm bell went off in her mind.

Wait, the crystal lighting in this cavern is only lighting up in areas where I have been, and it does not turn back off once I leave…

The ants, if they had any intelligent leadership or guiding force at all, would be able to find her easily, given those conditions. Wouldn't they? They should just stop at the last place the light touched and search the openings near there. That would do it.

Rosslyn clenched her fists and growled.

So close… what do I do? Do I go back to Adon and fight? She shook her head, rejecting the idea. No, I am too far away now to make it in time to be useful. He must be running out of time in that form by now, and then he will have to slip away. I need to find a safe place. I have to keep to his plan.

She had an idea.

I keep running. I keep running a bit longer, enough to give the ants the false impression that there are dozens more caves I might have slipped into. Then I just double back and duck in here. It was simple and perfect. She was annoyed that her mind was not working more quickly, but then, she was pretty exhausted.

Rosslyn dashed forward, going for pure distance now rather than looking for any place to hide—although she also kept as close to the wall as she could without crashing, so she could randomly jut her hand out into openings in the wall and activate those violet crystals.

She kept doing this for just a couple of minutes, then grabbed hold of a jutting stone from the side of the wall and used it to spin herself around without completely stopping. She ran back to the space she had found that could accommodate her plans and, without looking around at all this time, she quickly ducked into the crevasse. Keeping her movements quick and sudden was the best way of ensuring that nothing would see her enter the small offshoot of the cavern, or even if something did see her, it would just be a distant vanishing blur whose disappearance location was impossible to track.

Rosslyn collapsed against the back wall within the crevasse, hands on her thighs, panting, eyes slightly out of focus.

But a moment later, she made herself concentrate and cleared her vision.

She extended her arm and pointed her palm at the opening to the crevasse. She saw that her hand could block the entire opening from her field of view from the bottom to around seven feet up. That was a reflection of how far into the crevasse she had stepped, as well as how narrow the gap she rested within was.

Most importantly, however, if she used light magic, she should be able to emit a burst of energy from the palm of her hand that would blast anything between her wrist and the entrance to the crevasse.

I am ready, she thought, slightly giddy.

The plan had worked.

Adon, I am all set! Rosslyn thought much louder. Please get away from the ants now!

The Princess swallowed. She wanted to scream out loud, both in frustration and to alert him to her location. But she forced herself to remain calm. His Telepathy was the only safe way Rosslyn had of letting Adon know the situation and her precise positioning. She knew that.

A minute went by.

Two minutes.

No answer.

Rosslyn started to worry.