Re: Butterfly (Reincarnated as a Butterfly)

Rosslyn felt nervously for the telepathic connection between herself and Adon.

To her relief, she immediately sensed the light touch of his mind on hers.

So, you are still alive, she thought very quietly. It felt slightly treacherous to even imagine that something might have happened to Adon, or that he could not handle the situation she had left him in.

But Rosslyn could not control that. She would never have been able to forgive herself if Adon died covering her retreat, and their parting was just him standing and fighting as she ran away. He wasn't a soldier or a knight. He wasn't sworn to her defense. It wasn't his duty to die that way, and she did not feel that her life was more important than his—either in some abstract sense of "value" or in the sense of one being more consequential than the other.

If the mystic butterfly died in this dungeon, it would be a terrible loss not just for Rosslyn and Adon's friends, but also for her country and perhaps their world. She knew his story was not meant to end this way.

But where are you?

—

All right, I give up, Adon decided. Rosslyn must be safe somewhere by now. It's time to make my escape and go into hiding myself.

He released his Transformation, and like a rubber band he'd been holding in tension, his body instantly snapped back to its standard butterfly form.

The dozens of ants that had been snapping at his ankles, injecting venom wherever they could, fell away in an instant, since their legs were now resting on empty air.

Then the ants that had been on the ceiling, which Adon had more or less ignored, started throwing themselves at him.

Shit!

He wheeled to the side and managed to dodge the first two, then turned himself invisible. Another three ants flew by without striking him, though he still had to maintain a little focus on dodging as he weaved his way to the opposite wall from where he had been positioned.

Suddenly the lighting changed—went from violet to some shade of turquoise—and Adon's internal alarm bells started going off.

Another ant threw itself at him from the ceiling and, as Adon dodged, clipped his wing with one of its legs.

What is going on?! It took him only a fraction of a second to understand, as other ants rushed up to the empty spaces on the ceiling to have their shot at him.

They're not giving up on me, because they can still see me. Which means that this color change isn't just a light show from the Dungeon Core. Somehow, it changed the lighting so I wouldn't be invisible anymore…?

More ants threw themselves at him, much more accurately than they had done in the seconds when he was truly fully invisible.

Adon's body dodged frantically as the bulk of his brain searched his memory banks for the right move to escape the situation. Then he remembered a feeling he had experienced for the first time shortly after he initially emerged from his chrysalis. He focused his mind on the air, on the wind, on the sensation of flying and being free. He allowed that preoccupation to suffuse his body and brain—to turn from a background thought to the main event of his consciousness.

He became one with the wind and sky, despite being deep underground.

And he sensed it.

Even here, far from the open skies where he had experienced the greatest joys of flight, there was air. Where there was air, there were air currents. Adon felt one, pulling at his body and inviting him to become a part of it.

Adon let go of everything, and he began floating away, his body drifting on an air current as much as flapping its wings.

He barely noticed what happened for the first minute of this, except that he didn't die. So that couldn't be too bad.

After a minute, he felt comfortable enough that he wanted to understand what was going on at a conscious level—to better replicate this experience anytime he needed to

He had become one with the wind, one with an air current, one with the small, confined incarnation of the open sky. What did that mean?

He felt his body was almost fully intangible. He could be touched, and he was not certain whether he was perfectly invisible again. But now, when the ants threw themselves off the ceiling, they were making a half-physical contact with him at best, their feet perhaps grazing the edge of one wing and slipping off as soon as they had their first touch. The ants did not seem to know where he was anymore, at least not reliably.

Some could perhaps see him, while others couldn't. More likely, there were those that had sprayed him with their chemicals while they were fighting him earlier, and that rendered him partially 'visible' to them in a different sense, one which his current Transformation had not washed away—at least not yet.

Adon reached out with his mind, looking for something that he knew ought to be there somewhere.

And he felt a presence. Something that did not reach back, but recoiled at his touch.

Adon could not pinpoint an exact location, but he recognized the mind he was dealing with. The same mind that had perhaps almost orchestrated the death of the party in the ant floor.

Welcome to the heart of the dungeon, the spider's inner voice said quietly. I hope you feel at home. Your games of hide and seek are over now. We have found you. The question is what you will do now that you cannot hide.

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Adon maintained his composure and didn't even reply. He knew the monster was just trying to make him focus too much on the content of its words and hopefully lose the will to maintain his current state. The butterfly was almost untouchable right now.

Instead of composing a message back, Adon tried to pinpoint the spider's location with Telepathy. It proved difficult, though. This was partly because he was focused on maintaining his current semi-gaseous form and avoiding the ants—their constant flailing from above and below meant this was a full-focus sort of task—but also because Telepathy wasn't a precise radar.

All he could easily know for certain was that something was within the range of Telepathy. Perhaps it would be more useful as a device for locating enemies with another Evolution Store upgrade, but that would undoubtedly be exorbitantly expensive at this point.

The only other way he could perhaps use Telepathy as radar was to fully focus on the locating-the-spider job, which wasn't an option right now.

More ants surged from the ceiling and every wall, not exactly throwing themselves at Adon now but standing on each other's bodies and reaching for him with their collective mass as if they were all part of a single organism.

A mass of twenty ants extended from the middle of the ceiling like a tentacle, grasping for him with dozens of limbs that managed a fairly wide reach.

Adon spun and twisted through the air, a little nervous that he could still be captured in the net of body parts.

As he neared the left wall, there was a slight shimmery glint nearby. It became invisible again in an instant, but Adon nudged himself back to the right slightly. He had already benefited from the sudden angle shift that made what he had just seen temporarily perceptible.

That's a web, isn't it? he thought.

The big spider was trying to narrow his movement options—to capture him.

And the ants, Adon realized, were all moving in his direction. They knew his direction of travel from before he turned semi-intangible, of course.

I could probably escape them by just moving through the middle of the air and going back the way I came until I passed the whole army, Adon considered.

But then the ants would continue along their same path. They would hit the end of where the glowing crystals lit up the cavern—crystals that seemed possibly to be motion-activated?—and the ant colony would recognize that Adon had given them the slip.

They would probably explore every opening in the walls they had passed, looking for him, before they turned around and retraced their steps.

There weren't an infinite number of possible places he could be hiding, after all. Only those that the ants would pass before they came to the place where the crystal light ended—where no motion had triggered the crystals before they got there.

So they would find Rosslyn wherever she was hiding before they made it back to search for Adon again.

Goddess damn it, Adon thought.

You cannot protect the girl you brought with you, the spider thought loudly, as if aware of what was on Adon's mind. Give yourselves over quickly, and we can promise you a quick death.

Not exactly a tempting offer. Perhaps it spoke to the apparent asymmetry in their respective strength—the spider with a small army of ants, while Adon and Rosslyn only had each other. But Adon felt as if the spider might actually be bluffing.

It couldn't catch Adon thus far, and it did not know where Rosslyn might be. That was why it had to do things like randomly add netting that Adon had to avoid.

But I also can't kill these things while evading attacks… I really am at a disadvantage here. Since my evasion strategy is burning more Mana than anything the spider or the ants are doing, I'll probably run out of energy first. That's what the spider is waiting for, why the chase is still worth it for him instead of them going after Rosslyn and forcing me to play defense.

Adon decided he didn't have a lot of good options. The spider shouldn't be able to detect when and if Adon ducked away, not if Adon tried to be as invisible telepathically as he largely was on a physical level.

I need to regroup with Rosslyn. I can't kill these things on my own.

He had been maintaining a telepathic radio silence for most of this pursuit, mostly just not deigning to respond to the spider's taunts, but also keeping quiet even with Rosslyn. He could tell she was still alive, still seemingly in her normal state—not comatose or dying. That had been enough until now.

Adon opened his channel with her just slightly more than he had kept it before this point, and he sent a message.

Ros, I think I'm going to have to come your way at some point. The spider is helping the ants again. I can't detect his presence while I'm also avoiding them.

Get over here, then! Rosslyn almost shouted in her mind. Adon could hear a mix of nerves and relief in her inner voice.

Just keep talking to me as I move, Adon replied. I'm going to try and operate Telepathy as quietly as I can from the spider's perspective, but from you, I need a conversation at normal volume. It gets subtly louder or quieter when I get closer or further away, so this will help me figure out where you are.

All right, she thought. You know that I ducked into one of these little caves. It is before the place where the crystal lights stop. I moved past my intended hiding place to activate crystals further away from my location, then doubled back.

That was good. Clever.

Keep going, Adon sent.

I, um… hmm. I do not know what to say, but I will fill the air. I am at the back of the offshoot area where I hid right now.

That was a good tactic, Adon added helpfully. Doubling back. It made it so that neither the ants nor I know where you are, and they don't have any way of finding you.

Am I getting quieter or louder as we talk? Rosslyn thought.

I think I just passed you. Give me a minute, and I'll get back to where you are. Just keep talking.

Adon reduced himself to the smallest size he possibly could—a very densely packed butterfly with the dimensions of a bumblebee—and he whizzed through the center of the funnel formed by the ant colony's bodies, which jutted out of walls, ceiling, and floor, every surface behind him.

There was even webbing strung between the ants, as a final catch-all to grab a butterfly that attempted to escape that way.

It didn't work. Adon was not only semi-intangible and invisible now, but also tiny. He slipped through the thread links like they weren't there.

When he made it out the other side, he hooked a quick right turn.

I think you should be about… here, he sent quietly.

Adon entered a crevasse, and to his relief, he found himself eye to eye with the Princess.

Thank goodness, Rosslyn thought. I am so happy to see you in one piece.

The march of ants across every surface continued outside of the little tunnel. But for the moment, Adon and Rosslyn appeared to be safe.