Summoned A Hundred Years Too Late

That was it. Alexandra was falling to her death.

It was the end. Perhaps she shouldn’t have entered the cavern. Perhaps she should have turned around when she saw how high the ledge was.

Now she was falling, and she knew it, which meant the ground was really far below.

She was surprised at how calm she was. She should be panicking, looking for a solution. Yet, she wasn’t. Instead, she was enjoying the cold air of the depth pushing against her body. Freefall was an amazing experience, and it would probably be her last.

Might as well enjoy it.

The sound of the underground river grew louder.

She couldn’t see anything. Her orb of light was dispelled when she fell. She didn’t want to see anything. It would ruin the moment.

The rumbling of water echoing against the walls of the underground ravine filled her ears, overwhelming the sound of wind produced by her fall.

Then she hit the water.

She sank for a few long seconds before snapping back into action. She swam up, and up again. The underground river was deeper than expected. Finally, just as her breath was about to run out, she broke through the surface.

She panted. The current was strong. So strong that it took her underwater again. She fought to keep her head out, but there was no respite.

No light. No sense of where she was or how she could leave the river. Her mind was completely occupied by the need to keep herself afloat and the water out of her lungs. Her feet alternated between scraping against the bottom, hitting rocks and shells, and flapping in the unknown depth, unable to find the ground.

She knew she was moving with the current. She didn’t know where, nor was she capable of estimating the speed at which she was going.

All she could tell was that there was water everywhere, and that she better not inhale it. The water itself was cold, though her solar core kept her warm.

During a brief moment of calm, she summoned an orb of light above the water, trying to see if she could locate a place to land. There wasn’t any. She was in a tunnel that had been smoothed out by the immemorial passage of the river. Nowhere to land, nothing to grab onto.

She let the flow carry her.

It still wasn’t a peaceful ride. The river was a chaotic, bruising machine. With inconsistent light, she couldn't brace for what was coming. One moment she was floating in a deceptive pocket of calm, and the next, a sudden drop in the riverbed violently sucked her downward. Her shoulder slammed into a submerged shelf of rock.

She swallowed a mouthful of icy, bitter water, coughing and choking as the current rolled her over like a rag doll. Her lungs burned, a desperate fire demanding oxygen she couldn’t reach. Every time she managed to claw her way back to the surface for a ragged gasp of air, the river tore her under again, dragging her shins across jagged gravel that shredded her trousers. The absolute blackness made the claustrophobia suffocating; she was entirely at the mercy of a blind, crushing force.

Then she was back in a pocket of calm. She breathed. She slowed down. Turned her Light back on.

And the cycle repeated.

After what felt like a small eternity of fighting for every single breath, her hands finally scraped against a steep, muddy bank that didn't immediately slip away. Dragging her battered, aching body out of the torrent, she finally managed to reach the shore.

She was in a cavern even larger than the first one, but this time, at least, she couldn’t fall lower.

Keeping her light working with as little mana as possible, she collapsed on the rocky ground and breathed.

Moments later, she was already up. Just because she made it out of the water didn’t mean she was safe. She scanned her surroundings, and only when she didn’t notice any trace of a presence did she allow herself to relax a little.

“Okay, good news: I’m not dead,” she whispered, if only to reassure herself. “Bad news: everything else.”

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She was lost deep in a maze of caves, tunnels, and underground rivers with no idea how she would make her way out. She had no food, no water—

She paused, looking at the river before her. “I guess water isn’t going to be a problem.”

All her clothes and belongings were soaked. It was a miracle that she’d managed to keep her sword with her the whole time.

Worse, she was underground, away from the sun. “Something I should have considered before going on an underground hunt.”

Without the sun, she couldn’t rely on her bloodline to replenish her energy. She had reserves, but they would eventually run out. At least, now that she had the Solar Affinity, her core would fill up with solar mana naturally. It was slower, less efficient, and it wouldn’t be enough to eliminate the need for food, but it was better than nothing.

Under her light, she summoned her journal to receive her consolation prize.

Diving: Dive from a height of 100 meters (1/1)

Swimming: Swim for 20 kilometers without leaving the water (20/20)

Swimming 1 -> 2

“Twenty?” she almost shouted. “How the hell did I travel twenty kilometers in that damned river?”

She bit her lip. That was bad. She was further away from the entrance than she thought. Twenty kilometers underground was a lot, especially since she couldn’t swim up the river.

“More than twenty. I got a skill level out of it too,” she corrected herself. “All of this for two useless skills.”

She was about to complain that there was nowhere to use, or even practice, those skills in the Grey Basin, but realized that wasn’t quite true. There was this very place.

“Can Swimming give me enough power to go upstream?”

That sounded unlikely. With how strong the current was in places and how long the journey back to the first cavern would be, she didn’t think a common skill would be enough. Even if she could overpower the current, which was doubtful, she’d grow too tired to continue long before reaching her destination.

She had to find another exit.

She tried activating Tracking, setting the target to something that lived on the surface. She tried humans, animals, various types of beasts, and elementals, but nothing caught.

“Looks like this place isn’t the most accessible.” She grimaced.

Still, there had to be a way out. If anything, all that water had to be going somewhere, though following it was a bit dangerous. It might take her even deeper, and there was no guarantee there would be pockets of air.

Thinking of air, she noticed that the cavern she was in had it. Of course it did, given that she was breathing. But it meant that this place was linked to the surface, probably in more ways than the one she came from.

She turned toward the water soaked into her sleeves and let her Light skill’s heat dry it off. Steam rose off her clothes and hair, whose blue dye had worn off into a lighter shade. It took longer than she would have liked, as she had to be careful not to damage them, but eventually her clothes stopped clinging, and her boots stopped squelching with every step.

Now, all she could do was explore. She stood, rolled her shoulders, and picked a direction.

The cavern was wide, the ceiling too high to see. She walked away from the main river, following a small stream that came from the far corner of the cave.

Her boots crunched softly on gravel, the sound amplified by the immense, hollow space around her. As the stream narrowed, the light from her floating orb washed over a pale, tangled mass resting against a large boulder. Alexandra stopped, lowering her light to inspect it.

It was a graveyard of small bones. Hundreds of delicate, needle-thin ribs and tiny, hollow skulls were piled in a neat drift where the water pooled. They didn't belong to anything human. They looked like cave-rodents or blind, subterranean lizards that had been swept down the stream and trapped. Most of them were picked clean, but a few of the more recent remains bore distinct, melted-looking grooves, as if something acidic had dissolved the flesh right off them.

The sight made her grip the pommel of her sword a little tighter. Whatever was killing them lived further up this branch.

She'd gone maybe half a kilometer when the temperature dropped.

Not cold like the water had been cold. This was different. It was a chill that came from nowhere and pressed against her skin like it wanted in. Her orb flickered, shrinking to a coin of light before she forced it back up with a surge of mana.

"That's new," she murmured. New, and likely bad news.

She turned a corner and entered a smaller chamber. There, at the edge of her light, the shadows along the far wall caught her attention. She started in that direction, and, just to be sure, tried Tracking for darkness elementals.

It was a hit.

"Of course," she said. "Of course, there's one of you down here."

A shape gathered itself out of the dark. It had no eyes, no mouth, just a humanoid upper body floating in the air, black on black, darker than the absence of light around it. It didn't have a face to read, but she felt the attention all the same, a cold weight settling on her like a hand on the back of her neck.

She pushed more mana into Light. The elemental writhed in pain.

It was angry.

“Want more?” she asked.

It didn’t answer and came at her instead, fast, like a ghost that flew across the air without friction. She threw herself sideways as a limb of pure shadow scythed through the space where her head had been. She felt it pass. A kind of cold that skipped straight past her skin and went right for her bones.

She grabbed her sword.

"Okay," she breathed. "Let's see what you've got."