The Apprentice of Ouroboros [Monster Evo LitRPG Adventure]

They made good time through the abandoned streets. Neska spotted a few students near the entryway, having decided to elope, and looked extremely flustered as the group slithered, walked, and hopped past their little alcove of false privacy.

The boy spoke several pitches higher than he should, stammering about exploring the city, and searching for old artifacts. Neska surmised he was looking for treasure of a different sort, and that the young woman looking all rosy-cheeked and disheveled might have been the source.

Durim gave the two a scolding and sent them back up the lift, warning them they were supposed to be in groups of four or more, and with a professor who knew their way around the ruins. It was the only distraction for a while.

Neska felt the cool, chunky stones on her belly scales. It felt so different from the hive, and not an immediately hostile zone that threatened to devour them if they made one misstep. The hive had thrummed beneath her scoot scales and given off an impossible warmth, the air sticky.

This place was the opposite, almost frigid, damp, and dead silent. She found it surprising that the buzzing of wasps had been a constant reminder to stay alert, but the dead silence here led to a false sense of safety, as did the open air expanse.

They passed the ruins of several structures, collapsed and moldering from decades of lack of use; some may have fallen as the city sank beneath the surface from the layers beneath. Some structures were even tilted at odd angles, as if the ground had bowed. It likely had, according to Durim, given the area's previous volcanic origin.

Neska couldn’t imagine that. A city of thousands, far from sunlight, far from the safety of trees and foliage. Here, threats could come from anywhere: above, below, all around them, even, and retreat without a whisper into the darkness.

But the silence and darkness weren’t all-encompassing. They passed what appeared to be a field of tilled earth, and earthy-smelling, brown and blue spotted mushrooms sprouted from the cavern floor. Some even grew from the sloping walls of the caverns, or attached themselves to the stalactites lurking above like ancient stone teeth.

The mushrooms themselves glowed on the soft blue spots covering their fruiting surface. Neska also noted mycelium strands anchoring them into deep crevices within the rock. Likely, the erosion and dampness provided them with sufficient minerals and nutrients to grow and expand.

“Glowcaps. Very common in places like this,” Durim pointed out, tapping one softly. “The fruiting cap of it is edible, and has been described as tasting of dirt and bison. Cooked right, it’s a delicacy.”

“And this field of other strange plants?” Neska pointed out.

“Attempted horticulture. You don’t need the sun to grow things, as you’ve seen. Mana can sort of provide the right type of light, in high enough quantities,” he pointed to spiderwebs of the magical material in rough striation patterns in the cavern wall. “It’s low grade, widely dispersed. You’d need to refine hundreds of tons of rock to get a single pound of usable mana ore. That’s why it’s left there.”

They proceeded in silence past this impromptu field, and ducked into a curving tunnel that bypassed a landslide going from the floor to the ceiling, up to a hundred feet high. “Bypass access tunnel. Note the steel they used to reinforce it. That’s human engineering, not dwarven. We sculpt stone like it’s clay. We know what’s solid and what isn’t.”

“Through practice? Or magic?”

Durim nodded. “Every species has some small magical ability or passive. Even without the Interface. Some magic isn’t governed by it. Makes it special, you know? Our earthsense is like Miss Juni’s passives as a terramouse.”

“I can smell all sorts of tasty ores,” Juni breathed. “Pretty deep, though. Beyond my ability to dig through. This rock is tougher, denser than my claws can handle. I could phase through the earth, but I always get nervous about using that one, and it's limited range."

“As ye should.” Durim kept the lantern low and shielded, with Jurik and Hadley in a tight delta formation behind him and Kalloway. “So, Professor, who are we after? You mentioned a person of interest.”

“Now's that time to bring it up. Markus.”

The dwarf cursed the second he heard that name, spitting on the ground. “That scaly fuck? He’s supposed to be ten years buried, and I say, not nearly long enough. He was one of Risha’s few bad eggs. Uh, no disrespect meant to you lot,” he added hastily.

“None taken,” Brent said, but Neska saw the invisible hand slap across the face when he gritted his teeth. “I can hear dripping water. Where’s that coming from?”

“Could be from the city above. Water always leaks down, from rainwater to cisterns and aqueducts without sufficient sealing.”

Syra grumbled. “Not looking to add sewage to my fluid composition, thanks.”

“It would only be water by the time it got down here, after filtering through a hundred yards of dirt,” Durim assured her.

The tunnel sloped up and past the rockslide, revealing another monumental section of the cavern. Neska had to stare upward and switch to her [Spectral Sense] to peer into the dark.

She was greeted by the outline of a grand cityscape. Like the common area they started from, these doors, windows, and stairwells were carved right into the cavern wall itself. A stairwell of rusting metal had been driven into a stalagmite that stretched nearly to the ceiling to access some of the pathways. Stone doors with brass and rusted steel handles lay undisturbed, collecting glowing green moss. No one had called this place home for a vast period of time.

“Have those been searched?” Jurik asked, pointing to them.

“Commons area. Where the low and middle castes of society would retreat in the evening. Ya know, it’s a pain in the ass to tell time down here without the sun. Gnomish made clocks that kept track. But listen close, look closer, and you’ll see this place has its own rhythm, independent of the surface.”

Neska could hear that rhythm. The scurrying of large rodents that peered at them from empty window sills and the fluttering of bats far above their head. Small roaches scattered about, seemingly blind, but scattered at their approach and into small crevices in the terrain. Even the drip of water ran at a constant rate, once per second, in a nearby primal pool formed over broken cobblestone.

It was as if time had stopped down here, preserving this place at the moment of disaster. “What happened to this place?” she asked.

“We’re only at the topmost layer. They built on the ruins of what lay below. And they, in turn, built on top of older ruins. There are at least four distinct levels of this city, some of it miraculously intact, some pancaking on top of one another, sealing their secrets in stone and silence.” Durim sounded rather grim as he said that.

“Why would they keep rebuilding? Why not start somewhere new? Someplace untouched?” Neska knew this question had an answer that related to her; she could feel it.

“This place is a tomb, built over an older tomb, and so on.” Brent sniffed the air, frowning. “You can smell the unease in the air.”

“That's your spooky senses going off, young wolf?” Durim asked.

“Yeah. You could say that.” Hadley, too, seemed on edge, more than usual, even nodding in concurrence with Brent, hand tapping her quiver as if to assure herself of its placement. Her footsteps were light and tense. Ever ready, those two. Brent might be silent as an owl on a winter night, but Hadley's presence left no trace. Not even a ripple of water across a puddle as she stepped by.

“Through that stairwell. We’ve got to go further down, but the easy walk will be over soon. We’ll have to go through ruined internal rooms and plazas,” Durim cautioned.

“Why cautious?”

“You’ll see why.”

---

Neska understood Durim’s caution perfectly when she saw what awaited them in one of the ruined buildings. The roof had collapsed, now providing an opening to access the top of the building. It surprised her how the floor of this entire city was just the ceiling for the one below it, in many regards. She sprang down and used her claws to steady herself as she landed, dusting off her uniform when she kicked up a dust cloud.

She looked around and noted the remnants of steel-framed chairs and moldering wood still clinging to them. Next to them were many hastily strewn stone-surfaced desks with metal stands, the material heavily corroded by moisture and time. A few moldering books still survived, and when she opened one desk, she found a book intact, written in an archaic script. The leather was faded, and the pages turned brown with age, but the inkwork was quite legible.

She motioned to Trevor. “Can you read this?”

“I can. Old Valosian. You also have…” he let out a sound of surprise as he thumbed through the pages slowly. “Huh. Dwarvic, and Sovarthian. It looks like a student's translation textbook. Likely for learning different languages. Some of it is tough to read, though. It’s not the same as current dialects.”

“Let me guess. Your home library?”

“I might have been born forth, so my wealth was knowledge,” he answered proudly. “Mom always said that. I think a third of the books in that library back home were bought just for my younger sister and me.”

He closed the book gently and set it back in the desk. “Sadly, you’re unlikely to find many well-preserved books. I think our odds get even worse as we go deeper down.”

Neska heard a chittering sound and snapped to attention, drawing an arrow and firing before she could think. Her mana-charged arrow pierced and pinned a centipede the length of her arm against the floor, as it squirmed and writhed, screeching horribly.

“More bugs. Fun.” Hadley finished the creature off with a dagger to its head, then she cleaned the blade and pulled Neska’s arrow out. “Save ammo, if you can. You never know when you’ll be one arrow short of survival.”

“Chatterpede,” Durim muttered, peering over the corpse. “Oh, looks like he got a victim in his little nest.” He motioned to a pile of debris and junk, small bones, and scraps of clothing. After digging for a bit, he pulled out a corroded silver tiara, one cracked pink gem set in the middle. “It looks like nobody saved the princess,” he muttered.

“It looks like cheap, gaudy wear for someone who wanted to be a princess, but couldn’t be,” Kalloway cautioned. “That’s rosea stone. Pretty to look at, but not worth much due to its common nature.”

Durim set the tiara back down over the nest, as if it weren’t worth picking up. If this wasn’t anywhere near as far as other expeditions made it, then anything of real worth had likely been picked clean. “Just keep an eye out for bigger bugs.”

“What I wouldn’t do to have Kasfew right now,” Neska sighed. “Nori, too. Just as well, I’d feel bad for bringing them into unfavorable terrain twice in a row.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find Markus in a day,” Jurik offered, hand close to his blade. “Besides, they’re on the backup team with Nevin. We’ll scout out the threat in the general area, then, once we’ve set up a staging zone, the larger team will join us. Better to scout it out silently than go all in.”

Neska slinked around the ruins, hand ready on her bow, and her fangs practically dripping venom at the thought of more bugs to deal with. She’d tried to eat a centipede once and gotten bitten for her efforts. Nasty things. All those extra legs made them super creepy. Even her snake self found them repulsive.

Durim led them down a flight of partially collapsed stairs, hopping down and landing effortlessly. He waved them forward. “This isn’t a tour. Plenty of nasties in the dark. Void bats have been spotted here and in the larger caverns. They’ll burst your eardrums if you’re too close.”

“Sounds like we need to shut them up,” Syra muttered, forming a small fountain of water in one hand. “Hope you brought earplugs, Brent.”

“With our snakey witch and her maddening cackles, I wouldn’t dare leave home without them.” he held a few small devices that looked like they might fit in his elongated ears.

“I don’t cackle.”

“Yeah, it’s more of an unnerving hiss,” Juni grinned, elbowing Neska at her torso height. She frowned and gave a disapproving look to the mouse. “It’s true.”

“It’s also highly effective. Laughter is the best medicine for annoying bugs.”

“And bombs,” Hadley added with a wicked grin.

“I still have some of those in my stomach.” Neska also realized that upping her Endurance would increase her storage capacity, if it wasn’t such a large requirement of 10 Endurance to get one extra slot. That was likely because the ability was absurdly broken, to put it mildly.

She also kept a few emergency healing potions in her stomach in resin vials; she hadn’t wanted to use glass where possible, but Trevor had some resin and what he called bakelite containers used to store materials. Right now, she was using three of five inventory slots for those, plus an extra stash of arrows, in case she ran out.

They continued through the empty corridors. Some of the walls had cracked, and part of the building had collapsed here, and they had to duck into another classroom, this one filled with broken glassware, though she noted a few vials still intact. A grumbling sound emanated from behind the teacher’s desk, a mammoth-sized piece of furniture.

Neska drew her bow and raised her height a little to see over, only to be disappointed by a large frog covered in pale green, shiny skin attempting to swallow a centipede not dissimilar to the one she’d killed earlier. “Well, you’re an improvement on the local wildlife,” she said, sighing in relief. The frog’s eyes were milky white, as if completely blind, yet it also responded to her voice and hopped out of a window with a splash emanating on the other side.

She peered over and saw a large pool of deep water just below the building. Water had been collecting for some time, with the water almost a jade green from slime and mineral deposits in the liquid itself. Faint traces of mana traced through the stone, illuminating the pool in an eerie manner.

“Cave frog. Huh. That’s new.” Durim huffed, then led them into a large chamber, where water trickled nearby.

Neska stopped as the chamber opened up and she saw an underground river before her, water similar to that primal pool they had passed. She wondered if it was connected, as the river twisted and bent, with water flowing swiftly. “Guessing we’re not swimming that?” she asked.

“No. We need to cross that.” He pointed to a stone archway crossing over. “Tread lightly.”

She didn’t need to be told twice to know there was danger afoot. They crossed without incident, but just as Trevor crossed, a massive fish lunged out of the water, twice his body length, up and over the bridge.

It was only a quick grab of her prehensile tail that knocked him down and kept him from getting nabbed by the giant fish, which dove back into the water as suddenly as it appeared. Panting, Trevor patted her tail scales.

“I told you. Tread lightly,” Durim said, muttering something likely unflattering in another language that sounded rough on the throat.

Trevor glared at the dwarf, then at her. “Why’d it go after me? You’re the most worm-looking thing out of all of us,” he fumed.

Neska held her snout from laughing or shouting at him. She had to admit, the pun was pretty good. “This wurm has teeth.”

“So do the regular worms,” Jurik muttered. He knelt to point at an inky black pile of semi-fluid material on the ground, streaked like someone had smeared ink over the ground. “This sludge is something’s offal.”

Brent held his nose before sniffing cautiously. “Smells like chemicals. What the hell did that?”

Jurik immediately looked around, behind them, then toward the ceiling, then back to the wolfling. “Worse things.”

“I hate this place so goddamn much,” Brent grumbled. “New rule: no more caves. And if one exists, Neska blasts the opening until it ceases to be our problem.”

“But there might be treasure," Neska proposed. Everyone loved treasure, right?

Trevor frowned. “Wow. You sure you aren’t part dragon? Dragons love treasure. And virgin maidens. Actually, I think a lot of that is just myth.”

“Well, I was offered a wurm evolution at my last Tier, so…maybe?” Neska smiled politely as everyone else grimaced.

Juni grumbled irritably. “If you ever become something even remotely close to a dragon, Neska, I might almost feel bad for whatever’s down here, and any Varadur foolish enough to fight you.” The mouse's ears went on end, and her tail went stiff. “Guys? Trouble somewhere ahead. I don’t know what, but it’s digging fast, and headed in our general direction. Get to high ground.

Neska grabbed Trevor and sprang up to an alcove about a dozen feet above the ground, with the wizard protesting and sputtering. “All this effort for extra snugs,” he whispered, trying to fix his hair after the sudden disruption.

She put a finger to his lips, and he went dead silent. Jurik and the others had taken up hiding spots at the high points of the chamber–low walls, part of a crumbling building, and in Hadley’s case, springing up onto the large mushroom trees growing in this particular chamber and swaying gently on the large flat cap of the fungal growth.

Neska watched with interest as she felt the earth rumble, and the ground shifted. It upheaved just where they had been standing moments before, cracking and crumbling the broken bricks. A hiss of steam rose up from a small vent that opened as the thing let out a grumble of gravel and a low bass tone, reverberating through the air.

Durim pointed silently to it, as the pile of rubble shifted and circled the site. It did not approach the river, then zigzagged back and forth, as if searching for them. He silently mouthed something that she couldn’t make out.

Neska knew whatever was lurking down there was something they had no business tangling with; if it could disrupt the earth like this, and disperse steam through the cracked earth. Only a handful of creatures came to mind. Lyndwurms came to mind, but those weren’t native to the area, and preferred desert terrains where loose sand and silt were plentiful. Nor did they grow to enormous size.

Durim leaned over, and Neska mimed a warning as the brickwork he was leaning on crumbled, and sent bricks tumbling to the ground in a clatter of stone and shattering masonry.

A primal snarl filled the air, and steam vented from the rift marking the creature's presence as Durim’s eyes went wide with fright.

“Oh, ballocks. Inferno wurm!”

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