The Forgotten Faithful: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 2) by Cajiao, Jez (little red riding hood ebook TXT) 📕

“When you what?! I’m not letting you die, Jax! Hell, no!” she screamed into my mind, and I worked to project a sense of calm to her.

“It’s not like that, Oracle. This form is a wight, remember? We’ve talked about them; once it’s destroyed, I’ll come back to my body.”

“I do not like this, Jax! Not at all!”

“Ha! Believe me, neither do I!” I said, and pulled a shortsword from the rack, belting it to my waist, with a dagger on the opposite hip.

I’d usually tool myself up a lot more, but right now I couldn’t carry it. I could barely carry what I had.

I slowly moved across the floor to the stone door. I’d seen this enough times to know that the supplicant usually had to give a donation of their blood on the other side. It wasn’t a large one; it was just meant to show humility, from what I’d been able to make out over the years of inspecting the glyphs on the walls.

Instead of a supplicant begging for aid, though, there was a sealed door, and it sounded like explosions outside somewhere.

I reached out and started to search the inside of the door for a latch when my fingers slipped into it.

I blinked and pulled back, shocked. After a second, I reached out again, my fingers sinking into the stone effortlessly. I reached in deeper, at first concerned that it was to do with the gloves, but my arms continued to pass through, and I took a deep breath, pushing myself into the stone and moving forward.

The deeper I moved into the stone, the more resistance built up, until, as my fingers waved in clear air on the far side of the passage, it felt like I was walking through quicksand.

I pushed myself free on the opposite side, but when I touched the stone again, the lustrous shimmer that had covered it had drained to a bare hint of glitter, and my fingers, instead of passing through, gouged patterns in rapidly solidifying stone.

I yanked them back, as my brain caught up, and I realized what was happening: the loss of mana was affecting the stone! If I’d waited any longer, or moved any slower, I’d have been trapped inside.

I stood looking at the stone, my eyes wide as I processed the thought of being trapped inside the stone for who knows how long, as the last dregs of mana drained, and I suffocated.

I started to shake, my artificial heart speeding up as I panicked. My one true terror from childhood reared its horrific head before me, until I heard Oracle’s voice.

“Jax, are you okay?”

“Ye…yeah...sorry, I’m okay…why?”

“You… your body, I guess… it just tensed up and started to shake…”

“I…I’m okay, just a bit of a bad experience…I…” An explosion from further down the hall interrupted me, and I spun around, crouching low as I fumbled my sword out of the sheath.

“I’ve got to go,” I told her, and I set off down the corridor. I was used to being out in the middle of nowhere, but here, it looked like a city, an old one.

The floor I crept along was slanted slightly; it took a few seconds to realize it, but I had to work to walk in the middle, and as I went on, another faint crash sounded in the distance, followed by a scream of rage.

I sped up, coming to a ‘T’ junction at the end of the corridor. To my left was blackness, and a feeling of cold seeping into my bones, but to the right, in the distance, was a light, and I realized I’d nearly left the light that came from two glowing bronze bowls outside of my sanctuary.

Wherever I was, I didn’t even have the mana available to use my DarkVision, and I moved toward the light cautiously.

I sniffed as I walked, a scent filling the air strong enough to get through even the weak senses of the Mana Wight. These creations I usually rode had fantastic vision and hearing, but smell, taste and touch were always off, so if I could smell it, I knew it was bad.

It was coppery and tangy, like salt…sea salt, I realized a few seconds later. As I turned the next corner, passing a single room that was filled with debris, the back wall collapsed in, and grey shale covered most of the interior.

I couldn’t see much inside, but I could see the white of bones sticking out from under a large slab as I staggered past. I took another turn, going to the left this time, and the light grew much brighter, bright enough that I had to cover my eyes to look at it, and I came to a wobbly stop.

The room before me was broken; huge rents ran across the floor and walls, and the mosaic-covered ceiling had cracks running across it. One crack had water flowing through it, running down across the sharply tilted floor. I squinted at the silvery-white light that illuminated the space, reflecting from the collected seawater that lapped at the sides of a circular pool filling the center of the room.

I stood transfixed as I looked into the room, the floor sloping away from me at a low angle. Debris had been piled against the far side of the room, and I realized what I was seeing, why the air tasted so strongly of the sea and blood that I could taste it through the sense of a manawight.

I was in a sunken city, a city from who knew when, and the creatures that battled around the pool at the center, their blood staining the blue of the ocean, were its terrible residents.

I saw at least three species battling it out: a huge serpentine merrow stood on one side, a half dozen smaller variations of its species surrounding it and battling tall blue skinned humanoids with jet black eyes. The second group held scavenged clubs and stone daggers as their only weapons in webbed fingers