Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 70 – Return to Sunlight

The night passes peacefully without a single attack, and the next morning they break camp early to start their trek back. Before they leave, Emily separates from the group without a word, leaving them behind as she sprints out of the cavern, following one of the paths downstream. She cuts her way through several groups of beasts as she gets further away from the lake, but even as her stamina drops and she starts to feel fatigue setting in, after running for almost twenty-four hours straight, she still finds nothing but more winding tunnels and an endlessly flowing stream.

Damn, I guess I’ll have to come back again to finish my quest. I’ll run my own expedition before I leave once I reach third circle.

Sighing in disappointment, she resets time back to the morning by the lake.

Unaware of her journey further into the deeps without them, the group sets off, leaving an emptier cavern behind them, having collected most of the crystals and thrown all the bodies and heads into the water. The writing on the wall, they don’t touch.

They retrace their steps, heading upstream and back towards the surface with tension hanging over the group, fear of a repeat of the last horde of groglers present in everyone’s minds. They run into a few fire-spitting bugs and iron-clawed moles on the first day of their travel, filing into the well-lit tunnel from the dark side passageways.

The fire-spitting bugs are eviscerated by Emily’s flying lightning and a few well-placed water blades. Their attacks harmlessly burst against the group’s water barriers. The iron-clawed moles once again prove fun for Emily, as she charges out from the rest of the group with flying lightning swinging and quickly dispatches them all. The rest of the first day marching along the water’s edge is quiet.

This pattern repeats as they get further from the lake, with no large, coordinated attacks. A few dog-sized acidic centipedes show up on the second day, and Emily is forced to stop using flying lightning when the first one she cuts open melts the weapon. Instead, a few bolts and flaming projectiles from Dante reap their lives.

On the third day, they spot a patch of vothral weed, a small blue stalk imbued with strong water elemental mana, growing on the other side of the lake. They cross the water to collect it, but several shimmering blades of water shoot out from the depths below, shredding Dante and Mia to pieces. Emily resets once, and this time before letting anyone into the water, she shoots two bolts in, filling the water with electric mana and frying several piranhas, that float to the surface dead.

They continue onwards, and it’s not until they enter the dark, waterless tunnels connecting the surface and The Waters on the evening of the fifth day that they run into groglers again.

When they reach the small junction room filled with luminis, a small group of ten groglers rushes them from the tunnels. They rip them to pieces with ease, and find no others nearby, assuaging the group’s fears that they might signal another coordinated offensive heading their way. Afterwards, they settle down for the evening in the flower-lit room.

As everybody sits to eat amongst the flowers, Emily chooses to sit alone by the entrance to the tunnel to the surface, silently staring out into the darkness ahead.

“You excited to head back?” Oscar asks, approaching from behind her, carrying food.

“Of course,” Emily responds with a grin as he sits beside her. “I have new things to research and toys to make. Also, I miss Jules.”

Her grin fades to a bittersweet smile.

“Haha, yes,” Oscar laughs. “It’s nice to have something good to return to.”

Emily raises a brow in surprise, before switching to a teasing grin.

“Who do you have to return to?”

“My family,” he says with cheer. “This expedition will be a great achievement for us, thanks to you.”

“At least you know who it’s thanks to,” she responds with a smirk.

“Seriously though,” Oscar says with a solemn gaze. “Thank you for keeping my head on straight back there. I’m not sure what came over me, but I was giving up way too fast. It’s not a good mind-set for a leader. You’re the main reason we’ve made it this far at all, let alone with this few casualties. I know you won’t really be getting a fair cut for how much effort you’ve had to put in, but I’d like to offer you my proper thanks.”

Emily watches him in silent surprise.

“The normal procedure when a member of an expedition dies is to split their share: half to the family running the expedition, and half to be divided between the surviving members. I’d like to give you half of my family’s share.”

“Are you allowed to do that?”

“Yes. No one in my family will argue with me when we return.”

Emily scoffs at his confidence, but thanks him with a grin.

“Thank you then. Always happy to have more funds and research material.”

“You deserve it for keeping us safe.” He rises, patting her on the shoulder, as he heads towards his sleeping bag. “Let’s hope we get back without more troubles.”

***

The night passes and they continue through the dark tunnels away from The Waters. They run into a few bugs and moles, but Emily and Dante deal easily with them at the front of the group. They sleep again the next night, simply stopping and setting up camp on the path, fighting off a few bugs in the night.

The next day they step out through the entrance to The Waters, rising through the crack in the earth to meet sunlight, finally pulling free from the clutches of the oppressive darkness.

“Finally!” Dante cheers, matching the sighs of relief emanating from the rest of the group as they step into the rain.

“It’s certainly nice to see the sky again,” Oscar agrees, while pulling up his hood to cover his head. “Let’s set up here and have lunch before we continue. We’ll have a long fight ahead of us once we leave the relative safety of this clearing.”

Everyone nods in agreement, remembering the many fights they had in the last days of their journey through the forest. They spread across the clearing, some sitting in the open, enjoying the cooling rain on their faces, and some leaning against trees, sheltering under the canopy’s cover as they eat. Emily, Ivor, Dante, and Enzo settle at the edge of the fog wall, facing in the direction of their return.

“How did you two become friends?” Emily asks a question that has been on her mind for a while, ignoring the water trickling into her robes through the rips left behind by the wendigo.

“Our mums are close!” Dante says proudly, throwing his arm around Enzo’s shoulder.

“Unfortunately, they are,” Enzo grumbles with a sigh. “The Hibiscus march and Dianthus viscounty border each other and have friendly relations. Our mothers were in The Covenant at the same time and are still close. They often meet up and they used to bring us along, so I was forced to put up with him from a young age.”

“Haha, you love me really!”

Enzo rolls his eyes and refuses to respond, drawing chuckles from Emily and Dante.

They eat in good spirits, enjoying the sunlight dripping through the canopy along with the rain. Soon, they finish eating and gather together in formation again, adopting the same formation as in the caves, except Ivor returns to the left flank, and Erin moves to cover the right. They step out through the fog wall, re-entering the dense mist of The Glade. A few hours into their march, they run into their first enemies since the tunnels.

Emily spots six glowing orange figures darting through the trees towards them and quickly alerts the group. Before they even finish preparing barriers, an ocelax leaps out of the foliage at Emily. She deftly sidesteps the attack, her left arm flashing out and slicing the cat’s head off with a machina-infused Claw. A wind barrier covers her as the second cat springs towards her and she knocks it aside with an elbow to the side of the head before finishing it with a heavy boot stomp, crushing its skull.

Emily finishes summoning flying lightning as her foot falls, and the dart quickly whips between the four remaining beasts before they can attack, ending the assault.

Weird. They were incredibly aggressive.

She puts the thought to one side as they move on swiftly. However, within the next two hours, five more sets of beasts rush them. They move quickly, beelining for the group the moment they enter range, with four of the five arriving before the group manages to spot them with earthen detection. After the fifth group, Emily realises what is probably the cause.

The Mensacus is still leaking some of its influence. I guess reducing it to only minus one intelligence wasn’t enough to keep it from affecting the nearby beasts. That’s gonna make this trip back a pain.

They push onwards, the number of beast attacks slowly ramping up as they move away from The Water’s entrance. Come nightfall, the rain lets off for a bit and they set up tents in a small crater, with banks of earth partially concealing them on all sides.

Emily takes her food and settles on one of the banks, looking out into the forest. Her groupmates sleep soon after, and she’s left alone in the faint light of the moon as it creeps through the canopy above. Twenty minutes into her watch, she spots movement outside the barrier and moves to meet them.

Small, brown shards of rock fall down from above. Emily dodges them with ease, letting them drop past harmlessly while weaving hand signs to summon flying lightning. She whips the weapon into the darkness overhead, her precise attacks ripping through the howlers, aided by her spatial awareness and keen eyesight. As the last howler tries to flee, she sends flying lightning through its chest and turns back to the camp with a frown as its body drops to the floor.

This is going to be annoying. I wish I could just sit in the trees and shoot them.

Sparks go off in her mind, and she re-enters the sound barrier and approaches a tree hanging over the camp. She springs up the trunk, utilising the spikes left on one of her boots to help her, quickly approaching the top edge of the barrier. Stopping before she breaches it, she settles down on a branch, overlooking the crater, that is lit by a beam of moonlight.

She perches with one leg crossed over the wide branch, and the other hanging down. Pulling out her revolver, she places it on the leg in front of her and stares at it.

If I shoot it within the barrier, the beasts outside will only hear the sound of the bullet flying through the air. It will be enough to scare them nearby, but it won’t pull extras from far away. However, it will wake everyone inside the barrier.

She unhooks one of the green teardrop earrings from her ear and hooks it onto the trigger guard of her revolver. Touching a finger to it, she carefully injects mana into the mana pathways of the gem, forcing the mana within to flow in reverse and activating the engraved spell. A small, shimmering barrier forms around the gun, barely perceptible to the naked eye.

Emily raises the gun to point at the sky and rests her finger on the trigger.

Please work.

She squeezes, releasing the hammer to drive home and fire. A hissing pop sounds from the gun, audible but quiet enough to ignore, and a bullet flies out, leaving the barrier and getting lost in the clouds.

Perfect!

A satisfied smile spreads across Emily’s face, and she disables the earring before reloading the revolver and laying it down in her lap to wait. Forty minutes later, Emily spots a group of six fog cats, weaving towards the camp through the mist fifty metres out, and sits up, alert with an excited grin.

Maintaining infra-sight, she carefully activates the earring in reverse again, then raises her gun towards the first cat. She takes a deep breath, lining up the barrel with the cat’s skull. She charges the revolver with machina before slowly releasing her breath while squeezing the trigger. With a faint pop and a bright flash, a bullet flies into the trees, ripping through one of the feline stalkers.

Without a moment's hesitation, Emily moves on to the next target, taking another breath and releasing it with a squeeze. With another pop, a second cat falls. She lines up her third shot, the bullet ripping through another cat’s throat. Her fourth shot misses as the target notices its dead packmates and jumps erratically, but the fifth puts it down.

The moment the fifth shot leaves the barrel though, Emily’s instincts flare and she follows them. She flicks the gun to the side slightly and pulls the trigger without a thought. Her sixth bullet flies out, punching through the torsos of two cats jumping past each other, dropping them to the floor unmoving.

¯¯¯¯¯

Skill learned: Basic Shooting (passive)

[Basic Shooting (passive)]

User knows how to use ranged weapons and firearms.

-Grants +10% dexterity and agility when fighting with ranged weapons

-Grants +10% familiarity with ranged weapons

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A calming feeling of familiarity washes over her as she adjusts her grip on her revolver. Her slightly tensed wrist relaxes, and she slides her finger out of the trigger guard to rest it on the side. She pops open the gun’s cylinder, dropping the empty casings and quickly loading six new bullets.

She moves the leg that is crossed over the branch, drawing her foot in and raising her knee to create a comfortable firing platform, and rests her gun against it while looking out into the forest with a smile.

I was wondering if I’d get a ranged version of my melee skill at some point. These earrings worked like a charm! All those shots and I didn’t wake anyone. Maybe I’ll work on a properly silent gun when I get back. It could be a useful method for assassinating a mage. I bet I could hit them with a silent bullet before they could put a barrier up, and with this, I don’t need to waste as many wind crystals adding them to the bullet’s propulsion mix every time.

She silently deactivates the earring on the gun and watches her surroundings, waiting for more targets to wander into range.

The night slowly ticks by, and she continues picking off approaching beasts from the trees. Half an hour before the end of her watch, she starts to run out of bullets.

Fourteen shots left. I should probably save some for if I need them on the rest of the trip. One final test.

She spots three pop frogs hopping closer, glowing a warm orange in her thermal sight despite being amphibians, and loads two bullets into the cylinder while standing up. Stepping forward, she drops from her high perch, deftly bouncing between a few branches as she falls near silently to the floor.

She checks her stats as she rushes forward to meet the frogs outside the barrier.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Attributes:] Strength 12 (16), Dexterity 34 (36), Agility 26 (29), Vitality 13 (16), Intelligence 60 (59)

_____

She bursts through the trees, arriving a few metres in front of the frogs. She raises her revolver to point at one and watches her stats changing

¯¯¯¯¯

[Attributes:] Strength 12 (16), Dexterity 34 (39), Agility 26 (32), Vitality 13 (16), Intelligence 60 (59)

_____

One muffled hiss and the first frog drops dead. She springs forward, turning the gun on another frog while extending her claw into the last.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Attributes:] Strength 12 (18), Dexterity 34 (39), Agility 26 (34), Vitality 13 (16), Intelligence 60 (59)

_____

She pulls the trigger as her blade sinks into the frog’s soft head, finishing the fight and letting her added strength flow out of her.

“Tsk,” she clicks her tongue as she wipes her blade and turns back to the camp. “The bonuses don’t stack for the same stats but instead take the highest boost. Ah well, it was worth a shot.”

Returning to the camp, she sits on the bank of the crater again and waits out the rest of her watch. It comes to an end without any more encounters, and she wakes Ivor and Matteo to watch together due to the number of encounters she’s had. After briefly warning them, she settles down in a tent to meditate through what’s left of the night as the rain starts to pour again.