The crunching, the buzzing. They never stopped, even long after she’d covered her head and ears with a torn piece of her robe, even long after the beast had gone silent. The hours passed by like nails raking down her back, long, painful. Slow.

She focused on the letters floating in her mind, clinging to them.

Not because of the skills she’d gained, nor the singular Level she’d gotten from being dragged on the quest to kill the rats.

But because it was all she could see.

She’d heard that blind people and animals with no concept of language would see the System as a series of concepts and ideas, and part of her had wondered what it would be like now that she no longer had sight.

And to her great relief, that hadn’t happened. She could still see the System’s information, faint white letters floating in place in her mind, as if she could still see. So she stared at the window with eyes that weren’t there, just to indulge in what she could no longer have outside her own head.

-Species: Humanoid

-Race: Elf

-Name: Emhreeil

-Paths: [Infuser] Level 7

Base Attributes:

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +0 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +0 )

Perception ( +0 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +4 )

Soul ( +2 )

Available: 0

-Racial Skills: [Attuned], [Quick Learner]

-Acquired Skills:

[Magic Resistance - Level 5]

[Mental Resistance - Level 6]

[Poison Resistance - Level 4]

[Pain Resistance - Level 8]

[Illumina - Level 6]

[Sparkburst - Level 12]

[Haste - Level 9]

[Mana Perception - Level 15]

[Mana Manipulation - Level 9]

-Acquired Traits:

Kindhearted (1 / 3): You have shown yourself capable of both sympathy and empathy, and have backed up your emotions with actions that you believe were moral. Gain +1 in Soul and Resolve when helping sentient beings as long as you do not assist them with committing actions you find immoral.

She focused on her one and only gained Trait with the acidic, bitter taste of resentment. Were she not “kind”, would she have some other Path that would save her? Something, some spell that could kill the monster prowling around her? That could help her regain her sight?

Focusing on the past, she’d learned, was among the most meaningless things anyone could do.

But so was everything else right now.

So she continued, her mind rolling down a well-walked spiral, until she was so deep that everything faded under a thin veil of despair.

How long until she was rescued? Did she even want to be rescued? Without her eyes, she couldn’t even tell how much time had passed. It might have been two days, or it might have been six. She was so dehydrated. She was so hungry.

Maybe she should just… anger the monster on purpose. Bare her throat, make it quick.

Because she couldn’t find any other way to escape her predicament. She had nothing, nobody. Even her fumbling attempts to attract the monster to her, to see how amicable it was, in the vain hope of it being some bound creature or some summon she could befriend, had done nothing to attract its attention.

How much longer could she last without water? She had no idea, but the headache pounding in her skull didn’t give her much confidence. Yet she could do nothing but stay rooted in place, withering away like a poisoned plant.

Or she could just… stick her palm against the holes where her eyes used to be, and activate [Sparkburst].

Minutes passed in silence, her mind slowly growing foggy. She thought of a warm bed, a cool glass of water. Pain suddenly registered as tears came out of her tear ducts to pool into the sensitive holes of her sockets, and she hissed, hurriedly trying to tilt her head to the side to let them drip to the side of her face. Unable to do anything, she let the minutes pass her by as she sat there, her mind slowly emptying of all thought, slipping into a fugue.

Then, in an instant forged out of a piece of her consciousness, her sight returned.

The staircase wobbled under her feet as she watched Kisae speed past them with the [Haste] spell she demanded, leaving them behind, the horde at her heels.

Something snapped, a scream tore at her throat as she lost her footing, and then her world was nothing but fur, and teeth, and agony, blunt teeth yanking bits of her flesh off as the world began spinning, the [Sparkburst] spell on her right hand burning her own skin, eyes ripped out of their sockets, teeth snagged on tendons, fingers tearing, the clicking of teeth, the shrieking-

She woke up with a terrified scream, attempting to bolt upright and open eyes that weren’t there anymore and only managing to raise her torso a couple inches off the ground before gasping and laying back down. She panted in pain and panic from the sudden jerk of wakefulness jostling her broken limbs and for a moment she simply breathed in the miasma of rot in the air, until her brain remembered her predicament, and she relaxed back onto the stone as best as she could.

The scrape of nails on stone neared, and she took in a shaky breath as she tried to muffle her whimpers of pain.

Despite the fact that she just wanted to give up, she was scared. She didn’t want to die, so she tightened her throat, grit her teeth. Yet, much to her dismay, the clicking nails kept getting closer. Logic told her that if it wanted to kill her, it would have done so ages ago, but her mind kept conjuring the stomach-churning sounds of the thing battling the rats, the horrid, endless sound of crunching bone and tearing flesh.

She didn’t need eyes to hear its pacing, to know it was right next to her, circling around her as if deciding what to do with her now that all its food had rotted away. She could be next, a realization both comforting and horrifying in equal measure.

Her heartbeat hammered away in her chest. Minutes passed in relative silence, and then a singular bark, far, far too loud to be coming from a canine of the size she remembered, broke the silence, and she flinched.

And then, silence, once more. Yet slowly but surely, shrill squeaking came closer and closer, and she could only tremble in fear and hope the monster would protect her.

The wolf could only guess what made the human scream. Maybe a dream, maybe it tried to move, only to feel whatever injury it had, but despite circling around her thrice, it could find no new injury or threat besides a single rat in the opposite end of the pit.

The vermin would slowly come back, now that they thought the danger was away, so it would probably be best to move the human far away from the lip of the hole, and somewhere where the wolf could keep her close. If she died, that would be unfortunate, but it was going to make damn sure the human didn’t die before it learned how to move the mana or at least how to communicate a bit.

Now that it was certain there was little danger, it sat on its haunches, and accessed its body.

Not only did it feel amazing, it looked amazing compared to before. The excess fur covered in filth had mostly disappeared from its body, making it feel just a bit lighter after shaking off the chunks of blood and dirt. That lightness was somewhat offset by its additional fat and a bit more muscle, which the wolf was more than grateful for, but with its intestines gone, it was still about as light as when the symbols came to its mind for the first time, despite all its added bulk.

It almost couldn’t see the outline of its ribs anymore, and the rest of its body was similarly filled out. Just a couple days more and it wouldn’t even look or be malnourished.

It spun in a quick circle, just to feel the air on its new cerci hairs, pleased with how easy it was to know how the wind moved around its body. A mild advantage, but a welcome one. The cerci hairs were… strange. There was little to no airflow down here, so it had to spin a couple more times to figure out how each sensation of displaced air felt, from pushing it out of the way to the air retreating around its form on the other side, but it got a grasp of it fairly quickly.

The thing it was most excited about however, were the antennae.

It was like having a dozen extra tiny, flexible tentacles on the end of its snout. Moving each one individually felt as natural as twitching an ear. A bit of experimentation in individually moving more than two of them in opposing directions proved it difficult, as if strings had them tied together and it simply couldn’t extend an antennae too far in the opposite direction. But it was definitely possible. It wasn’t a biological restriction, but more one that had to do with coordination.

Experimentally, it pressed them flat on its snout to hide them, disliking how intense the sensation of the antennae burrowing into its snout hair was. The miniature hair on the antennae were a bit more sensitive than it had expected, and the sensation of hiding them into its fur felt much like having an overly sensitive area rub against rough fabric. Not painful, but overloading to the point of it almost being so.

It suspected that was largely due to the fact it had removed pain censors from the organs, rather than the sensation actually not being painful.

Then it decided to flare them all out at once, all fourteen twitching antennae, and the world… deepened. Or rather, its perception of the world did. Even from the simple vibrations in the air, it could very, very faintly feel distant impacts and hums, mechanical and not.

It lowered its snout to the ground, its flexible antennae moving erratically, brushing against each other and the ground. There was just so much information in an instant, that for a moment, it felt overwhelmed, prompting it to yank its head up. After a few seconds of preparation, it shook itself and bent down once more.

It was like getting a tactile sensation of everything in contact with the stone below its feet, the sensation peaking with vibrations of varying strength. It felt that the gears of the hole were arranged in a sort of grid made of lines and levels, the lines of gears at the top row further apart than the ones below, repeating for five levels until anything that made it out of the bottom would be smashed together.

It felt places where the stone’s vibrations magnified and condensed, into pipes and stairways buried into the sides of the pit, into rooms full of moving… metal? It felt like the gears, which were metal.

The pit was already gigantic, but knowing just how much more there was to its sides and underneath, made it feel completely dwarfed.

But it didn’t matter.

Because it could feel almost all of it.

Its tail wagged with so much strength that its hips were forced to move side to side in a sort of overly excited wiggle, and it sniffed at the ground once more, before stomping a paw, its eyes closed.

It couldn’t see, but it could feel.

There were pipes of metal running through the stone, rooms embedded in the sides, accessible through other tunnels it couldn’t feel the entirely of, cubes of stone full of inert machinery waiting to start spinning the gears, there were tiny impacts following a pattern and unstable path, that it quickly realized were actually rodents as they scurried out of the pipes, there was some complicated mechanism connected by pipes running up the walls to the wolf's sides and towards the top of the pit, connected to four metal boxes, inside which were complicated bits of wires and metals.

The human behind it shifted, just a tad, but the light thud of her head hitting the stone told it exactly where she was, even if the impact was muffled by her hair.

It slowly peeled back more and more of its antennae as it continued reading the vibrations around itself, noticing that it could feel and sense less and less with every peeled back organ. It was like having a dozen ears that all worked in harmony to send it clear signals.

It was amazing.

It was so happy that it honestly didn’t know what to do with itself, so it nailed its eyes to the singular rat on the other side of the pit, gathered as much air as it could in its lungs, and barked all of it out at once with a booming bark that made its throat hurt a bit, the sound easily carrying to the other side of the massive pit.

The rat turned at the sound and spotted it, and started its long, frenzied journey around the edge of the pit towards the wolf, who genuinely started feeling its tail growing sore from its wagging.

A celebration with a snack, what more could it want?

It lowered its snout to the ground, just to confirm that the mounds of trash would muffle the sound of its bark enough to the rats down there to not attract more than it could handle, and besides a low buzz of activity from a couple that were already near the top, it was ‘silent’.

It hopped back and forth in place just a bit before directing its gaze to a plate of metal on the wall behind it and trying to visualize if it could accurately toss the rat onto its center, just as a test of accuracy, or rather, a game.

And froze in place as it saw another wolf, ears shooting straight up.

Wait, no, that wasn’t right.

It tilted its head, and the other wolf did the exact same. It thought back to how light interacted with the human and wolven retinas and pupils, and realized what was happening. A reflection.

A reflection that was wrong.

It moved its head, flared its antennas in specific patterns as it approached, the reflection a perfect mimicry of its actions, but not its form. It mimicked exactly how the wolf moved and acted, if mildly distorted from detritus and a thin layer of moss growing on the shiny plate.

But its eyes were glowing in the reflection.

It hadn’t done anything to its eyes that would do that. There was no light entering and reflecting the lining in its eyes right now. They were just… glowing. Two yellow circles of gold with the background of a mangy-looking canine, on a dirty plate of metal.

Why were its eyes glowing?

No other canine it had seen ever had glowing eyes.

Even as the furious squeaks slowly got closer, it couldn’t look away, confused and worried.

If its eyes were glowing, why hadn’t it noticed? Why did its eyes not see that light that seemingly radiated out of its iris? It made no sense. Was the light only visible from a certain angle, allowing it to not be bothered by the golden luminescence?

From simple logic, all it should be able to see would be a bright yellow light, even if it closed its eyes. So it probably had to do with the thing that broke logic, which were the symbols. After it spent a minute thinking, it couldn’t really remember anything eye-related in the symbols besides the Title ‘Witness of Divinity’.

Could it turn that off somehow?

Because the more it looked at its own glowing eyes, the more it started to realize that blending in with other canines was going to be much harder than it thought. It made sense now why humans kept giving it second looks, and why it was suddenly drawing so much more attention than it was used to. The humans probably kept pausing to see if its eyes were reflecting some light from some strange angle, or if they were actually glowing.

The shrill squeaks came closer and closer as the human started breathing faster, whimpering short words at the sound that the wolf didn't care to register, and it turned to rush at the rat, no longer in a good mood.

One swipe, bite, and thrash of the vermin later, it wrenched its head to the side and accurately slammed it into the plate of metal with a rattling bang, and got back to thinking, only idly checking for any more rodents that would disturb it.

Hunting with its eyes giving away its position like that was going to be really difficult, at least against anything with any semblance of self-preservation and wariness. There had to be a way it could turn it off, because otherwise, it would be nothing but a detriment to its survival. It knew that Traits couldn’t be turned off, because it had asked the symbols if it could, due to the fact that it hadn’t liked the ‘Timid’ Trait slowing it down when it began hunting, but it hadn’t considered asking if Titles could be turned off.

Skills like its resistances could be mentally dialed up and down, even if it was awake, with little more than a thought, but trying to focus on that Title and asking the symbols to disable it did nothing. Maybe it could just make new eyes. Or would those be affected too?

The symbols sometimes answered its questions, so when it slept again, it was going to have a lot of them.

For the moment, it couldn't do anything about the glow, so it simply turned to the human, who was still breathing harshly, and tried to consult its internal clock. It had been… two days since it broke the staircase? The human must be starving, and would definitely need some liquid to survive.

It glanced at the shredded rat lying limp under the metal plate, tilting its head as it tried to remember what human stomachs were designed for.

Yeah, that would work. Not the safest, because human stomachs were weak to raw meat, but it didn’t have many options to feed her.

Plus, if she cared that much, she could just burn the thing with her ‘mana’ fire thingie and eat it after drinking the blood. Blood was about… nine tenths water content, so all it had to do was grab some rats, bleed them into her mouth, and then let her do whatever she wanted with the meat, and she should theoretically survive.

As it gripped the rat in its jaws and trotted back to the human, it began to wonder if the girl was really worth all the trouble, and tried not to think how suspiciously long it was taking for the humans to come pick her up.

At this rate, it was starting to come up with escape plans of its own, just in case the humans never showed up.