Viewing her memories from the safety of a cargo craft deep beneath the Andean ice allowed Lilijoy a more leisurely assessment of the creature attached to the new sound. She remembered her first impression though.

Legs. Really long legs. So many really long legs.

Really, the creature did resemble one of her all time favorites, the rambling opiliones, commonly known as daddy long-legs. She found their gait utterly charming as they clambered along the forest floor. There was something intrinsically humorous and endearing about the way their tiny bodies bounced around, to her anyway.

The being, and in this case she was even prepared to use the word monster, that appeared out of the night possessed extremely long limbs in relation to its body. However, it shared none of the other qualities she enjoyed in her tiny forest ramblers. Its gait was smooth and rippling, distributed among dozens of impossibly long, lightly stepping legs. Its body, held high above the ground was oval and finely faceted underneath, with a single long spike descending from the middle.

The sound that announced its arrival had been footsteps blended together in a continuous rolling snare of soft-edged clicks. Scan once again failed to show anything.

Can an ability break? Or is it something about instanced travel? I’d at least like to know the name for these things.

“Don’t get under it!” Lilijoy called out. “It’ll drop on you.”

It seemed obvious enough that the creature preyed upon the splurchins. Its long legs could keep it above the spikes, while its own spike, probably a proboscis or something similar, was long enough to penetrate to the splurchin’s body.

Or skewer me from head to toe.

While she spoke, she tried to build a model of the monster’s movements. It wasn’t a trivial endeavor, as the thirty-two legs each had three joints and the body suspended high above her head swiveled and darted back and forth. It was much faster than the splurchins, too, closing half the distance to the cohort by the time Lilijoy finished her warning to the others.

It’s faster than Jess. Looks like running away is off the table.

Lilijoy did her best to incorporate her party in her anticipatory model as she waited for the creature’s arrival. Skria was already in the air, headed away from the creature while she gained altitude. Lilijoy saw Swoot fly to meet her, barely visible even to her enhanced senses. Magpie had already disappeared, and Jessila was pulling out the enormous length of ironwood that Rosemallow had given her a few days before their journey.

Here we go!

A feeling of intense excitement passed through her. This was nothing like the fight with the vorpal crows, which had made her feel powerless and frustrated, or even the various moldy creatures she had fought in the scenario. This was epic combat with a monster fifty times her size. She didn’t know if she could hurt it, but she planned to have fun trying.

Spiked feet rained around her as she twisted and dodged. The monster seemed to prefer a highly vertical step, but she stayed alert for signs it might kick or sweep with one of its many limbs. So far, it seemed that her anticipatory model wasn’t worth the loss of mental speed, but that wasn’t a surprise, given that it was an unfamiliar opponent and a new way to use her system.

She took a couple seconds to find the rhythm of the dance with her opponent before she threw her first Qi strike at a spindly leg. It succeeded beyond her expectations, shattering the hollow exoskeleton and removing the foot entirely.

Huh. No resistance to lateral force. Guess that’s why it doesn’t kick.

Behind her came a sound like a bundle of twigs snapping, and the creature above her lurched. Jessila had just swung her club and taken out four more legs.

Immediately an explosion of liquid flew from the spike above them. Lilijoy saw it happen and launched herself into a diving roll, doing her best to escape the spray, which hissed and spat upon the stone and burned her skin.

Stone Eating Acid inflicts

5 HP Damage

(INV ignored)

She saw Jessila get a face full of the droplets and immediately stagger back. The creature was already on the move, high-stepping away from them as fast as its remaining legs could carry it.

Wait. That’s it?

Skria drifted down from the sky. “Um, not that I’m complaining, but...”

Jess was flicking the caustic liquid off her hand. “Burns a little,” she observed.

“What the hell?” Magpie added as she emerged from wherever.

Lilijoy watched the uneven bumbling gait of the not-so-monstrous monster as it ran away from them. There it is. Now it looks just like a Daddy Long-Legs.

“Does anyone else wonder why its legs are so long?” she asked. “It wouldn’t need to be that far above the splurchins.”

Magpie gave her a look. “There are a few things wrong with what you just said,” she started.

That was when something came up through the stone and swallowed the retreating creature whole.

There was a stunned silence.

“Does it matter which direction we travel?” Lilijoy whispered after a while. “Because I would like to go very far from what we just saw.”

***

An hour of very soft treading later, the party was still on the plain. Skria was flying above them, trying to keep an eye out, though according to her, flying above the unbroken reflection of the stone was disorienting and she wasn’t confident she could see anything.

“Has anyone else noticed that Swoot is completely useless?” asked Magpie, after enough time had elapsed for her to feel irritation rather than terror.

“What, you mean he disappears and hides at the first sign of combat?” Lilijoy retorted.

Magpie ignored the barb, if she even noticed. “It’s just that he doesn’t warn us about danger, or help Skria scout, or… I don’t know. Isn’t he supposed to do something?”

“He’s quiet. No voice,” said Jess.

“So he has that going for him,” added Lilijoy. She’d been experimenting with snark lately, and thought she was getting the hang of it.

The night was quiet again, with only the occasional mandala swimming by to light the way and Lilijoy turned her thoughts to the huge mass that had emerged from the stone to eat their former opponent.

It’s almost like an inside-out water ecosystem, a stone sea with the surface and the bottom folded together. Water striders, urchins and plankton on the surface. Bigger predators in the depths that surface to feed.

Her attempts to figure out the creatures of the starry plain hadn’t really paid off yet, but she was coming to understand that the Inside wasn’t a series of random encounters, at least not this portion of it. There were interdependencies and relationships among the creatures, a full ecosystem that could be understood, and thus predicted.

Never mind the utter impossibility of giant beasts that swam through stone.

Although…

“Can we stop for a minute? I have something I want to try.”

They got Skria’s attention, and after some mild grumbling from Magpie, the party came to a halt. Lilijoy moved off a fair distance and lay on the cold surface, putting her ear to the stone. After a moment, she could hear faint static full of crackles, pops and the occasional rumble. She sped her thoughts to try and make sense of the mess.

There could be four types of sound; environmental, movement, echolocation and communication. I need to figure out which are present and which is which.

It was not a simple task. Even with her perfect recall and enhanced pattern matching abilities she could barely make sense of the subtle cacophony.

Let see, the speed of sound in granite is about twenty times that of air. That won’t effect the frequency of the sound though. It’s kind of like how my thoughts can be faster without necessarily being smarter. Are there any echos?

She listened for sounds with attenuated repetitions. The task was made more difficult by the transition from the stone surface to the air in her ear, so she mashed the side of her face as hard as she could against the granite. That helped a little, though it introduced new sounds into the mix as well.

This is kind of silly, she realized. It’s not like I can travel across the plain with one ear to the ground the entire time.

An image of Jessila dragging her across the plain on her ear crossed her mind and she giggled.

Even if I figure out what the big creatures sound like when they move, I don’t know that an early warning would help much. I guess we could freeze until it passed, assuming they are attracted by surface vibrations.

She was about to give up on her experiment, when one last thought occurred. She picked her head up and placed both hands flat on the ground, pouring every ounce of her system enhanced thought toward the sense of touch from her palms. Nandi’s boon clicked when it touched the stone, and as always, she wondered, just for a second, if she would ever know what the embedded crystal did.

At first, her pulse obliterated any other vibration, but it was trivial to filter that signal out, as well as the pressure and temperature from her skin’s presence on the cold stone. With the interfering signals removed, she was in the touch equivalent of total darkness. Slowly, the darkness lifted as she tuned in the faint vibrations, focused and amplified them and passed them to her other senses.

The static crackle and pop came into her hearing, and then she could see the patterns, the echos and reverberations, see them converge on sources of vibration, weak and powerful, near and far. Her mind began to map all the information onto her spatial sense and the picture that formed before her was like looking into a starry void or an endless chasm where vastness lurked and immensity played.

She watched as leviathans moved through the stone, fused through the stone and she felt a pulse of energy, almost a concept made tangible, pass through her outstretched palms and enter her.

Magic Class Discovered

Fused

New Ability Discovered

Earthen Sight I (Very Rare)

Lilijoy pulled her palms from the cold granite, momentarily overwhelmed by the depths below and the discoveries therein. She felt a wave of soothing pass through her from Jiannu, but even so, as she walked back to the others, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she could sink into the vast depths beneath her at any moment, never to be seen again.

She was also burning with curiosity about the stray bit of magic she had acquired, and her new Earthen Sight ability.

It’s a shame I can’t trust Magpie. I’ll have to ask Skria about it later. Now how do I explain what I just saw without revealing too much?

“So...the good news is that there aren’t any giant earth creatures near us at the moment,” she said.

“And the bad?” asked Magpie.

“Not sure if it’s bad exactly. There are all sizes of beings underneath us, but as far as I can tell, they don’t know that we’re here. I think we should keep walking softly and hope for the best.”

“So if more of those tall leg beasts come, we’re pretty much screwed.”

This reminded Lilijoy of something she had forgotten to ask the others.

“Did anyone else try to use Scan? Mine seems to be broken.”

“Mine didn’t work either,” Skria piped in. “I’ve heard that some monsters can resist it, just the same way that we can hide our titles and so forth.”

“My trainer is obsessed with Scan,” Magpie added. “She says that it’s the most important ability to level up. But she also said that it doesn’t always help against rare monsters, especially if very few people have encountered them. That’s my operating theory for what’s happening here.”

“So it’s like there’s a pool of knowledge, and when people discover something, they add to the pool and make it easier for everyone else,” Lilijoy conjectured. “Do you think that this whole area was made just for us as part of the travel instance?”

“I think the travel instances use existing places, so I bet that this one is really remote or hard to get to. We might be some of the first people to ever find it,” Skria said.

Lilijoy watched Jessila follow the conversation. It wasn’t unusual for the big girl to remain completely silent while everyone else talked, but it always made Lilijoy wonder what she could possibly be thinking.

“What do you think about all this, Jessila?”

Jessila looked down at her with a startled expression. “I like it here. Nothing to break.”

Her reply made Lilijoy a little sorry she had asked. Nonetheless, she persevered.

“Didn’t you say something about it being ‘deep’ before?”

“I can feel it below us. Strong. Deep.”

As she replayed her memories in the relative safety and less than ideal comfort of the cargo craft, Lilijoy winced at what she was about to do. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Jess, can you try something for me?”

Nod.

Lilijoy patted the surface of the granite lightly.

“Try putting your hands on the stone.”

Jess carefully lowered herself and placed her palms as Lilijoy asked.

“Now, close your eyes, and try to tune out everything but the stone beneath you. See if you can feel anything from below.”

The big girl closed her eyes. Lilijoy was rarely so close to her face, so she took a moment to look at her smooth features.

It’s really like someone put the most perfect skin over something terrifying.

Jessila’s face was still a bit unsettling to Lilijoy. It was just so… not human, with nose and jaw pushed out as if a muzzle was trying to emerge. She was still looking when she saw the faint glow appear. For a moment, she thought it was a mandala coming up beneath them, but then she realized it was coming from Jessila’s hair, the golden locks that were still tightly bound in Mr. Sennit’s braids.

It was at this point that she began to wonder if she had done something unwise.

“Um, Jess...”

Behind her she heard Skria whisper. “Why is Jess glowing?”, along with the barely discernible sound of Magpie backing away slowly.

The light from Jessila’s hair was flowing down her arms now, outlining her hands against the dark stone. Lilijoy was torn between interrupting more forcefully or waiting.

This is what I get for experimenting when I have no idea what the possibilities are, she thought.

Speeding up her mind simply gave her more time to be indecisive. When she noticed that the golden light from Jessila’s hands was permeating into the granite, her internal stalemate broke.

“Jess!” she called, grabbing one of her arms.

There was a pulse, a forceful presence that expanded out from Jessila, a round and resonant explosion. Lilijoy felt it through her bones.

Utter stillness followed. Jessila opened her eyes.

Then the reply came.

Layer upon layer of force rose through the earth beneath their feet, and even as Lilijoy’s vision wavered, she saw the granite surrounding them flow and ripple in concentric waves. She lost her balance, and when she put her hand down to catch herself she caught a glimpse of the vastness coming for them.

And above that massive form, so large she could only perceive an edge, were other beings, fleeing in the only direction available to them. Up.

“Run!” she cried, somewhat uselessly. Magpie was long gone, Skria was already in the air, and Jessila didn’t seem to have any awareness of her environment. She didn’t take her own advice either. Instead she shook Jessila, even going so far as to slap her.

“Deep.” was all the response she got.

Well, I’m certainly not going to carry her and I can’t abandon her. I guess a respawn’s not the worst thing after all.

It was amazingly easy to forget that the stakes were not very high. Although, somehow ‘not dying’ was the same as winning, which was always a compelling incentive.

I wonder what I would do if I turned that motivation off. There’s still a rational reason to avoid raising my death counter, but I have no way to calibrate it. How do I value an uncertain loss realized in the future?

Lately she had become aware that uncertainty played an increasing role in her decision making. It was an odd phenomena, that emotions and irrationality actually made decision making easier. Without emotional impetus, there was less reason to decide without complete information.

Does this mean that the smarter I get, the more paralyzed I will be, absent arbitrary factors? Is that exactly what’s happening now, that I’m having an internal discussion about the role of emotions in rational decision making instead of running as fast as I can out of fear?

At that moment an arbitrary factor, in the form of a stone eel the size of a school bus breaching the surface, impinged on her thought process. She scanned it out of habit, and was pleasantly surprised that her ability worked.

Elemental Stone Eel: Level 32

HP: 790

After which she was genuinely horrified by the results.

And that’s one of the small fry. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t after me. I’ll end up a snack of opportunity.

After the eel came a host of smaller creatures, Elemental Stone Eel Larvae according to her scan. They ranged from level ten to twenty, and were significantly smaller. The eel larvae were crystalline, almost transparent, and also quite flat; despite being about fifteen feet long, they only came up to her waist. Unlike their senior sibling, who wriggled across the stone for the horizon, they thrashed about, writhing and biting in blind panic.

“Jess? You back yet?” Lilijoy called.

There was no response, and several of the eel larvae were about to roll over her friend. It seemed that once they got above the surface of the stone they were not always able to get back under.

Lilijoy moved into Flash, and targeted the closest, launching her strongest Qi strike to see its effect.

Qi Strike does 9 damage

Stone Eel Larva HP: 231/240

Well that’s a drop in the bucket.

She had a flashback to kicking moldy rats for a point or two of damage, only she sensed that critical hits were not going to happen this time around. To add insult to lack of injury, it seemed like the eel larvae hadn’t noticed her attack at all.

Lets see if it notices this.

She launched a barrage of Qi strikes up the length of the eel larva, culminating with five shots to its head. If it had eyes, she would have targeted those, but as it was, she pounded away at the side of its face.

Qi Strike Barrage does 104 damage

Stone Eel Larva HP: 127/240

The juvenile stone fish flipped and attempted to swim away, smashing its head onto the granite before it finally succeeded in slipping under.

It probably just hurt itself worse than I did.

It was satisfying to drive away such a tough enemy, albeit one without much in the way of effective offense against someone fast and small. Unfortunately there were several more on their way. From somewhere in the night sky above, Skria was casting Forceful Wind in a futile effort to knock the creatures back. She could hear the sound of metal on stone from where Magpie was fighting some distance away.

She dashed back and forth around Jessila, trying to optimize the number of hits it took to cause the larvae to change direction. Even so, her mana was draining fast. Each hit only consumed three points, but she was dealing five or six at a time and already seeing the bottom of her well.

The plane was full of writhing bodies in every direction, and larger denizens of the deep stone were arriving by the second. She had long since abandoned any attempt to model what was happening. Even with her mind working at top speed she was overwhelmed. There was no escape, no alternatives.

Jiannu contacted her, momentarily pulled her away from her senses.

Lilijoy, I’ve been following your thoughts. Do you realize you are avoiding an obvious possible solution?

Oh. Crap. Lets merge for this.

I think that’s best.

They merged, and in the split second before she acted, Lilijoy could see the pattern of her previous thoughts, see the emotional structures diverting her creativity away from a certain action. Guilt, shame and affection twined and formed a wall in her definition of self, a barrier that had blocked her from conceiving of the possibility.

I hope I don’t regret this.

Another part of her knew that regret was an emotion like any other, something she could easily remove.

She ran, jumped and twisted through the air to land on Jessila’s broad shoulders.

She activated Two Minds One Self.