The sand streamed and flowed past the group and they watched as the ground beneath them disappeared. The first to fall was Rena and Hika. Then Erin and Riika followed by Rouna trying to fly after Elisa.

Rune, watching all the people around him fall, let himself be pulled by gravity. The gravity was larger than Earth’s due to it being larger, but it wasn’t much of a difference to the class because their vessels were already used to the gravitational strain before they had arrived.

The entire group was swallowed by the desert sands and a huge pitfall appeared under them while the sand that used to be under them was in the sky. It was a huge sphere with some sandstone chucks and there was only darkness below.

Rune fell alone with a katana in his hands. He was engulfed by darkness for a moment as the light above him disappeared, but cast [Light] and a small ball of light came to life in his left hand.

He hadn’t had a chance to put away his platform and didn’t feel like flying up to get it. Instead, he enchanted his greaves with feather fall and waited until he reached the ground.

He couldn’t feel the temperature, but it was growing hot around him as he looked with his eye that detected heat. With his night vision, he saw that he could see Rena and Hika falling a distance away from him.

He maneuvered in the air to make his way towards them. The air whistled around him and he could faintly make out what Rena was saying.

She was pointing at Rune and speaking to Hika.

“I think that that’s Rune!!!!”

Rune reaches them and enchanted their boots with feather fall as well. He cast it just at the right time as he ground came up to meet them quite quickly.

Rena and Hika found themselves safe as they didn’t feel the brunt of the impact, but they stumbled as they had been falling for 5 minutes.

Rune, on the other hand, was fine and had done a hero landing as it was something he wanted to do on his bucket list, but he hadn’t found the right time and place.

The sand underneath them was sharp and hard and felt like broken blades of metal. Rune wasn’t affected, but Rena and Hika were and he was forced to enchant their clothes to be fortified enough to defend against the strange sand.

The temperature around them was as hot as a sauna and would affect Erin and Rouna for they were part of the reptilian family who were cold-blooded. Even so, Rena and Hika were sweating and Rune pulled out a small cooling device to protect the two of them from the heat.

The walls around them were made of something that looked like the sand underneath them, but it wasn’t shifting around like the ones making up the floor. Instead, they were forming sharp spikes that seemed to reflect the light from the light in Rune’s hand.

Rune looked around in the dark and found that he couldn’t see the rest of the group. Although he couldn’t see them, he was sure that at least Rouna and Elisa were alive due to one of them being a dragon.

He turned in a circle and saw that there were three different tunnels and, above him, there was a ceiling full of stalagtites overhead them. They looked down menacingly upon them and Rune quickly took out his shield and hooked it onto his gauntlet.

The only way out now was to leave through a tunnel and he started to move. When Rena and Hika realized what he was doing, they moved quickly to catch up to his semi-fast pace.

“We need to first know where we are and, secondly, find the rest of the group. I think that they should be able to protect themselves, but I can’t be sure. I don’t know what things lurk down here, but, be sure, there will be those stupid squid things.”

“Yes.”

“Understood.”

They made their way down a random tunnel and walked for a minute before they started to hear some noises. Rune dispelled his [Light] and peered around the tunnel intersection’s corner. His magic right eye was glowing a blue light and a white light around it, but the visor covered most of the light shining through.

Around the corner, he saw three squid beings conversing with each other. Rune wanted to shoot them, but he didn’t have a silencer as they weren’t able to develop them yet. Instead, he cast [Quiet] around his gun and pointed it at them.

He fired eight shots and two of them died. The last one was shocked and spoke in the unknown language that it had conversed in. It looked around and Rune fired the last two shots in his clip.

They both flew through the air in such a straight line that they hit where Rune was aiming, the area between its eyes. It fell to the ground like the previous two and silver blood guzzled out like a less powerful hose.

Rune crept up to the corpses and absorbed them. Not only did he gain some of the power from them, he also now knew that they were dead as he could still only absorb inorganic and deceased organic material. The blood disappeared around his finger tips and he also absorbed some of the strange sand as well.

Then he realized something. He could analyze the material as it was inorganic. He picked some up and a white light shone in his palm.

[Calamity Sand]

[Sharp sand that is made of some strange metal alloy. When inhaled or taken in to the body, the effects are extremely harmful. They cause multiple cuts throughout the body and also sapped the strength of the inflicted.]

“Oh, dang…”

He turned to Rena and Hika and stood back up. He walked over to them and spoke as he looked them both in the eyes one at a time.

“You didn’t inhale this sand or get cut by it, right?”

After a moment of silence, Rena raised her hand.

“Um… I may have accidentally cut my hand on the wall…”

Rune face palmed as he heard this. He was thinking that this was some sort of event caused by the gods. However, this wasn’t caused by the gods at all, but random mishaps and a strange fate and path that no god knew about.

Gods in Arborea or even all of the Astral Plains had no control of destiny, fate, or other important events for, if they did know, then they would surely rebel against it. Only the Fates knew of any and all fates.

Currently, Rune was forced to try and cast [Cure] and [Heal] while he explained all he learned about the metal sand. Rena was mortified when she learned of the effects and Hika even more so.

Rune didn’t want to try and absorb or store the sand from her system as he would most definitely miss and end up taking some of her blood or worse. He handed her a small chain necklace that he forced her to don which had an automatic healing effect.

The sand would remain in her system, but her wounds would heal as quickly as they formed. Still, whenever one cut her, which was frequently, she winced in pain. Rune didn’t have any painkillers on him at the moment nor something with a similar effect.

Rune, from the strange squid things, gained the skill [Ethereal] which allowed him to partially phase into another dimension for a minute before he had cast it again.

This allowed him to keep his body in the material plane, but also to not allow any physical attacks affect him. This was why the squids shimmered and his attacks missed several times.

The other dimension was something like a mirror world where people could still see, hear, and smell him, but they couldn’t even touch him. This would be great due to the fact that it looked like an illusion where it was actually the real person.

Even so, it couldn’t fall through the ground, walls, or floors of anything unless it was not attached to the actual building. Since they could be both opened easily, he could also just hop through a window or walk through a door if it was less than a foot thick.

He didn’t completely understand the skill and he was currently in a rough situation, he couldn’t, or rather didn’t want to, use some brain power to understand it.

In fact, he was quite tired of trying to understand every little thing in Arborea due to all the unimaginable craziness occurring around him. For example, how dragons flew when they were quite heavy or how did Beast People actually hear with their ears or even how transmutation worked in the alchemy field.

Nevertheless, he started to walk and Hika had to help Rena walk behind him. She sometimes went into spasms of pain for several periods of time and it was miraculous how she managed to stay conscious during it all.

Suddenly, a stalactite dropped from the ceiling and Rune, with a quick reaction speed, cut it up in front of him and it fell to become part of the ground while several chunks still remained. Rune handed Hika a shield as he motioned for them to move backwards.

Hika raised the shield as soon as she got it and two stalactites fell down and pierced Rune’s arm. At this point, he was perfectly fine, but was a bit troubled by the fact that Deadly sand would wind up in his armor by the time they exited the cavern.

The armor now had two holes in them and he quickly picked up the pieces that fell onto the ground. Then he transmuted them back into his arm and looked up.

There was a large holes in the ceiling above him as the two stalactites were rather large. Four eyes glowed in the dark from that hole and Rune jumped back and used [Ethereal] as he did so.

Just after he used his skill, two knives flew through him and embedded themselves in the sand wall.

The creature jumped onto the floor and roared with a primal rage. Rune could see that it had four eyes, two on each side of its tortoise-like head. It had an animal muzzle over its mouth and it was painted with a fanged skull design.

Its skin was rough and leathery and was a grey color. The eyes were yellow with black slits as the pupils and there was some strange war paint around it and all over its body. It wore chains on its lower body and around its arms.

On its hands, it had four fingers and each was clutching the same knife that was thrown through him a moment earlier. On its back, it carried a large two handed ax on its back and had a belt with three more knives.

It looked up with its eyes at Rune and started to throw another knife while speaking in a language that Rune did not understand. Rune started to use telepathy, but, somehow, it was blocked.

The tortoise person threw the knife and Rune grabbed it out of the air. Then he spun three hundred sixty degrees in place and chucked the projectile back at him. The knife rotated three times in a full circle before it landed and pierced the humanoid tortoise being’s face

Even with the knife in its face, the thing still moved. The knife hadn’t penetrated far enough to kill it and it roared once more. Quickly, while it was roaring, Rune stabbed its mouth and also cut off its tongue at the same time with his katana.

The katana slid into the slimy flesh on the inside of its mouth and he heard several crunches as blood and bone matter was spewing from the wounds. He had destroyed two bones from the spinal column and he saw some bones sticking out.

Still, the being was still moving and he removed the katana as blood spilled out. Then he sheathed it and snapped off the lower jaw of the being like he was opening a book. It tore off completely and he absorbed it quickly.

Then he reached on hand in the mouth and grabbed hold of the white material in the back of the throat sticking form the flesh. He could see the bone marrow leaking from the broken column and, as he grabbed it, more liquid poured from it.

Rune didn’t and couldn’t understand how the being was still alive as it tried to reach for its ax. Using his other hand, Rune stabbed his fingers through its elbow and tore off the lower arm from the upper arm. Then, while the being was flailing around, he tore the spinal column out of the mouth and blood and a mess of flesh and blood ensued.

He looked at the spinal column as if it was a unique item and then absorbed it. Then he did the same with the spinal columnless body. It was now dead as it died of asphyxiation and blood loss.

He sighed in his mind and Hika breathed a sigh of relief. They headed onwards as Rune saw that the area where the being had come from caved in with the metal sand.

The three of them moved further down the cave when they heard another sound.