“Stand clear of this circle,” Riley instructed the team as she fabricated a three-foot radius circle hologram with the pole as its central axis. She seized the pole and gripped the center of its shaft firmly with both her hands.

“Get me out of here!” she whispered, her mouth approached the staff and stopped just a few inches away from it. It once more took a few seconds to follow her order. It seemed like she didn’t take much of its consent into consideration. She was straight away harassing her crank into doing her bidding.

“Don’t make me ask again, you arrogant imp!” she threatened as she squeezed it harder around its center, tightening the grip of both her hands around it. But soon after she released her clutching over it and stepped back until she was out of the marked circle when the staff began to stretch uniformly along its width all of a sudden.

The cane kept at expanding and got thicker and wider until it’s radius and the radius of the marked holographic circle matched. To put it in simple terms, the center of the circle enlarged and became the circle itself. A thin and small staff transformed into a huge distended cylinder as if it got pressured from the inside to bloat up real big and large in an unreal amount of time.

Ryan sharpened his eyesight before directing it toward the cylinder and noticed a very thin horizontal slicing exactly in the middle. That whole thing wasn’t just a single-cylinder, no, it had two of them one on top of the other clubbed together with a slick hard-to-notice gap sundering the two.

The upper cylinder began to rotate and in just a matter of a few seconds, it reached an unnatural speed like almost a hundred rotations per second or so. It cut through the stone roof like a knife through the butter and extended along its length knocking the lacerated stone wall circular segment like a lid off a pressure cooker or a cap off a soda bottle.

Climbing out of the cavern by hanging onto the staff as it stretched upwards, the team entered a corridor and proceeded forward to the only room it had or more precisely the only one they could see at the end a few meters ahead of them. The room was dark and they didn’t know where they had been placing their footing the whole time until a girl rushed into the room and flashed a light out of her palm in their direction.

A comically repulsive, ugly, and distorted monstrous creature was lying on the floor sleeping soundly and Ryan had one of his feet placed on its flat widened auricle. The atmosphere in its vicinity was pervaded with a threateningly inauspicious aura in insane proportions. The magnitude of that gigantic six-limbed beast’s dimensions strikingly resembled that of a brontosaurus.

It had a bull’s face, a set of hairy protracted nostrils along the lower end of its colossal nose, with two horns one pointing north while the other one south, bulging out of its forehead. Its body had thick multi-layered scales on it like a lizard dragon cross-breed and it’s nails had substantially overgrown with intensely sharp edges.

“Shh!” the girl placed a finger before her pursed lips as she shushed them to be quiet. Her eyes glowed blue in the dark background like a pair of dog eyes but they knew it was her crank-up state that triggered it. Not many a cranker could obtain special features like that girl’s bioluminescent senses and that was for a damn good reason too.

Those who had passed their sorcerer’s key test in a first-class grade would be the only ones gifted with such unique abilities and their numbers on the entire planet could be count on fingers. That fact alone could give us an idea of how close to impossible even scoring a pass-grade in that test was.

A perfect analogy between passing graduation with a degree certificate and the sorcerer’s test with a sorcerer’s key would be prodigious. Except for when you fail where a lifetime of scolding and judging would most definitely be in order in the former case which would be a lot worse compared to the inevitable agonizing transformation into a detestable monster.

The mysterious girl beckoned Ryan to stand still and not to remove his foot from the position it occupied as she gestured the rest of the team to follow her without making a sound into the other room she came from. Ryan was glued to the spot terror-stricken. His fright became hysterical, and shortly before he couldn’t help but scream, he brought out a sound barrier and strapped it across his mouth.

Heavy green vegetation had flourished everywhere on the walls right, left, top, and bottom of that room, and Riley along with Zoe was struck by wonder, their mouths wide open in awe. Fully bloomed flowers that massed into an uncountable number of blossoms embellished that lush green verdure. And their petals had been taking on a light pink tint after a bright yellow one in a periodic cycle.

“Let me see her!” the girl uttered her first set of words before them. She cleared a table that was artistically sculptured out of a solidified lava rock and asked the burly and sturdy figure holding her to rest her down on it. “I can help, please! Introductions can wait for later!”

“We don’t even know who she is, yet you’re trusting her with your daughter?!” Riley said to Sir Nick as she blocked him with her staff. But he proceeded ahead and placed Liss on a rather flat than smooth surface of that stone table, ignoring her contrary advice. “Don’t blame me for your own stupid actions!”

“Her lifeline has completely erased. She is corrupted.” Zoe said, showing Liss’s palms to the girl. “I wanted to at least alleviate her pain but I couldn’t channel my power into her no matter how much I tried, not even in my god mode.”

Every cranker would have an extra special mode installed by default deep within them the minute they had passed their sorcerer’s test. It was called god mode. When a cranker entered god mode, he or she consumed their inner chi faster than it’s production inside their body. And because of that, a substantial amount of their lifetime would be lost forever. So, except under critical circumstances like for example, life and death situations, one should not use god mode if they fancied the number of years they could stay alive to lead a wretched and miserable life of a cranker.

“Not yet. I can still sense her presence. She is there, struggling alone in her abyss. The death reaper hasn’t caught her yet. She must’ve hidden herself from its sight.” the girl said, her eyes closed, her one hand clenching Liss’s and the other one deposited on her freezing forehead. Opening her eyes, she used her chi-ray eyes to scan each one of the intruders before she stepped her way to Riley.

“You think you can take on that omega?” she asked her.

“My job is only to pin it down to the ground, the rest from there is ‘don’t know, don’t care.’” Riley said to the girl when a prolonged high-pitched monstrous cry barged into the room. And before they knew, that resonant terrifying bawl had already crowded the room, repeating and reflecting over its walls in all magnitudes, directions, and angles.

“Aargh!” Riley expressed her frustration as she darted across into the main room, and the new girl followed right after. Sir Nick and Zoe stayed where they were to complete preparations for the sacramental rite.

... to be continued.