Looking down the tunnel revealed a nearly vertical shaft with two branches out of sight of Ursel’s glowing bracers. But she jumped anyway.

“Ack!”

Then she was yanked backwards by her granduncle.

“Reckless enthusiasm will not help anyone, Ursel,” Aydan said with his grip firm on her shoulder.

“But we have to save Melanthina!” Ursel tried to shake him off- and perhaps if she weren’t more than a full phase behind him she could have succeeded. But she was merely at the peak of Foundation Phase and he was in the Consolidated Soul Phase.

“And getting yourself lost will help… how?”

“I know where I’m going! Right there!” Ursel pointed with her club. Then she looked at it and tossed it down the hole. “Oh look I dropped my weapon I have to go after it!”

Two seconds later Aydan had shoved her against the nearest wall, manacled her hands behind her back, then tossed her over towards the rest of the group away from the pit. Then he caught Tirto’s sleeve as he tried to sneak past. “Do you need me to lock you up too? I know neither of you know how to pick locks.”

Tirto protested fruitlessly. “But Melanthina-”

“Will be looked for. But not by children,” Aydan said sternly. “Especially not children who throw away their weapons.” He looked sternly at Ursel, “What will Master Renato think about your actions?”

“You were supposed to let me go get it!” Ursel complained, rolling herself to her feet.

“Weapons are valuable,” Aydan said, “But not as valuable as you. Both of you will stay here with the rest while I go find Melanthina. Tirto, keep your sister safe. She won’t be able to fight like this.”

Ursel roared in discontent, “Then why not unlock me?”

“Because you’ll be safer being attacked by beasts like this than running off blindly after your sister. If you had waited five seconds for me to explain I might have considered letting you come along.”

“... Can we?” Tirto asked.

“Yeah, I’ll be good!” Ursel said.

“No,” Aydan declared. “You threw away your chance with your weapon, Ursel. Tirto, I need you to stay with your other sister and keep her out of trouble. Act like the responsible young master I know you can be.”

“Yes, sir,” Tirto inclined his head.

After a brief exchange with the other escorts- during which he handed over the keys to the manacles so they could make the choice about Ursel if it was too much trouble to protect her as she was. Once they were a day’s travel away from the area would be sufficient regardless of her attitude.

“I will track down Melanthina… and hopefully your weapon, Ursel. Don’t expect me to meet up with you in the Prismatic Caverns. I will be bringing her directly to the entrance.”

Aydan looked down into the tunnel, feeling less confidence than he projected. If he’d been a bit faster, a bit more careful… perhaps none of this would have happened.

-----

Melanthina was… alive. No, fine. She was fine. She tried not to think about the fact that most of the rations were with others or that she was lost or that something was stalking her. No, she was fine. This was just a little side excursion. One of the events that would eventually lead to her becoming a powerful cultivator worthy of propping up the Tenebach clan. If she survived. No, after she survived.

After an hour, she decided that climbing was stupid. It seemed really easy at first when she started, brimming with spiritual energy and with fingers that weren’t covered in scratches and twitching with exertion every time they were moved. Ursel could have probably continued, but Melanthina had perfectly good side tunnels she could go down while looking for a way back up. And she couldn’t say she didn’t roll through any of them on the way down, because she honestly had no idea.

She sat down in one to rest, drawing in more darkness element. There was only so much her body could handle in a single day, replenishing her stores a few times. Beyond that point, it would just be exhausting. But she closed her eyes and took deep breaths, drawing in spiritual energy and especially feeling it.

The latter was important for when her stalker attempted to kill her. She didn’t feel a human killing intent behind it, everything being muted, but she sprang into action when the thing leapt at her, stabbing with her dagger into the ethereal belly of a living shadow. Dark claws raked across her arm as her dagger stabbed into nothing- but not without any effect. Her dagger twisted, disrupting the darkness element that made up the creature, scattering some and drawing some away.

She stepped away as a creature visible only by the fact that she could not see beyond it continued to slash at her. When it stood in the middle of the tunnel it was a gangly humanoid shape with clawed hands as large as its torso, certainly a troubling image, but it was when it was on the walls that it was the most trouble.

Determining that she could damage it, the creature flattened itself- not the way Melanthina might, expelling her breath and pressing herself against a surface, but truly becoming two dimensional plastered over the rough surface of the tunnel. Attempting to strike it merely resulted in her dagger smashing against stone. She might have been able to pull away the slightest bit of darkness energy from the thing, but she was hardly effective.

And then the thing reached its arms towards her, one slashing along her wrist as she drew back. The thing was literally made of spiritual energy, and tore through her own defenses like paper. It wasn’t fair.

Melanthina took off running, her brilliant ambush failed. She ran down tunnel after tunnel, trying to lose the creature. After ten minutes, she realized that wasn’t going to happen- it matched her pace, lingering there half-detected in the back of her mind. Yet when she stopped, weapon raised, it didn’t attack. And why would it? It could wait for her to weaken, or to try to rest. It was the hunter, and she was the prey.

She carefully bound her cuts with one hand, keeping her dagger always ready. The presence had faded to a dull throbbing again- matching the physical one of her head, annoyingly.

Melanthina looked around, finding the tunnels were more… natural. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been away from the earth glider’s tunnels. Perhaps it had been before the shadow, perhaps after she started running. Either way, there were fewer vertical options, and a greater presence of other creatures. She was no longer alone, but she didn’t feel any more confident for that fact.

She could try to go back past the shadow, into tunnels she might find her way through… or she could hope to lose it somehow. She wasn’t confident she could actually sneak away, but she would try. If a creature of shadow could cloak itself from her senses, why couldn’t she do the same?

As she moved down the tunnels, trying to avoid the territory of anything that felt dangerous- which in this case meant of vaguely similar strength to herself- she thought several times that she had lost it, only to pick up the signs of it again later. She was unsure if her stealth was working or if it was her own senses that were failing.

Melanthina picked out a dire bat for her next move. She managed to sneak up onto one, hanging from a stalactite in a decently sized cavern. Though many bats flew to the surface at night, she assumed that this one was a full cave dweller like everything else in the Prismatic Chambers.

A throwing dagger entered her hand, flying towards the thing’s chest. Its resulting screech almost legitimately knocked her off her feet, and what followed was a battle where she dodged and weaved through the terrain of the cavern trying to avoid the flying bat while slowly whittling it down.

Then she set about making a fire with… the… sticks and things she had. Would have had. If she had prepared anything like that in her storage bag. She could have had a dollop of spirit flame, a vaguely eternal heat source. A flint and tinder. Any idea how to cook or butcher meat or anything.

She looked at the small handful of rations in her pack, and at the dire bat. Was any of that actually edible? Raw?

She just threw herself against the wall and sighed. This was stupid.

That was when the shadow chose to attack, but at least that had been part of the plan. She’d just kind of been hoping to get a meal out of the first part.

When the claws reached for her from the wall above, they had to extend into space she could attack, could cut apart with her dagger and her own darkness element. She lopped off one sharp finger- only to see it grow back a moment later. So this wasn’t something she could wear down with injuries, but nothing was unbeatable. It only had so much spiritual energy. She just had to be more efficient than it.

After another minute of dodging around, taking several small slashes while barely landing anything of her own, she was losing confidence in that. Perhaps if she had other options than fighting darkness with darkness. Water like her brother would have been a nice buffer that would slow the attacks and give her a chance to counter. The strength of earth like her sister. Fire or lightning as more intangible elements would help. But she didn’t have any of that.

All she had was darkness… and just the tiniest bit of light contained when she had been training with the Golden Tomb Guardians and later the Combining Luster Sect. Her father did his best to inundate himself to the opposing element that he would eventually possess- if he could somehow reach the Exalted Soul Phase, which was the stuff of legends. Melanthina had no intention of cultivating anything but pure darkness, but dealing with light was a real pain so she’d done her best to learn everything she could.

She dodged back, pointing her finger at the shadow and immediately calling upon that tiny bit of light. It came forth in a straight beam of light, something she had seen many times before. She didn’t do anything complicated like splitting and recombining it, she just released it.

The resulting flash made her worried that she was blind, and the pain in her finger made her worry she had exploded it off. Fortunately, neither seemed to be the case. She felt her finger and it was all there, more or less. Some of it was… crispier… but everything was there. She had gotten pretty good at handling external light, but that little bit had been contained inside her for so long and she was already off balance from the battle. On the other hand, not blowing up her finger might count as an accomplishment.

In front of her was… a puddle of darkness element. More pure than that floating around her. The corpse of the shadow, more or less. She coaxed it into a storage container taken from her bag- at least she was prepared to gather spirit darkness. That was… something. She couldn’t eat it though. So she munched on one of her rations and looked hungrily at the rest, her eyesight slowly returning in the pitch darkness. Those would have to last for a while.

-----

Unaware of their daughter’s peril, John and Matayal along with the rest of their group continued to fight and harvest their way through the water element section of the Prismatic Caverns. It was a long trek, but they found quite a bit of value along the way- with less risk than the ice bears had been. Pools of water, underground lakes, frozen and sometimes fog. There was quite a variety of water element to be found, and the Brandle Clan was satisfied with what they found, either the bodies of beasts, spirit water, or a few interesting fruits. They would likely not grow in saltwater oceans, but they could be used for many things still.

When they began to approach the air element chambers, John wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Information was scarce among those of the Stone Conglomerate- most of the residents didn’t come this far into the Prismatic Caverns.

Winds he did expect. A general charge of static electricity setting his hair on end? That was also within expectations. A chamber full of hovering rocks was not within his expectations, but there they were. Then again, there were entire islands floating in the sky, so why should he be surprised by even that? Except he hadn’t seen any of those islands, only heard about them. In a world such as this with so many amazing things, he had only seen a small portion of them.