Edge Cases

Misa was, compared to Sev, having a far more interesting day.

The first thing she'd done was use her Anchor skill to call a copy of her mother and two of the guards over, ones that specialized more in tracking and hunting than necessarily in guarding the town. She gave them a chance to acclimate themselves to the strangeness of having two bodies while she spoke with her mother, who was having no such problems.

They were still in the privacy of the inn, anyway, so the two guards could bump into the walls all they wanted.

Though it was pretty funny.

"This place is strange," Charise said, her brows furrowing slightly. She ran her fingers over the wood of the walls. She frowned, glanced at Misa, and took a step away from her — then tapped on the wood again, her expression contemplative. "It doesn't feel entirely here, but it's more solid in some places than others."

"The fuck does that mean?" Misa asked, earning a scowl from her mother, and she raised her hands in surrender. "I'm just worried!"

"I am too," Charise admitted. "But I don't think it's bad. It just feels... different. It's hard to say until we know a little more about what's going on."

No answers yet, then. Misa was forced to accept that with a nod, though it was a little tense. For all that there wasn't much they could do with that information, a part of her still worried...

But no. She was going to trust that the others could take care of themselves, and focus on her own task.

Which was tracking down the goblin raiders.

"Are you guys set up?" she asked, glancing at Volaro and Juni — the two guards her mother had brought with her. Juni was a half-orc woman like herself, and was grinning at her as she bounced up and down on her feet; Volaro, on the other hand, was a surly-looking older man who mostly seemed eager to get this over with.

"This is so cool," Juni said. "Can we do this more often?"

"Any idea where we should start?" Volaro asked politely, pointedly ignoring Juni's question.

"I don't actually know," Misa said. Sev hadn't been able to find out, either, though she'd been periodically messaging him — so far his interviews hadn't yielded much information. No one had actually seen the goblin raiders coming and going from any particular direction.

"Then we'll have to circle the town instead," Volaro said, letting out what sounded suspiciously like a long-suffering sigh. "If we're lucky, we'll find something the goblins left behind. We have some skills that will help, but they might not be enough, depending on how long ago this was."

Misa raised an eyebrow, interested. "What kind of skills?"

Volaro gave her a look. "I know your reputation. Not today, Misa."

Her mother smirked at her, and Misa did her best to scowl in response — though she couldn't help the slight grin that edged on the side of her face.

Surprisingly, it didn't take them too long to find something, once they got out of the inn. They'd barely walked out of town when Volaro stopped, frowning.

"Something's pinging my skills," he said, hesitant.

"Already?" Charise glanced sharply at him.

"It's not usually this good." Volaro frowned slightly, glancing into the air like he was staring at his status screen. "[Tracking Instinct] is supposed to just accelerate the process of me spotting things I would normally spot. This is the first time I'm getting a direction."

"I mean, that doesn't sound like a bad thing," Juni said brightly.

"It's different." Volaro folded his arms. "And different can be dangerous."

"Bah," Juni scoffed. "Point me in the right direction, old man. I'll find the thing!"

"I'm not—" Volaro sighed.

While they walked, with Volaro leading the way, Misa gave her mother an amused raise of the brow. "Are they always like that?"

Charise smiled. "Volaro's practically adopted Juni," she said. "He just won't admit it. And Juni's going to keep calling him 'old man' until he does."

It was still early in the morning, and so they had plenty of time to find what they needed. Misa wouldn't have minded if they'd taken much longer; the plains that surrounded Fendal weren't exactly interesting, but it had been a long time since she'd been able to just go on a walk with her mother.

And yet, right as she was about to strike up a conversation...

"I found something!" Juni pointed excitedly at a clump of bushes that looked identical to all the other bushes nearby — even Volaro looked confused, although Misa noted that he seemed quite certain that Juni knew what she was talking about. He just wasn't seeing whatever she was seeing. "There's an underground passage here. Very well hidden."

Juni pushed the foliage to the side, revealing... ordinary dirt, as far as Misa could tell.

And then Juni poked her foot at it, and the dirt collapsed into a passageway.

"What the fuck," Misa said flatly, and then she stared at Juni. "Was that a skill? Or was that just hidden by magic?"

Juni grinned. "You sure you want to know?"

"Yes," Misa said bluntly, and Juni laughed, sticking her tongue out at her.

"Yeah, I figured. It's just hidden by a [Minor Earth Illusion]. I'm surprised they have that kind of magic at all. Minor elemental spells have some level of physical presence; most monsters just have the standard [Minor Illusion] variant, and those are pretty easy to spot."

Misa blinked. "That's very specific."

"I learned it at tracking school."

"We didn't have a tracking school."

"She learned it from me," Volaro said tiredly. "Can we please just go? The goblins are clearly hiding in there. We can go in, clear them out, and be done with this."

Misa frowned. "Probably not how we're going to do things," she said with some authority. For one thing, she wasn't practiced with fighting with Volaro and Juni, and certainly not with her own mother; it was always Orkas that had trained her, even if Charise was formidable in her own right.

For the other, it didn't feel right to do this without her own team. And besides! The information they had was still incomplete.

But not for much longer.

The inside of the tunnel was dank and musty — and the worst part was that the tunnel was poorly lit at best. There were torches, certainly, of the everburning variety; Misa recognized the rune from the various times Vex had tried to show off the spell — but those torches were few and far between, and set so far into the wall that the light they cast into the tunnel was barely a speck of light in what felt like a very long trail of darkness.

And the worst part was that the passageway was small, clearly built for goblins. They all managed to fit, but it was a tight squeeze at best; Misa had to bend over slightly for her head not to be scraping against the ceiling.

It was uncomfortable, to say the least. And she was the tallest of their group, so she was the only one that struggled with the ceiling of the tunnel quite like that.

The four of them walked alone the tunnel in a single file, expecting the path to begin to branch out — but there were no branches or forks. It was just a straight tunnel. Juni frowned.

"There's some kind of magic here," she said.

Misa froze, narrowing her eyes slightly. "Hostile?"

"No," Juni said, but she hesitated for a second, sniffing the air. "I don't think so. It feels like spatial magic. It's... spatial compression? I'm pretty sure it's some variant of spatial compression."

"Hang on," Misa said. "Are you smelling the magic?"

Juni grinned. "It's a skill. [A Nose For Magic]. Managed to learn it using some tips from Volaro. Pretty cool, right?"

"I didn't even know that was a thing you could do." Misa paused. "I don't even know if Vex knows that that's a thing you can do."

"It's a common skill in that it's technically easy to get it, but not a lot of people actually get it," Juni said. "Skill rarities are weird! But it's pretty useful if you're a tracker and you don't have [Mana Sight], like me."

"You'll have to teach me sometime," Misa said, and she meant it. Having a new skill could only help expand her repertoire, and the fact that it was a different way of detecting magic might mean she could cover for things that Vex didn't spot —

"You might not want to learn it," Juni said, and this time she looked embarrassed. "If there's any strong magic around it's usually impossible to stop sneezing."

Oh.

That made things a lot more awkward, didn't it?

"Anyway, let's keep going," Juni said, quickly getting over her own embarrassment. "We're not too far now, I don't think. The magic smells stronger ahead."

Misa, of course, couldn't smell any such magic — but both Volaro and Charise seemed to agree, even though nothing about the passage had visibly changed. Misa put herself on guard, literally; [Guard Stance] flickered into activity as they ventured carefully into the depths of the tunnel.

And then they hit a dead end.

Except it wasn't a dead end, of course. Juni reached out to tap it, and it crumbled away just like exit did; this time, when it crumbled away, Juni hissed and pulled back, because the light from the tunnel was spilling into a massive underground cavern in a way that was really quite obvious —

But no one seemed to notice them. Obvious as it was, the tunnel they were in was just one light amongst many — and there were many other entrances that all spilled into this enormous cavern dug deep into the middle of the earth. Below them, small enough to look almost like the specks of stars, glittered the lights of a bustling city.

Almost a kingdom.

"What the hell is this?" Misa said quietly. Her voice echoed, though thankfully it didn't travel too far before it was just lost in the general noise.

There were buildings down there. Buildings of stone, lit with the light of everbright torches and some more sophisticated looking mana lamps. Small figures ran around below them, and a thin precipice of a path just outside the tunnel led down into the city proper; Misa didn't need to look closer to be able to tell that goblins were far from the only species in this sprawling underground city.

"Perhaps we won't be clearing them out," Volaro said, and Misa gave him a deadpan look.

They were here to scout. Only scout. She wanted to figure out more about what was happening here, but she wanted Sev and Vex and Derivan with her, too; this was too big for them to explore on their own, and her villagers didn't have the levels to back her up. Because there was something else that Misa was noticing about the citizens down below —

All of them were monsters. Every single species she saw, she knew the system categorized as a monster.

And yet... not a single one of them had a system label. No level. No species indicator.

Nothing.

[Guys,] Misa sent through the system. [You need to see this.]