I didn’t know how much time had passed when I eventually woke up incredibly drowsy and with a pounding headache. Unfortunately, from what I knew about mana exhaustion, it would take at least the rest of the day for the headache to go away. Luckily it didn’t take away my ability to use my mana but doing so would lengthen the time that it would take for me to recover.

I slowly opened my eyes and looked around me to see that Val had moved me so that I was using her lap as a pillow while she kept watch. She also knew that I would be waking up with a bad headache so she kept the flame dim in order to not make it worse which I was extremely thankful for. In front of us was a lake of acid that hadn’t been there before I lost control.

I was confused for a minute until I remembered what had happened before I had passed out, causing me to instantly sit up straight and go on high alert. ‘Don’t worry there are no more left’ Val said, instantly figuring out what was going on in my head, ‘By the time you passed out they had all either been killed or had run away. I had tried to tell you that but you wouldn’t listen to me so I had to just wait until you passed out.’

Hearing this I calmed down before looking at Val, seeing concern on her face which caused me to feel a bit guilty for losing control of myself. I took a long, deep breath to calm myself down before apologising and quickly explaining what had happened. Throughout my explanation Val went through a few emotions but the main one was worry for me and when I finished she asked me if I was ok.

I quickly assuaged her fears and said that now that the bugs were gone I was fine to continue exploring the cave before asking her what happened. However when I tried to stand up I collapsed again so we decided to stay where we were as, over the next ten minutes, Val explained everything that had happened. When she had looked back to check on me she had called my name but I didn’t answer her and after a few seconds I just started shooting arrows past her.

This caused her to look back at the bugs and see them charging at us as the arrow I had sent let out a wave of acid that washed over a dozen of the bugs. they were incredibly weak so everything that was caught in the acid was dissolved instantly. Seeing this she quickly started to back up away from the bugs while casting her own AOE spells and calling my name, trying to get me to retreat as well.

I didn’t answer her calls, being too far gone to hear anything, and just kept on shooting arrows instead of retreating or getting ready to protect myself. After calling me a few more times she knew that she wouldn’t be able to get through to me so instead she ran in front of me and used the earth around us as protection while trying to take down some bugs whenever she wasn’t getting attacked.

Unfortunately, since I was better at close range fights than she was, we had come to an unspoken agreement that while it was just the two of us I would be our frontline fighter whenever the need arose. This meant that she hadn’t really practised using her magic defensively enough to be fully proficient with it, instead focusing on offensive spells, so some of the bugs were able to get around her defences and hit her.

As she said this I suddenly noticed that she had lots of bite marks all over her body as it hadn’t been long enough for them to fully heal yet. Seeing this caused me to apologise even more, she said that it was fine but I still blamed myself for not being able to protect her. The fight went on for about a minute like this before all the bugs were either dead or had run away but I was still firing my arrows at nothing.

This was when she tried to break me out of my trance but nothing worked, it was like my eyes were dead but my body was still moving, which was practically what had happened. At the time she hadn’t known why this was happening so it caused her to worry about me. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do anything other than watch until I eventually collapsed due to mana exhaustion a minute later.

During this time the acid pools from my arrows were starting to converge and get dangerous so she used her earth magic to create a small lake before forcing all of the acid into it. After Val had finished telling me what had happened I thanked her for protecting me and not being angry at me for freaking out before looking at my status to check on it. Firstly, my mana had fully recovered over the past three hours thanks to my high WIS attribute. Secondly the fight had given me another level.

Unfortunately my headache was still so bad that I would be useless in a fight so I cooked our lunch as I was still able to at least do that. Val tried to tell me to lay down and rest but she has had to take care of me multiple times over the last couple of days and I wanted to return the favour. I was only reheating some stew that we had made a few days ago after hunting a deer so it wasn’t that difficult.

It had some mushrooms and herbs that I found on our journey and checked weren’t poisonous as well as some cuts of the deer and water from a local river. It was pretty simple and we didn’t have access to as many flavourings as I would have had back home but it still tasted pretty good. Looking at the metal flask we stored it in I reckoned we had enough for another meal before it would be back to the dried jerky and bread.

Another hour later and I was just barely able to move around without too much difficulty but I wouldn’t be fighting at full strength for a while yet so we went back to looking around the cave to see if it had anything else interesting in it. After about fifteen minutes we ended up finding another hallway that exited the cavern. We thought that if we went down it then we would most likely end up fighting something so we ignored it for now.

Over the next hour we ended up finding more mana gems, a few thermal vents with bio luminescent mould growing around it and another nest of the glowing beetles that we easily dispatched. We then found the entrance to the cavern so we knew that we had searched all of it and I was now ready to fight so we quickly went to the other side of the cavern before going down the unexplored corridor.

As we went down the hallway it slowly distorted as the walls bent in unnatural ways. It reminded me of when someone would mess around in a virtual environment builder to create angles that were never meant to exist. Except it wasn’t on a screen it was in front of me, in the real world. The further we went the more disorienting the effect was until we couldn’t tell what way was up and what way was down.

Sometimes it would feel as if we were on the ceiling and then the next we would be back to normal. This made me feel incredibly sick and at one point I almost threw up but luckily I managed to keep my lunch down and power through it. The effect made both of us want to turn back and just let someone else deal with whatever creature was creating this awful effect but we were both incredibly stubborn and wanted to find out for ourselves.

As we pressed on we eventually started hearing ramblings, well hearing isn’t quite the right word because it was more like something was projecting its voice straight into my head. I stopped for a minute to try and figure out what it was saying but it was too distorted and quiet for me to figure it out so I quickly started moving again.

The further we went the louder the voice became, although what was being said was no clearer until the hallway we were in started to expand outward and it became almost indistinguishable from our own thoughts. We slowly moved up to the room but before we could see what was in it the voice in our heads suddenly stopped rambling.

A second later the voice returned but this time it was much clearer so we could tell what it was saying. Who goes there? Did Master finally send someone? How is he? Did he give you a message to pass along to me? The voice was quite deep and almost sounded like a normal adult man, although a slight distortion gave away the fact that it was unnatural.

We stood there looking at each other as it kept on asking question after question, not letting us answer any of them even if we wanted to but getting more and more angry with each question. I was the first to act as I moved over to the entrance and since it already knew we were here I didn’t try to hide myself.

What I saw filled me with a completely different fear than what I had felt almost five hours ago. The fear I felt before was an instinctual, but irrational one. The fear I felt seeing this thing came from knowledge I had gained in my previous life and was completely rational. I didn’t fully recognise what it was but it looked like something I had seen in many different forms in fantasy media from my old world.

It had a medium sized round body that floated around a metre off of the ground and had four stalks coming out of it, each of which had an eye at the end of it. The body was covered in decade old scars that made it evident that this thing had seen plenty of battles. When I laid my eyes on it it slowly turned, letting me see a fifth eye that was much bigger than the others and rested above a massive mouth that had tons of sharp teeth in it.

This thing didn’t let me process the fear as it kept on asking questions with each one having more and more anger put behind it until my head started to hurt. ‘I am sorry, I think we are lost.’ I said as a bead of sweat fell down my cheek, ‘I think we should be going back the way we came.’ When I said this the questions stopped for a second but then the voice quickly returned.

Lost you say, that’s impossible you could only find this place on purpose. Master never told me about you, no I don’t think I can let you leave either. Seeing that my excuse failed I tried to back away, out of the room but I bumped into a wall before turning around to find that the hallway I had just exited had somehow disappeared. Luckily Val had made it into the room so we were still together but the only way left for us to leave was by killing this thing.