After witnessing the Void Horror shaped like the shadow of a dragonkin feast on the 

basilisk and its city, Aurora resumed desperately fleeing, though not while trying to resist any compulsions this time. Despite knowing that she was moving far slower than literally every other creature in the Void could, Aurora propelled herself away as fast as possible, her mana pool slowly dwindling as Void spewed from her paws. By the time her mana pool reached 50%, she kept going, at 25%, she kept going, and even when it was down to 2%, she kept going. The moment her mana pool hit 0%, though, Aurora stopped moving… and fell asleep.

 

— — — — — — —

 

Aurora, drifting soundlessly through the endless Void, woke up. Immediately, her fox head turned frantically from side to side, as she looked around for the other Void Horror, seeing if she had been followed. Upon seeing absolutely nothing in the surrounding area, Aurora let out a large sigh of relief. 

 

And then she remembered everything that happened previously; what she had become, the desire that emanated from every fiber of her being, and she looked down at her paws as though she had betrayed herself. The system told her she was a Void Horror now from the moment she woke up, it just hadn’t… clicked as much as it did now. With that, Aurora came to the realization that even if her original form had drastically changed beyond recognition, there really wasn’t much that she could do about it. “Screw it,” she thought, bringing up her Status.

 

Name: Aurora Dreamfire

Class: - Unavailable -

Class 2: - Locked -

Level: Level 1, F Rank

Species: Void Horror - Nine Tailed Kitsune (Void, I*?u$i•n)

Sex: Female

Age: 16

Affinities: Void, I*?u$i•n

Soul: Void Horror (Void, I*?u$i•n).

Forms: Void Horror - Nine Tailed Kitsune (Void, I*?u$i•n); Void Horror - Nine Tailed Fox (Void, I*?u$i•n) 

 

Skills (0/10)

Without wasting another moment, Aurora willed for herself to transform into her Kitsune form; whatever might be left of it. “Mom, dad, I hope you will still be able to recognize me after this.”

 

Form: Void Horror - Nine Tailed Kitsune (Void, I*?u$i•n). Would user like to change forms? Warning: This process may take a moment, leaving the user vulnerable during this time. This is the singular instance the user will receive this warning. Continue?

 

Aurora willed for the change to occur.

 

The skin of the inky black fox floating silently suddenly erupted, as though it had just begun to boil. The fox was bent, twisted and kneaded until Aurora floated in that space, a kitsune girl rather than a fox. As her vivid violet eyes opened again, Aurora held out her hands and took stock of what she looked like now. Then she realized that there wasn’t the slightest bit of light coming from anywhere, but she could still clearly see her own body; she never really bothered to look that closely at her fox form, other than what she noticed from a few quick glances.

 

Before conjuring a small hand mirror, Aurora first looked at her hands… and noticed that her skin was gray now. Not white, not black, not brown, or any other color imaginable, and certainly not the same color as her parents were, and she used to be. 

 

After Aurora conjured a hand mirror, taking less time to push it into existence than she had the first couple spells she casted, she looked at her face, and let out a relieved sigh upon noticing that she looked almost exactly the same as before she left. There were no tentacles mimicking hair or anything of the sort. The biggest differences in her physical appearance were really just her skin color, her purple eyes being even more vivid somehow, and the white tips at the ends of her tails and ears becoming black, the same color as the rest of her fur.

 

Aurora was still wearing the kimono she brought when she was supposed to be summoned, and her sword was still in its sheath on her waist, albeit solid black now. Both of them appeared to have somehow been integrated into her form when she was changed. Aurora had to conjure up a second mirror to take a longer look, having forgotten that the surrounding Void would swiftly erode the first one.

 

As the gray-skinned kitsune looked at herself in her rapidly dissolving hand mirror, she thought “That… is actually not bad at all! I don’t look like a creature straight out of a horror story! No large tentacles protruding from my forehead, no snake hair, no eyes all over my body, none of that! Mom and dad could easily recognize me! Well, if I see them again, that is…” she thought, the smile rapidly fleeing her face.

 

“I guess the best way to try to get home is to figure out how to leave the Void, could those gray lines help?” Aurora wondered, scratching her head. “They can’t be inner realms, I saw one of those earlier… are they summoni— OH, there was one extending from the gateway from mom’s necklace! They have to be forms of teleportation then, right?

 

Literally the moment she thought that, a new line appeared right next to Aurora. Expelling some energy, this time from her hands, Aurora moved closer to the line. As she stopped in front of it, Aurora grabbed it with her hand… which proceeded to pass through the line completely unscathed, but the portion of the line Aurora’s hand had touched completely vanished. The entire length of the line that Aurora could see instantly began to crumble apart.

 

“That was not what I expected to happen, I didn’t expect it to work on the first try but… I didn’t think it would just vanish into thin ai— thin Void? And when I think about it, I didn’t see anyone get spit out from the line either; I guess it makes sense because that sort of transportation is usually instantaneous.

 

Either way, Aurora was still floating, absolutely nothing going on in the blank space around her. So, she decided to resume where she left off before she was interrupted by an entire city springing into existence. In her mind’s eye, she began trying to compose an energy blade made of Void that she could fling with a slash of her sword. She began constructing the blade like she did with her illusions, its position anchored to the sword, condensing it to stay together when she flung it off her blade… and then she poured Void mana into the spell, pushing it out with her will. A vibrating black energy blade materialized on the blade of her katana, and while she readied her arm to swing, the sword literally ate the energy blade.

 

“Huh? What just happened?” Aurora wondered, staring at the edge of her katana. She tried channeling her Void mana into the katana to see if anything changed, drawing from her Void  mana pool that had risen back to 99%, the same as it was before casting her spell. As she swung her katana, literally nothing happened, but she felt her mana flow back to her from the blade. She tried again, and pushed as she would with a spell, and nothing changed. 

 

Aurora then tried the first energy blade spell again, but this time, she cast the energy blade so that it would materialize just a hair above her blade. It actually worked as intended now, and as Aurora swung her sword, the energy blade launched off after it in a crescent shape, sailing perfectly intact through the Void, until Aurora eventually lost sight of it.

 

While trying to figure out what the deal with her new sword was, Aurora felt another gray line appear above her, which was surprisingly quick. This one seemed a little bit brighter and thicker than the previous one, but that didn’t matter to Aurora as quickly she propelled herself upwards, rapidly nearing the line. She noticed what appeared to be small runes running along the surface, slowly rotating in opposite directions along the line; Aurora didn’t notice those last time. Aurora reached out with the tip of her finger to delicately touch the edge of the line, and then the very tip of her finger made contact. As soon as that happened, the runes running across its surface flashed, and the tip of Aurora’s finger vanished. So did her entire arm.

 

Aurora stared at the stump where her right arm was just a moment ago, a flat, gray surface marking a clean break.

 

“Nonononono my arm is there this isn’t happening this didn’t just happen my arm is still there it’s still there.” Aurora babbled, no sound leaving her mouth as it was eaten by the surrounding Void. “FUCK why did this have to happen, now I’m practically crippled and can’t even fight if I need to. Could you take mana? I’m a being made of energy now, could you regrow if I give you energy?”

 

As Aurora poured mana from both her Void and I*?u$i•n pools into her stump desperately, both her mana pools were sucked bone dry as her arm shot out from the stump, albeit without the hand. At the end of the arm, there was the same flat, smooth gray surface. However, as Aurora’s mana pools ran out, she fell unconscious once again, unable to notice the change.

 

— — — — — — —

 

After both Aurora’s mana pools had been refilled by the surrounding Void and the passage of time, her eyes blinked open. “What happened- oh shit, my arm!” She thought, looking over at her stump which now had most of a thin, gray arm protruding from it. “Wha… how… oh, it worked! It makes sense, I did hear that elementals do something similar when they lose a limb. My hand isn’t there, was it just because I probably ran out of mana and fell asleep again, or something else?”

 

After channeling mana from both of her pools into the stump at her wrist, mana rapidly flowed down her arm, and a gray hand slowly began forming. As the process began, Aurora began laughing without sound; it felt like being tickled and having very very bad pins and needles at the same time. 

 

A minute or two later, after her right hand had finished regrowing, Aurora balled it into a fist a few times, as though confirming it still worked. And then, only a couple seconds later, Aurora felt a gray line flare back into existence that had fallen dormant, this time to her right. Darting towards it, the line was blessedly less vibrant than the previous one; and didn’t have any runes covering its surface.

 

This time, Aurora reached out to gently poke the edge of the line again… and her hand was trembling so much she accidentally swiped through it, instantly breaking it. Shocked, Aurora looked at her recently regrown limb as her mouth formed an O. “Um, I guess I haven’t recovered from that shock yet. I’ll test out my theories with spells before I try poking it again, yeah, that sounds like a great idea so I don’t need to go prodding those anymore!”

 

— — —

 

By the time the next gray line appeared, Aurora had constructed and tested several simple Void spells to use on the lines. On the first line that appeared, she fired a razor-thin blade made of Void from her sword, slicing the line clean in half. The gray line split in two, and rapidly dissolved into the Void as its light died out.

 

On the second line, Aurora tried something similar. She formed the same razor-thin blade of Void on the edge of her sword, but this time cut a thin gap into the line, without severing it. The line didn’t immediately fall apart, but it quickly started dimming. Aurora reached her left hand in to see if she could get sucked in or something, but all she did was fully break the line, and it began dissipating again.

 

By the fifth line, Aurora tried cutting the line clean in half with a Void blade and knotting it back together, to see if she could reform it around, say, herself. This failed, as she couldn’t find any way to manipulate the broken line without further damaging it.

 

When she reached the eleventh line that was safe to touch, with no runes on its surface, Aurora tried using a needle made of Void to poke a small hole through the line. The only thing that happened was the line gradually dimming as soon as she removed the needle, until it eventually collapsed. 

 

And a little bit after her experiment with her twenty-third line, Aurora saw something else floating in the Void near her.

“Hello?” she mouthed. “Oh right, it can’t hear me.”