“Hello?” Aurora mouthed, as she looked straight at the… creature in front of her, immediately propelling herself backwards to put a little bit more space between them.  “Oh right, it can’t hear me.”

 

The creature bobbing in front of her was a grotesque ball of biological parts, composed of legs, arms, eyes, ears, tails, wings, and god knows whatever everything else might be. As the creature, another Void Horror, like the ones she saw charge the basilisk, slowly floated by, it showed absolutely no interest in Aurora at all.

 

Aurora slowly tilted her head to follow it as it went by. “I am VERY glad I didn’t end up looking like, well, whatever that thing is.” Immediately at that thought, an eye snapped towards Aurora; it looked like a goat eye with its rectangular pupil, except the entire thing was about a foot in diameter. The eye protruded from the end of some sort of dangling appendage, which looked like a neon blue three headed squirrel.

 

As the creature rocketed towards Aurora, far faster than she had learned how to move, Aurora hastily pushed herself out of its way to dodge. She turned around, hastily unsheathing the katana around her waist as she waited for it to come back around… but it just kept barreling onwards, completely ignoring her existence.

 

Aurora blinked a couple of times before she saw what the Void Horror was barreling for; a new gray line. She hadn’t noticed its formation simply due to how focused she was on the other Void Horror. Aurora hastily began propelling herself forward to get a closer view of whatever it was doing, energies spewing from her left hand to propel her forward as she tightly gripped her unsheathed blade with her right.

 

As the other Void Horror reached the line, it stopped just millimeters shy of the surface. Then, an extraordinarily small mouth, looking like a miniature sea lamprey, stretched out from under the fold of a wing shifting between vomit-inducing colors. The mouth, somehow even smaller than the line, reached it and barely made contact with the line, burrowing into it by just a hair.

 

As the tiny sea lamprey mouth burrowed into the gray line, it began pulsating, as though it was swallowing something. With each gulp, the line grew slightly dimmer, and after a minute or so of that, when Aurora had long since gotten within proper viewing distance, all light from the line was gone. As soon as the sea lamprey-esque mouth left it, the line instantly crumbled apart.

 

As the mouth withdrew back into the body of the Void Horror, its eyes became unfocused again, and it resumed slowly drifting through the Void, traveling the opposite direction of where Aurora, as she remained there, floating.

 

“So essentially, it just did what I did on my seventh attempt, where I stuck a needle through it, but it kept its thing in the line, and somehow ate the thing?” She thought, sheathing her katana as the Void Horror drifted out of sight, and began pulling at the top of her fluffy ears. “I know there are a ton of records of sentient Void Horrors hijacking summoning rituals, usually leading to devastation of the local populace, which is why we kitsune only allowed ourselves to be summoned; a Void Horror has never come out the opposite side of a ritual in recorded history. So I should be able to do something similar to get somewhere else, right?”

 

After a couple hours or so of pondering what she could do next, and what she might try doing in more experiments, Aurora sensed another gray line appear quite far off in the distance. She hastily began propelling herself towards it, energies spewing from both hands. Sadly, by the time she arrived, it was gone, the entire line having been yanked over to one side in what she assumed was the conclusion of whatever spell, enchantment, or ritual formed it.

 

“Shoot, I was almost there!” Aurora thought. “If I had moved faster like that Void Horror, I could’ve made it! What did that thing do again…” Unfortunately for Aurora, the way the other Void Horror moved wasn’t her greatest concern when a lovecraftian monstrosity was barreling straight towards her face.

 

— — — — —

 

The next time a new line appeared, Aurora moved herself next to the line, and inserted a hollow needle she constructed with a simple spell into it, almost like a straw. The hollow needle allowed the surrounding Void in though, and the line crumbled rapidly.

 

— — — — —

 

After a second line appeared, Aurora formed and inserted another needle into the line, this time, one that wasn’t hollow, more like a sewing needle. While the line didn't immediately fall apart, nothing happened other than it slowly grew dimmer, until it eventually crumbled apart.

 

— — — — —

 

By the point a sixth line formed that Aurora could safely experiment with, she had tested various methods of tapping into a line. The best way she found to maintain the composition of one of the lines for longer was simply to have minimal internal exposure to any surrounding Void energies.

 

— — — — —

 

As the thirteenth line Aurora could reach sprang into existence beside her, Aurora was still looking for a way to let the energies composing her body flow into the line, so she could be summoned to a material plane that way. The only method of doing so she found was when she dissolved her finger into energy, though that energy didn’t remain a part of her, and drifted apart. She promptly used her mana to regrow it.

 

— — — — —

 

When Aurora spotted the thirty-fourth line, she was still attempting to expand a line to a size she could fit; every attempt, though, either broke from the sheer amount of energy put into it, or snapped before it could reach any sufficient size.

 

— — — — —

 

Not long after her seventieth line, Aurora noticed another inner realm spring into existence. This time, after a shockwave of energy rippled out, it grew from nothing into the size of a small house over the course of some time. The realm appeared to be one big bubble of water, with a polished desk made out of black rock in the center. There was what looked like a penguin in a tuxedo, wearing a black tophat and monocle standing on the desk. It was manipulating the bubble around it, along with its cane, to butcher the Void Horrors charging it. There were definitely a smaller number of Void Horrors than the first time though, and there were no sentient Horrors nearby, other than Aurora.

 

While her very soul demanded that she consume the penguin, and feast, the urge was significantly weaker than the first time, and Aurora was able to push her urges down swiftly with some effort, not moving closer at all. She did begin salivating in her mouth though. Since the penguin’s inner realm was just starting to form, they were most likely just advancing to A-rank..

 

On the bright side from this encounter, she did see how the Void Horrors moved so quickly. Rather than pushing themselves forward by emitting energy, they manipulated the surrounding Void to essentially form a bunch of hands, or tendrils, simultaneously pushing and pulling themselves towards whatever destination they set their many eyes on. 

 

When the penguin had killed all the Void Horrors infiltrating his realm, with only corpses floating in its domain which was now the size of a pool, the penguin lifted its cane in the air victoriously, its suit and hat torn to shreds. Then, the penguin and his fancy attire vanished from the Void, along with his realm.

 

— — — — —

 

At the 144th line, Aurora finally made a breakthrough. She threaded a thin string of condensed Void through the line, and welded the two ends together, forming a small circle that passed through the line.

 

As she did so, Aurora touched the tip of her sword to the far edge of the strand of Void energies and she instinctively pulled, as though to feast on the energies contained within. The gray energies from the line were yanked across Aurora’s tendril as they began to dissolve, coating it in some gray energy. 

 

As she did so, the main line quickly dimmed, and some energies flowed into the center of the small circle. The moment those energies formed the outline of an uneven semicircle for a fraction of a second, a picture of the inside of a dimly lit wooden shack flashed into existence. Aurora saw no living creatures in immediate sight before the image rapidly flickered out; holes eaten into the sheet of energy.

 

Tails rapidly waving, Aurora’s jaw dropped as her 144th experiment since she saw the first Void Horror float by her actually, well, worked. At least partially. “Finally!” She thought, literally throwing her hands up into the air at her first success. “Well, I guess most of those other designs probably won’t work then.” While in the total emptiness of the Void, the only thing keeping Aurora sane was that in between her experiments she constantly was coming up with new designs for further experiments, and the few times she expelled her entire mana pool to actually be able to fall asleep. Her further experiment designs ranged from using her sword to eat a line, vomiting it back up into a portal, to attempting to wrap herself completely in a line while in her smaller fox form, like a mummy. Also, still being able to roughly gauge the general passage of time with her Status did help a bit.

 

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: 17

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)

 

— — — — — — —

 

An estimated ten days later…

 

On the 192nd line, Aurora finally had a complete success. She started by, well, making it to a line, a bit dimmer than some others, and similarly to what she did on her 144th attempt, she roped a thin strand of Void through that line, forming a perfect oval shape, big enough for her kitsune form to fit if she ducks and squeezes her tails.

 

Immediately, she began pulling through her sword, dragging energy from the line onto her strand of Void, dexterously using a spell to push the majority of the surrounding Void energies away from the circle. Putting the tip of her sword into the middle of the oval as soon as the strand of Void was coated in energy from the line, she pulled the gray energies towards her sword. 

 

As they flowed towards the center, which was looking like a gray mirror, Aurora began hastily eating large chunks of energy with her sword, spitting them out where there wasn’t enough. As she did, it felt like she was forcing herself to vomit something back up after partially digesting it, every single time. She hated that part. As soon as the entire surface was connected and flat, at least mostly, the line practically about to fall apart, color flickered into the Void. 

 

Wasting no time, Aurora immediately had the surrounding energies yank her forward, as she ducked her head and bunched her tails up with her hands behind her to fit through the oval. Falling into what looked like a fancy ritual hall, various paintings and statues lining the walls, Aurora experienced gravity again for the first time in a while, promptly landing on the back of her head.

 

“Mom, dad, this is my first step back to you—” she thought, before her head made contact with the ground. “Ouch! Oh, hello!”

 

– – – – POV: ??? – – – –

 

As it watched the girl excitedly dive through the rudimentary portal she spent the past few measly months working on, successfully leaving the Void, it chuckled. “I suppose I need to keep an eye on her; she should get a mythic class at minimum if she survives; whether she takes it is a completely different question though. Ah, this is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in the past few millennia.”