The mini-expedition from the main expedition wasn’t supposed to take long, which was why I didn’t really mind accompanying everyone who wanted to recover more monster bodies.

  And I mean, I got it. I really did. I’d be lying if I said the idea of more profit didn’t tempt me at least somewhat. The more loot we recovered before we got out of the Nether Vein, the richer we’d be after this whole thing was done. Safety was paramount, but that was why I was going. To keep things safe as much as I could.

  “Wow, so this is the power of Illumination,” the Ogre alchemist said. I had learned his name was Mulg. “It’s certainly different from other light-based Aspects I’ve seen.”

  I had created an orb of light with Manifestation working on Illumination. It was enough to keep the Netherthread storm at bay. Especially after I used Permanence on it.

  “Is it?” I asked. “I suppose I’ve never really paid attention to how other light Aspects work.”

  “Yes, it seems to have some curious properties.”

  I wondered if he meant how it wasn’t fading over time. “Well, it’s not just Illumination there. I’ve combined it with my Permanence Augmentation as well, and I’m using my Gravity to haul it along with us.”

  “Ah, no, I had already accounted for the effect of other Aspects and Attributes.” Mulg shook his head with a little smile. “Rather, your Illumination has some other properties that are very, very curious.”

  “You keep saying that, Mulg,” I said. “But what are these curious properties?”

  He looked too kindly for me to assume he was just stringing me along to keep them company. But at the same time, I wanted to know what exactly he had determined.

  “Well, for instance, its consistency seems to be rather different from regular light.” The Ogre reached out a finger towards my light orb, though he didn’t quite touch it. “Light is merely an intangible energy. Its only interaction with the real world is its ability to, well, light things up. But… have you tried touching your Illumination?”

  I blinked. Then I reached out my hand as well, briefly brushing the orb with my finger. The sensation made me gasp.

  “No way…” I murmured, not sure I believed what I was experiencing just then.

  “Yes,” Mulg said. “Your light has a certain presence to it, yes? A certain mass if you will. As though it isn’t just energy, but matter as well. In an ethereal sense, at least.”

  That seemed a little bit insane. The biggest point was that I had never felt that sort of sensation from my summoned light. Never. So why now all of a sudden? It wasn’t that the light was suddenly a solid substance. Rather, it felt like my body was instinctively telling me I was touching something that shouldn’t be touched.

  An ethereal sense, Mulg had said. That was an apt description. There was something there, and while it wasn’t physical matter that made up the universe, it was still something my body could interact with at least at a spiritual level.

  I couldn’t ever recall trying to feel my Illumination that way. Why would I? This was supposed to be fucking light. Nobody touched light. That was absurd.

  Nor had anyone else ever suggested that Illumination might have properties that were different from regular light. Not even Master Kostis. Admittedly, it was foolish to assume any one person would hold the full breadth of knowledge about everything.

  Still, I couldn’t stop feeling like I had missed some sort of opportunity. Like I should have known this from the start.

  Unless… I looked around. Unless this whole thing was a special interaction with the Nether Vein.

  Mulg had followed my gaze. “Has it always been like this, or…?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know too,” I said. “I never tested it for something like this. I mean, it’s supposed to be a variation of light. But I didn’t think the variation would result in light having substance.”

  “I don’t blame you. I suspected that it being Illumination instead of plain old Light would mean it would possess separate properties, but being tangible wasn’t one of them. Not until I observed closely.”

  “Do you know much about other kinds of light-based Aspects?”

  “I do have passing knowledge about them, yes. I believe that was why the Honoured Councillor so kindly invited me along.”

  Right. She was well aware of Illumination’s effect on the Netherthreads. No doubt, she had invited others who might have some inkling on how to repeat the strategy.

  “We’re done here,” one of the junior alchemists said.

  Both of the other alchemists besides Mulg were back up, having finished harvesting the fallen puppets. Apparently, one of the key things they were researching was how the Netherthreads interacted so mechanically with the puppets’ bodies to manipulate them. I had been curious too. Those things had moved with uncanny precision and grace.

  “Great.” Mulg then called in the two adventurers. “It’s time we headed off.”

  My thoughts were still swirling around the discovery about my Illumination Aspect. The longer it went on, the more I was starting to think it really was some messed up interaction with the Nether Vein. Sadly, the only way we’d test that was when I finally got out of here.

  It made me wonder if my other Aspects were exhibiting secret properties within the Nether Vein I wasn’t aware of. How would I even find out? Manifesting Flare didn’t suddenly show me that it had turned into lava. Gravity was still heavy, still amorphous and not exactly interpretable.

  So was it only Illumination showing such a property? Why? That seemed so strange…

  Our little side quest didn’t have any troubles. One of the things I was afraid of was monsters barging in and attacking us. As such, we were making sure not to stray too far from the actual expedition team. Just in case something went wrong, we wouldn’t be too far from help.

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  At one point, the threat of significant danger did manifest. A rippling snarl echoed out from the darkness, causing the Netherthreads to writhe in response.

  Most of the others had frozen. The two adventurers were doing an admirable job of forcing themselves to stand their ground, facing the direction the noise was emanating from.

  I stepped up. It wasn’t because I was huffing on the fumes of being some sort of hero and saviour, no matter how everyone else was starting to look at me. I was objectively the strongest person there in our little group, so I had the best chance of stopping whatever was out there.

  Not that I was just going to wait for it to come out.

  Gravity orbs shot up. I used Manifestation as far as I could, so the dark violet orbs went up a few dozen feet away from me. Energy swirled around them, Manifestation then calling up Flare and Illumination, creating little orbs of burning light.

  The snarling intensified. I responded by pushing more mana out, which raised the intensity of the orbs’ gravitational pull, as well as that of the burning and blistering energy. And it wasn’t just one or two spheres. I summoned them in droves all around us. Little simulacra of stars shot up and burned away the Netherthreads, bathing everything in harsh sunlight.

  It wasn’t enough to create Protostars. That would need a lot more complicated tying-together of my Aspects. I didn’t have that kind of time.

  But it was still enough.

  We never faced whatever creature had threatened us. At my display of magical power, the monster’s snarling started fading. Pretty sure it was gone a minute later, though we all waited for a few minutes longer just to be sure.

  “I think it’s best we head back now,” Mulg said, clearly shaken a little.

  I nodded. “Let’s go.”

  When we returned, the expedition was ready to set off. We were not stopping till we reached the barrier.

  The journey forward grew more intense the farther we got. Said intensity grew severe after mere minutes of our restart. The Netherthreads hemmed us in harder, frothing and writhing and pushing intensely against whatever strange barrier the Klevacite had created.

  “Is it going to last?” Cerea asked.

  “No clue,” Ugnash said. “We’ll just have to be ready in case it doesn’t.”

  I decided to use Illumination with little bits of Permanence within them to help repel the Netherthreads. Using Imbuement and a bit of Gravity with Massless Interaction, I stuck them to little sticks. “Distribute these, please. That way, we can push them back at all corners of the expedition.”

  Even then, the dark strands of ferocious, deadly magic kept pushing. The Nether Vein really didn’t want us reaching the barrier ahead.

  It was enhancing its own strategy in response to our continued success. In surprising ways, too. I was not expecting monsters that attacked and acted with such savage intensity to carry out hit-and-run tactics to try to pull apart our formation from the outside and make it easier to take out portions of the expedition.

  “These Pits-cursed bastards!” one of the nearby adventurers growled after yet another brush with the monsters that refused to commit.

  I understood the frustration. Having a flying, slithering monstrosity that attacked from range and was hard to hit as well was annoying by itself. But when the monster purposefully drew away from combat, the annoyance turned to legitimate frustration that frayed our concentration and orderliness.

  “Stay together!” the Councillor yelled over the din of battle all around us. “Losing formation is losing the battle.”

  Right. Because if we gave chase, we’d lose the protective covering of the Klevacite. My Illumination torches would help but why take the risk? Then the Netherthreads might still tear us apart.

  But the monsters were succeeding. Hit and run meant that everyone had to remain on high alert without going all in, which was a prime condition for lapses of concentration and judgement. This resulted in a string of casualties—most thankfully minor—that kept the healers busy even as we continued moving forward.

  Not that we were completely helpless against the monsters’ new style of attacks. We had our own ways of countering.

  I tried creating shots of Flare, priming them up and holding them with Concentration before releasing them in as focused a burst as I could. It wasn’t that effective. Despite my intent, the fiery blasts didn’t travel far enough and fast enough to hit the monsters before they evaded. I had to admit that Flare was best effective at short-to-mid range.

  That said, others had superior long-range powers. There was Cerea with her arcing lightning blistering out into the Netherthread-infested atmosphere. We cheered her on and made sure none of the monsters got to her.

  Another adventurer had a firearm that was somewhere between a small cannon and a rifle, which he fired at the monsters with wild abandon, laughing with every shot.

  Revayne was the MVP here as well. Her summons were stronger than a few people whose main thing was summons. Her whip-sword lashed out almost as fast as the crazed cannon-toting adventurer, with a lot less sound and recoil to boot. She was also fast enough to flash through the expedition’s entire formation to arrive wherever she might be needed in a blink.

  “We’re nearing the location,” she said at one point when she passed by my spot. “Be ready.”

  “Ready?” Khagnio bared his fangs in a hard grin. “The Nether Vein won’t know what hits it when we arrive.”

  Revayne’s words were prophetic. I could sense the expeditioners who had been a part of the last trip, like Khagnio, all growing tense. We were close.

  I was honestly both a little impressed and somewhat surprised that we had made it this far without significant casualties or losses. On seeing the first expedition’s condition on Ring One, I had thought the Nether Vein would overwhelm us. That we’d be barely clinging on to our lives and our sanity the deeper and deeper we went.

  Maybe I had feared too much. If it really had been that desperate, I’d probably have heard about more deaths.

  I probably wouldn’t have seen as many returning for another expedition.

  We came to a pause. A ripple went through everybody, a strange shiver running up my spine. Ahead of us stood a veritable wall of Netherthreads, so thick and compressed that it looked like we’d have to cut our way through somehow. Fewer monsters were attacking us now, and our response was relegated to the edges too.

  “We have arrived,” Se-Vigilance said, voice ringing across the area. “The barrier that stopped us is just ahead. The Nether Vein may try to stop us, but we will not be held back. We will be victorious!”

  My voice joined everyone else’s in the fierce cheer that followed. She was right. We had come far. Whatever the Nether Vein did, it wasn’t going to stop us. Not for long.

  Se-Vigilance began gathering an enormous amount of power. The pressure of it made the air itself start to thrum. I felt like I was standing inside a jet engine powering up.

  “Is she going to blast a hole through the Netherthreads?” I murmured.

  My initial assumption had been that we’d need to gather closer while the Klevacite was used to push through the wall of the Netherthreads. Apparently, not so. The Councillor had a different idea.

  “Get ready!” Revayne shouted as the sound of the Councillor’s power reached a crescendo.

  Everything was starting to shake. Heavy tremors wracked the whole area, like a battering ram was pounding on reality itself. Everybody’s tension was making me tense too, like all the Threaded Reinforcement had turned rigid and rock solid. We—

  A crack hammered in from beneath. I barely managed to keep my footing. Everybody cried out, myself included, as half of the expedition fell to the metal floor.

  “What was that?” I asked. My heart was trying to leap into my mouth.

  “I don’t know.” Cerea was looking down straight at the ground like she could pierce through the metal. “What—is there something underneath us?”

  Voices rose in panic. The chaos was immediate. My brain was a little slow in realizing that disarray was one of the biggest threats here.

  “Stay calm,” Revayne was shouting over the mess. I had never heard her so severe, so strict. “Keep an eye out.”

  I was on my feet again, but it didn’t matter. Another, even stronger crack came in from below, the bang accompanied by a metallic tear, which was immediately followed by an explosion that sent dust and shrapnel flying in every direction.

  If the chaos had been bad before, it was now multiple times worse. But more than that, more than everyone scurrying like ants and shouting in panic, was the scream fading below us. The scream of a familiar individual, and the disappearing glow of the Klevacite. Whatever had struck us had done so with extremely unerring accuracy.

  The Klevacite torch was gone, and so, the enormous wall of Netherthreads now roared and slammed in. We were buried in an avalanche of darkness.