That is the entire reason we have come here. We claim that half of the landmasses in our world are fully under the sway of monsters, lands where no civilization can take root. I challenge this narrative, the world cannot be half-empty. There are people out there that we have yet to find, and if they live in such monster-infested realms as these, they need our help. Where better to start looking than a yellow-tiered continent? Will there be danger? Yes, but I believe that it will be worth it.

  - Last Missive of Sandervas the Explorer

  “I don’t necessarily think it would be a great idea if I were to lead,” I say.

  In the darkness of the hive, three sets of eyes turn in my direction. The tunnels leading down into the earth are spacious enough to easily stand inside of, the rocky walls reflecting the light of my burning hand as if it were covered in water. Looking back, the pinprick of light where we entered still shines, but as we descend into the dark, the light fades.

  I was only given a few moments to find my team before the entire army began to shift. The battle plan was changed, and Illigar sent off a good quarter of the army before the assault on the western hive could begin, heading back in the direction of Maidenlake. The man himself, the one who was supposed to lead the assault, left us as well, heading toward the far hive, the tallest one built into the side of the mountain.

  Iona Nepsin, the third-rank healer, was given the command of the assault on the hive, the only third-rank we have left. After spending a good hour and a half clearing the termites that blocked our approach, the valley grew silent, and we hit our first snag. Despite seeming to be made of simple earth and stone excavated from the ground as the termites tunneled downward, the walls of the hive can block soul presences, stopping the army from scouting out the interior by flaring the presences of those with the reach to do so. Thus, we were divided, split into smaller units to carefully infiltrate and find the primary targets of the assault, the mid-tier rank three monsters hiding deep beneath the earth.

  “That is probably a good idea,” Jess agrees immediately. “Your eyesight isn’t the best.”

  “What?”

  “We need the light, though,” Dovik says, moving past the obvious insult. “Charlene, stand to the rear with Jor, but turn up the light. I don’t want us to get ambushed in these tunnels.”

  “It would be nice if we could stop that from happening,” Jor’Mari agrees. “Though, not likely I imagine.” Not ten feet after we entered one of the tunnel entrances on the side of the hive, two termites exploded from the walls of the tunnel, trying to kill us.

  “There is a fix for that,” I say. With minimal effort, my soul presence seeps out of my skin, rocketing forward toward the tunnel, taking the shape of the stone. Despite having been told that the walls will hem in the soul presence, I think myself a bit special for a moment as my aura seeps into the rock. It doesn’t make it more than a few inches into the stone before hitting an impassable barrier.

  Information floods my mind, but with the restraint of the hive walls, it never threatens to overwhelm. Taking a beat, three spots stick out to me as strange further down the tunnel. The stone there is too smooth and jitters slightly.

  “Three ahead,” I tell Dovik. “Maybe a hundred feet or so, buried in the stone on the left side of the tunnel.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “And I thought I was the one learning to be a scout.”

  I shrug, holding my hand higher and making the fire burn brighter. A globe of black sand appears in the air next to me, called from my vault. As the dragonfire burning bright in my hand touches the black orb, the fire moves onto its surface, burning brightly like a torch floating above my head.

  “You could have done that earlier,” Jor’Mari says, shrugging off the top of his robes and tying the sleeves around his waist. There is no doubt in my mind that the man knows exactly what he is doing as he makes a show of changing forms, his muscles growing large and taut with barely restrained power.

  I step away from him as an aura of deep purple begins to peel off of him. “You’re too close.”

  He looks between me and the orb floating above my head for a moment before shaking his head.

  “I told you,” Dovik says. “That sand would be too powerful otherwise.”

  I am about to ask how Dovik figured out that others’ soul presences mess with my ability to control the sand, but I stop myself. The man has seen me use the sand multiple times, seen it fail. He isn’t an idiot.

  “Seems like a bit of a hinderance,” Jor’Mari says. “Not that it isn’t an incredible ability, I mean. They told me you killed that crazy wolf with it.”

  “Speared it good,” Jess confirms. “While I would love to show you all what I have been doing with those pelts, we are supposed to be accomplishing something right now.”

  “It’s just infiltrating a hive of monsters where at least three rank-three creatures reside,” Dovik says, retrieving his sword from his storage item and giving it a few practice swings. “I don’t see why we can’t simply reminisce and talk about past fights as we go. Perhaps, on the way, we can wonder aloud about how easy the fighting is and why we haven’t found anything dangerous yet. While we’re at it, we might even bad mouth Talava, see if we can’t attract the eye of fate.”

  “I think your first sentence was sarcastic enough,” I tell him, pointing down the tunnel. “They still haven’t moved.”

  “I’ve been wanting to see if I can kill one of these termites in a single blow,” Jor’Mari says, turning the ring on his middle finger. His clawed fingers wrap tightly around the grip of a massively heavy mace invisible to everything except for my mana sense. As he trudges forward at the head of the group, his body begins to grow even larger, the sculpted marble of his shoulders roiling as his snow-white hair grows into a waterfall that almost floats on the air. He looks back after a few paces, throwing me a look that puts butterflies in my stomach.

  I barely catch the sound of Dovik mumbling something as he walks forward, Jess skipping up next to him, telling him that she thought he was funny if no one else did.

  Jor’Mari gets his wish. As we approach the spot in the tunnel where I sense monsters to be hiding, we find a tunnel wall that looks as ordinary as all the other parts. Galea can’t even see anything amiss. I only have a moment to question my soul presence before Jor’Mari leaps forward, bringing his weapon down on the stone in an earth-shattering stroke.

  The wall hisses and screeches as a veneer of stone is broken away to reveal a squirming monster beneath. The termite that falls from the wall is nearly split in two by Jor’Mari’s attack. It squirms on the ground as everyone turns their attention toward the other monster crawling out of the wall in a failed ambush, left to die of its grievous wound less than a minute later.

  The second termite doesn’t even fully make it out of the wall before Dovik decapitates it with a heavy strike. A bolt of dragonfire slams into the head of the last termite trying to escape its hiding spot, the explosion of magic shaking the tunnel wall, causing pebbles to rain down on us. As was the case with the monsters outside, my blast of fire is woefully ineffective, though at this closer range, the damage is more significant. One of the creature’s eyes is burned white, the other looking around erratically as its claws swipe the air.

  Jess is there, moving like she can see the future. Between the frenzied strikes of the monster, she dances her way closer, hopping off of a stone as she makes the last few paces, landing on the termites back as it flails half-in the wall. The loop of Jess’ chakram dips down like a garrote, an expert twist of her wrist bringing the inside blade of the weapon to bear on its neck. With a quick gesture, her weapon is ripped free, the bloody remains of the termite’s head falling to the floor a moment later. The counter-ambush is so quick, they never even have time to spray their troublesome acid at us. None of the monsters were even able to exit the wall fully.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  As we continue down the tunnel, we find two more similar ambushes awaiting us. The tunnel opens into a corridor of splitting tributaries and winding hallways deep beneath the earth after the speck of light shining from where we entered long forgotten. I envy some of the other groups that took ascending tunnels as the weight of the rock overhead presses down on me.

  The monsters inside take on a different makeup as we continue our slow progress through the hive. Instead of the huge termites that dominate the exterior of the hive, we find more and more smaller insectoid monsters that I might think to be ants if Galea didn’t continue to identify them as termites. The weaker bugs, most no bigger than a hound, are incredibly fast, their white carapaces a blur as they run through the tunnels in packs of four or five.

  We set an ambush for the first group, waiting around the bend of a corridor as I track them arriving at a pace that would put a mustang to shame. The second they come into sight, I bear down on the monsters with all the power I can force through my soul presence. The sudden weight knocks two of the bugs into the ground, their two-foot-long mandibles digging furrows in the stone as they come to a crashing halt.

  Indigo blood explodes from the body of one as Jor’Mari renders the monster to pace with his mace. It is a disconcerting thing to watch a giant turn to you in the low-light of a tunnel, a wicked smile on his face and strangely glowing blood dripping off an invisible sphere near his shoulder. Disconcerting but a little exciting at the same time.

  One of the monsters not so hampered by the press of my aura as the others, turns and races like a bullet toward Dovik. The man’s blue aura flashes into the air seemingly out of nowhere, his body appearing at a space inside the shroud in the same instant that he vanishes from where the termite’s mandibles snap close. He makes his soul presence disappear so quick that I have to consider whether it was ever really there. He kills the termite with a single swing, almost looking bored as he does so.

  Jess finishes off the two straining on the ground with expertly placed stomps. The last one attempts to run, blurring down the tunnel like an arrow. Instead of throwing fire at it, I take aim with a globe of black sand. It becomes a bit easier to point, my finger tracking the bug as it skitters away. My aura crashes down on it, all the power I can muster isolated to one point, but the monster is already far enough away that I can’t knock it to the ground. I don’t need to; just slowing it is enough.

  A lance of black sand flies down the tunnel, the octagonal pyramid elongating in flight, thinning out until it becomes a forked bident of harsh geometrical lines. The incredible weight of the spear is enough to lift the speedy termite from the floor when it collides with the white carapace, smashing it into the stone wall as it continues to press. A horrid whine echoes through the tunnel as the tips of the spear scratch against the carapace, the bug scrambling to move as it is held pressed against the stone. Finally, the carapace snaps, and the spear stabs through, ending the monster’s struggles.

  “Not as good strong as I hoped,” I sigh. The five corpses puff into pink smoke a moment later, flying toward me and disappearing into one of the storage devices that Illigar left me with before making his exit.

  “Better than the fire,” Jor’Mari adds, trying to be encouraging.

  “Can you sense a direction to go?” Dovik asks, looking back and forth at the various twisting turns. “If we find the central chamber, we can get out of this place. I do not like it down here.”

  “If there even is a central chamber,” I say.

  “Could that be true?” Jess asks, looking at each of us. “Dovik, what if there isn’t?”

  The three start to entertain the thought that this hive might just be some twisting tunnels as I focus on my soul presence. The walls of the hive might impede me, but with my range, I can still spread it pretty far. Calming my breathing, I let my senses spread out, peering through the various turns, trying to find some order in the chaos of pathways.

  The density of monsters only grows, but as far as I can see, most of them are the weak, speedy ones that we just got rid of. Even at the furthest reaches of what I can push my presence to encompass, I don’t find anything that I might classify as a central chamber.

  “No chamber,” I say, turning back to my team. “There are more monsters down this way. If I was going to think of where a central chamber inside a hive would be, I would bet on where the most monsters were.”

  “It makes a certain kind of sense,” Dovik says. “Lead on then.”

  For the next five hours, we descend further and further into the western hive. With the skillsets of our team, there was never a chance that we would successfully sneak to the heart of the hive. The only chance that we have to approach without being overrun is to kill every monster we come across before they can run away and bring attention our way.

  My job becomes simple: spot the packs of monsters long before they reach us and make certain that none escape. Despite the simplicity of the task, the pressure of performance wears away at my nerves with each fight we get ourselves into. After the second hour, I don’t even dare to use dragonfire, fearing that the explosions will bring down a swarm of hundreds of termites on our heads.

  The black spears prove impractical after the first few combats, one of the fast termites almost managing to get away when I fail to penetrate its carapace one too many times. A new way to dispatch the monsters comes to me, the inspiration sparking from the duel I have with Priscilla a few weeks back.

  The termites demonstrate that they have no auras to impede my sand. Those that show themselves as resilient to my soul presence are slammed with spheres of sand as they try to leave, spheres of gold falling to the ground after each collision as I move the black dust into them. The resistance to my manipulating the black dust inside the bodies of the termites is incredible. These monsters are beneath my level, but they still are rank two monsters. In the end, I have to deliver much more dust into their bodies than I did with Priscilla to achieve a similar effect, but once I have them, they are mine.

  What I do to the bodies of the monsters, twisting and ripping them apart like they are no more than dolls, fills me with a horrible thrill. I refuse to allow myself to enjoy these fights, at least I try to. Of all the things I can do with these incredible powers I have gained in the last year, ripping monsters apart with the force of my will like they were…bugs, it scares me more than anything else. I will lose something important if I enjoy it too much.

  After each hour, Dovik checks in with the rest of the army using a device provided to him by Iona. Even at five hours into the assault, none of the teams have managed to locate a central chamber. By this time, two have stopped responding. The general hope is that they have simply found a spot in the hive where the communication device no longer works, similar to how the walls block soul presences. I don’t know if anyone truly believes that to be a possibility.

  This far down into the hive, we stop in an alcove I find, something that looks like a tunnel still under construction. With my mana running low, I pull back my soul presence and sit on the ground in the position I learned from the other mages, the lotus position, they called it. It takes a moment for me to find the network of energy running through my body, the circuit of tiny tubes that carry my mana.

  If I concentrate for long enough, I begin to feel the circulation of energy through the system. Exerting my will pushes the energy to flow faster, roaming through the network in a rush. My mana seems to recover in a way directly linked to how well I can circulate mana through my body. Every minute that I spend on the meditation, the pathways grow more defined. There are smaller systems within the whole I am coming to realize, objects made from the paths the mana cuts through my system.

  Even after weeks spent staring at the patterns whenever I need to meditate for a time, I feel my grasp on the system as a whole is woefully inadequate. Every time the image in my mind of the network sharpens, I realize how much further I have to go until I create a clear picture. It will take years for me to find the final picture. I haven’t even begun to truly sharpen my understanding of my vitality network, the one that carries my healing magic, and the one that carries stamina is only a theory at this point.

  Looking up from my meditation after some time, I find Dovik staring at the dark ahead of us, a small lamp lit in the corner of the tunnel for light.

  I open my mouth to say something, but a strong hand clamps down over my lips. Jor’Mari leans in close to me, a deathly serious look on his face, his eyes two black orbs of darkness. He mouths something as he stares into the shadows ahead of us, something that makes me realize no one is moving a muscle.

  “Something dangerous is coming.”

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