The next day, midnight. The only free time students had to rest, yet here they were, at the familiar Backwoods, or to be more precise, near the pine forest's edge. The trees were so dense that even the moonlight couldn't reach the ground. Absolute black under the canopy.
And among those dense pines, the rustle of moving through undergrowth, and these two.
One was obviously Lucian: dark charcoal sweatpants, a plain dark grey woolen pullover, and a dark woolen watch-cap pulled down over his ears. He was carrying a burlap sack.
After they slipped through the gap in the fence, where no camera or patrol had been spotted, they pushed deeper toward the far end of the Backwoods.
Lucian's hand was... ehm... embarrassingly tugging at the hem of Karin's clothes as she kept moving forward through the trees.
She was wearing a faded dark green canvas tunic, threadbare at the collar, with a thin wool undershirt beneath and dark, worn combat trousers. She too was carrying a burlap sack.
How embarrassing... but honestly I can't see anything.
His lips twitched. His ash-gray eyes were open, useless, staring at a black that didn't end.
It occurred to him that the words he'd used to mock her, muscle head, were... a bit rude, given that he was the one clinging to her sleeve to cross the Backwoods.
Finally, they broke out of the trees. The night air hit colder, almost biting at his skin, but what caught his attention was something at the edge of his vision, dim under a half-clouded moon: a rim.
White with frost. Below it the Pit was pure black, swallowing the first few meters entirely, with mist rising off the water in slow columns and glowing faintly in the moonlight.
"Finally here!"
But while Lucian stood there, both amazed and a little overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Sunken Quarry, Karin had been holding back a grin the whole way.
She turned to face him, wolf-gray ponytail swinging, the thin white scar at the corner of her mouth pulling her smile sideways.
"Let's go, Croft!"
She reached for his hand, probably because he'd been tugging at her tunic hem, but Lucian had already let go and stepped back.
"Wait, wait." He narrowed his eyes at the dark. "What do you mean, go?"
He'd already spotted the ladders, dark rusted lines dropping into the pit, and the two cranes at the east end, leaning out over the drop like frozen herons.
He could see no other way down.
Does this muscle head intend to jump?
"Don't we need the ladders?"
Karin blinked at him. Her amber-gold eyes went wide, then narrowed. Then the corner of her mouth pulled up.
"You're asking me that?" She looked him up and down once, deliberately, head tilted, a loose strand of hair falling across one eye. "The man who put a Committee officer through a wall last week, scared of a ladder?"
"I'm not scared. I'm sane."
"Same thing."
She closed the distance before he could move, got a fistful of his pullover at the shoulder with her bandaged knuckles and pulled him in, close enough that he could smell the woodsmoke on her collar.
"B-blake!"
"What, you scared?"
The grin pulled the scar sideways again.
"Wait!"
She jumped and took him with her.
The air hit his face like a slap. His hair whipped upward. The watch-cap nearly tore off his head.
This absolute lunatic!
And then it stopped. Abruptly. Ten seconds, no more.
"Heheh. Surprised?"
She'd let go of him and turned away, both hands loose at her sides, hair half-loose from the ponytail and her chest still moving from the drop. She was grinning like she'd just told a joke he hadn't gotten yet.
Only then did he register the ground under his boots. A wide dirt track, packed and weathered. A faint pale curve cutting back into the mist below them.
The ramp.
It caught a ledge of the western wall about fifteen meters down from the rim, invisible from above unless you already knew it was there.
Lucian stared at it.
She just shrugged and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. "I don't scout something and then come back blind, Croft."
…
The ramp curved downward, the light fading with every step. Earth pressed in from both sides , raw rock on the left, and on the right, past a lip of loose gravel, the black drop into the pit.
Finally, the temperature dropped below freezing. The only sounds were their footsteps echoing off the walls. Earth on all sides, pressing in.
At some point Karin had unwrapped her five-foot iron cleaver from its heavy woven canvas. Lucian was already holding his pocket knife.
"We're here." The playful tone was gone. Both of them went quiet.
The Sunken Quarry. At its base lay a flooded subterranean pool coated in a skin of blue ice.
So that's what they look like.
Lucian's eyes narrowed. The clouds had shifted off the moon somehow, and he could see better down here than he'd expected.
Exactly as instructor had said. Roughly sixty to eighty centimeters in length, pale blue bodies, translucent. He could see the organs through the skin, dark masses suspended in blue gel.
Kind of like that thing from Earth. What was that fish called?
The backs were segmented calcium plates, jagged and overlapping, each one a dull white-blue, rimed with frost. Armor made of ice and bone.
That was the strength.
And the weakness, Lucian muttered to himself as he found the belly. Soft, pale, unprotected. No plates. Just membrane, thin enough that the pressure showed through it.
The head was barely distinct from the body, a blunt front end with a dark, rasping mouth plate. Eyes: none. Not even sockets.
Roughly eight to twelve in total.
"So much food!"
Unlike Lucian, Karin was excited, the kind of excited that was a little terrifying.
Her amber-gold eyes had gone bright, her whole face lit up, and that focused look of hers was less like a fighter sizing up an enemy and more like a chef sizing up ingredients.
The slugs were clustered at the base of the fissure wall, overlapping, half-buried in ice.
They were simply grinding their mouth plates against the rock in slow, patient arcs, scraping up mineral sediment, completely unbothered by the intruders.
Then Karin looked at him, and her expression shifted. The excitement went out of it, replaced by something more careful. The ponytail had stopped swinging.
"So," she said, quieter. "The strategy?"
Hmm? He noticed the change.
Perhaps because she had seen he take down a Rank 2 Aura Knight, which should have been impossible.
She had also seen what he could do with beast meat loaded with toxins. Somehow, Karin now had started trusting his judgment?