Abyssal Awakening

"Why… Why must it be like this… Luthor… Please…" The woman\'s voice called out.

"Please… Why does it have to be her… Kill me if you have to… But why must it be her?"

In this darkness, Alice floated aimlessly as tears started to flood her eyes.

\'Am I… Crying? Why…\' Alice questioned herself as her mind slowly gained clarity.

The last thing she remembered was Allura wrapping them in her flames before diving down into the bowls of the ravine.

Remembering this, Alice snapped her eyes open and sat up while looking around her.

"Woah there, take it easy. Ria is still napping." Allura\'s voice brought her back as she looked to her left and saw Allura leaning against a boulder while there was a small campfire in the middle. To her right, Ria was currently sleeping.

"You were crying in your sleep. Was the journey down that bad?" Allura asked as Alice noticed her tears hadn\'t stopped yet.

"Ah… No. It was… A weird dream." Alice shook her head while wiping her tears away with her sleeves.

Furrowing her brows, Alice held her head while remembering the words of the woman in her dream.

She called out for a man called Luthor. A name familiar to her as it belonged to her father.

\'Was… That woman my mother?\'

She doesn\'t remember her mother\'s voice nor what she looks like. After years in the Zenia prison, all she could remember are her tortures and the faces of her captors. Especially her brothers and her father. Her biggest sources of betrayal.

\'What happened that night…\' Shaking her head, Alice sighed out as a heavy feeling plagued her chest.

"Where are we right now?" Alice asked, wanting to put her focus elsewhere so she could forget this discomfort.

Looking around her, she could see that they were hidden within a rock formation right now. Despite the fire and smoke giving away their location, nothing was attacking them.

"We\'re at the bottom of the Ravine. I didn\'t take us too far, I\'d say about… a 5 minute walk from where we landed?" Allura tapped her chin as Alice stood up and climbed over the rock walls.

From where she was sitting, she couldn\'t see much as all she could see was the darkness that hung over her head.

As she climbed over the rocks to see what was around them, the smell of charred flesh assaulted her nose as she widened her eyes in shock.

Large corpses belonging to a variety of beasts were scattered around them. The weaker ones seemed to have been reduced to ashes while the larger ones had parts of their body still intact.

Regardless of the state of their body, a graveyard of beasts surrounded them.

"Don\'t mind them. Just a few pests that tried to attack without knowing what\'s good for them. Honestly, even when I release my aura, some of the beasts still attack out of fear. Some just don\'t know what\'s good for them I guess" Allura shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

Hearing that Allura had called them \'pests\' Alice couldn\'t help but glance back in bewilderment. Though considering Allura\'s power, she was not wrong.

Even so, all of these beasts seemed to be at the level of five to six stars. Just one was enough to kill both her and Ria never mind a whole batch of them like this.

Looking past the corpses, Alice finally caught a glimpse of their surroundings.

Compared to the mystical nature of the areas she\'s been to so far, this was far darker and ominous.

Black roots ruptured from the rocks and walls, while vines hung from the darkness above. A constant mist layered the ground while the remains of corpses could be spotted, breaching the ground with their claws.

Silhouettes that seemed to look like trees without leaves with flickering shadows between the gaps. It felt as though a beast could jump out the moment she stepped away from the safety of Allura.

"You might want to be careful. The average level around this layer is six Sigils, especially when we are this deep. The closer we get to our destination, the higher the chances are to run into a seven star beast so make sure you don\'t get too far from me when we leave." Allura reminded as Alice swallowed her saliva in nervousness.

Making sure that Alice took this time to rest up as she had used quite a bit of blood on the way down, Allura kept an eye out for beasts who were unafraid of death.

While waiting for Ria to wake up, Alice\'s mind finally calmed down from her strange dream as she sat down and drank some healing blood.

"Just out of curiosity, how long does it take for the side effects to disappear? You don\'t have to answer if you don\'t want to. I\'m just wondering if you know your limits." Allura asked. While she didn\'t want Alice to recount her traumatic past, her physique was her strongest weapon right now.

The more she understands her own situation, the better her odds of survival are.

"It depends on the strength of the side effect… Sometimes they take minutes to disappear, sometimes they take hours. The longest one took about 3 days I think." Alice replied, trying her best to remember the results of the experiments.

"The ones that take the longest are those that build up and manifest like Vampire Lilies. That one took 2 days to disappear once it manifested the flower on my back. If I\'m not being injured with other wounds, the side effects disappear faster."

Hearing this, Allura raised an eyebrow as this was stranger than what she had expected.

\'Seems like Alice has some kind of recovery ability. I don\'t think that\'s exactly normal even if she is able to recover from side effects. If the time to recover changes based on her wounds, then it might mean her body needs to focus on her wounds before attending to the side effects… Then again… Alice\'s recovery has been rather fast compared to normal standards.\'

Allura remembered the time she was first exposed to Alice\'s secret. How quickly her body patched her wounds up as she approached death\'s doorstep. The way her wounds closed up was fresh in her mind.

\'This isn\'t the first anomaly I\'ve seen thus far considering the Blood Cult is messing with dead gods and the Eclipse Cult is messing with sealed Abyss Lords.\' Allura scratched her head while pulling out a cigarette.

Just as she lit up the cigarette, she noticed Alice giving it a glance occasionally.

"Curious?" Allura asked with a smile.

"A little. Is it… tasty? You do it a lot."

"Tasty? Hmm… Not quite. It\'s just routine for me now I suppose. Plus, it\'s not like it does me any harm." Allura shrugged.

"I don\'t think you should try it though haha."

Scratching her cheek, Alice nodded her head as she wasn\'t a fan of the smell.

It didn\'t take too long for Ria to wake up as the sound of their talking and the beasts that tried to attack only to be burnt to a crisp by Allura was quite loud.

Sitting up, Ria seemed to be half away as her eyes were barely open while she sluggishly looked around her.

"Whaz goin on?" She asked softly while blinking her eyes.

"Wakey wakey. We\'ve stayed still for long enough now. If we keep delaying, we might not make it back in time." Allura clapped her hand as Ria nodded her head slowly before standing up and yawning.

Rubbing her eyes, she stood next to Allura without much input and just followed as though she was sleep walking.

"Seems like she exhausted herself more than I expected. Might take her a bit of time to get back to normal." Allura smiled.

"Anyways, let me do this as a precaution. You can never be too careful out here."

Snapping her fingers, she created two small motes of fire before capturing them in small glass containers.

"Keep them on you and crush it if you get into any danger. If things go south and I can\'t immediately be there to help you, this\'ll deal with the threat. Even if it doesn\'t kill, which I doubt, it\'ll buy you some time." Allura reassured as she handed one container to Alice while giving the other to Ria who stored it away without another word.

"I think that\'s everything now. Let\'s go."

Digging her fingers into the boulder behind her, Allura tossed it aside as though it was garbage and started to make her way through the Abyss.

Hearing the loud thud followed by the screeches of Abyss beasts, Alice didn\'t hesitate and followed closely behind Allura.

"How did you come across this place? Didn\'t Gin make this ravine recently?"

"I found it quite a few years ago. Personally, I had never used it, so I left a marker at the location. With the beasts that surround this place, I doubt any of the noble families managed to locate it and even if they did, I would\'ve known. I was keeping this place as a bargaining chip if I needed one.

Just like the blood I used to trade for the sparring session, they come in handy once in a while so it doesn\'t hurt to collect or mark down a few things here and there." Allura explained with a shrug.

Over the years, she had marked down hundreds to thousands of locations that could be useful for her future endeavours. She just never found a situation for them yet.

"Are they all places like the communal point?"

"Nope. Some are ruins, some have treasures. One place I marked down used to belong to a weird b*stard who kept collecting cursed crap. Things that have malicious abilities embedded into them thanks to certain beasts. Weird pieces of armour that cover strange places and even a spear made of ice that never melted. It was a pretty good storage vault though so I marked it down.

"I\'ll make note of some places on a map for you in the future since they\'re not suited for your strength right now. Going there means death for you." Allura smiled.

As Alice is her family now, this could be considered her inheritance to some capacity.