[h3][b][color=367597]Lysette[/color], [color=a36209]Riss[/color] and Sirius[/b][/h3]
The loud whistle echoed throughout the mineshaft. Riss briefly wonders how deep the cavern extends. Unlike Riss, Sirius had covered his ears to prevent from dying to the sound, “L-let’s not.”

“Aww… okay. I guess we just head deeper now?” Lysette asks.

“Yes, that would be-” Sirius is cut off when a great menagerie of cries sound out like one might hear at a slaughterhouse. Immediately, the party is accosted by the closest ones, the airy cries of canaries, their yellow feathers transitioning into purple going down their bodies with tail feathers replaced with a foul trail of black, hazy fluff.
Reacting to the sudden assault, Sirius boxes the six canaries with a cube of light.

Riss steps closer to the caged birds. “Aw, they’re pretty cute.” The canaries savagely smash their beaks against the cube with deranged fervor.

Sirius knows he won’t be able to maintain the cube indefinitely, so he shrinks it and lowers the canaries to the ground. “Lysette, can you deal with that?” 

Lysette stares at the frantically writhing birds in the small container. She considers stabbing them, but reconsiders and decides otherwise. Instead she would position her foot carefully above the cube and stomp downward, amplifying her leg with Qi to crush the birds with excessive force.The light drops just before her foot hits the birds, smashing most of them and severing the squishy tails of the other ones, leaving a viscous mess beneath her.

Lysette lifts her foot, looking at the mess with disdain. “Gross.”

A couple of the canaries escape and are promptly smacked out of the air with a shovel. “That takes care of that.” Riss says, leaning against his gardening weapon.

“Mind if I take one Riss? I wanna try poisoning my swords or something cool like that.” Lysette asks, chalk at the ready.

Riss stares at Sirius, having already left to stand watch. “Uh… if you don’t mind me taking [i]five[/i]…?” Riss pulls out his own chalk, ideas for artifacts already taking shape. He heads over to the mess of feathers and blood and begins separating the bodies, careful not to touch any of the black piles of gunk their tails left behind. One by one, he turns them into little skulls on strings to wear, each with small inscriptions to differentiate their abilities.

Riss picks up one of the intact birds and brings it over to SIrius. “Are you certain that you don’t want any of them?”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m not interested in Death. You’d probably use it better than I can,” Sirius responds.

Riss shakes his head. “We could all use more sealed artifacts, and if not even that, you could always just use it as a money artifact.”

“But it would be hindering your progress in death. I can make sealed artifacts out of manabeasts people aren’t going to need,” Sirius counters. 

Riss stares at Sirius in the eyes for a good three seconds of unblinking, unemoting uncertainty before saying “Okay then.” and turning around to get with making it into a fifth skull necklace. Only after completing the final necklace does he realize none of these artifacts have much direct use in combat.

Lysette singles out the remaining bird, much cleaner due to having died from blunt force trauma by a shovel, and pushes it to the side to give Riss some more room to work with. Delving further into her bag, she pulls out her sets of chalk and begins circling the bird in red. Now focused into a single canary feather, she holds a sealed artifact, capable of applying a magical poison onto objects. Satisfied with her creation, she sticks the feather to the side of her hat, quite fashionable and deadly. Finished with her crafting session, she cleans up her chalk and looks to Riss, who was still at it, now adorning himself with… skulls. [i]So edgy.[/i]

Sirius leans against the earth wall, keeping an eye out for anything that may approach the pair while they were creating their artifacts.

After Riss wiped off his shovel, collapsed it and put it back in his backpack, he approaches Sirius, then stares at the darkness looming ahead of them. He turns back and sees Lysette ready to go, so he nods his head towards the blackness.. “Lead the way.”

Sirius takes the lead, the sphere of light floating in front of him. As they descend, an eerie quality seems to surround them. Flickers of movement, glints of light where there should be none. Yet, as much as one might interpret these as red flags, nothing happened.

Soon enough they start to hear a strange noise, the sound of metal scraping stone. Sirius points the light forward, less like a lantern and more like a flashlight. The scraping gets closer and closer until eventually, a large, spiky limb rounds a corner, followed by the remainder of the creature. A stubby, wingless dragon dressed from top to bottom in spiky metal plates appears, somehow shining in the light despite its dank environment. It was like a giant armored lizard with claws, a horn, and no tail. His voice drops to a whisper, “Does anyone have an idea on how to take on this thing?”

Riss calmly pulls out his shovel again. “You ever feel what it’s like to have a nail ripped off?”

“No?”


“Me neither, but I imagine it would be unpleasant.” With that Riss runs forward, jukes its initial goring headbutt and hops on top of it. He immediately jams his shovel into the back of a large spike atop its head and starts to push against it like a crowbar while decaying away where the plate meets skin. Immediately, it begins to buck, but clearly, it was not made for jumping. Instead it begins to ram itself into nearby walls sideways, trying to remove Riss, and after a few tries, Riss has to concede, evacuating while pulling the shovel out the wrong direction, ripping it off more.

The manabeast, suddenly much angrier than it was before, stands there with its metal plate drooping off its head crookedly, pulling at raw skin never meant to feel air. Riss starts to feel bad for it before it roars, an awful sound echoing across the cave just as the whistle.

From behind Sirius and Lysette, the sounds of metal scraping against rock repeats as a second one appears a ways away, charging at them. At the same time, the first one was clearly moving in to attack.

Things were escalating fast, so there was no time to coordinate. “Try not to hit the edges of their metal plates. If the edges become jagged, they’ll cut us instantly.” Riss wiped a small cut on his leg with the jeans around it and went to meet the second dragon-lizard-dinosaur [i]thing[/i].

To distract the second metal beast, Sirius fires a beam of light into each of its eyes. The armored dragon-lizard shrieks and starts blindly charging around, ramming into walls haphazardly. Sirius secretly hopes that the ceiling above them wouldn’t crash down on them.

Lysette spots the opening that Riss provided on the rare metal dragon. With a Qi enhanced leap toward the roaring roar dragon roaring, she lands above the exposed rare metal flesh. Drawing a sword in each hand, she stabs downward, burying the blades into the beast’s rare metal head. It begins to move erratically to get Lysette off, and now it’s Lysette’s turn to play cowboy on Mr. Dragon’s wild ride.

The numerous rare metal spikes were convincing enough for Lysette to release her grip and retreat from the flailing rare metal dragon. With both of her swords still stuck in the rare metal opening, it was a wonder that the rare metal dragon was still standing. “Maybe I should have poisoned the blades before sticking them in…”

Riss casually takes a step onto the blinded rare metal dragon and begins digging. Rather than trying to crowbar a plate off, he instead just tries to shove the shovel all the way through as he decays the skin connecting it to flesh. This works much better, his shovel smacking the horn on its face as the plate pops off. The rare metal dragon doesn’t like this one bit and tries to smash its horn into Riss, bending over backwards as best as its stubby stature allows.

It’s actually kind of pathetic. Rare metal “dragons” clearly aren’t predators.

Riss gets off of it anyway so that he can deliver a smack to its face with his shovel, which immediately clangs, leaving his shovel vibrating and a skin-crawling echo resounding throughout the mine. Clearly, shovels are musical instruments.

“You can enchant my sword and I’ll go stab it,” Sirius states, offering his weapon to Lysette, who complies and enchants the blade with a poisonous edge. Forming a series of steps with his light constructs, Sirius gains some vertical ground on the manabeast. When he’s on top of its weak point area, he drops down and thrusts his sword downward into its flesh. The metal dragon-lizard roars and rears suddenly, and Sirius barely manages to stay on by keeping a firm grip on the sword. The manabeast falls back to the ground with a weak growl and stays still. Sirius pulls out his sword from the creature’s head.
“Whew. One down, one more to go.”

Now able to retrieve her swords from the defeated rare metal dragon, Lysette pulls them free and sits back to watch Riss dig to his heart’s content. 

The dragon, reeling from the fact that its head was made to vibrate enough to produce a sound, patiently waits as Riss rummages through his bag for something sharp and settles for a pair of gardening clippers. Like a knife, he stabs it through the exposed flesh as deep as possible and tries to hold onto it, twisting it hideously as the rare metal dragon panics.

It probably makes it more pissed, but getting on top of its back is probably the safest place for this, considering how there are horn-like spikes coming out of its face and joints. Eventually the dragon moves erratically enough for the knife to come out of its head, where Riss leaps off and begins to make some distance in case it starts a chase.

As it so happens, that is exactly what it does. Unfortunately, it is still blind.

As it crashes into the wall, it falls over, blood pouring from its rare metal stab wound. Riss looks back at Sirius and Lysette. “You know, removing Lysette’s knives to let it bleed out would have probably been enough to kill it.” Riss moves back in to finish off the rare metal dragon in case it was still alive, and with that the combat comes to a rare metal close.

Riss, emulated Sirius from earlier, stands on the side and begins cleaning his gardening tools while keeping watch. “So, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you guys going for metal?”
Sirius, drawing a circle around the first slain rare metal dragon, responds, “I’ll be wearing armor in the future and the extra protection and the offensive capability metal offers is useful. I’m also looking into mirrors though.” He rips off the dangling plate and begins concentrating the beast’s  mana into the metal. [i]I can probably get this shaped into an armor piece when I get back.[/i]

“I want to sword faster.” Lysette states, slowly encircling the other rare metal dragon in chalk. Several strong whacks to the beast’s rare metal horn removes it from the body to serve as the collection point. Unfortunately, with her Wind mana conflicting with the Metal in the new reagent, she would be unable to start absorbing from this artifact until she depleted her Wind mana pool, which would be unwise to do in such a risky environment. “Into the bag you go!” Lysette says as she tosses her belongings into her bag.

As the party finishes up their preparations, the mineshaft seems to come alive. The walls shake, rocks start to fall, it was like some sort of earthquake hit all at once. Riss tries to regain his balance as the shaking eases and begins heading toward where they came from. “I think that’s our cue to leave.”

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Sirius agrees.

[i]Must be my whistle blowing,[/i] Lysette thinks.

The party begins to leave, slowly making their way back to the surface, but no matter how much closer they get to it, the rumbling only seems to get worse.

They walk in silence for several minutes before Riss notices a distinct change in the rumblings and turns around to find a horde of Earth manabeasts approaching rapidly. Bats, crabs, moles, scorpions, spiders, rabbits, rats, and countless insects of several varieties. A veritable swarm was approaching, and there was no way in [i]hell[/i] that the party of three could deal with them all at once.

“Run.” Giving a one-word warning, Riss begins to run.

Sirius bolts after Riss.

Lysette runs. Fast. Zoom Zoom. Combining Wind and Qi together resulted in her running speed significantly increasing, overtaking both of them.

Despite their speed however, the entrance to the mine was still too far away. The manabeasts overtake Sirius, then Riss. Lysette abandons her comrades to die. [i]Goodbye my friends…[/i]

[i]I’ve already used quite a bit of Light mana. If I use too much more, I’ll get backlash.[/i] Clutching his new metal regent, Sirius creates a protective metal shield around him and Riss. Countless Earth manabeasts swerve around the structure, some accidentally headbutt it in their haste and fall over dazed. Eventually, the stream of creatures stop and Sirius tentatively peeks out from the shield. The coast was clear. He turns to Riss, “What do you think that was all about?”

Riss doesn’t answer immediately, but when a god-awful screech rips out from behind the shield, he no longer has to.

Once in the open, the swarm of small manabeasts behind Lysette disperse outward in waves, many slowing down in the harsh sunlight. Rapid kicks into the crowd eliminate manabeasts at random. Free artifacts go flying left and right. The scene becomes less joyous when Riss and Sirius come running out of the mine entrance followed by what appears to be, from where Lysette’s standpoint, a giant crystal centipede.

Lysette keeps running, stuffing many fallen creatures into her bag on the way to the train. [i]Goodbye my friends…[/i]

Mandibles clack menacingly against each other, as the centipede swivels its head side to side searching for food. It lunges forward and snaps up a nearby rabbit. The bones crunch audibly as the centipede consumes the animal.

Sirius pales visibly. Lysette pales distantly. Riss is fine. Too fine, really. He looks towards Sirius. “Got any plans? I can think of a few, but domesticating it seems difficult.”

“Can you distract it? I’ll try to cut off its mandibles first. And then we can go at it relatively safely,” Sirius comments.  

Riss stares at Sirius, looking back at the centipede. “It looks pretty distracted already. Are you sure it’s a good idea to bring its attention to the humans around with the [i]allure of food[/i]?

“Use your best judgement,” Sirius begins rushing towards the centipede, sword drawn.

“Do your best!” Lysette yells from a distance.

Riss takes a close-mouthed sigh before making dead… cows would actually be too big for the centipede, wouldn’t they? Pigs then. Riss leaves a small trail of pigs for the centipede to reach down and eat. Riss, the greatest Bacon Mage the world has ever known.

The centipede seems to take notice at the great quantity of literal bacon being presented and gets down instead of rearing up dramatically all the time. It crawls over, its crystalline legs stabbing into the ground all the way, producing the sound of jackhammers.

As he nears the giant crystal insect, he approaches carefully. The manabeast was devouring the crass amounts of bacon, distracted by its feast. Sirius holds the sword above a mandible and swings down with as much force as he can muster. The mandible snaps right off, crystal being brittle and all. He immediately swings the sword up at the other mandible. The centipede scurries backwards rapidly, but Sirius manages to partially sever the other mandible before it escapes. The appendage dangles uselessly from the centipede’s mouth as it rears up and screeches with anger. It attempts to devour Sirius by lunging and actually would have, if not for the metal shell that materializes around him. The centipede experiences rebound from its own kinetic energy and is momentarily stunned. 

Riss climbs up a leg and starts breaking off anything crystalline he can reach with a shovel. The centipede proves to be universes more flexible than the rare metal dragon and scoops up Sirius, swallowing him whole before twisting its body and eating Riss as well.

Riss stares at Sirius in the fleshy confines of a centipede, a mound of small animals is the only thing between them and stomach acid. “I think I like the domestication plan better.”

Riss grabs Sirius and pushes past him, putting Riss closer to the stomach. “You might want to hold on or… I don’t know, just don’t… get stuck.”

“Errr...what?” Sirius asks, confused.

Riss begins creating cow after cow, the biggest animal he has available to him. Riss suddenly gets a flashback about how cows are too large for the centipede to comfortably eat.

In no time at all, the walls of flesh surrounding them start to convulse, and soon enough Sirius, Riss and multiple cows are being upchucked. Before the cows come, Riss climbs atop its stooped figure and begins smacking its face with a shovel. In physical pain both internally and externally, it does its best to shake it off with as little movement as possible and fails as Riss holds on by eye sockets and antennae, whacking it over and over until he hears something break. As the centipede expels another cow, it seems to have lost all ability to properly react to the things being done to it. Taking advantage of this, Sirius begins hacking away at the point where the head attaches to the body. Eventually he makes adequate progress wherein he decapitates it with a metal wall. Riss hops off of it as Sirius stabs it through the head for good measure. It seems that the centipede is dead.

But it’s a centipede.

The remainder of its enormous body writhes around violently. A giant pillar of centipede meat and carapace raises up and immediately comes crashing down right over Sirius. Sirius tries to backpedal but when another metal wall collapses, he closes his eyes and accepts his horrible fate.

For some reason however, it never lands. Sirius opens his eyes slowly when the expected weight never drops on him to find himself in the shadow of the headless centipede clumsily holding itself up with a few of its legs.

Riss yells from his spot outside of the shadow. “You should get out of there.”

Sirius doesn’t need another prompt before booking it. 

The pair rapidly abscond as the body flails in random directions, going back to Lysette,who’s been spectating the whole thing lazily. The sight of several small animals and insects being crushed under the centipede’s weight was equally as horrifying as debt.

Riss looks at the mess covering himself and Sirius, a light burning sensation covering his body. He turns to Lysette and looks her in the eyes. “You could have prevented this.”

Sirius goes over to the piles of slightly burned manabeasts, cows, and giant centipede corpse and begins to gingerly separate them by element --a process made much more difficult by the constant burning sensation all over his body. Most are Earth, a few are varying types of Crystals, and another small portion are Metal. Sirius plucks out a few manabeasts and motions for Riss to come over to partake in the spoils. He draws multiple small formations around each fallen corpse to convert them to reagents. 

Sirius was adamant to give Riss (and not Lysette) every single fucking Earth artifact, causing his backpack to jingle with the sounds of artifacts clanking against gardening equipment. Sirius himself was able to pick out the bodies a few small-fry metal and crystal manabeasts, and with Riss’ help, the centipede itself. Rolling it up to fit in a chalk circle of reasonable size took longer than it did to convert the rest of the bodies, but when it was finished, Sirius had a pendant to show for it. It was just a simple rectangle piece of crystal with the end cut to a tip with a leather cord looping around his neck. 

“Let’s head back as soon as possible,” Sirius states, “The sooner we get treatment the better. I don’t have anything for acid, unfortunately.”

Riss ponders for a moment, strapping on his backpack. “We’re not exactly drenched; I think we’ll be fine, but you’re right. It’s better to be on the safe side. [i]Let’s go Lysette[/i].”

They return to the orphanage and take a well-deserved shower.

Lysette regrets many things and laments her missed opportunity to combat [i]the[/i] [b]greatest evil[/b].

Debt.