Above him, the girl raised her eyebrows, positioning her right hand over the hilt of her sword, which was currently in a silver sheath by her side.
It seemed that he hadn't been the only one chasing after the light.
"Hello?"
Ignoring the familiar girl's words above him, Free continued lying on the soft sand, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground with each fleeting second.
Is there any way to transfer it!?
Where the hell did it even go!?
Although Free strived for change and deviation from his mundane life, he was still human...and terribly afraid of death.
There was a fine line between exploration and stupidity.
Eclipser?
That might as well be a slur!
Who the hell did that voice think they were calling him that!?
At that moment, Free suddenly felt a bundle of warm air rush against his face, causing him to open his eyes in surprise.
And, mere inches away from his face, stood the girl's frozen pupils, not showing a hint of emotion.
"PFFT!"
In the next second, another gust of warm air rushed against his face as the girl opened her mouth and purposely took a deep breath.
Still paralyzed and limp from his sand burial earlier, Free trembled and screamed as the girl opened her mouth again.
"OK! OK! I'm awake!"
Not backing her face away from his an inch, she simply pointed at the dune... no pile of sand to the right and asked.
"Where is it?"
Should I play stupid...?
No...how would I explain just randomly being stuck in a sand dune?
She's from my village...right?
We can talk things out!
Finally opening his mouth, Free hesitated before responding.
"So, you see, I was actually af-"
*RUMBLE*
Interrupting Free's sentence, a dune to their right suddenly collapsed, and the ground below began to shake.
Immediatly, the girl leaped backward, a couple of meters to Free's right, and unsheathed her sword, revealing a thin iron sword...that shone a light blue?
The only form of light in the darkness-filled world was small orbs dropped from darkness monsters upon death that functioned like electricity and could power lights.
If she had a shining sword...it had to have come from a darkness monster.
Before Free could finish his thought, a massive shadowy figure, more than double his height and three times his width, appeared behind the fallen dune.
The creature had two tree-stump-sized legs, a stomach as wide as a table, and an extremely small human-sized head.
At the exact center of the stomach lay an empty circle, resembling the first stage of the moon cycle, "New Moon."
...is that a stuffed animal!?
In the next moment, though, the center of the creature's massive stomach started shining a pitch-black.
The creature's lips suddenly parted, but its mouth remained still, revealing two rows of pearly white teeth, each the length of my arm.
Its pitch-black pupils rose to the top of its eyelids
W-was it smiling..?
"w-what?"
All Free's lost strength immediately returned to his limbs as adrenaline flooded through his body, but it was too late.
As he stumbled backward, a circular beam of pitch-black light, darker than the sky itself, burst forward through the air, right at him.
Looking forward, all Free saw was... utter darkness, not the one he saw every day when he looked up, but...the absence of any light.
Momentarily catching Free's attention from the dark beam heading at him, a cold and somewhat...familiar voice sounded from his left...?
"Now."
Since when was there a person there...?
As the beam approached him, Free suddenly looked left...and there, standing atop a nearby dune, looking down at the girl and him, was a figure he knew.
Her curly blonde hair flew backward in the wind as her emotionless voice echoed in the vast desert.
Before Free could even question anything, the mysterious girl to his right leaped forward off the ground, her sword drawing a light-blue semicircle in the sky over her head.
As her sword passed the 180-degree mark, it vertically cut right through the creature's right shoulder, causing the creature to tilt left.
The pitch-black beam immediatly followed, disappearing from in front of Free, and appearing to the left, in the area between the blonde-haired girl atop the dune and him.
While the mysterious girl slid down the creature's lengthy body, her light-blue sword still embedded in it, the other girl suddenly picked up a bow.
The bow itself was normal...yet the arrows she strung into it were not.
Leaning down, she picked up three arrows, each of their tips shining a light blue, and simultaneously strung them into her recurved bow.
Even with three arrows strung in her bow, she managed to pull the string back and immediatly let it snap forward.
*WHOOSH*
*WHOOSH*
*WHOOSH*
Flying through the air like comets, the three light-blue-tipped arrows all aimed at different targets: one up at the dark beast's head, one straight at the middle stomach, and one down at the leg.
At that moment, the pitch-black beam passed right by Free's left, separating the blonde girl from his sight, and pierced through the sand dune behind.
Defying gravity, the dune didn't even collapse...a massive circle-shaped hole simply appeared in it as the beam of darkness continued into the desert.
When Free turned my head back to the creature, it had already been hit by the three arrows, weakening it to the point of collapse.
*CRASH*
Falling to the side like a domino tower collapsing, the creature's massive body dropped on the sand sideways, shaking the ground.
The dark beam suddenly flickered for a moment, like a light switch turning on and off, before disappearing.
Retracting her sword from the beast, the mysterious girl leaped backward right before hitting the ground.
Raising her light-blue sword to the sky, she brought it down with incredible speed, cutting right through the creature's flesh like a knife cutting butter.
With that, the creature's body trembled for a moment before halting...permanently.
A white light suddenly flashed in the mysterious girl's palm as her eyes scanned the air in front of her as if she were reading something.