The old alchemy wing was a relic of gothic architecture, all pointed arches and stained glass darkened by time, grafted onto the Academy's modern skeleton. At five minutes to midnight, Arlan approached the designated service entrance—a rusted iron door set into a foundation wall, half-hidden by thorny, mana-infused brambles. He wore dark, non-reflective syn-thread, his utility belt stocked with basic tools, two mana-restoration pills, and the runic fragment—a lucky charm, or a piece of a future solution.
Umbral Sight revealed the door was warded, but the wards were old, their energy patterns faded and glitching. They were meant to alert, not bar entry. A simple tech-savant's trick—using a focused burst of neutral mana on the decayed rune's weak resonance node—would likely open it without triggering the alarm.
He was about to step forward when two figures emerged from the deeper gloom. Selene, her burgundy hair seeming to drink the scant moonlight, and a taller, stockier girl with close-cropped brown hair and ears lined with subtle sonic receptors. Blythe. Her aura was a vibrant, humming yellow, pulsing in complex, overlapping waves—2nd Order, Rank 4. A Resonance Adept, just as Selene said.
"You're punctual. Good," Selene whispered. "Blythe, this is Arlan. Arlan, Blythe. She doesn't talk much when we're working. Saves her voice for the frequencies that matter."
Blythe gave a curt nod, her eyes scanning the surroundings with professional paranoia.
"The ward is a Motesight Sentinel, circa 80 years old," Arlan said, keeping his voice low. "Its detection matrix has a dead zone in the lower-left quadrant. A targeted mana pulse of 3.4 megathaurms at a 22-degree offset should bypass it."
Selene blinked. "Or… I could just use a drop of blood from a creature that died before the ward was made to confuse its life-signature detection." She produced a tiny vial of black, viscous fluid. "Graveworm essence. Simpler."
"Your method is quieter," Arlan conceded. He was thinking like an engineer in a world of magic. He needed to adapt.
Selene applied a drop to the door's lock. The old wards shimmered, interpreting the ancient death-essence as 'nothing of concern.' The lock clicked. She pushed the door open with a groan of protesting hinges.
The air that wafted out was cold, damp, and carried the cloying scents of rot, old chemicals, and something else—ozone and psychic static. The Whispering Catacombs.
They descended a crumbling stone staircase. Arlan activated a low-level Umbral Sight, the world resolving into gradients of energy. The walls were stained with the faded, sickly green of old alchemical spills. Faint, ghostly blue echoes of long-dead researchers flitted at the edge of perception. The 'whispering' was real—a subliminal hum of residual memories and trapped emotions.
"This way," Selene murmured, her witch-senses guiding her. She moved with uncanny certainty through the branching tunnels. Blythe walked in the middle, her head tilted, listening to the acoustics of the place, her hands occasionally making subtle shaping motions as if tuning an invisible instrument.
Arlan brought up the rear, his senses stretched taut. He saw things they didn't—the almost-invisible silver tripwires of old security glyphs, which he disabled with precise shadow-tendrils to snap their connection. He spotted a pressure plate disguised as a cracked tile and pointed it out.
"Useful," Blythe grunted, her first word.
They descended for what felt like an hour, the air growing thicker, colder. The residual emotions grew darker—flashes of panic (bright orange), despair (deep blue), and the chilling, vacant grey of madness.
Finally, Selene stopped before a seemingly blank wall. "It shifts," she said. "The chamber is on the other side. The confluence is… here." She placed her palm on the stone. Her witch-magic flared, a deep purple light. The stone rippled, like the surface of a pond, revealing an archway into a large, circular chamber.
The room was a tomb and a garden. Bones—animal and humanoid—were stacked in neat alcoves. From them, and from the damp stone, grew fungi of bizarre shapes and colors. In the center of the room, on a small mound of black earth, was their prize.
The Ghost-Cap Mushroom. It was as large as a dinner plate, its cap a translucent, pearlescent white that seemed to glow with its own inner light. Beneath the cap, ghostly, ectoplasmic tendrils wafted gently in a non-existent breeze. The mana radiating from it was dense, pure, and shockingly cold. A Grade-2 treasure, indeed.
But between them and the mushroom, covering the floor, walls, and ceiling of the central area, was the Spectral Mold. It was a pulsating carpet of violet and grey, covered in tiny, phosphorescent dots that resembled eyes. It emitted a soft, hypnotic hum. As they entered, the hum intensified. The mold shifted, flowing like liquid towards them. Arlan's Umbral Sight saw it clearly—it wasn't just a plant; it was a colony organism with a rudimentary hive-mind, its energy a hungry, absorbing void.
"Blythe," Selene said, her voice tense.
Blythe stepped forward, took a deep breath, and sang.
It wasn't a song with words. It was a pure, focused tone, a resonance frequency that made the very air vibrate. Arlan felt it in his teeth, in his bones. The mold recoiled as if scalded. The hypnotic hum was drowned out by Blythe's sustained, disruptive note. The mold pulled back, clearing a narrow, trembling path to the mushroom.
"Go!" Blythe managed, the effort of maintaining the tone evident in the strain on her neck.
Selene darted forward, a glass and silver harvesting tool in her hand. Arlan moved with her, covering her flanks, his eyes scanning the bone alcoves. His paranoia was right.
As Selene carefully cut the mushroom's stem, a clicking, grinding sound came from two of the alcoves. From the piles of bones, two skeletal constructs assembled themselves. They were crude, humanoid, held together by strands of dried mold and residual alchemical bindings. Their eye sockets glowed with the same violet light as the mold. Old guardians, reactivated by the disturbance.
One lurched toward Selene, its bone-claw raised. The other turned its glowing gaze on Blythe, disrupting her focus.
Blythe's note wavered. The mold surged forward.
Arlan didn't think. He acted. He couldn't afford a major spatial tear here—the feedback in this confined, magic-saturated space could be catastrophic. Instead, he used his growing understanding of pressure and containment, learned from the runic fragment.
He focused on the space around the guardian approaching Selene. He didn't try to erase it. He tried to compress.
With a grunt of effort, he visualized that pocket of air as a box and willed the sides to collapse inward.
The air around the skeleton shimmered. There was a sound of groaning stress. The guardian's movements suddenly became sluggish, labored, as if it were moving through thick syrup. The localized spatial pressure was immense, straining its brittle bones. It slowed to a crawl.
"Hurry!" he gritted out, the effort of maintaining the compression field draining his Universal Mana rapidly.
Selene sealed the Ghost-Cap in a stasis container and turned. She saw the second guardian nearing Blythe, whose song was now a ragged hum as she fought to keep the mold at bay while evading the bones.
Selene's eyes flashed crimson. She hissed, a sound of primal fury, and flung out her hand. From her fingertips launched not magic, but five razor-sharp shards of darkness that seemed to be carved from solidified night. They slammed into the second skeleton, not breaking bones, but siphoning the residual violet energy holding it together. The glow in its eyes died. It collapsed into a harmless pile.
Witchcraft and vampiric theft combined.
"Fall back!" Selene commanded.
Arlan released the compression field. The first skeleton, suddenly free, stumbled but was immediately caught in the renewed advance of the Spectral Mold, which began to cover and dissolve it.
They ran. Blythe switched her resonance from a disruptive tone to a focused sonic pulse behind them, blasting chunks of the pursuing mold into slurry. Arlan disabled more security glyphs on the fly, his tech-mind working in overdrive. Selene led, her witch-senses finding the fastest route out.
They burst out of the service door and into the cool night air, slamming it shut behind them. For a moment, they just stood there, breathing heavily in the moonlit brambles.
Then, Selene laughed, a sound of pure, wild relief. She held up the stasis container. The Ghost-Cap glowed within, pristine. "We did it."
Blythe nodded, massaging her throat, a small smile on her face.
Arlan felt it too—a surge of something that wasn't cold calculation. Camaraderie. The shared triumph of a risk taken and conquered. He shoved it down. Sentiment was a vulnerability.
"Your payment," Selene said, opening the container. With a delicate tool, she carefully split the large mushroom into three relatively equal parts. "One for each. Consume it within twenty-four hours in a secure, meditative state. It will help with your physiques."
She handed Arlan his portion. It felt cold and strangely alive in his hand, thrumming with potential.
His personal system chimed wildly.
```
[Covert Retrieval: SUCCESS.]
[Reward: Ghost-Cap Mushroom (1/3) obtained.]
[Merit Points Equivalent: +167 MP.]
[Warning: Spatial instability spiked to 40% during compression field use. Stabilize before consumption.]
```
"Thank you," Arlan said, the words feeling foreign.
"Don't mention it," Selene said, her amber eyes serious. "Literally. To anyone. This never happened." She looked at him, then at the mushroom in his hand. "When you take that, you'll feel it trying to align you. Your affinity is… chaotic. It might be a rough ride. If you need help again, … you know where my usual haunt in the library is."
With that, the two girls melted back into the Academy's night.
Arlan clutched the cold, luminous fungus. Power. In his hand. A key to breaking his first major bottleneck.
He looked back at the dark, silent door to the Catacombs. The mission was over.
---