Akiko stood at the edge of the borehole, the shaft dropping away into darkness beneath her boots. Heat still rolled up from below in heavy waves, caught and scattered by the faint shimmer of her cold-forged runes. Her breath fogged in the thin, mineral-tanged air, whisked away by unseen drafts spiraling up from the depths.

Beside her, Raya adjusted the seals on her borrowed suit, movements deliberate but betraying a tightness at the shoulders that hadn't eased since they started threading through the heavy safety doors. Her visor turned just enough to catch the dim lights, revealing a faint reflection of worry in the curve of her lips.

"This is the part," Akiko muttered, "where you pretend this is all perfectly normal."

Raya let out a sharp, almost brittle laugh. "I'd settle for 'marginally survivable.'"

Akiko smirked, but it was thin, stretched around the edges of strain. Her claws flexed at her sides, foxfire crackling between them; playful, almost eager to launch her into the drop. The moon's gravity was already low enough to trick the body into thinking it was safer than it was. But too much momentum, and they'd still crater at the bottom.

She reached for Raya's arm, glove closing over the padded sleeve of the suit. Through the layered insulation, she still felt the faint tremor. Magic pooled around Raya in subtle threads, gathering for the barrier that would keep the pressure from crushing them like paper.

"Ready?" Akiko breathed.

Raya's answer came in a whisper, audible only because of the helmet comms. "Just don't let go."

Akiko's ears twitched, a small ache catching in her chest. She didn't answer, just drew Raya close, the mining laser braced along her other arm, cool against her suit where it slotted in. Then she let the foxfire surge through her legs. A controlled burn, blue-white heat rippling off the ice runes, sending faint plumes of frost skating across the deck.

They stepped off the edge together.

Gravity caught them and Akiko's foxfire flickered, pushing against the fall. They sank faster than walking pace, slower than true freefall, the borehole walls streaking past in smudges of rust and mineral deposits. Below, darkness swallowed all detail.

The cold aura held, sloughing off heat that tried to claw its way in, while subtle ripples of golden light flickered around them. Raya's barrier, tense and flexing under pressure.

Akiko's every sense was keyed to the balance: enough thrust to keep their descent gentle, not so much that it overwhelmed Raya's magic. She could feel Raya's breath, small gasps over the comms, her mana spinning in fierce, careful patterns.

As they descended, the atmosphere changed. The press of mana thickened, at first like humidity, a subtle weight gathering on Akiko's shoulders, then growing denser. Her tail twitched uneasily, foxfire crawling under her skin as if testing the boundaries of the containment she'd woven.

By the time they neared what should have been the geothermal vent's natural terminus, Akiko slowed to a halt. Her claws scraped across something not quite rock. A layer of dense, water-aspected mana, slick and cool even through her gauntlets.

She leaned close. The surface wasn't exactly visible, but she could feel it. Like pressing a hand to the skin of a pond, just before it gave way and plunged into something far deeper. It wasn't purely physical. It was metaphysical, a membrane that separated this space from something else.

Raya touched her shoulder, and even through the layered suits and containment fields, Akiko felt the small tremor in her fingers. "This… isn't the vent anymore, is it."

"No," Akiko whispered. Her breath fogged faintly against her field. "It feels like a threshold. Almost like… a dungeon. But different. It doesn't have Karn's signature. Something else."

Beyond this barrier, she could sense something vast and tangled. The source of the mana flux. The reason the Hold's systems were failing.

She swallowed. Met Raya's hidden gaze, trusting that beneath the helmet her eyes were steady.

"You ready to step off the edge?" Akiko asked, voice thin but trying.

Raya's answering squeeze on her shoulder was firm. "Always."

Akiko pressed her clawed hand against the mana-slick surface, feeling the cool vibration ripple up her arm.

Raya's hand found hers, squeezed once. Through the comm, her voice came soft but certain. "On three."

Akiko gave a tense nod, then drew in a slow breath.

Together, they dropped downward.

The membrane yielded like water, then swallowed them completely. For a heartbeat there was nothing but cold, though it wasn't biting or painful. Just vast and heavy, a sense of distance stretching in every direction.

Then they emerged into open space.

Akiko's momentum eased into a gentle suspension, her tail flicking out to steady her as momentum slowed. Even that motion dragged at the water, sluggish and unresponsive.

Around them stretched a massive underwater cavern, the walls lost in haze. Threads of bioluminescence ran through the stone in meandering veins, glowing a dim aquamarine that seemed to pulse with their own hidden rhythm. Tiny organisms, no bigger than dust motes, drifted in lazy spirals, catching the glow and scattering it like living snow.

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She flexed her fingers. Her foxfire responded, but sluggishly, heat immediately wicking into the dense liquid around them, devoured before it could spread.

She turned to Raya, whose suit was now softly haloed by the barrier field, tiny bubbles racing across its surface as if it constantly adjusted to equalize forces. Beneath the helmet, Akiko couldn't see her expression, but the steady grip of her hand was enough.

"You alright?" Akiko asked, voice hushed despite the comm.

Raya gave a short nod. "Feels… weird. Like standing inside a bubble that wants to pop. But I've got it."

Akiko let out a slow, careful breath. The cavern felt impossibly still, their movements sending faint currents curling away in long, delicate ribbons. Somewhere deeper, something stirred, a suggestion of vast shapes, or perhaps just tricks of the refracted glow.

"Let's keep moving," Akiko said, voice low. "Whatever's bleeding into the vent, it's down here."

The cavern stretched out around them in hushed immensity, bioluminescent threads tracing long, curling veins across the walls. Every pulse of light seemed to echo in the water, slipping around Raya's barrier in shifting tendrils that brushed against Akiko's suit.

Her tail flicked to adjust her balance, but even that subtle motion pulled oddly, slower than zero-g. The water gripped her, dragging at each small twitch, reminding her this wasn't her usual domain.

She was about to nudge Raya forward when something in the flow changed. A faint reversal of current that skimmed across the fine hairs at the base of her ears. Akiko froze. Her foxfire flared cautiously inside her, feeling for mana signatures, but the dense liquid damped everything, smudging fine distinctions into useless gradients.

In the same instant, lines of cool blue System text rippled across her vision.

Skill Layer Initialized.

Category: Hydrokinetic Mana Analysis.

Status: Novice (1.8% milestone achieved).

Notice: Hydrokinetic disturbance detected. Pressure gradient forming.

Too late.

The first eel came out of the gloom in a coil of lithe muscle, its skin shimmering faintly with mana. Its head split open in a blossom of needle-like teeth, and it struck with startling acceleration, water parting in a hard pressure wave that shoved against Akiko's chest.

Subskill Acquisition (Hydrokinetic Mana Analysis): Laminar Constriction Observation – 3.1% milestone achieved.

She tried to twist aside, claws flashing out to rake its flank. The foxfire carved neat, glowing lines through slick hide. But the eel was already corkscrewing past. Its tail swept around in a punishing arc.

Akiko lurched, jerking the mining laser in an awkward attempt to brace. The weapon was too slow in the dense water, it caught the tail only at a glancing angle, the impact rattling through her shoulder. It wasn't enough to stop the force. She spun out, the heavy laser dragging her further off-kilter.

She collided hard with Raya. Together they tumbled into a low drift of fronds clinging to the cavern wall. Polyps, mouths opening in delicate starbursts, tendrils whipping out to taste for power.

Akiko felt the first bite like static across her armor. A cold siphon raced through her foxfire, trying to unravel it. Her hand with the mining laser twisted, pinned awkwardly against the wall by grasping fronds. The heavy weapon jolted uselessly in her grip, regulators whining under sudden strain.

Mana drain detected. Flow attenuation at 12%... 15%...

Akiko's ears pinned flat. "No—"

She snarled, then jerked her free hand across her body, claws spread towards the polyp fronds. Foxfire coiled hard at her wrist, the matrix locking with a sharp internal pull.

Applied Spellform: Foxfire Pulse Vector (Tier I)

Heat surged outward in a narrow lance, white-hot and searing. The beam cut across her own braced arm and punched into the polyp cluster, water instantly vaporizing into a roiling bubble. For an instant it felt like her arm would tear from the recoil, but Raya's barrier flared at the same moment, catching the explosive backlash and forcing it outward in a smooth pulse.

The polyp fronds blackened and curled away, shattering in brittle fragments that drifted in dark clouds through the water.

Akiko sucked in a ragged breath, feeling her foxfire stabilize again. Her tail lashed with nervous relief.

But the next eel was already on them, arrowing up from below, jaws yawning wide. Its slipstream caught Akiko's armor, trying to yank her into its path.

She twisted, both hands snapping down on the mining laser's grip. The retrofit channels along its barrel lit up in jagged blue-white seams as she forced foxfire through them, her personal entropy bleeding into industrial conduit. The matrix rippled out, locking with a deeper, thunderous resonance.

Applied Spellform: Foxfire Pulse Vector (Tier II) — Channeling through [Modified Mining Laser]

A fusion-hot beam seared from the laser's mouth, cutting through the water without even slowing. The dense liquid parted around it in shimmering shockwaves, light refracted into brutal coruscating arcs.

The eel met it head-on. Its body split apart in an instant, halves tumbling past in a slurry of dark fluids and shredded internal mana flows. The water boiled violently in the beam's wake, crashing against Raya's barrier before settling into cool, jittering currents.

Akiko hovered in the slow churn of disturbed currents, claws flexing, the mining laser still humming faintly under her hand. A year ago… hell, months ago, a fight like that would've left her core hollowed out, foxfire scraping bottom after a single desperate spell.

But now… she could feel it.

Mana flowing through her like a slow exhale. Not just from within, but also from the dense, saturated water itself, the ambient tide of this place. The regulators on the mining laser throbbed in gentle sync with her own pulse, feeding small measured streams into her system.

And layered beneath it all was the steady cadence of Kaede's old breathing patterns, ghost memory or not, the ritual rhythms that had once annoyed her beyond words. She kept them now like a second heartbeat.

All of it meant she could hold her spellforms. Sustain them. Even after bleeding out tiered vectors and violent pulses, she wasn't running dry. Her foxfire still roiled under her skin, hungry for more.

She let out a long, careful breath, claws relaxing.

So this is what real growth feels like, she thought. Then grimaced. Which probably means the universe is about to kick me in the teeth.

The polyps had withdrawn into themselves, fronds pulled tight and sulking. Tiny motes of disturbed bioluminescence drifted everywhere, making it feel like they floated through a snowfall of pale ghosts.

Akiko sucked in a shaky breath. "...You good?" Her voice sounded thin over the comm.

Raya's hand tightened on hers, the barrier flickering in gentle confirmation. "Good. You?"

"Little rattled." Her tail gave a twitch, managing something like a shrug in the slow drag of water. "I keep forgetting I can't rely on momentum here. Everything feels off."

"You're still terrifying." Raya's laugh was soft, laced with adrenaline. "Even half-slowed."

They lingered a moment longer, scanning the murky dark for any more of the eels. The water settled again, currents rebalancing.

In the distance, deeper into the cavern, Akiko thought she glimpsed another broad archway. Darker than the rest, framed by lines of natural crystal that pulsed with slow inner light.

"Alright," she murmured. "Let's keep moving. And maybe not cozy up to any more toothy plants."

Raya squeezed her hand once more, then together they angled forward, drifting deeper into the dreamlike hush of the dungeon's hidden heart.

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