Standing in front of the entrance to Junnhaven’s expansive aqueduct system, the trio of adventurers were addressed by one of the many night guards on patrol that evening, who was holding a map in his hands as he talked to them. “You’ll be combing through the upper half of the city’s drainage circulation tonight. It consists of empty storm drains and sewage lines running into the lower levels.” The guard explained, pausing for their confirmation before continuing.

  “Got it. This is where the water sprites are, right?” Reggie asked, crossing his arms.

  “Yes. Reports of water sprites have increased as of late, causing water supplies in many parts of the city to degrade,” The guard continued, occasionally pausing to point at different spots on the map. “The city called in specialists to clear them from the topside aqueducts, but that drove them down to the sewers.”

  “How many should we expect to -ribbit- find?” Duce pitched in, glancing down the winding tunnel entrance and taking a noticeable gulp.

  “Just get rid of as many as you can find. You can keep track by picking up their broken cores,” The guard replied, now speeding up his explanation seeing as the group had questions he wasn’t on payroll to answer. “Every sprite has a core near the middle. If you break it, they die. Any which you can’t kill, just drive them into the lower level storm drains.”

  “The river will be able to take them away from there… it’s a good idea,” Clarisse noted, reading the map. “Is there anything else we should know about?”

  “Not really. There will be other guards like me patrolling the sewer outskirts, so you can call for help if something goes wrong and someone will show up soon,” The guard said, before rolling up the map and holding it out towards them. “Good luck.”

  Reggie immediately sprung forward, grabbing the map with a smirk. “We won’t need it. I’ll lead us through.” he said pridefully, walking towards the entrance.

  “He meant to say t-thank you!” Duce followed up for his friend, doing a courtesy bow to the guard before following Reggie. “Hey, Wait up!”

  Clarisse stayed behind a little longer to confirm her suspicions from the guard. “Are there any other creatures besides water sprites down there?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Maybe some stray animals,” The guard shrugged, “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Alright… we’ll meet you here when we’re done,” Clarisse replied, before breaking into a light jog to catch up to the duo standing next to the entrance.

  Stepping through the dingy, weathered brick tunnels of the sewers, the trio made their way into the depths of the pungent, crass-smelling disposal system. With Clarisse being their only source of illumination, she stood in between the boys so that Reggie could read the map and Duce could watch their flank. Progress was slow for the group, much to their boredom. Finding a traversable path through all the sludge and flowing sewage proved to be tough, even more so with the unbearable stench emanating from the waters they walked by shutting down any sense of smell the trio had.

  “Where are these things?” Reggie thought aloud, the smell of the underground getting to him almost an hour into their venture. The trio paused as his voice echoed through the passages all around them, before it was once again overshadowed by the sound of flowing wastewater. “We haven’t found a single sprite yet…” he groaned.

  Clarisse let out a sigh, not wanting to seem empathetic towards the boy’s complaints but also finding them to be quite agreeable considering their surroundings. “Wait a moment, I have an idea,” She called for both of them to halt as she took off her backpack and opened it to see if Sera was awake.

  “Ah, you need assistance?” The doll sprung awake a few seconds after Clarisse nudged her, floating up and revolving once to get an idea of their surroundings. “My, oh my. This is certainly… putrid.”

  “What the- ” Reggie let out a curse under his breath, startled by the living doll. “It’s that thing which hangs around that fox-creep again! Why are you here!?” he shouted, surprised that Sera had been with them all along.

  “Hey- He’s not a creep!” Clarisse retaliated with a punch to his shoulder which set Reggie off his balance momentarily, before turning back to Sera with an apologetic smile. “Do you know anything more about water sprites? We’ve been walking around for an hour and found nothing so far…”

  “Hmm…” Sera pondered, seemingly unbothered by Reggie’s comment about Nikolas. “They like to stay near stagnant water pools… sometimes they can camouflage themselves with trash or muddy water too.”

  “Ribbit-! That means I can freeze the water temporarily to flush them out of it!” Duce exclaimed, moving one end of his staff towards the stream flowing beside them and began concentrating. In a matter of moments, the top layer of the stream began to crystallize in a small area of a few feet.

  “Good idea! If you can freeze a cross-section of stagnant water, you’ll prevent them from escaping without leaving it.” Sera replied with a pleased smile upon seeing Duce’s quick thinking.

  “Thank you, but it was nothing…” Duce replied humbly, bowing his head slightly towards the doll before addressing his other companions. “We have a proper plan now, let’s get to one of the dead ends nearby. The water should be stagnant there.”

  “Sounds like it…” Clarisse nodded, closing the bag for Sera who had quickly returned into its safety, considering the nearly toxic atmosphere around them. “Thanks Sera.”

  Reggie couldn’t decide what to be more bewildered by - that a talking doll had just helped them, or that Duce had just taken charge of the situation. He decided to tackle the problems one at a time. “What’s she even doing with you? Shouldn’t she be with that fox adventurer?” he asked the redhead.

  “He went on his own quest and left her with me,” Clarisse replied with a smug air to her, happy to find something which actually bothered the blonde fighter. Plus, it also felt good to be able to associate herself with a higher ranking adventurer.

  “Ugh… let’s just go.” Reggie rolled his eyes and returned to reading his map and leading the way to the nearest dead end they could find.

  “If I may ask, how do you get his acquaintance?” Duce asked as they found themselves getting closer to their first place of interest. “Mr. Nikolas, right? It’s strange… many people at the guild know who he is, but no one knows him.”

  “Hmm?” Clarisse glanced back, causing Duce to take a step back as her flaming hair swished back towards him. “Oh, I was umm… he helped me with a quest, and then I asked him to teach me,” she replied, deciding to omit the part where he had saved her from bleeding out in the forest. “I don’t get why both of you feel like this about him. Training is tough, but he’s not a bad person.”

  “Because he doesn’t do anything except show up, pick a quest and leave every time-” Reggie said, consciously staying a few steps ahead of Clarisse to avoid another potential punch thrown at him. “He’s always taking on the coolest quests on his own and returns unscathed. Besides, shouldn’t fox-people be living in Aniera? There’s something off with him.”

  “Kitsune-” Duce let out a croak, unable to disagree with Reggie’s description. “I used to look up to Mr. Nikolas, but he seems like a scary person… ”

  “Huh…” Clarisse pondered on their complaints, and they did seem to match with some of her own experience with Nikolas. “Well, I don’t know that much about him either. He’s always giving me vague answers.”

  “A left here,” Reggie spoke up as they reached a four-way intersection within the tunnels. He rolled up the map and tucked it at his waist, held up by his belt. “I see something- it’s moving!” he exclaimed, locking his eyes at the end of the tunnel.

  “Duce, you’re up.” Clarisse made her flames burn brighter for them to see and moved farther into the tunnel. There was a pile of sludge and algae accumulated at the end, with the occasional squelch and crunch caused by the movement of something.

  “Ribbit!” Duce acknowledged, walking along behind them until they crossed the last pipe draining into the sewer lines before lowering the bottom of his staff towards the water. A layer of icy crystals formed on the surface, before the effect spread across the gap and created a barrier within the water. “All done.”

  “I’ll take one side, you take the other.” Clarisse relayed to Reggie as she raised her hands and formed a fireball in each, keeping her distance from the pile of sludge.

  Reggie nodded, taking a small run up and jumping to the slick bricks on the other side of the stream, before unsheathing both his shortswords and holding them low to the ground.

  Met with the unexpected stimulus of light and warmth in the depths of the sewers, one of the brown gelatinous blobs which comprised the pile of sludge slid out from its habitat, quickly crawling towards Reggie and leaving a line of slime in its path.

  Alarmed at seeing the animated blob slide towards him, Reggie took a step back to put some distance between them and reached out with one of his swords, stabbing into the gelatinous flesh of the creature. “Die! You… thing!”

  The sprite morphed its body around the blade which had spontaneously appeared in its path, continuing along as usual and tried to escape under Reggie’s legs. At the same time, other sprites of various discolorations began to emerge from the waste mound, wasting no time in escaping the warmth which was so foreign to them.

  “Ah! Ew-!” Clarisse exclaimed, throwing one of her fireballs at the sprite which slid past Reggie. The fireball landed squarely, and though its explosion was quelled by the sprite’s gooey body, the flame quickly reduced it into a steaming pile of waste. She threw another fireball at the ground in front of her, letting it explode and sending sprites flying around the trio, some killed by the impact, others singed and slowly dying from their burns.

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  “Strike their cores!” Duce exclaimed, spotting sprites trying to let the flow of water take them away but trapped by his icy barrier. He formed sharp shards of ice within the water, launching them at the trapped sprites to pierce them. It took a few tries to get it right and not have the ice uselessly cut through their slimy bodies without hitting the cores. Ultimately, the sprites were squarely trapped without anywhere to go like fish in a barrel.

  “Hard to do when the cores aren’t visible!” Reggie let out a frustrated grunt as he sliced at another sprite but only managed to smack it into the wall, where it gradually slid down and recollected itself before trying to move again. Fed up, he stomped down on the sprite, crushing its core under his shoe. “That works…” He muttered, lifting his leg to inspect the gooey residue left by the dead sprite before turning around to deliver the same fate to another sprite.

  The trio only paused to catch their breath once the rest of the sprites in the tunnel had been dealt with. By then, the entire passage was littered with viscous residue and burnt up shells of the sprites, with Duce’s ice barrier holding back a number of floating coagulations of sludge from flowing into the waste circulation.

  “Geez, this is a messy job…” Clarisse complained, holding her nose shut to avoid the horrid stench of burnt discharge and death floating in the air around them as she stood on the edge of the intersection. She was also feeling strangely fatigued, forced to lower her flames on her hair to a gentle simmer in order to maintain them.

  Duce stood close by her, not wanting to stray far from the light. “Someone has to do it…” he sighed, looking back at his short-tempered companion with an apologetic look. Exploring for exotic flowers in faraway hillsides sounded like a dream right about now.

  “We still have to cover many dead ends like this one,” Reggie replied, scraping off slime from his shoes and pants using his swords before sheathing them. He pulled out a map and began walking ahead of the pair. “Can’t you make your fire a little brighter? It’s hard to read this thing.” He asked, looking back at Clarisse.

  “Sorry,” Clarisse mumbled in a confused tone before taking a deep breath and closing her eyes to focus. “I’ll try. I need a moment, that’s all. I can usually maintain it for longer…”

  “We should have brought an oil lantern instead…” Reggie remarked in a callous voice, much to her annoyance. “At least that wouldn’t run out.”

  “That’s not-” Duce tried to intervene in the conversation, but was interrupted by Clarisse.

  “I said I’ll try!” The redhead snapped back at the blonde, her hair bursting into a bright glow in response to his comment as she balled her fists, making Duce jump back for fear of getting burnt.

  “That’s more like it,” Reggie smirked, already using the better lighting to chart their path to the next intersection. “We should be able to clear the next ones quickly now that we know how to do it.”

  “I swear to Svaha-!” Clarisse muttered, following along begrudgingly behind him with Duce in tow. Despite her fatigue, she was determined to maintain the intensity of her flames for the rest of the night simply to spite Reggie’s temperament.

  Clearing tunnels became much faster for the trio now that the first had been tackled, and although the number of sprites varied for each tunnel, Duce’s collection of cracked cores quickly grew. With each encounter, both the party’s clothes and spirits were muddied bit by bit.

  “And that makes 78…” Duce updated his count of cores as they finished clearing another dead end. “Even though we lost a lot to them being completely crushed or melted, this is good loot. I wasn’t expecting to find more of them in the hallways.” Looking up from his bag of monster bits, he let out a tired sigh, leaning back against the humid brick walls.

  “Yeah? We’ve basically cleared the entire top floor.” Clarisse replied, struggling to put up a smile as she stood with her arms wrapped around herself, barely able to maintain her hair in its blazing state. “Can we go - achoo - back outside now?” she croaked out to Reggie with a sneeze, who was standing next to her, holding up the map and squinting into it.

  Even though his posture was showing signs of exhaustion, the swordsman was not nearly as spent as his mage companions on account of his remaining mana reserves. “Sure… doesn’t look like there’s anywhere else left to go. We’ll just go back the way we came.” His decision was met with sounds of relief from both companions.

  Retracing their steps was relatively easy given the unceasing trail of dead sprites they had left at regular intervals within the tunnels. Treading past all the gooey entrails they had left behind was creating a bad feeling rising from the bottom of Clarisse’s stomach, but soon enough something would distract her.

  A deep gurgle echoed through the sewers, reaching the party from all sides. It was unlike anything else they had heard in the last several hours of exploration. Unlike the ambient flow of wastewater, the drips of moist algae from the walls or the occasional draft passing by, this sounded like a far more malevolent noise, prompting them all to stop.

  “W-what was that?” Duce was the first one to speak, looking back into the darkness they left behind with uncertainty.

  Clarisse felt a shiver run down her spine as she considered that the sound could have echoed from anywhere in the tunnel system to them. “I don’t think I want to find out. Let’s get out of here quickly-”

  “We’ll be fiiine,” Reggie chided both of them with a chuckle before continuing to walk ahead at the same pace as before. “We’ve crushed everything we found down here so far. It’s probably not close by anyway.”

  “And we’re keeping it that way!” Clarisse asserted as she made haste and began walking faster, “C’mon Duce, I’m not getting caught down here by some crazy monster we haven’t seen yet.”

  “R-right!” Duce followed up from behind, pausing next to his partner for a moment to express his concerns, “We shouldn’t stay here any longer than we need to, Reggie…”

  Passing by all the vaguely familiar tunnels, it wasn’t long before they heard the deep, frothing roar again, this time far louder than before, coming directly from the darkness in front of them.

  “Huh-?” Reggie stood in place, unsheathing his twin swords and looking into the darkness with uncertainty. “Uhh… I don’t know what that is, but we can take it, right? Light up the place, Ris.”

  “I can’t make it brighter anymore…” Clarisse grit her teeth, reaching for her dagger as she took a step back. “How did it get so close already…?”

  Another splash and bubbling roar followed before the flow of wastewater in the current next to them changed. A wave of water washed up onto the brick pathway on either side of it from the way they were intending to go. Through the darkness, Clarisse’s flames were reflected by a massive viscous body made of slime. A gigantic water sprite soon came into view, spanning the full width of the tunnel they were in. Its entire body vibrated with each motion, revealing the assimilated corpses of many smaller sprites inside it all coagulated into one.

  Duce’s immediate reaction was to freeze the water around their feet and direct them at the bottom of the sprite, hoping to stop it in its tracks. “I don’t think we can take that!” He exclaimed desperately as he watched the giant slime casually slide over his icicles and crush them into bits under its weight before absorbing them within itself.

  Reggie was not as easily discouraged, spotting the proportionally large core present in the middle of the creature. “All we need to do is break the core!” He declared, without even looking back at his companions. “Hit it with everything you got!”

  “Can’t you tell we’re both spent!?” Clarisse shot back at him, conjuring a fireball and throwing it at the sprite. The fireball singed the slimy exterior of the monster on contact, but failed to do anything to slow its advance towards them. “We need to run!”

  A hollow space opened in the center of the giant sprite as it jumped forward, opening its makeshift maw to roar at the group, spraying them with a wave of sludge in the same fashion.

  Reggie saw his opening through the sludge being launched at him and wound an arm back. “Eat this, monster!” He threw one of his shortswords through the slime’s open mouth to strike its temporarily exposed core.

  The spinning sword caught itself on the sides of the creature’s mouth, slowing down before coming to a standstill as the sprite closed its mouth, leaving the sword to float inside it, rendered harmless.

  “This isn’t worth it!” Clarisse yelled out, grabbing Reggie by his shoulder and pulling him back. “Let’s run and find another way out, c’mon!”

  “We can -ribbit- run around it using the tunnels!” Duce called out, running back to the nearest intersection behind them, though he didn’t dare go any further without Clarisse to light up the way. “Let’s use the map!”

  “No, I know I can do this,” Reggie muttered as he yanked himself free from Clarisse’s grip, tightening his grip over his remaining sword. He wiped off some of the sludge covering his face and neck, waiting for the monster to make another move. As the sprite advanced again, he rushed towards it with his blade held close to his body in a stabbing motion. “DIE!”

  “Reggie NO!” Clarisse cried out, but by then it was already too late. Seeing the adventurer volunteer himself, the sprite jumped forward to meet the challenge.

  Reggie charged forward into the sprite, stabbing forward with as much strength as he could muster. His sword penetrated the sprite’s translucent skin initially, but quickly lost momentum as it dug deeper into it. The fighter’s eyes grew wider as he realized that the slime was still lumbering forward, and pushed him under its weight. He tried to let out a cry for help while he was under it, but that only served to deprive him of precious air as the sprite tried to assimilate him.

  Duce’s eyes widened as he witnessed Reggie floating inside the viscous creature attacking them, and he rushed forward in aid of his friend. “Grab onto these and get out of there!” he called out, forming icicles from the water on the ground and making them stab into the sprite.

  Reggie’s vision through the slime was blurry at best. Everything was washed over with a deep brown tint and was partly obstructed by the corpses of other sprites. His movements were inhibited inside the monster, only able to move each limb slowly on top of his quickly escaping breath. He wriggled as best he could to reach for the ice spikes Duce had made at the bottom of the slime, desperately grabbing onto them and trying to pull the rest of his body down.

  The blonde fighter let out his final gasp in shock as the icicle he had grabbed broke from the rest of Duce’s creation and began to dissolve in front of him. Immediately after, a burning sensation over his neck and face made him shut his eyes and claw at himself. The sensation would soon spread to his arms as well. Though he had more painful things to worry about, tiny pieces were chipping off his armor and clothing. Where they weren’t present, patches of his skin began to corrode and burn away.

  The sprite stopped its advance momentarily, before its gooey texture would begin to bubble and froth on the outside, reducing the barely distinguishable bodies of smaller sprites into a single seamless part of itself. Although Reginald was larger, it was clear that his fate would be the same unless they were able to take it down quickly.

  “GET A HOLD OF IT! I’LL PULL YOU OUT!” Duce was still trying to free Reggie, now pushing one end of his staff into the creature and beckoning him to grab onto it, but it seemed as if Reggie couldn’t hear his cries amidst his own burning pains.

  Standing on the other side of the stream from Duce, Clarisse had been reduced to a state of panic, both figuratively and nearly literally frozen cold. Her instincts told her to run, that this was something none of them could overcome in their condition, but something kept her rooted in place, quickly going through all her options in the moment.

  “I- I can’t do any damage to it-”

  “I don’t have enough mana to cast another spell…”

  “But he’s going to die-”

  “I can’t let him die, I don’t want him to die!”

  “W-what do I do!?”

  Clarisse’s stupor was only broken by the feeling of a familiar wooden touch, making her shudder. Looking to her side, she found Sera perched on her shoulder.

  “Need some help?” The magic doll asked nonchalantly, her expression fixed in a calm, content smile.

  Thank you for reading!

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