Warlock Apprentice

Angor quickly descended toward the depth of the sea while Luna stayed close to him by hanging on his clothes.

They saw the black vortex again. Angor tried to stay really far this time so that he could observe it. He could see nothing. Both the vortex itself and the area around it were hidden in total darkness.

“The signals came from inside that thing…” Angor couldn’t make up his mind about whether or not he should enter the vortex since it might be too dangerous.

Luna saw Angor having trouble with a decision and went for the vortex on its own.

Angor watched as the kitten disappeared into blackness.

A moment later, it poked its head out and meowed at Angor.

So we can get back out again?

Since Luna already did a little test, Angor immediately followed her example. Time was very precious now.

He entered the vortex and immediately felt the pulling force gone. When he looked back, he could still see the exit behind him.

Since escaping wasn’t an issue, he calmed down and moved deeper inside.

There was almost no light in here. He saw some unknown substance that released light they absorbed from the environment, but their number was growing thin as he moved downward.

He couldn’t cast Light in his soul form. When looking at the complete darkness underneath, he hesitated again.

Luna suddenly spat two small Inferno embers that released dim blue light around them. By referring to what he had seen in Keely’s battles, Angor knew that these embers were used for freezing things.

Most of the light was dimmed by the unknown substance around them, so they could only see half a meter away.

Luna controlled the embers and moved around. It allowed Angor to see that they were still in seawater, which didn’t look much different compared to the outside. There were occasionally tiny fish swimming in the area but they weren’t supernatural monsters.

The only thing worth noticing was the exceptional darkness and illusion nodes with unknown purposes.

Angor tried to attack one of the nodes and broke it without any trouble. But almost at the same time, a new one appeared at the same spot.

He still couldn’t tell the nature of the illusion nor which subfield it belonged to. Also, he wondered why the illusion didn’t affect Luna. Maybe it only meant to trick humans.

Using Luna’s firelight, they kept moving deeper.

Common fishes were soon replaced by terrible looking deep-sea dwellers, which was made worse by Luna’s dim, pale light. Thankfully, these ordinary creatures could do nothing more than giving them an initial fright.

As they moved further, Angor began to see creatures with supernatural powers—the same ones that belonged to the original garden world. He didn’t wish to waste time and strength on these things, so he tried to avoid their detection.

But his attempt soon failed when he was blocked by a winged shark. Those weren’t actual wings but really long fins with ice shards on them. No doubt they could help the creature with both flying and unleashing attacks.

Angor’s sequence of gravity was now as powerful as level-3 apprentices at the summit of their condition. He dealt with the shark within seconds.

But something was troubling him. During the entire battle, the shark chased his soul while completely ignoring his body that was being dragged along. Also, it shattered to pieces and disappeared upon death. There was no corpse left behind.

“Is it some kind of spirit or… something created by illusions?” Angor looked around carefully. He was sure that none of the supernatural monsters had actual bodies. Only the common creatures were “real”.

Is this really something done by an Illusionist apprentice? The enemies are fake?

No… not exactly.

After going for two minutes, Luna meowed again and gave Angor the Duon scale.

Angor sensed the signals and found out that the separate scale had reached his teammates.

The other signals weren’t moving at all, which meant Keely and others were still “sleeping”.

Then whoever just caught them wasn’t going to be nice…

Realizing this, Angor maximized his speed and headed to the signals as fast as he could without minding the monsters.

He suddenly felt as if he pushed through a soft barrier. After that, he could no longer see water around him.

Using the Inferno embers to look around the strange place, he saw several of his teammates lying on the ground.

Luna suddenly meowed at something.

Angor looked that way and saw a shady figure carefully moving away while dragging Nausica’s body.

“Who is it?!” Angor yelled out while unleashing a gravity bullet.

The shadow jumped, dropped Nausica, and quickly turned tail. Angor failed to catch up with the individual, but he knew that his gravity power successfully landed a hit when the shadow screamed in pain.

Whoever it was tried to feign a gruff man’s voice, but Angor still noticed that it was probably a woman.

The shadow’s body definitely seemed human, not a Dugon or Duon.

Is that the person who created the illusion? But why would she run away so fast?

Instead of going after the enemy, Angor checked on Nausica first.

“Mmmf… Aw…”

Angor turned around at the noise and saw Luna slapping Keely’s face with a paw. It successfully woke up its owner after leaving several paw prints on her cheeks.

“Luna?” Keely rubbed her aching face and looked around. “Where am I?”

So the illusion is gone? Angor returned to his body and did not feel the hypnotic effect again. But he could still sense the illusion nodes. Also, he felt something familiar from the nodes but he couldn’t tell why.

Keely moved to wake the others.

When everyone came to, Angor explained what happened earlier.

“A vortex?” Keely rubbed her temples. “I don’t know about that. Guess I fell asleep for real.”

“Never mind then. Fifty minutes left and we gotta move!” Angor asked them to stand up so that they could get away ASAP. There was no time for them to explore this strange place.

Nausica had been keeping her head lowered. She hesitated and finally decided to speak, “My Meriad’s Sword is gone.”

When her words attracted their attention, Shan suddenly yelled out, “What happened to your face, Nausica??”

Nobody saw her face earlier. Now that they had time to check, they all saw a large, bloody scar starting from Nausica’s forehead and reaching all the way to her right cheek.

Nausica looked up as she could no longer hide it. “I don’t know. The wound is here when I woke up. It’s pretty shallow, I already treated it with Heal.”

“That woman did this?” Angor mumbled.

“Which woman?!” Shan quickly grew furious. “She ruined Nausica’s face! I’m going to kill her!”

Angor described the unknown woman he saw earlier. “That’s probably the culprit who hurt Nausica AND took her sword.”

“I gotta find her!!” Shan spoke and quickly grew confused. “But my sword is here… why only Nausica? Did an old enemy of hers come to the garden too?”

“Old enemy?” Nausica went over her memories and shook her head. “I don’t think I offended any woman ever since I came to the wizarding world.”

“There is one. The large rain hat, remember? She even attacked you before,” said Shan.

Nausica widened her eyes as she remembered something.

Yes, there was a strange female who openly showed hatred toward her even before entering the garden. And when they were exploring the fish-infested garden world, the same woman came and wounded her.

“But… I don’t know who she is at all.”

“Well, like I said, I’ll skin her alive the next time I see her!” Shan stomped her foot.

“It’s fine though. Luna still has one gray scale, same for Nausica. We can still get another Meraid’s Sword,” said Angor as he let out a sigh. “Whoever that was, we don’t have time to catch her. We have to move.”

The others nodded to agree, while Nausica gave them an apologetic look. “Sorry for the trouble… again.”

“Well, it’s not you to blame.” Angor smiled at her. “Easy, we understand. We still have enough swords for each of us.”

They prepared to move back to the surface.

“I think I went through some kind of barrier to get here. We can get out again by going up. In case you all get affected by the sleeping effect out there, I’ll drag you away using gravity power.”

With that, Angor ejected his soul and began to fly upward.

But instead of reaching the said barrier, he found himself trapped in mist.

“Oops. Where’s the exit?” Angor grew puzzled and checked on the others, only to see that no one was following.

The way back took way less time than he expected. When reaching the ground, he saw everyone looking around with their own puzzled looks.

“Something confused me and I found myself back at square one,” said Keely.

“It’s the illusion…” Angor realized that this new trick could now affect his soul form as well.