Free PHANTASIA by R. Atlas Page B

ceiling. Sharp grey stalactites hung from above like metallic scythes in this one, forcing him to carefully weave between their points. He noticed a light a long distance ahead of him, and then the certain movement of a pair of shadows in the chamber. His heart leaped for a moment, before he realized that it must have been Butz using a cast to create extra light. The thought hadn’t occurred to him, the glow of the Cron seemed enough — but he quickly copied the idea and created a ball of light himself, feeling more relaxed as the practice of extolling his energy calmed him. Casting with his left felt awkward at first, like he was forcing his body to misappropriate its energy, but he became used to it as he held his focus. Still, the motion lacked a sense of fluidity.  
    “Butz?” he called out softly. The sound echoed through the chamber, and he suddenly worried that he might attract unwanted attention. He had forgotten that there was a good chance there were other creatures here. From what he understood about the desert, the deeper one went, the more likely it was to run into a late stage critter.  
    “Red? Is that you?” Butz replied.  
    “Yeah, hold on, I’m coming,” Red whispered back loudly. He heard the soft pur of Linx as well, and a surge of relief suddenly washed over him. But the feeling was short lived when he finally came face to face with Butz. The falconer looked far more disturbed than usual, like he had just woken up from a nightmare.  
    “There’s something here Red…”  
    “Huh? Something like what?”  
    “I don’t know what it is, but I spotted something moving underneath the foam when I first landed and I could’ve sworn it was following me.”
    Red clenched his left hand into a fist and let a wisp of fire surround his knuckles. He vaguely recalled an image of one of the dangers bred inside umbriel — a body of collected microbes that moved like a single organism and hunted calculatingly. The specimen in the image were tiny, and incapable of higher levels of thinking, like problem solving, on their own, but they were able to come together to rapidly create larger collections of themselves with centers of thinking that functioned similar to brains. The more of the microbe that came together, the smarter the super organism they created. He let the wisp of fire grow into a ball of flame, and then looked around sharply for any movement but found none.  
    “Seems to be nothing here,” he remarked calmly, but didn’t let his guard down.  
    “Yeah I guess…or at least nothing that wants to be seen…” Butz replied uncertainly.  
    “Have you tried sending out a message to the control room from your microAI?” Red asked as he began to do just that.  
    “Yah, it won’t work. Maybe we’re too deep? I don’t know, something’s jamming the rays.”
    They moved towards the center of the chamber where there seemed to be no foam, only a vast pit with jagged stalagmites that stuck out from the floor in queer angles. Red took a step into it, intending to climb down and away from the foam for a while, but then pulled his foot back quickly when ripples broke out at the top of the pit. A second later he realized that there was no pit at all; there was a lake of water at the center of this chamber. One that had stood unmoved for so long that it perfectly reflected the stalactites on the ceiling. The ripples he sent out broke the illusion, and he suddenly felt a pang of guilt for having disturbed something that must have been sleeping for millennia.  
    Butz seemed to be equally surprised but caught on quickly and returned to eyeing the foam suspiciously. Linx seemed relaxed, which gave Red a feeling of assurance. The Aeyz Cat had far better senses than them, and if there was anything of danger here, it would sense it first.  
    “Red…what was that thing? That half man - or whatever it was - with an arm that looked like a blade? And that eye… I’ve never seen or heard of anything