I was so immersed in our conversation that I didn’t even notice I had finally reached the end of the hole.

What felt like hours had passed in the blink of an eye, thanks to talking with Ezio and keeping my mind off the trauma.

I was out.

The first thing that hit me when my head emerged was blinding light. I had been in the dark too long, and my eyes hadn’t adjusted yet.

I covered them with a groan, but I didn’t curse or complain. I was just happy to be out.

Then came the air, proper air, flooding into my lungs in quantities the hole had never allowed. I breathed in and out slowly.

It felt so good to breathe properly again.

Once my eyes adjusted, I lowered my arm.

I could finally see where I was. The hole opened into an enormous chamber hidden inside the mountain. Sunlight poured through a massive opening in the ceiling, casting light across a long stone bridge that spanned a gigantic fissure. The storm outside had apparently passed.

Beneath the bridge was a seemingly bottomless abyss, so deep that the darkness at its base remained untouched by the light above. It was as if the mountain had been split apart, leaving behind a wound that never healed.

The hole sat about 3 meters off the ground. I crawled out, dropped down, I spun my body mid air and landed in a crouch.

Then I leaned back against the wall and slid down to sit.

I let out a long sigh.

’You did it.’ Ezio’s voice came through in my head.

"Yeah." A smile formed on my face. "Thanks to you."

’I didn’t really do much. You crawled out on your own.’

"That’s true..."

But I don’t think I would have made it without him talking to me the whole way through. For that, I would always be grateful.

I raised my right hand and pressed it to my chest. My heart was beating fast, not from fear this time, but from the relief of having that nightmare behind me.

My shadow stirred, and Ezio stepped out of it.

"I never knew that hole led here. It’s faster than those tunnels over there." Ezio pointed to the left, where four dark tunnel entrances sat side by side.

"Yeah, much faster than going through tunnels full of turns when this goes straight to the same place." I said.

Ezio looked at me and said, "I’m not even going to ask how you knew that path existed."

He had clearly figured out I wouldn’t give him a straight answer.

Well, there was a character who was supposed to discover that hole while fleeing the bats, but he hadn’t shown up yet.

Ezio walked toward the abyss and stopped with the tips of his boots right at the edge.

"It’s deep. I can’t see or sense the bottom." He said with a frown, peering down.

He had probably extended his senses to probe it.

Even for him, the abyss was just too deep. Those who fell down there never came back, and their bodies were never found either.

I knew exactly why, but I wasn’t going to spoil it.

It was also the reason most adventurers were advised to go around the mountain entirely rather than through it, and not just because of the abyss.

I stayed seated against the wall, resting, while Ezio explored the chamber.

"You’ve never been here before?" I asked.

"No." Ezio leaned out over the edge. Instead of falling, the soles of his boots stayed fixed to the stone, and he stared down into the abyss from a new angle. "I never had the time to explore this mountain. When your father went on monster raids and brought me along, we always just teleported. Never came through here."

"That makes sense."

We went quiet after that.

Ezio kept doing whatever he was doing while I turned my thoughts to the techniques I could develop at my current level.

Techniques were applications of your own Story Authority, developed through your own practice and understanding. Unlike Story Gifts, which were granted automatically when you ranked up your story, techniques had to be built from scratch.

I had already developed three.

Darkness Shaping, Darkness Sense, and Darkness Slash.

Darkness Shaping let me create things out of darkness — constructs, objects, weapons. That was the current extent of it, though I wondered if things created through it could eventually move on their own as I grew stronger.

It was easier for me than it might be for others. You needed a strong mind and a solid imagination to get the most out of it, and I had both. I also used to have maladaptive daydreaming, which probably had something to do with how naturally it came to me.

Darkness Sense let me detect things and people similarly to mana sense, and it was amplified at night, letting me pick up conversations from a distance. The darkness circle I had used against the mantises was an extension of that, detecting movement instead of mana signatures when their mana was too faint to track directly.

Darkness Slash let me release slashes loaded with darkness energy, making them sharper and more powerful than a normal cut.

One thing I was considering adding to it was a secondary effect: when an opponent blocks a Darkness Slash, it triggers a burst of black spikes on impact. Not a bad idea, though I could already tell it would be extremely mana-heavy.

The next technique I wanted to develop was a personal armor.

Relics in this world covered both offense and defense, and the most sought-after were almost always the defensive ones, particularly armor-type relics.

A great suit of armor could let you survive a hit that would otherwise be lethal, and that kind of margin could decide an entire fight.

The best offense was a strong defense.

There were monsters weaker than me that could still one-shot me without the right protection in place.

That was why the next technique I would build was armor, one that would evolve alongside me as I grew stronger.

It wouldn’t be quick or easy. But I would get there eventually.

Whoosh.

Something tore through the air at high speed, heading straight for my face.

I snapped my head to the right on reflex, and the attack buried itself into the wall beside me.

An arrow made of white bone, inches from where my forehead had just been.

I looked toward where it had come from. On the far side of the bridge stood a skeleton holding a bow.

Remember when I said there were things that pushed people off the edge into the abyss?

That was the culprit.