Vex followed along behind Derivan, glancing cautiously at the walls of the tunnel around them. The system messages from the dungeon had been their cue to leave and meet up with Misa; they exchanged a few messages to make sure they were all on the same page, and Sev had been thrilled to finally have an excuse to extricate himself from all those interviews.

Noram wasn't here, and neither were any of Misa's people. Without the overlay of the system, there was no easy way for them to gauge how powerful the monsters down in the cavern were, and while they weren't necessarily expecting hostility given the nature of the raids...

They were still more equipped to deal with danger. Vex had to promise Noram to keep in contact, though.

It hadn't been long before they found themselves in the tunnels Misa had mentioned, but Vex had to admit that he was feeling uncharacteristically nervous.

They'd been suspicious, at first, about the way it had reacted when Derivan tried to cast — and the armor was barely connected with the system to begin with. Their prevailing guess was that whatever the Magic stat did, it didn't play well with the new systemless region they found themselves in. But if the reaction had been angry when Derivan had cast, then it had been outright hostile when Vex made his attempt.

It was a good thing they hadn't encountered any monsters down in the door dungeon, really, because Vex's spell had outright exploded in his face.

They were prepared for the possibility, so the spell he cast to test had been a weak one, and even then Derivan had to catch the lizardkin as he stumbled from the resulting explosion. Vex's expression had been ashen. He'd always been close to magic. To have it actively fight against him...

'Distressed' was a mild way to put it. But Derivan assured him that they would find a way to work around the problem, and he felt his unease fall back to the wayside, replaced by a warmth in his chest.

There was definitely some animosity between mana and the system, though. That little experiment almost seemed to confirm it.

His distress was, at least, largely forgotten as he approached the end of the tunnel, where Misa and Sev were already waiting. The sight of the massive cavern with a whole underground city was awe-inspiring, to say the least; Vex couldn't stop himself from gawking at the sight for a whole minute before he eventually gathered himself, and that little bit of nervousness leaked back in.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Misa asked. She looked worried — part of her knew how badly Vex wanted to explore this new city, but she also knew Vex didn't have his magic.

"Yes," Vex said with admittedly a little bit of trepidation. "I know I can't cast magic right now, but I won't be a burden."

"I'm not worried about you being a burden," Misa said with a sigh. "You pull your weight in more ways than just magic, you know? You don't have to prove yourself or anything."

Vex hesitated. "I know," he said softly. "But anti-magic exists. This is a danger I'm going to have to deal with at some point. If it gets too dangerous down there, then we can bail, but I can still protect myself a little."

He gripped his dagger. Derivan looked at him, something like concern and protectiveness flickering in the light-purple light of his eyes, and Vex tried to ignore the way his heart fluttered. Misa was probably right in that it was past time he talked to the armor about his feelings...

...Not now. Not yet.

"Let's go," he said instead, though Derivan looked at him curiously, like he'd noticed something. Misa sighed, but nodded, no doubt resolving to use her blocking skills to make sure Vex stayed safe. She lead the way into the cavern, and Vex couldn't help but gape as he followed.

There must have been a secondary illusion over the entrance that he hadn't noticed, because the moment he stepped through, the whole cavern burst into multicolored light.

Misa hadn't mentioned the amount of mana here.

Which made sense, since she couldn't see mana normally, and she hadn't stepped through whatever illusionary filter was there at the entrance — but if what Vex had seen back in the town was unusual, what he was seeing here was outright unheard of. The magic in the air went beyond simple, dancing streams; they turned into thick rivers in the air, weaving and twisting around with so much density that Vex was sure they were visible to even those without mana sight —

"Whoa," Sev said, confirming his thoughts. "Is that mana?"

"Yes," Vex said, and winced a little bit as he toned down his own [Mana Sight]; the skill was making things a little too bright for him, on top of the natural brightness of the mana. "I've only ever seen mana this concentrated when dungeons are forming."

"Perhaps this is the natural state of mana," Derivan suggested. "If the system did not exist."

"I'm thinking more and more that all of this is," Vex said with a sigh. "Which makes me wonder what the point of it all is. The system's clearly manipulating mana, dungeons are at the center of this manipulation in some way, and it's outright harvesting gods..."

He glanced at Sev, who shrugged. "Aurum is quiet today, and we're not going to find anything out from standing around," he said. He hesitated for a moment. "...I'm a little worried about the guy. It might just be that I can't talk to him while we're... here."

"Let's get going, then," Misa said, waving them forward impatiently.

The sheer concentration of mana diminished somewhat as they headed down the path set into the stone; it circled around the cavern, leading them on a curved path down towards the center. There were dozens of other paths that were the same, too, cut into the rock like a set of spirals going down into the city. Vex wondered if those paths led to other towns — surely not. They would've gotten a lot more than just a report from Fendal had that been the case.

Then again, the whole town was clearly under some kind of natural infolock, so...

"There aren't that many towns around here, are there?" Vex asked, worried. Sev glanced at Vex, then followed his gaze to the paths circling around the walls of the cavern.

"No," he said cautiously. "But the path here had spatial magic in it, right? So this is pretty far away from Fendal."

"We're going to have to do so much walking to check that out," Misa groused.

"We could also just ask," Derivan said calmly. They were approaching the floor of the cavern, now, which meant that they were also at the outskirts of the makeshift city at its center. Vex barely had the time to wonder at the arrangement of magical lights, many of which looked nothing like the runic inscriptions Elyra used to fuel its own lights — there was some kind of rune painted on the floor, but the language was entirely different; nothing like the detailed circuitry Vex was used to — before Derivan approached one of the many so-called monsters that were going about their days.

"Excuse me," he said politely, and the cockroach-like man he'd spoken to turned back to him, startled.

"You talkin' to me?" he said. His voice was low, bordering on gruff; he hefted the groceries he was carrying onto a ridge on his hip.

"Yes," Derivan said. "I was wondering if you could tell us where the other paths lead. We are new here, you see." Derivan indicated the other spirals cut into the wall, and the other man peered at him, antennae dipping low over his eyes in a curious impression of a squint.

"They don't go nowhere," he said gruffly. "Roads are sealed. No one knows why."

"We're here," Misa pointed out.

"Roads are mostly sealed," he corrected himself with a sigh. "Go to the city hall if you want to talk about it. I ain't the scholarly type. Got some mages there trying to figure out the Roads. And take a shower. You guys stink."

With that, he started to walk off. "Thank you," Derivan called after him, trying to be polite, but he looked baffled. He turned to the others. "Do we... stink? I do not believe I am capable..."

"I can't believe he just called us smelly," Misa said, looking offended.

"Let's just go to the city hall," Sev sighed. "Again."

Vex frowned, looking around. The lights in the city were reminding him of something — he remembered the version of himself that Misa had summoned, casting off meteors with a brush.

The symbols on the ground weren't runes. Not as he knew them. They were more like miniature paintings in themselves...

He was walking forward before he even realized it.

"Uh, Vex?" Sev asked.

"Just give me a second," Vex said. "I wanna look at some of the lights. Did you see them? The runes they use down here are totally different. If there's a whole new system I can use... maybe it'll work better than system-assisted spells."

Sev raised an eyebrow, but he didn't protest as the lizardkin scurried over to one of the so-called lamps — they were effectively poles of solid light that extended out from a painted rune on the ground. Vex examined it closely, though there wasn't all that much to look at, and he felt Derivan approaching him as well to stare curiously at the painted image.

"The material looks similar to the mana your [Splash of Mana] skill generates," Derivan noted. "Do you think you can still use that skill?"

"Probably," Vex hedged. He wasn't actually sure. "System skills are still working properly... Skills and spells are differentiated by mana usage colloquially, but they're more nuanced than that academically. The ones that generate runes are the ones that are actually considered spells; everything else is a system skill that happens to cost mana. [Splash of Mana] doesn't generate a runic inscription, but I'm still kind of worried..."

He trailed off a little. Derivan was right, though, in that the rune he was looking at looked like it was painted out of mana, the exact same way things had looked when he was creating material to work with using the [Splash of Mana] skill.

He grabbed a notebook out of his tailbag, making a quick sketch of the rune. It was nothing like the painting he'd made with Derivan, so many nights ago, modelled after his [Starry Night]. But there was still a certain beauty to it. It was made of long, swooping lines that looked almost like wings; the mana flowed into it from the sides and up through the center, filling out the rest of the image in a prismatic sheen before forming a glowing light pole.

A part of him was half afraid that his pencil sketch would be enough to trigger whatever magic there was here, but the mana stayed thankfully dormant — he didn't want to accidentally burn a hole through his notebook or anything.

"That explains some of the things I was confused about," Derivan admitted. "Do you think you can use these to cast, with the system disabled?"

"I need a brush," Vex said. "I think I should limit my use of system skills as much as possible, just based on what we've seen so far. Even if I can get away with using Splash to generate the mana-paint, using [Delineate] to paint it might be a bit much."

"There are supply shops nearby," Derivan noted. "Perhaps we can look in those?"

Misa sighed, and glanced at Sev. "We're gonna get sidetracked by a shopping trip, aren't we."

Sev shrugged and smiled a bit. "But look at Vex. He seems pretty happy."

Vex stuck his tongue out at Sev.

And yet... he couldn't deny it. This was new. This was exciting. This was why he'd come out to adventure in the first place, or at least a part of the reason he'd done so.

The lizardkin took Derivan's hand and outright dragged him towards one of the shops. It was the closest one, too; Vex hadn't bothered looking through the shops particularly closely. All the nearby ones looked mostly the same, anyway, and were slightly dilapidated for being near the city outskirts; the stone they were made of was worn and chipped, and the paint had peeled, but dammit, they were magic shops.

Actually, Vex paused right before he stepped into the shop. Was that why some of the light-lamps were weaker than others? They weren't all the same; some were dimmer than others. Maybe, like the paint on a shop wall could chip and peel, the runes could...

He needed a better name than runes. The system was completely different. Glyphs?

"I'm gonna call the new runes glyphs," he decided, and then scribbled down a note about it in his notebook so he wouldn't forget.

"Glyphs?" Derivan asked, and Vex beamed at the question.

"Look," he said, throwing himself practically entirely off course to drag the armor to a nearby failing lamp instead of the shop he'd been about to walk into. Sure enough, he was right — the glyph was damaged, the paint partially peeled. "The glyph is damaged, but the light's still working, it's just a bit weaker. Regular runic inscriptions don't work like that — a slight bit of damage either breaks the spell or alters its function in a very predictable way."

"But glyphs remain functional," Derivan said, and Vex nodded excitedly.

"It could change the face of enchanting," Vex said, and then he frowned slightly. "Although I'm not sure... hmm. Glyphs look like they function off of ambient mana, and outside of dungeons runic inscriptions usually have to be powered by personal mana or a mana crystal. Normally I'd say that saves on mana, but most cities don't have that much in the way of ambient mana..."

He frowned, starting to mutter to himself. Derivan chuckled.

"Perhaps we can worry about that later?" he offered. "There was a shop you wanted to go to."

"Right!" Vex brightened again, and grabbed Derivan's hand to pull him into the shop. Misa glanced at Sev.

"Think Vex is gonna tell him first?" she asked in a stage whisper, her tone amused.

"Nah. Derivan's got Physical Empathy. I'm sure he'll figure it out," Sev said, chuckling.