Edward stood above the corpse of a creepy-crawly, violet blood splashed on his armor. After his initial encounter with them, he continued to teleport deeper, hunting for them, seeking more blood essence. Those creatures had very fast strikes but they were slow to act, taking several seconds for their feelers to find him. That is why Edward hadn’t found them before, his teleportation took only two seconds to recharge and since his aura was telling him the caverns were empty, he hadn’t stayed longer than that before moving on. It was only when he had stopped in place to take the time to think that those monsters had discovered him.

When he teleported into a new cavern that gave him the time to summon a fire rune to illuminate the surroundings. He was usually then struck by a few blows but it was nothing his aura couldn’t endure and the monsters themselves weren’t that tough. Although throwing an energy blade wasn’t enough to end them, a single spear through their maw or a direct slash with his daggers did the trick.

He was even starting to reconsider his feelings about them. They indeed look creepy but this is actually a good hunting spot. There are a large number of predators and killing them is not that hard. Even though the surge must have helped, it’s the first time I’ve seen so many native predator-level monsters in the same place. I have already killed twenty of them and I’m not done yet. The deeper I go the more of them I find. This is probably a place that was ignored by adventurers even before the surge which explains the now large population of monsters… I can understand why. Hunting creepy monsters in total darkness wouldn’t be my first choice either and not exactly something I would associate with the word adventure.

Edward felt the urge to continue tracking monsters to drain them of their blood essence. Each additional drop of essence he was absorbing exacerbated his desire to get more. Somehow, I’m glad that I’m underground. Here, I can go as crazy as I want. I don’t risk hurting anyone.

It was then that he sensed something happening through his clone still present with Ignis and Adotinus. The sky was vibrating like a drum, the spatial distortions pulsating at the same beat. His clone’s attention was fixated on the dark patch of sky that seemed to pierce straight through the firmament, and then the spatial distortion exploded outward and Edward knew with absolute certitude that a breach had been opened. He sensed a tremendous power approach, his clone was unable to move as if the air was congealed around it and then he lost his connection with it.

Shit! His good mood evaporated in an instant. The Andherians are here. I don’t have time. Edward teleported as deep as he could, ignoring several caverns in a row. He wanted to rush his breakthrough to come back as quickly as possible. He was so close to the next rank that he could feel it, and a few more monsters should be enough.

Having teleported nine hundred meters deeper at once he felt a change of temperature and an increase in pressure. The air felt thicker and it was harder to breathe. His aura probed the surroundings but its feedback was strange, it only managed to sense part of the cavern’s walls while the rest of it was blocked, not returning any input. The next second his aura wasn’t returning anything.

Edward frowned, it was rare for his aura to be unable to return any feedback like that. It had happened when he was in spider territory with their webs absorbing and disturbing it, with the Andherian’s mist inside Pescara, and within the sandstorm. There was no chance for simple darkness to block it. He invoked a flame with a rune to illuminate the surroundings. A fireball appeared, illuminating exactly nothing. Edward could see the flame floating in total darkness, he could see himself but everything else was pure black, he couldn’t even see the stone he was standing on. It was as if he was in space with all the stars gone rather than in a cavern.

It was then that he sensed his aura consumption increased. He wasn’t hit by anything but his armor demanded more aura as if it was repairing damage. The flame in front of him started to be devoured by darkness, parts of it disappearing as if they had never existed. Edward looked down at himself and saw the darkness encroached on his aura as well, globs of darkness sticking to it and failing to dissipate the aura protecting him. He attempted to teleport away but realized with horror that since his aura was blocked, he couldn’t teleport anywhere.

He sent an energy blade in front of him, it flew through the darkness before cleaving through a wall, leaving a cut on it. All traces of damage soon disappeared as the darkness covered it as well.

Edward forced himself to calm down. Let’s resume what I know. Something is blocking my aura and I’m sustaining constant damage. I can’t teleport. But at least it seems I’m still in a cavern, it’s just that the darkness is covering everything. I can attempt to slowly backtrack hoping to find a way out of here somehow. Not the best option since I’m unable to see or sense anything. I can try to find the source of that darkness and kill the monster responsible for it if there is one. Again, easier said than done. If there is a monster causing this it can easily avoid me and hide until I’m spent. The last choice that I have is to fight that darkness directly and find a way to dispel it.

Having taken a decision Edward felt his desire to fight back merge with his hunger for blood essence, he licked his lips. Sending blades through the dark doesn’t seem to affect it. Let’s try something else. The layer of aura around him, protecting him from the encroaching darkness, morphed, blades sprouting all over it. Then his aura flowed around him making the blades slowly spin. His time in the desert had made him learn how to finely control his aura, adjusting its flow to limit the friction while he had been surrounded by fast-moving sand. Now he was using this technique for a new application, turning himself into a meatgrinder as his aura flowed faster, his blades gaining in speed.

The blades cut through the air while Edward himself stayed immobile. For the first time, he managed to feel something, he wasn’t able to sense the cavern’s walls, but he could sense the darkness shift as it was pushed by his blades, entering a spinning motion as well and losing coherence. Nonetheless, it wasn’t dispelled.

This is not as effective as I wished. Still, it wasn’t completely ineffective, the drain on my aura has decreased significantly. It can’t destroy the darkness surrounding me, but it disorganizes it. Now how to get rid of this thing? It’s formless and all-encompassing, slowly dissolving everything it touches. Cutting through it is ineffective.

Edward summoned more fire around him. The flames were able to lighten patches of air where the darkness had been cut apart, and separated into smaller entities, but it didn’t do anything to the darkness itself. The flames were feeding off Edward’s aura, but their light was lost and absorbed by the darkness, and they weren’t able to burn it as well. Darkness slowly started to encroach on it making the flames disappear again bit by bit.

It was worth a try.

Physical attacks are unable to destroy it. I need something more destructive, this thing needs to be obliterated. I bet an explosion would work, sadly, I have already used all of Leyla’s runes bombs. I can replicate bombs by charging clones with my aura but it will be extremely wasteful and it will leave me vulnerable. If my aura gets depleted, I will be eaten by the darkness just like the fire I summoned earlier.

Something like acid or fire could probably work as well. Sadly, I don’t have any fire ability, the only fire I can conjure is feeding off my aura and is unable to burn the darkness. The damage needs to be inclusive enough to destroy the darkness entirely. I don’t have anything like that.

But it’s not completely immune to physical damage as well. It’s not like my attacks are not reaching it, it’s just that what I’m doing is akin to cutting through water. Maybe this would work if I made my attacks small enough.

Even as the darkness was still eating at his armor Edward changed tactics. He summoned a cloud of aura needles but worked on making them as thin as possible. This wasn’t something he had worked on before, his focus being more on controlling a larger quantity of aura and making bigger attacks. To his surprise, he realized his control was good enough to make the needles remarkably small. Each one was constituted by only a few threads of his aura. At this size, the destruction they caused would be almost at the scale of cellular damage. Such needles would be ineffective against large monsters as the damage they cause would have been so localized as to be negligible.

He sent the needle cloud at a patch of darkness. Edward was elated when he noticed that his aura was now able to travel through this area. The darkness had been destroyed for good, the dark turning back to a mere absence of light rather than a devouring presence. However, his joy was short-lived as his needles were eaten by the darkness soon after, their small size making them unable to resist it.

Tche. This was such a promising attempt. But if each time I summoned a needle cloud it’s getting eaten after a single successful attack I will be here forever. I don’t even know how far this darkness spreads out.

Edward felt pressure as all of his options were proven ineffective one after the other while time was passing by with Ignis and Adotinus needing his help.

No, I can’t give up now. I don’t see any other way to destroy the darkness other than small physical attacks. I just need to improve it and correct its flaws.

My needles got eaten because I wasn’t able to supply them with aura. But if I had more aura in them, they would grow bigger and risk becoming ineffective. If the needles come directly from my body and I maintain a thread linking them to me, I will be able to supply them continuously with aura, preventing them from being eaten by the darkness while maintaining their small size.

Edward did just that, forming a cloud of needles linked to him by small threads and he let them loose in the darkness when they were ready. For the first attempt, he kept control of the needles which looked more like small tendrils than needles by now. To affect even a medium area, he had to conjure a large number of tendrils due to their small size, and on top of that, he had to adjust the aura flowing to them to prevent them from being eaten. Edward was suddenly glad that he had trained so much in multitasking with his clones.

This method appeared to be much more effective with his tendrils able to make several swipes, destroying the darkness in their wake. He lost some of them as the thin tendrils got cut by the darkness, but he was doing a lot more damage compared to what he was losing.

To his surprise, he realized that he was able to absorb energy from each patch of darkness he was destroying. Rather than needles what he had conjured was closer to mycelium, a network of filaments made from his aura, destroying and eating at the darkness. He had an epiphany understanding that must be how the darkness was eating everything coming into contact with it, he had replicated the process and reversed it for his own gain.