Using the conventional way, Sarah and the rest of the party were obviously late to participate in the fight.
However, they still arrived in time to witness Sera being engulfed in darkness. As usual the mage initially thought of just letting her sister handle the fighting, though then a wave of mana passed over them and only emptiness remained at the place, where she had previously sensed her sister.
How did she vanish? Where was she? Sarah didn’t know. But for now she had to act.
No one of the others would be much of a help. Well, maybe the guide could do something, though, so far, she also needed some form of assistance when taking down enemies far higher leveled than herself. Therefore, in the end, Sara herself had probably still the best chances of actually removing whatever obstacle her sister just had faced.
Especially so, since the sudden disappearance of her sister had left the enemy unmoving for whatever reason. Be it shock, being too concentrated on figuring out where the girl went to, or some other cause.
But an opportunity was an opportunity.
The darkness surrounding the enemy wouldn’t have made it easy for most people to figure out where the enemy was, but visual information seemed more and more overrated in this realm. Therefore she relied on her mana and soul sense.
Relying on her skills to aim, she readied a few of her stored souls.
It hurt using up those resources just to eliminate an enemy, but she also knew that normal attacks would likely only cause little damage or take some time to show effect. Not to mention that with a soul being the payload, it was her most mana efficient way of attacking. Mana, which she was still recovering.
Though just in case, she also shot icicles. Not in an attempt to actually hit her opponent, they wouldn’t do much damage anyway with her current mana situation, but to corner her target further, in case they had ways to see through the shadows or detect attack through other means. She didn’t even fire them at the target, but around them, assuming no one would willingly step into an attack, if they actually sensed it.
The “fight” was then rather anticlimactic. Whether her additional work with the icicles actually contributed or not was impossible to tell, though the souls she fired hit and removed the obstacle.
[You have annihilated a Human Lv 95.]
Though, while the thread had been dealt with, she still wasn’t happy. Her mana regeneration got reduced again and she lost a potential test subject. At least she prevented potential information leaks about her virus and managed to gain two additional, currently frozen bodies to experiment on.
However, now that all imminent threats had been removed, where did her sister go?
Sarah doubted that their stalkers were related to her sister’s vanishing. The one she killed at the end behaved too surprised for that. Add to that the mana wave and she could only assume that Sera did something dumb again, like cast spells based on feelings or something else idiotic.
Technically the realm could also be responsible, but it seemed too much of a coincidence. There weren’t any other waves of mana she sensed since their arrival and while the realm caused people to vanish, it seemed more related to whole parties and not one or two people who get randomly teleported away.
A quick discussion with Nia came to a similar conclusion, though while the guide was pretty sure Sera still remained in the realm, the way to here was apparently much harder to figure out. Well, Sarah was pretty confident that they would find her eventually and, if not, this would become the second realm she had to reshape.
Though, while they were still near the location where the warrior had vanished, the scientist wanted to at least try to contact her. Damage done to the buildings had also been visible in the reflection and she doubted it was just a reflection. Then it would have been a realm of reflections and not space and illusions. So it wasn’t that unlikely to assume that damage caused in buildings would appear all around the realm.
Acting on her hypothesis, she pulled out her dagger, the one she got more or less forcefully from her sister shortly after their arrival in the realms, and carved a message in the concrete-like material. Or tried to. Aside from some hardly visible scratches, nothing much happened. As it turned out, while it did look somewhat like the common building material from her old world, it wasn’t. Well, if it were, the buildings likely wouldn’t have survived eons. And while her strength already far surpassed anyone from her old world, the low starting values and her mind focused class caused her physical attributes to stay low for someone of her level.
So the task fell onto Nia, the only person currently here with a somewhat strength focused class.
The guide still questioned the usefulness of the task, the party menu was still working and according to it, Sera was more or less fine and healing, but she still humored Sarah. The message was then quickly carved into a wall.
And to Nia’s surprise an answer soon appeared.
Well, the scientist had to admit that the conversation of “you k” with the answer “y k” wasn’t that useful on the surface. But the short answer made it likely that it was Sera who carved it, that she was still in the realm, could move freely and was near an instance of this location.
An in depth analysis would be required, but she was pretty sure that the city block they were currently in only existed once and space looped in on itself. The whole carving process felt too natural and magic-less to be an illusion or information which was shared.
So if she managed to move through the looped space…
Sarah was quickly lost in thought.
Nia had initially planned to only stay in this realm for a bit, so they could avoid the danger of potential assassins and to gain her space affinity. But now it seemed like that wouldn’t be the case.
If she was unlucky they would likely stay here for years and not because they were lost but just because the realm was interesting.
“Ahm, is this normal?” Anna suddenly asked. The two girls had been rather quiet until now and were probably just hoping to escape whatever insanity they stumbled into alive. If Nia had to guess.
“Well, normally i would ask what exactly you mean, but, even though i haven’t been together in a party with them for that much time, i can confirm that regardless of what you are talking about, it is normal for them. If you want to get rid of your common sense, now is probably a good opportunity for it.” The guide then answered the question.
“So they vanished into the Grave of the Lost and we haven’t heard from them since then even though they wanted to come back if they can’t find them near the entrance? This will be problematic. We can hope the girls get lost in it, but i guess they hope we believe that.”
The branch-leader of a certain store-chain sighted in his office, having just received a report from one of his men.
“Well, as much as it hurts, sending a recovery team would likely only increase our losses. If they somehow manage to deal with 4 of our contractors far above their own level and potentially even kill an employee, we can’t do much.”
A few lines of text then soon appeared on a piece of paper, which then vanished into an envelope. Sealing it with magic, he moved it over the reporting figure.
“Anyway, please take this with you, when you return to HQ.”
Finishing the meeting, the figure was dismissed and silence returned to the meeting room.
“… i guess we will have to work with the Followers on this one.”
