I pushed past the frozen knights, Stormstep carrying me deeper into the facility. The halls stretched on, lined with the hooded statues I had seen before, their stone faces watching me with empty eyes.
The vats grew fewer as I moved deeper, replaced by chambers filled with more esoteric devices, their purposes unclear. I knew the Hollow Avatar was cataloging everything I was seeing, and so I did not bother to focus on these strange devices; my focus was on the sensation of the watcher.
My movements were not random; this facility was too vast for me to make such a mistake. I was using Death Touch to navigate through the facility.
This Title could not just inform me of danger; the cold spots would get increasingly fiercer as the danger became closer to me. Using this method, I began to follow the wave of cold from the Watcher, heading towards where the chill grew more biting.
If in the beginning my actions could be hidden, after a while, as I followed different connecting halls as if I was familiar with the layout of this facility, only a fool would not realise that I knew someone was watching me, and I was heading towards that person.
One thing this loop had taught me was that for someone like me, the way to overcome my difficulties was to go through them. I had an advantage that no one else shared, and the best option for me was not to run away from danger, but to face it.
Soon I began to slow as the cold from the watcher began to become more concentrated, and I knew that it meant I was coming close to my destination. I stopped and looked around.
In front of me were three passages, each leading to halls covered in darkness. My eyes flashed past the three halls, and I turned to an area that led nowhere, just a wall.
I raised my hand towards the wall, and threads of lightning emerged on my palm, and with a flick of my mind, the threads flashed towards the wall and vanished. A second passed, and a red line in a perfect circle appeared on the wall.
The Moon Fox grinned, "I will huff and puff..." and its cheeks swelled, and she blew a soft breeze towards the wall, causing a metallic groaning sound to emerge from it, and an entire section of the wall collapsed, following the perfect circular cut that I had made. "...And blow the walls down!"
I smiled as I looked beyond the hole to see a fourth passage. I knew that without any doubt that the watcher knew I was aware of it, as the sensation of danger shrank further, now it covered my entire torso.
My two arms turned golden blue as the Anima embedded in my channels were drawn closer to the surface, as I became lightning Incarnate and vanished.
I reappeared a hundred meters into the hall, stopping before a massive door. It was set into the far wall of the hall, taller than any doorway needs to be, its surface the same dull gold as the temple’s beaten walls and worked with the hooded figure I had seen in the statues.
And behind it, Death-Touched showed me the originator of the source of cold. I could feel it through the door, as someone was moving beyond it. It was amazing that in such a massive facility, there was seemingly only one living being here.
The fox’s claws tightened on my shoulder. "That’s it, isn’t it?" it said, very quietly. "The bad guy."
"That’s it," I said. "Let us see who was slowly killing us over the last three months."
I let the suicide-charge sit ready, in case I had misjudged what waited, and I set my hand flat against the cold gold of the door, and I pushed, but the door did not budge, and the fox stared at me without moving its head. I think it was trying to hold back its laughter.
Well, I had to try. Who said all doors had to be locked? Those only happened in stories.
I set my palm flat against the door again, spreading out my fingers, and I pushed an intense electrical charge into the metal, expecting the material under my hand to begin to glow red with the intense power I was pouring into it, but the door swallowed every electrical charge I poured into it.
The charge went into the door and simply stopped, as if it had been swallowed. I frowned and looked closer, and with the new perception my grown Anima Depth had given me, I saw why.
The door was inscribed with the same dense living script I had found inside the chips, and my frown deepened.
My teachers in the Academy had said that Inscriptions were the language of magic, but I had always thought that was just a rather fancy description to push many young Acolytes into the difficult occupation of an Engraver, before the harsh expectations of this field broke most of them, but I was now seeing the reason behind this description.
The Inscription inside this door was complex, and yet it was different from what was inside those chips, and it was performing two different actions, and doing it extremely well.
"Hollow," I said. "Can you open it if I give you access to these Inscriptions?"
"I could, but we are being watched, and before we know more about who is behind us, I believe we should hold back on magic outside what we have overtly displayed."
Right, I was a Lightning Mage, and no one expects me to be able to pour out silver flames that could disintegrate everything it touched. I should keep this power aside and use it when my enemy does not expect it.
The ability of this door to drink my lightning meant I had to push a ridiculous amount of power to shatter it, and with my regenerative capacity and the strength of my Anima, I could do this, but that would take too much time, so it was a good thing that I had the perfect tool for this.
I took in a deep breath, took several steps back from the door, and I summoned Titan’s Marrow for the first time without holding back. The fox yelped in surprise as my entire body began to grow, causing the shoulder it was resting upon to expand.