Reincarnated Hero System

Despite the risk of being hit by Artemisia and Beatrix, the two monsters lunged at him. The fists of the first sliced through the air and a crushing wind vortex spiralled toward Evan, sharp and fast, as the second abomination opened its hollowed maw and unleashed another blinding beam of raw divinity.

Both attacks hurtled toward him in tandem, but Evan didn’t even get a chance to use blink as Beatrix acted, warping space around him and ripping him from the path of the combination attacks.

He reappeared next to Beatrix and Artemisia, right in the middle of the clearing.

The monsters roared in fury as their attacks hit nothing but the empty air and the ground quaked beneath their rage-filled cries.

The first one, furious, slammed its fists into the trembling earth again, widening the cracks that snaked across the clearing, weakening it even more.

But it was the second creature, the one still engulfed in Evan’s relentless prismatic flames, that was the real threat.

Its burning skin sizzled and peeled under Evan’s flames, but it was unbothered by the agony. Its head hollowed even further, the charred flesh splitting as it bellowed a guttural roar—this one, however, was different.

The roar was laced with divinity, sending out a pulse of sonic force that washed over the three teenagers like a tidal wave.

“?!”

“Guk.”

“…!!!”

The impact hit them instantly.

A high-pitched ringing exploded in their eardrums, drowning out all other sounds.

Evan clutched his head, his vision swimming as his knees buckled beneath him. Pain shot through his skull, a searing migraine that felt like a vice was clamping down on his brain.

His hands pressed against his temples, but the pressure did nothing to dull the stabbing pain as his balance wavered, and the world around him blurred.

Similarly, Beatrix winced, dropping to one knee, her fingers digging into the ground. She bit her lip hard, trying to fight through the intense dizziness, her head pounding in sync with the relentless ringing.

Her vision flickered, and for a moment, it was as if the whole world tilted violently to the side.

Artemisia squeezed her eyes shut, her hands covering her ears, but the noise was inside her head, ricocheting like shards of glass through her mind. A wave of nausea hit her as the sonic blast twisted her senses, making her feel as though the earth was spinning beneath her feet.

At that moment, the horned monster punched the ground, trying to catch them in another meat-grinding vortex.

However, the already weakened ground beneath them was unable to take the impact. The earth groaned and gave way, the tremors from all the earlier attacks proving too much.

Within seconds, the ground collapsed under the teenagers and revealed a gaping chasm of darkness below.

Evan’s heart raced as the ground dropped away. He instinctively unfurled his wings, fighting the sudden drop, but just as he rose, a chunk of debris struck him square in the chest, knocking the air from his lungs and sending him hurtling back down.

Beatrix wasn’t in the state of mind to use her spatial magic and Artemisia had the wind magic circles she just barely conjured shattered by falling rocks.

It felt as though gravity had suddenly tripled, and the cold air rushed past them as they plummeted into the depths of the chasm.

The sound of the monsters’ furious roars echoed from above, growing fainter as the darkness swallowed them whole.

And then, there was silence.

◇　◇　◇

*THWUMP!

After a brief yet scary sensation of weightlessness, Evan’s body slammed into something soft. A moment later, he felt Artemisia and Beatrix slam down next to him.

He immediately forced himself to his feet and looked around. Though it was dark, he could still make things out.

If there was any consolation, it was the fact that danger sense wasn’t screaming out in his head.

“Wher-guh!?”

He couldn’t even complete his words as his nostrils and mouth were assaulted by a pungent odour, and he reflexively covered them with his hands.

But before his fingers touched his face, he noticed they were covered in a thick, gooey liquid and stopped just short of smearing his face with the unknown substance.

He lowered his gaze and when he saw what had softened their fall, his expression darkened.

“Ugh!”

He heard Beatrix groan in pain and immediately turned towards the direction of the sound, just in time to catch the girl’s eyes flutter open.

Evan immediately pulled out a towel from his inventory and tossed it on her face, covering her vision.

“Nngah?! What the hell?!”

“If you guys don’t want to throw up your breakfast, then just close your eyes.”

Artemisia and Beatrix froze when they heard his words, but Evan’s warning had the opposite effect. Most times, telling someone NOT to do something often makes them WANT to do that thing.

Evan got to his feet and moved down the squishy mound, his expression contorting with each uneven step.

“And hope you have a change of clothes with you.”

He added that line as he picked his way through the piles of bones, rotten flesh and the remnants of what had once been human faces.

No matter where he looked, all he saw was carnage. The three of them were atop a literal mountain of corpses, and though the majority of them were human, Evan could see elven ears on some heads, and beastman tails on some severed torsos.

Most of the bodies were twisted and contorted in bizarre ways, with a mix of dried golden and red blood on them.

The walls of the cavern were primarily a dull grey, marked in places by a symbol Evan found familiar.

‘Is that not…the Aramisian Army?’

He had seen this symbol on the uniforms of soldiers that he’d passed on the streets in Tolgue, and Sloklens with Arthur. It was even in the house of the girl Arthur introduced to him as ‘Rachel’.

“What the hell is this place…?”

Evan jumped off the mountain of corpses, landing on the floor just as he heard the sound of someone vomiting.

“I warned you, didn’t I?”

Evidently, either one of the two girls with him had let their curiosity win.

Evan wasn’t sure whatever lay outside this chamber they were in would be any different, but they had little choice as the place they had fallen through was completely sealed up.

Questions continued to race through his mind as he approached the exit to the chamber, which was marked by a door that hung ajar.

He peeked through the gap in the door and didn’t see any monsters or dead bodies. Danger sense was also silent, so he stepped out of the room and finally was able to inhale much better air.

It still stunk, but it was heaven compared to the abomination in the chamber behind him.

First off, he washed his hands and then used magic and his flames to sterilize his body and kill whatever germs had stuck to him.

The ground melted from the sheer heat of the flames he immolated himself with, but as Mesarthim’s flames could NOT damage him unless he suddenly awakened to masochism, he was fine.

Right after he turned himself into a human torch, Artemisia and Beatrix stepped out of the Chamber and Beatrix dropped to her knees and vomited once more.

As Artemisia handled her best friend, Evan looked towards the wall and grabbed a crystalline object affixed to it.

It resembled a magic stone and he saw it was connected to the bulbs on the ceiling. He infused magic power into it and a moment later, the lamps embedded in the ceiling of the tunnel they were in blinked on one after the other.

Once their eyes adjusted and they got a good look at their surroundings, the three were left in awe at the sprawling complex that stretched before them.

“My, oh my.”

Evan spoke as he reached out for the grey metallic wall. He pushed his palm on it and it was only until he exerted enough force to crush the skull of a grandmaster-level monster that he was able to dent it.

Since they had fallen down a chasm to get here, that meant they were even deeper underground than before. He could only imagine the sheer technical skill needed to build and excavate such a massive installation underground, to say nothing of the money involved.

‘Well, that’s a problem for the people of this planet.’

“So, shall we start looking for a way outta here?”

Evan spoke as he turned to the two girls, but Artemisia looked down on her body which was stained with some liquids she didn’t even want to know the sources of and spoke.

“I need to get these clothes off me.”

“Well, though I mentioned it earlier, I doubt there’s any place where you can have the peace of mind to change clothes.”

Evan responded, then snapped his fingers and engulfed the two girls in his Yellow flames.

“Mesarthim; Yellow: Purge.”

Artemisia nearly attacked him on reflex, but when she saw that the flames dealt zero damage, she lowered the sword she had summoned in that instant.

“At least, you shouldn’t have any strange bacteria and stuff on you now.”

After saying that, Evan turned around and headed down the tunnel, with the two girls following behind at a distance.

Beatrix used her spatial power to try and map the place out, but she didn’t spread it out too far for fear of alerting whatever could be lurking beneath these walls.

The three moved deeper and deeper into the complex until they came to a fork in the tunnel. First, they went left, only to find that led to a dead end.

They backtracked to the fork and went right, which continued for quite a way. The further they went, the darker it got and they figured they needed to find another light switch.

Unlike the left-hand path, this tunnel led to a door.

They didn’t hear any sounds of movement and Beatrix’s spatial perception didn’t detect anything on the other end, so they slowly opened it up and Beatrix used light magic to light up the room.

Correction—She used magic to light up the Hall.

The place was enormous, even more so than the chamber where they had fallen into.

Towering test tubes lined the space, each large enough to hold two full-grown men stacked one on top of the other.

The tubes showed signs of once being filled with liquid, but now, they were completely bone-dry, covered in layers of dust that hinted at long abandonment.

Many of the tubes were shattered, glass fragments littering the floor, while others remained eerily intact, some still connected to a web of pipes that fed into hulking machinery scattered throughout the room.

Evan and Artemisia crouched to examine the floor, spotting shattered divinity crystals mixed with the debris.

These were like magic stones they were familiar with, but with divinity coursing through them instead. Around them were devices that, to Evan, resembled industrial generators, though most were rusted, broken, or sealed shut with red tape.

Around here, Evan found a lever which when he pulled, activated this place’s lighting system. One of the generator-like devices began to let out a low hum and the lamps hanging from the ceiling lit up the hall, allowing them to see every corner.

Moving further in, and navigating past the broken tubes and discarded equipment, they stumbled across scattered papers and files, their edges frayed and yellowed.

A staircase led to an observation deck above, which they climbed to get a better view. From there, they could overlook the entire hall of test tubes, a silent graveyard of whatever had been experimented on here.

But when they turned around, something else caught Evan’s attention.

Behind them was another window, and what lay beyond it made his expression twist in confusion.

“Are those… baby cribs?”