Unlimited Isekai and Other Unfortunate Magic

Dave surfaced, gasping and sputtering. He looked around frantically for Cedez, relief washing over him as he saw her treading water nearby.

The thunderous roar of the waterfall behind them echoed off the cavernous walls. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was struck by the alien beauty of their surroundings.

Bioluminescent fungi clung to the rocky walls of the massive underground chamber casting a soft, ghostly glow across the cavern. The light danced on the surface of the dark pool, creating shimmering patterns that seemed to pulse with an otherworldly rhythm. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like giant icicles, their crystalline surfaces reflecting the eerie light.

In the center of the underground lake stood a small, rocky island. Dave's breath caught in his throat. A tree, unlike any he had ever seen, rose from the craggy surface. Its trunk was pitch black, seeming to absorb the light around it. Instead of leaves, it bore strange, jagged two-dimensional planes that sparked at the edges.

At the base of the tree, a small meadow of flowers carpeted the island. Their petals were the color of the night sky, dotted with pinpricks of light that mimicked distant stars.

He recognized them immediately.

The Void Lotuses swayed gently, despite the lack of wind, their movements almost hypnotic.

As Dave and Cedez swam closer to the island, movement caught their eye. A figure emerged from the hollow in the roots of the void tree, its emaciated form barely more than skin stretched over bone.

Darkness pulsated within its translucent flesh, as if its very essence had been hollowed out and replaced with living Void.

"A Sentinel!" Cedez warned.

The ex-adventurer turned his hollow gaze upon them. With a sickening crack, the dead man’s chest cavity split open, revealing a writhing mass of darkness within. From this void, a swarm of Voidbats poured forth.

As he too neared the shore, Dave felt something brush against his leg. He kicked frantically, just as a long, eel-like creature burst from the water, its maw lined with needle-sharp teeth. Cedez reacted instantly, her hand lashing out with a shadow blade that cleaved the long fish in two.

The pair scrambled onto the rocky shore, gasping and dripping. The Voidbats were closing in.

With a fierce snarl, Cedez unleashed a whirlwind of shadow nails, firing through the air with deadly precision. The Voidbats fell dead, their unearthly shrieks echoing through the cavern.

More bats disconnected from the Voidtree, forcing Dave to stop time. He disposed of the bats around them, cutting the time-frozen critters until his mana ran out once again.

As Cedez dispatched the last of the bats that were further away with shadow-nails, the Sentinel made its move. In a single step that seemed to defy physics, the emaciated figure closed the distance between them as if it stepped through an invisible portal. A blade of pure darkness materialized in its skeletal hand.

Before either of them could react, the Sentinel thrust its Void blade forward. Dave's heart stopped as he saw the dark weapon pierce Cedez's chest, emerging from her back in a spray of liquid shadow.

The mouth of the foxgirl opened in a silent scream.

The starlight gems on her outfit flickered like dying embers. She grabbed the Sentinels neck producing blades from her fingers and decapitated the undead human.

Dave reached Cedez just as she began to fall. The Sentinel's blade was still embedded in her chest. It was no longer wrapped in Void, now just a rusty, old blade.

Shadows poured from the foxgirl onto the jagged rocks.

Dave caught Cedez as she fell.

"Cedez!" He growled. "Hold on, please!"

The foxgirl's eyes filled with tears of pain. "Ge-get th-the flowers... dummy," she hissed out.

"But..." he began.

"No butts. I'm... done… Ga-game over." She hissed. "Don't lose... my d-dress... find your way back... promise? D-don’t eat my soul… please.”

"Promise," Dave nodded.

"Attaboy," Cedez said and then with a final flicker all of the blue gems on her dress winked out. Her entire body cracked and shattered like a gray porcelain shell, billowing smoke-fluid pouring out across Dave's hands onto the ground.

For a moment, Dave simply crouched there, paralyzed by shock.

Slowly shaking himself out of his stupor, Dave remembered Cedez's parting words. He had a promise to keep. With trembling hands, he gathered her empty outfit into the bag.

Turning towards the field of Void Lotuses, Dave fought his fraying nerves. He had come this far; he couldn't let Cedez's sacrifice be in vain. Cautiously, he approached the strange flowers.

As he reached out to pluck one, a sharp pain lanced through his hand.

Dave hissed, pulling back to see a small cut on his finger. The lotuses, it seemed, had microscopic, two-dimensional thorns along their stems. Gritting his teeth, he pushed everything into Vitality and repaired the cut. Then he wrapped his hand in a piece of thick cloth and sliced the bases carefully with his bone knife, managing to harvest all of the flowers as his mana slowly reloaded.

With the flowers secured, Dave activated Phantom Sight. There were sparks of the dead all over this island, the brightest one of all contained within the headless Sentinel.

Dave absorbed all of them, his mind momentarily lost amidst myriads of lives of Shandrian adventurers who dared to challenge the Void dungeon and perished here. It was about eleven people overall, who had a Quest to harvest Void Lotus plants for Healers Hall and Witch Coven of Octocogash and the Maidenlynes of Gorefield. The first Quest was given out by the city officials and the second in a secret Undertown catacomb pub.

One of the dead adventurers had a Quest from Undertown Assassins Guild to collect the Voidtree leaves as they made particularly tough and sharp sting-knives.

Dave attempted to remove the leaves from the Voidtree with his bone knife as he waited for his mana to reload, but it seemed a completely futile endeavor as the branches and leaves simply refused to be cut.

As he put more Strength into his arm, his trusty bone knife suddenly snapped in half against the impervious edge of the Voidtree's branch.

"Damn it!" Dave swore, glaring at his pitiful knife remnant.

A few more bats teleported next to him, forcing him to dispatch them with his nearly useless knife shard. Slotting Wisdom and letting Sherlock observe the tree, he figured that this tree was most likely a clever death trap - it took far too much effort to get the overpriced leaves and in the meanwhile the dungeon brought more monsters to the island.

Dave's mana had finally replenished itself.

He looked at the roaring waterfall that had brought him and Cedez to this cursed place. More bats were making screeching noises in the distance. It was time to go.

With a thought, Dave activated his Timelessness state.

The roaring waterfall became a silent, frozen cascade, its droplets suspended in mid-air like a million crystal beads.

He stepped onto the surface of the lake without sinking. With increasingly determined leaps, feeling nearly weightless, he rushed across the lake's surface, each step causing ripples that spread out in slow motion behind him.

Reaching the base of the waterfall, Dave didn't hesitate, using the air itself to leap up.

As he neared the top of the waterfall, Dave pushed himself harder, knowing he had limited time before the effect wore off. With a final burst of effort, he rushed along the river until he located a crevice to rest in.

In about thirty more minutes of hiding and accelerating himself to run atop the time-frozen river he found himself back in the winding tunnels of the cave system.

He waited in darkness and silence until his mana reloaded, heart beating madly. Thankfully, no other enemies came for him.

Dave pushed mana into the foxgirl's gem, causing it to light up with a soft, blue glow. The familiar light brought a pang of sadness to his heart, but he pushed the feeling aside.

Something stirred in the depths of the caverns, attracted by the light of the gem.

With a deep breath, Dave shifted everything into Agility, running without stopping time.

As he rounded a corner, a dark shape loomed in his path. It was a snake-like creature, its body covered in wicked, jagged spikes.

The spikes on its body begin to flash with an ominous light.

Dave stopped time just as the Depthknell's spikes were about to teleport into his body. The world around him froze, the creature suspended in mid-attack.

Running at the top speed that his body could allow, Dave flashed through the time-frozen caverns. He passed by two more Depthknells, Voidbats, and other grotesque creatures, all caught in various states of motion. It was like running through a museum of horrors, each exhibit more terrifying than the last.

Just as the effect of his ability wore off, Dave burst out of the cave and into the open air.

He stumbled, nearly falling to his knees as the sudden shift in momentum caught up with him. Gasping for breath, he turned to look back at the cave entrance, half-expecting to see a horde of void creatures in pursuit.

Thankfully, there was nothing. The cave mouth stood silent and dark, giving no hint of the terrors that lurked within.

It seemed the speed he moved at had confused the Void-aligned monsters.

Dave pulled up his stats, discovering that eating dungeon monsters brought him to [38.5263] usable soul bits. He allowed himself a moment to catch his breath and then began to slowly limp away from the Void dungeon. His eyes scanned the glacier below, looking for the path back to Shandria.

What he saw after about ten minutes of walking, made him freeze in his tracks.

Two figures about a thousand feet below him were trekking across the ice fissures from the direction of the city.

The first was a tall, bald man with broad shoulders and a purposeful stride in a blood red cloak. His fists gleamed, covered by armored gloves. But it was the second figure that made his heart skip a beat and then made his blood run cold.

It was a girl who looked exactly like Cedez… except she had six horns instead of fox ears.

The girl flashed Dave a grin from afar and pulled her right glove off, grabbing the man's neck.

Dave watched as the man's eyes widened, his entire muscular body contorting as if struck by lightning.

The girl pointed a glove hand at Dave, her mouth saying something that distantly sounded like “Kill him!”

The bald man, his muscles now bulging unnaturally beneath his clothes, bent down towards the icy ground. With a grunt that echoed across the desolate landscape, he wrapped his arms around a megalithic rock suspended within the glacier, its surface rough and pitted by centuries of erosion.

The boulder was enormous, easily the size of a city bus, and yet the man tore and pulled it from the ice as if it weighed no more than a pebble.

The man's veins pulsed visibly, his skin taking on an almost metallic sheen as he hoisted the massive rock above his head. Then, with a loud roar, the man spun far too quickly and hurled the enormous rock directly at Dave.

The Cedez copycat laughed, revealing sharp chompers.

The gargantuan boulder sailed through the air, its shadow growing larger by the second as it hurtled towards him. Dave could hear the thrum of displaced air as it reached him, about to squash him like a tiny bug.