"What do you want?" asked a young girl with lustrous pink and uniquely arctic blue eyes, staring at the person standing on the other side of the door.
The visitor was another young girl, one with white hair and amber eyes.
"I just want to talk," said Diana, her expression unreadable.
"Talk to yourself," the pink-eyed girl replied, and she was about to close the door when Diana shoved her foot into the gap, keeping it open just enough to maintain eye contact.
"I JUST WANT TO TALK!!!" she demanded, attempting to force her way in, to which Jenny halted and asked again, more firmly this time, "What do you want?"
Diana went still, then exhaled slowly.
"It's... it's about Riley," she said, and the young girl's expression soured even further.
"What about Riley?"
At that question, Diana visibly tensed, her eyes briefly darting to the side. From the look of her, she appeared almost deprived of sleep and wound far too tight with anxiety.
"According... according to my aunt, there is a slight possibility that he might actually be alive," she said.
The girl's eyes widened for just a moment before narrowing into a sharp, suspicious frown.
"What do you want, Diana?" she asked.
"Um... well, he... he once told me about your other aspect. Please, I just want to know if..."
"Stop. And no, I won't help, even if it kills me. You people are sick. Get out of here."
Bam.
---
"Is this supposed to be a desert?"
Riley muttered the words under his breath, staring out at the land stretching before him, dry and cracked in every direction.
The sky was red.
The clouds were red as well.
There were no trees anywhere, though far ahead he could make out what looked remotely like mountains rising from the earth.
All around him, however, there was nothing but fractured ground. The land was vast, so impossibly vast that he felt small standing in the middle of it.
He turned and looked back. A great distance behind him loomed what appeared to be a colossal mountain range that rose and disappeared into the sky itself.
"Ember Mountain?" he guessed, his brow furrowing.
It stretched like a wall across the horizon, spanning many kilometres in both directions. As tempting as it was to attempt scaling it, he quickly reasoned against the idea. If escaping this place were as straightforward as climbing those peaks and heading back up, then everyone who had ever fallen here would have already returned. There was undoubtedly something in place to prevent exactly that, some barrier or force he could not yet see.
He set that thought aside and turned his attention to the more pressing matter at hand.
Where exactly was he?
"Huh?"
He frowned, noticing something.
The ether fluctuations in this place were extremely abnormal. He could not yet determine what kind of effect that might have on him, but every detail mattered at this point, and so he filed it away carefully in his mind.
"Could it be slowing down my ether restoration?" he wondered. Perhaps what it actually did was suppress the rate at which his ether pool replenished itself. If that were the case, then...
[MANA: 400/510]
"Wait, it is actually faster... my ether pool has expanded as well," he noted quietly, though the more he turned it over in his mind, the stranger it seemed. Something like this could easily be considered a boon, and a significant one at that, particularly for an ether wielder.
So why, then, had no one ever returned from this place?
He sighed and turned his thoughts toward finding a way out of his situation.
"Those hills look like about the only destination worth heading toward," he muttered, casting one final glance around himself. The fact that those men had gone to such lengths to construct a base underground still gnawed at him. There was something deeply off about this place, something that went far beyond the crimson sky and the desolate, desertified terrain.
Channelling ether into his legs, he launched himself forward and leapt into the air.
"Steps."
A magic circle materialized beneath his left foot. He stamped down on it and shot forward in a burst of wind, and immediately after, another circle appeared, which he stepped onto, followed by another, and then another after that.
With every step, he kept a careful watch on his ether levels. Running dry at a critical moment while still suspended in the air would be a disaster he could not afford.
---
After a considerable stretch of time, he finally arrived.
The hills were charcoal black. From a distance he had assumed it might have been a trick of the eye, some distortion caused by the strange light of this world, but now, standing before them, there was no longer any room for doubt.
There was something genuinely, profoundly wrong with this place, something he was beginning to suspect he wanted no part of whatsoever.
"System, is there a way out of here?" he asked, more out of reflex than expectation, and to his surprise, a response came.
You just have to die, and the curse will be broken. But not yet.
The voice was quiet enough, but...
That was not the System.
"Who the hell are you?"